Page 54 of A River Red With Blood
But the name beneath the pictures was not the one on her driver’s license.Instead, the pictures identified her as Gai Cotter.Or in full, Special Agent Gai Cotter of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Chapter 49
Sabine left Bingham feeling simultaneously unsatisfied and relieved: the former because, having gained access to the Norton home, she was no closer to Mallory—nothing had been awakened, and she could detect no echo of the girl beyond the house, even though Sabine was attuned to her now; and the latter because it would have saddened her to receive confirmation of Mallory’s death, as her efforts would then have focused on helping to locate a body.
Sabine drove north, cutting through the backroads of the Forks into The Plains.The light was still good, and it was about two and a half hours from Bingham to her home; if she started out by three, she’d be back in Haynesville by six at the latest.She didn’t plan to go walking in the woods, and if she did get out of her car, she would not stray far.From the media reports, she knew roughly where Scott Theriault’s remains had been found.The current had carried his body to within sight of the road, where it was spotted lodged between rocks.She would drive to the spot and there she would stay for as long as she felt comfortable.
Just inside The Plains, she passed a convenience store and gas station on her left, with two cars and a truck parked outside.The tea she had drunk with Anita Norton was now pressing on her bladder.She should have asked to use the Nortons’ bathroom before leaving, but she always felt awkward peeing in a stranger’s home.She made a quick U-turn and returned to the store, which advertised itself as “Small’s Gas & Provisions—The Big Heart of The Plains,” whatever that meant.She put twenty dollars’ worth of gas in the tank, because even if she didn’t need to fill up now, she would by the time she got halfway home.Also, ifshe was going to use the facilities, it was only polite to put some money the proprietor’s way.
As she went inside to pay, she saw another photo of Mallory Norton, but appended to it was a handwritten sign announcing a search scheduled for the following morning, to convene at ten a.m.from Small’s.Sabine continued to the register, paid, and was directed to the bathroom.Once she’d done the needful, she asked the man behind the register if anyone was welcome to assist with the search.
“If you can walk and look around at the same time without tripping over your feet, we’d be happy to have you,” he said.He introduced himself as Bennett Small, the owner.“Are you from around here?”
“No, Haynesville.But I know the family.”
Which was true, so far as it went.
“You’ll need a good pair of boots,” said Small.“We’ll supply coffee and pastries, but you might want to bring your own to-go cup.”
Sabine told him she’d do that.Like a lot of Mainers, she kept a spare pair of old boots in her trunk and never went anywhere without a to-go cup.She returned to her car, and after a pause for reflection, turned south instead of north.If she wanted to visit the place where Scott Theriault’s body had washed up, tomorrow would do, after the search.And who knew what she might discover by participating?At the very least, she’d be able to gain access to regions that might have been inaccessible to her otherwise.
In Bingham, she rented a room for the night at the Motor Inn on Main, close to the banks of the Kennebec, her room looking out over Big Island.For sustenance, she bought a sandwich, a bag of potato chips, a Milky Way, and two cans of beer at Jimmy’s, the gas station and convenience store a stone’s throw away.As she walked back to her lodgings, that rain still threatening, she spotted an elderly woman watching her from the wooded island.Sabine shouldn’t have been able to see her so clearly, not in the dusk, but the woman glowed faintly.She was wearing a nightgown that reached to her shins, and her feet werebare.A quadrant of her skull was missing, the edges impossibly neat, but the wound had stopped bleeding a long time before.Her head moved to follow Sabine’s progress along the road, but Sabine ignored her.That was what came of being so focused on Mallory Norton, of calling in the hope of receiving a reply: if you sent out a signal, you didn’t know who else might be listening.Sabine began the process of closing her mind.She’d been about to do so anyway in preparation for a night’s sleep, but the woman’s appearance made her act sooner.Sabine had learned early that going to bed with that damned faculty of hers active and engaged was a bad idea.At best, it made getting to sleep difficult, and at worst—well, she didn’t want to wake in the night to discover that old woman with the ruined head standing by the side of the bed.
“Go on now,” said Sabine.“You’re not the reason I came here.”
She pictured shutters closing, and fingers winding the wick on an old oil lamp, extinguishing the flame.She was grateful to see the woman’s glow dissipate—and without resistance, because the dead commonly fought.They didn’t want the shutters to close or the light to go out.They wanted to be seen and heard, but that was mainly the recent ones.Those who’d been dead awhile, such as the ruined woman, were more resigned, like starving people grown accustomed to the withholding of food.They began to give up until, at last, they faded away.If Sabine returned a year from now and called out to Big Island, perhaps no one would answer.Nevertheless, back in her room, and before she closed her eyes, she asked—no, label it what it was: prayed—that the woman would find peace.
Chapter 50
Iwas not a fan of early mornings—Macy shared that antipathy, which might be another reason we got along so well—but I was awake before seven a.m.that Sunday.I made a mug of instant coffee, took it to my office, and opened the floor safe.From it I removed the documents retrieved years earlier from the plane wreckage in the Great North Woods.The plane had been lost for years, but I’d found it, although people had died along the way, died for what I was now holding.It was an early list of Believers, the compromised and the compromisers, those who had allied themselves, with varying degrees of willingness, to a specific cause: the search for the Buried God.It was, depending on whom one asked, a relic of a fallen angel, a representation of one, or the angel itself.The reality, objective or otherwise, didn’t matter so much as the harm these people were visiting on the world with their activities: the accrual of wealth and influence untampered by moral, social, or environmental concerns, and the creation of a shadow rule of the wealthy and powerful over the poor and the vulnerable.
The head of the serpent was the Backers.If they could be dealt with, the serpent would be decapitated.Somewhere in these papers lay clues to the Backers’ identities, a pattern of acquaintance and association waiting to be revealed.I had spent a long time trying to establish that pattern, when finances and opportunity permitted.Of course, I could simply have handed over the documents to SAC Edgar Ross of the FBI, but I didn’t trust Ross to share with me whatever he might subsequently uncover.Ross knew I was in possession of the documents because I’d passed selected contents to him when any of those named in them were set to assume positions of especial prominence orauthority.Once informed, the FBI, or Ross’s particular dirty-tricks section of it, would move against them, exposing their failings to the light or using them as material for blackmail: financial impropriety, assaults, affairs, forced abortions for younger lovers, rape, all were grist to Ross’s mill.Fire was fought with fire as their own methods were used against them.But this was a personal matter for me.For reasons I did not understand, I represented a threat to the Believers, yet they were reluctant to move decisively against me.They closed in, but did not strike.Sometimes, I felt they might even be frightened, though that could have been vanity on my part.
It might have been my recent conversations with Angel that led me to look again at the papers.In the years since their retrieval I had added notes, additional supporting documents, copies of bank accounts and affidavits, but soon, everything would have to be gone from my possession.I’d achieved what I could, and I accepted that others could do more.But I had a solution, however partial, to the puzzle of the Backers’ identities, because the name of one institution recurred more often than any other: the Colonial Club of Commonwealth Avenue, Boston.But of course, Ross must already have known that because he, too, was a member of the Colonial Club, which I had learned only relatively recently.
Ross had been a part of my life for decades.I would not have called him a friend, and he would not put my interests before those of the bureau, but I’d never had cause to doubt his commitment to obstructing the Believers until I learned about his membership of the Colonial Club.
Ross, heeding.Ross, enjoining.
Ross, waiting.
III
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun …
—John Keats,Hyperion
Chapter 51
The rain that Sabine had intuited came down during the night.She woke to the sound of it on the roof above her room, at first mistaking it for footsteps, so heavy was it.She lay awake for a time, enjoying the novelty of being in a strange bed two nights running, before allowing the aperiodic rhythm to ease her to sleep for another hour.Later, she replenished a water bottle from the tap in her room, filled her to-go cup from the coffeepot at reception, just in case there was a line at Small’s, and once more drove out to The Plains.
The parking lot was full by the time she arrived at the gas station, forcing her to park on the road, and all was bustle around the trestle table from which two women were pouring coffee and distributing donuts and Danishes.Next to it was a smaller table at which participants were required to sign up.Separate from the other cars and trucks, Sabine saw vehicles from the Maine Forest Service, the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office, and the Maine State Police, along with a quartet of men and women in uniform.Their presence made her feel more comfortable about assisting with the search, so much so that she even liberated two of the donuts, one of them eaten there and then and the other wrapped in a napkin for later.She then added her name to the list.
Minutes later, one of the rangers used a bullhorn to call for attention.By then Sabine counted about forty people present, varying in age from teenagers to seniors, some carrying trekking poles and walking sticks.There were also four or five dogs.Most of those involved appeared to know one another, and the dogs likewise.She looked around to check whether Anita Norton or her husband were present, but saw no sign of them;their presence, she supposed, might have represented an awkward distraction.
The searchers were split into two groups, each under the supervision of a ranger, assisted by a state trooper or deputy, and given a rendezvous point from which they would start out at ten sharp.Sabine was assigned to the second group, which was led by the ranger with the bullhorn and a state trooper who ticked off names as people confirmed they were clear on where they were supposed to be going.If, like Sabine, they were unsure, the rendezvous was pointed out to them on a map.Sabine put the location into her phone, though she didn’t think she’d have trouble spotting a big group of cars gathered up by the Dead River, even without the help of the convoy that was already pulling out.
