Page 81 of A River Red With Blood
Every space on the walls was adorned with pornographic images, many of very young boys and girls, at most in their midteens.Of the rest, there could be no doubt that the subjects were underage, with their teenage years ahead of them.Up close, the arrangements appeared random; only when viewed from a distance did patterns emerge.Louis discerned figures human and bestial, dominated by one image that took up the main gable wall, where genitalia, heads, nipples, and pubic hair combined in collage to create a dark angel seven feet tall, its wings extending to the side walls.Particular pain had been taken in constructing those wings: the scapulars and marginal coverts were nippled breasts, the primary and secondary coverts vaginas, and the primaries and secondaries below them erect penises.Louis could smell the paste used to glue the images to the wall; the angel was a recent addition to the décor.
The flip phone rang, startling him.He used the button on the earpiece wire to accept the call.
“Courtesy contact,” said Southwood.
“I’m in.The house is empty.”
“Can you see a computer?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s probably the one I’ve accessed.Would you like to hear what I’ve found so far?”
“If it involves naked children, I’ll decline.”
“How did you know?”
“He’s covered his walls with pictures of them.”
“Guess he does his own housework,” said Southwood.Then: “He’s been accumulating videos and photographs for a long time.He uses the dark web, probably because he’s under the false impression that it protects his anonymity.He’s not just looking either: he’s an abuser.If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to leave everything intact, meaning I don’t want to attempt to copy his caches to a secure server.Even I have my limits, and if I’m ever apprehended by law enforcement, however remote the prospect, I don’t want child pornography coming back to bite me.But if you decide you want to sic the feds on him, I’ll happily direct them to his door.”
Louis said he’d think about it.
“Heads up,” said Southwood.“You have a man entering the property, the same one who left earlier.He’s just come through the gate.”
“Description?”
“Tall, thin, balding.”
Sturgis.
“Understood,” said Louis, killing the call.He found a place in the shadows, the angel looming behind, and made himself unseen.
Chapter 77
Sabine Drew had returned to Haynesville to feed her fish, do some laundry, and consider everything that had happened in The Plains—which included, distractingly but pleasantly, a couple of bouts of lovemaking with Tim Sadlier at the Bingham Motor Inn.Sabine, who hadn’t had sex in so long that she feared she might have reattained virginhood, was surprised by just how joyful being with Tim made her feel.She’d been alone for years—or not quite alone, given the imminence of the dead to her, but certainly deprived of close contact with the living—and it was only in embracing another person, physically and emotionally, and allowing herself to be embraced in turn, that she recognized just how isolated she’d become.At one low point she’d even investigated becoming a nun, after learning that the number of Catholic nuns in America had dropped by eighty percent over the past fifty years, with the average age of those who remained also being eighty.Sabine had been baptized Catholic but lapsed in her teens—coincidentally or otherwise, when her gift/curse, delete as appropriate, began manifesting in earnest, proof of an afterlife not necessarily corresponding to proof of the existence of God.Nonetheless, she wagered the nuns needed her as much, if not more, than she might need them, and so wouldn’t be in a position to quibble over details.What finally put Sabine off, apart from the prospect of having to rise before dawn to pray and chant, followed by solitary Bible study and reflection, was that she’d be required to spend the rest of her days contemplating the ultimate unattainable male.This struck her as adding unnecessary fuel to the fire.
She had, therefore, been living with a low-level hum of depression for years.When her seclusion was shattered by Tim Sadlier,and the hum fell away, she was able to appreciate the quietude, broken by the breathing of the man lying next to her in a motel bed.Strange, she thought, that she should use the wordlovemakingabout sex with a man she barely knew.Sabine disliked profanity and used it sparingly, but even allowing for her sensitivities, words other than the ‘f’ one were available to describe what she and Tim had enjoyed.That she did not reach for them might have been dismissed as sentimentality, the impulse of a foolish woman falling head over heels in late middle age, a prelude to handing over the contents of her bank accounts before learning that her beloved had families in three states and a criminal record for fraud.But Sabine was not foolish, and her abilities made her acutely sensitive to those around her.She could pick up quickly on lies, evasions, hostility, but she was also attuned to their opposites: truth, openness, kindness.Love.In Tim Sadlier, she perceived only decency, and a kind of idealism.Life might have disappointed him, yet he was not a disappointed man and there was no bitterness to him.He had shared with her his ambition to leave Spero and The Plains, and while he might not have been speaking of moving to Europe and becoming an artist, or venturing into the Amazon to work with threatened tribes—he didn’t even want to leave Somerset County, never mind the state—it was a big step for him.It spoke of a man who was not prepared to give up hope, however modest it might be.In like manner, Sabine had suspended, if not abandoned, her dream of companionship (stopping short of love, which was where hope entered the realm of fantasy), while isolating herself against regret should it prove elusive.Life, it seemed, had surprised both Tim and Sabine, rapidly and unexpectedly binding each to the other.
But the incident in the woods had stayed with her, and she discussed it with Tim before returning home, she in his arms, her face against his chest, breathing in the strong man-smell of him, all sweat and earth and grass.She shared a great deal about her past that night, because she wanted to be up-front with him from the off.Were he to Google her name, he’d find out the truth anyway, at least about the children, the living and the dead.That she was also a murderer who had killed a man by poisoning his wine was a morsel she’d keep for a deathbed confession.Murder was a lot to take in on a second date, and represented the kind of overshare that might militate against a third, even if the man in question had deserved what he got.(Sabine’s lack of doubt on that issue surprised even herself.)
“So you’re a medium?”Sadlier asked.
“I don’t call myself that,” Sabine replied brusquely.“I don’t even know what it means.Do you?”
Sadlier admitted that he didn’t, but it was the only word in his vocabulary that approximated to what she was telling him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.“I didn’t mean to offend.I’m trying to understand.”
“Well, good luck with that.I’ve been trying to understand it all my life, and I can’t say I’m very far from where I started.”
“So when you came here to help with the search, it wasn’t just to pull on your hiking boots and walk a grid?”
“I hoped I might have more to offer,” said Sabine.
“Did you, um, pick up on something before you got here?Or see anything?”
“Like Mallory Norton’s ghost, soaked in blood, with a finger pointing into the far distance?‘Yonder lies the man!’”
