Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (15 page)

“Heat camera,” Tommy explained. “I spotted something on my property that registered extremely cold.”

The floor of the landing above them glowed with warmth.

“What’s that?” Tommy said, wary.

“Just the hay,” Carl said. “If the bales are put up damp and packed tightly enough, you get fermentation inside, and it generates heat. Plus, it insulates. A good barn full of hay will stay warm all winter.”

They checked the machine shed where they found a new John Deere tractor and the implements needed to mow, rake, bale, and transport hay, as well as a workbench and the tools needed to service the machinery. Tommy found an old boom box on a shelf above the workbench and turned it on. The radio was tuned to the local NPR station, and there was a Rolling Stones tape in the cassette deck. He turned it off.

“I would have thought country and western,” he said.

He moved to a bookshelf of greasy, well-worn service manuals and tipped them out one at a time as he read the titles.

“What are you looking for?” Carl said.

“This,” Tommy said, holding up a manual for a 2004 Honda CRV. “He fixes his own vehicles. He’s got a manual for the Dodge and the Ford, so I’m thinking this is the car that’s missing.”

Standing by his Jeep again, Tommy used the infrared camera to scan the house but found nothing unusual. The windows appeared to be the
same color as the siding, indicating that the furnace inside either wasn’t working or the thermostat had been turned down low. Carl asked if the coast was clear.

“I don’t even know for sure if this thing works,” Tommy said. “I’m pretty sure nobody’s home, but why don’t you go around back and see if the back door is locked. I’ll try the front.”

As Carl walked around the house, Tommy climbed the steps of the front porch and peered into the front windows. The house was dark and nothing stirred. He went to the front door and pulled the brass knocker back to rap against the plate. When he did, a business card that had been pinned by the knocker fluttered to the deck. He picked it up.

The card belonged to Julian Villanegre, Morningside, Hinksey Hill, Oxford, England, and listed an eleven-digit cell phone number. Tommy flipped the card over and saw, written by hand:

I’ll be happy to appraise your collection. I’m staying at the Peter Keeler Inn. Please give me a call.

He knocked on the door, first with his knuckles. There was no response. He tried again with the knocker, louder this time. He heard something and then realized it was Carl knocking on the back door. A moment later Carl came around the corner of the house and held his hands out, empty. Tommy showed the card to Carl, put it back where he’d found it, then called Dani to tell her they’d struck out. George Gardener was not home, and it didn’t look like he’d been home for a while.

“Casey’s been trying to contact him,” Dani said. “So’s Banerjee. Next of kin. Where are you?” She was on the Saw Mill Parkway and heading home after saying good-bye to Quinn.

“Right now I’m standing on George Gardener’s front porch with Carl,” Tommy said. “We’re thinking he’s driving a 2004 Honda CRV. What does Casey want with him?”

“He was the last visitor Abbie had before her death,” Dani said. “Or rather, the second to last, not counting a candy striper who checked on her after dinner. We’ve been trying to reach him for two days.”

“Can you track his license plates through the tollbooth cameras or figure out where he’s using his credit cards?”

“I can’t make that happen, but Casey can,” Dani said. “He might have thought of it already. Do you think George is on the run?”

“From what?” Tommy said. “Unless you think he’s guilty of something.”

“We’re all guilty of
something
,” Dani said. “I’m meeting Quinn’s train in Katonah later tonight. Do you remember my grandfather’s friend from the State Department?”

“Ed Somebody?”

“Stanley.”

“I thought it was Ed. Oh, wait—Stanley’s his last name. He was stationed in . . .”

“Moscow. I sent him an e-mail. Quinn said he’d heard gossip in the neuroscience community about Guryakin working for some Soviet weapons program. Ed Stanley might know somebody who can find out if it’s true. Worth a shot. Where are you going next?”

“Library. My aunt said she has some information for us.”

“I’m about twenty minutes away. I’ll meet you there,” Dani said and hung up.

She had wanted to say more. She had wanted to say, “When this is all over, why don’t we go somewhere, just the two of us, and fall in love the way everybody else does, instead of . . .” But that was being selfish, she thought. And off task. Not possible, not right now, anyway.

From the hayloft of the barn, the thing watched as the two men drove off in the car, staying low behind the insulating hay in case the younger one turned his scanner on to look behind him one last time.

When the car was far enough away, the beast leapt down from the hayloft and bolted along the ground, unable to use the atrophied wings on its back but running fast enough to keep up with the car, sometimes overtaking it and crouching in the branches of a tree by the side of the road to wait like a buzzard, watching them as they passed.

It stayed in the shadows, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Finally it came to rest high on the roof of the Grange Hall, where it looked down as Tommy parked in the lot next to the stone building that housed the East Salem Library and watched as Tommy and Carl got out of the car and entered the building.

It looked down on the town green, the gazebo in the middle, the row of shops, and at the opposite end of the green, a white church with a tall steeple and a gold cross mounted atop the steeple. The thing hated everything it saw. It felt scorn for the way these humans lived, and looked forward to the time when it would destroy the people who had just gone into the library, as easily as squashing bugs. It looked forward to the time when all of this would end, and there would be nothing left but the rats and the cockroaches and the flies swarming over the carcasses and the offal.

From the roof of the Grange Hall, next to the library, it waited, watching.

14.

“Tommy—that strange man has been here since lunchtime, and we close at six tonight,” Ruth said. “He’s very nice, but he’s making me nervous.”

“I’ll have a word with him.”

Tommy went to the carrel where Ben Whitehorse sat, surrounded by a half dozen volumes of local history books, including two by Abigail Gardener—
The Witches of East Salem
and
History of Ghosts in East Salem
. Ben looked up from the
Atlas of the Colonial Era
when he saw Tommy.

“You wouldn’t be following me, would you?” Tommy said, hoping he sounded friendly.

“I’m a good tracker,” Ben said, “but even I’m not good enough to follow someone and get there before they do.”

“Good point. Did my aunt help you find what you were looking for?”

“If that woman over there is your aunt, then the answer is yes,” Ben said. “I was very happy when I saw that there was a library so close to the inn. Whenever I get to a new town, I like to read up on the local history. Do you remember what I was telling you about paper?”

“That it was the biggest advantage the Europeans had when they arrived in North America?”

“Correct. Most of the work I do is with oral histories, but I love paper
histories too. Did you know that these days you can get a book and listen to it on a CD player? It’s quite amazing. Though I wish they wouldn’t let Hollywood actors do the reading. They ham it up too much. A good story should speak for itself.”

“So to speak,” Tommy said. “I did know that. Listen, I’m actually here to have a discussion about history that you might be interested in. Would you care to join us?”

“I would like that,” Ben said, closing the books in the carrel and straightening them before picking up his hat and following Tommy.

Tommy paused briefly to peruse the community bulletin board— advertisements for tag sales and yoga classes and pictures of lost cats. It had been an early morning yoga class on their way to perform a Salutation to the Sun on Bull’s Rock Hill that discovered Julie Leonard’s body.

He showed Ben the way to the media room, pleased when he saw Dani push through the door. He waved to her. Carl and Aunt Ruth were setting up the projector and logging into the proper files. Dani threw her coat over the back of a chair. Tommy was about to comment on how nice she looked—a sleeveless black dress with a Mandarin collar, accessorized by small gold hoop earrings—when he remembered that she’d had lunch with Quinn. It was perfectly natural to want to look nice for an old friend you hadn’t seen in years.

“How was lunch?” he asked.

“Good,” Dani said. “Fill you in later. Quinn’s coming up on the train tonight.”

“Dani, this is Ben Whitehorse, the man I told you about. Ben, this is Dani—uh, Dr. Danielle Harris.”

The old man shook her hand and said, “Dr. Harris, it’s a pleasure to meet you. May I ask you—what kind of doctor are you?”

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

“I admire psychiatrists very much. I sometimes think of them as spiritual healers of a different kind. A person’s heavenly spirit can only
be healed by prayer and by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, but people have a body spirit too. When that is sick, it makes people terribly sad or gives them an anger they can’t get rid of. The body is God’s temple, and you’re the electrician for the temple. You make sure all the lightbulbs work.”

“Thanks,” Dani said. “I never quite thought of it that way. Where are you from, Ben?”

“Oh, I’m sort of from all over the place. I travel a lot.”

It was closing time for the library, so rather than bother his aunt, who seemed to be getting along cordially with Carl, Tommy locked the front door for her and turned off some of the lights. Dani introduced Ben to Carl and Ruth, who set a platter of marshmallow Rice Krispy treats that had survived that day’s story hour on the table. The Smart Board displayed a Thanksgiving mural the children had drawn that morning. Ben examined it closely.

“Ben’s visiting from . . .”

“The Midwest,” he said, smiling.

“I was just asking Carl if he had any plans for Thanksgiving,” Ruth said to Ben, exchanging a brief glance with her nephew. “If you’re in town over the holiday and have nowhere else to go, perhaps you’d care to join us? We’ll be having all the traditional foods.”

“Eel?” he said.

“Well, no,” Ruth said. “Turkey. Stuffing. Cranberry sauce.”

“At the first Thanksgiving, they ate eel,” Ben said. “It was very plentiful in this part of the world back then.”

“I can make eel if you’d like . . .”

“No, turkey will be fine,” he said, admiring the mural. “Your children are very artistic.”

“I was hoping Tommy and Dani would join us too,” she said, looking to her nephew for a reply. Tommy saw Carl nodding urgently to him, as if he were too shy to be alone with Ruth for more than a few minutes.

“We’d love to,” Dani said.

“Now that
that’s
settled,” Tommy said, taking the floor. He explained that the reason they’d gathered was to help decode something Abbie Gardener had said. He described the circumstances of the interview he and Carl had conducted with her and then logged out of the Smart Board’s Thanksgiving mural. In its place he posted his transcription of the interview and the questions he and Carl had written down after going through it the day before.