Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy)

by Lis Wiehl

  “Vanillylmandelic acid?”

  “Well done!” Quinn said. “This is why we had such a good time together. My friends say I should just let him be a dog, but he’s a bloodhound—he wants to sniff things out. It’s incredible, what he can do. What did you say you were teaching?”

  “You didn’t give me a chance,” Dani said. The waiter brought their food, and as they ate, Dani told him about the teaching she’d been doing, classes in criminal psychopathology, character evaluation methodologies for noncooperative subjects, forensic psychiatry in the courtroom. She told him about her job in general terms. When he wasn’t talking nonstop, Quinn could be a very good listener. When she’d finished, Dani thought it only fair that he have the floor to update her on his recent activities.

  “What’s the paper you’re delivering about?” she said. “‘An Immunoradiometric Study of Hyperandrogenism and Autism’?”

  “Well, it’s kind of a spin-off from the work I’d been doing on neurotransmitters of the frontal cortex—”

  “Impulse control?”

  “Exactly. The original work was with dopamine dysregulation syndrome and Parkinson’s and Tourette’s, and then we went longitudinal and started asking what happens to autistic children when they hit puberty. You’re aware of the effect of hyperandrogeny on teens in the A-A spectrum?”

  “Not the way you are, evidently,” Dani said, “but sure. Kids with autism who already have a hard enough time coping with emotions have an even harder time when they reach puberty and become flooded with testosterone or estrogen. They get completely overstimulated.”

  “And when they can’t take it anymore, they explode with anger,” Quinn said, fishing for his wallet to hand the waiter the money to cover the bill. He hadn’t touched his coffee or his garlic bread. “Sometimes. Not every time. Walk me back to my hotel?”

  They headed north on Broadway.

  “What do you know about Provivilan?” Dani said as they dodged pedestrians approaching from the opposite direction.

  “Not a thing, thank you very much,” Quinn said.

  “Isn’t Linz Pharm one of the conference sponsors?”

  “Indeed they are. Provivilan is the new miracle drug. If memory serves, one of those comes along every 2.5 years. Actually, I haven’t really dug in. Though I should. They offered me a job. Just last summer. In fact, this invitation to speak may be part of an ongoing wooing process. I could have made more money than Croesus.”

  “Maybe you should have listened,” Dani said. “You could have funded your research for years. No more grants to write.”

  “Yes, but they would have told me what to work on,” Quinn said. “I’m not cut out for that. I’m better off following my own path. If my life is ever going to amount to anything, I think that’s the way I have to go.”

  Dani thought it was odd to hear him sounding so fatalistic. When they’d first met, the sky was the limit and he spoke as if nothing would ever stop him. Now he seemed aware that the clock was ticking. Perhaps that was the curse that came with winning awards and scholarships at an early age—the gnawing sense you’re not living up to your potential.

  “Did the name Peter Guryakin come up when they offered you the job? I met him at an art opening in East Salem.”

  “It did not, but it probably would have if I hadn’t turned them down. He’s one of the research directors, right?”

  Dani smiled. “He told me he was in marketing.”

  “Perhaps he was just being humble. Or lying outright, which would not surprise me. The word on the grapevine is that he was running a KGB weapons program. Weren’t they trying to use their mental powers to make goats explode back then, or was that just a Hollywood movie?”

  “That was a movie. And I think the CIA tried that, not the KGB.”

  “Either way, the whole thing sounded unsavory,” Quinn said, craning his neck to look up at a tall glass building. He folded his hands together behind his back and rocked on his heels. “This is my hotel. We’ve had a snack and a walk, and you still haven’t told me how I can help you.”

  “I have a favor to ask,” Dani said. “Actually, two. We tested a boy, postmortem, who killed a young woman in a rather terrible way. I diagnosed him as having dissociative identity disorder, but that wasn’t with a full intake. His proteomics were all over the map. I was hoping you could explain the findings. The only catch is that I can’t send you the file. You’d have to come up.”

  “I don’t have a car. Can I take the train?”

  “Take Metro North to Katonah and I’ll meet you at the station. Can you do it?”

  “I deliver my paper this afternoon, but I’m free after that. This is good—it gets me out of dinner. What’s the other favor?”

  “The boy was supposedly in treatment, in a drug trial of some sort. I don’t know who was sponsoring the trial or even running it, but I think this is what they were testing.”

  She handed him a small zip-locked baggie with the blue capsule Tommy had found behind the Sweet’N Low at Starbucks. Quinn held it up to the light to look at it.

  “And you want me to find out what this is?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “I can, but I’ll need a lab. I know someone at Columbia. It’s not Provivilan, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Dani said. “I didn’t exactly get it from my pharmacist.”

  “Did you steal it?” Quinn said, smiling mischievously.

  “No,” Dani said. “One of the boys in the trial gave it to me.”

  “But you think it’s an SSRI?”

  “Or something related.”

  “To treat depression?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I’ll have a look. Which of the two favors has the higher priority?”

  “If you can assay the pill first, it may help explain the proteomics.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Quinn said. “I assume this is the only sample you have.”

  “It is.”

  Across the street a woman was already decorating a shop window for Christmas. Quinn put the baggie into his pocket and patted it.

  “Then I’ll be very careful,” he said. “Maybe when I come up, you’ll introduce me to whoever it is you’re in love with. I’d like to meet him. He’s lucky to have you.”

  “I didn’t say anything about—”

  “You said everything but,” Quinn said. “I’m not a behaviorist, but some things are obvious. I’m glad for you. I really am.”

  “It’s good to see you, Quinn.”

  “It’s good to see you too,” he said. “I worried about you.”

  “I’m strong,” she said. “And getting stronger all the time. You know me.”

  “Not sure that I really do,” he said. “Or ever did. But that’s my loss. I’ll call you when I know something.”

  She liked that he’d said when he knew something, and decided she’d been wrong to worry that it would have been awkward to introduce him to Tommy. She was certain Tommy would like him.

  A new worry occurred to her. She was involving Quinn in something that could be dangerous. Was that fair? She wondered if she should have laid all her cards on the table instead of keeping a few in the hole. But in a way, she thought, the less Quinn knew, the safer he would be. Unless his curiosity led him into dangerous territory. And she knew there was no stopping his curiosity.

  13.

  By talking to the staff at the High Ridge Manor nursing home that morning, Carl had at first learned little more than the police already knew—that the windows of Abbie’s room were locked from the inside, and that the surveillance videos didn’t show anybody going in or out of her room in the hour prior to when her body was found. Her physician told Carl that the progression of her illness had been slow but steady. The candy striper, a girl of sixteen named Amber who’d helped box up Abbie’s personal effects, said the clothing in her drawers had not been as neatly folded as Abbie usually kept it, but nothing was missing as far as she could tell. Carl found nothing unusual i
n Abbie’s stuff, save that the spine of her well-thumbed Bible had been cracked and partially torn.

  He was about to leave when Amber asked if he knew where Abbie’s son, George, was. “We’ve been trying to reach him,” she said. “He was here to visit that morning.”

  “Didn’t someone go to the house to tell him the news in person?” Carl said.

  Amber nodded and said with a shrug, “Nobody was home.”

  Tommy was also looking for George. He wanted to run some of Abbie’s comments by her son to see if he could shed any light, so he and Carl drove to the Gardener farm. As he drove, Tommy told Carl about the visit earlier from Ben Whitehorse. Carl wasn’t sure what to say, other than they needed all the help they could get.

  When they reached the farm, they paused at the long gravel drive. The hayfields beyond the low stone walls were brown, and they could see the slate-gray waters of Lake Atticus. Tommy turned down the drive slowly, honking his horn three times and turning his headlights on and off to let anyone in the house know they were coming. He parked in the circular drive in front of the house and shut the motor off.

  The large old house was a Queen Anne, with a stone foundation, a wraparound porch, corner turrets and gables and reddish-brown siding, black shutters and black gingerbread trim, and thick climbers of dark green English ivy rising up and over the trellises. Tommy remembered that when Abbie was healthy, the gardens and the decorative shrubs around the house were pruned and weeded, but it had all gone to seed in her absence. In the fading late-afternoon light, a month shy of winter solstice, the house looked not just dark but dead, as if no one lived there now or ever had.

  They got out of the car and without speaking split up to circle the house, looking in the windows to see if there was anyone inside. The day was getting colder and darker. Tommy turned up the collar of his navy peacoat against the wind and tugged down the brim of his Irish newsboy cap.

  They met up behind the house on a broad lawn leading down to the lake. A gas grill on the back patio was covered with a large garbage bag. On the lakeshore, an Alumicraft rowboat was docked.

  “That oughtta be turned over if they’re done for the season,” Carl said. “If George went to Miami to lie on the beach for the winter, he would have taken care of that. Is there a car in the garage?”

  “First there’d have to be a garage,” Tommy said, heading for the barn.

  “What does George drive?” Carl asked, following him.

  “I’ve seen him driving into town to pick up stuff at the hardware store in an old green Ford F150 with rusted fenders,” Tommy said. “I don’t know if he has any other vehicle.”

  “Didn’t Abbie have a car?”

  “A Dodge Dart. With a slant six. Those things were good for 300,000 miles.”

  “So was the driver,” Carl said.

  Tommy slid the barn’s great door open and saw both the Dodge Dart and the F150 parked inside, but with enough room left in front for a third vehicle. He paused to use the infrared handheld to scan the building. Carl looked over his shoulder.

  “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.