“Say what?”
“She doesn’t own a record player,” I repeated.
“Then why does she need the record?”
“She likes to look at the cover and read the insert while she streams the music.It’s what the kids do these days.I admit it’s odd, but it could be worse.”
Louis took this in.His expression suggested that were the information a morsel of food, he’d have spat it out and shot the chef.
“The world,” he pronounced solemnly, “is doomed.”
“It was always doomed.”
“Okay, more doomed.”
I still hadn’t asked him what he was doing in New York, and he still hadn’t told me.If it was to do with his health, Angel would have shared it with me, which left two possibilities: it was illegal, or it concerned me, and potentially both.
We walked on.By now we were outside one of Angel’s favorite stores, Pinecone+Chickadee on Free Street.If a man couldn’t find something he didn’t need there, he couldn’t find it anywhere.We were about to head in and buy stuff none of us needed when a woman came out with a full bag, her hair and forehead concealed by a large wool hat.Louis, barely registering her, stepped aside to let her pass, but she stopped to stare.It was Angel who recognized her first.
“Well, well,” he said, “if it isn’t the human fortune cookie.If you tell me I’m going to meet a tall dark stranger, you’re decades too late, and don’t think I’m not resentful about the belated warning.”
Sabine Drew smiled.It was an expression of genuine pleasure, but I didn’t manage to return it.At one time, Sabine was the most famous medium in the Northeast, thanks to her involvement in the recovery of the remains of a missing girl named Verona Walters.Unfortunately for Sabine, she hadn’t been so successful after, and became known as one of the most famous fake mediums in the Northeast, assuming one was prepared to accept that not all of them were fakes to begin with.I’d been a skeptic until our paths crossed on a later investigation involving another missing child, after which I judged that whatever else Sabine might be, she wasn’t a charlatan.But I wouldn’t have called what she had a gift, and I doubted she would either.It brought her too much torment.
But none of that was the reason for my caution.I had cause to believe she might have killed a man with poison, a woman’sweapon for a woman’s revenge.This was the first time we’d met since his death, and only Angel and Louis knew of my suspicions.It wasn’t for me to bring the law to her door, and anyway, as someone who stepped outside the law on occasion, it would have made me a hypocrite.However, few things dispose a man to be wary around a woman more than an aptitude for toxins.I couldn’t say the same for Angel and Louis: Sabine’s willingness to administer her own form of justice only seemed to make them admire her more, even if they did their best to hide it.
“They’re still with us, I see,” she said.
“They may always be with us,” I replied, “like the poor.I’ve tried to get rid of them, but they keep finding their way back.”
“You’re not trying hard enough.With the stubborn ones, it can take time, but the effort is worth it in the end.”
She peered at Angel and Louis, who regarded her with amusement, but not mockery.
“You know,” she said, “it’s like they understand every word you say.They’re almost human.”
Sabine was easy to dismiss, with her mismatched thrift-store clothes, the stray hair poking from beneath her hat, and a face she did her best to render unremarkable by making no effort at all to conceal it.At least one man was never going to make the mistake of underestimating her again.
Angel and Louis left us for the joys of the store, though not before Louis requested Sabine’s assistance with locating a missing cuff link.
“Bribe Saint Anthony,” she told him.“He takes all the small jobs.”
She placed her bag at her feet.I asked what she was doing in Portland.
“Before I heeded the siren call of this place, I was out at Easy Aquariums in Westbrook.”Sabine kept exotic fish.It was from these that she might have sourced her toxin.“You didn’t stay in touch.”
“I never said I would.”
“I hoped you might.”
“I thought it better to keep my distance.”
A number of people had died in the course of the investigation that first brought us together—not all of them as bloodlessly as the poisoning victim, though certainly less agonizingly—and it made me the object of unwanted police attention.All things considered, Angel, Louis, and I were fortunate not to end up facing serious charges.Whether I was correct about Sabine or not, it was wiser not to give the law any excuse for taking a closer look at her.As it happened, Sabine was not in the mood for circumspection.
“The police asked me about him, you know, the man who died so unpleasantly.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said I’d only ever met him at a funeral, and we didn’t speak, but I supposed he wasn’t a very nice person if someone had gone to the trouble of poisoning him.”
