A more calculating Rakestraw showed his face.
“In the first district, perhaps, if we’re talking congressionals,” he said.“The second is less predictable.For governor, it’s a toss-up.You know, you ride a tall horse, Mr Parker.The fall, when it comes, will be painful.”
“Will your stepson’s death affect your ambitions?”
“A few years is a long time in politics.”
“It’s a long time, period,” I replied.“Long enough for people to forget, if you want them to.”
“We’ll see.I’d have preferred not to have to take that into account.”
The politician departed, and the stepfather reassumed his place.
“You know, Scott screamed when they took him,” he said.“He screamed, and he cried, and he begged and begged.He made so much noise that one of the men slipped a gag over his mouth because they were afraid someone might call the police.Scott kicked and fought so hard it took three men to subdue him, and they had to put cable ties on his hands and feet.I think letting it continue was the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
“You could have stopped it.”
“I could, but I didn’t want to.That’s my failing.Isn’t that what you came to hear?”
“By now, I don’t know why I came,” I said.“I just wish I hadn’t.What about your wife?”
“She repeats what you heard in there: that Scott brought it on himself, that it was his own fault.She’d like to believe it’s true, but she can’t, so she keeps saying it over and over in the hope it might make it true.”
Rakestraw’s voice dried up.He coughed hard.After, he was able to speak again.
“Scott was far from perfect as a son, but we should have been better parents.We were the adults and he was the child, so the onus was on us, not him.That makes us complicit in his death, however it occurred.Do you know what Santopietro told us when we first met him to discuss Scott’s future?He said that we shouldn’t blame ourselves for sending him away because we weren’t trained to deal with troubled children.But what parent is?”
I had nothing useful to offer.Behind Rakestraw, Hailee Theriault floated to the front door.
“Jerry,” she said, “let the man be about his affairs.”
“If you learn anything—” he began.
“Alcock will let you know,” I said.
“Not you?”
“No.”
I got in my car and drove away.I tried to think of a child who had been failed so badly by more of the adults in his life than Scott Theriault, but couldn’t come up with any.And I couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or a bad.
Chapter 44
Sabine Drew arrived in Bingham shortly after noon.The town was quiet, but it was hard to imagine it any other way, except in the height of summer, and even then only as a throughway.Bingham was a functional community: three or four churches, some schools, a NAPA auto parts, a Dollar General—because where would the poor be without a Dollar General?—a few gas stations with convenience stores, and because this was the new Maine, a cannabis dispensary.Faded signs on deserted or boarded-up buildings whispered of a departed Bingham with more appetite for the inessential and a supply to meet the demand.They reminded Sabine of the names found on stones, or beneath pale pictures of thedead.
Thanks to the newspaper reports about Mallory Norton’s disappearance, and aided by a Google search at the Inn at St John, she had in her notebook the location of the building supplies premises owned by Mallory’s father, Todd “T.K.”Norton, as well as the address of the family home and much else besides, including prizes won by Mallory in middle and high school, both athletic and academic, and a selection of the more interesting comments about her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.(Sabine would never call it X, not as long as breath remained in her body.) She had also assembled a short list of Mallory’s employers since leaving school, which included the family business.Like a lot of residents in that part of the state, notably the younger ones who either opted to stay or felt they had no choice due to family commitments, Mallory Norton worked a couple of jobs, depending on the season: part-time hours for her father in late winter and spring, combined with shifts at a gas station or restaurant, or packing shelves as far south as Solonor Madison; but in the summer, when the tourists flooded the region and all the resorts and camps were scrambling for staff, she had greater latitude.She might still work two jobs, though out of choice rather than necessity, because what she earned would help her through any lean periods to follow.The opportunities tailed off some in hunting season, but the crossover with the winter sports crowd meant she could still bring in good money from waitressing through January or so.After that, it was a few months of hardscrabble.
Sabine was building a picture of the girl.This, she reflected, was not dissimilar to how the private investigator operated, though with a different aim.He would be looking for clues, but Sabine was looking for traces, like the scent offered to a dog before a search, just as the men and women who had scoured the Kennebec Valley for Mallory Norton might have done with their hounds.It wasn’t enough for Sabine to arrive in a place, clear her mind, and wait for the dead to present themselves in the hope of identifying the one among them that interested her.That would be like opening the sluice gate on a dam and expecting to catch a single drop of water in one’s mouth.For her to be of any help, filters were required.
Right now, Sabine had no sense of Mallory beyond what she’d read, which was why she’d driven to Bingham.She wanted to walk the streets the girl walked, see what she saw, hear what she heard, and smell what she smelled.She would stop by T.K.Norton’s place of business and pass by the school, even go inside if it was open.Should anyone ask what she was doing, she might tell the truth, but more probably she would lie, inventing a daughter, a niece, the child of a friend, who might soon be relocating to the area.Finally, she would visit the street where the young woman lived and seek to enter her home, where all that was Mallory was so much more present.Of course, the Nortons might not appreciate a stranger arriving on their doorstep unannounced to spend time in their missing daughter’s bedroom.Even if they knew who Sabine was, there was no guarantee they’d welcome her, but it would not be the first time she had invited herself into a situation rather than wait for an invitation to beproffered, and in common with the investigator, she understood the value of tenacity.
Sabine first went to T.K.Norton’s warehouse and store where, on a small table inside the door, a votive candle was burning next to a framed photograph of the missing girl.Pinned to the table was a laminated notice containing a physical description of Mallory, when she was last seen, and contact numbers for the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office and the Maine State Police.Sabine placed the palms of her hands on the reception desk on the pretense of inquiring if the store had a restroom she might use.She would also have liked to touch the chair behind the desk, or even to have sat in it, but it wasn’t really the kind of thing a visitor could ask of a receptionist.
She then went to Valley High School (“Home of the Cavaliers”), a redbrick building with tidy lawns and sports fields in the rear.The doors were all locked, the fields unoccupied, and she saw no one around who might have been persuaded to let her explore further.At the front door, beside a sign requesting that visitors and parents buzz for entry, a copy of the same photograph from the store had been blown up double-size and taped to the inside of the glass, with a printed sign beneath that read MALLORY:INOURTHOUGHTS, INOURHOPES, INOURPRAYERS.As at the store, Sabine ran her fingertips over a surface that Mallory might once have touched, and as at the store, she picked up nothing.But it was another step toward familiarizing herself with the girl’s world by locating her in its precincts.The shape of a person was forming, but Sabine needed more than a bare outline if she was to have any chance of finding her, dead or alive.Sabine feared the worst—the disappearance of teenage girls from good homes rarely boded well—but she resisted allowing fear to become an assumption, because that would cloud her perception and judgment.Even the presupposition that the Norton home environment was good or safe was problematic, for who knew what went on behind closed doors?If she could get inside the house, Sabine might be able to come up with an answer, even if it was only to rule out the involvement of one or both of the parents.Abuse left a very distinct miasma, and sexual abuse amore specific one.A person didn’t even have to be as unusual as Sabine to spot it.She had known police who could pick up on it within moments of entering a residence, especially if parent and child were present; abused and abusers had a shared spoor.So Sabine would have to go to the house, as she had always assumed she would.She could procrastinate no longer.
The Nortons lived on the northern outskirts of Bingham, on the road to Moscow.It was a ranch-style home on about a half acre, but with no extensions to the original necessary to accommodate a growing family, since Mallory was the couple’s only child.The front yard was planted with fall-blooming native trees—Franklin, Higan cherry, and witch hazel—while a single sugar maple stood at the eastern extreme, close to the road, a green ribbon tied to its trunk.The doors to the two-car garage at the right of the house were open, but only one of the bays was occupied.The vehicle inside was a Honda CR-V: more the choice of a wife than a husband, in Sabine’s view.That was good, as she preferred dealing with women more than men.It wasn’t that women were necessarily more open-minded, only that they didn’t feel the same need to pretend they weren’t.
She rang the doorbell and watched samaras pinwheel from the sugar maple, the crown of the tree bright with yellows, oranges, and reds, so that it might have been afire against the blue of the afternoon.But to the west, the sky was turbulent with cloud, and there was rain on the air.The door opened.Anita Norton stood in the gap; Sabine recognized her from the news reports.She was in her late thirties, so she couldn’t have been more than twenty when Mallory was born, but looked older than her years.Her daughter’s vanishing would have aged her, even in such a short space of time, though Sabine guessed that life might have been chipping away at her from before.The Honda in the garage was eight or nine years old, and the house showed signs of patching and mending in the absence of funds to make more meaningful repairs.The Nortons were managing to keep their heads above water, even as they felt it lapping against their chins.
