Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (5 page)
“I know,” Tommy said. “I have one.”
“Can it do this?” the angel said. He opened a small blade and pointed it toward the ceiling. As Tommy watched, it transformed into a large sword, radiating a bright white light that forced Tommy to shield his eyes with his hand.
The light became flame, swirling toward the ceiling in beautiful, flickering tongues. Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the flames were extinguished. The light went out and the blade shrank back into the angel’s hand.
“No,” Tommy said. “Mine can’t do that.”
He knew somehow that what the angel had chosen to show him was only a partial display, a hint at the full extent of his power.
There were a hundred questions Tommy wanted to ask, but this wasn’t the time. He had to get back to Dani. Knowing her, she’d be looking for him. The bug he’d hoped to plant was useless, but he shoved the pieces into his pocket lest someone find them and take a closer look.
“What should I do if he comes back?”
“When a demon is in physical form, it feels pain,” the angel said. “You
can’t kill them—humans can’t—but you can drive them off. They operate in the shadows. The pure light of God is harsh to them. It burns them. And they don’t like to draw attention because they know we might come to defeat them. I have to go. But you’re on the right track.”
Tommy blinked, and the angel was gone.
Next time
, he told himself,
don’t blink
.
Dani was shocked when she read a text message from Carl Thorstein telling her Abbie Gardener had passed away in the night. Carl was a friend of Tommy’s, a theologian and scholar who’d counseled Tommy after that tragic accident convinced him to do something other than play football. Carl often visited residents at High Ridge Manor, the nursing home where Abbie had been a resident. According to Carl, Abbie had been alive during a routine bed check at ten and dead at the next check at two.
Dani put a kettle of water on the stove for tea, then texted Tommy the news. He instantly texted her back:
I HEARD. INTERESTING TIMING
.
She’d been thinking the same thing. She typed back:
FIGURED HE TOLD YOU. NATURAL CAUSES, RIGHT? CARL SAID IN HER SLEEP
.
She’d barely set the phone back down when Tommy’s response popped onto her screen:
IN THE NIGHT. BIG DIFFERENCE
.
Dani reread Carl’s text and realized Tommy was right. She sent him one more:
I’LL MAKE SOME CALLS
.
Dani had questioned Tommy’s run-in with Dr. Ghieri because she was skeptical by nature. When he’d told her Ghieri had lifted him off the ground, she reasoned that Ghieri was a strong man temporarily assisted by a jolt of adrenaline. She thought it more likely the guidance counselor had “vanished” simply by running from the room while Tommy was still on the
floor, recovering from being choked. Charlie wasn’t an angel; he was simply a guest at the opening who had appeared to help Tommy because he’d heard the scuffle. She didn’t believe in prophecies or premonitions—she knew that if you had a thousand premonitions a day, you’d only pay attention to the one that came true and forget the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.
But when Tommy told her Charlie had produced a flaming sword and provided a demonstration of its power, she did not doubt him but sought corroboration. After he dropped her off at home, she’d researched the notion of angels wielding swords and had found plenty of references in the Bible and in noncanonical texts.
“You
should
be asking questions,” Tommy had said. “God wants you to ask questions—he wants you to be
you
, and to use all your scientific training. Test your hypotheses and don’t take things at face value. That’s what you do, and you’re good at it.”
Following Tommy’s line of thinking, however, required a leap of faith. Dani had made the leap when she realized science couldn’t explain the things that were happening. On the night Julie Leonard was killed, Dani had begun having troubling dreams that woke her at exactly 2:13 night after night. Then Tommy reported having the exact same dream she’d had, an apocalyptic nightmare where millions of people were fleeing a flooded city and jumping to their deaths from tall white buildings. Then an angel had spoken to her—in a dream, but she knew it was real. He’d said, “Go ahead and jump—I’m here to catch you if you need me.” The angel had spoken to Tommy too, and told him to look in the book of Revelation, chapter 2, verse 13:
“I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is; and you hold fast My name . . . My witness, My faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.”
Tommy’s conclusion was that God wanted them to be together. He’d sent them an angel to tell them Satan was at work somewhere in the town where they lived, East Salem, and God wanted them to do something about it. Dani couldn’t argue.
She and Tommy had decided to do what each did best, a kind of division of labor. God had brought them back together and given them an assignment, a part to play in a spiritual war, the breadth and scope of which were beyond their knowing. They agreed that Dani would approach things scientifically, using her medical training and psychiatric expertise, while Tommy would pursue the more spiritual lines of inquiry.
She sat down at her kitchen table to sip her tea and think.
Tommy was right about the timing. Abbie Gardener died the very night the Bosch exhibition opened at St. Adrian’s. After all the strange things that had happened in East Salem recently, Dani was inclined to believe that if something seemed suspicious or evil, it probably was.
Why that night? For over a century, before succumbing to Alzheimer’s, Abbie had lived on a 150-acre farm that included half a mile of frontage on Lake Atticus. Abbie drove her own car, worked in the town archives, and stayed active until she was 100, declining an invitation from the mayor for a town-wide birthday party. Her son, George, brought her to High Ridge Manor at the age of 101, when he’d realized she was failing and he could no longer keep her from wandering off the property. If she’d lived so long, why die the very night the painting came to town? What was the connection?
Dani went to her study and looked on the shelves where she kept books she’d treasured as a child. Among them she found what she was looking for, a slender volume entitled
The Witches of East Salem
by Abigail Gardener. She leafed through it but found nothing remarkable save the title page, where the author had written during a visit to Dani’s fourth-grade class,
You are special
.
Tommy and Dani still wondered if Abbie was somehow connected to the murder on Bull’s Rock Hill. The night Julie Leonard died, Abbie had wandered away from the nursing home and managed to set off the alarm on Tommy’s property at two in the morning. Tommy found her by his pond, where she insisted on showing him a dead frog she held in her hands. “These are the first,” she’d told Tommy. “You’ll be the last.” She’d seemed incoherent, rambling about luck’s fairy, they thought, until Carl Thorstein
realized she’d been speaking Latin. “Luck’s fairy” was in fact
lux ferre
, which translated as “light-bringer,” the Latin root for the name Lucifer.
It placed her in proximity to the killing, if nothing else.
Tommy had met with Abbie in the nursing home a few days later, hoping she’d seen something the night Julie died. He’d had Carl record the interview, which hadn’t gone well—a few semi-cogent responses, and then the old woman transitioned into a psychogenic fugue.
Dani looked out the window of her study. The morning sky was dark gray and heavy with the promise of rain. With the leaves all down on an overcast November day, the town of East Salem took on a sepulchral tone, the massive homes and mansions suddenly visible through the naked trees, and they looked gloomy and lonely, isolated from each other. Once the Christmas lights went up in December, things would be cheerier, assuming the town could shake the additional pall cast by the recent tragedies. People were still on edge. Parents hugged their kids just a little harder, tucked them in just a little tighter, checked to make sure the doors and windows were all locked before going to bed.
Dani picked up the phone to call Stuart Metz, the assistant DA. She’d dialed the first three numbers when her cell phone rang. She glanced at her caller ID.
“Stuart,” she said. “I was just about to call you.”
“You heard?” Metz said.
“About Abbie Gardener?” Dani said.
“They took the body straight to the medical examiner. He said he’s never seen anything like it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Just telling you what Banerjee said. How soon can you be there?”
“They need me?”
“Casey asked for you,” Metz said. Detective Philip Casey had been the lead detective on the Leonard murder. “If you’re feeling up to it. I know
you’re still on leave, but this is just a little consulting. I think he has some questions about Alzheimer’s.”
“I never evaluated Abbie,” Dani said. “There must be someone at the nursing home who knows more about her condition.”
“Yeah, but you’re on the payroll.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Forty with traffic.”
The county medical examiner had never seen anything like it? Baldev Banerjee had seen a great deal. Dani wasn’t sure she wanted to see what had happened to Abigail Gardener. She’d been a brave soul who deserved a peaceful ending. Dani doubted she’d gotten one.
Tommy drove his father, Arnie, and his father’s caregiver, Lucius Mills, to the airport and put them on a plane for Texas to stay with Tommy’s Uncle Sid, Arnie’s kid brother. Tommy’s Aunt Ruth, the middle child, was the East Salem librarian. Arnie suffered from a kind of cognitive impairment called Lewy Body Dementia. He had good days and bad days, more bad than good lately, and Tommy was concerned about having to keep one eye on his dad with everything else that was going on.
When he returned home from the airport, he punched in the code on his security keypad, drove through the gate, and was glad to see Carl Thorstein’s motorcycle parked in the courtyard. Tommy put his Jeep in the garage and greeted his friend who, in addition to knowing the code to open the gate, had his own key to the house. He was sitting on the back steps. He’d been a kind of second father to Tommy—not a substitute, Tommy liked to say, but a close second.
“Feel like riding?” Carl said.
“Where to?”
“Does it matter?”
“Might rain.”
“Might.”
Carl, a die-hard enthusiast who rode year-round and wore a snow
mobile suit to keep warm during the winter months, rode his motorcycle for some of the same reasons Tommy turned to exercise. It was where he got his best thinking done. He rode when he was troubled or sad. He’d ridden to Mexico after his daughter, Esme, drowned in a boating accident. Today Tommy knew Carl was thinking about Abbie.
Tommy had three motorcycles: a Harley-Davidson 883 Sportster for light riding, a more muscular black Harley-Davidson Night Rod Special for longer highway trips, and a white BMW R1200 GS for going off-road. He rolled the Night Rod out of the garage and followed Carl’s chrome yellow Fat Boy west on 35 to the Taconic Parkway and then north to Taconic State Park and Copake Falls, where they stopped to stretch their legs.
The only other visitor at the park was an older man in a trench coat and black beret, walking a large black poodle. Tommy and Carl were looking at the falls when the rain started. They rode their motorcycles under a nearby picnic pavilion and sat on a table. Tommy thought about the first time he’d put his arms around Dani, waiting out a thunderstorm beneath a bridge.
“Bad for us but good for the waterfall,” Carl said, taking off his gloves. Sections of an old
New York Times
sat on the picnic table next to a can of lighter fluid, near a blackened charcoal grill and beside a box of dry kindling. Carl slid the sports page across the table to Tommy, who glanced at a story about one of his former teammates demanding to be traded to a championship team and then pushed it aside.
“Are you sad about Abbie?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t be, right?” Carl said. “It’s not like her life was cut tragically short at 102. Tough old bird—isn’t that what they say? I’m sure the Lord was glad to finally meet her face-to-face.”
“And vice versa.”
Esme had been seventeen when she died, several years before Tommy had met Carl. “
You don’t get over it
,” Carl had told him. “
You move on, and you keep living, but you carry it with you forever
.” Carl had dedicated
his life to helping others and had thrown himself into his work as a way to cope with his loss, but Tommy knew the pain came back from time to time, particularly when the days grew short and the nights grew longer.
“Your text said you had something to tell me,” Carl said.
“I do,” Tommy said. “About what happened last night at the exhibition.”
“Did you see the painting?”
“Up close.”
The old man and the poodle were making no effort to get out of the rain, the man throwing a stick, the dog joyously chasing it. Tommy wondered if the old man had a wife. Perhaps the dog was his sole companion.
“Do you see that guy?” Tommy asked. “Do you think he has a guardian angel?”
“Sure,” Carl said.