A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  She gave a weary sigh, as though such a thought was simply irrelevant to the realities of her life. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said, ‘just look out for yourself.’

  25

  Joe Sawyer worked in a paper mill only a couple of miles from where he and Jennifer lived. She gave his job description as supervisor. From what Tom gathered, it meant handling the guys who delivered and unloaded the raw material of massive logs, a job requiring little more than the ability and readiness to deck anyone who got persistently out of line. Sophisticated industrial relations did not, it seemed, play much of a role at this level of the paper-making business.

  Tom decided to wait for Sawyer outside the gates when his shift ended at 5 p.m. He tried to dissuade Oliver Lewis from coming with him, seeing no reason to involve someone of his age in what could become an unpleasant confrontation. Lewis brushed aside his misgivings, observing that the best way to avoid trouble was to be in the company of an elderly person who could always clutch his heart and threaten to expire at the first sign of violence. Tom laughed; he was beginning to like Oliver Lewis quite a lot. All the same, he insisted that Lewis remain in the car Tom had rented while he waited for Joe Sawyer on the sidewalk.

  Sawyer emerged with a group of men, mostly tough-looking customers like himself. He was chatting with two of them when he saw Tom. The men followed Sawyer’s gaze as he stopped and glared in Tom’s direction. He said something to them, and they moved off towards a parking lot over to one side. One of them stole a glance over his shoulder, curious about what was about to happen, but followed Joe Sawyer’s advice to stay out of it.

  Sawyer started towards Tom with deliberate slowness, his arms hanging loose in the sleeves of the same leather jacket he had been wearing that first time they had faced each other at the family house. He let his gaze fall to the ground as he walked, focusing on Tom again only when he got right up to him, crowding him with his presence. Tom did not step back, which was obviously what Sawyer wanted him to do; he was damned if he was going to be intimidated by the kind of crude bullying attitude that Sawyer was obviously a specialist in.

  ‘You told me you didn’t want me at your house, so I came to where you work,’ Tom said, taking the initiative. He stood with his hands casually in his trouser pockets, looking up at Sawyer, who was a good two inches taller.

  ‘Did my wife send you down here?’ Sawyer asked.

  Tom had discussed with Jennifer what he would say if this question came up.

  ‘I asked her if she could put me in touch with any of the police officers who’d investigated her sister’s disappearance. She said you were the one who’d liaised with them, not her.’

  Suddenly Sawyer’s gaze went past Tom and his eyes narrowed threateningly. ‘What the fuck . . . ?’ he spat out softly. Tom turned, and saw Oliver Lewis with his miniature camera taking a shot of the two of them together.

  Lewis slipped the camera back into his pocket and strolled up to them, beaming amiably.

  ‘Mr Sawyer, I imagine,’ he said. ‘Glad to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Sawyer growled.

  Tom made the introductions; neither man offered to shake hands.

  ‘If somebody takes my photograph, I like them to ask me first,’ Sawyer said.

  Lewis was unperturbed. ‘My apologies, Mr Sawyer. I had no wish to offend and no intention to embarrass you. It’s a picture merely for my personal records.’

  ‘What personal records?’ The muscles in Sawyer’s jaw were still tight as he spoke.

  ‘Dr Lewis has spent many years investigating the kind of phenomenon we saw the other day with my daughter at your house,’ Tom said. ‘It’s something that happens all over the world – and something that I, for obvious reasons, would like to understand better. So would your wife. I’m sure you can understand that, Mr Sawyer. As to what we want, I just told you. To talk to the cops who were looking for Melanie. To see if there’s any stone been left unturned, any avenue of investigation that might tell us more.’

  ‘You think I’m holding out on you? You think I have something to hide? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Mr Sawyer,’ Lewis said, in that reassuring tone Tom had already seen him use to good effect with Jennifer, ‘we are simply trying to verify the extent to which Julia Freeman’s memories correspond with the events of Melanie’s life. Your wife has made it clear that neither you nor she has anything to hide. We have no interest in proving otherwise.’

  Sawyer thought this over for a moment, then said, ‘I could use a drink. There’s a bar over here.’

  Without waiting for their response, he led the way to a door alongside a darkened window on which the single word ‘Nick’s’ was written. The interior was fairly basic, with a scattering of tables and a tarnished mirror behind the bar. A handful of men sitting around the place probably came from the plant, because they looked up at his entrance and acknowledged him with a nod. Tom asked what he could get him, but Sawyer insisted it was his call. Lewis and he had a beer, Tom had a mineral water. He noticed a flicker of reaction in Sawyer’s face to this choice, but it was accompanied by no comment.

  ‘OK,’ Sawyer said, returning with their drinks, ‘let’s get this over with. I don’t know what this fucking baloney is all about, and I don’t care. You want to find Melanie – go ahead and find her. My guess is she’s working as a hooker out of some trailer park in Vegas or Reno, living with some pimp who knocks her around when he’s had a few drinks. That’d be about her speed. Do what you have to, but leave me and my wife out of it – you hear what I’m saying?’

  ‘You’re talking as though you’re sure she’s alive,’ Tom said. ‘Have you any reason to think that?’

  ‘I’ve no reason to think she’s dead or alive. All I know is she’s been gone a long time.’

  ‘Was there a problem between yourself and Melanie?’ Tom asked. ‘Is that why she left?’

  Sawyer looked at Tom as though he would have liked to smack him in the mouth, but he’d made his mind up to go along with this thing and was sticking with the decison – so far.

  ‘Yeah, there was a problem. The problem was the kid was a bitch. Soon as her mom and her sister were out of the house, she’d be walking around near-naked, asking me if I liked what I saw. Or she’d come into my room when I was sleeping late after a night shift. You get the picture? When the cops started asking around after she disappeared, they found she had a reputation for giving the best blow job in the neighbourhood – when she was all of thirteen years old. It didn’t surprise me, but I made sure none of that got back to her mother or her sister. They already had enough trouble.’

  He leaned forward, sliding his arms across the table and tilting it slightly towards him with his weight.

  ‘But nothing ever happened between the kid and me. I respected my wife, I respected my marriage. I still do. And I’m advising you to do the same and leave us out of this shit you’re trying to dig up.’

  Lewis was sitting comfortably, untroubled by the implied physical threat behind everything the man opposite him seemed to do or say. Tom gave a single nod, conveying that he had taken on board Sawyer’s words without being unduly impressed by them.

  ‘Did you ever hit her?’ he asked.

  Sawyer’s gaze focused on him and hardened. ‘My wife tell you that?’

  ‘She didn’t have to,’ Tom said. ‘I saw the way you reacted to my daughter the other day. “Fuck you, Joe,” she said. And you were ready to kill her.’

  Sawyer’s big hand tightened around his glass until it seemed he might break it.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ he said, not taking his eyes off Tom as he spoke, wanting to watch every word hit home and make its mark. ‘I didn’t fuck her either. Yeah, I hit her a couple times. She asked for it. And she was damn lucky that was as far as it went.’

  ‘So,’ Tom said, ‘you admit that when she disappeared, you were glad to see the last of her.’

  ‘I don’t admit a damn thing. Don’t tr
y your fancy lawyer tricks on me.’

  ‘I’m not a lawyer.’

  ‘Then maybe you should get yourself one before you start making accusations you got no right to make.’

  Sawyer lifted his glass and kept his eyes on Tom as he drank. Lewis broke the silence that followed with his soft, forensically dry voice.

  ‘Your wife told us that you were the one who dealt with the police on the family’s behalf. Do you think they did everything they could to find her?’

  Sawyer did not even glance in Lewis’s direction, as though he was of no importance and the question not worth answering.

  ‘They traced her to some place east of Rochester. That’s all I know.’

  ‘And after that. . . ?’

  He shrugged. ‘I guess the trail went cold.’

  There was a moment’s silence, then Lewis asked: ‘Do you remember the name of the officer in charge of the case?’

  Only now did Sawyer look sharply at Lewis. ‘What d’you take me for? The fucking memory man? It’s been ten years, for Christ’s sakes!’

  He finished his drink and put his glass down with a finality that was underscored by the way he scraped back his chair and got to his feet in the same movement.

  ‘Don’t come around the house, and don’t come around here any more. Either of you. Not even if you find her. Not even if she’s married to a movie star and living in Beverly Hills. As far as I’m concerned she’s history, and she can stay that way. That goes for my wife, too. You understand?’

  He didn’t wait for a response from either of them, just turned and walked out of the place. A couple of men at the bar glanced over with vague curiosity, but nobody was paying any serious attention.

  ‘So? What d’you make of that?’ Tom said to Lewis after the door had swung shut behind Sawyer.

  He leaned back in his chair, cocked a speculative eyebrow and pursed his lips. ‘Nasty piece of work. Capable of pretty much anything, I’d say.’

  ‘You know what,’ Tom said, ‘we need to find the cop who was in charge of the case. If he’s still alive, it shouldn’t be impossible.’

  26

  ‘Detective Schenk?’

  The heavyset man lifting fishing tackle and a cooler from the trunk of his car paused and turned in Tom’s direction. ‘Used to be. Who wants him?’

  ‘The station gave us your address, said they’d call ahead.’

  He grunted, slung a tackle bag over his shoulder, and slammed the trunk shut.

  ‘Been out since dawn. My wife must’ve took the message.’

  He glanced briefly at Oliver Lewis, who was standing by the car, then back to Tom.

  ‘You want to see me about something?’

  ‘We have an interest in a missing-person case I believe you worked on almost ten years ago. My name’s Tom Freeman, this is Dr Oliver Lewis. We’d be grateful for a little of your time.’

  Schenk, whose large head was covered in a mass of curly grey hair, weighed up both men through rimless glasses, decided they looked harmless enough to turn his back on them, and started up the gently sloping drive towards the modest but well-kept bungalow in which he lived.

  ‘Come on in,’ he said, ‘time’s something I got plenty of these days.’

  The door was opened by a stocky but trim woman with short blonde hair and a bright smile. ‘You must be the men they called about,’ she said to Tom and Lewis. ‘Murray if you’d only remember to take your cellphone with you . . .’

  The old cop handed her the cooler, saying something good-humoured about the privileges of retirement including no fire drills. Tom introduced himself and Lewis to her, and discovered her name was Evelyn. She asked if they would like some coffee. They accepted gratefully, then followed Schenk through to his den at the back of the house. It was wood-lined with a handful of fishing trophies proudly on display along with pictures of his finest catches over the years. An elderly black German shepherd, half asleep on a beat-up leather sofa, gave a perfunctory bark as they entered. Schenk ruffled the dog’s ears affectionately, then turfed him off to make a place for Lewis to sit. Tom took an equally beat-up armchair, while Schenk took the big chair behind his paper- and book-cluttered desk, hit the recline lever, and leaned back contentedly.

  Evelyn Schenk brought in the coffee while Tom was in the midst of explaining what they wanted and giving the background to the whole story. Like the good cop’s wife she must have always been, she gave no sign of even hearing what was being said, let alone having a response to it or offering any comment. She placed a plate of homemade cookies on the corner of her husband’s desk and invited her guests to help themselves, then left the room and closed the door behind her.

  Schenk listened to the story with furrowed-brow concentration. As a cop he must have heard a lot of weird things in his time, but Tom got the impression that this struck him as being in a class of its own. When Tom finished, Schenk didn’t look up for a few moments. Then he reached for a cookie, crunched on it, and turned to Oliver Lewis.

  ‘You say this happens a lot, Doc?’

  Lewis nodded. ‘More than you might imagine until you look into it.’

  ‘Damnedest thing I ever heard.’ He paused. There was a hint of scepticism in his voice as he asked, ‘But you’re the only one who’s done what you might call scientific research into it?’

  ‘Heavens, no,’ Lewis said. ‘Are you on the Internet?’

  A computer was fixed to a hinged stand by the desk. Schenk reached out and pulled it towards him. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What d’you want to check out?’

  Under Lewis’s direction, he typed the word ‘reincarnation’ into a search engine as Tom had done a few days earlier. Schenk’s surprise at the extent of the response was as great as Tom’s had been. Lewis guided him through a few of the sites, including briefly his own. When he’d seen enough, Schenk sat back and ran a hand over his chin, absorbing what he’d learnt. He looked over at Tom.

  ‘So you believe your daughter is possessed by this Melanie Hagan, Tom?’

  Like all the cops Tom had ever known, Schenk had the habit of addressing people by their first names right from the initial meeting.

  ‘I’m not sure Dr Lewis would want to call it “possession”,’ he said, glancing in Lewis’s direction, ‘but frankly, in my view, I’d say there’s an element of that to it.’

  Lewis made a dubious face. ‘“Possession” usually refers to demonic possession,’ he said. ‘You know, The Exorcist, that kind of stuff. What we’re dealing with here is something subtler, and not necessarily malevolent. In fact I haven’t known any case that I would describe as outrightly malevolent. It’s simply a question of unexplained memories lodged in minds where they have no reason to be.’

  ‘But always children?’

  ‘Almost invariably.’

  Schenck thought a moment, then looked at Tom again.

  ‘So tell me, Tom, why do you think this Melanie Hagan has chosen to come back – assuming she’s dead – through your daughter?’

  ‘That’s something I’ve been asking myself,’ Tom said, ‘and I have no idea.’

  ‘The point of this phenomenon seems almost to be that there’s no point,’ Lewis interjected. ‘There’s a whole subset of cases where a deceased individual’s memories and personality traits appear to be reborn into younger members of their own family but even there I’ve never come across a case of somebody returning with a specific purpose – you know, the will’s in a tin box under the stairs, that kind of thing.’

  Schenk grunted in response, and sat with his chin buried in his chest, gazing down at his well-rounded belly. Tom suspected he was thinking of many more questions that he would like to ask, but which he finally decided to ignore in favour of focusing on the immediate business his visitors were there for. He looked up with a brisk, faintly disdainful sniff, as though metaphysics was no subject for a cop to waste his time on.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll help you if I can. It’s a long time ago, and I can’t say I recall the
case. But I’ll dig out my notebooks and see what I can find. Why don’t you fellows help yourselves to another cup of coffee?’

  They did just that while Schenk rooted around on his hands and knees in the back of a deep drawer at the bottom of a large chest. Eventually he produced a handful of tattered flip-open notebooks, asked them the precise date, as near as they had it, of Melanie’s disappearance, and then selected one of them. He skimmed through several pages, frowning, then began nodding his head.

  ‘OK . . . I’ve got it now . . . yeah, I vaguely remember this guy . . . Sawyer, Joseph Anthony Sawyer . . . brother-in-law of the missing girl . . .’

  He thumbed through a page or two, then back.

  ‘I can’t tell you much. She was picked up in Buffalo by a couple driving east. Looks like the trail went cold. I can’t tell you if it’s still officially an open case without checking records . . .’

  ‘We know it’s an open case,’ Tom said. ‘The girl was never found, so it has to be.’

  Schenk flipped another page, then turned the notebook sideways to read something he’d scribbled in the margin. ‘The officer who traced her out of Buffalo was Detective Jack Edwards. I know Jack, we’ve worked together. He’s still on the force – Sergeant now. I’ll be glad to call him for you, see if he can help at all.’

  Tom and Lewis waited anxiously as Schenk dialled a number that he read off a Rolodex, and was put through almost immediately to his old colleague. They heard only Schenk’s end of the conversation as they spent a few moments catching up on friends and families, and laughing over a couple of old in-jokes. Then he came to the point and explained why he was calling. He listened in silence a moment before covering the mouthpiece of the phone and turning to the two men with him.

  ‘He doesn’t remember any more than I do, but he’s checking the computer.’

  The three of them waited in silence. After a couple of minutes Edwards came back on the line and said something that brought a puzzled frown to Schenk’s face.

  ‘Are you sure of that?’ he asked. He listened some more. ‘OK, thanks, Jack. I’ll tell them. Yeah, you too. So long, pal.’