Rise the Dark Read Free Page B

objection was raised. “It’s your nickel, bud.”
    “Thanks,” Mark said. “We had a good run this morning. Sorry to cut it short. That’s just how it goes sometimes.”
    Jeff’s voice was soft and sad when he said, “He won’t be in Cassadaga, Markus. You know that. He won’t go back there.”
    “He could.”
    Jeff shook his head. “You’re just feeding the darkness if you do that. Think about Lauren. What she believed, what she worked for! What she would want.”
    “You’re asking me to consider what she would have wanted in her life. She’s dead, Jeff. Who’s to say what she wants now? In those last seconds of her life, maybe she formed some different opinions.”

3
    T he sun had barely been up when Jay left on the first call-out, but it had set and risen again by the time he made it home and found a stranger at his kitchen table.
    Jay was so exhausted, so bone-tired, and the man was so relaxed, sitting with one leg crossed over the other and a polite smile, that Jay felt no threat. Just surprise, and only a modicum of that. He was confused by the stranger’s presence but unbothered by it because of the way he sat so calmly, with a cup of coffee, still steaming, close at hand. It was one of Jay’s mugs, and his perception was that his wife must have brewed the coffee. Everything that Jay didn’t understand about his visitor, Sabrina must know.
    “How’s it going?” Jay said to the stranger as he shed his jacket and set to work unlacing his boots.
    “Long day?” the stranger asked, genial and compassionate. He was a lean man with a narrow, pale face and long hair tied back in a tight topknot against his skull.
    “A day so long it started yesterday,” Jay said, liking the stranger well enough. He walked past him, out of the kitchen and into the living room, and called for his wife.
    “Sabrina isn’t home,” the stranger said. He took a drink of the coffee. He didn’t bother turning to face Jay.
    “Pardon?” Jay’s next thought was that the man must be a neighbor unknown to him, because Sabrina hadn’t gone far—her car was in the garage. Sabrina was the more outgoing of the two of them, and she tended to the neighbors with an interest Jay had never been able to muster. His initial concern in Red Lodge had been getting to know the power grid, not the neighbors.
    “She’s not in the house, is what I mean,” the stranger said.
    Jay was standing in the living room, looking back at the man in the kitchen. The stranger set the coffee down, lifted a cell phone that was resting on the table, and beckoned to Jay.
    “Come here. I’ll show you.”
    Jay walked up beside him obediently. He wasn’t sure if the man had a message on the phone or if he intended to call Sabrina, wasn’t sure of anything but that the situation, however odd, was absent of menace.
    Then he saw the phone’s display.
    At first he thought the image on the screen was a still photo. For a few frozen, shocked seconds, he was convinced of it. Then his wife moved, and shackles rattled across her body, and he understood that it was a video.
    “She’s unhurt, as you see,” the stranger said in an unfazed voice. “A bit groggy now, but physically unharmed. She’ll remain in that condition as long as you desire. Everything in Sabrina’s future belongs to your choices, Mr. Baldwin.”
    On the screen, Sabrina shifted again. She was wearing a pale blue nightgown that Jay had given her two Christmases ago and there was a handcuff on her wrist that was fastened to long links of a chain that trailed offscreen. Jay was numbly aware of the floor beneath her—unvarnished boards, clean and showing no blood. He was looking for blood already. As Jay stood in his kitchen and watched, Sabrina glanced down at her wrist and cocked her head from side to side, as if she didn’t understand the meaning of the handcuff and was trying to make sense of it.
    Jay started to shout something then. A question, a threat. Maybe just a scream. He