Under a Dark Sky Read online

  “What did you do with Hillary?” I said, choosing the offensive. “Or was she the dessert?”

  “Sure, we’re supposed to feel sorry for her after she accused one of us of killing our best friend,” Sam said.

  The counter guy shifted on his feet and pretended to find something about the lottery ticket dispensers to fuss with.

  “Which one did she accuse?” I said. “Maybe Malloy told her some things before he died.”

  An odd silence swept across the group until Paris gained control. She stalked toward me, brushing past on her way to the wall of coolers. “Who’s the one with a dead husband back home, huh?” she said, grabbing at bottles of water. “I bet the police will be looking into that.”

  “And they should,” I said. “They’ll be looking into all of us. I imagine they’ll find a lot more interesting things among the people who actually had a relationship with the victim. The skeleton in my closet is a car accident.” I had to pause to catch my breath, to push out the image of the car, the police. “How about yours?”

  I didn’t feel as brave as I sounded. I had a vision of that night in Chicago, at home with all the lights on, waiting for someone who wouldn’t come, waiting for the news they’d brought to be wrong.

  I avoided looking Dev’s way. If he hadn’t told them yet, he would, and what did it matter? I would go back to being a stranger, inconsequential, and isn’t that what I wanted? Maybe someday I’d be called to testify at the trial of one of them. That is, if Emmet County’s finest could eventually pin the murder on the right suspect, or on any donkey at all.

  “Look,” Dev said, rubbing at his face and eliciting a sandpaper scratch from his five o’clock shadow. “It’s been a rough day for us all, and it started pretty early. Why don’t we call a truce for now so we can try to get some sleep?” Here, he looked pointedly in my direction. “They’ll come get us tomorrow, probably interview us again, probably another rough day ahead. Several rough days for us, with Malloy’s family arriving—”

  Here, Paris made a small noise of distress and held her wrist against her puckered face. Dev went to her and pulled away the bottles of water. He looked down at the ice cream in my hand, blinked at it. “And,” he continued, leading her toward the register. “And I’m not even sure what happens then. A funeral, at some point. Answers, I hope. But for now, I’m not going to fight anymore. Let’s go, Pare.”

  Fight with me? I was hardly his staunchest opponent but once again I was providing the third man in the ring, the one they could all fling punches at. Hillary must have gotten tired of it.

  They paid for their waters, Paris’s hungry eyes lingering on the ice cream carton in my hand. They marched from the store and turned toward the town, Dev’s arm around Paris’s shoulder. In their absence, Sam and Martha hurried to get bottles of water and juices for themselves. When they had finally gone, I put the ice cream back. Heaven-sent was too hopeful for me.

  In the end, I settled on a package of crackers and some water, too. Dinner. The guy at the register rang me up, clearing his throat several times before giving my total. “You in that mess up at the park?” he said, taking my money.

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Guy killed,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  He held my change in his hand, weighing it but not giving it over.

  “Did you have a question?”

  “My money would be on that bombshell,” he said.

  Paris. Martha was buxom but no one’s bombshell. Paris was the one you couldn’t look away from. She was also black, but I hoped we weren’t in racist territory here. “I don’t have any information,” I said. “But she’s as good a killer as anyone, I guess.”

  “It’s usually a blonde, though,” he said.

  “Is it?” I found I was interested in spite of myself. “Usually where?”

  “In the movies,” he said. He held out my change and dropped it into my hand. Not chancing the possibility of touching me, I noticed. I had blood on my hands, maybe literally.

  “The dead guy’s girlfriend is a blonde,” I said, remembering Hillary’s little speech about our all being together in the house, our meet-cute.

  He pointed at me. “Bingo.”

  “She’s pretty tiny,” I mused. “I’m not sure she could get a screwdriver into him.”

  “He took a screwdriver?” the cashier moaned. “Where? In the—?” I pantomimed the neck stab it would have taken on myself, an upward thrust. So a tiny person might have been able to pull it off. A strong person, though.

  “Nasty,” he said. “That’s definitely a chick kill, not even remotely gentlemanly.”

  “Yes, because men are always gentlemanly when they kill,” I said, turning for the door. What was gentlemanly or civilized in any of this? What had that group of misfits come to do in the wild woods, anyway?

  One of them, it seemed, had come to take a friend’s life.

  For the first time, I felt scared for my own. The brazen retorts that had come so easily to the group now fell away. My knees buckled. I caught myself with the help of the door.

  Across the street stood the lone figure of the blonde in question, scraping her feet as she walked toward the motel. She stopped and stared up at the sputtering neon, and then up at the sad outlook of the place. Down at the end of the building, a door opened and a group of people emerged, laughing and singing. Drunk. Hillary let the crowd pass, then turned in the direction of the bar and picked up her pace.

  I wasn’t sure why Malloy and his friends had come to the lake, but I knew that Hillary had just made the decision to avoid her room and go get blotto on her own. And why not? The man she couldn’t live without was dead.

  I was halfway across the gas station parking lot before I realized I was going to join her. And why not?

  So many reasons, and yet they were not what I thought of as I chased Hillary’s rabbitish movements across the lot and inside. Maybe I wasn’t thinking at all.

  Chapter Ten

  Inside the bar, it was dark.

  I had pulled open the door and then stood on the edge of the gloom, stalled and unable to force myself to take another step. The dim lights over the bar illuminated only a few questioning or leering faces turned my way.

  “In or out, lady,” said a gruff woman’s voice.

  “I’m over here.” Hillary’s reluctant voice was timid against the other woman’s. It would not have been heard in any other bar, but this bar relied on just one TV on the back wall and its patrons concentrating on their own drinks and regrets. My eyes adjusted slowly, by which time the customers had lost interest in me. The woman who had first spoken up turned out to be the bartender. She folded her arms over her ample middle, the extra flesh a fierce white except where her neck and chest had started to go pink with impatience. For a moment I could imagine the woman rising to the challenge of kicking me out. She would have to. I was frozen in place.

  “Eden,” Hillary said, waving so that I could find her. “I’m buying you a drink. You look like you need one almost as bad as I do.”

  Now I could pick her out, her head turned over the high back of a booth. With the eye contact, I found that I could step inside the bar and let the day’s light close off behind me. I managed the last few shaky steps to the booth and fell in across from her. Seated, I had a view of a reassuring amount of blue sky through a window high in the front wall. I concentrated on that until I could face Hillary.

  Her face was puffy, eyes swollen to slits and nose rubbed raw. I remembered my own first hours after the doorbell rang with news of Bix. Nothing would have made it better. No one could have said the right thing. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s no help that I’ve been where you are.”

  She dug into her purse and pulled out a crumpled tissue. “They think I did it.”

  “The police?”

  “Those jerks from the house.”

  “One of them doesn’t,” I said. “Just not sure which one.” I was flooded with an anger I didn�
��t fully understand. What made people think they could kill and get away with it? Bix had made a mistake and had paid dearly for it—but I couldn’t think about what he’d done right now or I would lose the little bit of distance I could impose on this situation. I just needed to get away from this place and these people. This story could go on without me.

  “Malloy knew something bad would happen,” she said, her hands in fists. “He didn’t want to come here. But I—” Her face folded in on itself.

  “You wanted to meet his friends.”

  “Malloy talked about them all the time,” she wailed. “He talked to them all the time, too, phone calls, texts. I just thought . . . people that important to him should be important to me.”

  “Or maybe you should be important to them,” I said.

  She sniffed and held the tissue to her nose, talking around it. “So what if I did think that? They didn’t own him, though you would have thought they did from how much they asked of him.”

  I couldn’t help my curiosity. I wanted to know. “Why do you think he didn’t want to come? Did he single anyone out?”

  “I think he talked to every one of them in the week leading up to the trip,” she said. “Except Paris. He avoided her calls.”

  Interesting. “Why?”

  “Hey, Sex in the City,” the bartender called. “You ladies going to order some fruity cocktails or what?” She was leaning heavily against the bar but when we turned to look, she took in Hillary’s swollen face and backed up. “I’ll send something over. Good for heartbreak.”

  “I hope it’s bourbon poured over Xanax,” Hillary muttered. “How did you get through this?”

  “I gave up drinking and bored everybody’s sympathy away,” I said. “And ate. I gained and lost twenty pounds. Well, I lost twelve.” I looked at her, calculating how much the truth might cost me. “It also helped that I found out he cheated on me for at least a year before he died.”

  Hillary’s hand dropped from her face.

  The bartender came over and set down two shot glasses and a bottle with a thud, reminding me of Dev thumping down the bottle with the screwdriver still in the cork in its neck. Its neck, and then, later, Malloy’s. I must have paled. The bartender waved me off. “Drink what you need,” she said, quietly. She shrugged at the bar. “On me, but don’t tell those losers at the bar I have a plush side.”

  After she was gone, I poured the two glasses without bothering to see what we’d be drinking. My hand shook a bit. Telling the truth was still difficult. Shaming. I wanted the drink.

  “I thought you didn’t drink,” she said.

  “I don’t drink as much as some people.”

  “When did you know?” Hillary said. “About . . . her?”

  “Not soon enough to discuss it with him,” I said. “I was never not going to be blindsided, I guess. And then his funeral—well, he had more than his fair share of chief mourners.” I didn’t like to think about that day. That woman, bringing her grief to my husband’s funeral. “It got a little crowded near the casket.”

  “I’ll kill them if they come near him,” she said.

  She’d said it loudly. One of the men at the bar swiveled on his stool and took a long look at us before turning back around.

  “Careful what you say right now,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You don’t think I did it. Everyone else does, but you don’t. Why?”

  “I don’t know. You could have done it back where you live, I guess? Why bring him all the way here to stab him?”

  “Deeper pool of potential suspects?” She downed the shot and made a face.

  Good point. I held my glass for a long moment, trying to decide if this was how I wanted to handle the situation. There was no such thing as one shot.

  Hillary watched my hand on the glass. A little social lubricant might help this conversation. I drank my shot and suffered through the flames that rose back up through my throat and nostrils. When I could talk again, I said, “Well, if you did do it, what’s your motive? He wouldn’t commit?”

  “You’re thinking of Paris,” she said.

  “Why didn’t Malloy take her calls?”

  She waved a hand at me. “He did,” she said. “But only about half the time, or after she had tried three or four times in a row. Oh, yeah, she did that. He called it ‘war dialing.’ Like a spoiled brat. But he always gave in to her.”

  “Always?”

  “Well, not always.” Hillary reached for the bottle and poured us another round. “She wanted him, and he didn’t give in to that. They all wanted him, in their own way, but her demands were pretty straightforward.”

  “She wanted to sleep with him,” I said.

  “She wanted to marry him. Forever and ever, amen, and nobody else had better ever come knocking.” She shot back the drink and I joined her. My gut was warm, and the feeling was starting to emanate out into my legs. I had forgotten that hard alcohol numbed so quickly, and I didn’t mind the reintroduction. “She hated that I even existed,” Hillary said. “And that poor kid she’s stringing along.”

  Kid. She sounded a thousand years old.

  “But Paris wouldn’t have killed Malloy,” I said. I studied the blue square of the window for a moment. “She would have killed you.”

  Hillary shrugged. “Or Martha, then. She wanted him, too.”

  I could believe her story about Paris, the beautiful woman with the accommodating fiancé she couldn’t seem to wed. She had looked upon Malloy with the hungry eyes of a feral cat. But Martha? I couldn’t see it. Martha and Malloy were playful with each other—a flirtation, maybe, or a sibling-like closeness.

  “What do the guys want?” I said. A third shot waited for my hand. I didn’t remember it being poured but reached for it anyway. Magic.

  “Sam was calling a lot for a while, about his job,” she said. Some of her words sounded fuzzier to me than they should, but was that her speech going soft or my hearing? My hands tingled. When I squeezed them, they seemed to open and close in slow motion. “And Dev. I don’t know. He sometimes calls right after Paris does, just to talk. Malloy always picks up the phone for him.” She went quiet, looking off into the dark room. “Picked up.”

  “Favorites,” I said. “He played favorites among them.” For some reason, I knew that this would have been the biggest insult among their group, to be the person Malloy didn’t love as much as the others. To know it, too—to see the light dim as his eyes passed over the one who had somehow failed to inspire the same level of adoration as the rest. “That’s what he did.”

  “What?” she said. Her face was flushed. She held the back of her wrist to her mouth and closed her eyes.

  “He didn’t love them all the same,” I said. “And they all wanted to be the one he loved best. You. You wanted it, too.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” Hillary said. She pushed herself from the booth and raced away from the table. I heard her fumble at a door and the creak as it opened.

  I held my head in my hand and let the warmth of the liquor pulse under my skin. When I opened my eyes, the bartender stood at our table, pulling the bottle back. “Your friend going to be OK?” she said, stacking the empty shot glasses.

  “Never again,” I said. “He died perfect. He’s never going to disappoint her, except by leaving her alone.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I had to drag Hillary up the stairs to her room, only a couple of doors down from mine, and tuck her into the questionably clean Hide-a-Way covers. Her face was pale against the sheets, her hair hanging across her eyes. I was tempted to check for a pulse—second time in twenty-four hours—but listened instead until I caught the sound of her breath.

  I took her room’s phone off the hook, at least. The poor woman needed what sleep she could get, even the alcohol-induced kind. It might be her last chance to rest until after the funeral. Or longer. I thought for a moment about the casseroles dropped off, the notes in the mailbox like little individual grief bombs, the dread
scent of stargazer lilies in bouquets that kept getting placed in my hands. Longer.

  In the bathroom, I soaked a washcloth in cool water for Hillary’s forehead and was startled by the woman in the mirror there. I pawed at my lank hair and wiped the powder of old mascara from under my eyes. I had been thinking of Hillary as a sister in grief but it was clear from what I saw of myself now that I would be mistaken for her mother, if anything. Who was I to give her advice? Bix and I had had our run of things—and we’d run them right into the ground. Hillary and Malloy had been on their way up. Maybe they wouldn’t have made it, in the end. But that wasn’t the point. Her misery could be nothing like mine. Her grief would be her own.

  A toiletry bag sat on the back of the sink. I had it open before I even knew I would be taking a peek. Inside, the usual creams and concoctions young women used to field off what was already well under way in my reflection. A new tube of lipstick in a red too harsh for the poor girl’s skin tone. Ridiculous Red, the label on the bottom said. One pack of birth control pills, taken up to last night. Well, that was one piece of good news. No tiny Malloy on the way as Papa was put into the ground.

  Back in the bedroom, Hillary was still passed out. On the chair near the bed sat a cute fabric reusable grocery bag, flowered and adorable. She’d been allowed a bag? When I’d been patrolled like a criminal, distracted enough I’d left my toothbrush behind?

  I hesitated, thinking about all the people who had buzzed around me after the accident. They meant well. Some of them had, anyway. I had felt exposed, as though I had just walked into the middle of a wide, empty theater stage, a spotlight trained upon me. What Hillary needed right now wasn’t someone snooping around or even hanging around. I should go.

  I started for the door, but stopped. What I should do and what I was drawn to do were not the same thing. The desire to know shot through me. The desire to understand what might never be explained. What had happened to Malloy?