Under a Dark Sky Read online

  Twenty minutes went by before the door to the street opened and Paris, Martha, and Sam appeared. Sam sat next to the sleeping man, noted the handcuffs, and then stood, offering the seat to the ladies.

  Paris gave Sam the kind of look given to a child who had soiled himself and seated herself on the other side of Dev. “Have they told you anything?”

  “Just to wait,” Dev said.

  “Has anyone seen Terry and Clare?”

  “Nothing yet, hon. Just waiting,” he said. She popped back up again and went to the window, where a young male officer kept court. He was chubby and pale, probably not more than a few years out of acne. Paris approached like a jungle cat. She was the kind of woman who got a better table with a smile or a flirtatious touch on the sleeve. The others watched. They had probably enjoyed those better tables alongside her. But I trained my eyes on Dev, on his bouncing knee.

  When Paris came back, she patted the knee still. “Only a few more minutes,” she said.

  “So . . . just waiting, then,” Sam muttered.

  Paris heard him. Her eyes flashed over the group, landing on me. I don’t think I was smiling, but I was watching. That was enough.

  She turned to Sam. “Maybe I’m just anxious to tell them what I know about certain items missing from Malloy’s body,” Paris stage-whispered. The word body cost her greatly, but she soldiered through.

  Sam folded his arms across his chest.

  “Pare, what’s going on?” Dev said.

  “He’s wearing Malloy’s watch,” she said. “That’s what’s going on.”

  We all turned to Sam. After a long moment, he unfolded his arms. On his wrist was the overlarge watch like the one I’d seen Malloy pull from his car and attach to himself. I hadn’t realized it was the same watch, though it was hard to miss, something more likely to be used to circumnavigate the globe than as a mere timepiece.

  Sam’s eyes darted around the room. “I didn’t take it from the— Who do you think I am?”

  “We’re not sure anymore,” Paris said.

  “Pare, come on,” Dev cautioned. “Sam, explain it.”

  The pudgy cop behind the desk had called in a few buddies. They all leaned into the slot in the window to hear the story. Sam stammered excuses about wanting to remember Malloy and keep the watch safe until a door at the side opened and Officer Cooley stood in the opening. “Come on back and tell it to the sheriff,” she said.

  “I found it in the bathroom, OK?” Sam said. “When they let us in to get a few things. It was on the shelf by the sink and he was dead—I mean he was already dead . . . but I would never—”

  “You stole a souvenir from a dead man,” Paris said. Dev reached for her but she slipped out of his grasp. I had seen this same move—reach, denial—a number of times since meeting them. Dev caught me witnessing it and bowed his head over his sandals.

  “Souvenir . . .” Sam gagged. Sweat beaded on his upper lip. “You don’t—you don’t really—”

  Officer Cooley crossed the room and took Sam by the arm. Martha went after him, yelling that she was his lawyer. The door closed behind them, cutting the room to silence.

  I was shaking. I got up and went to the bulletin board near the window. Wanted posters for a few local baddies had been stapled there, alongside a poster announcing a community carnival in town and a copy of the flyer listing the latest happenings at the dark sky park. Warden Warren’s uncomfortable mugshot looked out from that one.

  Behind me, Dev said quietly, “I can’t believe you did that to Sam. I didn’t even notice he was wearing Malloy’s watch. How did you even—”

  But everyone in the room save the passed-out drunk knew the answer. Paris spotted the watch because she noticed everything when it came to Malloy.

  I darted a quick glance over at them. Dev sat with his hands dangling between his knees, defeated.

  “It’s a really nice watch,” Paris said.

  A deep, embarrassing silence enveloped the room.

  “He didn’t like it,” I said.

  She turned on me, suddenly taking up more room. The beads on her braids clacked together. “How would you know?”

  “A guess. He wasn’t wearing it until he arrived at the guest house. He put it on but then—I don’t know—he fussed with it a lot, bothered at it. Seemed to me like he wasn’t used to wearing it. And it didn’t look like something he would wear.”

  “You don’t know a thing about him,” she said.

  “Oh, my God,” Dev said. We both turned to him. His face sagged, anguished. “You bought that watch for him, didn’t you?”

  Behind the window, the gathered officers—more of them than ever—had gone still. The only sound was the squeak of the front desk guy’s chair as he leaned closer to the opening.

  The door to the side opened. Again, Officer Cooley. She seemed as tired as I felt.

  Paris, for the first time since I’d met her, seemed unsure of herself. “I . . . it was a while back. For his birthday,” she said to Cooley, then turned back to Dev. “He’s a good friend of ours.”

  Dev pinched the bridge of his nose. “Except I never heard about it. Not from you. And certainly not from him.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Paris said, trying to laugh it off. “You can’t really think there was something going on between me and Malloy.”

  “Ma’am?” Officer Cooley said. “I think the sheriff might like to ask you about it.”

  Paris stopped, waiting for Dev to join her. He stayed in his seat, didn’t look up.

  “You’re just going to let them take me away?” she said. “God, even Sam had Martha running to his rescue.”

  “Maybe Martha will rescue you, then.”

  “Maybe,” she said, leaning down into his ear, “they’ll want to hear about how you wandered away from bed that night.”

  I looked to see if Cooley had gotten that. She had. Her eyes rose to the ceiling as she seemed to calculate something in her head. She ticked off a count on her fingers. “Yeah, we got enough rooms,” she said. “Why don’t you all come back?”

  “What did I do?” I said. “I just need my keys and phone. And a ride to the park.”

  Dev stood and took the long way around the chairs to get past Paris. “Like you don’t know,” he growled.

  The door to the street opened and Warren Hoyt entered the room. “Hey,” he said to me, looking strangely pleased. “Came to check on you. You should be getting a hall pass here soon, right?”

  He was so inexplicably out of place, I’m not sure I would have recognized him but for the fact that I’d just seen his face on the bulletin board. And the tight choke on the neck of his polo shirt. He seemed to be waiting for me—me, in particular—to answer his invitation.

  I turned back to Dev. “What are you talking about—I should know what?”

  “I saw you,” he said.

  “You saw me . . . what?”

  “Out walking around,” he said. “That night.”

  “No,” I said, my voice twisted into a croak just from imagining what he was saying. Me. Walking in the dark. It wasn’t possible but he was going to force me to say why in front of all these people. “You know—you know I can’t—”

  “You were sleepwalking or something,” Dev said. “Not all there. But you were up walking that night. I walked you back to your room, but who’s to say you didn’t come back out?”

  “Yep,” Officer Cooley said, waving us toward the open door. “Bring it in, team. Nobody’s getting a hall pass anytime soon, Warren, sorry.”

  I looked from face to face. This was a joke. It had to be. Hoyt’s face was more serious than even his portrait back at the park office. No joke, then. No joke at all.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The interview room was cold and smelled of day-old fast food and body odor. No clocks, anywhere. I began, after a while of waiting, shivering, and going over what Dev had said, to wish for that watch off Sam’s wrist.

  Sleepwalking. Or something. In the dark. It was
n’t possible.

  Not all there.

  Was it?

  My head hurt. I cradled my head in my hands and then remembered that I was probably being watched or filmed. I couldn’t look guilty.

  I wasn’t guilty.

  Was I?

  There was a lot of wiggle room between accepting the premise that I had been sleepwalking and the idea that I had spent that time stabbing someone. I hadn’t had any blood on me, no scratches from a struggle. But then, none of them had had blood or scratches, had they? Still. Even if I had been sleepwalking—

  But I hadn’t been sleepwalking, surely. I had no history of that, had never woken up with dirty feet or stubbed toes. Sure, I’d never been so tired in my life. I’d hardly been sleeping at all in the last nine months, and before that—well, my sleep had always been as spotty as the cell phone service at the park. Most of the sleep I’d had since Bix died would have been after sunrise. Had I been stumbling around in the daytime at home? In my neighborhood? In public?

  There was that bruise I didn’t remember getting . . .

  No. Not possible. I didn’t kill Malloy in my sleep. It wasn’t possible. As for sleepwalking at all—no. Someone would have said something. Except—

  Except I hadn’t been keeping much company. Who was left to tell me that I was losing my mind?

  This was what Paris, Dev, and the others had over me. They clung to their friendships; they fought for them. They had made the time to meet up here at the park, at least. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made time for a friend, my sister, Bix’s mom. I had closed myself off in a high white tower of misery.

  I forced myself to bring my aching head back to the moment. These friends, the ones still alive, were all lined up in individual rooms in a police station, and now I was among them. Who were these people? What did I know?

  Sam. Sam nabbed the watch that belonged to Malloy—after he was dead. Paris had given the watch to Malloy as a gift, a secret from her betrothed. And Dev—Dev knew I couldn’t stand the darkness and yet accused me of being out of my room, in it. Martha was a lawyer, which would be helpful for the culprit, when caught. Except if someone decided the culprit was me.

  The door opened.

  Sheriff Barrows’s barrel gut entered the room first. “Well, now,” he said. “Turns out you’ve been seeing more of the local bounty than you thought, huh?”

  “That’s what I hear, too. I don’t believe it.”

  Officer Cooley followed and closed the door. She stationed herself at the corner of the table with a notebook and placed a paper bag on the table. Inside the rustle of the bag, I heard keys hit the table. My keys. I felt the air in the room clear up a bit. I was going home.

  “It would be much more convenient for you not to believe it,” Barrows said, his mouth pulled wider around the words that I thought necessary. “I’ll advise you the room’s being recorded.”

  “OK,” I said. And then I thought—I don’t know my rights. I was so tired. Was this a good idea? Did I have any choice? I wished I could borrow Martha from Sam. “Should I have my attorney present?”

  The sheriff’s considerable eyebrows rose. “Got one already lined up, huh?”

  My attorney handled wills, probate, real estate contracts. “I could get one.”

  “Shouldn’t be any need for that if you keep telling us the truth. All of it.”

  “I can only tell you the parts I know. I don’t think I’ve ever sleepwalked. Sleptwalked? Sleepwalked? Which—”

  Cooley discouraged me with a tiny shake of her head. I sat up straighter. “I honestly don’t buy what Dev is saying,” I said. “I have—a particular reason to think that I would not be able to leave my room.”

  “Because of your . . . darkness thing?”

  It was getting around, faster than even I’d predicted. “Dev told you?”

  “Not that one,” he said. “The white fella, beard.”

  “Sam,” Cooley said, checking her notes.

  “That’s why I didn’t come out of the room when the screaming started,” I said. “I was scared of more than the noises I was hearing.”

  “You should have said,” the sheriff said.

  “And what would you have thought?”

  “I still don’t know what I think about it. Sounds like an alibi I can’t prove.”

  “Dev opened the door for me. You can ask him about—oh, no.”

  “Right,” Barrows said, bowing his head at how quickly I was catching up. “He’s said a few things now and I can’t select which of them I believe, can I? Is he lying or is he telling the truth?”

  “He’s telling the truth about coming to my door,” I said. “He turned on the light so I could come out. But the other . . . I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if you sleepwalk?” Cooley said.

  “My husband never said so,” I said. A small itch of some piece of information wanting to be noticed started up in my mind. I was distracted by the idea that Dev could be telling the truth. Those moments when I slipped away from the track of time and then clicked back in—could I have done that, and deeply enough to be able to walk out into the darkness? Deeply enough to have killed someone? For a moment I let myself imagine that I had done it. No. “But then . . . to be honest, I’ve slept badly since he died. So I suppose it could be a new problem. But even so, even if I’ve picked up a secret sleepwalking habit, I had just met Malloy. I had no reason to stab him. I’m not sure I could have gotten the screwdriver out of the bottle, anyway. Even Dev couldn’t . . . wait. What was Dev doing out of bed in the first place?”

  Barrows waved at Cooley, who flipped through her pages. “He said he went to get a drink—”

  “Wine?” I said hopefully.

  “Water,” she said.

  “In the kitchen.”

  “In the bathroom.”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Upstairs,” Cooley said, firm.

  “He says he saw me sleepwalking upstairs? How did I not kill myself on the stairs? That railing at the top is too low for my tastes, and that turn at the bottom of the staircase would be a rude awakening.”

  “He says he was upstairs and saw you downstairs,” Barrows said. “He was near that railing, he says. He came down, and then Paris came down after him, maybe some of the others as well, sounded like they were all there. He walked you to your room and shut you inside. He says.”

  “Maybe he saw someone else— Wait! Remember that I heard someone banging out the back door. Someone could have broken in, and that’s who he saw.”

  Cooley’s mouth took on a grim set.

  Barrows said, “He says he’s a hundred percent. It was you.”

  “A hundred percent,” I repeated, but my mind had galloped away, back to the suite, waking up from strange dreams, then opening the door, seeing the dead body. But hadn’t I also had that feeling that I’d been among them in the kitchen, that I’d been pulled away from a conversation there? How to explain the bruise on my arm I didn’t remember getting? At least I’d noticed the bruise before Malloy was killed. “I can’t explain it,” I said. “But I had no reason to kill Malloy. Or anyone.”

  Barrows tilted his head, as though he’d heard a familiar tune. “Speaking of anyone . . . you should be aware we’re getting the records sent up from Benedict Wallace’s demise. Bix, was it?” My blood rushed in my veins and in my ears so that I could hardly hear the rest of what he said. “Just a matter of having complete information, you understand, but I wonder if you’d do us the honor of spending another night as the guest of Emmet County.”

  I swallowed hard. It made sense they would need to see Bix’s records, didn’t it? They had to be sure. I could go along with the reasoning. But didn’t that mean I was seriously under consideration as the murderer here? And now I was walking around at night, alone, in the dark. So it was said. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not unless you have something else you want to tell me,” Barrows said. “But I’m afraid it’s not really a request. Le
t’s keep it polite and voluntary. You’ll be at the Hide-a-Way again.”

  “What about another hotel? Surely there are plenty of them.”

  “Fudgie season,” Cooley said. “Tourists, I’m mean. Or did you not notice the million other people all over town?”

  “Where are the others staying? Wait—they all have to stay, too, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Barrows drawled. “I’m not sure we’ve reached the bottom of what you all have to offer the files. And some of your friends are hoping to wait out the arrival of the deceased’s family.”

  “They’re not my friends,” I said.

  “They’ll all be at the motel, too,” Cooley said. “Though we might need an extra room,” she said to Barrows, rolling her eyes toward the hallway.

  Paris hissing accusations into Dev’s ear. The group was starting to splinter.

  “Now,” Barrows said. “What I really want to know about are these messages on your phone.”

  He reached across the table for the bag in front of Officer Cooley and slid it toward him. Cooley focused carefully on folding over to a fresh page of her notebook.

  “Which messages?”

  “Couple of texts sent the night of the death,” he said. “Maybe you were sleepdialing instead?”

  “No, I— Who? Who did I text, supposedly?”

  He rattled off a couple of names: friends, or they had been. But not the friends I might have called on in the middle of the night, on purpose, for any reason. Then: Bix’s mother. “Oh, no,” I said, instinctively reaching to take the phone. He held it away from me. “What do they say?”

  “Lots of interesting things—‘need to talk,’ mostly. Gibberish, a bit. You sound like a lady in trouble. Some didn’t go through. The cell service out there is spotty, but you know that, it seems. Some of them messaged you right back, good friends that they are. Or tried to call.”