Under a Dark Sky Read online

  We passed the entrance to the park and maneuvered along the drive, the canopy of trees hiding the sky.

  “Oh!” Paris cried, sitting back from the window. Cooley braked, hard. And then Paris laughed nervously. “Sorry. Those damn . . . people.”

  We all looked out the window at the silhouette of the little girl standing at an info display, too near the road.

  “How do you stand them?” Paris said. “I feel like they’re watching me.”

  They did seem out of place among the roadside brush like that. I didn’t like thinking of them out here, somehow, having the run of the place in the dark.

  “I guess you get used to them,” Cooley said. “But not everyone. One time a visitor out for a walk ran into one of the figures in the night and went crazy on it. Hurt himself and had to pay to replace the figure. And they are not cheap, I’ll tell you.”

  Something about this story was less than reassuring. I slumped down in my seat, weary. Paris and I sat in silence for the rest of the ride while Officer Cooley drove us through the woods and hummed a little tune to herself.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the warm police car, I dozed off in the two minutes it took to arrive at the guest house. I woke to Cooley opening my door. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be back in thirty for you.”

  As Paris and I entered the front room, Martha emerged from the bathroom at the top of the stairs. “Oh,” she said, coming cautiously down. “No offense, but I wish you were one of the guys. This place is creepy on your own.”

  “Where’s the cop supposedly watching the place?” I asked.

  “Smoke break,” Martha said, flashing the dimples. “I swore I wouldn’t be bad.”

  “Dev will be here later,” Paris offered.

  “Good,” Martha said. At the bottom step, she seemed to lose her sense of purpose. She stood for moment, one hand on the rail, uncertain, and then went to Paris and pulled her into her arms. “How are you doing?”

  “I don’t even know,” Paris said. “Up is down.”

  “I know. Me, too. I wish—”

  “I’m sorry about the thing with Sam,” Paris said. “I wish I hadn’t said it.”

  “You can tell him when you see him,” Martha said. “It will all be OK. Well—not everything. But we’ll find a way to salvage it. It’s us.”

  Paris nodded, wiping away the tears from her chin. “I want things to be—I don’t know. Is normal too much to ask for?”

  “I want them to be better than normal,” Martha said. “We have to keep in better contact, keep up better, see each other more.”

  Better than normal. That was going to be a tough thing to achieve. The women stood back from one another, glancing my way and now both of them seemingly uncertain what to do.

  “I’ve got to shower,” Paris said. “Before I see—anyone else. I think the water at the motel was brown. It felt brown.”

  Paris ascended the stairs and disappeared. I took a step toward my room and my own en suite shower but then stopped and looked past Martha to the kitchen floor. It seemed impossible, but I’d almost forgotten I’d have to cross a crime scene to get to my things. The kitchen had been roped off on one side where the stain of blood and wine still lay. A white sheet carpeted the allowable path around the kitchen island and out the back door. For a long moment, I couldn’t move.

  “They took the screwdriver, at least,” Martha said. “I mean. They also took—they took his . . . he . . . him.”

  Her face crumpled. The tears started quietly. She turned from me, looking for escape, and then bent double, emitting a strange keen. She straightened enough to move, stumbling along the sheeted path through the kitchen. Just as she reached the door of my suite, she collapsed on the floor, ruined and howling with abandon. I hurried to her side, but she slapped me away. I pulled her to her feet anyway and kicked open the door to my room.

  With real reluctance, I guided her to the bed. I had wanted the comfort of those sheets and that puffy comforter, of this quiet oasis, all to myself. She turned her back to me and wailed into the pillows.

  “Would you like some water?” I said.

  No response came but more crying, but the question seemed to bring her back from the brink. I sat on the edge of the bed and waited it out. Around the room, I noticed little things out of place. My suitcase, tossed. My flashlight, left behind in the ambulance, had been returned to a table near the door.

  After a few minutes, the choking sobs turned to sniffles and then quiet. Martha pulled her face out of the pillow. A curl of her hair was matted against her cheek.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” she said. “I’ve been nothing but terrible to you since I got here.”

  “I was once the recipient of a lot of kindness,” I said. Many people had sat at the edge of my bed in the days and weeks after Bix’s death. Not all of them. Some had strangely evaporated, not knowing what to say, I suppose. Not showing up for the funeral, not making a call. But many had hung in there with me. Through the first few months, anyway. Call it karma. Call it paying back into the great wheel. I could offer a small piece of comfort. “And you haven’t been terrible. You just wanted to be with your friends and here I was, in the way.”

  I truly didn’t think she had been horrible to me. It was Hillary she and Paris had excluded. Hillary, who should have been made to feel welcome. But that was a different issue.

  “I was talking to Paris about how you all became friends,” I said.

  Her look drifted into middle distance. “Did she tell you the short story or the long one?” She swiped the hair back from her face. “College. That’s the short version. We started hanging out, pairing up into couples the way you do at that point in your life.” The faltering smile she managed had a bit of a wink in it. Sam must have come by his crush on Martha the hard way, through youthful dorm-room exploration. I had seen the way he looked at her. Sharing a room here at the guest house had to be hard on the guy. “The long version—well, it’s weird, but I don’t remember how we ended up the five of us. It’s just always been that way.”

  “Six before your friend died.”

  Martha looked caught out. “Paris told you about her?”

  “Malloy did first, a bit. He didn’t tell me much, actually. Paris said you were remembering her as part of your weekend.”

  “Tash. Natasha, but everyone called her— She was great,” Martha said, her lips starting to tremble. Her bright red lipstick had smeared in all the crying. She looked as though she’d been slapped. “She was depressed, I guess, and you wouldn’t have known she was struggling. She was my roommate and we had such a good time. We didn’t talk about things like—real things, you know? You don’t talk about it when you’re young. Or not so young, either,” she said. “I don’t think we have figured out yet how to be without her.”

  I thought about what Malloy had said. Some of us are not finished mourning.

  “She was Malloy’s girlfriend.”

  Martha looked up, surprised. “They weren’t at the time,” she said. “It was . . . fluid. Although, yeah, they were together for a while, and then he and Paris—”

  “Paris was after Tash?”

  “Yeah, but I guess I thought Malloy and Tash might . . . I mean, never in a million years did I think—” She stopped.

  “That Dev and Paris would last?”

  She rolled her lips inward to show me she wasn’t talking, the dimples popping into view.

  “So then, five of you, together again,” I said. Five was an awkward number. Who was the fifth, the odd man out?

  “Four, now.” She took a shuddering breath. “We were just casual friends at first—and then when Tash died . . . We pulled together, you know? I can only hope we pull together this time.” Tears welled up in her eyes again. She wiped them away. “No more of that. Malloy would not have wanted us crying. He would have said it was wasted time—but you know, sometimes it’s OK to get it out. Don’t you think?”

  Even though she had already lo
st Tash—a close friend by her own reckoning—she didn’t seem to know yet that grief was a bottomless well. No amount of getting it out ever depleted the supply. Only with time could you get any relief—and then of course the sadness could come rushing back anyway. What caught you was the element of surprise, when a lone sock found behind the dryer reminded you of everything you had ever lost. The end of the box of cereal he had opened but never finished. A magazine he’d subscribed to, finally running out.

  “Sure,” I said, just to finish the conversation. I had to take a deep breath to shove that lone sock from my mind. “You said your friend was depressed. You believe she did it on purpose?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “It was—it was a bad time.”

  “But you came here in part to talk about her?”

  “With people who were there,” she snapped. “The people who went through it.”

  “I get that,” I said.

  We sat in silence for a while.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s another bad time right now, obviously. I feel guilty about what happened to Tash. I should have been there with her, and I wasn’t.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “Not just myself,” she said. “But I left her alone. She needed me, and I didn’t know.”

  You could know and still not save anyone.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

  Ah, here it was. My fear of the dark had come all the way through the original group. Only Hillary, the outsider, was left to discover my secret.

  “Why did your husband want to spend your anniversary here?” she said. “I mean, it’s nice and everything, but . . . there must be a thousand places like this between here and Chicago.”

  I was so surprised the question of my phobia hadn’t materialized that for a moment I didn’t answer. And then I realized I couldn’t. I didn’t know. “Honestly? He never told me. He made the reservation as a surprise and then—it was a surprise, for sure. After he died, I found a note about the reservation in his papers.”

  She stared at me expectantly. “That’s it? He never told you? He wasn’t a stargazer? He didn’t want a telescope for his birthday or something?”

  “He had taken up an interest, but not in a serious way.” In the last few months of his life, he’d grown a little more pensive. He still rushed around, still got distracted by any problem anyone brought him, but he also spent more time at work—or “at work,” I now knew—and, when he was at home, more time on the back porch, looking up at the sky. In Chicago, though, you’d be lucky to see a single star, and if you researched it, that one bright spot was more likely a planet. Planets were the brightest objects, the only celestial bodies bright enough to fight through the city’s light pollution. That must have been where the idea had come from to visit the park. He was missing out. He hated to miss out. “I guess he thought it was something we could enjoy together.” He would have liked hanging with these people, a handful of years younger than he was, drinking their wine. He would have stayed up all night with them.

  “If you don’t mind me asking . . . you said he died in a car accident. Was it storming or something?”

  She hadn’t wanted to talk about her friend, but apparently my life was available to be picked clean. But—sometimes a story wanted to be told. “The roads were clear,” I said. “He was late coming home, and there was a lot of talk on the news about an accident closing down the highway—”

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “—and then it was his accident, his death closing down the highway, closing down half the city.”

  “Do they know what caused it? The accident?”

  “A drunk driver,” I said, shutting out the details. “Four people. And Bix.”

  Martha raised her hand to her mouth, an O of horror. “I’m so sorry. How did you hear it was him?”

  “They came to the door. The police.” And when they had asked me a few questions and left one of the officers with me, a nice woman with a ponytail under her blue cap, I went around the house, room by room, and turned on every light in the place, the only thing I could think to do, the only thing that had ever worked for the bad nights, the worst nights. Ma’am? Ma’am? the officer had called after me, her voice rising into nervousness. Ma’am? Can I call someone to come over for you?

  They had not taken me to the hospital. It was understood, then, that hope had passed. I could not cry. I could not think. I stalked from room to room, lighting the way, with the officer following.

  “You’re here for your anniversary,” Martha said. “Today? Tomorrow?”

  “Tuesday,” I said. “It would have been ten years. Ten great, terrible, wonderful, messed-up years.”

  Martha was giving me a strange look, so I tried again. “You think it’s going to be a romantic story because we were married and marriage is the goal girls are sold along with our Barbie dolls,” I said. “But marriage isn’t endless romance. It’s not like we crossed the wedding-day finish line and everything since has been him carrying me across the threshold and laying me down on a bed of rose petals.”

  I didn’t want to go into the cheating thing again. Hillary knew, so eventually the rest of them would, surely. I couldn’t imagine a secret lasting among these people.

  “Wait,” Martha said. “Were you happy?”

  “I loved him.” I had just noticed the blanket over the window had been pulled down. The police, having a look around. Outside the sun was still high, the rays of light and the ripples of a breeze across the water turning the surface to diamonds. “I was devastated when he died,” I said. And then devastated again, of course. The woman at the funeral. Some of the devastation was private, but much of it turned out to be public. So many people must have known before, and after the accident, everyone did. If Paris wanted to see what a fool looked like, here she was.

  “Of course,” Martha said. “A few days ago, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine that kind of loss. But now . . . I should have been nicer to Hillary. What a position to be put in. I mean, if we don’t think she killed Malloy, that is. God. ‘If she killed Malloy’ is a thing that I just said. I can’t believe this. Do you think she did it?”

  I thought it was less likely she did than any other single person in the house, but I didn’t want to say so. I was sitting alone in a room, comforting a suspect. But then maybe that’s what Martha thought of me.

  “I’m embarrassed by how we treated her before—before,” Martha said. “I’m actually a functioning adult, you know. I just haven’t been showing it here this weekend.”

  “You’re a lawyer. That sounds pretty adult to me.”

  “Just a clerk at the moment. I handle a lot of paperwork. Divorces and wills and powers of attorney. All the sexy stuff. But if you say you’re a lawyer and then wave your hands around while your friend is being railroaded into a confession in a small-town jail, at least you can advise him to shut the hell up and stick around to make sure he does.”

  “He’s staying in town as long as he can,” I said, watching for disappointment. But Sam’s crush seemed to be one-sided this many years later.

  “He’s probably embarrassed, too, about the watch,” Martha said. “He just wanted something to have of Malloy’s . . .” She looked uncomfortable to suggest it. She would have to work on her courtroom skills. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Up is down, for sure.”

  If only this place weren’t a crime scene. I could have taken a nap. “Can I ask you a question?” I said. “Did you happen to see anyone using my phone?”

  “You still have your phone?”

  “No, I mean the other night,” I said.

  “I didn’t see anyone using a phone that I could tell was yours,” she said, with a weird look, but then this was a strange line of questioning. Or maybe this was a lawyer’s way of evading a question.

  “Just trying to figure something out,” I said. “Do you know who came up with the idea for this trip?”
/>   “Well, Dev made the reservations,” she said. “Malloy—”

  Somewhere in the house, a door opened. The front door, screen door first, slowly, then the storm door. Each opened and closed gently. Someone was making an effort to be quiet. We looked at one another. Martha nodded and rolled off the bed. She noticed the flashlight on the nearby table and picked it up. I stood by, too close to the open door for my liking, while Martha slipped behind it. We listened as small noises of movement made their way across the front room, toward the kitchen. Footsteps paused there and then continued. Martha raised the flashlight over her head.

  The door between the kitchen and the back hall was standing open. A dark figure stood there, like one of those silhouette cut-outs in the park, backlit. My breath caught and then Dev stepped into my room. Martha’s arm started its trajectory. “No!” I yelled and reached out to halt her progress. The flashlight hit me on the knuckles, hard.

  “Oh, no, are you OK?” Martha reached for my hand, but I was cradling it to me, waiting out the rush of pain. I sucked at my teeth, trying not to say terrible things aloud, though twisted and hissing noises escaped instead.

  “What just happened?” Dev said. He made no movement to assist. Some doctor.

  “Eden took the brunt of a flashlight in your place, you maniac,” Martha said. “Why are you skulking around?”

  “Didn’t realize walking around in broad daylight was skulking.”

  “These days? Through a crime scene? Yeah, that becomes skulking pretty fast.”

  “Or maybe your racism is showing? Fear of the brown man.”

  “Come on,” she said, tearing up again. “Malloy’s blood is out there on the floor. I just—”

  He held out his arm, and she rushed at him, crying. He patted her back and made a few comforting noises.

  I should have been amazed at how easily these friends could forgive each other anything. One of them was a killer. But it all reminded me of our friends, Bix’s and mine, and how quickly they wanted to get to the part of grief where they could remember him fondly and chuckle over his foibles. To tell the stories.