Under a Dark Sky Read online

“Hello,” her voice said. There was a moment of silence while Michele and the operator negotiated the release of my call, and then: “God, Edie, where have you been?”

  She didn’t sound worried so much as annoyed.

  “Michigan,” I said. “It’s a longer story than you might want on reversed charges. I just wanted to let you know where I was and that I was—”

  My voice strangled and stopped. I’d almost said fine. But I wasn’t.

  “What’s going on? Where in Michigan? Why Michigan? Oh, no, don’t tell me you went to that place—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The dark sky park.”

  “Eden, really? Aren’t you still sleeping with the lights on?”

  “There’s a guy here,” I started. But everything I could think to say required too much back story.

  “Which guy? What’s going on? Are you there with someone? Are you there with a man?”

  “No,” I said. The idea was ridiculous. I thought for a moment about those swim trunks I’d seen first thing when I’d entered the guest house, mistaken for boxers. If only I had turned and left then. “But when I got here, there was this mix-up—”

  “I can only imagine,” she said. “Bix, damn it. But you didn’t have to go along with it, you know.”

  Yes, I did, though she would never see it that way. Michele thought she and I had all sorts of things in common, but she was not widowed. She was divorced. “He planned it for us,” I said. “How could I not go?”

  “And he was such a good planner,” Michele said. “We don’t give him enough credit, though. He planned every step of your relationship—talked you into marriage before you knew what a mess he was, swept you off to Chicago to be near his family instead of yours. Talked you out of having kids, out of keeping that job you actually liked. He planned your life pretty well, except for the part where he fucked off and died. Oh, and the part where you never got to have a vote in anything. He didn’t have to plan that.”

  Because I let it happen. She thought she was being supportive to recount his faults—but his faults were actually my weaknesses. Itemized. And I felt worse than before I’d called. I had let Bix talk me into the life he wanted and now I would let anyone who wanted to cut him down do it without resistance.

  I tried again. “I’m at the hospital.”

  “What? What’s going on? Are you hurt?”

  “A little—but not as badly as a couple of people also staying in the house—”

  “What do you mean? Which people? I thought—ugh, Bix, you idiot—”

  “Michele,” I said. “I’m scared.”

  I filled her in as best I could around her questions and exclamations: Malloy, Paris, the thieving, the lying, the possible cheating. It occurred to me how quickly I’d let myself be pulled into the lives of these people.

  “I haven’t slept in days,” I said, sniffling through the last of the details. “I think I’m losing it.”

  “You’re not losing it,” she said. “Women can go a long time without sleep. Proven.” Motherhood had made my sister an expert on anything she wanted to tell you about. “You’re mixed up in some Agatha Christie shit, though.”

  “Did I ever sleepwalk? Like, when I was a kid?”

  “Not that I know of,” she said slowly. “Are you, now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, raising up my arm to find the bruise I didn’t remember getting. It had softened to a dark green. “Maybe.”

  “So are you a . . . I mean, do they think you’re a . . .” Either she couldn’t think of the word or she didn’t want to say it.

  “Suspect,” I said, more quietly.

  “Oh, Eden. If you didn’t kill Bix for everything he did, you’re probably not going to kill some stranger, are you?”

  “Should I get a lawyer up here?” I felt six years old, always relying on my big sister to get me out of trouble. She’d gotten me through the funeral, bodily dragging me where I needed to be, through the paperwork of Bix’s death, through the weeks afterward when I couldn’t quite go home. I was tired of being this woman but I couldn’t stop. “What should I do?”

  “Well, cooperate with the police, I mean, what else can you do? Who do you think really did it?”

  I glanced around the waiting room again. “I’m not sure. Malloy is dead and now Paris is maybe, too, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t kill him. But that accident—I don’t know what to think. Dev, Hillary, Martha, Sam—” I had simultaneously spotted Sam entering the waiting room and remembered him secreting away the bottles of wine from the house. What had that been about? How had he been left behind? “I need to go,” I said.

  “Who are all these people?” she said. “Wait, do you need me? I can figure something out, if you do. Give me a number to reach you.”

  “They just called my name,” I lied. This was my mess to fix. “I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Love to the girls.”

  Sam had gone to the desk to wait in the line. He stood behind a woman with a little girl who was holding her own arm in a protective embrace. For a moment, I saw Bix, grinning over his compound fracture, trying to get my number. I shook that image away and grabbed Sam by the arm. He whirled on me.

  “Oh, Eden, God,” he said. “You scared me. What’s going on? They wouldn’t tell me anything. I saw the ambulance pull away but the cop who drove me here didn’t see what happened.”

  His eyes darted around the room, landing briefly on the swell of my hand. Something about his anxiety seemed heightened. “If you had to guess,” I said slowly. “What do you think might have happened?”

  “Huh? I don’t know what—what are you talking about? Was it Paris?”

  For a moment I’d had the idea that Sam might know more about all this than he’d let on, that his ideas on who could have gotten hurt and who surely hadn’t would help me sort this out. “Were you especially worried about Paris’s safety?”

  “I’m worried about all our safety,” he yelled, and then pulled me away from the line and out near the pay phone while everyone in the waiting room watched. “What’s going on with you?” he hissed. “Are you crazy? I’m worried about all of us, and if you aren’t, you’re nuts.”

  “Where did you take the wine?”

  That stopped him. He swiped at the sweat at his brow. “What do you mean?”

  “I saw you,” I said. “Did you pour it out? Is it poisoned?”

  “Poisoned?” He glanced out at the waiting room, where the sea of people still watched us. He grabbed my sleeve and pulled me deeper down the hall. “Did you not see the screwdriver in his jugular? What are you talking about? No, it’s good wine, really good wine. I didn’t—I didn’t want it to be wasted, that’s all.”

  “So you . . . did what with it?”

  “I just put it somewhere to make sure it didn’t disappear into ‘evidence.’” He used finger air quotes. “Those bottles aren’t six-buck bottles from the corner store, OK? And they’re all that I have left of a promising career gone down the toilet.”

  “How much are they worth?”

  He took a deep breath but didn’t answer. He wouldn’t look at me, either.

  All he had left.

  “Are they worth your career?” I said. “If someone back at your old job knew you had them?”

  He made a noise in his throat. “That’s the thing. They suspect I have them already.”

  “Which is why you no longer work there.”

  His mouth opened and closed. And then he thought of what to say. “Don’t tell—” But he came up short, probably against the fact that the person he didn’t want to know what he’d done was dead. “Martha,” he said finally. “Don’t tell Martha.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Back in the waiting room, the hospital forms lay on the chair next to me while I iced my puffy hand. If only I had reached for that swinging flashlight with my nondominant hand, I might be more interested in finding a pen.

  I let my head drop. Behind closed eyelids, the chaos and brightness of the hospital�
��s waiting room flattened to a field of dark red and photo negatives in the shape of the overhead lights. But I couldn’t doze off, the way some of those around me had done. I couldn’t relax. I had developed an eye twitch—a steady one that made the world seem like a filmstrip playing through a defective projector, time skipping a frame. Also, I couldn’t be sure—but was my heartbeat also jumping, out of rhythm?

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  I found myself going over the things I’d learned, sorting them into little piles in my mind. Malloy’s pep talk to Sam hadn’t done him any good, and had maybe hurt him. I’ve been known to talk people into things. Malloy’s encouragement had only created in Sam the belief that he deserved more than he was getting: more money, more prestige, more respect. More free things from the warehouse. So instead of getting that promotion he was all but destined for, Sam got fired and the wine he’d taken got spirited away to Michigan. “A consolation prize,” Sam had said after begging me not to tell Martha, except I’d just heard the story, and understood that the prize was snatched before the competition had been called. The cases of wine along with the watch from Malloy’s wrist—the two pieces together didn’t look good, if you were searching among the group of friends for someone with a propensity for bad behavior.

  “So Malloy pumped you up,” I’d said to Sam. “And what you did with all that self-confidence got you into trouble.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “So you blame Malloy for losing your job.”

  He had picked up a full-body spasm that didn’t allow him to be still. “I never would have gone after the promotion so hard if he hadn’t—”

  I looked at him until he understood what he had been about to say. “Paris fell down the stairs,” I said at last, handing him Martha’s powder blue bag. It looked like the sort of thing a new mom would carry, actually. Congrats, it’s a boy? “Dev’s with her. And Martha—Martha’s pregnant with Malloy’s baby.”

  Sam blinked at me for a moment, words attempting to but not fully forming on his lips. “Malloy’s baby?” he said finally. “She said that?”

  I recalled the way Dev had pressed her the same way but before I could follow that lead, he had taken the bag from my hand and hustled away.

  And I had come to rest in the waiting room, ignoring the stares.

  I put my head in my hands, pressing at the side of my twitching eye. What to do? Who to trust? I had promised not to tell Martha about the wine theft. But I hadn’t promised to keep anything from the sheriff. I wasn’t even sure anymore what I knew, what I thought, or what was true. What mattered, what didn’t.

  When I opened my eyes, Warren Hoyt stood there. I couldn’t be surprised. He turned up everywhere.

  He smiled hesitantly, standing just off to one side as though he wasn’t sure that I would remember him.

  For a moment, I don’t know why, I had the strangest feeling that no one could see him but me. The filmstrip, scratchy and jumping at the edge of my vision, was a horror movie. The rangy, stoic man who silently haunted my steps was invisible to all but me.

  His wary look was steady, and I stared back, waiting for some word, some act, to reveal him as physical, as actual.

  And then a woman with a stroller ran her infant into Hoyt’s leg. He leapt out of her way with a yelp. All the heads in the room turned his way. I leaned back in my chair and pulled the paperwork off the seat next to me. He folded himself into the offered chair, pulling at the back of his neck with his hand.

  “Another tough day at the guest house,” he said.

  For whom? I didn’t agree or disagree. He nodded toward the ice pack.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “Punched a Maglite in the face.”

  He winced and shifted in his seat. “Were you there? For the—for the . . .”

  Some internal organ inside me leapt in anxiety. If I ever slept again, I would see Paris falling in my nightmares. “Please.”

  “Have you heard anything?”

  “No, but—” My memory showed me Paris’s crumpled form again. “It doesn’t seem good.”

  “Ah, jeez,” he breathed, and I was reminded of Cooley. I missed being in her good graces. I missed her icing-coated swear words, and the soft world they let me believe in, so different from the profanity-thick world of trailing along behind an Army husband. “Ah, jeez.”

  I hadn’t been looking closely at Hoyt before, but now I did, as though I had been invited to take his portrait. He was unshaven by a day or more, and the top button of his shirt—a faded, soft blue, instead of tidy forest ranger green—was undone. The shirt might have been a little wrinkled. Not ironed to perfection, at least. There was no polite way to ask. Was this basic human decency he was exhibiting, or did the problems at the park somehow make Hoyt’s life more difficult? Public relations? Funding? Plain old marketing problems, when in one weekend, you hosted both an impromptu murder and a separate deadly accident?

  Accident. My mind caught on the word.

  Was it too strange, the timing?

  I held my fingers against the twitch in my eye and tried to see the scene again. Dev, trying to keep the women apart, pressing his fiancée into the railing, and the railing—

  I suddenly recalled the sound the railing had made when Paris had cornered me against it. I could have broken through. I could have been the one.

  Or I could have stopped it.

  I hadn’t stopped it. Instead, someone else lay within this hospital fighting for her life.

  I should have said something. I could have done something. I hadn’t realized—but I felt keenly all the times in my life I’d had this same thought. I should have. I could have.

  Would I ever be the person who could live with what she had done, hadn’t done, had put up with, had acquiesced to. Would I ever fill out my own skin?

  I stood up.

  Warren looked up at me. “What’s wrong?”

  I sat back down. And then stood up again. “I have to use the ladies’ room.”

  My eye convulsed with a renewed vigor as I hurried over stretched legs and around small children toward the restrooms. In a stall, I stood facedown over the toilet until I was sure the moment had passed. At a sink, I splashed water over my face and looked at myself in the mirror.

  Could I live with myself? That was really the question I had come to the park to ask, wasn’t it? I had lived with Bix. I had lived with everything he had been and done. I’d given him every chance, every free pass. Every forgiveness, until the last. But now it was me, only me. There was nowhere else to go, no one else to rely on, no one else to blame. The money he’d left me was gone. The house, my only safe place, needed to be sold. I would have to face the dark, somehow. All that was immaterial to this: Could I be the kind of person I would need to be?

  A woman entered the restroom and gave me a long look on her way to a stall.

  In the mirror, I was a wreck, cradling my hurt hand like a kitten to my chest. I wetted the other hand and smoothed my hair, and then used a paper towel to wipe my cheeks. Even if it felt as though my eyelid was jumping around on my face, I could barely see it in the mirror. No one would notice. But the gray rings under my eyes, the blotchy neck. The puffy, outsized hand. Well, it was a hospital. What did they expect?

  Out in the hallway, Hoyt had my empty paperwork under his arm, my camera bag strap over his shoulder, and my suitcase at his feet. He was fidgeting with a little square gadget like something they’d hand you at a restaurant that served peanuts and encouraged you to spit the shells on the floor. “I got you a . . . pager,” he said, shrugging. “They said it’s still going to be a while until they call you back for X-rays. Thought you might want to get some air.”

  Good call. We found the nearest exit and walked along a sidewalk until it petered out into one of the parking lots, my suitcase clacking over the seams in the concrete. For an area of the country that depended so much upon its scenic views, the hospital planners hadn’t given much thought to making the grounds pleas
ant or walkable. Perhaps they’d thought no one having to spend time here would have a chance to seek enjoyment.

  And yet we were never far from the lake, from the wind whipping off the water. The waves struck at a strip of sand just across the street. The temperature had dropped. Clouds overhead made the world seem small and close.

  “That’s the Lower Peninsula over there,” Hoyt said, gesturing. “The park’s on the east side, of course, not really visible from here. But that’s the island right there, the source of all the fuss. There’s an exceptional hotel there, the Grand Hotel. The world’s largest front porch, they like to say.”

  I made a noncommittal noise. I had been hoping for the air, the walk, but not for the conversation. And not a tour.

  “You’ll have to come back . . . a better time, perhaps. And of course, that’s Lake Huron.”

  I followed his gaze. “I’m afraid my Great Lakes geography isn’t as sharp as I thought it was,” I said. “I thought—wait . . .”

  “Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are technically one lake,” he said, warming to the topic. Warren Hoyt was the kind of guy who warmed to topics. He was going to make a terrific old codger someday. The world’s largest front porch, indeed. “They share the same waters. The Straits of Mackinac link the two lake basins. You would have crossed over the straits on the bridge—”

  I held up a hand. “Let’s not talk about the bridge.” Maybe the ER would drug me up enough that the ride back to the Hide-a-Way would be more forgiving. And then I pictured Paris, gray-skinned against the gurney, and that brought me up short. “I feel terrible,” I said. “That railing made an awful noise when I was pushed up against it and then—”

  Now it was Hoyt’s turn to go pale. “Yes. I think we’ll be hearing a good deal about that railing. I’m glad you didn’t—what I mean to say is that I regret that anyone—”

  “Put the brochure away, Warren,” I said. “I’m not the lawyer and I’m not the one who got hurt. Martha’s the lawyer for the group, if you want to issue any apologies.”

  “The guest house is solid Michigan craftsmanship,” he huffed. “But the railing wasn’t meant to be wrestled against.”