Under a Dark Sky Page 9

  “You could do portraits,” he said. “Families, pets. Maybe you could get into taking those stock photos you always see.”

  I was picking up a sense of urgency that was counter to every promise he’d made. All those times I’d moved with him from base to base, starting over. Now that we were settled in Chicago, couldn’t I have a minute to myself?

  “I just got started,” I said. “Are we in some kind of money trouble? Is there something you need to tell me?”

  We’d saved smart all those years. What was it? Gambling? I didn’t follow the stock market. Maybe I had missed some big news.

  “No, I—” His hands patted the wheel as he tried to find words. I waited. He was sick? Dying?

  “What is it?” I said. He was freaking me out.

  “Nothing, Edie,” he said, and he was back to himself. He reached and took my hand. “Nothing’s wrong. What if something happened to me? I want you to be able to, you know, stand on your own two feet. And don’t you want to be able to make a go of this with your pictures?”

  “Someday, maybe,” I said. “I mean, I’d love to, of course, but it’s probably going to take some time. And— Bix, I don’t know if I’m any good—”

  Reassurances came, but I was not fully reassured and he’d spent the evening out distracted and moody. Everyone had noticed. It wasn’t a terrible night, but it wasn’t a fun one, either.

  In the dream, Bix was driving and I was the passenger. I was nervous for some reason, telling him to turn around. This is the way, he said. When I turned forward, headlights bore down on us, brightness filling the windshield—

  I jerked awake, reached for the door handle to steady myself.

  “OK, then?” Officer Cooley said.

  My mouth was dry, my head fuzzy. We passed a couple of roadside hotels. These must be the spots Hoyt had promised for “intimate” getaways. I had come back to myself enough to feel embarrassed for him having said it.

  And then, as we drew away from the town: green. Trees, fields, more trees. I sat up and rolled my neck, stiff from the short nap.

  “What do people here do for fun?” I said.

  “The lake,” she said. “Skiing and all, and then in winter, snowmachines all over. They’re crazy, swishing all over the place until someone drives in front of a semitrailer. And drinking, of course. Well, drinking all the time, and then the semi.”

  I swallowed hard and lay my head back on the seat. The accidents Hoyt mentioned were suddenly less abstract. Twisted metal. Rolling lights. A television announcer’s bobbed haircut swinging as the casualties were listed.

  Inside the park, Officer Cooley slowed her car to a crawl. The patient curve of the drive lulled me into inattention—until a figure leapt to the side of the car. I jumped and grabbed at Officer Cooley’s sleeve before realizing it was just one of the silhouette markers, a little girl, holding a stack of books.

  “Just one of them stand-ups they got all over,” Cooley said. “That one is the kid that named Pluto. There’s like ten of them, but she’s the one that gets me. I always think it’s some dang kid jumping in front of the car. Some of them are creepier than her. Bigger. They’ll really make you jump.”

  We pulled in at the park’s office alongside a green park Jeep, another county cruiser, and an old maroon civilian sedan with a bumper held on by wire and duct tape. The rust bucket had a Darwin evolving-fish sticker in the back window.

  Inside stood the matched set of drivers: Hoyt, the blustery police officer who had shooed us out of the guest house the night before, and Erica Ruth, chewing her nails behind the front desk.

  “Well, look who’s back,” said the red-faced cop. “That was quite an exit you orchestrated last night.”

  Warren Hoyt raised his chin, smiling. We were friends now, apparently. Over his shoulder, his stoic portrait looked out from the wall.

  Erica Ruth’s eyes darted around the room. She seemed afraid to let them alight on me.

  “I had a panic attack,” I said.

  “Convenient,” the officer said.

  “It isn’t,” I said. “I’d rather not have . . . the problem.” We were still in the realm of truth. I had been panicked at the thought of going outside and Dev had produced a good cover story. I owed that guy. “I assume you have questions for me.”

  “That I do. Hoyt?”

  Warren nodded toward his office, and the policeman pointed his tubby belly in that direction. “Cooley,” he bellowed over his shoulder. I followed him, with the younger officer trailing behind.

  In the office, the guy in charge chose the chair behind the desk. I pulled a straight-backed chair from the corner to sit in front of him, noting a couple of photos framed on Hoyt’s desk but not having the right view to see who he kept nearby. Officer Cooley closed the door behind us and stood at the wall.

  “Name?” he said, gesturing to Cooley. She pulled out a notebook.

  “Eden Wallace,” I said.

  “Maiden?”

  “What?”

  He glowered at me. “Your maiden name, ma’am.”

  “Cannon. I didn’t catch your name.”

  He looked as though he’d rather not bother with answering. “Sheriff Jeffrey Barrows. Address?”

  I gave him the address in Chicago, the house teetering on the chopping block. He raised his eyebrows. “That’s a nice neighborhood,” he said.

  “You know Chicago?” This tiny outpost on the tippy top of Michigan’s mitten seemed another world.

  “Can you tell me what time you retired to your room last night?”

  “Early,” I said. “Before ten. Maybe nine thirty?”

  “You came all this way to see the stars and sacked out before ten? It’s not even dark by ten right now.”

  “I was tired after the long drive. And with the mix-up—all the people in the house, you know—I had decided to go home today. Another long drive.” I glanced over his shoulder at the reassuringly bright window.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “As soon as I can put this mess behind me.”

  Sheriff Barrows’s pink face grew pinker. “A man’s life is not some mess to be swept away.”

  But a man’s life could be a mess, especially after he died. I swallowed hard. “Of course not,” I said.

  “Tell us about your evening. Start with what the whole group was doing before you turned in for the night.”

  I drew the scene for him, the friends convening in the kitchen over wine, the walk up the beach to the clearing, the gathering in the living room where I’d left them. Any conversations I remembered. Who was where, at what time? Who was arguing? Who sat near whom? No matter how I sliced it, I was the odd man out. “And then I turned in. They were all still in the living room when I left them. They might have gone out to the fire pit, after, or the beach. There was a plan, but it was cloudy. I fell asleep,” I said. He had no idea how unusual that was. “Then someone started screaming.”

  “Who was screaming first? Could you tell?”

  “One of the women,” I said. “I just met them, but for some reason I want to say Paris. But—I think she came down last, because she was still on the stairs when I came out. Martha or Hillary, then. And then there was more shouting and screaming, and Dev came to my door and told me to come out.”

  The sheriff waited for Officer Cooley’s hand to go still over her notebook. “Why do you think he did that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did he have to?”

  Now I saw the problem. People had been screaming bloody murder in the room next to my bed and I stayed behind a closed door until someone came to check on me. “I was scared, I guess,” I hemmed. That was the truth, if a lesser one. I wondered how soon Dev would tell the police about my weirdness. It was a character flaw, but perhaps a motive if you dug deep enough. Mental illness. He was probably telling the rest of them now. You’ll never guess, he’d say. She can’t even come out of her room, not even for a murderer—

  “Oh,” I said. “I
forgot—there was someone in the hallway before the screaming started. I heard a noise in the kitchen—oh, God, do you think I heard—” I stopped and swallowed the bile in my throat. That whisper, that moan, that stumble against the chair. I might have heard Malloy being killed. What, after all, had woken me up? “—and then footsteps, and then the door hit the wall, and I looked outside and saw someone—”

  “Who?” His jowls shook. “Man? Woman?”

  “I couldn’t see. Someone fast, and it was dark,” I said, shivering a bit. “I didn’t get a good look, just—shadows. And of course I had no idea how important it would be . . . and then Martha started screaming. I think Martha, but it could have been . . . So I was on edge, I suppose. That back hallway belongs to the suite. I was surprised out of sleep by one of them being back there—”

  “You thought it was one of the group back by your room?”

  “Well, it only made sense at the time,” I said. “I had no reason to believe anyone but Malloy and his friends were in the house with me. Now? I don’t know. It could have been a thief or—Malloy might have surprised someone in the act, I don’t know. Do you get a lot of break-ins up here?”

  He ignored me but I saw a look pass over Officer Cooley’s face as she wrote. They got a lot of break-ins up here.

  “Take me through it again,” he said.

  I went through the timeline again, adding details as I thought of them. “Two in the morning,” I said. “That’s when I was woken by someone in the hall. I looked at the clock and it didn’t seem that late, given what people come to the park to see. And then I fell back asleep. It was about a half hour later the screams started.”

  He sat back and sucked on his teeth for a second. “Forgive me, but you don’t sound like a stargazer.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Not even close, actually.”

  “And your new roomies? Are they?”

  “I didn’t get the sense they were there as scientists,” I said. I went back over what I knew about each of them. “The girlfriend, Hillary. He—Malloy—said she studied up on the constellations in advance of the trip, but they didn’t seem all that serious about the sky as a group. I left them in the living room, inside, before full dark, remember. They weren’t setting up telescopes.”

  “Maybe they all had long drives, too,” he said.

  “They seemed far more interested in drinking wine,” I said. “A lot of wine. A troubling amount of wine.” Officer Cooley scratched at her notebook.

  “So why here, then? If none of you are much into stars?”

  “I don’t know why they chose it,” I said. “They went to college together in Michigan. I guess I assumed it was nostalgia, an old favorite place, or maybe an equidistant drive from where they live.”

  “And you?”

  “My husband chose the location.”

  Barrows looked at Cooley. “Where’s the husband? Why have I not heard from this guy? Get him in here.”

  “He’s dead,” I said. It sounded particularly harsh, under the circumstances. “Deceased,” I tried.

  “Oh, yes?” Barrows said. He looked at me sternly over the fat of his own cheeks. A long moment passed. I began to think there was a real question that I hadn’t heard, wasn’t answering. At last he folded his hands together over his belly and sat back with a creak in Hoyt’s chair. “A dead husband, you say. By any chance, did he happen to fall into a screwdriver?”

  Chapter Nine

  I was sent out to the lobby while the police conferred—over my guilt, I supposed. As I walked into the room, Erica Ruth looked up, then nervously away. Hoyt was gone, and that was fine.

  They kept me waiting, on and on. I wandered to a bulletin board and glanced over a list of events in the park: night hikes, viewing of upcoming star-gazing activities, all hosted by the director of the park. His stoic face stared out from the poster. The activities read like movie listings, as though the sky had planned a show for ticket holders. I had seen the viewing area. Nothing special. Why come out to the park to see the stars when any old patch of land offered the same view? The lack of light, I supposed. The park had been set aside and planted with those educational silhouette markers—but those were visible only during the day. The lakeshore? Is that why people came here? But we were standing on the mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula of Michigan, surrounded by lakeshore. The whole damn state was a viewing area for some kind of nature or another. I didn’t get it.

  “Do you get a lot of couples here?” I asked Erica Ruth.

  At first she said nothing.

  “Romantic getaways?” I said. “Anniversaries?”

  “Some,” she said at last. “A lot of people seem to get engaged here.”

  “Ah,” I said, just to keep the conversation going. “And they stay in the guest house? With other people?”

  “Sometimes,” she said curtly. “Sometimes they stay in town.”

  “Sure,” I said. Speaking to her was a balm on my nerves. She treated me perfunctorily. I was someone she couldn’t be outwardly rude to, but she could treat me like a recurring checkbox she had to mark off. But even this bit of human interaction made me feel as though things would be fine. Things would be, someday, normal. “I bet the rooms are difficult to get here, anyway. That’s why you have to reserve them so far in advance.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes people just like to plan ahead.”

  She didn’t know how out of character it would be for Bix to alight on a plan and follow through. Military training or not, follow-through wasn’t his strong suit. A leader of men, sure, but he usually had his troops to do the work. On his own, he didn’t always see the end of things. Unless he was really serious about the goal and had to make his case. He’d once planned and saved for a motorcycle I didn’t let him buy. I thought it was too dangerous, that he would wreck and kill himself.

  “What?” Erica Ruth said.

  “Nothing, sorry.” I turned back to the bulletin board. Night hikes. Perseid showers. Whatever that meant.

  OFFICER COOLEY DROVE me back to the guest house to grab a change of clothes. The others had been allowed to take a few things out the night before while I was in the hospital.

  At the house, all was quiet except an officer stationed at the back door. He lifted the yellow police tape for us with a warning to stay away from the kitchen. Not a problem. The warm penny smell of the blood seeped through the closed door. Cooley watched while I collected the fewest items possible. “My camera?” I asked.

  “Leave it. They’re still sifting through evidence.” She noted on her pad what I’d taken with me.

  And then she drove me toward town. We had been relocated. At the outskirts of Mackinaw City, she nosed the cruiser into the parking lot of a two-story motel with a dilapidated sign announcing our arrival at the Hide-a-Way.

  “Is this really necessary?” I said.

  “Sheriff wants you all to stay put one more night at least,” she said. “And there’s the matter of your other bed being next door to a crime scene.”

  “And tomorrow?” I said. “Will I be allowed to go home tomorrow, by a reasonable time? It’s a long drive to Chicago, you know.”

  “Never been,” she said.

  “There’s a wide world out there, Officer Cooley,” I said. “You should get out there and learn some decent swear words.”

  “No need for that,” she said, turning her bubble-gum cheek toward the motel. “They have a room for you, but anything extra you gotta pay yourself.”

  The motel’s façade was dingy, the neon sign flickering. The parking lot around us, desolate. “Extras like what, exactly?”

  “One of us will come get you tomorrow, so stay close by.”

  With my phone and car keys still in police custody and my only mode of transportation stuck out at the guest house, blocked in by a dead guy’s car, I didn’t have much choice. There was nothing left to do but accept the Hide-a-Way as my home for the next evening.

  I got out of the car, carrying my armload of clothes and a plas
tic bag of toiletries. The nearest neighbor was a gas station with two of the four pumps out of order. Somewhere not far from here lay one of the Great Lakes region’s greatest tourist treasures—Mackinac Island, and a sleek wire suspension bridge to the Upper Peninsula you could see for miles coming into town—and yet nothing at these coordinates could convince me that anyone would come here willingly.

  In the motel’s office, a surly man checked me in with another warning about the luxurious extras I needed to avoid. Using the phone, it turned out, was extra. I had an upstairs room, along an outside walkway. After I had stowed my belongings in the spot in my room I deemed least likely to be infested with bed bugs, on top of a luggage rack, I hurried back outside, out of the stale air. I felt as though I had been holding my breath all day, and I hadn’t eaten in a long time, nothing since the cheese crackers the evening before. I wasn’t sure what I could count on in the next few hours. Except nightfall. I could count on the sky turning black and my ability to function failing me.

  In the parking lot, I stared long and hard at the sun’s position in the sky and then at the distance between where I stood and what I thought might be some quaint, small-town commerce. And then the sun again. It wasn’t late yet, just midafternoon, but I was tired. I couldn’t imagine sitting at a table, ordering from a menu.

  In the end, I went across to the gas station and shopped the hot dogs rolling inside the countertop machine and the dusty bags of chips and cookies hanging side-by-side with packs of batteries, toothpicks, air fresheners. The lights overhead tinted everything an eerie green. My own skin was a pall, otherworldly. Behind the counter, a guy of indeterminate age wearing a trucker hat over his greasy hair watched the silent TV in the corner.

  I considered the ice cream cooler, and took out a pint container from a local creamery for a closer look. Halloway’s Heavenly, the carton said over a scene of idyllic farmland. Such hope I had not encountered in some time.

  The door of the station beeped and clattered open to voices, streams of voices all trying to rise over one another. I didn’t have to look, but I did.

  Dev and Paris came first, going at one another again, then Sam and Martha, bickering in the harshest tones I’d heard yet. One by one they saw me and stopped. My face flushed hot. They would know by now. Dev would have told them what a nutcase I was.