Full Dark, No Stars

She felt that she should go back to the deserted store where it had happened and finish her business there. She could sit for awhile in the weedy lot, listen to the wind ticking the old sign (YOU LIKE IT

IT LIKES YOU), thinking about whatever people think about in the final moments of a life. In her case that would probably be Fritzy. She guessed Patsy would take him, and that would be fine. Cats were

survivors. They didn’t much care who fed them, as long as the bowl was ful .

It wouldn’t take long to get to the store at this hour, but it stil seemed too far. She was very tired. She decided she would get into Al Strehlke’s old truck and do it there. But she didn’t want to splatter her painful y written confession with her blood, that seemed very wrong considering al the bloodshed detailed within it, and so—

She took the pages from the Blue Horse tablet into the living room, where the TV played on (a young man who looked like a criminal was now sel ing a robot floorwasher), and dropped them in

Strehlke’s lap. “Hold that for me, Les,” she said.

“No problem,” he replied. She noted that a portion of his diseased brains was now drying on his bony naked shoulder. That was al right.

Tess went out into the windy dark and slowly climbed behind the wheel of the pickup truck. The scream of the hinge when the driver’s door swung shut was oddly familiar. But no, not so odd; hadn’t

she heard it at the store? Yes. She had been trying to do him a favor, because he was going to do her one—he was going to change her tire so she could go home and feed her cat. “I didn’t want his

battery to run down,” she said, and laughed.

She put the short barrel of the .38 against her temple, then reconsidered. A shot like that wasn’t always effective. She wanted her money to help women who had been hurt, not to pay for her care as

she lay unconscious year after year in some home for human vegetables.

The mouth, that was better. Surer.

The barrel was oily against her tongue, and she could feel the smal nub of the sight digging into the roof of her mouth.

I’ve had a good life—pretty good, anyway—and although I made a terrible mistake at the end of it, maybe that won’t be held against me if there’s something after this.

Ah, but the night wind was very sweet. So were the fragile fragrances it carried through the half-open driver’s side window. It was a shame to leave, but what choice? It was time to go.

Tess closed her eyes, tightened her finger on the trigger, and that was when Tom spoke up. It was strange that he could do that, because Tom was in her Expedition, and the Expedition was at the

other brother’s house, almost a mile down the road from here. Also, the voice she heard was nothing like the one she usual y manufactured for Tom. Nor did it sound like her own. It was a cold voice. And she—she had a gun in her mouth. She couldn’t talk at al .

“She was never a very good detective, was she?”

She took it out. “Who? Doreen?”

In spite of everything, she was shocked.

“Who else, Tessa Jean? And why would she be a good one? She came from the old you. Didn’t she?”

Tess supposed that was true.

“Doreen believes Big Driver didn’t rape and kil those other women. Isn’t that what you wrote?”

“Me,” Tess said. “I’m sure. I was just tired, that’s al . And shocked, I suppose.”

“Also guilty.”

“Yes. Also guilty.”

“Do guilty people make good deductions, do you think?”

No. Perhaps they didn’t.

“What are you trying to tel me?”

“That you only solved part of the mystery. Before you could solve al of it— you, not some cliché-ridden old lady detective—something admittedly unfortunate happened.”

“Unfortunate? Is that what you cal it?” From a great distance, Tess heard herself laugh. Somewhere the wind was making a loose gutter click against an eave. It sounded like the 7Up sign at the

deserted store.

“Before you shoot yourself,” the new, strange Tom said (he was sounding more female al the time), “why don’t you think for yourself ? But not here.”

“Where, then?”

Tom didn’t answer this question, and didn’t have to. What he said was, “And take that fucking confession with you.”

Tess got out of the truck and went back inside Lester Strehlke’s house. She stood in the dead man’s kitchen, thinking. She did it aloud, in Tom’s voice (which sounded more like her own al the time).

Doreen seemed to have taken a hike.

“Al’s housekey wil be on the ring with his ignition key,” Tom said, “but there’s the dog. You don’t want to forget the dog.”