Full Dark, No Stars

pegboards and Bob’s workbench in good order. The floor was a concrete slab painted battleship gray. There were no oilstains; Bob said that oilstains on a garage floor either meant the people who

owned the garage were running junk or were careless about maintenance. The year-old Prius he used for his weekday commutes into Portland was there; he had taken his high-mileage SUV dinosaur to

Vermont. Her Volvo was parked outside.

“It’s just as easy to pul it in,” he had said on more than one occasion (when you were married for twenty-seven years, original comments tended to be thin on the ground). “Just use the door opener on

the visor.”

“I like it where I can see it,” she always replied, although the real reason was her fear of clipping the garage bay door while backing out. She hated backing. And she supposed he knew it… just as she

knew that he had a peculiar fetish about keeping the paper money in his wal et heads-side up and would never leave a book facedown and open when he paused in his reading—because, he said, it

broke the spines.

At least the garage was warm; big silver pipes (probably you cal ed them ducts, but Darcy wasn’t quite sure) crisscrossed the ceiling. She walked to the bench, where several square tins were lined

up, each neatly labeled: BOLTS, SCREWS, HINGES HASPS & L-CLAMPS, PLUMBING, and—she found this rather endearing—ODDS & ENDS. There was a calendar on the wal featuring a Sports

Illustrated swimsuit girl who looked depressingly young and sexy; to the left of the calendar two photos had been tacked up. One was an old snap of Donnie and Petra on the Yarmouth Little League field, dressed in Boston Red Sox jerseys. Below it, in Magic Marker, Bob had printed THE HOME TEAM, 1999. The other, much newer, showed a grown-up and just-short-of-beautiful Petra standing with

Michael, her fiancé, in front of a clam shack on Old Orchard Beach with their arms around each other. The Magic Marker caption below this one read THE HAPPY COUPLE!

The cabinet with the batteries bore a Dymo tape label reading ELECTRICAL STUFF and was mounted to the left of the photos. Darcy moved in that direction without looking where she was going—

trusting to Bob’s just-short-of-maniacal neatness—and stumbled over a cardboard box that hadn’t been entirely pushed under the workbench. She tottered, then grabbed the workbench at the last possible

second. She broke off a fingernail—painful and annoying—but saved herself a potential y nasty fal , which was good. Very good, considering there was no one in the house to cal 911, had she cracked her skul on the floor—greaseless and clean, but extremely hard.

She could simply have pushed the box back under with the side of her foot—later she would realize this and ponder it careful y, like a mathematician going over an abstruse and complicated equation.

She was in a hurry, after al . But she saw a Patternworks knitting catalogue on top of the box, and knelt down to grab it and take it in with the batteries. And when she lifted it out, there was a Brookstone catalogue she had misplaced just underneath. And beneath that Paula Young… Talbots… Forzieri… Bloomingdale’s…

“Bob!” she cried, only it came out in two exasperated syl ables (the way it did when he tracked in mud or left his sopping towels on the bathroom floor, as if they were in a fancy hotel with maid

service), not Bob but BOH-ub! Because, real y, she could read him like a book. He thought she ordered too much from the mail-order catalogues, had once gone so far as to declare she was addicted to them (which was ridiculous, it was Butterfingers she was addicted to). That little psychological analysis had earned him a two-day cold shoulder. But he knew how her mind worked, and that with things that weren’t absolutely vital, she was the original out-of-sight, out-of-mind girl. So he had gathered up her catalogues, the sneak, and stowed them out here. Probably the next stop would have been the recycling bin.

Danskin… Express… Computer Outlet… Macworld … Monkey Ward… Layla Grace…

The deeper she went, the more exasperated she became. You’d think they were tottering on the edge of bankruptcy because of her spendthrift ways, which was utter bul shit. She had forgotten al

about Two and a Half Men ; she was already selecting the piece of her mind she intended to give Bob when he cal ed from Montpelier (he always cal ed after he’d had his dinner and was back at the motel). But first, she intended to take al these catalogues right back into the goddarn house, which would take three or possibly four trips, because the stack was at least two feet high, and those slick catalogues were heavy. It was real y no wonder she’d stumbled over the box.

Death by catalogues, she thought. Now that would be an ironic way to g—