Full Dark, No Stars

But it wasn’t. There were three plastic oblongs inside, bound with an elastic band. She picked the bundle out, using just the tips of her fingers—as a woman might handle a cast-off rag she fears may

be germy as wel as dirty. Darcy slipped off the elastic.

They weren’t credit cards, which had been her first idea. The top one was a Red Cross blood donor’s card belonging to someone named Marjorie Duval . Her type was A-positive, her region New

England. Darcy turned the card over and saw that Marjorie—

whoever she was—had last given blood on August sixteenth of 2010. Three months ago.

Who the hel was Marjorie Duval ? How did Bob know her? And why did the name ring a faint but very clear bel ?

The next one was Marjorie Duval ’s North Conway Library card, and it had an address: 17 Honey Lane, South Gansett, New Hampshire.

The last piece of plastic was Marjorie Duval ’s New Hampshire driver’s license. She looked like a perfectly ordinary American woman in her mid-thirties, not very pretty (although nobody looked their

best in driver’s license photographs), but presentable. Darkish blond hair pul ed back from her face, either bunned or ponytailed; in the picture you couldn’t tel . DOB, January 6, 1974. The address was the same as the one on the library card.

Darcy realized that she was making a desolate mewing sound. It was horrible to hear a sound like that coming from her own throat, but she couldn’t stop. And her stomach had been replaced by a bal

of lead. It was pul ing al of her insides down, stretching them into new and unpleasant shapes. She had seen Marjorie Duval ’s face in the newspaper. Also on the six o’clock news.

With hands that had absolutely no feeling, she put the rubber band back around the ID cards, put them back in the box, then put the box back in his hidey-hole. She was getting ready to close it up

again when she heard herself saying, “No, no, no, that isn’t right. It can’t be.”

Was that the voice of Smart Darcy or Stupid Darcy? It was hard to tel . Al she knew for sure was that Stupid Darcy had been the one to open the box. And thanks to Stupid Darcy, she was fal ing.

Taking the box back out. Thinking, It’s a mistake, it has to be, we’ve been married over half our lives, I’d know, I would know. Opening the box. Thinking, Does anybody really know anybody?

Before tonight she certainly would have thought so.

Marjorie Duval ’s driver’s license was now on the top of the stack. Before, it had been on the bottom. Darcy put it there. But which of the others had been on top, the Red Cross card or the library

card? It was simple, it had to be simple when there were only two choices, but she was too upset to remember. She put the library card on top and knew at once that was wrong, because the first thing she’d seen when she opened the box was a flash of red, red like blood, of course a blood donor card would be red, and that had been the one on top.

She put it there, and as she was putting the elastic back around the little col ection of plastic, the phone in the house started to ring again. It was him. It was Bob, cal ing from Vermont, and were she in the kitchen to take the cal , she’d hear his cheery voice (a voice she knew as wel as her own) asking, Hey, honey, how are you?

Her fingers jerked and the rubber band snapped. It flew away, and she cried out, whether in frustration or fear she didn’t know. But real y, why would she be afraid? Twenty-seven years of marriage

and he had never laid a hand on her, except to caress. On only a few occasions had he raised his voice to her.

The phone rang again… again… and then cut off in mid-ring. Now he would be leaving a message. Missed you again! Damn! Give me a call so I won’t worry, okay? The number is…

He’d add the number of his room, too. He left nothing to chance, took nothing for granted.

What she was thinking absolutely couldn’t be true. It was like one of those monster delusions that sometimes reared up from the mud at the bottom of a person’s mind, sparkling with hideous plausibility: that the acid indigestion was the onset of a heart attack, the headache a brain tumor, and Petra’s failure to cal on Sunday night meant she had been in a car accident and was lying comatose in some hospital. But those delusions usual y came at four in the morning, when the insomnia was in charge. Not at eight o’clock in the evening… and where was that damned rubber band?

She found it at last, lying behind the carton of catalogues she never wanted to look in again. She put it in her pocket, started to get up to look for another one without remembering where she was, and thumped her head on the bottom of the table. Darcy began to cry.