Full Dark, No Stars

There were no rubber bands in any of the worktable’s drawers, and that made her cry even harder. She went back through the breezeway, the terrible, inexplicable identity cards in her housecoat

pocket, and got an elastic out of the kitchen drawer where she kept al sorts of semi-useful crap: paper clips, bread ties, fridge magnets that had lost most of their pul . One of these latter said DARCY

RULES, and had been a stocking-stuffer present from Bob.

On the counter, the light on top of the phone blinked steadily, saying message, message, message.

She hurried back to the garage without holding the lapels of her housecoat. She no longer felt the outer chil , because the one inside was greater. And then there was the lead bal pul ing down her

guts. Elongating them. She was vaguely aware that she needed to move her bowels, and badly.

Never mind. Hold it. Pretend you’re on the turnpike and the next rest area’s twenty miles ahead. Get this done. Put everything back the way it was. Then you can—

Then she could what? Forget it?

Fat chance of that.

She bound the ID cards with the elastic, realized the driver’s license had somehow gotten back on top, and cal ed herself a stupid bitch… a pejorative for which she would have slapped Bob’s face,

had he ever tried to hang it on her. Not that he ever had.

“A stupid bitch but not a bondage bitch,” she muttered, and a cramp knifed her bel y. She dropped to her knees and froze that way, waiting for it to pass. If there had been a bathroom out here she

would have dashed for it, but there wasn’t. When the cramp let go—reluctantly—she rearranged the cards in what she was pretty sure was the right order (blood donor, library, driver’s license), then put them back in the LINKS box. Box back in hole. Pivoting piece of baseboard closed up tight. Carton of catalogues back where it had been when she tripped on it: sticking out slightly. He would never know the difference.

But was she sure of that? If he was what she was thinking—

monstrous that such a thing should even be in her mind, when al she’d wanted just a half an hour ago was fresh batteries for the goddarn remote control—if he was, then he’d been careful for a long time.

And he was careful, he was neat, he was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy, but if he was what those goddarn (no, goddamned) plastic cards seemed to suggest he was, then he must be supernaturally careful. Supernatural y watchful. Sly.

It was a word she had never thought of in connection to Bob until tonight.

“No,” she told the garage. She was sweating, her hair was stuck to her face in unlovely spikelets, she was crampy and her hands were trembling like those of a person with Parkinson’s, but her voice

was weirdly calm, strangely serene. “No, he’s not. It’s a mistake. My husband is not Beadie.”

She went back into the house.

- 5 -

She decided to make tea. Tea was calming. She was fil ing the kettle when the phone began to ring again. She dropped the kettle into the sink—the bong sound made her utter a smal scream—then

went to the phone, wiping her wet hands on her housecoat.

Calm, calm, she told herself. If he can keep a secret, so can I. Remember that there’s a reasonable explanation for all this—

Oh, real y?

— and I just don’t know what it is. I need time to think about it, that’s all. So: calm.

She picked up the phone and said brightly, “If that’s you, handsome, come right over. My husband’s out of town.”

Bob laughed. “Hey, honey, how are you?”

“Upright and sniffin the air. You?”

There was a long silence. It felt long, anyway, although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. In it she heard the somehow terrible whine of the refrigerator, and water dripping from the faucet onto the teakettle she’d dropped in the sink, the beating of her own heart—that last sound seeming to come from her throat and ears rather than her chest. They had been married so long that they had

become almost exquisitely attuned to each other. Did that happen in every marriage? She didn’t know. She only knew her own. Except now she had to wonder if she even knew that one.

“You sound funny,” he said. “Al thick in the voice. Is everything okay, sweetie?”

She should have been touched. Instead she was terrified. Marjorie Duval : the name did not just hang in front of her eyes; it seemed to blink on and off, like a neon bar sign. For a moment she was

speechless, and to her horror, the kitchen she knew so wel was wavering in front of her as more tears rose in her eyes. That crampy heaviness was back in her bowels, too. Marjorie Duval . A-positive. 17