Full Dark, No Stars

Honey Lane. As in hey, hon, how’s life been treatin you, are you upright and sniffin the air?

“I was thinking about Brandolyn,” she heard herself say.

“Oh, baby,” he said, and the sympathy in his voice was al Bob. She knew it wel . Hadn’t she leaned on it time after time since 1984? Even before, when they’d stil been courting and she came to

understand that he was the one? Sure she had. As he had leaned on her. The idea that such sympathy could be nothing but sweet icing on a poison cake was insane. The fact that she was at this moment

lying to him was even more insane. If, that was, there were degrees of insanity. Or maybe insane was like unique, and there was no comparative or superlative form. And what was she thinking? In God’s

name, what?

But he was talking, and she had no idea what he’d just said.

“Run that past me again. I was reaching for the tea.” Another lie, her hands were shaking too badly to reach for anything, but a smal plausible one. And her voice wasn’t shaking. At least she didn’t

think it was.

“I said, what got that going?”

“Donnie cal ed and asked after his sister. It got me thinking about mine. I went out and walked around for awhile. I got sniffling, although some of that was just the cold. You probably heard it in my

voice.”

“Yep, right away,” he said. “Listen, I should skip Burlington tomorrow and come back home.”

She almost cried out No!, but that would be exactly the wrong thing to do. That might get him on the road at first light, al solicitude.

“You do and I’l punch you in the eye,” she said, and was relieved when he laughed. “Charlie Frady told you that estate sale in Burlington was worth going to, and his contacts are good. His instincts

are, too. You’ve always said so.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like to hear you sounding so low.”

That he had known (and at once! at once!) that something was wrong with her was bad. That she needed to lie about what the trouble was—ah, that was worse. She closed her eyes, saw Bad Bitch

Brenda screaming inside the black hood, and opened them again.

“I was low, but I’m not now,” she said. “It was just a momentary fugue. She was my sister, and I saw my father bring her home. Sometimes I think about it, that’s al .”

“I know,” he said. He did, too. Her sister’s death wasn’t the reason she’d fal en in love with Bob Anderson, but his understanding of her grief had tightened the connection.

Brandolyn Madsen had been struck and kil ed by a drunk snowmobiler while she was out cross-country skiing. He fled, leaving her body in the woods half a mile from the Madsen house. When Brandi

wasn’t back by eight o’clock, a pair of Freeport policemen and the local Neighborhood Watch had mounted a search party. It was Darcy’s father who found her body and carried it home through half a mile

of pine woods. Darcy—stationed in the living room, monitoring the phone and trying to keep her mother calm—had been the first to see him. He came walking up the lawn under the harsh glare of a ful

winter moon with his breath puffing out in white clouds. Darcy’s initial thought (this was stil terrible to her) had been of those corny old black-and-white love-movies they sometimes showed on TCM, the ones where some guy carries his new bride across the threshold of their happy honeymoon cottage while fifty violins pour syrup onto the soundtrack.

Bob Anderson, Darcy had discovered, could relate in a way many people could not. He hadn’t lost a brother or sister; he had lost his best friend. The boy had darted out into the road to grab an errant

throw during a game of pickup basebal (not Bob’s throw, at least; no basebal player, he’d been swimming that day), had been struck by a delivery truck, and died in the hospital shortly afterward. This coincidence of old sorrows wasn’t the only thing that made their pairing seem special to her, but it was the one that made it feel somehow mystical—not a coincidence but a planned thing.

“Stay in Vermont, Bobby. Go to the estate sale. I love you for being concerned, but if you come running home, I’l feel like a kid. Then I’l be mad.”

“Okay. But I’m going to cal you tomorrow at seven-thirty. Fair warning.”

She laughed, and was relieved to hear it was a real one… or so close as to make no difference. And why shouldn’t she be al owed a real laugh? Just why the heck not? She loved him, and would give

him the benefit of the doubt. Of every doubt. Nor was this a choice. You could not turn off love—even the rather absent, sometimes taken for granted love of twenty-seven years—the way you’d turn off a faucet. Love ran from the heart, and the heart had its own imperatives.

“Bobby, you always cal at seven-thirty.”

“Guilty as charged. Cal tonight if you—”

“—need anything, no matter what the hour,” she finished for him. Now she almost felt like herself again. It was real y amazing, the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover. “I wil .”