Full Dark, No Stars

“Love you, honey.” The coda of so many conversations over the years.

“Love you, too,” she said, smiling. Then she hung up, put her forehead against the wal , closed her eyes, and began weeping before the smile could leave her face.

- 6 -

Her computer, an iMac now old enough to look fashionably retro, was in her sewing room. She rarely used it for anything but email and eBay, but now she opened Google and typed in Marjorie

Duval ’s name. She hesitated before adding Beadie to the search, but not long. Why prolong the agony? It would come up anyway, she was sure of it. She hit Enter, and as she watched the little wait-circle go around and around at the top of the screen, those cramps struck again. She hurried to the bathroom, sat down on the commode, and took care of her business with her face in her hands. There was a

mirror on the back of the door, and she didn’t want to see herself in it. Why was it there, anyway? Why had she allowed it to be there? Who wanted to watch themselves sitting on the pot? Even at the best of times, which this most certainly wasn’t?

She went back to the computer slowly, dragging her feet like a child who knows she is about to be punished for the kind of thing Darcy’s mother had cal ed a Big Bad. She saw that Google had

provided her with over five mil ion results for her search: o omnipotent Google, so generous and so terrible. But the first one actual y made her laugh; it invited her to fol ow Marjorie Duval Beadie on Twitter. Darcy felt she could ignore that one. Unless she was wrong (and how wildly grateful that would make her), the Marjorie she was looking for had Twittered her last tweet some time ago.

The second result was from the Portland Press Herald, and when Darcy clicked on it, the photograph that greeted her (it felt like a slap, that greeting) was the one she remembered from TV, and probably in this very article, since the Press Herald was their paper. The article had been published ten days before, and was the lead story. NEW HAMPSHIRE WOMAN MAY HAVE BEEN

“BEADIE’S” 11th VICTIM, the headline screamed. And the subhead: Police Source: “We’re Ninety Per Cent Sure”

Marjorie Duval looked a lot prettier in the newspaper picture, a studio shot that showed her posed in classic fashion, wearing a swirly black dress. Her hair was down, and looked a much lighter blond

in this photo. Darcy wondered if her husband had provided the picture. She supposed he had. She supposed it had been on their mantel at 17 Honey Lane, or perhaps mounted in the hal . The pretty

hostess of the house greeting guests with her eternal smile.

Gentlemen prefer blondes because they get tired of squeezin them blackheads.

One of Bob’s sayings. She had never much liked that one, and hated having it in her head now.

Marjorie Duval had been found in a ravine six miles from her house in South Gansett, just over the North Conway town line. The County Sheriff speculated that the death had probably resulted from

strangulation, but he couldn’t say for sure; that was up to the County Medical Examiner. He refused to speculate further, or answer any other questions, but the reporter’s unnamed source (whose information was at least semi-validated by being “close to the investigation”) said that Duval had been bitten and sexual y molested “in a manner consistent with the other Beadie kil ings.”

Which was a natural transition to a complete recap of the previous murders. The first had occurred in 1977. There had been two in 1978, another in 1980, and then two more in 1981. Two of the

murders had occurred in New Hampshire, two in Massachusetts, the fifth and sixth in Vermont. After that, there had been a hiatus of sixteen years. The police assumed that one of three things had

happened: Beadie had moved to another part of the country and was pursuing his hobby there, Beadie had been arrested for some other, unrelated crime and was in prison, or Beadie had kil ed himself.

The one thing that wasn’t likely, according to a psychiatrist the reporter had consulted for his story, was that Beadie had just gotten tired of it. “These guys don’t get bored,” the psychiatrist said. “It’s their sport, their compulsion. More than that, it’s their secret life.”

Secret life. What a poison bonbon that phrase was.

Beadie’s sixth victim had been a woman from Barre, uncovered in a snowdrift by a passing plow just a week before Christmas. Such a holiday that must have been for her relatives, Darcy thought.

Not that she’d had much of a Christmas herself that year. Lonely away from home (a fact wild horses wouldn’t have dragged from her mouth when talking to her mother), working at a job she wasn’t sure