Full Dark, No Stars

the kids to think about. Donnie and Ken had just landed their first two clients, but the bank and the car dealership looking for a fresh approach would be gone three hours after this shit-bomb exploded.

Anderson & Hayward, which had taken its first real breath today, would be dead tomorrow. Darcy didn’t know how much Ken Hayward had invested, but Donnie was al in the pot. That didn’t amount to

such of a much in cash, but there were other things you invested when you were starting out on your own voyage. Your heart, your brains, your sense of self-worth.

Then there were Petra and Michael, probably at this very moment with their heads together making more wedding plans, unaware that a two-ton safe was dangling above them on a badly frayed cord.

Pets had always idolized her father. What would it do to her if she found out the hands which had once pushed her on the backyard swing were the same hands that had strangled the life out of eleven

women? That the lips which had kissed her goodnight were hiding teeth that had bitten eleven women, in some cases al the way down to the bone?

Sitting at her computer again, a terrible newspaper headline rose in Darcy’s mind. It was accompanied by a photograph of Bob in his neckerchief, absurd khaki shorts, and long socks. It was so clear

it could already have been printed:

MASS MURDERER “BEADIE”

LED CUB SCOUTS FOR 17 YEARS

Darcy clapped a hand over her mouth. She could feel her eyes pulsing in their sockets. The notion of suicide occurred to her, and for a few moments (long ones) the idea seemed completely rational,

the only reasonable solution. She could leave a note saying she’d done it because she was afraid she had cancer. Or early-onset Alzheimer’s, that was even better. But suicide cast a deep shadow over

families, too, and what if she was wrong? What if Bob had just found that ID packet by the side of the road, or something?

Do you know how unlikely that is? Smart Darcy sneered.

Okay, yes, but unlikely wasn’t the same as impossible, was it? There was something else, too, something that made the cage she was in escape-proof: what if she was right? Wouldn’t her death free

Bob to kil more, because he no longer had to lead so deep a double life? Darcy wasn’t sure she believed in a conscious existence after death, but what if there was one? And what if she were confronted there not by Edenic green fields and rivers of plenty but by a ghastly receiving line of strangled women branded by her husband’s teeth, al accusing her of causing their deaths by taking the easy way out herself ? And by ignoring what she had found (if such a thing were even possible, which she didn’t believe for a minute), wouldn’t the accusation be true? Did she real y think she could condemn more

women to horrible deaths just so her daughter could have a nice June wedding?

She thought: I wish I was dead.

But she wasn’t.

For the first time in years, Darcy Madsen Anderson slipped from her chair onto her knees and began to pray. It did no good. The house was empty except for her.

- 7 -

She had never kept a diary, but she had ten years’ worth of appointment books stored in the bottom of her capacious sewing chest. And decades’ worth of Bob’s travel records stuffed in one of the

file drawers of the cabinet he kept in his home office. As a tax accountant (and one with his own duly incorporated side-business to boot), he was meticulous when it came to record-keeping, taking every deduction, tax credit, and cent of automotive depreciation he could.

She stacked his files beside her computer along with her appointment books. She opened Google and forced herself to do the research she needed, noting the names and dates of death (some of

these were necessarily approximate) of Beadie’s victims. Then, as the digital clock on her computer’s control strip marched soundlessly past ten PM, she began the laborious work of cross-checking.

She would have given a dozen years of her life to find something that would have indisputably eliminated him from even one of the murders, but her appointment books only made things worse. Kel ie

Gervais, of Keene, New Hampshire, had been discovered in the woods behind the local landfil on March fifteenth of 2004. According to the medical examiner, she had been dead three to five days.

Scrawled across March tenth to twelfth in Darcy’s appointment book for 2004 was Bob to Fitzwilliam, Brat. George Fitzwil iam was a wel -heeled client of Benson, Bacon & Anderson. Brat was her abbreviation for Brattleboro, where Fitzwil iam lived. An easy drive from Keene, New Hampshire.

Helen Shaverstone and her son Robert had been discovered in Newrie Creek, in the town of Amesbury, on November eleventh of 2007. They had lived in Tassel Vil age, some twelve miles away. On