Full Dark, No Stars

the November page of her 2007 address book, she had drawn a line across the eighth to the tenth, scrawling Bob in Saugus, 2 estate sales plus Boston coin auc. And did she remember cal ing his

Saugus motel on one of those nights and not getting him? Assuming he was out late with some coin salesman, sniffing for leads, or maybe in the shower? She seemed to remember that. If so, had he actual y been on the road that night? Perhaps coming back from doing an errand (a little drop-off) in the town of Amesbury? Or, if he had been in the shower, what in God’s name had he been washing off

?

She turned to his travel records and vouchers as the clock on the control strip passed eleven and started climbing toward midnight, the witching hour when graveyards reputedly yawned. She worked

careful y and stopped often to double-check. The stuff from the late seventies was spotty and not much help—he hadn’t been much more than your basic office drone in those days—but everything from the

eighties was there, and the correlations she found for the Beadie murders in 1980 and 1981 were clear and undeniable. He had been traveling at the right times and in the right areas. And, Smart Darcy

insisted, if you found enough cat hairs in a person’s house, you pretty much had to assume there was a feline on the premises somewhere.

So what do I do now?

The answer seemed to be, carry her confused and frightened head upstairs. She doubted if she could sleep, but at least she could take a hot shower and then lie down. She was exhausted, her back

ached from throwing up, and she stank of her own sweat.

She shut off her computer and climbed to the second floor at a slow trudge. The shower eased her back and a couple of Tylenol would probably ease it more by two AM or so; she was sure she’d be

awake to find out. When she put the Tylenol back in the medicine cabinet, she took the Ambien bottle out, held it in her hand for almost a ful minute, then replaced that, too. It wouldn’t put her to sleep, only make her muzzy and—perhaps—more paranoid than she was already.

She lay down and looked at the night table on the other side of the bed. Bob’s clock. Bob’s spare set of reading glasses. A copy of a book cal ed The Shack. You ought to read this, Darce, it’s a life-changer, he’d said two or three nights before this latest trip .

She turned off her lamp, saw Stacey Moore stuffed into the cornbin, and turned the lamp back on again. On most nights, the dark was her friend—sleep’s kindly harbinger—but not tonight. Tonight the

dark was populated by Bob’s harem.

You don’t know that. Remember that you don’t absolutely know that.

But if you find enough cat hairs…

Enough with the cat hairs, too.

She lay there, even more wide awake than she’d feared she’d be, her mind going around and around, now thinking of the victims, now thinking of her children, now thinking of herself, even thinking of

some long-forgotten Bible story about Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. She glanced at Bob’s clock after what felt like an hour of going around that wretched worry-circle and saw that only

twelve minutes had passed. She got up on one elbow and turned the clock’s face to the window.

He won’t be home until six tomorrow night, she thought… although, since it was now quarter past midnight, she supposed it was technical y tonight that he’d be home. Stil , that gave her eighteen hours. Surely enough time to make some sort of decision. It would help if she could sleep, even a little—sleep had a way of resetting the mind—but it was out of the question. She would drift a little, then think Marjorie Duvall or Stacey Moore or (this was the worst) Robert Shaverstone, ten years old. HE DID NOT “SUFFER!” And then any possibility of sleep would again be gone. The idea that she might never sleep again came to her. That was impossible, of course, but lying here with the taste of puke stil in her mouth in spite of the Scope she had rinsed with, it seemed completely plausible.

At some point she found herself remembering the year in early childhood when she had gone around the house looking in mirrors. She would stand in front of them with her hands cupped to the sides

of her face and her nose touching the glass, but holding her breath so she wouldn’t fog the surface.

If her mother caught her, she’d swat her away. That leaves a smudge, and I have to clean it off. Why are you so interested in yourself, anyway? You’ll never be hung for your beauty. And why stand