Full Dark, No Stars

“Bob—your friend BD is dead. He’s been dead for almost forty years. You must know that. I mean, on some level you must.”

He tossed his hands in the air: a gesture of good-natured surrender. “Do you want to cal it guilt-avoidance? That’s what a shrink would cal it, I suppose, and it’s fine if you do. But Darcy, listen!” He leaned forward and pressed a finger to her forehead, between her eyebrows. “Listen and get this through your head. It was Brian. He infected me with… wel , certain ideas, let’s say that. Some ideas, once you get them in your head, you can’t unthink them. You can’t…”

“Put the toothpaste back in the tube?”

He clapped his hands together, almost making her scream. “That’s it exactly! You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Brian was dead, but the ideas were alive. Those ideas—getting women,

doing whatever to them, whatever crazy idea came into your head—they became his ghost.”

His eyes shifted upward and to the left when he said this. She had read somewhere that this meant the person who was talking was tel ing a conscious lie. But did it matter if he was? Or which one of

them he was lying to? She thought not.

“I won’t go into the details,” he said. “It’s nothing for a sweetheart like you to hear, and like it or not—I know you don’t right now—you’re stil my sweetheart. But you have to know I fought it. For seven years I fought it, but those ideas— Brian’s ideas—kept growing inside my head. Until final y I said to myself, ‘I’l try it once, just to get it out of my head. To get him out of my head. If I get caught, I get caught

—at least I’l stop thinking about it. Wondering about it. What it would be like.’”

“You’re tel ing me it was a male exploration,” she said dul y.

“Wel , yes. I suppose you could say that.”

“Or like trying a joint just to see what al the shouting was about.”

He shrugged modestly, boyishly. “Kinda.”

“It wasn’t an exploration, Bobby. It wasn’t trying a joint. It was taking a woman’s life.”

She had seen no guilt or shame, absolutely none—he appeared incapable of those things, it seemed the circuit-breaker that control ed them had been fried, perhaps even before birth—but now he

gave her a sulky, put-upon look. A teenager’s you-don’t-understand-me look.

“Darcy, they were snoots.”

She wanted a glass of water, but she was afraid to get up and go into the bathroom. She was afraid he would stop her, and what would come after that? What then?

“Besides,” he resumed, “I didn’t think I’d get caught. Not if I was careful and made a plan. Not a half-baked and horny-fourteen-year-old boy’s plan, you know, but a realistic one. And I realized something else, too. I couldn’t do it myself. Even if I didn’t screw up out of nervousness, I might out of guilt. Because I was one of the good guys. That’s how I saw myself, and believe it or not, I stil do. And I have the proof, don’t I? A good home, a good wife, two beautiful children who are al grown up and starting their own lives. And I give back to the community. That’s why I took the Town Treasurer’s job for two years, gratis. That’s why I work with Vinnie Eschler every year to put on the Hal oween blood drive.”

You should have asked Marjorie Duvall to give, Darcy thought. She was A-positive.

Then, puffing out his chest slightly—a man nailing down his argument with one final, irrefutable point—he said: “That’s what the Cub Scouts are about. You thought I’d quit when Donnie went on to Boy

Scouts, I know you did. Only I didn’t. Because it’s not just about him, and never was. It’s about the community. It’s about giving back.”

“Then give Marjorie Duval back her life. Or Stacey Moore. Or Robert Shaverstone.”

That last one got through; he winced as if she had struck him. “The boy was an accident. He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“But you being there wasn’t an accident?”

“It wasn’t me, ” he said, then added the ultimate surreal absurdity. “I’m no adulterer. It was BD. It’s always BD. It was his fault for putting those ideas in my head in the first place. I never would have thought of them on my own. I signed my notes to the police with his name just to make that clear. Of course I changed the spel ing, because I sometimes cal ed him BD back when I first told you about him.

You might not remember that, but I did.”

She was impressed by the obsessive lengths he’d gone to. No wonder he hadn’t been caught. If she hadn’t stubbed her toe on that damned carton—

“None of them had any relation to me or my business. Either of my businesses. That would be very bad. Very dangerous. But I travel a lot, and I keep my eyes open. BD—the BD inside—he does, too.

We watch out for the snooty ones. You can always tel . They wear their skirts too high and show their bra straps on purpose. They entice men. That Stacey Moore, for instance. You read about her, I’m sure.