Full Dark, No Stars

Married, but that didn’t keep her from brushing her titties against me. She worked as a waitress in a coffee shop—the Sunnyside in Watervil e. I used to go up there to Mickleson’s Coins, remember? You

even went with me a couple of times, when Pets was at Colby. This was before George Mickleson died and his son sold off al the stock so he could go to New Zealand or somewhere. That woman was

all over me, Darce! Always asking me if I wanted a warm-up on my coffee and saying stuff like how ’bout those Red Sox, bending over, rubbing her titties on my shoulder, trying her best to get me hard.

Which she did, I admit it, I’m a man with a man’s needs, and although you never turned me away or said no… wel , rarely… I’m a man with a man’s needs and I’ve always been highly sexed. Some women

sense that and like to play on it. It gets them off.”

He was looking down at his lap with dark, musing eyes. Then something else occurred to him and his head jerked up. His thinning hair flew, then settled back.

“Always smiling! Red lipstick and always smiling! Wel , I recognize smiles like that. Most men do. ‘Ha-ha, I know you want it, I can smel it on you, but this little rub’s al you’re going to get, so deal with it.’ I could! I could deal with it! But not BD, not him.”

He shook his head slowly.

“There are lots of women like that. It’s easy to get their names. Then you can trace them down on the Internet. There’s a lot of information if you know how to look for it, and accountants know how. I’ve done that… oh, dozens of times. Maybe even a hundred. You could cal it a hobby, I guess. You could say I col ect information as wel as coins. Usual y it comes to nothing. But sometimes BD wil say,

‘She’s the one you want to fol ow through on, Bobby. That one right there. We’l make the plan together, and when the time comes, you just let me take over.’ And that’s what I do.”

He took her hand, and folded her limp and chil y fingers into his.

“You think I’m crazy. I can see it in your eyes. But I’m not, honey. It’s BD who’s crazy… or Beadie, if you like his for-the-public name better. By the way, if you read the stories in the paper, you know I purposely put a lot of misspel ings in my notes to the police. I even misspel the addresses. I keep a list of misspel ings in my wal et so that I’l always do it the same way. It’s misdirection. I want them to think Beadie’s dumb—il iterate, anyway—and they do. Because they’re dumb. I’ve only been questioned a single time, years ago, and that was as a witness, about two weeks after BD kil ed the Moore woman. An old guy with a limp, semi-retired. Told me to give him a cal if I remembered anything. I said I would. That was pretty rich.”

He chuckled soundlessly, as he sometimes did when they were watching Modern Family or Two and a Half Men. It was a way of laughing that had, until tonight, always heightened her own amusement.

“You want to know something, Darce? If they caught me dead to rights, I’d admit it—at least I guess I would, I don’t think anybody knows a hundred percent for sure what they’d do in a situation like that

—but I couldn’t give them much of a confession. Because I don’t remember much about the actual… wel … acts. Beadie does them, and I kind of… I don’t know… go unconscious. Get amnesia. Some

damn thing.”

Oh, you liar. You remember everything. It’s in your eyes, it’s even in the way your mouth turns down at the corners.

“And now… everything’s in Darcel en’s hands.” He raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed the back of it, as if to emphasize this point. “You know that old punchline, the one that goes, ‘I could

tel you, but then I’d have to kil you’? That doesn’t apply here. I could never kil you. Everything I do, everything I’ve built… modest as it would look to some people, I guess… I’ve done and built for you. For the kids too, of course, but mostly for you. You walked into my life, and do you know what happened?”

“You stopped,” she said.

He broke into a radiant grin. “For over twenty years!”

Sixteen, she thought but didn’t say.

“For most of those years, when we were raising the kids and struggling to get the coin business off the ground—although that was mostly you—I was racing around New England doing taxes and

setting up foundations—”

“You were the one who made it work,” she said, and was a little shocked by what she heard in her voice: calmness and warmth. “You were the one with the expertise.”

He looked almost touched enough to start crying again, and when he spoke his voice was husky. “Thank you, hon. It means the world to hear you say that. You saved me, you know. In more ways than

one.”

He cleared his throat.