Full Dark, No Stars

“Seventy-eight in May.” He spoke with evident pride. “If I make it. I always add that for good luck. It’s worked so far. What a nice kitchen you have, Mrs. Anderson—a place for everything and everything in its place. My wife would have approved. She died four years ago. It was a heart attack, very sudden. How I miss her. The way you must miss your husband, I imagine.”

His twinkling eyes—young and alert in creased, pain-haunted sockets—searched her face.

He knows. I don’t know how, but he does.

She checked the Bunn’s basket and turned it on. As she got cups from the cabinet, she asked, “How may I help you today, Mr. Ramsey? Or is it Detective Ramsey?”

He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. “Oh, it’s been donkey’s years since anyone cal ed me Detective. Never mind Ramsey, either, if you go straight to Holt, that’l work for me. And it was

real y your husband I wanted to talk to, you know, but of course he’s passed on—again, my condolences—and so that’s out of the question. Yep, entirely out of the question.” He shook his head and settled himself on one of the stools that stood around the butcher-block table. His topcoat rustled. Somewhere inside his scant body, a bone creaked. “But I tel you what: an old man who lives in a rented room—

which I do, although it’s a nice one—sometimes gets bored with just the TV for company, and so I thought, what the hel , I’l drive on down to Yarmouth and ask my few little questions just the same. She won’t be able to answer many of them, I said to myself, maybe not any of them, but why not go anyway? You need to get out before you get potbound, I said to myself.”

“On a day when the high is supposed to go al the way up to ten degrees,” she said. “In a State car with a bad heater.”

“Ayuh, but I have my thermals on,” he said modestly.

“Don’t you have your own car, Mr. Ramsey?”

“I do, I do,” he said, as if this had never occurred to him until now. “Come sit down, Mrs. Anderson. No need to lurk in the corner. I’m too old to bite.”

“No, the coffee wil be ready in a minute,” she said. She was afraid of this old man. Bob should have been afraid of him, too, but of course Bob was now beyond fear. “In the meantime, perhaps you

can tel me what you wanted to talk about with my husband.”

“Wel , you won’t believe this, Mrs. Anderson—”

“Cal me Darcy, why don’t you?”

“Darcy!” He looked delighted. “Isn’t that the nicest, old-fashioned name!”

“Thank you. Do you take cream?”

“Black as my hat, that’s how I take it. Only I like to think of myself as one of the white-hats, actual y. Wel , I would, wouldn’t I? Chasing down criminals and such. That’s how I got this bad leg, you know.

High-speed car chase, way back in ’89. Fel ow kil ed his wife and both of his children. Now a crime like that is usual y an act of passion, committed by a man who’s either drunk or drugged or not quite right in the head.” Ramsey tapped his fuzz with a finger arthritis had twisted out of true. “Not this guy. This guy did it for the insurance. Tried to make it look like a whatchacal it, home invasion. I won’t go into al the details, but I sniffed around and sniffed around. For three years I sniffed around. And final y I felt I had enough to arrest him. Probably not enough to convict him, but there was no need to tel him that, was there?”

“I suppose not,” Darcy said. The coffee was hot, and she poured. She decided to take hers black, too. And to drink it as fast as possible. That way the caffeine would hit her al at once and turn on her lights.

“Thanks,” he said when she brought it to the table. “Thanks very much. You’re kindness itself. Hot coffee on a cold day—what could be better? Mul ed cider, maybe; I can’t think of anything else.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, I know. Dwight Cheminoux. Way up in The County, this was. Just south of the Hainesvil e Woods.”

Darcy worked on her coffee. She looked at Ramsey over the rim of her cup and suddenly it was like being married again—a long marriage, in many ways a good marriage (but not in al ways), the

kind that was like a joke: she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew that he knew. That kind of relationship was like looking into a mirror and seeing another mirror, a hal of them going down into infinity. The only real question here was what he was going to do about what he knew. What he could do.

“Wel ,” Ramsey said, setting down his coffee cup and unconsciously beginning to rub his sore leg, “the simple fact is I was hoping to provoke that fel a. I mean, he had the blood of a woman and two

kiddies on his hands, so I felt justified in playing a little dirty. And it worked. He ran, and I chased him right into the Hainesvil e Woods, where the song says there’s a tombstone every mile. And there we both crashed on Wickett’s Curve—him into a tree and me into him. Which is where I got this leg, not to mention the steel rod in my neck.”

“I’m sorry. And the fel ow you were chasing? What did he get?”