Full Dark, No Stars

Ramsey’s mouth curved upward at the corners in a dry-lipped smile of singular coldness. His young eyes sparkled. “He got death, Darcy. Saved the state forty or fifty years of room and board in

Shawshank.”

“You’re quite the hound of heaven, aren’t you, Mr. Ramsey?”

Instead of looking puzzled, he placed his misshapen hands beside his face, palms out, and recited in a singsong schoolboy’s voice: “‘I fled Him down the nights and down the days, I fled Him down

the arches of the years, I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways… ’ And so on.”

“You learned that in school?”

“No ma’am, in Methodist Youth Fel owship. Lo these many years ago. Won a Bible, which I lost at summer camp a year later. Only I didn’t lose it; it was stolen. Can you imagine someone low enough

to steal a Bible?”

“Yes,” Darcy said.

He laughed. “Darcy, you go on and cal me Holt. Please. Al my friends do.”

Are you my friend? Are you?

She didn’t know, but of one thing she was sure: he wouldn’t have been Bob’s friend.

“Is that the only poem you have by heart? Holt?”

“Wel , I used to know ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’” he said, “but now I only remember the part about how home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. It’s a true thing, wouldn’t you say?”

“Absolutely.”

His eyes—they were a light hazel—searched hers. The intimacy of that gaze was indecent, as if he were looking at her with her clothes off. And pleasant, for perhaps the same reason.

“What did you want to ask my husband, Holt?”

“Wel , I already talked to him once, you know, although I’m not sure he’d remember if he was stil alive. A long time ago, that was. We were both a lot younger, and you must’ve been just a child

yourself, given how young and pretty you are now.”

She gave him a chil y spare-me smile, then got up to pour herself a fresh cup of coffee. The first one was already gone.

“You probably know about the Beadie murders,” he said.

“The man who kil s women and then sends their ID to the police?” She came back to the table, her coffee cup perfectly steady in her hand. “The newspapers dine out on that one.”

He pointed at her—Bob’s finger-gun gesture—and tipped her a wink. “Got that right. Yessir. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ that’s their motto. I happened to work the case a little. I wasn’t retired then, but getting on to it. I had kind of a reputation as a fel ow who could sometimes get results by sniffing around… fol owing my whatdoyoucal ums…”

“Instincts?”

Once more with the finger-gun. Once more with the wink. As if there were a secret, and they were both in on it. “Anyway, they send me out to work on my own, you know—old limping Holt shows his

pictures around, asks his questions, and kind’ve… you know… just sniffs. Because I’ve always had a nose for this kind of work, Darcy, and never real y lost it. This was in the fal of 1997, not too long after a woman named Stacey Moore was kil ed. Name ring a bel ?”

“I don’t think so,” Darcy said.

“You’d remember if you’d seen the crime scene photos. Terrible murder—how that woman must have suffered. But of course, this fel ow who cal s himself Beadie had stopped for a long time, over

fifteen years, and he must have had a lot of steam built up in his boiler, just waiting to blow. And it was her that got scalded.

“Anyway, the fel a who was SAG back then put me on it. ‘Let old Holt take a shot,’ he says, ‘he’s not doing anything else, and it’l keep him out from underfoot.’ Even then old Holt was what they cal ed me. Because of the limp, I should imagine. I talked to her friends, her relatives, her neighbors out there on Route 106, and the people she worked with in Watervil e. Oh, I talked to them plenty. She was a waitress at a place cal ed the Sunnyside Restaurant there in town. Lots of transients stop in, because the turnpike’s just down the road, but I was more interested in her regular customers. Her regular male customers.”

“Of course you would be,” she murmured.

“One of them turned out to be a presentable, wel -turned-out fel a in his mid or early forties. Came in every three or four weeks, always took one of Stacey’s booths. Now, probably I shouldn’t say this, since the fel a turned out to be your late husband—speaking il of the dead, but since they’re both dead, I kind’ve figure that cancels itself out, if you see what I mean…” Ramsey ceased, looking confused.

“You’re getting al tangled up,” Darcy said, amused in spite of herself. Maybe he wanted her to be amused. She couldn’t tel . “Do yourself a favor and just say it, I’m a big girl. She flirted with him? Is that what it comes down to? She wouldn’t be the first waitress to flirt with a man on the road, even if the man had a wedding ring on his finger.”

“No, that wasn’t quite it. According to what the other waitstaff told me—and of course you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they al liked her—it was him that flirted with her. And according to them, she didn’t like it much. She said the guy gave her the creeps.”