Full Dark, No Stars

images from a particularly vivid nightmare.

You need to be grateful to Arlette, because I never would have come out here if not for her, he said.

Dead, I replied.

Sheriff Jones: She’s dead, all right.

And then, speaking as I had learned to speak at my mother’s knee: I killed her, didn’t I?

Sheriff Jones took my mother’s rhetorical device (and his own, don’t forget) as a real question. Years later—it was in the factory where I found work after I lost the farm—I heard a foreman berating a

clerk for sending an order to Des Moines instead of Davenport before the clerk had gotten the shipping form from the front office. But we always send the Wednesday orders to Des Moines, the soon-to-be-fired clerk protested. I simply assumed—

Assume makes an ass out of you and me, the foreman replied. An old saying, I suppose, but that was the first time I heard it. And is it any wonder that I thought of Sheriff Frank Jones when I did? My mother’s habit of turning statements into questions saved me from the electric chair. I was never tried by a jury for the murder of my wife.

Until now, that is.

They’re here with me, a lot more than twelve, lined up along the baseboard al the way around the room, watching me with their oily eyes. If a maid came in with fresh sheets and saw those furry jurors, she would run, shrieking, but no maid wil come; I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door two days ago, and it’s been there ever since. I haven’t been out. I could order food sent up from the

restaurant down the street, I suppose, but I suspect food would set them off. I’m not hungry, anyway, so it’s no great sacrifice. They have been patient so far, my jurors, but I suspect they won’t be for much longer. Like any jury, they’re anxious for the testimony to be done so they can render a verdict, receive their token fee (in this case to be paid in flesh), and go home to their families. So I must finish. It won’t take long. The hard work is done.

What Sheriff Jones said when he sat down beside my hospital bed was, “You saw it in my eyes, I guess. Isn’t that right?”

I was stil a very sick man, but enough recovered to be cautious. “Saw what, Sheriff ?”

“What I’d come to tel you. You don’t remember, do you? Wel , I’m not surprised. You were one sick American, Wilf. I was pretty sure you were going to die, and I thought you might do it before I got you back to town. I guess God’s not done with you yet, is he?”

Something wasn’t done with me, but I doubted if it was God.

“Was it Henry? Did you come out to tel me something about Henry?”

“No,” he said, “it was Arlette I came about. It’s bad news, the worst, but you can’t blame yourself. It’s not like you beat her out of the house with a stick.” He leaned forward. “You might have got the idea that I don’t like you, Wilf, but that’s not true. There’s some in these parts who don’t—and we know who they are, don’t we?—but don’t put me in with them just because I have to take their interests into account. You’ve irritated me a time or two, and I believe that you’d stil be friends with Harl Cotterie if you’d kept your boy on a tighter rein, but I’ve always respected you.”

I doubted it, but kept my lip buttoned.

“As for what happened to Arlette, I’l say it again, because it bears repeating: you can’t blame yourself.”

I couldn’t? I thought that was an odd conclusion to draw even for a lawman who would never be confused with Sherlock Holmes.

“Henry’s in trouble, if some of the reports I’m getting are true,” he said heavily, “and he’s dragged Shan Cotterie into the hot water with him. They’l likely boil in it. That’s enough for you to handle without claiming responsibility for your wife’s death, as wel . You don’t have to—”

“Just tel me,” I said.

Two days previous to his visit—perhaps the day the rat bit me, perhaps not, but around that time—a farmer headed into Lyme Biska with the last of his produce had spied a trio of coydogs fighting

over something about twenty yards north of the road. He might have gone on if he hadn’t also spied a scuffed ladies’ patent leather shoe and a pair of pink step-ins lying in the ditch. He stopped, fired his rifle to scare off the coys, and advanced into the field to inspect their prize. What he found was a woman’s skeleton with the rags of a dress and a few bits of flesh stil hanging from it. What remained of her hair was a listless brown, the color to which Arlette’s rich auburn might have gone after months out in the elements.

“Two of the back teeth were gone,” Jones said. “Was Arlette missing a couple of back teeth?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Lost them from a gum infection.”

“When I came out that day just after she ran off, your boy said she took her good jewelry.”

“Yes.” The jewelry that was now in the wel .