Full Dark, No Stars

“I’l tel you how I think it was,” Doreen said in the moonlight. “I think Ramona knew that if your little brother wound up in an interrogation room with an even half-smart policeman, he might confess to something a lot worse than touching a girl on the schoolbus or peeking into cars on the local lovers’ lane or whatever ten-cent crime it was he’d been accused of. I think she talked you into taking the blame, and she talked her husband into dummying up. Or browbeat him into it, that’s more like it. And either because the police never asked the girl to make a positive identification or because she

wouldn’t press charges, they got away with it.”

Al said nothing.

Tess thought, I’m kneeling here talking in imaginary voices. I’ve lost my mind.

Yet part of her knew she was trying to keep her mind. The only way to do it was to understand, and she thought the story she was tel ing in Doreen’s voice was either true or close to true. It was based on guesswork and slopped-on deduction, but it made sense. It fit in with what Ramona had said in her last moments.

You stupid cunt, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And: You don’t understand. It’s a mistake.

It was a mistake, al right. Everything she’d done tonight had been a mistake.

No, not everything. She was in on it. She knew.

“Did you know?” Tess asked the man she had kil ed. She reached out to grab Strehlke’s arm, then drew away. It would be stil warm under his sleeve. Stil thinking it was alive. “Did you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Let me try,” Doreen said. And in her kindliest, you-can-tel -me-everything old lady voice, the one that always worked in the books, she asked: “How much did you know, Mr. Driver?”

“I sometimes suspected,” he said. “Mostly I didn’t think about it. I had a business to run.”

“Did you ever ask your mother?”

“I might have,” he said, and Tess thought his strangely cocked right eye evasive. But in that wild moonlight, who could tel about such things? Who could tel for sure?

“When girls disappeared? Is that when you asked?”

To this Big Driver made no reply, perhaps because Doreen had begun to sound like Fritzy. And like Tom the Tomtom, of course.

“But there was never any proof, was there?” This time it was Tess herself. She wasn’t sure he would answer her voice, but he did.

“No. No proof.”

“And you didn’t want proof, did you?”

No answer this time, so Tess got up and walked unsteadily to the bleach-spattered brown hat, which had blown across the driveway and onto the lawn. Just as she picked it up, the pole light went off

again. Inside, the dog stopped barking. This made her think of Sherlock Holmes, and standing there in the windy moonlight, Tess heard herself voicing the saddest chuckle to ever come from a human

throat. She took off her hat, stuffed it into her jacket pocket, and put his on in its place. It was too big for her, so she took it off again long enough to adjust the strap in back. She returned to the man she had kil ed, the one she judged perhaps not quite innocent… but surely too innocent to deserve the punishment the Courageous Woman had meted out.

She tapped the brim of the brown hat and asked, “Is this the one you wear when you go on the road?” Knowing it wasn’t.

Strehlke didn’t answer, but Doreen Marquis, doyenne of the Knitting Society, did. “Of course not. When you’re driving for Red Hawk, you wear a Red Hawk cap, don’t you, dear?”

“Yes,” Strehlke said.

“And you don’t wear your ring, either, do you?”

“No. Too gaudy for customers. Not businesslike. And what if someone at one of those skanky truck-stops—someone too drunk or stoned to know better—saw it and thought it was real? No one would

risk mugging me, I’m too big and strong for that—at least I was until tonight—but someone might shoot me. And I don’t deserve to be shot. Not for a fake ring, and not for the terrible things my brother might have done.”

“And you and your brother never drive for the company at the same time, do you, dear?”

“No. When he’s out on the road, I mind the office. When I’m out on the road, he… wel . I guess you know what he does when I’m out on the road.”

“You should have told!” Tess screamed down at him. “Even if you only suspected, you should have told!”

“He was scared,” Doreen said in her kindly voice. “Weren’t you, dear?”

“Yes,” Al said. “I was scared.”

“Of your brother?” Tess asked, either unbelieving or not wanting to believe. “Scared of your kid brother?”

“Not him,” Al Strehlke said. “Her.”

- 39 -

When Tess got back in her car and started the motor, Tom said: “There was no way you could know, Tess. And it al happened so fast.”

That was true, but it ignored the central looming fact: by going after her rapist like a vigilante in a movie, she had sent herself to hel .