Full Dark, No Stars

She was sitting in the kitchen, writing on the pages of a grimy Blue Horse tablet she had found in Strehlke’s upstairs bedroom. There were four rooms on the second floor, but the bedroom was the

only one not stuffed with junk, everything from iron bedsteads to an Evinrude boat-motor that looked as if it might have been dropped from the top of a five-story building. Because it would take weeks or months to go through those caches of the useless, the worthless, and the pointless, Tess turned al her attention on Strehlke’s bedroom and searched it careful y. The Blue Horse tablet was a bonus. She had found what she was looking for in an old travel-tote pushed to the very back of the closet shelf, where it had been camouflaged—not very successful y—with old issues of National Geographic. In it was a tangle of women’s underwear. Her own panties were on top. Tess put them in her pocket and, packrat-like, replaced them with the coil of yel ow boat-line. Nobody would be surprised to find rope in a rapist-kil er’s suitcase of trophy lingerie. Besides, she would not be needing it.

“Tonto,” said the Lone Ranger, “our work here is done.”

What she wrote, as Seinfeld gave way to Frasier and Frasier gave way to the local news (one Chicopee resident had won the lottery and another had suffered a broken back after fal ing from a scaffolding, so that balanced out), was a confession in the form of a letter. As she reached page five, the TV news gave way to an apparently endless commercial for Almighty Cleanse. Danny Vierra was saying, “Some Americans have a bowel movement only once every two or three days, and because this has gone on for years, they believe it’s normal! Any doctor worth his salt wil tel you it’s not!”

The letter was headed TO THE PROPER AUTHORITIES, and the first four pages consisted of a single paragraph. In her head it sounded like a scream. Her hand was tired, and the bal point pen

she’d found in a kitchen drawer (RED HAWK TRUCKING printed in fading gilt on the barrel) was showing signs of drying up, but she was, thank God, almost done. While Little Driver went on not watching

TV from where he sat in his La-Z-Boy, she at last started a new paragraph at the top of page five.

I will not make excuses for what I have done. Nor can I say that I did it while of unsound mind. I was furious and I made a mistake. It’s that simple. Under other circumstances—those less

terrible, I mean—I might say, “It was a natural mistake, the two of them look almost enough alike to be twins.” But these are not other circumstances.

I have thought of atonement as I sat here, writing these pages and listening to his television and to the wind—not because I hope for forgiveness, but because it seems wrong to do wrong

without at least trying to balance it out with something right. (Here Tess thought of how the lottery winner and the man with the broken back evened out, but the concept would be difficult to express when she was so tired, and she wasn’t sure it was germane, anyway.) I thought of going to Africa and working with AIDS victims. I thought about going down to New Orleans and volunteering at a

homeless shelter or a food bank. I thought about going to the Gulf to clean oil off birds. I thought of donating the million dollars or so I have put away for my retirement to some group that works toend violence against women. There must be such a society in Connecticut, perhaps even several of them.

But then I thought of Doreen Marquis, from the Knitting Society, and what she says once in every book…