When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel

by Paula McLain

  On the way back, I head straight over the ridgeline, mostly for the effort of doing it. The terrain grows so steep in places I have to drop and scramble along on my hands and knees, through gray lichen and bracken and humus, my breath coming fast and sharp, my face filmed with pine dust and phosphorescent pollen.

  At the top of the ridge, I stop for water, feeling winded and exhilarated. A hemlock has fallen up here and looks like a slain giant, its trunk like wet black sponge. Where the root ball has pulled up violently, I see three long scrapes in the earth and a length of animal scat that might be from a mountain lion. When I bend for a closer look, something flickers in my periphery, not an animal, but a solid form. Shelter.

  Though the sun has begun to drop and a chill has settled between my shoulder blades, I plunge down the hill anyway, too curious not to take a closer look. I have to lean back on my heels to keep my balance on the decline. The soil is thin and full of deadfall. Dry bracken stings my hands and slaps at my jeans, but finally I reach the small compound. Someone’s set up a hunting site like you’d see in a wilderness guide, propping a six-foot lean-to pole against a stripped Douglas fir, and then threading it with wire loop snares at intervals. It must be working. Around the base of the fir, pine-cone scales and other ground cover show trampling, the effort spent resetting the snares again and again. This is an effective kill site, elegant even. Whoever built it knows exactly what they’re doing and is eating very, very well.

  The shelter shows the same level of sophistication, and sets off subtle alarm bells for me. It doesn’t look like a hunter’s cabin, but a cone-shaped structure that reminds me of historical photos I’ve seen of indigenous peoples like the Pomo. They settled in small bands throughout Northern California hundreds of years before the Europeans, and their homes looked much like this, rounded at the base with poles supporting the angled walls, tied together with reeds and overlaid with redwood bark and timber.

  Who would go through this kind of effort to build a convincing replica of a Pomo shelter, though? And why so far from town, miles from anything like a road? Is this the work of a screwball survivalist who thinks the world is ending soon? Someone who’s off the grid because they have something to hide, maybe? Or is this my cop brain reaching for dark possibilities when really it’s probably just an outdoors type like Hap or like me, who needs the woods and the silence to feel whole sometimes?

  “Hello?” I call out once, leaning in for a response, but only the quiet presses back.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t drive into Mendocino again until the first day of October, when I’ve reached the end of my supplies. The light has begun to change with the season, the way it always does, sharpening the angles and shadows and making you grateful for every sunny day. This one is chilly but clear, with a severe sort of freshness that feels good on my face. After I shop, I stash my groceries in my Bronco and decide to walk for a bit. In Rotary Park, a man and woman are camped out at the lone picnic table near a small, tattered pup tent. They have a medium-sized dog with them, shorthaired with a dark muzzle and reddish fur. He spots me and his head snaps up, as if we’re friends. Then he trots over, falling into step behind me.

  It’s funny at first, how quickly he matches my pace. I stop, lifting my hand like a traffic guard—“Stay”—but he ignores me. I take a step and he takes a step. I laugh and he sits down. We’re in a sitcom, suddenly, though no one seems to be watching, not even the hippie couple in the park.

  I walk back to them. “Hey, would you mind holding on to your dog?”

  “Not ours,” the woman says. She might be thirty or fifty, with a sun-lined face and spiky blond hair resembling duckling fuzz. A Seahawks sweatshirt hangs halfway to her knees over a long print skirt. “Never seen it before.”

  The guy with her looks like he’s been on the streets since the Summer of Love. A single graying braid hangs over one shoulder, loosely plaited but clean. One silver tooth winks as he says, “Smart dog, though.”

  “How can you tell? I’ve never kept dogs.”

  “It’s all in the eyes,” he explains. “She’s listening, see.”

  “She?”

  He flashes another silver-tipped smile. “You’re not a dog person.”

  I find myself laughing suddenly, charmed by him. “Can you just hold on to her so I can get out of here?”

  “No problem.” He points to the ground once, and the dog sits, cued for his next command. When he flattens his palm, she drops to her belly. Over the back of his left hand I notice half a dozen x’s inside a circle.

  “What does your tattoo mean?” I ask, pointing.

  “Lessons.” His pupils are so black they seem to bounce. “Things I shouldn’t ever forget.”

  The woman beside him says, “Don’t believe anything he tells you. Once he tried to say they stand for the men he killed in battle. Go ahead, ask him which one.”

  “Which battle?” I ask, playing along.

  “Waterloo.”

  (ten)

  Eden was the first person I ever met who believed in past lives. Before then, I’d had a wild sampling of religion through various placements, from Mormonism to Pentecostalism to born-again Presbyterianism, without feeling persuaded by any of them. But Eden’s universe was bigger and more complex than any I’d ever heard of, and far more intuitive. To her, the idea that we reincarnated was an obvious extension of the cycle of life. All life. Everything spun on a constantly moving wheel of birth, growth, and decay, the ocean around us and the Milky Way above, and all the galaxies beyond ours, numberless as the ferns unfurling along the side of the road. God wasn’t up there, in some celestial kingdom, but here in the world, in dirt clods and dew, in the patience of the spider that lived behind the sugar jar, in the exquisite strands of her web. Death wasn’t the end any more than a single shuddering wave on Portuguese Beach could stop moving. She’d made her peace with it, but I was still struggling.

  * * *

  —

  After Jenny’s body was found, an investigation stretched out for months. Ellis Flood and his team interviewed half the town, or so it seemed, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. Her father and Caleb, all of Jenny’s friends, and her coworkers at the vineyard in Boonville. Jack Ford was a natural early suspect. He was an odd man and always had been, and everyone knew he drank too much. Besides his wife, who had left him suddenly when Caleb and Jenny were six, leaving no sign of her whereabouts, he wasn’t close to many people, including his children. More than once I’d seen Caleb flinch when Jack called his name—but that wasn’t evidence. Ellis Flood found nothing at all to incriminate him, and the search went on.

  Jenny had kept a journal, it turned out, which was discovered when the authorities searched her room. The pages were primarily filled with cryptic poems and song lyrics, but there were a number of entries in the months before her death about wanting to leave home the way her mother had, by vanishing without a word. Things were intolerable. She couldn’t stay. Couldn’t take it anymore. That was the general tone of what she’d written, but there was nothing specific about pressures or fears, or why she felt so desperate now, on the verge of leaving home anyway, for college. Whether it made sense or not, the general theory was that Jenny had meant to run the night she vanished, but instead of a helpful ride, she’d crossed paths with her killer. As for who that person might be, there were no real leads. He might have been a drifter, passing through, or he might still have been here among us, hidden in plain sight.

  Neighbors stopped lingering to talk on the street. Hap and Eden had never even locked their doors at night, but did now like everyone else. Hap’s service weapon, the one he usually kept locked in his truck, regularly sat at the ready on his bedside while we slept. Did I feel safer for it? A little, maybe, but the surface of the world had shifted overnight, changing form—and not just for me. The sheriff’s office began enforcing a nine o’cloc
k curfew for anyone under eighteen. No one wanted to be out after dark in the village, anyway. Those days seemed gone for good, like the bonfires down at the beach, and flashlight tag on the headlands. Just when I’d started to believe I could count on them.

  * * *

  —

  At the far end of Kelly Street, the Ford house is a weathered brown-shingled saltbox with a detached artist’s studio, both buildings canted toward the headlands and the sea. Caleb once told me that it was built by one of the original founders of the village, and that one or another of his descendants has lived there since 1859, which isn’t hard to believe, looking at the place. While he was alive, Jack Ford never made any effort to keep things looking nice, and now, so many years later, the effects of his neglect are still visible everywhere, in the peeling paint on the eaves and shingles, the battered-looking garage door, and the yard tangled with tall weeds and thistle. Almost as if he’s still here, making sure nothing ever grows or changes or flies free of him.

  Jack was always known as an eccentric in the village. A painter who worked on huge canvases in oil, he rarely left his studio. He didn’t have many friends and seemed not to know how to talk to people civilly. Whenever I would show up looking for Caleb and find only Jack there, I got a strange feeling about him that was more than a little familiar. It wasn’t anything he said, really, or anything he did. Just a heat he gave off that sent me backward, toward closed-off moments I’d left behind, people I never talked about.

  Now as I walk slowly up Kelly Street toward the house, I don’t know why I’ve come, exactly, or what I hope to feel. Maybe it’s what Will said about crazy times and keeping old friends close. Or maybe I’ve never fully made peace with Jenny’s death and need to stand at her door, one more time, even if she can’t answer.

  I’ve barely reached the edge of the gate, still whirling through things I might say to explain myself, when the studio door opens and a man steps out. He’s tall and heavily built, wearing painter’s coveralls splotched over with white. Underneath, his gray T-shirt exposes a tan neck, broad chest and shoulders, big hands. Nothing about him looks like the thin, brainy boy I once knew.

  “Caleb?” I call out.

  His head jerks up, eyes unfocused for a moment.

  “It’s Anna. Anna Hart.”

  He comes to the fence looking puzzled and then he recognizes me. “Oh my God. Anna. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Just visiting.” I flush, feeling disoriented. The years between us seem to contract and expand. “I ran into Will Flood and he said you were back in town. You doing okay?”

  “I am, yeah.” He bobs his head. “Wow. Anna Hart.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  He shrugs, one ear dipping toward his shoulder. His hair slides boyishly over his forehead. “It has.”

  “Listen, you have time to grab a drink or something?” I ask without knowing I’m going to say it.

  “Sure,” he says hesitantly. “Let me wrap up here and meet you somewhere in a bit?”

  “I could just grab a six-pack and wait for you on the bluff?”

  “Sure,” he says again. “Why not?”

  * * *

  —

  Fifteen minutes later, we’re sitting on the hard-packed ledge above Portuguese Beach, sipping cans of Coors. It’s midafternoon and the light has slipped sideways. Fifty feet below us at the water’s edge, sandpipers race back and forth on cartoon feet as the tide crashes forward and back. For some reason, I find it all reassuring, and somehow tender. When we were young, we sat here hundreds of times, sometimes with stolen beer. I miss those years. Those kids.

  “I think you were still in high school when I left,” Caleb says after a while. “I drifted for a few years, and then enlisted in the navy. I was happy to be out of here, even when I went to the Persian Gulf.”

  “Iran? That must have been tough.”

  “Some of it, sure. I was there in ’79 during the Islamic Revolution. That was pretty intense, but the ocean was amazing. Super warm, not like this bitch.” He smiles. “I learned to free dive there. Oysters the size of fucking softballs. And the reefs were fucking incredible.” He takes a long slug from the Coors in his hand. “How about you?”

  “I did half a year at San Francisco State, then dropped out and drifted for a bit. For a while I did Outward Bound trips in Yosemite.”

  “That sounds cool.”

  “It was fun, yeah, but started to feel like summer camp over time.”

  “You didn’t want to be a ranger?”

  “I thought about it, but police work felt more important. Once I entered the academy I gave it everything I had. I was interested in missing persons from the beginning. That seemed like the clearest way I could do some good. Never left the Bay Area.”

  “Missing persons, huh?” He sounds surprised. “So are you here to help find that high-school girl?”

  “No.” Not yet, my mind fills in, but I keep it to myself, uneasy about treading so close to old feelings. About conjuring up Jenny more than we already have. “I’m taking a break right now.”

  “Oh, good, then.” He sounds like he means it. “Good for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  The sun is sinking fast now, staining the cloud line. Gulls draft over the chop below us, buoyed and free.

  “This place,” Caleb says quietly, as if he’s read my mind.

  “I know.”

  (eleven)

  One particularly bad year at Searchlight, when I’d dealt with three dead kids in a handful of months, Frank Leary sent me to a therapist. “It’s not a punishment,” he said. “Just protocol. You’ve been through a lot, Anna.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

  The therapist’s name was Corolla, like the car. Her office was in the Embarcadero with a view of the Bay Bridge. Only a small, metallic sliver of the bridge was recognizable from her window, a toothpick-sized joke if you were going to charge for it. She had an Eames chair and red-framed Sally Jessy Raphael glasses, and a cashmere poncho that covered her knees, the triangle tip pointing at the conservative Persian carpet when she crossed her legs.

  How was this going to work? I wondered. How could I possibly tell this woman in a poncho anything of consequence? And why would I want to? I was good at my job and had a strong track record. We hadn’t saved these three, but that happened. We would save the next one. We would keep fighting.

  “You have any trouble sleeping?” Corolla threw out. “Nightmares?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “How about substance abuse? Ever worry you might be drinking too much?”

  How much is too much? I wondered, but shook off the worry to shrug at her pointedly. “Listen, I don’t really buy the whole talk-therapy thing. No offense. I’m here because I have to be.”

  “I’ve worked with a lot of clients who have trauma to process,” she went on, unfazed. “My early training was with combat soldiers and shell shock. A lot of retired soldiers become cops. They think the stuff they saw and did back then is long buried, all in the past. They drown it. Numb it. Have bad marriages. Become alcoholics. But then something happens to trigger the trauma. And then boom, they snap.”

  “Why are you telling me this? I’ve never been in the military.”

  “There are other kinds of battlefields, Anna.” She brought her fingertips together in front of her face, letting her point sink in. “On your intake form, you noted you grew up in foster care. You had siblings, too. What happened to them?”

  “That has nothing to do with my job.”

  “Maybe not. It depends on how much work you’ve done to deal with what you’ve gone through. What you’ve already been carrying. What can you tell me about your parents? Do you remember them? Why couldn’t they care for you?”

  Her questions felt
too rapid-fire, and far too loaded. I turned my body in the overly soft chair, wishing our hour were finished, but we’d barely begun. “I don’t want to talk about this. And anyway, how will spilling my guts to you help me at work? I’ll only feel worse.”

  “It might be a relief to talk, actually. Have you considered that?”

  “No.”

  There was a long pause as she looked at me. “Humans are resilient, Anna. I have no doubt that you’re incredibly adept at your job. You’re holding it together really well. But maybe a little too well.”

  “What does that mean?” I’d begun to breathe heavily. My shoulders were tight and clenched.

  “Just that sucking it up isn’t a long-term solution. You might be thinking you can just go on this way indefinitely. But the things you’ve seen don’t really go away. They build up inside you and start to take a toll. And then there’s the older trauma you haven’t really come to terms with. No one’s bulletproof. Asking for help doesn’t mean you’re weak.”

  Weak? Where had that come from? “I’m fine. Ask anyone I work with.”

  Her eyes flicked over my face. “If you don’t want to talk, we could explore other ways to help you process. Some of my clients do yoga or tai chi, or journaling. I’m just trying to offer you tools.” She put down her notebook and then took off her glasses, balancing them between her hands. “When in your life were you the most at peace, the most yourself?”