When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel

by Paula McLain

  “What are you saying?”

  I plunge ahead and tell him about the window in Cameron’s room, and how it’s possible she was groomed and manipulated by this predator, whoever he was. That he may have preyed on her insecurity and need. “The stickiest sorts of violence are often incredibly intimate, Will. They require trust. They take time.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “If Cameron left the property voluntarily, she deliberately avoided the security camera. Why? Her parents were obviously going to figure out she was gone soon enough.”

  “You’re assuming she meant to stay gone. What if she was just planning to sneak out for a few hours, but then the situation flipped? It’s easy enough to avoid the cameras if she went through the woods to the coast road. All she had to do was disable the alarm. The remote was right there in her nightstand. She didn’t even have to work at it.”

  “Are you saying this was a tryst? Like a date?”

  “Maybe not. She could have only been seeking attention.”

  “From someone who could hurt her? Don’t you think she’d know better than that?”

  “No,” I say. “She wouldn’t.” I can’t expect him to be as tuned in to Cameron’s vulnerabilities as I am. He’s never been a throwaway kid. Never experienced the world in a woman’s body, or a girl’s. Never had a reason to confuse love with suffering. I’ve sensed that confusion almost electrically since the first moment I saw Cameron’s missing poster, the woundedness in her eyes. “Maybe she never had healthy radar to begin with.”

  Will nods in a halfhearted way, and then falls silent. After a while he says, “What did you think of Emily?”

  “I don’t know. I want her to be stronger, I guess.”

  “She might be doing the best she can.”

  His words knock and spark, like flint on stone. Of course he’s right. People almost always do the best they can. Sometimes it’s enough, but more often it isn’t.

  “If Emily had had the guts to leave Troy the first time he cheated on her, that might have changed everything,” I say.

  “Could be. We’ll never know now.”

  “What do you make of her?” I realize I have no idea what he’s going to say.

  He shrugs. “When the family moved here four years ago, I thought it would be so cool to have a movie star walking the streets, but they’ve really kept to themselves. I can’t think of a single conversation I’ve had with either Emily or Troy, even in passing. And Cameron’s just a face to me. It shouldn’t be that way.”

  “It shouldn’t.” I have to agree.

  “Listen.” Will clears his throat. “Those things you said to the Curtises about being adopted, the identity stuff and the acting out, was any of that true for you?” He pauses, clearly uncomfortable. “I remember you as a pretty happy kid, but maybe I wasn’t paying attention.”

  For a long moment I don’t know how to answer him. Frankly, I’m startled he’d have the nerve to ask.

  “You can tell me it’s none of my business,” he rushes to add, reading my face.

  I fix my gaze on the horizon. “It’s not,” I say gently but firmly.

  “Sorry.” He clears his throat again.

  We round the bluff, and the village flickers into view, sharp white rooftops, white fences, white spires. The storm clouds have begun to move off. In one place along the headlands, a blade of light breaks over dry grass and turns it deep gold. All my life this has been my favorite color. When I first came here, guarded and cynical, always on the alert for trouble, I felt sure that nothing would ever get better. But it had.

  “It wasn’t an act,” I finally say.

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  The gold grass ripples, bends. “Everyone deserves to belong somewhere.”

  (twenty)

  My mother died on Christmas, though it was a long time before I was able to put together the details. Everyone wanted to shield me, as if that wasn’t making it all harder. The silence and the guessing, trying to read looks and faces, and eyes that never met mine. I eventually learned that she’d gone out on Christmas Eve after the kids and I were in bed, borrowing fifty dollars from a friend to get us presents. Instead she’d bought heroin and overdosed. They found her in her car in a parking lot of Long John Silver’s on Christmas night and had come looking for us then, but we must have been asleep already. They might not have found us at all, I kept thinking for years after, in the magical way children think, if I hadn’t burned the eggs.

  As it was, the cops called social services to take over. I watched an older woman in a tired blue pantsuit sift through drawers trying to get the kids’ things together. She wouldn’t let me help, just kept shoving their clothes into pillowcases in a way that made me feel angry and embarrassed. I barely got to say goodbye before she put the kids in a car and took them back to live with their mom, who I already knew could barely take care of herself.

  The last I saw of Amy, she had almost all her hair in her mouth, and her face was covered with snot. They’d put her light blue socks on Jason as if it didn’t even matter what he was wearing. The way they both looked at me, I’ll never forget, as if they were silently asking how I’d let this all happen. I was asking the same of myself.

  * * *

  —

  Because Red was still in jail and because neither he nor Robin had any family around, no one knew what to do with me. I was taken to a safe house to wait for my first foster-care placement. The housemother was a young woman who didn’t look much older than my mom had been—twenty-seven. She made her own clothes, she told me as she gave me a plate of graham crackers and a wedge of bright orange cheese that came in a huge block, the wax stamped in blue by the welfare department. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said as I ate. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I didn’t. Her skirt was brown with yellow flowers, like she was some sort of frontierswoman, a character in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. There was no possible way she could understand my life, but pressure had been building inside my head. Words that I had to let out somehow. Not about my mother’s death, which I had barely begun to process, or about how worried I was for my brother and sister, who were still so little and needed someone to pay attention to them and make sure they ate, but about a single moment in time. One flick of the dial of the range while a worry festered in my mind about Phyllis, who’d been harmless after all.

  “I’m just so mad at myself,” I said to the woman in the ruffled blouse, and started to cry. Until that moment, I had held the tears in tight.

  “What?” she asked. “Why?”

  “I was such an idiot,” I said with the same inflection my mom had always used for my dad. “I shouldn’t have cooked. That was so stupid.”

  The woman—I think her name was Susan—looked at me sadly. “You’re just a little girl, Anna. You couldn’t have taken care of your brother and sister. If you’re going to be mad at someone, be mad at your mom. She left you alone. That wasn’t right.”

  It was obvious that she meant well, but she didn’t know the first thing about our family. My mom wasn’t a very strong person. If she slept too much or cried too much or did drugs it was because our dad hadn’t left her with much money and she couldn’t handle it. “I was doing fine,” I told her. “They’re really good kids.”

  She gave me another forlorn look and shook her head. “We’re going to find a nice home for you.”

  Suddenly the light in the kitchen shone right into my eyes. The graham cracker crumbs in my mouth had become sweet glue. She hadn’t been listening at all. “I had a good home.”

  Silence fell. I think she was afraid to look at me. “I’m so sorry.”

  (twenty-one)

  Will’s team of twelve has been working nonstop since September 22, just after Cameron vanished, canvassing and interviewing, going door-to-door in town and the surrounding area with her poster. Every day
they’ve dug through databases, making phone calls to parole officers, hoping to find a name and a motive, a fit for this. I’m sure they’re all good men and women, but I don’t want to know them, or get any more tangled up in the nuts and bolts of this case than I have to. Will agrees. He tells me I can report to him alone and have as much independence as I want as long as I keep him updated.

  “I’d like to interview Steve Gonzales,” I tell him. “I also want to learn more about Cameron’s birth family.”

  “Good. I’ll track down Troy Curtis’s girlfriend and get us more on Drew Hague. But first we talk to Gray Benson together?”

  “I was thinking that, too.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s a little after three o’clock when we head over, Monday, October 4. Gray lives two blocks away from Mendocino High on Cahto Street, a narrow residential stretch that borders Hillcrest Cemetery. There’s no real room to park, but Will manages, steering his cruiser into the thick wall of vines and eucalyptus on the left side of the street, killing the engine while the last of the rain beads on the windshield, filmy on the inside with the humidity of our breath.

  I know every stitch of Mendocino but haven’t spent much time on Cahto. Only four houses run along it, counting Gray’s, a simple shingled bungalow behind a plain low fence lined with trash cans. We get out and begin to walk up the street’s slight incline, around muddy potholes and asphalt patches, over the word SCHOOL painted onto the street in what’s now a cracked, rain-slick yellow. The air smells heavy and sweet, like wet bark.

  I’m trying to imagine Cameron here, to put myself in her shoes. The night she disappeared she studied first, after school, with Gray. She walked past these houses on her way home to dinner, thinking what? Did she already know she’d be meeting her abductor later that same night? Or did they somehow cross paths between Gray’s house and home? Maybe he suggested a meeting then, promising Cameron something of value to her. But what?

  “Did you canvass these houses to see if anyone remembers a suspicious vehicle?” I ask Will.

  He nods. “Nothing.”

  “If Cameron was here a lot, you should look more closely at the neighbors. What about Mr. Benson?”

  “He’s out of the picture as I understand it. Moved to New Orleans when Gray was young.”

  “That must be another reason Gray and Cameron connect. Losing a parent changes you, no matter how it happens.”

  * * *

  —

  The front gate of the Bensons’ house is open and tipped on its hinge from wear, with clematis vines clinging along the anchor post. In the side yard, I take in the messy vegetable garden sprouting from long planter boxes, neglected tomato plants bowing over wire stanchions, and think of how simple and real all this might have looked to a girl like Cameron, stranded on the bluff in a glass box while her famous mother pruned bonsai trees and pretended not to know what she knew about her husband’s indiscretions.

  Di Anne Benson answers Will’s knock. She’s plump and pretty, in her midforties, with crimped auburn hair. Behind her, the kitchen smells like jarred spaghetti sauce. “Sheriff Flood.” She holds out her dish towel. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Sorry to bother you again. This is Detective Hart. Is Gray home? I promise we’ll be brief.”

  She nods, leading us through the entryway and up a narrow flight of carpeted steps, a tan life-stained Berber. Lopsided botanical prints hang at intervals, the frames lightly painted with dust. Walking behind her, I notice the tag has flipped out of her loose-fitting navy sweater, and I resist the urge to tuck it back in.

  “Gray?” Di Anne’s voice stretches tentatively through the door before she opens it, moving to one side. Her movements have the feel of concern, I think. As if she knows her son has become fragile and wary. Vulnerable.

  Gray sits half swallowed in a brown velvet beanbag on the floor, his long legs up like a shield. He has a sketchbook in his hands, which he closes, looking up, his red hair combed into a pompadour, like a 1950s heartthrob, or like Duran Duran’s John Taylor in the poster taped to the inside of Gray’s bedroom door, from their first tour—moody eyes, popped collar, and all. Gray’s clothes are simple and everyday, though, a royal-blue hooded sweatshirt, soft khaki pants, and rubber-soled wool bedroom slippers. To me, he looks like someone caught between who he wants to be, and who he has to be.

  “I don’t have anything new to tell you.” He fiddles with the closed sketchbook, not quite meeting Will’s gaze or mine.

  “That’s okay,” Will says, and then turns to Mrs. Benson. “We’ll only be ten minutes.”

  “I’m Anna Hart,” I say to Gray. “I’m one of the detectives trying to find Cameron.”

  “I’ve said everything I could remember.”

  “I know you have. I also know how hard it must be wondering every day what happened to her. I’ll bet you’re not sleeping. I’ll bet you don’t even know what to do with yourself.”

  He blinks. “I’m okay.”

  Lowering myself to the floor so we can be at eye level, I say, “We’ve just been to Cameron’s house. Her parents have been going through a rough patch. Has Cameron talked much about that with you?”

  “A little.”

  Will and I exchange a quick look. It’s time to try another strategy.

  “I’m just going to step out to make a call,” he says. “Be back in a few minutes.”

  When he’s gone, Gray looks at me warily.

  “You like Duran Duran,” I say. “ ‘Ordinary World’ is a great song.”

  I’ve surprised him. Maybe that’s why he answers. “It’s the best song on the record.”

  “Yeah, sad though. It’s about David Miles, right?”

  His pupils flare. “Simon Le Bon has never said that.”

  “He hasn’t. That’s why it’s a good song. He’s not giving everything away, but if you pay attention, you start to hear what he’s not saying.”

  From Gray’s face, I can tell he’s following me. In that space, I decide to plunge ahead. “With the things that matter most, we guard them carefully. Sometimes we tell no one, and sometimes just one person, the one who knows us best.”

  “I guess so.” Gray drops the sketchbook to the floor, and without it, his hands look empty and pale.

  “Cameron’s parents say she’s been struggling lately. Is that how you would put it?”

  There’s a long beat as he wrestles with himself. Then: “There’s been a lot of stress at home.”

  “Seems like it. Too much to deal with maybe for someone as sensitive as Cameron.”

  His gaze is still cautious, but he follows my lead. “It’s always been sort of tough on her that her mom’s this world-famous actress. And her dad’s away a lot.”

  “Does his traveling keep them from being close? Emotionally, I mean.”

  “It’s more than that.” His pupils seem to twitch, his whole body subtly vibrating with the conflict inside of him. “He’s been having an affair with someone he works with. Cameron’s been mad at him, and worried about her mom.”

  I nod to encourage him, pretending he hasn’t surprised me. “Do you think this is the first time he’s cheated? Or maybe just the first time she’s known about it?”

  “Cameron says he’s always been this way. But now it’s worse. His girlfriend is pregnant and she’s going to have the baby. Did her parents tell you that? Maybe I shouldn’t even talk about it. I don’t know.”

  I try not to overreact. A baby? How could that have not thrown Cameron over the edge? “You can say anything,” I tell him. “There’s no way to get in trouble here. Cameron is your best friend. It’s natural that you keep her secrets and she keeps yours. That’s what best friends do.”

  “The sheriff has come to talk to me a few times. I’ve been really confused.”

  “Of course you have,” I sa
y. “You want to protect Cameron. But, Gray, there might be things you know that can help us find her. Do you think you can be a little more open with us?”

  I feel him tensing on the beanbag, wondering if he can trust me, if it’s really okay to say what he’s been holding on to. “Cameron had a lot of hard stuff coming up. Not just about her parents.”

  “Personal stuff,” I echo.

  “Yeah.”

  The door opens and Will is there. I feel myself deflate almost audibly. In an interview, it’s rarely the first or second or third thing the subject says that’s important. Real disclosure takes time. Takes patience in the unpeeling. And Gray has been close to telling the truth.

  “Hey,” Will says, taking a seat on the bed. “What did I miss?”

  I glance at Gray and he nods almost imperceptibly. “We’re just talking about Cameron’s parents. Her dad’s affair. Seems like the situation is more complicated than we thought.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I look to Gray again for some sign of assent before saying, “Troy’s girlfriend is pregnant.”

  “Oh wow. That’s a lot.”

  Gray says, “Please don’t tell her parents I said anything.”

  “You have perfect anonymity with us,” Will assures him.

  “This is what I mean, Gray. This is how you can help Cameron.”

  Gray is quiet for a long time, his hands flexing in his lap. Finally he says, “Cameron was starting to remember things from before.” The last word catches in his throat. “From when she was young.”

  “What things?” I ask gently.

  “You really can’t tell her parents.” Gray closes his eyes and then opens them again, seeming to ready himself for the cost of the truth. I can feel his fear and worry. We’re asking him to take Cameron’s dark secrets out of the box he’s kept them in for her. As her closest friend, he is that box. “You have to promise me.”