When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel

by Paula McLain

  (fifty)

  In a remote section of Montgomery Woods, an hour southwest of us, Shannan’s Firebird lies hidden in a stand of trees beyond a little-used dirt service road. It looks as if gasoline was poured over the hood and interior, or some other chemical that intensified the blaze enough to incinerate the seats and melt the paint, the tires, the mats and steering wheel. The windows exploded at some point, sending glass out in a mortar fan, over the ring of burned vegetation and beyond.

  When we arrive, Denny Rasmussen and his men are on site, along with a medical examiner and a team of forensics people who have already begun to process the car, which is scorched, collapsed. I’m disappointed to see the extent of the damage. We need fingerprints or hair or fibers, anything that can provide essential information, but the car is little more than a blistered husk. It’s hard to imagine any evidence surviving the incineration.

  “You okay?” Will asks.

  I can’t tell from his tone if he means okay with the look of the scene, or something more personal, but either way I don’t have time to answer him. The crime scene specialists have moved around to the trunk, which seems to have been more protected than the rest of the car. We join them as they manage to pry it open. And then silence falls. The smell hits us like a wall, a thick and heavy rot. Her body is curled fetally and her eyes are open, sunk back into her skull like jelly. Her mouth gapes, a ring of teeth jutting from a seeping hole.

  I steel myself, pulling down a layer of emotional armor so I can focus on the work at hand. But it isn’t easy. Her arms have been wrenched behind her body, her hands bound with skinny electrical wire, probably an extension cord. The trunk has shielded the body from the blaze, but it’s also held in moisture and heat. Her fluids have puddled, as if she’s suspended in a lake of herself, while maggots writhe like foam, a moving tide.

  “Mother of Christ,” Denny mutters. He’s muscular and fair-haired with the legs of a cyclist, thick calves stretching against the fabric of his khakis. Physical stamina won’t help him here, however. His face has gone white. Mine has, too, probably. No matter how many times I’ve seen the remains of a murder victim, it never feels like less than a rape of the psyche. The human mind wasn’t built to make sense of this.

  And yet we have to. Have to see everything with investigative eyes. Have to admit that as awful as it is to find a body like this, at least she’s no longer missing. That’s a win. A shitty win but a win nonetheless.

  The medical examiner, Robert Lisicky, scans the victim silently for several minutes before pushing at the nose of his wire-rimmed glasses with a gloved hand. “Caucasian from the hair. Here a few months, I’m guessing, based on the state of the body. But let’s seal this up. We’ve got to get the car to an enclosed space so you don’t lose evidence. Can you bring in a flatbed?”

  “Sure thing,” Denny says, and peels away to make the call. One of his deputies steps back as if to follow him, and then rushes toward the woods, where he heaves and then vomits.

  I glance at Will, wondering how he’s managing. He’s a professional, but even so, this will be new for him. And men always seem to have a more difficult time compartmentalizing at these times than women, I’ve found. Women are stronger because they have to be.

  I watch him wobble a little next to me and then right himself again as Lisicky takes two baby food jars out of his pocket and carefully collects specimens from the blossom of bugs on the body. An entomologist will be able to help us determine how long she’s been here, hopefully. The autopsy report will too. For now, the trunk is dusted for fingerprints and then sealed with crime scene tape, and the car is photographed from every angle.

  One strange thing is that the fire didn’t spread beyond a large scorched ring surrounding the car. It doesn’t make sense. Summer is the dry season up here. The flames should have taken acres if not more, half the damned park, but they didn’t.

  Will has noticed too. He points to the bald, blackened vegetation under the wreckage and then above to the tree line. “If this guy’s an amateur he got lucky.”

  “Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing,” Denny says, chiming in. “He could be a ranger, couldn’t he?”

  “Shannan didn’t have any reason to be in these woods,” I add. “She wasn’t camping, she was carjacked and then lured here. Her killer’s familiar with these roads. He knew the car wouldn’t be found right away.”

  “We’ll start running a list of park personnel through the database to see if there’s anyone who looks right for this,” Denny says. “Usually the Forest Service does a thorough background check before hiring, but I don’t know. Somehow he was able to stop the blaze from spreading after setting it. That’s not easy unless the weather turned.”

  “I don’t remember rain up here in early June,” Will says. “But we’ll confirm with the National Climatic Data Center right away.”

  “Did he kill her here or just need a place to deal with the car and body?” I ask, though I know I can’t get an answer. We won’t know anything until the autopsy and crime scene reports come back—and maybe not even then.

  “Let’s move to sweep this whole area,” Denny says. “There are rangers’ cabins in these woods, and huts for hikers. If he drove Shannan here in her car, how’d he get out unless he had a vehicle here waiting? Or lives somewhere on reserve property?”

  “He could have had an accomplice,” Will throws out. “That’s one of the theories with the Klaas girl. That there was a driver too, someone who stayed in the car while the other went in to take Polly.”

  “It’s possible,” I have to admit while, inside, a louder voice tells me, No. That this is one guy with strength enough to lift a body into the trunk, and skill enough to control a serious fire in woods he knows well. Maybe he is a ranger, as Denny suggested. Either way, if he’s the same guy who took Cameron in late September, he waited four months before hunting again. Could Cameron be in these woods, too, I can’t help wondering, hidden somewhere nearby? Is her harrowing ordeal still unfolding, or are we already too late?

  I look at the car again, a last stand, unwitnessed. Think of the photos in Karen’s wallet, her story about the fishtail braid. Nothing in the trunk looks like the girl who once wanted to be a Disney princess. But this is Shannan, I know it. And she was tortured before she was destroyed.

  (fifty-one)

  I haven’t been in Montgomery Woods since I was a teenager. It was late spring and warm, one of Hap’s rare days off. He drove us out of Mendocino along the Ukiah-Comptche road, one hand on the wheel, the other out the window. Several miles shy of the state reserve, on runty, narrow Orr Springs Road, he pulled his Suburban onto the berm and killed the engine. Then he grabbed a daypack from the tailgate, slugged a little water from his hiker’s canteen, and led us straight into the forest, where there wasn’t a trail for miles.

  The going was hard, just the way we both liked it. I scrambled after him, twigs stabbing through my jeans, attacking my hands, spiderwebs catching in my hair and stretching across my face. But after a while, I was able to match his stride. My legs had been growing stronger year by year, and my skills had improved exponentially. If at ten I was Hap’s cautious shadow, by fifteen I was deft and capable.

  The mountain laurel was at the end of its blooming season, white and pink star-shaped clusters that came apart in filmy layers, covering the ground like spent confetti. Through a dense grove of them, we dipped into a small valley where the vegetation shifted to the ferns and vines of riparian meadow, and gave off a boggy scent. Heading south along the meadow’s green rim, we walked for another half mile or so until we came to a thick tangle of alder and then a wide, still redwood grove. At the center was a towering giant that made my neck pinch as I looked up to see how high it reached.

  “Some will tell you this is the tallest tree in the world,” Hap said. He was in his weekend uniform, blue flannel shirt and jeans and a brown felt Stetson. His swe
eping, silver-tinged mustache moved when his mouth did. “There’s another one up in Humboldt could be taller.”

  “How tall is it?” I asked.

  He glanced up along the surface of the trunk, which was lightly furred where the fibers pushed out like tufts of hair, red and brown and almost human. Half to himself he said, “Is knowing so important? If something makes it this far, through everything the universe has thrown at it, maybe we should just say thank you.”

  As usual, he had a point. I followed the arrow of the trunk to the distant scrap of sky, a mandala of pale blue and deep green and rust.

  “Do you know where you are?” he asked quietly.

  “Montgomery Woods?”

  “What do you hear?” That’s when I knew we’d begun one of his survival tests, just for fun but also completely serious.

  I strained, then stilled. “The trees sound like they’re whispering.”

  “Can they tell you how to get back to the car? Have you been paying attention as we walked?”

  “I think so.”

  “Let’s say you’re lost, and I’m not here.”

  “But you are.”

  He smiled. “I’m not. What do you do?”

  “Look for the trail again,” I offered. “Look for water.”

  “Which?”

  “The trail.”

  He didn’t say yes or no. Growing up in strangers’ houses, I was adept at reading faces and guessing feelings, projecting myself into others, but this never worked with Hap. He was too deep and too quiet, too inside himself. What was that song about people being rocks and islands? Hap was neither. He was his own wilderness.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  I looked up through the canopy to fix the angle of the sun. We’d left the car around three, I guessed, and had walked for an hour or a little more. “Four-fifteen. We have plenty of time before dark.”

  A rare smile. “Maybe we do.”

  I closed my eyes and felt outward with my other senses, not moving until I began to hear things that hadn’t been there a moment before—the tremor of a leaf blown into a spiderweb, water moving underground in a trickle that pushed and sighed. There was more, too. Beyond all of this, beyond what I could actually hear, if I was going to parse it rationally, the sound of an engine, machinery. Civilization. “I think I know the way.”

  He let me lead from there, out of the grove and through the red alder, following signs that showed me where to go subtly, almost invisibly. Some of the spaces between the trees looked different from others, jogging my memory, alerting me to landmarks in the white slashes of mushrooms, in lichen, and in moss. There was the brackish smell of the meadow, the wet-feeling air as we neared the fern forest, the mountain laurel blossoms in a translucent pink carpet. A few times I got off track, but Hap didn’t say a word. He wasn’t going to help me at all this time, and it wasn’t out of stubbornness either, but out of love. He wanted to show me that I could do it. That I was competent and resourceful. That I could trust myself as much as he had learned to trust me.

  When we finally reached the car, I watched Hap load his daypack back inside. The steady movements of his hands, and his quiet concentration. Here was the tallest, straightest tree I would ever know. When he turned back around, I said, “Thank you.”

  (fifty-two)

  The next day the examiner calls with the autopsy report. Manner of death: homicidal force, strangulation. A fractured hyoid bone and soft tissue damage in the neck confirm it. The ligature marks suggest protracted binding.

  “When the Curtises hear, they’re going to lose their minds,” Will says once he’s filled me in. “Of course they’re going to wonder if Cameron is next.”

  We’re in his office, both jangling from the ongoing stress and too much caffeine. The last twenty-four hours have been so exhausting and upsetting, I can barely remember the kiss in his apartment. It’s as if it never happened, and that’s a relief. We have enough to deal with.

  “Strangulation is almost always a power thing,” I say to Will. “So much force is required to finish someone that way. You can see their eyes and smell their breath, knowing that you can stop the train at any moment and spare them. Or not.”

  “Jesus,” he says heavily. “I never thought this could happen on my watch. It nearly broke my dad. I don’t think he was ever the same kind of sheriff again. Maybe I’m not strong enough, or good enough. I mean shit, Anna.”

  I know what’s filling his head right now. The trunk. The body. It’s all with me too. “Try not to think about it,” I say gently. “You can do this. We’re in it together.”

  “Yeah,” Will says, clearly unconvinced. “What do you think of Denny’s ranger theory?”

  Hap’s profession has always been sacred to me, but I have to admit the idea sounds plausible. A ranger would be local and familiar with the area, comfortable in the outdoors. “Could be a firefighter, too,” I add, “or military, or someone in the National Guard? All those guys learn how to handle fire, and they’re physical.”

  “True,” he agrees. “By the way, did you notice Drew Hague didn’t show up at the community meeting? He seems pretty comfortable in the outdoors, too.”

  I had noticed. If Emily couldn’t bring herself to come, with all she’s dealing with, that’s one thing. But Drew has no excuse. Not a plausible one anyway, unless there’s a story. “I think there’s something he’s avoiding. How did the follow-up polygraph go?”

  “The technician had to cancel at the last minute. We’ve rescheduled for Wednesday.”

  “That’s two days from now.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, Anna. But what am I supposed to do? I’ve always had to call in techs from other counties, and Polly Klaas’s case is still sucking up a lot of resources. Anyone with talent is working there. Her tip line is still going crazy, and it’s only going to get more crazy now.”

  “We’re going to have to call Rod Fraser right away and share everything we know. This guy could be the same one who took Polly, right? We just don’t fucking know.”

  He stares at the center of his messy desk for a long moment, obviously overwhelmed. Then he says, “Let’s go back to the ranger idea for a minute. If that’s who we’re looking for, how would he have made contact with Shannan up here in the woods, particularly if she was on her way to Seattle? She wasn’t outdoorsy.”

  “Could he have run into her socially somehow, in a bar or something? Even dated her for a while?” I tap two more packets of Sweet’N Low into my coffee, hoping the rush will help me think. “Maybe it was an accident, even. Say he and Shannan hooked up one night and went somewhere quiet to have sex in her car. But then something flipped. He got violent and strangled her, and then afterward there he was with a body. He’d go somewhere he knows, right? He’d burn the car and bury his tracks and try to forget about it.”

  “June to September, that’s four months,” he adds. “So maybe he’s successful for a while or thinks he’s kicked it. But then Cameron Curtis appears. Why her and not someone else? What do she and Shannan have in common?”

  “They look a little alike,” I try. “Both girls have long dark hair parted in the middle and brown eyes. Both are more than pretty, too. They’re stunning. They’d stop you on the street.”

  “I can see that. But he definitely didn’t run into Cameron at a bar. By then something had shifted. He sought her out.”

  “He’d have to.” I sit forward in my chair, feel the hard plastic pressing into the back of my legs. “She’s not out in the world all that much, just school and home and sometimes to Gray Benson’s.” My temples have begun to throb dully. “It’s a crazy idea, but what if Cameron sought him out instead? Remember that poem from Cameron’s locker? The one that goes, I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie?”

  “Shit, you’ve mem
orized it.”

  “Oh, stop. Just hear me out a minute. Cameron’s not just any fifteen-year-old. Her life has been a pressure cooker these last few months. The silence and lies at home, between her parents. And that’s only going to get worse, right? A baby’s coming, maybe her parents are divorcing—or, worse, not divorcing but just going on this way. She’d be desperate for a way out.”

  “How about the free-clinic thing?” Will sounds as if he hasn’t quite caught up. To be fair, the theories have been flying pretty fast. “Where does that fit in?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the appointment was about independence, or started out that way at least. Maybe Cameron was just trying to carve out a life of her own. Having Emily for a mom can’t have been easy. It wasn’t all that long ago when she stopped taking film and TV roles. And even then, she stayed recognizable. Once she was even voted one of the fifty most beautiful people alive, right?”

  “I’ve thought about that. I mean, we think those magazines are stupid, but Cameron probably wouldn’t. Most girls would never feel special enough with that to measure up against.”

  “If Cameron wanted to break out somehow and make her own mark, how would she try and do that? What does that kind of unfolding look like, and how would that put her on a path to meet the kind of guy we’re looking at, a forest ranger or a military guy? With something to offer her, an escape route out of that glass box?”

  “I don’t see it,” Will says.

  “Yeah, me neither.” I feel the oxygen in the room dip. Feel us both spinning our wheels. After a while, I say, “Somehow there had to be enough trust built up between them that Cameron agreed to meet him late at night. How did that happen? What would it take for this particular guy not to scare her off but draw her closer? That’s the magic question.”

  Will makes a sound of agreement. “Emily said she’d never even had a boyfriend, remember?”