Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  The window in the real room was covered. If the moon had risen since I’d last dared look outside, it was hidden. The clock said that the long night I had suffered since I last woke was only a half hour.

  The shadows, just out of my sight, crept toward me, on the move. When I looked directly into the corners, everything was what it should be, but when I turned my head—

  And then came the scream.

  Chapter Six

  I ran to the door. But then I stood there, hand reaching toward the doorknob.

  The scream had come from the front of the house, maybe as close as the kitchen, but the hallway just outside my room would be pitch-dark.

  Elsewhere in the house, other voices rang out in alarm. Someone shouted, but I couldn’t tell what he’d said. One of the women shrieked and shrieked. No one comforted her, or if they tried, no comfort could be found.

  A band of light appeared under my door. A pathway. I wrenched the door open to find Dev, backlit, leaning into the hallway from the kitchen. His voice, when it came, was strangled, breathless. “Eden, are you OK?”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  He reared back, almost hidden behind the door. “What wasn’t you?”

  “The screaming,” I said. “What’s happened? Who’s yelling?”

  “Just about everyone,” Dev said, opening the door wider so that I could see him better. He wore only boxers. Ashen-faced. “You’d better come out. You’re alone, right?”

  I was still out of sorts from the nap and the dream. I glanced back at my bed. Some of the things that hadn’t been real had felt very much so, and now this moment of reality had the aftertaste of nightmare. “Of course I’m alone,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  The screaming had stopped, but I heard someone crying, the kind of desperate sobbing that produced a catch in my own throat.

  “It’s Malloy,” Dev said, and gestured me through the door to the kitchen. I wrapped my arms around myself and moved toward him.

  “Is he—” But before I could get the words out, I could see for myself. A hand, the fingertips bloody, lay open on the kitchen floor. I saw the hand first and concentrated there, even as the rest of my attention took in Malloy’s body stretched alongside the island, the swipe of blood along the wall to the floor, and then the screwdriver from the abandoned bottle of wine from earlier now stuck into his neck. “Oh, God.” A pool of blood darkened the floor there. “Oh, my God. No, oh no—”

  I pulled my gaze off Malloy. Paris clung to the newel post at the bottom of the staircase, gazing in dumb horror into the kitchen. Sam stood nearby, wearing a robe and a mask of terror on his pale face. Martha, in a short pink nightie, stood nearby, clutching herself by the elbows. Dev stood to one side of the doorway to let me through, pulling at his hair.

  Finally I saw Hillary. She crouched on the floor on her knees in a T-shirt that might have been Malloy’s, her face low to the ground and her hands in claws, wracked with sobs that had gone silent. Then she caught her breath and came up from the floor with her mouth wide and wailing. The noise was wordless for a long while, and then formed itself into a long, beseeching question. “Why?” she cried. Over and over, while we stood by and did nothing. “Why?”

  Martha took a shuddering breath and sank to her knees next to Malloy.

  “Martha,” Dev said. “No—”

  I jumped in. “I don’t think you should—”

  Too late. She crumpled forward into Malloy’s chest, crying.

  Malloy. It didn’t seem possible. But his skin was waxen, pale. His eyes, open and staring. They said death was peaceful but then when you witnessed it, you knew it couldn’t be. Not this kind of death—early, violent. With men like Malloy and Bix, the lack of life was too startling, too hurtful and unnatural.

  The air was thick with the smell of wine. The bottle that Dev had tried to jimmy open lay spilled on top of the kitchen island. The wine opener lay in a shallow pool of cabernet that ran over the edge of the counter. I could just hear the last of the stream of wine dripping onto the floorboards.

  “Why?” Hillary implored, her face pressed into the floor again.

  “The better question is who,” Martha said, rising from Malloy’s chest, her voice congested and accusatory. The front of her nightgown was heavy with blood.

  Paris gasped. It was hard to argue anything had happened here except murder, given the screwdriver, but they all seemed too dazed to take it in.

  In contrast, I felt sharp. I had slept in the night for the first time in months. After spending so long not sleeping well or at all, after months of treading through days, of making mistakes, of words coming out of my mouth that I myself didn’t follow, I felt as though I could see through walls. I felt as though I were up above the room, looking down on everyone’s movements.

  “You,” Hillary said, sitting up. The wail was gone, and her voice was guttural, animal. We all turned to her. “You did this.” She had pinpointed Martha as the target for this assault.

  Martha sat back on her heels, looking from Hillary to me to Sam, the others. “Wh-what are you talking about? I just—”

  Hillary got to her feet, wiping her face with her hands. “You. Or you,” she said, turning on Sam, then Dev. “You or you. Does it matter which one? All of you are at fault.”

  “That’s not fair,” Dev said. “None of us would have done this, Hillary.” But he sounded nervous.

  “You’re the one we don’t know,” Paris sniffed.

  “And her,” Martha said.

  The room went silent. I had been staring at the screwdriver, plunged up to the handle in the soft flesh of Malloy’s neck—I couldn’t help it—when I realized she was talking about me. In their silence I heard their agreement. I was the one they didn’t know. Hillary at least came vetted by Malloy, which was the only endorsement anyone needed. “I had no reason to kill your friend,” I said. “I didn’t know him, or any of you.”

  “Maybe you’re just that special kind of psychopath,” Paris hissed.

  “Paris, come on,” Dev said. Every word he uttered in Paris’s direction shaped the world to his desires—either to get her the thing she wanted or to keep her in bounds of what was polite or right. He was like one of those dogs herding sheep back into a paddock. I would have said she didn’t deserve a guy like that, but then I didn’t think a guy like that was much of a prize.

  A guy like—

  “I saw someone,” I said. “Someone ran out the back door and woke me up. I thought it was one of you, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was—”

  “Who?” Martha said, standing.

  “Any one of you,” Hillary growled.

  “Come on, Hillary,” Sam said. “You can’t possibly think that we came all this way to see everyone, planned this trip for—I don’t know—weeks, just to kill Malloy.” He looked down again at his friend’s body. “Oh, my—Malloy is really dead. He’s—he’s—”

  Sam stumbled backward, hit the couch, and slid to the floor.

  “We need to call the police,” I said.

  They all looked at me, uncomprehending. They were all as affected as Sam by the reality of the situation, stunned, and I was mother duck again. I looked around the kitchen. No landline. “Does anyone have their phone on them?” I said. No one moved, so I started back to my room.

  “Wait—” Paris said.

  I waited. We all did, all of us probably hoping for sense and order.

  “I think we need some kind of—system.”

  For a moment, we all stared at her. Then I knew what she meant. A buddy arrangement, of sorts. Truthfully I wasn’t sure I wanted to be on my own, either. My eyes drifted down to Malloy’s body, the bloody fingertips. I was the only one who hadn’t brought a date to this murder.

  “Nobody can leave these two rooms without someone with them,” Paris said thickly.

  “Like a bodyguard?” Dev said.

  “Like a witness,” Martha said. She looked down at the horror of herself. Dev handed her a towel from
the counter. “I agree.”

  They all looked back to me. “Well,” I said. “Who’s coming to witness me getting my phone?” I turned on my heel and made for my door, not waiting to see how the straws were pulled.

  It was Dev who appeared in the door, blinking into the blazing light of my room. He shielded his eyes. “You doing surgery in here?”

  I was digging through things on the night table for my phone and didn’t offer him an explanation. I’d had the phone in bed, I remembered, though I hadn’t called anyone. Little reception, and no reason to call, except—I hadn’t told anyone where I was going. I hadn’t told anyone I was keeping Bix’s plans. I should have texted someone, at least. His mother. My sister. I had a few friends left who might care if I lived or died. I should text someone now. That worked, right? Even if I couldn’t call someone, maybe I could text? Somehow, the fleeting second of connectivity a text needed to travel might be found? I finally located the phone in its bright pink case hidden in the bedcovers. It registered the symbol for a couple of missed calls and one bar of service. No. Zero bars. I held it out and turned in a circle.

  “Maybe outdoors?” Dev said. The bright pink case seemed to catch his attention and then his disapproval. He looked up. “What’s wrong?”

  I had stopped spinning. Outside? Outside would be dark as nature intended, the lake as black as a bag over my head—

  Dev grabbed my wrist. “Are you OK?”

  “I can’t—”

  I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t say that I couldn’t go outside, either. I held out the phone to him. He took it, held it high, low, out from his body. His eyes flickered to the window, to the blanket hanging over the curtains, to the floor lamps I’d pulled to my bedside, lit to full capacity. The package of 150-watt lightbulbs I’d brought with me to replace all the lesser values lay on top of my open suitcase. He registered the detail, was confused by it, blinking. At last his face cleared, illuminated. “So, you’re . . .”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “How do you get any sleep at all if you can’t—”

  “I’m not, OK? Hardly any at all.”

  “But that’s—”

  Crazy. He wanted to say crazy. That’s what my sister called it.

  He looked at me a long, uncomfortable moment.

  “Look, I’m a doctor,” he said. “It’s not healthy to miss that much sleep, to never let yourself be in the dark. It’s bad for—oh, whatever. I won’t lecture you on circadian rhythms when we have a— I’ll take this outside to see if I can get better reception.” At the door, he glanced back and then was gone. I heard the back door slap the wall, just as it had earlier in the night. That figure racing from the house—was that the person who had killed Malloy? And why? But what if—

  Here I stopped and thought over the last day, the complicated friendships I’d seen in action. What if Hillary was right? What if it had been one of the people in the house, running from what they’d done and then sneaking back inside in time to feign surprise and horror?

  I closed my door behind me and returned to the kitchen doorway. “Dev is calling the police,” I said. Nobody wondered why Dev was allowed to slip away from the buddy system.

  I stopped at the threshold of the kitchen and avoided looking at the floor. I wrapped my arms around my elbows to keep myself in place.

  The rest of the friends had shifted positions. Sam had been pulled up and moved to the couch, reclining in pajamas like a nineteenth-century lady with the vapors. Martha tended to him. She was now wrapped in Sam’s robe over her bloody nightgown, the dusty soles of her bare feet poking out below the hem. Paris sat nearby with wet cheeks, her knees skinny in shorts. Only Hillary stood where I’d left her, staring at the body.

  “Did anyone—did anyone check his pulse?” she said.

  “Hillary,” I said. The blood near Malloy’s body was dark, his face progressed to a shade of pearl. There would be ways to tell how long the poor man had been lying alone, dead, in the kitchen, but that’s what he was. “I think we’re far too late for that. Martha already—”

  “Please,” she whispered.

  I understood. Of all the people in the house, I knew best what it was like to hold out past the point of hope.

  I stepped closer to Malloy’s body and crouched in front of him. Bracing myself for the horror of touching him, I reached for a spot on his neck opposite the screwdriver. For a moment I thought I might feel the flutter of a low pulse. I peered at him more closely. His lips did seem to have some unexpected color. But then I realized the pulse was mine, the blood rushing through my own fingers against the dead man’s cold skin. His lips, sauvignon-stained.

  The room was drenched in wine and smelled of it, but at this close proximity, I could smell the nickel scent of blood and beneath that, the tender smell of another human being, salty and soapy. I held my fingers at Malloy’s throat, putting in the time so that Hillary couldn’t say I hadn’t given him a chance. I realized after some time that I had stopped thinking of the body as Malloy’s and had traveled back to the funeral parlor in Chicago and the body of my husband. The last touch, the last chance before the casket was sealed. A bad moment at the end of many bad moments.

  Then the moment clicked back into place. Hillary had stretched her neck to see me. God, how long had I kept her in suspense? I pulled my hand back and rested on my heels. I shook my head. She reached behind her for the wall and sagged against it.

  “I thought I had all the time in the world,” she said.

  Martha and Paris turned to listen.

  “Everybody thinks that,” I said. “Everybody’s wrong.”

  “Some are more wrong than others,” she said. And I couldn’t argue with that.

  Chapter Seven

  Dev entered the kitchen from the back hall and pressed my phone into my hand. I noted again the missed call and text notifications but didn’t check them. Now was not the time. Dev and I waited on the other side of the kitchen, listening to Hillary crying, the others occasionally sniffling. Within minutes, the sound of a car outside attracted Martha to the door. No sirens.

  “It’s the park director, I think,” she said.

  I looked at Dev. He shrugged. “I remembered the number.”

  “But you called 911, right?”

  “Yeah, of course. I just thought we’d need to alert him, too.” He ran his fingers through his hair so that it stuck up in the back. “It made sense at the time.”

  Warren Hoyt stood in the doorway in street clothes, though his version of everyday wear was just as nipped and tucked as the uniform he’d been buttoned up in earlier. At the sight of Malloy’s body, the expression on his face traveled between horror and disappointment in us all.

  He gazed forlornly around the guest house, as though making sure there were no additional corpses, and found Sam looking wan and Paris, drippy. He took a long look at Hillary, crying up against the wall, and then me. “I hear sirens,” he said, standing uncomfortably among us with a pleading look in his eyes. “So we’ll just . . .”

  This was either a man who had had no experience with death or far too much. Maybe this wasn’t the first body in the guest house. Maybe this was something that happened all the time. I didn’t like to think so. The water lapping quietly against the shore, the scent of the lake in the air, the crickets chirruping in the trees—or maybe those were frogs, I didn’t know. All of it was beautifully tranquil. Tranquil enough that I’d forgotten, just for a few hours, that I didn’t sleep. I ached to get back to that soft bed and try it again. For someone who hadn’t yet seen a single star and now stood watch over a dead body, I was a highly satisfied customer of the park’s facilities.

  Hoyt wiped his face with his hand. “No one, uh, moved the, uh, gentleman, did they?”

  “I think the police will handle the investigation, Mr. Hoyt,” I said. The sirens were quite loud now, anyway.

  A pained expression crossed his face. “Yes, I suppose.”

  “What is it?”r />
  “Nothing, only . . .” His eyes roamed over the rooms again.

  “Worried about your family-friendly marketing plan?”

  “No, of course not,” he mumbled, reaching for the top button of his shirt and finding it already fastened.

  “Maybe I imagined that you were worried about the police being called here?”

  Again, the pained look.

  “No, it’s—nothing. The local constabulary, you see, doesn’t get much opportunity to solve, uh, this sort of thing,” he said, turning as the sirens cut out and several car doors slammed within the yard. “They’re much more accustomed to . . . accidents.”

  The word covered an awful lot of ground. “What kind of—”

  “And it was going to be such a nice week, so many guests. The Perseid shower,” he said mournfully.

  “What—”

  But then the door opened and the uniformed men and women who gathered there drew all attention.

  “What in God’s creation,” the first man started. He was red-faced and soft-jawed. Prone to bluster and disbelief, I decided, watching him take in the balance of us in the room and the mess of Malloy’s body. He stood back and held the front door, bowing like a valet. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “this is a damn crime scene. Get out. Except you two.”

  Everyone, reacting quickly to authority, had stood and rushed to action and had to stop to see which two needed to stay put. Martha’s robe swished against her legs. The officer was pointing across the kitchen to Dev and me. “You two find another way out and try not to touch anything in the meantime.”

  “The back door,” Hoyt said unhelpfully and shuffled along with the others out the front.

  Dev pulled at the shoulder of my T-shirt to propel me away from the kitchen and down the back hall. I put on the brakes. The back door was hanging wide open, leaving the screen door as the only barrier between me and the darkness.