Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  “I can’t.”

  Dev sighed. “Look, I don’t know what your . . . deal is, but you’d better figure it out fast.”

  My deal. If it were my deal, I would have redistributed the cards to give myself a better hand to play. I would have cheated—believe it. “That’s what I was trying to do.”

  “That’s why you came here? To get over your fear of . . . the dark? Or whatever?” Dev looked out the door toward the black lake. “That’s rough immersion therapy, right there. No wonder you wanted the place to yourself. Did your husband help you through this kind of thing? Is that what you were coming here for? Both of you? I don’t get it.”

  “No, it’s—” The dark square of the door pulsed at me. I couldn’t think. Words failed.

  “Oh,” he said. His voice had dropped its edge so that now I heard a hint of kindness I hadn’t before. “He caused it. By dying.”

  The warm turn in Dev’s voice calmed me. It created a small bubble of hope in which I found that I could speak. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.”

  “So you can’t go outside?”

  “I’m not sure I can.”

  “What if I help you?” he said.

  “How?”

  “You tell me.”

  I had never tried to defy the fear, to walk out into it. I hadn’t had any plans for how plunging myself in the park’s natural darkness would fix the problem. But I hadn’t had time to devise a plan since I’d been here, either. I didn’t want the darkness to touch my skin. It made no sense. The darkness had no weight, no texture, no heat. And yet it burned me almost physically only to think of stepping out into its embrace.

  I opened the door of my room. The bright glow of my army of lamps was such a relief I wanted to run to the bed and leap in. As welcoming as the lamps were, I might cover my head and hide.

  Cover my head.

  I went to the bed and pulled the comforter off the top and then went to my suitcase and dug around the edges until I found the large, heavy flashlight I’d brought along and the long sleeve of batteries for it. I tested the current batteries with the button, flashing the light, on, off, on.

  “Is that going to work?” Dev said.

  I looked up. The circle of light from my flashlight landed upon his chest like a target. “Maybe.”

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. “Do I need to tell you how suspicious it’s going to look for us to be hanging out back here after they told us to get out?”

  I grabbed my car keys, just in case, and wrapped the blanket around me, pulling the edge down over my forehead. I turned the flashlight on myself, lighting my chin upward. The effect was immediate. I couldn’t see much of anything with the glow of the light beaming over my cheeks skyward. I was light-blind, probably the only way I would get out of this house tonight.

  Dev made a noise in his throat at the sight of me. “I guess we’ll work with it.” He turned for the hallway and I followed, trying not to trip over the blanket or anything else on the way out.

  At the open door, I hesitated again. I felt the weight of the blanket shift, a tug. Was Dev pulling the comforter? Had he stepped on the hem? “What are you doing?”

  “Picking up your train, milady,” he said, dropping it. “Never mind, just go.”

  I stepped forward, thrilling a bit at the idea that I had done it. I was outside. I didn’t need to stay a week. Under the comforter, I could feel the chill in the air. A fish or animal splashed at the lakeshore. Outside. I was outside, at night.

  But then I heard voices coming around the back of the house. Dev turned toward them, and I lost the thin cord that connected us and allowed me to believe this might work. I teetered there at the threshold, unsure. What would the police do if I lunged for the door and barricaded myself in the suite? Maybe I could keep them at bay until dawn.

  And then they’d take me to jail.

  “Sir,” the man’s voice said, “we need you and the lady to come around— What’s this about?”

  “The lady is having a little bit of a . . .” Dev said. “Uh, panic attack?”

  Perfect. That was a role I could fill. I had an escort then, was hustled around the side of the guest house and to a waiting ambulance. The response, the concern, the hurry—I didn’t have much time to actually panic or to see what the rest of the group thought. The bay doors of the ambulance hung open like shutters and inside all the panels and instruments gleamed in a bright, otherworldly, medical light. I reached toward the interior of the rig, moth to flame, and let myself be packed inside.

  Outside the ambulance, as the doors closed the night away from me, Paris said, “And why does she get to escape this nightmare while we stand here in the dark?”

  FROM AMBULANCE TO emergency room to triage room, curtained off from view, I let them shuffle me from bright space to bright space. I tried to justify the attention. To say nothing was wrong with me—that was a lie. But was it something I needed a doctor for? Was it something that could be fixed?

  And yet all I had to do was think about being set out of the hospital into the night, and my blood pressure skyrocketed.

  “Are you experiencing any stress?” said a concerned nurse. She watched the latest spike on the monitor over the top of a pair of reading glasses and made a note on a clipboard.

  “A man was just murdered in the house I’m staying in,” I said.

  Her eyebrows rose into her hairline and her glasses slid down her nose, but she kept writing. “Seems like that would do it,” she said. “Friend of yours?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. “He wouldn’t have to be my friend for his murder to upset me,” I said. We both listened to the tone of my voice, the words hanging in the air. “Sort of,” I said.

  Malloy had called me a new friend upon introduction—before he had known my name or a single thing about me. It had nothing to do with me. I could have been anyone, but that was not how Malloy saw the world. And would his real friends—the ones with whom he was having one last good time before adult responsibilities and marriages and new careers pulled them apart—would they have been so fond of him if he’d been any other way? I had discovered the Malloy-ness of the man, the thing that made him so much himself, just like Bix. It was openness. It was the willingness to be only what you really were, pilgrim or otherwise. That open quality was one I missed, though it was the same quality that might have been at the heart of my life’s current state.

  “Yes,” I said, finding myself tearing up. The nurse looked at me strangely. “He was my friend.” Or he would have been by the end of the week, if either of us had lasted in the house that long. I had a moment of regret that I would never know Malloy better. He had seemed smart, kind. Maybe if I’d stayed the week, he could have helped me find the path through the decisions I needed to make. I was nothing if not a pilgrim to men like that.

  The nurse made another note on the chart. I was picking up diagnoses as I went.

  When she left, the hospital noises closed in on me. I had nothing to read, had turned over my phone and my keys before the ambulance bay doors closed, and had left everything else I owned behind. I couldn’t sleep, even with the brightness of the room.

  A strange despair came in a wave over me—gut tender, throat clenched. I had been here before, but for reasons that made more sense. I turned away from the nurse and wiped at my eyes. Malloy? He was someone’s son, someone’s lover. His death was a tragedy, but for someone else. Bix again?

  I peeled back another layer on what was bothering me, though, and found an unexpected nerve. The park. Even though I’d made it outside into the absolute darkness of the park, I still hadn’t gotten to see a single star. And that was Bix again—his expectations, his dream, his plans kept secret from me, and now I would fail to see them through. His stupid idea to come here. I didn’t even like surprises, not anymore.

  An hour or more went by while people in varying shades of surgical scrubs came to ask me the same three or four questions. Observation, this was called. Which wa
s fine, as I had nowhere else to be. I lay back for the pressure cuff once more and glimpsed through the curtain a dark sleeve just outside the room. A police officer? I wasn’t just under observation. I was also under lock and key.

  I’d left my car behind, for crying out loud. I had turned over my keys, my phone. Where did they think I’d run off to, if I had something to hide besides my own crippling neurosis?

  But then the sleeve slipped out of view and a pair of eyes darted a look through the part in the curtain.

  “You can come in,” I called.

  Warren Hoyt appeared at the gap, clearing his throat but not saying anything.

  Even fully clothed, I felt suddenly exposed and fragile in that hospital cot. I pulled the thin blanket up to my shoulders. “I thought they had a cop stationed outside my door for a minute,” I said. “You’re not deputized, are you?”

  “You mean the conservation officer,” he said, not a hint of humor visible. “The district officer will probably want an accounting of all this later, but of course it’s the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office investigating.”

  “The ones who are more accustomed to accidents,” I said, “than murders.”

  “The lake,” he said. The strict veneer dropped a bit to show what was underneath: hopelessness. “Horseplay, someone loses their balance and falls out of the boat. The whole group drinking—” His face darkened. “Wherever people are off their guard and the beer bottles stack up, you can be sure there’s potential for an accident.”

  A wave of memory washed over me. I closed my eyes, but the image of twisted metal rushed in. I took a deep breath and willed it away. “This was no accident,” I said, my voice shaky. “That screwdriver—”

  “Please,” he said, easing himself down on the edge of the bed, pale. I scooted up on the mattress to make room for him. “I’m trying to get the screwdriver out of my head.”

  That provided a different image. Hoyt winced at his own words, so I could tell he’d heard it, too.

  He was a prim specimen. A forty-something-year-old guy who probably talked to two people a day in the course of his work duties. No wedding ring. No guts for blood. No evidence of an interior life—or maybe his life was all interior. What was his story?

  “Have you had any other accidents like this one?” I said. “The not-an-accident type of accident?”

  He stared at the floor for a moment. “Never anything quite like this. Not in living memory, anyway.”

  “Not like that hotspot of criminal activity Mackinac Island,” I said.

  “They do see their share.”

  It had been a joke. “Seriously? And how do the villains get away? On bicycle? By horse cart?”

  “By ferry,” he said, frowning.

  The man had never met a joke before, that much was clear. My desire to see his surface cracked, just once, was distracting me from Malloy, the guest house, all those people back there, the dark sky.

  The machine behind my head gave a dramatic beep. Hoyt looked over at it, concerned. “Is there something wrong?”

  “Blood pressure,” I said. High blood pressure could probably be blamed for the headache I had acquired. I rubbed my forehead. “I had a . . . panic attack, I guess.”

  “Lucky you didn’t have it in the water,” he said. Now I had the image for what an accident on the lake might look like. So much in life could go wrong—that was the thing you could go several decades of your life not understanding. Things could go wrong. And then they all did.

  The problem was that when you were young you could assume that someone else would take care of everything when things slid sideways. But the older I got, the more aware I was that no one would be riding in on a white horse if things went sour. There was no safety net. If the local cops were better at fishing drowned bodies out of the drink than investigating an actual murder, then Hillary wouldn’t get satisfaction. She’d have to suffer it out, and maybe there was nothing anyone could do about that anyway.

  Bix was dead, and nobody had been able to take a dent out of that. But I was the one left standing.

  I was standing.

  Figuratively, at least. I lay back in my hospital bed and let my eyes close. The events of the night rushed over me until I was dizzy. I had no notion that I would be able to sleep, not after all that had happened and would continue to play out, not with a stranger sitting on the edge of my bed. The Emmet County sheriff would want a word, if this machine ever stopped beeping at me, and I would probably have to see the rest of the group again before I could make my way back home. I would have to figure out how to reclaim my life in well-lit Chicago, but perhaps for the first time since Bix died I thought I might be able to do it. The house? I would figure it out.

  Just before I dropped into sleep, I had two simultaneous visions that banged together like cymbals but were too late to keep me awake. Warren Hoyt, sitting on the edge of my hospital bed, and Hillary, wailing on her knees.

  What was Warren Hoyt doing at my bedside? Why had he attached himself to me? And then: How could poor little Hillary make it through this, if I hadn’t been able to?

  I’ll help.

  I’ll.

  Chapter Eight

  I jumped awake to the curtain around my cot being whisked open. Standing in the wide gap was a police officer. A real one this time. I sat up, bleary. My eyes were drawn to the woman’s belt and the gun at her hip. “They said come get you,” she said, speaking around what I hoped was chewing gum. She hadn’t taken off her hat. Her hair stuck out from underneath, a frizzy halo of blond curls.

  “What time is it?”

  “Six or better.”

  The sun was up. Thank you, Michigan summers. Thank you, bright morning sun, the only star I would get to see on this trip. I was getting back to the park, fetching my things, and racing back to Chicago at speeds that might be unseemly and highly illegal. The sun wouldn’t set until after 10:00 p.m. here on the tip of the mitten state, but I would be long gone. All thoughts of Hillary and Malloy and of conquering my own fears had flown from my mind. Being able to go out at night was overrated. If I could only go home, I would forget these people and their murderous problems. I would get on with things as well as I could in the daytime. A small life, boxed in by the hours of sunlight. It was fine. I could live with it.

  Warden Warren had left at some point. I stretched, yawning but clearheaded. I’d slept a couple of hours again, and in a hospital bed, of all places. Over the course of this one night, I’d probably gotten more sleep than I had in any single night since Bix had died. It was like a miracle cure. I hated to let it go.

  “Come on,” the officer said. “They got some papers for you to sign.”

  Many papers and a startling invoice later, I was released to the officer’s custody. Her badge read Bridget Cooley. She was straight-waisted, not just because of the belt and holster, with round, childish cheeks made rounder on one side by the bubble gum.

  The lobby doors swished open for us. Outside the air was cool and soft. I took a deep breath. The sunlight, the sleep. I was renewed.

  She led me over to a county cruiser. “I don’t suppose you’ll confess to killing the fella.”

  I stared at her. “No,” I said. “I won’t be doing that.”

  “Then you can sit up front with me.” She opened the door. “The back’s for killers. And dogs.”

  The cruiser smelled mostly of the latter. When she slid into the driver’s seat, I said so.

  “I said it was for dogs,” she said. “My partner, Gruff, had to be put down last month.” Her voice got thick but she recovered. “The county might not swing for me to get a new pup. The training, you know. It costs.”

  I rolled down the window. “Will you have to get a human partner?”

  “Cheese and rice,” she exclaimed, her mouth falling open and the pink wad of gum inside revealing itself. “I never once thought of that. What if they make me drive around with one of the guys? Rather be guarding the fudge shops at Mackinaw Crossings than share a car
with some of those . . . farging ice-holes.”

  It wasn’t an act, this innocence. I was used to a different sort, Bix and his buddies, who didn’t hold back on colorful turns of phrase. I wondered how the Irish lass had gotten through the police academy without taking anyone’s name in vain at the very least, but decided it was rude to ask. “How long have you been a cop?”

  “Three years almost. I thought about being a CO but I don’t like to fish, like, at all.”

  “CO? What is— Oh, is that a conservation officer?” What had Warden Warren said about them? That there was one, somewhere, keeping the peace in some way. What did that make Hoyt? A paper-pushing administrator, my guess. An accountant in shiny new hiking boots without a speck of dirt on them. What was so special about Hoyt that he was in charge of the vast night sky of the Straits Point Park, seemingly without naturalist or ranger pedigree or a shiny badge?

  “Yeah, watching for poachers out of season and nabbing swells out fishing without a license. Bo-ring.” She had a lot to say about poachers for a while, enough that the subject seemed less than boring, actually, to her. I closed my eyes, pretending to sleep so as to avoid learning more about the daily duties of conservation officers, but despite the pretending and the sleep I’d gotten, I did doze a bit, because for a moment or two I believed I was in the car with Bix.

  He was driving fast, as he did, and we were late. We must have been meeting someone, and Bix was worried that this person would have to wait on us. Who is more important than me? my dream self couldn’t bring herself to say. Why are you endangering my life because someone else might wait five minutes? And then we were driving to his mother’s for the holidays, having the fight we’d been having since I’d started the photography classes. He’d pushed me to make a change, to take the time, but then suddenly he’d decided I’d had enough training and should have been looking to turn the photography into a job.

  “What job is that?” I’d said, when we’d had the actual fight the first time. It stung. No strings had been attached but now I was derelict of duty.