Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  The missed calls I’d seen and ignored, the messages stacked up. I thought of all the people I would have to explain the situation to—but then I didn’t know yet how to explain any of it. Sleepdialing? Was that a thing?

  “And then this number,” Barrows said, “which received about four texts from you earlier that day.” He read the digits, but I hardly recognized anyone’s number from memory these days.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know it.”

  “Funny thing,” Barrows said. “That’s an Indiana area code.”

  “OK . . .”

  “And it belongs to our dead friend,” Barrows said. “The one who was not your friend. And these four texts to his phone, now, one of them I’ll give you as a, what do you call it, butt dial, of one of those—what do they call those little things, Cooley?”

  “Emoji,” she said. “I think. Is it an emoji if it doesn’t have a face?”

  “Right. Dumb little picture of an apple, whatever. But the other three, they say . . .” He held the phone close to his nose. “They say, ‘Meet me downstairs . . . when she’s asleep. Need to talk.’”

  “What? No, that’s not—my phone?”

  “Your phone.” Barrows looked at me, hard. “Now what did you need to meet that no-friend-of-yours about? And what went wrong when you did?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I had no answers.

  We went over the questions again, anyway.

  I hadn’t known Malloy before meeting him at the park. I hadn’t had his number. I didn’t sleepwalk—that I knew of. I didn’t sleepdial. I didn’t sleep.

  It was hard to find time to do many activities in my sleep when I never actually drifted off.

  But I had been sleeping at the guest house, I admitted. Pretty well, actually, if only for a couple of hours. I had captured a few winks besides, too, in Cooley’s car on the ride back to the park, in the early hours of dawn in the Hide-a-Way.

  I didn’t think that meant I’d been parading around the lakeshore, calling all my long-lost friends and relatives. In the dark. Texting a man I’d just been met to sneak away after his girlfriend was asleep. I hadn’t needed to talk to Malloy. I hadn’t known his number. I hadn’t known him.

  I did not use emojis.

  My eyes stung from weariness. The thought of another missed night of sleep made me want to weep. My body ached, each movement as though I were swimming through time. If I could get just one hour of sleep, I would understand what was going on. I’d be able to crack the code of what was happening. I hoped.

  As it was, however, I couldn’t tell them why I had Malloy’s number on my phone, why it seemed like I had made plans to meet him. Barrows had tucked the phone into the bag and sent it back across the table to Cooley.

  Instead of reclaiming the phone and my keys and then my car, another plan was proposed. Numb, I accepted it. I would walk to the motel myself. Officer Cooley would pick me up at a specified time to take me out to the guest house for the rest of my belongings. I was moving into the Hide-a-Way.

  My toothbrush. I needed my toothbrush from the guest house. I would agree to anything, if I could only have it.

  Which is how I came to be standing in the Hide-a-Way parking lot with the sun burning the top of my head a few hours later. How I suddenly came to the thing that made the most sense: Someone had been playing with my phone.

  Who? Whose attention had I caught? And why?

  One of the first-floor room doors behind me opened. Paris stepped out. She had changed into her extra clothes. I had, too, but I hadn’t had a chance at the shower, what with Sam in my room.

  When Paris saw me, she stopped. Her eyes were swollen.

  “You’re going out to the park?” I said finally.

  “Maybe.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I would have to face one of them again so soon. They’d hand-fed each other to the dogs so quickly back at the police station. Were they even really friends? I had no patience for being among them. “Maybe you haven’t decided? Or you have, now that you know I’m going there?”

  “The regular kind of maybe.” She sniffed. “I haven’t talked to Dev yet.”

  “I’m sure he’ll go wherever you’re going to be.”

  “I don’t know,” she murmured, pulling a tissue out of her shoulder bag. The big diamond on her finger flashed in the sun. “I might have messed it all up.”

  Now here was love with a little mileage on it, and a woman who had more sense than I had suspected. “He seems smitten,” I said. “When they love you as much as Dev seems to love you, I’m sure it takes a lot to chase them away.”

  “Like turning in his friend for theft and then suggesting that maybe he himself might have gotten out of bed to kill someone? Yeah. I’m not sure what would cancel the wedding, if this doesn’t.”

  Sam was “his” friend, but Malloy was “our” friend? According to Sam, the arrangement between them was “best,” all equal shares.

  “He seems very keen to marry you,” I said. “And he’s been hanging in there for a while . . .”

  “Five years,” she said. “Almost.”

  “Oh,” I said, too late to avoid sounding surprised.

  “Yeah, but it’s not that long, is it? If we started dating when we were in college?” Her pretty face puckered in concentration. She pulled one of her braids to her lips and talked around it. “We got together after—well, I was on the rebound from . . . a real mess. So we took it slow. Everyone thinks I’ve been stringing him along, but we’re still too young. At least, that’s how I feel.”

  Not that young. Bix and I were married when we were baby-faced, in our midtwenties. We didn’t have a long courtship or engagement. In the military, you had to be married or you got left behind. Of course, any age but my current one seemed young to me now and, anyway, nobody ever got married knowing what marriage would ask of them. “I don’t think it was the age that bothered him,” I said. “Or even the years of devotion he put in.”

  She groaned. “The watch. I know.”

  I didn’t have any patience for cheating. That watch was damning. “It was just a gift?”

  “It was— Oh, who am I kidding? It was whatever Malloy wanted it to be.” She sat on the curb, her long brown legs visible as her skirt fell open at a slit. “He could have had me for a song. A song, a nickel, a smile. I was cheap for that man.”

  My feelings for Paris wavered. I liked her less and, simultaneously, more, for the honesty. Why I was the recipient of it, I didn’t know. Surely one of the others was a better audience. But maybe all she needed was an audience, any audience at all. “Really? You hid it so well.”

  “I’ve been ridiculous. I’ve been—a fool, an actual fool.” She shook her head, the beads in her braids clicking together musically. Her eyes drifted away. “Scheming against my own self-interests, but it didn’t matter. And now I’ve been absent from my life for almost five years, waiting for something to happen that— Did you see that girl?”

  “Hillary? She’s stunning. But so are you.”

  “She’s the whitest chick I’ve ever seen,” Paris said. She held out her hands to show me the dark skin of her own arms. “If that’s the kind of girl he’s going to end up with—oh, God.” She folded her arms around herself and bent over them. “He’s not going to end up—he’s dead. He’s dead and I keep forgetting. That’s not right, to forget.”

  It was exactly right, in my experience. To think, Wait until I tell Bix what I heard. To reach for the phone to text him. I had tried on occasion to call my mother in the years after she died. Like when I met Bix and wanted to tell her about him. With Bix, it happened all the time, still. Sometimes I thought, I want to tell Bix how pissed off I am at him. And lifted the phone.

  “No, that’s how it goes,” I said. “Grief isn’t always sad. Sometimes it’s weird and wrong—or funny, when you shouldn’t be laughing.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to be laughing anytime soon,” she said. “This is—it’s too much to take in. M
alloy is dead. I can’t wrap my mind around it. And I can’t begin to think—”

  “That one of your friends did it.”

  She squinted up at me. “When Tash died, it was hard to understand, but this—this can’t be real.”

  I hadn’t yet heard the story of Tash, but I felt the skin on my arms prickle. This group had already lost one of its own. Tash would have been Malloy’s first love, the one lost too soon, the one we had to keep mourning. “How did Tash die?” I said, aiming for casual curiosity, like I hadn’t just learned her name.

  “Drugs,” Paris murmured. “An overdose, they said. Some of them wanted to believe she had overdosed on purpose, but . . . Tash had everything, you know? She was top of our class at school. She would have been valedictorian, with Dev. She was funny and gorgeous and happy. She was dating Malloy and then—well, that didn’t work out. I always wondered . . .” She stared off at the gas station long enough I thought there might be someone there.

  “What? You always wondered what?”

  “Huh?” She blinked heavily at me.

  “You always wondered if losing a boyfriend was all it took?”

  She shrugged.

  “You were all friends at the time?”

  She came back to me. “Yeah, Dev and Malloy, Sam, me. Then Martha. Casual friends at first, but then Tash—it changed things. We got tight. Got through it together. I guess that’s why it’s so hard to be drifting apart now.”

  “A weeklong vacation together doesn’t sound like drifting.”

  “We haven’t all been together since graduation,” she said. “And now I guess we’ll never be all together again.” She put her head in her hands, her face tucked away from me. I found a pack of tissues in my bag and offered them to her, but when she looked up, her eyes were dry. She waved me off, turning a furrowed brow toward the parking lot.

  “How did you do it?” she said.

  “Do . . . what?” I readied myself for more accusations.

  “Live with the impossible. When your husband died.”

  “Oh.” I sat on the curb. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  “But you’ve made it this far,” she said. It was an accusation—what was my magic? What secret had I kept to myself? “What if I can’t live with the days that come after this? What if I can’t live with—what comes next.”

  What came next was a life without someone she had pinned her hopes on, getting on with that career she’d prioritized, settling in for a wedding—ah. I saw what she meant. One of her friends would be accused, proven guilty, jailed for killing the man she would have thrown her life over for. One of her friends, maybe even the man she was supposed to marry.

  “You’re worried it was Dev?”

  “No!” she said, sharply. “Of course he wouldn’t—but what if . . . one of them?”

  One of them, but which one? And when it was certain which one, a new devastation, a new friend-shaped hole in the group. Why tease around it? The group was gone. It was one thing to rally around the loss of a college friend dead to an overdose, on purpose or by accident, but this would break them into pieces. Individual pieces. I looked over at the bride. She’d lost them both, the imagined and the real. There would be no wedding. And she knew it.

  “I don’t have the answer for you,” I said. “What’s sad is—maybe Malloy might have. He was the one who lost the love of his life and made it through.”

  She pouted over my phrasing. “Who called her that?”

  “He did, actually.”

  She stood up. “Malloy made it through everything.”

  “They call it resilience,” I said. “It’s harder than it looks.”

  “They call it imperviousness,” she said. “Nothing touched him. Maybe even when it should have.”

  “What you should try to remember was that he was happy,” I said. When Hillary’s secret came out, I wondered if his friends would allow his happiness to remain a fact. Would they rewrite history to make him a dupe, happy only in his ignorance? “No matter what else comes to light—your friend found happiness again.”

  “My friend,” she said. “I always call him ‘our friend,’ you know? I guess that was part of the delusion. But he was. He was my friend. But, Eden, come on, don’t tell me you didn’t notice that body.”

  “I’m not the dead one.” I didn’t mention that I had also noticed Dev’s.

  “OK, then.” Paris gazed out over the empty parking lot. “Do you think they forgot that car for us? We need to get out there, get sorted, and get back before it’s dark—oops.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. My dirty laundry had passed from hand to hand so quickly. Given everything else going on, who had the time to gossip ’round the watercooler? “Who told you?”

  “That block of cheddar cheese they have as deputy,” she said, shading her eyes and looking up and down the street. “The woman. It wasn’t gossip. I heard her talking to the sheriff.”

  So news of my lunacy had traveled from Dev to Sam to the sheriff to Cooley to Paris. The circle was almost complete. Shouldn’t be too long before my secret got around to Hillary and Martha and then one of them came to inform me, too.

  The strange thing was that I didn’t mind anymore. I didn’t have to hide it or make excuses. Except, when you added it to the sleepwalking theory and now the phone calls and texts, I looked good for actual psychosis. The laugh died in my throat. Those texts were a real problem for me.

  But then it occurred to me: Dev. Dev had used my phone to call the police. He’d had the chance to message other numbers, if he’d wanted to. It would explain the random nature of the texts sent out. He wouldn’t have known which of my friends I would text in the middle of the night, scared or alone, which ones I would never bother. He’d probably texted the last six or seven people I had texts from, clicking through the queue, one after another. And he was the one who’d witnessed the alleged sleepwalking.

  I watched Paris’s profile for a moment. “Is there any reason you can think of that Dev would—lie? About seeing me out of my room that night?”

  She stood up and slung her bag over her shoulder. “Dev is a good man. You and I are all deep in the shit right now and being girlfriendly, but let’s not think you can slur my fiancé. Also, I saw you out of your room, too.”

  She was going to go down fighting, then. And here I was talking to one of the other best suspects. Paris had admitted her feelings for Malloy. What if she had put her desires out on the table and had them rebuffed? Was embarrassment enough of a motive? What if what she couldn’t live with was the presence of Hillary in Malloy’s life? Of Malloy’s life going on without her? Of Malloy’s life going on at all.

  Officer Cooley pulled up in her cruiser with a whoop-whoop of the siren. She had to get out and open the back doors for us, prisoner-style, but let us close ourselves in. In the backseat, Paris sniffed and made a face. “It smells like . . . a circus in here.”

  “Just the dog act, I think,” I said.

  “What the—”

  I hushed her before Cooley slid into the driver’s seat.

  “Who’s excited to go get all her clothes back?” Cooley said, as she turned the car toward the park.

  “We cannot wait to go back,” Paris said. “There is nothing I like better in a vacation spot than the dried blood of my friends on the wallpaper.” She paused, swallowing hard, and then seemed to recover. She dug around in her bag for a few minutes and then stopped and huffed. “When are we getting our phones back?”

  “Can you even get any service up here?” I said. “Mine couldn’t pick up a signal—hey. How do I have all those outgoing texts from my phone if I can’t seem to get any signal?”

  “Which texts?” Paris said.

  “Maybe when you were—out walking,” Cooley said. “The reception in the trees is bad, but it’s good out by the lake. On the shore is the only place my phone works anywhere near that park.”

  “But I—” We were going to pursue this, even with everyone knowin
g I couldn’t possibly go out in the dark? I put my head in my hands. So tired. All I wanted was to crawl into the loving embrace of the suite’s bedcovers. After locking the door and shoving something heavy in front of it, of course.

  “So,” Paris said, “what happened with the watch?”

  I looked up. It was a strangely selfish question but I was curious, too.

  “The watch?” Cooley said. “Or the friend caught wearing it?”

  “Both,” Paris said, giving me a glance. “Of course that’s what I meant. What happened with that situation?”

  “The watch is being tested for evidence and will be returned to the victim’s estate.”

  Paris chewed at her bottom lip.

  “And Sam?” I prompted.

  “He’s chosen to stay in town for a bit longer,” Cooley said. “And the other one, too. The blondey.”

  “When is Dev coming out to pick up his things?” Paris asked, leaning forward. She looked hopeful.

  “Eventually,” the officer said.

  “And Martha?” I said.

  “Right,” Paris said. “Where’s Martha?”

  “I already took her over and left her with the officer on duty there,” Cooley said. “Cooley’s Taxi Service.”

  Paris looked out the window. “She didn’t want to be in the car with us.”

  “Didn’t say that,” Cooley said.

  But no other reason was offered.

  “You can have the same deal, a half hour to pack up your things,” Cooley said. “I got to run back one more time for the rest of them. We only ask while you’re in the house that no one messes with the room where, uh . . .”

  “Malloy,” I said.

  “Yes. His room. And the kitchen. It would be helpful if you stayed out of there until we’ve had a little more time to process the scene. Basically, try to touch as little as possible. Get in, get out.”

  Paris was smiling. When she caught me looking at her, she turned away. I went back over the conversation until I saw the conclusion she had reached. Cooley was running another trip between the motel and the guest house. Dev would arrive in the next run, and in close quarters once again, she’d have the chance to turn him around.