Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  “Paris is such a drama queen,” Sam said. “That stupid damn pear. Man, I never want to see that thing again.”

  It seemed a pretty rough thing to say. He might not be bothered with a text from Paris ever again. But he wasn’t thinking clearly, which seemed like too good a chance to pass up.

  “So whose idea was this trip, Sam?” I said. “Yours?”

  “Like we ever did anything I wanted to do,” Sam said.

  “Except drink wine,” I said.

  “Except drink wine,” he agreed. “Good wine, not that swill—shhh.” In a lowered voice, he started again: “The swill they probably sell here. Hey! You’re not drinking.”

  I drank my shot but didn’t refill the glass or Hillary’s when I refilled his. We all threw back our glasses, and I refilled his again. He was outpacing me by double, Hillary maybe by threefold. The warmth of the drink pooled around my knees. I should have been on the floor, but the alcohol only made me bold. “Was the vacation Malloy’s idea?”

  “Ha,” he scoffed. “Malloy didn’t want to hang out with us. He had her—” He hooked his thumb at Hillary. “You. And before that, no. Not Malloy’s idea.”

  “He didn’t want to hang with you?” This was interesting, considering he was their best—all their best—friend. But hadn’t he said as much to me? It wasn’t even close to his idea.

  “I don’t even know who made the arrangements,” Hillary said. “It wasn’t me or Malloy.”

  “Dev did,” I said. “Martha said so, and at the office after we met up at the house, he realized he’d misunderstood there was a suite. Was it Dev’s idea to get together, Sam?”

  “Dev is the busiest of all of us,” he said. “He’s too busy being Mr. Important Doctor to ever do anything fun.”

  “What about Paris? If she wanted to see Malloy,” Hillary said. “Maybe she suggested the idea and got Dev to set it up?”

  The idea had merit. Dev did whatever Paris wanted, retrieved for her everything she ever desired. Even Malloy? Did it make sense that he would allow her even this, to make the arrangements for her to see the man she actually wanted to be with?

  “Maybe he thought if Paris saw Malloy again,” I said, “especially now when he was dating you, Hillary, that maybe she would snap out of the hold Malloy had on her.”

  “And get married,” Hillary said.

  “Finally,” Sam said. He belched and reached for the bottle to peer at the label. “This stuff is fire. I’m pretty sure this says it was distributed from the seventh ring of hell. It is awful small print, though. So maybe I’m wrong.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  My eye twitched. I held my finger against it and judged the quality of blue at the slice of sky visible in the window of the bar. Time was falling away. “So whose ideas do you always have to follow, Sam, if you never get to suggest anything?”

  He blanched. “I know what you’re doing. You keep trying to trick me into saying something about my friends.”

  “She’s just trying to get some answers,” Hillary said. She looked at me. “Though I have no idea why.”

  “Well, I still think one of you is the most likely killer.” Sam had to enunciate carefully around the words and then tried it again. “Likely killer.”

  One of the men at the bar cast an eye over us.

  Hillary leaned in closer. “I loved him. I would have done anything for him.”

  “Anything to get him, maybe,” Sam said darkly.

  “What does that mean?” she said.

  “I know you’re a liar.”

  She glanced my way. I shrugged and poured him another shot. I hadn’t said anything about Angel to anyone. “Tell us about it,” I said. If he had managed somehow to hack into the pipeline of gossip to hear about Angel, this was good information. I had not considered Sam to be the hub of the group, but maybe he was the one they all trusted. He was cuddly-looking, innocent. Hadn’t I let him into my motel room without even considering he might be the one who killed Malloy? He inspired confidence. But maybe that was how he’d walked out of his place of business with a considerable amount of liquid compensation.

  “This bar is nothing like Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap,” he said. “But you wouldn’t know that because you never went to the University of Chicago, did you?”

  “Just because I don’t remember what a college bar looks like doesn’t mean—”

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “I sent that photo I took of you and Malloy at the water that day to my sister. Had you dead to rights”—here he made a gun with his hand and pulled the trigger—“before we even got back from the viewing spot. I knew you looked familiar.”

  Hillary’s face was flat, unreadable. What had Angel said on the phone that night? That Hillary had worked so hard getting her GED. It hadn’t occurred to me: Would a prestigious university accept someone on those terms? A university that could probably afford to be highly selective?

  “Familiar?” I said to Sam.

  “Like, from-the-news familiar,” he said.

  “Let me out,” she said, shoving her leg into mine.

  “What did you do?”

  “You go immediately to what did I do, just like the rest of them.”

  “She assaulted a University of Chicago recruiter,” Sam said. He picked up his shot glass, considered the liquid inside, and then put it down. “It was in the student paper. Big headlines on campus. I don’t know how much play it got elsewhere.”

  “I didn’t assault him,” she hissed. “He’s the one—”

  “Trading sexual favors for an acceptance letter,” Sam said. “Prostitute U—”

  “That’s not what happened!’

  “My sister remembered you right away because she was on the newspaper staff. Boy, she went to town on that story. Trying to get her Pulitzer by twenty, I guess. She’s at the Trib now.” He seemed to lose track of things for a second, and then came back to the story. “I asked her to send me the article—wait, I’ll see if she found it.” He patted his pockets.

  “They took your phone,” I said impatiently.

  “Oh, right.”

  “Let me out, I said,” Hillary growled. “Or I’ll tell this entire bar what your husband did—”

  “My husband was a drunk driver,” I announced. The two guys at the bar didn’t even turn around. Only the bartender paused to look my way. “He killed himself and four other people. A family plus—” For a moment the words were difficult to get through. “He cheated on me.” The bartender nodded once. It felt like a transaction. Satisfying, in a way. I had bought some freedom here, and maybe a small dram of respect, though I didn’t want that. I didn’t deserve that. I poured another shot and sank it.

  “Shit,” Sam breathed.

  “And this guy,” I said loudly, directing attention toward Sam, “is probably wanted for grand larceny back wherever he’s from—”

  “Hey!” Sam cried.

  “So, you can sit your ass down and tell us what really happened,” I said to Hillary.

  She slid deep into the booth and stared down at the table, her hair hiding her face.

  “How old were you?” I said.

  “High school. A sophomore. He promised me he could get me into that school, and I believed him.” She shot me a look. “That young.”

  “Angel’s dad?”

  She nodded.

  “Who’s Angel?” Sam said.

  “And when I showed up at the school, he called the cops,” Hillary said. “He made up some story about the bribes I’d been offering him. He had a few emails . . . he patched them together so they told the story he wanted to tell. They didn’t investigate much. Who was I? Just some poor pregnant kid from Indiana with a diploma from the night school for poor pregnant kids.”

  “Did you go to college anywhere?”

  She glanced between us.

  “No, then,” I said. “And how old are you really?”

  “Only a couple years older than Malloy,” she said. “I never lied about that. He knew.”
>
  “But the rest of it . . .”

  She shrugged.

  “So your résumé is a lie and your career is built on a faked degree.”

  “Faked identity,” Sam said. “Hillary isn’t her real name.”

  Hillary’s gaze turned to him, hot and deadly, and then it was gone. But I’d seen the presence of resentment.

  But Hillary wouldn’t have killed Malloy, not when he represented the way out. A woman who loved him or even only loved what he could do for her and her kid didn’t need to kill. Unless—

  Faked identity? Faked, not changed.

  My memory reached for those legal papers in my suitcase. What had Malloy added to that will? If he had added Hillary to it, that name change might let some unnecessary air into the legal proceedings. Was that motive? For Hillary? Or for someone else?

  My eye leapt. The filmstrip skipped off the reel and then righted itself. At the table with me, a liar, a thief. And me? We had all three of us dumped our secrets out onto the table, a pile of ill-gotten gold. Nothing about this felt good. Nothing at all made any sense.

  The bottle half gone, we all switched to water. The patch of blue in the wall had turned to a pale noncolor of early sunset. I’d have to leave soon. “Tell me about your friends.”

  Sam’s eyes were slits, but not from suspicion. I imagined he was having trouble keeping me in focus. “You just want to put them in jail.”

  “I’m not the police,” I said. “And if one of your friends killed the other, don’t you want that person to go to jail?”

  “Stop it,” he said. The words were soft and sibilant. Hillary leaned in to hear better.

  “He said, ‘stop it,’” I said.

  He repeated himself. “Stop using . . . logic and—what’s another word?”

  “Lucidity,” Hillary said.

  “Reason, maybe?”

  “All of that,” he said. “I get enough of that lawyerliness from Martha—oh, God, Martha, no.” He dropped his head and pressed his fists into his eye sockets.

  Hillary had too much lucidity of her own. I didn’t want her sidetracked by what he would be moaning about next. “Let’s save Martha for another time,” I said pointedly. “OK, Sam?”

  “She’s OK, isn’t she?” Hillary looked at my hand in its splint and packing. “What actually happened today? It was Paris who crashed through the bannister, right?”

  “Paris, oh, God, no,” Sam groaned, something of the livestock barn brought inside. The customers at the bar and our hostess all tended to us now.

  “OK, time to go,” I said.

  “Wait,” he said, holding out his hand to Hillary. “The bannister? You mean—the one at the top, over the living room?”

  “The rail broke and she fell through it?” Hillary said, looking at me for confirmation. I watched Sam.

  Sam shook his head, as though trying to clear it, blinking. “You said,” he said, to me. “You said she fell down the stairs.”

  I had. I hadn’t meant to lie. “Not exactly.”

  “But that can’t be. No, that’s not right.” He put his head in his hands, then looked up, angry. “That’s not possible! That means—”

  He slammed his hand on the table.

  “Hey, get him out of here,” the bartender said from her station. “Come on.”

  Between the two of us, we got him upright and moving toward the door. His rage had given way to crying.

  “You left your bottle,” one of the men at the bar said.

  “Keep it,” I said.

  “I’ll keep it for you,” the bartender said. “You’ll be back.” I desperately hoped she was wrong.

  Sam’s feet dragged across the threshold out into the parking lot. The sky was bright but pink, yellow, the beginnings of a gorgeous sunset, if you liked that kind of thing.

  “He’s staying . . . with you?” Hillary said.

  “Holy shit, no,” I said. “He was only in my room because he locked himself out. I told you—they are all strangers to me. I only know them as well as I know you, which it turns out is not that well.”

  She gave me her profile. “I don’t know any of them, either. Or—Malloy, really, if you want to know the truth. We weren’t even together a year.”

  “Three months, you said.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “Three months. You can’t cut me even a little break, can you?” She struggled under Sam’s arm and jostled him higher onto her shoulder. “I won’t even rate in his obituary, you know? Girlfriend. What would it even say that would be the truth? His family—I haven’t met them. We were so new. And yet, it wasn’t new anymore. He felt like home to me. He felt just like . . . going home. I can’t explain it well.”

  It all sounded whirlwind and romantic, not unlike my own ill-conceived marriage—and yet. I hadn’t read the will from Martha’s bag yet, but the presence of a will, to me, meant the presence of money. Malloy hadn’t seemed like a person to flaunt his wealth, all his talk of pilgrims, his beat-up car, and the gift of an expensive watch that had no real place in his life. But the presence of money could be easily researched, collected, stored. It could be targeted.

  I was too hard on people. That was the thing that Bix had always said about me, the thing that was true. He didn’t just mean that I was too hard on him. No. I was impatient at cashier lines, with chitchat among waitstaff, with bankers, with Girl Scouts at the door. What he meant was that I had no charity. I had no humanity.

  Maybe those were the words he used to make himself feel better, but I knew how right he was. And here under the darkening skies of this place, I had had a few chances to practice virtue. Empathy, at least. But I had failed. I was failing. If I did nothing different than I ever had, I would return home the same husk of a human he’d seen me for.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Hillary and I paused to catch our breath and to allow someone coming down to get by. The woman wore a blue jacket that caught at her hips and cheap dress shoes with beads at the toes, out of place for the season and for daytime, really, anywhere. Something about those shoes and the shape of her in that jacket made me look twice, but then Hillary was pulling me toward the stairs and I had come to a decision about the person I had decided to be.

  “Maybe they’ll include you,” I said to Hillary. “In the obituary. It doesn’t hurt to ask.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  For one of my photography classes, I had brought in a photo of Bix I’d taken. He’s sitting in an outdoor bar in Wrigleyville, near the baseball stadium, his hopeful striped Cubs jersey gone to black and white in the dimness of the place. He’s sitting along the sidewalk, people in similar fan wear walking away over his shoulder. I can’t tell from his demeanor or theirs if the team had won or lost that day.

  I think they lost. They’d been losing early, and it was spitting rain. We sneaked out to the bar, to get better beer.

  Quality-wise, the photo did not represent my ideal work. I spent the next twenty frames trying to capture a certain glow from the streetlight on his beer glass. The snap of Bix was just a throwaway. His face was a little blurry because he’d been turning his head away from me when the shutter closed. Click. But he was smiling, a laugh caught in the wild. His movement only increased the width of the grin, dragging the white of his teeth across the image, feral. There was the strength of his jaw, brightness of his eyes, mirth and joy. And then, in the sweep of his face, something hideous.

  In my class, the other students tore that photo apart. That’s how it went. If they loved a photo, they said a few supportive things, though no one gushed. Envy was too strong among them. The instructor took his turn next. He was a guy who had worked as a staff photographer for the Sun-Times for decades before they cut their entire staff, who wore a khaki vest with safari pockets that had probably once held all manner of lenses and rolls of actual film, back when film was used. His commitment to teaching was tenuous. He might spend more time on an image he found promising. But I had discerned a sort of melancholy in him, too, as though every imag
e he thought had promise would have been better if only he’d been the one to take it. If it had been his own work, and also taken twenty years prior. Nothing of this world was good enough. He would have liked to ban digital cameras from the classroom, but the university wouldn’t let him. They had dismantled all but one small darkroom for a new faculty lounge. The faculty smoked in there; you could smell it.

  The teacher never said he hated a student’s photograph. I simply began to understand that he hated everything until proven otherwise. But when the other students loathed a print someone had brought in, they were confident in their hatred—and loud. A pack of dogs let loose.

  They had been overly polite to all the submissions prior to mine the night I showed them my photo of Bix. Penned in, until the gate opened. After a full round of torture, everyone agreed. The image of Bix had no merit, was a mistake, was not fit for human eyes. After that, we moved on.

  After class, I held back so that I wouldn’t have to spend any more time with them. But the teacher stayed, too. He picked the print from the display where it sat alone as the room emptied. He held the print of Bix on the palm of his hand for an extra beat before offering it to me. “Half handsome, half monster,” he said, his voice almost a low hum for its monotony. “Not bad but accidental, I think. A portrait is better if it reveals character. Maybe it’s like him, even so?”

  Which is what I had not allowed myself to understand. Why had I brought the image in for the class’s derision, when its value lay somewhere far more private than even between myself and myself? Why had it been my favorite? Maybe, I came to understand much too late, I had brought it in to test my own theory, that I was married to someone I didn’t fully know. That I was married to a man with secrets. That I was married to the devil, smiling.

  That image of Bix came to me unbidden as Hillary and I dragged Sam up the stairs to his room in the Hide-a-Way. I stopped short with the memory—it stung anew—and felt Sam’s body weight shift in a cataclysmic way toward the void below.

  Hillary and I both yanked him forward, almost sending him into the window of the room at the top of the stairs. He sagged between us as we caught our breath and regained our nerves. Below, someone getting into a car parked on the street slowed to watch what we were up to.