Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  They’d bagged up the bottle, the cups. They’d put me away in the squad car in the parking lot, someone’s coat thrown over my head to keep me from beating at the black windows. Best they could do. They’d taken my camera.

  Now Barrows and I sat on opposite sides of the cold slab of table at the police station, the same clock-less room.

  Barrows had a stack of folders at his elbow, but he hadn’t brought anything forth from them. They were for show, I was sure, in the same way the room was kept at meat-locker temperatures. I was the meat. The coat had been returned to its owner, and my T-shirt was no match against the cold. I had wrapped my arms around myself for warmth, knowing that I must look strung out and guilty. I was strung out. I was guilty, too—of certain things.

  I’d have said this was the longest night of my life, but there had been so many. The last nine months flowed together like one, long dreamless night, the sky never black. Tonight, somehow, the end of it.

  I folded myself in two, my pounding head resting on the table. My tongue was thick in my mouth. “Can I get an aspirin?”

  “I’ll get you sorted just as soon as I understand a few things,” Barrows said. I hadn’t seen Officer Cooley. Her absence felt strangely like a rebuke. “Like what you put in that booze—”

  “Nothing,” I snapped. “Ask the bartender. I was drinking it all afternoon. So were Sam and Hillary.”

  “They’re a-OK,” Barrows said. “Alive, at least, though fairly hungover, especially that guy. Sam. What about . . . how are all those young people traipsing in and out of your room at the motel when you’re so-called strangers?”

  I had no good answer for that. Because I was stupid. Because I had let my guard down, again and again. Because I was too focused on the surface of things to notice what went on beneath them. Because I was waiting for things to go how they would go. It would not be the first time that character trait had bitten me in the ass.

  “An aspirin is waiting on the other side of you telling me what happened to that young man,” he said. “With that young man. He has a pretty girlfriend, a fiancée, over in the hospital, so I know I must be reading too much into this.”

  “He carried my suitcase,” I said, pressing a hand to my head.

  “Sure, sure. All innocent,” he said. His voice was singsongy, as though he could get me to hum along. “Tell me you got that girl out of the way, so you could get at her boyfriend.”

  I looked up. “What? I had nothing to do with what happened to Paris, and if you asked any of the three other people who witnessed it, including your own officer—”

  “I know you weren’t in the fracas,” he said. “But a little woodworking done beforehand, a little shove in the right direction . . .”

  “I didn’t shove anyone,” I said. “I wasn’t even on the same floor, and I don’t have designs on—any of them. Any kind of designs. That’s just a . . . distraction.” I couldn’t help thinking that Barrows keeping me cooped up in this town was half the problem. Who wouldn’t go crazy, stuck as we were? “Wait—woodworking?”

  “That railing didn’t crack,” he said, stern now instead of crooning. “Not the rail itself. It was loose at the wall, probably hanging by a thread by the time she was up against it. Of course we don’t know if it worked itself loose or if someone helped it out.” He pushed the stack of folders out in front of him. “The place covered in fingerprints, the timeline unknown. Anyone who’s ever stayed in the guest house could have had a hand in it.” He sucked his teeth. “So to speak. Our first goal is to narrow the field a bit.”

  “OK.” I didn’t know what he was getting at. It seemed like he wanted to tell me something. “How do you do that?”

  “Glad you asked,” he said. “We ask a few questions, of course. Such as, Mrs. Wallace, have you ever stayed at the Straits Point Park’s guest house before this week?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  The tone he’d adopted made me nervous, but I was certain about this. “Absolutely sure.”

  “Fine. And then we collect what are called elimination fingerprints from all the witnesses—you and all the current guests, you’ll remember, had your prints taken early on. Of course we can’t eliminate any of you at the moment. What we can do is go through the fingerprints we’ve pulled from the house now on two occasions and find out who’s been hanging around at the top of those stairs.”

  I had been. I’d surely grabbed at the railing as Paris shoved me against it. “I told you already,” I said, sullenly. “I was at the railing earlier. I heard it groan. Paris and I both could have gone over.”

  “Lucky for you,” he murmured. “You didn’t.”

  “But—” I held my head in my hands. I had something gnawing at me, wanting to be remembered. And then the image developed from the mist of memory. The day I arrived, Sam had been perched high above the room on that same railing, sneakers dangling.

  “Sam,” I said.

  “Sam’s the one?” Barrows said, leaning forward. “How do you know?”

  “No, I meant to say—the day we arrived, Sam was sitting on the bannister talking with Martha.” My exhaustion fell away. “He wasn’t just resting against it. He was sitting on it with all his weight.”

  “He’s a pudgy guy,” Barrows said, resting his hand on his own gut.

  “He has to outweigh Paris by—I don’t know—forty, fifty pounds. Or more. Surely if it was going to break, it would have broken on him. So that means—”

  “That means it got loosened up this weekend,” he said. “That narrows the field right down. One of you fiddled with that rail with an eye toward another of you leaning too hard on it.”

  “That’s a poor plan for murder,” I said. “How could you know who would be near it? Or if anyone would put any weight on it at all? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s a certain amount of chance being introduced, but if you think about it, maybe there’s some sense, too.”

  I couldn’t think about it. My head hurt. My eye twitched. I didn’t want to look too directly at the sheriff or, frankly, the situation. Five former classmates and a guest enter the guest house with an interloper, and one by one the friends meet with disaster? For a moment, I was back there, watching from above as though I had been standing at that faulty railing. The friends, gathered around Malloy, drawn close. Malloy, Paris, now Dev, somehow poisoned. I counted them out, picturing little red grease pencil X’s over each of them. And then suddenly I saw the sense of it. It didn’t matter who leaned their weight against the railing. One of them had.

  “All of them?” I said. “Someone is trying to kill all of them?”

  “Someone.”

  “I know what you want to believe,” I said. “But I don’t have any reason to do it. You’re wasting your time on me and meanwhile— God, Warren was right.”

  Barrows’s top lip curled a bit. “Right about what?”

  “He said you wouldn’t—”

  We stared at one another. Finishing the sentence seemed like a bad idea.

  “I need to— I’m so tired. I need to go.”

  “Go where? You got someone expecting you?”

  The guest house was a crime scene. The motel room was presumably being combed over now and also off-limits. “Is there another room at the Hide-a-Way?”

  “All full up. A number of surprise guests in the last twenty-four hours.”

  I swallowed the bile in my throat.

  “Reporters. Parents of those kids. The first one’s folks showed up this morning and now the parents of that girl. I suppose that fellow tonight will have parents, too.” He rubbed at his chin, looking me over. “I noticed no one came rushing up to your side.”

  I gave him the look he deserved. “I’m a widow.”

  “My condolences et cetera. When was this again?”

  “What?”

  “When your husband died.”

  “Nine months ago.”

  He nodded, contemplating the folders in front of
him. “So he’s not coming to your rescue.” He lowered his voice. “But I’m wondering where everybody else is. Aren’t you wondering?”

  I wrapped my arms around my stomach more tightly. I was shaking, though I wasn’t sure why. I should have asked Michele to come up for me. She’d offered, and I’d turned her down, afraid of needing her, of always needing someone. Maybe I should have asked for a lawyer by now. I had not been smart. I had been thinking the best of people, seeing everyone in the best light, though this was a strategy that had already failed.

  “Whenever someone sits in front of me and I don’t hear banging on the door to let them out,” Barrows continued, “I wonder who it is I’m really dealing with.”

  He stood up, stretched, and pushed his chair in. Taking his time. “Did you know? Even the worst of them have someone along, fighting for ’em, snapping the heads off my front-desk sergeant. Wife beaters, child rapists, murderers. Drunk drivers. They all got someone coming to tell me I’m all wrong about the accused. Who are you that you don’t? What are you?”

  I stood up. He stepped back, surprised by the sudden movement.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Well, I thought of a bed that would be free,” I said.

  “Where’s that?”

  In bad taste, I thought of Dev’s room at the Hide-a-Way. Free for the night, surely. “The jail.”

  He lit up. “What charges would you suggest?”

  “Assaulting a police officer,” I said, leaning on the chair I’d vacated. Barrows flinched. “Save me the trouble. I’m exhausted.”

  “Is that a threat?” Barrows tapped the gun holster at his hip with a single finger.

  “It’s a plea,” I said. “We both know I can’t leave this place tonight, now that it’s dark outside. And at least if I’m in jail, and someone else gets hurt, you’ll know it wasn’t me. Once and for all.”

  Barrows shook his head. “Keeping you close by is not the worst idea I ever heard. I’ll be wanting to talk to you again. And again. And again, until we get this sorted out. At least until we know if that fella tonight makes it out of the hospital.”

  He picked up his file folders and went to the door.

  “You never stayed on at the park before. You’re sure?”

  I nodded. I was sure. I thought I was sure.

  He was gaslighting me now, trying to make me uncertain of my own motives and moves. They did this sort of thing, didn’t they? For false confessions. I steadied myself. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Strike that. I hadn’t done anything against the law. “Why are you so sure I’ve been here before?”

  “Not you,” he said, opening the door and beckoning someone from the hall. “But I found a dead man in our crime scene. A different dead man than the one being mopped up. Your husband, of all people, crawled right out of the woodwork.”

  His words wouldn’t turn over in my mind. My husband what?

  Another officer came to the door, tall and not a hint of nonsense about him. In my shock, I had the feeling that the tall man was somehow canted toward me, looming. I backed up a step. Perez, his name tag said. Barrows motioned to me. Officer Perez had no reason to question the sheriff’s orders. He approached and gently put one arm and then the other behind my back.

  I let myself be manacled. Barrows was talking but I couldn’t follow what he was saying. I interrupted him. “Wait,” I said, barely able to force the words out. “My husband what? What?”

  “He had a prior arrest—”

  “That was a misunderstanding,” I said. That guy had tricked Bix into helping him break and enter. He had faced no charges, in the end. Bix, damn it, and his situations. “The other guy—”

  “Regardless,” he said. “His prints were in the system and—”

  “He’s been dead for— What could he possibly—”

  “Just listen for a damn minute,” Barrows barked. “A latent fingerprint left by your husband—almost half his hand, that’s no mistake, no possible way around it—was recovered from the scene.” He waved us out of the room.

  “But—”

  “Until I know why, I don’t mind extending a little hospitality, since you asked so nicely. We’ll call it for your own safety. Suicide watch. You’ve just had some bad news.”

  Weak, I let Perez lead me away from Barrows, down a hall, down a set of concrete stairs, and into a bleak, fluorescent-lit hall lined with a handful of empty cells, two left, two right. The cell was concrete on three sides, with a heavy wire cage door. A toilet in the wall, a comfortless cot with no bedding. I framed the scene in my mind, a photo I would never take. The theme? Loss of hope. End of the road. The cell had no windows. It could have been any time of day or night. It didn’t matter. It was definitely night, at last.

  Somewhere nearby, there was someone talking in an even voice. A radio, maybe.

  I had the oddest feeling as the officer led me into the cell and released my hands from the cuffs. I turned and watched the door slide closed with a clang. This was real. I was living this moment. What if I could go back in time and tell the three-years-ago me, the five-years-ago me, that this moment existed in our future? Standing on the cold floor of a jail cell, listening to the slammed metal door hum like a bell rung? What would that past me make of this? How had I brought us both to this place? Into this cell, this town I’d never planned to visit, this state I didn’t live in—this life I had screwed up. Where was Bix? That’s the question former me would resort to.

  Where was Bix? Was it possible—? What did latent mean?

  The officer turned to go. “Wait,” I said. “Do you know how long a fingerprint can last?”

  He stopped and looked me over. “Years, at least.”

  The flutter of hope in my chest turned tight and choking. Of course. He was dead. I knew that. I had chosen clothes for his broken body myself. “How long can they hold me without charges?”

  This one he wasn’t sure he wanted to answer. He hadn’t pegged me for a troublemaker. “Twenty-four hours,” he said, curt.

  “Great,” I said. My voice was tiny and childlike, bouncing against the walls. “I need at least that many hours of sleep.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The fluorescent light outside my cell flickered. The slab on which I had invited myself to sleep was even less comfortable than I had assumed. No prison-issued blankets or pillows had been offered. I curled up on my side and pulled my arms into the sleeves of my T-shirt. The only positive thinking I could manage was that I had the cell and the hall to myself. And it was safe. Maybe. I lay on the slab and breathed into the neck of my shirt for the warmth.

  The sputter of the light, the flutter of my eyelid. It was better to close my eyes. I was wired. I would never sleep. The voice on the radio from down the hall drifted in, reached like a hand. The voice said . . . the voice said . . .

  The moon? And he called it she.

  “She’s always a woman, isn’t she?” the voice said. “In the myths and legends, she’s a goddess, a sister, a maiden, a round-faced girl turned into the mother of our night sky. In the pocked surface of the moon, other cultures might see a rabbit or a set of giant handprints . . .”

  Giant set of handprints? Horrible. I didn’t like to think of it, but then I did. I thought about the moon, because the calming voice had asked. The rabbit, the lady, the face of a man laughing down on us. The same face, always. I had learned at some point that we only ever saw the bright side of the moon because—

  “. . . because the mass of the moon isn’t evenly distributed, Earth’s gravity keeps one face—the more delicate and puckered side—toward us. The highlands, the shiny peaks, which aren’t mountains but the edges of overlapping crater rims, from impact with debris. Even those smooth dark areas, the ‘seas’ you hear so much about—they aren’t formed by water. Altogether, the lunar map features twenty seas, fourteen bays, twenty lakes, and one ocean—and hardly any water to speak of.”

  Thirsty. I wished for a drink of water. The voice was
muffled for a moment, faint. I willed it to come back, to keep talking to me. Tell me about the seas that are not seas. Tell me about the lakes that are not lakes. Tell me about the one lake created by two.

  “—all made through impact. Basically, the moon gets hit with a lot of sh—stuff. It has no atmosphere, like the earth, to deflect or burn up stuff. She is up there, our moon, no protection, taking every bit of it on the chin. Thin-skinned as heck, from all the things she’s already lived through. She’s a pretty lady, bright, lovely, tough . . .”

  Tough. It was fine to think so.

  “Tougher than she thinks,” the voice said. “Tougher than she feels right now. She casts a spell, though. Get out there and take a look.”

  Cold, dark, distant. The moon was a rabbit-faced lady. I was a rabbit-faced lady. I was a rabbit. I was small, tightened into a fist against the cold. Everything hurt.

  “Why don’t you sit down for a while?” a new voice said. My sister.

  My back hurt. These shoes. I shifted from foot to foot. I would not lay my hand on the casket. I would not.

  “Sit down,” Michele said. “No one will mind. They’ll understand. I can bring you a drink.”

  Yes, please.

  “Not that kind of drink.”

  I’ve given it up anyway.

  “For now,” Michele said. “Until—oh, no. What’s this about? Stay here.”

  People are bending down into my vision to say things, quiet things and well-meant things. I’m afraid I won’t remember the kindnesses. What I’m noticing are those who are not there. The condolences not murmured or mailed. There are people who have texted me to say things that cannot be said in so few words. There are people I haven’t heard a word from, who have faded into the past tense in my mind. I don’t want to be the person who sorts, who keeps count. Where has that gotten me? Here.

  Michele is back, and she’s pulling me by the elbow. “She needs a break,” she says. I think she means me. “I’m sure you can understand.”