Wide awake and preoccupied with my assignment, I didn’t notice the night fall. In the small hours of morning, I might have even gotten a few hours of sleep if I’d thought to try. But I had remembered Photoship and reached to unplug my phone. Paris and the others had said they kept in touch there, hadn’t they? I’d not had a phone and reception in the same place all weekend to check it out. I pulled up the app and waded in.
How to find any of the friends there, though? I hadn’t learned any of their last names. But wait—I did know the full name of one of them, thanks to his will. Patrick Malloy Halloway.
I shouldn’t have worried. He had found a way to go by Malloy, simply Malloy, which made him quite easy to find. I paged through his photos, the phone’s glow on my face. People laughing, someone’s cute dog, someone’s red-faced baby growing into a pigtailed little girl in saggy diapers, marathoners lined up with their numbers pinned to their chests, Malloy in the middle. In every image, Malloy in the middle. The last few weeks, he had uploaded an astounding number of photos of himself, with Hillary.
Through those photos, I found Hillary’s profile, too. Her images, it seemed to me, had been carefully curated to avoid including Angel and work. Nothing much was left to document other than the last three months of happiness. Malloy and Hillary over a checked table cloth, Malloy and Hillary in hiking gear on a trail. Malloy and Hillary, a photo he’d taken himself, his arm stretched out to hold the camera high. They’d taken a lot of their photos that way, always just the two of them. Where had Angel been, all this time? She was part of the story, too, even if no one except Barrows and me knew about her.
Sam’s collection of images was tidy and spare. Wine labels, a few corks with the name of the winery printed on them, a couple of nice landscapes. Vineyards. And then a few photos of Sam with other people. Work friends? There was something staid and reserved to Sam in these pictures; he seemed like a different person altogether.
At this, I remembered the blankness of his rooms at the guest house and motel, his neat wardrobe, no reading material, no amusements. You knew a person through the way they spent their time, but I had no hold on Sam. Just as the sheriff wondered about me, because no one rushed forward to my defense, I wondered about Sam. Who was he?
Paris’s Photoship profile was jammed with photos she had taken and uploaded, saved, shared, or had had taken of her, shared by other people. She was a star in every image, a beacon, central to every group—
A head injury. A lot depended on her waking up soon, whole. How much would she be dimmed? The photos I thumbed through showed what a terrible loss it would be.
After a little trouble tracking down Martha’s profile through her friends, I finally discovered her under the name “Marty.” Sure, OK. A nickname on a public site kept her law colleagues, and her clients, out of her private life. Plus, Malloy had called her that, bringing out the dimples. The photos she shared were mostly other people’s, reshared: flowers from a garden, a misspelled roadside sign, a decadent dessert.
Very few photos of Martha had been connected to her profile. There were a couple of old photos, one of Martha with another girl’s arm thrown around her shoulders. The setting was a dorm room, maybe, the walls covered in posters. I paged through her photos until I found one of the whole group hanging around a picnic table, throwing peace signs and flipping off the photographer. The background was an anonymous patch of green. Paris’s hair was out of its braids and big, dramatic; Malloy’s sideburns were too long. Sam wore a regrettable argyle sweater vest. Dev, sporting a short beard that didn’t suit him, was half in profile, eyes on Paris. She really was beautiful. They all were, chewing the scenery with their beauty, with youth. Martha sat at the end of the bench, dimples in place, happily surrounded.
Who was behind the camera? But I knew that, too. Tash.
My phone was quickly losing charge again, so I plugged it in and lay on the bed with it, my hand over the edge so the cord could reach the wall.
For a moment I wavered. It would be so easy to click over to the much-visited memorial websites and check in with a few comment sections I had been trying to wean myself from.
No. Not time to wallow.
Tash. I scrolled back to the image of Martha and the other girl. What was there to learn about the woman who had brought all these people together? Barrows knew about Angel; he had probably dealt the presence of Angel into this poker game. But did he know about Tash? Malloy had never gotten the chance to tell me—how had he phrased it?—the sordid details. What was there to tell about Tash?
Natasha, Michigan State University, about five years ago? Was it enough for a trail?
It was. I was not surprised to see that she had died not approximately five years ago, but precisely five years ago. They were here for an anniversary, too, just as Paris claimed. Just not a happy one.
I read, not minding the dark and then not noticing the orange fingers of sunrise that reached through a breach in the curtain. I read until they came for me one more time.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The knock on the door was quiet but insistent. And early. I peeked out the curtain. A neat man in Sheriff’s Department browns stood out on the walkway of the motel. When I opened the door, he said, looking over my shoulder, “I’m to take you in for more questions. You and—” He consulted a piece of paper in his palm. “I think this says Holly?”
“Hillary,” I said, yawning and pointing to the room two doors down. My eyes were bleary. I’d fallen asleep at some point after dawn, the phone falling from my hand and unplugging itself. It hadn’t fully charged, but the clock worked. The man at my door looked familiar. After a few blinks, I placed the formal demeanor and his inability to look me in the eye. This was Officer Perez, the one who’d shut me up in the jail. “What’s happening? Why so early?”
“Don’t know. Sheriff said to come fetch you. And to be quiet about it.”
He went to knock on Hillary’s door. The door between opened and Martha stuck her head out. “What’s happening?”
Had she been there the whole time? Minus a night in the hospital? “Not sure,” I said. “We have to go to the police station again.”
“I’ll get dressed.”
“They didn’t ask for—” But her door closed. Who was I to say they didn’t need her, anyway? I should have insisted on a lawyer a long time ago.
“Bring your bags,” Perez said to me while he waited for Hillary’s door to crack open. She appeared with bleary, puffy eyes. “You, too, ma’am,” he said. “You’re both checking out now.”
Hillary peered around the doorjamb to see who had been included in the invitation and then disappeared again. I retreated, too, quickly throwing things at my half-jumbled suitcase. Pajamas, wet toothbrush in, jeans and T-shirt out. At the last minute, I pulled out the fleece Warren had lent me, for the cold station. Cautiously optimistic it was the last time I would need it. I was going home.
Perez and Martha chatted pleasantly by his car as I dragged my suitcase down the stairs, clacking with every step. Hillary was just behind, dragging her case at her heels and blinking into the severe slant of the early sun. Perez hurried up the stairs and took our cases from us, lifting them and walking carefully. How quiet? Avoiding-the-reporters quiet?
“What about the others?” Martha said.
“Who are we missing?” Hillary said. “Paris is in the hospital, Malloy—” She recovered herself. “Dev is—Eden, how is Dev?”
Perez rolled our cases to our feet and scratched at his chin. “At least one of them’s at the station already.”
Ominous. Martha and I met eyes. He could only mean Sam or Dev. Martha hopped into the front seat, leaving Hillary and me to shove our cases into the backseat between us, a barrier that we treated as impermeable all the way to the station.
Inside, the lobby was full of people I didn’t know. After a few seconds, they sorted themselves. Paris’s parents, maybe a sister. Everyone jangled and paced, except a white-haired couple sitting quietly. D
ev rushed at us, brushing past me to accost Martha. “Tell him not to do it,” he said.
“What’s going on?” Martha said. The quiet couple had caught her eye. Malloy’s parents, had to be. Something was indeed going on. Hillary dropped her suitcase and hurried to them. I didn’t get the chance to see the introduction. Dev moved in the way, pressing for Martha’s attention.
“He’s—” He looked at me and turned Martha away.
“Mrs. Wallace,” Cooley said, leaning through the security door to the back. “You’re up.”
Martha marched up behind me. “No, not you,” Cooley said. “He’s turned down counsel. Especially yours. His words.”
Dev pulled Martha back into a huddle, everyone too busy talking to bother with me being taken out of the room. “What’s going on?” I whispered to Cooley.
“Can’t say, but who’s missing?”
I counted them out. Sam. “Where is he?”
She popped me into an interrogation room and closed the door. “He came to confess. Sheriff’s getting the story now.”
“He—confessed?” Sam? The day before I would have said he was a top prospect for the guilty party, but now the idea struck me as hollow. But that was just Sam: he was unknowable, blank. The only thing I knew about him was that he dealt in wine, but he’d been stripped of that. Without that, what was he? A killer? “He’s confessing to Malloy’s murder?”
Cooley huffed impatiently. “What else would he—never mind. He said he had things he wanted to say. So Sheriff’s in there with him now.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Why? Because he doesn’t look so tough? Don’t be fooled. Maybe he filed away a lot of resentment and snapped—”
“He snapped,” I said. “From what?”
“Hey, I don’t know,” she said. “Seeing his old-time friends again and everybody else has a job and a pretty girlfriend or a future, at least. Instead of getting to listen in, I’m arguing with you. So let’s just do this real quick and the sheriff said I can take you over to pick up your car.”
“Just like that.”
Her face twisted into disbelief. “You’ve been demoted from suspect to witness. Be happy about that. You’ve seen the jail, remember? Come on, sit. Start at the beginning and tell me what you think would be helpful to this case. You may be called up for the trial, you know. So on the day you arrived . . .”
I started to sort through the images. Wet swimming trunks on the newel post. A handsome couple, fighting as I arrived. Sam riding the stair rail.
I went through the day, snapping and sharing the photos that existed only in my head. An Adirondack chair with the slim peninsula in the background. Wine splashed out of a glass. Paris, her chin out, defending her bridesmaids’ yellow dresses. Malloy’s wry smile at his phone, when he must have received a text from Paris from my number. Later, Dev’s expression of disgust when he saw my phone case, presumably because he recognized it from Paris’s efforts with Malloy. The clearing, with the others paired off.
I skipped over the feeling I’d had there, of raw and hopeless panic, alone, small, against an endless universe. Grief as heavy as the world. Maybe I understood why Sam had done it, after all, if he had ever felt that vast emptiness from within. Was that it? It all came down to loneliness, of the loss of hope?
During certain crucial moments, no images were available in the memory bank other than the shadows cast on the wall of my room by the artificial light of the lamps. The noises in the kitchen, then the hall, the door slam.
“Were there no fingerprints on the back door?” I said. “From the person running out that night—there would be fingerprints, wouldn’t there?”
“The door was clean. Wiped.”
“When?” There’d been no time—but these were people who had stayed in the house waiting for the police, people who protected one another. Dev. Dev had been through the back door, with my phone to call the police. And then he’d led me through, covered in the blanket from my bed—hadn’t he lifted the edge of the cover at one point? My “train,” he’d called it, as I emerged into the night for the first time in nine months. But why? Because he had touched the door, too? Someone was buying up an insurance policy, there. I backed up the story and included the detail of the tug on the blanket. Who was he saving? He didn’t think Sam should confess, so who did he want to take the blame? Did he know that Sam hadn’t done it, because he had? Then why not let Sam take the blame?
“And then what?” Cooley said.
And so on: the smeared kitchen wall, Malloy with the screwdriver in his neck, the wine bottle overturned, the corkscrew lying in a pool of red.
“Blood?” Cooley asked.
“Cabernet.”
I’d gotten one thing right. A friend had done it. The closeness of the attack, the screwdriver pulled out of the cork to begin with. Two friends having a drink, gone wrong. The screwdriver, easy to hand. For a moment, the image wavered. A screwdriver? Why not the corkscrew, so close by and certainly sharper?
Back to the still life photos of my memory: Hillary kneeling on the floor. Martha in Sam’s swirling robe to cover the blood on her nightgown, the bottoms of her feet dusty, attending to Sam after his swoon. The beautiful face of Paris, snot dripping from the tiny gold hoop in her nostril as she cried.
This image was interrupted by one far later in the week. I saw Paris in the parking lot of the motel, mourning the loss of the life she’d had planned, not just Malloy but also Dev, her friends. One of them had done it. Did it matter which one? Just as the fixing of the railing had assumed that someone would lean against it and fall—one of them, but it hadn’t mattered which. Had it?
I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on the kitchen, leaning over Malloy’s body to check for a pulse. The softness of his skin at his temples. The blush of red wine stained to his lips.
“And Ridiculous Red,” Cooley said.
“What?”
“He had a little lipstick there, along with the wine stains,” she said. “Ridiculous Red. Hillary had a tube in her cosmetics bag.”
I was there, crouched over the poor man’s body with my hand reaching for his neck, letting this new information fold into my own photo, details developing out of the mist like a Polaroid. “You’re sure?”
“That’s what it was called. They always have names, I guess,” she said. “Everyone said they’d been kissing all day.”
The images petered out after Malloy’s pulse could not be found. “I guess that’s it, as far as the crime scene goes,” I said.
Cooley, who had been making a few notations in her pad, looked up. “Why were you so surprised about Sam coming to turn himself in?”
I shook my head. “I spent a lot of time with him this weekend. It’s—weird, I guess. The whole time, he was the one.”
Now the image that came to me was not one of Sam sitting uncomfortably on the chair in my motel room so that I would have the bed to myself, but of his face, cracked with grief, when I told him I’d seen him carry off the wine, when he’d confessed to stealing it from his old employer. That admission I’d believed. Don’t tell Martha. A man that broken up over the admission of theft had murdered someone? Had tinkered with railings and poisoned hotel room cups? Sam’s face, when he heard that Paris had broken through the rail he’d been riding sidesaddle.
“What did he do to the stairway railing, supposedly?”
“Uh, loosened it from the wall, I think, right?”
“Yeah, but how? With what?”
“A screwdriver, I guess,” she said, and then turned wide eyes to me. “Yikes.”
“Not the same screwdriver, surely,” I said.
“It could be—if the railing was done first,” she said. “Which I guess it must have been? Probably? You guys found the screwdriver in the cabinets looking for a wine opener, right?”
That didn’t sound right. I stalked a feeling of unease back to its source. “It was from one of their cars,” I said. And then I remembered: Sam’s rosy neck when
Martha admonished him to keep his thoughts off her trunk. “It was from Martha’s car, but she and Sam drove over together. Maybe he brought it in to open the wine. He was very into getting the wine open. They all were.” Until the murder, and then Sam had wanted the wine spirited away, safe. The good stuff needed to be preserved. Presumably somewhere he could snatch it back, the second he and Martha were released to go. Which might not ever happen, now.
Why would he have saved the wine, if he’d planned to turn himself in? Or, what had changed since he’d hidden the wine away that made him decide to confess?
Or—was it bad wine? “Did he say where he hid the wine?”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
The photo untaken: Sam carting away the carry-all bags of wine left behind while Cooley herself waited on the other side of the house for him and Dev. To the woods? He hadn’t had much time.
“No fooling,” Cooley said, taking more notes as I drew the picture for her. “I wonder . . .”
“What was Dev poisoned with?”
“The labs still aren’t final,” she said, “but they couldn’t find anything lethal. He’s fine now, seems like.”
“I don’t understand. You started to say—”
“This is all back before we had the confession. Now we just need the labs to know what the one guy—”
“Sam.”
“—poisoned the other guy—”
“Dev.”
“—with. You’re off the hook.”
“But—” There was something to my sleepwalking. I had been sleepwalking through the last two days, surely, not to understand fully what had been attempted. I held my head just so, letting it catch up with me.
The poison, however it got to him, was not meant for Dev. Dev had no business in that room. The poison, whatever it was, could have only been meant for me. So the whole time I had allowed Sam to sleep in my room, to use my toothpaste, he’d been looking for an opportunity to put something in place that would harm me?
That scheme, however, had had randomness introduced to it from the outside—from the spur of the moment decision to let Dev into my room. If the game was to kill any one of the friends at all, Dev’s attack was an outlier. It didn’t belong.
Under a Dark Sky Page 27