“Are you going to cover how to shoot star trails?” one of the early birds wants to know. He’s wearing one of those khaki vests with the loops for film, just like my teacher used to. The vest means business.
Star trails. I am. We’re going to shoot long exposures and find the threshold between when the stars photograph as prim little pricks of light and when the exposure catches them stretching and twirling around Earth’s axis. It can be a matter of a second, the passage of time made visible.
Yes, we’ll be shooting the whole range. Satisfied, the guy lurches away.
One of the other early attendees is a young woman with smooth dark skin and black braids tied in a ponytail. When she turns her head, I’m sure it’s Paris. I look for the nose ring, for a moment of recognition, for a flare of hatred.
The last time I saw Paris was when we crossed paths during the legal proceedings. I watched her giving testimony from a closed-circuit TV down the hall by special permission. Under the circumstances, my presence in the same room wasn’t welcome.
Listening to her, I’d learned a few things. She had used my phone to text Malloy to meet her because she wanted to talk to him about Dev. She suspected he’d been unfaithful. Something wasn’t right. And then Martha, after compelling them all to the guest house to honor—Martha’s word—Tash’s death, had played with that concern at the bannister that day. Hints and dimples, always, but they were all Paris needed to understand that Martha would have taken anything from her, if she could. “Some people are like that,” she said nervously. Her braids were out and her natural hair glorious, a dark crown. You couldn’t look away from her.
I go back to my setup. I use a fisheye lens, a full-frame camera. These are all things I had to learn, like how to sleep again, like how to let the sun set, all the way through the golden hour and beyond, into night. I had to learn to be still, to breathe. It takes a long exposure to film anything but the brightest objects in the night sky. A long exposure takes patience, hands off, and trust.
I keep looking up at the woman, though, to make sure it’s not Paris.
It’s been a year since the anniversary trip. That’s what I still called it, shorthand for everything that happened and the outcome.
After a few legal delaying tactics, Martha is in Ypsilanti, at the women’s facility there. I think she must not get too many visitors. So many of her friends are unavailable. Malloy, Dev—I still hate to think of Dev, though it turned out Cooley was right. The car striking him caused internal injuries that caught up with him there at the shore. But of course I did that, too. He would have been half mad and half gone by the time I swung a bottle at his head, and some might say he’d been half mad to buy the gas. I understood what he’d meant to do, though it was hard to explain to people who hadn’t gone through what we had. With Malloy dead and Paris down and probably gone, he didn’t care who did it. He wanted to burn the world down and see what was left standing.
Sam’s still in the wine business, but not visiting anytime soon. He’s in the west somewhere, working off a bit of debt to his former employer, but they hired him back, with caveats, I’ve heard. I’m not sure how he can stay sober and still sell wine, but then maybe he can’t think of anything else to do. Maybe he can’t think of anyone else to be.
Hillary works at Halloway’s Heavenly for Malloy’s parents. They don’t much care about her past or any degree and where she got it. They found her name in their son’s will. Her name, the real one along with the new one, and Angel’s, too, written into Malloy’s will and notarized by one of Martha’s colleagues. None of us knew how Malloy found out about Angel, or why he built them into his will so quickly. Love? Someone more cynical than I have turned out to be would have to make that call.
What there had been no provision for in the will: further heirs. It would have taken a court case and a lot of money Martha had not yet earned to wrench a slice out of Malloy’s estate. But no one thought it had been about money for her, and news of the baby has been quiet. Maybe Terry and Clare had taken the child in or found a good home for him, if he was indeed the prince of the dairy.
In a way I didn’t want to know what happened to the kid. It’s better not to know.
I mean, I’d like to know. There’s just no one left to ask.
Malloy’s kid? Or Dev’s, or Sam’s?—oh, yes, Sam’s. I had revisited the open wound of Sam’s face as he pined for her, the hopeful knock on my motel door when he meant to strike for hers, the lost key in his pocket. But why had he stayed? Maybe he’d really thought he’d lost the key. Or maybe since he hadn’t found Martha, any other human would do.
Was it even true, the baby? But as long as Martha carried the child of one of them—didn’t matter which one—as long as that part of the story was true, the friendship had a future. Without it, what was it all for? It was too much loss. You couldn’t look directly at it.
I don’t know where Paris went, after. Which is why I see her everywhere. I want her to show up one day, leading a small child by the hand, a child with Martha’s dimples and Dev’s black eyes. I don’t see how it can be possible, but it’s the story I tell myself.
The timer on this camera body is tricky. I fuss with it, absorbed, until a shadow falls over my hands. I squint up at Warren. I hadn’t thought of a nickname. Sometimes I call him Hoyt, like we are teammates. I like him the way he is. I don’t want him repackaged or changed. When I first came back to Michigan after selling the house, I didn’t move in right away. I lived in a rental cottage north of the area, on the Upper Peninsula, a place out of season and cold. A blue cottage that faced down the lake, overgrown, a mosquito’s daydream had it been summer. I spent a few months watching storms come in and waiting for the power to go out.
Not that I hadn’t visited. Not that I hadn’t found ways to mess up those throw pillows on his couch. Not that I hadn’t slept in his bed.
Except I had my own bad nights, now, waking from dreams in which Bix’s old truck careens away from headlights off the dark road somewhere near Chicago and lands, inexplicably, in the dark waters of the Straits of Mackinac. It sinks, sinks and I sit up, choking and gasping, scaring us both. He always stays up with me, trying to make it right.
It will not be right. Not the past, anyway. I won’t force things into shapes that fit a story I’d rather have lived. When I think of Bix, he’s there, in the past. I try not to hold a grudge. He taught me to stand on my own two feet. Just not the way he meant.
I live with Warren now. I have seen where he keeps the plaques. One of them props up a corner of the unbalanced washing machine.
Michele thinks I’m crazy. Or maybe she’s just mad that I didn’t let her shape the next stage of my life the way I let Bix command the first part. I miss her, and when I call, I don’t have any favors to ask, except to put the girls on for a minute.
So I live in a tourist destination now, and I’m happy. Cooley brings the dog over to the house to knock things off the coffee table. I work at an insurance agency in town, just office work, and teach these sessions for the park. A regular life, lived in one spot. Loving and being loved, who knew? It was the equivalent of having the lights turned on, all the time.
Warren’s looking out toward the water at some kids, ever watchful. It’s getting dark. People do things in the dark they would never dare otherwise, but there were people like him, too, those who will practice kindness, even in darkness.
When the kids come away from the water, Warren turns his attention to the clearing. He puts his warm hand on my back, near where the knife went in. Corona Australis, he calls the spot in my back where the skin was pieced back together into a fisherman’s hook, a raised golf club of a scar. Which is, I guess, the shape of that constellation. I’m still learning them. He makes them up, sometimes, when he walks into a room I’m in, reading. “Lady with a book,” he might say, and I know he sees the shape of me in stars. “Man with spatula,” I might say, to get him to make me eggs for breakfast.
On either side of the thin white lin
e of the long scar on my back are small white dots left behind by the stitches. The skin is puckered there, so calling it the southern crown is another kindness. By naming the scar, he has tidied the pain, the loss of blood, the nicked lung, the near death into myth and legend.
My hands, though. He traces and re-traces the scar tissue in the palms of my hands from Sam’s bottles, looking for constellations. He has no end of heroic stories for what he finds there. He tells a story of a woman who was once afraid to go out at night, and it does feel as though he’s making it all up. Who would leave the lights on so long, blotting out the world around her?
The class is filing into the clearing, getting set up while there is still light. In a minute, we’ll get started with introductions. Maybe they’ll be friends, or maybe some of them already are. Then we’ll start taking a look at the horizon, where the sun is finally setting. First star, a cheer goes up. This is a good group. It’s going to be an OK night. They’ll have a good time, getting a chance to see each other in the glorious light of the golden hour. Shutters will start to click because everyone is so pretty in that glow. So pretty.
We’ll move quickly from there. There’s not much time. They’ll have just one chance to see each other in the best light, and then we’ll turn toward the stars.
The End
Acknowledgments
This book would not be what it became without my editor, Emily Krump. Thank you. Thank you to the entire HarperCollins William Morrow team, especially Liate Stehlik, Jennifer Hart, Michelle Podberezniak, Amelia Wood, Julia Elliott, and Serena Wang.
Thank you, as always, to Sharon Bowers.
Thank you to Margaux Weisman for green-lighting this project on the basis of three words—“dark sky park.”
Thank you to Julie Schoerke, Marissa DeCuir, Angelle Barbazon, Sydney Mathieu, and Ellen Whitfield from JKS Communications for all their assistance.
My deep appreciation goes to early readers Yvonne Strumecki and Kim Rader.
Thank you to the Headlands International Dark Sky Park in Mackinaw City, Michigan, for providing the model for my fictional park. I had to borrow the silhouettes, but I took great pains to leave your wonderful new observatory. Go visit a dark sky place near you by searching http://www.darksky.org/idsp/finder/. Thank you to YouTuber Marianne Else for her video tour of the Headlands, which was very useful in the early days of researching this novel. Thank you to Devi Bhaduri for her insomnia expertise (and yikes). Thank you to Michael Rader, Sherry Novinger Harris, Susan Courtright, Walter Gragg, Julie Nilson Chyna, Jamie Howard, and Mariah Watson for their military and married-to-the-military expertise. Errors made within the story are definitely mine. Thanks also to Robin Agnew, the Mackinac Island Library, and the Grand Hotel.
I would like to acknowledge the writers of Mystery Writers of America Midwest Chapter for all they’ve done for me and continue to do for other up-and-coming mystery writers. Thanks also to Sisters in Crime and International Thriller Writers. I couldn’t begin to name all the generous authors who have helped me along my career, but I do want to thank Sara Paretsky, William Kent Krueger, Lou Berney (not fair!), Larry D. Sweazy, Terence Faherty, Susanna Calkins, Leslie Budewitz, Caroline Todd, and Ann Cleeves for their enthusiasm and support.
Thank you, again and always, librarians and booksellers.
Thank you to Erica Ruth Neubauer, Martha Cooley (and sister Bridget Cooley), and Dab Holt for naming characters for charitable causes.
Of course I have to thank my family and friends for putting up with me during the rough patches of writing, revising, and promoting. The biggest dollop of gratitude is always reserved for my patient and supportive husband, Greg. Pretty sure he’s the reason I write so many happy endings.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
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Written in the Stars: Meet Lori Rader-Day
About the Book
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Musical Playlist for Under a Dark Sky
Q&A with Lori Rader-Day
Questions for Discussion
Read On . . .
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More from Lori Rader-Day
About the Author
Written in the Stars: Meet Lori Rader-Day
LORI RADER-DAY is the Mary Higgins Clark and Anthony award–winning author of Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She lives in Chicago, where it is very hard to see the stars. Her life has intersected with the stars a few times, though. Just for fun, here’s Lori’s life, written in the stars.
I once lived in a dark sky community, unofficially.
From the age of twelve, I lived in a house in the middle of nowhere, Indiana, where our nearest neighbors were a quarter of a mile away. We had no continuous outside lights at our house, so the countryside at night got as dark as dark gets. To see the stars, all I had to do was go outside. Once I picked up a few constellations I could identify, I could actually see them without going outside. I could see them from my bed. Now that I can barely see a single star in the sky from my backyard in Chicago, I miss having easy access to the night sky.
I was (briefly) a shooting star.
At my junior high school, eighth graders took a multi-week science class unit on the constellations, which culminated in a famously difficult test. We were given a single piece of paper with nothing but dots—and we had to connect the dots to make the constellations, naming as many as we could. When the teacher revealed the highest scores in reverse order, the last score revealed was . . . mine! I was a pretty good student, but this might have been the first time I was the “best” at anything, especially, let’s face it, at science.
I have a relative (kinda) in the space game.
I am tangentially related through my grandmother’s family to astronaut Jerry Ross, who participated in seven Space Shuttle missions and is tied with Franklin Chang-Diaz for the record for most spaceflights. In 2017, Jerry and I met up when we were both authors at a book fair in Indiana. His book about his flights is called Spacewalker.
I am not the star of our household.
I spotted our dog as a five-pound puppy on a rescue website: a black German Shepherd mix who looked just like a little black bear. Before we had even applied to adopt her, I knew her name: Ursa Minor (named for the constellation, translated to “Little Bear”). She is now ten years old—and looks even more like a bear.
I am a space movie nerd.
I am a sucker for a space-related movie, stemming from a teenage obsession, perhaps, with Space Camp. Space Camp the movie, not the actual camp. Space Camp starred Tate Donovan before he was on Friends and Scandal. Caveat: If you can’t suspend your disbelief, don’t try watching Space Camp now. It’s too late for you. My sister Jill and I call this phenomenon—when you can’t revisit old favorite shows because your tastes have, ahem, matured—“Dukes of Hazzard.” As in, “Jill, don’t pause on that channel. That movie is so Dukes of Hazzard.” (I think you can guess why we chose this particular reference. I loved the Duke boys at age eight, but it’s best not to revisit them.) Other favorite space movies: Apollo 13, Arrival, Contact, Wall-E, Galaxy Quest, and Hidden Figures.
I love a good space story.
One of my all-time favorite books is The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, about the original crew of Mercury 7 astronauts as well as the jet pilots who refused to tow NASA’s line, and therefore were passed up as astronauts. I read this book for my master’s in journalism, when I thought I might want to write the type of long-form nonfiction known as literary journalism or creative nonfiction. I never attempted it outside of classwork, but thank goodness writers like Wolfe, Erik Larson, Melissa Fay Greene, and Susan Orlean are on the job.
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About the Book
Musical Playlist for Under a Dark Sky
I always make a playlist for my books, but not as a marketing tool. I actually do write to music. Many writers say they can’t listen to
songs with lyrics while they write because the words are distracting, but I find that music, even with lyrics, helps me focus and get work done. Songs have to do some of the work for me to be on the list; just liking a song isn’t enough. Here are the songs that helped me write Under a Dark Sky:
“TWILIGHT” BY SHAWN COLVIN
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“Twilight is the loneliest time of day,” Shawn Colvin sings. In Under a Dark Sky, Eden is a photographer, trained to watch the light upon surfaces and subjects. Since her husband died, she has folded the activity of her life into the daylight hours, and she’s always aware of what time it is and how far off the dark is. It’s a countdown to twilight, though most hours are just as lonely to her.
“TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK” BY MUMFORD & SONS
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“I only ever told you one lie/When it could have been a thousand/It might as well have been a thousand.” A lot of liars populate Under a Dark Sky, but Eden has been prepared for them by her husband’s betrayal.
“YOUR EX-LOVER IS DEAD” BY STARS
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Not a spoiler, but he is. “Live through this/And you won’t look back.”
“YOU’RE MISSING” BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Under a Dark Sky Page 32