Darkness My Old Friend

by Lisa Unger

  At the gym he clocked three miles in less than twenty-five minutes, then moved on to weights. The other guys there were all in their twenties, buff and fleshy in the way of youth. Henry knew he was in good shape, that he didn’t have anything to be embarrassed about when he took his shirt off. But he still felt like the skinny nerd he was in grade school, the bully magnet. He wondered, did anyone ever stop hearing those taunts? If someone had told him that he’d still feel the sting of those insults in his forties, he wouldn’t have believed it. Maybe if he’d left The Hollows. Maybe if he’d left Hollows High, had a different life, the past wouldn’t be so present all the time. Maybe.

  On the way home, he called Maggie Cooper-his childhood friend and, although she didn’t know it, the love of his life.

  “I had some issues with Willow Graves today,” he told her. Bethany Graves had asked him to call Dr. Cooper and bring her up to speed before Willow’s session tomorrow.

  “Oh?” said Maggie. “She’s been doing well with me. I’ve felt like we’re making progress.”

  Henry filled her in on the events of the last couple of days-the incident with Mr. Vance, the cutting, the unauthorized trip into the woods.

  “We’ll talk it out tomorrow,” she said.

  “Anyway, it looks like Jones is back on the horse,” said Henry. “So to speak.”

  “Meaning?”

  Henry paused a second. She must know. Had he misspoken?

  “Oh, you mean the cold-case investigation,” she said then. “Marla Holt. He’s excited about it. I think it will be good for him.”

  Henry pulled into his driveway. The same basketball hoop he’d used in high school hung above the garage. He’d repainted it recently and put a new net on it. He hadn’t used it in ages, though. But for sentimental reasons he couldn’t bring himself to take it down.

  “He came by asking some questions, wound up coming out to the woods with us to look for the kids. It felt like old times.”

  “Hmm,” said Maggie. It sounded like she had taken a sip of something she was drinking. “When was this?”

  “This afternoon, close to five.”

  “Hmm,” she said again. But this time it sounded different.

  “What?” he said.

  “Oh, nothing. I just thought he had another appointment this afternoon.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Henry. “Did I get the poor guy in trouble?”

  He expected her to laugh, but she didn’t.

  “No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  Jones and Maggie had had their rough patches over their twenty-plus-year marriage. But they were one of those couples, so obviously connected, in love, faithful, and abiding, that Henry could barely imagine one without the other-though he had been guilty of wishing otherwise in the past.

  She changed the subject. “Did you know Marla Holt?”

  “A little,” he said. “We were neighbors. We ran together sometimes.”

  It was then that he realized he’d called his friend to talk about how that wasn’t really it, that there was more. He wanted to tell her and hear what she had to say. But the words didn’t come. And the conversation wound down into the usual pleasantries, a plan to have coffee at the end of the week, meeting at their usual spot. And then he ended the call, wound up sitting for a while in his driveway, his mind wandering.

  Jones had made it as far as the second clearing. There was nothing there to see, so he turned around and was heading back. He kept his flashlight on the ground in front of him. The sky was dark, and the whole world seemed to hold its breath. He didn’t hear any birds or the rustling of small animals fleeing from his path. In the summer the night air would be alive with sound.

  The abandoned mines were one danger back here. There was a siren song from those dark entrances that young boys could hardly resist. But beyond that there were the residents, the old families who didn’t like people trespassing on their land.

  The city people who had recently settled in The Hollows referred to them as “mountain people.” The term brought to mind unshaven thugs with flannel shirts, riding four-wheelers, with rifles strapped to their backs, a bottle of moonshine between their legs. It wasn’t all that. But it wasn’t not that, either. The families owned huge tracts of land, refused to sell to encroaching developers. These were people who believed Americans had a right to bear arms, who made their own liquor once upon a time; they didn’t like trespassers. The biggest problem these days was the meth labs that had replaced liquor stills. During his time on the Hollows PD, they’d dismantled three with the help of the DEA and the FBI. It was a rural problem. The labs emitted such a toxic smell that it required acres to run one with any stealth. There were still plenty of empty acres in The Hollows.

  Because Jones had lived so long in The Hollows, he did fairly well with the longtime residents. Chuck Ferrigno, a New York City transplant, had admitted that he wasn’t doing so well. Hollows people didn’t like city transplants, and they didn’t like the police, so Chuck started every local encounter with two strikes against him.

  Jones could hear the rushing of the Black River. It was not quite a mile from where he was, but sometimes on quiet nights like this in the woods, sounds carried in an odd way. He approached the Chapel clearing again on his way out, was going to pass right by and return to his car. It was getting late, and he wasn’t even sure what he’d hoped to find. But then he decided instead to move into the clearing. He shone his light here and there, wishing again for his gun. He walked around aimlessly for a few minutes, tracking the beam through the grass. He was about to turn and go when the light caught a glint of something.

  He knew the clearing well. If he crossed through the tall grass, he’d find the foundation of another old barn, one that had long since fallen or been demolished. There was a rusted-out old car, too, somewhere to the right. He didn’t remember a mine shaft, but he wasn’t far from a rock outcropping in which a mine entrance had been blown, so that meant that tunnels could be anywhere below him.

  As he moved deeper, he could see where someone had cut back the grass, and he followed the swath into the field. It wasn’t long before he saw where a hole had been dug. But there was nothing to it; it looked as if the project had been abandoned.

  What had Michael Holt been doing out here? What had he been digging for, if not that mine? That story Bethany Graves had told didn’t ring true. He’d never heard it before. There were lots of tales and legends about ghosts and murders in The Hollows. Some of them were true, some weren’t. But Jones was pretty sure he’d heard them all.

  His phone rang then. He pulled it from his jacket pocket and answered. He didn’t have to look at the caller ID to know who it was. No one ever called him except Maggie.

  “Hey,” he answered.

  “Where are you?” Her voice broke up, the line full of static. Cell phone reception was bad out here. Sometimes there was no service at all.

  “On my way home,” he said. It wasn’t a lie; he was about to leave. There was nothing for him to do here. He didn’t have the tools with him to dig more out of the hole. But he figured Chuck Ferrigno would like to know about it. Jones walked to the edge of the hole and shone his light down. Nothing to see but dirt. He’d need equipment and manpower to find out what was buried there.

  “So I understand you didn’t make it to your appointment today,” Maggie was saying. He only heard the sentence in chops. But he didn’t need to hear the words. He heard the tone. She was angry with him.

  “No,” he said. “I rescheduled for next week.” That was a lie. He hadn’t rescheduled. But he would. Probably. His answer was greeted with silence.

  “Reception is bad,” he said. “We’ll talk when I get home.”

  Still nothing.

  “Maggie. Did I lose you?”

  But the line was dead. He didn’t know if they’d gotten cut off or if she’d hung up. All the service bars on his phone were gone; he couldn’t call out. He felt angry then-angry at her for being angry with him. It wasn’t
her business-was it?-if he went to therapy or not. She couldn’t control everything about him. He was a man, after all, not her kid, not Ricky. And he was the one who would decide if he needed to keep seeing a shrink.

  It was fully dark now. He stuffed his phone back into his pocket. He made his way to the car, moving fast, not looking back.

  chapter eighteen

  It wasn’t as though she was in them. She didn’t feel what they felt, exactly. But her empathy to their various plights was so total that she took on a bit of the terror, the sorrow. Her own adrenaline would start to pump. She couldn’t read their thoughts, didn’t see through their eyes. She was the watcher. But she was neither omniscient nor omnipresent. Eloise had always felt, though she couldn’t say why or by whom, that she was shown a particular perspective. And sometimes this perspective was partial, and sometimes she was front and center. Oh, it was frustratingly inconsistent. She had no control over it. She was a spectator to some twisted game. She was forced to watch but unable to choose her view.

  And in the case of Marla Holt, or supposedly Marla (because sometimes what she thought was one person was actually someone else), there was sound and blurry, distant visuals. Eloise could hear her ragged breathing as she raced through trees. Above her a night sky was riven with stars, visible above the reaching branches of dead trees. There were voices, male voices in the distance. But Eloise couldn’t hear the words. She could just pick up on the anger and fear in their tones.

  Then the woman was bursting through a line of trees into a clearing. A large, sagging structure loomed ahead. She stumbled and slowed, as if she couldn’t run anymore; she was gripping her side against a cramp. Then she limped, casting a terrified look behind her, into the wide mouth of the structure. Was it an old barn, a dilapidated church, or a schoolhouse? Eloise couldn’t be sure.

  Then there were two men. In the clearing they came to blows, and one of them was left lying on the ground, still and dark. The other man entered the structure. There was silence, silence until a wild scream tore open the night. Then it was quiet again. And when it ended, it was like waking from a dream.

  She had to talk fast, write things down, because the details faded quickly. The edges started to curl back, and it lifted away in the air like burning bits of paper. What was left behind was fear and sadness, pain, loneliness-a little bit every time. Every time a little more, until after years of accumulation it filled her. And now it was all she was. She was like a miner who disappeared into the bowels of the earth, and every time she came back up into the sun, she brought a little bit of the blackness up inside her. It coated her lungs, her organs, her heart, suffocating her from within. And all the medicine in the world was only a stalling of the inevitable.

  “The Holt house connects in the back to the Hollows Wood,” said Ray when Eloise had told him everything.

  “Yes,” said Eloise. She remembered that from when she’d sat for Michael and Cara, too. Now the real-estate ads raved about how the properties backed up against state land. But people who had lived in The Hollows carried a superstition about those woods. Bad things happened out there. Everybody knew that. Of course, Eloise knew better than most that bad things happened everywhere-on a sunny tree-lined street, at the mall, at an office, at a Christmas party, in your home. But for most people it was easier to think that it could all be contained in the scary woods, in the dark of night. Bad things happened only in certain places, and if warnings were well heeded, they wouldn’t happen to you.

  “They searched the woods back then,” Ray said.

  “Yes,” said Eloise. “Several days after her disappearance.”

  She remembered that a group had been organized; they walked the woods. But it was late in the game at that point. Eloise had not yet fully connected with her sight then, was still in denial. She didn’t even try to get anything on Marla. She hadn’t even known that she could try. Back then she thought if the visions didn’t come, she couldn’t seek them. And they were so painful and disorienting for her that she wouldn’t have tried even if she had known.

  “It was someone she knew,” said Ray.

  “It usually is.”

  She kicked the shoes off her feet, and they fell with a thud-thud to the floor. She wanted them off her feet. If there was more to see, she was too tired to see it now.

  “Someone else was there, too?” he said. “Two men?”

  “That’s what I saw.”

  He leaned back, pinned her with his gaze. “You think she’s dead.”

  “I think it’s likely,” she said. She was speaking strictly pragmatically. She never had any sense of these things. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You never know.”

  It was getting late. She wanted to sleep, but she didn’t want him to leave. She thought how nice it would be if he’d just sit there like a sentry in the chair as she drifted off. The thought surprised her, because she was used to being alone. As if reading her thoughts, sensing that she needed company, Oliver lumbered into the room and leaped heavily onto the bed beside her. He curled himself into a purring crescent, pressed against her leg.

  “You know, I don’t know if I ever really loved her.” They were back to Karen. It had always mingled like this for them. They could talk about horror, about flight for life, about murder, and then chat about the weather, make love, have coffee.

  “Isn’t that sad?” he said. “I mean, we were together for twenty years, have two children. I like her, I respect her. But I don’t know if I ever loved her. Not the way you loved Alfie.”

  He sat hunched, brow furrowed, his chin on his fist. The Thinker.

  “You must have loved her once,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I remember having the idea that she was the right one. She was pretty and sweet. But I don’t think I really understood the whole marriage thing when we walked down the aisle.”

  Eloise smiled, offered an affirming hum. “They sell you the white dress, the dream of forever. It’s the day-to-day that really surprises you. How much work it is.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “But you never would have fucked around on Alfie, right?”

  She shook her head. “No. Never.”

  “And what about Marla Holt? Was she cheating on Mack?”

  “Maybe,” said Eloise. “If she’s looking for romance, excitement. The promise that life isn’t just a couple of kids and a husband with a day job. Cooking meals, beauty fading, she wants more.”

  “But you knew her. You watched her kids,” he said. “Was she having an affair?”

  She remembered her conversation with Jones Cooper. “I wouldn’t have thought so. She adored her children, spoke lovingly of her husband. But you never really know anyone, what’s going on inside. I’m not sure where she went or with whom when I baby-sat. I never asked.”

  Ray chewed on the inside of his cheek when he was thinking hard. “So if she was fooling around at home that night, maybe Holt walked in on her. There was a chase out to the woods. The other man fights for her, gets knocked down. Holt kills her.”

  “That’s one interpretation of what I saw. It’s a possibility. But what happened to the other man? Did Holt kill him, too? And if so, where are the bodies? It’s not easy to hide two bodies well, especially in a crime of passion.”

  “Or he ran,” Ray said. “No one knew who he was.”

  “The neighbor said she saw Marla get into a black sedan, carrying a suitcase.”

  “That doesn’t jibe with what you saw.”

  “It’s just a moment. A moment I don’t even understand. We can’t know what came before or after.”

  Ray put his face in his hands and rubbed, released a frustrated grunt.

  “It’s late,” she said. “Let’s digest the information. You connect with Jones Cooper in the morning. I have a feeling he’s a part of this somehow. He might be the one to connect the dots.”

  “If the Hollows PD reopens the case, we’re out of a job,” he said.

&nbs
p; “We have a waiting list twenty people long,” she said. “There are lots of people with unanswered questions, looking for justice, resolution. We move on to the next.”

  “I’m not like you,” he said. Did he sound bitter? “I can’t just move on.”

  “Sometimes we have to,” she said. “You know that. We don’t solve them all.”

  What was with him? It wasn’t like him to be so attached. Dogged, yes. Determined. Relentless. But not attached. That was different. Attachment hurt, was in fact the source of all pain.

  She sat up, and Oliver gave her an annoyed look.

  “What’s going on with you?” she asked.

  He stood and walked over to the bed, sat down beside her. The mattress groaned beneath his weight, and the cat jumped away, left the room with an angry meow.

  “I’ve been talking to this kid trying to find his mother, searching through that awful mess of a house, going over old interviews, newspaper articles, talking to folks who knew Marla Holt. But nothing’s jelling. Something just doesn’t feel right.”

  Eloise didn’t say anything, only put a hand on his shoulder. It felt nice to touch him. His shoulder was round and powerful beneath the cotton of his shirt.

  “And I just keep thinking that I’m losing it. I’m not good at this anymore. And if I’m not good at this, then what? I was a bad husband, a mediocre father.” He turned to Eloise. “I’m not even an especially good friend. Look at you. You’re drained dry, and here I am asking for more.”

  She put her hand to the back of his neck.

  “We gave everything to this, didn’t we?” he said. “Everything.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We did.”

  She didn’t say that she had already lost everything when she came to this. That it had been thrust upon her. She hadn’t chosen it, as he had. The fact that she’d frightened Amanda off, that Amanda kept Eloise’s grandchildren far away from her-that was collateral damage. That was Amanda’s choice; Eloise was powerless against it. She’d have shut it off if she could have. She’d have rejected her sight, the work, all of it, for the love of her family, if only the choice had been offered. She didn’t say any of that.