In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  Don’t tense. Let it happen.

  You’re going to die.

  No, you’re not.

  He exhaled the last gasp of breath that was left in his chest and let his muscles go soft. He closed his eyes again, and just as he did, time finally caught up with him. His toes parted the seas. His body fired through the water like a rocket. He was conscious of pain, bones breaking, clothes ripped from his skin, water flooding his lungs. He saw the lights of the world wink out into night. He felt hot agony turn cold, felt himself descending and descending and descending, as if he could travel right through the earth and wind up in hell.

  Except the deep channel was not bottomless, and after he had gone down as far as he could go, he hung suspended, a moth enrobed in a cocoon, before his body began to coil and climb. The bay that sucked him in found him hard to swallow and decided to spit him out.

  Later, he would remember none of it. His last memory would be of running toward Rikke Mathisen on the bridge. There, the film ended. He would have no recollection of the car that hit him and drove him from the bridge, of falling, of time stretching out, of the impact that broke his left leg and collapsed both lungs, of bobbing to the surface on his back, of the searchlight of the Coast Guard boat bathing like a warm glow over his body. No recollection of ever thinking to himself that if he had made it this far, he was going to live.

  51

  When Stride saw the glass door open, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the restaurant patio was his late wife, Cindy.

  For an instant, he felt as if he were falling again, long and hard toward the water. The enigmatic smile he remembered from years ago was the same. When she lifted her sunglasses, her brown eyes stared back at him with a familiar glint over the heads of the others in the restaurant.

  It wasn’t her, of course. It was Tish.

  She joined them at the same table where she had met them for the first time three months earlier. Stride sat with Serena and Maggie on either side of him. The heat of summer had yielded to September evenings, when darkness ate away the daylight. As he watched, the last sliver of sun dipped below the western hillside, and the lake grew gray and unsettled. Tish shivered as she sat down.

  “How are you?” Stride asked her.

  Tish sized up his condition. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

  Stride’s right leg was encased in a cast. His crutches were balanced against the railing of the patio. He fingered the brace on his neck. “Physical wounds heal,” he said. “Yours may be a little harder to deal with.”

  Tish put on a brave face and smiled. “You know how they say you have to face your fears to overcome them? That’s a load of crap. I never want to cross a bridge again in my entire life.” She reached out and took Stride’s and Serena’s hands. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you both properly. I should be dead now. You saved me.”

  “It’s over,” Stride said. “Try not to think about it anymore.”

  It wasn’t really over, though, not for any of them. Serena had nightmares where she relived his fall from the bridge. She would wake up in a sweat and hold on to him. For himself, he was surprised and a little anxious that he had felt no emotional response to his own near-death experience. He felt strangely empty, as if the fall had happened to someone else. He feared that the emotions would build silently like an avalanche and someday overtake him with a roar.

  “Seriously, how are you?” Tish asked him.

  “It’s going to take me a few months to fully recover,” he admitted. “The doctors don’t want me to come back until the end of the year, but I’m not going to wait that long.”

  Maggie winked. “I’m the interim head of the Detective Bureau. He’s afraid I’ll take over.”

  “Be my guest,” Stride said.

  “I already gave away your chair,” Maggie told him. “It was too big for my ass.”

  “Go away, Mags.”

  She laughed.

  “Did you finish the book?” Stride asked Tish.

  “I’m on the last chapter.” Tish tugged nervously at her hair. “I feel guilty writing it. Like it was partly my fault. I drove Laura into Rikke’s arms back then.”

  Stride shook his head. “Rikke knew how to manipulate young girls. She was responsible, not you.”

  “I know, but maybe if I had been more patient with her, Laura would have stayed with me all along. She would never have fallen into Rikke’s trap. I wish she had told me what happened between them.”

  “She was scared,” Serena said. “Laura found out that Rikke was a murderer, and she ran away.”

  “And when I came back for her, she died,” Tish said.

  “Don’t blame yourself for surviving,” Stride said.

  Tish’s eyes pierced him. “That’s good advice.”

  An electronic alert chirruped under the table. Stride automatically reached for his belt, but he wasn’t wearing a pager. Maggie pulled out her own pager and studied it. “That’s me, boss,” she said. “We’ve got an armed robbery at a gas station on the south end of Michigan Street.”

  “You want me to come with you?” Stride asked. “Unofficially, that is.”

  Maggie sighed and looked at Serena. “Do something about him, will you?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Maggie pushed her chair back and got up. She waved at the three of them and headed for the restaurant door.

  “I should be going, too,” Tish said.

  Tish stood up from the table, but she didn’t leave. Her mouth became frozen and sad. Her eyes grew glassy, and she blinked back tears. She sat down again, but when she tried to speak, the words caught in her throat.

  “There’s something more,” she admitted finally.

  Stride felt a sense of uneasiness. He knew without Tish saying anything that whatever she had to share with him involved Cindy. All along, there had been a missing piece. A secret. He wasn’t sure anymore that he wanted to know what it was.

  “I have something for you,” Tish told him. “I feel bad that it took me so long to give it to you, but I hope you’ll understand when I explain.”

  She slipped an envelope out of her purse and pushed it across the table to Stride. He saw the words written on the outside in black ink. For Jonny. He had no trouble recognizing the tight, precise handwriting he had known for years.

  “Cindy gave this to me the last time we were together,” Tish said. “She told me if I ever came back here and decided to be up-front about my past, I should give this to you. I never opened it. I never read it.”

  Stride didn’t pick up the envelope.

  “Your past?” he asked.

  “Yes. Before Cindy’s father died, he told her something about me. Something important. That’s why Cindy reached out to me. I didn’t think I ever wanted anyone else to know, but I guess the two of you deserve to know the truth.”

  Stride waited.

  “Cindy’s father knew about me and Laura,” Tish continued. “He overheard Laura on the phone, and he knew we were planning to run away together. He went berserk.”

  “I knew William Starr,” Stride said. “The idea of his daughter being gay would have been horrifying to him.”

  “It was worse than that,” Tish said. “It wasn’t just Laura being gay. It was me. It was the two of us being in love.”

  “You?”

  Tish slid something else from her purse. A fragile piece of newspaper. When she unfolded it carefully, Stride saw the headline. So did Serena, who caught Tish’s eye. Tish nodded at her, embarrassed.

  “I didn’t lie to you, Serena, not really,” she said. “The robbery where my mother was killed had nothing to do with Laura’s death. Cindy found this clipping in her father’s Bible shortly before he died. He had kept it for years. She asked him why, and he finally told her the truth. He finally admitted the affair.” Tish shook her head with fierce bitterness. “That selfish, hypocritical son of a bitch. I hate him. Nothing will ever change that.”

  “Your mother?” Serena gu
essed.

  Tish nodded. Tears pooled on her eyelids and ran over to her cheeks. “She was the honorable one. More honorable than he ever deserved. She never told a soul. Not even when she was fired from her job at the store. Not even when she was drummed out of their church. She never admitted that he was the father.”

  Stride closed his eyes. He had never liked William Starr. He didn’t like him now.

  “All those years, he never acknowledged me,” Tish said. “Even when my mother died, he was too gutless to admit who I was. I’m glad he thought he was being punished by God for everything that happened.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Cindy told me, and I begged her to keep it between the two of us. Can you imagine what it did to me? I found out I had a sister. A half sister. I also found out that the great love of my life was something terrible. Something immoral. Me and Laura. I was in love with-”

  Tish stopped. Her voice seized again.

  “You didn’t know,” Serena murmured.

  “No. We didn’t know. Even after Cindy told me, I tried to pretend to myself that it wasn’t true. I still loved Laura. I still ached for her. I wanted it to be the way I remembered it. I didn’t want to give up what we had.”

  Tish fingered the note that lay in front of Stride.

  “Cindy wanted me to tell you,” she said. “She hated the idea of keeping part of her life hidden from you, but I insisted. When she knew she was dying, she made me promise to come back here. She wanted me to do it for Laura, but I think she also wanted me not to be alone. She thought maybe I could find some kind of family here.”

  Her eyes formed a question.

  “You do have family here,” Stride said.

  “Thank you. To both of you.” She stood up. “I really do need to go.”

  “Don’t stay away forever, Tish.”

  She came around the table and bent down to wrap her arms around Stride’s neck. She embraced him and whispered in his ear. “I keep part of her with me, even though I lost her.”

  Stride didn’t say anything. Tish gave Serena a brief hug and then slung her purse over her shoulder. The wind mussed her hair, and she fixed it. She gave Stride a broken smile and left the way she had come. Stride followed her with his eyes until she was gone. From the back, she looked like Cindy again, walking away, leaving him.

  Stride held the envelope in his hands and thought about letting it go and losing it in the wind. He didn’t need a message in a bottle washing ashore right now. He didn’t need a resurrection.

  He and Serena sat together, not talking, as the evening grew darker around them. Most of the other tables were empty; it was too cold now to be outside. Out on the Point, beyond the lift bridge, white caps crested and lapped at the sand. The air smelled like fall.

  After a space of silence, Serena got up and kissed his cheek and put her cool fingers on his bare arm. “I’m going to walk on the boardwalk for a while,” she told him.

  Their eyes met, and he nodded. She left him there, and he was alone with Cindy.

  Stride traced the sides of the envelope with his fingertips and wondered how long he could wait without opening it. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for Cindy to be alive again, even for a moment. Not when his grief was over. When he couldn’t hold back anymore, he used a knife from the table to slit the envelope at the top and slide out the single sheet of paper inside. It was ordinary typing paper, and when he unfolded it, he found a few handwritten lines inside.

  Dear Jonny,

  If you’re reading this letter, it means Tish finally told you the truth, and you know why I kept you in the dark for so long. It also means I lost the battle with cancer. I’m so sorry, my love, for leaving you earlier than we had planned.

  Stride took a labored breath. His eyes burned, and the words blurred on the paper as he tried to read.

  Not a day went by that I didn’t long to tell you about Tish, but it was never my secret to share. It was hers. My sister’s. And it was a secret born in too much blood and pain for anyone else to reveal. I hope you can forgive me.

  I’m gone now, so tell me that it didn’t take too long to let go of me. I know what kind of man you are, Jonny. When you hit a brick wall, you beat your head against it with your suffering. I hope you didn’t do that for me. Tell me you’re not alone and that you’re in love again. That would give me peace.

  I don’t really know what else to say. God may not have given me all the time I wanted, but how can I complain? For the time I had, I had you.

  With all my love,

  Cindy

  Stride folded up the note and slid it inside his pocket. He made a pyramid with his hands and buried his face inside, and he no longer felt empty or dead. He cried one last time for his wife, and then he stared up at the heavens hidden behind the charcoal sky, and he exhaled a ragged breath, and he let go. When he turned and watched the quiet boardwalk on the lakeshore below him, he saw Serena sitting on the rocks amid the long shadows, her back to him, her black hair flying. Seagulls soared and cried around her, floating on the wind with their wings spread. He knew it was time to go. She was waiting for him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks as always go to my agents and editors: Ali Gunn, Marion Donaldson, and Diana Mackay in the United Kingdom, and Deborah Schneider and Jennifer Weis in the United States. I have also been privileged to work with a large team of agents, editors, sales reps, and publicists in countries around the world who have been instrumental in my career. I’m grateful to all of them.

  I have built friendships over the past several years with many readers and booksellers who are a constant source of inspiration and encouragement. Very special thanks to Jean N., Mike O., Lilamae, Lynn, Amanda, Sally, Laura P., Sara W., Bonnie, Jim H., Ed K., Eric, Paul P., Christine, Lenie, Connie (and everyone at Ezzulia.nl), Ambra, and Alfredo.

  I also need to mention a few advance readers who gave me invaluable counsel on early drafts of this book, including Matt Davis, Paula Tjornhom Davis, and Gail Foster. And, of course, my wife of twenty-five years, Marcia, who relishes her role as my toughest critic (and best friend).

  My parents and my family have been with me every step of the way, even when we have been far apart. Thanks for believing in me all these years. The same is true of our dear friends and neighbors Barb and Jerry.

  Stride and Serena continue to live in a cottage on Park Point in Duluth, which you can explore for yourself at [http://www.cottageonthepoint.com]www.cottageonthepoint.com. Many thanks to Pat and Bill Burns for their continuing hospitality when Marcia and I come to Duluth.

  As always, you can write to me at brian@bfreemanbooks.com.

  Brian Freeman

  ***

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