Even In Darkness--An American Murder Mystery Thriller

by Lynn Hightower

  But what I want to do is throw them all away. Burn them. I don’t want their presence in my space, and even as I have this thought I feel a sense of guilt, as if I am betraying Jimmy. These glimpses I have of his final moments make me feel defiled. Death is intimate and I do not want to witness this private montage of the end of his life.

  I stumble back into my shoes and trudge down the carpeted hallway through the kitchen and to the back door and in my head I list everything I hate about this house. The layout, for example, is too much like a rat warren. I want openness and tall ceilings. And I don’t like carpet, I like wood floors. Old ones, not too shiny, covered in the patina of scuff and scratches, worn with life but ready for more. I like old houses and tall ceilings, homes designed when architects still held sway, instead of the way they are built now – contractors piecing them together like a toddler with a small selection of blocks. Random thoughts to fill my head, a way to push back the images of pictures I never wanted to see.

  I stare out the window of the kitchen door and for once I catch Leo unaware. He is snuffling through the monkey grass that rings the white birch tree, and I see from the way he jerks his head up and backward that he has rooted up yet another garter snake. They love the long grass but they do not love Leo. He noses them up for the evident pleasure of watching them glide swiftly out of reach, a puzzled but satisfied light in his teddy bear eyes. I have never seen Leo harm any living being, with the exception of flies, which he can snap right out of the air, but to the cats, dogs, snakes and neighbors that are the focus of his affectionate enthusiasm, he is an object of terror. Lean and athletic as he is, a still-growing adolescent of fourteen months, he weighs eighty-three pounds and stands twenty-seven inches high at the shoulder. He is thirty-eight inches long, not counting the fifteen inches of tail that will take out any lowlying coffee cups. His coloring is unusual – black and tan feathered with silver, without the standard black saddle markings common to most German shepherds.

  Leo’s feet are monstrous and he has yet to grow into them. I think, with pride and uneasiness, that he will not reach full size for yet another year. His ears are long, upright and pointed, and his face is solid black, and when I take him for walks, people cross to the other side of the street.

  I am sitting on the couch again, and Leo, who has raced through the living room three times, slopped water out of his bowl on to his ‘shirtfront’ of fur and into a line of puddles on the kitchen floor, has suddenly caught my mood. He trots close, winds his way around the chair and coffee table, which he has knocked two feet off kilter, and sits on the rug that is now wrinkled and curled sideways. He lays his head sideways in my lap. My off-white cargo pants soak up the water that dribbles off his muzzle and I feel the thunder of his heartbeat against my leg. He offers me consolation by bringing me his third favorite toy, the beloved ‘chip monkey’ – now headless – and it sits on my knee, the fur sticky with dog spit. I pull Leo’s ears and scratch behind them, feeling the hardened lump of fur where a neighboring cat has swiped at him, drawing a copious amount of blood.

  I left the pictures on the coffee table. I reach for the second set. One hand on Leo’s head. One hand on the pictures. I think of the dreams these photographs will bring me.

  Now Gloria I do recognize, with a dread that makes me feel weirdly hollow through the knees, and it is good that I am sitting down. In the first shot she is standing on the steps of her church in the traditional black robes trimmed in purple, a good Presbyterian assistant pastor. I used to envy her having a church of her own. I could not get one, so I went into televangelism, and by the time I was offered my choice of positions, I didn’t want them anymore. In an echo from the past, I hear the familiar introduction, Joy Miller, a preacher without a pulpit, the way pulpit would become pull-pit in a drawn out southern drawl.

  Gloria’s hair is mostly grey now, and it is cut short. Like me, Gloria Schmid got a degree in religion. Unlike me, she began with the intention of ‘keeping her place’ in the church – an obedient female, she would focus on counseling, though if ever a woman was born to preach, it was Gloria.

  Hanging out with me, in the days we were students together, was politically incorrect in a big way and she took flak for it. I have been both credited and vilified for convincing Gloria to preach. In those days, a woman in the religion business didn’t take the pulpit, she captured it, like changing lanes on the 405 in Los Angeles.

  Like all of us, she’s changed dramatically since school. For Gloria, there is weight, grey hair and more than the hint of a double chin. That air of disapproval I remember about her still emanates from the muddy green of her eyes or maybe I am imagining it. She certainly disapproved of me – disapproved, competed, judged, took me on as a project, tried to save me, reported on me to our professors and, years later when my cable show became a hit, followed in my footsteps.

  There is a student hierarchy, in seminaries. We are categorized, and there is a pecking order. I have heard that when Billy Graham was in seminary it was thought he would not amount to much.

  The most admired student among my own classmates was good old Elwood Shipley, who professed to having been a heroin addict who slept under the I-65 northbound bypass until he awoke one day with a religious tract in hand that turned his life, as he used to say, right side in. The peckerwood accent, the Howdy Doody freckles and Opie of Mayberry sprouts of reddish brown hair gave him a so uncool he was cool credibility and he spent his off-study time saving endangered souls at the top of his lungs.

  The professors loved him. Even when he was exposed as the son of well-to-do physicians, a boy who’d gotten a brand new Corvette at the age of sixteen, and a boy who had never been addicted to anything except being the center of attention, they still loved him. He just confessed his sin of lying and begged them to join hands with him as he knelt in front of the whole student body to beg for God’s forgiveness and direction.

  I cannot see in the picture of Gloria Schmid if she still wears the tiny pearl earrings she wore every day in school. She always wore pantyhose to class, skirts and uncomfortable-looking polyester blouses, and flat, square-toed shoes that just looked odd on her long chunky legs.

  There were times we banded together, as only women can when drowning in a sea of men. And others when we were at each other’s throats, as only women can be when drowning in a sea of men.

  I was ‘the albino’, Gloria was ‘the frump’. Most female students had a derogatory nickname, supplied by a small cadre of small-minded male students we ourselves nicknamed ‘the frat pack’.

  It is true that my skin is very pale, almost bluish. I think if I were ever foolish enough to try a tanning bed, they would have to give my money back. I am slim and tall and got my first bra more from desperation than need; I wear a minimum of makeup and have always dressed plainly. If I have a style, you’d call it stark. My face is sharp and angular, my nose broad. I am intellectually adventurous, if physically frail. In high school, my looks never earned me a place on the cheerleading squad, but I was the hands down choice to play Joan of Arc in the senior play.

  It was unfair as well as unkind to label Gloria a frump. She was merely conservative and formal. Where I am androgynous, she is Rubenesque. In a physical sense, as a woman, Gloria would be a sonnet. I would be a haiku.

  Leo whimpers softly, head burrowing deeper into my lap. ‘Be easy,’ I say. Not sure which of us I am trying to reassure.

  She has children. Gloria. I lost track of her, but I know that she married. In the next picture, she’s hugging a boy of about sixteen. He is reluctant enough that he is clearly hers. She got married way after I did, waited sensibly to establish her career before she had kids. The boy looks like her, minus the air of disapproval. He has evidently just lost a soccer game, from the looks of his mud-streaked uniform and the glum aura of his teammates. No doubt a public hug from Mom made it better.

  He is caught exchanging looks with his father, who stands behind Gloria, a tall, broad bear of a man with a pewter gre
y crew cut, and something of a military bearing. I wonder about this boy, bracketed between a minister mother and military father.

  And then it hits me that the minister mother may be dead now and I move through the next two pictures.

  Just like the sequence with Jimmy Mahan, these pictures follow a pattern. Subject at work. Subject at play. Subject with family. Subject moments before death.

  Oh, Gloria. All of those times I hated you, I admit it; I see your eyes now and am filled with such compassion that it feels like love. How stupid we were, way back when. What a waste it was, all that anger and angst. I would not wish this on you in a million years. I would take it off your shoulders if I could. If I could have been there to hold your hand, Gloria, just to hold your hand, let you feel the warmth of another human being, to give you something – some connection when you were so afraid. I see such fear in your eyes, I would do that for you Gloria, I would.

  It is not a weak thing to be frightened. But to see Gloria in so much fear makes my throat so tight that trying to swallow makes me give off a dry sort of choke that makes Leo raise his head.

  Gloria is ravaged just like Jimmy Mahan. Throat torn open by a bullet, and the blood and bits of flesh that hang beneath her head, the bib of red that runs down the front of her silky green blouse, strike me as pornographic in the perverseness of the violence.

  I put my head in my lap. Feel Leo snuffle my ear with his nose.

  The next set of pictures. These. These are even worse than the last. I recognize him right away. Darrin Lane. He is thin still, hair no longer that baby fine pale blond, but now a taupe silver, like champagne, with sun streaks of whitish blond, no doubt earned while building schools in the hot African sun.

  In spite of the other pictures that sit in my lap, I still have hopes for Darrin.

  He’s not like the other two. He was a skinny country boy from Western Kentucky, outspoken in the confident way of people who are not used to hiding behind words. He arrived at school with little experience and less regard for the way speaking your mind on matters spiritual can make you vulnerable to the piranha-like pounce of religion students who are as loud as they are narrow.

  Darrin was just so normal. No ax to grind, and a quiet calling he’d rarely mention. He was a boy of compassion, and for Darrin, compassion was an action, not a feeling or idea. It was what he did and why he did it.

  The pecking order of wannabe religious leaders is established by those who talk the talk. Not Darrin. His good works were as private and habitual as brushing your teeth and changing your underwear.

  Nobody much knew what he was up to, in school. He did not get a lot of attention. I knew because I gave him rides when his pickup truck was in the shop, and I never took the gas money he tried to give me. I had generous parents. I did not need the crinkled dollar bills and pocketful of quarters that he offered. Darrin was the kind of guy, if he had a dollar, you had a dollar, which meant he was usually broke.

  I go through the pictures methodically. It’s one of those juvenile things. Hold your mouth just right, crank once and then the car will start. Only now it is curl your toes and don’t breathe and Darrin will come out of this one alive. Go through the pictures one at a time, fifteen seconds apart, and Darrin will be OK.

  Whoever this is – and I think I know who, I’m afraid that I do – he sent me these pictures with an agenda. But maybe even he could see that Darrin Lane is different. This man – this Dark Man if he is who I think he is – you can’t tell what he will do. He can surprise you. There is a reason to have hope if it’s him.

  The first picture is vintage Darrin. Sitting outside behind a rough wood table under the trees. It’s spring, because the trees are just beginning to bud out. Darrin sits on the side with about ten other people. Looks like breakfast – I can see bacon and a metal coffee pot. Darrin is in his element there at his addiction rehab boot camp for at-risk adolescents, twelve to seventeen. It is just like him to be sitting along one side with everybody else, instead of at one end or other of the table, leading the pack.

  I’m sure Darrin is not the only adult there. But all I can see in this first shot is Darrin himself, chin in his hand, listening to a boy who has a pierced eyebrow and lip, spiky black hair and his hand in the air. The boy, fourteen maybe, looks intense, and huddles in a grey hoodie in a way that makes it clear it’s a source of comfort, habit and warmth. Darrin’s eyes are narrowed. It makes me remember that about him – how good he was at listening, how attentive he was, how connected.

  The thing about Darrin – he’s a safe place in an unsafe world.

  The next picture shows him hiking. He’s third in line. I get the impression of a pretty big group – maybe twenty – all going single file up the side of a mountain. The trail is steep and the girl at the head of the line has turned back to look over her shoulder. She is sweating, her hair plastered to her neck, and she has a serious look, like she is counting heads. If the well being of the group rests upon her, which might well be the case, that would be Darrin’s style. To trust. To give responsibility. To let people accomplish things on their own so they can revel in the way that doing well makes you feel good. She cannot be staff; she looks barely twelve.

  Regret rises inside me, pressure mounting like an oil well about to blow, and I wonder how Darrin’s program was going. How he related to his charges – did he save their souls? Set them on the path of self respect and sobriety? I know he was particularly concerned with addictions and people in thrall to that brand of hell. I know he felt most rehab programs fell short, that you had to find a way to deal with the darkness that drove the addict as well as the addiction. He used to spout statistics on the success versus failure rate of different programs. The high failure rates worried him. Actually kept him up at night. He said the problem had to be in most part the programs themselves. If they were any good, why didn’t they work? Why assume the addict failed the program when it was clear, from the failure rates, that the programs failed the addict?

  Like a lot of things, many of them precious, Darrin slipped through the fingers of time, fading from my life a little bit more every day. I wish I had not let him go.

  But I did. If he was still alive – please, please – if he was still alive I would reconnect. If I could have that second chance.

  The please, please dies on my lips when I flip to the next photo.

  Darrin is sweating hard, his hair gone dark and wet, and his right eye is swollen shut. He put up a fight. Of course he did. Kentucky boys don’t just lie down and die.

  But he did die. Just like the others.

  FOUR

  The note says there are two reasons I should not go to the police. It is much in the style of kidnappers who tell their victims not to go to the authorities – when of course that is exactly what they should do. Still, it sticks in my mind – two reasons?

  I’m not so sure what this means, but the usual threat concerns family. My family is Leo, my dog, Caroline, my DIL (daughter-in-law) and Andee, my granddaughter. Some people do not count dogs. Which leaves Caro and Andee. Two reasons?

  I check my watch. Three p.m., and they are on Central time. Caro will not be off work until four thirty, five thirty my time. Too early to call. The best time to catch her is that pocket of opportunity between dinner and bed, when she and Andee curl up together on the couch. Andee is allowed one hour of television every day. If she uses it up during the afternoon, they curl up together and read instead. Andee has chocolate milk. Caro a glass of red wine. There is nothing the two of them treasure so much as the time they spend lost in their books.

  If this packet is from who I think it is, one of those reasons could be that I owe him my life. But that would only be one reason, and he mentions two.

  They never cover this problem in the movies. But I’ve always thought that in real life, as in now, it would not be unusual for people not to be able to figure out the cryptic demands of the weird and deranged. It is like trying to figure out the tax code – ripe with trouble and
retribution and a perverse logic that is clear only to the perpetrator. I can’t get through the daily crossword in the newspaper, so how am I going to figure out the hazy demands of a sociopath?

  I need to hear Caroline’s voice.

  I pick up the phone, knowing I am way too early, but unable to help myself, and, as expected, catch the voice mail. This is a comfort, but a small one, a sense of business as usual that I cling to. Caro will be home from work in three hours. It should be OK to wait that long before I call the police. In case she and Andee are the two reasons.

  Which seems likely, considering the significance of the date. I tell myself it could be a coincidence. For him to know the date, he’d have to have been keeping track of me. I don’t like to think of him keeping track of me.

  And keeping track would not be difficult. My son’s death was media fodder off and on for eighteen months. Maybe Joey’s death is one of the reasons, the second. Which means my husband’s death, fourteen years ago, is reason one, and my son’s death, seven years ago, is reason two. Tragedy comes to me in seven-year cycles, like locusts. Which means that my card has come up again.

  I have fallen asleep with Leo’s head on my foot, my neck sloped sideways in an awkward slant that makes me ache when I wake up. Leo, whose head is also slanted sideways, does not seem to ache. He blinks his sleepy eyes at me, watchful, perhaps, to see if I am going to cry. I have overslept. It is too late now to be calling my DIL.

  Caro answers on the first ring. She sounds breathless, not like her usual self. On the other hand, today is after all the seventh anniversary of the day she shot and killed Joey, her husband and my son, in self defense. Always the thought comes to me – if only she had not bought a gun. Followed as always by the next thought – would he have killed her? I love my son as much today as I did the day he was born. I miss him every day of my life, and, considering who his father was, he turned out better than he should have. But he had miles to go and years of evolution ahead of him. He just didn’t last long enough.