Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  “No,” she said, her face reddening. “What...what kind of program was he in?”

  McGuane gave what looked to her like an ironic grin. “Not sure yet. I was hoping you could tell me, actually.”

  “I have no idea,” she said, her voice taking on a faraway quality as if she were ransacking memories to try and remember one thing he might’ve said about something from childhood that seemed out of the ordinary. Her mother’s annoying voice erupted in her head, the bad advice given when she got engaged to Hut: Remember, wives never really know much about their husbands. It’s just the way marriage is. That’s why your father and I got divorced. They keep secrets. They hold back. To hell with it. Then, she remembered something. “Oh. He told me he was …” she glanced at Mel as if trying to get her to confirm a memory of a conversation. “You were there. It was about some accident when he was little. He said he was in a hospital for a long time.”

  “All we know is that it was a school called Daylight. Or the Daylight Project. And it was not an ordinary program.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “Your husband may have known one of the other victims. All of them were there. Your husband may have known the man who killed him. We’re just looking into things for now. Trying to connect the dots,” McGuane said. “A man, roughly your husband’s age, was attacked by the killer. But not killed. His memory, after the attack, isn’t so good. But he knew about your husband. He knew about two women who were also killed. We’re having trouble with his story, simply because … well, he claims to have psychic knowledge.”

  “Psychic?” Mel said, shooting a glance at Julie. Julie caught it: what the hell?

  “Wait, are you saying that some psychic is claiming things, and the NYPD is listening?”

  “We’ve had some help, at times, from the psychic community, Mrs. Hutchinson,” McGuane said, straight-faced. “I personally don’t really believe in that kind of thing. But, sometimes it helps.”

  “So you’re going to use a psychic to find who killed Hut?” Julie could not repress a laugh.

  McGuane glanced down at his soda. “There are all kinds of ways to find a killer, Mrs. Hutchinson. I’m sure you would want us to use every resource at our disposal.”

  Mel chimed in. “Mom told me that sometimes psychics feel they see a murder scene,” she said.

  “Sure,” Julie deadpanned. “Maybe we should ask Livy to tune in on her brain radio.” Then, more seriously, to McGuane, “You think that my husband knew psychics?”

  “No, nothing like that,” McGuane said.

  “Because he didn’t. He didn’t go for mumbo-jumbo. That’s one thing I can say for sure about him. He was a doctor. He was fascinated by scientific research. He didn’t think life was mystical,” Julie said.

  “That’s true,” Mel said, and Julie was thankful she was there.

  Mel got up to go get a glass of water. McGuane made a joke about crazies who phoned in solutions to murders. “This guy may just be one of the crazies, that’s true,” he said. “Still, he knew some things.”

  “Where did it happen?” Julie asked, wanting to steer the conversation away from mumbo-jumbo.

  McGuane looked out, beyond the living room window, as if thinking about how to delicately answer this question. “That doesn’t really matter right now.”

  “It does to me.”

  “All right. Just outside town. Out in some hills beyond the highway.”

  “He died in the woods.”

  “We found his car on the side of the road,” McGuane said. “In Newark.”

  “But you found him nearby.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to go there.”

  3

  Against his better judgment, McGuane agreed to drive her to the place where her husband had been murdered. The roads were slick from a previous rain, and he took the turns along the highway slowly, both for safety and because he felt as if he had a fragile item in his car.

  They said nothing as he drove along the back road that led up to the hillside, beyond the suburbs, and Julie stared straight ahead the whole time, thinking of nothing whatsoever to mention.

  When they got there, to the edge of the road where the killer had left the victim’s car, McGuane parked, got out, and went around to open her door.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He had positioned the headlights of the car to shine on the narrow gravel path that cut through the woods.

  “He took your husband through there,” McGuane pointed, and then made a circle with his finger in the air. “There’s a clearing when you go higher.”

  “I suppose it’s too dark to go up there.”

  “Mrs. Hutchinson, if you think this will help at all,” he said, “I’ll get a flashlight and we can go up there. It’s muddy, and frankly, any footprint we leave might obscure some vital piece of evidence. I hate taking that chance.”

  She nodded and glanced around the woods. “Do you know when he died?”

  “We’re not sure. Not yet. I’d guess it was early afternoon, yesterday. Might’ve been last night. Some mountain bikers use that path. They’d been going up and down the hills around here this morning. One of them thought he saw a dead deer and went to get a closer look. Only, well, it wasn’t...what he had thought. That was before nine this morning.”

  “It rained yesterday, off and on,” she said.

  “But it was fairly dry when the bicyclists came through here.”

  “Where did the car end up? My husband’s Audi?”

  “Mrs. Hutchinson,” McGuane said. “it’s important to examine every little detail of this crime scene.”

  “It’s impounded,” she nodded, understanding. “Livy and I were here yesterday. Well, not here. Miles away, really. To the west. But we were in the woods, up in the hills.” She walked up to the edge of the path. She looked into the darkness between the trees as if half expecting someone to be there. Then, she turned, facing the headlights of McGuane’s car and said, “Please take me home now. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  4

  Later that evening, after the detective had gone, and Julie walked in the front door, Mel called to her from the top of the stairs. The kids were all ready for bed. It was nearly ten, and everybody was exhausted. Julie went to sit on the edge of Livy’s bed.

  Matt unrolled his sleeping bag on the floor near Livy’s bed.

  “It’s okay for a night or two,” Julie said. “It’s wonderful, in fact. But you need to move it back to your own bedroom soon. Okay?” Even as she said this, she wanted to bring both of them into her own bed and hold them for as long as possible.

  Matt’s reaction had surprised her. She had suspected he might have a violent outburst, or become agitated. But he chose silence, instead. He had barely said a word since Julie had told him of his father’s death, but stuck close to Livy who had bawled for hours before she had just gone to her room and begun reading. Julie wasn’t sure how Livy understood death, and even as she tucked her in, Livy looked at her as if she didn’t quite believe that her father was not coming home again.

  Mel sat next to Matt on his temporary bed, while Julie began singing “Lullaby and Goodnight” to Livy, who clung to her as she fell asleep.

  “It’s nice of you to do this,” she whispered to Matt before kissing him good night, which he shrugged away as if he were too old for kisses on the forehead.

  “I want to keep her safe,” Matt said.

  Julie glanced around his sleeping bag. “You usually sleep with your camera.”

  “Not tonight, Julie. I don’t feel like making a movie out of this,” he said. He covered himself up to his neck in the sleeping bag and then rested his head on the pillow. “You won’t let me go back to my mother, will you?”

  Julie felt a lump in her throat. “Of course not. We’re family,” she said. “You and me and Livy. Don’t even think it. Remember when all those papers got signed? You’re stuck with me, bucko.”

  5

  When the kid
s were asleep, she went to the linen closet and drew a footstool out so she could reach the very top shelf. She drew a metal box down. It clanked when she moved it. She took it into her room and set it on the dresser. She found the small key to the lock. She opened the box. Wrapped in a thin cloth, the gun. She knew nothing about guns. She knew this was some special type of revolver that Hut had to get a license for. She hadn’t wanted to know about it. She had pretended that the bad people never showed up at your door in the suburbs.

  Then, she went to find the clip to put in it. She didn’t think she’d use it. She didn’t think she’d ever need to. But she wanted to feel as if it was there for her, if anything ever threatened her children.

  6

  Before Julie went to bed, she looked up the phone number in an old Day Runner that she’d kept since their wedding day. She punched in the number on her cell phone. California. The area code had changed. She had to tap the number in again, this time with another area code.

  At first no one picked up. Then, a man’s voice. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Hutchinson. This is Julie.”

  He said nothing in response.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She could not help her tears.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Hut’s father said. His voice had a slightly Midwestern inflection. She imagined a husky man of seventy-one with salt-and-pepper hair. “We heard from the authorities. How are you doing?”

  She didn’t want to lie. She wiped at her eyes with her free hand. “I don’t know.”

  “How’s Matty and Livy?”

  “Sad. Quiet. I can’t imagine what they’re thinking.”

  “The shock has just hit us both in the gut,” he said. “I’m glad you called. We needed to get in touch. At some point. Even if it would be against his wishes.”

  “I know.”

  “Joanne’s sleeping. She’s been sleeping since we heard.”

  “We can talk another time. Would that be all right?”

  “Of course,” he said. “And Julie, it’s good to hear from you. Even under these circumstances. We want to try and keep up now, if possible. Would that be all right?”

  Julie tried to erase the words her husband had used over the years about his parents, about how horrible they’d been to him, about how they could not come to the wedding, about how they had treated him like a piece of trash since the moment they’d adopted him, about horrible verbal and mental abuse at their hands, about how he had to use college scholarships to escape them, and get beyond their cold darkness.

  It didn’t seem to matter anymore. She wanted to know them. She wanted to know more about Hut.

  “Of course,” she said. “I want my daughter to know her grandparents. And Matt.”

  “Thank you,” the man said. “He never thought of us as his parents. Not really. But we loved him, despite everything. We really loved our son.”

  It struck her as normal for him to say that, even though Hut had all but convinced her that his father was a monster and his mother was an overly passive contributor to his father’s moods. Hut was dead now, after all. It was easy for his parents to remember their love for him. She had always assumed that Hut would deeply regret the rift he’d created with his folks when one of them died. She had never anticipated that Hut would die first, and that she might finally get to know his adoptive mother and father, two people she had only briefly met, during a trip when Hut had just blown up with anger at them and he and Julie had to retreat back to a hotel “rather than spend ten more seconds with those awful people!” as Hut had yelled at the time.

  7

  She woke up late and couldn’t pull herself out of bed until eleven. She had the vague memory of a dirty dream—something about a man pressing his fingers into her and licking her thighs. It made her feel a little guilty to have such a dream so soon after Hut’s death.

  When she finally rose, she made some calls to the sheriff. Julie learned from the sheriff’s office that Detective McGuane had gotten some kind of ridiculous permission to transfer Hut’s body to a morgue in Manhattan.

  “It’s necessary,” the sheriff told her on the phone, and she had first called Andrew Money, a lawyer she knew from work at the hospital, to see what her legal rights were in this—she’d left an overly detailed message for the lawyer, which she wished she could’ve erased right after she’d finished with it.

  By noon, she had tried to reach McGuane by phone, furious that she could not plan a funeral and have her husband’s body safe from the dissectors of the autopsy room.

  Finally, McGuane tracked her down, via cell phone. “Mrs. Hutchinson, we need to talk again. As soon as possible.”

  8

  “I can drive you,” Mel said.

  “I can do it. I need the drive. I’ll be fine.”

  “No, I’m going to drive you. Laura can stay with the kids. You should not be behind the wheel of a car right now. Not with all this,” Mel said. “I can go shopping—where’s this guy? Hey, he’s right around the corner from Bed, Bath & Beyond. I need to get a few things. So, you just call me when you’re done. I can shop ’til midnight if I have to.”

  It took them nearly two hours to get to the city, so she was at McGuane’s office just before three.

  McGuane’s office was full of maps and pictures of what might’ve been forensics snapshots. A gallery of the dead in pictures.

  A young woman sat opposite McGuane. She glanced back at Julie, as if startled from a private conversation.

  “Mrs. Hutchinson, this is Officer Donati. She’s our point person in forensics.”

  Donati nodded in her direction, a warm but silent greeting.

  “Coffee?” McGuane asked, pointed toward a Mr. Coffee machine that looked filthy at the edge of his desk.

  She shook her head slightly. “What is it you wouldn’t tell me on the phone?”

  “Please, sit down,” McGuane said, overly polite, gesturing to an empty chair near the other officer.

  Donati spoke up. “This happens from time to time with transfers between morgues and paperwork foul-ups, although in this case, it’s somewhat unique. It’s …”

  McGuane cut her off. “Mrs. Hutchinson, your husband’s body is missing.”

  Chapter Six

  1

  It was nearly four thirty when she stepped out onto the street in Manhattan and just began wandering. She felt as if the woman named Julie Hutchinson had been hollowed out, and now she was someone else.

  She walked down to Sixth Avenue and cut east over to Washington Square. The great arch was fenced off, and the circle within the park had some acrobat passing a hat after a brief show. Dogs in the dog run were barking, and she almost wished she were a drug addict so she could buy some drug from the dealers at the edge of the park, some drug that would just put her further away from reality.

  Then along the streets, again, past NYU, past the windows of shops full of shoes or books or pastries or trendy clothes.

  She stepped into Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore that had been a favorite of hers from her student days. She browsed the shelves, wondering what she should be looking for.

  Then, she remembered the conversation with her mother, after Mel had done a three-way phone conversation when the news of Hut’s murder had arrived; her mother had recommended a specific book. What was it?

  Something about The Life Beyond.

  She touched each book on the shelf, as if it would speak to her. None of them did.

  “Can I help you?” a young woman asked.

  Julie smiled, shrugged a little. “I guess I’m looking for a book. I thought it would be in self-help. It’s called The Life Beyond. At least, I think that’s the title.”

  “Let me look it up,” the clerk said, and then retreated to the cash register counter. She emerged a few moments later. “I’m afraid we don’t have that one in at the moment. Michael Diamond’s books are a little hard to get these days. We could order it for you, if you like.”

  Julie felt normal for the
two minutes or so it took to order the book, but when she was on the street again, it was as if she were afraid to run into her old self. The sky, seen between the overhang of buildings, was shadowy with clouds. She smelled rain in the air.

  2

  She wandered neighborhoods, remembering how it had felt to be younger and living in the city.

  She glanced in shop windows along Greenwich Avenue, crossed over to Ninth and passed by Electric Lady Studios, thinking of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, the legends who had recorded there, past the Barnes and Noble that had, when she’d lived there, been a B. Dalton’s, past Gray’s Papaya and moved through other stops along her memory’s lane, and there she was, outside her old apartment building.

  It was as rundown as it had been then, when she and Hut had their trysts, when she had just finished getting over a heartbreak of her twenties and decided that there was no such thing as romantic love, and then, suddenly, she had met Hut, and she believed in things again. She believed that love and romance and happiness were in the world for her.

  She sat down on a stoop outside a junk shop on Breton Street, which conjured a scene from her twenties of buying funky lava lamps and scratched-up coffee tables, and she thought of her old friends—Alicia and Joe, whom she used to go to hang out with, see movies, explore the city, cry over relationships that didn’t work, and laugh when life just became too absurd, or the time Joe asked if she’d be the “Best Woman” at his ring ceremony with his husband, Rick, and she had stood on the corner of Bleecker and Cornelius and just wept with happiness for him because she felt someone should be happy and in love.

  Those were her old days, and then, Hut had come along, and she’d left it all behind. She’d called Joe and Rick less and less, and then Alicia had grown cold (or had it been me? Julie wondered). Alicia had an art studio somewhere now, and Joe was writing novels about the gay community. She had meant to read them, meant to follow up on Alicia’s shows and installations, but Hut had brought her out to Rellingford, and they had quickly built a life, which seemed at times beyond their means. She glanced up at the window that had been her apartment, across the street.