The Darkest Time of Night

by Jeremy Finley

  I should have known when I’d driven to Anne’s before eight and found another crop of cameras waiting to document me hurrying into their house. I had never been so thankful that she drove a Subaru with tinted windows, so we could pull out of the garage and none of the cameras could get footage of Brian in the backseat.

  I heard Tom’s footsteps approach from the other room. He always scuffed his feet when he was anxious.

  “Has Brian spoken yet?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Please don’t smoke in the house.”

  “I was in the study with the door closed. And who the hell cares at this point, Lynn? How is Brian?”

  “I care, Tom, because Ginger Roth from church died from lung cancer last year.”

  “Tell me about the doctor. Did he get Brian to talk?”

  “No, Tom, he didn’t. He wants Brian to come every day and do some experimental therapy to hopefully open him up to discuss what happened. But he thinks the same thing the police think: that whatever Brian saw stunned him into silence.”

  “Experimental therapy? My God, we don’t have time for experiments. It’s been almost twenty-four hours, Lynn. You heard what the detectives said. Every minute that passes means our chance of finding William diminishes. Brian needs to talk. He’s the only one with answers. I should have gone.”

  His used that tone primarily when he was in Washington, with everyone from his staffers to Republican adversaries. It indicated that he knew everything about which he spoke. There was no room for debate.

  “If you had gone, you would have ended up in a shouting match with the doctor. So no, Tom, you shouldn’t have gone. I know you want this to end—”

  “So I can get back to Washington and the VP offer? That’s not true, Lynn.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you were thinking it.”

  “This is my fault. I’m the one who allowed that photographer to take his picture and put it on the cover of that magazine. My God, what was I thinking? I just wished I’d known the truth.”

  “If this magazine had anything to do with William’s disappearance, I will live with that for the rest of my life. It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault but my own. It was my idea. Even Kate didn’t know. I didn’t think it would do any harm. I keep saying it, over and over again. I know the agents are tired of hearing me say it.”

  “But if you’d just told us about the formal offer to run for vice president the night William disappeared, how could anyone else have known?”

  “It’s the worst-kept secret in Washington. And the FBI does not hesitate to point out that you could fill a phone book with the names of the people who hate me.”

  I actually sat in during the first meeting with the investigators from the government and local police, but became so upset I had to leave in the middle of it. When the vice agents began to talk about the desire of pedophiles, I couldn’t hear anymore.

  The likely culprit was someone who had staked out the family, the investigators believed. It was no random act. Someone either had become fascinated with William from the article, or wanted the deepest revenge possible on my husband.

  “Could someone hate you that much?”

  Tom’s face took on a weary look. “Shall I begin stateside or overseas?”

  “I can’t believe someone in the United States would do this for political reasons.”

  “I never thought it was possible either, Lynn. I still can’t fathom it. But people are so angry now, they are so fired up by the pundits on both sides … All it would take is one crazy zealot who listened to one of the conservative commentators call me an enemy of the state. The FBI played it back to me, a recording of what’s-his-name, the bigheaded guy, looking at the screen, pointing. ‘Take back your country. Do whatever you have to do stop Roseworth and his liberal agenda. Don’t let him into the White House. Do whatever you have to do.’ All it would take is one nut job to come up with the idea to hurt my family. Because that’s about the only thing that would cause me to turn my back on politics forever. They know that.”

  “This certainly can’t be an act of terrorism.”

  Tom twitched his lips. It meant he was craving a cigarette.

  “Terrorism … do they really think…?”

  “It’s been tense in DC. It’s by design that I don’t bring you or the kids there anymore. I have almost constant security now.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I started coming down hardcore on needing more ground troops in the Middle East. I knew it would be controversial when a Democrat called for it, but I didn’t expect to become public enemy number one. ISIS obviously hasn’t taken responsibility for William—that would have been plastered all over the internet. But domestic terrorism is a different story. We’ve seen what these extremists have done. It’s all about seeking revenge. And there’ve been no calls, no letters, nothing demanding a ransom for William. I’ve had every theory thrown out to me by either the CIA or the FBI, and I get a real feeling they don’t know a damn thing.”

  The lights. Tell him about the lights. What you heard, what you did all those years ago.

  Instead, I nearly threw up, something I’d never done in my life, despite living through countless stomach flus with the girls. I hadn’t even vomited with Anne, my only girl who had prompted late-term morning sickness. Anne’s pregnancy had been so different than the others.…

  “Lynn, listen to me.” Tom placed his hands on my shoulders, leaning in close. “I need you. I need you to be the person you’ve always been for us. We need you to be solid, to be unwavering, to be calm. No more outbursts like the other morning, asking if the magazine spread was a setup. I can’t have you acting like that. Anne and Chris need you to be supportive and encouraging. Brian and Greg need their grandmother to be loving, not frazzled. Greg especially is having a hard time. Being nine-years-old and having one brother missing and the other refusing to talk is weighing heavily on him. Kate and Stella are tough, but they need their mother too. And I … I need my rock. The person I can depend on for everything.”

  He pulled me into a tight embrace.

  And with that, I decided to keep lying.

  * * *

  It was Roxy who broke me free. Leaving the house wasn’t an option, with investigators and police still combing the woods, and Tom receiving hourly updates on no potential leads. All this meant there was no way to avoid the cameras, the calls from earnest-sounding producers from the Today Show and Good Morning America, the neighbors bringing food and insisting they were refusing all sorts of financial offers from the tabloids to gain access to a better view of our house.

  Roxy showed up late in the evening. She scowled at the photographers who’d flicked on their lights to capture her arrival in her pickup truck, took one look at me pacing in the kitchen, and ushered me out the back door towards the Rose Peddler.

  Our garden shop was already closed on Sunday anyway, but she’d made a sign that read “Closed Indefinitely. This means you, National Enquirer.”

  As Roxy unlocked the door, the familiar smell of the lavender candles and fertilizer brought the first moment of peace I’d had since Anne’s frantic phone call two days ago. I inhaled deeply as she led me out to the back to the small screened-in porch we added on a few years ago as a place for me to read magazines and for Roxy to drink margaritas after a long day.

  “No one can see you here. No reporters, no investigators, no husband or children. Turn on Nina while I pour the tequila.”

  “My God, Roxy, I can’t do this. What if the police find something, what if Anne needs me, and I certainly can’t have alcohol—”

  “Sister, that tequila is for me. I wouldn’t waste it on you, you’re drunk off half a glass of wine. And you know as well as I do that your phone is in your pocket set on the loudest ringtone possible. Tom saw me haul you out, he knows where you are. We need to talk, and we need to do it in private. And your house happens to be crawling with the FBI at this moment. Simone. Now.”

>   I reached over and pushed play on the ancient, yellow CD player. The piano rift that began “I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl” was barely audible above the cicadas outside. As Nina Simone began to sing about her heartbreaking longing, Roxy returned from the mini refrigerator with a margarita in a pouch, something she routinely stocked up on at the liquor store.

  “Now.” Roxy took a long swig. “Tell me everything.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. No leads. No ransom notes. No threats. No homegrown terrorist taking credit. All the sex offenders in a twenty-mile radius have been questioned and their homes searched. Now—as Chief Stacks warned us—the attention is turning to us.”

  “To you?”

  “To the family. You can’t imagine how awful it is. Here are Chris and Anne, in the midst of the worst moment of their lives, having to answer the most awful questions. They asked Anne if Chris is abusing the boys. Not only physically, but sexually. She almost hyperventilated, especially when they said they’d tracked down her old fiancé from college, who claimed that Tom was mentally abusive to all of us.”

  “He said that because Tom told him at Thanksgiving dinner that he doubted the punk would ever make more than $12,000 a year.” Roxy raised her index finger before taking a drink. “But regardless, how terrible.”

  “And they just circle the boys. They try to talk to Brian, who only sits in his chair and stares. I sat in when they interviewed Greg, and they asked him if he was ever afraid of his mom and dad. He looked at me and Tom in confusion and answered yes. You should have seen the FBI agent stiffen, and when they asked Greg why, he promptly told the story of when the dog pooped in the house, and he used the robot vacuum to try and pick it up, and it spread feces all over the upstairs carpets.”

  “He should have been afraid after that. That poor boy.”

  “And they know everything. All the times Chris has been sued by unhappy clients, when Brian was suspended from school for a day for bringing a pocketknife, what Anne posted on Facebook about her anger at people who complain about public breast-feeding. About that weirdo from Antioch who kept sending Stella those love letters at the TV station, demanding she friend him on Facebook. Anything—anything at all to indicate problems with our family, or who would hate us.”

  “Oh Sis, I’m so sorry. And it probably took them thirty seconds to interview you. You have no enemies and you’ve never made anyone mad, except for me—those pastel garden hats we wore at my wedding were your idea. You may have put off a few of your fellow English students in college when you critiqued their awful short stories, but that’s it. You’re as noncontroversial as anyone could possibly be.”

  At that moment, I wanted to take the pouch from her and drain it dry. You’ve been my best friend all my life, and even you don’t know what happened.

  Roxy took another long drink. A wasp darted above us. Somewhere nearby, a lawnmower from one of the yard services roared to life.

  “No family can survive this.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “We won’t. We can’t. Who could? We can’t have Christmas. We can’t have birthdays. How can you celebrate anything when you know he’s out there? How will we ever recover? How can we go on without him?”

  “You’ll recover when William comes back. They will find him, Lynn.”

  “How? How can they find him? What if they don’t know what they’re doing? What they’re even looking for?”

  “Lynn, this is the FBI. That’s what they do.”

  “What if they don’t know? I’m so afraid they don’t know.”

  “I know you are. We’re all afraid. What do you think they don’t know?”

  I rocked instead of answering, and I knew Roxy understood what that meant, just like she knew what it signaled when I ate chocolate at midnight or crunched ice after watching Matthew Crawley on my DVD box set of Downton Abbey. When I rocked, it meant I was trying to work something out.

  “Do you remember my father not allowing me to go into the woods?”

  “Hmmm?” Roxy leaned back, folding her arms, a nap rapidly approaching. Ever since we were teenagers, it only took a little bit of alcohol to put her right to sleep.

  “He absolutely forbid it when I was growing up. Once he told me that when you go into the woods, you don’t come out.”

  “Your father was the sweetest and most overprotective man I ever knew. You were his only child. He raised you as a single father after your mom died so young. And let us not forget that he almost lost you too.”

  I reached up and let my fingers trace the back of my head, just behind my right ear. I was five when Daddy said the doctors discovered the brain tumor and insisted it be removed, even if the risks were great. My very first memory was waking up and seeing a man smiling at me. I asked who he was, and he barely could manage to say, “Your Daddy.”

  Some parents would have crumbled, but Daddy soldiered on and taught me everything about my life before the procedure, repeatedly showing me pictures of my mother to try and prompt me to remember her, which I never did. When I returned to school the next year, my friends (none of whom I remembered either) thought I’d moved away. Nashville was a lot smaller then. Daddy bragged to my teacher that I relearned to read in a week, and I was probably too advanced for kindergarten, but the school made me repeat the grade. Twelve years later, I graduated at the top of my class. In every picture from graduation, Daddy had tears in his eyes.

  “He adored you. He didn’t even want you riding in the car with me when I got my license, which, in retrospect, was a real concern. But honestly, do you think your dad could have foreseen this? Because that’s impossible. I know you’re running over every possibility in your mind. Don’t torture yourself.”

  “Was that it, then? Him being overprotective?”

  “Mmm hmmm.” Roxy spoke in almost a hum.

  “Maybe he was just being a helicopter dad. Remember when I came home from Illinois even though it was Tom’s last semester in law school, because I was determined to have my first baby in Tennessee? Daddy never even told me how sick he was. When I was up north, he refused to let me come home and visit, saying that I needed to stay and support Tom in his last year. Even when I told him over the phone I was pregnant, he said I needed to start a new life there. I didn’t even tell him I was coming home, and when I did, he had practically wasted away. He couldn’t speak, write, or even eat on his own. All that time, he was protecting me from the truth about how sick he was.”

  I looked over to say more and saw Roxy’s mouth was open enough for a soft snore to escape; her glasses had slipped down her nose. The tequila had kicked in.

  “And do you know what else?” A hot wind blew through the trees, and I watched the leaves stir. “Do you know just before he died, he did speak to me? Only once. He said, ‘Don’t you raise that baby here, Lynnie. You go, and you never come back.’ What did he mean by that?”

  Roxy’s chest rose and fell.

  “I want to tell you.” I want to tell you everything. But once that door is opened, it can never be closed. And you would immediately begin to worry that I’d lost my mind.

  “What’s that?” Roxy mumbled. “What … did you say?”

  “Nothing.” I took the pouch from her hand, placed it on the floor, and continued to rock. “I didn’t say anything at all.”

  SIX

  OCTOBER

  I could feel the encroachment of night, even though daylight saving time hadn’t officially ended. The only solace to the early dark was that I could go to bed a little earlier each evening, pull up the quilts, and close my eyes. On this night, though, sleep had other plans.

  I thought of Kate talking in hushed tones on her cell phone in the corner of the kitchen, on the rare weekends she was home from Washington. She had twice now booked earlier flights to return to the capital.

  Of Stella’s resignation from the anchor desk and her agreement with her news director to take a pay cut to join the investigative unit. How she held the mic like a weapon on the
six o’clock news tonight, thrusting it in the face of a minister who took money from his congregation then promptly closed the church and purchased two sports cars and a boat. “I need to nail some bad guys,” Stella said quietly last week, over lunch.

  Of Anne, who slept away much of the day. Of Chris’s leave of absence from the law firm, spending his days poring over information on sex offenders in Nashville and pacing through the woods.

  Of the alarm going off at 6:00 A.M., so I could be at Anne’s house by 6:30 to get Greg ready for school. Of 3:15, when I picked him up, took him home, and peppered him with questions about school. Don’t you think you should rejoin scouts? Don’t you think you should get back into flag football? He preferred to sit in front of the Cartoon Network instead. I didn’t mind. That programming was never interrupted with news updates, which occasionally pertained to our family.

  Of Brian, vacant and wooden, staring out the window of the psychiatrist’s office, refusing to engage with the doctor or anyone else. He was unresponsive at school, so Chris and Anne had to pull him out and hired a tutor to come to the house to try and work with him. Yet every day I brought Greg home, the tutor only shook her head. Chris had flown into a rage on Monday, screaming at Brian to tell them what he saw. Brian had gone into his room and laid on top of his bed. I hurried in, hoping to find him crying. His eyes were dry.

  Of Tom’s absence from the neighborhood Labor Day parade, which just last year he, Brian, Greg, and William had led, the boys tossing candy from Tom’s 1990 soft-top Jeep Wrangler. How he disappeared into his library to stare at a photograph of the four of them, each holding a Jolly Rancher in their teeth and grinning like hyenas. He emerged smelling like smoke and whiskey.

  Of our family’s offer of $500,000 for any information that led to the safe return of our grandson. Of the hundreds of false leads that followed.

  Of the flowers in the garden that I had abandoned at the end of the brutal summer. I felt like I had done the same to William, in denying that I remembered where I had first heard the words.