The Woman in Darkness

by Charlie Donlea

  Thomas asked. Thomas and Bill were partners in their concrete business, pouring foundations for new homes, paving industrial parking lots and indoor garages. Their business, started when they were both twenty years old, had grown to a midsized company with a unionized labor force.

  “I’ve got a request in to Local 255. They’re working on it, but until we hire someone I’m running the crews, which means I’m outside all day. And with temperatures in the midnineties, I’m very happy to be sitting inside tonight.”

  “If it helps,” Thomas said, “I had to work the Bobcat when one of our guys was sick this week.”

  “That doesn’t help,” Bill said. “Driving a Cat is not the same as running the crews. If I get any more mosquito bites, I’ll contract malaria.”

  “Should we be more sympathetic toward our hardworking men, Angela?” Catherine asked.

  Angela stared at her plate, a detached look on her face.

  “Angela,” Thomas said.

  When she didn’t respond, he reached out and touched her shoulder, startling her. Angela looked up suddenly. The expression on her face made it seem like she was surprised to see others in the room.

  “Bill was just saying how bad the mosquitoes are,” Thomas said in an encouraging voice. “And that he’s working harder than I am down at the shop. I need my wife to defend me here.”

  Angela tried to smile, but ended up simply nodding at Thomas.

  “Anyway,” Catherine said, pointing at her husband’s neck, “if you get any more bug bites, you’ll not have to worry about malaria as much as needing a blood transfusion. It looks like Dracula got to you.”

  Bill put his hand to his neck. “I had an allergic reaction to the bug spray,” he said.

  Thomas kept his hand on Angela’s shoulder, an attempt to coax her into the conversation. She put her hand on top of his, and offered another false smile.

  “I’m not sure insect repellent works on vampires,” Angela said.

  This brought chuckles from the group. Angela tried to engage in the dinner conversation, but all she could see was the afterimage of the television reporter still burned in her mind, and all she could concentrate on were the women who had gone missing this summer.

  CHICAGO

  August 1979

  WHEN THEIR GUESTS WERE GONE, ANGELA CINCHED THE TOP OF THE garbage bag and tied it off. Her husband wiped his brow with his forearm as he stood in front of the sink and cleaned dishes. Entertaining was a new experience for her, and something to which Angela was still adapting. Before meeting Thomas, she had never enjoyed the experience of close friends, or any friends at all, for that matter. She had spent her life on the outskirts of societal norms. Vivid memories from Angela’s youth reminded her why traditional friendships were impossible.

  When Angela was age five, a girl had approached her in the kindergarten classroom to offer a Betsy McCall doll and the invitation to play together. To this day, Angela could feel the overwhelming sense of discomfort from someone standing so close to her, and the revulsion that came at the thought of touching a doll so many other children had handled. Even before kindergarten, Angela had taken to carrying her possessions in plastic sandwich bags to keep them safe from germs and filth. Her parents had learned that Angela’s tantrums—complete sensory detachments—were quelled only when her belongings were safe inside the plastic bags. The habit continued through grade school, and kept her sealed off from friendships as tightly as her possessions were protected from the world.

  So, hosting Catherine and Bill Blackwell for dinner had taken Angela as far out of her comfort zone as she’d been in months. But it was a good thing. It was making her life more normal. She had Thomas to thank for her transformation. Angela would forever be aware of the sideways glances she encountered from most of the world, but she took solace in the fact that Thomas accepted her, despite her many idiosyncrasies. Through her marriage, a new world had opened up. Catherine was the first person she called a friend. Around others Angela managed to control many of the unique habits that plagued the rest of her time. Catherine had seen some of these idiosyncrasies, and had accepted them. Like Angela’s aversion of physical contact by anyone other than Thomas, and her affliction to loud noises, and the way she could become transfixed by something her mind wouldn’t stop working on—as had occurred tonight when she watched the reporter explaining that another woman had gone missing. She had been unable to concentrate on anything else for the rest of the evening.

  Despite her friendship with Catherine, Angela had never warmed to Catherine’s husband, who was one of Thomas’s closest friends. But this, too, seemed to be a nonissue for Catherine. They met frequently for lunch while their husbands worked.

  “That was fun,” Thomas said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You and Catherine are becoming good friends?”

  “We are. And her husband is nice, too.”

  Thomas came over to her. “Catherine’s husband has a name, you know.”

  Angela averted her eyes, staring at her feet.

  “I know tonight was hard for you. But you did great. I also know Catherine provides a level of comfort for you, but you can’t only talk to her and me. You have to talk to everyone who’s in the house. It’s just polite.”

  She nodded.

  “And you have to call people by their names. Bill, right? Catherine’s husband’s name is Bill.”

  “I know,” Angela said. “He just … I’m not used to him, that’s all.”

  “He’s my business partner, and he’s a good friend, so we’re going to see him a lot.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  He kissed her forehead again, like he had when she watched the reporter covering the latest disappearance, and went back to the dishes.

  “I’m dropping this outside,” Angela said, lifting the tied-off garbage bag.

  She headed out the kitchen door, which led to the backyard. She walked across the small plot of grass, and noticed the utility door to the garage was open. It was dark now and light spilled from the garage and through the door frame to form a trapezoid on the grass outside the door. When Thomas was grilling the chicken, Angela remembered Catherine’s husband—Bill, as Thomas had just reminded her—walking freely in and out of the garage. It was another part of the night that made her uneasy, knowing the garage was a mess of clutter and junk. Angela had a hard time with things that were not strictly organized, and she was so embarrassed by the appearance of the garage that she had considered closing the door at one point during the evening as a nonverbal way of asking Catherine’s husband to stay on the patio.

  Angela shut the utility door now and pushed past the chain-link fence to enter the darkened alley. Lifting the top of the trashcan, she placed the garbage bag into the empty bin. A cat hissed and darted from behind the cans. Startled, she dropped the trashcan top, causing a loud metallic ruckus to echo through the alley while she let out a scream. Dogs barked from adjacent lots.

  Angela took a deep breath and looked down the alley. A street-light glowed at the far end of the block, casting swaying shadows of tree limbs onto the ground. In her mind Angela pictured a satellite image of the city limits, and referenced her location now as she stood in the shadowed alley on the far fringes of the city. Angela’s thoughts turned to the diagram she had meticulously created, in which she placed red dots to mark the suspected location of each abducted woman. She had highlighted in bright yellow the area that joined them all. Her neighborhood was far outside the colored pentagon.

  With a rumble in her chest and a tremor in her hands, Angela retrieved the top of the trashcan and haphazardly threw it back in place before running through the yard and into her kitchen. Thomas had finished the dishes and she heard the Cubs game playing in the living room. When she peeked in on him, Thomas was in a deep recline in the La-Z-Boy, which meant he’d soon be snoring. With her fingertips alive with adrenaline, she snuck into her bedroom and knelt at the foot of the bed. Opening the trunk, she found the stack of new
spaper clippings and her map of the city.

  She’d spent the entire evening suppressing her obsessive-compulsive needs. Angela’s freshly learned self-restraint had done her well. It opened up a new world with Thomas, and had allowed her to forge a friendship with Catherine. But Angela knew she could not completely ignore the needs of her mind and the demands of her central nervous system, which screamed for her to organize and list and break down the things that made no sense. She saw things as either straight and ordered with sharp, ninety-degree angles, or in complete disarray. The calls of her mind to piece together in rigid order anything that did not line up smoothly had always been loud and impossible to ignore. But lately, those screams had been deafening. The idea that there was a man who had eluded the police, and who had thrown the city into a state of paralysis, was the very definition of chaos. And ever since Angela had allowed her fierce and unrelenting psyche to consider this man, whom authorities called The Thief, she had been able to think of nothing else.

  She brought her stack of newspaper articles to the small desk in her bedroom, clicked on the light, and spread them out in front of her. Angela read them all for the hundredth time, determined to find what everyone else had missed.

  CHICAGO

  August 1979

  ANGELA SPENT THE FOLLOWING MORNING AT HER KITCHEN TABLE surrounded by the previous week’s newspaper clippings about The Thief. She had read them late into the night as Thomas slept on the La-Z-Boy. Now he had left for work and Angela was back at it. Both the Tribune and the Sun-Times lay before her as she meticulously worked the scissors around the corners of each article. She’d even managed to score a New York Times that had a brief write-up about the events in Chicago, the article drawing parallels to the “Son of Sam” killings from three years earlier. Angela read and re-read the news pieces, concentrating on the five women who had gone missing, and cataloguing everything that had been reported about each victim. She collected photos and created her own biographies. She knew so much about each woman that she felt connected to them.

  Angela worked hard to hide from Thomas the full scale of her affliction. There had been stretches in the past when her obsessive-compulsive disorder had consumed her, overwhelming her mind in ways that prevented routine rituals of daily life. During the darkest times, the illness tethered Angela to the completion of redundant tasks her brain insisted were necessary. And the more she tried to break free from those tumultuous duties, the more paranoid she became that something terrible would happen if she interrupted the cycle of meaningless assignments. The loop of paranoia fed itself until Angela was lost to its power.

  She felt that pull happening again now, and knew she needed to tame this current bout of obsession if she hoped to avoid a relapse. But she felt helpless when her mind focused on the missing women and the anonymous man who was taking them. Angela believed she could find a link between the victims. What she would do with her discovery, Angela hadn’t decided. Perhaps she would share her findings with the authorities. But Angela was careful not to get too far ahead of herself. Thinking too far into the future opened her mind to wild speculation that caused angst and fear. If Thomas noticed her missing lashes and thinning eyebrows again, he’d worry about a relapse. This would send her back to her therapist’s office, which would spell the end to her research. She couldn’t let that happen. The women who stared back from the newspaper clippings deserved her attention, and Angela was powerless to ignore them.

  After the press clippings were catalogued and ordered, she packed up her files and placed them back in the chest at the foot of her bed. It was 10:00 A.M. when she brought her coffee out to the garage. She carried with her two homemade breakfast sandwiches wrapped in foil. The garage was a detached two-car unit behind their bungalow-style home. A cement walkway led from the patio off the kitchen and ran to the utility door at the back of the garage, the front of which opened into the alley. The previous night, Angela had allowed her imagination to create irrational nightmares of what waited in the dark shadows after the cat ran from behind the trashcans. This morning, the sun was bright and her fear was gone.

  She walked through the utility door and hit the opener on the wall, causing the large garage door to rattle upward, and allowing the morning’s sun to brighten the area. Because she rarely ventured into the garage, it was incongruent to the home she kept. If the space were hers and not Thomas’s, Angela would have it ordered and meticulous the way everything else in her life needed to be. Instead, it was a mess of cluttered shelving filled with tattered books and dusty storage containers; there were paint cans coated with the drippings of a home project from when she and Thomas had painted the bedroom; there was car repair equipment, which Thomas had stacked in the corner, and an old couch they had meant to sell, but had never gotten around to. The couch was now filthy from dust and dirt, and covered by old magazines and newspapers. It was her morning project.

  Wednesday was garbage day, and Angela’s task was to drag the old couch into the alley for the garbagemen to haul away. The breakfast sandwiches were her bribe to the guys for hauling away such a large piece of trash. Before she could get to the couch, though, Angela started with the magazines and newspapers that covered it, dumping them in the trash. After ten minutes, the couch was empty of the clutter that had covered it. Positioning herself near the entrance of the garage, she grasped the arm of the couch and pulled. It was weighty and her progress was slow, but after ten minutes, Angela managed to drag the couch into the alley. She needed to move it another twenty feet to the garbage area, but she had spent her strength hauling the heavy piece of furniture this far. She walked into the garage to catch her breath and regain her energy.

  As she took deep, recovering breaths, she looked anxiously at the cluttered shelves, knowing that Thomas would be upset if she took her obsessiveness for order to the rest of the garage when she had told him she planned only to move the couch out to the garbage. But her fingers tingled as she looked at the chaotic shelving. Inspecting the items, she found things she had forgotten existed—old glassware from before she had married, and holiday decorations she and Thomas had never used.

  On another set of shelves, Angela stumbled over old wedding gifts that were both impractical and unwanted. She found a picnic basket flanked on each side with compartments for wine bottles. Never in her life had she been on a picnic, and the idea of sipping wine while sitting among insect-infested grass caused her skin to crawl. She lifted the top of the basket. Something inside caught her eye. A closer inspection revealed a thin jewelry box.

  She looked around the garage, and then out into the alley, as if she had just discovered a hidden treasure and worried about another learning her secret. She pulled the box from the depths of the basket and opened it. A sliver of morning sunlight slanted through the side window of the garage and struck the diamonds of the necklace, brilliantly highlighting the green peridot they encircled. It wasn’t unusual for Thomas to make extravagant purchases. He’d done so in the past and Angela’s birthday was just a week away. She immediately felt guilty for having spoiled his surprise.

  “Can I offer you a hand?”

  The deep, unfamiliar voice caused Angela to jump. She dropped the necklace back into the basket and spun around, finding herself face-to-face with a man she did not know. Her lungs expanded in an unintentional gasp, and a whine escaped into the air. The man stood in the alley by the couch, but his presence felt much closer. He had deep-set eyes darkened by the morning light, which shined down from behind him and silhouetted his form. The black presence of his shadow crept across the garage floor, coming so close to Angela that her skin tingled with goose bumps.

  “Looks like you’re stalled.”

  “No, no,” Angela said without thought. She was backing away toward the utility door behind her, her feet staggering. As a general rule, Angela Mitchell avoided eye contact whenever possible. But the charcoal holes in the man’s face were too cryptic to ignore.

  “I’ll just give it a push with you,
” the man said. “Help you get it over to the trashcans. You’re throwing it away, yes?”

  Angela shook her head. Her mind flashed to the biographies she had amassed on the missing women. The newspaper articles she had scanned and studied. The map of the city she had marked with the locations of the disappearances, and the bright yellow pentagon she had highlighted to demark the area of the city to avoid. She was filled now with the same sense of dread as when the stray cat had hissed from behind the trashcans. Last night, she had sensed another’s presence, and she had run back into the house before her mind could dwell too heavily on the feeling. And since then, Angela had worked hard to compartmentalize the thought, to suppress the idea that someone had been present with her in the alley, watching from the shadows. To allow her mind to concentrate on that fear, to permit her psyche to continuously strike the flint that might throw sparks onto the tinder of her anxiety, had the power to drive her mad. Once that thought was ignited, she would be unable to stifle the flames.

  Years before, a vagrant thought like that could send her into a weeks-long state of paranoia and obsessiveness where she’d lock herself in her home, checking and double checking the door locks, climbing from bed in the dark of night to make sure every window was secure, lifting the phone one hundred times in a row to make sure a dial tone was present to prove it was functional. Angela had worked too hard over the last few years to allow her new life to be ruined by the inner workings of her convoluted mind. But now, as she stared at the man in the alley, she wished she’d paid closer attention to the warnings her brain had sent last night.

  “My husband will be right out,” she managed to say. “He’ll help me the rest of the way.”

  The man looked beyond Angela, through the frame of the open utility door behind her, and to the back of the bungalow. He pointed at the house. “Your husband is home?”

  “Yes,” Angela said too quickly.