Full Dark, No Stars

His eyes shifted upward and to the left when he said this. She had read somewhere that this meant the person who was talking was telling a conscious lie. But did it matter if he was? Or which one of them he was lying to? She thought not.

"I won't go into the details," he said. "It's nothing for a sweetheart like you to hear, and like it or not--I know you don't right now--you're still my sweetheart. But you have to know I fought it. For seven years I fought it, but those ideas--Brian's ideas--kept growing inside my head. Until finally I said to myself, 'I'll try it once, just to get it out of my head. To get him out of my head. If I get caught, I get caught--at least I'll stop thinking about it. Wondering about it. What it would be like.'"

"You're telling me it was a male exploration," she said dully.

"Well, yes. I suppose you could say that."

"Or like trying a joint just to see what all the shouting was about."

He shrugged modestly, boyishly. "Kinda."

"It wasn't an exploration, Bobby. It wasn't trying a joint. It was taking a woman's life."

She had seen no guilt or shame, absolutely none--he appeared incapable of those things, it seemed the circuit-breaker that controlled them had been fried, perhaps even before birth--but now he gave her a sulky, put-upon look. A teenager's you-don't-understand-me look.

"Darcy, they were snoots."

She wanted a glass of water, but she was afraid to get up and go into the bathroom. She was afraid he would stop her, and what would come after that? What then?

"Besides," he resumed, "I didn't think I'd get caught. Not if I was careful and made a plan. Not a half-baked and horny-fourteen-year-old boy's plan, you know, but a realistic one. And I realized something else, too. I couldn't do it myself. Even if I didn't screw up out of nervousness, I might out of guilt. Because I was one of the good guys. That's how I saw myself, and believe it or not, I still do. And I have the proof, don't I? A good home, a good wife, two beautiful children who are all grown up and starting their own lives. And I give back to the community. That's why I took the Town Treasurer's job for two years, gratis. That's why I work with Vinnie Eschler every year to put on the Halloween blood drive."

You should have asked Marjorie Duvall to give, Darcy thought. She was A-positive.

Then, puffing out his chest slightly--a man nailing down his argument with one final, irrefutable point--he said: "That's what the Cub Scouts are about. You thought I'd quit when Donnie went on to Boy Scouts, I know you did. Only I didn't. Because it's not just about him, and never was. It's about the community. It's about giving back."

"Then give Marjorie Duvall back her life. Or Stacey Moore. Or Robert Shaverstone."

That last one got through; he winced as if she had struck him. "The boy was an accident. He wasn't supposed to be there."

"But you being there wasn't an accident?"

"It wasn't me," he said, then added the ultimate surreal absurdity. "I'm no adulterer. It was BD. It's always BD. It was his fault for putting those ideas in my head in the first place. I never would have thought of them on my own. I signed my notes to the police with his name just to make that clear. Of course I changed the spelling, because I sometimes called him BD back when I first told you about him. You might not remember that, but I did."

She was impressed by the obsessive lengths he'd gone to. No wonder he hadn't been caught. If she hadn't stubbed her toe on that damned carton--

"None of them had any relation to me or my business. Either of my businesses. That would be very bad. Very dangerous. But I travel a lot, and I keep my eyes open. BD--the BD inside--he does, too. We watch out for the snooty ones. You can always tell. They wear their skirts too high and show their bra straps on purpose. They entice men. That Stacey Moore, for instance. You read about her, I'm sure. Married, but that didn't keep her from brushing her titties against me. She worked as a waitress in a coffee shop--the Sunnyside in Waterville. I used to go up there to Mickleson's Coins, remember? You even went with me a couple of times, when Pets was at Colby. This was before George Mickleson died and his son sold off all the stock so he could go to New Zealand or somewhere. That woman was all over me, Darce! Always asking me if I wanted a warm-up on my coffee and saying stuff like how 'bout those Red Sox, bending over, rubbing her titties on my shoulder, trying her best to get me hard. Which she did, I admit it, I'm a man with a man's needs, and although you never turned me away or said no... well, rarely... I'm a man with a man's needs and I've always been highly sexed. Some women sense that and like to play on it. It gets them off."

He was looking down at his lap with dark, musing eyes. Then something else occurred to him and his head jerked up. His thinning hair flew, then settled back.

"Always smiling! Red lipstick and always smiling! Well, I recognize smiles like that. Most men do. 'Ha-ha, I know you want it, I can smell it on you, but this little rub's all you're going to get, so deal with it.' I could! I could deal with it! But not BD, not him."

He shook his head slowly.

"There are lots of women like that. It's easy to get their names. Then you can trace them down on the Internet. There's a lot of information if you know how to look for it, and accountants know how. I've done that... oh, dozens of times. Maybe even a hundred. You could call it a hobby, I guess. You could say I collect information as well as coins. Usually it comes to nothing. But sometimes BD will say, 'She's the one you want to follow through on, Bobby. That one right there. We'll make the plan together, and when the time comes, you just let me take over.' And that's what I do."

He took her hand, and folded her limp and chilly fingers into his.

"You think I'm crazy. I can see it in your eyes. But I'm not, honey. It's BD who's crazy... or Beadie, if you like his for-the-public name better. By the way, if you read the stories in the paper, you know I purposely put a lot of misspellings in my notes to the police. I even misspell the addresses. I keep a list of misspellings in my wallet so that I'll always do it the same way. It's misdirection. I want them to think Beadie's dumb--illiterate, anyway--and they do. Because they're dumb. I've only been questioned a single time, years ago, and that was as a witness, about two weeks after BD killed the Moore woman. An old guy with a limp, semi-retired. Told me to give him a call if I remembered anything. I said I would. That was pretty rich."

He chuckled soundlessly, as he sometimes did when they were watching Modern Family or Two and a Half Men. It was a way of laughing that had, until tonight, always heightened her own amusement.

"You want to know something, Darce? If they caught me dead to rights, I'd admit it--at least I guess I would, I don't think anybody knows a hundred percent for sure what they'd do in a situation like that--but I couldn't give them much of a confession. Because I don't remember much about the actual... well... acts. Beadie does them, and I kind of... I don't know... go unconscious. Get amnesia. Some damn thing."

Oh, you liar. You remember everything. It's in your eyes, it's even in the way your mouth turns down at the corners.

"And now... everything's in Darcellen's hands." He raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed the back of it, as if to emphasize this point. "You know that old punchline, the one that goes, 'I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you'? That doesn't apply here. I could never kill you. Everything I do, everything I've built... modest as it would look to some people, I guess... I've done and built for you. For the kids too, of course, but mostly for you. You walked into my life, and do you know what happened?"

"You stopped," she said.

He broke into a radiant grin. "For over twenty years!"

Sixteen, she thought but didn't say.

"For most of those years, when we were raising the kids and struggling to get the coin business off the ground--although that was mostly you--I was racing around New England doing taxes and setting up foundations--"

"You were the one who made it work," she said, and was a little shocked by what she heard in her voice: calmness and warmth. "You were the one with the expertise.

"

He looked almost touched enough to start crying again, and when he spoke his voice was husky. "Thank you, hon. It means the world to hear you say that. You saved me, you know. In more ways than one."

He cleared his throat.

"For a dozen years, BD never made a peep. I thought he was gone. I honestly did. But then he came back. Like a ghost." He seemed to consider this, then nodded his head very slowly. "That's what he is. A ghost, a bad one. He started pointing out women when I was traveling. 'Look at that one, she wants to make sure you see her nipples, but if you touched them she'd call the police and then laugh with her friends when they took you away. Look at that one, licking her lips with her tongue, she knows you'd like her to put it in your mouth and she knows you know she never will. Look at that one, showing off her panties when she gets out of her car, and if you think that's an accident, you're an idiot. She's just one more snoot who thinks she'll never get what she deserves.'"

He stopped, his eyes once more dark and downcast. In them was the Bobby who had successfully evaded her for twenty-seven years. The one he was trying to pass off as a ghost.

"When I started to have those urges, I fought them. There are magazines... certain magazines... I bought them before we got married, and I thought if I did that again... or certain sites on the Internet... I thought I could... I don't know... substitute fantasy for reality, I guess you'd say... but once you've tried the real thing, fantasy isn't worth a damn."

He was talking, Darcy thought, like a man who had fallen in love with some expensive delicacy. Caviar. Truffles. Belgian chocolates.

"But the point is, I stopped. For all those years, I stopped. And I could stop again, Darcy. This time for good. If there's a chance for us. If you could forgive me and just turn the page." He looked at her, earnest and wet-eyed. "Is it possible you could do that?"

She thought of a woman buried in a snowdrift, her naked legs exposed by the careless swipe of a passing plow--some mother's daughter, once the apple of some father's eye as she danced clumsily across a grammar-school stage in a pink tutu. She thought of a mother and son discovered in a freezing creek, their hair rippling in the black, ice-edged water. She thought of the woman with her head in the corn.

"I'd have to think about it," she said, very carefully.

He grasped her by the upper arms and leaned toward her. She had to force herself not to flinch, and to meet his eyes. They were his eyes... and they weren't. Maybe there's something to that ghost business after all, she thought.

"This isn't one of those movies where the psycho husband chases his screaming wife all around the house. If you decide to go to the police and turn me in, I won't lift a finger to stop you. But I know you've thought about what it would do to the kids. You wouldn't be the woman I married if you hadn't thought about that. What you might not have thought about is what it would do to you. Nobody would believe that you were married to me all these years and never knew... or at least suspected. You'd have to move away and live on what savings there are, because I've always been the breadwinner, and a man can't win bread when he's in jail. You might not even be able to get at what there is, because of the civil suits. And of course the kids--"

"Stop it, don't talk about them when you talk about this, don't you ever."

He nodded humbly, still holding lightly to her forearms. "I beat BD once--I beat him for twenty years--"

Sixteen, she thought again. Sixteen, and you know it.

"--and I can beat him again. With your help, Darce. With your help I can do anything. Even if he were to come back in another twenty years, so what? Big deal! I'd be seventy-three. Hard to go snoot-hunting when you're shuffling around in a walker!" He laughed cheerily at this absurd image, then sobered again. "But--now listen to me carefully--if I were ever to backslide, even one single time, I'd kill myself. The kids would never know, they'd never have to be touched by that... that, you know, stigma ... because I'd make it look like an accident... but you'd know. And you'd know why. So what do you say? Can we put this behind us?"

She appeared to consider. She was considering, in fact, although such thought processes as she could muster were probably not trending in a direction he would be likely to understand.

What she thought was: It's what drug addicts say. "I'll never take any of that stuff again. I've quit before and this time I'll quit for good. I mean it." But they don't mean it, even when they think they do they don't, and neither does he.

What she thought was: What am I going to do? I can't fool him, we've been married too long.

A cold voice replied to that, one she had never suspected of being inside her, one perhaps related to the BD-voice that whispered to Bob about the snoots it observed in restaurants, laughing on street corners, riding in expensive sports cars with the top down, whispering and smiling to each other on apartment-building balconies.

Or perhaps it was the voice of the Darker Girl.

Why can't you? it asked. After all... he fooled you.

And then what? She didn't know. She only knew that now was now, and now had to be dealt with.

"You'd have to promise to stop," she said, speaking very slowly and reluctantly. "Your most solemn, never-go-back promise."

His face filled with a relief so total--so somehow boyish--that she was touched. He so seldom looked like the boy he had been. Of course that was also the boy who had once planned to go to school with guns. "I would, Darcy. I do. I do promise. I already told you."

"And we could never talk about this again."

"I get that."

"You're not to send the Duvall woman's ID to the police, either."

She saw the disappointment (also weirdly boyish) that came over his face when she said that, but she meant to stick to it. He had to feel punished, if only a little. That way he'd believe he had convinced her.

Hasn't he? Oh Darcellen, hasn't he?

"I need more than promises, Bobby. Actions speak louder than words. Dig a hole in the woods and bury that woman's ID cards in it."

"Once I do that, are we--"

She reached out and put her hand to his mouth. She strove to make herself sound stern. "Hush. No more."

"Okay. Thank you, Darcy. So much."

"I don't know what you're thanking me for." And then, although the thought of him lying next to her filled her with revulsion and dismay, she forced herself to say the rest.

"Now get undressed and come to bed. We both need to get some sleep."

- 10 -

He was under almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, but long after he'd commenced his small, polite snores, Darcy lay awake, thinking that if she allowed herself to drift off, she would awake with his hands around her throat. She was in bed with a madman, after all. If he added her, his score would be an even dozen.

But he meant it, she thought. This was right around the time that the sky began to lighten in the east. He said he loves me, and he meant it. And when I said I'd keep his secret--because that's what it comes down to, keeping his secret--he believed me. Why wouldn't he? I almost convinced myself.

Wasn't it possible he could carry through on his promise? Not all drug addicts failed at getting clean, after all. And while she could never keep his secret for herself, wasn't it possible she could for the kids?

I can't. I won't. But what choice?

What goddam choice?

It was while pondering this question that her tired, confused mind finally gave up and slipped away.

She dreamed of going into the dining room and finding a woman bound with chains to the long Ethan Allen table there. The woman was naked except for a black leather hood that covered the top half of her face. I don't know that woman, that woman is a stranger to me, she thought in her dream, and then from beneath the hood Petra said: "Mama, is that you?"

Darcy tried to scream, but sometimes in nightmares, you can't.

- 11 -

When she finally struggled awake--headachey, miserable, feeling hungover--the other half of the bed was empty. B

ob had turned his clock back around, and she saw it was quarter past ten. It was the latest she'd slept in years, but of course she hadn't dropped off until first light, and such sleep as she'd gotten was populated with horrors.

She used the toilet, dragged her housecoat off the hook on the back of the bathroom door, then brushed her teeth--her mouth tasted foul. Like the bottom of a birdcage, Bob would say on the rare mornings after he'd taken an extra glass of wine with dinner or a second bottle of beer during a baseball game. She spat, began to put her brush back in the toothglass, then paused, looking at her reflection. This morning she saw a woman who looked old instead of middle-aged: pale skin, deep lines bracketing the mouth, purple bruises under the eyes, the crazed bed-head you only got from tossing and turning. But all this was only of passing interest to her; how she looked was the last thing on her mind. She peered over her reflection's shoulder and through the open bathroom door into their bedroom. Except it wasn't theirs; it was the Darker Bedroom. She could see his slippers, only they weren't his. They were obviously too big to be Bob's, almost a giant's slippers. They belonged to the Darker Husband. And the double bed with the wrinkled sheets and unanchored blankets? That was the Darker Bed. She shifted her gaze back to the wild-haired woman with the bloodshot, frightened eyes: the Darker Wife, in all her raddled glory. Her first name was Darcy, but her last name wasn't Anderson. The Darker Wife was Mrs. Brian Delahanty.

Darcy leaned forward until her nose was touching the glass. She held her breath and cupped her hands to the sides of her face just as she had when she was a girl dressed in grass-stained shorts and falling-down white socks. She looked until she couldn't hold her breath any longer, then exhaled in a huff that fogged the mirror. She wiped it clean with a towel, and then went downstairs to face her first day as the monster's wife.

He had left a note for her under the sugarbowl.

Darce--

I will take care of those documents, as you asked. I love you, honey.