Even In Darkness--An American Murder Mystery Thriller (3 page)

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.

T
he 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.

It is wrong to blame Caroline, who was five months pregnant that day and on her way out the door and the marriage. In all fairness to me, it was undoubtedly my testimony that influenced the jury to acquit. The average jail time for a woman who kills her husband in self defense is twenty-five years. Men who kill their wives average seven.

I know I did the right thing, saying what I did at the trial. I know that Joey, for all of his faults, genuinely loved Caroline, and I know he would not have wanted her to go to jail, and knowing all of these things I still cannot think of what I said without feeling knotted up inside.

I see Joey in Andee's eyes and some of her mannerisms, and though Caro and I try to stay in touch, it has always – no surprise – been awkward between us. She lives in Fort Smith, Arkansas now – just a place she stopped on her way to California, the vague destination of people who are breaking tries with their past. Andee got sick on the way, and they stayed where they landed for a few days, Caro too wise and kind a mother to push a sick toddler on a cross country trip in that rackety Jeep Wrangler she drives. They met some nice people, she found a little bungalow to rent, a job in a local bank, and she felt good there. She stayed.

Caro seems happy enough in Arkansas, where she says the state motto should be
it's not as bad as you think
. Sometimes I think she is homesick, but I don't blame her for leaving Kentucky. If she'd stayed here in Lexington, she would have been defined by the worst day of her life. She told me that she wanted it to be the
least
important thing about her, not the most.

Sometimes I dream that it was I who killed Joey, not Caroline. I raised him, after all. He was my only son. And while I consider Andee and Caro my family, to all points and purposes, it's just me and Leo.

‘Hey, Caro, it's Joy. I'm sorry to call so late.'

‘Oh, hey.' Caro is a well brought up southern girl, and she is well mannered enough to sound glad to talk to me, but my voice is clearly not the one she was expecting to hear.

‘Did I wake you up?' I ask.

‘No, no.'

Her voice sounds heavy, so it could be sleep or it could be something else.

‘I was thinking you might call,' she says.

It can't be because it is the unhappy anniversary of Joey's death. This is the one day of the year that we never talk. I often wonder if she felt different, after. Killing someone, even in self defense, changes you, this I know. But you never quite feel like you're supposed to feel. You never react the way people think.

‘Mrs Miller, did you get anything funny in the mail today? Icky funny, I mean?'

Icky funny. That was one way to put it.

‘I did.' My voice broke. I wasn't expecting that. I had called to see if
she
was OK. She and Andee. But it hits me that there is never anyone to call and see if I am all right, and I am pathetically grateful for the kindness I hear in Caro's voice.

‘Me too. Mrs Miller, I'm sorry, this has got to be hard for you.'

All these years, and she still calls me ‘Mrs Miller'.

‘Did you get pictures?' I ask her. My hand aches and I realize how tightly I am holding the phone so I make an effort to loosen my grip. Leo wedges his giant head into my lap.

‘Pictures?' She sounds puzzled. ‘Newspaper pictures, if that's what you mean. Copies of all the stories they ran, you know, after Joey died. All about my trial. My all time favorite headline … “Pregnant Shooter Jailed”.'

Damn. Weird. ‘Is there a postmark? Any kind of note?'

‘The postmark is from Lexington, Bluegrass Station. And there's a weird note. It says “Retribution is yours, Caroline Staley Miller” and some other stuff.'

‘And that's all?'

‘Isn't that enough?'

‘Did it come in a plain brown envelope with white sticker labels printed up on some home computer?'

‘Yeah. It did.'

‘And was the note torn off a yellow legal pad, and written in green Sharpie?'

‘
Yes.
What did yours say? You got the same thing, right? About Joey?'

‘Not exactly.'

There was no way to tell her easy. Unwise to tone it down. I read her the note that came with my package.