Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (40 page)
I said, “Using the toad to raise suspicion, through Frank Ganim’s death, and my poisoning, Mallory was framing you. You’re not a psychopath, you’re just a Quinn.”
Her sneer was at odds with the innocent roundness of her face. “What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing it’s why we make good cops, because we have more equal measures of dark and light than most people. Or some of us have a little more dark and we’re not smart enough to fear it. But emotion is highly overrated. Even if you don’t feel good about doing right, or bad about doing wrong, I think it’s the doing that counts.”
Did I say that, or did Carlo? I’ve begun to get confused about where his thoughts end and mine begin. I did feel something just now, a surge of gladness that Gemma-Kate had come away from the rest of the Quinns to Arizona. Now that I knew who Gemma-Kate was and who she might have become, I understood better my promise to Marylin. It wasn’t just about letting Gemma-Kate stay with us for three months. The promise was to watch over her and make sure her journey continued on a righteous path.
“Well I’m not going to be a cop,” she said.
“You’re going to be a biochemical researcher. Get holed up safely in a lab somewhere.”
“No, I was thinking I might become a veterinarian.”
I felt my viscera recoil in horror at the thought of Gemma-Kate hurting small animals. “Terrific. You think some more about that.” I pulled up her covers because it felt like the house got chilly, which often happens in the spring after the sun goes down.
But before I turned off the light, or maybe because of the reflection of it in her eyes, I caught something in her look, like the North Star in an otherwise black sky. She knew what she was saying and what effect it would have on me. With that crack about being a veterinarian, she was making a joke about herself. And I realized that wherever there was real humanity there was the capability of not taking yourself too seriously. Wherever there was humor there was hope.
I said good night, and went about turning off the lights and securing the house. I wouldn’t lock Al and Peg in our bedroom tonight.
Feeling my way through the dark, I remembered what Elias Manwaring had told me about the guy who said the only way to achieve any happiness at all is to start by admitting that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible. The guy was right about that. Children died before their parents. People you thought were friends betrayed your trust. Wives let their husbands beat them up and sometimes there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was too much haze over which of us was good and which was evil.
Shit, if you allow yourself to think of all that, sometimes you think it’s better not even to love anymore because all love ultimately ends in abandonment, betrayal, or death. And that is truly horrible.
Well, shit.
But what if you think beyond that? If the world was so clearly and completely horrible, then every moment of life that wasn’t horrible must be a bloody miracle. A gift, more valuable for being rare. Like the fact that, for today, I was well, mostly. Like the discovery that Gemma-Kate’s humanity might be limited, but that there was hope she might be made whole enough to live. That she was more like me than she was like Mallory.
Either way it made no sense to worry about anything else tonight. We were safe right now. Empathy is nice, but sometimes you have to put the death, the mistakes, the suffering, and the betrayals aside. Allow yourself moments of not-feeling rather than get dragged under by the drowning victim you’re trying to save. The way I felt about the nameless woman at the shelter. Not feeling is a way of protecting ourselves to fight another day.
Because if you can’t stop to appreciate those moments when nothing bad happens, it’s like kicking aside a gift someone left in your path. Everyone was safe in the DiForenza house this night. So while I couldn’t go as far as saying the world was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, I could say that in this particular moment, in this small space, it wasn’t half bad.
Welcome to the human race, Quinn.
Rage Against the Dying
BECKY MASTERMAN, who was an acquisitions editor for a press specializing in medical textbooks for forensic examiners and law enforcement, received her M.A. in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University. Her debut thriller,
Rage Against the Dying
, was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, and the ITV Thriller Award, as well as the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony awards. Becky lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
FEAR THE DARKNESS.
Copyright © 2014 by Becky Masterman. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photographs: woman under tree © Mark Owen/Arcangel Images; desert © Bertl123/
Shutterstock.com
; branches © Gurgen Bakhshetsyan/
Shutterstock.com
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Masterman, Becky.
Fear the darkness: a thriller / Becky Masterman.
pages; cm.—(Brigid Quinn series; 2)
ISBN 978-0-312-62295-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-4223-6 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3613.A81965F43 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014032397
e-ISBN 9781466842236
First Edition: January 2015