Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

Then the woman was bursting through a line of trees into a clearing. A large, sagging structure loomed ahead. She stumbled and slowed, as if she couldn’t run anymore; she was gripping her side against a cramp. Then she limped, casting a terrified look behind her, into the wide mouth of the structure. Was it an old barn, a dilapidated church, or a schoolhouse? Eloise couldn’t be sure.

Then there were two men. In the clearing they came to blows, and one of them was left lying on the ground, still and dark. The other man entered the structure. There was silence, silence until a wild scream tore open the night. Then it was quiet again. And when it ended, it was like waking from a dream.

She had to talk fast, write things down, because the details faded quickly. The edges started to curl back, and it lifted away in the air like burning bits of paper. What was left behind was fear and sadness, pain, loneliness-a little bit every time. Every time a little more, until after years of accumulation it filled her. And now it was all she was. She was like a miner who disappeared into the bowels of the earth, and every time she came back up into the sun, she brought a little bit of the blackness up inside her. It coated her lungs, her organs, her heart, suffocating her from within. And all the medicine in the world was only a stalling of the inevitable.

“The Holt house connects in the back to the Hollows Wood,” said Ray when Eloise had told him everything.

“Yes,” said Eloise. She remembered that from when she’d sat for Michael and Cara, too. Now the real-estate ads raved about how the properties backed up against state land. But people who had lived in The Hollows carried a superstition about those woods. Bad things happened out there. Everybody knew that. Of course, Eloise knew better than most that bad things happened everywhere-on a sunny tree-lined street, at the mall, at an office, at a Christmas party, in your home. But for most people it was easier to think that it could all be contained in the scary woods, in the dark of night. Bad things happened only in certain places, and if warnings were well heeded, they wouldn’t happen to you.

“They searched the woods back then,” Ray said.

“Yes,” said Eloise. “Several days after her disappearance.”

She remembered that a group had been organized; they walked the woods. But it was late in the game at that point. Eloise had not yet fully connected with her sight then, was still in denial. She didn’t even try to get anything on Marla. She hadn’t even known that she could try. Back then she thought if the visions didn’t come, she couldn’t seek them. And they were so painful and disorienting for her that she wouldn’t have tried even if she had known.

“It was someone she knew,” said Ray.

“It usually is.”

She kicked the shoes off her feet, and they fell with a thud-thud to the floor. She wanted them off her feet. If there was more to see, she was too tired to see it now.

“Someone else was there, too?” he said. “Two men?”

“That’s what I saw.”

He leaned back, pinned her with his gaze. “You think she’s dead.”

“I think it’s likely,” she said. She was speaking strictly pragmatically. She never had any sense of these things. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You never know.”

It was getting late. She wanted to sleep, but she didn’t want him to leave. She thought how nice it would be if he’d just sit there like a sentry in the chair as she drifted off. The thought surprised her, because she was used to being alone. As if reading her thoughts, sensing that she needed company, Oliver lumbered into the room and leaped heavily onto the bed beside her. He curled himself into a purring crescent, pressed against her leg.

“You know, I don’t know if I ever really loved her.” They were back to Karen. It had always mingled like this for them. They could talk about horror, about flight for life, about murder, and then chat about the weather, make love, have coffee.

“Isn’t that sad?” he said. “I mean, we were together for twenty years, have two children. I like her, I respect her. But I don’t know if I ever loved her. Not the way you loved Alfie.”

He sat hunched, brow furrowed, his chin on his fist. The Thinker .

“You must have loved her once,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I remember having the idea that she was the right one. She was pretty and sweet. But I don’t think I really understood the whole marriage thing when we walked down the aisle.”

Eloise smiled, offered an affirming hum. “They sell you the white dress, the dream of forever. It’s the day-to-day that really surprises you. How much work it is.”

“Exactly,” he said. “But you never would have fucked around on Alfie, right?”

She shook her head. “No. Never.”

“And what about Marla Holt? Was she cheating on Mack?”

“Maybe,” said Eloise. “If she’s looking for romance, excitement. The promise that life isn’t just a couple of kids and a husband with a day job. Cooking meals, beauty fading, she wants more.”

“But you knew her. You watched her kids,” he said. “Was she having an affair?”

She remembered her conversation with Jones Cooper. “I wouldn’t have thought so. She adored her children, spoke lovingly of her husband. But you never really know anyone, what’s going on inside. I’m not sure where she went or with whom when I baby-sat. I never asked.”

Ray chewed on the inside of his cheek when he was thinking hard. “So if she was fooling around at home that night, maybe Holt walked in on her. There was a chase out to the woods. The other man fights for her, gets knocked down. Holt kills her.”

“That’s one interpretation of what I saw. It’s a possibility. But what happened to the other man? Did Holt kill him, too? And if so, where are the bodies? It’s not easy to hide two bodies well, especially in a crime of passion.”

“Or he ran,” Ray said. “No one knew who he was.”

“The neighbor said she saw Marla get into a black sedan, carrying a suitcase.”

“That doesn’t jibe with what you saw.”

“It’s just a moment. A moment I don’t even understand. We can’t know what came before or after.”

Ray put his face in his hands and rubbed, released a frustrated grunt.

“It’s late,” she said. “Let’s digest the information. You connect with Jones Cooper in the morning. I have a feeling he’s a part of this somehow. He might be the one to connect the dots.”

“If the Hollows PD reopens the case, we’re out of a job,” he said.

“We have a waiting list twenty people long,” she said. “There are lots of people with unanswered questions, looking for justice, resolution. We move on to the next.”

“I’m not like you,” he said. Did he sound bitter? “I can’t just move on.”

“Sometimes we have to,” she said. “You know that. We don’t solve them all.”

What was with him? It wasn’t like him to be so attached . Dogged, yes. Determined. Relentless. But not attached. That was different. Attachment hurt, was in fact the source of all pain.

She sat up, and Oliver gave her an annoyed look.

“What’s going on with you?” she asked.

He stood and walked over to the bed, sat down beside her. The mattress groaned beneath his weight, and the cat jumped away, left the room with an angry meow.

“I’ve been talking to this kid trying to find his mother, searching through that awful mess of a house, going over old interviews, newspaper articles, talking to folks who knew Marla Holt. But nothing’s jelling. Something just doesn’t feel right.”

Eloise didn’t say anything, only put a hand on his shoulder. It felt nice to touch him. His shoulder was round and powerful beneath the cotton of his shirt.