Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

The rain was hammering on her window. The sound of it was frightening and depressing, so she turned on the television but found that the cable was out. Of course it was. She threw the remote across the room, and it landed harmlessly on the basket of laundry she was supposed to have put away before dinner. She sat on the edge of her bed, feeling trapped and sorry for herself. Then at the window a flashing light caught her eye. A rhythmic flashing-light, then dark. Light, then dark.

She walked over to the window and looked down. In the glow from the front porch stood Cole and Jolie, under a large umbrella. Cole was flashing the light, and Jolie was holding the umbrella. She had that smile on her face, the one that Willow just couldn’t resist. It promised a good time, no matter how awful everything else was. And then there was Cole. His smile promised something else altogether. She waved to them both and held up a finger. She grabbed her raincoat from her closet and moved quietly down the stairs. She could hear her mother and Mr. Ivy laughing. She didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt as she slipped out the front door.

“How is it that you’ve never married, Mr. Ivy?” She’d been alternating between calling him Henry and Mr. Ivy. He liked the way his name sounded from her mouth. Usually the question would bother him, make him feel self-conscious. But there was something about her, something so wide open and nonjudgmental that he found himself really thinking about it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Always in the wrong place at the wrong time or never in the right place.”

He’d successfully pushed back his thoughts about Marla Holt to come to dinner. He’d decided after he hung up the phone with Bethany that whatever cosmic force had decided he wasn’t allowed to be happy could just fuck right off. He liked Bethany Graves, and she seemed to like him. And he’d be damned if he was going to go home and brood over what had happened to Marla and what he might have done to prevent it. What good did that do now?

Then, on the way over, he’d heard on the radio that the medical examiner had confirmed that the bones found did in fact belong to Marla. She was up there. She had been up there all this time. Even that he’d managed to put into a box within himself. He’d look at it later.

“Have you ever been in love?” Bethany asked.

He’d had too much to drink, which for him was more than two glasses of wine. He was on his third, and he had that warm, light feeling. From the flush on Bethany’s face, he’d say she was feeling the same. They’d been touching since Willow went upstairs. He’d dared a soft caress to her arm. There was a quick lacing of fingers while she told him about her husband who’d died so young, leaving her with a small child. Since they’d moved from the table to the couch in the living room, the desire to kiss her was almost an ache. The air between them was electric.

“I have been in love,” he said. “Yes.”

She frowned when he said it, put a hand to his face. “Love shouldn’t make you look so sad,” she said.

It was something about that sentence. Or maybe it was her tenderness, the openness of her expression. Everything that he’d been tamping down rose up inside him.

“It’s not that,” he said.

The music playing in Willow’s room, something predictably raucous and angry, drifted down the stairs. He looked around the living room-the tall shelves of books, the flat-screen television, the warm amber recessed lighting. They sat close on the plush sectional, her leg pressing against his. He could sink into this place, this moment with her. If only he could shut off his mind.

“Tell me,” she said. “Really, tell me. It’s not like we can do anything but talk, with Miss Willow in seek-and-destroy mode.”

Her smile was wide and trusting. She was expecting him to tell her about his unrequited love, or the one he’d lost, or how hard it was to meet someone in a small town. Something normal.

“Did you hear about the bones?” he said. “Back in the Hollows Wood.”

A shadow crossed her face, like she was recalling something that disturbed her. And it was then that he remembered. It was Willow, really, who had found Marla Holt. If Willow hadn’t run from school that day, made her way home through the woods, she would never have stumbled on Michael Holt near the Chapel. She never would have brought her friends back there, leading Henry, Bethany, and ultimately Jones Cooper to that place. If Jones Cooper hadn’t gone back there and alerted the police, those bones might never have been discovered by anyone other than Michael. It struck Henry as almost funny, even as a blistering headache debuted behind his eyes.

“The bones?” she said. “What bones?”

It was almost too much for him to get his mind around. Marla and Bethany. Michael and Willow. It was some kind of cosmic joke. Here he was with this smart, beautiful woman, with the first romantic feelings he’d had in so long. And because Bethany Graves’s child and Marla Holt’s child had crossed paths, he couldn’t simply sit here, maybe kiss her, tell her how pretty he thought she was and how much he enjoyed just talking with her. That it was enough. It was more than enough. He wasn’t allowed even that simple thing.

“The police found bones back by the Chapel,” he said.

She took in a breath. “Back where Willow was?”

He nodded, and the frown she was wearing deepened. He told her everything.

Ray came in from the rain, soaked and cranky. Eloise took his jacket and hung it in the laundry room. Then she put on a pot of tea.

“Dental records confirm that the bones belonged to Marla Holt,” he said. He sat heavily in the chair. She handed him a towel, and he used it to mop himself off.

She already knew that, of course. Not that anything was ever certain in her line of work. But she was as close to being sure of that as she was of anything.

“And Michael?”

Ray shrugged. “It’s my second night out there looking for him, walking through those goddamn woods calling his name. Tonight I finally convinced Chuck Ferrigno to send some men out. After all, Marla Holt’s body was out there, so there will have to be an investigation. Michael’s a witness, at the very least.”

Eloise sat across from Ray.

“Did he kill her, Eloise? He was just a kid. Did Michael Holt kill his mother?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“But what do you think?”

She didn’t say anything. He knew better. She wouldn’t speculate. She’d told him everything Marla Holt had said to her. It would be easy to jump to conclusions.

“How could I have missed it? It never even crossed my mind.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

The kettle started to whistle, and she got up to pour the hot water into the teapot.

“He walked in on her with someone, went into a rage, and killed her. But he adored her, couldn’t stand what he had done. So he repressed the memory.”

Eloise knew that Ray was just talking, sounding it out.

“There was another man there, too,” she reminded him. She looked at the steeping pot, the blue and white flowers on porcelain. It had been a gift from her daughter. Eloise missed her girl so much. For whatever reason, in that moment, the ache of it was almost unbearable. Eloise was going to call her. They needed to talk. Maybe she would go to see her daughter, invited or not; maybe it would help Amanda not to have to come to this house where so many ghosts lived and visited.

“Mack.” Ray’s voice brought her back. She wanted to be present for him, but somehow she couldn’t stop thinking about what Jones Cooper had said to her. His words had wormed their way into her thoughts about who she was, about what she was doing, about her relationship to Ray, whom she really did love.