John Saul - In the Dark of the Night

Kayla’s cell phone rang seven times before a sleepy voice spoke. “Hello?”

“Were you asleep?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Kayla sighed. “What time is it?”

“Not that late,” Cherie told her. “Listen — I met the guy whose family rented Pinecrest. His name’s Eric Brewster, and he’s cute! I mean, like, really cute.”

Abruptly, the sleep was gone from Kayla’s voice. “Where? How’d you meet him?”

“I went for a ride with Adam in his dad’s boat, and we pulled up to the Pinecrest dock.”

“Adam Mosler?” Kayla asked. “Why were you out with him? You always said he was a jerk.”

“Don’t ask,” Cherie groaned. “He is a jerk. But I told Eric about the dances in the pavilion, and he’s going to come and bring Kent and Tad. You know, the guys from last year?”

“I remember Kent,” Kayla said. “He called me once last fall after he got home.”

“He did? How come you never told me?”

“Because he only called once. Besides, who cares? I’m with Chris now, anyway.”

“But—” Cherie began, but before she could say another word, her bedroom door swung open and her father loomed in the hallway.

“To sleep, Cherie,” he said.

As his eyes fixed on her, Cherie pulled the bedspread over the thin nightie that was all that covered her body. “I gotta go,” she said to Kayla. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay. ’Night.”

“’Night.” As she folded the cell phone and set it on the nightstand she kept her eyes on her father. How much beer had he drunk? “It was just Kayla,” she said. “I’m going to sleep now, okay?”

Her father hesitated, and for a horrible moment Cherie was afraid he was going to come in and try to kiss her good night, getting his beery breath all over her pillow. But then he nodded, grunted a good-night that was reduced to a single almost unintelligible syllable, and closed the door.

Cherie clicked off her bedside lamp and slid under the bedspread and sheet. The crickets outside her bedroom window were the loudest she’d heard all summer, and every few seconds a frog croaked from the little pond down the road.

She wondered if Eric was listening to the crickets, too.

And she wondered if he was thinking about her the way she was thinking about him.

LOGAN THREADED HIS boat through the tangle of cattails and willow branches as easily in the near-total darkness as he would have in full daylight, bringing the prow so gently to rest in the narrow channel that served as its berth that he barely felt it at all. Securing the bow line to a dead tree, he carefully lifted his old dog out of the boat and set him on the shore.

The dog staggered for a moment, found its footing, and followed behind Logan as he moved through the thick brush to the cabin that was completely invisible from the lake, though it was barely two hundred yards from the shore.

Logan’s feet felt heavy as he slogged along the path, and by the time they came to the cabin door, he was out of breath. The sack he carried, though only half full of the things he’d scavenged from the Dumpsters in town, felt heavy enough to stretch his arm.

He shouldered open the door and set the bag on the battered folding table he’d rescued from the dump so long ago he couldn’t even remember when, fixing its broken leg with someone’s discarded cane.

Home.

Safe.

Except he wasn’t safe.

He would never be safe again.

Logan lit the stub of a candle that had half melted into a jar lid and set it on top of a stack of boxes so old they were starting to fall apart, held upright only by their contents. The light threw flickering shadows around the old trapper’s shack, and for a moment Logan could almost imagine that he’d drifted back a century or two and was coming home from a night on the traplines rather than another night of keeping watch on the lake.

The one-winged crow he’d found in the marsh a few years back squawked, hopped from his perch by the window to the box, and started tearing at the bag with its beak.

“Greedy critter, aren’t you,” Logan muttered, snatching the bag away as quickly as he could, but not quickly enough to avoid the bird’s angry jab. “Dog first,” he said, nursing his injured finger for a moment.

The ancient dog had collapsed on his jumble of rags in the corner. Logan squatted down and opened the bag. The old Labrador’s nose twitched at the scent of scraps of half-eaten hamburgers he’d found in the Dumpster behind the drive-in, and piece by piece Logan hand-fed the dog. As the animal ate, Logan’s eyes fixed blearily on the stack of boxes. “Keep the papers,” he muttered softly. “That’s what Dr. Darby said, isn’t it? Keep all the papers.”

So he’d kept them, and every now and then, as the years had passed by, he’d looked through them. There were all kinds of old papers in the boxes. Some of them came from Dr. Darby’s own files, but that wasn’t all there was. There were files from the hospital Logan himself had been in so long ago, after the trouble.

That was how he always thought about what had happened: the trouble.

The story of the trouble was in the boxes, too. The third box, the one with the yellow label that had finally fallen off a couple of years ago. Or maybe longer. But that was the box — it had all the newspapers in it, and the papers from the lawyers, and from the court, and then from the hospital where they’d put him.

Even now he wasn’t sure how Dr. Darby had collected all of it, and Dr. Darby hadn’t ever told him, either.

Before he was finished feeding the dog, the crow had dropped down to the floor and was pecking bits of meat and bun out of Logan’s hand, off the floor, anyplace he could get to, even right out of the old dog’s mouth.

“Why’d he want me to keep them?” Logan muttered. Maybe he should just burn the whole lot of them. But Dr. Darby had told him not to, told him that if he burned the papers, or threw them in the lake, or tried to get rid of them at all, they’d come and take him back to the hospital.

Logan didn’t want to go back to the hospital. The hospital had been even worse than living out here in the old trapper’s shack all by himself. So he’d done what Dr. Darby told him to do, except for one thing.

The stuff in the old carriage house.

He should have gotten rid of it a long time ago, right after Dr. Darby—

— after Dr. Darby left, he finished, unable even in his own mind to think too much about what might have actually happened to Dr. Darby.

Dr. Darby had told him to do it. The very last time he’d seen Dr. Darby — at least he was pretty sure it was the last time, but there were things he just couldn’t remember very well — things he didn’t want to remember, Dr. Darby had told him — so maybe the last time he remembered wasn’t really the last time he’d seen Dr. Darby.

But he remembered what Dr. Darby had told him. Keep the boxes. But don’t let anybody find the things in the back room.

And so far, no one had. But no one had come to Pinecrest, either.

But now there were people there, and he wasn’t sure what to do.

Logan stroked the old dog’s head until the dog sighed and put his gray muzzle down on his paws. “I’ll do my best,” Logan said softly. “It’s all anyone can do, isn’t it?” The dog whined softly, and Logan nodded as if the animal had just confirmed his words. “And maybe nothing will happen,” he went on.

The dog closed his eyes and relaxed into sleep, and Logan knew he should go to sleep, too. It was late, and he was tired, and before long another morning would be here. But he couldn’t sleep — not tonight.

Tonight he had to look in the box — the box he hated most of all.