John Saul - In the Dark of the Night

Ellen and Ashley were right; it was, indeed, time to give up her title and stop worrying.

If every day turned out like this one, there would be nothing to worry about.

ERIC PASSED THE bag of marshmallows to Kent Newell, who expertly skewered three of them onto a single stick and held them just far enough over the glowing barbecue coals so they’d brown without bursting into flames the way his own marshmallows always did. The low murmur of their parents’ voices floated out from the house, and the soft background chorus of chirping crickets was the only other sound that broke the silence of the calm evening, except for the occasional croaking of a frog or the lonely call of a loon searching for its mate somewhere across the lake. As the daylight began to fade, he leaned back in one of the worn canvas camp chairs they’d found in the basement and decided that things couldn’t get much better. Kent and Tad were both here, and the summer stretched before them, an unexplored territory with a new adventure waiting every day.

“I’m going to look up Kayla Banks tomorrow,” Kent said, slowly rotating his marshmallows. He grinned at Eric and Tad over the barely flickering fire. “She’s had all winter to think about me.”

“Which could be good or bad,” Tad pointed out, “depending on how hard you tried to get in her panties last summer.”

“She loved it,” Kent bragged.

“And assuming she hasn’t already got a boyfriend,” Tad went on. “You don’t really think she’s been doing nothing but dream about you all year, do you?”

“If all the guys up here are like the ones I ran into, they’re all jerks,” Eric said before Kent had a chance to defend his desirability.

Kent’s gaze shifted from Tad to Eric. “Who?”

“Adam somebody.”

“Mosler.” Kent spat the name as if it tasted bad in his mouth. “Adam’s an asshole. He and two other creeps hassled us last year.” He grinned again, but this time there was a hint of maliciousness about it. “But this year it’s three of us against three of them. No problem.”

“Or maybe we ought to just steer clear of them,” Tad said. “In fact, maybe we should just stay away from all the townies.”

“No way,” Kent flared. “I have an investment in Kayla from last year, and this year it’s gonna pay off!”

“Jeez,” Tad groaned. “You sound like you think she owes you something.”

Kent’s grin broadened. “She does. She owes me a piece of—” He cut his own words short as first one, then the second, and finally the third of his marshmallows dropped off the skewer into the coals and burst into flames. “Crap!”

As Kent reloaded his skewer, the boys lapsed into silence, watching the embers. The brighter stars were just becoming visible in the evening sky, and the pine trees on the hills across the lake were silhouetted points against a rosy background.

Fireflies winked around the yard.

Suddenly, Eric remembered the other night, when a boat bearing not only Adam Mosler, but someone else as well, had shown up at the dock at just about this same time. “Do you guys know Cherie Stevens?” he asked.

“Sure,” Kent said. “She’s Kayla’s best friend.”

“I’m thinking maybe we should go to the pavilion dance next Friday,” Eric said. “She practically invited me.”

“I’m in,” Kent said. “We’ll all go, and maybe we’ll all get lucky.”

“We didn’t get lucky last year,” Tad reminded him.

“But that was last year,” Kent countered. “I’ve got a good feeling about this year.”

The kitchen lights went out and the dining room lights went on in the house, and Eric watched as all their parents settled in for a card game, which meant none of them would move for at least an hour. “You guys want to see what I found today?” he asked in a tone that caught both Kent’s and Tad’s attention. Setting down his marshmallow skewer, Eric rose from his chair, and a moment later the three boys moved soundlessly away from the terrace, across the lawn, and into the shadows of the old carriage house.

Eric opened the door and led the way down the darkened hallway.

“What is this place?” Tad asked, unconsciously dropping his voice to a whisper.

“It’s the garage now,” Eric said. “But there’s an apartment upstairs, and lots of other rooms from when it was a stable and carriage house.”

He opened a door and turned on a solitary lightbulb.

Kent and Tad edged past him and they all crowded inside the cramped room Eric had discovered only a few hours earlier.

“Wow,” Tad said, peering at the jumble of furniture. “Look at this stuff! My mom would go nuts if she saw all this.”

As Tad ran his hands over the polished wood of one of the old dressers, Kent opened one of the boxes, peered inside, then carefully lifted a leather photo album out of the box, setting it on a desk.

He opened the cover.

“Look,” he said. “It’s old pictures of Pinecrest.”

Eric and Tad moved closer and peered down at the page covered with deckle-edged photographs of the house. In one of them a young man in an old-fashioned suit was standing in front of the front door. “Suppose that’s Dr. Darby?” Tad asked.

Kent turned a few more pages. There were more photographs of people at Pinecrest — people posing on the front porch, relaxing on the back terrace, standing on the dock with a stringer of fish.

Some of the pictures showed people standing next to old cars; others depicted the interior of the house but with different furniture than it now contained.

Nowhere were there captions for the pictures.

Nowhere were there identifications of the people in them.

“Look at that,” Tad said, pointing at a photograph of a man wearing wire-rim glasses, his hair slicked back, sitting in front of a small oak secretary. “That’s a picture of this desk.” It was clearly the same slanted-front secretary they had the photograph album resting on.

Eric and Tad leaned in closer as Kent turned the pages one by one….

ELLEN NEWELL PEERED dolefully at the pair of sevens that had first been dealt her, and made one last attempt to find the possibility of a winning hand in the five additional cards that had come her way. Finding nothing, she tossed the hand in. “Okay,” she sighed as Dan Brewster raked in the pot, adding the last of her chips to the enormous pile in front of him. “I’m broke, and I’m tired, and I want to go to bed.” She glanced out the window, but all she could see was blackness — the last of the fire’s embers had long since died away. “How about you go call your son?” she asked Jeff, who’d lost the last of his stake in a game to Dan two hands earlier.

“How come he’s suddenly just my son?” Jeff asked as he stood up and moved to the French doors.

“Because I’m too tired to call him myself,” Ellen replied, watching her husband step out onto the terrace to call Kent.

When there was no answer, Jeff called again, then crossed the terrace and moved down the steps onto the lawn. “Kent!” he called again. “We’re leaving!”

When there was still no answer, he moved down the lawn to the fire pit, where a half-empty bag of marshmallows lay by one of the canvas chairs and three skewers — still sticky — were propped against the metal ring that contained the fire, which was no longer even smoldering.

But no sign of the boys.

Jeff felt his blood pressure rise as he walked down to the boathouse. If they’d taken the boat out after dark and not even bothered to tell anyone what they were up to, all three of them would find themselves grounded for a week.

But the boathouse was dark; Pinecrest’s little aluminum skiff lay quietly tethered to the dock.