In the Dark

by White, Loreth Anne

  Guilt washed up Katie’s gullet. She pressed her hand against her brow. She knew who Stella was now. The terrible awareness had begun to sink like a poison into Katie as Stella had recounted her story, even as one part of Katie’s brain had tried to fight the realization. She was Estelle Marshall. Ezekiel Marshall’s mother. The woman Katie had brought down with her rabid coverage of the hit-and-run. Unfairly. Katie was acutely aware of just how unfair she’d been now that she was a mother herself, and older.

  And hadn’t she done something awfully similar herself? Spurred by the exact same impulse—just a quick self-centered distraction that could’ve led to something tragic? She’d needed a few items from the grocery store. She’d thought she’d only be a second, so she’d availed herself of the free fifteen-minute parking outside the store and left Gabby in her car just for a minute. Doors locked, windows open a crack so no one could reach in and take Gabby. One minute had turned into twenty when the line of customers at the checkout got stuck behind an old woman who couldn’t remember the PIN for her credit card and who had then gotten flustered and dropped her strawberries all over the place. It had been a hot summer’s day. Katie had spat verbal vitriol at the old woman as she’d finally managed to pay and push past her.

  By the time she’d rushed out of the store with her purchases, a young woman was bashing on Katie’s vehicle window with the base of a small fire extinguisher.

  Stop! Just stop it—leave my car!

  You left a child in there! What kind of a mother are you? Do you realize how hot it is? Look at her cheeks. They’re red. She’s crying. This is criminal. I’m calling the cops.

  The woman had set down her fire extinguisher and begun rummaging in her sling purse for her phone.

  Katie had gotten into her car fast. She’d fired the ignition and reversed at speed, her wheels jumping right over the goddamn extinguisher, her heart thumping out of her chest. If the media got hold of this—Katie Colbourne locked her kid in the car . . . Katie Colbourne swore at a half-senile senior who could have used her help instead of her hatred.

  “Mummy! Mummy!”

  “It’s all right, honey. It’s fine. Mummy’s just in a rush . . .”

  Thank God Gabby had been okay. If this had gotten into the papers, or had gone viral on social media . . . She’d thought then of Estelle Marshall, and how she’d been party to the woman’s destruction. And that was why Katie had really quit her job. She’d been shown firsthand how one stupid and selfish mistake—one charge, one accusation, one revelation—could destroy a life. Or lives. She’d wanted out of the limelight. She’d wanted to be a good mother.

  Now she knew. Stella was Estelle.

  We’re all being punished . . . a reckoning.

  She dragged both her hands over her hair, pulling it back from her face. She stared at the little girl. Exactly the same as Gabby.

  Gabby, now the age little Ezekiel Marshall had been.

  Why should she not be punished the same way Stella had? She’d just gotten away that day. Gotten lucky. It was the fucking luck of the draw that decided what path you went down, where you ended up.

  Those of us who judge others . . . shall themselves be as harshly judged.

  Another scream snapped Katie sharply back to reality.

  She spun around in panic.

  A woman’s scream. It reached her again. It came from inside. Echoing, bouncing off the ceilings and against the walls, as if the whole house itself were screaming, as if the scream emanated from the pores of the fine grains of the old wood.

  Terror slammed Katie from all sides.

  Stay? Hide? Unlock the door, go help? Indecision rooted her boots to the floorboards.

  But after a few moments, all seemed to go silent.

  Katie waited some more, until she couldn’t bear it any longer.

  She opened her door, peered out. Nothing. She went carefully over the creaking floorboards, leaned over the balustrade. Down below in the great room, beneath the animal heads, far below the horned chandelier, stood Deborah.

  Water drops clung to her jacket, as if she’d just come in from outside. She clutched her hands over her mouth. She was staring at the coffee table.

  “Deborah?” Katie said over the balustrade.

  Her gaze shot up to Katie. The woman’s face was white. Her eyes black holes. She pointed a shaking hand toward the checkerboard.

  “Another one,” Deborah whispered. And the sound of her words sifted up to the vaulted ceiling like a hiss and curled all around. Another one another one another one another one . . . Katie fought the urge to clamp her hands over her ears.

  Deborah picked up two pieces. A head. A body. Separated. Extending her arms, she held them both skyward, up toward Katie, as if making an offering to the gods.

  “Head is off,” Deborah said quietly. “It’s been chopped off.”

  Six Little Liars tried hard to stay alive.

  One saw the judge, and then there were five.

  She couldn’t help saying the words she said next. It was all going to come out anyway now. This house was going to get it out of them. It was going to stir the silent demon inside each one of them.

  “I remember who Stella is.”

  Deborah stared blankly, still holding the decapitated head and torso up.

  “Fourteen years ago her little boy, Ezekiel Marshall, was hit and killed by a blue BMW. Outside Kits Corner Store. Zeke—she used to call him Zeke—he’d been carrying a bag of groceries with a box of Tooty-Pops, a Snickers bar, and some eggs inside. And holding his puppy on a leash. I covered the story. I asked Estelle Marshall, the mother, why she’d bought those items. She was going to make spaghetti carbonara for dinner. Zeke liked it. Her husband loved it. And . . . and they were out of Tooty-Pops. And Zeke had wanted a treat so she’d bought him a little Snickers bar because at least the peanuts were healthy. And then she’d wanted wine to go with the pasta . . .”

  Deborah slowly lowered the pieces of carving down to her side. Still she said nothing, just stared up at Katie.

  Katie cleared the thickness choking into her throat. “Estelle Marshall told me she saw two people in that car. A man and a woman. What people would hit a little boy, reverse to check, see his mother come screaming into the road, and then gun the gas and squeal down a dark side street?” Her voice caught on the emotion in her throat. “What woman would annihilate another woman in the media like I did, because it was going to make me a name? I ask you, Deborah, who? Who am I?”

  “Katie, you can’t—”

  “I never believed her that there was a witness on the street corner who’d stolen her fatally injured son’s backpack while he lay bleeding in the street, do you know that?” Katie said. “Because honestly, who would do a thing like that? Estelle—Stella—claimed it was a woman. About five six. Short skirt. Umbrella. Very skinny. Maybe a street worker. She’d seen prostitutes on that corner before. But I still didn’t believe her, because no one came forward, and what witness wouldn’t come forward for something like that?” She paused, her heart beating loud in her ears.

  “And you know what?” Katie said softly. “I think I know who that woman is now.”

  THE LODGE PARTY

  MONICA

  Monica stumbled along the marked trail with two thoughts in mind: Get inside the lodge. Bolt the door until the others return.

  She was a coward. She’d always been a coward. Hidden from ugly things. Fled from them.

  She pushed through brambles. Wet branches slapped back into her face. She was running away from the truth, from being exposed as what she was. Fleeing from herself. From the secret that had been dogging her with hot breath for fourteen long years. The secret that always managed to find her in the dark of night, in her dreams. And she’d wake in a sweat. She tripped and fell hard. The memory of the jolt and thump of her BMW shuddered through her body. With it came the never-ending loop of memory . . .

  “Fuck! What in the—” Steven slammed on the brakes.

  His erectio
n rammed into the back of her throat with the force of the collision. Monica gagged.

  A dog—we’ve hit a dog!

  She jerked her head up from between Steven’s legs. She couldn’t bear it if they’d hit a dog . . .

  He was reversing, fast. His fly open, his penis still sticking out, and still hard. She heard the tires of her BMW crackling on the wet street. Through the rain-smeared windows she saw store lights, reflections. A skinny woman in a miniskirt and high-heeled boots . . . crouching down next to a small person lying in the road.

  Panic licked through Monica’s belly.

  Steven slowed the car. The woman looked up into the car window, her face white. She opened her mouth in shock. She grabbed something and ran away. Monica saw the grocery bag next. On the wet street. Then the crushed box of Tooty-Pops that stuck out of it—she knew instantly it was Tooty-Pops. Distinctive cartoon character. Bright red, yellow, and green. Her own kids, when they were younger, always squealed in the grocery store aisles, demanding that cereal. A cardboard egg carton lay flattened beside it. Yellow egg yolks and glistening raw egg whites seeped out of crushed eggshells. Then a little white hand came into her view.

  It lay palm-up on the wet road, an open chocolate bar with a bite out of it near his fingertips. Blond hair. Blood dribbled from his mouth. His eyes . . . They stared straight up into the falling rain that splashed into the puddles around his head.

  “Fucking hell!” Steven slammed the wheel.

  He hesitated, then hit the gas. Tires screeched. Monica was thrown back in the passenger seat with the speed. Another woman ran out of the liquor store, dropped a bottle of wine, and screamed. She ran toward the child lying motionless on the wet road, waving at Steven to stop. Monica’s BMW’s tires screeched around a corner into an alley.

  Steven skidded around another corner, clipping a parked van. The BMW fishtailed, almost colliding with an oncoming SUV. The driver laid on the horn, swerved.

  “Steven! You have to stop. We have to go back!”

  “Shut up.” He kept driving, hands tight on the wheel, eyes fixed dead ahead. Her heart thudded. She couldn’t breathe. He didn’t say another word, just kept weaving through the quiet side streets until finally he slowed and joined a main artery of traffic. He moved carefully into the bumper-to-bumper stream as it crawled well below the speed limit. As they drove with the traffic flow, he kept scanning the other cars as if waiting for cops, sirens. Rain came down harder. Wipers clacked faster. Finally he indicated and casually turned onto a road that led to the ocean.

  “Steven, he might be alive. The child might be alive—”

  “Shut up, Monica.”

  She was shaking, sweating.

  He turned her BMW into a big, deserted parking lot at the rain-swept beach. Slowly tires crackled on wetness as he drove up behind the changing rooms and concession building that would be full and busy in the summer. He pulled carefully into a parking space behind the concrete building. Neat. Between the lines. A sulfurous glow from a nearby lamp fell over his face. It gave him an ugly cast.

  He sat. Unmoving. She lunged for the door handle.

  The sudden grip on her arm was like a vise.

  “Get ahold of yourself, Monica.”

  She stared at him. “We . . . we have to go back. You hit a child.”

  “We.”

  “What?”

  “We hit a child, Monica. You and me. Together. In your car.”

  He stuffed his limp penis back into his pants and pulled up the zipper.

  The reality began to seep in, like ink into porous white paper. Monica McNeill. Heiress. Big grocery-chain CEO. Professor Nathan McNeill’s wife. Going down on the locally famous Dr. Steven Bodine, who was the money and mind behind the feted Oak Street Surgical Clinic, where Vancouver’s rich housewives all had their faces done. Dr. Bodine, who was married to an ex-model who owned a ritzy boutique downtown.

  “We are both over the legal driving limit, Monica. We are both married. To other people. We both have children. Spouses with careers and reputations.” He regarded her, a tight, dark look in his face. “We both have our own businesses and employees to think of.”

  He let it sink in.

  “The media, cops, it’ll be a nightmare,” he said. “We’ll go to prison.” He grabbed her face so suddenly, and held it so tightly between his hands, she suddenly wondered if he might kill her. His eyes lasered into hers. Mad, dark pools in the sickly light from the parking lot lamp. “We. Will. Lose. Everything.” He didn’t loosen his vise grip. “Do you understand?”

  She tried to nod.

  He released her head and sat back. She could smell him. Acrid sweat. Fear. Alcohol. Sex.

  “Someone saw us,” she said dully.

  “A hooker. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I know that corner,” said Steven. “I’ve seen sex workers there. Maybe even that same woman before. Even if she does come forward, those women are soaked to the gills with drugs and liquor. I know. I’ve seen it in the ER when I did my residency. If she even remembers, she’d have to talk to law enforcement, and they don’t like to do that. It displeases their pimps. And that could get them hurt. And even if they do talk, they’re unreliable witnesses. Their brains are fucked. They’re useless for anything—it would never stand up in court.”

  “She took something. From the street.”

  “So what? All the more reason she’s unlikely to come forward.”

  “The mother saw us. She saw my car.”

  “Park it. Leave it in the garage. Keep the garage door closed.”

  “I can’t just—”

  “We can’t go back there. Not now. Not after we fled.”

  He was shaking a little. So he was a bit human.

  He turned in the seat. “Monica, listen to me. We both need to lay low. Stop seeing each other. See what shakes out.”

  So he was going to leave her holding the bag if they found her car. Or if anyone had seen the license plate. The paint from her BMW would also be on the van they’d hit. There would be blood on her fender, she was sure. Tears pooled in her eyes.

  “There could have been other witnesses, Steven. There were parked cars all down that street and the side streets. Someone could have been sitting inside one, watching out the window at that one instant. Maybe a store clerk, looking out of the window . . . There was that SUV you almost hit. It could have had a dashcam. There could be CCTV cameras outside those stores—”

  “It was raining hard, Monica, and it was dark. You can’t see anything in rain like that. Pedestrians are hit all the time in weather like that. The kid ran into the road, for Chrissakes. What was that kid doing in the road? Alone? Not our fault.”

  “Not our fault? Even if hitting the boy was unavoidable, we left an accident scene,” she said very quietly. “You reversed, saw what you’d done, and only then sped away. You’re a doctor, Steven. You could have helped that child and the mother. Maybe you could have saved his life.” She was shaking hard now, her face wet with tears. She had a bad wine taste in her mouth. “Nathan will see the damage on my car.”

  “Then you will have to tell him that you hit something. And get it repaired.”

  “Fuck you,” she said quietly. “I hate you. I hate you so much.”

  “I’m going to get out of the car now, Monica. I’m going to walk down the road and call a cab. You’ll drive your car home.”

  “I swear, if they come after me, if they find my car, I’m going to tell them you were driving—I will tell them everything.”

  The horror of that night dogged Monica as she scrabbled, sobbing, back up onto her feet in the woods. She stumbled onward toward the lodge, following the bits of orange tape she’d affixed to branches along the narrow trail.

  I can’t do it, I can’t outrun this any longer . . . not out here. Sinner, I’m a sinner, we’re all sinners.

  Nine Little Liars thought they’d escaped.

  One missed a plane, and then there were eight . .
.

  . . . One Little Liar thinks he has won.

  For in the end, there can only be one.

  But maybe . . .

  there shall be none.

  Cursed are those who Sin

  And Lie to cover their deeds

  For a Monster will rise within . . .

  The Monster was Monica—it was inside her, and it had taken shape out of her guilt, and it had sunk its claws into her. And it was inside Nathan for helping hide her car. It was inside the mother running out of the liquor store into the street, because she’d been buying chardonnay instead of watching her dear little boy as he bit into his Snickers bar and his dog got away from him. The Monster was the skinny woman in the raincoat who had taken Ezekiel’s backpack. And the license plate, as Monica had learned later, after she’d parked the car and seen it was gone—after no plate was found by the cops at the hit-and-run site. The Monster was Steven, holding her face in a vise grip, Steven who’d paid to silence the witness somehow and had never told Monica how. It was the garish Tooty-Pops cartoon on the sugary-cereal box . . . It was Bart for fixing and getting rid of her car—her murder weapon—when he had to have seen the police calling for people who’d seen it on the news . . . A wild feral madness filled Monica’s head. She ran faster.

  Sinners . . . All . . . Liars.

  Monica burst out of the forest. She stood panting for a moment, orienting herself in the fog that hung over the clearing. She saw the shadow of the lodge. She ran for it, crossing beneath the totem poles with the horrible raven head. She reached the front door, her breasts heaving, the air cold and raw in her throat.

  She tried the handle. It was unlocked.

  She stilled, uneasy about entering because she suddenly remembered that Deborah had been told to lock the doors.

  Blood drumming in her ears, Monica quietly opened the door a crack. She heard voices inside. Female.

  Something about the tone of the voices made her pause. Cautiously she peered through the crack into the interior gloom of the great hall.

  Deborah stood by the coffee table, her face turned up toward the balcony upstairs. In her hands she held parts of a figurine.