Death Waits in the Dark

by Julia Buckley

  “Yes,” Adam agreed. “No billboard back then, and those trees still obscured Green Glass Highway. Funny how you can look at then and now and remember both worlds.”

  “Where’s that other man? The one who said he was studying when you all got together?”

  “Paul Graves? He didn’t really hang out with us. Except in the pub, I guess. He was there because of his father, who obviously wasn’t a part of our group. He was just a local businessman.”

  “What about Karina or Jane or Carrie? Where are they?” Sam asked.

  Adam shrugged. “You know how it is when you’re teens. You mostly hang with the guys, but you talk about the girls.”

  We smiled, and Adam passed some more pictures around; we looked closely at them, then handed them to the next person at the table. For a while we did this in silence. Adam was on my left, Sam on my right. Often when I handed Sam a picture, his hand would linger for a moment on mine. Since my accident he seemed to take every opportunity to remind himself that I was physically intact.

  Finally, Camilla held one up in triumph. “I have Carrie!” she said.

  We all jumped up and crowded around her, Sam and Adam taking care not to jostle my cast. I peered down at the photo in Camilla’s hand. In it a blonde woman, perhaps about twenty years old, smiled at the camera. She wore a white T-shirt with a yellow daisy appliqué, and she was sitting at a table in front of a cake. A birthday party? I looked more closely at her face. It was pretty, with wide eyes and a slightly pointed nose, and full red lips. Her hair, which looked thick, was tied into a careless tail that had spilled several strands that hung delicately around her face. Overall it created a casual but attractive image.

  “She’s lovely,” I said. I peered more closely to read the date stamp on one white margin of the picture. “The date says August 1971,” I said.

  “Right before she left,” Camilla said. “Perhaps that is a going-away cake. Do you recall, Adam?”

  Adam shook his head. “I don’t even recall this gathering. Or why I have the photo. It might just be my failing memory, but—I don’t remember Carrie very well. She wasn’t in our class at school, and if she tagged along with Jane now and then, I didn’t really interact with her. James and I were generally engrossed in some conversation together or with Horace or Rusty or Travis or one of the fellows from school.”

  I studied Carrie again. Was I imagining the fact that her smile looked sad? “She was already pregnant here,” I said. “And she knew it, but no one else did.”

  This silenced everyone. Then Sam said, “At least one other person probably knew.”

  I watched Camilla as she processed that idea. “Unless she left town to prevent someone from knowing. Let’s consider these possibilities: Carrie knew she was pregnant, and so did the man who made her pregnant. If that was the case, then perhaps she was leaving because (a) he didn’t want her or the baby, and she was mortified, or (b) he did want her and the baby, but she didn’t want him.

  “But let’s suppose Carrie was leaving and the father of the child never knew she was pregnant. Then we might consider that (a) she left because she didn’t want him to know—if so, why?—or (b) she left because she was afraid he would find out. Those are a few possibilities. What am I missing?”

  Sam raised his hand. “That she left because someone told her to.”

  “Why?” Adam asked. “To protect his reputation?”

  Camilla pursed her lips in a thoughtful expression. “It could be—but in that case, why wouldn’t that person pay her way out of town? He might be desperate enough to cover those expenses and set her up in an apartment. Why would James feel obligated to do it? I think everyone at this table is willing to give my dear James the benefit of the doubt. If he paid for that girl to leave town, it was because he was helping her.”

  We thought about that. “But if that’s the case, it seems more likely that the father didn’t know,” I said. “Because otherwise wouldn’t he question James’s involvement? Resent it, perhaps?”

  Camilla lifted her notebook. “Let’s not forget these things we learned from James’s letters.” She read them to us, holding up a finger for each new item:

  “He was agitated in the months before I arrived. He told me that he couldn’t come to see me because something else had come up.

  “He wrote about family and the realities of blood. He could have been speaking of his family, or mine, or—someone else’s.

  “He spoke about losing trust in the people you grow up with. Couldn’t that have referred to the old gang? The boys in the picture there, or the girls? And if so, how did he lose faith in them?

  “He said—” She paused and stared at the paper. “He said he had seen the darkness of the human heart.”

  She looked back up at us, her eyes wide. “And then he asked me to pray for him.”

  Sam shook his head, processing these ideas, and then pointed at Adam. “You were here with him at that time. You must remember what was upsetting him.”

  Adam leaned in, pushing aside the pile of pictures still in front of him. “I do recall the time. James had been quite busy at work, and then had his father to care for at night. I didn’t see a lot of him then—some occasional outings on weekends.”

  “Do you remember him being distressed?”

  “Yes.” Adam’s handsome face looked sad. “But I fear I missed something very important because I thought he was just sad about his father. As I recall, I assumed his father was dying, and when James was reticent I realized it would be rude of me to press him for information he might not want to give.”

  “Of course. You and James were both so good and kind, even as young men,” Camilla said.

  Sam looked unconvinced. “Is there anything you can look back to now—a diary, or a letter, like Camilla’s pile there—to give you some insight?”

  Adam bit his lip. “We lived in the same town, so we didn’t really correspond. But I’ll keep digging.”

  Camilla said, “Let’s assume that James’s comment about ‘the darkness of the human heart’ applies to whatever happened with Carrie. That would push us toward Sam’s theory that she needed to be protected from something. Or someone, perhaps. Whatever it was disillusioned James and prompted him to spend all of his ready money on that young woman.”

  I had returned to my chair, but I sat up straight with a new thought. “But Camilla, if there was some secret involving Carrie, she never told her family!”

  “Why do you say that?” Camilla asked.

  “Because Carrie died a couple of months ago, according to Marge, and after that Jane was perturbed, distressed, until she came marching to your house to address some long-ago grievance, some secret that James Graham had kept. Perhaps she was indeed assuming that James got Carrie pregnant and then forced her out of town. But if that’s not correct, as we all believe, then that means Carrie never told her sister what really happened, but instead allowed her to draw her own conclusions.”

  We all sat in silence for a moment.

  Then Adam said, “Why would a girl like Carrie, who loved and admired Jane, not immediately confide in her own sister?”

  “Because she was ashamed?” Sam asked.

  “Or because she was afraid,” Camilla said.

  11

  There are some things, Camilla, that I think I’ll never tell you.

  —From the correspondence of James Graham and Camilla Easton, 1971

  CAMILLA FINALLY BROKE up our meeting, saying that I needed rest. She gave everyone some letters to study, with the strict order that these precious missives must all come back to her. “Adam, if it’s all right, I’ll hang on to your photo album,” she said. “Lena and I might have some questions about the pictures. I think we’ve looked at all these loose ones.”

  Adam murmured his agreement, then said, “Sam, if you’ll stay here for the time being? I’m going to go home and p
ack a bag. I’ll be back in an hour or so.” Sam nodded. Camilla offered to put the loose photographs in a folder, and Sam and Adam stood by the window, discussing the logistics of their “guard duty.”

  I wandered out of the room and gravitated to Camilla’s office. I sat down in my purple chair, which I connected with the creative wavelength that traveled between Camilla and me when we collaborated on books. I wanted to be writing now, to be in Delphi on a dark night when our main character, Lucy Banner, stepped carefully over the stony path, hoping not to make a sound that would alert the men in the tavern to her presence. We had left her in danger and alone; I wanted to guide Lucy through that rocky terrain and through our complicated plot so that she could emerge victorious with her new lover at her side.

  With a sigh, I leaned back in the chair, my red cast poking out of its sling and looking strange against the plump chair arm. Lestrade wandered in, jumped on the opposite side, and began to make dough with his paws on the purple upholstery. I petted his fuzzy face and he purred, his eyes slitted in a pleased expression. “A lot has happened in this room, buddy. Did you know there’s a secret chamber behind that wall over there? And did you know I once came face-to-face with a murderer in here? Or that I helped to write two novels with my idol, at this very desk?”

  Lestrade tucked his legs underneath his body until he resembled a fluffy boat. He did not look impressed by any of my information. “You’re hard to please, Lestrade. But I do love you.”

  His eyes were fully closed now, but he was still purring.

  I sighed again and leaned my head against the chair. Lestrade had made closing his eyes look pleasurable, so I tried it, too . . .

  “Lena?” Sam stood before me, tall, handsome, serious. “I’m sorry to wake you, but Camilla wants to know if you’d rather rest upstairs, or at my place?”

  “I could write,” I said.

  He shook his head. “She said you would say that, but she claims she is unavailable to work for the next day or two.”

  I curled my lip. “That’s just her being protective. How hard is it to write? I would just sit in this chair.”

  “You are tired, though. You fell asleep in here.”

  “Whatever,” I said, unsure of my mood.

  Sam smiled, and I felt better instantly because I hadn’t seen a genuine smile from him since before the accident. “Fine,” I said. “If Camilla’s taking a break, then you and I can work on this mystery and catch this murderous person before he strikes again.”

  “Sure. We can read more letters, if you like, or look at Adam’s book.”

  “Maybe we should go back and talk to Adam’s old group, one by one. Away from the influence of their friends.”

  Sam nodded, running his hand through his slightly mussy hair. “We could, but we might be stepping on the toes of the police, since they’re probably doing just that.”

  “Huh.” I stroked Lestrade’s ears. Sam knelt in front of me and began to pet him, too. Lestrade’s purr grew louder. Heathcliff and Rochester, always pleased to see a human at their level, came padding in to sniff at Sam and to put their wet noses on his face. He laughed and patted their big heads.

  “All the animals in this house are spoiled—Camilla’s right. I wonder if Star Kelly is going to walk them today. Oh!”

  “What?” Sam looked up, surprised at my tone.

  “Star and her father were there. At the lunch, right before our crash. They heard everything Camilla said.”

  “Okay—?”

  “I mean—that probably means nothing, but they should be on Doug’s list, I guess. How well do you know Luke Kelly?”

  Sam shrugged. “Not well. I consulted him once, when Victoria was missing, to see what my options were.”

  “Regarding what?”

  “The law. The public. I was persona non grata with them both. I got death threats; you know the drill. Nowadays there are people who go straight to the rhetoric of violence—no attempt at thought, or conversation, or resolution. Just I’ll kill you because I don’t understand you.”

  “It’s horrible.” I stared at my cast. Was that what had motivated the person who had rammed into Camilla and me? But why? Surely, they knew that the police, and not just the town mystery writers, would be investigating Jane Wyland’s death?

  I said as much to Sam, and he shook his head. “I have no better idea than you, but I’ll tell you one thing I learned from more than a year of isolation: you take every threat seriously, and trust no one until they’ve earned your trust. Doug asked if I have a gun, and I told him that I do. I never really wanted one in my house, but—you get enough threats, and you figure you might want to be able to defend yourself.”

  I shivered.

  “Are you cold?” Sam asked, solicitous, leaning forward to reach for one of Camilla’s flannel throws on a side table.

  “No. Camilla’s air-conditioning isn’t that effective. I just had a shiver, like the kind they say you get—what is it? When someone walks over your grave?”

  “I don’t know. Is that an expression?”

  I yawned. “I think so. It’s gruesome, though.”

  “How about if I help you upstairs and you take a nap?”

  I shrugged. “Only if you and Lestrade lie there with me.”

  Sam leaned in, smiling, and kissed me softly. “I would love to do that. Let me just make two quick phone calls, and then I’ll carry your cat upstairs for you.”

  He stood up, pulled his phone from his pocket, and stepped out of the room.

  I smoothed Lestrade’s unruly eyebrows. “Soon things will be back to normal, buddy.” He opened his eyes to give me a bored glance, and I realized that, in his leisurely cat world, nothing had really changed.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN I WOKE I was on my bed alone, although Lestrade was nearby, watching birds from my bedroom windowsill and making low chuckling noises in his throat. I lay and looked at the ceiling, my left arm feeling like a block of cement against me. I recalled a character in Camilla’s novel The Villainous Smile. Her protagonist, Prudy Penrette, had been strolling with companions in the woods on her cousin’s palatial estate when she was shot in the leg by a wayward hunter’s bullet. While convalescing in a bedroom in her cousin’s giant, drafty house, she started to wonder whether the injury had in fact been accidental.

  I’d felt such horror as a reader, realizing, along with Prudy, that her cousin himself had the best motive for wanting her dead, that he was in debt and would inherit her trust fund if she died. Slowly it dawned on her that she was helpless as a patient at his hundred-acre residence, with no access to the outside world and her cousin himself checking on her several times a day. She grew to dread the sound of his tread on the stairs, the shadow of his elongated form on the wall as he approached her bed, smiling and asking after her health.

  Smiling. Camilla had taken the title, The Villainous Smile, from a line in Hamlet. The young prince complains “that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” as he contemplates the crimes of his nefarious uncle. And here I was, able to move but partially disabled by my cast, wondering which smiling person in Blue Lake hid the dark heart of a murderer. I no longer wanted to be alone, not even in the room that I loved, and which had been my haven for almost a year.

  “Hello?” I called tentatively.

  Moments later Camilla’s face appeared in my doorway. She must have been in her room. “Oh, you’re awake. Did you have a nice rest?”

  I sat up, and she came to sit on the edge of my bed. “I guess so. I was kind of scared just now, so I wanted company.”

  “Scared?” She smoothed my blanket in an automatic gesture.

  “Remember Prudy Penrette?”

  “The Villainous Smile,” she said. “I scared myself writing that one.”

  “Yes. I was reminded of her, lying on this bed, in this town th
at I had assumed would be my new start, my haven. Just like her. And at first her cousin seemed so solicitous and friendly—it was amazing, the way you let the horror slowly creep into that plot.”

  She patted my leg. Camilla had been patting various parts of me since the accident; like Sam, she seemed to want to find ways to comfort me, or perhaps to atone for what had happened, despite her innocence in the matter. “Probably not the best story to think about right now.”

  “No. I was thinking about our story, too, our Lucy, but then I got tired.”

  I must have looked wistful, because she said, “We’ll get back to it very soon. Just a day or two for you to feel like yourself again. Tomorrow is the Fourth, and you’ll want to go to Belinda’s party. After that—back to work!” She pointed at me with a feigned stern expression that made me laugh.

  “Oh! Camilla, I meant to show you something. Look over there on my desk.”

  She got up and walked to the wood desk that dominated the south wall of my bedroom. The books from Belinda were stacked neatly there.

  “Old library hardbacks! Where in the world did you find these?”

  I struggled to the edge of the bed, feeling a bit like a bug on its back. “Belinda gave them to me. Her library has all new editions, so she thought I might like these old ones. They’re in fairly good shape, and I do love those original covers. The artist was a genius. I even know her name, because I read every word, even the copyright pages and the tiny notations that no one generally sees. Persephone Drake.”

  “Oh yes! I met Persephone a few times in New York. A very talented young woman. Well, young at the time. That was in the ’80s. She still does the occasional cover for me.” Camilla picked up one of the books and glanced at the inside flap, then the back cover. “My, it doesn’t seem that long ago.” She turned to grin at me. “But copyrights don’t lie.”

  I smiled back but grew distracted by the sound of voices on the main floor. “Is Sam talking to someone? Or is that the television?”