In the Waning Light

by Loreth Anne White

  She passed the old motel. Crooked sign. Peeling paint. It was in an even worse state of repair now. Bates Motel, they’d called it as kids. Didn’t look much different from the old black-and-white Hitchcock movie version. She wondered if crows still roosted in the old cottonwoods at the back and beaded the telephone lines out front at dusk, black menacing shapes watching the cars go by.

  Never catch me staying there. I’d rather be dead than caught staying in a place like that … Sherry’s chuckle. Meg jumped at the memory, so vivid that she glanced over at the passenger seat, as if she might see the spectral form of her sister sitting there, conjured from micromolecules of memory.

  … Crazy that they haven’t spruced it up yet. Or demolished and rebuilt it … You going to stay at the old house tonight, Meg?

  Meg dragged her hand down hard over her mouth.

  She drove past the elementary school, the rec center where she used to swim, the township offices, fire hall, and she turned into Front Street. It was empty, rain glistening on the pavement, signs swaying in the wind. The old buildings had been gussied up, given rugged frontier facades. Quaint. Pseudo-artsy.

  It was the same and it wasn’t, she thought as she cruised slowly through, tires crackling on the wet street. The old town, a palimpsest with the past scraped off, rewritten with bolder, brasher strokes of tourism and commerce, a bigger community. But whenever spaces are rebuilt or remodeled, whenever the vellum is scraped down to be reused, evidence of its former use always remains, the ghosts of the past perpetually whispering just below the skin of the present.

  “In those early days, right after her murder, I used to imagine Sherry up in heaven, watching our lives unravel like skeins pulled from carefully knitted sweaters—some rows collapsing faster, others thick and slow—as we all struggled with the aftermath. Mom, Dad. Tommy and his family. Sherry’s best friend, Emma. Blake. Sheriff Kovacs trying to do right by the town. I’d go down to the beach, hunker in the lee of some dune, and watch the heave and pull of the sea, and I’d try to make my body so still, like an empty vessel, in an effort to hear the whisper of Sherry’s spirit, to let her in, to listen for some desperate message she might be trying to impart from the other side. A nudge perhaps. A clue to my missing chunk of memory that would tell us all what had really happened. How it had happened. Why. But I couldn’t recall. Either because of the concussion, or because it was so terrible that I’d repressed it. And it’s still down there inside me somewhere—a dark, festering, inky thing.

  “Sometimes I actually felt her sitting beside me there on the dune, watching the waves … and she’d walk partway home with me, too, but always dematerializing as we got too close.

  “Until the day my father hunted down Tyson Mack, and killed him. Until the day my mother, forgetting I was even there, took her own life in grief. Until the day I became an orphan and gave up the stupid notion of Sherry in heaven. And God. Because God and heaven and Sherry and everyone had given up on me.”

  Seriously, when did you ever give up on anything, Meggie-Peg … you, the little fighter for lost causes and animals … when did you once back down on a challenge … prove it to me, prove it … A chill shivered down the nape of Meg’s neck. Again, quickly, she glanced at the passenger seat. For a nanosecond she almost caught the sense of Sherry’s smile.

  Shit.

  This was not going to be easy.

  She drew to a stop at a red traffic light, right in front of The Mystery Bookstore. A quiver of recognition shot through her. It was still there, with its bay windows and little panes that reminded her of something out of Dickens. And as she peered through the rain-streaked window at the storefront display, her heart kicked. Her book. Her new hardcover, Sins Not Forgotten, was front and center, along with a promo poster of her. Her own face staring back out at her through little rain-smeared windowpanes. A distorted fun-house mirror.

  She’d tried so hard to forget this town, but it had not forgotten her. Part of her was still here. Right in her favorite store.

  Had her earlier books been stocked, too? Had the people of Shelter Bay read her words? She sat for a while, feeling a strange sense of dislocated identity. And guilt. And a sudden stab of longing for something long gone. Her mother, father. Sister. Family. A time when she’d been happy. A time when she used to come here to peruse the new books.

  The light turned green. Meg drew in a deep breath and took the road to Forest End, her old subdivision. Her intention was to park the camper outside the family house while she fixed it up, and then to move in while she researched and worked on her book. It was darker here, near the forest, sparsely lit. Trees swished behind the last row of houses. She turned into the old driveway, headlights illuminating a chained gate. Meg removed her headset and stared at the lurid graffiti that covered the walls and boarded-up windows.

  Pulling up her rain hood, she got out to open the gates. Rain beat down on her back. The chain was wet and icy cold in her hands, securely padlocked. Rusty. She jiggled the gate, but it held fast. Climbing back into her truck, she scrubbed her hands hard over her wet face, refusing to allow any more memories in.

  This was dumb. You’re wrong, Jonah. Sometimes you don’t need to go back to go forward … the hell with this!

  Angrily she keyed her ignition. She swung her truck around, wheels spitting up gravel on the sidewalk. She headed for the coast road, a half-baked purpose forming in her head to go someplace warm. Far away from this town. This stupid winter. Jonah. Her life. When she got too tired, she’d pull over and sleep. California. Mexico. She could drive all the freaking way through South America. To Tierra del Fuego. Until she ran out of land.

  So what if she was running …

  But as she neared the town exit, the rain pummeled down even harder, wind gusting fierce off the Pacific, and a light on her dash began to flash orange. Fuel gauge. She swore bitterly and slowed, keeping her eyes peeled for a gas station.

  Meg drew into Millar’s Gas and Motor Shop and pulled up alongside a diesel pump. An attendant came running out. She asked him to fill her tank while she ducked into the convenience store in search of something hot to drink.

  The doorbell chimed as she stepped into the fluorescent brightness. Meg shook off her hood, picked a few things off the shelves, and poured a self-serve coffee. She went to pay at the counter, where a plumpish, blonde woman with smooth, creamy-looking skin and apple-dumpling cheeks was serving a giant of a man. Meg stood behind the man, taking in his stained pants, muddy construction boots, ink-black hair.

  He snagged his smokes and six-pack off the counter, turned, and stalled dead as his gaze lit upon Meg. His mouth opened, then closed. His features hardened.

  Meg swallowed at the full-bore intensity and hot energy radiating off him. She nodded, smiled. But his eyes narrowed sharply as he pushed past her and out the door. Through the window she saw him climb into a black van with a circular logo on the side. His brake lights flared red before he pulled out onto the coast road.

  A memory, a voice, came through her. Faint, so faint, it was almost the sound of sand scraping in the wind outside.

  Wait. Stop! Don’t run, Meggie, don’t run!

  She froze, trapped suddenly in a loop of time. She felt a hand grabbing at her arm, fingers digging into bare skin, terror rising in her throat …

  “That be all?”

  The woman’s words jerked her back to the present. Shaken, she placed her items on the counter—a wrapped sandwich, a packet of potato chips, the coffee. Newspaper. A packaged cream-filled snack cake that she planned to inhale whole before she was out of the lot.

  “Terrible night to be out and about. You just traveling through?”

  Meg hesitated, suddenly drained. “Actually,” she said, trying to force a smile, “I’m hoping to find a clean motel for the night. Or somewhere to camp my rig.”

  The woman glanced at Meg’s rig parked outside, her Washington plates clearly visible.

  “No fun camping in this storm,” she said as she placed th
e items in a bag. Meg handed over her credit card. “State park is closed for the season, anyways. There’s the One Pine Motel at the north end of town. It’s a low-budget place.”

  Bates Motel … never catch me staying there … rather be dead than caught staying in a place like that, Meg.

  You are dead, Sherry.

  “There’s also a new boutique hotel in Whakami Cove, one town over, if you’re looking for something more upmarket. Pretty ritzy, though.” She passed the card back to Meg along with the slip to sign. “It opened this past summer as part of a big new Kessinger-Sproatt waterfront development. And there’s Bull’s Marina, down on the bay.”

  Meg glanced up sharply.

  “They have some cabins, but I don’t know if they still stay open during the winter,” the woman said.

  “Bull Sutton’s place? It’s still there?”

  “You know it?”

  “I, uh … from years ago.” Meg picked up her bag of goods, but hesitated. “That guy who was just in here—do you know him?”

  Suspicion flitted into the woman’s eyes and a frown tilted her brows inward as she weighed Meg’s question.

  “No worries. He … looked familiar, is all.” Meg nodded to her bag. “Thanks.”

  But as she reached the door, the woman called out behind her. “Name’s Mason Mack.”

  Meg stalled. Swallowed. A chill trickled down her spine. Trying to keep her voice level, she said, “Guess I don’t know him, then.”

  She pushed through the door and into cool mist. Her skin was hot, her blood electric. Rain clattered loudly on the tin roof, and shimmered in a bead curtain beyond the covered area. She climbed into her truck and glanced uneasily in the direction the man’s van had disappeared. A nearly inaudible whine, like a wet finger tracing around the rim of a crystal glass, began circling in her brain.

  Mason Mack.

  The uncle of the young man who’d raped and strangled her sister. The young man her father had shot and kicked to a pulp. The reason her dad had died in prison.

  She reached down, keyed the ignition. Her big diesel truck rumbled to life, and she let it idle a moment as heat blew into the cab and she ripped open the snack cake packet, and ate the awful thing in two bites, welcoming the instant sugar rush. She sipped her coffee, feeling vaguely human again as the whining sound slowly dulled in her head. But as she pulled out of the gas station, in her rearview mirror she saw the woman come up to the store window and stare out at her.

  The image of the woman, her encounter with Mason Mack, filled Meg with unease as she arrived at a T-junction intersection with the coast highway. A sign pointed south to Whakami Cove. Another sign pointed north, back into town.

  Another bolt of memory sliced through her, the voice louder this time, oddly familiar …

  Wait. Stop! Don’t run, Meggie, don’t run!

  Hot panic flicked through her stomach. Then came a memory of Sherry’s voice …

  Cover for me, Meg. You won’t regret it … just tell Mom and Dad we went to see that new movie … do it for me … look, here’s some cash …

  Then wham. Yet another image. A flicker of black shapes against blinding white. It came with a sharp slice of pain up the back of her head. Then it was gone. Trees in her headlights bent suddenly in the wind, the gust tearing debris free that hurtled across the road and smacked into her windshield. She jumped, pulse racing, past slamming into present—a dark, wet, black horror trying to rise out of the abyss of her mind and crawl into her consciousness. With it came a raw instinct to flee. South. On the back of it rode a compulsion to stand ground, fight it. Make it show itself—this horror.

  Prove it. Prove you can go all the way and get the life you deserve.

  You haven’t been back to see your aunt since she went into that home …

  She gripped the wheel tight. Fine, you damn town. You don’t want to let go, then you got me. Gritting her teeth, she turned north, to Shelter Bay, clamping down on all her reasons for coming back. A mile in she took another turn, this time toward the ocean, negotiating the zigzagging road down to the bay.

  And there it was. Through the mist and whipping rain, the faint pulse of the lighthouse beam on the dark rocks of Shelter Head. A guide. A warning. A Janus message being sent out over the black sea.

  And as she rounded the point, snugged along the bay, she saw the marina. Above the buildings a neon sign smeared by rain flickered in dull pink: BULL’S MARINA AND CRABBY JACK’S CAFE. Another memory reared sharp and hungry, clawing open her chest. Blake kissing her on the dock. Her telling him that she was leaving. The desperation, the ferocity in his eyes, the emotion in his voice as he’d pleaded with her to stay, to just try. He’d enlisted the day after she left. Went straight into the army. Became a medic. She hadn’t seen nor heard from him since.

  His older brother, Geoff, had also left town, along with so many other of Sherry’s contemporaries. Her murder had come at a time of change in the lives of her fellow graduates, but to Meg it felt as if her sister’s brutal death had precipitated a more seismic shift in this town, and the lives within it.

  She wondered if either of the Sutton men ever came home to see their dad. Did Bull manage this marina on his own? He had to be about seventy now—the same age her dad would be, if he were alive.

  She rounded another curve dense with brush.

  A small VACANCY sign beckoned at the top of the long gravel driveway. Meg tapped her brakes, hesitating a moment, before quickly swinging her wheel and taking her rig bouncing down the steep, rutted track to the water.

  And she knew she’d just done it—taken her first solid step back into the past, into writing Sherry’s story. Into the murk of her own memory. Because now she would have to speak to Bull Sutton. He’d ask why she was here, and she’d ask him what he remembered about that day that she and Sherry went missing. She’d ask after his boys. And he’d give her their addresses.

  There was no turning back now …

  CHAPTER 3

  Meg hoicked up her rain hood, exited her truck, and jogged through the lashing rain to the office. There was a small light on inside. She tried the door. Locked. Cupping her hand against cold glass, she peered in. It looked much the same as it had when she’d left Shelter Bay—a store counter, some crab nets, and other gear on the walls. Life jackets. A vintage postcard display rack. Touristy knickknacks on a few shelves. Stairs at the back climbed up to the residence. Pop fridges flanked an archway that led into what was once Crabby Jack’s Cafe, but now appeared to be a vacant room in the throes of renovation, shrouds of drop cloths on the floor, a ladder in the center of the room.

  Meg stepped out from under the covered deck area and, holding her hood against the whipping rain and wind, she squinted up at the top floor where the Sutton men had all lived. There were some lights on up there. She could smell wood smoke from the chimney. Someone was home.

  A dog barked.

  She hesitated, the sound of the foghorn moaning in the mist. Thunder clapped, and rain redoubled its assault. She ran carefully back to her truck, avoiding the black puddles. She’d check in come morning.

  Back inside the camper, she shook out of her wet gear, pulled on a fleece jacket, and turned on the gas heater. It clunked and grumbled to life, blowing air with a noisy fan. The interior started to warm as Meg made her bed, shaking out her down sleeping bag. The camper rocked in the wind, rain drumming on the roof. Eager to ease the chill, Meg poured a small glass of brandy, sipped, then took out her phone. She debated for a moment whether to make the call.

  Then, wrapping a throw around her shoulders, she bit the bullet and hit speed dial.

  Jonah answered on the fourth ring, voice thick, as if with sleep.

  She checked her watch, frowned. “It’s me,” she said.

  “Meg. Where … where on earth are you? I’ve been trying to reach you for two days.”

  “Shelter Bay.” She inhaled. “I came home.”

  Silence. Then a ruffling sound, the kind sheets might make. He
r pulse quickened. When he spoke again, he sounded different, as if he’d moved location.

  “Are you okay, Meg?”

  “I—” She worried her engagement ring around her finger, thinking of Jonah’s final words after she’d tried to talk to him again.

  Keep it. I don’t want it back … it’s just a reminder of what didn’t work. I don’t need a trophy for that.

  “I will be.”

  “What’re you doing there?”

  “I’m going to prove it,” she said quietly. “I’m going to write the story that everyone says I can’t. I’m going to go back into the past, to work through it all, and put it to bed. The End.”

  A long beat of silence.

  “Can you?”

  “Yes. No … I don’t know. But I’m going to try. And, Jonah …” She closed her eyes, taking a moment to corral her emotions. “When I’m done, when I’ve written The End, I’m coming back to Seattle, and—” Thickness caught in her throat. She took another beat to marshal herself. “—I … hope you’ll still be there.”

  A soft curse.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Meg—”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “I … listen, Meg … you were the one who walked out on me. On us. You chose to end it.”

  She scrunched her eyes tighter, a hot burn rising in her chest.

  He’s been patient, so patient, and I just blew through it all …

  “I came to Shelter Bay because I want to win you back,” she said softly. “I want the things we spoke about. Children. A family. A proper home—walls and a roof. I want to find a way forward, and I want it to be with you.”

  “Meg, I … I’ll always love you. You know that?”

  She killed the call, hands shaking.

  Shit. She scrubbed her hands hard over her face.

  What have I done …

  “Whoa, Lucy, what’s up, girl?” Blake Sutton came running down the stairs in socked feet at the sound of excited barking. He ruffled his black Lab’s fur as he entered the dimly lit office. Cupping his hand against the glass he peered into the dark. He’d thought he’d heard knocking, but the thunder was loud. Rain hammered a din on the tin roof—the old wooden structure creaking like an ancient mariner’s ship in the storm. The buoys tied to the rafters outside beat a steady thump thump thump in the wind, accompanied by the low, metronomic moan of the foghorns.