Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  Dedication

  To Greg, forever

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A Few Years Ago

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Now

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Praise

  Also by Lori Rader-Day

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Few Years Ago

  In the dim of the truck’s dashboard lights, Bix’s hand reached toward the steering wheel. “Hold on a second,” he said.

  “At ease, soldier.” I swatted him away and kept my eyes on the road. We’d already had this argument back in the parking lot of the bar where we’d met the guy from his old unit and his wife. Out of earshot, of course, closing ranks. He usually drove—he couldn’t stand to be a passenger—but he’d had one too many at dinner. Three too many. Even so, I’d had to go low to get the keys from him. You get a DUI, I’d said. I’ll have to drive you everywhere for a year. I didn’t know if that’s how it went or not, but neither did he, and also he was drunk.

  “Take a nap or something,” I said.

  “Eden, pull over.”

  “You getting sick?” I let off on the gas, pulled to the edge of the road, and unlocked the doors. Bix stayed buckled. “What?”

  “Just . . .” He squinted out the windshield. “I don’t know. Is that weird?”

  Our headlights picked up a pair of bright eyes in the brush. Beyond that, an empty field. We were stopped in the homebound lanes of the divided highway, still more than an hour away from our front door. A black sky wrapped around us. A car approached, but it was distant.

  “What? Is what weird?” I said.

  When he didn’t answer, I looked over at him again. He was shadow. “You going to puke or what?”

  “Just . . . hang back,” he said.

  I put the truck in park with a sigh. Drunks. I wanted my bed, the fresh sheets I’d put on. We should have left the bar hours ago, as far as we’d had to travel. Of course there were a lot of stories to get through, a lot of inside jokes until the guys were all red-faced and drawing attention. The wife I’d known from base housing in Fayette Nam, as we called it. Me in North Carolina back when Bix was on the ground in Fallujah. She had as much patience as anyone could expect for dinner and nostalgia, but even she had started yawning into the back of her hand. Rounds got poured. Things got late. And now—well, Bix could take the guest room, if he was going to be sick all night.

  He blinked, squinted past me. I was admiring him, my handsome husband, when I realized how bright the night had become.

  Out the windshield, the headlights of the approaching car had grown intense—far too bright and too quickly. In the moment I realized what was happening—

  “What the—”

  —the car rushed past us at speed, on our side of the highway instead of its own, almost in our lane.

  We shook, and dust and debris lashed against the truck.

  Bix whipped around, pulling against his seat belt to watch the car’s red taillights disappear.

  “—hell,” I said.

  “Dude’s having a wild night, that’s what the hell.”

  It was Army to both respect the rules and scorn them. But I was not Army, and neither was Bix, anymore. “He’s going to kill someone,” I said. I put the truck in gear and pulled onto the road. Bix tucked his arms across his chest and let his neck cradle into the sling of the seat belt. He mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “If he was going to kill someone . . .” He swallowed the rest of it, his head lolling back.

  “What?” I said again.

  He had begun to snore. I turned on talk radio to keep me company, but it was still a long way home. I kept myself alert trying to figure it out. If he was going to kill someone . . . what?

  When we got home, I shook him awake, gently, to go inside. His eyes opened, red and bleary, and I wondered what kind of night we would have. Scale of one to ten. But then he unbuckled the seat belt and opened the door on his own, walked a straight line to the door, and patted his pockets for the keys before he remembered he didn’t have them. He waited for me, sheepish. An OK night, then, at least.

  “What did you say about that car?” I said, yawning. “About if he was going to kill someone . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The car,” I said. “On the highway. You know.”

  “Weren’t there a lot of cars on the highway?”

  He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember the car, the near miss, or what he’d said that I couldn’t hear. I let it go. I needed an OK night. I just wanted the sleep.

  Chapter One

  June

  The first sign that things would not go as planned was the tableau that awaited me at the bottom of the open staircase: a pair of boxer briefs hanging from the newel post, as out of place as if they’d been dropped from the sky. Still life with underwear. After a moment, the boxers resolved into a pair of swimming trunks, which was a relief but not a full pardon. A mistake, easily. The last week’s renters must have forgotten them. But I wasn’t satisfied, because I had already noticed the other car parked outside, an expensive model with Ohio plates. I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my suitcase and camera bag at my feet, waiting for the swimming trunks to make sense. It was one thing for the owner to forget them here. It was another thing altogether to think the cleaning service hadn’t bothered with them, or with the pool of water forming on the hardwood floor below.

  The pool of water couldn’t be a mistake, could it? How could the system that turned the guest house over from one week to the next—every week of the year—break down so completely?

  The rest of the place seemed tidy and reassuring: a big airy front room with wide windows filled with sunlight and a kitchen stocked with silver appliances reflecting the shine. In all this aggressive daylight, I felt safe and entirely at odds with why I had come.

  I’m not sure how long I stared at the mess, unable to decide what to do about it.

  A footstep sounded above and then a man, young, bare-chested, stood at the top of the stairs, speaking back over his shoulder. “I said we’d figure it out later,” he said. “I thought I heard Malloy—”

  He’d seen me now and was eyeing my suitcase in the same way I’d calculated the puddle on the floor.

  “Hello,
” he said. He was gorgeously brown, South Asian, maybe, with smooth, hairless arms and eyes so dark I couldn’t quite look into them. His black hair was wet and swept back from his forehead in a sheet. The owner of the swim trunks, no doubt. He came down the stairs almost regally on bare feet.

  “Are you late getting started on your way?” I said.

  “Are you from the cleaning service?” he said at the same time.

  “No, I’m . . .” For some reason I didn’t want to say that I was here to stay the week. I had a bad feeling that who I thought I was and who he thought he was would clash, unrecoverable. I had enjoyed a certain kind of avoidance of conflict since my husband had died. Dodging disagreement was a symptom, though, not the disease. The truth was that I was a decorated solider in the fight against decision-making, and since Bix had died, I had given up all patience for the clockworks of life and the world around me. The casualty had been friendships, then family. Strangers, of course, had been the first to go. I didn’t like talking to them, or having them talk to me. In most situations—and I hadn’t known this until I’d had the chance to practice it—I could end any conversation I didn’t want to have and walk away. Midsentence, if necessary.

  Of course I had lived a bit of a rarified life, no children, not having to work, not having to settle any disputes or answer to any demands. Not after the funeral and the first rush of mourners had stopped fussing at me. Not after that. All the systems of my life had been set up well beforehand, and they continued to tick-tick toward infinity. Or, actually, not infinity at all, as it turned out.

  “I’m the renter this week,” I said finally, no way around it.

  “Paris,” the man called loudly.

  “What?” The voice came first, then the woman, lithe, showing off long brown legs in tiny shorts and a substantial décolletage in a strappy bikini top. Her black hair bobbed in thin, tight braids, some of them decorated with beads, gold to match the delicate gold ring in her left nostril. She provided another royal descent down the stairs, an African queen. The frown on her face projected that she wasn’t going to accept whatever there was to find out. She had made up her mind. She looked me up and down. “What’s going on? Where’s Malloy?”

  “This is our week, right?” he said. “In the house. You’re absolutely sure.”

  “Of course it’s our week. We already checked in, remember?” She turned to me, shapely arms folded across her chest. “We’ve had it booked for weeks.”

  “My reservation was made almost a year ago,” I said.

  They exchanged a glance, in which it was confirmed that anyone who would make plans so far in advance was clearly disturbed and probably the one at fault. The one most likely to get the date wrong, anyway.

  For a moment, I let myself wonder if I had mixed up the date. I hadn’t been sleeping well. Plans, thoughts, promises, memories—at times it all went a little fuzzy at the edges. My mind would wander from the moment and deep into another place I couldn’t pinpoint or explain, and then I would come back to reality with a click. A click, almost audible, like the click of a camera shutter. Not my camera, the one I had been carrying around since I’d started the lessons Bix had signed me up for. On my camera, the shutter noise was a setting I could turn off, and so I had. But that was the sound I heard when I came back from wherever I had gone, and maybe the person I’d been talking to would have shifted or even moved away. Click. Sometimes the problem in front of me took care of itself.

  But I knew I hadn’t messed up this date.

  “My husband,” I said. “He booked it for our wedding anniversary—”

  The man’s eyes flicked behind me to the door, empty. I hadn’t gotten used to that little glance over my shoulder. It still hurt. He should have been there, backing me up. Though backing me up had not been his best quality.

  “Before he died,” I said. It was hard to explain, the loss. Nearly nine months later, I was still trying to figure out which words people needed to hear first. Or at all. People wanted the story. They often felt the details were part of something owed to them. For these two strangers standing in my way, simplicity was best. “He made the plans, but he didn’t live to keep them.”

  “We’re so sorry,” the man mumbled, but the woman wasn’t having it.

  “It’s an anniversary for us, too,” she said.

  “Pare,” he scolded. “Don’t.”

  “Well, it is,” she said, though she looked slightly abashed. “And besides—it’s also the anniversary of when we graduated,” she said. A toddler pout crept onto her face. She was used to getting her own way. “Almost. It’s been forever.”

  Forever. People liked to throw around words like that, the meaning stripped away. The younger they were, the more easily they pitched the phrase. What did forever mean to someone for whom the word anniversary was tied to leaving a school?

  “High school?” I said.

  “College,” he said. It came out apologetic. “Five years.”

  “Oh.” I had only a handful of years on them, six or seven. An age difference that didn’t matter from my side but might from theirs. They seemed even younger, actually. But that was probably the grief talking. Grief had its way with you, time-wise.

  I was already tired of having to talk with them. They shouldn’t be here. I had fought my despair and inertia and doubts to drive up here and face up to a few things, and these people had no role in it. For a moment, I felt the tug of home. This was the permission I needed. I could get back in the car and, if I drove quickly and made no stops, be home before dark. I could see our tenth anniversary through as I had all the days since he’d gone, locked up tight inside a house with all the lights blazing out into the darkness.

  Except it couldn’t continue this way. A set of house keys had been placed in the hands of a keen real estate agent who had encouraged me to vacate so that he could inventory all the ways in which our history could be stripped out of the place. At the end of the week, I would decide. Did I give him the go-ahead to stage the place as a showroom, or did I return and figure out how to live there on my own? He had tried to call me three times during my drive north to the park, but I hadn’t answered. There were no emergencies left in my life. Except—

  I imagined sunset stretching shadows into my path on the long ride home. Except that one.

  “Let’s find the park director,” I said, throwing my camera bag strap across my chest. “We need to settle this before it starts to get dark.”

  “Why?” the woman said, trading in her pout for a sneer. “I thought we came here to be in the dark.”

  “But when it gets dark here, it’s going to be really dark,” the guy said, turning to me. He was trying to be nice, but I felt his hope radiating toward me that when we worked this out, I would be the one to get back in my car. He wanted things to go well but he wanted things to go better for this woman and himself. “She wouldn’t want to start for home in that kind of dark,” he said, and he had no idea how right he was.

  “WELCOME TO THE Straits Point International Dark Sky Park—oh.” The young woman at the main office recognized me right away. When I’d checked in less than a half hour prior, we’d had a little trouble with the process. Something in the paperwork, and the reservation being under Bix’s name—anyway, we had worked it out at last. Wallace, party of one, not two. Now the woman waited to see what more trouble I could cause, her smile as pinned on as her name tag.

  The couple came in behind me, arguing in close tones and letting the screen door bang. I had learned on the way over that the man’s name was Dev. “It means divine,” the woman, Paris, had said, as though it anointed them both.

  Neither of them stepped forward, so I did. “We’re hoping you can clear something up for us,” I said, leaning in close to read the woman’s name tag, “Erica Ruth Neubauer.”

  “I can try,” she said. She was young, too. Maybe the whole world would seem that way to me now.

  “The guest house seems to be a little, uh, crowded,” I said. “This nic
e couple believes they have it for the week, and I’m pretty sure I do.”

  Erica Ruth looked among us. “That’s right.”

  I suddenly saw the third option, the one I hadn’t wanted to consider. On the wall over Erica Ruth’s shoulder, there was a head-and-torso photo of a man with a thoughtful expression. He was handsome, with the sharp collar of his shirt framing a clean-cut, masculine jaw. He had something of the accountant about him. All business. A metal plate on the bottom of the frame read Warren Hoyt, Director.

  “Is the director around?” I asked. “We need to get to the bottom of things pretty quickly here.”

  Erica Ruth turned her back on us to put a page through on a walkie-talkie, then we all waited in awkward silence. I felt the rays of sun diminishing as we stood there shuffling our feet. I was always keenly aware of what time it was these days.

  “How many bedrooms are in the guest house?” I said, fidgeting with my camera bag. It was heavy on my neck.

  “Three upstairs plus the suite,” she said.

  “Which suite?” Paris demanded. “What does that come with?”

  Erica ran through a few details without enthusiasm. “They all come with access to the lake,” she said, shooting for cheerfulness.

  At the sound of tires crunching outside, we gave up on talking and waited. The man from the wall’s portrait, his face just as thoughtful in real life, appeared in the doorway and entered with a sigh. “Let me guess,” he said. “Both parties thought they had the entire house for the week.”

  He was a tall guy, muscular in his adult version of Boy Scout khaki gear, a green polo shirt buttoned to the collar. Warren. There was no easy nickname for Warren that I knew of, and people without a path to a nickname put me on notice. The faux-military aspect of his uniform also got my back up. Bix had been career Army, master sergeant, decorated, twenty years and retirement by age thirty-nine, with stints guarding the DMZ in Korea and active deployments in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As someone who had dated, then married into the strain and fall-out of the actual military, I didn’t expect much from this proto-scout. Either sell me some cookies or get off my porch.

  Plus, I had heard the guy’s transference of the problem back on us. A management move. “So we’re meant to share it,” I said. “Is that what I’m hearing?”