In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  I don’t know what he will do, but when he figures it out, I know he’ll pour his whole heart and soul into it. Like he’s poured his heart and soul into me.

  Jonny shouted something to the pitcher, who held the ball and waited for him. He came off the base and jogged up to us. He wore shorts and sneakers. His chest was bare. He kissed me.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  We were awkward around each other, because we both knew what we were thinking. It’s exciting, unsettling, and unnerving when you know you’re going to do it.

  “We’re going down to the lake,” I told him. “Meet us there, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will you be long?”

  “No, we’re almost done, and the rain will probably wash us out in a couple minutes anyway.”

  “Okay, love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Jonny kissed me again. He waved at Laura, but I could see him wondering if the two of us would be alone. Part of me wanted Laura to stay, because I was nervous about what was going to happen. Part of me couldn’t wait to jump off the cliff.

  We continued by the side of the field to where another trail led down along the creek toward the lake. The eyes of the boys followed us. They made jokes. Laura stayed on my left and stared at the ground.

  I noticed Peter Stanhope among the boys. He was coming up to bat next. We had to pass within a few feet of him, and he leaned on his bat and watched us the whole way, his head swiveling to track us, his eyes gleaming. Laura didn’t look up at all, but I could tell she knew he was there. It was Laura he wanted. He didn’t say a word to either of us, but we felt him. Peter had a presence, because he was so sure of himself. He wasn’t as tall as Jonny, but he was beefy and strong. He had bushy blond hair, parted in the middle, swept back in two waves. He chewed gum relentlessly, and his lips were always parted in a perpetual smirk that dimpled his cheeks. His skin was ruddy and freckled.

  Most of the girls chased after him. They wanted a ride in his Trans Am. They wanted to swim in the Olympic-sized pool in his father’s backyard. Peter went from one girl to the next, doing what he did with Laura, pushing them to have sex. Most said yes. Rumor is, he even bedded down a couple of the married teachers at school. That’s the way life is when you’re a Stanhope. The word “no” isn’t in your vocabulary. Peter’s father, Randall, owns a big mining operation in the harbor. People are afraid of him. He’s the kind of man who can get what he wants by picking up the phone. So Peter lives that way, too. Taking the things he wants.

  I resented him, because we never had much money in my house, and I figured anyone with that much money probably got it by stepping all over other people. I also didn’t like the way he treated Laura. I was never sure why she went out with him. But he didn’t care what I thought. I was nothing. He looked right through me, and I could see him stripping off Laura’s clothes in that horny brain of his.

  “Come on,” I said to her.

  We hurried out of the field. It got dark again as we entered the forest. Laura glanced behind her, as if Peter might be following us.

  “He’s a creep,” I said.

  Laura didn’t say anything at all.

  The stream tumbled over stones beside the path. We walked beside it for ten minutes until the creek split out of the trees into a furry brown nest of cattails, where we could see the midnight blue waters of the lake pooling at the shore just past the weeds. We both ran out onto the beach. My toes bunched the sand as I headed for the water, where I splashed in the foam. A handful of ducks lifted off noisily.

  “You want to swim?” I asked Laura.

  “I don’t have a suit.”

  “So?”

  She shook her head.

  I came out of the water and sat down in the sand. Laura slid the backpack off her shoulder and sat down next to me. We didn’t talk. I watched the black stain in the sky grow as it blew closer. The north side of the lake was already obscured by nightfall, and the line where the water became the trees was impossible to distinguish. There was another beach on that side and more trails that wound down from the other end of the park.

  The warm breeze turned cooler. Laura sat with her hands around her knees, staring at the water.

  “You and Dad really went at it last night,” I said.

  Fights weren’t new between them, but this one was worse than usual.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Laura said.

  “What was it about this time?” I persisted.

  “Nothing.” She looked away, shutting me down. Her legs twitched. She twisted her neck to stare over her shoulder, and I thought she might get up and run away.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  Laura shrugged. “Life’s weird.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. Just weird.”

  “You’re pretty weird, too,” I told her, smiling.

  She didn’t smile back at me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It was a joke.”

  “That’s okay.”

  I felt a spatter of raindrops on my skin.

  “Seriously, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m just thinking about stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  Laura hugged her knees together. The drizzle ran like tears on her cheeks. “Do you think you could ever kill someone?” she asked.

  I stared at her. “What kind of question is that?”

  “I mean, do you think only an insane person could do it?”

  I tried to read her face, which was a mask of shadows. I realized it wasn’t rain. She was crying.

  “You’re scaring me, Laura. What is this about?”

  “What if Dad were abusing me?” she asked. “Could you kill him?”

  I felt a chill. “Oh, my God, did something happen between you two?”

  Laura shook her head. “No, it’s not that.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  I was afraid she had opened up to me as much as she ever could. “Laura, please.”

  “I just wish everything weren’t so complicated,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Everything.” Laura looked at me. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Of course.”

  “Even from Jon?”

  “If I have to, sure. What is it?”

  She didn’t tell me. She never got the chance. This time, we both heard it. Something snapped in the woods behind us. We spun around, and I heard Laura suck in her breath. We couldn’t see anyone, but someone was there.

  “Jonny?” I called.

  No one answered.

  “Wait here,” I said.

  I didn’t shout this time. I charged the woods, sprinting through the sand onto the trail, where I skidded to a stop. I listened but heard only the wind as it landed with a frenzy, kicking the forest to life. I made a slow circle, my eyes narrowing as I tried to penetrate the darkness. I stared where I thought I had heard the branch break and was rock still.

  I knew I wasn’t alone.

  I heard a shout from Laura, and when I turned back toward the beach, I could see that the rain had come. It was sheeting down. Lightning sizzled, and the forest shook with thunder. The noise covered everything else. Whoever was near me could use the storm to escape.

  I waited a few more seconds, and then I smelled something odd and sickly sweet above the freshness of the rain.

  Marijuana.

  7

  Tish Verdure nursed a gin and tonic and studied the row of aging high school sports photos hung above the booth in the downtown bar. One was a group photo of a state championship hockey team. Another was an action shot of two tall white boys fighting over a basketball layup. In a third, she saw a cheering section of baseball players in a stadium dugout, with bats strewn around them on the ground. Some of the photos were from the 1970s, and she saw faces that loo
ked familiar. For all she knew, some of the boys were in the bar right now. She wouldn’t recognize them today.

  The waitress, a bored UMD student in a Rascal Flatts T-shirt, told her that one of the men at the bar wanted to buy Tish a drink. Tish waved her off without giving the man a look. It wasn’t the first time tonight. Men assumed that a single woman in the bar was on the prowl, when all she really wanted was to get drunk. She knew she drank and smoked too much. It was a way to get through the days and nights.

  Tish wondered if she had made a mistake by coming back. Stirring up her life wouldn’t accomplish anything, and she was already lying about her past. Stride knew it-she could see it in his eyes when he looked at her. A part of her wanted to pack up and go before things got worse, but she owed it to Laura to be here. She owed it to Cindy, too. She had foolishly made a promise to her, and she couldn’t put off any longer her need to honor it.

  She paid her bill. It was one in the morning. She left the bar through the crowd of smokers outside the door and strolled past dark storefronts toward her rental car. Rather than get in, she continued past it, down the sharp slope of Second Avenue toward the corner. She stood by a parking meter on the curb and stared diagonally across the street, where a crumpled piece of newspaper blew up against a brick building like a tumble-weed. The ground floor of the building housed a wireless phone store behind its big windows. Neon glowed brightly in the display.

  Back then, when she was a child, the same space had been a bank office. The bank where her mother worked as a teller.

  Tish had been in school when it happened. The policeman who came to get her had a black mole on his cheek and breath that smelled like burned coffee. He took her to the station and put her in a white room, and then a woman in a flowery dress came in and told her. That was it. She slept with strangers that night.

  “I’m home, Mom,” Tish murmured to the air.

  She turned around, leaving the old bank building behind, and stalked briskly to her car. The fresh air had burned off some of the alcohol clouding her brain. She drove north out of downtown through streets largely empty of traffic. The lights stayed green. She turned right at Twenty-first Avenue, crossed over the freeway, and curled around a sharp curve to the cliffside road that led to the condominium she was borrowing. She parked under the trees at the end of the street and got out. She lit a cigarette and stood there, smoking, letting it burn down. The lake twinkled below her. The birches were silhouettes with a thousand arms, moving and alive. Behind her, the freeway overpass rumbled on its stilts like a concrete giant. She felt strange. As if eyes were watching her. That was how Laura must have felt. Tish shivered, but she finished her smoke before crushing out the butt in the street and continuing to her front door.

  She stopped. Froze.

  One of the miniature square panels of stained glass in the door was shattered, letting out a square of white light. The broken pane was near the dead bolt.

  Tish backed up, listening. Everything was quiet. She looked behind her, feeling a stab of panic. The sensation of being watched had fled. She was alone now, but she felt violated. With her cell phone, Tish called the police. They told her a car would be there soon. Knowing that help was close by gave her the courage to return to the door, which was unlocked, and nudge it open. She took a cautious step into the foyer, listening for anything that would betray a stranger. She breathed the air, trying to smell an echo of whoever had been here, but all she detected was a lingering paint smell from the work that had been done on the place before she arrived.

  Nothing was disturbed that she could see. Nothing taken. But she had only been in town for a few days, enough time to get up her courage to see Stride, enough time to visit the north beach in the park. A pilgrimage to feel Laura’s spirit again.

  All she had in the condo was her suitcase and some food.

  Tish waited for a long time by the front door, and when she was convinced she was alone, she went to the bedroom. Her papers were strewn over the bed, not the way she had left them. Her clothes were in and out of the drawers. The closet was open, and so was her suitcase. Tish caught her breath and immediately went to the case and unzipped the netting over the main compartment and found the hidden pocket inside. She reached in as far as she could and exhaled with relief.

  The letter from Cindy was still there. Untouched. So was the clipping about the robbery.

  She returned to the living room to sit down and wait for the police. It was obvious that no matter how little time she had been here, someone already knew she was back.

  Someone already wanted her gone.

  Stride lay in bed on his back and stared at the ceiling. The bedroom window was open, and he could hear the surf on Lake Superior where it assaulted the shore on the other side of the sand dune. The narrow strip of beach was only steps from their back door. Tish was right that hardly anyone lived on the Point year-round in the old days. Cottages like this one were mostly summer getaways then. Today, it was prime real estate. The old houses were being torn down and replaced by castles and condos. Anything on waterfront anywhere was gold. He liked it better when he and Cindy had first moved out here, when people wondered why anyone would want to live in the eye of the Superior storms. Stride wasn’t always sure himself, except that the lake was so vast that he sometimes felt as if he were staring at eternity.

  Serena sat cross-legged on the bed, watching him. The lights were off. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he expected that he would open them again and see Cindy sitting there, in the same pose, a crooked smile on her face. As if all the time that had passed had been in his imagination. He wasn’t really closing in on fifty years old. He wasn’t really bruised by death and loss. He was a teenager. A new cop. A young husband. Everything that was going to be lay ahead, not behind.

  “You know what I remember about that night?” he told her. “Other than me and Cindy, I mean. I remember the bat.”

  Serena didn’t say anything. He could see it like a video clip on a loop that played over and over in his head. Close up. That bat going around and around.

  “It was Peter’s bat. One of those aluminum ones. Bright silver. He never let anyone else use it. I remember him taking practice swings at home plate and hearing the whoosh of the bat. I can still see that bat in his hands. All I can think about is that, not long after, someone used that same bat to beat an innocent girl to death. A girl who would have been my sister-in-law. Someone hit her and just kept swinging and swinging.”

  “If it was Peter’s bat, how did it get into someone else’s hands?” Serena asked. She spoke so softly that she was almost whispering.

  “You’re assuming it did.”

  “Well, you said someone else’s fingerprints were on it.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” he admitted. “Someone else had it. Someone who killed Laura. That was the only explanation that made sense to me all these years.”

  “How did the bat wind up at the murder scene?”

  Stride remembered. He saw the bat again in his mind. Close up. In the field.

  “The rain came,” he said. “We all went running. The storm was severe. Everything turned black. It sounded like a train, the way a tornado does. I went to the woods to find Cindy and Laura down by the lake. Peter was on second base, and he took off as the storm hit. As I ran for the trail, I saw Peter’s bat lying in the weeds. He must have forgotten all about it. So anyone could have picked it up. There were a lot of guys with us in the field.”

  “But?” Serena asked, hearing him hesitate.

  “But I remember thinking that Peter was going to come back for that bat.”

  Stride was distracted, watching Cindy and Laura go. He was anxious for the game to be over. He could still taste her lips, which always tasted the same way, like a cherry Popsicle. When they kissed, they were connected, electricity passing between them. He had an erection, thinking about what they would do later. If they really did it. If she really meant it. He could tell she was nervous. He wondered if she had brought
Laura with her as a shield, so that she had an excuse not to go all the way. As the two girls disappeared into the trees, though, he saw Cindy look back at him, and her face told him that nothing had changed. She wanted him. She was waiting for him.

  He glanced at the black sky. Time was short. He hit the pocket of his mitt impatiently. Dave McGill was at the plate, and he kept tipping foul balls that dribbled to the edge of the field, where Raymond Anderson, who was the catcher, had to retrieve them. Stride thought they should call the game right now. He could taste rain, and he already felt the sky leaking drops onto his face. No one else paid any attention.

  McGill finally struck out. Peter Stanhope took his place, swinging his silver bat theatrically, sporting an arrogant grin. Stride didn’t really know Peter, other than by reputation. They weren’t friends. They didn’t hang out together. The only thing they had in common was baseball. The longest conversation he could remember having with Peter was about Rod Carew.

  Peter swung violently and missed. Strike one.

  Stride saw a bright flash and imagined Peter’s bat, held high over his head, attracting the current like a lightning rod. Less than five seconds later, thunder washed across the field in a drum roll.

  Peter swung again. Strike two. His face contorted in effort and frustration. His jaw worked his gum furiously. He was a good hitter, but overeager, always looking for the home run on every pitch. He struck out as often as he connected. On the third pitch, though, his aluminum bat swatted the ball with a loud ting, and the ball lofted over Stride’s head into the outfield, where it dropped for an easy single. Peter loped to the base. He bent down and picked up a half-full bottle of Grain Belt and swigged it empty, then tossed the bottle toward the weeds. He wiped his mouth with the bottom of his red tank top.