A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  He rolled toward me, twining fingers into my hair. “Just enough light to see you by,” he said. “Have to stock up for the road.”

  “Same,” I said.

  We just looked, not moving, while the room went from pale blue to lavender, pink to apricot.

  “So,” he said.

  “So.”

  “You find out what you needed, downstate?”

  “I think.”

  “He’s in the clear, your guy? Spent that year in Zurich or something?”

  I closed my eyes.

  “What?”

  “Spent part of it at Camp Drum,” I said. “Then Asia.”

  “He go to the fair, meet some girls?”

  I nodded.

  Dean sighed. “You don’t seem too upset, or whatever.”

  “Because I know he didn’t do it.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.” I opened my eyes, looked at him as hard and true as I could. “Not just because of what Lapthorne said, down there . . . there’s stuff Kenny found out.”

  “Kenny’s on board with this?”

  “Very.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “What comes next?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He touched my hair again. “Ballpark ideas?”

  “Like talking to the cops and stuff?”

  “Sure . . .”

  “It’s still really tricky. Schneider and everything . . .”

  “There’s no hurry, seems like. You can take your time, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Make sure of it . . . every detail . . . don’t decide anything until I get back. Don’t do anything, okay? Just be really, really careful.”

  “Really, really, really careful. I promise.”

  “Because, no offense, Bunny, but, like, that keys-in-the-eyeball thing?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Some guy wants to hurt you, that’s not gonna stop him for shit.”

  “I know.”

  He framed my face in his hands. “Don’t just say ‘I know’ to make me lighten up. I’m not fucking around. I want you to tell me you understand me and mean it.”

  “I understand you. I mean it.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you in any danger, the way things are right now?”

  “No,” I said. “Nobody else knows about this. The dog tags, all that. It can wait until you get home again. Kenny will make sure.”

  “Nothing with Schneider?”

  “Nothing. He doesn’t know my name. Never saw my car.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “Because I won’t leave, otherwise,” he said. “If there’s any chance you’re in danger.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “I’ll quit everything with the grinder,” he said, “and follow you to work every day instead, all you have to do is say the word. I don’t care if it means I end up working for Wimpy my whole damn life.”

  “It’s okay. I promise.”

  Dean shivered. “Makes me crazy . . .”

  “So . . . want me to reheat those Nuggets of Glory, for the road?”

  He grinned at me, and right then his alarm clock started buzzing: 4:37.

  When he rolled over to turn it off, I gave him a solid swat on the ass.

  “G’wan,” I said, “you’re burnin’ daylight.”

  I took him to the airport, walked him as far as security.

  “I’ll call tonight,” he said. “Don’t know when I’ll be able to again, off in the Yukon or whatever . . .”

  “I’ll be home.”

  He kissed me and went on through.

  I watched him go, duffel bag hoisted over his shoulder.

  I stood there until long after I couldn’t see him anymore. Just to remember how he’d looked.

  When I turned to go, Syracuse was ugly again.

  I stopped in at work and told Ted I wanted to return to the scene of the crime, as it were, then talked Simon into giving me the manila folder jammed with prints.

  There wasn’t much traffic, so I was out of the city fast. I pulled onto Collamer Road and was soon away from the tidy stretch of ranch houses with well-kept lawns and sparkling Methodist blue American sedans. After the farm stand, you had to run through the flat, barren crossroads where the skanky bar with the mud-wrestler chicks was, and then there was nothing for a while but stunted trees and swamp around old fucked-up houses sagging into the dirt with “in-law” trailers out back.

  In front of most were snowmobiles up on blocks, next to either a plywood fat-lady-leaning-over-to-expose-dotted-bloomers cutout or a knee-high Madonna sheltered by one of those things that always looked to me like a plaster bathtub upended, half-buried, with the interior painted turquoise.

  I couldn’t find crap to listen to on the radio, just endless Supremes and bad skinny-tie hair bands, but I kept punching buttons until I was nearing the cornfield in question. I slowed down, then pulled across the narrow lanes and thunked off the asphalt onto a runoff-corrugated shoulder of hard, pale dirt.

  I got the folder containing all the photos out of the back, and opened it carefully on the roof of the car.

  I flipped through the prints and picked a couple of distance shots in which the bodies figured. Then I started to read from my Xerox of Wilt’s piece, “‘. . . Two girls lay side by side in a tiny grove along the western edge of Johnston’s acreage . . .’”

  I looked up. The sun was directly overhead, so that was no help. Where the hell was west? I could never tell directions around here—too damn flat and no ocean.

  I started looking at the trees in each photo, finding a maple with a peculiar fork, right next to a pair of firs. When I looked up, all the trees were a lot taller and more filled out, but those three were recognizable. I headed into the gap between two rows of tall corn. It was close to noon, and the sun was strong enough to make me squint at the deep green all around me. It felt like the light would tint anything pale with a glowing aura of lime chiffon.

  There was no breeze, so the only sound was the occasional rush of a car and my footsteps in the dirt. When I stopped for a second, though, there was a strange squeaky popping noise all around.

  I’d been up here long enough to recognize the sound of corn growing, the broad green leaves dragging against one another as they sought sunlight and altitude.

  Then I was at the end of the stately tasseled plants, my identified clutch of trees thirty feet beyond. Looking from the photographs to the grove and back a couple of times, I figured out the placement of the bodies, roughly fifty feet into the woods.

  One photo showed the spot after the cops had left—Simon’s shot. Another, one of the official pictures, was framed about the same, only with the girls still lying on the ground.

  I looked at both again, then walked forward toward the grove, passing out of the bright sun and into cool shade. For a moment I couldn’t really see, until my pupils dilated enough. Something was tugging at the edge of my consciousness. I walked in a circle, then stopped, backing slowly away from the tree under which the girls had lain.

  I looked at the ground. Although some sunlight was coming through the branches overhead, I cast no shadow in the dappled light.

  I squatted down and put the same two photos on top of Simon’s folder.

  They were taken from roughly where I was positioned, but one didn’t match . . . the one that showed the girls’ bodies still on the ground.

  I looked at Wilt’s article again. There it was, the statement about when the police had arrived—eleven a.m.

  If that were true—and it probably took some time to set up—the photographer would have been shooting around the time it was now. Almost noon.

  But the police photographer’s long shadow was captured in the shot, spilling past the bodies. He’d been standing in just about exactly the spot on which I was now hunkered down, me casting no shade at all. Impossib
le.

  I closed my eyes and tried to orient myself . . . had to be facing west, so the “police” shots must have been taken just after dawn, hours before the cops officially showed up.

  I looked again at the photo. Both girls’ eyes were open, staring up at nothing.

  Back at the paper, I spread the photos out over the big round table in Ted’s office and showed him, Wilt, and Simon the deal with the shadows.

  “Jesus,” said stubby Simon, shaking his head. He jammed his fists into the pockets of his jacket, bracketing his friar’s belly. “It never occurred to me. Of course those had to be taken in the early morning. I think mine were done around noon the next day, so that’s the lighting these should have.”

  “But not all the police photos were taken that early,” said Wilt, perching on the edge of the table, stretching out his long legs and smoothing down the rumpled pant legs of his brown suit. “It’s just these four, here.” He drew those shots off to the side. “The rest look about right.”

  “The quality’s different, too,” I said. “These four are almost as good as yours, Simon—sharp focus, very high contrast, really black blacks. The rest of them are a little muddy.”

  “Holy shit,” said Wilt.

  “Huh,” said Ted.

  You could tell he was getting excited—he kept raking his fingers back over his head, freeing long strands of his red hair from the rubber band at the nape of his neck so that they flew haphazardly around his olive face.

  He turned his back on me and threw an arm loosely around Wilt’s shoulders. “You know, Wilt, maybe you’d better look into this—”

  “Uh, Ted?” I said. “I’m on it.”

  “—because this could be a real scoop, you know?” he continued, not even turning his head toward me, and Wilt nodded.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “First you made me take the assignment, and then the minute I tell you I found something, you give it to Wilt?”

  His head snapped around. “That’s just it, Madeline. I had to badger you into taking it on at all. It’s not like you were overjoyed about it,” he said, lips pulled back in full Angst Lizard sneer. “You’re not into hard news, and Wilt’s got the experience to do this right.”

  “Look . . . I just . . . I think it would be a mistake,” I said. “I have some other information about what went on, aside from this.”

  “Okay, so sell me on it. Why should I let you be the lead on this? Why is this the moment you should break out from, what was it, ‘green bean casseroles with mushroom soup and canned fried onions on top’? This is potentially huge for us, and I don’t know if I trust you with the responsibility, frankly,” Ted said. “I mean, we’re not talking about Jell-O recipes.”

  “First of all,” I said, “who’s the one who noticed what was up with the photos you’ve had lying around for twenty years? It took your food-and-whatever writer to catch something that should have been obvious from the outset.”

  He pursed his lips at me.

  “And second, there’s this,” I said, pulling the folded-up dog tag rubbing from out of my wallet. I yanked it open and slammed it on the table in front of him.

  “Yeah?” asked Ted, looking unimpressed. His lips made a pressed smirk. Simon went pale behind him.

  “The girls were last seen with two soldiers, right?” I said, my voice getting a shrill edge. “That’s a set of dog tags Dean’s father plowed up in the field where their bodies were found.”

  That wiped his smirk right the hell off.

  “Plus which, I know who the owner of those tags is,” I said. “I just spent the weekend with him, and I found the silhouettes from the fair at his house, so I made him tell me what happened, and now I know he didn’t do it.”

  Now he just looked confused. He probably hadn’t read Wilt’s article since it first came out, and I could tell he wasn’t completely following what I was talking about, but Wilt and Simon were zeroed right in.

  “Well,” said Simon shyly. “I guess the next question is who that man is . . . the guy on the dog tags . . .”

  I fumbled, and the three of them stared at me. “It’s not about him,” I said, finally.

  Wilt brushed his long bangs out of his eyes and focused on me. He spoke slowly. “I think you’ll find, Maddie, that it’s going to be very much about him . . . sooner or later—”

  “Sooner being a lot fucking better, if you have any hope of getting your byline anywhere near this piece,” snapped Ted.

  “It’s not the byline.” The words you reptile asshole hanging unsaid between us.

  “‘It’s not the byline,’” he mimicked, in a smarmy mincing singsong.

  Flaming reptile asshole.

  “Why would I tell you,” I said, “if I don’t have the assignment?”

  “Why would I ask you,” said Ted, “if you were no longer employed here?”

  Wilt stood up from the table. “Hey, man . . . lay the hell off her,” he said, hooking his thumbs in his belt and glaring down at Ted. Mr. Natural to the rescue.

  “That’s right,” said Simon, Wilt’s Sancho Panza, taking a step closer to him and crossing his arms, staring up at Ted. I’d never seen Simon defiant, and even the fluorescent light seemed to glint off the top of his head more sharply, the dark curls over his ears to bristle—the man was a pissed-off hedgehog.

  I turned toward the two of them. “You guys know the players in this. I’ve already talked to Archie Sembles, and I know he was threatened, told to keep quiet after he spoke to Wilt.”

  The three of them stood silent for a second, and I was shaking. But instead of getting further ticked off at me, Ted did an emotional one-eighty, slapped me on the back, and said, “Well, it’s about damn time you got serious. We might make something of you yet.”

  Sure, he did it more for them than for me, but I’d take what I could get, and I’d managed to avoid telling any of them why I knew the guy whose name was on those tags.

  CHAPTER 32

  Ted finally said he was glad to have me continue with the article, and I told him I’d be happy as hell to have whatever input Wilt could give me, so Wilt dragged me over to his desk.

  I was holding Simon’s file on the Rose Girls, but couldn’t find a clear spot on which to set it down, so Wilt leaned across to pluck the photocopy of his original article out from the side.

  “So what’s your next step on this?” he asked.

  “Hell if I know. What would you do?”

  “Well, let’s look this over, Madeline,” he said, “see who you’ve talked to out of my old sources. . . . Who was the cop? Have you talked with him?”

  “He wasn’t forthcoming with the sound bites,” I said. “Nobody was, to tell you the truth. Sembles was convinced that if he talked to me he was going to be seriously messed up, so even when he wasn’t nodding out he wasn’t exactly psyched.”

  “I’m hip. But Sembles, he’s a local dude, right? Any idea where he lives?”

  “Marcellus or Bridgeport or something, but there’s no way he’d talk to me again,” I said.

  “They’ll all talk, Maddie, you just have to find the right motivation.”

  “Oh, what, like offer to buy him a bulletproof vest? I’m serious, Wilt, the guy was terrified. I really think he’s a dead end.”

  “So get in his face, Maddie. If he’s getting wiggy on you it’s because he’s close to the stuff you need to know,” said Wilt. “You’ve just gotta hammer him until he talks to you. Find a lever . . .”

  I must have looked freaked, because he just gave me a little punch in the shoulder and said, “It sounds like you might need a little negative incentive for this guy. If there’s nothing he wants, figure out what he doesn’t want. What’s he scared of?”

  “He’s scared somebody’s going to find out he talked to me, but I don’t even know who. I think it’s the cop, but maybe he’s just the heavy for somebody else. I don’t have any goddamn idea who’s behind the threat.”

  “Who’s the cop? You haven’t said.”


  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other.

  Wilt raised an eyebrow, but then shrugged and let my lack of an answer go unchallenged.

  He probably thought I was making sure he couldn’t scoop me, but that wasn’t it. I just didn’t want to show all my cards yet. I didn’t want anyone else following up on what I was pursuing, or hounding me further. I was too scared of screwing things up if I were to face more pressure.

  He leaned back in his chair. “If Sembles doesn’t want to talk because he’s afraid someone’s gonna find out,” he said, “all you have to do is tell him you’ll make it known he told you everything, whether he does or not. Tell him you know perfectly well who ‘they’ are. Make it sound like it’s an even bigger conspiracy than he suspected, what the hell?”

  “And what if it really is? What if I coerce him to talk and he does get fucked up for it?”

  “What, by the second gunman on the grassy knoll? It doesn’t work like that, Madeline. Bad guys are like roaches, the worst thing you can do to them is turn on the lights. They want to stay in the dark, where it’s safe and they seem bigger and nastier than they really are.”

  Wilt pulled a phone book from under a pile of old grocery bags. He flipped through the pages. “Here he is,” he said, “Archibald Sembles. Tell him you want to meet tonight.”

  He turned the book toward me and shoved his phone across the desk.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Tonight. Dean is calling from Canada . . . he might not be near a phone again for weeks, there’s no way to get him on the road. . . .”

  Wilt rolled his eyes.

  “Any other night,” I said. “Honest to God.”

  “Dial the phone,” he said. “Meet him for goddamn brunch, all I care.”

  My stomach went into a nifty little helix. “Aw, Wilt, you’re going to make me do this with an audience?” I said.

  “We can sit here all day, Madeline. I don’t have no stinking deadlines. My piece for the week’s already in.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, reaching for the receiver.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .” he said. “Just dial.”

  By the middle of the phone call with Sembles, just to add to my misery, Ted came over to lean on the back of my chair and listen in, and Simon was standing quietly on Wilt’s side of the desk. I was so nervous the soles of my feet were wet, slicking up the lining of my old black loafers as I scrunched my toes in embarrassed misery.