The Darkest Time of Night

by Jeremy Finley

  “It has everything to do with astronomy,” he responded quietly.

  I stood with my arms folded across my chest, waiting for him to continue. “I’ll be honest with you, Miss Stanson—”

  “It’s Mrs. Roseworth.”

  “I suspected you were bright, but I actually didn’t think you’d figure out the system this quickly.”

  “Well, you thought wrong. And I’m wondering if you should be giving this to police instead of to me to organize for you.”

  The professor reached deep into his pants pockets, and then fumbled in the interior of his coat, finally locating his keys. He pivoted his chair around and unlocked an old file cabinet behind him, pulled out a drawer, took out a thick envelope, and slid it across the desk.

  “Open it.”

  I picked it up and lifted the clasp. I expected to find more blacked-out papers, but instead saw what looked to be hundreds of photographs of varying sizes.

  “What is this?”

  “Those are the people we’re trying to help. They’ve had someone disappear, or are missing themselves. I keep that envelope close by, and about once a day I open it, to remind myself why it’s so important to keep all this so … shall we say … cryptic.”

  I once again looked around at the posters of space and maps of various states and countries, connected with pushpins, notes, and coordinates.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Dr. Richards chewed on his lip.

  “I will tell you one thing: The second I think you’re up to something illegal, I’ll go to the police.”

  “It’s nothing like that. But you have permission to do so if I ever break a law. I suppose you could say that some people come to me when someone they love goes missing.”

  “Why would they come to you? You’re an astronomy professor.”

  “Because they can’t get answers from police. And they know something is wrong. I believe we have the ability to tell—to sense even—that something has happened beyond our understanding.”

  I raised my eyebrow.

  “Has anything ever occurred in your life that you can’t explain?”

  “Honestly, no.”

  “Then you’re lucky, and I hope, for your sake, that the rest of your life goes that way.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would they come to you if someone is missing?”

  “They don’t just come to me. They come to all of us who are trying to find the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “That the government is aware of people disappearing and refuses to acknowledge it. I really shouldn’t discuss this anymore until you agree to keep what we do silent. I had to see first if you could even decipher how we communicate–-it can get complicated. Maybe I should have you sign something.”

  “Does the university know about this?”

  “Oh, no. I’d be fired if they knew the amount of time I devote to this. They pay me to teach students about stars; students who actually don’t care about stars and only want to fulfill their undergraduate demands.”

  Dr. Richards then added quickly, “I’ll pay you to do this on the side.”

  I tried to not let on that at that very moment, I was ensnared. The student loans Tom would rack up by graduation seemed insurmountable.

  “I won’t do anything that’s illegal, and I won’t keep quiet if I even think you’re doing something that harms someone.”

  “There’s nothing harmful about anything we’re doing. Honestly, most people would laugh if you told them what we do.”

  “And what is it, exactly, that you do?”

  “Start organizing all those papers by date. You’ll find the reference to a date on every other page. I’ll pay you a $1.50 an hour.”

  I started doing the math in my head. It didn’t even meet minimum wage standards for 1969, but it wouldn’t be bad extra money. “I still don’t know what this is about. Why are these people disappearing? Who is taking them?”

  Dr. Richards stared hard at me, and then pointed up with one finger. I looked up at the ceiling covered in maps of the stars.

  Like all children of the fifties, I’d seen the movies featuring the campy music, the flighty women, and cardboard-cutout heroes who fought against invaders from other worlds. When I had read over the documents from Dr. Richards’s office, I tried not to think about those films. Because the people who documented the missing were real, and they were afraid. The letters, the bizarre phone calls, all came from very serious people.

  I only told Tom that I was doing additional freelance copy editing work for a professor. It meant I would be staying later at the office. He certainly didn’t object to the extra cash flow.

  So I combed through the papers, leaving the neatly organized stacks in boxes outside the professor’s office each evening. When I arrived the next day, the boxes would be gone.

  One night, with the campus silent with snow, I had set a box outside Dr. Richards’s door, surprised to see the light still on. I knocked. He looked up and motioned me in.

  “You’ve been getting the checks in your mailbox?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “No, thank you. It’s unacceptable, the conditions of those files.”

  “Do they really think…?”

  He put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. “Think what?”

  “That … aliens … took their loved ones?”

  “You’ve read it all. What do you think?”

  “I know they’re afraid. They’re really afraid. And I know they’re desperate to believe in something that explains what happened. But if you read the newspapers, you know that terrible things sometimes happen: drugs, alcohol, mental illness. I wonder if you’re feeding them false hope.”

  Dr. Richards jutted out his jaw. “It’s a fair criticism. Something I’ve wondered myself. But it’s the commonality that keeps me up at night.”

  “Commonality?”

  He leaned his chin on his right hand. “How can someone in Malvern, Arkansas, describe the same kind of being that someone in a remote village outside Kenya, Africa, says they saw as well? It’s all the same, with some small variation. Look here.”

  He handed me two pieces of paper. “You know this family. The Gobels.”

  “How can you forget? It’s terrible.”

  “Farm family. Outskirts of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Wake up one morning to find their two-year-old daughter gone. Massive search, police, FBI, everything. No one finds anything. The mother, Sarah, is so distraught, she hires a hypnotist to force her to remember everything about that night. And when she’s put under—what does Sarah see?”

  “It’s not what she sees. It’s what she feels. Something probing her body. Large eyes. Wide forehead, gray skin. Then bright lights…” I paused, finding the words on the page, “… and her daughter going into them.”

  “The Semitacalous, from the Zakynthos Island in Greece.” Dr. Richards slid me another folder. “You know their story too: Elderly couple. Go to bed one night. Anna wakes up the next morning, her husband, Georgios, is gone. But she doesn’t need a hypnotist—she remembers everything. The probing, the wide head, the irregular eyes. The bright lights and her husband rising into them.”

  He placed the folders on top of each other. “The Gobels’ daughter went missing on August 20, on the same night Georgios Semitacalou disappeared. Neither has ever been seen since.”

  He looked down, his pen scratching across the paper before him as if I had never interrupted him. “Now you tell me what to tell these families.”

  I looked out his small window. “I … hate it for them. How long can they keep looking? How long do you tell them to keep hoping?”

  “Forever.”

  “Why? How can you even encourage them?”

  “Because sometimes they come back,” he said, continuing to write.

  EIGHT

  At first, I found the laminated cards that Dr. Richards gave to me to pass along to the families of the missing quaint and sweet. I had praised him fo
r being compassionate enough to come up with the poem written on the front. His response had been an academic frown.

  “It wasn’t my idea. I honestly don’t know why we hand them out. We started doing it about five years ago. I suppose it’s supposed to be comforting, but I think it’s a bit much. We’re all instructed to do it, so it’s become our calling card. Every family gets one.”

  I often sent them by mail, always with a handwritten note. I reread the poem each time I placed one in an envelope.

  PRAYER FOR THE MISSING

  You are not gone, as long as I remember.

  You are not away, as long as I weep.

  You have not vanished, as long as I can picture your face.

  You are with me.

  You are in the rain.

  You are in my tears.

  You are where the water falls.

  Being an English major, I wasn’t overly impressed with the poem, but it was a nice sentiment. And knowing Dr. Richards was atheist, handing out anything that resembled a prayer was a real stretch for him.

  He told me to send one to Barbara Rush when she insisted on meeting with him.

  “Her family is against our involvement,” he said.

  “She wants your help,” I replied, flipping through her brother’s case file.

  Barbara was only eighteen, four years younger than me. Her twin brother, Don, had gone missing in a snowstorm in St. Joseph, Michigan, a small tourist town on a dramatic arch of Lake Michigan. Her parents had fallen apart after his disappearance, leaving the girl to search for her brother on her own. That led her to a missing-persons support groups, and ultimately to one of Dr. Richards’s colleagues who attended such meetings to seek out questionable disappearances. When he heard her story, he encouraged her to call to the University of Illinois’s astronomy department.

  She had asked for Dr. Richards, and I took the call.

  Don had casually smoked marijuana, Barbara explained, so the St. Joseph police thought he got stoned and wandered into the storm. Probably got too close to the lake, they surmised. His body will wash up soon with the ice balls, she heard one whisper to the other.

  But she insisted that her brother—despite being a lifelong Michigander—hated the cold. Even high, he would have never gone out. And when she had awoken that night and found light streaming through her bedroom, she’d assumed a car was shining its headlights into her room—maybe one of Don’s friends from the bowling alley had come to pick him up for a quick nip at the bar. She had parted the curtains and saw Don standing on the street, in the snow, looking up. Then the lights were gone, and so was Don.

  “I told my parents,” Barbara had said. “They thought I was sleepwalking. But I don’t sleepwalk. Never have.”

  I had talked to her off and on for several weeks. But then her parents listened in on one of the calls and forbid her from calling “those whackos in Illinois” again. So she called from pay phones when she got off work at the restaurant around the corner from her house. I stayed late at work to accept her calls.

  A month after her first call, Barbara showed up at the office.

  “I took the bus all night. I had to see your face,” she had said to my astonished expression. “You’re as nice as I pictured.”

  Barbara sat and talked with Dr. Richards and me for hours, pleading with us to come to Michigan to help her search. The more she talked, the more she twisted a strand of hair on the back of her neck. “Nervous habit,” she said, smiling sheepishly.

  Dr. Richards had explained they didn’t have a budget for traveling. She vowed to give them all her money. Steven shook his head. “I can get you in touch again with my colleague at the University of Michigan, who told you about us—”

  “I don’t want him. I want you. And Lynn. He talked about theories of missing people, including something called … Argentum? Am I saying that right?”

  Dr. Richards frowned. “I’m sorry, Barbara. I can’t help you, especially with that.”

  Even though I didn’t have the money either, I had paid for her bus ticket back to Michigan. I gave her one of the laminated poems. She had cried at the bus terminal, and I cried along with her.

  “That can never happen again,” Dr. Richards later said. “Sometimes people expect us to drop everything and find their loved ones. Give them one of the cards and end it with that. It can’t work any other way. We only gather information, take careful notes—”

  “If all we’re doing is gathering facts, how does this ever help anyone?”

  “Because it might not now. Might not in ten years, twenty years. But one day, we’ll have enough cases to show that this can’t be ignored.”

  “Why was she asking about Argentum? Who is that? What is that?”

  “I’m going to have a long talk with my esteemed colleague in Michigan about that. He knows better. It’s a theory about extraterrestrials that we are all instructed to dismiss outright. I’ve heard some talk that it’s about aliens inhabiting human form, or that it refers to interdimensional travel. It’s our Loch Ness monster—everyone has heard of it, and no one has any proof.” Dr. Richards didn’t bother to hide his irritation.

  “Perhaps I should refer her to some of the other organizations. I’ve read quite a bit about UFO theorists—”

  “For God’s sake, don’t do that. Me and my … peers … we aren’t like the others in those other groups. I mean, I appreciate the work APRO and NICAP are doing—”

  “But you don’t belong to them. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena are quite open with their mission. Why not join them?”

  When he raised his eyebrows, I shrugged. “I do research. I pay attention.”

  “Good organizations, good people, their focus is just different than ours.”

  “How?”

  “We have a primary mission of trying to connect people who have gone missing to abductions. APRO and NICAP are doing admirable work on people who are returned quickly from abductions. My theory, and the theory that I share with my peers, is that unexplained disappearances of people all over the world can be tied to the abductions.”

  “Where’s your proof, besides the stories told by people they leave behind?”

  He chewed on the end of his pencil. “I wonder what you think…”

  “What I think?”

  He jotted down something on the paper in front of him. “You have a brilliant mind, Lynn.” He looked once more, intently, at his writing.

  I pulled my cardigan tighter around me.

  I left work early, taking Barbara’s file home with me. At home, I read through it five more times. Then I grabbed my coat. Tom had come home at that exact moment, and I told him I’d be back later. When he asked about dinner, I pretended I didn’t hear.

  Dr. Richards had already left his office, but he recently had given me a key, for emergencies. I figured this counted.

  Three hours later, I found what I was looking for. I cleared off the battered couch in his office and lay down to read. At midnight, I’d meant to only close my eyes for a moment.

  I awoke to Dr. Richards standing over me. “Your husband is banging on the doors outside the Curry Hall entrance. You better go.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven A.M. Did you sleep here all night?”

  “I have to tell you what I found.”

  “No, you have to go.”

  “It’s the weather. That’s the commonality. It’s the weather.”

  “We can talk about this later. Go home. Take the day off and get some rest—”

  “I have to tell you about this.”

  “Not a good time. Not only is your husband outside, but I have a faculty review today. I will have no time today.”

  “Then I will be here at the end of the day. Wait for me.”

  Tom and I had fought all day. I called him a stranger, he called me disconnected. I cried, he paced. I was grateful at dusk when he announced he needed to go out for a run. I
lied about going to a coffee shop to work on my book.

  I didn’t even knock when I reached Dr. Richards’s office. He put on his glasses as I sat down.

  “You may not remember the Soothe case in Alaska; we don’t have much on it,” I began. “But something jogged my memory about the date. I realized why when I studied Barbara’s case. A man went missing there, exactly two years to the day Barbara’s brother went missing. In a snowstorm.”

  “There’s always a snowstorm in Alaska in winter.”

  “His wife told police she saw lights in the snowstorm. You mentioned the abductions in Arkansas and on that Greek island. But you failed to mention it was during blistering nights of temperatures in the upper nineties—ninety-eight degrees to be precise—with scattered storms producing heavy downpours that lasted mere minutes. Same dates, almost exact same weather pattern. What if that’s what happens? If we started to piece together all those dates, and match them up with the weather…”

  I then slowly shook my head in realization. “That’s what you’ve been having me do, isn’t it? You’re not putting them in some kind of chronological order. You’re matching the dates of the missing and comparing the weather.”

  Dr. Richards slid back his chair and walked around the desk, clearly uncomfortable in his proximity to me. “I think they come on the same days, in different years, but in the same weather. And I think they return to the same places, too, over and over again. But the abductions can come years, even decades apart. I don’t know why. But that’s the key, I think. Lynn, it took me my whole life to figure this out. You put it together in a few months. I hoped you would help me get organized. But I never expected you’d become a colleague.”

  When I smiled, he did too. I was surprised at how his entire face lit up, his usual downtrodden eyes forming crescent moons.

  * * *

  I’ve found that life has no tolerance for dwelling in memories. I may have wanted to stay in bed, examining those thrilling and confusing times to seek clues that could help find William. But my recollection was ended by an exhausted sleep, and then the cat pawing at my face, ready to be fed. Since school hadn’t let out for fall break yet, I had to rush to get Greg to school and check in on Brian, followed by a complete collapse by Anne, in which she sobbed on the couch for an hour, and then a call from Tom that we needed to have dinner together tonight to discuss some important things. I’d put some salmon in the oven, but when we sat down to dinner, I quickly lost my appetite over what my husband had to say.