In the Dark

by Loreth Anne White

  In my bed.

  Katie retreated a step as his eyes locked with hers. She stumbled, steadied herself with a hand against the trunk of a young hemlock.

  “Why?” he asked.

  She looked down at his hands. He saw how they fisted and unfisted, as if of their own volition.

  He held out his hands and splayed his fingers forcibly to stop the fisting. He laughed out loud, the sound harsh and strange to his own ears. “I’m sorry.”

  “It . . . it’s okay,” she said. Her eyes, her body posture, seemed to disagree. “It’s . . . Everything is making us twitchy. I . . . I think we should go back.”

  She was scared. Of him. Wham—it struck him. Nathan liked that she was frightened of him—he actually did, really did. Dr. McNeill, professor of mushrooms, could make women tremble and stumble. It filled his blood with a sense of potency, virility. That was what his wife saw in Dr. Steven Bodine. Power. Alpha behavior. Control. Honed physique. Thick head of hair. Virility. Basic biological programming. It drove the attraction of the opposite sex. Drove them to juice up, engorge, send out pheromones, primed them to come together for intercourse. Sex in order to procreate. To fertilize eggs. Preserve the species.

  Steven Bodine was a bull among cows. Full of testosterone and biologically programmed to fuck every cow that would allow him.

  Basic science. The selfish gene. An expression of evolution. He knew all this. His wife sent out her feminine signals without being able to control it—big boobs, nice round ass that gave a guy a hard-on before he could even think about whether she was married and off-limits. It was just there. Hard dick. Desire. Do the programmed thing. We deluded ourselves, we humans, thinking about romantic notions of love and fidelity . . .

  “Nathan?”

  He shook himself. Looked at her—really looked. Katie sent out signals, too. But it was her immaturity that turned him off. She might be in her late thirties, but some women just stayed like that. Childish. Helpless. And she thought she was special because she could hold a mike and talk in front of a camera. She was a bleached-blonde airhead who thought she could judge a woman like Estelle Marshall, a commercial airline pilot. Katie Colbourne of CRTV had thought it would make her popular if she took Estelle Marshall down, if she revealed Estelle’s mental illness so that aspersions would be cast on the woman’s parenting ability, so that Estelle Marshall would be judged even more harshly for briefly leaving her six-year-old outside a liquor store on a dark and rainy afternoon. And now look at her, a scared mother herself, finally seeing what it was like.

  “Nathan,” she said more insistently, backing away, her hand going hesitantly to the pepper spray canister she’d secured to her hip.

  “Thirty more minutes,” he said, suddenly snapping back into focus and looking at his watch. “Then we can turn around.”

  She glanced over her shoulder. Toward a little piece of fluorescent-orange tape tied to a branch in the distance, along the trail they had come.

  “I’m going back.” She turned abruptly and hurried back along the trail.

  “Katie!”

  She raised her hand, kept going. “No . . . no. Stay away from me!” She tripped on a root, crashed down into black mud. She scrambled wildly onto all fours. She cast another look back over her shoulder. Nathan saw raw terror twisting her face. She lurched up and began to crash wildly through the forest.

  “Fuck,” he whispered.

  He turned in a slow circle, wondering what to do.

  Then he heard voices coming through the mist. Someone was nearby.

  THE LODGE PARTY

  MONICA

  As the path twisted deeper and deeper into the woods, doubling back on itself in places, Monica felt as though the trees were in cahoots, trying to confuse, regrouping and closing in behind her and Stella as they moved branches aside and pushed forward.

  They’d split up from Nathan and Katie at a branch on the trail about fifteen minutes back. And Monica was fastidiously affixing strips of luminous orange tape onto branches every few meters, terrified they were not going to find a way to return. With each step forward, the pull in her gut to race back to the comparative safety of the lodge intensified.

  Stella stopped ahead.

  “Helloooooo,” she called into the misty forest. “Hoi. Hooooo!”

  They waited.

  From their left came an echoing call. “Hoi, helloooooo!”

  Another answering call came from farther up toward the stone mountain. “Helloooo! All gooood!”

  Stella started forward.

  A rustle sounded in the bushes. They halted, listened. Monica saw Stella’s hand hover near the bear spray at her belt. A raven croaked, the sound dry and hard.

  Silence.

  Monica laughed nervously.

  They pushed on for another nine minutes, Monica counting the seconds until they could turn around and hightail it back. The forest grew darker. It felt colder, dank. It smelled musty, mossy. Strange. She felt she was losing her mind in this space. She was grappling with the fact that they were even here and going through this. It was as though she and Stella were walking deeper and deeper into an alternate reality, and when Monica woke up, it would all be normal again, and fine.

  She jumped at a shadow. Her nerves skittered. She saw the little boy again. Ezekiel Marshall. In her mind he was here with them, a ghost shadow among the mist specters, sifting after them into the heart of the woods, retreating into shadow every time she turned to see him.

  Her brain raced. Memories twisted.

  Going down on Steven while he was driving her car. They’d both had a few glasses of wine. Nathan out of town. Early darkness of fall. Rain, lots of rain. Slick black streets, smeared city and car lights behind streaks of rain on the windows. Giggling. It was so wonderful . . . feeling young. The heady rush of early sexual attraction, the excitement of an illicit affair. The brilliant plastic surgeon with all his money and status, so assertive, so virile against her drab and nerdy Nathan. Sex. With Nathan nights had become routine, both of them rolling to opposite sides of the bed just to avoid the rigmarole of pretending to be interested in fucking.

  The squeal of brakes. The bang.

  Monica stopped. She was breathing hard, sweating suddenly. Shaking.

  “Are you flagging?” Stella asked, stopping to see what was holding up her partner.

  “Yes.” Monica held her sides, unable to look into Stella’s eyes. Unable to shake the memory of the mother running out of the liquor store, screaming, dropping her bottle of wine to the sidewalk, the bottle shattering, her broken child lying on the road. The squashed box of Tooty-Pops and broken eggs in the wet street. The stricken look on her face as she reached up her hand and yelled, pleaded, for them to stop.

  “You want to rest a moment?” Stella asked.

  Monica shook her head. They resumed. Monica watched Stella moving ahead of her. The angle of her shoulders, the slope of her neck. Her arms. As Monica watched, in her mind Stella fattened up and morphed into the younger woman of the past, and Monica saw her again, bursting out of the liquor store, screaming, dropping the bottle of wine, running over to her broken little boy bleeding in the road. The words came out of Monica’s mouth before she even registered.

  “What happened, Stella, when you lost your little boy? How can you think you killed him?”

  Stella stopped, turned. Stared at Monica. The wind hushed through the trees—a sibilant, whispering susurration.

  “Did I say my child was a boy?”

  Monica’s heart thudded.

  Had she? Shit.

  “I . . . I thought . . . I’m sure you said that he . . . liked cereal. The Tooty-Pops cereal. You said everyone believed you’d killed your son, that you were an unfit mother because you’d been institutionalized.”

  Stella’s face changed. Her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t say anything about being institutionalized.”

  “Kitsilano . . .” Panic whipped through Monica. “Isn’t that what we were all talking about? The grocer
ies. Kits Corner Store in Kitsilano.”

  Stella’s face darkened.

  “It was on the news, wasn’t it? I . . . We saw the news. We all did. It was terrible. There was a photo of the Tooty-Pops on the road, all the little colors in the rain, the broken eggs . . .” Her voice choked. Tears blurred her vision. “I . . . I put two and two, pieced it together, Stella. It was all over the news, night after night, and we lived right near there, so I remember. It stuck out.”

  Stop, Monica, stop the fuck talking before you tell her everything.

  “It was Katie Colbourne, wasn’t it, who claimed you were a bad mother, that you were mentally fragile and an unfit parent, and you should never have left your young child alone on the dark street, not even for a few moments, and then Ezekiel’s dog ran . . . I . . . Oh God, Stella, I am so sorry, so sorry.”

  “Ezekiel. You know his name?”

  Monica swallowed. The forest pressed closer. The sky lowered over her head. She couldn’t breathe. “I . . . I remembered,” she whispered. “From the news. I . . . I’m so sorry, Stella.”

  “Sorry? You’re sorry?”

  “For what you went through. I watched the whole thing unfolding on TV, I . . . It was you, the commercial pilot. You look different, but I can see it now.” Tears slid down her cheeks. “I remember your eyes.” She swiped the tears away. “I remember you pleading to the camera for someone to come forward.”

  Stella cursed. She looked away, into the forest, as if trying to find words. “Yet no one did, did they, Monica? No one came forward.” She faced Monica. “Instead, I was crucified. Because people—they always need someone to blame, to make into a villain. So they can feel better about what happened, and move on.”

  “You must have recognized Katie Colbourne as the one when you first saw her at the floatplane dock, or when you saw her name on your manifest.”

  Stella sniffed softly. “Of course I did.”

  “You didn’t say anything? You didn’t confront her?”

  “Would you? If you wanted to forget everything about your past? If no one knew or recognized you, would you dredge it up again?”

  A thin needle of fear went through Monica. A warning. She heard it being whispered by the trees.

  “Why are we all here, Stella?”

  Stella angrily palmed off her wet hat, shook the drops of water off the bill. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t. I keep going back to that rhyme. Agatha Christie’s story. A judge. Some deluded sense of justice. Crimes that some maniac mastermind feels need to be atoned for. Perceived crimes committed by each one of us. So we’ve been lured here for a reckoning.” She looked away. Inhaled. “And there was a character—a woman in that Agatha Christie story who’d killed a little boy in her charge. A little boy like my son. The young woman had been a caregiver, and she’d failed the child. Adults, mothers, fathers, caregivers, they need to protect the innocent children. Maybe some sick ‘judge’ believes I wasn’t actually punished enough, Monica.”

  The emotion in her eyes was raw. It sliced through Monica.

  “So that’s me,” Stella said. “That’s my sin. And you? Why are you here, Monica? What do you think your sin is? What is your lie?”

  Flustered, shocked, Monica took a small step backward. Her mind raced. Her heart beat so fast she thought she was going to faint. “I . . . cheated on my husband.”

  Stella stared. Swallowed. Cold rain started to fall, drops finding their way down through the dense forest canopy.

  “I cheated on my husband with Dr. Steven Bodine.”

  Stella’s mouth opened, then closed. She seemed at a loss for words.

  “And Nathan?” Stella asked finally. “Why is Nathan here? What has he done?”

  Monica rubbed her wet face. “He loved me. That’s all. Nathan loves me. And he just forgave me. And . . . maybe he wasn’t supposed to. Maybe he was supposed to confront me. And Steven. See us both pay.”

  Instead of helping to hide our crime, the hit-and-run murder of a six-year-old boy. He should have gone to the police.

  “He knows about the affair?”

  Monica nodded, more tears sliding down her face.

  “You stayed together.”

  Silence.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And he . . . never wanted to punish you—ever?”

  And Monica suddenly realized what Stella was asking. A sickness washed into her gut. “It’s not him. He didn’t orchestrate this, lure us here. He . . . he wouldn’t.”

  “And you’re so sure?”

  Monica suddenly wasn’t. She was not sure about any goddamn thing anymore.

  Could Nathan have done this? Brought me and Steven together to face Stella? With Bart? To mess with our heads? Could it be some bizarre way of absolving his own guilt? No. Not possible. Not at all. It’s an insane idea. But everything about this situation is insane . . . and he has been behaving more oddly than usual lately . . .

  Bile surged up into Monica’s throat. She was going to be sick. She thought of Nathan’s passive aggression. His brilliant brain. He loved reading complicated mysteries, true crime about mad minds. He was a loner who disappeared on long walks into hostile forests and who felt he could talk to trees. And that they were communicating with him. He detested Steven Bodine. Sometimes, even though he acted as though he loved her, she got strange little feelings that part of him buried deep down might detest her, too, for bringing Steven into their marital bed, for allowing him to be cuckolded like that. Inside his own home. For forcing him to hide her crime so he could protect himself and his family.

  Could Nathan even be passively furious at Bart Kundera for having allowed him to help hide the crime?

  Could Nathan have been willing someone to come forward fourteen years ago, so that he himself wouldn’t be forced to do the difficult thing—turn in his own wife for manslaughter? For failing to remain at the scene of a hit-and-run?

  Was he hoping someone else would destroy her and Steven so his kids would still keep loving him?

  A sharp crack resounded through the forest. Then another. Birds scattered from branches.

  “Gunfire!” said Stella, eyes wide.

  A scream cut the air. Male. Raw. It curdled Monica’s blood. Then another scream.

  Stella broke into a crashing run through the forest, toward the sound.

  “Stella!” Monica shrieked. “Stella!”

  But Stella vanished into the forest.

  Monica spun around and raced in the opposite direction, sheer terror driving her legs to pump, her arms to thrash. She scanned the trees, wildly charging from one piece of orange flagging tape to the next, back to the lodge.

  THE LODGE PARTY

  KATIE

  Katie bashed her fist against the back door of the lodge.

  No answer.

  She wiggled the doorknob, yanking at it.

  Locked.

  Deborah was told to lock the doors . . .

  But Katie was driven beyond rationality to just get inside. All she could think was that she had to find a way in, any way in. She yanked at the door again, sweat breaking out over her face. A noise cracked through the forest behind her. She froze. Another report split the air.

  Gunshots!

  She heard screams. Men. The sound of men screaming in feral terror was more than she could bear.

  She spun away from the door and stumbled wildly through the slush around the side of the lodge, falling and getting up and falling again. She came around to the front. She ran up the stairs and onto the porch. She banged on the front door, mewling, sobbing, covered in mud, wet.

  No answer.

  She tried the handle. To her surprise, it opened. Katie hesitated, then darted inside, slammed the door shut, and pressed against it with both hands. She leaned the side of her face against the rough wood, breathing hard.

  It took a few moments for her brain to reengage. It was dark inside. Quiet. Too quie
t.

  Deborah?

  Katie left the door and moved to the base of the stairs. She placed her hand on the banister and listened.

  “Deborah?” she called.

  The house exhaled cold woodsmoke-tinged air. It creaked.

  Katie hurried up the stairs. She stopped on the landing. Deborah’s door was closed. Cautiously she moved toward it, raised her hand to knock, then hesitated.

  “Deborah?” she said.

  Silence. The house made a cracking noise, like ice defrosting in the timbers. A shudder ran through Katie. She knocked lightly, then reached for the handle. Carefully she eased open the door, peered inside. “Deborah?”

  The room was empty.

  Another noise came from outside. Air horn. Like a siren, it went on and on. Stopped. The alarm sounded again.

  Deborah? She’d been left with an air horn. Had she gone outside?

  What about Steven? Bart? They had an air horn between them, and the rifle.

  Katie hurriedly left the room, rushed down the hall, and barreled into her own room. She slammed the door shut, locked it. Then leaned against it, breathing hard.

  She was mad—she’d gone stark raving mad. Nathan wasn’t evil . . . was he? She’d imagined it all. What in the hell was happening to them all? She sensed it suddenly and froze.

  Someone was inside the room. She felt a presence. Katie stepped tentatively forward to see around the freestanding closet.

  The painting.

  It looked alive.

  Gabby.

  Her daughter’s eyes bored directly into her. That little smile, sly, smug, said, Bad mother. You’re a bad mother. You accused a good woman of being a bad mother . . .

  Katie went up to the painting and looked more closely at the rendering of the golden scale in “Gabby’s” chubby hand, the little human heart weighting down one end. Stella’s words sliced through her chest.

  I’d had my heart cut right out . . . and they said it was karma.

  My heart cut right out . . . The human heart tipping the scales of justice, Katie being judged by the sly smile of her own child.