Fear the Darkness: A Thriller

by Becky Masterman

  Yes.

  “And Ken. Peter was something of a bully, Joey said. But I liked Ken.” The words were darting pretty steadily from her mouth now that she had begun. “Is the youth group still active, Lulu? Are you still in charge?”

  Yes, they were planning a kickball … but Lulu’s words trailed off as she realized there were no right ones to speak, that anything she would say would have the sound of a slap. So she stopped trying to talk altogether and stopped trying to look anything but miserable.

  I thought Lulu was going to apologize, for something, for Jacquie’s grief, for her own children still being alive. Jacquie turned to me with a look that said Do you see? but I didn’t see at all.

  “I’m so … sorry,” she said, all her anger collapsing into itself, though her apology was seemingly directed at only Carlo and me. “I … just … can’t … do this. I … thought I … could do it.”

  Lulu turned her head as if she couldn’t face Jacquie’s ache. This was the moment that Mallory, ever positive that no situation couldn’t be improved by wine, approached with a bottle in each hand. “I would have gone for the champagne but it would have given you all head…” she trailed off as she saw Tim and Jacquie standing while the rest of us sat.

  “I’m so sorry we can’t stay,” Tim said. “Please give Owen my best. I’ll stop by next week to see him.”

  “But,” Mallory said.

  Tim lifted a finger that appeared to press Mallory’s lips closed from across the table. “I thought it would be good for her, for us, but I think we both made a mistake.”

  Mallory put the bottles down and started to come around to the Neilsens’ side of the table, but then stopped. Tim reached out his hand and shook Carlo’s politely, and Elias’s as well, while Lulu kept her hands in her lap and looked stricken. Jacquie made her little murmuring sounds, an “ah-ha” and a “hmmm,” but now they sounded like tiny verbal uppercuts to someone’s jaw.

  Without saying good-bye to Mallory or the Manwarings, Jacquie said once more, “I can’t,” then turned and walked across the lawn, Tim making her lean against him as she stumbled either because of unaccustomed heels or because her knees were buckling as she walked.

  I picked up Tim’s business card that had been left on the table and turned it over. On the back, along with a phone number, Jacquie had written Help me.

  Ten

  Still standing, Mallory watched them go off a little way, then without a word poured wine in our glasses to a level that she would usually disparage. She lifted hers, and when we lifted ours, wondering what the most appropriate Mallory toast could possibly be at a moment like this, she said with a shake of her head as well as the hand that held the glass, “Fuck.”

  It was rude and unfeeling, but I tell you, in that moment it felt like a perfect prayer, and it felt as if we had permission to be real. Lulu gave a mirthless laugh, took a slug of wine, and dropped her face into her free hand in the first sincere gesture I’d seen at the table. Elias raised his glass a little higher and followed suit with a sad “My heart is breaking for her.”

  Mallory fell back into her chair rather than simply sitting down and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m just so sorry. Why didn’t I realize? I’m an utter monster.”

  “They accepted the invitation, Mallory,” I said. “They couldn’t even foresee what the effect would be. She wasn’t ready.”

  They took turns telling me, with the Manwarings able to offer much more than Mallory could. Whether it was Christian concern or good old-fashioned gossip didn’t matter to me. I watched Elias and Lulu bat the facts back and forth as we listened and Mallory spurred them on as the need arose, apparently grateful that at least the conversation was flowing.

  “Their son, Joe, died about six months ago. It was horrible.”

  I thought of another person I knew who’d lost his child, and I knew that six months, six years, was nothing. But except for Carlo, I still kept thoughts like that to myself rather than have to answer questions about how I knew all that, about the details.

  “Accident. Drowning. Pool.”

  “Suicide.”

  “Which?” asked Mallory. “I heard both rumors, never knew what they finally decided.”

  “No, it was that thing they do with sex.”

  Lulu said, “No, that’s just another rumor. If you ever talk to Jacquie again don’t even hint that you heard that. At the funeral she overheard someone say he was found with his pants unzipped and she went ballistic right there in front of everyone.”

  “In denial,” Elias said.

  “But why are they upset with you?” Mallory asked. “I thought they left the church because of some crisis of faith, and I thought I could do some—”

  “It’s a whole other issue,” Lulu started.

  “Denial,” Elias repeated. “Tim Neilsen is a goddamn homophobe.” He held out his glass to Mallory for a refill.

  Lulu seemed relieved to be able to tell the story, and I wondered how many more times it would take before she could let it go for good. “I help out by being the youth group director. The kids get comfortable with me. Joe confided that he wanted to tell his father he was gay.”

  “Stepfather.”

  “But Joe was so little when they married it’s almost as if. I shouldn’t have encouraged him to come out. It wasn’t my business to do that.”

  “We have two kids, a boy and a girl, one in high school, one in college,” Elias said to us. “Amanda came out two years ago. It was nothing. You already know, you know?” Cocking his head in Lulu’s direction, he asked, “Why would she think the Neilsens would be any different?”

  Lulu said, “Tim and Jacquie, Tim especially, they were in serious denial about Joe being gay.”

  “This day and age?” I said. “I could see it maybe being an issue in Prescott or Yuma, but Tucson? It’s a university town, for Pete’s sake. Tucson is”—I lowered my voice the way people do when they say “herpes”—“liberal.”

  Mallory nodded. “Seems like everyone here is either LGBT or writing a book. Aren’t you writing a book, darling?” she asked Carlo.

  Carlo’s attention had been on a shnoodle that wandered up and sniffed his trousers, but he smiled his assent, not finding it necessary to express an opinion when there already seemed to be plenty about. That’s how Carlo is.

  “Doesn’t matter where he lives, or whether he’s Joe’s biological father, Tim’s a goddamn homophobe,” Elias repeated. “Jackass.”

  “Oh, you’re just upset because they withdrew their pledge,” Lulu said to Elias, with a sharpness in her tone that indicated she didn’t drink daily. Then to me, “Joe seemed to trust me enough to talk to me. I suggested he tell them, and he did.”

  I merely repeated, “This day and age?”

  Lulu nodded. “The Neilsens were so conservative they switched churches.”

  “St. Bede’s. I hope they’re happy there,” Elias said, but even those mild words came out sounding more like They should eat shit and die.

  I glanced at Mallory, who was sipping thoughtfully. She had tried to be a peacemaker between the Neilsens and the Manwarings the way that Lulu had tried to help Joe and his family. Everyone but me should mind their own business, was my opinion.

  “So you didn’t know this?” I asked her.

  Mallory shook her head. “We were friends through the church. You know how that is.”

  I handed the business card to Carlo, who said, “Brigid, you should call her. Maybe you can help somehow.”

  “Sounds to me like she needs therapy more than investigation,” I said, hoping to change the subject. “You must have a therapist to refer her to?” I asked Elias.

  Carlo said to me, “You would know how to explain things to Jacquie and help her find information. You know people.”

  Lulu thought that was a great idea. “You must call her.”

  Mallory, able to see my hesitation, looked amused and said blandly, “Oh yes, Brigid, you must, you absolutely must.”

  Elias sta
rted, “I don’t know if that’s—”

  Whereupon Lulu snapped, “You’re the one who said they threatened a lawsuit.”

  Ah, there you go. Not even a clergy wife’s motivation is entirely pure. Unfortunately for the conversation, which was beginning to take an interesting turn, Adrian Franklin showed up at the table with a black Labrador retriever and that grin that made twenty years disappear.

  “Look what I got!” he said like a boy with a new puppy.

  The dog threw his fifty pounds of glee at Mallory, accidentally hooking the nails of his front paw into her blouse like a canine bodice ripper. Some other time, some other man, she might have used the moment to advantage, but right now did not appear amused.

  Carlo was immobilized, Lulu was struck dumb, Elias overturned his chair jumping to help, and Adrian, rather than reaching anywhere near Mallory’s bosom in what might be considered an ungentlemanly way, tried to disengage the dog with “Down, Ebony! Down!” Ebony did not respond. But Mallory’s grabbing the large puppy paws and easing herself out of their clutches seemed to help more than the command.

  Ebony was forced to stay, and sat twitching with not totally suppressed joy at Adrian’s feet while Carlo introduced him around just in case and offered one of the chairs the Neilsens had vacated.

  “I’m sorry,” Adrian said. “I just came over to say hi because I recognized you and disrupted your whole conversation. I’d thought of getting a dog to keep me company and was going to ask around here. They have a bunch of rescue animals looking for homes if anyone is interested. Ebony is less than a year old. Can you believe someone didn’t want her?”

  I observed Ebony’s pound-for-pound destruction potential but didn’t comment.

  “But it looks like we’re going to have to have some obedience classes.” He shrugged. “What else is retirement good for?”

  “More wine?” Mallory asked, still looking a little distrustful of the dog.

  Adrian and Ebony, though quite adorable, had unintentionally made the talk small, and I welcomed my cell phone ringing even as I wondered what it could be about. I dug through my tote bag, pushing aside a water bottle, hand lotion, lip balm, all the usual accoutrements of living in a place where the humidity hovers around six percent.

  The phone stopped ringing when I found it. I opened the cover and saw the number was from home. I pressed the number to call back. Gemma-Kate picked it up in half a ring.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I should bother you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think one of the dogs is sick.”

  “Sick how?”

  “It’s throwing up.”

  “What do you mean, throwing up? Sometimes they get a little sick, eat weeds, throw up.”

  “I know, but this is sort of green and foamy … Aunt Brigid … he’s starting to breathe funny.”

  “We’re just up the road and we’re on our way.”

  I had pulled the phone away from my ear in preparation for closing it when I heard, “Oh my God, he’s jerking around!”

  Eleven

  We said quick good-byes, drove the short distance home, and came into the house to see Gemma-Kate standing helplessly over one of the Pugs lying in a pool of green vomit. Before either of us could react, the dog went rigid and then jerked into a seizure.

  “Oh God,” she all but shrieked, “he keeps doing that thing and I don’t know how to stop it!” She rocked with her arms wrapped about her as if she didn’t trust that her hands could do anything useful.

  I ran to the kitchen area and looked at an address we had tacked to the side of the fridge.

  “La Cañada and River,” I muttered to myself, while Carlo wrapped the sick, now shaking Pug into a towel and handed him to me.

  “I’ll drive,” he said.

  Gemma-Kate stood watching us, looking like the best she could do was keep from crying until we were out the door, but I couldn’t stop to reassure her just now.

  The female dog standing at my side, looking up at me with her buggy eyes like a terrified Elsa Lanchester meeting her new husband, was another matter. “Let her come along,” I said to Carlo. The Pugs did everything together.

  Carlo picked up the dog and we left, the well Pug whining in the backseat, me in the passenger seat holding the limp Pug in my lap while so much drool ran out of his mouth, through the towel and onto my dress, that it seemed he had to be vomiting it. I passed my finger over the oh-so-soft spot between his eyes and thought the words Hurry, Carlo, he’s dying, but I didn’t say those words. Maybe I said something like “It’s okay, Mr. Puggly Wuggly, you’ll be okay.” I know, it still embarrasses me, too, when I think about it.

  The ride took forever and it seemed as if each mile was marked by a further slowing of the dog’s breaths. Carlo went at least fifteen miles over the speed limit down Oracle, while I was in charge of cursing at the red lights and hoping if we got pulled over I would know the cop personally. By the time we pulled into the parking lot of the emergency veterinary center I was counting maybe one breath a minute and the dog’s body felt boneless, it was so limp.

  We ran through automatic sliding doors into a lobby any human hospital would be proud of. The receptionist glanced at the dog, picked up a phone, and shouted, “Triage!” While Carlo signed paperwork, an assistant rushed me into a back room where a vet didn’t bother to introduce herself but completed a two-second inspection and said, “Toad. How long ago?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She had already grabbed the dog and was moving out of the room with me following close behind as she asked, “More than a half hour ago?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How big was it?”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “Did you flush him?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Activated charcoal probably useless,” she muttered, and I felt as if she could as easily have been referring to me. We had entered a small room with a sink next to which she placed the dog. She turned on a faucet with a hose attached and stuck it in the side of the dog’s mouth. I almost shouted no in horror, but controlled myself and watched the stream pump in one side and out the other. Some no doubt went into his stomach and just a little into his lungs as he coughed and retched and threw up some more.

  When she was finished waterboarding my dog she took him into another room and, after shaving a tiny patch on his leg, hooked him up to an IV that the assistant had ready. She got the needle into him without his reacting, watched him for too long as he stabilized, and only then explained what was happening.

  “Colorado River toad,” she said, as we both finally breathed. “They’re deadly, and with all the rain we had over the winter I’ve seen a few cases, even though it’s not quite the season for them yet.” The dog was as unresponsive as it had been in the car, the only indication that it was alive a light movement of its rib cage as it took an occasional breath. But it wasn’t drooling or seizing anymore. Whatever was in the IV seemed to be working. The vet raised one of the Pug’s heavy velvet chops and showed me his gums. “See how pale they are? He’s dehydrated from the vomiting.”

  “Will he be all right?” I said with a wobbly voice that wasn’t mine.

  “Hopefully between the vomiting and the flushing I gave him we got a lot of the poison out of his system.”

  “What are his chances?” I whispered, lifting one of his paws and finding no resistance.

  The vet put her arm around me and gave me a brief hug like I’ve never known from a physician. “Excellent chances. Tell you what. Leave him here and we’ll continue to give him intravenous fluids to decrease his dehydration.”

  “There’s no antidote?”

  “Nothing. If we caught it right after ingestion we could have flushed him with a solution of activated charcoal that absorbs the toxins before they get into the bloodstream. But he’ll be okay.”

  The assistant had shown
Carlo into the room while we were talking, and he stood there with the healthy Pug draped over his arm and his other arm draped lightly around my waist.

  “He won’t die,” I told Carlo. I felt like those words made me God and gave me the control that was necessary to do the job I used to do. You can’t save everybody, but “This dog won’t die.”

  Gemma-Kate turned on the computer in Brigid’s office, keyed in Peter’s number. When he answered she didn’t ask if he’d been asleep. “Go to your Skype, Peter.”

  Peter yawned. “Why?”

  “I need to see your face while I’m talking to you. It’s serious.” She waited, then whispered, “Good. I can’t sleep. I think I’m in trouble, Peter.”

  “What happened?”

  “Their dog got poisoned.”

  “Is it dead?”

  “I don’t think so. They left him at the vet’s.”

  “So why are you in trouble? Did you poison their dog?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What d’you mean not exactly?”

  “It ate a Colorado River toad.”

  “You fed their dog a Colorado River toad?

  Gemma-Kate studied his face. “Okay, yeah. I fucking poisoned their dog. Okay?”

  “Because they wouldn’t let me come over while they were gone?” He almost looked flattered. “That’s extreme.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Gemma-Kate paused, staring at him. She could tell he was trying to tell if she had a bra on underneath her sleep shirt. She was sorry she told him.

  “Don’t you tell anybody,” she said.

  Twelve

  The next morning when I got up shortly before sunrise I found the other Pug lying with her back pressed up against the door leading to the garage, paws jerking a bit, making little moofmoof sounds in her sleep. I woke her from what sounded like a bad dream, and she followed me into the kitchen.

  Carlo had left the invoice from the vet on the counter. It specified that the charge of three hundred and twenty-five dollars was for initial treatment and projected costs for three days in the hospital with nursing care. The form listed the Pug’s name as Al.