The Darkest Evening of the Year Read online

  street, boy and dog seemed to be at play.

  The tailgate of the Expedition was open. The boy must have let Nickie out of the SUV.

  On second look, Amy realized that Jimmy was not playing a game with the retriever, that instead he was trying to run away. The dog blocked him, thwarted him, strove to herd him back to the house.

  The boy fell to the pavement and stayed where he dropped, on his side. He drew his knees up in the fetal position.

  The dog lay next to him, as though keeping a watch over him.

  Settling Theresa on a porch step, Amy said, “Don’t move, honey. All right? Don’t move.”

  The girl did not reply and perhaps was not capable of replying.

  Through a night as quiet as an abandoned church, breathing eucalyptic incense, Amy hurried into the street.

  Nickie watched her as she approached. Under the moon, the golden looked silver, and all the light of that high lamp seemed to be given to her, leaving everything else in the night to be brightened only by her reflection.

  Kneeling beside Jimmy, Amy heard him weeping. She put a hand on his shoulder, and he did not flinch from her touch.

  She and the dog regarded each other across the grieving boy.

  The retriever’s face was noble, with at this moment none of the comic expression of which the breed was so capable. Noble and solemn.

  All the houses but one remained dark, and the silence of the stars filled the street, disturbed only by the boy’s softly expressed anguish, which grew quiet as Amy smoothed his hair.

  “Nickie,” she whispered.

  The dog did not raise its ears or cock its head, or in any way respond, but it stared at her, and stared.

  After a while, Amy encouraged the boy to sit up. “Put your arms around my neck, sweetheart.”

  Jimmy was small, and she scooped him off the pavement, carrying him in the cradle of her arms. “Never again, sweetheart. That’s all over.”

  The dog led the way to the Expedition, ran the last few steps, and sprang through the open tailgate.

  While Amy deposited the boy in the backseat, Nickie watched from the cargo space.

  “Never again,” Amy said, and kissed the boy on the forehead. “I promise you, honey.”

  The promise surprised and daunted her. This boy was not hers, and the arcs of their lives likely would have only this intersection and a short parallel course. She could not do for a stranger’s child what she could do for dogs, and sometimes she could not even save the dogs.

  Yet she heard herself repeat, “I promise.”

  She closed the door and stood for a moment at the back of the SUV, shivering in the mild September night, watching Theresa on the front-porch steps.

  The moon painted faux ice on the concrete driveway and faux frost on the eucalyptus leaves.

  Amy remembered a winter night with blood upon the snow and a turbulence of sea gulls thrashing into flight from the eaves of the high catwalk, white wings briefly dazzling as they oared skyward through the sweeping beam of the lighthouse, like an honor guard of angels escorting home a sinless soul.

  Chapter

  3

  Brian McCarthy and Associates occupied offices on the ground floor of a modest two-story building in Newport Beach. He lived on the upper floor.

  Amy braked to a stop in the small parking lot beside the place. Leaving Janet, the two children, and the dog, Nickie, in the SUV, she accompanied Brian to the exterior stairs that led to his apartment.

  A lamp glowed at the top of the long flight, but here at the bottom, the darkness was unrelieved.

  She said, “You smell like tequila.”

  “I think I’ve still got a slice of lime in my shoe.”

  “Climbing the table to jump him—that was reckless.”

  “Just trying to impress my date.”

  “It worked.”

  “I’d sure like to kiss you now,” he said.

  “As long as we don’t generate enough heat to bring the global-warming police down on us, go ahead.”

  He looked at the Expedition. “Everybody’s watching.”

  “After Carl, maybe they need to see people kissing.”

  He kissed her. She was good at it.

  “Even the dog’s watching,” he said.

  “She’s wondering—if I paid two thousand for her, how much did I pay for you.”

  “You can put a collar on me anytime.”

  “Let’s leave it at kisses for now.” She kissed him again before returning to the Expedition.

  After watching her drive away, he went upstairs. His apartment was spacious, with Santos-mahogany floors and butter-yellow walls.

  The minimalist contemporary furnishings and serene Japanese art suggested less a bachelor pad than a monk’s quarters. He had gutted, rebuilt, and furnished these rooms before he met Amy. He didn’t want to be either a bachelor or a monk anymore.

  After stripping out of his tequila-marinated clothes, he took a shower. Maybe the hot water would make him sleepy.

  Still feeling as alert and wide-eyed as an owl, he dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. At 2:56 A.M., he was awake for the day.

  With a mug of fresh-brewed coffee, he settled at the computer in his study. He needed to get work done before sleep deprivation melted the edge off his concentration.

  Two e-mails awaited him. The sender was pigkeeper.

  Vanessa. She hadn’t contacted him in over five months. He had begun to think he would never hear from her again.

  For a while, he stared at the screen, reluctant to let her into his life once more. If he never again read her messages, if he never answered them, he might be rid of her in time.

  Hope would be gone with her, however. Hope would be lost. The price of freezing Vanessa out of his life was too great.

  He opened the first e-mail.

  Piggy wants a puppy. How stupid is that? How can a piggy take care of a puppy when the puppy’s smarter? I’ve known houseplants smarter than Piggy.

  Brian closed his eyes. Too late. He had opened himself to her, and now she was alive again in the lighted rooms of his mind, not just in the dark corners of memory.

  How are you doing, Bry? Do you have cancer yet? You’re only thirty-four next week, but people die young of cancer all the time. It’s not too much to hope for.

  After printing a hard copy of her message, he filed the e-mail electronically under Vanessa.

  To avoid slopping coffee out of the mug, he held it with both hands. The brew tasted fine, but coffee was no longer all that he needed.

  From the sideboard in the dining room, he fetched a bottle of cognac. In the study once more, he added a generous portion of Rémy Martin to the mug.

  He was not much of a drinker. He kept the Rémy for visitors. The visitor tonight was unwelcome, and here in spirit only.

  For a while he wandered through the apartment, drinking coffee, waiting for the cognac to take the edge off his nerves.

  Amy was right: Carl Brockman was a pussy. The drunkard reeked of tequila, but even at a distance, Vanessa smelled of brimstone.

  When Brian felt ready, he returned to the computer and opened the second e-mail.

  Hey, Bry. Forgot to tell you a funny thing.

  Without reading further, he pressed the PRINT key and then filed the e-mail under Vanessa.

  Silence pooled in the apartment, and not a sound ascended from the office below or from the dark depths of the street.

  He closed his eyes. But only genuine blindness would excuse him from the obligation to read the hard copy.

  Back in July, the pigster built sandcastles all day on the little beach we have in this new place, then wound up with a killer sunburn, looked like a baked ham. Old Piggy couldn’t sleep for days, cried half the night, started peeling and then itched herself raw. You might expect the smell of fried bacon, but there wasn’t.

  He was a swimmer on the surface of the past, an abyss of memory under him.

  Piggy is pink and smooth again, but there’s
a mole on her neck that seems to be changing. Maybe the sunburn made some melanoma. I will keep you informed.

  He put this second printout with the first. Later he would read both again, searching for clues in addition to “the little beach.”

  In the kitchen, Brian poured the contents of the mug down the drain. He no longer needed coffee and no longer wanted cognac.

  Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow, and sorrow is an enduring rider.

  He opened the refrigerator, but then closed it. He could no more eat than sleep.

  Returning to the study and working on one of his current custom-home projects had no appeal. Architecture might be frozen music, as Goethe once said, but right now he was deaf to it.

  From a kitchen drawer, he extracted a large tablet of art paper and a set of drawing pencils. He had stashed these things in every room of the apartment.

  He sat at the dinette table and began to sketch a concept for the building that Amy hoped he would design for her: a place for dogs, a haven where no hand would ever be raised against them, where every affection wanted would be given.

  She owned a piece of land on which hilltop oaks spread against the sky, long shadows lengthening down sloped meadows in the early morning, retracting toward the crest as the day ripened toward noon. She had a vision for it that inspired him.

  Nevertheless, after a while, Brian found himself turning from sketch to portrait, from a haven for dogs to the animal itself. He had a gift for portraiture, but never before had he drawn a dog.

  As his pencils whispered across the paper, an uncanny feeling overcame him, and a strange thing happened.

  Chapter

  4

  After dropping Brian at his place, Amy Redwing called Lottie Augustine, her neighbor, and explained that she was bringing in three rescues who were not dogs and who needed shelter.

  Lottie served in the volunteer army that did the work of Golden Heart, the organization Amy founded. A few times in the past, she’d risen after midnight to help in an emergency, always with good cheer.

  Having been a widow for a decade and a half, having retired from a nursing career, Lottie found as much meaning in tending to the dogs as she had found in being a good wife and a caring nurse.

  The drive from Brian’s place to Lottie’s house was stressed by silence: little Theresa asleep in the backseat, her brother slumped and brooding beside her, Janet in the passenger seat but looking lost and studying the deserted streets as if these were not just unknown neighborhoods but were the precincts of a foreign country.

  In the company of other people, Amy had little tolerance for quiet. Enduring mutual silences, she sometimes felt as though the other person might ask a terrible question, the answer to which, if she spoke it, would shatter her as surely as a hard-thrown stone will destroy a pane of glass.

  Consequently, she spoke of this and that, including Antoine, the dog driver who served blind Marco, out there in the far Philippines. Neither the two troubled children nor their mother would take the bait.

  When they came to a stop at a red traffic light, Janet offered Amy the two thousand dollars that she had given to Carl.

  “It’s yours,” Amy said.

  “I can’t accept it.”

  “I bought the dog.”

  “Carl’s in jail now.”

  “He’ll be out on bail soon.”

  “But he won’t want the dog.”

  “Because I’ve bought her.”

  “He’ll want me—after what I’ve done.”

  “He won’t find you. I promise.”

  “We can’t afford a dog now.”

  “No problem. I bought her.”

  “I’d give her to you anyway.”

  “The deal is done.”

  “It’s a lot of money,” Janet said.

  “Not so much. I never renegotiate.”

  The woman folded her left hand around the cash, her right hand around the left, lowered her hands to her lap as she bowed her head.

  The traffic signal turned green, and Amy drove across the deserted intersection as Janet said softly, “Thank you.”

  Thinking of the dog in the cargo area, Amy said, “Trust me, sweetie, I got the better half of the deal.”

  She glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the dog peering forward from behind the backseat. Their eyes met in their reflections and then Amy looked at the road ahead.

  “How long have you had Nickie?” Amy asked.

  “A little more than four months.”

  “Where did you get her?”

  “Carl didn’t say. He just brought her home.”

  They were southbound on the Coast Highway, scrub and shore grass to their right. Beyond the grass lay the beach, the sea.

  “How old is she?”

  “Carl said maybe two years.”

  “So she came with the name.”

  “No. He didn’t know her name.”

  The water was black, the sky black, and the painter moon, though in decline, brushed the crests of the waves.

  “Then who named her?”

  Janet’s answer surprised Amy: “Reesa. Theresa.”

  The girl had not spoken this night, had only sung in that high pure voice, in what might have been Celtic, and she had seemed to be detached in the manner of a gentle autistic.

  “Why Nickie?”

  “Reesa said it was always her name.”

  “Always.”

  “Yes.”

  “For some reason…I didn’t think Theresa said much.”

  “She doesn’t. Sometimes not for weeks, then only a few words.”

  In the mirror, the steady gaze of the dog. In the sea, the sinking moon. In the sky, a vast intricate wheelwork of stars.

  And in Amy’s heart rose a sense of wonder that she was reluctant to indulge, for it could not be true, in any meaningful sense, that her Nickie had returned to her.

  Chapter

  5

  Moongirl will make love only in total darkness. She believes that her life has been forever diminished by passion in the light, when she was younger.

  Consequently, the faintest glow around a lowered window shade will burn away all of her desire.

  A single thread of sunshine in the folds of drawn draperies will in an instant unravel her lust.

  Light intruding from another room—under a door, around a crack in a jamb, through a keyhole—will pierce her as if it is a needle and cause her to flinch from her lover’s touch.

  When her blood is hot, even the light-emitting numerals of a bedside clock will chill her.

  The luminous face of a wristwatch, the tiny bulb on a smoke detector, the radiant eyes of a cat can wring a cry of frustration from her and squeeze her libido dry.

  Harrow thinks of her as Moongirl because he can imagine her loose in the night, silhouetted naked on a ridge line, howling at the moon. He doesn’t know what label a psychologist might apply to her particular kind of madness, but he has no doubt that she is mad.

  Never has he called her Moongirl to her face. Instinct tells him that to do so would be dangerous, perhaps even fatal.

  In daylight or dark, she can pass for sane. She can even feign wholesomeness quite convincingly. Her beauty beguiles.

  Especially in purple, but also in pink and white, bouquets of hydrangea charm the eye, but the plant is mortally poisonous; so, too, the lily of the valley, the blossoms of bloodroot; the petals of yellow jasmine, brewed in tea or mixed in salad, can kill in as little as ten minutes.

  Moongirl loves the black rose more than any other flower, though it is not poisonous.

  Harrow has seen her hold such a rose so tightly by its thorny stem that her hand drips blood.

  Her pain threshold, like his, is high. She does not enjoy the prick of the rose; she simply does not feel it.

  She has total discipline of her body and her intellect. She has no discipline of her emotions. She is, therefore, out of balance, and balance is a requirement of sanity.

  This night, in a wi
ndowless room where no starshine can reach, where the luminous clock is closed in a nightstand drawer, they do not make love, for love has nothing to do with their increasingly ferocious coupling.

  No woman has excited Harrow as this one does. She has about her the ultimate hunger of the black widow, the all-consuming passion of a mantis that, during coitus, kills and eats its mate.

  He half expects that one night Moongirl will conceal a knife between mattress and box springs, or elsewhere near the bed. In the blinding dark, at the penultimate moment, he will hear her whisper Darling and feel a sudden stiletto navigate his ribs and pop his swelling heart.

  As always, the anticipation of sex proves to be more thrilling than the experience. At the end, he feels a curious hollowness, a certainty that the essence of the act has again eluded him.

  Spent, they lie in the hush of the blackness, as silent as if they have stepped out of life into the outer dark.