The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 59

For the moment, Amy could not talk any more, and she could not drive. She parked the Expedition on the shoulder of the highway.

Without another word, she walked into a meadow of stunted yellow grass, gray weeds. The land sloped but only slightly, and far out at the low crest, no oaks waited, but only more struggling grass and weeds, and beyond the crest an ashen sky, bearded and blind.

She stopped after she had gone twenty feet and looked at her hands, the palms and then the backs of them, and the palms again.

The memories were not stored only in her mind, but in her hands as well. The skin of her palms retained the memory of the last time she had touched her living child, the softness of her girl’s skin and the texture of her clean glossy hair as Amy had smoothed it back from her face, the warmth of the breath from her delicate nostrils.

Amy could feel all that and more-the sweet sweep of Nicole’s jaw line, the curve of her cheek, the tender lobe and helix of her ear-detailed sensations as real to her now as when the touch had occurred, sensations that she would carry with her all the days of her life, that could rush back to her both summoned and unsummoned, to devastate her when she least expected.

She walked farther into the meadow with no destination in mind, as she had proceeded for almost nine years, toward nothing concrete, seeking only a solution to her loss, all the while knowing that no solution was possible, that the meaning of her loss was an equation that could not be solved in this life.

In another twenty steps or a hundred, she dropped to her knees, but could not even maintain that posture, and went to her hands and knees, all fours, as if she were a child reduced to crawling, but she didn’t have the strength to crawl, or anywhere to go.

After she had stopped being Amy Cogland and could not return to being Amy Harkinson, as Amy Redwing, she had never told the story of that night to anyone. After so many years of husbanding her emotion, tending to it in the dark and quiet nights of sleepless recollection, she discovered that telling it to Brian had torn her down harder and farther than she had expected.

Knees and hands against the earth, she hung her head, for it was heavier than stone, and the sounds she made were more efforts to draw breath than they were sobs. She had wept when recounting the death of Nickie, Misericordiæ’s mascot. Now tears seemed not to be an adequate expression of the loss of her second Nickie. Perhaps the only way to honor such a loss would be to have died that night with her daughter.

She sat on the yellow grass, legs crossed, almost in the lotus position, except that she clutched her knees with her hands and still hung her head. She rocked slowly back and forth.

Once she had read that meditation was the path to serenity; but she never meditated. She knew that inevitably meditation would lead every time to contemplation of that night, to the same unanswerable questions, the one why and the thousand what-ifs.

She had prayer instead, and it sustained her. She prayed for her daughter, for James and Ellen, for Lisbeth and Caroline. She prayed for the dogs, all the dogs, for the amelioration of their suffering.

After a while, Amy looked up and saw Brian standing awkwardly forty feet away, with Nickie on a leash. Clearly, he wasn’t sure that giving her time to herself was the right thing, but of course it was.

She loved him for his occasional awkwardness, his hesitations, his doubts, his self-consciousness.

Michael Cogland had been always self-assured and smooth and confident in any context. But what had seemed to be a natural grace had been in fact the sociopathic gloss of a man who had never been inhibited by so much as a scintilla of humility.

Now Brian released the golden from the leash, and that was also the right thing. The dog raced into her arms.

After a hesitation, almost as gawky as a boy, Brian came to her and sat beside her.

Following an awkward silence, he said, “Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can’t support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There’s such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and for the mistakes we make because of those illusions.”

Dear God, she heard nothing awkward in that. In that was the perfect truth of her eight years in rescue, as she could never have put it into words.

For a time they didn’t need to speak, and they lavished on the dog, on this living Nickie, the affection they felt for each other.

“Michael fled the country,” she said at last, needing to finish the account. “They never found him. Although he didn’t go back to Argentina, he had established quite an alibi in Buenos Aires. His friends there swore he’d been with them on the night. Of course that wouldn’t work after I’d seen him and survived. What kind of people were they, swearing to a lie known to be a lie, when swearing to it didn’t matter anymore?”

Having claimed his inheritance by marrying and by fathering a child, Michael had no further use for a family. By law, a wife had a claim on a portion of his wealth, as did a child. Amy and Nicole were not assets, but liabilities, and he needed to purge them from his books.

He could have hired someone for this little accounting job, but he must have worried that a paid killer would have no scruples about engaging in blackmail. The savagery of the murders suggested that Michael had done the deed not solely to avoid being vulnerable to extortion, but also because killing gave him pleasure.

The police discovered he had prepared for the possibility that he might become a suspect in spite of his tightly woven alibi. In the three years preceding the night, he had gradually transferred most of his fortune out of the United States, moving it through a complex series of investments and entities designed to launder it and fold it away under an alternate identity that could never be traced.

Devastated by the actions of their son, the senior Coglands had been kind to Amy; they would have treated her as if she were their daughter. But her taste for luxury had been lost, and the lifestyle in which she once delighted now appealed to her no more than would have a diet of vinegar and ashes.

Amy had cashed out what comparatively little equity Michael had left in such mortgaged assets as their houses. Even that felt too much like blood money, and she knew she would have to find something to do with her life that would make her funds clean again.

Michael’s cold calculation and the extreme brutality with which he had treated his victims argued that he would not remain safely on some tropical island, lazing in the sun with piña coladas for the rest of his life. By fighting back, she had forced him into hiding; worse, literally and figuratively, she had wounded him.

When a man has no humility, pride is the thing that fills the void. He might feel that the wound she’d dealt to his pride required payback, and in time he might come looking for her.

Consequently, her attorney was able to convince the court that the government needed to assist her in the creation of a new identity and forever seal the records involving her name change.

She had lived as Amy Harkinson since she was three, and she had all but forgotten the last name pinned to her shirt when she’d been abandoned in the church at Mater Misericordiæ. Redwing.

She was quite sure she had never mentioned it to Michael. Her history of tragedy embarrassed her, as if she were a waif imagined by Dickens. Rather than the full truth with all the melodrama of her abandonment, and rather than present herself as a woman of unknown parentage, she had preferred a white lie of omission, allowing him to believe she had been the Harkinsons’ child and had gone to the orphanage only after their death.

Her attorney and the judge preferred she create a new name from whole cloth, but she had suffered panic attacks at the thought of a life without any touchstones to her past. The nuns at Misericordiæ cooperated by redacting the name Redwing from their records, and as best they could from memory.

She had, then, also lost the sisters who had raised her. Until Michael was found, if ever he was, Amy dared not return to Mater Misericordiæ for a visit.

She had come west. She bought a little bungalow. She became a bone to grief, gnawed thin, and a prisoner of loneliness, who for most of a year could find no way to escape her cell.

Then one day, slipping her locket around her neck, remembering sweet Nickie who had come to her out of an autumn meadow, she knew what she must do. She found a good breeder. She bought two puppies.

Fred and Ethel had brought hope back into her life. With hope she could again consider what meaning her life might have, and so she founded Golden Heart.

Now in the withered meadow, Brian’s cell phone rang. Vanessa had further directions. They were less than an hour from bringing Hope back into Brian’s life.