The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 65

Harrow quickly ascertains that his ex-wife and the architect are not in the SUV either dead or wounded.

The back wheels of the Expedition overhang the edge of the cliff, forty feet above the beach, and the tailgate has sprung open.

He must therefore assume that the bodies were in the cargo space and were pitched out of the back when the vehicle came violently to a halt. In that case, they have been cast down to the beach below.

In this fog, in the last of the dying daylight, he will be wasting time and taking risks for nothing by trying to survey the terrain below from the slippery edge of the granite escarpment.

A set of old concrete stairs with a rusted iron railing lead down to the beach. He can descend by those.

He’s not keen on searching the strand, but if the bodies are down there, he needs to know. Before morning, the tide could carry them out to sea and move them farther along the coast.

The police are clever about coastal currents and tide charts. Upon finding a corpse and, by forensics, determining the length of time that it has been in the water, they can calculate its point of origin with disturbing accuracy.

The kneeling girl’s hands were folded, entwined by a silver chain, with perhaps a pendant hidden between her palms.

She was beautiful, as she’d been beautiful as an infant. Beauty has more faces than beaches have grains of sand; and this was the beauty of innocence, humility, gentleness.

Her eyes were blue, Brian’s shade of blue, and clear. They widened with wonder, but then a shyness came into them, and she looked away.

Brian wanted to put a hand to her face, lift her chin, raise her eyes to him. He wanted to put his hand over her hands.

That she might know who he was, that she might flinch at his touch, that she might ask where he had been all these years: The fear of rejection prevented him from touching her.

“Let’s go, come on,” Amy whispered.

“Honey,” he said softly, “do you know who I am?”

Eyes still averted, the girl nodded.

“Will you come with me?”

“Mother has a knife.”

“I’m not afraid of her.”

“She kills you sometimes.”

He trusted inspiration. “Not with our attack dog.”

Following his gesture, she saw the golden for the first time. Her face brightened, and her eyes. “Doggie.”

Considering this an invitation, Nickie went to the girl, plumed tail celebrating the making of a new friend, and Hope flung her arms around the dog in a display of instant and total trust.

Brian glanced at Amy, and she motioned him to her.

Amy worried that even if they could find keys for Michael’s vehicles, they couldn’t drive away. The engine would be heard. They would be shot down as they backed out of the garage.

At any moment, they might encounter Michael or Vanessa. They had been in the house maybe three minutes. They were already overdue.

“We can’t hunt them with Hope. The dog will keep her safe.”

She saw the anguish in his eyes as he said, “That would make sense if you were right about…what Nickie is.”

“My daughter will take your daughter to safety.” As Hope petted Nickie, the pendant on the chain hung visible. “Look.”

The silver word stunned him.

“Believe what you know,” Amy urged.

She crouched to hug Hope, who was awkward about the affection, though she had been easy with the dog.

“Honey, you’re going outside with Nickie. Hold her collar. Stay with her. She’ll keep you safe. Don’t be afraid.”

Smiling at the dog, Hope said, “I’m not. She’s a Forever Shiny Thing.”

With a glance at Brian, Amy said, “Yes, sweetie, she is.”

The hall was deserted. They went to the nearby front door. Fog entered, and Hope left with Nickie.

The dog hesitated on the stoop, testing the air, then led the girl quickly away into the fog.

Harrow on the beach searches sand, fog, and surf foam for any sign of the bodies, when belatedly he realizes that he saw no blood in the Expedition.

He feels deceived, not only by his quarry but also by his own expectations.

Amy got lucky once, back in Connecticut, but she’s a submissive, not a transgressor, just like her architect, and it is an affront to Harrow’s deepest-held views to imagine that she could get the best of a killing machine like Billy.

He hurries back to the steps and climbs two at a time, clutching at the rusty iron railing.

He is not worried about Moongirl, only about missing something that she might do to them if she finds them in his absence.

Vanessa catches the little freak doing it, mumbling over a HOPE pendant as though it’s a fragment of the Lord God Almighty’s toe-nail, hallelujah, smell that toe-jam residue!

She always thought this would be long and slow when the time came. Thought she might like to take a couple of days breaking down the little freak before burning her.

Now she just wants it over. Tonight. Right now.

She has a gallon of gasoline for the third act.

The second act is just going to be punching Piggy. Except for the burns on the bottoms of her feet, Vanessa never marked the little creep before. You have to be careful: all the meddlesome bastards who see one bruise and they’re on to child welfare. She really wants to hit her. She’s got a lot of years of hitting saved up.

The first act is some little pretend-drowning in the big bathtub upstairs. Tie her up, do some dunking, see how long she can hold her breath. If it’s good enough to get some answers out of terrorists, it’s good enough for Piggy, who doesn’t even have any answers to give.

Vanessa has just finished filling the tub with cold water, as cold as she could draw it. She’s selected and set out some scarves she doesn’t want anymore, to tie up the little freak.

She has wasted ten years with this. Ten years. She has never gotten from it the level of satisfaction she expected.

It’s very difficult for a pleasure in reality to be equal to what you work up first in your imagination. The world is always failing her. Pleasure is the only thing, everything, and yet it is never what it ought to be.

Maybe she’ll find something better in the desert. She likes the heat of the desert, the barrenness, the emptiness.

There’s too much nature here on the coast. She just wants sand and heat and white sky and silence.

She bought a book, The World Without Us, she wants to read it in the desert, someplace isolated, where there’s just her and Harrow, and then maybe not him.

Death is the only thing that satisfies. It’s the only thing that is complete, everything you expect it to be. The dead never fail you.

She is descending the front stairs when, just as she’s about to turn onto the landing, she hears whispering in the vestibule. She stops, puts her back to the wall, and eases to the corner.

She’s just in time to see Piggy going out the door with a dog. What the hell is that about?

Amy Redwing looks after the girl for a moment, then closes the door and turns to Brian.

Vanessa eases back from the corner, for fear they’ll glance up at the stairs. She hears fragments of their quick exchanges: search…kitchen…back stairs.

She retreats to the second floor and races across it, as light-footed as always. She descends the back stairs.

They have guns, and she just has the knife she was going to use to mess with Piggy’s mind a little, the old Bear knife. She doesn’t care if it’s a challenge. She doesn’t even care if she dies. But she won’t die, precisely because she doesn’t care. It’s when you care about dying that you hesitate, and when you hesitate, Vanessa cuts you down.

Redwing and Bry want to live. They’ll hesitate, which makes a knife faster than a bullet every time.

She is very excited. She has wanted him dead a long time.

Off the back stairs, across the kitchen, where fog creeps through the open door, toward the pantry, but instead into a narrow broom closet. The closet contains only a mop, no broom, and Vanessa has just enough room to close the door. It’s like standing up in a coffin.

Returning from the front of the house, Amy and Brian searched the rooms that they passed by earlier when Nickie led them through the place. As it turned out, the dog’s disinterest in those spaces proved to be wisdom at work, because they were all deserted.

In the kitchen, the pantry seemed unlikely to yield either one of the charming couple, but Amy yanked open the door while Brian covered it with his pistol.

The hinges creaked on the pantry door, and behind Amy other hinges creaked almost simultaneously, and she started to turn, but the knife took her in the back and went deep, and the air went out of her, and the strength.

Amy made a small bird cry, and Brian turned to see Vanessa behind her, and Amy’s face as white as the whites of her eyes.

Running horses on stone could have clopped no harder than his heart, and he hesitated to shoot because Amy was blocking Vanessa.

His hesitation coincided with movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye, and he saw a man, surely Michael, coming through the open kitchen door, a pistol in his fist.

Brian wasn’t familiar with the gun that he had taken off the shooter earlier, but he didn’t hesitate to fire before being fired upon. The weapon was a machine pistol; a quick squeeze pumped out five, six rounds.

Michael went down, but maybe not because he was hit, maybe only for cover, and as Brian turned back to Vanessa, he saw her stab Amy a second time, with another down stroke, and then she surprised him by shoving Amy toward him and surprised him again by coming at him as Amy fell forward between them. She might have half climbed over Amy to slash his face, but he emptied the gun at her, and she was done.

Quaking with terror, he threw aside his gun, dropped to his knees beside Amy, whose face had darkened from white to pale gray, and took her pistol.

Looking under the table, he saw Michael across the room, lying in blood, looking as if his shade had already left his flesh and was boarding the Hellbound train. His arm was stretched out in front of him, his pistol pointed at Brian, and enough of a quiver of life remained in him to pull the trigger.

The round hit Brian in the abdomen, knocked him off his knees, and onto the floor beside Amy, where his left hand fell into her upturned right palm.

If he was going out for good, he wanted to squeeze her hand, but he didn’t have the strength, and neither did she.

The pain was so fierce, a furious white heat, that his vision blurred, but he nevertheless saw Hope toddering through the back door, trying to stay on her feet as Nickie dragged her with all the power of a team of sled dogs. In fact, as Brian began to go blind, in the strange euphoria accompanying massive blood loss, he saw Nickie fly over the table, toward them, and Hope flying, too, one hand clutched around the dog’s collar.