Full Dark, No Stars(107)

Before tonight she certainly would have thought so.

Marjorie Duvall’s driver’s license was now on the top of the stack. Before, it had been on the bottom. Darcy put it there. But which of the others had been on top, the Red Cross card or the library card? It was simple, it had to be simple when there were only two choices, but she was too upset to remember. She put the library card on top and knew at once that was wrong, because the first thing she’d seen when she opened the box was a flash of red, red like blood, of course a blood donor card would be red, and that had been the one on top.

She put it there, and as she was putting the elastic back around the little collection of plastic, the phone in the house started to ring again. It was him. It was Bob, calling from Vermont, and were she in the kitchen to take the call, she’d hear his cheery voice (a voice she knew as well as her own) asking, Hey, honey, how are you?

Her fingers jerked and the rubber band snapped. It flew away, and she cried out, whether in frustration or fear she didn’t know. But really, why would she be afraid? Twenty-seven years of marriage and he had never laid a hand on her, except to caress. On only a few occasions had he raised his voice to her.

The phone rang again… again… and then cut off in mid-ring. Now he would be leaving a message. Missed you again! Damn! Give me a call so I won’t worry, okay? The number is…

He’d add the number of his room, too. He left nothing to chance, took nothing for granted.

What she was thinking absolutely couldn’t be true. It was like one of those monster delusions that sometimes reared up from the mud at the bottom of a person’s mind, sparkling with hideous plausibility: that the acid indigestion was the onset of a heart attack, the headache a brain tumor, and Petra’s failure to call on Sunday night meant she had been in a car accident and was lying comatose in some hospital. But those delusions usually came at four in the morning, when the insomnia was in charge. Not at eight o’clock in the evening… and where was that damned rubber band?

She found it at last, lying behind the carton of catalogues she never wanted to look in again. She put it in her pocket, started to get up to look for another one without remembering where she was, and thumped her head on the bottom of the table. Darcy began to cry.

There were no rubber bands in any of the worktable’s drawers, and that made her cry even harder. She went back through the breezeway, the terrible, inexplicable identity cards in her housecoat pocket, and got an elastic out of the kitchen drawer where she kept all sorts of semi-useful crap: paper clips, bread ties, fridge magnets that had lost most of their pull. One of these latter said DARCY RULES, and had been a stocking-stuffer present from Bob.

On the counter, the light on top of the phone blinked steadily, saying message, message, message.

She hurried back to the garage without holding the lapels of her housecoat. She no longer felt the outer chill, because the one inside was greater. And then there was the lead ball pulling down her guts. Elongating them. She was vaguely aware that she needed to move her bowels, and badly.

Never mind. Hold it. Pretend you’re on the turnpike and the next rest area’s twenty miles ahead. Get this done. Put everything back the way it was. Then you can—

Then she could what? Forget it?

Fat chance of that.

She bound the ID cards with the elastic, realized the driver’s license had somehow gotten back on top, and called herself a stupid bitch… a pejorative for which she would have slapped Bob’s face, had he ever tried to hang it on her. Not that he ever had.

“A stupid bitch but not a bondage bitch,” she muttered, and a cramp knifed her belly. She dropped to her knees and froze that way, waiting for it to pass. If there had been a bathroom out here she would have dashed for it, but there wasn’t. When the cramp let go—reluctantly—she rearranged the cards in what she was pretty sure was the right order (blood donor, library, driver’s license), then put them back in the LINKS box. Box back in hole. Pivoting piece of baseboard closed up tight. Carton of catalogues back where it had been when she tripped on it: sticking out slightly. He would never know the difference.

But was she sure of that? If he was what she was thinking—

monstrous that such a thing should even be in her mind, when all she’d wanted just a half an hour ago was fresh batteries for the goddarn remote control—if he was, then he’d been careful for a long time. And he was careful, he was neat, he was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy, but if he was what those goddarn (no, goddamned) plastic cards seemed to suggest he was, then he must be supernaturally careful. Supernaturally watchful. Sly.

It was a word she had never thought of in connection to Bob until tonight.

“No,” she told the garage. She was sweating, her hair was stuck to her face in unlovely spikelets, she was crampy and her hands were trembling like those of a person with Parkinson’s, but her voice was weirdly calm, strangely serene. “No, he’s not. It’s a mistake. My husband is not Beadie.”

She went back into the house.

- 5 -

She decided to make tea. Tea was calming. She was filling the kettle when the phone began to ring again. She dropped the kettle into the sink—the bong sound made her utter a small scream—then went to the phone, wiping her wet hands on her housecoat.

Calm, calm, she told herself. If he can keep a secret, so can I. Remember that there’s a reasonable explanation for all this—