Dark Pursuit

The day she’d walked out of jail she vowed to change her life. She joined a Twelve Step program and committed fully to getting clean. For a year she held two jobs, barely making it, saving every penny she could toward cosmetology school. Some days she wanted to get high so badly she nearly climbed the walls. That’s when prayer helped the most. A California license required six hundred hours of school—thirteen to fourteen months if she worked real hard. Not to mention tuition of around ten thousand dollars. She applied for federal grants. Most went to single moms, but amazingly she got one. God, she thought.

In cosmetology school over a third of her classmates dropped out after the first four months. It was way more demanding than many of them thought—herself included. At first she found it hard to concentrate, the drugs had so messed up her brain. But slowly her head cleared. She pressed on, determined. When her old car broke down, she took the bus. When she didn’t have money for the bus, she walked. No help from her mother in England, who couldn’t care less. And she was too afraid to ask her grandfather.

The day she earned her license was the happiest day of her life. Moving to Gayner, finding a place to work, meeting Craig—blessings beyond belief.

Now it was all about to be taken away.

The restroom door opened. Sheila and Leslie pushed in, chattering away.

“Hi.” Kaitlan forced a smile.

“Hey, Kaitlan!” They disappeared into stalls.

Straightening her shoulders, Kaitlan returned to the party and Craig.

An interminable half hour later as they prepared to leave the restaurant, Chief Barlow closed in. “Son.” He shook hands with Craig. “You say goodbye to your sister?”

Resentment flicked across Craig’s face. “Twice.”

“Then go say goodbye to Joe.”

Craig shoved his jaw forward, turned and left.

The chief leaned toward Kaitlan. “Keep yourself out of trouble now.”

She gave him a tight smile.

Craig returned and put his arm around her shoulder. “We’re leaving, Dad.” He spoke the words flatly— I can handle her.

The chief gave them a mock salute. “Good seeing you both.”

Craig ushered Kaitlan out the door.

As they crossed the parking lot he kept his head down, hands in his pockets. “Nice party.”

“Yeah.” Kaitlan hugged herself against the cold.

In the Mustang, Craig put the top up for the drive home.

Kaitlan focused out the window, watching familiar streets go by. They no longer looked friendly.

Somewhere out there lay a woman’s body. Kaitlan realized she hadn’t noticed if the woman wore a wedding ring. Was some husband going crazy with worry? Children?

Surely by now she’d been reported missing.

They reached Kaitlan’s apartment. Her heart pounded and her limbs felt brittle. If Craig touched her she’d break apart.

Please stay in the car.

He pulled up behind her Corolla and cut the engine. “I’ll see you inside.”

The words hit like stones. She opened her door and got out.

Crickets’ pulsing songs grated her ears. A chilling breeze lifted a strand of her hair, popping goose bumps down her arms.

The surrounding forest was so dark.

How had she ever felt safe here? The night seemed to have a thousand eyes.

Her footsteps sounded loud as she approached the door and unlocked it. Stepping inside her kitchen, she could feel Craig’s looming presence at her back.

This was insanity. She never should have listened to her grandfather.

“I won’t be staying,” Craig said as she placed her keys and purse on the table. “Tomorrow I’m on the 6:00 a.m. shift.”

Relief weakened her knees. She nodded.

“I’ll just check your place out. Make sure you’re safe.”

Kaitlan stood like granite as he walked through the living room, into the hall. She clutched the top of a chair, the fingers of her other hand curling into her palm. Get out, Craig, get out! she wanted to scream. The minute he drove away she would throw what she needed into a suitcase and drive like a madwoman to her grandfather’s —

“Kaitlan. Come here.” He called from the door to her bedroom.

Something cold and slimy unfolded in Kaitlan’s chest. For a wild moment she pictured herself tearing out the door and into the black forest.

Where she’d get maybe one hundred feet before Craig caught her. And he’d be furious.

“Hey! Come here.”

If he tried to hurt her, she’d fight. She’d tell him that others knew what he’d done, and if anything happened to her, they’d go to the police.

Yeah, right. The Gayner police.

Kaitlan did the only thing she could. She walked toward the bedroom.

twenty-seven

Silence echoed through the house. A silence that mocked as Margaret waited for the phone to ring.

She had become accustomed to small noises amid the quiet. The heater kicking on in winter. A newly made ice cube falling in the freezer. The creak of a wall for who knows why, except that the house was old and perched on a hilltop where the wind whirled between ocean and bay.

Tonight Margaret heard none of these. Only the ticking, aching silence.

Dear God, protect Kaitlan.

Shortly after eight Margaret had tiptoed across the hardwood floor to D.’s office and leaned an ear against the door. No sound from within. Holding her breath she eased open the door, tensing against his sure anger at her intrusion. But she found him in his chair at the computer, legs splayed, head lolled to one side and mouth open. Sleeping.

On his monitor—a randomly rolling ball against black void.

She leaned against the door, its knob in her hand as hard as the fist of a corpse.

Through dinner, while cleaning the kitchen and mopping its floor, she’d clung to the hope that the clear mind D. had displayed with Kaitlan would remain. That given this deadline of all deadlines, he would rise above his weaknesses—because he had to.

How foolish she’d been.

Repelled and angered by the futility of the room, she’d shut the office door and hurried away.

Now Margaret stood in the library, facing the bookcase containing the first editions of D.’s novels. She’d been driven to this place with the sense that something here could help their situation. But what?

She scanned the ninety-nine books, shelved in order of publication.

Margaret’s eyes landed on Fractions, D.’s first in his Ben Seitz mathematician- turned-detective series. It was followed by Division and Decimal Point. Margaret’s gaze skipped around then, from Tumult to Ransacked, Perilous Hope to Midnight Vision, In the Making, Out of Madness, Last Speck of Dawn, Black Over Water, Sky Bright, From the Mist. She knew them all. Many she had edited. Those written before she’d started working for D. she’d read on her own. Ninety-nine inciting incidents and story arcs and resolutions, spanning over forty years of work.

They say a writer’s worldview emerges through his stories. Over the years Margaret had seen an element repeat in D.’s books. After Gretchen died it appeared even more strongly. Through symbolism and subtext throbbed what Margaret had come to call his “vain empires” doctrine, the phrase taken from her favorite passage in