Darkness My Old Friend

Just walking with no destination, just being outside to be outside.” Jones was feeling a little breathless from the walk, but Henry seemed energized and light on his feet. He didn’t answer Henry, because he didn’t want the other man to hear how out of breath he was.

“So what did you want to talk about, Jones?”

Jones came to a stop, pretended to look around at the trees and up at the dimming sky. The air was cool but humid; it felt like rain.

“Actually,” he said when he could breathe a little easier, “I was coming to talk to you about Marla Holt.”

“Oh,” said Henry. A frown creased his forehead. “Really? What about her?”

“Do you remember when she disappeared?”

“I do.” Henry rubbed his crown. “It was a long time ago. She ran off. She left her kids and went away with someone.”

Above them Jones heard cardinals. They were issuing the danger-alert call, a kind of shush- shush sound that cautioned the others to be still or hide. He looked up for the flash of their red feathers, but they’d hidden themselves well. In the sky above, two hawks circled.

“I remember we talked, Henry,” Jones said. “You just lived a few doors down from the Holts.”

“We did talk,” said Henry. He’d folded his arms around his middle. “Quite a bit, as I recall. It was your first case.”

“There were rumors back then.”

“Yes, I know,” said Henry. He looked down at the ground, moved some leaves with the toe of his brown leather shoe. “But Marla and I were just friends, if you can even call it that.”

“Refresh my memory.”

Henry offered a polite smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “We jogged together every so often. I’d met her out on the street one evening. She’d been running ahead of me, turned her ankle, and fell. I helped her get home, and after that we were friends. We ran in the evenings sometimes after her kids were asleep, when her husband got home from work.”

“Mack Holt didn’t have a problem with that?” asked Jones.

In the early years of his marriage to Maggie, Jones hadn’t been thrilled about his wife’s relationship with Henry Ivy. Maggie and Henry had been best friends since high school. But Jones didn’t have any female friends, and he hadn’t understood why she needed Henry. Maggie wouldn’t budge. She’d said, A man who asks you to give up your friends will, over time, ask you to give up other important parts of yourself. Over the years Jones had come to accept their friendship.

Henry shrugged. “If he did have a problem with me, she never mentioned it.”

“Did you have feelings for her?”

Henry rolled his eyes, gave Jones a weak smile. “Come on, Jones. She was a knockout. Everyone had feelings for Marla Holt. But I was-what? Twenty-five at the time, just starting as a teacher at Hollows High. I had no confidence, even less money. She was untouchable. I couldn’t believe she’d even talk to me.”

Henry started walking again; Jones followed.

“Did she ever confide in you?”

“About what? An affair, plans to run off? No. I knocked on her door for our Thursday-evening run. She told me her husband wasn’t home, that she had the baby to care for. We chatted for a few minutes.

Then I left.”

“I remember there were phone records. You called, or someone called, from the school.”

Jones saw Henry’s cheeks flush-effort or embarrassment, it was hard to tell. “I did try to call her.”

“After her husband left for work?”

Henry sighed and shook his head. “She’d seemed odd at the door. Upset about something. And, honestly, I was concerned. Then, of course, a few days later I learned she was missing.”

“You were never a suspect, Henry. I’m not grilling you.”

“Really? It seemed like you were looking at me pretty hard back then. It doesn’t feel much better now.”

“You were crushing on her a little bit, right?”

“A little bit, yes. But I wouldn’t do that. She was married with children. I’m not that kind of man now. I wasn’t even when I was younger.”

And Jones knew that to be true. Henry Ivy was a good man. He ate dinner at their house, had cheered for Ricky at Little League, written him letters of recommendation for college. Sometimes he even came for Thanksgiving, when for whatever reason he couldn’t make it down to Florida to see his parents. They’d all been friends for a long, long time. But Jones also knew that Henry had always been at least a little in love with Maggie. That he’d never really, as far as Jones knew, had a serious relationship with a woman. And Jones wondered why Henry always wanted the women he couldn’t have. Maybe it was just bad luck. But maybe it was something else.

“What else do you remember about her?” Jones asked.

Henry stopped walking again, shoved his hands into his pockets.

“I thought she was the saddest woman I’d ever met. She seemed lonely. But lonely at the core, as if there were no amount of love and attention that could ever make her not lonely. Does that make sense?”

Henry’s words made Jones think of Abigail. Abigail Cooper, his mother, had been a black hole of need, a space that could never be filled. He’d spent his entire life trying and failing, until the day she died.

“It does make sense.”

“I don’t know what happened to Marla Holt, Jones.”

They were standing before a clearing now. The locals called this place the Chapel. Toward the edge of the clearing stood an enormous, dilapidated barn. It had become kind of a local gathering place. Because of the way the sun shone in from the holes in the roof, creating golden fingers that reached into the darkness, the frescoes of graffiti on the ceiling, it had earned its name. They’d all been in there at one time or another over the years, though the thing looked like it could collapse at any time. Parties, make-out sessions, a few years ago Hollows PD had broken up a rave out here. Even from where Jones stood, he could see that the ground was littered with bottles and cans.

The flecks of gold in the grass were shell casings. People in The Hollows liked their guns; they liked to come out here and fire off some rounds, teach their kids how to shoot a bottle off a wall. It was one of the big tensions in the community, between the wealthy people who had settled here in the last decade and the people who’d lived here for generations.

“What are you looking for out here, Jones?”

Henry walked into the clearing and squatted down to pick up a spent shell. He held it up under the beam of Jones’s flashlight.

“I’m a little curious about what Michael Holt was doing,” said Jones.

“He’s a caver, gives tours around here and in some of the other mining towns. I think he’s writing a book.”

Jones hadn’t heard any of that. “Is that so? Have you ever heard that story about the mine where a body is buried?”

Henry shook his head. “Nope.”

“Me neither,” said Jones. Jones knew a lot about The Hollows, its past and its present, more than most. “We’ve both been here a long time. I feel like that’s a story someone would have told before now.”

“I could do some research,” said Henry.

Jones regarded Henry again. “That’d be great, if you have the time,” he said.

“Happy to,” he said. “As you know, I’m a bit of a history buff, especially about this region.”

Poor Henry, thought Jones. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. But he still retained that nerdy aura he’d carried around since grade school.

“Someone needs to take the initiative to get this place cleaned up,” said Henry, apropos of nothing. He kicked at an empty vodka bottle. The label was mostly worn off, but Jones could tell that it came from the Old Mill Bar, where they distilled some of their own liquor. It was truly terrible, an instant headache and upset stomach if you weren’t used to it. But as kids, they all drank it. The Old Mill Bar was the only place where they could get served.