What the Night Knows (with bonus novella Darkness Under the Sun)

secrete a black pearl of worry. Intuition, intense but unspecific, warned her that the children were in some way at risk. Curiously, this concern began with a difficulty she was having with her current painting.

She seldom returned to work in her studio following the post-dinner family time, but this evening she wanted to study the canvas that was in progress, perhaps for a couple of hours.

John was understanding, as always. He said that he would read in the library and that she shouldn’t be concerned if he came to bed late, as he felt so wide-awake he might be in the grip of insomnia.

She took a snifter of brandy to her studio, though she rarely had anything to drink except wine at dinner, and though she had never previously wanted—or needed—brandy to assist her in the evaluation of a problem painting. She put the snifter on the tall table with the yellow roses that had been arranged by Imogene a few hours earlier.

Taped to the upright of the easel, above the current canvas, was a photograph of Zach, Naomi, and Minnie, taken two weeks earlier. For the photo, Nicky had carefully posed them framed by the living-room archway, and this group portrait was the subject of her latest work.

She had planned a painting informed by John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit: light in the foreground fading to deep shadow, depth of field, and spatial mystery against which the clarity of the children’s character would be explicit.

In the painting as in the photo, the kids stood in an unexpected order, not in ascending age and not girls together. Naomi was in the hall, in the foreground, arms crossed and feet planted apart, a power stance, challenging the artist, the world. Behind and to the right of Naomi, Zach posed casually in the archway, hands in his pockets, self-possessed. Farthest from the artist, within the living room, stood Minette in a white dress, luminous in shadow, entirely clear.

The spaces and the details of the clothing were nearly complete, and the quality of light was almost as Nicky wanted it, though she had not yet done the fine work on the faces, which were currently just cranial structures and muscle masses, otherwise eerily blank. She had come to a halt because the painting wasn’t saying what she intended that it should say.

Among other things, she meant to show personality expressing itself powerfully regardless of distance from the viewer or the nature of the lighting. Each child should be known equally well for the person—for the grace—that she or he was. Nicky intended the painting to be a quiet but moving celebration of individuality.

Instead, it felt like a painting about loss. As if she were re-creating her children not from a photograph but from her memory of them after they were dead.

This perception at first annoyed her, then disturbed her, and finally filled her with an abiding disquiet. She told herself that the unfinished faces were the cause of her uneasiness, those blank bone and muscle masses, but she knew better. She had worked in this manner before, toward a culmination in faces, without any problem.

For the past three days, the painting increasingly projected the theme of loss until she could not study it long before disquiet escalated into a gnawing anxiety. In the brushstrokes she had laid down, she could see—could feel—the less acute but more enduring grief that is called sorrow, as if she had done this work years after some unthinkable tragedy.

She had never labored on the canvas while in a somber mood. She approached the picture with enthusiasm, affection, and love. At all times, she worked with pleasure, which often rose to a condition of delight. Yet the piece appeared despairing, as though an artist with a darker set of mind had come in every night to rework the portrait.

The photograph, a computer printout on a full sheet of paper, was different in many ways from the canvas because she never had any intention of merely reproducing it in paint. Now she peeled it off the upright of the easel to inspect it closely.

She had instructed the kids to remain deadpan, because she did not want to paint from a shot in which they were mugging for the camera; she intended to supply each with his or her most signature expression. Maybe they subtly defied her instructions, assuming just enough expression to influence her subconsciously. But, no, each was as deadpan as could be.

Then she noticed the shadowy figure.

The photo had been taken in the evening, with overhead light in the hallway but only one table lamp aglow in a corner of the living room beyond the archway. Behind Minnie, everything faded to darkness, and the only thing to be seen in that gloom was a tall mirror on the farther wall, which was expressed only as a pale shimmer of reflected light, its baroque frame invisible. In that dim rectangle loomed a dark figure that could not be any of the kids or Nicky because none of them was positioned to reflect in the mirror.

She carried the printout of the photo to the slanted draftsman’s table in one corner of the studio. A large lighted magnifying lens, fixed to the table on a swing arm, brought the mysterious figure into fuller view. The silhouette lacked features, but it appeared to be a tall, stoop-shouldered man.

No one but she and the kids had been present. No one had watched from the hallway, and no one other than Minette had actually been in the living room. Zach, the nearest to Minnie, stood in the archway, on the threshold of the chamber.

Nicky’s uneasiness grew the longer she studied the silhouette. She cautioned herself that what she saw might not be a person but a trick of lighting or a reflection of some item of furniture in the living room.

At the time, she had taken five other shots that she deemed less desirable than the one she used at the easel. She retrieved printouts of them from her desk and brought them to the draftsman’s table to study each under the big magnifying lens.

In four of the five photos, the figure appeared as a shadow in the mirror. It could not be a reflection of an inanimate object that happened to resemble the silhouette of a tall man, because from shot to shot it subtly changed position.

Nicky thought back to the imagined murky presence in the master bathroom and the shattering mirror that hadn’t really shattered, the hallucination that she persisted in attributing to an adverse reaction to Vicodin. She sensed that the first figure and this one in the living-room mirror must be related, but she could not see how. The first had been a moment of delirium, but this one could be seen in five of six photographs, as real in its way as any of the three children, yet no one had been there.

After reviewing the photos again under the magnifier, Nicolette remained baffled, but her intuition bored with a sharper bit, drilled deep, and worry welled up.

31

BRENDA SALSETTO WOBURN SAT WITH HER TWELVE-YEAR-OLD son, Lenny, on the living-room sofa, watching TV. Lenny liked being with his mom more than he liked being anywhere else, and with Brenda the feeling was mutual. He was her Down syndrome boy, as sweet and true as anyone she had ever known, wise in his way, always surprising her with his observations, which were as clear and thought-provoking as they were uncomplicated.

Davinia, seventeen, was studying in her room, and Jack, Brenda’s husband, worked in the kitchen, testing a recipe for veggie lasagne that, if it turned out well, would be the next night’s dinner. Jack was a parks-department supervisor, a good man who had become a fan of the Food Network. He discovered that he possessed a previously unrecognized culinary talent.

The family movie on TV featured talking dogs, and Lenny giggled frequently. Brenda should have been relaxed; but she was not. For the past five days, she had been preoccupied with how to respond to something her brother had done and something unspeakable that he might have intended to do.

Brenda feared her younger brother, Reese. She knew that after she left home when she was eighteen, Reese molested their sister, Jean, from the time the timid girl was seven years old until she committed suicide at eleven. Brenda had no proof, only something Jean said to her on the phone a few hours before she hung herself, so long ago. She had more reasons to despise her brother than to fear him, but her fear of him was great.

She tried with some success to minimize their contact over the years. But she knew that if she rejected him outright for any reason or without expressing a reason, her repudiation would be a boil in his mind, festering over weeks or months until bitter resentment darkened into anger, anger into rage, rage into fury, and he would be swept to a violent reaction. He wanted everything that he didn’t have and wanted it with a frightening vehemence, not just material possessions but also admiration and respect, which he believed could be gotten with intimidation