from top to bottom.
On the morning that they returned home, Father Angelo Rocatelli, the priest from their new parish, formally blessed each room of the house. He even climbed into the service mezzanine between the second and third floors to bless that space. Minnie loved him as much as she loved Father Albright, and Minnie’s opinion carried a lot of weight in the Calvino family.
On day one of his investigation, Lionel Timmins discovered a connection between Preston Nash and Roger Hodd. The reporter’s wife, Georgia, had been Preston’s rehab therapist. Why the two men would conspire to invade the Calvino home and terrorize the family, no one could quite say, though theories abounded. Georgia Parker Hodd suggested that her late husband’s alcoholism and Preston’s addictions gave them something in common, but she theorized no further. It was thought that Professor Sinyavski must have been stabbed by Nash or Hodd and dragged into the arbor after spotting them entering the house with malevolent intent. In any event, John acted in self- defense, and no charges against him were ever considered.
Walter and Imogene Nash accepted a position as estate managers for a magnificent eighty-acre property in California. The Calvinos missed them, but Lloyd and Wisteria Butterfield, who replaced the Nashes, were good workers with sunny dispositions. Mr. Butterfield had once been a United States Marine, and Mrs. Butterfield knitted hats and matching scarves.
A month after returning home, the Calvinos rescued a year-old golden retriever from the pound. Minnie named him Rosco and said that Willard approved of him.
Nicky successfully finished the painting of the children. She hung it in the living room, where the baroque mirror once had been. She continued to imagine scenes and make them real, as she would until the end of her days.
A year after they prevented Blackwood from keeping the hateful promise, John and Nicky flew back to John’s hometown, where he had not been for twenty-one years. For three days, they walked the streets that he had walked as a boy. The residence in which his lost family lived had been torn down, another built. It looked like a good house. Each day, they went to the cemetery where the four graves were side by side, and they spread a blanket to sit on the grass. Embedded in each gravestone was a porcelain medallion bearing a photo of the deceased. The sun had not faded them, nor had two decades of weather worn away the glaze. John found the faith to ask forgiveness for having failed them, and he felt forgiven. He no longer dreaded that a moment might come, after the world and outside of time, when he might see them again, because he was able at last to imagine that such an encounter would be about one thing and one only—love.
At last at peace, he and Nicky flew home, where they belonged.
Read on for an exclusive novella about a young boy’s fateful encounter with Alton Turner Blackwood, the killer at the dark heart of
DARKNESS
UNDER THE SUN
1
1989
A WEEK BEFORE HIS ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY, WHEN Howie Dugley climbed to the roof of the former Boswell’s Emporium to watch normal people doing all kinds of ordinary things along Maple Street, he saw the monster for the first time.
Howie’s family lived only two blocks from the building in which Boswell’s had formerly done business. He could get there by crossing the cemetery beside St. Anthony’s Church and then following a cobbled alleyway that seldom had traffic. Huge scarlet oaks, glossy green now in mid-June, shaded the graveyard. Howie liked the trees. They lived longer than people, and they seemed wise to him, wiser than people would ever be, because they had seen so much and they had nothing to do but think about what they had seen and then grow ever bigger. He wished he could just sit under them for a while or even climb them, climb up into the quiet wisdom of the trees. But that was too risky. That would be asking to have his butt kicked. He got plenty of butt-kicking without
As he made his way through the cemetery, in addition to all the tree shadows, headstones and monuments provided some cover. He wore a baseball cap, kept his head down, and was prepared to avert the left side of his face from anyone he might encounter—and to run if he spotted any of the usual goons.
Nine months earlier, Boswell’s moved into a new building a block north of its former quarters. The old brick structure would in time be remodeled for some new business; but that work hadn’t begun yet.
Along the bottom of the back wall were five French windows, each two feet high and three long, which looked into the basement of the emporium. They had been opened from time to time to ventilate that lower space, to prevent mildew, in the days before air-conditioning and dehumidifiers. All five seemed to be locked, but when Howie pushed hard on the middle one, the corroded piano hinge along the top moved with a dry grinding noise. He slid feetfirst through the opening, into the gloomy cellar, and then reached high to press the window shut.
Clipped to his belt was a small flashlight, which he used to navigate the former storerooms of the vacant basement. The narrow beam picked out his path, but it did little to brighten the musty chambers through which he passed. Menaces unknown appeared to creep and quiver in the darkness around him, but those phantoms were nothing more than shadows shuddering away from the traveling light and billowing back after it passed. Howie wasn’t afraid of darkness. He had learned young that the dangers in bright daylight were worse than anything that might wait in the dark, that the bogeyman could have a kind face and a winning smile.
The elevator no longer worked. He climbed stairs to the fourth floor and then ascended a final flight, steeper and narrower than those before it. These last stairs led into the lid-service room, which was a kind of shed on the flat roof of the building. Here were stored snow shovels, push brooms, other tools, and products that the maintenance staff required.
Although Howie always engaged the deadbolt on the outer door when departing the roof, he found it unlocked. Apparently, he had forgotten the bolt on his previous visit. He opened the door and stepped out into sunshine, facing east toward the alley.
Paved with gray ceramic tiles, the roof didn’t lie perfectly flat. A slight pitch in it allowed water to drain toward scuppers along the parapet. That perimeter wall came waist high to a grown man, higher to Howie. Every three feet, there was an eighteen-inch-wide crenellation like in a castle wall where archers would stand to defend against barbarians.
Howie doubted that barbarians had ever attacked Boswell’s, which was only a small department store, or that Boswell’s had employed archers or steely-eyed gunmen to defend the place. They had designed the brick parapet with crenellations just for looks, for the style, but it was nonetheless cool. No structure in town stood taller than the old Boswell building, not even the new Boswell building. Howie could kneel at one of the crenellations, lean into it, and peer down at people on Maple Street, watch them going in and out of stores and restaurants, and imagine what his life might be like if he weren’t so different from them.
When he rounded the lid-service shed, he saw a sentinel sitting sideways to the parapet, gazing down into the heart of town through one of the crenellations. Although Howie had stepped quietly onto the roof, the sentry turned his head to see who had joined him, and it was then that the boy realized he shared the roof with a
