In the Waning Light (3 page)

“He’s an asshole,” she quipped, as they started up a gangway strung with white fairy lights. Wind gusted and hair blew across her face. “I told him backstage—Sherry’s murder was off-limits.”

He opened the restaurant door for her.

“Why?”

She stalled. “Why what?”

“I mean, why is it off-limits? Maybe it would be good to just put it out there, talk about it. He did have a point, you know, with his question about your memories in relation to Lulofs’s.”

“Oh . . . no. No. Don’t
you
go pulling out the old victimology tricks and profiling
me
, Doctor Lawson. Sometimes people just do things, okay? Doesn’t all have to be traced back to childhood trauma.”

But by the time they were seated at a table in front of tall glass windows, cocooned with candlelight and looking out over the bay, snow starting to fall in fat gauzy flakes under the halos of lamps, Meg’s mood had soured further. She picked at her napkin while Jonah perused the wine list and ordered a Burgundy from the slopes of the Saône River.

Once the waiter had poured the wine and left, he said, “Maybe you
should
write it, Meg. Go back and put the past finally, properly, to bed. Get closure.”

She stared at him. “I have closure. Tyson Mack is dead. Why are you even pushing this?” She reached for her glass and took a fierce slug of wine.

He crooked a brow, watching her intently. “Stathakis was right about the commercial potential.” He raised his glass, gently swirled the liquid. “The ending is poignant, too. Your father going to prison. Your mother—”

“Stop,” she said, her voice low, quiet. “Stop right there.” Something in her tone must have brooked no argument, because he went very still, his dark blue eyes holding hers. Her cheeks burned and she took another heavy pull of the damn fine Burgundy she knew he’d ordered because they’d visited the vineyard. It was where he’d proposed. Over two years ago. And by the price it was a wine to be savored.

“You of
all
people should get why I don’t want to tackle it, Jonah. It’s personal. It’s
mine
—not for public consumption, not for money. And it’s over. Christ, it’s almost a quarter of a century ago. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I
have
put it to bed. And there are more cases. Tons. Sick killers—monsters out there who’d make excellent antiheroes, more subject material than I’ll ever be able to tackle, so why in the hell worry about Sherry’s story? I moved on years ago.” She reached again for her glass.

“Except, you haven’t.”

She stilled, glass midair. She held his eyes. “Shall we just eat? Order? Call the waiter—” She raised her arm to summon somebody. “Anybody! Some service here, please?”

He reached for her raised hand, lowered it slowly back to the table.

“Prove it,” he said quietly.

A whispering chill of foreboding sunk into her chest.

“What do you mean? Prove what?”

He removed the wineglass from her grip, set it down gently, and took both her hands in his across the white linen tablecloth. Candlelight sparkled in his eyes, but they were cool and sharp with an intensity that scared her. He swiveled the diamond cluster around her finger as he held her gaze. The ring they’d bought together in Paris.

“Marry me, Meg. Let’s set a date. Tonight.”

Her mouth opened. On some level she’d known this was coming tonight, that it was the root of her tension. The whispering, rising panic. The tightening claustrophobia.

“I . . . wow.” She tore her gaze from his, but he cupped the side of her face, forcing her to look back into his eyes.

“We’ve been together three years now. It’s over two years that you’ve worn this ring, since we made each other this promise in France. The first time I suggested a wedding date, it was that you needed to finish your book, the research. Then it was conflict of interest in the coming trial. There was travel. Time. Then it was financial.” He paused. The silence in the restaurant felt loud—pressed against her ears. The air thickened, tightening her throat. “You have it all now. Your books are all bestsellers. Offers to do more. You’re independently well-off. You’ve checked it all off the list. So, let’s just do it. Tomorrow. This weekend. Next month.”

Blood drained from her head. She felt dizzy. She opened her mouth to speak, but the waiter came. Frustration sparked through Jonah’s striking face.

“Are you ready to order, sir?”

“What’re you having, Meg?” Jonah said, not bothering to look at the menu, nor the waiter.

“Uh . . . I’ll have . . . the special.”

“Same.” He handed his menu back to the server, his attention fixed solely on her.

“Everything all right for drinks?” the server said.

“Yeah.” Still, his gaze didn’t leave her or waver for a second.

As the server left, Jonah said, slowly, quietly, “You can’t do it, can you? You cannot commit. Look at you . . . you live in my house, sleep in my bed, but you park your truck and camper and Jetta in my driveway. You keep a supply of clothes in there, a backup laptop. Ready for what? Emergency escape?”

“The camper is my office.”

“You could get a real office, you know, with foundations and walls and a roof.”

“I like the mobility.”

“You can’t put down roots.” His eyes challenged hers. “It’s just a matter of time before one of the monsters you write about will be released from prison. You should consider security. A proper house, a condo—”

“I have a house.”

Compassion entered his features. “Yes, a house in Shelter Bay that now stands empty and borderline condemned. A house covered in graffiti, and tempting squatters, that is now earning you warning notices from the city.”

“I’ve been meaning to list it, but it’s in a bad state of repair—no one will buy it as it stands.”

“Then tear it down, for God’s sake. It’s not like you don’t have the money. It’s sitting there sheltering ghosts.”

“My aunt might want to move back—”

“
Listen
to yourself, Meg. Irene is in an assisted living facility. The prognosis is not good. You’ll be forty in a few years. I’m forty already. It’s a fair time for us to enter a new stage.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Jonah? That it’s time to grow up? Because maybe I like—”

“I’m trying to tell you that there are only so many growing seasons to a life, Meg. Only so many years to have children. We spoke about this—kids. A family.”

Tick tock bio clock.

She inhaled deeply, drawing on anger now, using it to beat back the biting edge of truth in his words.

“You haven’t even been to see Irene since she went into that home. You haven’t returned in eighteen years. You can’t put roots down here, yet you can’t go back, either. See? You have
not
put it behind you. This is not about your work. It’s about your problem with intimacy, with letting people in. You want connection, yet you push people away. You push
me
away.”

The server brought food. Meg stared, unseeing, at her plate. Throat tight. Unable to breathe. Skin hot.

“If you ask me—”

“I’m not asking you.”

He continued anyway. “It’s the same thing that cost you the crime desk at the
Times
.”

Heat flushed up her chest, neck, and into her face. The curse of a redhead. An anomaly of genetics that embarrassed her into wearing her emotions on her sleeve.

“Why tonight, Jonah? Why push this tonight?”

“Because it’s time. The end of the line. I want to marry you. Either we cross this line and go forward. Tonight. Together. Or we face up to the fact that it’s never going to work.” He paused for several beats. His voice went quiet. “I want to be with you, Meg. I want to make a life, a family with you. I’m tired of being kept on hold. In stasis. Isn’t that what you told Stathakis about lives in limbo, lives without closure? Well, that’s how I feel about us. If that means you going back to Shelter Bay and writing this, then let me help you do it.”

“Sometimes,” she whispered, “I really hate you, you know that? When you drag out all the psychobabble and metaphysical shit—sometimes . . . sometimes I think you’re with me because you see me as some live-in test case. The ‘fiancée in the petri dish.
’
” She made angry air quotes. “The damaged rescue puppy that you think you can rehabilitate, and ‘save’ because it serves the so-called altruist in you, the Dr. Lawson of the realm of fractured minds and souls.” She leaned forward. “But you know as well as I do—there’s no such thing as pure altruism, is there, Jonah? You do it because it makes
you
feel good, and self-righteous. The Messiah.”

He leaned back, rubbed his brow. She’d cut him, and she loved him, and she couldn’t stop jabbing in and twisting the knife. And an indefinable kind of terror and panic was rising up her throat. A self-destructive craving for annihilation. She was whirling into a tunnel, and just gaining speed, unable to stop.

“Maybe,” she said darkly, “I’m having a bit of trouble
committing
since you went and fucked Jan Mascioni.”

He flinched, glanced out the window, blew out a long, controlled breath. Always so damn controlled. He reached for his glass. Holding it by the stem, he took a sip of wine. When he spoke, his voice was soft, defeated.

“We’ve been through that. You know why that happened.”

Hurt flushed through her. So easy for him, just to fill his bed with another woman.

“Jonah—” She reached for his hand.

He moved it away. “No, Meg. Don’t do this. Not this time.”

“Do what?”

“Obfuscate like this. Touch me like this. Try to connect with sex when you’re really using it to shut me out.” A glimmer of anger finally. In his eyes. In that face, that body that attracted her, this man she loved, but couldn’t truly connect with. It was like she had a type of autism or something. As much as she needed him she had an intense need to be alone. And she couldn’t the hell find a way to combine those two drives at war inside herself. Pain balled in her throat. She held her mouth tight against it.

“Give me a date.”

“I . . . I can’t. Just not tonight. I—”

His jaw set in a fierce line. “If not tonight, then, when?”

“I . . . I think I need some air.” She got up. Dizziness swirled. She braced her hand on the table to steady herself.

“Meg.” He grasped her wrist, tight. “Walk away now, leave this restaurant, and it’s over. You know that. This time it’s over for good.”

She stared at his hand on her wrist.

He released her slowly. She turned, hesitated. She walked.

Legs like columns of water, she made it past the reception area, pushed out of the door, and was hit square in the face with a bracing icy wind and biting crystal flakes off the black sea.

She grasped the railing for balance, the wind drawing water from her eyes, because she didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried since the day her father was charged. Since her mother took her own life. With her bare hands she gripped that frozen railing. And she waited. She waited for the door to fling open behind her, for Jonah to come out. To take her home.

Where they would make fierce love until she hurt. Because that’s what usually happened when this—or any other prickly subject—came up. When she was trying to avoid hearing the possible subterranean truths, that she was fucked up in her head and unable to allow anyone to love her. Refusing to need—truly need—anyone again.

But the door remained shut.

He didn’t come.

And she knew, this time he wouldn’t. This time, it really was over.

CHAPTER 2

Three days later. Oregon coast.

Meg peered through the wipers slashing arcs across her truck’s windshield. Rain slanted silver in her headlights. The road was lonely, dark, a sepulchral mist sifting through trees. Strangler vines snaked around coastal pines, cutting off lifeblood, creeping over everything, as if at war with Himalayan blackberry—the place being slowly consumed by alien invasive species and populous sprawl.

The signs had flashed by in the night.
GEARHART
.
SEASIDE
,
CANNON BEACH
,
MANZANITA
. . .

Tension tightened her stomach.

Are you happy?

Jonah had asked this question in the fall, during a visit to the pumpkin patch, as they’d chased his two nieces through the corn maze. He’d grasped her hand, swung her around to face him, kissed her full on the mouth in the rustling privacy of the corn walls. Eyes bright. Hands cold.

“Of course I’m happy,” she’d told him.

Why wouldn’t she be? She had literary acclaim, financial success. Her health. Strength. She was busting with career energy. She’d snagged the man the
Seattle Times
had dubbed the most eligible bachelor in the Northwest. A man with the looks of a dark and broody Heathcliff on high misty moors. A man who was ridiculously independently wealthy in his own right, and who, without question, loved her deeply.

Or had.

She’d met him over three years ago while interviewing him for one of her books. He’d been the consultant for the police on the case, and had presented evidence in court on the state of mind of a serial sexual sadist.

But if anything, her Jonah was an acute observer of human nature, a perpetual delver into the psyche. An obsessive watcher, and he’d been watching her that chill October day. He’d seen in her eyes something deeper, a shadow, as she’d chased his nieces through the husks of corn. They were sisters with the same four-year gap between them as Sherry and herself—the older one remarkably beautiful and full of grace. The younger one gawkish and tomboyish and slavishly loyal to her sibling. An awkward little shadow.

Sherry’s shadow, they’d once dubbed Meg. The redheaded little hoyden who’d chased continually in the wake of Sherry’s golden light. The kid sister who’d idolized Sherry’s feminine magic, the way her big sister could smile with the apparent naiveté of a child while simultaneously wrapping people around her little finger.

“Come. Let’s find the girls!” Meg had pulled away, the husky corn walls suddenly too close, a prison labyrinth she needed to escape.

But Jonah had held on a moment longer. “What do you want out of life—children?”

“When we’re ready.” She’d left him alone in the maze. She’d run after the girls, chasing perhaps a memory through the dead growth, chasing something in herself, or perhaps, as Jonah would have said, running again. From allowing him—anyone—in.

Hot irritation flushed through her, and her hands tightened around the wheel of her Ford F-350. On the back of irritation rode self-reproach, a kind of shame. She reached over to the passenger seat, jabbed the record button of her digital recorder, and took a breath.
The beginning, just start at the beginning . . .

“I should never have lied for Sherry that day,” she said softly into the mic of her hands-free headset, peering into darkness, headlights cutting narrow tunnels into mist. She passed a brooding monkey puzzle tree choked with ivy. “Should never have covered for her—” A sign caught her headlights, white paint bouncing back the gleam of her beams.
SHELTER BAY
.
FIVE MILES
.

Something ran across the road. She hit the brakes, skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder. Her heart thudded. All around her camper and truck, bushes waved in the wind. The skirts of conifers swirled.

She stared at the sign, an unspecified dread mounting in her, forgotten neurons reawakening with fear, drawing her mind down the stairs into the cobwebby murk of her own subconscious. Once the happy hamlet of her youth, Shelter Bay was now a Stephen King-ish town in her memory, a place where blackness lurked below a cracked tourist facade.

And we all know what happens to heroines who go down the stairs into the basement, candle quavering . . .

“That’s where it first went wrong,” she said softly into the mic. “If I’d told Mom and Dad right away that Sherry had gone with him to the spit, instead of going to find her myself, to warn her to hurry home. Save her bacon—” She cleared her throat, beating back tension by speaking louder into the darkness, against the squeak and slap of her wipers. “I don’t know what in me was always trying to save Sherry. Protect her. What did I know at age thirteen, fourteen—was it premonition? Was I beginning to see, subconsciously, as my own sexual awareness dawned, that my sister was tripping a sort of dangerous light fantastic? Dancing just a little too close to the sun that final summer before college, before what was supposed to be the rest of her life? Because in the end, by lying for her, I failed her. Even after her death I failed her, by not remembering. In many ways everything that happened that late August day, and after it, was my fault . . . It should have been
me
, not Sherry, who died.”

Meg shifted her truck back into gear and pulled out into the empty road. Hands firm on the wheel, she fought the mounting urge to pull a U-turn, and just call it quits. Because if she was going to write Sherry’s story, she
had
to go back. She always visited the key locations when she wrote a book—she wanted to take her readers there, too. Wanted them to see, feel, what she’d seen. And, just as she was doing now, she verbally recorded her thoughts and impressions as she went, capturing her own knee-jerk reactions that she would later refine, interpret, and weave into the cold facts of the case.

Just another job, another book. Do it all the same way, and you’ll be fine . . .

“You could argue it every way to Sunday, but there was no escaping the fact that Sherry was the special daughter. The firstborn. The blessed one. She had everything. Tall, lithe. A golden girl to my shorter, dark-red looks. Honey tan to my pale complexion and freckles that made me look like a boiled lobster in the sun. An open smile and easy laugh that could ignite a crowd. She made people feel good. She’d just graduated—had a scholarship lined up for Stanford. Homecoming queen. Had been dating Tommy Kessinger since the eighth grade, a star quarterback. A gold, Greek god himself. A college football scholarship in hand, his sights set on the NFL. Shelter Bay’s young royalty and the world was their oyster . . .”

Meg cleared her throat, negotiating a sharp bend down the twisting road. Steep now. Water running in a sheen down the hill. Her camper buffeted by gusts of wind.

“Until Tyson Mack had growled into town on his custom chrome cruiser, with muscled biceps and rippling tats . . . oozing dark sex appeal, danger, thrill . . . until Sherry had mounted Ty’s bike and gone with him to the make-out spot on the dune spit near the state park boundary. And I’d covered for her while Tyson raped and strangled and left her dead in the dunes.” Meg tapped her brakes before another sharp turn.

“After her death, I used to see the question in my mother’s eyes—
why Sherry?
I used to feel that question in town. I felt blame. And I wore it like a hair shirt, craving the discomfort as a form of self-flagellation. An attempt at redemption I’d never find.”

Jonah’s words sifted into her mind . . .

You need to go back, Meg, and forgive yourself for not having been able to save your sister. You need to see it was
not
your fault . . .

Bitterness filled her mouth. She peered lower through the arcs of the wipers as she drove along the twisting coast road. The drop-off to her right was sheer.

Close now.

She inhaled deeply, taking another stab at it, memories cloaking about her like the mist and darkness enveloping her rig.

“The brutal sexual assault and murder of Sherry was a sin, a violation against this small town of Shelter Bay . . .” Fog was dense at the bottom of the pass. The road leveled. And suddenly there it was. The fork in the road. The wooden sign swinging in the wind and rain.
SHELTER BAY
, home of white dunes and Dungeness crab.

Her chest cramped and she slowed, skin growing hot as she focused on the road hemmed by dune grasses. Then came lights. First, the old diner. She slowed to a crawl. It was still there—with its mini replica of the Shelter Head lighthouse, a landmark that had once defined home. She and Sherry had played in that small lighthouse, like a dollhouse at the bottom of the lawn, while her dad ate breakfast in the diner.

She passed the old motel. Crooked sign. Peeling paint. It was in an even worse state of repair now.
Bates Motel,
they’d called it as kids. Didn’t look much different from the old black-and-white Hitchcock movie version. She wondered if crows still roosted in the old cottonwoods at the back and beaded the telephone lines out front at dusk, black menacing shapes watching the cars go by.

Never catch me staying there. I’d rather be dead than caught staying in a place like that
. . . Sherry’s chuckle. Meg jumped at the memory, so vivid that she glanced over at the passenger seat, as if she might see the spectral form of her sister sitting there, conjured from micromolecules of memory.

. . . Crazy that they haven’t spruced it up yet. Or demolished and rebuilt it . . . You going to stay at the old house tonight, Meg?

Meg dragged her hand down hard over her mouth.

She drove past the elementary school, the rec center where she used to swim, the township offices, fire hall, and she turned into Front Street. It was empty, rain glistening on the pavement, signs swaying in the wind. The old buildings had been gussied up, given rugged frontier facades. Quaint. Pseudo-artsy.

It was the same and it wasn’t, she thought as she cruised slowly through, tires crackling on the wet street. The old town, a palimpsest with the past scraped off, rewritten with bolder, brasher strokes of tourism and commerce, a bigger community. But whenever spaces are rebuilt or remodeled, whenever the vellum is scraped down to be reused, evidence of its former use always remains, the ghosts of the past perpetually whispering just below the skin of the present.

“In those early days, right after her murder, I used to imagine Sherry up in heaven, watching our lives unravel like skeins pulled from carefully knitted sweaters—some rows collapsing faster, others thick and slow—as we all struggled with the aftermath. Mom, Dad. Tommy and his family. Sherry’s best friend, Emma. Blake. Sheriff Kovacs trying to do right by the town. I’d go down to the beach, hunker in the lee of some dune, and watch the heave and pull of the sea, and I’d try to make my body so still, like an empty vessel, in an effort to hear the whisper of Sherry’s spirit, to let her in, to listen for some desperate message she might be trying to impart from the other side. A nudge perhaps. A clue to my missing chunk of memory that would tell us all what had really happened.
How
it had happened. Why. But I couldn’t recall. Either because of the concussion, or because it was so terrible that I’d repressed it. And it’s still down there inside me somewhere—a dark, festering, inky thing.

“Sometimes I actually felt her sitting beside me there on the dune, watching the waves . . . and she’d walk partway home with me, too, but always dematerializing as we got too close.

“Until the day my father hunted down Tyson Mack, and killed him. Until the day my mother, forgetting I was even there, took her own life in grief. Until the day I became an orphan and gave up the stupid notion of Sherry in heaven. And God. Because God and heaven and Sherry and everyone had given up on me.”

Seriously, when did you ever give up on anything, Meggie-Peg . . . you, the litt
le fighter for lost causes and animals . . . when did you once back down on a challenge . . . prove it to me, prove it . . .
A chill shivered down the nape of Meg’s neck. Again, quickly, she glanced at the passenger seat. For a nanosecond she almost caught the sense of Sherry’s smile.

Shit.

This was not going to be easy.

She drew to a stop at a red traffic light, right in front of The Mystery Bookstore. A quiver of recognition shot through her. It was still there, with its bay windows and little panes that reminded her of something out of Dickens. And as she peered through the rain-streaked window at the storefront display, her heart kicked.
Her book.
Her new hardcover,
Sins Not Forgotten,
was front and center, along with a promo poster of her. Her own face staring back out at her through little rain-smeared windowpanes. A distorted fun-house mirror.

She’d tried so hard to forget this town, but it had not forgotten her. Part of her was still here. Right in her favorite store.

Had her earlier books been stocked, too? Had the people of Shelter Bay read her words? She sat for a while, feeling a strange sense of dislocated identity. And guilt. And a sudden stab of longing for something long gone. Her mother, father. Sister. Family. A time when she’d been happy. A time when she used to come here to peruse the new books.

The light turned green. Meg drew in a deep breath and took the road to Forest End, her old subdivision. Her intention was to park the camper outside the family house while she fixed it up, and then to move in while she researched and worked on her book. It was darker here, near the forest, sparsely lit. Trees swished behind the last row of houses. She turned into the old driveway, headlights illuminating a chained gate. Meg removed her headset and stared at the lurid graffiti that covered the walls and boarded-up windows.

Pulling up her rain hood, she got out to open the gates. Rain beat down on her back. The chain was wet and icy cold in her hands, securely padlocked. Rusty. She jiggled the gate, but it held fast. Climbing back into her truck, she scrubbed her hands hard over her wet face, refusing to allow any more memories in.