Darkfall

pour it out all at once.”
    “I want you to understand.”
    “Take your time. I’ll be here. I’ll wait. Take your time.”
    VIII
    In the corrugated metal shed, leaning over the pit, using two pair of ceremonial scissors with malachite handles, Lavelle snipped both ends of the cord simultaneously.
    The photographs of Penny and Davey Dawson fell into the hole, vanished in the flickering orange light.
    A shrill, unhuman cry came from the depths.
    “Kill them,” Lavelle said.
    IX
    Still in Rebecca’s bed.
    Still holding each other.
    She said, “The police only had my description to go on.”
    “A six-year-old child doesn’t make the best witness.”
    “They worked hard, trying to get a lead on the creep who’d shot Daddy. They really worked hard.”
    “They ever catch him?”
    “Yes. But too late. Much too late.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “See, he got two hundred bucks when he robbed the shop.”
    “So?”
    “That was over twenty-two years ago.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Two hundred was a lot more money then. Not a fortune. But a lot more than it is now.”
    “I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”
    “It looked like an easy score to him.”
    “Not too damned easy. He killed a man.”
    “But he wouldn’t have had to. He wanted to kill someone that day.”
    “Okay. Right. So, twisted as he is, he figures it was easy.”
    “Six months went by…”
    “And the cops never got close to him?”
    “No. So it looks easier and easier to the creep.”
    A sickening dread filled Jack. His stomach turned over.
    He said, “You don’t mean…?”
    “Yes.”
    “He came back.”
    “With a gun. The same gun.”
    “But he’d have to’ve been nuts!”
    “All junkies are nuts.”
    Jack waited. He didn’t want to hear the rest of it, but he knew she would tell him; had to tell him; was compelled to tell him.
    She said, “My mother was at the cash register.”
    “No,” he said softly, as if a protest from him could somehow alter the tragic history of her family.
    “He blew her away.”
    “Rebecca…”
    “Fired five shots into her.”
    “You didn’t… see this one?”
    “No. I wasn’t in the shop that day.”
    “Thank God.”
    “This time they caught him.”
    “Too late for you.”
    “Much too late. But it was after that when I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a cop, so I could stop people like that junkie, stop them from killing the mothers and fathers of other little girls and boys. There weren’t women cops back then, you know, not real cops, just office workers in police stations, radio dispatchers, that sort of thing. I had no role models. But I knew I’d make it someday. I was determined. All the time I was growing up, there was never once when I thought about being anything else but a cop. I never even considered getting married, being a wife, having kids, being a mother, because I knew someone would only come along and shoot my husband or take my kids away from me or take me away from my kids. So what was the point in it? I would be a cop. Nothing else. A cop. And that’s what I became. I think I felt guilty about my father’s murder. I think I believed that there must’ve been something I could have done that day to save him. And I know I felt guilty about my mother’s death. I hated myself for not giving the police a better description of the man who shot my dad, hated myself for being numb and useless, because if I had been of more help to them, maybe they’d have gotten the guy before he killed Mama. Being a cop, stopping other creeps like that junkie, it was a way to atone for my guilt. Maybe that’s amateur psychology. But not far off the mark. I’m sure it’s part of what motivates me.”
    “But you haven’t any reason at all to feel guilty,” Jack assured her. “You did all you possibly could’ve done. You were only six!”
    “I know. I understand that. But the guilt is there nevertheless. Still sharp, at times. I guess it’ll always be there, fading year by year, but never fading away altogether.”
    Jack was, at last, beginning to understand Rebecca Chandler-why she was the way she was. He even saw the reason for the overstocked refrigerator; after a childhood filled with so much bad news and unanticipated shocks and instability, keeping a well-supplied larder was one way to buy at least a small measure of security, a way to feel safe. Understanding increased his respect and already deep affection for her. She was a very special