The Darkest Evening of the Year

sulked briefly. They knew a visit to the vet always included a cookie. Besides, they could smell it on their sister’s breath.
     

     
    Renata Hammersmith lived inland, where pockets of horse country still survived the relentless march of southern California suburbs.
    She dressed so reliably in boots, jeans, and checkered shirts that it was easy for Amy to believe that the woman slept in a similar outfit, impossible to imagine her in pajamas or peignoir.
    Surrounded by white ranch fencing, her three-acre property once featured horses grazing in a meadow that served as the front yard.
    The horses became a luxury when Jerry, Renata’s husband, was disabled. His beloved 1967 Ford Mustang was hit head-on by a pickup.
    Paralyzed from the waist down, Jerry had also lost his spleen, a kidney, and a significant portion of his colon.
    “But I’m still full of shit,” he assured friends.
    He had not lost his sense of humor.
    Drunk, unemployed, and uninsured, the driver of the pickup had walked away from the collision with two broken teeth, an abrasion, and no remorse.
    Six years ago, the Hammersmiths sold Jerry’s construction business, banked the capital gains, cut expenses, and hoped to make the money stretch the rest of their lives. They were now fifty-two.
    Because Renata could not look after Jerry and hold a job, she feared having to sell their land one day. She had lived always with elbow room. The thought of having neighbors a wall away chilled her.
    Amy drove past the ranch house, where thriving red clematis festooned the veranda roof and the posts that supported it. With a cell-phone call en route, she had learned that Renata was working with the ghost dogs in the exercise yard.
    The kennel, converted from a stable, adjoined a fenced green lawn. An immense California live oak shaded half the grass.
    Six golden retrievers were sitting or lying at separate points in the big exercise yard, most of them in the shade. Renata sat on a blanket in the center of the space, a seventh golden at her side.
    As Amy opened the tailgate and let her kids out of the SUV, she looked back the way she had come, past the house, to the county road.
    On the farther side of the two-lane blacktop, opposite the entrance to the Hammersmith property, parked in the purple shadows cast by a small grove of jacarandas, stood the Land Rover that had been following her all morning.
    When she opened the gate to the exercise yard, Fred and Ethel led Nickie directly to Renata, to receive the affection they knew she would bestow, and to greet Hugo, the golden at her side.
    As Amy arrived amidst the slow swarm of four socializing dogs, Renata held up to her the binoculars that she had asked for on the phone.
    With them, Amy looked back toward the distant jacarandas and adjusted the focus, pulling the Land Rover toward her.
    The trees spilled a currency of shadows and a few coins of light across the windshield, conspiring to obscure the face of the man—if it was a man—who sat behind the wheel.
    “Is it the wife-beater?” Renata asked.
    “Can’t tell. Probably not. I don’t think he could have been sprung from jail this quick.”
    Amy sat on the blanket and put the binoculars aside.
    The six ghost dogs watched with interest from their separate positions around the yard. None of them came forward to meet and greet.
    “How’re they doing?” Amy asked.
    “Better. Slow but sure. If not the wife-beater, who?”
    “Maybe I’ve got a secret admirer.”
    “Has someone been sending candy and flowers anonymously?”
    “Secret admirers don’t do that anymore, Renata. These days, they kidnap you, rape you, and kill you with power tools.”
    “What joys the revolution has brought.”

 
    Chapter
16
    V ernon Lesley parked his rustbucket Chevy two blocks from Amy Redwing’s bungalow.
    The sedan was old and in need of body work. He had repaired the upholstery with duct tape. Because the car didn’t clean up well, he never bothered to wash it.
    For a long time, he had been embarrassed by the Chevy, but not once during the past year; because in his other life, he now owned a $150,000 sports car that made a Ferrari look like junkyard scrap.
    He didn’t bother locking the sedan. No one would want to steal it or anything in it.
    Confident that he would attract no attention, he walked directly to Redwing’s place and boldly around to the back porch.
    He was thirty-nine years old, five feet eight, round-shouldered, and paunchy. Thinning beige hair.