The Darkest Evening of the Year

could wake Brian, and said softly, “Hello?”
    No one responded.
    Although Brian continued to sleep, Nickie had awakened. She raised her head to watch Amy.
    “Hello?” she repeated.
    “Oh. Is that you, dear? Well, yes, of course it is.”
    The sweet, high-pitched voice was unmistakable. Amy almost said Sister Mouse, caught herself, and said, “Sister Jacinta.”
    “You’ve been in my thoughts so much lately, Amy.”
    Amy hesitated. She thought of the slippers. She felt now as she had felt then, when Nickie insisted she take the slippers. “Sister…You too. You’ve been in my thoughts.”
    Sister Jacinta said, “You’re always in my heart of course, you were one of my very favorites, but lately you’re in my thoughts all the time, all the time, so I thought I better speak to you.”
    Emotion tied a knot in Amy’s vocal cords.
    “Dear? Are you all right with me—I mean, the middle of the night like this?”
    Speaking hardly above a whisper, Amy said, “Just tonight I told Brian, a friend…told Brian about back then, our mascot Nickie.”
    “That wonderful, wonderful dog.”
    “And the locket you gave me.”
    “Which you still wear.”
    “Yes.” With her forefinger, she traced the contours of the canine cameo.
    “This friend, dear, do you love him?”
    “Sister, I’m sorry, but I’m kind of…struggling here.”
    “Well, love is or it isn’t. You must know.”
    Amy merely murmured now. “Yes. I love him.”
    “Have you told him?”
    “Yes. That I love him. Yes.”
    “I meant have you told him all of it?”
    “No. I guess you know. I haven’t yet.”
    “He needs to know.”
    “It’s so hard, Sister.”
    “The truth won’t diminish you in his eyes.”
    She could barely speak. “It diminishes me in my own.”
    “I’m proud you were one of my girls. I say, ‘See her, she was one of my Mother of Mercy girls, see how she shines?’”
    Amy had come to tears again, quiet tears this time. “If only I could believe that was true.”
    “Remember to whom you’re talking, dear. Of course it’s true.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t be sorry. Just tell him. He very much needs to know. It is imperative. Now get some sleep, child, get some sleep.”
    Although Amy heard no change in line tone, she sensed that they had been disconnected. “Sister Jacinta?”
    She received no reply.
    “Oh, Sister Mouse, sweet Sister Mouse.”
    She placed the phone on the nightstand.
    She turned on her side, toward Nickie. Face to face, Amy put one arm around the dog. Those eyes.
    Amy shuddered, not because of the call itself, but because the call must mean that something terrible was coming.
    Sister Jacinta, Sister Mouse, had been dead for ten years.

 
    Chapter
49
    A writer who had never failed to excite Billy Pilgrim’s contempt for humanity, who had reliably made him laugh uproariously at those cretins who believed in human exceptionalism, had this time failed him utterly and had raised in him not one giggle in forty pages of text.
    Billy twice studied the photograph on the back of the jacket, but the face was familiar. The piercing eyes that challenged you to read the savage truth between these covers. The slight sneer that said If you don’t laugh at this poisonous satire, you’re a self-deluded fool who will never be invited to the best parties.
    The writer had changed publishing houses, but that could not account for the collapse of his standards, the loss of his narrative voice. This publisher had released a number of books that Billy had found enormously appealing. It was a highly credible house.
    No publisher hit home runs all the time or even the majority of the time, but this colophon on the spine had always previously been a mark of quality.
    As Billy stared at the colophon, a chill prickled at the crown of his head and spread outward in concentric shivers, to the limits of his receding hairline and beyond, down his unsmiling face, down the back of his neck, to the base of his spine, to the pit of his gut.
    A stylized sprinting dog served as the colophon. Although not a golden retriever, it was a dog nonetheless.
    He had seen this colophon a thousand times, and it had never unnerved him before. It unnerved him now.
    He was tempted to click on the gas-log fireplace and consign the book to the flames. Instead, he put it in the nightstand and closed the drawer.
    The memory of the tears that he had shed in McCarthy’s kitchen remained vivid, mortifying and frightening. In his line of