The Darkest Evening of the Year

guardhouse somewhere ahead.”
    The car drifted forward. Amy said, “Wait.” Brian stopped again.
    Amy turned in her seat, said “Move” to Nickie, and snatched her carryall from the back. She opened a zipper, withdrew the SIG P245.
    “If it’s feeling funky to you,” he said, “we can turn around, drive past the gate. The open ground’s rough but passable.”
    “I don’t know how it feels. I have to trust furface here.”
    At the sight of the pistol, the golden stopped growling.
    Amy said, “We know Vanessa’s sick. How sick, do you think?”
    “She’s too in love with herself to do anything too stupid.”
    “That’s the calculation I made when I wondered whether I should bring a gun. I decided I didn’t need it. Yet here it is in my hand.”
    He nodded. “Let’s go back.”
    “No.”
    “You just said—”
    “Here’s the thing. There’s a pattern. I lost a girl, and you lost a girl. Mine is gone forever. Yours isn’t, but she may be soon.”
    Nickie whined, as though to suggest urgency and to add emphasis to Amy’s use of the word soon .
    “But they want us to take her,” Brian said.
    “The pattern includes things unseen. That night, Michael wasn’t in Argentina, he was right there, I didn’t know. The alarm system appeared to be engaged, a secret override disarmed it.”
    Phantoms of fog shaped all the monsters of myth.
    “Vanessa’s rich boy is waiting with documents, a fat checkbook,” Amy continued. “But he’s a thing unseen, maybe he doesn’t exist.”
    “We agreed her story made sense.”
    “The pattern is clearer now. In Connecticut, I thought I might get a golden. If I’d had one, it would have warned me, saved us.”
    As if on cue, Nickie growled again.
    “We have a golden now,” Amy said. “And not just any golden.”
    “For sure, not just any. She’s…something.”
    “I had a phone call from a dead nun.”
    “Is this a Marco-and-his-blind-dog moment?”
    “The dog isn’t blind. I told myself Just a dream. I knew better. Sister Jacinta said tell you about my girl, how I lost her.”
    “Okay, that’s it, we go back to the county road, call the cops.”
    “No. Vanessa expects us in a few minutes. The fog explains a short delay, not a long one. I’ve got a bad feeling, Brian.”
    “Yeah. It’s infectious.”
    “Truth is, I’ve had a bad feeling the whole way here.”
    “You didn’t say.”
    “Because it was maybe the only chance to find your girl. Let’s go a little farther.”
    The amorphous white tissue of the late afternoon parting as if to the thrust of a blade, healing at once behind, enfolding on every side things unseen…
    Amy said, “If something about this does stink, and she thinks we smell it, she’ll kill Hope.”
    “Where do you get that from?”
    “Intuition. Pattern. What Theresa said.”
    “Theresa?”
    “She told her mother the dog’s name was always Nickie. Always.”
    In the deep swamp of fog, half-seen trees, bearded and strange, prehistoric and insectile, looming then gone…
    Amy said, “You and me forever, Brian. Isn’t that where we are?”
    “God, I hope it is. It’s what I want.”
    “So if it’s you and me, and Hope is yours, then Hope is mine, too. Our daughter. I couldn’t save my own girl. Not back then.” Her voice pulled tight, didn’t break. “But two nights ago I saved her.”
    “Amy…?”
    “I saved her, and now she’s helping us save Hope.”
    He coasted toward a stop. “Amy, you don’t mean…”
    “Keep moving.” She held the pistol in both hands, palms dry, ready. “Whatever I mean, this is a second chance for both of us. If we fail to take it, the levels of Hell don’t go deep enough to give us what we’ll deserve.”
    Into the last white-blind minutes before twilight, when the mist will darken to murk…
    Brian said, “So it’s this again.”
    “This?”
    “Tagging after you into crazy-violent, tire-iron, jumping-on-the-table places.”

 
    Chapter
62
    L ike ten thousand people whispering in the distance.
    Standing with his back to the fissured trunk of a pine, Billy strove to silence the sea, but the sea had no respect for Billy.
    Not only had the stupid simile changed how he perceived the sound of the surf, but it also led him to the further conviction that those ten thousand people were whispering his name.
    Everybody liked Billy. Likability had always been his most valuable asset. But the ten thousand people out there in the fog, down on the shore, were not