Free Darkness peering by Alice Blanchard

curled in a fetal position
on a narrow bed, clean white sheets tucked securely under his chin as
if he were somebody's child.
    "He had his own room?" Rachel asked.
    "I considered Marty to be a permanent resident. He died in his sleep,
looks like to me."
    The room was spartan, the furniture mostly secondhand. Books littered
the rickety bedside table. On the dresser was a photograph of a man,
woman and child--Melissa as a toddler. Her mother held her with
supreme tenderness and delicacy, as if she were made of hand blown
glass, and everyone was smiling.
    Rev. Boudreau picked up the picture from the dresser. "After his
daughter was murdered, his wife, Frances, just fell apart and had to be
committed. In one fell swoop, Marty lost everything ... his family,
his job, his home."
    "And that's when you took him in?"

    "Heavens, no. He rode the rails for several years. I don't know what
happened to him during that time. We never discussed it."
    Rachel checked for a pulse. The old man's skin was cold and livor
mortis was evident, indicating he'd been dead for at least a couple of
hours. After a brief inspection, she said, "And the murder of his
daughter ... that case was never solved?"
    "I have my suspicions." He looked at her oddly. "You don't remember
any of this, do you?"
    She shook her head, an old sadness reasserting itself. "My father
committed suicide right around that time."
    "Oh yes," he said tenderly. "I remember."
    When Rachel was young, there were scary things she wasn't supposed to
talk about. Secrets. Bad things. Like Billy killing those cats.
Like her father's dark moods and her mother's anger. Like the retarded
girl. Rachel and her friends used to take turns acting out the murder.
Rachel often played the victim, and her best friend, Anne Marie, would
wrap her hands around Rachel's throat and squeeze, and once Rachel
almost blacked out. There was a murderer loose in town, but then her
lather shot himself, and none of her friends ever mentioned Melissa
D'Agostino again.
    After Rachel's father committed suicide, a hole opened up inside of
her. She couldn't stop thinking about the last few seconds of his
life. She hoped he wasn't in any pain when the gun went off. She
hoped he blinked out like a light. As the years passed, the hole
inside her filled up with tears and guilt, and then one day she stopped
thinking about it altogether.
    Her mother had been inconsolable. Her mother's sorrow had stretched
across the landscape like a blanket of snow, smothering all color,
suffocating the world.
    "You said you had your suspicions, Reverend?"
    He glanced down at Marty D'Agostino's body and sighed. "Ozzie Rudd.
Perhaps a few others."
    "Are you serious?"

    "I wouldn't kid about a thing like that."
    "But no suspect was ever arrested, isn't that right?"
    "Correct." He shrugged. "The evidence was circumstantial, at best.
No confessions. No eyewitnesses. You have to realize, these kids were
all from influential families. The D.A. wouldn't touch it."
    "What makes you so sure it was Ozzie?"
    "I'm not sure. It's just a hunch. Ozzie Rudd admitted to us that he
and some friends picked Melissa up after school on the day of the
murder. And that they later dropped her off at Black Hill Road."
    Her stomach knotted. "What friends?"
    He gave a pained expression. "It's all in the case file."
    "You're not suggesting I reopen the case, are you, Reverend?"
    "I'm not suggesting anything."
    She didn't know much about Billy and the cats. Her parents had
protected her from the truth, and she'd buried the memory like a
shameful thought. She didn't feel sorry for herself for having lost
her father so young. Instead she locked the mystery away in her heart
and kept it there, snug. Her private fury. Daddy was gone. He had
given so much, and yet he'd taken away even more.
    Rachel shook her head, refusing to accept it. "Ozzie Rudd wouldn't
hurt a flea."
    His smile was kind. "Your father was a good man, Rachel. Melissa