When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel Read online

  When the Stars Go Dark is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Paula McLain

  Maps copyright © 2021 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Ballantine and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to use an excerpt from “I Am Too Alone in the World” from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke: A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly, copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  Names: McLain, Paula, author.

  Title: When the stars go dark : a novel / Paula McLain.

  Description: New York : Ballantine Group, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020034008 (print) | LCCN 2020034009 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593237892 (hardback) | ISBN 9780593237908 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kidnapping victims—California. | Young women—California. | Detectives—California. | Resilience (Personality trait)—California.

  Classification: LCC HV6574.U6 M33 2021 (print) | LCC HV6574.U6 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020034008

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020034009

  Ebook ISBN 9780593237908

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title-page and part-title images: © iStockphoto.com

  Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Elena Giavaldi

  Cover photograph: Kristen Campagna / EyeEm / Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Maps

  (prologue)

  Part 1: Signs and Vapors

  (one)

  (two)

  (three)

  (four)

  (five)

  (six)

  (seven)

  (eight)

  (nine)

  (ten)

  (eleven)

  (twelve)

  Part 2: Secret Things

  (thirteen)

  (fourteen)

  (fifteen)

  (sixteen)

  (seventeen)

  (eighteen)

  (nineteen)

  (twenty)

  (twenty-one)

  (twenty-two)

  (twenty-three)

  (twenty-four)

  (twenty-five)

  (twenty-six)

  (twenty-seven)

  (twenty-eight)

  (twenty-nine)

  (thirty)

  (thirty-one)

  (thirty-two)

  (thirty-three)

  (thirty-four)

  (thirty-five)

  (thirty-six)

  (thirty-seven)

  (thirty-eight)

  (thirty-nine)

  Part 3: Time and the Maiden

  (forty)

  (forty-one)

  (forty-two)

  (forty-three)

  (forty-four)

  (forty-five)

  (forty-six)

  (forty-seven)

  (forty-eight)

  (forty-nine)

  (fifty)

  (fifty-one)

  (fifty-two)

  (fifty-three)

  Part 4: The Bent Grove

  (fifty-four)

  (fifty-five)

  (fifty-six)

  (fifty-seven)

  (fifty-eight)

  (fifty-nine)

  (sixty)

  (sixty-one)

  (sixty-two)

  (sixty-three)

  (sixty-four)

  (sixty-five)

  (sixty-six)

  (sixty-seven)

  (sixty-eight)

  (sixty-nine)

  (seventy)

  Dedication

  (acknowledgments)

  (author’s Note)

  By Paula McLain

  About the Author

  Here is the world.

  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.

  Don’t be afraid.

  —Frederick Buechner

  (prologue)

  The mother who tore off her dress when the police came to her house with the news and then ran down the street in only her shoes, while her neighbors, even the ones who knew her well, hid behind their doors and windows, afraid of her grief.

  The mother who clutched her daughter’s purse as the ambulance sped away. The purse pink and white, shaped like a poodle and smeared with blood.

  The mother who began to cook for the detectives and her neighborhood priest while they were still trying to explain to her what had happened, her hands raw as she chopped a mountain of onions, washed dishes in scalding water. No one could get her to sit down. Sitting down meant she had to know it. Accept it.

  The mother who left the mortuary after ID’ing her child’s body and walked in front of a live Muni, the jolt throwing her twenty feet straight backward, her fingertips smoking where the current blew through, her lips black. But she had lived.

  The mother who used to be a famous actress, but now waited for news the way glaciers wait at the far tip of the globe, frozen and quiet, half alive.

  * * *

  —

  The mother I was that day in July, on my knees as the EMT tried to get through to me with words, sentences, my name. I wouldn’t let go of my child’s body. “Detective Hart,” he said over and over as my mind gasped, plummeting. As if that person could still possibly exist.

  (one)

  The night feels shredded as I leave the city, through perforated mist, a crumbling September sky. Behind me, Potrero Hill is a stretch of dead beach, all of San Francisco unconscious or oblivious. Above the cloud line, an eerie yellow sphere is rising. It’s the moon, gigantic and overstuffed, the color of lemonade. I can’t stop watching it roll higher and higher, saturated with brightness, like a wound. Or like a door lit entirely by pain.

  No one is coming to save me. No one can save anyone, though once I believed differently. I believed all sorts of things, but now I see the only way forward is to begin with nothing, or whatever is less than nothing. I have myself and no one else. I have the road and the snaking mist. I have this tortured moon.

  * * *

  —

  I drive until I stop seeing familiar landmarks, stop looking in my rearview to see if someone is following me. In Santa Rosa, the Travelodge is tucked behind a superst
ore parking lot, the whole swath of it empty and overlit, like a swimming pool at night with no one in it. When I ring the bell, the night manager makes a noise from a back room and then comes out cheerfully, wiping her hands on her bright cotton dress.

  “How are you?” she asks. The world’s most innocuous question, impossible to answer.

  “Fine.”

  She holds out the registration card and a purple pen, the dimpled flesh under her arm unfurling like a wing. I feel her looking at my face, my hair. She watches my hands, reading upside down. “Anna Louise Hart. That’s sure a pretty name.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you think so, baby?” Her voice has the Caribbean in it, a rich, warm slant that makes me think she calls everyone “baby,” even me.

  It’s hard work not to flinch at her kindness, to stand in the greenish cast of the fluorescent bulb and write down the number of my license plate. To talk to her as if we’re just any two people anywhere, carrying on without a single sorrow.

  She finally gives me my key, and I go to my room, shutting the door behind me with relief. Inside there’s a bed and a lamp and one of those oddly placed chairs no one ever sits in. Bad lighting flattens everything into dull rectangles, the tasteless carpet and plastic-looking bedspread, the curtains missing their hooks.

  I set down my duffel in the center of the bed, take out my Glock 19 and tuck it under the stiff pillow, feeling reassured to have it nearby, as if it’s an old friend of mine. I suppose it is. Then I grab a change of clothes, and start the shower, taking care to avoid the mirror as I undress, except to look at my breasts, which have hardened into stones. The right is hot to the touch, with a blistered red mound surrounding the nipple. I run the water in the shower as hot as it will go and stand there, being burned alive, with no relief at all.

  When I climb out, dripping, I hold a washcloth under the faucet before microwaving it, sodden, until it smokes. The heat feels volcanic as I press it hard against myself, singeing my hands as I bend double over the toilet bowl, still naked. The loose flesh around my waist feels as rubbery and soft against my arms as a deflated life raft.

  With wet hair, I walk to the all-night drugstore, buying ACE bandages and a breast pump, ziplock bags, and a forty-ounce bottle of Mexican beer. They only have a hand pump in stock, awkward and time-consuming. Back in my room, the heavy outmoded television throws splayed shadows on the bare wall. I pump with the sound off on a Spanish soap opera, trying to distract myself from the ache of the suction. The actors make exaggerated movements and faces, confessing things to one another while I labor on one breast and then the other, filling the reservoir twice and then emptying the milk into the baggies I label 9/21/93.

  I know I should flush it all, but I can’t make myself do it. Instead, I hold the bags for a long minute, registering their meaning before tucking them into the freezer of the small convenience unit and closing the door, and thinking only briefly about the housekeeper who will find them, or some road-strung trucker looking for ice and feeling repulsed. The milk tells a whole sordid story, though I can’t imagine any stranger correctly guessing at the plot. I’m having a hard time understanding it myself, and I’m the main character; I’m writing it.

  * * *

  —

  Just before dawn I wake feverish and take too many Advil, feeling my throat catch and burn around the capsules. A breaking-news banner is running across the bottom of the TV. Forty-seven confirmed dead in Big Bayou, Alabama. Deadliest crash in Amtrak history. Sometime in the middle of the night, a towboat on the Mobile River has gotten off course in heavy fog and driven a barge into the Big Bayou Canot Bridge, displacing the track by three feet. Eight minutes later, running right on schedule, the Amtrak Sunset Limited traveling from Los Angeles to Miami has slammed into the kink at seventy miles per hour, shearing off the first three cars, collapsing the bridge, and rupturing the fuel tank. Amtrak is citing negligence of the tugboat driver. Several crew members are missing, and recovery efforts are still underway. President Clinton is supposed to visit the site later today.

  I click off the set, wishing that the rubbery red button on the remote could work to shut off everything, inside and out. Chaos and despair and senseless death. Trains hurtling toward kinks and gaps, everyone aboard sleeping and clueless. Tugboat captains on the wrong river at exactly the wrong moment.

  Eight minutes, I want to scream. But who would hear me?

  (two)

  Once I worked a missing persons case, a boy we later found in pieces under his grandmother’s porch in Noe Valley, the grandmother on a creaking, peeling porch swing directly over his body when we pulled up. For months after, I couldn’t get her face out of my mind, the powdery folds of skin around her mouth, frosted pink lipstick painted just beyond her upper lip. The serenity in her watery blue eyes.

  Her grandson, Jeremiah Price, was four. She had poisoned him first, so he wouldn’t remember the pain. “Remember” being her word, the first word in the story she was telling herself about what she’d felt she’d had to do. But the story had no center, not to anyone but her. When we took her confession, we asked her the same question over and over. Why did you kill him? She could never tell us why.

  * * *

  —

  In my dim room at the Travelodge, a rotary phone sits on the cheap, scarred bedside table with instructions for dialing out and the rate of long-distance charges. Brendan picks up on the second ring, his voice slow and thick, as if it’s coming through concrete. I’ve woken him up. “Where are you?”

  “Santa Rosa. I didn’t get far.”

  “You should get some sleep. You sound awful.”

  “Yeah.” I look down at my bare legs on the bedspread, feeling the Brillo pad scratchiness of the cheap fabric against my thighs. My T-shirt is damp and wadded, stuck with sweat to the back of my neck. I’ve wrapped my breasts in a tourniquet of bandages, and the pain, in spite of all the Advil, sends a pinging ache through me with each heartbeat, a ragged sort of echolocation. “I don’t know what to do. This is awful. Why are you punishing me?”

  “I’m not, it’s just—” There’s a long, freighted pause as he weighs his words. “You have to figure some things out for yourself.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “I can’t help you.” He sounds defeated, stretched to the breaking point. I can picture him on the side of our bed in dawn light, his body hunched over the phone, one hand in his thick dark hair. “I’ve been trying, and I’m tired, you know?”

  “Just let me come home. We can fix this.”

  “How?” he asks breathily. “Some things aren’t fixable, Anna. Let’s just both take some time. This doesn’t have to be forever.”

  Something in his tone makes me wonder, though. As if he’s cut the cord but is afraid to acknowledge it. Because he doesn’t know what I’ll do. “How much time are we talking? A week or a month? A year?”

  “I don’t know.” His sigh is frayed. “I have a lot of thinking to do.”

  On the bed next to me, my own hand looks waxy and stiff, like something that belongs on a mannequin in a shopping mall. I look away, fixing on a point on the wall. “Do you remember when we first got married? That trip we took?”

  He’s quiet for a minute, and then says, “I remember.”

  “We slept in the desert under that huge cactus with all the birds living inside. You said it was a condominium.”

  Another pause. “Yeah.” He isn’t sure where this is going, isn’t sure I haven’t lost it completely.

  I’m not so sure myself. “That was one of our best days. I was really happy.”

  “Yeah.” Through the phone his breathing quickens. “The thing is, I haven’t seen that woman in a long time, Anna. You haven’t been here for us and you know it.”

  “I can do better. Let me try.”

  Silence spreads through the receiver, po
ols around me on the bed as I wait for his answer. Finally he says, “I don’t trust you. I can’t.” The clarity in his voice is devastating. The resolution. For weeks he’s been so angry, but this is worse. He’s made a decision I can’t fight, because I’ve given him every reason to feel precisely this way. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

  I feel myself teetering on a dark edge. In other moments of our marriage, he would have thrown me a rope. “Brendan, please. I can’t lose everything.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and disconnects before I can say another word.

  * * *

  —

  Nearly two hundred people came to the memorial service, many of them in uniform. Colleagues and friends and well-meaning strangers who’d read the story in the Chronicle and thought, There but for the grace of God go I.

  I zipped myself into a dress I couldn’t feel, so high on Ativan it could have been made of knives. I read lips through huge black sunglasses while Brendan said thank you over and over. Back at the house, I positioned myself in a corner of the kitchen, turned away from the aggressively placed flowers and condolence notes, the stricken faces around the table full of casseroles and cheese platters. My supervising officer, Frank Leary, found me there, a plate of food in his hands that he didn’t even pretend to want.