When the Stars Go Dark

by Paula McLain

The night feels shredded as I leave the city, through perforated mist, a crumbling September sky.

Even the unkempt motel parking lot is a garden, half a dozen silk trees with feathery fuchsia drag-queen blooms.

I’d lived in larger, dingier towns all through Mendocino County. By comparison, the village was spick-and-span, with only fifteen streets that even had names. In my mind, it seemed like a doll’s house you could open like a suitcase and see into, room by room.

The sun slid into the Pacific as if it was slowly melting, a ball of widening orange-pink taffy that seemed to pulse from the center, like a beating heart.

I can only assume the girl was Cameron Curtis, my subconscious fabricating a version of her disappearance, caught up in the drama that’s always preoccupied me, long before I became a detective, even. As if cries for help that are forever ringing through the atmosphere get amplified as they cross my path, and sticky. As though they belong to me somehow, and I have no say in the matter, no choice at all but to try and answer them.

My fingertips are still sticky with the strands as I press inside, and then time is sticky, too. I’m ten or eleven, being shown the secret way into the grove for the first time.

There’s an old ghost story about that, I remember, how the devil steals souls by asking for them openly. He isn’t a thief, but a master manipulator. The real danger, or so the story goes, isn’t in the devil himself, but in not knowing you have a choice to turn him away.

For as long as I could remember, I’d had reasons to disappear. I was an expert at making myself invisible, but this was something else. I was part of things now, knitted into the landscape. And not overlooked at all, but cared about.