A Darker Place Read Online Free

continued existence, a payback for the lethal blend of arrogance and blindness that killed Abby. Suicide would have been a relief and a coward’s way out, so I gave myself over to Glen and his crazy schemes.
    And on the whole, her work for Glen had been worth it. There was no bringing Abby back, but she had at least saved other mothers’ children. Maybe only a few; perhaps as many as sixty-eight, all the children salvaged from the four communities she had interfered with. No matter the numbers, she had begun to feel a semblance of equilibrium, that she had done her penance and might be allowed to move on.
    How long, Abby?
she whispered into the still air. How many more weeks of acting stupid and serene while my bowels go loose with shitting out the terror? How many more times do I ritually pollute myself with that man, whom I don’t know if I love or hate? How long until a great wave of tiredness overtakes me at some crucial moment, and I blurt out something that triggers a madman’s paranoia?
Oh God; how many more times can I do this?
    Anne had not realized that she was taking Abby’s photograph from its resting place in the drawer until she found herself sitting back in the chair studying her daughter’s face. She kept the picture hidden for fear that it would become familiar and lose its ability to reach her. Time, however, and the first faint distortions of color on the paper had conspired to make the child a bit of a stranger.
    Abby had not been beautiful; Anne had known that even when she was alive. She was an ordinarily lovely child with a wild mop of curly, almost kinky black hair—Aaron’s impossible hair—dark brown eyes, and a dimple in her right cheek. Her teeth would have required braces had she lived long enough, but at the age the photograph was taken, just after her seventh birthday, their crookedness was merely charming.
    Aaron had taken the picture, unusually enough, although Anne had still been there on the Farm. In the early years of gazing at the photo she had thought that the faint blur on the far right border was her own arm, because she remembered Abby grinning just that way, on the picnic lunch two days before Anne had left, and she wanted very badly to be in the picture with her daughter.
    Print it how they might, though, the photo labs had been able only to raise a blur. It might possibly have been Anne’s elbow; more probably it was the tail of one of the Farm dogs.
    Two days before Anne had driven away in their Volkswagen camper van, the aperture of Aaron’s camera had opened and allowed Abby’s face and her living body to be imprinted onto the emulsion of the film. Two days after the picture was taken, Abby’s mother had abandoned her, driving off to try and “find herself” (a phrase that still had the power to set Anne shaking with an intensity of fury and detestation, on the rare occasions when a student or a friend chanced to use it in her hearing). She drove off to find herself, and eight days later drove home to find instead the remote dirt road clogged with the pulsing lights of a hundred strange vehicles, sheriff and newsmen, ambulance and coroner’s vans, disturbed neighbors and frightened relatives, and at the core of it, when she had finally clawed her frantic way through to the cloying miasma of death that lay over thefarmhouse and barn complex, a dozen or more invisible, unmarked, and distinctive late-model cars of American manufacture, driven by men like Glen McCarthy.
    The film in Aaron’s camera had been developed by one of the government agencies as an automatic part of the investigation, and returned to her many months later along with Abby’s shoes and teddy bear and several cartons of Aaron’s books. More than three years later, during the final stages of her Ph.D., she had been moving apartments and come across the few things of theirs that she had kept, and she made the mistake of taking the developed strips of negatives in to be printed. There had been