What We Lost in the Dark

  “You know he’s not there! No one in that family is there. Every one of them except Dr. Andrew’s son Tim is in Bolivia. You know that, Allie. You saw that on the news. You saw them leaving.” My mother stopped the car in our driveway. “You got a letter from the night supervisor about your volunteer service …”

  I snorted. In my mind, Garrett Tabor could be anywhere he wanted to be. My fear had assumed the proportions of reverence, invested him with the superpowers.

  “Well, you did. You saw them leave. On that note, Dr. Stephen said he regretted that he wouldn’t be around to help you, and that he hoped you had a good experience.”

  This was also true. Even though the general belief was that I’d tried to boil his boy alive, Dr. Stephen Tabor seemed genuinely concerned for me—and even enthused.

  “Do you believe that?” my mother said.

  “I believe you.”

  At least one of us should relax. I didn’t believe her, at all.

  “I believe you,” Angie said. Then, I had to smile.

  “No one will punish you anymore. It’s over,” Mom added.

  On both counts, she was wrong.

  A week later, when I showed up for my community service, the first person I saw was Garrett Tabor, the man who murdered Juliet, and who knows how many other girls, and who also would murder me.

  2

  ONCE AGAIN, FOR THE FIRST TIME

  The night I arrived at the lab, I pulled into the parking lot, then nearly jerked the wheel of the car around and went home.

  There was the little red Italian sports car—the car that had twice almost run me down, the car that Garrett Tabor drove.

  But that was silly.

  What had Mom said? None of the Tabors was around. I breathed out, as a therapist taught me after my best friend’s strange death. “Breathe out, breathe out,” she said. “The body would always breathe in on its own.” I listened for my heartbeat to obey, following the meter of my breathing down and down.

  It wasn’t Garrett Tabor. The car belonged to his pathologist father, Dr. Stephen.

  Why it was parked here, instead of in Steve’s garage? I had no idea. He could park his car anywhere he wanted.

  I stood up straighter and pressed the button on the steel door. A buzz prompted me to enter the one-story concrete-block building that housed the Iron County Medical Examiner’s Office. When I got inside, though, there was no one in the short hall that separated the lab and morgue from the offices.

  “Hello?” I said. “Hello?”

  The interim night supervisor would be a medical doctor, or a nurse practitioner like my mother. There would also be an evidence technician to train me.

  From behind me, I heard a sudden clicking and slithering, like a snake wearing cleats.

  “Good evening, Allie,” said Garrett Tabor. “How are you?”

  I whirled like a child’s top. A whimper escaped my throat. I saw the pleasure rippling across his face. Not in Bolivia, he stood two feet from me. Blondie. It was the streak of platinum that ran down the wavy dark pelt of his hair. The first time I saw that streak, Tabor was hunched over a half-naked girl in an empty apartment.

  Garrett Tabor: trusted ski coach, privileged son, genetic researcher, and serial killer.

  Does that surprise you?

  Does it surprise you that a serial killer was walking around?

  The great majority of them are walking around. The great majority look like everyone else. My criminology books call them “unsubs,” meaning that they’re unknown. Some even look a little better than most—unless you catch the unguarded flat gaze of the predator, sympathetic as a grizzly. They present a front that’s civil, even charming. That’s how they get people.

  I put my hand behind me on the door handle. It didn’t budge.

  Tabor shrugged. “It’s a government office. It has to be locked at night. There’s a code you punch in on that pad.”

  A code.

  “That’s illegal,” I said. “What if there was a fire?”

  Or a murder?

  “Of course there are emergency exits.”

  I wouldn’t be able to find them. The over-breathing rose like floodwater. You can have one panic attack or you can have fifty; and they all feel like you’re dying. I rummaged in my front pack for my keys, tethered to my phone case.

  “Let me out,” I said finally, gasping.

  “You can leave whenever you want,” Garrett Tabor said.

  “Where’s the supervisor?”

  Garrett Tabor shrugged again. “Nobody’s here but us.”

  Shit. Shit. Shit. A panic attack … incoming, incoming. I punched in button two, the one that led to my boyfriend, Rob Dorn. Answer, I prayed. Answer.

  “I’m organizing my data from Bolivia,” he said. “I came back early.”

  “I’ll call the police.”

  I could hear Rob, distantly saying, “Allie? Hello? Allie?” I pressed the speaker. “I’m right here,” I said. “I’m in the lab with Garrett Tabor. So you know.” To Tabor, I said again, “I’m going to call the police.”

  “To say what?” Tabor said. As always, he was right. “I just want a chance to tell you I feel badly about this, Allie.”

  “Badly?”

  “This is all so sad. First Juliet. Then this thing with you. So much hurt could have been avoided. I realize how impaired your judgment was. I’ll give you that much.” He smiled, a dog’s grin, avid and yet patient. “I’m trying to move past this.”

  “Move past it …? You’re crazy,” I said. “Let me out.” I almost added please. I was sweating and lunging like a runner who’d left everything on the track. Tabor looked as at ease in this house of the dead as he would have looked in his own bedroom. Of course he did. Just as Dr. Stephen ran this office, and Dr. Andrew Tabor ran the Tabor Clinic, they owned the condominiums, the ski and dive rentals, the motor lodges, and two of the restaurants. Iron Harbor was the name of this place only by virtue of geography. It should be called Tabor-ville.

  I stared now at the scion of that great family of healers.

  That I was even here was because Garrett Tabor’s lies were better than my truth. After Juliet’s death, he said I had scaled the balconies to his apartment—a place, of course, called the Tabor Oaks Condominiums. He said I’d broken in wearing a ski mask and poured boiling water on him as he lay innocently in bed.

  How could adults believe pure shit? I … poured boiling water on him? I found the stove in a place I’d never been, and put a teakettle on, with Tabor one wall away? If I’d gone to the trouble to catch him vulnerable, why didn’t I just bring a big hammer and hit him with it? Still, Tabor had the surveillance tapes of Rob and Juliet and I climbing the outside walls that long-ago night. He had second-degree burns rippling along his neck and a ski mask I’d once owned.

  WHAT WAS TRUE was that I was a gifted climber.

  Rob and Juliet and I had practiced the urban discipline called Parkour, and there was almost no place that we could not boulder up or leap down from. We had indeed traced the Tabor Oaks, and had seen Tabor there. Those tapes had no time stamp. We were high with the triumph when I saw him with that still, colorless, half-naked young woman whose name no one would probably ever know, helpless, her clothing and her dignity torn away, by those same immaculate hands.

  I called the police back then.

  I called them later, when Garrett Tabor forced me to jump from the third story of a parking garage, breaking my arm so badly I had to have surgery.

  I called when he threatened me, and again when he cornered me in a local cemetery, finally chasing me all the way into town until I screamed for help front of Gitchee Pizza.

  The owner, Gideon Brave Bear, a true friend and a true drunk, fired off both barrels of his shotgun. Gideon got a ticket. Tabor got the satisfaction of knowing that no one believed Gid or me. It was always my word against his. His word always prevailed.

  Except once.

  After Juliet’s memorial service, when I got the phone cal
ls, I didn’t risk calling the police. The only person I trusted was Dr. Barry Yashida, my advisor at John Jay University. A man I’d met only once on Skype, he had kept my confidence, and kept what I gave him.

  It wasn’t even the horror of Juliet’s disappearance, or the confirmation that Juliet’s DNA matched the badly mauled remains pulled from the river three weeks later.

  The phone calls diced my guts.

  Deep in sedative-soaked sleep after Juliet’s memorial, I never heard my phone go off. The following night, my breath stopped when I beheld the screen: five calls from Juliet’s phone.

  Dead for weeks, Juliet left me five pleading, chilling phone messages.

  Dr. Yashida, who’d been FBI for thirty years, had the voiceprint of the phone call compared with the old videos Juliet and I made, of us dancing, or modeling the clothes we’d bought. At least three were a near-perfect match for her voice. CD copies of those calls were in the fireproof safe in Rob’s ceiling.

  Now I knew that those calls had been recorded long ago.

  A heartless ruse from a soulless creature, they had done the job that they were meant to do on my head.

  He wanted me to think there was slimmest chance that Juliet was still alive and needed me. If I told anyone, I would pull the trigger on the even-worse: if she were alive, then she would die because of me.

  Since then, my mother and my sister and I lived not only with blackout shades on the windows but with motion sensors in the yard and, on the doors, thick, steel prison locks that opened only to a code we changed weekly. It made me strange. My little sister Angela had to text me twice to prove she was at school before I could sleep. I would check the door and window locks, not just once but twenty times. Next to my bed—along with my sleep mask, my Maglite, and my miner’s headlamp, and the stack of journals I’d been writing in since I was twelve—I now also kept the kind of weighted baseball bat that hitters use in practice, a gift Rob insisted on giving me, admittedly not the most romantic token you could imagine, but protective. Rob’s dad had a collection of a couple of hundred of those bats that once belonged to sluggers in the pros. He gave them like golden tickets to the owners of sporting goods stores who were good boys and girls and pushed lots of gear with official team logos—the stuff Mr. Dorn sold. We figured he wouldn’t miss one.

  A bat like that could kill with one swing.

  NOW, HERE I was, in a morgue, in the approximate dead center of nowhere, filled with silence and saws and poisons, facing the man who bequeathed such madness.

  The police had come to think of me as an overheated sick girl with an overactive imagination and a grudge against the family to whom I literally owed my life.

  If you went even further back, I was here not only because of what Garrett Tabor was, but because of what I was.

  I wouldn’t have been trapped in this pus-green hallway with a murderous sicko if my parents didn’t fall for someone with a recessive gene that turned out to be well … me. I was born with Xeroderma Pigmentosum, or XP, the deadly “allergy” to sunlight. So was Juliet, and so was Rob. So if I were the best singer who ever lived, I could never be on Broadway. The spotlights would fry me to a crisp. If you have XP, you are the bread, and life is the toaster.

  A boy once dismissed Juliet by saying she was pretty hot for a girl who had to go home every morning and sleep in her coffin. Well, we weren’t dead, or even undead, but we only came out at night, or, on rare occasions, in daylight, wearing light-resistant regalia that made us look like we were going to battle against the Imperial forces without benefit of atmosphere. The only line of defense between XP and me was the Tabor Clinic, the world’s eminent research and treatment facility.

  Garrett Tabor’s grandfather, Simon, founded the Tabor Clinic.

  With Simon’s own sons following in his footsteps, Dr. Andrew treated the living. Garrett Tabor’s father, Stephen, a pathologist, analyzed the tissues of those who died from XP, along with his duties as ME.

  When it came to this disease, they were the top researchers on earth.

  So why wasn’t the Tabor Clinic in New York or San Diego, but instead here, in the northernmost northwoods, on the edge of a village that made Paris, Illinois, look like Paris, France?

  It was for a prosaic reason. Dr. Simon liked to ski. His family had a cottage in Iron Harbor when he was a boy, and he brought his own young family here from the University of Chicago. Dr. Simon’s now several hundred years old, but he still skis. Watching him water-ski is like seeing one of those movies in which the skeletons in armor spring up from dragon’s teeth.

  From all over the world, the Tabor Clinic attracted families like Rob’s, Allie’s, and mine. Some of them had younger kids with the telltale clusters of big, dark freckles that often characterize the disease. There were older XP patients in Iron Harbor, but not much older. There were even other teenagers, but the hide-inside kind. For the three of us, sunset was the dawn. We rushed out into a bright new night, to find something to do—or simply to raise some hell.

  We’d grown up inseparable, as loyal as you can be only to someone who saw you eat sand and then skinny dip, who saw you hide your first lost tooth under your pillow in a bag tied with a ribbon and then hide your beer under the pier in a bag tied with a clothesline.

  It felt like forever sometimes.

  And then Juliet changed. It was nearly imperceptible at first. She was always different when she was skiing, so it seemed like any other year. Juliet was one of Tabor’s ski prodigies—a gifted aerialist and at practically no risk to her at all (except the obvious risks of flipping around a hundred and fifty feet in the air down a hill). Because XP people have very weak eyes, she wore specially treated glasses. All the rest of her, every inch, by the very nature of the sport, was covered, slick as a sexy seal in Juliet’s trademark midnight blue. By the time she was fourteen, she was nationally ranked, known for the deceptively reckless grace of her spins and flips.

  Then, so quietly at first we never sensed a thing, Tabor began to spin into Juliet’s life, to spin his web.

  Tabor used my Juliet’s lust for freedom to push her past skiing, making her his live doll, his sexual toy—when she was not yet fifteen.

  Still, even then, when Tabor had her in his coils, “us” still meant the three of us. Even after last year, when Rob realized that he was as much in love with me as I had been with him since I was eleven, which should have ended it, we were the tres compadres. The primary “us” was the first “us” that existed—Juliet and me. Rob and me. Juliet and Rob and me.

  Only death parted us.

  We could have died from Parkour, but if you’re going to die young, and we probably were, you crave thrills. While Juliet was a skier, Rob and I would crawl into caves so narrow that Rob’s broad shoulders barely fit—caves that could have been home to rabid wolverines—just to do it. On our own skis, we went not down cliffs, but off the edges. Then Juliet took a bad fall, and doctors learned that her vision had deteriorated so much that she had the eyesight of a vole. She was through. She almost lost her mind.

  Break-ins and brewfests kept us going for a while. But then, just in time, before we turned to vices in a get-busted way, Juliet led us to Parkour. Every dull structure in our very dull town became something to vault, to conquer. We got bruises and blisters, big biceps, concussions, and broken bones. We violated people’s privacy and we trespassed—on private and government property. And it was all ferociously magical until we scaled the Tabor Oaks, where we saw what crawled out at night.

  3

  THROWDOWN

  “If you want to stay, my father left your instructions on that empty desk over there,” Garrett Tabor said.

  “I’m not staying,” I said. “Screw that.”

  I could feel my guts constrict, like wet laundry. After Juliet, life for me was holding its breath. Would I let him make me go on holding my breath forever?

  “Allie, Allie, don’t look so scared,” Tabor said. “I’m not the big bad wolf.”

  “Tha
t’s insulting to wolves,” I said quietly. I breathed in, normally. “You should be scared. Someone is going to get you.”

  “Somebody already tried. You.”

  “You know that’s a lie,” I said. I thought of Juliet, silhouetted against the sky, arms and skis joyously outstretched. The year she had to stop was the first time that girls could compete at the Olympic level in the ski jump; Juliet could have been a pioneer. It didn’t seem possible, but at that moment, I hated Tabor even more. “Juliet wasn’t afraid of you.”

  “I don’t know. Do you know? Who knows her better? Me? Or you?”

  “No one knows her like I do,” I said.

  “You knew her as a childhood friend,” he said. “I was her friend when she was a young woman.”

  “You were her rapist.”

  Tabor’s charm slid off his face like snow off the hood of a hot car. Beneath the mask there was nothing. His face was the front of a locked building. He said, “You know that isn’t true.”

  “I know it is,” I said. “So did Juliet. So does my mother. Does your mother know?”

  With a visible gathering, Tabor rebuilt his countenance. He smiled like a stroke victim, just relearning how.

  “My mother’s dead,” Garrett Tabor said, his pleasant gaze unwavering. “She died in a car accident, on Christmas Eve. With her baby daughter.” Reflex almost prompted me to offer a condolence. I didn’t, though. He might not even have been telling the truth. He went on, “I know you don’t really put a lot of faith in my friendship with Juliet. But it was very real. You know, the last time I saw Juliet was right here. That beautiful girl, stretched out on a stainless steel table … but you don’t want to know about that.”

  My stomach began to boil. I thought of her the way they had found her, her teeth knocked out, her skin shredded, her lips ravaged by scuttling little crabs.

  “You were here for Juliet’s … autopsy?” The word was straightforward. It was a word I would have to get used to in my major.

  “I wasn’t here for that purpose,” he said. “But I was in the building, yes. Are you sure you want to know about it?