The Darkest Evening of the Year Read Free Page B

him.”
    “No. By now he’s decided that he sold his honor with the dog. He’ll blame Janet for that. Come on.”
    She started toward the house, and Brian hurried at her side. “Shouldn’t we leave it to the police?”
    “They might not get here in time.”
    Vague leaf shadows shuddered on the moon-silvered sidewalk, as if they were a thousand beetles quivering toward sheltering crevices.
    “But a situation like this,” he said, “we don’t know what we’re doing.”
    “What we’re doing is the right thing. You didn’t see the boy’s face. His left eye is swollen. His father gave him a bloody nose.”
    An old anger rose in Brian. “What do you want to do to the sonofabitch?”
    Climbing the porch steps, she said, “That’s up to him.”
    Janet had left the front door ajar. From the back of the house rose Carl’s angry voice and hammering and crystalline shatters of sound and the sweet desperate singing of a child.
    At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.
    Amy pushed open the door. They went inside.

Chapter

2
    C eramic salt and pepper shakers, paired dogs—sitting Airedales, quizzical beagles, grinning goldens, prancing poodles, shepherds, spaniels, terriers, noble Irish wolfhounds—waited in orderly rows on shelves beyond open cabinet doors, and others stood in disorder on a kitchen counter.
    Shaking, face pale and wet with tears, Janet Brockman moved two sheep dogs from the counter to the table.
    The tire iron swung high as the woman moved, descended as she put the shakers on the table, and barely missed her snatched-back hands. Salt and ceramic shrapnel sprayed from the point of impact, then pepper and sharp shards.
    The double crack of iron on wood was followed by Carl’s demand: “Two more.”
    Watching from the dark hallway, Amy Redwing sensed that the collection must be precious to Janet, the one example of order in her disordered life. In those small ceramic dogs, the woman found some kind of hope.
    Carl apparently understood this, too. He intended to shatter both the figurines and his wife’s remaining spirit.
    Clutching a ragged pink rabbit that might have been a dog toy, the little girl sheltered beside the refrigerator. Her jewel-bright eyes were focused on a landscape of the mind.
    In a small but clear voice, she sang in a language that Amy did not recognize. The haunting melody sounded Celtic.
    The boy, Jimmy, evidently had taken refuge elsewhere.
    Alert to the fact that her husband would as soon shatter her fingers as break the salt and pepper shakers, Janet flinched at the
whoosh
of arcing iron. She dropped a pair of ceramic Dalmatians on the table.
    Crying out as the weapon grazed her right wrist, she cowered back against the ovens, arms crossed over her breasts.
    When the lug wrench rang off oak, sparing both the salt and pepper, Carl snatched up a Dalmatian and threw it at his wife’s face. The figurine ricocheted off her forehead, cracked against an oven door, and fell dismembered to the floor.
    Amy stepped into the kitchen, and Brian pushed past her, saying, “Leave her alone, Carl.”
    The drunkard’s head turned with crocodilian menace, eyes cold with a cruelty as old as time.
    Amy had the feeling that something more than the man himself lived in Brockman’s body, as though he had opened a door to a night visitor that made of his heart a lair.
    “Is she
your
wife now?” Carl asked Brian. “Is this
your
house? My Theresa there—is she
your
daughter now?”
    The sweet song rose from the girl, her voice as clear as the air and as strange as her eyes, but mysterious in its clarity and tender in its strangeness.
    “It’s your house, Carl,” said Brian. “Everything is yours. So why smash any of it?”
    Carl started to speak but then sighed wearily.
    The tide of foul emotion seemed to recede in him, leaving his face as smooth as washed sand.
    Without the anger he