Page 2 of Forever Dark
She can bake.
What more are you waiting for?
Maybe any sane man would have gone for somebody like Cheryl.A woman who understood the work.A woman close by.A woman who hadn’t blown through his life like weather.
Connor had his own rule about that.Work stayed work.Small towns had long memories, and departments in places like Eagleton ran on trust and habit.The wrong kind of relationship could sour both.
Besides, he’d been married once already.
That should have burned the lesson deep enough.
Fifteen years had passed since Selena Raven left him, and some part of him still measured time against it before she went.After she went, he hated that.Hated the weakness of it.Hated that her name could still rise in his mind without warning and leave a bruise behind.
Most days, he had things under control.That was the best way to keep those corrosive thoughts at bay.
He knew his routes.Knew the county.Knew the shape of his life and the weight of it.He had a house on the edge of town, a respectable job, a name people trusted, and a mother who still thought all of that meant there was plenty of time to settle down again.
Lately, though, the quiet in that house had started to press on him.
Not every night.Just enough.
A solitary unwashed plate in the sink.The television muttering to itself in the den.The bed with one side untouched.His life had become something orderly and dependable, which was good.He believed in orderliness.He had built himself around it.
Then forty had arrived and orderly started to look a little too much like a permanent vacancy or hole in his life.
Maybe this was it.Too many years behind him, the rest laid out in patrol miles and county fairs and tax disputes and dead batteries on freezing mornings.Good life.Honest life.Useful life.
A lonely one.
The thought irritated him enough that he shifted in his seat and adjusted his grip on the wheel.As he did so, he noticed something.
A light appeared ahead through the trees.
Connor narrowed his eyes.
St.Bartholomew’s sat beyond a low stone wall and a weed-choked yard, half-forgotten at the edge of Eagleton like something the town had meant to get back to and never had.The old parish church had been abandoned for years.Too damaged to repair without money nobody wanted to spend.Too familiar to tear down.It represented many things to many people.To Connor, it was the scene of a bad memory that played out long ago before he was married.
Most nights it was just a black shape with a steeple.
Tonight, a dull amber light burned high up in the tower.
Connor slowed.
At first, he thought it might be a trick of the angle, moonlight catching on broken glass.Then the light shifted slightly, not moving, but flickering in a way moonlight never would.
Someone was in there.
His hand went to the radio.“Dispatch, you there?”
Cheryl answered right away.“Go ahead.”
“You know of anybody working over at St.Bart’s tonight?Renovations, inspections, electrical, anything like that?”
A brief pause followed.He could picture her turning toward the board, scanning notes, pencil in hand.“No.Nothing I’ve heard.Why?”
Connor kept his eyes on the steeple.“There’s a light on in the tower.”
“That’s weird.I didn’t even know it had power.”
