The Dark Above Read online

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  For Rebecca,

  Who can summon the storm,

  but prefers to command the sun.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Paul Stevens at the Donald Maass Literary Agency, for his calm and steady guidance. To the entire staff at St. Martin’s Press, especially my brilliant editor, Peter Wolverton, who knew he wanted a sequel from the very beginning. My additional thanks to the talented Jennifer Donovan, Joe Brosnan, Sarah Bonamino, Hannah O’Grady, Sophia Dembling, Norma Hoffman, and Niko Eickelbeck.

  To Lauren Szurgot with the William Morris Agency, who shares the vision.

  I cannot express my gratitude enough to the bookstore owners and staff, the book clubs, and my family and friends who embraced these novels. And to the writers who’ve offered support along the way, especially Michael Koryta, J. T. Ellison, and Hank Phillippi Ryan, I am forever thankful.

  To Kathleen and Steve Morris, family who are our closest friends. Thank you for bringing Peter and Nick into the world so I could write about redheads.

  To Michael Morris, for the fact-checking.

  To Todd Wrubel, for helping to develop a character that proves there is good even in the most notorious of troublemakers.

  To Todd Doughty, an extraordinary publicist and an even better friend.

  To my brother Jason Finley, for your edits and extensive knowledge of aliens.

  To my daughters Eve and Charlotte. You make me proud to be your father.

  And to my wife, Rebecca, whose grace, kindness, grit, beauty, intelligence, and love proves in the story of my life, the hero is a woman.

  PROLOGUE

  The monster in the mountain was awake.

  Even outside, under stars drowning in a dark North Dakota sky, the little girl felt it stir. She waited to see if it would come for her; steal through the dark and drag her back.

  Standing in the dust from her escape, she felt it move within the stone and become still.

  A mournful hooting interrupted the silence. The girl looked away from the towering stone to stare across the vast emptiness illuminated by a shy moon peeking out just enough to reveal land formations in the distance, thick and blocky. She wanted to run to them, and whatever lay beyond, and never stop.

  Instead, she slowly turned back to the mountain, knowing what she left behind. It hurt so badly, she felt she might die on the spot.

  But she was only nine years old, and she wanted to live.

  She’d almost forgotten about the outside world, having been asleep inside the mountain for so long. But then a man had appeared in her dark dreams and reminded her that there was, in fact, a real world to which she belonged. He looked as frightened as she.

  She wanted to reach out to him and never let go, as she once had the small velvet bag containing her meager possessions. There hadn’t been much in that bag, just a plastic ring, a marble, and a top that blurred the color of the rainbow when it spun. She’d loved that bag, even slept with it, holding it close to her chest, until the night came that never ended, and the monster emerged from the black.

  The girl had no idea how she’d escaped, where to go, or what to do. She thought of the man, with his kind face and thick hair that swirled in waves. He’d seen her, too; she knew it. He’d seen the awful things that had happened in her dreams. He’d shown her she wasn’t alone. All she knew was that after he’d appeared, she found a way out.

  She had to find him, even if it meant leaving behind what mattered to her most in the world.

  “I promise,” she whispered.

  Feeling the aching breach in her heart, she turned from the mountain and began to walk.

  ONE

  Her Birkenstocks, with straps nearly identical in color to her turquoise bracelet, scooted along the cobblestones. Every third paver or so, she would eye a raised edge or a bit of moss, both of which she knew would surely result in a terrible slip and a broken neck.

  “Would it kill you to just put in a concrete slab?” Roxy grumbled.

  She knew the answer. Lynn would sooner place one of those cowboy silhouettes tilting his hat before she would dig up her carefully plotted cobblestone path.

  The entire garden lacked practicality, and it expanded every spring. It was way too much for a widow in her late seventies, Roxy liked to remind her. Still, Lynn had recently planted a row of delphiniums, despite their dislike for hot summers.

  “Those are going to die, you know,” Roxy had warned her last month, carrying over a metal watering can.

  “We will see,” Lynn had responded, tossing a scoopful of Miracle-Gro into the water. “And if you insist on scuffling when you walk because you’re afraid you’re going to fall and a break a hip, let me remind you that you walked the Tomato Art Fest 5K last year and came in first in the sixty-and-older division.”

  Roxy had made it a point to skid her shoes loudly each time she walked past Lynn since she’d made that comment. This morning was no different, just in case Lynn was in the kitchen and could hear her approaching. She passed the delphiniums with their stately white blooms reaching for the sun. They shouldn’t flourish like this here. They should be wilting. Their garden club had included them on their “DO NOT PLANT” list because of their preference for cool climates.

  As always, Lynn Roseworth had proved them all wrong.

  Roxy reached the porch, wincing on the stairs. The pain was bad this morning. It was bad every morning. Women don’t get beaten in their mid-sixties and then decide to start taking up tennis. But the pain lessened as the day went on, and she wasn’t going to start taking those opioids that doctors seemed to give out like Reese’s cups at Halloween.

  So I have some pain, big deal. And a big, ugly scar to go with it. It’s not like I’m entering Miss Tennessee this year.

  “Lynn!” she called out as she entered the kitchen. “’I’ve got it! The Happy Hookers! Get it? I know Gladyce will object, but she can pull that walker of hers out of her ass. We can get bowling jackets with the name on the back and wear them in Gatlinburg. We’ll be the stars of the fall rug-hooking conference.”

  Roxy went straight for the coffeepot, delighted that it was still warm. “Did you make the reservation for it yet? I prefer a cabin with a pool table. Hey, where are you hiding the sugar these days? I’m not using artificial sweeteners anymore. They say it causes dementia, and I can’t afford to lose any brain cells.”

  She found the sugar stashed on the lazy Susan in the corner cabinet, mumbling that it was the least accessible place in the kitchen. Lynn had kept it in a sizeable wooden canister for decades, ready for her to dip in to at a moment’s notice should her husband come home cranky from DC. The smell of a freshly baked apple pie was always the best way to detox from the Beltway, Tom always said with a wink.

  Roxy gently placed the small glass container on the counter, her hands trembling a bit. Grief was sneaky like that. Comes up like a thief, waiting for you to feel comfortable, even happy, then jabs in
the knife.

  Tom, she thought, closing her eyes. You stubborn, set-in-your-ways politician. I miss you.

  You wouldn’t know it, given how we bickered. But I was part of the package when you married my best friend. You didn’t like that I knew more about cigars than you did, and I didn’t like your unwavering stance on the death penalty. We were supposed to argue for many, many years to come. You weren’t supposed to die at seventy-eight.

  She’d been prepared for Ed’s passing. Her sweet, quiet husband, living so long with colon cancer. Of course she sobbed that morning when she woke to find him blissfully silent, after so many weeks of the hospice workers giving him painkillers that dried out his mouth and scratched his throat, forcing him to make the unmistakable sound of approaching death.

  But Tom, even with his smoking habit, always seemed so solid and healthy that death wasn’t a possibility. Lung cancer, however, disagreed.

  “Lynn?” Roxy’s voice was quieter when she called out again. She really was trying to be a bit less blunt these days, more compassionate. Age was supposed to soften people naturally. Roxy was waiting for that to kick in.

  She walked through the kitchen and down the hall to Tom’s study, swallowing her desire to kick aside the oriental rugs that lined Lynn’s wood floors throughout the house.

  You don’t get it, she thought as she carefully avoided the curled edges of the runners. If I fell or tripped, and truly hurt myself, I couldn’t bear the thought of you always alone in this big old house, wrapped up in your secretive work and worrying about your family. You are the strongest person I’ve ever known, Lynn Roseworth. But you need me up and mobile.

  The door to Tom’s study was closed, signaling that Lynn was deep into whatever she was working on.

  Roxy wanted to pound on the door in irritation, but instead took a deep breath and quietly knocked. “Hey Sis, I’ve been calling for you. Can I come in?”

  When there was no response, Roxy tried the handle. If it was locked, she would have no choice but to make a minor scene. Lynn might have her headphones on, with Yo-Yo Ma blaring, oblivious to anything from the outside world.

  When the handle turned, Roxy peeked in. “Lynn?”

  The room smelled so much like Tom, a mix of tobacco and books, that another wave of sadness brushed over her. She understood why Lynn chose to spend so much of her time in here. Roxy often found herself going into the basement of her own home, carrying whatever she was reading at the time, to walk past her husband’s workbench. Beyond Ed’s woodworking tools and amongst the last of the scattered shavings of pine, she would sit in the maroon recliner she’d banished to the underworld of their house. She’d inhale deeply, open the book, and find the words blurred by tears.

  Entering Tom’s study, Roxy could see the aging desktop computer was humming with no fewer than twenty open internet searches and a Word document. She fought the urge to peek at it, but remembered the time Lynn had caught her flipping through files when she was supposed to be looking for the remote to the TV in the den.

  “Never, ever, are you to know what I’m doing,” Lynn had said. “You’re already at risk and have been unfairly scrutinized because of me. I can’t drag you down further. Promise me, Roxy. Promise me.”

  Roxy had begun to protest and accidentally hit the side of the desk. It was like pouring gasoline on the fire of the nagging pain in her hip from where that Colorado thug had struck her and tossed her into the snow. She’d grimaced and said something about being tougher than old rawhide—with the skin to match—but she’d grudgingly vowed.

  She’d felt better knowing that Lynn wasn’t alone in her work, that after some significant time and discussions shared only between them, Tom turned over his study to his wife. Even after a lifetime seeing the wrinkles on his forehead deepen from handling crisis after crisis, domestic and international, she’d never seen him look as grim as he did after Lynn allowed him to join in her research. It was no wonder he made the decision he did, as much as it shocked the country and, ultimately, fractured his family.

  Roxy’s attention was caught by a small video in the corner of the screen, playing on a continuous loop that reset every few moments. Roxy looked closer, putting on her glasses, which hung from a multicolored lanyard around her neck. The video was from an entertainment news show. It had a broad, dramatic headline beneath the image of a handsome, redheaded young man: “WHERE IS WILLIAM NOW?”

  Roxy sighed and turned away. She knew exactly where Lynn was.

  Through the house she marched, out the porch door, and into the garden once again. She swept past the Rose Peddler, hoping Lynn’s oldest daughter, Anne, would be late in arriving this morning to open the garden shop at ten. Especially fragile these days, it always made Anne nervous to see her mother emerge from the woods.

  Roxy cleared her throat, to prepare to yell. It was her only option, given that her friend was deep within the trees, separated from the outside world by the sky-high iron fence. Not long after they’d returned from Colorado all those years ago, Lynn had the fence erected to surround the entire woods. No one, not even Tom, knew the pass code to enter through the hidden gate.

  As she rounded two large boxwoods that Lynn had planted strategically to block any view of the gate, Roxy sighed in relief to see a blond-haired woman standing at the fence line, her hand on one of the iron posts. More white than blond these days, Roxy thought. But aren’t we all.

  “There you are,” she said. She watched as Lynn turned slowly, her hand remaining on the fence. “It’s a bit early to be tromping about in the woods.”

  As she approached, she could see that Lynn was trembling. The binoculars that hung on a strap around her neck rose and fell with heavy breathing. When Lynn teetered, it became immediately clear that she wasn’t casually leaning on the fence, but rather clinging to it to keep from falling.

  “Lynn!” Roxy rushed forward, grabbing her friend. “Lynn, what’s wrong?”

  Even when supported by Roxy’s arm, Lynn still clung to the fence. “Roxy … you have to go away.”

  “What are you talking about? Come on, let’s go to the shop and sit down.”

  “Are my ears bleeding?” Lynn turned her head.

  “No, not at all.”

  “My head isn’t hurting. I don’t feel pain…”

  “Honey, let’s go inside. I’ll call the doctor—”

  “No,” Lynn shook her head. “You have to go. Right now. And don’t let Anne come to the shop. Close it. No one comes anywhere near the property.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. What the hell is going on? Do you feel like you had a stroke? Does your chest hurt?”

  Lynn closed her eyes. “I’m afraid it’s happening. After all this time … it’s happening.”

  Roxy lifted her chin. “Well, let it come, then. I’ve had a good, yet increasingly strange, life. And if it ends standing outside the damn woods with you, so be it. But I can tell you, I feel just fine. Maybe irritated that I haven’t had enough coffee, but I’m not dying.”

  “Roxy, please. It could be happening—”

  “Look at me. I’m fine. No one is dying, OK. Start with explaining to me why you think … after all this time … you’ve been triggered.”

  The words still felt heavy, difficult to say. Even after everything she’d learned, everything she’d seen that Colorado night that haunted her, Roxy still struggled with discussing it: a nightmare that should disappear in the morning light but proved to be just as real as the grass they stood upon, the branches above, the very air around them.

  They all carried the burden. All of them who survived that frantic escape from Argentum. How do you pay the gas bill, clean your windows, go to Bunko, go on living a normal life, knowing what’s beyond the night sky?

  “Just talk to me,” Roxy said softly. “Why did you go into the woods this time?”

  She watched Lynn take a deep breath. “You really feel OK?” Lynn said. “No pain, nothing strange at all?”

  “I think you know th
ere’s a whole lot strange about me. But nothing unusual. I know you were watching some video about William. Don’t be mad, I just glanced at it on your computer screen when I was looking for you. I promise I wasn’t snooping.”

  Lynn’s fist covered her mouth, her other hand bracing her elbow. “I don’t want the shop opening today. I have to call Anne. In fact, we need to leave right now.”

  “Anne won’t be here for another three hours to open the shop. You need to take a deep breath and just explain what’s going on. I know this has something to do with that video.”

  “I have to know when anything is reported about William. Turned out to be just the same rehashed theories of where he might be. But that wasn’t why I came out here. I was right to be worried.”

  As Lynn turned once again to the trees, Roxy followed her gaze. The morning’s humidity swam like a river around them, seeping through the iron fence and throughout the burr oaks beyond. Not a half mile into the trees was the site that prompted Lynn to wall off the woods from the world.

  “I woke up with this horrible feeling. You know how it is when you’re supposed to do something important, then you forget it, and when it comes back to you, it hits you like a Mack truck?”

  “We turn eighty next year, Lynn. I am well aware of the sensation of forgetfulness.”

  “This was worse than that. It was like a neighbor calling to say that smoke is coming out of your house and remembering that you left the gas burner on. Take that horrible feeling and times it by a thousand. I was in a panic. When the video proved to be nothing new, I searched for anything about him or Kate. There was nothing. That feeling, though … of something horrible remembered … wouldn’t go away.”

  Lynn continued to look through the fence. Roxy had only been to the abduction site a few times, and that was when William first disappeared. She’d found nothing remarkable about it all those years ago. Just a small grove amidst the trees where, unlike most of the woods, grass actually thrived in places, thanks to gaps of sky amongst the canopy of leaves. That summer, everything the sun encouraged to grow was flattened by the feet of searchers and police. Surrounded by crime-scene tape even in the winter months, it became desolate.