When the Stars Go Dark

Sheriff Will Flood’s obsession with solving the murder of a childhood friend, his first and most lasting crush, shapes (and nearly destroys) his life. That he cannot allow Jenny’s case, even 20 years later, to go cold testifies to his emotional connection with a girl he is sure cannot rest in peace with her killer never identified.

He follows in the footsteps of his father, the town’s long-serving sheriff. His dedication to the work, to clearing cases, is one thing—he is careful, diligent, by-the-book investigator—but his need to find Jenny’s killer, to bring her spirit peace, impacts him emotionally. He drinks and has insomnia. He is distant from his wife and children. His apartment is cluttered with boxes of evidence from Jenny’s unsolved murder as well as evidence from seven other unsolved cases from the area, each involving a teenaged girl. Will is certain they are all connected.

The missing girls haunt him, their innocence, their naivete, their humanity, as does his inability to do anything against the cruelty and brutality of the perpetrator, who most likely walks the streets of his town. In working with Anna, Will comes to feel an attraction of one lost soul for another. Their kiss symbolizes how a wounded heart might find solace and the will to hope by connecting with another wounded heart. Will’s goodbye to Anna as she heads home to repair her marriage reveals his own need for someone; solving Jenny’s murder has reanimated his heart as well. He offers Anna a chance to help him work through the other missing girl cases now that Caleb has been caught and the cases solved, telling her, “Let me know how you are, okay? […] You’ll be on my mind” (358).

In a novel that offers the gift of companionship as solace in a world of terror and beauty, Caleb Ford’s emotional dilemma becomes clear: He is a twin threatened with abandonment. The psychological and emotional tie between twins drives him. When Jenny decides at 18 that she is leaving Mendocino and leaving Caleb behind, the threat of being abandoned compels Caleb to stop Jenny from leaving the only way he can. He murders her. In the closing chapters, Anna and Will discover disturbing evidence that Caleb, in addition to confessing to strangling Jenny and kidnapping and torturing Cameron, may be responsible for seven other abducted teenage girls. As Anna realizes the night Caleb breaks into her cabin to kill her, “Losing a sister doesn’t turn everyone into a killer, obviously. Something had already begun to twist Caleb at the root so that Jenny’s death had done more than plunge him into grief—it had broken him” (339).

Anna does not pretend to understand Caleb. Perhaps his problems are genetic—Caleb’s father was an eccentric man with an alcohol addiction and an antisocial artist, and his mother was emotionally distant. Caleb is fascinated with the unalloyed beauty of youth, with innocence and purity that can only be preserved by killing. The clues are in the tormented canvases he creates, “full of dark undulating curves” (310). Anna learns how completely banal evil can be, how a predator, a serial killer, can move about a community unnoticed. Caleb helps search for Cameron. He chats with Anna like the old friends they are. His rage, his violence, his calculating evil in the end remain an unsettling mystery; that is the chilling reality of Anna’s profession, a world, as the novel’s epigraph from Protestant theologian Frederick Buechner says, where “beautiful and terrible things will happen / Don’t be afraid” (2).