Dark Debts by Karen Hall

well. She decided to drive. Driving always made her feel better. It was a way to have a connection to the world without having to participate. She especially loved to drive in LA, where the landscapes changed vividly from one neighborhood to the next. The lost souls wandering down Hollywood Boulevard. Overdressed agents lunching with disgruntled clients at the outdoor cafés on Sunset Plaza, all of them happy enough to see and be seen; breathing carbon monoxide was a small price to pay. Tanned, muscular guys in tight jeans strolling down Santa Monica Boulevard with their arms around each other. Beverly Hills housewives dressed in their Chanel suits, on their way to lunch at the Beverly Wilshire before the Ferragamo trunk show at Saks. The Santa Monica promenade, with its bizarre mix: yuppies; beach bums; panhandlers; an occasional schizophrenic preaching fervently to a nonexistent congregation.
    She drove aimlessly for about an hour, then paid a guy in a red vest three dollars for the privilege of parking at the Santa Monica pier, where she could stare out at the ocean. She did that until she was bored, then leaned her head back on the headrest, closed her eyes, and made a conscious decision to let herself remember.
    Cam had come into her life eight years ago. More precisely, she had come into his. She had happened upon a book he’d written during one of her book-buying sprees. She had seen it on the “Staff Picks” shelf at Book Soup and had been intrigued by his name. Cameron Landry seemed far too poetic for a mystery writer. When she read on the jacket flap that he was also from Georgia, she decided to give it a shot. The book had startled her with its complexity and insight. She was also drawn to its darkness—its bleak themes and haunted characters. Randa had been attracted to darkness from an early age. Maybe it was just from having grown up in the South, where people clung to morbid fascinations and superstitions as if they were consolation prizes from the Civil War. (A just God would never have tolerated Sherman’s rampage, so there had to be powerful dark forces at work that protected Yankees and other agents of evil.) Or maybe it was growing up in her family, where everyone practically worshiped at the altars of depression and morbidity. (The only song Randa could ever remember her mother singing to her was “Put My Little Shoes Away”—a song about a child who knew he was dying.) Whatever the reason, something about the darkness soothed her like a lullaby, and she sought refuge in it by whatever safe means she could find.
    The darkness in Randa’s soul had been quick to respond to the darkness in Cameron Landry’s prose. She immediately bought his other three books and read them, then pestered everyone at the paper until they let her write an article about him. She scheduled an interview through his literary agent, then ferreted out every article ever written about him and every interview he’d ever done. The reviews of his books were consistently effusive. People who cared about such things compared him to Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett. A reviewer in one of the magazines for mystery buffs swore that Landry would leave them all in the dust before it was over.
    Very little had been written about the man himself. He’d grown up in several small towns in rural Georgia, the youngest of four brothers in a working-class family. He’d read a lot, he was good in English, a teacher had encouraged him, he’d decided to become a writer, and so on. No indication of where that dark vision had been born.
    As she continued to search the computer indexes for anything more enlightening, she came across another Landry, one whose name had an even more poetic lilt: Tallen Landry. She didn’t know if the name belonged to a man or a woman, but she loved the sound of it. When she saw it the second time, she decided to detour and find out. She typed the name