Darkly dreaming Dexter   ::   Lindsay Jeffry P.

The fire has died down and the stars are exceedingly bright and foster dear old dad has been quiet for some time, taking small sips on the old-fashioned hip flask he has pulled from theoutside flap of his pack. And he's not very good at this, not like so many other cops, not really a drinker. But it's empty now, and it's time for him to say his piece if he's ever going to say it.

“You're different, Dexter,” he says.

I look away from the brightness of the stars. Around the small and sandy clearing the last glow of the fire is making shadows. Some of them trickle across Harry's face. He looks strange to me, like I've never seen him before. Determined, unhappy, a little dazed. “What do you mean, Dad?”

He won't look at me. “The Billups say Buddy has disappeared,” he says.

“Noisy little creep. He was barking all night. Mom couldn't sleep.”

Mom needed her sleep, of course. Dying of cancer requires plenty of rest, and she wasn't getting it with that awful little dog across the street yapping at every leaf that blew down the sidewalk.

“I found the grave,” Harry says. “There were a lot of bones in there, Dexter. Not just Buddy's.”

There's very little to say here. I carefully pull at a handful of pine needles and wait for Harry.

“How long have you been doing this?”

I search Harry's face, then look out across the clearing to the beach. Our boat is there, moving gently with the surge of the water. The lights of Miami are off to the right, a soft white glow. I can't figure out where Harry is going, what he wants to hear. But he is my straight-arrow foster dad; the truth is usually a good idea with Harry. He always knows, or he finds out.

“A year and a half,” I say.

Harry nods. “Why did you start?”

A very good question, and certainly beyond me at fourteen. “It just-I kind of… had to,” I tell him. Even then, so young but so smooth.

“Do you hear a voice?” he wants to know. “Something or somebody telling you what to do, and you had to do it?”

“Uh,” I say with fourteen-year-old eloquence, “not exactly.”

“Tell me,” Harry says.

Oh for a moon, a good fat moon, something bigger to look at. I clutch another fistful of pine needles. My face is hot, as if Dad has asked me to talk about sex dreams. Which, in a way- “It, uh… I kind of, you know, feel something,” I say. “Inside. Watching me. Maybe, um. Laughing? But not really a voice, just-” An eloquent teenaged shrug. But it seems to make sense to Harry.

“And this something . It makes you kill things.”

High overhead a slow fat jet crawls by. “Not, um, doesn't make me,” I say.