When the Stars Go Dark

Beneath an eerie yellow autumn moon, Anna Hart leaves San Francisco and heads north to Mendocino. She feels alone and has realized, “[n]o one is coming to save me. No one can save anyone, though I once believed differently” (7). That night, at a hotel in Santa Rosa, Anna pumps breast milk that she knows she should flush down the toilet, but she stores it in the room’s mini refrigerator. As she watches the evening news, a story about a train wreck that killed 47 commuters in Alabama, she considers a world full of “chaos and despair and senseless death” (10).

Struggling to sleep, Anna thinks about a case she worked, a grandmother who poisoned her grandson for no reason. Anna recalls her husband of seven years, Brendan, back in San Francisco: “We can fix this,” she says, to which he responds, “Some things aren’t fixable, Anna” (12). For now, Brendan believes they need some time apart to come to terms with what happened. Anna recalls her daughter’s memorial service, where she suggested to her boss that she return to work to have “something else to focus on” (13). Brendon overhears and is angry. Anna cannot stop blaming herself for the accident that killed their daughter.

Anna is heading home for the first time in 20 years, back to Mendocino along California’s northern coast, about three hours from San Francisco. After her birth mother disappeared and her birth father’s incarceration (and later murder), Anna had been placed in several foster homes before she was welcomed into the home of a childless couple, Hap and Edna Strater, in Mendocino. Hap was a ranger in the US Forest Service. By the time Anna arrived, however, she was moody and often difficult, but the couple provided Anna during the eight years she lived with them in a loving and supportive home.

Now, as she drives into the town, she notes the town’s iconic photo op site: a statue, carved from redwood, high atop the bank. Titled Time and the Maiden, it features the figures of an old man with wings, carrying a scythe and braiding the hair of a young girl reading a book, an hourglass and urn near her feet.

When Anna stops at a coffee shop for lunch, she overhears two men talk about a teenage girl named Cameron Curtis, who has been missing since yesterday. Because Anna is a detective specializing in missing children, she listens. When she sees an ad posted beneath the missing person flyer for a cottage to rent some seven miles outside town, she calls the owner and takes it.

The cottage is perfect, like “somewhere a hermit might live, like an island in the trees” (24). It’s an ideal haven for Anna as she runs from her grief and her problems at home.

Anna unpacks and settles into the cabin, but she cannot stop thinking about the missing girl. It’s a common feeling because “[t]he missing and the damaged,” she reflects, “their stories [pull] at me like jagged little siren songs” (26). In San Francisco, Anna worked for an initiative called Project Searchlight that focused resources on crimes against children, sex crimes, trafficking, abuse, kidnapping, parental custodial interference. That commitment to abused children, she fears, cost her quality time with her own family. Outside a coyote calls, “cold, lonely, and hungry” (27). Anna settles herself with a drink.

Anna dreams about a girl being chased along a seaweed-strewn beach. When she wakes up, a bit hungover, she heads to Jug Handle Creek, a favorite hiking spot for Hap, a forest ranger who knew these woods and had mentored Anna in survival skills. In the woods, she realizes how much she still misses Hap, how he had shown her the world, the “loveliness” and the “ugliness” (32). Without wanting to, Anna thinks about the missing girl, and she has the strangest feeling that she is somehow near the missing girl.

As she is about to leave the hiking trail, Anna sees a gathering from town, a search party with cadaver dogs, no doubt for Cameron Curtis. Anna recognizes the sheriff, Will Flood, a friend from her childhood. Will tells her Cameron Curtis is the adopted daughter of Emily Hague, a television actress, and her husband, Troy, a prominent film producer. Will, despite the pressing concerns over the missing girl, invites Anna for a drink later.

Anna recalls growing up in Mendocino with Will and the neighbor twins, Jenny and Caleb Ford, who lived with their father, an eccentric painter of some reputation, after their mother took off. Anna knew then that Will had a crush on Jenny with her shiny brown hair, coppery freckles, and beautiful, “high and haunting” singing voice (39). Anna was 15 when Jenny, then 18, disappeared as she walked home from work. Anna remembers in the confusion how Caleb said his sister would never have run away, would never have left him behind.

That night, Anna meets Will. He is married and has two kids. Will is focused on the missing girl and how this disappearance might be tied to Jenny Ford’s murder 20 years earlier. The two recall that it took five days to find Jenny’s body. She had been strangled, her body dumped in the Navarro River. Although the police initially suspected Jenny’s artist father, a man with an alcohol addiction, no one was ever arrested for the murder. The two leave the bar. As they walk beneath the Time and the Maiden statue, Anna feels that Will wants to kiss her, but he makes no move.

For the next two days, Anna spends afternoons hiking in the woods. She comes upon a little shelter, which she figures, given its intricate construction, had been built by hunters.

When on the first of the month Anna finally heads into Mendocino for supplies, she meets a couple with a dog, a beautiful Belgian Malinois although they tell her the dog is a stray.

Anna recalls how her adoptive mother, Eden, believed in reincarnation, that everything is part of the same whirling cosmos of energy and spirit. Anna visits the Ford house to talk with Caleb. The two share beers and talk about the past. Caleb talks about his time in the Navy and being stationed in the Persian Gulf. He assumes Anna is back in town to help find Cameron. Anna says nothing about her daughter’s death.

At a difficult moment professionally, Anna had been sent to see a therapist. Anna initially resisted, but the counselor suggested Anna picture a house containing all the lost children whose cases she had worked but never solved. The therapist, certain that Anna is haunted by her past, tells Anna she needs to heal and that healing would begin only when she confronts her own memories.

After her drink with Caleb, Anna dreams about being in the woods and her adoptive mother, Eden, showing her a tree marked by an arrow. Then, she is walking with Hap, who points out a wounded doe in the branches at the foot of the marked tree. Hap tells Anna she is like the wounded deer. He beckons her to “follow the signs” (62), that that is the only way to find “her.” When Anna wakes, she knows she must join the investigation into Cameron’s disappearance.

Anna recalls the Christmas morning when she was eight when her mother, Robin, suddenly disappeared. Anna struggled to help her younger siblings, Jason and Amy, feel like everything was “normal,” telling them that Santa and the gifts had been delayed by an ice storm in the North Pole.

When Anna goes to Will’s office, he is reviewing a police bulletin about a missing 12-year-old girl in nearby Petaluma named Polly Klaas. Will wonders whether this case—the girl was abducted at knifepoint from a sleepover with two friends by a middle-aged white male—might be connected to Cameron’s disappearance. Anna doubts it; the ages are wrong, but it would be worth a drive. Will accepts Anna’s offer to help, and the two head to Petaluma.