Father’s Murderous Mementos Haunt Psychologist as Suspected Copycat Emerges

I thought I knew what monsters were. [But] monsters didn’t hide in the woods; they weren’t shadows in the trees or invisible things lurking in darkened corners.

No, the real monsters moved in plain sight.

The speaker in Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark (Minotaur Books) is Chloe Davis. She was twelve the hot July day in her small Louisiana town when the girls, not much older than she, started to go missing. By the end of the summer, six of them were gone; panic was everywhere; and that’s when Chloe found the box in her father’s closet, the one containing keepsakes from all the victims.

It shattered everybody’s lives. Her father was sent to prison, and her mother tried to commit suicide; her older brother, Cooper, shut down, and Chloe suffered panic attacks, insomnia, nyctophobia: “The two of us together were childhood trauma wrapped in a bow and placed delicately on the doorsteps of every doctor in Louisiana. Everybody knew who we were; everybody knew what was wrong with us.”

Now, twenty years later, Chloe is a medical psychologist treating the traumas of others, a respected professional, engaged to get married, the happiness she has worked so hard to attain now within her grasp. But it is a very fragile condition. She still looks at people she meets, wondering what they’re hiding, what they aren’t telling her. She still has trouble sleeping, imagining the things that could happen to her in the dark. If she needs an occasional Xanax to help her keep control, that’s understandable, isn’t it?

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