Hunter's Moon (32 page)

“It’s okay, Mom,” he thought to say as he started for the house.

The front door swung open when he pushed on it, and the splintered wood proved it had been forced. After taking a step inside, CJ stopped and looked around but nothing seemed out of place. He entered the living room, his mother and Julie a few steps behind him, and a quick inspection showed this room looked fine too. That didn’t surprise him; he expected the damage to have been done in the attic.

Without looking through the other rooms, he entered the hallway and found the attic ladder was down. He released a sigh.

“Stay here,” he said to Dorothy, but he needn’t have worried. His mother looked like a shell of her former self. Her face had lost its color.

“I’ll stay with her,” Julie said.

The attic was cleaned out. To CJ’s untrained eye, it appeared that his father had even taken things that clearly belonged to Dorothy. What was worse was that what he hadn’t taken, he’d ransacked. His mother’s sewing machine—the same one she’d had when CJ was young—lay on its side. The boxes holding her old clothes had been opened and emptied. CJ saw broken glass in a few spots, but couldn’t immediately tell from where it had come.

As he turned toward the part of the attic that held his own belongings, he heard footsteps on the stairs behind him. It appeared George had done some work there too, although it wasn’t as bad as what he’d done to Dorothy. CJ didn’t even know if George had made that distinction when he was up here.

The sound his mother made when she reached the top of the stairs was something that CJ never wanted to hear again. When he spun around, Julie was at Dorothy’s side and CJ’s mother looked as if she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. Then, as if in slow motion, Dorothy took a few steps and bent down, coming up with a picture, the same picture CJ had asked her about the other day. It had been ripped in half.

“It’ll be okay, Mom,” he said for the second time in a matter of minutes, knowing how pitiful it sounded.

“What happened?” Julie asked him.

“George got even,” CJ said.

By the time CJ got back to the store, after staying long enough to make sure Dorothy was going to be all right, and then to assist with the police report, it was almost noon. To make things worse, there were half a dozen customers in the store, which was the most CJ had seen in Kaddy’s at any one time. Artie was at the register, and there were two customers behind the one he was serving, with three others milling about various aisles. CJ grabbed his store apron from the hook by the register and went to intercept the closest customer.

Fifteen minutes, six sales, and somewhere near two hundred dollars later, Artie and CJ were alone in the store.

“I thought you were right behind me,” Artie said as he sat down on his stool.

“I was,” CJ said. “But a funny thing happened on my way back to work.”

CJ told Artie about the break-in and how the police had told them there was probably nothing they could do—not unless some of the missing items started showing up in area pawnshops, which wasn’t likely to happen, the police had said, if CJ was right about it having been his father who had ransacked the place. Their most helpful piece of advice was for Dorothy to take out a restraining order on her ex-husband.

“Julie’s going to stay with her for a few hours, make sure she’s okay.”

“I can’t believe George did that,” Artie said.

CJ snorted. “Then you don’t know my father.”

At that, Artie’s face flushed, and CJ couldn’t tell if it was in anger or embarrassment. But before he could say anything, Artie smiled and his face returned to its normal color.

“How do you think Dorothy will handle this?” Artie asked.

“Good question.” What CJ didn’t say was that Artie should ask someone who knew his mother—that an absence of seventeen years did not leave CJ positioned to speak to his mother’s state of mind. If he had to guess, he thought that this might kill her. He suspected all that had held her together for the last ten years was spite. With that gone, who knew what would happen?

“I’m going to let Thor down,” CJ said, extricating himself from such unpleasant thoughts.

When he reached his apartment, the first thing that came to mind was that he hadn’t realized karma could be so synchronous. That thought turned out to be fleeting, soon replaced by worry for his dog.

His door had been compromised in much the same fashion as his mother’s, only in this case the wood behind the cylindrical lock had succumbed, leaving a gaping hole in the doorframe.

“Artie!” he yelled back down the stairs, and then he pushed open the door and walked inside. It was eerily similar to walking into his mother’s house earlier. There was nothing out of place that he could see, and there was less ground to cover here. And no attic.

Artie’s breath came in gasps by the time he reached the apartment, taking in first the door and then CJ. “What happened?”

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me,” CJ said.

Artie joined CJ in the living room.

“It must have happened when we were at the courthouse.” He looked around the room. “Did they take anything?”

“Thor’s not here.”

It took Artie a moment to process that. “What?”

“The dog’s gone.” At least he hoped he was gone. Another, sicker thought was pushing its way into CJ’s mind—the possibility that he would walk into one of the remaining three rooms and find his dog dead.

Artie apparently tracked with him because he put a hand on CJ’s shoulder and said, “They had to have come through the back door. If they left it open, Thor could have run off.”

“You’re right, he could have. What’s strange, though, is that it doesn’t look like they took anything.”

“You haven’t checked the whole apartment yet,” Artie reminded him.

So CJ did, beginning with the bathroom, and then shaking his head at how dumb it was to start with the room in which the most expensive possession was a tube of toothpaste.

Moving to the kitchen, he suffered a flash of panic that came and went in the same second as he saw his laptop on the card table. It had survived the break-in, unscathed by the looks of it, and he was grateful for that. One thing was certain: this was no run-of-the-mill robbery.

By the time he reached the bedroom, so many conflicting thoughts fought for the space in his head that he was almost relieved to see the note on his unmade bed. It was Janet’s handwriting.

The dog belongs to me.

J.

“What is it?” Artie, standing in the doorway, asked. CJ held up the note. “My wife has stolen my dog.”

Chapter 25

For the first time in days, CJ turned on his cell phone. Before he dialed her number he scanned though the thirty-seven calls he’d missed. There were three from his editor, seven from his agent, twenty-one from his lawyer, and three numbers he didn’t recognize. Janet hadn’t once tried to call him.

She picked up on the second ring.

“I want my dog,” he said.

He’d left Kaddy’s after giving his second police report of what was turning out to be one of the longest days of his life. Artie had remembered a dark car parked on the street when he returned from the courthouse, noticing the Tennessee plates. He hadn’t thought much about it at the time, and when CJ arrived for work, the car was already gone. CJ suspected she’d hired a private investigator, and he marveled that she would spend that kind of money to procure a dog she didn’t want.

The same two officers took his report. CJ didn’t fault them for the confused, even suspicious looks they gave him. By the time they left, CJ had the sudden realization that he’d spoken with the police on two occasions and yet hadn’t been arrested on his outstanding warrant. So even though he didn’t feel lucky, today he was forced to admit a portion of that commodity still remained.

He had the Honda pointed south down Main Street, and he didn’t realize he was going to the house on Lyndale until he made the turn onto the street and started up the hill.

“You stole the dog from
me
, as I recall,” his wife said. He hated the way her voice sounded when she was being smug. Just hearing that tone made him angry.

“You know Thor is
my
dog,” he said, working to keep things civil. “I gave you the car. I gave you the house. And you won’t let me keep my dog?” His efforts at keeping his anger contained were now being tossed aside.

“I guess we’ll have to let the courts decide whose dog he is,” Janet said. Then she laughed, and of all the things CJ had experienced in his life that might have made him mad, the fact that it would be his wife’s laughter was not lost on him. He ended the call, turned off the phone, and threw it on the passenger seat.

The Honda’s tires squealed when he pulled into the driveway too fast. Instead of following the circle, he went up onto the walkway, the tires encroaching on the grass. He hit the brake hard and brought the car to a stop just inches away from the front steps. He had no idea what he was doing here—only that right now he hated his wife more than he’d ever hated another person, and since he couldn’t do anything to her, this was the next best thing.

The door was locked when he tried it, so he knocked, waited, then rang the bell then knocked again, and somewhere during this process, which he repeated twice more, he realized he had a decision to make. He could either let the anger go or he could nurse it until he found an appropriate outlet. He chose the latter.

Leaving the porch, he headed toward the back of the house. The garage door was down, yet CJ was counting on the recent repairs to the place not reaching something as inconsequential as a garage door. Taking hold of the handle, he gave it a test tug and was rewarded when the door rose a few inches. When he pulled harder, the door responded until there was perhaps a seven-inch gap.

It looked a lot narrower to CJ than it had when he was in high school. Then, he could shimmy underneath the door without so much as his shirt touching it. Now he wasn’t so sure. He let the door back down and set about looking for something to use as a wedge, settling on a landscaping rock that looked somewhere near the right height. With the rock in one hand, he pulled on the door handle with the other until he had it raised as far as he could. Straining to keep the door up, he tried to slide the rock underneath. At first it wouldn’t go in and he thought he might have to find something else, but he gave the rock a slight turn and it slipped into place.

CJ let go of the door and stood back, taking a critical look at the gap between door and driveway. But after having come this far, he wasn’t about to let the possibility of getting stuck deter him.

On his back, he began to slide himself into the darkened garage, head and shoulders leading. These slipped nicely beneath the door after CJ turned his head to the side, and he made good progress until it was time to bring his midsection in after the rest of him. It took two tries, and the deepest breath CJ had ever taken, to get through.

He stood up and felt his way to the wall on his right and then followed that toward the stairs, feeling for the light switch as he got close. Once the light was on, he tried the door. And that was when the anger, which had ebbed as he worked to get into the garage, came rushing back. The door was locked—something CJ had considered only as a remote possibility. In his experience, this door was never locked, and it threw him that this was yet another thing that had changed.

He sat down on the steps, hands in his pockets, as he pondered what to try next. Of course, he also had to answer the question of what he hoped to accomplish once he gained entry. It was obvious no one was home. After a time, as he listened to the wind coming in gusts beneath the garage door, he decided that the old house had defeated him.

The thought drew a derisive laugh. Hang his murderous family; the empty house alone had proved more than a match for him. Then again, why shouldn’t it have? Wasn’t this house, the house on the hill, the house that had overlooked Adelia for more than two hundred years, the embodiment of the Baxter spirit? Wouldn’t it have soaked in what it meant to be a Baxter, and then marshaled those attributes against him? It made poetic sense, if nothing else.

Beneath its tarp, the Horch seemed to commiserate with him—this rare, beautiful car that had not felt the road beneath its tires since the day Sal drove it into the garage. CJ thought it a monumental waste, and it occurred to him as he sat on a wooden step in the family garage, dirt and cobwebs in his hair, that he was angry at his grandfather; he was angry at Sal for being too scared of whatever it was he’d been scared of to enjoy the car, to use it for what it had been built for.

CJ stood, the cold, damp air of the garage stiffening his knees, and began to roll back the tarp, ignoring the lurking thought that this might be the last time he got to see her. The black body of the four-door sport convertible gleamed under the lights. He trailed his hand along its long hood—long enough to accommodate the straight-eight engine.

“Top speed of a hundred forty kilometers per hour,” CJ said, parodying Sal, who used to touch on each of the car’s components while CJ, a rapt child, walked alongside him, absorbing every word.