Isabella Moon (10 page)

“Please, Bill, we’re not even out of the parking lot,” she said, looking around to see if anyone had noticed.

“Yeah, you got me. Conduct unbecoming an officer,” he said. He held his arms out in front of him. “Better get out the cuffs.”

She pushed lightly at his arms. “You,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re up to, chatting up old ladies, but I know it’s something.”

A few minutes before nine on Monday morning, Bill saw Frank come in and drop a folder of papers on Daphne’s desk. Daphne seemed to be treating him with some consideration, but he could hardly call it friendly. He was constantly reminding his deputies to be nice to one another—though he didn’t always follow his own advice. With the exception of Daphne, all of his deputies were ex-military and pretty good at taking orders, but they had their difficult days. Frank could be moody, but Bill put that down to Rose’s illness. Frank didn’t talk about it much, but her illness had put a number of strains on them, financially and emotionally. Daphne couldn’t keep her mouth shut about department business, even though she had a handful of warnings in her file. Mitchell Carl was too distractible—particularly by attractive women. It was the reason his wife had left, Bill was certain. Clayton Campbell was just young. The others weren’t much trouble, and in the end, everyone seemed to get the job done. Fugitives from the law, robberies, and suspicious deaths were pretty rare in the neighborhood, murder even rarer. Most Carystown miscreants were drunk and disorderly, welfare and tax cheats, or deadbeat dads.

Bill picked up his coffee and wandered out to Daphne’s desk.

“What’s the good news, Frank?” he said.

“I worked overtime talking to the kids this Saturday,” Frank said. “Rose about had my head. She’s wanting the yard cleaned up for spring. You
know
I was sorry to miss that.”

“You bet,” Bill said. “I had my share of outdoor chores this weekend myself.”

“You two are lucky you have homes at all, the way you talk,” Daphne said. “You act all helpless inside the house, then complain when you have to help keep the outside nice. Both your wives ought to put you out with the cats.”

When Frank protested that he was the better cook in the house, Daphne just shook her head. “Excuses, excuses,” she said.

Bill wasn’t in a mood for one of Daphne’s man-bashing rants. “So, any bites?”

Frank indicated the folder containing the reports on Daphne’s desk. “Depends on what you call bites. The girlfriend’s a mess, could barely speak, and his buddies swear up and down there were no fights and no drugs. Maybe it’s a straightforward heart thing after all.”

Bill took a sip of his coffee. “Keep me posted.”

Frank looked for a moment like he wanted to add something, but instead he said that it was no problem and left the office.

Daphne picked up the reports. “You want me to pass these on to Mitch?”

Mitchell Carl was his chief deputy. The lights in Mitch’s office were dark. He spent the better part of his day on Monday in court. Bill was always surprised that he made it in early after his weekends in the city. A part of him envied Mitch his freedom, but he knew it was an expensive sort of freedom. He owed a pile of child support and always had at least one or two other women to help him spend what was left.

Bill took the folder from her. “I think I’ll just thumb through them before I pass them on,” he said, heading back to his office.

Daphne watched him. “Why the personal touch, boss?”

Bill shrugged. “Hey, sometimes it’s good to shake things up a bit,” he said.

The reports were dutiful. Brad Catlett had been a campus favorite. His grades had been slipping some in the previous months. At least two of his teachers had attributed it to the rites of spring and his preoccupation with his girlfriend. The track coach reported that he thought the boy had been under the weather lately, but said he’d been turning in great times and was poised to make the team serious competition in the state meets. Bill wondered whether it was true or just the coach’s wishful thinking. There was nothing there that was particularly helpful—and it didn’t really matter anyway until he got the coroner’s report.

He was glad that he’d had somewhat more success with his research on Kate Russell. Edith had been helpful.

Beaufort, South Carolina, was not Charleston, South Carolina. He’d found in his line of work that when people lied, their lies were often very close to the truth, as though that made their lies more acceptable. She probably wasn’t from Beaufort either. He pulled a map of South Carolina up on the Internet and saw that they were both near the eastern shore of the state. He figured that if she hadn’t lived in either place, she hadn’t been far away. Maybe somewhere in between.

When he pulled up Kate Russell’s DMV records, he found that she didn’t have so much as a parking ticket. There were no previous addresses listed for her in any of the online phone listings. He made a note of her Social Security number so he could check her out in the national databases the state subscribed to.

Later, on his way home for lunch, he cruised past Janet Rourke’s office on Bridge Street. A light mist fell on the cruiser, and the sidewalks were emptier than usual. While he waited in line at the long traffic light at Bridge and High, he saw the woman he’d been thinking about all morning step outside the agency office and shut the door behind her. She seemed okay, but criminals were criminals, and if she was thinking that she was going to make some kind of profit on her bullshit notion about the lost girl, then she was a criminal, plain and simple.

Today she moved with an easy grace that had been absent when she came into his office. Her hair framed her face, pointing up the delicacy of her features. She looked much younger than the thirty-two years listed on her driver’s license. Still, she had the confident look of a tomboy tamed. He wasn’t surprised that she’d attracted the attention of the guy he’d seen her out with. As he felt the blood rush to his groin, he was blindsided by the realization that she reminded him of a young Margaret.

As he watched, she approached a woman who leaned dejectedly against the agency’s front picture window. When she reached the woman, she tilted her umbrella in the direction of the mist to keep them both dry.

Carystown was small enough that there wasn’t a homeless problem. He and the Social Services people quickly swept most of the mentally ill into the state system and the transients were briskly moved along. This barelegged woman, with her loose, lavender dress and skin that spoke of too many hours in the sun, was familiar to him, but in the confusion of the moment, he couldn’t think of who it was.

As Kate Russell gently took the woman’s arm, she chanced to glance up and, he thought, caught him watching. He quickly looked away to see that the cars in front of him had already cleared the intersection. As he crossed High Street, it came to him that the woman Kate Russell had been speaking to was Hanna Moon, Isabella’s mother.

8

Mary-Katie carefully sipped the coffee that one of the other volunteers had brought her from the hospitality table. A fine November mist was falling, obscuring the sunrise, but the mood of the runners arriving for the Children’s Hospital Half-Marathon was light. She almost wished that she had trained for the race, but she was no runner and had never fooled herself about the fact. Running gave her a headache. What she really liked was walking, miles and miles of walking for the pleasure of it. It seemed to her that when she ran, she missed too much.

In years past, her grandmother, Katherine, after whom she’d been partially named, had walked with her. Together, they knew every inch of Beaufort and the surrounding countryside. Sometimes they went all the way to the beaches, but mostly they stuck to the flats, finding odd little roads that dead-ended after miles at someone’s truck farm or piney woods. Now Mary-Katie took her walks alone, always coming home to tell her grandmother what she’d seen, what new houses were going in nearby, who had been outside gardening, and who had asked her to stop and chat. But more and more often, her grandmother was asleep in her comfortable chair by the front window, where she’d be waiting for her to return. She’d made great progress from a stroke, but not enough to allow her to walk more than the distance from her chair to her bedroom or the kitchen without stopping to rest a few moments.

One of the runners dropped his registration card on the table, startling Mary-Katie, who had been watching the crowd.

“Got anything in the forties?” he said. He glanced at her name tag. “Forty-two, if you have it, Mary-Katie.” He smiled.

The name written on his card in compact block letters read,
MILES CHENOWETH
.

Miles Chenoweth was neat, like his handwriting. Not tall; she guessed he was no more than a couple of inches taller than her own height of five feet six inches. In fact, when she later looked at his card, she saw that he was five-seven. Overall, he had the look and bearing of a wrestler: squarish shoulders, tapered waist, and muscular arms (that were, she noted, on the hairy side). He was, in fact, a rather hairy man, with small, tight curls peeking around the edges of his runner’s jersey. But the hair on his head, which was the same deep brown color, was close-cropped to keep it from unruliness.

“We have to give the numbers out in the order that people come up,” she said. “I’m sorry. The best I can do is 138.”

He gave a low whistle and looked at his watch. “I can’t be that late,” he said.

Mary-Katie laughed. “They started at one hundred,” she said.

“Why aren’t you on this side of the table?” he said. “You look pretty fit to me.”

“Running’s not my thing,” Mary-Katie said. “But I love the Children’s Hospital. I was a candy striper there in high school.”

“One of those little red and white uniforms?” Miles asked. “And a pointy cap?”

“T-shirts,” she said. “But they were red and white.”

When he smiled, his arctic blue eyes narrowed with amusement. Mary-Katie envied his thick eyelashes. Her own were rather thin and lighter than her hair. She hadn’t thought to put on makeup that morning. The sun hadn’t even been up at all when she’d had her breakfast.

“Will you be at the finish?” Miles said. “Or are you only registering people?”

“Will
you
be at the finish?” Mary-Katie said. She felt herself responding to this very forward man in a way that she knew her grandmother wouldn’t approve. But she told herself that she was twenty-four years old, not fourteen, and she was old enough to make a sensible judgment about what a man was like.

“I’ll be the first one across the line,” he said. He said it so matter-of-factly that it didn’t sound like a boast.

At exactly one o’clock, Miles walked into the café where Mary-Katie had agreed to meet him for lunch. It was crowded for a Saturday afternoon, and most of the well-dressed diners looked like tourists in to start their Thanksgiving Day holiday a few days early.

When she saw him come in the door, Mary-Katie lifted her hand to wave, but dropped it again quickly into her lap. She didn’t want to seem too eager.

Miles scanned the crowd as though he were looking for something important. He looked so serious, in fact, that his forehead was creased. Mary-Katie imagined that this would be how he looked when he was angry. She decided then and there that it would be a terrible thing to see him in a rage. Finally, he spotted her sitting against the back wall that glinted with the shards of pottery and fake gems plastered and painted onto its surface. When they made eye contact, his face lighted up with pleasure. Mary-Katie relaxed. He was glad to see her.

“They could have put us at a better table,” he said, brushing her shoulder with his fingertips as he sat down. “A woman like you should be right out front, not hidden back here in no-man’s-land.”

Mary-Katie blushed. Of course, sometimes when she was alone, she would look in the mirror and tentatively admire what she saw there: the slender, straight nose, the spray of freckles across her cheeks that she had so hated when she was in high school, the almost auburn hair and the hazel eyes that were just like her father’s. She knew she wasn’t homely, but she certainly had never thought of herself as beautiful.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t find me back here,” she said. “But it’s close to the kitchen, so we should get served quickly.”

Miles looked at her, wondering if she was sincere. When he saw that she was, he said, “Of course.”

They drank wine at lunch, something Mary-Katie rarely did. When she told Miles that the chardonnay put her in mind of apricots and wood smoke, he agreed and poured her another glass.

Through the wine, Mary-Katie talked more than she ever thought she could, or should. Miles listened to her describe growing up under the watchful eye of her grandmother after her father had left when she was five. He laughed in all the right places when she told him about her teller’s job at the bank, and about the characters who sometimes wandered in off the street trying to convince her that they had money there waiting for them even though they had no identification and there was no record of them in the computer. He frowned when she told him of the woman who had hit her child so hard for misbehaving in line that the child fell backward and hit her head and went unconscious. As she talked, he leaned forward, listening intently, as though what she was saying was critical information, as though she were the most important person in the world.