Isabella Moon (2 page)

“It was strange to see the town on the news every day,” Kate said. “But it never actually
looked
like Carystown on television. It was like they were talking about somewhere else.”

“We had a couple movie agents and such interested, thinking the story might sell, I guess,” Bill said. “In the end, there didn’t turn out to be much of a story, did there?”

Kate shook her head. “No. I guess not.”

As Bill leaned back in his chair, it made a painful squeak. “How long have you lived in Carystown, Miss Russell?”

Kate took a deep breath. This was more like what she had expected. If he believed her at all, he was sure to look at her as a suspect first.

“A little more than two years,” she said. “I have a house south of town near the old candy factory. It’s an antique mall now, but everyone still calls it the candy factory.”

The wind still sometimes carried the scent of chocolate through her windows. It had been on just such an afternoon that she’d rented the house after living in an inexpensive motel out near the highway for a few weeks. The factory building hadn’t yet been converted when she moved in, but was just a cavernous brick fortress with boarded windows, fronted by a long, crumbling porch. Such a vast emptiness so close to her house had overwhelmed her in those first months, but the smell of the chocolate was something of a comfort. And in those early, alone days, she had needed it.

“Best peppermint sticks in the country,” Bill said. “Never cared much for their chocolate stuff. Moved the operation down to Mexico about five years ago. Too bad.” He shook his head.

“We get a lot of tourists in for the antiques,” Kate said.

“Ah, yes, the tourists,” Bill said with apparent distaste. “So, have you ever been to Mexico? Is that a travel agency you work for?”

Kate wondered how long he was going to play with her. She was sure he’d want to hear what she had to say.

“Insurance,” she said. “Janet Rourke’s agency.” She looked at her watch. “I should be there now to open up. Janet had a breakfast meeting.”

“Good Rotarian, Janet. Assertive,” he said. “Gets things done.” What Janet Rourke really was was a bitch on skates. But he guessed that his opinion wouldn’t be a surprise to this young woman. “You from somewhere south of here, Miss Russell? Alabama, maybe? Georgia?”

Kate straightened in her chair. “I lived in South Carolina for a long time. Around Charleston.” It was enough of the truth. Just because he was some kind of policeman didn’t mean that she could trust him. “But this isn’t about me, Sheriff,” she said, knowing she was breaking one of the cardinal rules of southern conversation. One didn’t blurt out one’s business right off; one was supposed to come around to things gradually, delicately, give everyone involved time to know exactly who stood where on a subject. There was a lot of courtesy involved. Only Yankees came at things straight on.

But it had taken her so long to come to the decision to speak to someone, someone who might be able to help her, that she just wanted to get on with it. The girl was dead, yes, but she was hardly resting in peace. She seemed almost as alive to Kate as in the weeks before she disappeared two winters before, when she’d occasionally walked past the agency in her bright yellow coat and red snow boots. Isabella Moon hadn’t been an extraordinarily pretty child, but Kate had noticed her (thanks to the coat, probably) and wondered at her careful, self-possessed way of walking, as though she were much older than she appeared.

The suffering of the girl’s mother also caught her attention, and disturbed her. She had seen Hanna Moon on the news and, more frequently, on the streets of Carystown. Hanna Moon looked lost to her, and, somehow, more childlike than her daughter had been. Truth be told, she looked a little crazy. Even in cold weather she wore colorful, loose linen dresses of the sort favored by the women of the area’s hippie community and woven sandals. Her thick black hair was often twisted into a braid that hung down to her waist and tied with a ribbon, just as her daughter had worn hers in the photo that had been reproduced and taped onto windows and nailed to telephone poles all over town. Sometimes Hanna Moon appeared to be talking to herself, or, at least, to someone who wasn’t there.

It had been that singular photo of the smiling nine-year-old, her eyes wide and serious, that finally prompted Kate to come to the sheriff. Most of the photos had long since been taken down, but a couple days after Isabella Moon came to her in the night, she saw one taped to a coffee can at the drugstore where she’d gone to get some sort of over-the-counter sleeping pill. The can had been pushed back into a corner behind the cash register and was surrounded by rolls of register tape, old coupons, and rags. It seemed to have been forgotten, like the little girl herself. Something about the way the tape had worn off at the edges so that the photo was in danger of curling itself off the can drew her attention. The can was turned so that
HELP US
was all she could see of the words below the photo. From memory she knew that the whole sentence read: “Help Us Find Our Isabella Moon.”

She felt like she was losing her mind, so invaded had she been by the need to reveal what she knew, what Isabella Moon (
It was the child herself, wasn’t it? Not some devil or evil spirit that I don’t believe in, anyway, right? God, how am I to know?
) apparently wanted her to tell.

“Please,” Kate said. “Will you just listen to me?”

Bill Delaney had nothing better he wanted to do that Friday morning, and he was a man who hated to see another human being suffer—particularly a woman. So he listened, even though he wasn’t quite sure that he could trust her.

Mary-Katie.

The voice is a whisper, calling a name that doesn’t belong to her anymore.

Mary-Katie.

Kate struggles as though she’s escaping from a troubled sleep, her movements slow and exaggerated, as in a dream. But if it is a dream, why does she slip some nearby shoes onto her feet as she gets out of bed? Who thinks of shoes in a dream?

The hillside outside her window is bathed in silver light, and there, beneath the hickory tree shading the back porch, is a girl.

Mary-Katie.

The voice doesn’t seem to be coming from the girl, but from inside her own head. Her breath fogs the glass as she watches, knowing that the girl wants her to come outside.

Suddenly she is following the girl over the hill and across the open pasture on its other side. Her feet are light as she runs—yes, she is running!—through the brittle stubble of the winter grass. The few lights of the town are ahead of her. She doesn’t often go into town this way, usually preferring to stick to the familiar road that runs in front of her own little cottage. But the ground is firm and fast under her, and she wonders why she doesn’t come this way every day.

The girl disappears into the dark stand of trees at the edge of the pasture, but she knows the girl is still there, waiting. Even if she has run on ahead, Kate understands that she will find her. She is meant to find her.

There she is, standing in the street beyond the trees, her brilliant yellow coat vibrant as a bale fire in the night.

Kate runs faster, and the girl turns her back and leads her on toward the town, through the grounds of the old medical college, where the buildings stand mute and shuttered, through the backyard of the crumbling president’s house, where a single rusting bulldozer sits as testimony to someone’s forgotten plans.

As the girl runs out into Main Street without pause, Kate’s heart jumps, but there are no vehicles at all, not even a straggling log truck or a sheriff’s cruiser. As they pass the glassy storefronts, Kate is racing her own mirror image, but she can’t stop, she won’t stop, because the girl will not slow now. They cross over to Bridge Street and follow it until it ends in a blinking yellow light. Will the girl go left or right?

When she goes left at the corner and disappears behind a tall hedge, Kate keeps going. As she passes the Methodist parsonage with its stiff wrought-iron fence, she wishes that she had a stick to hit against its spindles and realizes at the same moment that, yes, there is a stick in her left hand. But when she reaches out with it as she runs, there is no satisfying
plunkplunkplunk
of wood against iron. In fact, there is no sound around her at all except the sound of her feet striking the pavement: no dogs, no sirens, no night birds. She’s not afraid. She is certain once again that she is dreaming.

The girl reappears in the light from the street lamp at the next corner.

Isabella!

How does she know the girl’s name? She hadn’t seemed to know it when she looked out her bedroom window to see the girl standing beneath the hickory tree like someone’s lost shadow.

The girl pauses at Kate’s voice but doesn’t turn around. Kate sees that her dark hair is shot with glimmering strands of silver
.
But she knows the girl can’t be more than ten years old and the silver is just a trick of the light from the street lamp’s broad halo.

Isabella!

The girl begins to run again.

Kate drops the stick, thinking it might speed her progress. In the next block there is a rottweiler who growls when she passes on her regular evening walks, and she has often carried a stick as a sort of talisman, thinking she would use it on him if she had to. But still there are no animal sounds, no lights on in any of the houses she passes, no cars slowing down to see why a woman is running through the streets in the middle of the night in her pajamas, wearing a scuffed oxblood loafer on one foot and a tan and white nubuck slip-on on the other. She is safe from the dog, at least.

They approach Birchfield Avenue, where her friend Lillian lives. But instead of going down Lillian’s street, the girl enters the first road, one where there are no street lamps. This road—she doesn’t know if it even has a name—twists through a set of woods for a distance, to finally end at the town’s water processing plant. No one lives back here in this no-man’s-land, the unofficial divide between Carystown’s small black community and the rest of the town. Amazed that she is not winded, she nearly catches up with the girl, who has finally slowed. Without street lamps, the road is black at their feet and the trees around them are like walls reaching to the sky. But Kate can see well enough: the silver in the girl’s hair is its own light, and she follows her easily.

Isabella must want her near. As they slow to a walk, Kate realizes that the girl is as silent as everything else around them. If it weren’t for the scuffing of her own feet, she would think she’d gone completely deaf.

Without warning the girl leaves the pavement and heads across the road’s shoulder.

Wait!

As Isabella pushes her way through the brush, Kate tries to keep up. But the girl seems unhindered by the brambles and tangle of slender branches that whip against Kate’s arms and face. The brambles sting, and Kate laughs to herself that it must be a pretty pitiful dream if she can’t even keep from getting scratched up in it.

Now they are in a clearing that Kate can’t remember ever seeing before. Part of its ragged circle is an expanse of brick that shines a brilliant white even in the dim moonlight. She has the feeling that if she were to put her hand against the wall and push, ever so lightly, it might disappear. She has that feeling, too, about the tall cedars that rise around them, their uppermost branches drawn together in soft, wavering points against the sky. Beneath her feet the ground is spongy, and she is surprised to realize that the clearing, though silent, has a distinct smell. She covers her mouth with her hand.

She thinks about those times when she wakes herself to use the bathroom in the night, turning on the light, even pinching her thigh as she sits down to urinate to make sure that she is not dreaming, that she is not about to drench herself and her bed. Now, she resists pinching herself because she has begun to suspect that she is not dreaming. She knows that if she rests her fingers against her thigh and squeezes, the pain will be just as real as the smell of decay filling her nostrils.

She calls to Isabella, who stands in the center of the clearing. But the girl only sinks to her knees, her silvered hair falling forward over her yellow coat.

As Kate approaches her, the wind picks up around them and the smell intensifies. Unafraid, Kate reaches out, thinking to touch the girl, to stroke her young head, to reassure her that someone is there, that someone wants to help her. But her fingers touch nothing and she is alone in the clearing.

She stands there for a moment as the sounds of the woods and beyond reveal themselves: a screech owl in some distant barn, a rabbit or raccoon hurrying through the brush, a truck downshifting out on Route 12. Suddenly cold in the pajamas that had been fine for a March night spent beneath a down comforter, Kate wraps her arms around herself as though it will make a difference and begins to think about the long walk home.

2

FRANCIE CAYLEY AND HER MOTHER,
Lillian, were already at their regular table at The Lettuce Leaf when Kate arrived, out of breath from hurrying from the office. She relished the idea of a break from her own thoughts. All morning at her desk she couldn’t help but wonder what the sheriff had really thought of her and what she’d had to say.