Isabella Moon (24 page)

“There’s nothing I can tell you,” Kate said. “Leave me alone.” She started to put down the phone.

“Wait!” he said. “I’ve been told that the little girl
spoke
to you, Ms. Russell. That—tell me if I have this right—her ghost led you to where she was buried. Is that right? Can you confirm that?”

Kate hung up the phone. She’d had her chance at the stoplight, but Isabella Moon was there, keeping her in Carystown, interrupting her life once again. Not just interrupting, but ruining! Even though she didn’t believe in curses, she was beginning to think that her very existence was cursed. Nothing good would ever happen to her again. It had been only a week ago that the girl drew her outside, with her not knowing if she was awake or asleep, awake or dreaming. Now, her good friend was dead, her best friend despised her, she’d had to walk away from her job, and she’d discovered that her lover was unfaithful. Too stunned to even cry, Kate went to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and turned the gas burner on beneath it.

No sooner had the kettle whistled and she poured the water over the tea bag than she heard a car pull into the driveway and knew it was the reporter, come to try again. She took her tea into the bedroom to listen as he knocked at the front door for a good ten minutes until he eventually went away.

Later, when the telephone rang again, Kate let the machine pick it up. No one spoke, but they didn’t hang up either, and she could hear the sound of people laughing in the background. Finally, the machine timed out and cut off the call.

With an irritated tug, Kate unplugged the machine from the wall so the telephone wouldn’t ring. Then she slid the dead bolt across the front door and went to her nightstand to see that the gun was still in the drawer. And though it wasn’t even three o’clock in the afternoon, she pulled down the bedroom window shades, took off her clothes, and got beneath the covers. The fresh sheets she’d put on a couple days before but hadn’t yet slept on smelled of lavender and felt pleasantly rough against her skin. The lavender made her ache for her grandmother, who had loved her without question or hesitation, even when she made a hash of things. She balled the pillow beneath her head and folded her legs protectively against her chest. Her single despairing thought before passing out was,
Who will love me now?

When she awoke in darkness, Kate rolled over to see that the clock read a little after eight in the evening. Her mouth felt dry and unpleasant, but she was hungry. She thought of the M&Ms she’d brought to Janet, and the memory of the whole horrible afternoon came back to her.

“Shit,” she said to the empty room.

Uneasy in the darkness, she wandered through the house turning on lights. She couldn’t help but think of Caleb. He had been here, in her living room, wanting her, touching her in the glow from the fire. But the memory soured and she could only picture him with Janet, her fingers with their perfectly manicured nails clutching his arm, pulling him close to kiss him. To devour him. The two of them had surely been in the very bed on which Janet had lounged so decadently, in the room where her own husband had died, no doubt already betrayed by Janet with some other man. Or woman.

Kate closed the living room blinds, although there was no one on the street that she could see. The antique mall had closed at six, and the few people who worked there were always gone by six-thirty. She expected to find the reporter camped out in her driveway, but he wasn’t there.

Between the living room’s two side windows sat an old, half-size rolltop desk that she’d bought at one of the less prestigious antiques shops in town right after she moved into the house. Small and beat-up as it was, the thing she had liked best about it was that it retained its original key, even after eighty or ninety years. As far back as her childhood, she had liked to have a box or a trunk, something she could lock and know that no one had access to but her.

Now, the rolltop stood open. The cubbies of the desk’s interior had been emptied of their paper contents—everything was in a pile in the center of the desk. Unpaid bills lay mixed with coupons and store receipts. Several of the letters her grandmother had sent her at college lay open, as though someone had been reading them. But there didn’t seem to be malice in the way the pile was made. It didn’t look as though it had been made in a hurry, but casually, as though its maker were merely curious.

Unnerved, Kate looked around the room as though expecting to see someone there with her whom she hadn’t noticed before, someone who had come in while she was sleeping. Turning on the desk lamp, she examined the lock. It didn’t look forced or broken. She looked around the desk for the key. Not finding it, she took the blue and white Chinese vase from the shelf above the desk. The key was still inside where she’d left it.

Kate quickly sorted through the pile, her hands shaking. She didn’t keep anything important in the desk; her real birth certificate and passport were in a safe-deposit box in town. She separated the papers, throwing away some and putting the rest in their appropriate cubbies. When she was done, she locked the desk again and replaced the key. Looking at the closed desk, she could almost imagine that it had never been disturbed. But it was small comfort.

Desperate for normalcy, she turned on the television. Its cheerful noise followed her as she made a quick tour of the house, checking each window and door lock.

Leaning across the kitchen table to lower a shade, she saw the photograph. She recognized it instantly. It was a candid portrait of Miles on their wedding day, one that one of the photographers had taken on the steps of the church before the ceremony. It had been an accident that the picture had come from Hilton Head with her. She’d locked it in the desk, having discovered it pressed between the pages of her confirmation Bible.
Why hadn’t she thrown it away?

The photographer had caught Miles looking into the distance, dark and pensive and unapproachable in his gray morning coat and striped ascot. She shuddered to see his face again. She knew she should tear the photo in two and toss it into the garbage, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. It needed to be back in the desk, where she could see it every so often and remember every horrible thing that he’d done to her.

She went back into the living room and opened the desk. As she slid the photograph into one of the cubbies, she noticed something different about the air around her: it bore the faint but unmistakable scent of honey.

24

“
LIKE THE MAN SAYS, BILL,
” Porter Jessup said, “I’m going to go ahead and make your day.”

“I expect you can’t make it any worse,” Bill said, settling into a chair on the other side of the coroner’s desk. He was glad to be out of the office. He’d done a press conference—brief as it was—earlier in the afternoon where he’d announced that the remains of a child had been found in a county cemetery and that, from the evidence so far, they appeared to be those of Isabella Moon. Two television stations had been there with reporters, and a couple more newspaper people. Joshua Klein had been front and center, but was oddly quiet, letting the outsiders ask the questions. When they asked how he’d come to look in the cemetery, Bill told them he couldn’t provide that information as yet. How he was going to deal with that, he didn’t yet know. He figured something would come to him.

Porter laughed. “I bet you can’t wait to see your ugly mug back on the tube tonight,” he said. “Did you do it on the steps of the courthouse, or did you go the humble, hardworking route and stick with the office?”

“And how many bad chicken dinners did you have to show up at to get your ass elected to this freak show?” Bill asked, indicating Porter’s bulletin board with its photographic collection of expressionless corpse faces crammed cheek-by-jowl over the cork surface.

Porter looked over the bulletin board like a man admiring so many pictures of his beloved children, a smile spreading across his face.

“Damn, I love my job,” he said. “I say, God bless the poor slobs who put me here. And the way you’ve got things going these days, this could get to be a full-time gig. No more farmers tipped over on their tractors for me. I’m anticipating some real drug lords soon. Streets awash with blood and bullets, yes, sir. Picturesque. Like the movies.”

“So I was right about the kid,” Bill said. “Meth?”

“Not using more than a year, I expect,” Porter said. “He was a snorter. Slight septum damage, but nothing too nasty. No heart defects that I could see. Healthy all around. Blood work won’t be back for a week or two, but, yes, I’d say you were right.”

“Mama won’t be happy,” Bill said. “Seemed like a nice kid.”

“What my mama didn’t know liked to have killed me, too,” Porter said.

The next thing Porter had for him were photos. Bill saw their edges peeking out from beneath a small pile of papers and hoped they weren’t more of the boy. He’d seen enough dead kids for the day.

“Lots of people liked this Cayley woman,” Porter said, sliding out the pictures. “One of the nurses fell over and concussed herself when she heard. Ironic, given what these pics show. The daughter’s a looker, too.”

Bill grunted an assent. Francie Cayley was a pretty thing and seemed the type to be on the ball. He’d been surprised that she hadn’t called the station wanting to know what was going on with the investigation. She might not yet have recovered from the initial shock, which had been one of the worst a person could get.

“Look here,” Porter said, flipping on the desk lamp and sliding one of the photos into the light. “We could go down and look at her in person if you want, but you can actually see a little better in the photo.”

The eight-by-ten was of the right side of Lillian’s head. Most of the hair had been shaved away from the temple and forehead areas to expose the carefully cleaned wound.

“This is what got her, right here,” Porter said, using an index finger to outline one obvious L-shaped indentation running from her cheekbone to her temple. “No splinters in the wounds, so I’m thinking metal. Maybe a gardening tool. I’ve seen the stuff from the site, but nothing looks good to me. Did she have any plumbing tools around?”

“Damned unlikely,” Bill said.

“Automotive, then? Maybe a tire iron?” Porter said. “If it was, it wasn’t a real big one. Look at the width of this area here.”

“Could be,” Bill said. “So, what was the pitchfork for?”

“That’s what I call gratuitous,” Porter said, shaking his head. “Stabbings are personal. Whoever used the pitchfork on her was expressing himself in a most inappropriate way. Should’ve said it with flowers.”

“Are you ready to turn loose of one of them? Both?” Bill said. The boy’s father had been calling every day to get his son back and buried.

“They’re all yours, as far as I’m concerned,” Porter said. “Now that you’ve brought me that bag full of bones, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”

“Anyone ever point out you’re kind of a ghoul, Jessup?” Bill said, getting up.

“Not everyone who spends his childhood dissecting barn cats turns out to be a serial killer,” Porter said. “Anatomy is important, you know.” He looked at his watch. “It’s getting late. You want to go get a beer?”

“I got someone a damned sight better looking than you at home to drink with,” Bill said. “But I’ll take a rain check.”

“Suit yourself,” Porter said. “Did I mention that you need to be looking at someone with good upper body strength? I’m thinking that it must have been a man to get that pitchfork to go all the way through. Could be a big woman, but I seriously doubt it.”

“Sure,” Bill said. “You give me a shout the minute you get a look at the Moon girl.”

“Just keep ’em comin’, Sheriff,” Porter said. “I’m your man.”

Both of the boy’s parents were at the house when Bill got there. The mother, Doreen, looked like she’d aged about ten years since he’d been to the house the previous Friday. Joe, her husband, shook his hand at the door and stepped aside so he could come into the house. The front room was still neat as a pin. A number of clean and empty casserole dishes sat stacked on the table by the front door. The local church ladies had obviously been busy, but Bill suspected that the food was probably at the bottom of a garbage bag somewhere. Neither Catlett looked as though they’d been eating much, or sleeping, for that matter.

When they were all seated, Bill got right to business, knowing what was uppermost in their minds.

“The funeral home can come and get your son’s body,” he said. “You can call them tonight, if you like.”

Doreen Catlett cried out as though she’d been hit. She reached for her husband, who pulled her close and began to stroke her hair. “It’s okay,” he said over and over.

No matter how many times Bill saw this scene, it always felt new and horrible to him. Even when it was a bad kid who had died, he was always somebody’s son or nephew or grandchild who had started out as a funny or solemn or beautiful boy who, in the eyes of the people who loved him, might someday have been a priest or a president. It kept him aware of how one’s life could change in an instant: that first joint, the wrong choice of friends, the harsh word that caused the initial turning away from the path to a life that might be worth a damn.

When things calmed down, he asked them about the boy’s behavior, if anything had changed about him in the previous few months. It took them a couple of puzzled minutes to tumble to what he was asking. When Joe Catlett caught on and jumped up from the sofa to come toward him, Bill’s hand started to go to his sidearm, but he caught himself.