Isabella Moon (31 page)

Mitch laughed. “I don’t think you’re supposed to put butter on rice. I heard that once.”

“Butter goes on everything,” Bill said.

Once Bill sat down, they eventually got around to Lillian Cayley.

“I’ve got a whole lot of nothing,” Mitch said. “Anyone who didn’t like her—and there are damn few of them—says they respected her. Even the ones she failed in school. No debts to speak of. No long-lost relatives after her money. Francie’s taking it pretty hard.”

“You know her?”

“We went to school together,” he said. “She was younger, of course. We didn’t run with the same crowd.”

No, Bill didn’t see Mitch hanging around with black girls from the East End, no matter how pretty they were. He had played some football, but kept a pretty low profile with everyone except the ladies. There were still certain Carystown women, now lawyers’ and landlords’ wives, who blushed when they ran into Mitch. Margaret liked him well enough to have him over for dinner, but she’d told Bill more than once that she found Mitch a little too smooth, too confident. Not even thirty-three, he’d already been divorced twice. He kept a picture of his two kids behind a pile of papers on the file cabinet, but he never talked about them. The skinny, gap-toothed girl, a serious, bespectacled sort who resembled her mother, and the boy, who already had his father’s winning smile, lived in North Carolina. No one in Carystown had seen them since they were babies.

“Listen,” Mitch said. “I might as well tell you now, Bill. I screwed up the casting of that tire track behind the Cayley place.”

“How bad?” Bill said.

“It didn’t set right. Crumbled like it was made of sugar.”

It would be much too late to get a new one. The curiosity seekers had been all over that shoulder in the past few days trying to get a look at the Cayley backyard, as though they might see the murder happen there all over again. They were stuck as far as evidence went. It was as though the killer had appeared out of thin air just to murder the woman and then vanished again.

“Too bad,” Bill said. Sometimes he missed being a part of a real department. Louisville was no big city, but the force had been as professional as any. He felt like a father who’d neglected his duty.

“Photos?”

“Daphne’s got them,” Mitch said. “Not great. Looked like maybe a truck tire to me.”

“Might have been the road maintenance people. Or kids parking,” Bill said. “No guarantee it was anything. But let’s do a backup next time.”

Mitch nodded. “Sure thing,” he said. “So, what time do you want me to come by later? I don’t want to be late to Margaret’s table.”

“Early. I’m playing hooky from church to interview Mr. Delmar Johnston with Frank in the morning and I need my beauty sleep.”

Mitch snorted. “You’re already pretty enough for that asshole,” he said. “Hell’s even too good for somebody who sells to kids.”

“I won’t take that as a comment on my looks,” Bill said. “We’ll see you at five-thirty.”

Wanting badly to get home to have some kind of Saturday afternoon nap in front of the television before Mitch showed up, Bill found himself instead standing on the shoulder of Shelbytown Road with Tom Kaptis, a fellow Rotarian who had asked him to come out and look at some vandalized fence.

“I had two calls about it this morning before I could even get down and see this mess,” Tom said. “I’m damned glad I didn’t have any stock out here. They’d be halfway across the county by now.”

“Nobody saw or heard anything?” Bill asked as he took in the ruined fence, the deep tire tracks leading out of the ditch and into the pasture. “You think it happened last night?”

“I can deal with a few slugs through the mailbox or my tractor-crossing sign, but this is more than a person should have to put up with. What the hell’s happening to this town, Bill? It’s like living in the Wild West around here these days. Where’s the law and order?”

It was more of an accusation than a question, and Bill let it go.

“No skid marks,” he said, looking on the road. “Must have been something built for off-road to make it up the other side of this ditch so handily.” He thought back on his conversation with Mitch, who had said that the tracks behind the Cayley house belonged to a truck. But that was a serious long shot. There were probably a couple thousand trucks or SUVs registered in Jessup County alone. And he figured that murderers who liked to creep around under cover of darkness didn’t generally go in for four-wheeling and taking out fences.

“They must have been drunker than hell,” Tom Kaptis said.

Bill, who was out of uniform and wearing jeans and hiking boots, made his way down into the ditch near where it looked like the vehicle might have left the road. There was the usual collection of crap—candy wrappers, a plastic bag, a faded beer can. Browned thistles scraped against his jeans as he looked around the rocks and weeds for evidence of an animal or maybe some piece of the vehicle. Anything.

“You can bet I’m going to press charges against whoever did this,” Tom Kaptis said above him. “I can’t see these two breaks being fenced for under a couple thousand bucks.”

Tom Kaptis wasn’t hurting for money, Bill knew. And he’d be sure to check it out with his insurance company before spending a dime of his own. He went on talking, but Bill tuned him out. There was something here. But he didn’t know what he was looking for until he found it.

“Here we go,” he said quietly to himself. Reaching over a flat, saucer-shaped rock, he picked up a pair of sunglasses jutting out of the weeds and held them up against the sky for a better look. They were twisted some, not much, but enough that it looked like they’d been fallen on. It took him a minute to recognize them as belonging to Kate Russell, but when he did, something clicked into place in his mind.

Everything,
everything,
pointed to her. But he still didn’t know why.

Bill parked the cruiser in Kate Russell’s driveway behind a late model Dodge pickup. It was after five o’clock and Margaret would be wondering where he was, particularly if Mitch showed up before he did. On the way up to the door he walked between the pickup and Kate Russell’s small convertible, casually glancing at the front of the pickup to see if it bore recent scratches or other body damage. Only a moron would park his truck in a driveway less than a half mile from the fence he’d just destroyed, but you never knew.

The bumper and grille looked clean except for a few bugs and some tar splashes from road construction. It had been worth a shot.

Kate Russell looked like a child to him. She was huddled on the couch beneath an enormous blanket that covered her body except for her left foot and ankle, which rested on a pillow. Scratches on her face blazed red beneath a sheen of antibiotic ointment that covered her cheek and reached almost to her chin. She watched him warily. It saddened him to see her hurt, but he kept a close check on his reaction.

“What can we do for you, Sheriff?” Caleb said after the introductions. Bill found him defensive: the way he rocked back and forth on his feet told Bill that the man was nervous. But he knew that innocent people, too, got nervous around the law sometimes, and there had been nothing so far to link him to any of the crimes.

“I see you folks got the paper today,” Bill said.

Kate glanced down at the paper, her face a blank. Neither she nor Caleb responded.

“I’d like you to know that the paper did not get that information from me, Miss Russell. It’s not the sort of thing that I wanted to see in print either.”

Caleb stopped rocking. His eyebrows knitted together as he frowned. “I don’t know if that’s some kind of joke, or what, Sheriff. It’s insane, if you ask me. Libelous. Who would make up something like that?”

Bill and Kate exchanged glances.

“What?” Caleb said.

“Is this someone you want involved in all this?” Bill said.

Kate looked up at Caleb. “Two days ago I would have said yes,” she said. “I don’t know about now.”

“Kate, please,” Caleb said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with what happened.
This
is serious.”

“And the other’s just fun and games. Is that it?”

Bill realized that there was more going on here than he was privy to. If he hadn’t been certain that she’d gotten her injuries from a vehicle chasing her into a ditch, he might have assumed she’d gotten them from the man standing a few feet away. She had that vulnerable quality about her, that wavering confidence he’d seen so many times in women who were prone to be victimized by men. He wondered for the briefest of seconds if that wasn’t what attracted him to her, that cruel streak inside him that he believed lived deep inside of every man. Most men kept it buried. Some never even had a clue that it was there.

“I can handle it,” she said, turning her attention to Bill. “It’s not going to make sense to anybody I explain it to, so I’m just not going to explain. I’ve already answered your questions, haven’t I, Sheriff?”

“Most of them,” Bill said. “We still need to talk about a couple of things, though.”

“Wait,” Caleb said. “You mean this whole ghost thing is true? The ghost of this kid
led you to her body
?”

The way he looked at Kate told Bill that any hope for the relationship between her and Caleb Boyd had probably died at that moment. A woman needed her man to trust her, and vice versa. He felt a little sorry for the guy. He’d been extremely skeptical himself, right up to the moment he’d uncovered that bright yellow coat in the dirt behind the cemetery. Still, he didn’t know quite what he believed. All he knew was that she’d been right and had no motive that he could find to have killed and put the girl there herself.

“You probably want to stay away from the press that’s sniffing around town,” Bill said. “Maybe take a couple of days away from work.”

He was surprised when Kate laughed. She pushed away some hair that had fallen into her face. “That won’t be a problem,” she said. “I don’t think I’m expected back there. But you, Sheriff. You’re looking just as wacky as I am here. What are
you
going to say to this?” She gestured toward the paper.

It was Bill’s turn to smile. “I rarely comment on ongoing investigations. We don’t even have confirmation that the child we found is the Moon girl. We should have dental records first thing Monday.”

He turned to Caleb. “So, yes, Mr. Boyd. I’d say the gist of the story is true. For whatever reason, Miss Russell here was made aware of—by some currently inexplicable means—the location of the missing child’s body. And, for reasons equally inexplicable, I followed up on that information. The body was found during the early hours of Thursday morning. I’d like to say that’s the end of the story, but I don’t think that it is. We still don’t know how the child got there. That’s my focus now.”

As Bill talked, Caleb looked from one to the other in disbelief.

“Why couldn’t you tell me about this, Kate?” he said.

“So you could look at me the way you did a minute ago?” she asked.

Bill thought that it was a good time for him to go. He took the ruined sunglasses from his shirt pocket and placed them on the newspaper.

“I found these down the road and thought you might want them back,” he said. “Maybe you want to come by the office in a day or two and clear up a few things?” In his mind he added,
Like who you really are and why you’re here.

This time Kate exchanged looks with Caleb. Bill observed that hers held a good deal of contempt or anger, possibly both. Caleb pressed his lips together as though he had something to say but didn’t want to let the words out.

More secrets. Bill wished them both a good evening and saw himself out. He stood on the porch a moment, savoring the view. From here he could see to the southern end of the valley and almost to the Quair. The distant hillsides seemed to be melting into the long shadows rising from the valley’s floor. He loved it here in Carystown. It troubled him that it seemed to be falling apart on his watch. But for just that one moment he felt like he could forget it all.

33

PAXTON SAT ON THE HOOD
of the Mercedes watching the sun drop behind the hills far on the other side of the river, almost fifteen miles in the distance. From here, the highest point on Bonterre, he could see not only the surrounding farms, but the edge of the national forest that started at the southern end of the valley. He couldn’t wait for the day when he could bring Francie up here. They would take a picnic and a couple of horses and wander the farm. He wanted to show her everything—from the stables to the waterfall on the creek to the patch of woods where he’d seen two black bear cubs tumbling in the leaves when he was nine years old. It occurred to him that maybe she didn’t ride, being from in town. Funny that he’d never asked her. But there would be time enough for that.

He’d tried to reach Francie over the past twenty-four hours but hadn’t had any luck. There were other things that had his attention, true, but he worried that he hadn’t tried hard enough. Perhaps her grief embarrassed her and she was afraid to call. But there was a shadow in his mind, a dark and ugly shadow that hinted that she didn’t really need him. He pushed it away.
She needed him.

Before he and Francie had finally gotten together, he’d seen his own future as a lonesome one. His mother was dying and seemed to have lost interest in anything but her magazines, the gardens in which she could no longer work, the television in her bedroom. At least she’d stopped harassing him about getting married, probably tired of coming up with names when he asked her whom he was supposed to marry. He knew for damn sure it wasn’t going to be one of the overbred and underfed local horse princesses that had long been paraded in front of him. Sure, they could talk horse breeding, horse trading, horse shows, and Jack Russell terriers, but most of them looked like horses to boot. The parade had, thankfully, trickled to a stop in the past year or two. He figured that the local matriarchs had given up in the face of his disinterest. Marriage—given the evidence of his parents’ strained years together—had always looked to him like a giant cage. He’d long ago decided that it was better to be alone (with the exception of frequent entertainments like Janet or reliable acquaintances from out of town) than to live in a hell of confinement.