Isabella Moon (40 page)

It didn’t please her. Her eyes narrowed and she peered at him from behind her heavily mascaraed lashes. Maybe she was seriously drunk, after all.

“No problem,” she said. “Pity fucks bore me, anyway.”

As Miles watched her rush out the door and down the inn’s front stairs, he thought about chasing after her and beating the hell out of her with the stick. His heart was suddenly pounding in his chest and he knew he might have killed her. But he stood still until he was again under control. He looked around, wanting to make sure that no one had witnessed his humiliation.

Picking up a copy of the local newspaper that lay on the registration desk, he went up to his room. A few minutes later, as he reclined against the generous bank of pillows on his bed, he put the woman from the bar out of his mind. Reading the coverage surrounding the funeral he’d attended that morning, he learned just what sort of trouble his Mary-Katie was in.

43

“
JUST WHEN I THINK
you couldn’t be more of a jerk, you do yourself one better,” Janet said, pouring Paxton a glass of brandy. “Of course she threw your ass out. You’re a sorry piece of shit, Pax.”

“You always have that special turn of phrase, Janet. No wonder you’re the popular girl,” Paxton said with a self-assurance he didn’t quite feel. The episode with Francie had shaken him. Janet knew that they’d had a fight—he’d told her only enough to get him the company he needed. He hadn’t wanted to go home alone to lie in bed, waiting for dawn until, perhaps, the sheriff came and hauled him off.

“Screw you,” Janet said, curling her feet beneath her as she sat on the leather sofa. Her silk robe fell open at the chest and he saw that she was naked underneath it.

Even though it was well after midnight, Paxton had seen a faint light from the television burning in Janet’s bedroom, so he hadn’t hesitated to ring the bell. Now they were in the library of her house, the only room she’d left untouched since her husband’s death. The furniture was heavy-footed and covered in hand-tooled leather or burnished to a mellow shine. Row after row of books filled the floor-to-ceiling shelves, and the discreet wet bar tucked behind a games table contained a selection of rare scotches. The old man had had a man’s good taste, or perhaps the room had been furnished by someone other than one of the town’s chintz-and tassel-loving matrons who passed for professional decorators. Janet herself looked out of place here, polished and brittle even in her half-drunk dishabille.

He knew she hadn’t been out much over the past few days. A small basket of mail sent over from her office sat just inside her front door, and he’d gotten a whiff of something rotten coming from the dishes piled in the kitchen sink when he’d gone looking for a glass of water. He could hardly blame her, though. Both of their lives had been weirder than hell lately.

“If you’re not nicer to me, then I won’t share my goodies with you,” he said.

“How about I won’t tell your mommy you’re here, and you give me what you’ve got?” she said.

“I’m just messing with you,” he said, sliding his stash across the massive glass-topped coffee table toward her.

She snatched the box before it stopped moving and expertly laid out some of its contents on the table, making four long and perfectly straight lines—two for each of them. She took her time, throwing her head back after doing each line to keep it going. Francie was always more tentative, as though each time were her first and she couldn’t quite believe she was doing it.

There was a chance that Francie was suffering now that she knew about his killing Lillian. But he would make it up to her. Now, though, he knew she needed to be alone for a while.

“You really were in a hurry getting away from your nursey,” Janet said, pointing at him. “Look at your shirt.”

He looked down to see that he was missing a button and the plackets were misaligned, one button off.

Paxton sank his face into his hands for a moment. Just outside the room, Janet’s grandmother clock struck one.

“I don’t know if she’ll take me back,” he said, his voice breaking. “It’s all so fucked up.”

“Jesus, Paxton,” Janet said. “She doesn’t know what we did, does she? Tell me you didn’t go confessing to her.”

“What?” Paxton said, looking up at her. “No. Quit worrying about that. This isn’t about that. Or you.” Why had he come here, of all places, to the home of the most self-centered woman on the fucking planet?
Everything
was about Janet to her. But maybe that’s what he needed right now, a diffusion of focus around the situation. Things had been way too intense at Francie’s house. Something about the wild look in her eyes when she’d woken him up, like she’d just had the hell scared out of her. What had she said about
seeing
him kill her mother?

“The last thing we need is Nurse Goody Two-Shoes shooting her mouth off,” Janet said.

Paxton took his turn at the table. He loved the immediacy of coke. It instantly put him in a good mood, even when things were going wrong like they were now.

“Don’t be harsh,” he said after a moment. “I come here for a little comfort and all you give me is a hard time.”

Janet slipped off the couch, licked her finger, and ran it over the tabletop to get the last crumbs of coke. She stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked at it lasciviously, making him laugh. Then she climbed onto his lap. Leaning close to him, she began to trace the outer rim of his ear with her tongue. By the time she was pressing her breasts against his chin, guiding one of her sweet nipples into his mouth, he knew that he was in danger of coming before she could unbutton his pants.

“When do you think they’re going to have the funeral for the kid?” Janet said. They had ended up in her bedroom and were sharing the dregs of a pint of freezer-burned low-fat butter pecan ice cream. “It’s just dumb luck that that cracker Charlie Matter never told the sheriff that I was out there that day.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Paxton said. His buzz was slipping. The ice cream was good, but overly sweet. There was something unpleasant, too, about the smell of Janet’s rumpled sheets, as though she’d had any number of men there before him. She was starting to annoy him.
Needy, needy Janet.
The sex with Janet was outfuckingstanding, but he was beginning to think that if he was going to keep Francie, he maybe needed to give her his full attention.

“What do you mean, ‘while it lasts’?” Janet said. She grabbed his bare shoulder to try to turn him around to face her.

“I mean, the sheriff may be a loser, but he got lucky finding the body,” he said, getting out of the stale bed. A shower sounded good to him right now. “You could be in some deep shit.”

“
Me?
That’s because
you
didn’t bury the body well enough, asshole!” Janet said, her voice raised. “You told me you’d help me, that you’d take care of it.
I
wanted to take her over the county line—anywhere but around here. But no, you bury her right under everyone’s noses like it’s some kind of joke.”

Paxton sneered. “So you think the kid’s ghost wouldn’t have taken your buddy Kate Russell out of town?”

“It’s still your fault,” Janet said. “And don’t bring up that bitch. That ghost stuff is a bunch of bullshit.”

“I recall that it was you and not me who hit the poor kid with that monstrosity you call a car,” Paxton said.

“It was a fucking accident!” she screamed. “It was a fucking accident and you said you’d help me!” Janet was suddenly up and flinging herself at him, trying to strike him on the arms, the chest—anywhere she could land her hands.

“Whoa, whoa,” Paxton said, trying to fend her off. “Quit, damnit!”

He was finally able to wrestle her off him, and he pushed her onto the bed, where she crumpled tearfully and tried to gather the soiled top sheet around her naked body. He loved to play rough games with Francie and Janet or whomever, but he found actually manhandling a woman distasteful. Men he had no problem with, but women were a different story. There were things that a gentleman didn’t do, and he despised Janet for driving him to it.

“I don’t think they’re going to figure out more than that someone ran her over,” he said, trying to keep the anger and frustration out of his voice. “But if you keep acting like the town flake instead of the ball-breaking bitch you really are, honey, then they will start looking at what might be wrong with you. You’ll say something to the wrong person, or you’ll pass by the sheriff’s office one day and decide you have to drop in and confess. If you think you feel bad now, imagine how you’ll feel being locked up in the state women’s facility.” Actually, he suspected that Janet would do pretty well in prison. She was a survivor. But if she went, she would take him down with her, and he had enough to deal with now that Francie was falling apart as well.

She stared up at him. He could see that he was getting through to her.

“I’m the only one who can possibly connect you to the kid,” he said. “I’ve still got that stupid scarf you left in your truck. But I can get rid of that, and Charlie doesn’t even remember you were there that day or he would’ve said something by now.”

“If he’d just sold me the place when I first asked him,” she said, sitting up. She hurriedly wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. “It was his own damned fault. How many times did I go out there? I can’t believe I begged that son of a bitch.”

“You know he liked it,” Paxton said. A pissed-off Janet was far better than a sulking, guilty one. “He just wanted to get close to that firm little ass of yours.”

“What a creep,” she said, reaching again for the sheet to pull it around herself as though Charlie Matter were there watching her, wanting to touch her. “I don’t know why I even wasted my time. There’s a place out in the west end of the county—the land’s more level and there aren’t twenty outbuildings to knock down. It’s a great setup for a spa. Less traffic and close to the county airport. I could get celebrities in here.”

Janet’s eyes, though still shot with red from the tears and alcohol, were shining now. Whether it was from the coke or excitement, Paxton didn’t much care.

“See,” he said. “All you have to do is keep your head.” Standing over her, he put his hand on her mussed and tangled hair, cognizant that his penis was within biting distance of her mouth. He squatted down beside her in case she flared up again.

“It’ll be easy,” he said. “Chances are it’ll all just go away once the kid’s buried and people move on to something else.”

“No. I bet you were right the first time,” she said. “Now that they know she’s dead, they’re going to want to know who did it.”

“You watch,” Paxton said. “They can’t even figure out who killed Francie’s mother. The answer’s right in front of them, but they’ll never get it.”

The look on Janet’s face slowly turned shrewd, considering. He’d seen her wear the same look when she was dealing with personal injury lawyers.

“Why?” she asked. “What do you know about Lillian Cayley?”

“I’m just an interested party is all,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. Her usually expressive face was suddenly unreadable to Paxton. He couldn’t tell if she’d figured out that he’d killed Lillian and just didn’t care or simply pushed the unpleasant thought away from her mind. Finally, she stood up from the bed without saying another word and went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

When he heard the water in the shower come on, he knew he had nothing to fear from Janet. Pulling on his pants, he hurried downstairs to find the coke. He was feeling better, but a couple of lines would improve his mood even more. The idea of having sex with a clean Janet appealed to him, and he thought that he might even catch her before she got out of the shower.

Was everything just the result of dumb luck?
Janet let the water course over her face and chest, feeling it caress her skin. When Paxton had taken the girl to bury her behind the cemetery, she’d retreated to the shower, turning up the hot water until she could barely stand it. It had been the only thing that could stop her shaking.

Charlie Matter was alone at the co-op. Because it was a slow time of year, some of the others who lived and worked there had part-time jobs in town or at the Buyer’s Mart.

“Another year, six months,” Charlie Matter said. He stood close enough to Janet that his sour smell nearly gagged her. But business was business and she stood unflinching. “What’s the difference to you? Plus, you’d be putting all the good folks out here out of work. You’ve got to remember, it’s not really up to me. We’re a democracy, and not everyone here thinks money is that important.”

“Who’s to say I couldn’t get them work?” she said. “A resort needs groundskeepers. They could make this place something special.”

“Right,” Charlie said. “And the first fancy client you get in here who’s come to get rubbed down with pig’s fat or palm leaves or whatever and doesn’t like Kyla’s tattoos or Darrin’s dreadlocks says she’s too spooked to come back or even stay, and my people are standing on the sidewalk in front of the unemployment office.”

“I never would’ve suspected you of being such an altruist,” Janet said. The guy was full of shit and they both knew it. She also knew—about herself—that she didn’t care so much about Chalybeate Springs (though she thought the name itself would sell the spa), but hated that Charlie Matter was being so stubborn about selling it. She’d started the negotiations well before Richard’s death, and the prospect of developing the spa, along with the new house, was just what she needed to keep herself going. Too many people in town thought she had no feelings, that what she’d had with Richard was not so much a marriage as it was a business arrangement: an old man’s last fling with a vibrant young woman (who was, they were certain, after his money). But those fools were so wrong.