Isabella Moon (5 page)

Bill and his deputies spent a fair amount of time out here, serving notices and enacting foreclosures. He was often asked to tag along with the BATF or the Feds when they went after the pot growers or the rare whiskey still in the area. There was nowhere else to hold the suspects except the county jail, which was his province. No one out here was ever glad to see him, and he wasn’t particularly glad to see them.

When Brad Catlett’s mother answered the door, Bill knew immediately that someone who knew what happened had reached her. She was a trim woman, athletic, different from the area’s usual overweight welfare mavens. Her face was mottled with hives from her weeping. She had the same fine features as her son, the same small bump on the bridge of her nose and prominent cheekbones.

“Our pastor’s wife works at the school,” she said as he entered with Frank. “I was out in the garden shed earlier. Won’t be too long before we can put in some broccoli,” she added, as though they needed the explanation.

She offered them coffee, but before they could say no, she said that she forgot she was out. The three of them stood in awkward silence for a moment. Tears slid down her face and her body began to shake with sobs. Frank guided her to sit in a chair.

Photos of Brad Catlett sat on several surfaces of the room: the television cabinet, a shelf above the couch, a side table. The photos spanned his entire short life, from Brad as a drooling infant in a jump seat, to a grinning six-year-old showing off a missing front tooth, and Brad and his father standing proudly beside a restored 1970 GTO. Brad had been the Catletts’ only child.

Frank spoke in quiet, comforting tones to the woman. Bill was glad that he’d come along.

“I need to see Brad,” the woman said. “Why can’t they bring him home? He should be here with his mama. He didn’t finish up his breakfast this morning. He’s always in such a hurry, that boy. Always wanting to go somewhere.”

“They need him at the hospital right now, Mrs. Catlett,” Bill said. “Is Brad’s father close by? In town?”

“He works at the Toyota plant,” she said. “I don’t want to tell him over the phone. He’ll go crazy.”

The plant was an hour’s commute from this end of Jessup County; Bill considered that dedication to making a living. It looked like the Catletts were probably good people.

“Somebody will contact him, Mrs. Catlett,” he said, making a mental note to put Daphne on it. “Can you tell me if Brad had any heart problems?”

“It’s stupid,” she said with disgust. “Those stupid doctors. I don’t know what happened to Brad or what the people at that school did to him, but he’s got nothing whatever wrong with him. He’s had a cold for a while, maybe a little allergy with spring and all. But there was nothing wrong with his heart. He was a runner, for God’s sake. He would run with me, five, ten miles a day, sometimes.”

“Frank, maybe Mrs. Catlett could ride back into town with you,” Bill said. “She needs to get to her boy at the hospital.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff,” Frank said. “Maybe there’s somebody you want to call to meet us there?”

As though on cue, the telephone in the kitchen began to ring.

“Do you mind if I take a look around Brad’s room, Mrs. Catlett?” Bill said. He hoped that in the confusion of the phone ringing and her desire to get to the hospital, she wouldn’t think too hard about it.

She didn’t. As she got up to answer the telephone, she waved a hand toward the hallway. “The last bedroom,” she said, and disappeared into the kitchen.

“I’d call that permission,” Frank said in a low voice. “I’ll stay here.”

He knew it was probably unnecessary, but Bill pulled on a pair of plastic gloves as he went into the boy’s bedroom. It was remarkably tidy for a teenager’s room: the bed was made and there were no dirty clothes littering the floor. The dresser, television, and video game console were free of dust and the goo that he knew generally went along with having kids. He suspected that Mrs. Catlett ran a pretty tight ship.

With expert speed he pawed through the boy’s clothes-filled drawers and found nothing unusual but a plastic Baggie filled with condoms (
Extra Ribbing for Extra, Wild Pleasure!
) and, in a drawer’s corner, a few loose pot seeds that were so old they’d lost their scent.

There were pictures in this room, too. These were unframed, taped to the mirror or stuck on the bulletin board: more shots of the car; a snapshot of the boy, younger, with a famous astronaut (space camp, maybe?); and several of pretty girls smiling shyly for the camera. Maybe he was an okay kid, after all.

On the way out of the room he noticed the Buyer’s Mart bag hanging on the back of the door. Inside were five or six boxes of cold medicine, the liquid nighttime stuff, and several boxes of generic cold tablets. He wondered if the mother had bought them herself or if it had been the boy, hiding things in plain sight.

4

FRANCIE LET HERSELF
into the apartment a few minutes before two o’clock. She had two hours before her shift at the hospital began, but she would have plenty of time to get there. Closing the door softly behind her, she could hear noise from a television in the apartment below. She had come into the building through a side door that opened onto a sheltered sidewalk, so she was certain that she hadn’t been seen.

She dropped her purse into a chair and sat down on the edge of the couch to slip off her shoes. Stretching her legs out in front of her, she surveyed her feet. The night before, she’d given herself a pedicure, scraping her heels and soles with a pumice stone and slathering them with a rose-scented lotion she’d gotten in a Christmas gift exchange. Then she trimmed her toenails and painted them a delicious, golden apricot color. Even in this uncomfortable place, she preferred bare feet.

No one had been in the apartment for several days, and it had a stuffy, shut-in feel to it. She went to the window and turned the casement handle to let in some air. With it came the sounds of Middleboro’s afternoon traffic. Only fifteen minutes up the highway from Carystown, Middleboro was less of a town than a suburban accident. From the window, she could see four fast-food restaurants (she’d driven through them all more than once on her way to work), five gas stations, and a single minimall with a grocery store, hair salon, cheap shoe store, and dollar store. The other thing that Middleboro had in abundance was hastily constructed apartment complexes, like the one that held the apartment in which she stood.

The apartment was ugly. But it hadn’t been her idea to rent the place, and it certainly wasn’t her money. The walls were painted an uninspired yellow, someone’s lame attempt at getting beyond the standard beige of most furnished places, and the cushions of the couch were a badly faded puke green and covered in dark stains that spread over them like amorphous blossoms. The two tables in the room were of some kind of veneered plywood, their grains like no wood she’d ever seen. A single chair and floor lamp with a shade whose shape vaguely resembled an elephant’s head sat in a corner. When she’d first seen the lamp shade, she laughed, thinking it was a joke, but it had lost its bizarre charm for her now. There was nothing funny about the thing. The two dark spots like eyes on either side of the shade seemed to watch her expectantly from across the room, asking her some question. She didn’t know what, but she imagined she wouldn’t like what it was.

Thirsty, she went to the kitchen and switched on the dusty radio by the sink. It was tuned to the only AM station that came in fairly well here, one that played obnoxious oldies music that had been old even when she was a little girl: the Chi-Lites, the Four Freshmen, the Supremes, Chuck Berry. But it was company.

With the Coasters cooing on about someone’s new love, she opened the cupboard to find a glass. As she reached inside, a cockroach flung itself onto the counter. When she opened her mouth and let out a shrill little shriek, the thing scuttled down the front of the cabinet and into an open drawer.

“What’s all the noise about, Buttercup?” Paxton shut the door behind him and slid the chain onto its bar.

Francie hurried out of the kitchen, her skin crawling with goose bumps. “You don’t even want to go in there,” she said. “This place gets nastier every time we come here.”

“What? Our little love nest?” Paxton said, crossing the room, his arms open to her.

“It’s nasty,” she said, turning her back on him. She hated that he made her feel petulant, hated asking him for things. Even so, there wasn’t really so much wrong with the place. Someone could spray for the bugs.

As she knew he would, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his chest. She relaxed against him. There was something about the bulk of his body—he’d played football at prep school and a couple years of intramural at college before he was thrown out—that made her feel wonderfully small and cared for.

But she was sure that he didn’t care for her, not deeply anyway, despite his promises to the contrary. It was sex that he wanted from her, and, if she were honest with herself, it was what she wanted from him. Or maybe it was something more than that. At that moment, though, she didn’t really give a damn.

Paxton began to gently massage her arms, her shoulders, letting his hands caress her upper back, rubbing circles with the pads of his thumbs on the back of her neck. The sounds of the traffic disappeared for her as he moved his hands down the front of her body, lingering on her breasts, feeling the shape of them with his fingertips and carefully sliding the buttons of her blouse out of their holes. As his fingers worked, he put his lips against her hair, the tips of her ears, and breathed softly on her.

She began to help him with the buttons of the blouse, and the two of them together slid it off her body and it dropped to the floor.

He turned her around to face him and lifted her off her feet so she could wrap her legs around him. She hung her head back and laughed as he carried her to the bedroom.

“You were
such
an asshole at lunch today,” she said. “What was all the goddess bullshit?”

“Was I?” he said, sounding just the slightest bit winded from carrying her. “Maybe I meant to be an asshole. We have to keep our secret, right?”

When he dropped her on the bed, she scrambled to pull the spread over herself. The March afternoon was cool and damp, and there’d been no heat on in the apartment overnight. But he reached for her and pulled her back to him.

“No, you don’t,” he said.

“You are the meanest thing,” she said. “I’ll freeze to death.” And to prove her point, she pretended to shiver, chattering her teeth and giving her shoulders a shimmy.

“You are so fucking sexy,” he said. “I want the rest of your clothes off.”

“I thought I was a goddess,” she said. “Not your screw toy.”

“Same difference,” he said, roughly unbuttoning her jeans.

Everything about Francie made him feel like his prick was going to explode. At lunch he’d had to make an effort to keep from staring at her, from putting his hand right up inside that tight-fitting top she’d been wearing. He’d had to concentrate on being polite to her too-sainted mother and that bitch Kate, who always had a stick up her ass. Ever since Francie and he were fifteen and he came back for the summer after his first year of prep school to find that she was working at the snack bar at the swim club, he’d found it almost impossible to be around her without wanting to fuck her right there and then.

On her breaks at the pool, he would find himself staring at her, then, drawn from the safety of his buddies to crouch down near the lounge chairs where she sat with her friends, he would joke around with her. He pretended nonchalance, but his body frequently betrayed him—he learned quickly to wrap a towel around his waist before he approached her. What he really wanted to do was to coax her back onto the grassy hillock behind the snack bar, throw off the towel, and jerk her bikini bottoms off and give it to her. But he never did.

It was torture, the way she had ignored him.

Francie was the only black girl in the group, but her skin was such a light caramel color that she didn’t look much different than the deeply tanned and sunburned girls around her. It wasn’t long before those girls, the ones who expected his attention as their due—Molly Bean, Arabella Taylor, the rich girls—caught on, and before the end of June, Francie was spending her breaks alone.

But it didn’t help him. She refused to go out with him no matter how many times he asked or how many times he called her house. He knew she wanted to, he could tell by the way she pushed her carefully straightened hair behind her ears when he approached her. Each time she said no, he knew she wanted to say yes.

Once.
There had been one small break in her reserve. She’d gotten off early one afternoon and he followed her home, riding his bike in the street beside her as she walked the mile to the East End, not far from the slaughterhouse.

He was silent, inarticulate with desire for her.

She surprised him by stopping dead in the road in front of a vacant lot that was thick with burdock and trash.

“Here,” she said, pulling at the sleeve of his T-shirt so that he nearly toppled off the bike. She stepped forward and put her hand behind his neck. He was smaller then, only a few inches taller than she. He hadn’t yet had the growth spurt that would put him over six feet.

Her kiss was insistent, surprising, her tongue cool and small and frantic in his mouth. His erection came on quickly, but his mind was too filled with her to give any thought to it.