Isabella Moon (50 page)

Never had she seen Miles so helpless. He had never told her what it was, but he’d hinted at some failure in his past, some incident in which he’d been caught unawares and sworn it would never happen again. And it hadn’t for a very long time. But now here he was.

“I could help you down,” she said again. “Let me.” She put the Zippo in her pocket. Her eyes had adjusted to the night and she didn’t need anything to help her see.

Kate lifted her hands to Miles. As she gripped his shoulders, she could feel the odd gap at his shoulder that meant the arm was completely disengaged from its socket. But Miles didn’t cry out or make any sort of sound as she tugged at him, gently at first, then more forcefully.

She swung Miles back and forth in the shadows, trying to get him loose from the low-growing tree that held him captive, its branches creaking in protest at her efforts to steal its gruesome prize. Every so often a limb would break and fall somewhere nearby or she would snap one beneath her feet as she moved. As she and Miles engaged in their strange and bloody dance, his inverted head resting against hers, his breath burbled against her ear, a shallow, watery sound. The memory of all the nights she had spent sleeping close to him, his body cradling hers and his breath damp against her neck, came back to her. Even with all that had passed between them, she couldn’t forget.

With a loud
crack,
the tree gave up and turned Miles loose. His weight dropped onto her, casting her to the ground, and she found herself on her back and out of breath, Miles spread across her like some grisly, awkward blanket. She lay there a moment, paralyzed, with Miles crushing her.

Lying there, she realized that sometime in the night she had ceased to be afraid. It was almost a comfort to have Miles there with her, his blood still warm on her face. Below them, the river coursed quietly, ignoring them. Even the animals seemed to be staying away. Her own body was numb, but she still shivered, despite the heavy cover of Miles. She knew she had some sort of fever. It occurred to her that she might be dying. But even that did not frighten her.

She worked her way from beneath Miles so that only his head lay in her lap, and she sat up to rest against a fallen log. The scent of the wood’s moldering leaves reminded her of the night in the cemetery with Lillian, and she was filled with the same sense of peace she’d felt lying on the ground, sheltering Isabella Moon’s grave. It was the smell of home—not the one she’d made for so many years with her grandmother, but a different kind of home. All her life she’d heard how all living things went back to the earth: ashes to ashes and dust to dust. That Miles should die here, so close to the thing he would eventually become, seemed to imbue him with more honor and dignity than she thought he actually deserved. He was not nearly noble enough. Surely not as noble as Isabella Moon, she thought. No one had more dignity than an innocent child.

As she watched, Miles’s eyes still blinked slowly, but they never looked left or right that she could tell. Their gaze was decidedly internal. Miles wasn’t looking at anything outside himself. She smiled to think how typical
that
was.

She wondered that he did not look at his own body, particularly the shaft of tree limb extending a foot or so out of his lower abdomen. The limb’s cruel shape stood outlined in moonlight. Did she imagine it, or was there a sort of shimmering aura surrounding it? Indeed, there was something magical about the night, in the calm of the air, the nearness of the river, and the moonlight glistening on its surface. She thought of the stories of elves and sprites in her grandmother’s leather-bound books, the ones her grandmother had also read to her father when he was a child. Perhaps her father had died, and was there with them now, wondering himself at what she was doing. She shook the thought away, knowing it was a little crazy. Her head, though, felt fuzzy inside, and her thoughts couldn’t fully form themselves. Fatigue overwhelmed her and she closed her eyes to rest for a few moments.

Mary-Katie.

She woke to see Miles still resting on her lap. Now his eyes were closed.
Had he spoken her name? How she’d come to hate that name, but now she knew that she was forever Mary-Katie, that she’d never really been anything else and never could be.

Please,
she heard him say. She wasn’t certain that his lips had moved, but she believed that, were he to speak, it would be exactly what he would say.

She felt a kind of pity for Miles. He was more animal-like to her than ever at that moment, helpless as he was and smelling of blood and urine and feces. Dapper, polished Miles who had never had a chest hair out of place around her unless he planned it to be so. She stroked his sodden brow.
Poor Miles.

Realizing she was thirsty, Mary-Katie turned her gaze to the river below them. But she knew that Miles had so many things to tell her that she couldn’t go yet. So, she listened as the words poured forth into the night air: recriminations, promises, dreams he’d had, jokes that she hadn’t heard in several years. He was suddenly the Miles she knew when they first met, the one who charmed her grandmother with his clever stories and good manners. Where had this Miles been? Tears filled her eyes as she listened, the words breaking and catching on the trees around them, settling down only to disappear like flakes from a spring snowfall.

He had one last request of her, and she couldn’t refuse him. They would never be the same people again, the two of them, but something between them had been tenuously healed.

She took Miles’s head in her hands and lifted it so she could slide away and let it gently down again to rest on the leaves.
Why wouldn’t he open his eyes? Surely he would want to watch.

“Wait,” she said.

Mary-Katie bent over Miles’s twisted body and grasped the ragged shaft of limb buried in his gut as though it were some primitive Excalibur. At the first pull, his back arched a couple of inches from the ground, but the limb’s outer covering of bark crumbled in her hands and he fell back with a grunt of escaping air.

“Sorry,” Mary-Katie said. She giggled.

She tried again, this time bracing her foot against Miles’s thigh. She twisted the limb to the right a bit as she pulled, ignoring the pain that blossomed in her own abdomen.

As the limb came free, she stumbled backward, her hands still wrapped around it. Even in the scarce moonlight, she could see the gore that had come out with it, and she tossed the limb into the darkness.

“There,” she said.

She’d done the last thing that she could for him, the last thing he’d asked her to do. She didn’t need or want thanks for it.

Without looking down at him, Mary-Katie stepped over Miles and headed down to the river to get a drink. Her fingers were cold and sticky; she thought that she might wash them in the water as well. Her progress down the hillside was slow, but she had no conscious measure of time.

When she got to the river, she found that she could not reach the water because of the broken logs and silt that crowded the bank, and so she crouched beside it, watching. It wasn’t such a wide river. She thought that she might even be able to walk across it if she wanted to find out what was on the other side. She was about to try again to get to the water when she became aware that someone was behind her, watching her.

“Who is it?” Mary-Katie said. She stood up and turned around to see a little girl standing on the bank just a few feet away.

It was Isabella Moon, yet it was not. This child had long, straight auburn hair and a happier mien than Isabella Moon. Her nose turned up at its end and the girl tilted her head fetchingly as she watched her. But she had the same ethereal grace that the other child had had, the same quality of light about her. The girl held out her hand to Mary-Katie and waited for her to decide if she would take it. There was no urgency about her, only a sense of calm and pleasant expectation.

The fatigue that had plagued Mary-Katie finally seemed to be gone, and her head cleared so that everything around her seemed etched in the same pure light that surrounded the child. She took the child’s hand, following her as they walked along the river’s edge, the water rippling beside them like the sweetest of music.

53

MARGARET CLIPPED
a hand’s width of asparagus from its bed and dropped the spears into a basket. They would have asparagus for about another month. In the garden there had been the usual battles with the local wildlife—chipmunks, rabbits, and the occasional groundhog. It seemed they had won this year, sacrificing only a half row of lettuce before they were able to trap two rabbits and transport them to a pasture outside town. At her parents’ house those many years ago, her father would’ve just shot them as vermin and pitched them into the woods or the sinkhole, but there were laws about discharging firearms within the town proper. And the vengeful crew that had replaced Bill and all his deputies after the last election would certainly throw Bill into jail if he so much as took a single shot at a squirrel.

Bill looked up from his book and smiled as Margaret came in the back door.

“You coming into the shop this morning?” he asked.

“I want to clean this, then get a start planting the second round of green beans,” she said. “Maybe around eleven? I’ll bring us lunch.”

“Sure thing,” he said, going back to his book.

He was dressed with careful precision down to his pleated khakis, which he’d ironed himself, and a bright green polo shirt. When she ran her fingers lightly, affectionately, over his head as she walked by, she found that his skin was smooth and knew that he had shaved it that morning in the shower. She was proud of him for so many reasons, but she was also grateful that he’d kept his dignity despite the many coroner’s inquests and Charlie Matter’s trial. It had been a stupid thing for him to run for reelection, but she had known better than to try to talk him out of it. His pride had kept him from just letting his term run out and leaving town, and she had thought that she should at least safeguard some of that pride, even though it meant he would be hurt.

Margaret walked to work, just as she had when she’d been director of the museum on the other side of town. This morning a trace of humidity hung in the late morning air from an unusual, after-midnight rain shower that had dampened the grass and streets. With the antiques shop just six blocks away, it was an easy walk. Best of all, she would be spending the day with the man she loved instead of a crumbling house full of scandal-loving blue-blooded gossips whose snide comments had caused her more than a moment’s pain.

She and Bill had discovered a whole new strata of friends in Carystown, the shopkeepers and real-estate people whose work kept Carystown going and whose interests had more to do with putting food on their families’ tables and paying their kids’ college tuition than what cocktail party they had or hadn’t been invited to.

When she reached Bridge Street, she crossed at the light and kept her head down as she passed the single empty storefront on the block, a shotgun space whose trim had been painted as bright a yellow as the city’s historical code would allow and whose front window sported an unbroken line of black-and-white Scottie dogs across its bottom.

Someone had, thankfully, smeared a wide swath of white paint over the lettering on the window, so that only a portion of a single letter
S
was visible. The interior of the shop was empty, but not quite swept clean, and much had been made about the scattering of boxes, broken pottery, incense sticks, and damaged pieces of clothing that lay on the floor.

It seemed the shop had opened almost overnight after Charlie Matter’s trial was over and he was sent to prison for thirty-five years for drug manufacturing and trafficking. (In a fit of conscience, Frank had waived his right to a trial and was given ten years for conspiracy and ten for poisoning Delmar Johnston. His attempted murder of Charlie Matter had never been pursued. It struck Margaret that no one, not even the prosecutor, had given enough of a damn about Charlie Matter to make any kind of issue out of it.) It was rumored that the mentally broken Hanna Moon had been paid a couple thousand dollars by someone from out of town for the use of her daughter’s name on the shop: Isabella Moon’s Fantastical Notions.

There were plenty of moneyed tourists, who had never heard of the dead child, to purchase enough of the shop’s tarot cards and crystals and copper bracelets, Ouija boards, and cheaply made Indian clothing to keep the shop open for a few months at a time, but in order for a business to survive in Carystown year-round, it had to draw at least some locals. But not even the most crass and curious of town residents could bear to cross its threshold.

Eight months it had lasted, and there were those in town—chief among them Carmella Pulliam, who had a fondness for old embroidered table linens and liked to come into Delaney & Lowe’s to browse—who believed that the place might have stayed open if Janet Rourke hadn’t made it her personal mission to get it shut down.

It was Carmella’s opinion that Janet Rourke had been involved with Paxton Birkenshaw and felt responsible in some way for the girl’s death. Bill also thought that Janet had known more than she’d told when she was questioned about her relationship with Paxton. But she had insisted that they were no more than friends, and social friends at that.

Janet, for whom Margaret had never much cared, had indeed seemed an unlikely champion for the dead child, and was certainly no arbiter of good taste with her expensive but sexy clothing, heavy jewelry, and heavier makeup. She wondered if perhaps Janet’s objection to the shop didn’t have more to do with the baby that she had borne in the midst of all the town’s troubles after an unashamed and very public pregnancy. Old-fashioned as Carystown could sometimes be, no one had condemned her, and her insurance business was thriving despite the fact that she wouldn’t name the baby’s father. She was just another aging professional who had wanted a baby more than a husband. There was also talk that she was planning to buy the Chalybeate Springs Co-op property and make its ancient sulfur spring the centerpiece of a luxury spa. That would happen only if she could keep the place from being declared a permanent toxic waste site. But Margaret suspected that if anyone could keep that from happening, it would be Janet.