Isabella Moon (9 page)

Caleb remained standing near the door, where he’d been since he first entered with Kate. “Looks too expensive to me,” he said.

“You’re just not used to the best, honey,” she said. “It doesn’t take long to acquire a taste for the good things in life. You just have to taste them first.”

Caleb walked slowly to the window, close to where she stood. “Cut the shit, Janet,” he said.

Janet relaxed her smile a degree, but it remained bright.

“I’ve spent well over two years of my life working on this house. All that time since I lost Richard,” she said. “And I think it should be appreciated.”

Caleb laughed. He half expected her to stamp one of her pedicured feet. To him, Janet was better than television, she was so damned unpredictable. “I think this house would’ve been finished a year ago if you hadn’t ridden your men so hard. You’ve made Kate’s life hell over this place.”

“She can handle it,” Janet said, her eyes narrowing. “I don’t think you know our Kate as well as you think you do.”

“Is that right?”

She leaned forward and gently scraped a long, polished nail across his forearm.

Caleb didn’t like her so close. Ridiculous as she was, she was disturbingly sexy. He’d been sucked in by her more than once, and he wasn’t about to be sucked in again.

“Oh, she’s full of secrets, our Kate. What if I told you,” she whispered, “that our Kate knows all about our little conference in the bathroom at the arts fund-raiser?”

“Fuck you, Janet,” he said.

The sound of her delicate laugh seemed to echo off the glass and fill the room. “But you’ve already done
that,
” she said.

Caleb had a strong urge to wrap his hands around her skinny throat and make her eyes pop out of their sockets. The idea of this woman telling Kate how he’d almost ripped off her dress in a fit of lust fueled by three or four glasses of George Dickel made him sick to his stomach. Sometimes when he was making love to Kate, Janet invaded his mind: his hands, his mouth on her breasts; the smell of perfume that emanated from her. The way he’d been desperate to fuck her without hesitation filled his mind, so that Kate disappeared beneath him and he couldn’t help but do to her what he’d been so driven to do to Janet. It filled him with shame and self-loathing, but he couldn’t stop himself. But equally disturbing was Kate’s reaction: she didn’t object, but only seemed to become dead to him, her eyes empty, her body willing but unresponsive.

He could smell that perfume now as Janet leaned close. He jerked his arm away from her, her nail leaving a jagged scratch on his skin.

“You’re just another slut, Janet,” he said. “You’re nothing special, and this pile of sticks you’ve built is nothing special either. You think your money buys you class, but everything about you is cheap and always will be. I hope this playpen you’ve built for yourself burns down around you.”

By now Caleb’s hands were balled into fists and pressed against his thighs to keep them from grabbing Janet.

A look of shock passed over her face, but she recovered quickly. There were no more smiles. She turned and hurried from the room, shouting for Kate.

Caleb’s first thought was to go after her, but now that she was gone, he suspected that she’d been bluffing about saying anything about them to Kate. She wouldn’t, at least not until she could use it to some advantage.

When Janet had gone, Kate took a quick walk through the house, making some notes on what was left to be done before the decorators and painters came in. She had a good relationship with the contractor and his subs, and if she could just keep the money flowing from Janet, the house would finally be finished. Her own bank account had improved since she’d been depositing the extra money that Janet paid her for her work on the house. She figured that she could have worse jobs.

She found Caleb standing in front of the house where the landscaper had begun to lay tile and block out where the plantings would be.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry that took so long.”

“No problem,” he said, still looking out over the pastures.

His eyes looked sad to her. There was still so much she didn’t know about him.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.

Caleb looked down at her as though suddenly realizing she was there. He leaned down and swept her off her feet to cradle her in his arms. “You are so damned corny sometimes,” he said.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “Comes with the package.”

“Nice package,” he said. He kissed her hard and put her down. But he held tight to her hand.

As they walked back to the car, the wind picked up hard enough to blow dirt and small bits of gravel across their path.

Remembering the fierce wind the night before, Kate pulled him gently on.

They got the car doors open and she turned the key. But Caleb bent down and picked something up off the ground.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. He looked around at the treeless pastures and the bare yard around the house as though he were looking for something in particular. “Wonder where these guys came from.”

He held out his open hand for Kate to see. Nine miniature pinecones lay spread across his palms.

“Cedar,” he said. “And I sure don’t see anything that could’ve dropped these around here. Must be some wind if it blew these out of the woods.”

“Some wind,” Kate echoed. She felt like a door had opened inside her and the wind was blowing straight through it.

7

IT WASN’T THAT
Bill didn’t like going to church. It just seemed to him that, given the projects with which Margaret liked to occupy him on Saturday mornings, he deserved a serious sleep-in at least once a week. Most of the previous day had been spent clearing brush in a sunny corner of the backyard that Margaret decided would be good for a vegetable garden.

“Why now, after all these years, do you want vegetables back there?” he had asked.

She shrugged. “It takes a few years to get asparagus going,” she said. “I haven’t had a veggie garden since I was a girl. Seems like now or never.”

It seemed to Bill that between Carystown’s Farmer’s Market and the Kroger, they did okay for vegetables, but he got out the scythe, weed killer, and wheelbarrow anyway.

Now, as he lay in bed, he could feel the heavy work of the day before in his back. But he could also smell the coffee and bacon that she’d started in the kitchen. They were his gentle clue that she expected him to accompany her to church. He took her pillow and crushed it to his face to block out the sun streaming in the windows. He felt the sharp edge of frustration rise inside of him, but before it was strong enough to cause him to react, to stomp down to the kitchen to tell her that he didn’t want any of her damned bribe of a breakfast or to have anything to do with the stiff-necked crowd at High Street Presbyterian, he got control of it. Better to have her, a woman who loved him enough to bribe him, alive and warm and vibrant, than to be in the house alone, missing her. The idea of losing her was never far from his mind.

Still, as he showered he reckoned it wasn’t much of a bribe: the bacon was turkey bacon, given that she’d banished the real stuff in deference to his cholesterol, and the coffee was decaf.

After the church service, Bill followed Margaret down into the undercroft for some real coffee and whatever pastries the blue-haired ladies of the Women’s Guild had scared up. He was about to whisper a five-minute warning in her ear when he saw Edith from Janet Rourke’s office standing near the piano, the feathers in the purple felt hat she wore trembling vigorously as she brushed coffee-cake crumbs from the front of her dress. He slipped away from Margaret, who was chatting with the choir director.

Bill quickly poured himself a coffee and casually walked up to Edith.

“Nice service, don’t you think?” he said to her. “Good music today.”

Edith put a hand to her hat, adjusting it. Now the feathers were crooked, giving her the look of a wan, curious bird.

“Why, Sheriff,” she said. “We don’t often have the pleasure of your company on a Sunday morning. This is a real treat.”

He was familiar enough with the ways of women of a certain age to know that he’d just been chastised.

“Just out making the county safe for ladies like yourself, Miss Edith,” he said, leaning ever so slightly closer to her.

Edith blushed beneath her mask of bisque powder.

“We’ve been after your Margaret to join the Garden Society, Sheriff,” she said. “It’s her right, you know. Her mother served three terms as president.”

He shook his head. “You know Margaret and her museum work,” he said. “I can hardly get her to come home in time to make me supper.”

Edith raised her voice a bit, drawing the attention of several nearby women. “I only work because I choose to, Sheriff,” she said. “My husband left me very well provided for. He was with the railroad, you know, many years before they shut down their operations here.”

“Where do you find time for things like the Garden Society?” Bill said. “Don’t they meet for lunch or some-such?”

He’d seen the antique collection of women in the private room at The Lettuce Leaf more than once, dressed in their luncheon suits and sporting clever handbags and curious-looking hats. It pleased him that Margaret chose to decline their annual invitation to join. He didn’t like to think of his wife as having anything in common with those old women. First off, she was only forty-nine. He also knew that several of them were seriously behind on the property taxes on their crumbling houses and fully grown gardens. It was only his forbearance that kept their names off the delinquent tax rolls posted at the courthouse every six months. They were illegal, his omissions from the rolls. And there were those who would think the consideration granted to the women was racist or at least discriminatory against less prominent folks, but Bill rationalized that the shame would probably kill at least one of the old girls. Things would only get sticky if the state got around to an audit.

Edith lowered her voice. “Janet isn’t very understanding, if you get my meaning,” she said, raising her eyebrows for emphasis. “But after Kate came on board, things got a little easier in that department.”

“A nice person, is she?” Bill asked.

“Oh, nice as pie,” Edith said. “I can get the odd two-hour lunch if I need it. And sometimes our speakers do go on. You should’ve heard that man from the arboretum down in Nashville. Very, very interesting, but he did go on and on about crepe myrtles, blah, blah, blah…” She made a puppet mouth with her hand and opened and closed it with each word, making Bill laugh. “And we just can’t grow them all that well around here.”

“You know where she’s from?” Bill said.

“He was a man, and I said he was from Nashville,” Edith said, looking puzzled. “Oh, you mean Kate?”

When Bill nodded, she said, “Nice as pie, that girl is. No personal life that I can tell of. No family calling her at the office, no weddings or funerals to go to or anything like that. Socializes with a colored girl named Francie. She calls sometimes.”

Margaret came to stand beside him and slid her arm beneath his sport coat and around his waist.

“What are you all up to here, looking like a couple of sneak thieves?” she said teasingly.

Bill looked at his watch. “Guess we’d best be getting on home,” he said. He couldn’t very well continue questioning the older woman with Margaret standing there. She would have questions of her own when they left the building, and he wasn’t ready to go into the whole Isabella Moon subject right then.

“Your sweet husband was asking me about my work, Margaret,” Edith said. “Pretty Kate Russell in the office. Do you know her, Margaret? She’s helpful about making sure I get to the Garden Society meetings. The ones
you
should be going to, dear.”

Margaret smiled. It was a smile Bill recognized, a smile that offered nothing, not even an argument. “Pretty, is she?” She gave Bill a secret squeeze on one of his small love handles.

“I set her up with Paxton Birkenshaw once, but I don’t think it worked out very well,” she said.

“A pleasure, Miss Edith,” Bill said. “Don’t talk to strangers, now. I don’t want to hear about you getting into any trouble.”

He steered Margaret toward the steps to leave.

“Oh, Sheriff,” Edith called after him. “Beaufort, it was, I think she told me. Beaufort, South Carolina.”

Bill smiled at her and gave her a friendly salute.

Outside, the morning had turned warmer, and Bill thought he might be able to get in nine holes of golf at the public course out behind the hospital. Margaret interrupted the pleasant thought.

“Are we keeping track of all the pretty girls in town now?” she said.

“Just the ones who might be trouble,” Bill told her. He wasn’t sure how much trouble Kate Russell was going to be. It bothered him, though, to be thinking about her at all around Margaret.

“Don’t you think Edith knew you were patronizing her?” she said. “I just don’t know how you get away with it, Bill Delaney. I’d have pinched you.”

“You
did
pinch me, woman,” he said, reaching behind her to squeeze her bottom. But he only got a handful of silk skirt.