Isabella Moon (19 page)

Out in the front hallway, the antique Swiss grandfather clock that Miles had once told her belonged to his grandparents rang four o’clock, its chimes as deep and rich and warm as music. She had found out later, from one of Miles’s more frequent associates, that he had won it off a man who’d gambled away everything in the house his parents had left to him and then hanged himself in the closet of his suite at an Atlanta hotel. But even knowing that, it was still one of the few things she was later sad to leave behind.

For the next couple of days, Mary-Katie couldn’t bring herself to speak to Miles beyond exchanging information about where she would be or the status of the dry cleaning or where they would go to eat their silent, awkward meals. She couldn’t lie beside him in bed if she were awake, and moved to sleep on the sofa in the media room with its giant projection television turned on, muted, so that she slept—or didn’t sleep—bathed in the shifting light of the screen.

She never thought specifically about Kyle Richardson, or what Miles had begged her to do to save them both. (That was the word for it, wasn’t it?
Begged?
With the tears and the pronouncement of their ruin.) She didn’t really think, except to choose the massage oil the masseuse at the spa used on her, or the color the pedicurist was to paint her toes. She immediately erased the cheery message from the secretary of the women’s tennis group she sometimes played in. The last thing she wanted was to have to wear a false smile for a bunch of women she didn’t know well and didn’t particularly like.

Five minutes after she arrived at the suite Kyle Richardson had booked at one of the bigger resorts on the island, Mary-Katie was in the marble-walled bathroom throwing up. As she’d walked through the lobby with its smattering of early season tourists, she imagined that they were all staring at her and knew exactly why she was there. Miles had helped her pick the light blue silk twin set and slender skirt from her closet. The sweater set’s shell was a low V-neck and sexy, but subtle, so she certainly didn’t look out of place among the casually but well-dressed fall tourists. She might have been on her way to meet a friend for lunch. In fact, a woman she knew only by sight from the country club caught her eye from where she sat in the café that bordered the lobby, but Mary-Katie pretended not to see her. She’d continued on to the elevator wearing a tenuous smile that felt frozen to her face. But her stomach and intestines were in an uproar. She had made it to the hotel, but she was afraid that it was all she’d be able to do.

Kyle Richardson knocked timidly on the bathroom door, asking if she needed anything.

Sure. Help getting my head out of the toilet,
was the first thing that came to her mind. She told him, “No, thank you,” instead. But as she went to stand up, she noticed a slender curl of pubic hair on the seat, its bulbous root still attached, and began to retch again.

When she looked in the mirror a few minutes later, she saw that she still looked like herself, a little blotched maybe, but not much different from how she had looked that morning or even the week before, when Miles first told her what he wanted her to do. In the back of her mind she had come to imagine that playing the role of prostitute would make her look like a slattern, perhaps a little more knowing, that her clothes would fit her differently, more provocatively, or maybe she would develop a cynical sneer.

Fortunately, the Valium Miles had given her half an hour before was starting to kick in. (She hadn’t known about the prescription, but then again, maybe he’d gotten it just for her. It seemed that there was so much she didn’t know about her husband.)

He had told her again and again to be herself, that Richardson was not going to make her do anything she didn’t want to do.

“Except fuck him,” she said sarcastically.

A shadow of irritation had passed over his face, and he said, “Please don’t talk like that with him. It’s beneath you.”

After swishing Kyle Richardson’s orange-flavored mouthwash around in her mouth and spitting it into the sink, she could only think that there wasn’t much that was beneath her now.

Kyle Richardson apologized four times (she counted) for the pitifully small size of his penis. If he had been one of the few young men she’d had casual sexual relationships with in college (men about whom Miles had never inquired, and whom she, vaguely embarrassed, hadn’t mentioned), she might not have responded, but finished perfunctorily and ended the relationship. Kyle Richardson, though, seemed to want reassurance, and she tried to imagine how a professional would respond.

“You’re great,” she told him, every time he said it. “You’re just fine.”

He didn’t seem like a bad man. As he sweated over her, his eyes squeezed closed and his fingers digging painfully into her shoulders, she thought that he probably had teenage kids and a wife whose picture he carried in his wallet. She wondered where his wife was, if she minded about the size of his penis that was just barely inside her own vagina at that moment, what kind of car she drove, and if she knew that her husband accepted sex for cash in his business dealings.

When they were finished and Kyle Richardson was putting on his socks and telling her how wonderful she had been, it occurred to Mary-Katie that she should have maybe faked an orgasm.

That evening, Miles took her to the yacht club for dinner. She considered it a kind of victory that she felt nauseated only once, leaving the table briefly to stand, not quite retching, over a toilet in the women’s bathroom.

They shared a bottle of wine over dinner. Miles’s mood was much lighter than it had been over the past few weeks. He suggested that once he was through with this latest round of business deals, they might go somewhere she’d never been, like Bermuda or somewhere off the coast of South America. Mary-Katie knew that it was just talk. But she wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe him when he said he would never ask her to do what she’d done with Kyle Richardson again.

Later, sated with food and wine, they made love in their own bed, and it was like she’d never been with anybody else. Unlike Kyle Richardson, Miles was a perfect fit for her, and she’d never once in their marriage had to even think of faking an orgasm. But it was a while before she could bring herself to wear the new pair of diamond solitaire earrings she found under her pillow when she was making the bed the next morning.

18

“
DON’T YOU THINK
we ought to cut the lights?” Margaret said quietly. They were in the closed cab of the pickup truck, but something about the night around them and the emptiness of the county service road made her lower her voice.

Bill shut off the headlights, leaving only the yellow fogs to glow mutely ahead of them. School would be in session tomorrow, so he knew that—unlike any given Friday or Saturday—they were unlikely to come upon any lovers parking along the road. They passed behind what he thought was the line of houses that included Lillian Cayley’s; each had a number of back porch lights on, so that their yards were illuminated. There was a single pitch-black gap that he was sure was the Cayley property. No one would be there. He doubted that the daughter would ever want to live in the house again, but she would sure have a hard time selling it.

He slowed the truck to look for the curve that announced the back of the cemetery property.

“There,” Margaret said, pointing. “The light at the front gate’s there. Right through the trees.”

“Yeah, I see,” Bill said. He drove across the opposite lane and pulled onto the shoulder. The truck idled for a moment as he tried to figure how far he could go into the brush, which was thicker than he’d hoped. There was little room for the truck, and only just enough for them to get through with the full-size wheelbarrow they’d brought. He pulled the truck as close to the brush as he dared and shut down the engine.

Once they wrestled the wheelbarrow out of the back of the truck, Bill rested the pitchforks, shovels, and the spade inside it.

“Bring the lights,” he said to Margaret. She got the backpack she’d brought with her. He had laughed in the light of the kitchen when she packed bottles of water and a can of nuts to snack on, but now that they were at the cemetery, he realized that they might be there the better part of the night.

Only an hour before, they’d been getting ready for bed when he told Margaret both about Kate Russell’s insistence that the little girl was buried behind the cemetery’s mausoleum and his encounter with Charlie Matter and Hanna Moon at the coffeehouse. He’d been light on details about Hanna Moon’s ominous words because he didn’t want to scare her. But it had been Margaret’s suggestion that they head out to the cemetery that very night.
You need to listen to your wife.

As he watched Margaret a few feet away, pushing her way through the brush ahead of him, the thought came clearly to him that taking her digging in a cemetery in the earliest hours of the morning not a few hundred yards from where a woman had been murdered two days before was a stupid, fate-tempting thing to do. Still, as absurd as it was, he didn’t think their project could hurt anything. It was unlikely they would find the child, and there were few times when he didn’t take pleasure in just being around his wife.

When they reached the clearing, he shined a flashlight over the mounds of leaves in its center.

“Didn’t look like so much this afternoon,” he said doubtfully. “Real equipment would be easier.”

“Let’s get to it,” Margaret said, pulling on the leather gloves she used for heavy garden work. “I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Are you sure you want to be here? I never should have even told you about this crap,” Bill said. “It’s liable to be a big waste of our time.”

“Honey, how much longer are you going to let this little girl weigh on your mind? I don’t know what has led you to set so much store by what this Russell woman says, but if we do this and don’t find anything, you can move on. You’ll know you’ve done the best you can.” Margaret picked up a pitchfork. “I don’t think it’s a perfectly logical thing to do, no. But people who murder other people aren’t logical either, are they?”

Uncertainty was a feeling he wasn’t used to, but he went ahead and unloaded the rest of the tools and navigated the wheelbarrow between the mounds of leaves the best he could. The ground was spongy beneath his feet, and with every step, the moist, rotten smell of the leaves seemed to intensify. The smell took him back many years to the days when he would hunt with his father, tramping behind him in the sodden woods, desperate to show that he could keep up with the other hunters.

“I knew there was a reason I never liked composting,” he said. “This is some nasty stuff.” He positioned the wheelbarrow near the middle of the clearing. “She said she thought it was right around here,” he said.

“It’s earth, honey,” Margaret said, handing him a pitchfork. “It’s the way it’s supposed to smell.”

Kate lay on Francie’s sofa in her apartment, an old carriage house in the historic part of town, and listened to the sound of Francie’s sobs from behind the single bedroom’s door.

She thought about going inside, but it was late and Francie had shut herself in the bedroom an hour before, ostensibly to go to sleep. She guessed that Francie needed some time alone. They’d watched television with desultory interest most of the evening and ate a few bites of one of the six casseroles that had shown up that day, the offerings of the Martha Guild at Lillian’s church, First Avenue AME.

Kate burrowed into the pillow and wound herself in the cotton blanket she’d brought from home. Francie was notorious for her lack of housekeeping skills and she was not set up for guests, even though Lillian had continually tried to train her to some notion of hospitality. Kate missed her own bed and the relative spaciousness of her own small house. But being there at Francie’s place made her feel closer to Lillian, and with Francie in her own room, she gave in to her own tears. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was responsible for Lillian’s death, that if she’d never gotten Lillian involved in her problem with Isabella Moon, Lillian would still be alive.

Above the couch, a breeze through the open window brought in the scent of a mock orange tree, reminding her that even with all the death surrounding her, spring was arriving. There were voices, too, of people coming out of The Right Note, a few blocks away. Life was going on.

Hearing them, she thought of Caleb, who liked to go there when a rockabilly band came through town. He would be home Friday, Saturday at the latest. What she would tell him about everything that had happened, she didn’t know.

Finally, long after Francie’s sobs abated, Kate fell into a restless sleep.

As though by some unspoken agreement, Margaret and Bill made their way, exhausted, to a fallen log at the edge of the clearing, far away from the ragged circle of earth they had exposed in the course of the last two hours. Most of the mounds of leaves were gone, hauled to one side and dumped from the wheelbarrow.

“It’s not as muddy as I thought it would be,” Margaret said. “But Lord, I’m filthy.”

Bill leaned close to her and kissed her cheek. “Even in the dark you’re the best looking woman in town,” he said.

They passed the can of nuts back and forth and shared a single bottle of water.

“Careful,” Margaret said. “Those things have about fifteen grams of fat in a serving.”