Isabella Moon (23 page)

“Thanks for coming out, but we’ve already heard, Sheriff,” Charlie said. “I’d ask you in, but not everyone’s presentable at the moment.”

“I’m looking for Hanna,” Bill said. “Maybe you could ask her to come outside.”

When Hanna Moon came to the door, he saw that it was she and not the bright-eyed Matter who had been smoking weed. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face puffy.

“That nice girl came out to tell me herself, Sheriff,” Hanna said, leaning against the door frame. She spoke dreamily, like she was telling him a story. “You should have listened to her when she first came to you. But it doesn’t really matter anyway. That’s not Isabella in that dirty grave.”

Before Bill could disagree, Charlie interrupted. He pushed a lock of Hanna’s loose dark hair out of her face. Again Bill was surprised by the gentleness of the action, the sensitivity he seemed to be showing. He didn’t think a hard case like Charlie had it in him. But, of course, Charlie had been in the house since Isabella was six.

“What she means is what she told you yesterday,” Charlie said. “Isabella’s free of that body. Or what’s left of it.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Bill said. “I sure wish it hadn’t ended this way. And I guarantee you that we’re going to do everything we can to apprehend the person or persons who did this to your daughter.”

Hanna gave a small laugh. “That’s what
she
said, too, Sheriff. And I told her, as I’m telling you. My Issy’s going to tell me herself who did it. I just have to wait.”

Crazy as a shit-house rat, he thought. Her reference to “that nice girl” bothered him. Somebody else was involved, somebody who shouldn’t be talking to Hanna Moon.

“You need to give me any information you might have,” Bill said. “It doesn’t matter where it came from.”

“You want her to come down there to your office?” Charlie said. “You know, for identification and stuff?”

Bill hesitated. The little girl’s flesh had been so efficiently dispatched by the bugs in the dirt and the rich humus layered over the grave that the skeleton was as bare as a high school science model. He’d wanted to vomit when the coroner carefully lifted the long black hair to expose the skull lying sideways in the soil.

“There are some clothes that it would be helpful for you all to take a look at,” he said. He had asked Mitch to pull the original file and compare what Hanna Moon had told them with the clothes in the grave. Two years ago, when she’d first gone missing, he’d gotten a vivid picture in his head: coat, boots, scarf, blue jeans, orange sweater. Margaret had asked him what sort of mother would send her little girl out to school in the winter without gloves and a hat.

“And she’ll want to stop by the lab at the hospital so we can get some blood for DNA identification.”

“Sure thing,” Charlie said.

They stood in uncomfortable silence for a moment. It wasn’t often he had to perform this part of the job, and here he’d had to do it twice in a week. The difference between Hanna Moon’s reaction and that of Brad Catlett’s mother couldn’t have been more different. Poor drugged-out Hanna Moon, with her pronouncements about talking to her dead daughter, was starting to give him the creeps.

“Just call the office when you’re ready to come in,” he said. “Later today would be good, but it can wait until tomorrow or Monday, if you like. And I’d expect some press bothering you all. But you’ve been through that already.”

Outside the porch, the rain was falling harder. Bill put his hat back on, and Hanna and Charlie started to go back into the house.

“Thanks for coming out, Sheriff,” Charlie said. “We’ll be in touch.” He waved and closed the door behind him.

Getting back into the cruiser, Bill shook the rain off of his hat brim and turned the key in the ignition. The image of Kate Russell huddled with Hanna Moon on the sidewalk in front of Janet Rourke’s office came into his mind.
Someone he should have listened to.
So she’d rushed out to the co-op to tell Hanna Moon the news even before he could get out there himself. Everything that woman did seemed geared to make him look like an incompetent asshole, and it was starting to piss him off.

The front office had fewer curiosity seekers than he’d expected, but it was still early. On the way back into town he’d seen a van from Channel 12, a regional television station that was known for putting on the most sensational stories it could find. Their people had hung around the longest after Isabella Moon’s disappearance, giving up only when there’d been a grisly murder-suicide involving six people on a farm an hour away from Carystown.

One of the loafers from the barbershop was leaning over the duty desk, pumping Daphne for information that he could take back to the shop like some kind of prize. A toddler played on the floor at the feet of a woman who, Bill saw at a glance, was wearing a fresh bruise just below her right eye. The deputy mayor, Lucy, was thumbing through a magazine, which she dropped onto the adjacent chair when she saw him come in.

“Bill, I can’t believe it,” she said, following him into his office. “When the mayor told me, I swear I couldn’t believe it. And she adored Lillian Cayley.”

“So, why the second string this morning?” Bill said. “Is Madame Mayor too busy to walk across the street and browbeat me herself?”

Lucy shut the door behind them. “She had to show some land this morning to a pair of docs. But now that we’ve got a bona fide crime wave here, I imagine they’ll have second thoughts. This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen here.”

Bill rummaged around on his desk until he laid his hand on a pen. “Thanks, Lucy,” he said. “I’ll make a note of that.”

“Ha-ha. She said you’d be defensive about it.”

“Listen, Lucy,” Bill said, trying to fake a patience he didn’t feel. He wasn’t a big fan of the mayor or her overlipsticked deputy, but he liked to keep things cordial. “Defensive, sarcastic, whatever. My sitting here chatting with you about this isn’t going to help find Lillian Cayley’s killer, that little girl’s killer, process the liquored-up bozo that Clayton brought in last night who shot up his wife’s boyfriend’s dog and trailer, or help the young woman out there get a restraining order on her asshole of a husband.”

“Don’t forget that high school boy,” Lucy said, and gave him a smug grin.

She had baited him, and he let his temper get the best of him. “Screw you,” he said.

Instead of looking shocked, as he’d thought she would, Lucy just took a step back from him, looking uncomfortable.

“Everybody wants the same outcome here, Bill,” she said. “The mayor’s getting a lot of questions, too. She needs to be able to tell people something.”

“When there’s something to know, I’ll give her a call,” Bill said. He didn’t like to lose his temper.

“At least tell me who sent you out to that cemetery last night,” she said.

Here it was, the beginning of the hard questions. There was no doubt that Kate Russell’s name was going to come out eventually, or at least the information that he had followed up on some nut job’s hokum hunch. But this wasn’t the time.

“That’s not something I can offer you right now,” Bill said. “Tell the mayor that the investigation is ongoing and that I’ll get back to her.”

With all of his deputies out, Bill walked the young woman over to the courthouse to swear out yet another warrant against her husband. The boy with her jabbered on the whole time they walked, asking questions about the road, the buildings they passed, Bill’s uniform. His energy was a relief to Bill, and he even caught himself smiling once or twice. The woman answered the boy’s questions patiently, clearly. Bill wondered why a woman who sounded so sensible and reasonable talking with her child would let herself get beaten up—more than once—by any man.

Later he went back to the scene where they were wrapping up. He brushed by the Channel 12 people, telling them there would be a statement later in the day. The coroner had already packed up what was left of the body and loaded it into the ambulance. Bill noted wryly to himself that the ambulance was about two years too late. While he stood talking to Mitch, who looked tired but intensely motivated, his cell phone rang.

“Delaney here,” he said.

When he heard the name, he recognized it as belonging to the woman he’d spoken to in the Beaufort, South Carolina, Sheriff’s Department when he called looking for information on Kate Russell. After the pleasantries, the woman got right to the point. She reminded him of Daphne, only with a deep and melodic southern accent.

“The Social belongs to a woman name Katherine Russell. Lived in a house down here for fifty-some years. At least she did until she died four years ago,” she said. “The house is in the name of someone named Miles Chenoweth and his wife, Mary-Katherine. Sounds like she could be a connection.”

Bill was silent on his end of the phone, thinking.

“It’s either a big mistake or someone’s trying to get away with something up your all’s way,” the woman said.

“Four years ago, you say?”

“Looks like it,” she said. “Right before she died, the house went into the name of this Chenoweth guy and his wife.”

“Any mention of how old the wife is? Around thirty, maybe?” He heard the rustle of paper on the other end of the phone.

“Nothing that I can see right off,” she said. “I could send someone out to ask around. But it might take a couple days to get to it.”

Bill thanked her, telling her it wouldn’t be necessary. Before they hung up, he jotted down the address and phone number of Miles Chenoweth.

A while later he sat in the cruiser and called the Hilton Head number the Beaufort Sheriff’s Department had given him.

A man answered. “Miles Chenoweth.”

After hearing what Bill had to say, Miles confirmed that his wife’s grandmother had left them the property in Beaufort. But when told that someone might be using the woman’s identity, he laughed.

“She’s been dead for several years,” Miles said. “I doubt if she’ll mind all that much.”

Bill didn’t know how to respond to the man’s casual attitude. “This could be serious, Mr. Chenoweth,” he said. “Maybe I should talk to your wife about it.”

He laughed again. “My wife wouldn’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Sheriff. She’s a very beautiful and intelligent woman, but she leaves business to those of us who are actually interested. Now, if you’re talking carat size or manicures, she’s your girl.”

“Does your wife have any female relatives? How old is your wife?” Bill asked.

“Thirty-two on her last birthday, but don’t tell her I said so,” Miles said. “Where in Kentucky did you say you were calling from?”

When he hung up a few minutes later, Bill was no more enlightened than when he’d picked up the phone. Miles Chenoweth had left him with a vague promise to have his lawyer look into the deceased woman’s affairs.

He generally liked to be right, especially about people he suspected were hiding things. But for some reason he felt a sense of disappointment instead of justification at finding out that Kate Russell—or whatever her name was—was not who she said she was. What he couldn’t figure, though, was what she was hiding, and why. And what, exactly, did she have to do with the death of the little girl they’d just extracted from a dirt grave? It had been Margaret, really, who convinced him that they go to the cemetery and start digging.
She
had never suggested that Kate Russell might have been involved in the little girl’s death and disappearance, but then, neither had he. His interest had been piqued, certainly, when she turned out also to be a friend of Lillian Cayley’s, but it worried him that he had never considered her a serious suspect in the woman’s death. Somewhere along the line with Kate Russell, he’d lost his objectivity.

23

WHEN SHE HEARD
Caleb’s voice on her answering machine, Kate felt a brief and unexpected desire for him, the kind of desire that only an hour before would have made her all the more lonesome for him. But after he whispered a quiet “Love you” at the end, she erased the recording quickly, pressing the button so hard that it hurt her finger.

Before she could move away from the phone, it rang and she picked it up with an irritated “Hello.”

“Ms. Russell?” It was the voice of a young man. “Joshua Klein from the
Carystown Ledger.
”

In her anger, it took Kate a moment to understand exactly who he’d said he was.

“Hello?” the young man said.

“I already subscribe,” Kate said, ready to hang up.

“That’s great,” Joshua said. “But I’m calling to ask you some questions. You’ve heard about the discovery of that little girl’s remains this morning? Out at the East End city cemetery?”

Kate sank into the chair beside the phone, suddenly wanting to make herself very small.
Invisible.
Something about Bill Delaney—his calm, steady manner, the serious way he spoke, the sturdy
presence
of the man—had made her want to trust him. She was certain that he wouldn’t involve her, but knew now that she’d been wrong. He didn’t trust her at all. Even if—possibly especially because—she’d been right.

“How did you get my name?” she said. “Who told you to call me?”

Joshua’s voice was earnest. “I just need to confirm a couple of things with you, Ms. Russell. I’m not far away from your house. I’d like to come over and get a couple of details straightened out.”