Isabella Moon (26 page)

“Don’t even think I’m going to have you sleep with Jules,” he said. “You’d want it too much.”

“I wouldn’t want it at all, Miles,” she said, trying to regain her patience. Stress wasn’t good for the baby. “You know I don’t want to be with anyone else. I did it because I had to. For us.”

“I don’t believe you,” Miles said. “Prove it.”

“You’re just going to have to believe me,” she said. “I can’t do any more.”

“What if I asked you to do it again? What if I asked you to do it to prove that you’re mine and not someone else’s?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Mary-Katie said. “Can we just go to bed? I love you and only you. I promise. I promise I don’t want anyone else.”

“Come on. You could do it again. Just once,” he said. “You can make this whole Jules thing up to me. You owe me that.”

Finally, Mary-Katie realized that he was serious. He had it in mind for her to have sex with yet another man. He may have even had Jules in mind until she’d tried to make him jealous. He’d lied to her about Kyle Richardson. Of course.

“I’m not sleeping with anyone else, Miles,” she said, looking into his eyes. She stood up and straightened her shoulders. He had to know that she was serious. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

Later, Mary-Katie told herself she’d been a fool and an idiot to expect any kind of response but the one she got. In the hours since she’d done the pregnancy test, she’d had a hundred daydreams about Miles telling her that he couldn’t imagine a better time to have a baby. Of course, she had imagined that he might take a little convincing, but that in the end all would be well and they would be happy.

Miles’s initial look of surprise was quickly replaced by the cruel sneer he reserved for people he truly despised. People like the runner, Lev Kaplan.

“Get rid of it,” he said. “Make the appointment tomorrow.”

“I don’t understand,” Mary-Katie said.

“You’re not stupid.”

“What are you saying? I can’t believe what you’re saying!” Mary-Katie felt her throat tighten. “This is our child, Miles.”

“I’ve been shooting blanks for years,” he said. “I told you I wasn’t interested. Ever. It must be your buddy Kyle’s bastard.”

“I don’t believe you,” Mary-Katie said.

“Believe whatever the fuck you like,” Miles said. “Just get rid of it.”

“I don’t believe you!” This time Mary-Katie screamed at him.

He was going to leave her with nothing.

26

WHEN PAXTON
turned on his cell phone and it started ringing immediately, he knew it was Janet before he looked at the caller ID. She was as persistent when she was trying to get hold of him on the phone as she was in bed: the woman never, ever gave up. He wondered where in the hell she got the energy. How much did he prefer his Francie, who was energetic as hell but knew when to relax?

“Where have you been?” Janet said. “I’ve been all by myself all night. You promised you’d help me.”

“I’m right here,” he said. “But I’ve got some business to take care of. I’ll be over later.”

Janet made a sound that he could only describe as a snort. “Pussy business, I bet,” she said. “Your nursey-nurse needs some comfort, does she? Maybe I should call her and we could compare notes on that busy prick of yours.”

“Do you kiss your mama with that mouth?” Paxton said.

“Or maybe I’ll just drive out to the new house, then drop by on my new neighbor,” Janet said. “Mother Birkenshaw and I could spend some quality time together.”

Paxton didn’t want to go into it with her on the phone, but he knew he had to keep Janet under some kind of control.

“We had a call from the sheriff’s office this morning,” he said. “Let me call you later.”

There was a stunned silence. “Shit, Paxton. Why didn’t you tell me? What the hell are we going to do?”

“
You
don’t need to do anything, Princess,” he said. “This stuff is my problem, and nothing you need to worry about. I’ll let you know.”

It took several minutes to calm her down and get her off the phone. She was wanting details and, frankly, he didn’t have too many.

He
did
know that the call from the sheriff was strictly one of those little courtesies that got exercised in a place as small as Carystown. The sheriff had called to speak to his mother, Freida, who wasn’t technically taking calls. But when the housekeeper heard it was the sheriff, she had put her on the phone.

Delmar Johnston, the man they wanted to come out and question, was only a name to his mother. She rarely left the four acres of yard and garden surrounding the house itself. The farm manager did the hiring and usually got the okay from Paxton, so she was never bothered.

The housekeeper had wakened Paxton to tell him what was going on.

“The strangest thing,” the housekeeper had said. “The sheriff’s on the phone with your mama, but it doesn’t sound like he’s selling tickets to anything. He sounds like business.”

After dismissing her, Paxton picked up the phone in time to hear the sheriff say Delmar Johnston’s name. Delmar Johnston was the man who both collected the local ingredients for the meth and distributed the meth that he and Charlie Matter made. He himself was just the money guy.

A quiet young man from east Tennessee, Delmar had been hired on to the farm the previous summer. When Paxton happened on him smoking a joint out near the stables one evening and he hadn’t even tried to hide it, Paxton knew they’d get along just fine. It was only a matter of weeks before Delmar was working both on the farm and for Charlie.

The one problem Paxton could see with Delmar, the problem that was sending him out to see Charlie as fast as he dared, was that Delmar Johnston wasn’t the sort of man who took personal loyalty too seriously.

“I’ve got about ten reasons already why I should kick your ass,” Charlie said. He raised his bandaged hand. “You’ve got to be the biggest asshole in town, showing up here, Birkenshaw.”

Paxton glanced around at the few cars in the parking area. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk,” he said.

“We’re open for business now,” Charlie said. “Make it fucking quick.”

Paxton followed him into the house and back into a badly paneled den that seemed to serve as both an office and a bedroom. The futon on the floor was heaped with blankets, atop which lay a fat Dalmatian that raised its head at their entrance but quickly put its nose back down on its paws, uninterested. Charlie Matter shut the door behind them.

“They’re questioning Delmar,” Paxton said.

“You think you’ve got all the information, don’t you?” Charlie said. “I already heard.”

“So what do we do?” Paxton said. “We have to get rid of everything. Shut it down. Right now.”

Charlie lit a cigarette, gingerly holding the lighter with the fingers of his bandaged hand. He regarded Paxton.

“Shut what down?”

“The barn,” Paxton said. “Everything.”

“You wanted to stay local,” Charlie said. “Like we were some kind of fucking hometown pharmacy. If you’d have let me bring in my Canadian friends sooner, we wouldn’t have been dealing with these pissant kids, and Delmar Johnston would be spending both his days
and
nights playing nursemaid to those wind-up dolls you call horses out there.
You
made this mess, Birkenshaw. And you have to clean it up.”

Somehow Paxton had known that it was all going to come down to money.
His
money. Only Francie seemed immune to his money. She didn’t care what he had. In fact, the way she talked, he suspected that she hated his money. Charlie, though, seemed to think that he was made of it. While he had plenty to live on and a little more to spend, he didn’t know if he could buy his way out of what Charlie had called his “mess.” He thought Charlie was mistaken, thinking that it wasn’t his mess to clean up.
He
had all the supplies to deal with, the paraphernalia. Those were the things that prosecutors liked to have for evidence.

“If you’d brought me the money yourself a couple of days ago, like I asked you to, we might not have to be concerned with this little problem,” Charlie said. “It might have disappeared before it even got to us.”

“You say that,” Paxton said. “But we never had any kind of guarantee. And why is it you don’t have the funds to take care of it, anyway?”

Charlie dropped his cigarette into the ashtray on the desk and twisted the open neck of Paxton’s shirt, to pull him close. “Look, shithead,” he said. “You’ve got your dick stuck so far up various and sundry women in this town that it’s started to affect your eyesight. This isn’t a game, and this isn’t a hobby. This is a
business,
and you, sir, have played lord of the fucking manor long enough.” He pushed Paxton away.

Paxton took a step back, looking around for something with which to knock the hell out of Charlie Matter. His eye fell on a nubby shillelagh leaning in a corner, but there was no way he could get past Charlie to lay his hand on it.

“Don’t be thinking too hard,” Charlie said. “Just start peeling off bills, because it’s your turn. They’re going to bring him in for questioning, and we want it to go well. You need to get your hands on about ten thousand to make this go away. And I need another five to get rid of all our playthings.” He picked up his cigarette again and pointed it at Paxton.

“And if we’re lucky, really lucky, my friends from Canada will be generous about discontinuing our relationship,” he said. “It might go well since we’re not in too deep yet, but I don’t know about that.”

Paxton felt an itch that was only going to be satisfied by wrapping his hand around that shillelagh. Unfortunately, there were too many people who might have seen him come into the house. It occurred to him that there could be newspeople coming around as well, now that the girl had been found. Fortunately, the newspeople apparently weren’t early risers. Still and all, he needed to get out of there.

“I’ve got three thousand with me,” he said. “That’s all I can get until next week. But it’s going to look pretty damn strange if I stroll into the bank looking for that kind of money come Monday morning.”

Charlie held out his hand for the fold of cash that Paxton took out of his pants pocket.

“Just get it,” he said.

Weary of debasing himself, Paxton turned and went out of the room, leaving the door open behind him. If there was one thing he was certain of, it was that Charlie Matter wasn’t getting another dime out of him.

As he drove the Mercedes down the long gravel road to the highway, he glanced at his passenger seat. The last time he’d been on this road, that little girl, that Isabella Moon, had startled him so that he’d almost driven off the road. But he had known then that she was dead, and he even knew how she’d gotten that way. He put down that image of her beside him to the play of his own mind, a reminder from deep inside himself that she was unfinished business. Now that her bones had been found, though, that business was probably also going to have to be concluded.

Then, as though he’d produced them out of thin air, a news van turned into Chalybeate Springs just as he pulled out onto the highway.

27

LATE FRIDAY MORNING
Francie pushed open the door of her mother’s house to find it filled with still air and silence.

“Mama?” she said. Of course, there was no answer. Her mother was lying on a slab in the basement of the hospital, her internal organs in dull stainless pans, no doubt, and much of her beautiful black hair in a plastic bag.

When the call had come from the coroner’s office early that morning to tell her that they were releasing “the body,” she had been asleep, alone for the first time since learning of her mother’s murder. The idea of going to the house by herself filled her with dread. She’d thought to ask Kate to help pick out clothes for Lillian to be buried in, but she was still angry with Kate. Nothing so concrete as an accusation had formed in her mind, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Kate had had something to do with her mother’s death, whether directly or just because Kate was a part of her mother’s life. Sometime in the past few days she had decided that Kate was bad news. When she’d said as much to Paxton, he’d said a loud “Hallelujah!” and told her that it was about time.

Inside the house there was evidence of the police search everywhere: drawers in the kitchen and bedrooms were slightly ajar, cabinets stood open, books and magazines were scattered about. Dirt had been tracked over the pale blue carpeting that Lillian installed only six months before. Francie imagined her mother scolding the deputies as they trooped through, reminding them to wipe their feet. She’d had several of them in her classes at the high school, and they would’ve obeyed quickly.

Francie walked from room to room, straightening things, putting them just as her mother had liked them. Her own apartment was always a mess, but she had lived with her mother for most of her life and knew how things were supposed to be. It didn’t occur to her that her mother would never be there to see it, to appreciate her work. Or that she would soon have to sell or store every last item. Or even that the house was now hers to do with as she pleased. She just knew she had to make it right.