Isabella Moon (28 page)

As Mary-Katie left the house, pulling the door shut and locking it behind her, she had a sense that her grandmother would approve of her leaving Miles. She knew that most likely she would never see the Beaufort house again. Miles would no doubt sell it soon after she was gone; she’d be lucky if she even saw a dime from the sale of it. But it didn’t matter. Her grandmother’s love was the most important thing she’d ever taken away from the house. And Miles couldn’t ever take that away from her.

Mary-Katie drove to the small savings bank where she’d kept her rainy day account since her grandmother helped her open it when she turned eight years old. For a long time it had bothered her that she never told Miles about it. She’d felt deceitful and untrusting of him. But the longer they were married, the more necessary she felt it was to keep something of herself to herself. Besides, she reasoned, he would’ve laughed at her measly eight thousand dollars if she’d offered it to him.

She knew the money wouldn’t get her far. But she could work, she knew, at just about anything. She would clean houses or haul trash to take care of herself and her baby if she had to. A part of her looked forward to living like a normal person again, one who didn’t have weekly manicures and pedicures and who didn’t have boutique saleswomen falling all over themselves to get her into their latest, most fashionable clothes.

“You want that in cash, honey?”

The teller was a woman who had known her grandmother. Mary-Katie had wanted to avoid her, but she was the only teller available.

“Please,” she said.
And please don’t ask me any questions.
At the bank where she’d worked, they were trained not to be nosy about customers’ requests. But this woman obviously felt entitled because of their acquaintance.

“That will only leave you with ninety-eight dollars and twenty-two cents,” she said. “You’ll be charged a four dollar a month service charge if it’s not at least three hundred dollars.”

Mary-Katie imagined the money dribbling away, disappearing into the bank, just as she would disappear. Eventually, they would both be gone.

“Nothing bigger than fifties,” she said.

The woman regarded her over the top of her bright red reading glasses, her unsatisfied curiosity obvious in the pursing of her lips.

“Certainly,” she said stiffly.

Unused to carrying so much cash, Mary-Katie glanced around the parking lot before heading to her car. Once inside, she put it into the purse with the gun and ammunition. She felt a vague thrill seeing them all together, as though she were about to commit some crime.

It wasn’t a crime, was it? To disappear out of one’s life? It was her business and her business only. The child wasn’t born yet, and Miles had already decided that he wasn’t the father, so there was no custody issue. But she owned the car she was driving outright. Her grandmother’s small legacy had paid for it, at Miles’s insistence. “She’d want you to have something nice,” he told her. There was debt, of course: the house and whatever instruments Miles had her sign over the years. Somehow she thought he wouldn’t be thinking about that when she left. It would be his pride that was most injured. That was the one thing that worried her. Miles didn’t like to be crossed when it came to his pride.

Mary-Katie was thinking about dinner when she pressed the button to open the garage door and eased the car inside. She was hungrier than she could ever remember being. She suspected that it was psychological. Weren’t pregnant women always supposed to be hungry?

At the grocery store she’d purchased nearly a cartful of produce: strawberries, avocados, grapes, apples, bananas, even a mango. Her diet was already pretty healthy, but she wanted to make sure. Eventually, she’d have to see a doctor. It can wait, she told herself. Getting away and getting settled was the important thing now.

She tucked the purse with the gun and cash beneath the seat, thinking that she had plenty of time to retrieve it before Miles would be home. She wanted to make sure she had a good hiding place, one she could access quickly.

Before getting out of the car, she pressed the button on the remote to shut the garage door. A fixture with a single bulb remained on above her, giving her just enough light in the windowless garage to get around to the trunk to get a few bags of groceries out. The timer on the fixture was brief, and she often found herself fumbling for the light switch at the door to turn it on so she could punch in the alarm code. Today, though, she made it to the step in time and put in the code before the light went out.

For one confused moment she thought the weight of the grocery bags had tipped her backward on the step, but then she felt an arm around her throat, and suddenly she was on the garage floor on her back, staring up at someone standing over her. There was just enough light from under the laundry room door to make out the shape of a large man.

“Please—” she started to say. He must have followed her from the bank. But how had he gotten here ahead of her? She wanted to tell him that she had money, that he could take anything in the house. But before she could get out another word, he kicked her in the side.

He kicked her a second, a third, a fourth time as she cried out. When she tried to roll away from him, to wedge herself beneath the front of her car, he quickly pulled her back and fell on top of her.

As she gasped for air, she inhaled the smell of him: cigarettes and sweat and, faintly, garlic. He was breathing hard, too, and as one of his hands fumbled at her waist, she was certain he was going to rape her. But he only rose up on his knees and began to pummel her abdomen with his fists.

Her breath came out in agonized bursts as he hit her. The pain exploded inside her with each contact, and she squeezed her eyes shut to ward it off. Still, she tried to scoot away on the floor, but before she could move an inch, he pinned her shoulder to the concrete. But her other arm was free and she flailed at him, grabbing at his head and feeling for his eyes. She knew enough to go for his eyes, even in her pain.

She thought of the gun in the car. But there was no way for her to get to it. Still, she grabbed at him, distracting him enough that it was all he could do to keep her pressed to the ground. He was wearing some kind of hat or balaclava, which she pulled off him, but she couldn’t see more than an impression of his face: a wide, flat nose, a broad jaw. Under her hand, his beard was scruffy. At last she was able to get hold of his ear and squeeze.

This time it was his turn to cry out in pain. But the surprise was more hers. The ear was thick and deformed, lumpy; it felt more like a small fist than an ear.

His cry was the only sound he made. As he ripped himself away from her, she felt the ear slip out of her fingers. The pain in her stomach and rib cage was bright and violent, but she seemed to feel the grease from his head and the absence of the misshapen ear on her fingertips more keenly.

Again he kicked her. She lost count of how many times. Finally, she lost consciousness, sinking into a place inside herself where, with her child, she felt nothing at all.

29

“
HERE COMES TROUBLE,
” Frank said.

Freida Birkenshaw was out of her car with a speed that seemed unnatural for a woman who spent the better part of every day leashed to an oxygen tank. With her cloud-white hair floating in wisps behind her and her patrician face set in an angry scowl, looking for all the world to Bill like an avenging fury, she made her way up to the tenant house where they were serving a search warrant. Leaning on a sturdy cane that thumped onto the porch steps as she approached, Freida looked at neither Bill nor Frank, but went straight to Delmar Johnston’s door.

Bill motioned for Frank to step forward to keep her from assaulting the Johnston character if he should be the one to answer.

“You shouldn’t be here, ma’am,” Frank said. “We don’t know…he might be armed.”

The look she gave Frank said that she didn’t really care. She pounded on the door with the head of her cane.

“Mr. Johnston,” she said. “You need to come out here right now.”

The clapboard house, its windows still taped up with plastic to keep out the late winter winds, was tiny enough that anyone inside would certainly have heard her voice. Bill saw a movement at the window, a shade pushed aside just a hair. He was certain that what he saw at the edge of the curtain was the barrel of a shotgun.

He shouted for the others to get down.

Frank pushed the old lady to the floor of the porch, covering her body with his so she lay flat against the splintering boards. Beneath him she made a startled warbling noise.

When Bill motioned for them to move away, Frank helped her crawl to the side of the porch and get down onto the grass.

Bill dropped below the lip of the front of the porch and called into the house.

“Sheriff’s Department,” he shouted. “Delmar Johnston, come out.” As he spoke, he unholstered his sidearm and took aim at the window. There was no movement. He waited, suddenly doubtful.

On the other side of the porch the old woman was cursing Frank, telling him, “Get your filthy paws off my neck.”

The battered front door of the house opened a few inches and Bill prepared himself to exchange fire with whoever was behind the door.

“You want to just come out,” he said. “We don’t need any excitement this morning.” It had been a hell of a long time since he’d had to shoot at anyone, and he prayed that the Johnston character would not make things difficult.

As Bill called out a second time, Delmar Johnston—a boy, really—eased the door open. His extended hands showed that he had no weapon. Shirtless, he wore blue jeans that he’d apparently had no time to button up. With his dark, tousled hair and sleepy eyes, he was the picture of innocence. Still, Bill didn’t trust what he was seeing.

“You got company in there?” Bill said.

“No, sir,” Delmar said. “You can see I got no weapon neither.”

“Step on down here,” Bill said.

Delmar came slowly down the steps. “I was just coming to the door,” he said. “I heard Ms. Birkenshaw.”

Bill didn’t want to be wrong about what he’d seen, but it was looking more and more like he had been. He was glad that Frank was with him rather than Mitch or Daphne—those two wouldn’t have let him forget his momentary panic. Panic was never good. He blamed it on his lack of sleep. Still, there was Freida Birkenshaw. It would be a bitch if she’d gotten so much as a scratch from Frank’s tackle.

“We’re just looking to get a few questions answered,” Bill said. “Maybe you can help us out.”

“Mind if I do up my pants?” Delmar gave him a Hollywood smile. For a farmhand, he had improbably white teeth. A pretty boy. But his skin was ruddy and his hands rough. Bill guessed that whatever the boy was into, he also managed some work on the operation.

Freida hurried over to the steps. “If you had anything to do with that boy’s death, Mr. Johnston,” she said, “you can pack up and get out now. I don’t run that kind of farm.”

When the boy didn’t ask who she was talking about, Bill knew they would eventually get some information out of him.

“Frank,” he said. “Why don’t you and Mr. Johnston go inside so he can get his things on to come down to the office for a chat? Then Mrs. Birkenshaw and I will just take this warrant I’ve got in my pocket inside and see what we can see.”

But the only reaction from the boy was a disinterested shrug. He turned and went into the house with Frank following him.

Bill stood awkwardly with Freida on the thin, wintry grass in the yard. He didn’t quite know what to say to the woman. While Margaret was certainly her social equal, it wasn’t like they all ever got together for dinner. About the time it began to seem to him that Frank was taking longer than should have been necessary, the door opened.

Delmar Johnston came out first, wearing a dusty, wide-brimmed Stetson that was as improbable as his smile. Behind him, Frank carried a sawed-off Mossberg with a black pistol grip.

“Look here what I found, Sheriff,” he said. “Right by the door.”

“Hell, Sheriff,” Delmar said. “A man’s got a right to defend his property. I didn’t know what was going on out here.”

“So you thought it proper to lie about the shotgun, Mr. Johnston?”

“No lie, Sheriff,” he said. “I didn’t answer the door with a weapon. Did I?”

“One, it’s not strictly your property,” Bill said. “Two, it’s not the kind of greeting we like to get when we pay folks a visit.”

“I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

“Wait,” Bill said. “I didn’t get to number three.” He took the gun from Frank. “You should know that when you cut your Mossberg down to these unusual proportions, you were breaking the law. You just got a first-class upgrade on your ticket into town.”

As Frank led him to the cruiser, Delmar looked back at Bill. “I ain’t never been in the back of a police car before. Maybe Ms. Birkenshaw should take a picture.” He laughed and winked at the old lady as Frank put him inside.

Somehow Bill didn’t think the boy was telling the truth about the cruiser. As they drove away, Bill watched the old woman. He expected her to be angry at the boy’s words, but instead she looked like she was thinking about something else. He wondered if she’d even heard him.