Isabella Moon (29 page)

“My great-grandfather was a chandler,” she said. “I used to think about how he brought a kind of light to this place. But the devil, too, spreads his own kind of ugly light wherever he goes.”

Inside, the house was tidier than Bill would have expected the home of a man Delmar Johnston’s age—twenty or twenty-one, maybe—could ever be. There were no pizza boxes or empty beer cans anywhere, no random piles of laundry. In the bedroom, the double bed was made so that the spread held no wrinkles. The only personal item in sight was a black plastic comb that seemed to have been carefully laid, horizontally, on top of the dresser. Throughout the house the furniture was shabby, like in most tenant houses, but in the living room it was arranged around a forty-two-inch plasma television that had an Xbox tucked into a floor stand.

“Give your tenants cable, do you?” Bill asked.

“It’s not as easy as you’d think to get people to work a farm,” Freida said. “Now we have to compete with Buyer’s Mart and the Toyota plant. But that’s not my television. This is quite a bit nicer even than Paxton keeps at the house.”

Bill didn’t say that it was also quite a bit nicer than his own television.

“Maybe he’s thrifty,” he said. “Or your wages are generous.”

She waited in the living room while he searched the boy’s closet and the rest of the bedroom. He’d been able to get the warrant for weapons, drugs, and drug paraphernalia. When he found one of the dressers stuffed full of porn of the sort one couldn’t buy from behind the counter at the local quick-stop, he thumbed through it quickly to make sure there was no kiddy or snuff material. But it was mostly skanky young women busily sticking things into one another and playing with themselves. Not his cup of tea.

Other than a sheathed hunting knife of questionable legality, Bill found nothing of any interest in the house’s single bedroom. The same was true for the kitchen, living room, and bathroom. No equipment, tubing, burners. Nothing.

Freida stood in the front doorway, looking out onto the morning. “I never have liked this house,” she said, turning to Bill when he came into the room. “The first tenant killed his wife in that bedroom, using one of her own silk stockings. What a woman like that was doing with silk stockings, I’ll never know. But this house has seemed like bad luck ever since. I should probably tear it down.”

“I didn’t see a door to any basement. Is there an attic?”

“The only storage is the crawl space beneath the porch,” she said. “There’s a kind of lean-to shed attached to the back of the kitchen.”

She followed Bill out of the house and down the porch steps.

“We’ve had enough disruption here today, don’t you think, Sheriff?” she said. She was sounding breathless, and Bill began to worry that he might end up with a medical emergency to top things off.

When they reached the other side of the house, they found that the door to the lean-to was padlocked shut.

“You keep anything in here, ma’am?” he asked.

“You’re joking,” she said.

After getting her permission to bust the lock, he grabbed a hammer from the toolbox he kept in the trunk of the cruiser. He figured that it probably would’ve been just as simple to take the screws out of the plate screwed to the jamb, but it was more fun to put on a show for the old woman.

“Step back, please, ma’am,” he said.

It took three (very satisfying) whacks to get the lock off. As he pulled open the door, Freida was again right there beside him.

“Good Lord,” she said. “What is wrong with that young man? We’ve got Dumpsters all over this farm.”

Bill tossed the hammer aside and took out his pocketknife to slash one of the fifty or so plastic garbage bags of various colors that were stuffed into the lean-to’s tiny space. The deep green bag gaped wide with an awkward smile and dozens of empty cold and allergy medicine packages fell at their feet. Bill tried to hold the bag back, but it disgorged small boxes and plastic bottles onto the ground until it sagged, nearly empty, beneath his hand.

It took him several minutes to explain to Freida that she was looking at the makings of a substantial amount of methamphetamine, and when he finished, he wasn’t certain that she fully understood. At face value, of course, there was nothing wrong with a person hoarding thousands of empty over-the-counter drug boxes. But it certainly didn’t look good for Delmar Johnston. He was getting a clearer picture of the dead kid’s connection to Mr. Johnston, who, besides lying about the gun, looked to be a cagey bastard. Definitely not smart, hiding all this packaging in his own house, but cagey.

“I’ll be sending someone out to take pictures,” he said. “I’ve got no idea where we’re going to store this much garbage, even if it is evidence.”

30

LATE SATURDAY MORNING,
when most of Carystown was lingering over coffee or doing weekend chores, Kate had already walked several miles out Shelbytown Road and was on her way back home. She kept to the fields and fence lines, striding through the still dormant March grass as though she were the most confident woman in the world, as though she weren’t plagued with uncertainty. After spending all day Friday at home with the telephone unplugged, she felt the need to get out, to walk as many miles as she could. She wanted to leave Carystown behind for a while, if only for a couple of hours. Walking cleared her head, and, just then, her mind needed some serious clearing out.

The sun was warm on her face and the fresh morning air was cool but not unpleasant as she headed south of town, toward where the Quair River left the valley. At home she’d felt suffocated in the closed-up cottage, afraid as she was to throw open the windows lest the reporter show up again. In the woods not far off the road, the trees had not yet leafed, but the birds were active and noisy. She felt their anticipation of full spring and was jealous of their enthusiasm. How much did she wish that she had something to look forward to besides hard questions and accusations and confronting the man she loved (she thought) about his betrayal?

How could she have been so wrong about Caleb?
Even as she had nursed her anger through the previous day and night, she had hoped (it was a tiny hope, a tiny, unwished-for hope) that he would show up unannounced, as he had the previous week. The phone had been unplugged, but he had his key. Was he worried that he couldn’t reach her? Certainly Janet had called him, triumphant, as soon as she’d left her house. He had to know how hurt she was. It sickened her to think of Janet with him, Janet touching him, tasting him, pleasing him. For a while, as she walked, she cried.

Was it some wicked, tragic flaw in her character that led her to fall for men like Caleb? Like Miles? There had been a boy in high school, too, a rich boy with a convertible 1957 Thunderbird and the easy manner of someone who knew the world was his for the taking. He was, as they say, far out of her league, usually seen only with golden, pearl-earringed girls who were confident and relaxed in their own right, simply biding their time until they were old enough to snag a med student or full-blown specialist so they could continue their lives of privilege. But one inexplicable evening he had turned his attention to her at a keg party, and she found herself, drunk, with his erection pressing against her stomach, and then, astonishingly, her lips. She was too overwhelmed with awe at his sudden apparent affection for her to refuse to take him in her mouth. But half an hour later they were back at the party and he deposited her with her friends, who hadn’t even known that she’d been away. She was speechless with shame as she overheard him tell the other boys gathered around the keg that she gave great head. She ran away into the dark, her friends calling after her. Finally, she came to a small barn and leaned against it and vomited, the smell of hay and manure all around her. Even now she colored with embarrassment to think of it.

It seemed to her that she was safe only when she wasn’t involved with a man. But then, her friendships hadn’t been working out so well lately either. She thought of Kelly, her sometimes tennis partner back in Hilton Head. She wondered if Kelly had thought of
her
in the past few years.

Lillian was dead. No one had known that Lillian went to the cemetery with her, not even Francie. There was no one who could tie Lillian to the little girl. Except, she thought, Isabella herself. But the idea that the ghost of a nine-year-old child would or could hit a woman on the head and then stick a pitchfork in her seemed too absurd for words even to her, a woman who seemed to have taken up believing in ghosts.

Lillian had told her to look after Francie, but so far she’d done a terrible job of it. Seeing the roof of the antiques mall come up over the rise ahead of her, she quickened her step, thinking that she would go to Francie and try to make amends with her.

The road had been mostly empty all morning, with only a few cars carrying people into town to shop or to have breakfast. As she looked off in the direction of her house, she saw a white truck or van—her long-distance eyesight wasn’t great these days—pass in front of the antiques mall and turn onto Shelbytown Road.

Kate shaded her eyes with a hand. Without the glare, there was no mistaking that the car was Janet’s Range Rover, with its silly black grille that Caleb called a cowcatcher stuck to the front of it. As it shot past her, stirring up wind and dust, she saw Janet—her hair covered by a scarf, her eyes hidden behind enormous tortoiseshell sunglasses—hunched over the wheel. But Janet didn’t turn to look at her.

For the briefest of moments, she thought about their exchange in Janet’s bedroom and wished she had done some violence to her, broken one of Janet’s expensive, unimaginative objets d’art over her head or at least thrown it in her direction. (Given her own violent thoughts, she should have been more alive to Janet’s, she told herself when she was at home later, ice packs placed strategically on the bruises that covered much of her body.)

As she stood looking after the Rover, it abruptly stopped a few hundred yards down the road as Janet slammed on the brakes. It idled like some quiet beast.

Janet
had
seen her. Kate turned away, stumbling as she turned her attention back to getting home. She felt her heart beat harder in her chest when she heard the gravel crunch beneath the Rover’s tires as Janet turned the car around.

Surely Janet didn’t want to talk to her!
She had rehearsed again and again what she would say to Caleb, but hadn’t even thought about confronting Janet. It had been foolish of her, of course. Carystown was too small for her not to ever run into a highly visible woman like Janet Rourke.

Kate quickened her step. She thought that Janet had either stopped or was driving so slowly that she couldn’t hear her.

But when she heard the Range Rover accelerate, she instinctively looked back. Janet’s face was hidden behind the solid mask of gold the sun had laid across the Rover’s windshield. But Kate knew Janet. If she was wearing one of her Hermès scarves over her hair, and sunglasses, then she was wearing little or no makeup. Janet wasn’t pretty without her makeup; she created herself each morning when she got out of bed. It gave Kate a small amount of much needed pleasure to know that she had caused Janet to let her facade slip.

The pleasure was too brief.
She would face Janet, the bitch. She didn’t owe Janet a moment’s politeness.
She stopped on the road’s berm to wait for Janet to pull up beside her. But it only took her a fraction of a second to realize that Janet wasn’t going to slow down.

Kate began to run, realizing that Janet meant to run her down there in broad daylight.

Losing her footing on the berm’s loose gravel, she fell, her arm sliding out beneath her, and felt the skin scrape away onto the pavement. She got up and ran then, knowing that if she didn’t, Janet would drive over her, crushing every bone in her body. Janet wasn’t a woman who did things by halves.

In the second the Range Rover would have hit her, Kate spread her arms as though she would fly and dove into the weed-and-rock-choked ditch, landing on one shoulder and hip. Janet steered the Rover into the ditch after her, missing her outstretched arm only by inches, and Kate was overcome by the smell of the Rover’s tires and the acrid odor and heat from the exhaust. With a grunt of acceleration, the Rover climbed out of the ditch. But no sooner was it out than Kate heard it crash through the pasture fence a dozen feet away from the edge of the ditch. She pressed herself flat against the ground, praying that Janet wouldn’t come back for her, that the broken fence would have awakened Janet to the insanity of what she’d just done.

She could hear the Rover above her, but the sound was receding. A moment later she heard another crash, again the sound of breaking boards. Trapped in the pasture, Janet had made her own exit farther up the hill.

Wake up.

The voice was a whisper in her ear.

Kate opened her eyes, confused. A blue-tailed lizard about five inches long regarded her from a small pile of rocks not far from her head. Its tongue tasted the air and disappeared into its mouth.

Kate tried to roll away from it, but her body felt leaden and weak.
Screw you, Janet, you crazy bitch.
As she slowly sat up, the lizard remained still. She brushed her hands together to get the gravel off and wiped her palms across her cheeks. Her left hand came away with streaks of blood.

“Just great,” she said, addressing the lizard. “I hope you got the license plate of that truck.” She gave a grim
ha-ha.