Isabella Moon (30 page)

Finally, the lizard crouched and slipped soundlessly into a crevice in the rock pile.

The sound of the whisper remained in her head, a child’s voice, urgent. Part of her wished that she could choose to believe that the lizard had wakened her.

Her body felt so stiff that she wanted to lie back down, but the rocks and beer cans and skeletons of last year’s bull thistles at the bottom of the ditch were hardly inviting. She groaned as she reached for the bank of the ditch and pulled herself up. After a couple of tries, she was able to get purchase on one of the larger rocks and climb out. Looking down at herself, she took stock: ripped sweater sleeve pushed up above her elbow, revealing an impressive array of bloody scratches; a knee torn out of her jeans, the skin beneath also red and inflamed; and the bloody face she already knew about. And as she tried to walk, she felt a sharp pain in her right ankle.
No, Janet didn’t do things by halves.

At the thought of Janet, she looked anxiously around, but the only sign of the Rover was the twice-splintered fence. Some farmer was going to be pissed off. Kate hoped that someone from the farm had seen Janet’s little rampage. The sun was a little higher in the sky than when she’d gone into the ditch, so she knew she’d been out for more than a couple of minutes. She figured that someone would’ve shown up by now if they’d seen.

When she saw a Buick coming toward her, she thought about flagging it down, but she just nodded and gave the old couple inside a brief wave. Questions, more questions, she didn’t need. The Buick slowed down some, and the woman inside pointed at the fence and covered her mouth in surprise.
Just keep going. Nothing to see here, folks.

The car sped away. The people obviously didn’t want to get involved, and she could hardly blame them.
She
sure didn’t want to be involved. But when her ankle started to burn even more, she almost regretted that she hadn’t flagged them down. No telling what sort of damage she was causing herself. And she’d never been the self-punishing sort. Apparently, she let the men in her life do the punishing.

She walked on, realizing only after it was too late to go back that she’d lost her sunglasses. By the time she reached the stop sign where Shelbytown Road ended, she wanted to weep. Her own street was quiet. The antiques mall had been open less than an hour, and its gravel parking lot with its faux hitching posts held only a couple of cars. From the corner, she could see the yellow and purple pansies she’d planted along her front porch to chase away the gray winter a few weeks before, and her heart lifted. But when she saw the back end of Caleb’s pickup truck peeking from the driveway on the other side of the cottage, she froze. She knew she wasn’t in any kind of shape for a confrontation.
Janet’s mouth on his. Janet, naked, lying beneath him. Janet laughing at her.
No, even if she were on her deathbed, she would face Caleb and his betrayal, and all the other people in her life—Francie, Sheriff Bill Delaney, even Isabella Moon, whatever she was—be damned.

The look on Caleb’s face when she opened her front door took away her words. He stood in the middle of her living room holding a copy of the
Carystown Ledger.

“Have you seen this? About that little girl?” he said, holding the paper out to her. Then, noticing how disheveled and bloody she was, “My God, what happened to you?”

He tossed the paper onto the coffee table and hurried over to her, to lead her to a chair. She shrugged his hand away.

“Don’t
even
talk to me, you son of a bitch,” she said.

He stepped back. These were her new terms, and she was in charge, if only for as long as it took to get him out of her house.

“One time,” he said. “One time, Kate. And it was a horrible mistake. She’s fucking crazy, she is. I was drunk, Kate.”

“You need to leave,” she said.

“Jesus, Kate, you’re in trouble,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on? What do you have to do with that child?”

“Nothing concerning me is any of your business anymore,” she said. Then, wanting to hurt him, “Maybe if I’d thought I could trust you, I would’ve told you what was happening to me.”

The words stung him. If anyone else had caused him to look as broken as he did at that moment, she would’ve been after them in a heartbeat.

“I deserved that.”

They stood in the silent room, the place she’d designed as a haven for herself, the sunny yellow floral couch, the gilt-framed antique photographs of children culled from local shops, the Depression-era vases (not expensive, signed ones, but pretty enough), the scattering of handwoven rugs, the pillows she’d needlepointed herself in those first lonesome months after her arrival. It was a woman’s room. Caleb always looked a little out of place here, unless the room’s only light was firelight.
Don’t go there or you’ll give in!

“I’m going to call the sheriff about your girlfriend,” she said.

“Janet did this?”

“She doesn’t get to go around trying to kill people,” Kate said. But when she started toward the telephone, the pain in her ankle caused her to cry out and almost fall.

Caleb was there to catch her. She couldn’t help but lean on him as he led her to the couch. Even in the midst of the pain, she told herself that she wasn’t going to let his tender attitude toward her soften her resolve. He didn’t deserve her forgiveness, and she didn’t deserve to be treated as though she were some kind of doormat.

“Stay here,” Caleb said after settling her on the couch.

They didn’t speak as he cleaned her wounds with a wet washcloth. She had no antibiotic ointment or bandages in the cottage. When he finished, he gave her some painkillers and tucked ice-filled plastic bags wrapped in towels around her ankle and the elbow on which she’d fallen.

“I’m going to the drugstore to get a wrap bandage for your ankle,” he said, taking his keys from the coffee table and jingling them on his index finger as he often did when he was nervous. “Don’t do anything, call anybody, or answer the phone until I get back. Please?”

“Why would I promise you anything?” she said. But she knew that she would do as he asked because she was too exhausted to do otherwise. She also decided that if he came back with flowers, she would have to kill him.

Caleb still had a half-pitying look on his face, but she saw an unguarded spark of alarm in his eyes.
Yes, be afraid! You don’t know what Mary-Katie’s capable of!

When he’d closed the front door and locked it behind him, Kate realized she’d been holding her breath. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes as she leaned her head against the couch’s plump pillows. The newspaper lay on the coffee table. She didn’t need to look at it to know that the whole town now thought that she was either a murderer or a certifiable lunatic.

31

“Come on, baby,” Miles said, holding the spoon near her face. “This is great soup. It’s from the Fresh Market.”

Mary-Katie slowly turned her head away from the spoon. Jagged streams of rain coursed down the outside of the window. It had been raining for two days, something not uncommon on the island in October. She’d been able to get out of bed without Miles’s help that morning, but the effort had left her exhausted.

“Maybe later.” Miles put the spoon and bowl on the bed tray. “Time for a pill.” He took an unlabeled medicine bottle from his sweater pocket and shook out a single tablet into his hand.

Mary-Katie took it with the glass of water he offered. Anything to keep the numbness of her body from turning into something more real.

“The remote’s right here,” he said, gesturing toward the tray. “Do you want anything else before I go downstairs?”

It seemed useless to her to be unpleasant to Miles. She shook her head, but turned again to stare out of the window. She’d come to think that he wouldn’t even understand it if she were rude to him or demonstrably angry. There was something wrong with Miles, she knew now, something neither of them could ever change.

The doctor—if he was a doctor—had told Miles in his thick Pakistani accent that at least one of Mary-Katie’s ribs was broken. Dazed by the injection he’d given her as soon as he arrived at the house, she had hardly been able to sit upright as he wrapped her torso in what seemed to be yards of bandages and thick white tape.

There had been kindness in his brown eyes, but as drugged as she was, Mary-Katie knew better than to ask him for help. Miles hovered nearby, and the only help she would get would be from him.

The first couple of days after the attack were a blur of endless trips to the bathroom, always supported by Miles, who used warm water to cleanse her of the blood that came from her uterus, first trickling, then coming in thick clots. He worked quietly, occasionally murmuring words of encouragement as she moved from the toilet to the shallow water in the tub.

Who would have imagined that he could be such a thoughtful nurse? His soft hands tenderly adjusted her bandages and cooled her brow with damp washcloths. Every couple of hours he would check her temperature as the doctor had instructed him to, watchful for signs of internal injuries.

So thoughtful, so able.

Mary-Katie had stared after him each time he took away one of her soiled maxi pads. He was a man who could, without comment, toss the clump of flesh that was his child into a trash bag and, later, wheel the full garbage can down to the end of the driveway so the waste company could haul it away to be buried in a graveyard of trash somewhere on the mainland.

Watching the rain, she let the knowledge that she would kill Miles comfort her. There was a tightness in her chest made up of tears she couldn’t yet shed for her child, for herself. The haze of the drugs kept her from letting them out. But she was patient. The ribs would heal. The bruises on her body would heal, and she would no longer need the drugs. In truth, a very small part of her felt a little sorry for Miles because he would soon be dead and didn’t yet realize it.

32

THE GIRLFRIEND
of the Catlett boy had given Bill another name: Charlie Matter. He and Frank were the only ones privy to that information, though, and he wanted to keep it that way. He had enough on his plate right now and wasn’t quite ready to do a full-scale search at Chalybeate Springs. If it turned out that the recipient of all the over-the-counter stuff in Delmar Johnston’s lean-to had been that raggedy-assed hippie, and right under his nose, he was going to have to give himself a good swift kick. The scope of the problem was starting to worry him, too. Carystown was small enough that he should’ve heard something about the operation before now, and as much as he hated to think so, he couldn’t deny that Matter might have some connection within the department.

Like a family of troubled children, his deputies all had their problems. Daphne couldn’t seem to keep a civil attitude with anyone, and she certainly had a big mouth. She was probably sleeping with the kid from the newspaper—
God help him
—and maybe had talked too much about the Moon girl’s case. But he couldn’t see her mixed up with Charlie Matter. She had no respect for the hippies. Mitch was worrisome. There had been a couple of times when the department kitty had come up fifty or sixty bucks short, and rumors that he’d let several of the town bigwigs out of speeding raps for the occasional favor. And Frank—well, Frank was solid to the point that he pissed a lot of people off. He wouldn’t let Mother Mary herself get away with stiffing a parking meter. Still, as flawed as they were, they were his best, and he had a hard time imagining any of them going seriously bad.

It burned him that while the Catlett boy was being prepped for burial at the funeral home, Delmar Johnston was probably enjoying the turkey and gravy dinner that Smithy, the jail’s “nutrition consultant,” had fixed for the weekend prisoners. That is, if Delmar Johnston hadn’t declared himself a vegan or vegetarian or lacto-ovum whatchamacallit and demanded a special meal, which, of course, they would have to provide for him. Air-conditioning and cable television weren’t enough. The law was soft and yielding these days, and Bill felt like the criminals knew it. Why shouldn’t they break the law? It was ripe for the breaking.

The office was quiet. Mitch was the only other person in the building. There never seemed to be enough for Mitch: enough time in the day, enough money, enough latitude in enforcing the law, and definitely not enough pretty, available women in Carystown. Mitch liked to schedule his days off consecutively and get out of town. He didn’t confide much in anyone, but the scuttlebutt was that he had at least two girlfriends—one up in Lexington and one way out in Harlan County—who didn’t know about each other. It wasn’t how Bill would’ve conducted his life, but he had to admit to himself that he envied Mitch his apparent callousness, his willingness to take risks in order to live his life
large,
as some called it.

He emptied the sludge at the bottom of the coffeepot into his mug and rescued it with some real half-and-half and a couple packets of sugar before stopping in Mitch’s doorway.

“Margaret says you’re welcome for dinner later,” he said. “She’s been on a salmon kick lately. Gets it up at the warehouse club in the city. Pretty good for farm-raised.”

“Thanks,” Mitch said. “She’s a heck of a cook.”

“Yeah, she is. But she’s starving me,” Bill said. “I’ll be lucky if I get butter on my rice.” He didn’t go on to mention that things were still pretty silent at home. He knew Margaret was looking for some kind of apology or explanation, but what could he say to her? He’d been completely unprepared for her questions—her suspicions—about the Russell woman. But it wasn’t as though he’d actually
done
anything, or even thought about doing anything. To his mind, Margaret was being unreasonable.