Isabella Moon (34 page)

“What’d I miss?” Bill said. “Who’s in the wagon?”

Daphne said, “It’s all under control now.”

“What would that be?”

Matthew John spoke up, suddenly defensive. “I went to take the boy his breakfast, Sheriff, but he wouldn’t wake up. I wasn’t going to take any chances, so I called Daphne over here to help me check him out. He was so white. Looked dead as a hammer.” He shook his head. “Sometimes they fake it, you know. But this boy definitely wasn’t faking.”

Daphne put a hand on Matthew John’s arm. He was too old to hold the jailer job, but was never required to handle the inmates himself, except to deal with their food and just generally keep an eye on things. He’d had the job the better part of twenty years when Bill had arrived in Carystown, and there hadn’t been any reason to let him go.

“I hope we’re not talking about Delmar Johnston,” Bill said, but he already knew the answer.

“They couldn’t get him conscious,” Daphne said. “He’s critical.”

“Of course he is,” Bill said. “Shit.” He was thinking that at least he wouldn’t have to call Porter Jessup, the coroner, today. They were spending too much time together lately.

“Did he fall down? What?” Bill said. “Did anyone see anything?”

Matthew John shook his head. “It was just me since yesterday afternoon except for a couple of the deputies came in to do some paperwork. We got in one DUI around two this morning, but the Johnston kid looked to be asleep in his bunk. Didn’t make any noise. Nothing.”

Daphne shrugged. “Maybe he had some kind of seizure or something. Maybe nobody knew about it.”

“Seems like a pretty strange damned coincidence,” Bill said. “Seeing as he and I were going to have that chat this morning.”

“What? Is he some kind of master criminal or something?” Daphne said with a sneer in her voice. “Anybody do a cavity search on him?”

Frank had searched him and was always thorough. But the kid was a dealer. Who knew what tricks he had?

“You got any ideas, Matthew John?” Bill said.

Matthew John glanced away, making Bill wonder if he wasn’t hiding something.

Daphne spoke up. “Matthew John might have stepped outside for a smoke once or twice,” she said. “No biggie.”

“It wasn’t but for five or ten minutes at a time, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ve been trying to quit, but I’m just too damned old. If I quit, my lungs won’t know what to do with themselves and I’ll end up with pneumonia.”

Bill took in Matthew John’s sallow pallor and watery blue eyes, which seemed years younger than the wrinkled skin that surrounded them. If he were Matthew John, he probably wouldn’t try very hard to quit either.

“We don’t need to start casting blame about this minute,” Bill said. “Let’s see what the docs say.” He turned to Daphne. “Get someone posted outside Mr. Johnston’s hospital room, then you and Matthew John get the paperwork done on this mess. I expect there are one or two forms that need to be filled out.”
So much for Delmar Johnston.

Bill parked the cruiser at the edge of the church parking lot and got out to wait for Margaret. When she came out of the church, he watched her for a few minutes before she noticed he was there. She was wearing her hair differently this morning, the front of it pulled off her face and held back with a barrette at the crown of her head. She looked younger than her forty-nine years and he liked that. He also liked that she didn’t go in for the large flowered dresses and stupid hats that some of her church contemporaries wore, as though they were dowdy seventy-five-year-olds instead of women in the prime of their lives. Her look was feminine, just at the edge of sexy. Her low-cut, rose-colored dress hugged the curved hips that he so loved to get a firm grip on.

They had made a cautious kind of love the night before, but, still, there was a distance between them, and he knew it was occupied mainly by the Russell girl. She was young enough to be his daughter, and probably crazy, but a man’s desires didn’t know any kind of logic. And having a loving wife didn’t mean he couldn’t think about another woman from time to time. It made him feel guilty as hell, but when he thought about the girl and her soft, clear skin and the firm lines that lay just beneath her clothes, he couldn’t help but imagine laying her down in some open field somewhere, or even in the back of the cruiser—anywhere he could have her quickly, desperately. It would be over and done with, so he could regret it and go on.

Margaret waved him over. He blushed, as though she’d read his thoughts, so he took his time crossing the parking lot. It looked like he was going to have to pay for his breakfast with a chat with the busybody pastor and her husband. Fortunately, the newspeople who had come down when the body was found had worn themselves out and seemed to have gone away. With the prospect of a decent breakfast before him, he could handle a few Presbyterians.

“I can’t imagine that Freida Birkenshaw had any idea about what’s been going on,” Margaret said. “She’s just not the sort to put up with that kind of nonsense.”

“It wasn’t too long ago that boy of hers got popped for a DUI,” Bill said. “Twice.”

“More than ten years ago,” Margaret said. “Not so much as a peep out of him since.”

Bill nodded to the waitress to top off his coffee. “At least not around here,” he said. “But there are plenty of stories about what he’s up to out of Mama’s earshot.”

The crowd was light in the inn’s dining room. Late spring and fall were its high seasons. Out in the lobby there was a poster for the town’s annual May garden tour. Bill liked to say that flowers and dead leaves were the only things that brought tourists to Carystown.

“Don’t, please,” Margaret said.

“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Bill said, bristling.

Margaret glanced around the dining room and lowered her voice.

“He wouldn’t do anything
illegal,
” she said. “Not on his own mother’s farm. She’s so sick, Bill. I don’t believe it.”

“I just said it was something I wanted to look into. I’ve got some state boys coming down on Tuesday. They’re going to look around,” he said. “That’s all.”

She had a blind spot sometimes when it came to the old families in town. She knew their dirty laundry—and some of it had involved, as a matter of course, her own family. There were limits, though, on what she was willing to believe.

With Delmar Johnston comatose, Bill was at a temporary impasse on the Catlett boy’s case, and a good search of the farm seemed sensible. He could detour and check out Charlie Matter, but that would be touchy because of the freshness of the discovery of the little girl’s body. He and Margaret still had to live in the town when both investigations were over, and he was having a hard enough time convincing people like the good pastor at church that he didn’t believe in ghosts, only hunches. Though, in his own mind, he still didn’t know
what
he believed. He only knew that he had come to believe Kate Russell. He decided to change the subject.

“You think you’ll go to Lillian Cayley’s funeral tomorrow?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Margaret said, looking a little relieved. “I didn’t know her all that well. Her daughter’s sweet.”

“I pretty much need to,” Bill said. “Is my dress uniform clean?”

“In the closet,” Margaret said.

Mostly, his relationship was cordial with the people in the East End. By tradition, it wasn’t a very integrated area. In temperament it was a quiet, safe part of town where, unlike the trailer parks and low-income apartments on the northern edge of town, a person could go out for a midnight stroll and remain unmolested.

That Lillian Cayley had been brutally murdered had stunned the East End’s residents. Even though many of them had been calling the station, worried about their safety, he still thought that the woman’s murder seemed a personal one. Given that nothing appeared to be missing in the house, he suspected that it had to have been someone who knew her and wanted her dead. The daughter had been at work most of the evening, and, according to Mitch, with Paxton Birkenshaw for some time after that. That was another coincidence he didn’t quite care for.

When they got back to the house, the answering machine was blinking. Before he could check the messages, the telephone rang.

“Delaney,” he said.

“If it’s not the ugliest sheriff in town,” the voice on the other end said.

“You’ve got little enough room to talk, Jessup,” Bill said. “Don’t you zombies take any time off at all?”

“Hey, watch it with that zombie talk,” Porter Jessup said. “That’s professional insensitivity. I could sue the county over that.”

“Go ahead,” Bill said. “It ain’t my money.”

“You’re going to feel all guilty about being mean to me when I tell you my news,” Jessup said, pretending to be wounded.

“Well, you better spill it then if it’ll make you feel better.”

“Did you notice anything unusual about that little girl’s bones when you got a look at them? By the way, the hair was hers. You definitely found yourself the Moon girl.”

“Unusual?” Bill said. “Besides the fact that they were covered in dirt in a shallow grave? That was enough for me.”

“Hah!” Jessup said. “See. You people need me after all. You didn’t even notice that a femur, her pelvis, and one of her arms were fractured. Not to mention both of her cheeks and a couple of vertebrae.”

“No shit,” Bill said.

“That’s not all. I took a look at her clothes. The only blood I came up with was on the front of the coat, like she’d spat it up. But there was something more interesting.”

“What?” Bill said.

“Gravel,” Porter Jessup said. “Tiny bits of gravel embedded in her clothes, some of it oily. We’ll send it to the state lab to see for sure.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Bill said. “So you have any thoughts on the how of things?”

“You people really do want me to do everything for you,” Jessup said. “Either she jumped off a tall building—which is unlikely because the ankles and the feet would be destroyed as well—or somebody crushed the hell out of her little bones with a couple good swift hammer blows. It’s tough to bust up a pelvis that good with a hammer, though it
has
been done.”

“I know you’re going to tell me that the gravel gave it away,” Bill said. “But it sounds like maybe she got herself run over by a vehicle.”

“Bingo,” Porter Jessup said. “And I wasn’t even trying.”

Bill wanted to tell Jessup that he was full of it, that he knew he had probably been working on the bones and the clothes day and night since the body came in. But it seemed a cruelty to shoot him down.

“I suppose you’re going to want me to recommend you for a raise,” Bill said.

“The county already can’t afford me,” Jessup said. “This one’s out of the goodness of my heart.” And although there was a joshing tone in his voice, Bill knew that he was partially serious. They had both wanted badly to know what happened to the girl, and now they were that much closer to finding out.

36

FRANCIE KEPT HER HEAD DOWN
as she walked behind her mother’s white casket, her face covered by the pale green veil of one of the hats her mother had rarely worn. She knew that the two hundred people in the sanctuary would be watching her, wondering how she was holding up, waiting for her to break down. She felt like she’d done all the crying she was going to do, but the sounds of the mourners around her, the muffled sobs and throat-clearing, were starting to get to her. Feeling the presence of so many people who had loved or admired or feared Lillian reminded her that Lillian had never really belonged to her at all, that she’d been a surrogate mother to many of them, and a friend to the rest.

The stiff wool dress Francie wore abraded her skin, and in the back of her throat she could taste the last bit of cocaine she’d had more than forty-eight hours before. One phone call to Paxton was all it would have taken and she could have had all she wanted. She wouldn’t have smiled through the service, but the fact that her mother’s brutalized body lay in the box in front of her might not have felt so surreal and unbelievable if she’d been even a little bit high. While she craved the coke more than she had ever craved any kind of food, she was determined that she was through with it. She would have to keep Paxton away from her if she was going to keep her head clear.
Was she up to it?
Her desire for Paxton was so deep and visceral that she didn’t know how she was going to fight it.

A woman leaned out from a pew and stretched her arms across the polished white surface of the casket so that the pallbearers had to halt the bier on which it rested. The woman’s sharp cry struck at Francie’s heart. For thirty-some years the woman had worked at school with Lillian, and in recent years Francie had often found them relaxing in her mother’s backyard, talking over their school days. When the man who was standing beside her gently put his arms around her, the woman crumpled against his gray suit, sobbing.

As Francie waited with the pallbearers for the woman to get out of the way, she felt a flush of heat move through her body. Glancing to her left, she saw Paxton standing a row away from where they’d stopped.

Gone was the easy smile that seemed to come automatically to his lips whenever they saw each other. Fine lines of fatigue pulled at the corners of his bloodshot eyes. His dark suit and crisp white shirt were impeccably neat, as his clothes always were. He looked like a sad, dressed-up little boy, and she wanted to go to him and hold him in her arms.