Isabella Moon (49 page)

When Francie started out of the cruiser, Bill held her back.

“I know I can’t make you stay in the car,” he said. “But we need to go up
together.
”

He was sorry to see the look of hope on her lovely face change to one of fear.

“Of course,” she said.

On the porch, Bill rang the bell several times. Behind the house they heard the distinct barking of beagles. They were so noisy, their yelps frantic and wild, that Bill wasn’t certain how many of them there were.

“Let’s head around back,” he said. “The dogs must be locked up.”

“They’ve got a run,” Francie said.

Bill didn’t like that she was with him. The area was exposed and Birkenshaw could have been hiding anywhere.

“Stay behind me,” he said. “Please.”

Around the back of the house security lights flipped on as they approached, throwing the yard into a pool of bright white light. He saw the beagles now, a good-looking pair that crowded the fence as they barked furiously.

He and Francie headed for the back door, which he noticed was standing wide open. He was about to tell her to stay close when she started to scream.

She grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back from the doorway where the mangled body of a man, presumably Caleb Boyd, lay blocking their path.

52

THE SOUND OF THE RIVER
sloshing against its bank lifted Kate to consciousness. An icy breeze stirred her hair. She was confused at first, knowing she was inside the car, but she opened her eyes to find the windshield gone and the driver’s side jammed with tree branches.

“Miles?” Her voice sounded unfamiliar to her, quiet and raspy.

There was no answer from within the branches.

When she tried to shift in her seat to get a closer look, she found that one of her legs was trapped in the crush of the dashboard. The deflated air bag lay like a giant balloon over her lap. Panic rose in her chest and she pushed at the air bag frantically with her bound hands as though she were battling some animal trying to trap her. Finally, it was off of her, and she wriggled her foot out of her shoe and inched her leg out, crying aloud with pain.

The pain made her want to curl into a ball and close her eyes and check out again. Maybe if she did, she would eventually awake to find herself in her own bed back at the cottage, Caleb breathing evenly beside her as he slept.

She called Miles’s name again, but the only answer was the constant
slap slap
of water against the riverbank.

Miles was gone, somewhere out in the falling dark. Dead or alive, she didn’t know.
Did she really care? Yes.
She surprised herself with the sudden hope that Miles was horribly, brutally dead. If he weren’t dead, if he’d awakened—she looked at the tree branches and asked herself how that might be possible—and had gone for help, she would never be free of him. She saw her life through the insane scenario that he’d been babbling about before the accident, living in the island house like the last few years had never happened, like they had been some extended hallucination. She felt the panic rise again. If there was anything that living with Miles had taught her, it was that there were worse things than death.

Outside the absent windshield there wasn’t much to see except the tangle of branches. Neither could she see the top of the hillside from the passenger window. The sedan had turned over several times on the way down, and she vaguely recalled the sensation of feeling afloat in her seat belt. What a bizarre favor Miles had done her by strapping her in so carefully after he’d forced her into the car. If he’d been less concerned about her safety (or, really, her ability to jump out of the car) and more about his, he might still be in the driver’s seat, pinned to it or gored by the intruding branches. Miles had always considered mandatory seat belt laws an unnecessary limit on his personal freedom.

Kate took a mental inventory of her body. When she twisted to the right, she felt some small pain, as though one of her ribs were bruised. But other than a dull ache behind her eyes and a sore arm, her leg was the only thing that seemed to be seriously injured.

It was getting darker. And colder. Accustomed as she was now to the country, she didn’t want to be in this abandoned place alone. As the last daylight faded away, she noticed a small bright circle just outside the front of the sedan: one of the headlights had stayed on. She imagined the headlight like a lazy eye, dangling from its socket.

She struggled with the scarf binding her wrists, chewing on its rolled edge. The taste of the silk was bitter on her tongue, and she had to stop frequently to gather saliva to lessen it. As she worked the scarf she soon realized that one of her upper molars was loose in her mouth. It had almost certainly happened when Miles hit her back at the cottage. She cursed him out loud, screaming his name, half hoping he could hear her.

An hour passed. Small, urgent rustling noises came from outside the sedan, and she saw the bulbous form of some kind of rodent run through the tree’s branches. Whatever it was, it didn’t come inside the window, and she was grateful. Caleb had told her that the river rats could grow to be as big as cats and had been known to try to hide themselves in the clothes people were wearing. Packs of dogs, too, roamed the countryside at night, and it had been a long, cold winter. In her life, she had been used to protecting herself from other humans, not animals, and she felt a new kind of fear. Although she was cold, tiny beads of sweat formed a line across her forehead. She felt feverish.

The night was so quiet that she could have cried. Every five or ten minutes she heard vehicles passing by on the road far above her. Was anyone looking for her? Francie was too bound up with Paxton. Eventually, the sheriff would want to talk to her again; he had been concerned about her going into her house alone the night before. Now she wished she had asked him inside. If there was anybody who was qualified to rescue her the way she needed rescuing now, it was Bill Delaney. But he didn’t even know she was missing.

Miles had obviously not flagged anyone down, or he would have been back for her by now. That meant he was out there somewhere, perhaps only a few feet from the car. The thought filled her with dread, but she knew that she wasn’t safe where she was. She decided that she had no other choice but to try to make it out of the car even with her hands tied.

Then she laughed, realizing what an idiot she’d been. She twisted around to the console box between the seats, feeling her way for the latch with her fingertips. It took her several minutes of breaking off small pieces of the branch that was wedged against it, but eventually she was able to raise it. She felt around the compartment until her hand recognized the hard rectangle of Miles’s favorite chrome Zippo lighter. She’d given it to him as a stocking stuffer on their second Christmas together so he could use it to light the cigars that he always, thoughtfully, took out to the patio to smoke. She had hated the cigars, but now she kissed the cool metal of the lighter’s case, knowing it would be her salvation.

As Kate climbed out of the sedan, the headlamp blinked out, leaving her temporarily blind in the darkness. The acrid smell of burned silk followed behind her as she felt her way, hesitating. The moon hadn’t yet risen, and she could hear the river better than she could see it. When her eyes finally adjusted, she saw that she was closer to the water than she’d first thought.

Her side was sore, but her leg didn’t trouble her much and she knew that she’d been lucky to be able to walk away, even if it had taken her several hours. She wasn’t wearing a watch, but guessed that it was somewhere around 9:00
P.M
.
If
she’d been back at the cottage,
if
it had been two weeks ago,
if
Isabella Moon hadn’t come into her life,
if
Miles hadn’t been such an animal, perhaps she would be lying on her sofa now in her chenille bathrobe, reading a novel or making plans with Caleb on the telephone.
If.
As Miles had said,
That’s a big fucking if.

Caleb.
She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to get the picture of his bloodied body out of her mind.
It was her fault. She’d killed him just as surely as if she’d pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger.

What would she tell Bill Delaney when she got back to town? The truth would have to come out about who she really was and where she’d come from. And what if Miles had been right about everyone thinking that she killed Caleb?

The weak light from the Zippo showed the hillside to be a maze of brush and broken trees and twisted pieces of the sedan. But she kept the lighter on too long, and the metal burned against her skin so that she dropped it.

“Please, please, please,” she whispered as she felt around the ground. She couldn’t imagine going on in the dark without it.

At last she felt a spot of warmth against her bare foot and bent down to find the lighter among some fallen leaves. As she tried to rise from the ground, her side exploded with pain and she cried out. Crouching in the darkness, she doubled over. Sweat dripped down her neck, soaking the collar of her blouse. When the pain subsided some and she was finally able to stand, she struck the Zippo again and held it aloft, briefly this time. She was relieved to see that her best chance of getting up the bank would be to go sideways for several yards before heading to the road above.

She moved slowly. After a minute she found walking with one bare foot too difficult and slipped off her remaining shoe. She had loved to go barefoot as a child, to the despair of her grandmother, but now she just tried not to think about the snakes or bits of glass or used condoms or beer tabs she might be stepping on.

When the growth on the bank thinned some, she started up the hillside. As she climbed, using pliable saplings and rope-thick vines as handholds, she could hear the passing traffic and her heart lightened despite the stabbing pain in her side.

Yes, she’d had to tell a few lies to get away from Miles, and, of course, the whole Isabella Moon affair was bizarre beyond words. But what harm had Isabella Moon really done her? Hadn’t it been Isabella Moon she had seen by the side of the road, staring after them as they passed by in the sedan? Hadn’t it been Isabella Moon standing in the middle of the road so that Miles saw her and veered off the road and down the embankment? If anything, she was grateful to Isabella Moon. If Miles were indeed gone—
please let him be dead please let him be dead
(her very heart cried for him to be dead)—she had nothing left to fear.

Something touched her hair. When she waved her hand to brush it away, she felt something rough and wet, something alive against her skin. She cried out.

“Mary-Katie.”
Miles’s voice was a choked whisper.

“No,” Kate said, looking up. “Miles.”

She backed away, pressing a hand to her mouth. The moon had risen and the light was better on the hillside. After a moment she could make out one side of Miles’s face. It was torn at the cheek so that she could see most of his upper teeth. The rest was a mass of bloody tissue. One arm hung down at a broken angle, the other she couldn’t see. His inverted body swung slowly, like a horrific pendulum.

In those first seconds, she wanted to run away, to leave Miles there and pretend that she hadn’t seen him. But she felt something down inside herself respond to the scene in front of her. There had been a time when she’d tried to kill Miles herself. She still wanted him dead, and all she had to do was walk away and not look back. But she couldn’t make herself run away this time.

Miles’s eyes opened and closed slowly, as though they would blink away the blood that had run into them. When she got closer, his eyes didn’t focus. Perhaps he couldn’t even see her. Kate put her hand up to his face and wiped some of the blood away with her fingertips. Still, he did not look at her. She began to suspect she had imagined that he’d spoken at all.

“Miles,” she said. Her hand stroked the undamaged side of his face. But, strangely, she was not repulsed by the carnage on the other side. “Miles. Does it hurt?”

Miles made a sound in his throat, but she couldn’t tell what it meant.

“Do you want me to go for help?”

This time she fancied his eyes looked toward her for the briefest of moments. He blinked with agonizing slowness. Droplets of blood, like tears, dripped onto her bare feet.

How many times had she imagined Miles helpless before her? Her daydreams, though, had been less than creative back in those days after he’d had her beaten and the child inside her killed. Torching him in his bed had been one of her favorites. Poisoning him with drain cleaner had been another. A hundred simple deaths. But
this
she couldn’t have planned in a million years.

“I could help you, Miles,” she whispered, getting close to his untorn ear. “I could help you down, if you want.”

There was no response from Miles. He might have been a deer carcass strung up into the tree to let the blood flow out.

She stood regarding him a moment, a little unsure how to proceed. It was bad enough that she was once again faced with Miles, even in his present state. But she was also now dizzy with exhaustion and pain. What she really wanted to do was to curl up on the bank and sleep, even though it wasn’t much farther to the top. Every so often there was the tempting growl of a passing truck or music from a car. She told herself that it would be easy to keep going, that she could flag someone down, call for help, get Miles an ambulance. But a thick sort of lethargy was settling over her, and her enthusiasm for the climb up the hillside was becoming weaker and weaker. And there was something else.
She didn’t want to save Miles.