Isabella Moon (51 page)

Inside Janet’s agency, a different young woman sat at the desk that Kate Russell had once occupied. Margaret knew that Kate Russell’s disappearance had been one of the great disappointments of Bill’s life. It was a disappointment Margaret didn’t share, except for the fact that she’d left him without any serious, public confirmation about her supposed contact with the dead girl, which didn’t help his credibility with the voters. She knew that Bill felt guilty, too, because if Francie Cayley was correct, Kate Russell—or whatever her name had really been—was probably as dead as her boyfriend, Caleb.

Paxton Birkenshaw and his mother were gone as well. Bonterre was up for sale. Margaret was only one of a handful of people, including the coroner, who knew that Freida Birkenshaw had killed her son, that it wasn’t the other way around. It had been Bill’s last concession to the collective dignity of the old families.

But it was Francie Cayley for whom Margaret felt the most sorrow. Things were better for her now. She was making a new life for herself in Texas, where no one had ever heard the name Isabella Moon. Francie’s Christmas card to Bill and Margaret had mentioned that she was engaged to be married, but she hadn’t given any details. Margaret could hardly blame her.

Delaney & Lowe’s was surprisingly busy for a Tuesday. Margaret had to set their sandwiches in the tiny office refrigerator as soon as she came in so she could help with customers.

Bill had surprised her with his willingness to learn about all things antique. They specialized in fine linens and mid-nineteenth-century American furniture, which was getting harder and more expensive to come by. But, as he had said, you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Carystown without hitting an antiques store that sold early twentieth-century tchotchkes and Depression glass, so they might as well go for it.

The morning ended with the sale of an enormous walnut dresser that Bill had picked up at auction down in Tennessee. The thing was incredibly heavy and just this side of primitive, but he’d bought it on a hunch and today it had paid off.

“Let’s celebrate,” he said, when the couple who had bought it left the shop. There were no other customers and the scheduled tour bus wasn’t due in town for another hour.

“I have apple juice in the back,” Margaret said.

“Good enough,” Bill said.

She brought the juice and two plastic cups from the office.

“I don’t think so,” Bill said. “I just made us a thousand bucks profit. This calls for the real thing.”

He plucked two crystal glasses from the place-setting display on a dining table and wiped them out with a paper towel.

Part of her knew that it was for her that he had stayed in Carystown. She would’ve gladly left if he’d asked. But he hadn’t. When the occasional clueless out-of-towner would ask what he knew about that dead little girl
what’s her name?
and what he knew about the rich guy who’d gone crazy and killed himself and those other people, Bill would tell them that it was a shame, all that had happened, and that they might go by the library to read about it in the old newspapers.

“To us,” Bill said, raising his glass. “And my damned good judgment.”

Margaret laughed.

“Wait, I haven’t finished,” Bill said. “And my damned good judgment in marrying you, Margaret Lowe Delaney.”

They clinked their glasses and drank, happy in each other’s company. Margaret brought out the sandwiches and they ate quickly at the desk, talking about their next buying trip. Bill was in favor of a trip to Virginia, but Margaret insisted that the market was already overpriced there, that they would do better to go west, or maybe to Indiana or Ohio for some primitive pieces. Before they could settle on a choice, a pair of well-dressed women in their sixties came in wearing looks of wary eagerness. Margaret knew they imagined that they’d find incredible bargains in this hick town they’d just discovered.

She greeted them, then tactfully went to work on some paperwork at the desk while Bill cleared up their lunch things and took them out to the Dumpster in the rear alley.

One of the women called her friend over to look at the walnut dresser that Bill had sold only an hour before.

“Look at this, Jenny,” she said. “Have you ever seen anything like this? Look how deep the drawers are.”

“I’m so sorry,” Margaret said. “That piece has already been sold, but I have several other walnut dressers along this back wall.”

The woman either didn’t hear or pointedly ignored her.

“And look,” the woman said. “There’s a penny in this drawer. It looks brand new.”

Her friend took the penny from her hand and examined it. “You know, my mother used to say—she’d be a hundred years old this week if she were still alive—she used to tell me that when you come across a penny on the ground, or even hidden away, it means that someone dead is thinking of you.”

Someone dead.

Margaret pressed her mouth together in a hard line. She never knew when it was going to happen, when she would be plunged into the hell that had been the past few years. For all the pretended normalcy of their almost-new life, she knew they were never going to be free of it. Someone, something would always call them back. If it wasn’t some prying or ignorant tourist, it was a look in Bill’s eyes, a fleeting look of deep hurt that he couldn’t hide from her. She glanced to the rear of the store where the back door still stood open. It was a small mercy that he hadn’t heard the woman, but a mercy all the same.

“I bet these people that own the store put it there,” the first woman said. “Like you do when you give someone a new pocketbook for a gift.”

Margaret gave her a bright, professional smile that signified nothing.

When Bill came in a few minutes later, he found her alone. He went to where she stood looking out the front window of the shop.

“That was quick,” he said. He touched her lightly on the shoulder.

“They weren’t serious,” Margaret said, sliding an arm around his now-slender waist. She kissed him on the cheek.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “You should probably call the trucking company about that dresser. That couple sounded pretty anxious to get it shipped.”

“Yeah. I wonder why?” Bill said.

Margaret shrugged as if to say it didn’t much matter why. That it would soon be out of the store was the only thing that was important to her.

Later that night, as she lay in bed with her husband sleeping at her side, she said a silent prayer of gratitude for his love and strength and tenderness. But, along with the gratitude there was, for the first time in their life together, a nascent fear of the day when he would no longer be there.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L
AURA
B
ENEDICT
’s short fiction has appeared in
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
and a number of anthologies. For the past decade she has worked as a freelance book reviewer for
The Grand Rapids Press
in Michigan and other newspapers. She lives in southern Illinois with her husband, Pinckney Benedict, and their two children.
Isabella Moon
is her first novel.

Isabella Moon
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Laura Benedict

Title page photograph by Pierre deJordy Blanchette

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B
ALLANTINE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Benedict, Laura.

Isabella Moon : a novel / Laura Benedict.

   p.    cm.

eISBN: 978-0-345-50213-1

1. Missing children—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.E6627I83   2007

813'.6—dc22      2007016274

http://www.ballantinebooks.com/

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