Isabella Moon (6 page)

In a moment it was over. She stepped back and regarded him with serious brown eyes.

“I thought so,” she said. Then she turned and ran through the lot, quickly disappearing into the brush at the edge of it, so that by the time it occurred to him to run after her, he saw the flash of a single white tennis shoe in the greenery, and she was gone.

The next day, as though a result of some cruel magic, his mother got wind of it all—he didn’t know how. Perhaps from Marlette, the day woman who also lived in the East End.

His mother stopped him as he was on his way out the door to ride his bike into town. She didn’t even look at him, but at herself as she stood at the hall mirror to check her makeup before going to garden club. “Paxton, honey, you’re making a spectacle of yourself,” she said. And that was all.

When he got to the swim club, Francie wasn’t there. When he called her house, he was told by Mrs. Cayley that she was “out” and would be for the foreseeable future. As small as Carystown was, he didn’t see her the rest of the summer.

They lay beside each other, the sheets beneath them soaked with sweat.

“Are you warm now?” Paxton asked, cuddling against her.

“You really are an asshole,” she said. “But, yes, I’m warm enough.” She grabbed her watch from the dusty windowsill above her head. “I’ve got to get to work. You made me late last week.”

He put a hand on her breast and dropped his head to bite playfully at the nipple he held between his thumb and forefinger.

“Ouch!” she said.

“You liked it a few minutes ago,” he said. “What? Tired of me already?”

“That was an hour ago,” she said, pulling away from him and getting out of bed. “I’m grabbing a shower. Did you get new soap?”

Paxton rolled over and watched her walk across the room. He liked how perfectly proportioned her body was from her butt to her well-toned shoulders. If her thighs were the tiniest bit broad at the tops, it only served to make her more interesting.

“You know,” he said, “you could quit that stupid job and stay here and be my fuck-bunny forever.”

Francie paused in the doorway of the bathroom. It upset her when he talked like this. She knew that he could easily support her in a place like this or one five or six times nicer. And in the back of her mind, wasn’t that what she really wanted? To be connected with Paxton in some kind of semipermanent way? Did she dare even think the word
married
? How many times, as a kid, had she daydreamed of being Mrs. Paxton Birkenshaw, replacing his high-hatted mother in the house at Bonterre, that big damned horse farm that the Birkenshaws had owned forever?

But
this
is what she had instead, and, somehow, it suited her for now. Even though she hated herself every time she came in the door of their pathetic “love nest.” Even though she hated herself only slightly less when she went out again.

“You wish,” she said, closing the bathroom door behind her.

5

THERE WASN’T MUCH TRAFFIC
on the road, but Kate stayed at its graveled edge, wary of the occasional car full of teenagers out for a Friday joyride. She had zipped her fleece anorak and pulled on thick gloves against the early evening air, but still, she was almost grateful for the cold. It would keep her going, and she needed the walk to clear her head.

Ironically, living in a small town with little traffic and a lot of countryside around it hadn’t been particularly good for her walking habit. No one walked here unless it was to do business or shop in town, where there were sidewalks. And those were limited to seven or eight streets with which she’d become very familiar. Janet had once taken her aside to tell her that people had been asking about her, that she’d become a kind of character, someone known for walking down roads at times when no one had any business walking, as though she couldn’t afford a car or was up to something illegal. Janet seemed to take their criticism of her as a personal offense, and Kate understood that the lecture meant she was probably supposed to stop. But that had been more than a year ago, and she was still walking whenever and wherever she felt like it.

She hadn’t had a definite route in mind today, but as the Methodist church came into view, she knew that she was being drawn to the East End yet again. Of course, now it was of her own volition, her own choice.

Going back there was like picking at a scab: she couldn’t let the damn thing heal—she had tried, she’d gone to the sheriff, hadn’t she?—and was driven to worry it, to keep the wound fresh. She couldn’t let go of the thought of Isabella Moon.

The streetlights stopped near the beginning of Birchfield Avenue. They had never been extended into the East End. “Darktown” is what she’d heard it called once by Edith in the office. In response to her puzzled look, Edith, who always seemed to be at least functionally educated and enlightened, had shrugged and said, “You know, the East End.” Kate understood that the neighborhood’s nickname hadn’t come from its lack of streetlights.

“Kate, honey, come on over here,” Lillian called from her porch. She had been sweeping when Kate approached, and wore a cotton scarf tied at the back of her neck to keep the dust off her hair.

There were evenings when Kate was happy to see Lillian outside when she walked by her house, which was always a landmark for her on this particular route. But at that moment she would’ve preferred to pass by unnoticed; the small clearing to which Isabella Moon had led her was part of the cemetery not far from Lillian’s house.

When she waved but didn’t immediately go up to the house, Lillian said, “I’ve got one of those giant éclairs from the bakery for my dessert, but I can’t eat it all myself. Coffee, too.”

Kate sighed.
So much for her plans.

She made her way up the walk through Lillian’s tidy yard, with its row of trimmed boxwoods along the porch and heavily mulched islands of azaleas and rhododendrons in the grass. Though the trees in the neighborhood had just begun to show the faintest of buds, a wave of sunny daffodils rose out of the gray dusk to beckon her forward. The stained-glass panels that Lillian’s father had made so many years ago as a wedding present for Lillian’s mother poured forth a faint, warm light onto the lawn. Lillian’s house looked like a home.

Kate followed Lillian around the back of the house. Inside, Lillian took her anorak and gloves, then hung her own sweater on a hook just beside the door. The kitchen was ablaze with light and smelled of lemon potpourri and chicken soup.

“There’s nothing on that worthless television tonight,” Lillian said. “Why aren’t you off on a date with that good-looking Caleb? When he wasn’t working, Friday nights were always date nights for Albert and me.”

“Work,” Kate said. “He’s off somewhere in the woods. I don’t know when he’s coming back.” She liked that Caleb, who worked for the timber company, was gone for long stretches at a time. It gave her time to think, to miss him, to appreciate his return. The past few nights, though, she’d wished desperately that he could be beside her in her bed. She worried that the girl might return, and thought that Caleb’s presence might keep her away.

“At least the railroad gave Albert a regular schedule,” Lillian said. “On one week, then off four days. It breaks my heart that he didn’t live to spend the pension he worked so hard for.”

Lillian halved the éclair and put the two plates on a tray with the coffee. Kate followed her to the living room, where they sat beside each other on the overstuffed love seat facing the front window. Outside, it had gone full dark. The reflection of the room obscured the street.

Black-and-white photographs of Francie and a few of Francie and her father, all in identical silver frames, covered one wall. Photography was one of Lillian’s hobbies, and Francie was her favorite subject. Each time Kate saw the photos, it struck her how truly lovely Francie was and how the camera adored her. Lillian’s camera was able to capture that fleeting look of longing in Francie’s eyes, the one she was always trying to hide from Kate and the rest of the world. But once, after they’d had a couple of glasses of wine, Francie had told her how she was afraid she’d never have a husband, children, that she couldn’t see it happening in Carystown. Ever. She’d lived away for several years but didn’t want her mother to live in Carystown without any family to take care of her.

“Who knew I’d die an old maid?” she said. She laughed ruefully. Kate objected, but she didn’t know what else to say.

Later, Kate remembered her words and wondered briefly—she hadn’t much time then to dwell on the details of Francie’s life—if Francie would choose to remain in Carystown permanently.

“Would you like to tell me what’s going on, or do I have to sit here all night and wait for you to make up your mind that you can trust me?” Lillian put her hand lightly on Kate’s arm, just the way Francie had at lunch.

Kate gave Lillian a nervous smile and fooled with her hair, shaping it into a loose ponytail, letting it go. “It’s just work, Lillian,” she said. “The invoices are piling up and I can’t get Janet to sign change orders or to write very many checks. Then she blames me when things don’t get done at the house. It’s so close to being finished. I don’t know if she’s having cash flow problems or what.”

Lillian looked at her evenly, expectantly.

“Really,” Kate said. “And I haven’t been sleeping well. Stress. Really.”

“Well, that’s an answer,” Lillian said. “It’s bull, but it’s an answer.”

Kate felt close to tears. She wanted to trust Lillian. But she hadn’t even been able to bring herself to talk to Francie. How could she confide in Francie’s mother? A small voice inside her asked if she wouldn’t want to tell her own mother if she could.

“Did Francine ever tell you that she used to smoke cigarettes?” Lillian said.

Kate shook her head. She wasn’t in the mood for a walk down someone else’s Memory Lane.

“She was fifteen and she would smoke them in her bedroom and blow the smoke out the window screen. Now, Albert smoked, too, so I didn’t notice at first,” Lillian said. “But I would find ashes by her window and burn holes on some of her clothes. And I could smell it on her when she came out of her room.”

“Wasn’t it just something she had to go through?” Kate said. She herself had smoked for a while, but quickly tired of it when she realized how expensive it was.

“I didn’t say anything to her because I knew Francine couldn’t bear to live with a lie for very long. It’s not in her nature. So I waited her out. But, you know, that child surprised me. She held out for a good six months. I thought I was going to have to speak to her. Or have her father do it.”

Kate knew that at the end of the story she was going to be expected to ’fess up, to tell Lillian what was plaguing her. Once the sheriff went to investigate what she’d told him, wouldn’t Lillian know anyway?

“In the end I didn’t have to because the septic tank backed up, and when the plumber went in he found that the biggest problem was inside the house, in the back bathroom that Francine used. Down in that pipe, he found about two hundred cigarette butts stuck in a great big wad about the size of a baseball.” Lillian began to laugh. “You should have seen the look on Francine’s face when she saw all those cigarette butts in his bucket. She looked just as surprised as he did.”

Kate laughed at the notion of Francie so mortified. It felt good to laugh, too.

“Albert said he would’ve spanked her, even at that age, but she was so embarrassed that she was in the way of punishing herself.”

Kate wiped at the tears that had sprung up in her eyes. Inside, she felt the dam of her detachment from her own fears break. She knew she had nothing to fear from Lillian.

“So,” Kate said. “Is it that my toilet’s going to back up if I don’t tell you what you want to know?”

“I guarantee it,” Lillian said. “And it won’t be pretty.”

“I don’t know that there’s anything to see,” Kate said as they passed through the freestanding stone pillars at the entrance of the cemetery.

Lillian pulled her jacket tightly around her. “Child, if you spend enough time in graveyards in the middle of the night, you’re sure going to see something.”

“I can’t believe that they don’t have a fence around it,” Kate said. “But then, where we’re going is not actually
part
of the cemetery. At least I don’t think so.”

Lillian swept her flashlight over the modest headstones before them. “This is the colored cemetery,” she said. “Nobody wants to come messing around in here, I promise you. Maybe a few kids thinking they’re really doing something, turning over stones and tearing up the grass, but that doesn’t happen but every few years.”

They walked in silence over the rough gravel of the cemetery’s central path. Despite the wind and misting rain earlier in the day, the air was calm and the sky clear enough that there was some light from a sliver of moon.

“Did you know the girl?” Lillian asked. “Alive, I mean.”

“Not to speak to,” Kate said. “But I recognized her when I saw the posters and her picture on television. She would walk down Bridge Street and pass in front of the window at work. Always alone. I never saw her with other little girls. Now, it’s her mother. She’s in town almost every day.”

“Terrible thing to lose a child,” Lillian said. “Your heart grieves forever.”