Turtle Moon (13 page)

She never in her life lent Karen Wright anything, and now she regrets it. The blouse is white linen, with pearl buttons, but Lucy doesn't stop to examine it. Instead, she goes to the night table; she knows where you keep what's most important.

She opens the top drawer and rummages through the earrings and cough drops until she finds what she's looking for. It's a photograph of Karen and her daughter, taken at the beach on a day when the humidity was bearable and the sky stretched out forever. It's even worse than those wild roses, so Lucy slips it into her pocket, then goes to shut the closet door.

Later, she'll take the photograph out and prop it up on her bathroom counter. After she phones to reserve a plane ticket back to a place where she never thought she'd return of her own free will, she'll memorize each one of her neighbor's features until they've become as familiar as her own. And when she's done, she'll take some lemons and halve them and rinse her hair twice, but not because Janey Bass told her to.

Arrow moves through the thickets and the thorns, his huge head down, his tail raised. For the past three days he has unearthed dead moles, the remains of sea gulls, lifeless crickets, curled up and blackened from the heat. Whenever he and Julian work together there is silence, except for the sound of their breathing and occasionally the crack of a branch beneath their feet. Nothing distracts Arrow, not the planes overhead or the heat or the golfers on the fairway.

Julian keeps the dog on a forty-foot leash, so it's almost as if he is free. A regular tracking dog might overlook a body that has been in the grass so long Spanish moss has begun to cover it, replacing the human scent with the rich odor of earth and growing things, but an air dog can gauge the extra molecules in the air when something dead is near. So when Arrow stops at the edge of the pond where Charles Verity died, Julian also stops. He's been thinking about his cousin too much.

If he didn't know it was the thorn bushes that tore at his skin, he would almost believe the streaks of blood on his hands were the physical proof of his guilt. If he doesn't focus soon and stop thinking about Bobby, he'll walk right past the trail he's looking for, he'll mess up in a big way, all because he was scared by a ghost.

Julian takes out a cigarette, and waits for Arrow's next move. The sun has already begun to set, faster than would seem possible. Soon the night birds will begin to wake. As Julian follows Arrow in a circle around the pond, evening falls.

Mosquitoes rise up from the shallow water, and the air grows heavier.

Julian can feel something, right between his shoulder blades, and he stands absolutely still. It's just like what they say about damp evenings such as this: the air's too thick for spirits to rise. It comes as no surprise to Julian that he would attract a loose soul, since he is alive purely by accident. Twice he was supposed to die, and yet here he is. He can tell by the way Arrow looks at him: the dog knows the truth. He's a dead man whose heart beats. For no reason at all, he's alive when others are not, whether or not he deserves to be.

The weight on his back, the spirit or dead air or whatever it is, pushes Julian forward. He lurches toward an overgrown thicket of sugar cane and Arrow looks up at him, startled. The dog growls, low down in his throat, then charges into the thicket. Julian is strong, he can beat a man fifty pounds heavier than himself in a fight, fair or not, but he can't hold Arrow back. He's dragged into the sugar cane, over wild rose thorns, till he's flat on his belly. When he's no longer pulled, Julian crawls farther into the thicket, following Arrow's slack lead. In the center of the clearing the dog is stretched out, his ears pricked up. In the darkness his eyes are like black stars in a black night. Between his paws is a stuffed white bunny, held tight.

"Good boy," Julian says.

Julian sits up and lights a match so he can see the hollows where the children have slept. Arrow looks up at him and blinks in the sudden light; in his own good time the dog approaches and lays the bunny at Julian's feet.

"Atta boy," Julian says, as he picks up the bunny and strokes its ears.

They go back the way they've come, this time in the dark. Arrow traces the children's path along the drainage ditch, trotting fast, so that Julian has to take care not to stumble over the weeds.

When they near the first concrete tunnel, Arrow stops. He raises his head to the sky and makes a sharp yelping noise, like an SOS no one can decipher. A long time ago, Julian Cash used to come here when he had nowhere else to go. Often he'd bring along a six-pack he'd talked one of the Platts into buying him up at the general store. He came here for weeks after the accident. He'd sit with his back against the cool concrete, thinking black thoughts that no boy is old enough to have.

He's still having those same damn thoughts, and it may be that he'll never understand why human beings have such a horrible need not to be alone.

It doesn't make any sense, since that's what you are, from your very first breath.

Julian reels in Arrow's lead so the dog won't get it into his head to attack. They walk side by side into the tunnel, where field mice are burrowing in the dry earth and blue crabs scuttle along the concrete.

The children are huddled together, their arms looped around each other.

For some reason, Julian can't bear the thought of waking them. He watches them sleep, while beside him the vicious dog who would think nothing of tearing a man apart tilts his head back and whines.

The boy shifts in his sleep. He can never get comfortable. He has lost his voice and all his courage, yet when Julian finally bends down and shakes his shoulder, he's ready to run. He scrambles to his knees, out of breath and shivering from his dreams. He reaches blindly for the baby beside him, and when he finds that instead he's clutching a huge dog, he's no less amazed than Julian to discover that the dog who has tracked these children into this tunnel now lies down beside the meanest boy in Verity, and refuses to budge.

Last week, Lillian Giles had three willow trees cut down and carted off her property. She had considered having these trees chopped down for a long time, nearly thirty years, since she was tired of warning visitors not to trip over their twisted roots. Sooner or later someone would break a leg, so she finally had them hauled away, and she can tell, already, it was a good decision. There, where the willows once stood, a circle of apple mint has already begun to spring up.

Lillian has always kept hutches full of brown rabbits, all of whom she calls Buster, although some are certainly female, since every spring there are new baby rabbits who sit in the palm of her hand, begging for leaf lettuce and sunflower seeds. Lillian has cared for more foster children than anyone in the county; all the social workers call her by her first name. Not too long ago, one of the children she raised, who's grown up to be a tax accountant in Orlando, bought Lillian a satellite dish, so now, when her feet begin to ache, she can rest them on a hassock and turn on Oprah, and that's a relief.

Lillian has always had a knack with babies and could put even the most difficult ones down for a nap within minutes. She still keeps a long-handled axe over by the shed for big, angry boys who need to chop wood. She never called any of the big boys in for supper, no matter how much wood they chopped, until they were good and ready, and then she'd fix them franks and beans, with brownies for dessert. She has two cribs stored in her back room, and two roll-away cots, and several large wicker laundry baskets filled with toys. Although she can't recall the name of the host of the Today show whom she watches every day, she remembers every child she's ever taken in, even the ones who stayed just for a day. In all these years she's never had a favorite, except for one, and that was Julian Cash, who was probably the ugliest, fussiest baby ever born. Time has gotten mixed up on Miss Giles. It seems like yesterday that she changed Julian's diapers and years ago that he drove up to make certain the men she'd hired were taking the willows out by their roots, since it was the roots that were causing the problem. She knows, in fact, this isn't possible, since some of the lemonade she served Julian and the yard men is still in a pitcher in her refrigerator.

That's one thing some of the children complain about, that she never adds sugar to her lemonade, but after a while they all get used to it, and when they grow up they can't bring themselves to drink the store-bought stuff; it's way too sweet for their tastes.

A long time ago, Lillian was in love with Charles Verity's great-grandson, but he went to New York and married a rich girl, and Lillian stayed put. It was simply her good fortune that somebody's burden was another person's delight, because that's the way she got Julian, and she's been taking in children ever since. She may be a little deaf, but that's no crime, and she can still tell Julian's car as soon as it pulls in her driveway. His car parks in front of the house tonight when it's very late and the frogs in the hedges are singing the same song they sing every May. Lillian has always been a light sleeper. She gets out of bed and pulls on her robe and hopes that she has enough food to fix Julian something, since she knows he never cooks for himself. When she goes to the front door to watch him get out of his car, her heart just about flips over. She opens the screen wide enough for him to bend down and kiss her.

"I brought you a little something," Julian says.

"How little?" Lillian knows he's not talking about a satellite dish or a microwave oven.

"A year or so," Julian says. "You know I can't judge."

Lillian peers out the door and sees Keith's sleeping form, slumped against the car window. "Looks a little older."

"And a twelve-year-old," Julian admits.

"Pick them up by the side of the road?" Lillian asks.

Julian grins at her. That's what she used to tell him whenever they had a new child in the house.

She just happened to be out walking when she picked this one or that one up by the side of the road. Once there was a baby so small and dehydrated that Miss Giles had to feed it with an eyedropper, the way she sometimes feeds the baby rabbits. Julian stood next to her, beside the rocking chair, dressed in his pajamas, listening to her talk that baby into opening its little pink mouth. He used to believe Miss Giles had night vision, like an owl, since she was the only one who managed to find all these children by the side of the road. When he got older, he would hear the social workers' cars pull up, at odd hours.

Sometimes he would put his ear up to the bedroom wall and discover there was a woman wailing in the kitchen. He opened his door a crack one night and saw a woman pulling on her hair, rocking back and forth in Miss Giles's chair as she held a baby in her arms. Maybe it was only the moonlight, or maybe there really was a silver pool of tears on the linoleum floor, or maybe it didn't even matter, since in the morning both the silver tears and the woman were gone and there was a new baby sleeping in the spare room.

Tonight, as they stand at the screen door, Julian realizes that Miss Giles has grown smaller. She's been shrinking and he hasn't even noticed. He guesses she is somewhere in her seventies, but he doesn't know for sure. All he knows is that when he was sent away, Miss Giles packed his suitcase and gave him a dozen brownies wrapped in tinfoil for the bus ride, then went into the bathroom and locked the door so he wouldn't hear her cry. Each week she wrote to him on thin blue paper.

Baby, she'd write, somebody here is missing you so she's losing a quarter of an inch ofherselfevert day, and it's all coming out of her heart.

"You'd better bring in those little packages," Lillian Giles tells him.

While Lillian goes to make up a crib and a cot with clean sheets, Julian walks out to the car.

In the backseat, Arrow paces behind the metal grating. Julian had to pull him away from the boy down in the tunnel, then tie him to a telephone pole in order to get close to the children. Now, as Julian opens the driver's door, Arrow begins to growl.

"Jesus," Julian says under his breath.

He doesn't expect Arrow's obedience, but he'll be damned if he lets his own dog keep him out of his car. The little girl is curled up on Keith's lap, but she doesn't wake as Julian lifts her up.

He carries her to the porch and she startles, just a bit, when he hands her over to Lillian.

"Ssh," Lillian says. The baby's eyelids don't even flutter when Lillian smooths her knotted hair and takes her into the house.

Walking back to his car, Julian knows he's making another mistake.

Actually, it's a done deed. The mistake was made as soon as he started driving to Miss Giles's instead of heading directly to the station.

That woman from New York has got him so messed up he's thinking about her even when he doesn't want to. It's that time of year when you have to be careful even when you can't. It doesn't help that the boy seems to be some kind of mute; every time he tried to speak to Julian all that came out was a croak. He fell asleep in spite of himself; dreaming, shirtless, he looks younger than twelve.

Julian gets into the car. "Wake up," he tells the boy.

The meanest boy in Verity nearly jumps out of his skin. When he sees Julian, then realizes that the baby is gone, he gets that wild look that Arrow has when he's cornered.

"Relax," Julian says. He raps on the wire meshing behind them to try to quiet Arrow, who's still growling.

The boy stays absolutely still, but all his muscles are tensed, just in case he has to make a run for it.

"Something wrong with your throat?" When the boy doesn't answer, Julian shrugs and adds, "It's probably a good thing you can't talk.

This way you can't bullshit me."

Julian takes the pack of cigarettes from the dashboard and shakes one out, then takes out another and holds it toward the boy.

Go on," he says when the boy doesn't move. "I just told you. You can't bullshit me."

When Julian lights the cigarette the boy inhales deeply, then coughs his dry, brown cough. There's panic all over him, so Julian speaks softly, as if talking through the chain link of the kennel.