Ghost Moon
Authors: Karen Robards
Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary, #General, #Suspense, #Fiction
Table of Contents
This book is dedicated to my mother-in-law,
Frances Hagan Robards Sigler,
in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday.
It is also dedicated, as always,
to my husband, Doug,
and my sons,
Peter, Christopher, and Jack,
with love.
‘‘IS THAT THE LAKE WHERE
YOUR MOM DROWNED?’’
Trust her sensitive, imaginative child to hit upon the one topic that Olivia really did not want to talk about just at that moment. The death of her mother had been the defining event of her childhood. It had changed her in a moment, like a catastrophic earthquake instantly reshapes the topography of the land. And yet, although the memory of the pain was sharp and strong even so many years later, she could conjure up no memory of how she had learned that her mother was dead, or of who had told her. No memories of her mother’s funeral, or her stepfather, or the Archer family in mourning. It was as if her memory banks, where the events surrounding her mother’s death were concerned, had been wiped clean. All she knew were the bare facts: Her mother had drowned at age twenty-eight in that lake.
The same lake from which voices now seemed to be calling to her.
‘‘Yes.’’ Olivia set her teeth against the sudden stab of loss remembered, and ignored the icy tingle of dread that snaked down her spine.
‘‘THIS BOOK ACTUALLY GAVE ME CHILLS
AND HAD ME SLEEPING WITH THE LIGHT
ON. . . . WELL DONE, MS. ROBARDS.’’
—
Old Book Barn Gazette
‘‘FANS WON’T BE DISAPPOINTED.’’
—Kirkus Reviews
‘‘
GHOST MOON
IS AN EXCELLENT
SHOWCASE OF MS. ROBARDS’ TALENT FOR
BLENDING RIVETING SUSPENSE WITH
SENSUALITY AGAINST A SEDUCTIVE
BACKDROP.’’
—Rendezvous
CHAPTER 1
‘‘MOM, I WET THE BED.’’ THE SMALL, SHAMED voice and the little hand that went with it tugged Louise Hardin out of a deep sleep. She opened one groggy eye to discover her daughter Melissa standing at her bedside in the darkened room. Behind her, the alarm clock glowed the time: one A.M.
‘‘Mom.’’ Missy’s hand tugged once more at the long sleeve of Louise’s pale green nylon nightgown.
‘‘Oh, Missy, no! Not again.’’ Louise’s whisper was despairing as she rolled out of bed, careful not to disturb her husband, Brock, who slumbered peacefully beside her. Brock had to get up early, at quarter to seven, to be at the office by eight. As he said, the rest of them could sleep all day if they chose, but he had to earn a living. Besides, he hated the fact that Missy sometimes still wet the bed. He was a pediatrician, he
knew
Missy should be over wetting the bed by now, and he tended to take her frequent accidents personally.
Consequently, Louise, Missy, and her ten-year-old sister, Heidi, conspired to conceal Missy’s accidents whenever possible.
‘‘I’m sorry, Mom,’’ Missy offered in a tiny voice when they gained the relative safety of the hallway outside the bedroom. The blue shag carpet felt soft and warm beneath Louise’s bare feet. Through the hall window, left uncurtained because it was small and high and on the second floor, Louise could see pinpricks of tiny stars and a wan sickle moon drifting against the black sky. ‘‘At least this time I dreamed I was on the potty. It seemed so real! And then I was all wet, and I woke up and I wasn’t on the potty at all.’’
‘‘All your dreams seem so real.’’ If Louise’s voice was just a tad dry, she couldn’t help it. She was really, really tired, and this was getting to be almost a nightly occurrence. As a seven-year-old, Missy was getting her up at night almost as much as she had when she was a baby.
Light glowed around the partially closed door of the hall bathroom, illuminating the path to Missy’s bedroom, which was at the far end of the hall, past Heidi’s bedroom and a smaller guest bedroom. Louise had started leaving the light on at night because, in addition to wetting her bed, Missy had suddenly become afraid of the dark. She had nightmares about monsters hiding in her room and watching her as she slept. Sometimes she woke up screaming, and Louise would jump from bed like she had been shot and race down the hall to find her daughter huddled in the center of her bed, in a ball, with the covers pulled over her head, crying her eyes out and gasping something that made no sense. Inevitably, Louise ended up bringing Missy into bed with her and Brock, a practice of which he strongly disapproved. That, Brock informed her, was undoubtedly a large part of Missy’s problem. Louise treated her like a baby, rewarding her misdeeds by giving her attention (which was what Brock said she wanted all along) when Missy should have been disciplined instead. Louise knew that Brock probably knew best—as he frequently pointed out,
he
was the expert—but she could not find it in her heart to punish her seven-year-old daughter for being afraid of the dark. Or for wetting the bed. Or, as Brock said, for nearly anything at all.
The ammonialike smell of urine struck Louise in the face as soon as she stepped inside Missy’s room. She sighed. Missy’s hand twitched in hers.
‘‘I’m really sorry, Mom,’’ Missy offered again.
Without a word, Louise let go of Missy’s hand, closed the door, turned on the light, and crossed to the chest to extract a clean nightgown from a drawer. When she turned around, nightgown in hand, she was frowning. Maybe Brock was right, she thought. Maybe she should try being a little tougher on Missy. She was really becoming tired of getting up in the middle of almost every single night.
Accustomed to the ritual, Missy had already pulled her wet nightgown off and was in the act of dropping it on the floor. Lips thinning, Louise moved to her daughter’s side and tugged the dry nightgown over Missy’s head. As the gown fell into place, she reached around behind Missy’s neck to free the long dark brown braid of her daughter’s hair. When Missy glanced quickly up at her, her big hazel eyes questioning, Louise gave the braid a small tug.
‘‘You can help me change the sheets,’’ she said, with more sternness than was usual for her.
‘‘Are you mad at me, Mom?’’ Missy asked humbly as the two of them worked together to strip the wet sheets from the bed. Louise’s heart smote her. Missy was so very little, after all. And she was small for her age. She’d been born six weeks premature, and Louise had often thought that her early arrival might account for some of Missy’s problems. Her body had just not yet matured as much as that of most seven-year-olds. Brock, of course, said that was nonsense.
Damn Brock.
‘‘No, baby, I’m not mad at you.’’ Her task made easier by the vinyl cover that saved the mattress from total ruin, Louise carefully tucked in the corners of the clean sheets that were kept, along with spare blankets, in a trunk at the foot of Missy’s bed. She smoothed a pink wool blanket over the sheets and pulled back a corner. ‘‘Hop in.’’
‘‘Don’t tell Daddy,’’ Missy said, obeying.
‘‘I won’t.’’ It was a ritual, these words. Some part of Louise felt it was wrong to promise to keep something a secret from Missy’s father, but the larger, practical part didn’t want to listen to Brock’s lectures if he discovered that Missy had wet the bed again. She didn’t want Missy to have to listen to them, either. No matter whether Brock was the expert or not.
Louise tucked the clean, dry bedclothes around her daughter as Missy snuggled onto her side, a small smile curving her lips as her cheek burrowed deep into the pillow with its tiny white hearts on a deep pink background.
‘‘Good night, baby.’’ Louise brushed her lips across the warmth of her daughter’s exposed cheek, and straightened.
‘‘I love you, Mommy.’’ Missy’s voice was already sleepy, and her eyelashes were beginning to droop.
‘‘I love you, too, Miss Mouse. Now go back to sleep.’’ Louise gathered up the wet bedding and nightgown.
‘‘Leave the bathroom light on.’’
‘‘I will,’’ Louise promised.
After opening the door and flicking off the light, Louise paused for a moment in the doorway to look back at her daughter with a faint, wry smile. So much for discipline, she thought. But Missy
was
only seven. . . . Lying there in her little white bed, which Louise had hand-painted herself with the colorful butterflies that were Missy’s favorite creature, Missy looked no bigger than a minute. She would grow out of this bed-wetting phase one of these days, Louise consoled herself. It would be something to laugh about when she was grown. . . .
‘‘See you in the morning,’’ Louise whispered, turning away. She headed toward the basement, meaning to put the sheets in to wash and thus leave no trace of the night’s misdeeds for Brock to discover.
What Louise didn’t know was that, concealed in Missy’s closet behind a double rack of neatly pressed outfits and a mountain of stuffed animals, a man listened and waited. He’d thought about running for it, when the child had gotten out of bed and gone for her mother. But he’d been afraid that he wouldn’t get away in time, and indeed the little girl and the woman had returned within minutes. If he had left his hiding place, he would have been caught. During the few minutes the mother had been in the room, he’d sweated bullets as he listened to their exchange. All she had to do was open the closet door—but she didn’t.
Now he and his little sweetie pie were alone again.
His heartbeat quickened as he waited, very patiently, for the mother to return to her room. When she did, he waited even longer, listening to the soft, light rhythm of the child’s breathing.
Finally, he eased open the closet door.
The next morning, when Louise went to rouse Missy for her ten A.M. play date, her daughter was stretched out in bed as neatly as could be, lying on her back with the covers pulled up under her chin.
‘‘Time to get up, sleepyhead,’’ Louise said, laughing because Missy never slept late and, since she had, this might signal the beginning of a whole new phase that did
not
include bed-wetting. Playfully she jerked the covers down.
In that moment she knew, and her laughter died, leaving her smile to deflate like a punctured balloon. Hoping against hope that she was mistaken, praying to all the gods that had ever existed in any universe that she was wrong, she grabbed her daughter by the arms.
Missy’s body was cold. It was stiff, too. Rigor mortis had already set in.
The child was dead in her bed.
The next week, this banner headline appeared in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune:
‘‘Prominent Baton Rouge Pediatrician Charged with Murdering Daughter, 7, for Wetting Bed.’’
The dateline was May 6, 1969.