Hunter's Moon (22 page)

“Are you staying here because you think it will help you deal with some of what you’re carrying around with you?”

“You have no idea what I’m carrying around,” CJ snapped, unsure how this amiable meeting had turned into an exploration of his metaphysical baggage.

“I know exactly what you’re carrying around,” the abbess answered. “And it’s not yours to carry.”

CJ was stunned. He’d come here for a number of reasons— not the least of which was to put some distance between himself and Julie—but while he’d also been hoping to gain a bit of clarity about some of the issues that, if Sister Jean Marie was correct, he wore on his person like race-car advertisements, he hadn’t expected a cut as deep as the one she’d just delivered. It made him feel uncomfortable enough to consider leaving, but one did not take stalking off on a nun lightly.

“I don’t know what to say,” he managed.

“Then don’t say anything. Listening is a skill as valuable as any you possess.”

CJ shifted in his chair. “With all due respect, Sister, it’s been a long time since we’ve talked. I think I’m a pretty good listener.”

“You’re good at spite, Charles.”

“And you at psychoanalyzing.”

She ignored that.

“You have a hard time letting go of it.” She gave him a sad smile. “You always did.”

At that he almost stood, collected his dog, and left. Instead he let the strong urge pass, finished the rest of his lukewarm tea, and allowed the sister’s words to roll through his mind.

After a while he looked up at Sister Jean Marie and, with a sad smile of his own, said, “And I don’t think I’m ready to give that up just yet.”

Chapter 16

As CJ walked up the steps he kept asking himself what he was doing here. He had no obligation beyond blood, and he’d allowed that to thin enough over the last seventeen years that he didn’t consider it a compelling enough reason to act responsibly. But without the genetic element, his presence had no legitimate explanation.

This was only the second time he’d been to the house on Lyndale since arriving in Adelia two weeks ago, and as the first visit had gone so poorly (his neck still occasionally ached from when Graham had clotheslined him) it was no wonder he’d avoided it. But Graham’s wife had told CJ this was where he would find him.

This time CJ just walked in.

He noticed that the hallway smelled damp as he headed toward the great room and he wondered if water was collecting near the doorstop. If the sill was tilted incorrectly, rainwater could find its way beneath the door, where it could seep into the subflooring, where it could rot the joists over time.

He wondered who would get the house. Sal Jr., by virtue of being the eldest, had more claim than any of the others, but he had a nice spread outside of town, and CJ couldn’t see him moving into this place. He might own it on paper, but he wouldn’t live here.

Either George or Edward was an equally likely candidate, but they were in the same position as Sal Jr., with properties bought and paid for. CJ knew how it had worked in the past: whoever the house fell to moved into it. It was just the way it was done. He wondered if this would be the first occasion in which death did not automatically mean a new occupant. He found Graham in Sal’s office. His brother looked up from some papers spread out on the desk and scowled when he saw who it was.

“Let me guess,” Graham said. “You’ve just filmed yourself kicking a puppy, and they’ll be airing that tonight.”

Instead of responding to the jab, CJ sank into a cushioned chair, regarding Graham on the other side of the desk.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he said after a while.

“No? Then whose fault was it?”

“For starters, how about Janet? She was the one who called the police.”

It was typical baiting, and CJ could see that Graham wasn’t in any mood to respond to it.

“Daniel’s already done damage control, so it looks as if this little hiccup won’t cost us too much,” Graham said.

CJ couldn’t have cared less about the little hiccup, much less his henchman’s efforts at damage control. He didn’t care if Graham won the senate seat. He didn’t care who might end up getting the house. He’d come over out of some strange sense of duty and maybe to offer an apology if he thought the occasion warranted one, but he’d found that whatever it was about proximity to family that turned him into a jerk was now doing its job.

Rather than let it sour him completely, he rose from the chair and went over and selected a fine bourbon from a small table in the corner. Once he’d poured drinks for both of them and then reclaimed his seat, they were just two Baxter men doing what their namesakes had done in this room for the last two hundred years.

“What are you doing here?” CJ asked, after enough time had passed for the bourbon to ease the tension a bit. He gestured to the papers on Sal’s desk.

“I’m trying to figure out what to box up and what to shred,” Graham said. As an example, he lifted a single page that had been torn from a notebook and read, “ ‘Waffles for breakfast at 6:17 a.m. Lunch, 11:52 a.m., waffles. Julie brought dinner, 6:39 p.m., pork chops.’ ” He set the page down and moved his hand along a collection of others that appeared to have been torn from the same notebook. “There’s a drawer full of these. Another drawer filled with cans of vegetables, and another filled with hundred-dollar bills.” The chair creaked as he pushed himself away from the desk. “And there’s no telling what he hid around this place while he was still walking.”

This evidence of his grandfather’s declining mental health depressed CJ, yet he found Graham’s surprise puzzling.

“I would have thought you and Dad would have been all over this years ago. You know, everything catalogued—the important stuff put somewhere safe.”

While he wasn’t sure what he was expecting when he said this, it certainly wasn’t the sharp laugh that Graham gave.

“Brother, you’ve got some strange notions about what things are like here,” he said. He tipped the chair back and placed his feet on the desk, heels on his grandfather’s papers, and he studied CJ, curiosity in his eyes. “You don’t really think there’s any mystique attached to the Baxter name, do you?” When CJ didn’t answer, Graham laughed again. “That’s the problem. You’ve spent so much time looking at all the pictures in this place, letting Gramps fill your head with stories, that you actually think this place is like a seat of power—that generations-long plans are hatched here.” He smirked at his brother. “This is just an old house. And Richard is what passes for the typical Baxter these days.”

“Believe me,” CJ said, answering with a smirk of his own. “I have no delusions about what it means to be a Baxter.”

The two sat in silence for a while. CJ could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway. Then it occurred to him to ask, “So why are
you
cleaning out Sal’s office?”

“Because it’s my office now,” Graham said.

CJ was only mildly surprised. Out of all the possibilities, he supposed this one made the most sense.

“It’ll take a while to get it ready, but we’ll sell my place and move in here. Daniel thought it was a good idea.”

“Keep in mind that Daniel thought my being at your press conference was a good idea too,” CJ said.

That earned him a shrug.

There didn’t seem to be much else to say, and CJ was within seconds of leaving when, in an instant that he couldn’t have stopped even had he known it was coming, he said, “Why did you kill Eddie?”

What struck CJ next was the depth of the quiet that settled over the room, over the entire house—as if the aged frame had stopped groaning long enough to hear the answer. The only thing that failed to abide by the hush was the grandfather clock, whose ticking seemed overly loud by comparison.

It took him a while to realize that the thing he was feeling in his chest was fear—fear of having asked the question, of having this thing that he’d carried for more than twenty years suddenly out there. Except that there was also something exhilarating in the asking.

However, even if he was experiencing a gamut of emotions, the moment had passed Graham by, except to have left him looking older, tired. At first, CJ didn’t think he was going to answer the question. Graham got up and poured himself another drink—more than the two fingers CJ had given him. Then, with his back to his brother, he said, “Why are you trying to dig up ghosts?”

“Because it’s not every day a kid sees his older brother murder someone.”

That seemed to deflate Graham. He leaned against the table that held the liquor, the bottles jostling from his weight. He didn’t say anything, and CJ knew that if he waited a hundred years in this room, his brother would hold the thing so tightly to his chest that CJ would never get to see it.

He got up from the chair and left the room without another word, only his steps didn’t take him to the front door. Instead he found himself fumbling at the lock on the door to the garage. When the light came on he descended the steps and pulled the tarp off of the 853, tossing it to the floor.

The blue car—polished a thousand times by a hand that loved it yet never used it—shone beneath the garage lighting. CJ stood on the passenger side, his hand on the convertible top. He stood there for a long time, and if Graham knew he was in there, he left him alone. When he was ready, he picked the tarp off the floor and covered the car, then left the way he’d come.

A single beam of moonlight has found its way past CJ’s drawn
shades, emptying its light somewhere near the foot of his bed. CJ is awake
and so tightly wound that he can’t fall asleep. The sights and sounds of
the last several hours have been too much for a boy to handle, and he is
only now coming to grips with the enormity of the events of the day.

Somewhere in the rooms outside of his own are the other members
of his family, each dealing with things in their own ways: his mother
with tears, his uncle Edward with a story from his Korean War days,
his grandmother with the endless baking, and his father with grim
silence.

He feels caught up in the totality of the thing, yet as an incidental
object—one easily discarded by a wave on a convenient shore. Graham
is the focal point, the one in need of comfort, the one whose story is told
again and again until it even sounds right in CJ’s ears. He’s not sure at
which point he realized that the accounting of events given by his brother
does not match what CJ holds in his head—only that the realization
came upon him like a creeping cold.

He wanted to say something, to pull an adult aside and tell them
what he’d heard, what he’d seen. Instead he’d eaten the cake, taken the
hugs, listened to the talk, and avoided looking at his brother. All of it
left him feeling ill, as if the cake had been bad.

There is an owl somewhere beyond his window, and for once CJ
understands its plaintive call. He understands too how there is something
expectant in it—how the sound doesn’t just hang there or dissipate
without a purpose.

When his door creaks open, he isn’t surprised because his heart
has been gaining speed for the last hour. Even so, he finds his breath
caught in his throat, especially when he sees the shirtless, sweaty form
enter his room.

Graham leads with the knife, and the moonlight glints off the surface
of the thing, and only Graham’s face can pull CJ’s eyes from it. His
brother’s eyes are wild. A single rivulet of sweat runs down his cheek.
It occurs to CJ to scream, but he discovers that he cannot find breath
enough.

His brother is at his side in three steps and then the larger boy is
on top of CJ, his full weight resting on CJ’s chest, and he lowers his
face until it is inches from CJ’s. CJ doesn’t know which is worse—
the feeling of oxygen pushed from his body or having to look into his
brother’s eyes.

Graham leans even closer. CJ can smell him—the sweat and dirt
of the day that he hasn’t yet washed off. And this person who is his
brother seems like a stranger—someone else besides the boy he’s grown
up with, yet also a fully formed version of something he is in the process
of becoming.

The silence in the room is absolute when Graham says, “If you
tell a single soul, I’ll kill you.” For emphasis he holds the knife to CJ’s
cheek. The younger boy hears a whimper, realizes it is himself, and he
silences it when he feels the knife point push into his skin.

In a few seconds Graham is gone, and only then does CJ release the
sobs that have been building since Graham pulled the trigger; only he
keeps them quiet, the sole sound that of the bed rocking with the heaving
of his shoulders.

Chapter 17

CJ felt unworthy of the honor that had been bestowed upon him, but that didn’t keep him from enjoying one of the more perfect evenings it was his pleasure to have experienced. Night had fully descended, and Artie stoked the fire that kept the growing chill away for a while longer. In truth, CJ wouldn’t have minded the cold snuggling in a little closer, reaching down his jacket and running icy fingers along his spine. A light chill always made crawling beneath the blankets a little nicer, a bit more rewarding.