Isabella Moon (13 page)

Kate closed the lid on her uneaten salad and dropped the container into the trash.

“She thinks her daughter’s
here,
Edith,” she said. “I mean, she thinks she’s seen her on the street.” The day before, Kate had stopped just short of telling Hanna Moon that she knew where her dead daughter was hanging out, and it wasn’t in front of an insurance agency on Bridge Street.

“Honestly,” Edith said, walking back to her desk. “Some people take advantage, don’t they? Remember how Janet donated all that reward money to find the child? That woman probably just wants more.”

Kate spun around in her chair to face Edith. “You can’t mean that, Edith,” she said, genuinely shocked. “That’s so cruel.”

Edith shrugged. “We’ll see,” she said.

Certain that Edith was wrong, Kate went back to work and tried to ignore the woman’s dark presence at the window. She’d been in cities where people like Hanna Moon, people who had mental problems, would claim bits of sidewalks for themselves so that they became part of the landscape, so that people who passed them would have to go out of their way to avoid making contact with them. She tried to put Hanna Moon out of her mind, to accept her for the time being, as she’d decided to accept the presence of her daughter.

At a quarter past two, Janet let herself in through the agency’s back door, which led from their private parking area.

“I’m back,” she called as she went into her office.

Within a minute Edith had gathered Janet’s messages and mail and followed her inside. But one of the first updates Edith gave her must have been about Hanna Moon.

Kate cringed ever so slightly when she heard Janet’s door open and her clipped footsteps on the hardwood floor. Janet came straight to her desk, as Kate had known she would.

“You were supposed to get rid of that woman, Kate. What the hell do I pay you for?” she said. She was in what Kate’s grandmother would have called “high dudgeon,” her chest puffed out in indignation, her nose in the air. Kate wanted to laugh. The last thing Janet needed to do was stick out her breasts to get them noticed. She wore an equestrian-themed scarf-print silk blouse today, with only the first two buttons undone. Kate guessed that her morning’s appointments must have been predominantly female.

“She’s not doing any harm,” Kate said. “I asked her not to come back and she said she wouldn’t.”

“Big clue, Kate,” Janet said. “She
lied.
Who’s going to want to come here and do business with that”—she pointed to the large form in the window—“purple elephant standing guard?”

Kate stood up, taller than Janet, even though Janet wore her usual three-inch heels.

“I’ve done all I can think to do, Janet, except call the police,” she said quietly. She remembered how the sheriff had watched her the day before from his car. She hadn’t heard back from him after their meeting on Friday and was beginning to suspect that he wouldn’t get back to her at all. “Or you could talk to her yourself.”

Janet glanced in the direction of the window and seemed to consider. Kate thought she saw a look of, what—apprehension? fear?—cross her face. Perhaps it was Hanna Moon’s closeness to tragedy that scared her. Janet was a shiny and new, upbeat kind of person. She didn’t like drama or highly emotional situations. She was all business—even though her business frequently depended on exploiting the emotions and needs of others.

“Just talk to her again,” she said, and went back into her office, slamming the door.

Hanna Moon was waving one arm in a slow arc back and forth in front of her. It occurred to Kate from time to time that she should switch jobs, maybe get a job selling clothes in one of Carystown’s numerous pricey boutiques. She knew enough people in town now, even if she wasn’t close to anyone besides Francie. The woman who owned Petals, up the hill, thought she had great taste and would pay her a good commission. But the thought of filling out paperwork that might expose her to more scrutiny worried her. Two years before, Janet had been so anxious to get someone both literate and presentable in the office that she’d been rather lackadaisical when hiring her. Still, Kate had worried all through the process.

When the phone rang, Edith was still in Janet’s office. Kate picked it up. A woman identified herself as Daphne Poteet from the sheriff’s office. Kate recalled the deputy’s homely face and efficient manner.

“I’m calling for Kate Russell,” she said.

“This is Kate. How may I help you?” Kate was suddenly both hopeful and a little afraid that she was going to get to speak to the sheriff again, that he’d either decided to believe her or would tell her to take a hike with her nutty ideas about Isabella Moon.

“The sheriff would appreciate it if you would proceed over to the home of Lillian Cayley, 112 Birchfield Avenue,” she said. “Right away.”

“What is it?” Kate said. “Is something wrong?”

The deputy hesitated a moment before telling her that there had been an incident there.

“What kind of incident?” Kate said.

“A death, ma’am. According to the sheriff, you probably want to go right away,” she said.

As she hurried past Janet’s office door, Kate said, “There’s an emergency. I have to go.” And she was out the back door before Janet or Edith could respond.

Her hands trembled as she tried to fit the key into the car’s ignition. If something had happened to Lillian, it was surely her fault, having dragged her into the business with the dead girl the way she had. Lillian would be yet another person to pay with her life for something she had done or said or wanted. Only this time, Kate was afraid that the murderer was not flesh and blood, but something harder to control, harder to fight—and impossible to punish.

12

WHEN THE DAUGHTER
of the murdered woman asked him to send for Kate Russell, Bill had found it more than a little startling. He didn’t like the way she had been showing up in his business, seemingly out of nowhere, over the past few days. Her name was now connected to a murder and the disappearance of the Moon girl, and he still knew very little about her. He had a line on some information down in South Carolina, but was waiting for a call back. His database searches had been inconclusive.

He handed off Mrs. Cooper, the woman from next door who had found the body, to Mitch when he saw the Russell woman park her car in front of a neighbor’s house. Watching her approach, he saw that she looked shaken, distressed, just as she had the previous Friday morning.

“Where’s Lillian?” she asked. “Is she here? What’s wrong, Sheriff?”

She took off her sunglasses. With their odd, dark green lenses, they reminded him of glasses his mother would’ve worn. He hadn’t noticed until now that Kate Russell had hazel eyes.

“Mrs. Cayley’s daughter asked for you,” he said. “You a friend of hers?”

“I’m a friend of Francie
and
Lillian,” she said. “Where’s Lillian? Why won’t you tell me what’s happened?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, but tried to push past him. Bill reached out and caught her by the arm.

“Mrs. Cayley is dead,” he said. “And I’d like to know what you know about it.”

She looked up at him in disbelief, then flushed when she realized that they both knew why he was asking. Lillian’s house was only a few hundred yards from the cemetery where she’d told him he should look for the body of Isabella Moon.

But when she spoke, she didn’t sound confused or afraid, as he’d expected. She was just plain angry.

“If Lillian’s already dead, then you might as well let me go see Francie,” she said. “I can’t kill Lillian twice, can I?”

“Don’t screw around with me, Miss Russell,” he said. “Being a smartass is going to land you in a place you won’t like very much. And you haven’t exactly presented yourself as very stable up to this point.”

Kate stared at him for a moment, obviously considering whether to push him. She backed down.

“May I please,
please,
just go see Francie?” she said. “I promise I’ll tell you anything you want later. Please let me go.”

Bill realized that he was still gripping her arm tightly. He let go, and she ran toward the front door.

It was an ugly murder scene. He’d been downright embarrassed that the daughter had shown up before they removed the pitchfork from the body. But he’d had to send someone back to the office to get the camera they used for crime scenes.

“What’s the word, Doc?” he asked the coroner, Porter Jessup, who sat back on his haunches studying the woman’s head wound.

“Nasty,” he said. “Almost as good as the old lady gored by that buck. But not quite.”

“That’s damned helpful,” Bill said.

“I’m thinking the whacks upside the head probably killed her,” he said. “Sometime between six o’clock and midnight’s my first guess. She’s stone cold. Body temp’s in the toilet.”

“Tell me the daughter was in the house when you performed that little deed,” Bill said.

“Hey, you know I’m Mr. Sensitivity, Bill,” the coroner said, indicating the plastic sheet he’d spread over the body. “She wasn’t anywhere near here that I could see.”

“Good,” Bill said. “You finished here?” he asked the two deputies standing by.

When they nodded, he sent them off to question more of the neighbors. Then he signaled the EMTs to take the body to the morgue. The technicians handled the woman gently. They made a good team and were the two he liked to see when he showed up at a car wreck, where things could get really messy. When she was bundled into the body bag and secured onto the stretcher, he told the technicians to load her up, but to take their time.

Before he let himself in the back door of the house, Bill took off his hat and ran his hand over the top of his head as though he had hair up there to smooth. He followed the sound of quiet sobs to the living room, noting that lights and lamps were turned on all through the house.

Kate Russell sat with her arms around the daughter, Francie, who was still weeping, though not as loudly as before. He waited a moment, giving them time to notice him. He also saw that the deputy he’d assigned to stay in the house appeared to have wandered off. Murders didn’t happen every day around Carystown, and his people were bound to be sloppy, but that didn’t mean he had to put up with it.

“The sheriff’s here,” Kate whispered to Francie.

Francie pulled away from her and looked up at the sheriff from the couch. She looked hopeful, like it might have all been some kind of mistake.

As he spoke, he held the rim of his hat tight in his fingertips. The grieving were always unpredictable.

“We’ve got your mother in the ambulance,” he said. “The coroner’s going to take a look at her and see what he can find out about her death.”

He stopped a moment as Kate picked up on what he was about to say.

“Do you want to go outside, Francie?” she said. “Do you want to see your mother go?” Her voice broke with the realization that Lillian would be leaving her house for the last time.

Francie could only nod.

Outside, a small crowd of people, mostly older black women, some of whom held small children close to their sides, had gathered near the rear of the ambulance. Bill walked a few steps behind the daughter and Kate Russell, who seemed to be speaking quietly to the daughter to keep her going.

The crowd parted as the women approached and the daughter broke away and scrambled up into the ambulance to throw herself over her mother’s body. Behind her, the crowd closed ranks, and for a long few minutes the only sound in the clear spring air was Francine Cayley’s high and heartbreaking voice keening for her mother.

When the ambulance was finally able to drive away, the coroner’s red pickup following close behind it, Bill suggested that Kate take Francie home or to Kate’s own place.

“I’m sorry to bother you with this,” he said to Francie. He held out a consent-to-search form. “You’re your mother’s next of kin?”

“Yes,” she said. “My dad’s been dead a long time.”

“We need to collect evidence inside the house as well as outside.”

He glanced at Kate, wondering if she realized that he’d be looking for evidence of her there, too. She just looked steadily back at him, as though waiting for him to challenge her in some way.

When Francie had finished signing, he spoke to Kate in a low voice. “You’ll want to stop by,” he said. “Tomorrow, if not sooner.”

“Of course,” she said. Bill would’ve liked to forgive the faint note of sarcasm in her voice, but he found he couldn’t. She was still an unknown quantity, even if she did seem to be a caring sort.

Kate put her arm around Francie and led her outside.

When everyone but Mitch and Clayton Campbell, who was interviewing neighbors, had gone, Bill went around the back of the garage. He took a few more pictures himself, concentrating on the fine mist of blood splattered on the garage’s back door. It took Mitch and him almost another hour, but they bagged and tagged the garden tools and basket she’d fallen onto and wrapped the pitchfork—which had been carelessly balanced on the garbage cans—in plastic. It was, in the words of the coroner, a nasty way to go. He hoped the doc had been right, that she’d been dead or near dead already when the pitchfork went in.