Isabella Moon (15 page)

The idea of walking into the bank and having everyone stare at her, wondering what she was doing there, mortified her. How could she explain? She would have to tell everyone that her handsome new husband had made a mistake, that he’d told them—against her wishes—that she wanted to quit her job. How stupid would that make her look? She knew she couldn’t bear their questions, their assumption that Miles was maybe a little crazy. It was bad enough that she was beginning to suspect that he was a far different man than the one she had thought she married.

As the day wore on, she tried to push that thought away, to soften her heart toward Miles, telling herself that he had meant well. He was such a man’s man. Of course he had wanted to give her everything he thought she would want. But she couldn’t quite convince herself. He had never asked her what she wanted.

She kept waiting for the phone to ring, expecting that someone from the bank would call, wondering where she was. When twelve o’clock came and went, she knew it wasn’t going to happen.

Her hand shook slightly as she picked up the phone and dialed Nancy, the branch manager.

“Mary-Katie,” she said. “I was hoping you’d just come in this morning. What’s going on?”

“I should have called you,” Mary-Katie said. “I’m sorry.”

“Is this what you want? Did you ask your husband to call me? I have to say I was a little surprised.”

Mary-Katie wanted to say that no one had been more surprised than she, but the truth was, she was too embarrassed. But was she so embarrassed that she would let it keep her from going back to her job? She didn’t know what she was going to say until the words came out of her mouth.

“I did tell Miles to call,” she said. “It’s my grandmother. You know how sick she is, and I need to spend more time with her. But I should have told you myself.”

From the brief silence, she could tell that Nancy was taken aback.

“I thought we knew each other better than that, Mary-Katie,” Nancy said. “I certainly would’ve understood. And the other girls, they’ll miss you.”

“Please tell them I’m sorry.” She got off the phone just as quickly as she could after Nancy had put her through to Human Resources to close out her records.

She moved slowly through the rest of the day, still surprised at herself, half regretting what she’d done. At one point she tried to watch daytime television for a few minutes, but turned it off, disgusted. What the hell was she going to do with herself for the rest of her life?

When Miles came home late that afternoon carrying a couple of bags of groceries, he was wearing different clothes. She hadn’t thought about it before, but she guessed that he’d probably slept at his office, where he had a shower and a closet for extra clothes.

He looked mildly surprised to see her there. She stood silently by as he started unloading the bags in the kitchen. He talked animatedly of the grocery store, of their need to start keeping a running list of things they were out of. She supposed that she would be expected to keep the cupboards full, now that she wasn’t working.

“The fresh spinach pasta looked good,” he said. “And I picked up some shrimp. I’ve got a few papers to go through, but then I’ll get dinner started.” He kissed her on the cheek as he passed by her on the way to the bedroom office.

When he was gone, Mary-Katie poured herself a glass of chardonnay and went to sit out on the deck. There was only a small view of the ocean between their building and the next one over, but she could hear the ocean, its roar sounding empty and hollow, as though she were listening to it inside a large conch shell. Tomorrow she would go and check on her grandmother. Then she would write a check for the entire amount she had in the bank where she’d worked and take it to another bank and open a new account.

14

EVEN THOUGH IT WAS DARK,
Paxton drove a mile past the entrance to Chalybeate Springs, turned around in a shuttered gas station’s parking lot, and headed back toward town. The co-op didn’t have a light on its sign, and he almost missed it coming back, but at the last second he swerved the Mercedes onto the farm’s gravel road and switched to running lights. Truth be told, he loved this cloak-and-dagger shit.

Banging Francie was good, though the novelty of their secret rendezvous at the Middleboro apartment was wearing thin. Francie belonged in a nicer place. There were even times when he imagined her coming down the stairs of his mother’s house, her hair swept up in some regal ’do and wearing nothing but heels and maybe some diamond earrings for decoration. But things would have to change in a big way for that to be more than a fantasy. And for the immediate future, poor Francie would be distracted with the death of her mother—in fact, he hadn’t been able to reach her all afternoon, which bothered him. But that would pass.

He parked the Mercedes well away from the house and store, but in view of the barn where he was headed. In the past few years the hippies had added a couple of greenhouses and some outbuildings to the old man’s original property, which had included the ramshackle clapboard farmhouse, barn, and curious bathhouse. Opening the door of the car, he heard birds in the distance, crows, he thought they were, their raucous cries breaking the peace of the night. What the hell crows were doing out in the dark, he didn’t know.

He hurried past the vine-covered bathhouse that gave him the creeps even in daylight. One late night, Charlie Matter, the guy he was now on his way to meet, had convinced him to go inside. By the harsh light of a single bare bulb suspended from the ceiling they had stripped down and gone for a float in the spring-fed pool the old man had built.

The quintessential hippie, Charlie wore his salt-and-pepper hair down to the middle of his back. Before undressing he had shaken it loose from the rubber thong he kept tied around it so that it swung behind his shoulders like a girl’s. Not that there was anything else feminine about him. Seen in his clothes, he was a pretty standard character, loping about Chalybeate Springs wearing an easy manner, straight-leg jeans, dollar store cotton T-shirts, and steel-toed farmer boots. But without the bucolic disguise, Paxton could see the hardness of the man. As he moved, the ropy muscles of his upper body seemed to strain at the surface of his fifty-something-year-old skin with an angry energy.

The shaggy ends of Charlie’s enormous Zapata mustache brushed at the sides of his chin (which was always well-shaved, Paxton had noticed), and his back and chest were covered in short, wiry hairs that had gone completely gray. The nest of hair surrounding his flaccid penis was gray, too, and the penis itself was nearly as long as a man’s hand. Charlie’s balls weren’t shriveled and cold, as Paxton’s own were, but looked firm, like solid rounds of rubber. As he lowered himself into the water, Charlie’s biceps flexed, but his movement was effortless, as though his body weighed nothing at all. When he caught Paxton staring, he gave Paxton a wry smile that made Paxton erupt in a nervous laugh and look away, red-faced.

But it was Charlie Matter’s eyes that long ago had told Paxton he wasn’t someone to be fucked around with. They were the stark blue of a sky reflecting off an icy snowpack. Paxton was just a little bit afraid of Charlie, and he was sure that Charlie knew it.

At the back of the barn, Paxton moved aside an old oil barrel sitting by the rusted root cellar door and tugged on the strip of rope there. Below the ground he heard the ring of a small bell that Charlie had rigged up. Paxton looked around. The barn was at the back of the property—behind him stretched the hillside that held the farm’s small blueberry orchard. It was from there that the sound of the birds came.

After a minute or two the door pushed open with a noisy squeal, and Paxton jumped back to give it room. He put his hand to his mouth to block the acrid fug of ammonia drifting up the cellar stairs. The top half of Charlie Matter emerged from the cellar, an abbreviated silhouette against the dim light.

“Man, you sure took your sweet-ass time,” Charlie said, letting Paxton grab hold of the door. He backed down the step and turned to disappear through the ragged black shower curtain that blocked off the entrance to the lab.

As Paxton began his descent, he held back the weight of the door while it closed so it wouldn’t bang shut. He didn’t much like it when Charlie talked trash to him. He was used to a certain amount of respect. It was a constant misunderstanding between them, Paxton believed. Once upon a time he’d only been Charlie’s customer, but he had since become more of an employer, bankrolling Charlie’s growing meth business. But sometimes, he thought, Charlie’s memory seemed to fail him.

One thing Paxton could never get used to about Charlie’s lab was the horrible smell. There was only one small vent in the storm cellar, and it didn’t do much to clear out the place. Whenever he left here, he made it a point to change his clothes before going anywhere else.

He nodded to Delmar Johnston, the young man at the small electric stove in the corner. Delmar worked in the stables for Paxton at Bonterre most days and lived in one of the tenant houses.

“What’ve you got?” Paxton said to Charlie.

“Hey,” Charlie said. “I heard about your old lady’s mother. Fucking drag.”

Paxton stiffened. He didn’t like the idea of Charlie bringing up Francie with Delmar in the room. It had been a mistake to mention her to Charlie, period.

Charlie sneered. “Come on, Birkenshaw. Everyone knows you’re doing that little nurse,” he said. “She’s a fine piece of ass. You really shouldn’t keep her all to yourself.”

Inwardly, Paxton cringed at the thought of sharing Francie with this filthy pig of a man. But he smiled genially. “I like you, Charlie. I like your friends, and I like doing business with you. Let’s keep it at the business level.”

Charlie looked up from the joint he was rolling and considered Paxton. He shook his head. “You’re a cold fish, Birkenshaw,” he said. “Coldest fucking fish I know.” But he grinned back at Paxton, showing a snaggled mouthful of teeth. When he finished rolling the joint, he gestured to the curtain.

“Why don’t we go back outside?” he said. “This here is a
no smoking
area.”

They sat on an old water trough outside of the barn. Paxton wasn’t a big fan of pot—he felt like it blurred his edges, made him too soft, too easy. He preferred coke—the fluffy white kind, not the crack bullshit—and he certainly never touched the meth that he was so heavily invested in. It made him jittery. It was lucky that Charlie was adept at getting him all the coke he wanted. Going out of town for it was a hassle.

“What’s with the birds?” Paxton said after he’d expelled his first drag of the joint. Around them the coarse, sporadic calls of the crows sounding off to one another filled the air. But when Paxton looked up into the sky, he saw only a single bat swoop into the trees.

“Hanna forgot to turn them off out in the orchard,” Charlie said. “We were testing them this afternoon. Damn birds nearly cleaned out our blueberries last year.” He paused, took another hit, and passed the joint to Paxton.

“Listen,” he said. “We’ve got a problem and I need some cash.”

“There’s that new store out in Middleboro that just opened up. They’ll cash a check for you and hold it until payday,” Paxton said, finding himself very funny.

But Charlie ignored his joke. “It’s a law enforcement problem. Here and now.”

“Ah,” Paxton said. “I see.”

“No, I don’t think you see,” Charlie said. “Some pissant kid, one of the regulars out here, keeled over from a heart attack last week. And our friend says that it doesn’t look good, that the sheriff’s thinking it’s an unnatural occurrence.”

“So what?” Paxton said. “Maybe he was sniffing airplane glue.”

“Sure,” Charlie said. “And I’m the good fucking fairy. You, of anyone, Birkenshaw, should know what a small town this is. You can play it any way you want, but our friend thinks that some cash would ease things, help keep the bright, shining light of inquiry off of our enterprise.”

“And what if we say no?” Paxton said.

“Suit yourself,” Charlie said. “I can stand the heat, make everything disappear. Good times don’t last forever, do they?”

Paxton thought for a minute. The meth wasn’t making him much money, and he’d never trusted Charlie’s methods for getting some of his ingredients—the stuff that was in cold medicine, allergy pills—from the very people he was selling to. But Paxton didn’t think they were quite done with the whole thing yet, especially since Charlie had been bragging to him just the week before that they were picking up business two, three counties away, maybe even down into Tennessee. Now, Charlie was getting more and more of his supplies from a buddy in Canada and was dropping the cold medicine angle. Paxton was starting to visualize the power—like he was some kind of serious drug lord.
Suits me to a fucking T,
he thought. If only his old man had lived to see just how powerful he was going to become. It wouldn’t have been to his old man’s taste—Paxton was just supposed to look after the farm’s business—but it meant something all the same.

“Let’s give him two large,” Paxton said.

“What?” Charlie said. “Do you mean two thousand? You think you’re in a
Baretta
episode or something? And he wants five.”

“Twenty-five hundred,” Paxton said, but he decided he wanted to push Charlie some. “And you’ve got to put in a thousand of your own.”