Isabella Moon (17 page)

“You did that to him,” she said. “You ruined his life.”

He smiled. “I could have. But he did most of it for me,” he said. “The sale was just the icing on the cake, sweetheart.”

“That’s one of the cruelest, most selfish things I’ve ever heard,” she said. “You’re acting like you’re some kind of animal.”

Miles shrugged. “Animals run only on instinct. They don’t do anything because they choose to. It’s not the natural order of things.”

“Do you call what you did instinct?” she said.

“It’s called justice, babe,” he said. “Sometimes you have to make your own. Here I thought you’d be happy for me. I can’t believe you’re defending that sad sack.”

“You can’t play with people like that, Miles,” she said. “What if he commits suicide or something? You would be responsible.”

“Everyone’s responsible for his own life experience,” he said. He got up from the table. “I have to get back to work if I’m going to make it to the funeral home tonight.”

When he bent down to kiss her on the top of the head, she recoiled. She half expected him to get angry, to grab her arm, or to at least tell her not to be ridiculous, as he usually did when she (so rarely) criticized something he’d done. But his face merely wore a sympathetic look akin to the one she’d gotten from the funeral director.

After a few minutes she watched his car turn around and head out down the long driveway. She wasn’t shocked by what he’d done because it fit so well with his character. She just hadn’t realized that his memory was so long. Worse, she didn’t know whom she pitied more at that moment: Lev Kaplan or Mary-Katie Chenoweth.

16

IT WAS WITH
a twinge of jealousy that Bill Delaney had sent Mitch off to interview the daughter and close friends of the Cayley woman. He’d thought that it wouldn’t be too tough a case to solve, but Lillian Cayley had turned out to be as unlikely a murder victim as she could be: no abusive spouse, no son hooked into the local drug scene, no obvious pile of cash that was drawing the interest of greedy relatives. The rumor in town was that she’d been surprised by some drifter to whom she’d shown some kindness, but it was still cold enough that drifters were sparse, and Bill’s people hadn’t recently had to run anyone off.

The phone at the office had barely stopped ringing since the word got out. Little old ladies all over the county were crying for extra patrols in their neighborhoods. Daphne had even jokingly suggested that they set up a recording on the phone telling them to take their medication and calm down.

Outside his office, Bill could see Joshua Klein, the only full-time reporter for the
Carystown Ledger,
drinking coffee with Daphne. Josh was a likable enough kid, but coming as he did from another small Kentucky town, he always imagined that the news should be bigger, more interesting than it actually was, particularly news about crime. Every lost dog, every high school kid’s joyride through someone’s front pasture had to have some seriously criminal cause, some plot behind it that would implicate the mayor, a local preacher, or a drug ring. Josh’s theories never seemed to pan out for him, but the paper kept him on anyway. Bill figured it didn’t hurt that it was owned by the kid’s uncle.

He wanted another cup of coffee, but knew that if he emerged, Josh would be pestering him instead of Daphne. Josh hadn’t been at the paper when the Moon girl disappeared, so with the Catlett boy’s sudden death and now this murder, he looked to be in hog heaven.

Frank was still working on the Catlett death. They wouldn’t have the tox screen on the kid’s hair and blood or the coroner’s report until at least Friday, and now that the coroner had another corpse on his table to deal with, things would be slow.

The other thing Bill was waiting for was the call from South Carolina that might tell him something more about Kate Russell, who was due in his office at any time.

When his private phone line rang, he gestured to Daphne that he would get it himself.

“No lunch today, honey,” Margaret said when he answered.

“Got another offer?” he said. “Somebody better looking?”

Margaret laughed. “Someday I will get a better offer, and won’t you be sorry? But it’s only the mayor wanting a little chat. I think she’s trying to pump me for information, seeing as I’m sleeping with the sheriff.”

“Is she buying?” Bill said.

“You bet,” Margaret said. “But you’ll get dinner. I won’t let you starve.” Margaret, being from one of the old families, was part of an elite Carystown group, but she remained at the edges of it as much as she could. In Bill’s opinion, most of them were a pitiful lot, spending way too much time worrying about what historic colors old buildings should be painted, who should be in what garden club, and complaining about what the Chamber of Commerce was up to.

“You’re too good for that crowd,” Bill said. He looked up to see Kate Russell standing at Daphne’s desk, signing in. “Hey, I’ve got to go, Sunshine. See you at home?”

As he and Margaret said their good-byes, he watched Kate Russell sit down on the bench to wait. It amused him to think that Josh Klein would piss himself with excitement if he knew what was going on with the attractive, neatly dressed woman seated so close by. When he was off the phone, he used the intercom to tell Daphne to send her in.

This man doesn’t like me, Kate thought, settling into the hard chair beside the sheriff’s desk. She felt like a schoolgirl called to the principal’s office. Bill Delaney was only barely old enough to be her father, but he had a seriousness about him that she found intimidating. It seemed to her that he considered Carystown to be his personal property and that she was an outsider who had brought it trouble. She wanted to tell him that it was Isabella Moon who had brought the town’s trouble to
her,
but knew that she was already sounding like a lunatic.

“How’s your friend Francie Cayley this morning?” he said.

Kate noted that he hadn’t even bothered to offer her coffee. He was hard for her to read, sitting so coolly behind his desk. But from the way he had spoken to her at Lillian’s house, she knew he probably wouldn’t believe anything she was about to say.

“I took her back to her apartment this morning,” she said. “I think she’s still in shock. I would be, too, if I’d seen my mother like that.” If she looked accusingly at him, could she be blamed?

The sheriff didn’t even blink.

“I wasn’t too happy to hear Miss Cayley ask for you, Miss Russell,” he said. “I don’t believe in coincidences. Do you?”

“I think they’re possible enough,” she said.

He watched her for a moment, but his attention was drawn away by something in the outer office. Kate turned around in time to see the man who had been in the waiting area when she arrived quickly turn his face away from them. The deputy, too, suddenly looked busy.

“Excuse me,” the sheriff said, getting up. In a couple of long strides he was across the room, lowering the blinds on the office’s picture window.

When he sat down again to take up their conversation, Kate decided she had nothing to lose by speaking out.

“Listen, Sheriff,” she said, leaning forward, her voice earnest. She was tired from being up with Francie, holding her as she cried, listening to her talk about Lillian. Every muscle in her body felt weak, but a wave of energy swelled inside her. “Lillian was my
friend,
” she said. “I’m not going to let you paint me as some kind of killer, Sheriff. Just like you, I think it’s possible—no, probable—that the awful thing that happened to her had something to do with that little girl. And I know I look like the only link between them, but maybe I really am just a coincidence. I’ll tell you right now that I have no kind of alibi. I went home after work and ate dinner and went for my walk, which wasn’t anywhere near Lillian’s—I suppose I said hello to somebody but I couldn’t tell you a name—and then I came home and went to bed.”

Kate Russell was standing now, her face flush with emotion. Bill was distracted by the fact that she was so lovely. It made him feel guilty at first, then foolish because he knew that even smart, attractive women could be criminals. His discomfort made him speak harshly to her.

“See any ghosts last night? What does the Moon girl tell you about Lillian Cayley?” he asked. “Or aren’t they acquainted?”

“As a matter of fact, Lillian and I went together to the cemetery a couple of nights ago,” she said, sitting down. “Do you want to hear about it?”

“I wouldn’t dream of stopping you,” he said.

“She’s getting to be a regular around here,” Daphne said when Kate left the office. “What do the ghosts have to say about it?”

“I’m headed to the Carousel to get some lunch,” Bill said. “You want anything? You must have a real appetite from all that getting up and down to listen at keyholes.” He put on the wide-brimmed gray hat that was standard issue for everyone in the department.

“Nothing for me, boss,” Daphne said. “Some of us got work to do.”

She gave him a smile, but Bill knew he’d gotten under her skin. He trusted her one hundred percent in a standoff situation, and her extraordinarily calm demeanor meant that she was a rock when they were dealing with some drunken foster mother or domestic dispute. But she had a taste for gossip that sometimes got her into trouble.

“Have you heard from Frank?” he said.

“Rose had some problems last night and he had to take her to the emergency room. Said he’d get in this afternoon. You want him to call you?”

“No. We’ll talk later. What happened to your playmate?” Josh Klein had left right after the door closed behind Kate Russell.

“Some moron up the road couldn’t wait until four o’clock to start burning last fall’s leaves in his yard,” she said. “I think Josh is chasing after the fire truck. He’s kind of enthusiastic that way.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Bill said.

The Carousel was two streets over and up the hill from the department. Bill had enough work to do that he knew he should just have a sandwich at his desk. But the day was fair, and Margaret would give him a hard time if he didn’t get out and get himself some lunch. It didn’t hurt that Janet Rourke’s office was on the way, and the woman, Kate, wouldn’t be in to see him walk by. She’d done a lot of talking, most of it even less believable than what he’d heard during her first visit. The most sense she had made came when she told him that she was planning to spend the rest of the day and the evening as well with Francie Cayley. She hadn’t convinced him that she wasn’t guilty of something—perhaps fraud, maybe murder (there had been less likely killers than she)—but he didn’t doubt that she cared about her friend more than she did her job.

When he reached the block on which the agency sat, he was disappointed to see that the Moon woman wasn’t standing beneath Janet Rourke’s green-and-white-striped awning. He hadn’t talked to her in months. Mitch had been the lead on her daughter’s case. It was Kate Russell who said she’d gone off the deep end, and he had a strong curiosity about her.

He put his head in at Pulliam’s barbershop and nodded to the duffers lounging in the peeling vinyl chairs lined against the wall. It didn’t do for him to linger in his uniform, so he paused in the doorway. Today, Ernst’s wife Carmella was at the number one chair giving a balding man Bill didn’t recognize a straight-razor shave.

“Where’s Ernst?” Bill said.

“Down with the gout,” Carmella said, turning to flick shaving cream off the blade and into the basin behind her. “If he doesn’t watch himself, he’ll miss out on the races and turkey season, both.”

“That’s a real shame. The boys will make it out, I guess?” Bill said, inquiring about her two high-school-age sons.

Before she could answer, a retired doc who lived out in the west end of the county spoke from his chair beside the rattling RC Cola cooler. “I still got those dump trucks tearing up my cattle guards,” he said. “When are you going to send someone out, Sheriff? I’ll be dead and they’ll be running down my hearse.”

A low grumble seemed to move through the line of old men, and Bill knew that he was in for a litany of trespassing and other misdemeanor woes if he didn’t get out quick.

“You can call down at the courthouse and see what’s holding up that paperwork, Keifer. Then let Daphne know,” Bill said. “You all have a good day.” He started back out the door, but another, more insistent voice stopped him.

“What do you know about Ms. Cayley, Sheriff? We going to have another one of these murders go unsolved? I ain’t looking forward to seeing us look like prime assholes on television again.”

The barbershop was quiet and Carmella made a
tsk
sound in the direction of the man.

“The poor woman’s only been dead two days,” she said. “She was a fine teacher, too. I liked to never got through history if it weren’t for her.”

“We’re on it,” Bill said. He knew the man who had spoken as the king of prime assholes. He’d been a union agitator at the textile company before it closed and had developed a medical condition that kept him from working but not from warming the chairs in the barbershop and the OTB parlor down the road.

“Give Ernst my best, Car,” he said, and shut the door behind him.

As far as Bill was concerned, there was no proof that the little girl had been murdered. Hanna Moon had sent her off to school that morning, bundled in her yellow coat and scarf and boots, and never saw her again. (At least, not
alive.
Kate Russell had said that Hanna Moon told her she’d seen the apparition of her daughter several times in the past few weeks.) The bus driver and the children on the bus remembered dropping her off at the coop’s entrance, but Hanna Moon hadn’t called 911 until after seven that evening. It was a sad comment on the state of things at Chalybeate Springs, Bill thought, that the child’s absence hadn’t excited any interest until then.