Isabella Moon (20 page)

Bill took a handful, putting much of it in his mouth. “We’ve worked it off,” he said with his mouth full. “Or we will.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Margaret said. “There’ll just be more of you to love.”

Bill grunted, put the lid back on the can, and pitched it on the ground near the backpack. They might have been out for a lover’s adventure, picnicking in the dark. One of their first dates had been a picnic, and he’d found out what a good cook Margaret was. When he’d tasted her fried chicken and German potato salad, he knew that if he didn’t fall in love with her, he was an idiot.

With the leaves cleared, they started digging. Their eyes were well-adjusted to the dark, and they used their flashlights only infrequently to illuminate the occasional large rock. Around them the cedars were still and quiet, with the exception of the topmost branches, which seemed to whisper restlessly against the sky.

When a single high-pitched cry broke the quiet, they both looked in the direction of the sound.

“Screech owl,” Margaret said. “How appropriate.”

Again they avoided the exact center of the clearing, the place where Kate had said she’d put her face close to the ground, where she was certain that Isabella was buried. They worked their way toward it, digging small trenches only about twenty inches deep. They were both tiring, but the dirt was soft and yielded easily to their shovels. They talked in low voices as they worked, about the museum and the board members that were driving Margaret crazy, about the next election. Finally, while he was still talking, Bill moved to the clearing’s center, the place where, if one looked up in the sky, the treetops enclosed a circle of stars and wispy clouds. Margaret joined him, as she often did when he was concentrating on something particularly difficult to do.

They’d dug down about a foot when Bill stopped digging and looked out toward the road.

“Shit,” he said. Headlights from a slowly moving car flashed intermittently through the trees. He’d considered it a calculated risk to park so close to where they were digging, and even brought his own truck, thinking it wouldn’t draw the attention that his cruiser would.

“Maybe you better get out of sight,” he said to Margaret. “It could be anybody.”

“I don’t think so,” Margaret said, flinging a shovelful of dirt to the side. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

It exasperated the hell out of him how stubborn she could be. But given that he’d put her in this ridiculous position, he figured it was no time to give her an argument. His stainless steel .45 Wilson Protector rested snugly in its holster at his side. There wouldn’t be any trouble that he couldn’t handle.

The car out on the road slowed as it approached the truck. He thought he recognized the erratic
tick-tick-tick
of the engine of the newest patrol car, a Crown Vic, but the car sped off before he could be sure.

“They’ll be back,” Bill said. “Everyone knows the road dead-ends at the waterworks.”

“They’ll just think we’re in the truck doing the nasty,” Margaret said. “Let’s get this over with. I’ve had about as much fun as I can handle tonight.”

Recognizing the tired edge in her voice, and knowing that she meant what she said, he attacked the hole they were working on with renewed effort. The brisk night air and the cloying smell of the leaves were getting to him as well. So far they’d come up with only beer cans, weathered candy bar wrappers, a chipped china saucer, and three well-chewed rubber dog toys. They dug in silence, with Bill looking frequently over his shoulder for the car, until Margaret suddenly spoke.

“I’ll be damned,” she said, lifting her shovel. “Get a light on, Bill.”

He dropped his own shovel and shined the flashlight he had clipped to his gun belt down into the hole. A patch of bright yellow stared up at them from the ground, and Bill knew immediately that it was the girl’s yellow coat. He squatted down and brushed dirt away from it with a gloved hand.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Margaret said.

Bill knew at that moment that she was afraid. This was no longer just a midnight adventure. This was something real. “It’s probably nothing,” he said.

“Right,” Margaret said. “Someone’s idea of a joke. Maybe that Russell woman. Maybe she’s some kind of psychopath who plays tricks on people. You always were a sucker for a pretty girl, Bill Delaney.” She laughed nervously.

So intent were they on the hole that neither of them noticed that the car had returned until it parked so its headlights shone through the brush.

“Got to be one of mine,” Bill said. “I don’t know who’s on duty tonight, but I guess we’ll soon find out.”

“What do we do?” Margaret said.

“Wait,” Bill said.

They didn’t have to wait long. They heard a car door shut. Another light came on, this one a bright police spot. It swept the trees, resting here and there until finally it was close enough to light on them.

“Sheriff’s Department!” a voice shouted. “Drop!”

“Go on, get down,” Bill whispered to Margaret, who sank quickly to her knees beside the hole.

Bill dropped to one knee and called out, “Mitch, it’s Bill. Get that damn light off me.”

The light shifted, but Bill and Margaret had already been nearly blinded by it and couldn’t make out the shape of the deputy behind it.

“Sheriff?” Mitch said from the edge of the brush. “What the hell?”

In her current state of sleepiness and grief, it seemed to Kate to be the most natural thing in the world to see, in the doorway to Francie’s bedroom, a young woman whose image seemed to tremble and fade in and out like a bad television signal. Her experience with Isabella Moon had blunted her fear of the bizarre. For a moment she thought she was looking at Francie playing dress-up, her hair swept into a beehive hairdo high on her head, wearing a peach-colored sundress that was incandescence itself.

The young woman was looking around the room as though she’d never seen it before. Standing on tiptoe on her bare, slender feet, she gently swung a small, trunk-shaped purse by its bamboo handle and clutched a brilliantly white pair of gloves in one hand.

“Lillian,” Kate said, her voice just above a whisper. “Lillian.” Her heart was glad that Lillian had come. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed her. She hadn’t realized how fully Lillian had come to fill the empty space created inside her when her own mother had died so young. There was so much she wanted to say to her, to apologize for. But beneath all the emotion, only one question was in her mind.

“What should I do, Lillian?” she said.

Then, as though she were looking at a film, there was a tear in the young Lillian’s image and it split into two parts that seemed to stretch and then fold into themselves, twisting the young Lillian’s anguished face, her torso. Her slim legs and arms bent in agonizing angles that stretched toward Kate so that she could almost touch them.

Kate shrank away, now terrified. And then all vestiges of Lillian were gone. The vibrant light that had seemed to come from inside her dress, from beneath her silken dark skin, was gone. But in Lillian’s place stood Francie—the real Francie.

“Francie,” Kate said. “Your mother—”

Francie was motionless, and Kate said her name again. Outside, the red lights from a silent ambulance blinked into the room, freezing Francie’s expressionless face into a picture from which Kate could not look away.

“Please, Francie,” Kate said, getting up to go to her. She dropped the blanket on the floor and held out her hand. “Say something, Francie.”

Suddenly Francie
was
looking at her, but her eyes were the empty eyes of a sleepwalker. When she spoke, her mouth moved, but it wasn’t her voice.

“There’s trials to come, honey,” she said slowly. A bit of drool escaped the left corner of her lips and crept down to her chin. “Look out for my Francie. Look out for yourself, Mary-Katie.”

Francie’s face relaxed and her eyes closed. Before Kate could catch her, she fell to the floor, one forearm across her eyes, as though to shield them from some unwelcome sight.

Bill squatted beside the hole with Mitch standing by. He could feel Margaret behind him, still nervous.

“It’s county land,” Mitch said. “We don’t need any kind of warrant, do we? I say we go ahead and dig in.”

Bill was inclined to agree. But he knew they were going to need the coroner if the body was indeed there, and he had no equipment for night photographs, so those would have to wait until morning. And if they were looking at a crime scene, then Margaret shouldn’t be there at all. There was a hell of a lot to consider, and they couldn’t stand around there all night. He had to be sure that what they were looking at was concealing a body and wasn’t just somebody’s car blanket left behind by a couple of horny teenagers.

“You got another lamp in the cruiser?” he asked Mitch.

“Sure thing,” Mitch said. He stood up and started off to the car.

“Evidence bags, too, Mitch,” Bill called after him.

“This is so exciting,” Margaret said. “Horrible. But exciting.”

Bill got to his feet and put an arm around her. “Why don’t you go on home and get some sleep,” he said. “If we’re right, than it’s an all-nighter, plus.”

She put a hand against his chest and gave him a gentle push. “You don’t get to drag me out here in the middle of the night, then when we find what we’re looking for, send me to bed. Forget that, cowboy,” she said. “You owe me.”

“Consider yourself warned, Margaret,” he said. “It could be gruesome as hell.”

“Of course,” she said. Then her voice was contrite. “But I do hope we’re wrong. It makes me sick to think the child has been right here the whole time.”

As they stood waiting for Mitch to return, the breeze picked up in the clearing, enveloping them in the scent of earth and decay.

The dirt came away easily from the yellow coat. However many months it had been there hadn’t stained it too badly; it was still vibrant in the glare of the lamp Mitch had set up by the hole. Dawn was only an hour or so away, and the occasional bird called from the trees around them. Bill, at least, wasn’t particularly anxious to expose what was beneath the coat, which seemed to be front down in the hole. They were nearly to the collar when Bill put his hand out to stop Mitch from taking more dirt.

“Wait,” he said. He tossed his own shovel aside and plunged his arm down into the hole. His fingers moved deftly through the dirt that still hid whatever was just above the coat’s collar. He seemed to stroke the dirt, and after a moment Margaret gasped above him.

“Oh, Bill,” she said.

As the dirt fell away, they could all see that mixed in with it were thick strands of black hair. Bill couldn’t feel the hair through his gloves, but he didn’t need to. The woods had nearly taken this prize, this small, innocent being, but in the end they had freed her from her shoddy grave.

“Time to make some phone calls,” he said, trying to hide the emotion in his voice. “Wake some folks up.”

19

KATE WORKED
as quietly as she could in the kitchen, assembling breakfast from the groceries she’d brought by Francie’s apartment the previous afternoon. Her brain felt fogged and slow. She knew that she must have slept, but couldn’t remember. She could recall getting Francie back to bed and sitting on the couch anxious that something else would happen, that Lillian might return, or perhaps even Isabella. But there had been nothing. She thought that maybe she’d fallen asleep as dawn began to break, but she wasn’t sure.

On the way to Francie’s room to check to see if she was awake, she passed the elaborately framed mirror that Lillian had bought Francie on their European vacation the year before. She wasn’t going to stop to look in it, but a single glance pulled her up short: the face that stared back at her seemed unfamiliar. Aside from the deep circles beneath her eyes, she saw new wrinkles around her mouth and eyelids. It jarred her. Even after all the trouble she’d had in her life, she’d never felt like her face paid for it. She considered it one of the reasons she’d been able to get away with living such a normal life in Carystown. Being able to roll out of bed, wash her face, dab on a little mascara, and look good had its advantages. She had the kind of face that could be trusted. But her face looked worn to her now, like it belonged to someone ten years older.

Francie’s bedroom door opened, startling her.

“God bless you for making coffee,” Francie said. She inhaled deeply, almost comically, as she emerged from the room. She was dressed in blue jeans and a fresh white blouse; her hair was pulled back from her face with a wide paisley headband, and a pair of bright copper discs hung from her earlobes. She looked to Kate as though she were off for a day’s shopping instead of the funeral home, which is where, the night before, she told Kate she’d be going. She gave Kate a quick kiss on the cheek.
Breezy
was the word that came to Kate’s mind for the way Francie was acting, hardly the way she’d been expecting her to be.

“Francie?” she said. “Are you okay?” She followed her into the kitchen, where Francie began to spoon scrambled eggs from the skillet onto her plate.

“You bought bagels, too?” Francie said. “You are the best, Kate. Just the best.”

Kate watched, dumbfounded, as Francie put a bagel in the toaster and poured herself some coffee. She could see that the morning wasn’t going to go quite as she’d thought it would. It was pretty obvious that Francie had no memory of coming into the living room the night before, or of passing out on the floor.
Was passing out even the right phrase? Surely she’d never actually been awake.
As Kate had made breakfast, she struggled with whether to ask Francie about it. She knew, too, that she should tell her about taking Lillian to the cemetery. Francie would probably find out eventually. But now Kate didn’t know what to say.