Isabella Moon (27 page)

Outside, the yellow crime scene tape that had been hung around the back of the house where her mother was found was finally gone.

Someone
had killed her. And that someone had had a reason. Francie didn’t buy the theory that the neighbors espoused that first day—that some drifter had come up on Lillian working in her yard and killed her for whatever they could find in the house. Francie hadn’t noticed anything missing.

She knew every inch of the house and had never felt afraid here, even when she’d stayed, alone, when her mother was away. She felt safer being alone here, even knowing that her mother had been killed just outside, than she did in her tiny apartment with its single entrance on the second floor.

Just after noon, Francie spent a difficult hour with Aletha Cooper in Lillian’s bedroom, selecting the clothes she would be buried in. Aletha, with her tender heart and ready tears, wore Francie out. By the time she shut the door behind Aletha and saw that she was safely across the yard, Francie felt desperately in need of some relief. But even with Lillian gone, she was uncomfortable doing drugs in her mother’s house. She closed herself in the bathroom and drew the shade.

For years she had tried to get her mother to remodel the pink-tiled bathroom. In junior high she’d loved to visit her friends who lived in the new housing developments just outside the city limits, loved spending time in their shiny, vinyl-floored kitchens and wallpapered bathrooms with their double sinks and fixtures that weren’t corroded with mineral deposits and didn’t squeak when they were turned on.

“What do we have to live in this old house for?” she’d asked Lillian after an overnight in Bluegrass Estates.

“You don’t leave behind a house and your friends just because you can afford different,” Lillian had told her. “You don’t want to be around people who live like that. There’re people on this very street who could afford to live anywhere they wanted to. But they choose to live here.”

It plagued Francie. She suspected that it was more than loyalty that kept them in the East End.

“Maybe we wouldn’t be allowed to buy a house in Bluegrass Estates,” she said. “Maybe they wouldn’t let us.”

“Is that what you think?” Lillian said.

Francie didn’t answer, but looked away. Lillian took hold of her chin and made her look forward.

“I don’t ever want to hear you talk like that,” she said. “We live where we choose to live because that’s what we choose to do. We don’t measure ourselves by where we live, what we have, or whom we choose to associate with. God made us every one His children, and anyone who puts himself above another is asking for trouble. And that includes you, Francine Lillian Cayley.”

But she knew her mother had strong ideas about with whom she should spend her time. Lillian had made that clear long ago, particularly on the afternoon Francie told her about Paxton following her home. There had been another boy in college, another wealthy white boy she’d dated for a few weeks, but she could never bring herself to tell Lillian about him. They’d broken up—she dumped him, actually—a few weeks before Christmas break. She didn’t like to think that she’d done it because she knew Lillian would disapprove. If someone were to ask her, she’d say with utter conviction that it was because he’d been a sloppy kisser.

Francie opened the coke vial and put the miniature spoon inside to take out some of the fine-grained powder. Holding the spoon to her nose, she found her hand was shaking. When she put the vial on the edge of the sink, it fell, clattering against the porcelain and spilling its contents all over the bowl. Cursing quietly, she tried to brush the coke back into the vial, but much of it had fallen into drops of water and was fast melting away.

She glanced up to catch herself in the mirror. Would her mother even recognize the woman she saw there? She didn’t want to recognize
herself
trying to rescue a few dollars’ worth of cocaine from flowing into the sewer. Illegal drugs had never been a part of her life before she’d taken up with Paxton. The way she felt now, that might have been a hundred years ago.

The modicum of nervous courage she’d gotten from the coke helped her face the other chore she’d been dreading: the thick pile of forgotten mail Aletha had brought in from the mailbox. She was relieved to see that most of it was made up of clothing and gardening catalogs. But along with the catalogs and a couple bills, there was a statement from a brokerage firm. Francie held on to the envelope and just looked at it for a moment. When you died, nothing belonged to you anymore.

She opened the envelope and spread out the several sheets it contained on the table. She knew that her mother had long ago arranged for life insurance to cover her burial. But what was printed on the paper in front of Francie would’ve covered fifty expensive funerals. Money would never be an issue for her again. She knew that she should’ve felt happy, grateful. Instead, she just felt empty inside and regretted all over again the coke that had melted away in the sink.

When the doorbell rang, startling her, she stuffed the broker’s statement into the envelope as though it were something she had to hide.

She opened the door to find Mitch Carl looking slightly embarrassed to be there. His cruiser sat in the driveway.
God, she was tired of seeing those cars.

“Mitch,” she said. “Haven’t you all finished here yet?”

“Just a couple minutes, Francie,” Mitch said. “Can I come in?”

She showed him to an armchair and took her place on the couch. They’d known each other since elementary school, but she didn’t hold a very high opinion of him. Good-looking, but not a particularly good student and an only so-so jock, he’d never impressed her as a serious person. He’d been too concerned about the girls he went out with, what kind of car he drove. It had been rumored that his mother had taken a job just so she could pay for him to have a car and insurance. Francie couldn’t respect someone like that, always taking the easy way at someone else’s expense.

“So you made Miss Lillian’s funeral arrangements?” he said.

“Did you really come here to ask about that?” Francie said. “It’ll be in the paper.”

He pulled out his notebook. “I just need to ask you about that night. Monday night.”

Monday night felt like a lifetime ago. Lying in her own bed while her mother lay bleeding, dying in her own backyard.

“Your shift ended at nine?”

“Yes.”

“You went home?”

“Yes.”

“Right away?”

Francie hesitated.

“Come on, Francie,” Mitch said. “You can tell me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Francie said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Mama.”

“Try me,” Mitch said.

Did it really matter if anyone knew? Hadn’t she felt, just that morning, that she didn’t give a damn what people thought of her? Paxton wouldn’t care. He’d been pressuring her for a long time to be seen with him, not to hide anymore.

“I was with somebody,” Francie said. “Not for very long.”

“Did you go somewhere? Out where someone would’ve seen you?”

“It’s not really any of your business,” Francie said, though she knew she was wrong. It couldn’t be more of the Sheriff’s Department’s business.

“I was in my car,” she said. “Paxton Birkenshaw met me at my car.”

She watched as a shadow of surprise crossed Mitch’s face.

“You went somewhere?”

“No.”

“How long were you in the car?”

“As long as it took,” she said evenly.

She wanted to laugh at him. She wondered if a woman had ever made Mitch Carl blush the way he was blushing now.

Later, she wished that she hadn’t brought Paxton into it. A part of her wanted to pretend they had never been together. A part of her didn’t ever want to see him again, as though her mother’s death had made their relationship irrelevant. The implications of that thought made her sick to her stomach.

28

A pall of dust lay over the furniture in the Beaufort house. Mary-Katie had been paying a woman to come in once every couple of weeks to check on the house, to dust and run water through the pipes, but she had obviously missed a visit or two. As she crossed the musty kitchen, Mary-Katie caught sight of the tail of a mouse as it slipped beneath the pantry door. When she’d lived here with her grandmother, the mice were annual visitors, seeking shelter when the cool breezes of fall made their way south. But she didn’t open the pantry. The mice could have whatever was there.

In the living room, she sat down heavily in the wing chair beside the fireplace. She remembered sitting with her grandmother in front of a Christmas morning fire, sometime after her father had gone, and wondering aloud if he had a fireplace where he was. Sad as they both were, Mary-Katie was the only one who had cried. Her grandmother had told her that only God knew where he was and that Mary-Katie should pray for him to be safe.

This sudden advent of her own child had made Mary-Katie think of him again and again. Soon, even if he came back looking for her, he wouldn’t find her. But she herself had grown up with only her grandmother as her family and she’d done all right. The child would have its mother. She told herself that she was all he or she would need.

Mary-Katie knew she had only another week, maybe two at the outside, before Miles started to seriously press her about the abortion. He was predictable that way, always giving her time to come around to his way of thinking before pushing her. Usually, it worked. She found it easier just to accommodate him. But there was no question that this time was going to be different. She wouldn’t be around that long.

At home, she kept to her routines—her tennis, her spa appointments. The refrigerator was never allowed to be empty, and she ran Miles’s errands with her usual efficiency. As for Miles himself, he was often absent, to her relief. She felt like an actor, playing the role of the woman she’d been for the last five years.

Mary-Katie found it laughable that he had demanded that she get rid of the child. It didn’t matter to her who the father was, though she was certain that Miles had lied to her. He was too vain to have given up his shot at immortality so early in his life, no matter what he’d told her. She considered the child inside her to be completely hers and not liable to the whims of anyone but herself. It was as though the line on the pregnancy test had divided her life into two parts: the past, which mattered not at all, and the future, which meant everything. Miles was the past. The child was her future.

There wasn’t much that she wanted from her grandmother’s house. All of the valuables had long ago made their way into her own jewelry box or the safe-deposit box at the bank. She’d donated most of the silver to charity, knowing she and Miles would never use it.

Up in her old sun-faded bedroom, which looked out over the backyard, she went through her desk drawers a last time, riffling through the piles of school papers and photographs that were stuffed inside. In one album she had collected tiny, two-by-three-inch school photographs of herself from every year since kindergarten. She flicked through them, watching herself grow taller, seeing how she wore bangs one year, barrettes the next. For the briefest of moments she thought of taking them home as a sort of funny prize to share with Miles. When she realized that she would never again share anything with Miles (except, perhaps briefly, a bed), she felt a spot of cold develop in her stomach.

She started to close the drawer quickly, but it caught on a piece of stiff paper that thwacked against the inside of the desktop. Sliding her hand to the back of the drawer, she inched the paper out and saw that it was a gold-bordered certificate.
IN RECOGNITION OF SERVICE TO THE SATTLER HIGH GUN CLUB
it read in bright red letters.

Her grandmother had laughed when she told her she wanted to join the gun club. “Just like your father,” she said. “He thought he was some kind of cowboy.” It was then that she had given Mary-Katie his Ruger .22. “He accidentally killed the neighbor’s cat, but he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn when he meant to. Let’s hope you’re a better shot.”

Now Mary-Katie thought that it probably hadn’t been such a bad thing that her father wasn’t more comfortable with the gun. As depressed as he must have been while her mother was dying, he might have used it on himself. Or her grandmother. Or her.

Mary-Katie knew she’d just been competent at the range. But it had been fun, and she gained a certain notoriety for being one of only two girls in the club.

She stuffed the certificate back into the drawer and shut it. For a moment she couldn’t think of what she’d done with the gun all those years ago. Then she remembered.

She moved the desk chair to her closet and stood on the seat. Pushing aside piles of moth-eaten sweaters and old purses, she found, shoved in a corner, a fabric-covered hat box that her grandmother had given her when she got rid of all her hats. The Ruger lay wrapped in a soft gray flannel cloth. Beside it, in a flimsy cardboard box, was a small tray of ammo. She hadn’t yet decided where she was going when she left Miles, but it made sense to her to take the Ruger with her now that she was responsible for someone besides herself.

She put the gun and the ammo in a denim hobo purse she found on the shelf and quickly set the room to rights.