Isabella Moon (38 page)

“I’ll wait until you get inside,” the sheriff said. “Unless you want me to come in and take a look around.”

“That’s all right,” Kate said. “I’ll be fine.” She felt like they had gotten past the awkwardness she detected between them earlier, and there was a part of her—a weak, needful part—that
did
want him to come inside. But she didn’t trust herself.

“I guess I don’t need to remind you that you want to stay in Carystown for the foreseeable future,” he said. “For your own safety.”

“You think Paxton Birkenshaw doesn’t know where I live?” she said. “I don’t feel particularly safe, Sheriff.”

“I’ll take care of Mr. Birkenshaw in due time,” he said.

“I just hope it’s not too late for Francie. Or me,” she said. She got out and shut the car door behind her.

Kate turned on every lamp in the living room and kitchen before heading back to the bedroom. She was hungry, but knew there was nothing in the house, as usual. If things had been better between them, Caleb might have picked up a bag of groceries after he left Francie’s. But things were a long way from that sort of thoughtfulness. Her usual popcorn would have to suffice for dinner. At least it would be better than the cloyingly sweet block of crispy treat that she’d choked down at the diner because she didn’t want to hurt the waitress’s feelings.

Where was Caleb?
Deep inside, she knew he wasn’t lying when he told her again and again that he wasn’t in love with Janet. Men didn’t fall in love with Janet. Janet consumed men the way she consumed chocolate—greedily and for temporary effect. Kate just didn’t know if she was ready or even
wanted
to forgive Caleb. Maybe it had all happened for the best.

When she reached to flip on the bedroom’s overhead light, she found that it was burned out. With the dim light from the hallway, she started to make her way over to the bedside lamp, but caught the heel of her shoe on something on the floor, tripped, and almost fell.

“What?” she said. She turned on the lamp.

When she saw the shoes lying on the floor, her first reaction was puzzlement. She’d worn that particular pair only once, to the arts gala—the same one at which Caleb had told her he’d been unfaithful with Janet. Then she saw the dress laid out on the bed. But it wasn’t just the dress. There were earrings, too, and several bracelets. Someone had laid everything out carefully, arranging the dress to look like the person wearing it lay down and just disappeared. The earrings were spaced evenly, just where they might have been; the bracelets had been slipped onto the wrist of the dress’s transparent right sleeve.

Why would Caleb do such a thing? she wondered. But then she knew that it hadn’t been Caleb. Whoever did it had chosen that dress, the one she’d worn to the gala. Caleb would not have been that cruel. Janet would.

Kate sat down on the bed, fingering an edge of the fine silk. The dress had cost her most of two weeks’ salary, but she’d fallen in love with it the minute the saleswoman at Petals took it off of the rack. The sheer top with its crystal buttons and silky black shell underneath was elegant, but sexy. She’d bought it even though it reminded her strongly of many of the clothes she bought when she was with Miles. Caleb had whistled at her when he saw her in it.

“Now
that’s
the kind of dress you should wear every day,” he said.

Kate quickly drew her hand back from the dress as though it had bitten her.

Miles.

How like Miles! Not confronting her directly, but trying to frighten her.

One night, not long after they’d been married, they were sitting in the hot tub drinking wine when he began to talk about a girl he’d dated in college. Had Miles even finished college? She doubted it. The girl had “potential,” Miles told her. She hadn’t thought to ask him at the time what sort of potential he was talking about. Now she had a better idea.

He’d bought her things, Miles told her. Tasteful clothes, ladylike shoes. Even jewelry. And she had begun to wear them when they were out together.

“She wasn’t as pretty as
you,
” Miles said. “But, like I said, she had potential.”

Then one of the girl’s “stuck-up friends” told her that Miles had helped to steal a test for a psychology class, and they fought about it. (Even then, she knew better than to ask if he’d actually stolen the test.) The girl was drunk and had thrown a cup of beer at him where he sat behind the wheel of his car.

“I threw her out,” Miles said. “Nobody pulls shit like that with me.” He’d left her downtown and started to drive himself home, he said. But he had to pass by her house, which she rented with two other students. Finding the place dark, he parked his car down the street and waited. She came home in a cab about half an hour later.

“I could tell she was still drunk as hell,” he said. “So I waited until she turned out her bedroom light and went to bed.” Then Miles had started to laugh.

“She was lying right there on her cheap-ass futon in the middle of the room. Passed out. In five minutes, with just a key chain flashlight, I found every single thing I’d bought that bitch. Some of the stuff still had tags,” he said. “I got cash back for almost all of it.”

It wasn’t so much the story that had shocked Kate, but the satisfied smile Miles wore when he finished telling it. She would think of the poor girl from time to time, lying there alone, miserable and disappointed and drunk, then passing out. She’d always wondered what the girl had felt when she awoke the next morning and realized Miles had been there while she was sleeping. Now she had her answer.

Panicked, she sprang to open the bedside drawer.

The .22 was gone.

Her little cottage, which had always seemed so remote from Miles, so safe, felt suddenly like a prison, a cage in which she was supposed to sit and wait for him to come and get her. She’d been such a fool, deluding herself for so long. If Miles had really been dead, the police would have found her years before. Miles, though—Miles was patient. He liked to savor his revenge.

Where could she go? The sheriff had told her not to leave, but did she have a choice? Then there was Francie to think of. She couldn’t just abandon her to Paxton.
What could she do for Francie, really?
But the thought of Lillian’s faith in her kept her from jumping into her car to run away from Carystown.

She picked up the telephone to call Caleb. He had to have gone to his own place. But she put the phone down again. She couldn’t wait for him to come all the way there to pick her up. Miles could be sitting outside, not a hundred feet away from her. Watching. Waiting.

Kate threw her toothbrush into her purse and took the few hundred dollars of emergency cash from a canister in the kitchen. She opened the front door, half anticipating that Miles would step out of the darkness, but the porch was empty. After locking the door behind her, she rushed to the car. The car doors locked automatically when she turned the key in the ignition, but she locked them again with the button to reassure herself.

As she pulled out of the driveway and onto the street, she paused a moment to look at the home that had been hers and hers alone and wondered if she would ever see it again.

Caleb’s house stood alone at the center of a hundred-acre piece of land that his parents had left him. As Kate pulled into the driveway, she heard Myrt and Earl, the two beagles that Caleb’s father had kept for hunting, send up a howl. She parked beside Caleb’s truck, close to the house.

Before she could get her purse out of the car, Caleb had the front door open and was calling her name.

“Kate, you’ve got to watch coming up that gravel so fast,” he said as she ran toward the house. “You’ll wreck your suspension.”

When he saw her face, he stopped the lecture.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

She looked back over her shoulder. There had been a couple of other cars behind her on the road. She was afraid that Miles might have been in one of them.

“Can we go in?” she said, looking up at Caleb.

In answer, he took her arm and brought her inside. He had a fire going in the great room and the television was on. All was normalcy here, contentment. A man’s retreat.

“I know you already think I’m crazy,” Kate said.

“I just want to understand, Kate,” Caleb said. “I want this to work. I really do.”

“I need you to listen to me,” she said. “And I don’t know what you’re going to think when I’m finished. But I’m in trouble, Caleb.” She paused, looking at his broad and honest face.
Not so honest, maybe. He’s had his secrets.

“You may not want to have anything to do with me when I tell you who I really am.”

41

FRANCIE PUSHED
the plate of noxious-smelling food a few inches away from her.

“Come on, baby,” Paxton said. “You’ve got to eat more than that.”

“I’ve had enough,” Francie said. With Paxton here, she felt full inside, but it wasn’t a feeling of satisfaction. It was a stolid, dead feeling that was so devoid of emotion that it could hardly be called a feeling at all.

“You didn’t know I could cook, did you? One of the farm managers’ wives taught me how to make it. It’s white-trash food, for sure. Who knew your mother would keep that cheese in a box stuff around?”

“Don’t talk about Mama,” Francie said. “Please.”

“Poor baby,” Paxton said, coming around the table to comfort her. “It’s this place. You shouldn’t be here. Do you want to go back to your apartment, or maybe a hotel? We can stay wherever you want.”

But Francie knew that she belonged in the house. She owed it to her mother. There was some kind of redemption here, some forgiveness that she knew she could receive from her mother. She could feel it.

“No,” Francie said. “I want us to stay here.” Paxton had to stay here, too. He was part of it all. She let him put his head against her shoulder as he knelt on the floor.

“Let me take care of you,” Paxton said.

Francie touched his fine blond hair, which was so soft her fingers slipped through it as they would through water. She’d had a doll once whose long blond hair was almost as fine as Paxton’s. She had played and played with the doll’s hair, trying to work it into elaborate braids and twists, but it was impossible to get it to do anything but lie there, shining and golden. Even the clips and bows she put in it slid off, useless. The doll was probably still packed away in the attic, where her mother had stored so many of her discarded toys.

“Let’s go in the other room,” Francie said. The kitchen was the room that most reminded her of Lillian, and the smell of the tomato-soup-covered mess that Paxton had made was starting to get to her.

As they left the kitchen, Francie almost told Paxton that her mother had probably bought the boxed cheese for the food pantry at church, but she decided not to. Paxton didn’t need to know everything about her mother.

“Not in here,” Francie said, leading Paxton through the living room. They went down the hallway, past the closed door of her mother’s bedroom and into her own room.

When she flicked on the overhead light, Paxton walked slowly, almost reverently, around the room, picking up pictures, reading the diplomas and award plaques on the wall.

“Hey, I remember reading about this,” he said, tapping her high school valedictory certificate. “I wanted to call you or something.”

“You should have,” Francie said quietly. There had been nights, long ago, when she lay on the bed in this room, touching herself, imagining Paxton there with her. They were childish fantasies, focusing on intense kisses and a lot of rubbing against one another because she had been too young and inexperienced to imagine more.

“Of course I should have,” Paxton said, taking her in his arms.

Francie closed her eyes, pretending she was a girl again and Paxton was the thin, muscular boy with deeply tanned skin and shining white teeth that she remembered, and not the dissipated, dangerous man she knew he had become. But if he had changed so much in that time, what, then, had she become? She felt tears slip from beneath her eyelids and onto her cheeks.

Paxton kissed her cheek where the tears had fallen.

“Poor Francie,” he said.

“Why?” Francie whispered.

But Paxton covered her mouth with his own before she could say more, and she tasted him and the terrible dinner and a hint of tobacco and perhaps the mouthwash he’d used earlier in the day. After a moment it was just
him,
and she began to feel for the buttons of his shirt and the buckle of his belt, and before long she was tearing at his clothes with anger. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it, but only answered her with equal violence, jerking down the tight panty hose that had bound her all day and unzipping her staid dress with enough force to break the zipper.

Before pushing her onto the bed, Paxton reached over and flicked out the stark overhead light.

It was right, Francie thought. They should be in the dark together, hidden from the light.

Francie opened her eyes to darkness. Paxton lay sleeping beside her, his arm thrown across her belly as though he would keep her from getting up.

Something, some sound, had wakened her. Before she was fully conscious, she thought it might be her mother moving around the kitchen, making herself a midnight snack as Lillian sometimes did when she was a girl. But Francie knew that wasn’t right. Her mother was gone.