Isabella Moon (4 page)

Francie blinked. “I recall,” she said. “What a show-off.”

“Then there was that time it was said he tried to run over that boy in the Winn-Dixie parking lot over the Christmas holidays.”

“That Paxton,” Francie said. Kate heard a strong note of sarcasm in her voice. “He’s so unpredictable.”

“Amen to that,” Lillian said. “Best none of us should forget it.”

3

BILL DELANEY HAD
just zipped up the back of his wife’s wool skirt and lifted her hair to lightly kiss the back of her neck as a
thank-you
for obliging his lunch hour whim when his pager buzzed on the nightstand.

“Must be your lucky day,” Margaret said with a laugh. “Daphne’s timing’s way off. She usually catches us before we can even get the window shades down.”

“Daphne would be shocked,” he said.

Margaret smiled at her husband’s naiveté it was one of the things she treasured about him, his innocence about the ways and knowledge of women. Sometimes it got him into trouble, but her life was maybe a little more amusing because of it.

“Oh, I don’t know that she’d be so surprised,” she said. “Daphne knows what a woman wants.”

“As the kids say, ‘I don’t think I want to go there,’” he said. He let his hand slide slowly down to his wife’s bottom and squeezed. “Um, um,” he said. “Now, that’s sweet.”

Margaret gave her hair a flirtatious toss and stepped way from him and over to the mirror to brush it. He loved to watch her brush her hair. He pretty much loved to watch her do anything: butter toast, read a magazine, scrub the bathtub, balance the checkbook. Eight years before, he nearly lost her to ovarian cancer, but she had beaten the odds and licked it. Sometimes, when they lay together, he would run his finger over the rough scar that crossed her pelvis like a souvenir from a brutal battle. It was a battle that had cost her nearly all of her female insides and hadn’t let her get far from the house for almost a year, except to go to the cancer center up in Lexington, but she had won it.

There had been a few guilty moments back then, when he imagined a life without her, during lonely, empty nights when he had to leave her alone at the hospital. He thought of them with shame now. He’d suffered a lack of faith in her, in their marriage, in God. He hadn’t had faith in anything. When it was finally over, he decided that it had been Margaret’s stubbornness that got them through.

“Guess we can fool around all we want now,” she’d said, looking up at him from her hospital bed after the anesthesia from the radical hysterectomy had worn off. Her skin was jaundiced because her liver function was low, and her hair—cut short to hide the fact that the chemo had taken so much of it—rested in dark, damp curls about her face. Still, her eyes were just as bright and blue as the day he’d met her at a U of K alumni barbecue.

“Just try to keep me away,” he’d told her. And he was true to his word. Who knew if he was making up for lost time, or trying to reassure her, whatever—at nearly fifty years old, he was hot after her like a teenage boy on a prom queen.

The pager buzzed again.

“They can’t live without you,” Margaret said over her shoulder. “I need to get back anyway. There’s a seniors’ bus tour coming in at two.”

“My lucky day,” Bill said, shutting off the pager.

“Frank says it’s one of the kids from the east end of the county, out near Anderson,” Daphne said. “You want me to send somebody out to the kid’s house?” Bill could hear Daphne’s tiny portable television playing her afternoon soap in the background.

“Sounds like Frank’s got it all figured out,” he said. One of his most conscientious deputies, Frank liked to lay claim to and hold cases as long as he could, reporting to him only when he knew he had to. Bill understood that it was just enthusiasm, but probably had something to do with his long tenure as an enlisted Marine.

“He’s over at the medical center talking to the docs,” Daphne said. “The kid had a heart attack in the ambulance.”

“Tell him I’m on my way,” he said. “And Daph, turn off the tube before you get back on the radio. We don’t need it going out over everybody’s scanners.”

“You bet, boss,” she said, her voice devoid of repentance.

Slowed by Friday afternoon traffic around the Buyer’s Mart store straddling the town/county line, Bill flipped on his blues to get the minivans and pickups out of his way. The medical center was a couple miles outside of town, in what Margaret jokingly referred to as Carystown’s suburbs: a rocky expanse of countryside dotted with cheap subdivisions and car dealerships. There was no reason to hurry, and he didn’t like to use the siren if he could help it. Daphne hadn’t said, but he would have bet a stack of dollars that it was some kind of overdose that had gotten the kid. If it wasn’t the occasional hunting accident or severe beating inflicted by their so-called friends, the kids who died in and around Carystown usually did it to themselves—suicide by shotgun or a noose slung over a sturdy tree branch in the family woods. These days, though, drugs were often the cause, sometimes intentional, sometimes not. From the numbers he’d seen, the county stats, percentagewise, weren’t so different from those of Louisville or Lexington.

Once he got past the Buyer’s Mart, traffic was clear for a mile or so, until he came up fast on a stuttering and ancient VW bus whose driver apparently wasn’t checking his rearview mirror. Bill hung back, looking to go around it, but after a steady line of oncoming traffic they came up on a lengthy blind curve and he started to get impatient. He knew the bus, one of three owned by the Chalybeate Springs Co-op Farm, which was just around the curve.

The co-op had actually begun its life as a commune, a place for hippies from up East to get back to nature. They had been there fifteen years by the time he and Margaret had come to Carystown, getting by on a truck-farming scale, selling vegetables in the farmer’s market in town, harvesting honey from their bees, and peddling pottery at craft shows. But in the last few years, with the help of a questionable character by the name of Charlie Matter, they’d managed to tap into the Internet for their goods, selling their pottery and honey all over the country. Now, a professionally painted sign had replaced the rotted wooden shingle at the co-op’s entrance. At the end of the operation’s gravel drive sat two hundred acres of prime farmland with an iron-rich spring that gave it its name. The commune had bought the land cheap from a do-nothing named Glenn who wanted to make the place into a resort but never scared up the money to build anything but a big metal shed over the fifteen-by-twenty pool where he and his buddies drank beer and floated themselves in the sulfurous water for their rheumatism.

And here was one more thing Chalybeate Springs was known for: it had been the home of Isabella Moon.

When the VW bus slowed further, and turned into the farm without benefit of a turn signal, Bill sped past.

Isabella Moon hadn’t been far from his mind that day. It wasn’t the girl herself so much as the woman who said she knew where the girl’s body was buried. He tried to figure what kind of angle the woman might have, coming to him. Her story had been damned strange, if not downright loopy, full of mysterious figures in the night and voices—no, not voices, but
thoughts
that spoke inside her head, which the woman said weren’t hers, if he had it right. Certainly she was nuts. She had asked him,
begged
him, really, to follow up on it, to go and see for himself if her information was correct. She had been agitated, but earnest. She didn’t seem to understand that he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) just grab a shovel and go digging. He wondered if he shouldn’t check her out with Janet Rourke. Then again, he’d rather put a fork in his eye than ask a favor of Janet Rourke. There was that other woman in the office, Edith, who might be more approachable. He wanted to be careful, though. When law enforcement asked even the most casual questions around town, people got nervous.

Pulling into the hospital’s parking lot, Bill noted wryly that two of the town’s five cruisers were parked in the fire lane outside the medical center’s emergency room. He slid his own into one of the spaces marked
POLICE CARS ONLY
at the close-in parking lot.

In the E.R. examining area, Frank, a couple of emergency technicians, and another deputy, Clayton Campbell, stood in a grim cluster, giving desultory attention to the boy on the gurney. The heart monitor was shut off. Some other machine clicked in regular intervals, but the boy himself was obviously dead.

“Bill,” Frank said. “Come on over.” He introduced Bill to the doctor, a woman about his own age wearing improbable red high-heel pumps with her otherwise rather dull doctor’s jacket and shapeless gray dress. With her oversprayed hair and flashy jewelry, she looked more like a trashy sort of schoolteacher than a doctor, but Bill reckoned that it took all kinds. Shaking his hand, she looked directly into his eyes, serious.

After the introductions, Bill got down to business. “Any kin available?” he said. “What do we know?”

Frank read from his notes.

“Brad Catlett. Seventeen. Good student, according to the coach. Cross-country runner. Lives out near Anderson,” he said. “Collapsed playing basketball during gym period right after lunch.”

“Any contact injuries?” Bill asked. “Did anyone see him go down?”

“A gym full of boys and girls,” Frank said. “The gym teacher. Looks like a straight-ahead heart attack to me. Maybe some congenital thing.” He nodded toward the doctor, who was looking restless. “But what do I know? What do you say, Doc?”

“Let’s get him covered up,” she said to one of the technicians. “Has someone contacted the boy’s parents?”

“No answer at home, the cell phone number on his school emergency card was no good,” Clayton offered.

The doctor looked at a sheet on the clipboard in her hands. While she read over the EMT’s notes, she tapped the head of a pen against the metal. “We know we’re looking at some kind of heart event, but without any history to look at or a look inside, I can’t tell you much right now. His blood pressure and body temperature were through the roof. His temp was 105 when they got to him—that’s abnormal for an attack brought on by a heart defect. Sounds more like an infection, maybe, but there would have been other symptoms. Had he been ill this week? Do we know if he was sweating a lot or nauseated, vomiting?” She looked at Frank.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “But I’ll try to find out.”

“That’s it, then,” the doctor said. “We’ll get on it, make sure we’re not dealing with some sort of contagion. But beyond that, we won’t know much until we get the autopsy done. And we’ll need the next of kin for that.”

Given the kid’s tender age, Bill couldn’t see sending Frank or one of the other deputies out alone to talk to the parents, though it was a part of the job he really disliked. He walked over to the gurney and lifted the corner of the sheet.

Brad Catlett was a good-looking kid. Probably had a cheerleader girlfriend who liked to bake him chocolate-chip cookies. That was his own fantasy, of course. He knew that just because a kid had neatly cut hair and kept his face shaved, he was not necessarily an angel. Girls, too, at this age (and younger) were also as likely to be into drugs and alcohol, or even home porno movies just for kicks. There had been a scandal at the high school last year when they’d had to arrest the sixteen-year-old daughter of the political science teacher on prostitution charges. The girl had managed to take down a long-haul trucker and a lawyer from the next county, too, who testified that he’d been told she was eighteen. He’d since been disbarred and then divorced by his wife, but he hadn’t bought any time. It was still a small state in a lot of ways.

The boy’s face was already ashen and empty. One of his eyelids revealed just a sliver of white, as in a lewd wink. His skin still looked taut, only raw around the nostrils—coke, maybe, or just from blowing a hundred times during a cold. Bill didn’t recognize him, but saw in him every white or black or Hispanic or Asian kid whose death he’d had to follow up on in the past twenty-five years. They all looked the same in death whether they were shot up, cut up, or overdosed. They looked wronged, often mildly surprised, like it shouldn’t have happened to them.

He reached over and closed the boy’s eyelid the rest of the way.

“Tox screen, don’t you think, Doc?”

“Part of your friendly coroner’s package,” she said. “As long as you ask.”

Outside, Bill got the boy’s address from Frank, who looked a little rough around the edges. No one liked to see a kid die. Or perhaps there was trouble at home with his young wife, Rose, who’d developed MS a couple of years ago. Frank worried a lot about Rose.

“Want company, Sheriff?” he asked.

The boy’s house was way out in the country, just shy of the next county line. It never ceased to amaze Bill that kids from out here had to ride a bus into town for almost an hour to and from school each day.

The east end of Jessup County was dirt poor. Just at the edge of worn-out coalfields, it had no industry except a small amount of timber to recommend it. Some years before, a congressman had managed to get a textile company to relocate here from the North, but once the tax relief and bonuses it extracted from the county petered out, the jobs started to slowly disappear. Finally, the entire operation had shut down. Most of the folks in the neighborhood were on some kind of disability. For some families, disability—carpal tunnel, Epstein-Barr syndrome, back trouble, whiplash—was the family business.