The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (17 page)

I didn’t want to leave her, but Mother brushed aside any suggestion of my staying away from work. “Michelle will be here,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Don’t fuss.”

But Michelle fussed, and when I came home I saw that Mother had settled happily into being cared for by my sister. I stood on the sidelines, watching Michelle hold Mother’s arm as if she were an invalid and walk her into the dining room for dinner. When Mother wanted something from the kitchen, Michelle leapt to her feet to fetch it.

After dinner they went to Mother’s bedroom. From the hallway I heard them murmuring beyond the open door. I stood out of sight and listened for a long time to the soft rhythm of their voices, catching only a few clear words now and then.

What am I doing?

Suddenly aware of how ridiculous it was to be eavesdropping on my mother and sister, I strode purposefully past the door, headed for my room. When I glanced at them in passing, I saw Mother on the bed with her legs stretched out and Michelle in a chair drawn close, one of Mother’s hands caught in both of hers.

“Rachel?”

Mother’s voice stopped me. I turned back to her doorway.

Smiling, she patted the bed beside her. “Come sit with me.”

When I sat down Mother’s right hand slid into mine. Her skin was so cold it made me worry that her heart wasn’t circulating blood efficiently. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked.

She nodded, looking exhausted but happy. “I feel wonderful, just having the two of you here with me.”

***

Fuzzy-headed and bone-weary with the need for sleep that wouldn’t come, I padded down to the kitchen at 2 a.m. In the glow of the small fluorescent light over the sink, I poured a glass of milk, then forgot to drink it as I stood at the patio doors looking into the night. There was no moon, and beyond the circle of the patio floodlight I saw only flat blackness without a hint of shadows or shapes.

“Can’t sleep?”

I jumped. Mother had come into the kitchen silently.

“What are you doing up?” I said.

“Oh, I can’t get comfortable with these electrodes stuck to me.” The recorder strap crossed her shoulder and chest, and the machine dangled below her left arm. Its lead wire disappeared between the front folds of her white cotton robe. Mother’s hair was a mass of tangles, as if she’d been twisting restlessly in bed.

Beside me, she peered into the yard. “Oh, look.” 

Two young foxes ventured into the light for a second, then trotted back into the dark.

“They’re growing up,” Mother said. “Going around without their parents.”

With both hands she shoved her hair away from her face.

“Remember that bad winter,” she said, “when you were thirteen or fourteen, you started putting out the cats’ dry food for the foxes?” She laughed. “I couldn’t understand why Kate and Sarah were using so much food. I was about to have Dr. McCutcheon run tests on them to see if they both had a metabolic disorder.”

“Then I confessed.”

Mother laughed again, obviously finding it funny in retrospect. I didn’t recall her laughing at the time. She’d given me a lecture about sneakiness. The fox-feeding stopped.

It was absurd, this welling up of resentment over something that happened when I was a child. With a harshness that surprised me, I said, “Mother, you ought to be in bed.” I softened my voice. “You need rest more than anything else.”

“I know. I’ll sleep when I’m tired enough.”

She stepped to the switch by the hallway door and flipped it. I blinked in the glare of the ceiling light. I watched her move around the room, straighten a hand towel on the rack behind the sink, push the salt and pepper shakers into perfect alignment on the counter next to the stove. The familiarity of these actions touched and comforted me. She was my mother, not some stranger I had to fear. I needed to believe that.

The tidying up done, she poured a small glass of skim milk and pulled an oblong plastic container from a cupboard.

“Maybe a snack will help me sleep.” She popped open the container’s flat lid and removed two sheets of graham crackers. Laying them on a saucer she took from another cabinet, she smiled at me and said, “Let’s sit down and talk a little.”

I carried my milk to the breakfast table and sat across from her. She pushed the saucer holding the crackers toward me, and I snapped off a brown rectangle, scattering a few crumbs on the tabletop. When I dunked the cracker in my milk Mother laughed.

“You’ve always done that,” she said.

“Try it.”

She dipped her cracker and took a bite. “Mmm. It’s good.” She licked a white drop off her lower lip.

The sight of her doing this stirred sweet-sad memories: Mother walking between Michelle and me at Disneyworld, all of us munching on popcorn; Mother at the county fair, wrestling with a huge fluff of pink cotton candy and getting a bit stuck on her nose. Laughter. A mother and her happy children.

She placed the rest of the cracker back on the white saucer. Seeing her face grow solemn, I tensed, waiting.

She was silent a moment, using the side of her hand to brush the cracker crumbs into a tiny brown pile. For some reason I thought she was going to ask me about Luke, why I was seeing him again. I braced for that, and what she actually said caught me off guard.

“Rachel—” She hesitated. “I don’t understand why you wanted Theo instead of me to hypnotize you. And I won’t ask you to explain. But I know I can help you with your memories more than Theo ever could. As soon as I’m rid of this silly machine, I want you to let me hypnotize you.” 

Everything in me recoiled. I tried to clamp down on the panic, but it surged through my blood and set my heart racing. If she’d made me forget in the first place, what would she do to me this time?

Unable to meet her eyes, I traced the grain in the wooden tabletop with a remarkably steady finger. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

“I really believe it would be the best thing for you.”

She reached across to close her fingers around mine. Our two hands, so much alike. Her gold wedding ring bit into my knuckle.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’ll be with you. I won’t let it go too far. I’ll be in complete control.”

I snatched my hand away so quickly that hers was left suspended above the table.

“Let me think it over.” I rose, meaning to rinse my glass and tuck it into the dishwasher, but instead I plunked it down hard on the counter.

“Rachel, let’s talk—”

“Not now. You need to get some rest.”

She sighed, a faint exhalation. “I’ll go up in a minute.”

I fled down the hall, up the stairs, into the cocoon of my room.

When I slept I entered another world, of shadows and far-off voices. Kathy, my imaginary childhood friend, took me by the hand and led me first into a tangled wood, then across a blazing desert, then down a street to a rain-swept playground where a jungle gym loomed like a skeletal monster, its empty swings creaking in the wind as a child cried somewhere nearby.

Chapter Seventeen

“I miss you,” Luke said, his breath against my ear. “How long do we have to wait?”

We were in his office at lunch time, with the door closed. Tucked into a corner, we couldn’t be glimpsed even through the window. He pressed his mouth to mine and I wrapped my arms around him, pulling him closer, as close as he could get, not close enough.

A long moment later I broke the kiss, gasping. “Patients,” I said.

He nuzzled my neck. “I don’t think I’ve got enough patience to last.”

I laughed. “I meant the four-footed type. It’s almost time.”

Groaning, he stepped back, ran his fingers through his sandy hair and rubbed a hand across his mouth. “How much longer is this going to go on?”

I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes for a second, giving in to the fantasy of going home with him now, this minute, staying in bed with him until we were both exhausted and sated. 

Opening my eyes, I met his steady gaze. “She seems to need us home with her every night. I think this episode with her heart really spooked her.” I paused. “Last night she said she’s updating her will.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Luke said, half-laughing, half-amazed. He shook his head. “Rachel—”

“What?” I didn’t understand his reaction.

“She’s playing on your guilt feelings. She’s also trying to keep you away from me, but what really worries me is the way she’s twisting your emotions.”

I sat on a corner of his desk and rubbed at my eyes. So tired. I’d been awakened over and over during the night by my own dreams. “Don’t you think I can see that?”

“Then why are you letting her do it?”

“I think she’s genuinely afraid of dying.”

“Even when she knows damned well she’s not?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with what’s rational. She knows something’s wrong with her heart, and I think it terrifies her, even if she won’t admit it.”

“I’m still not convinced she has a real problem. I’d have to see her sonogram and EKG before I’d believe it.”

“I talked to her doctor, Luke. He confirmed what she told Michelle and me. It’s not life-threatening at this point, but it’s real, and her condition has deteriorated in the last few months.”

Luke let out a long breath and stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the floor.

Before he could say anything, I went on, “She’s got this look in her eyes all the time. I don’t know how to describe it. Haunted, maybe. She looks haunted and scared.”

“Haunted by what?”

Avoiding his gaze, I rose and moved to the window. In the parking lot an elderly man struggled to keep his black poodle from getting at the cat carrier a young blond woman had just pulled from her car.

I hadn’t yet told Luke what Mother revealed about her family—my family—the night she fell ill. Suicides. Insanity. My heritage, my bloodline. I wasn’t sure I’d ever want him to know. But if I kept something like that from him, what right did I have to let him get deeply involved with me?

I had to answer his question. What haunted my mother? I turned back to him, shrugging. “My father’s death, I guess. She’s tried hard to put it out of her mind, and I keep bringing it up.”

“Rachel, why are you so ready to blame yourself? Maybe she’s worried that you’re going to find out what she’s hiding from you. Maybe she knows you’ve uncovered her sick little mind control game—”

“Luke!” I pressed my fingers to my temples. The last thing I needed was a tension headache just as I started afternoon appointments. “I don’t want to talk about this now.”

“When will we talk about it? I can’t even get you alone these days unless I drag you into my office.”

“I’m telling you I can’t take any more of this right now.”

“Okay, okay.” He lay a hand along my cheek, his skin warm on mine. “Look, it’s you I’m worried about. I don’t give a damn about your mother’s emotional life, or her health either, for that matter.”

Stepping away from his touch, I said, “I think I need to find out more about my father’s death. About the accident. I’ve got a feeling—I don’t know, maybe it’ll jog my memory.”

“How can you find out about it? You don’t have any relatives to ask, do you?”

“No. Newspaper stories, maybe.”

“Stories more than twenty years—”

A knock on the door, then Megan’s high musical voice. “Dr. Campbell? Dr. Goddard? Your two o’clocks are both here.”

***

Day after day passed in a haze of rainless heat. High temperature records were broken, health advisories were issued. Under the relentless sun the air grew murky with pollution and humidity, and weeds along the roads yellowed and died in the dust-dry earth. I moved the sprinklers around the yard according to Mother’s instructions, and they swirled and sprayed for hours each morning, keeping her plants alive.

The stifling air of early evening kept us indoors. Unable to putter among her flowers, Mother decided to revive our old habit of reading aloud to each other for an hour after dinner. With an enthusiasm that seemed to baffle Michelle, she compiled a list of possible books, presented it to us at dinner one night, and urged us to contribute our own ideas.

“Mother,” Michelle said, “I have work to do in the evenings.” She frowned at the list in her hand.

“Oh. Of course.” A sudden drawing-back, a quickly hidden hurt. Usually I was the one who caused Mother to react that way. With thumb and index finger she lifted the sheet of white paper from Michelle’s hand. “Well, then, Rachel and I could read together. Rachel?”

“Sure. Let me see what you’ve come up with.”

Michelle glanced from Mother to me, a frown etched between her eyes, her mouth puckering into petulance. “I guess I could spare a little time,” she said.

“Oh, wonderful!” Mother beamed and reached to squeeze her hand.

So we gathered in the den after dinner, and I sat staring up at the proud-Mother wall while she began reading
Rebecca
. Except for the book choice, I felt like a child again, enclosed in our tight little circle, sheltered from the world of strangers outside.

***

Mother never mentioned the terrible memories I’d forced her to talk about on the night of July 4. Instead of withdrawing from me as I’d expected her to, she seemed to need my company more and more. She discussed the news with me, asked my opinion about relocating her office when her lease was up. She talked to me about my job and my rehab animals as if she truly cared.

This closeness was something I’d yearned for all my life, but it came too suddenly, and too late, to feel natural. I gave her my company and attention but kept up my guard, torn between love and concern for my mother and suspicion that she was simply trying to silence my questions.

***

My own reflection could mesmerize me. I sat at my dresser and studied my face, picking out this feature and that, proving and disproving, arriving at conclusions only to throw everything into doubt again.

Memories came in snatches or in long threads that stretched thin and refused to expand. A musky perfume floating through darkened rooms. A narrow street where half a dozen squealing children hurled snowballs. A woman who looked like Mother braiding my long red hair while I watched her sorrowful face in a mirror.

One Sunday morning as Mother stood at the living room window in a blaze of sun, I suddenly saw her at another window, in another time, holding a scorched African violet up for examination.

“It died from too much sun,” I blurted, remembering the drooping, brown-edged leaves.

Mother’s eyebrows went up. “What?”

“That African violet you used to have,” I fumbled, sensing the wrongness of what I said but unable to pin it down. “It was in a sunny window, it got too much sun.”

“Rachel,” she said, with a slight bemused smile, “I’ve never had African violets.”

The picture was still as vivid as the splash of light on the windowsill. But no, it wasn’t Mother. It was a woman who looked like her. The woman who’d braided my hair.

“Oh.” My voice came out faint, and I made an effort to raise it to a natural level. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

I turned away from her sudden scrutiny, and smothered the inexplicable panic that rose in me.

***

During those long weeks of July, Mother suggested three more times that I let her hypnotize me. She wasn’t going to let it drop. It was important to her.

“Why don’t you let her do it?” Luke said.

Astonished, I faced him. “Are you serious?”

We were in the National Zoo’s Amazonia building, a miniature tropical rainforest where monkeys, birds, and a shy sloth inhabited soaring trees under a glass roof. On our first date in three weeks, Luke had wanted time alone with me in his apartment, but I balked at the intimacy we both craved. It was one more form of pressure, a demand I couldn’t handle. Disappointed and baffled, he gave in when I suggested the first thing that came to mind, an outing where we’d be surrounded by a multitude of strangers.

I wanted to unwind away from home, put Mother out of my head. But she was all we talked about on the drive into D.C., and we went on talking about her among the camera-flashing Japanese tourists who crowded the narrow path through the exhibit.

“Yes,” Luke said, “I’m ser—” A screech erupted from the scarlet macaw in a nearby tree, making Luke break off and wince. “Yes, I’m serious,” he said when the bird fell silent. “I’ve been reading about hypnosis. If you consciously decide not to go into a trance, nobody can put you under. Right?”

A knot of half a dozen Japanese children squealed and pointed at two black monkeys leaping in the branches overhead. Safely out of reach, the monkeys settled to chewing on apple chunks and returned the children’s interest with indifference.

Luke and I edged past the kids and stopped at a railing overlooking the small artificial river.

“What’s your point?” I said. “Why would I let her try to hypnotize me, then not let her put me under?” 

“Pretend to be hypnotized. Find out what she’ll say to you when she thinks you’re under her control.”

I looked down at catfish three feet long. Their plump yellow-sided bodies floated lazily, their whiskers drifted back like loose hair in a breeze.

“I’m not sure I could do that,” I said at last. “I don’t know if I’m that good an actress.”

The children, impatient for a turn at the rail, jostled us and we walked on.

“Listen,” Luke said, his voice low. “What have you been doing all your life but acting, to please her?”

Two feet from my head a white-billed hummingbird hung in the air at a feeder, furiously beating its wings just to stay in one place.

“It seems so bizarre,” I said.

“It could tell you a lot.”

I didn’t answer. We moved along the path, stopped to watch blue and red tanagers flitting among branches at the far end of the exhibit, then left the mini-rainforest through heavy double doors.

The air outside was hotter than that inside, and almost as humid. “I’ll bet it’s a hundred degrees already,” Luke said.

***

In the Mane Restaurant, a utilitarian cafeteria redeemed by wide windows overlooking a wooded trail, we had a lunch of cheese sandwiches and iced tea. Luke made small talk, giving me time to get back to the subject that I knew occupied his thoughts as much as mine.

“What would it prove?” I said, breaking off a discussion of the weather. “If I did what you suggested.”

He glanced at the couples and children around us, then leaned forward across the table and spoke quietly. “It’d prove she’s used hypnosis to control your memories.”

“It seems so deceitful,” I whispered. “Dishonest.”

“She’s not entitled to honesty. If she’s done what you think she has, then what the hell do you owe her?”

I stirred my tea, twirling the straw around and around in the tall paper cup. “I owe her my life, my education, everything I’ve been able to do.”

He sat back in his chair, threw up his hands, attracting startled glances from the young couple at the next table. “Okay. I won’t say another word about it.”

He picked up his sandwich and started eating methodically. I gazed out the window. How unconnected the murky past seemed to this bright hot day, the sun slanting in across our table, the trees shaking their heads in the breeze.

I lifted my iced tea to my lips, but set it down again without drinking. When I leaned toward him, he sat forward, waiting for me to speak.

“I’d have to be really vigilant,” I said. “She might catch on that I’m pretending, or she might be able to put me under whether I want her to or not.”

Luke considered this, then sighed. “If you really think you couldn’t control it, then you’d better not mess around with it. You don’t want her getting into your head like that.”

Could I do it? If I pulled it off, I might find out for certain whether Mother was capable of the stunning deviousness I suspected. I might defeat her control once and for all.

I said, “If I do decide to try it, I could tape the whole thing. Hide a tape recorder ahead of time. Then I’d know for sure what she did. What she said to me. I’d have the proof.”