The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (19 page)

“Can I trust you? Will you be a good girl and do what I say?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Promise you’ll be good?”

“I promise.” A little girl’s voice.

“After you wake up, you will do what you promised to do. But you won’t remember what we talked about while you were under hypnosis. You will act on it but you won’t remember what we talked about. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to count backward from five. As I count you’ll become more and more awake, and when I reach the number one you’ll open your eyes. You’ll be awake but you’ll feel sleepy and ready for bed.”

She started counting.

I listened to the sounds of Mother putting me to bed as if I were a child, saying good night and sleep well. Then the tape held only silence.

My eyes shifted to the glass next to the tape player and I reached for the water, suddenly feeling a desperate thirst. When I lifted the glass my hand shook so violently that Luke had to steady it while I drank. He placed the glass back on the table and wiped a drop from my chin with a fingertip.

Crumbling, sliding toward an abyss, I let him catch me and pull me into his arms.

“I could kill her,” he muttered against my hair. “I swear to God I could kill her.”

Chapter Nineteen

Luke sat on the couch and listened, his eyes following me as I prowled the room. When shock had worn off, feeling had flooded back, pushing me to my feet, propelling me into motion.

“How could she do this to me? I always knew she was controlling, but my God, something like this—” I shook my head. “How could she believe she’s got the right? Nobody has the right—Oh, God.”

I stopped and covered my face until I rid myself of the urge to cry. No more tears. No more.

“If I were still a child, she could claim she’s just protecting me.” I marched to the window, looked out at the streetlights blinking on along Leesburg Pike, turned and started back across the room.

“But I’m almost twenty-seven years old. She’s not protecting me. She’s protecting herself.” Bewilderment, anger, hurt warred in me. “But from what?”

I pivoted, took a dozen steps, spun around. “Why does she have to control me to protect herself? And why is she afraid of you? She’s always been afraid of anybody getting too close to us. I always thought she just wanted to keep us to herself, we were all she had, but she’s afraid of anybody getting too close and asking too many questions, that’s so clear to me now.”

I balled my right hand into a fist and rapped it against my left palm. “She’s keeping something from me, and I feel like it’s something I already know but I can’t get my mind around it—”

Waves of pain, rage, fear knocked me in one direction after another, leaving me exhausted. I sank onto the couch, head in hands, and came to rest at last in a cold, still place deep inside myself.

We sat in silence until Luke asked, “What are you going to do about all this?” 

I’d already decided. “First, I’m going to find out what I can about my father’s death.”

“How?”

“The Library of Congress has old newspapers on file from all over the country. If he died the way she says he did, the Minneapolis paper would’ve had a story. I can go tomorrow, it’s my day off.” I glanced at my watch. “God, look at the time. She’ll think I’m with you.”

As I rose, Luke half-laughed, a sound of consternation rather than amusement. “You are with me. And what the hell does it matter what she thinks?”

I grabbed my purse from the chair where I’d dropped it earlier and swung the strap over my shoulder. “I have to get home.”

He jumped up. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I started for the door but he blocked my way. “You’re not going back to that house. Rachel, the woman’s dangerous.”

Looking into his dark blue eyes, I felt cracks snaking across the wall of my resolve. I laid a hand along his cheek. “Don’t worry about me. She can’t do anything to me now.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Please don’t go.”

“I have to. I don’t want her to get suspicious yet. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

I pressed my mouth to his in a quick kiss and left him standing in his doorway.

***

That night I looked directly into Mother’s eyes and lied so convincingly that she believed my story of an emergency at the clinic without hesitation. She was the one who gave herself away. The apprehension that tensed her body dissolved in an instant and I saw her relax like a taut string unloosed.

By clearing my mind and stamping down on any thought that threatened to intrude, I got through dinner with Mother and Michelle. The next morning I stayed in my room, supposedly sleeping late, until I heard them leave.

***

Although I’d lived in the Washington area most of my life, I’d never used the Library of Congress. In middle school I’d been inside the Main Reading Room and Great Hall on a class excursion, a midwinter traipse through all the imposing government buildings, led by a teacher determined that we’d be at least as well acquainted with the federal city as tourists were.

I remembered feeling as if I’d entered a different century when I walked into the Jefferson Building, with its soaring ceilings, statuary and mosaics, stained glass and murals. But the Madison Building, which housed the periodicals reading room, was a big white box that sat firmly in the late twentieth century and had none of the Jefferson’s beauty and grandeur.

Walking between rectangular marble columns to the door, I warned myself not to expect old newspapers to yield many answers. The story about the accident might not tell me anything new about my father and mother.

But if nothing else, the story would certainly hold one bit of information: names of survivors. Maybe I would find a picture of us all together, the young family whose father had been tragically lost. I would surely be mentioned in the story itself. I needed to see some proof of my place among the Goddards. 

When I entered the lobby I stood for a moment letting my startled skin adjust to air that was twenty degrees cooler than outside. I took a deep breath and willed myself to go about this task in my normal methodical way, as if I were researching a fine point of veterinary medicine in order to help a patient.

A uniformed young man looked in my purse as I passed through the metal detector. He directed me down the hall to the periodicals room.

It was as starkly utilitarian as any neighborhood library, with bright fluorescent lighting, pink-gray industrial carpet that needed shampooing, dark paneled walls, and a couple of lackluster dracaena plants by the main desk. It was hard to believe this impersonal place held clues to my family’s very personal secrets.

While the desk clerk instructed me on the procedure for obtaining materials, a voice in the back of my mind kept whispering that I should just leave it alone, there was nothing to discover except the source of my mother’s heartbreak, something I already knew. The voice was Mother’s, silky and persistent, firmly planted and ineradicable. I couldn’t shut it up, but I wouldn’t listen to it.

The clerk directed me to one of a dozen stations where reading machines were set up, and I sat down to fill out a request slip for microfilm.

I didn’t know the date of the accident. But I knew it happened when Michelle was two and I was five, and Mother had said it happened in a snow storm, which could mean anytime from November through February. I requested four months of the Minneapolis Tribune. Retrieval time, the clerk said, could be as long as forty-five minutes.

I sat at my desk and waited. All around me in the hushed room, people were engrossed by the past events appearing before them. The machines made little whirring noises as they moved the microfilm from page to page. Footsteps scuffed on the carpet. Rising and walking around, I saw that some machines could make copies from the microfilm, and I decided I would do that when I found what I wanted.

I pulled tissues from my shoulderbag and wiped my clammy palms and the line of moisture above my lip and wished I had something to read. That struck me as funny—writing, writing everywhere, but not a word to read—and I almost laughed.

I didn’t think I could bear the waiting.

After twenty-five minutes a young man with a dark ponytail appeared at my side, rousing me out of formless thoughts. The shallow tray he set on the desk contained four cardboard boxes. “Do you know how to use the machine?” he asked quietly.

I shook my head no. He dragged a chair from an unused desk and sat elbow to elbow with me, instructing me in a monotone, an
I’ve said this a million times
voice. With the first roll of microfilm in the machine, he stood, moved his chair, and left me.

I sat, momentarily paralyzed. Headlines on the screen blurred into black smudges.
All right,
I told myself.
Do it.

Taking a deep breath, I began.

The days rolled past. I carefully examined every page, catching my breath each time I came across an auto accident story. The man at the desk to my left kept turning to look at me, and I sensed his irritation with my tiny noises. I forced myself to stay silent.

When I finished the month of November I slipped the roll back into its box with a mixture of disappointment and relief that I hadn’t found the story. 

December had plenty of news about weather. Minnesota seemed to have snow almost every day. My attention was caught by a photo of two small children building a snowman, and I stared at it, lost in a half-memory. Snow, snowmen, snowballs, a sled. Flying downhill on a blue sled, breathless with the thrill of it, but not alone, someone strong was with me, holding me, protecting me. My father?

The image wouldn’t gel. I was left with a piercing sense of loss.

I moved the microfilm forward, skimming over local news that meant nothing to me and national and international stories that meant little more. A politician was in trouble over a woman, a Renoir was stolen in Brooklyn. Violence in Angola and Northern Ireland. Nelson Rockefeller was sworn in as Vice President, to serve with Gerald Ford.

When the three-column photo of mangled vehicles popped into view, I somehow knew instantly that I’d found what I was looking for. The picture and the story it illustrated were at the bottom of the Sunday, December 22, front page under a big headline:
Five Die in Snowstorm Crash
.

Heart racing, I skimmed the beginning of the story for a familiar name, and found it in the second paragraph. Michael J. Goddard Jr. I paused, released the breath I’d been holding, and felt the stare of the man next to me.

I went back to the first line and started reading.

I read the second paragraph again, then again, but still it made no sense to me. The words separated into individual letters that seemed to spin apart.

I blinked, refocused, and read on.

My mind refused to absorb what I saw in front of me. Michelle slept in the room across the hall from me, she sat across the table from me at breakfast and dinner. She hadn’t died in a car wreck at the age of two.

Michelle Theresa was the couple’s only child.

The story wasn’t real. I was imagining it. I’d been sitting here waiting too long, anticipating, worrying. I closed my eyes, opened them. The words sat heavy and black on the screen.

I was dreaming, then. I gave my head a rough shake, trying to pull myself out of the nightmare, and was dimly conscious of the man beside me turning his whole body in my direction. His movement released a faint odor of perspiration.

I leaned my face into my hands. A rational explanation had to exist for what I was reading. There was a rational explanation for everything.

With fumbling fingers I pressed a button on the machine, zipping through to page 10 and the rest of the story. I found a picture of the baker Lund with his wife on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and a school photo of little Marcy Linda Bergman, smiling gap-toothed, her dark hair in two long braids tied with ribbon bows. Between them was a studio portrait of my mother and father, the kind of formal posed picture a man keeps on his desk at work. I’d seen this photo before, in one of the albums Mother kept hidden. On Mother’s lap was a smiling child, little more than a baby. Pale wispy hair curled over the child’s head and onto her cheeks. Her eyes were big in her small face, and full of joy. I read the names under the picture: Michael, Judith, and Michelle Goddard.

Transfixed, I sat for a long time, waiting for the flat grainy image to give back a spark of revelation that never came. I leaned closer and tried to examine the face of the little girl. The picture separated into a field of shaded dots, it wouldn’t hold together, wouldn’t allow inspection.