Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

“What?” Donny said.

“This morning. See, sometimes when I sign for my mother, people talk around me like I’m deaf too. To keep you from going after the Pails, he said, ‘If I can take it, you can too.’ Take what?”

“I can’t really get into it.”

“No, of course not. Because of how critical your part-time police work in Black Falls is. I’m sorry, Donny, but this is bullshit. It’s crap, this whole thing. Skinny cop-sluts coming out of your house in the middle of the day? Your truth-only pledge, which lets you dodge all the questions you don’t want to answer? That’s so convenient for you.”

“You have every right to be angry—”

“Stop agreeing with me!”

“I’ve been up front with you all along. I’ve said the whole time, once I sell this house—”

“You’re leaving, good-bye. I know it. I’m shrill.”

She had lost herself in this relationship, happily, purposefully, using it to escape from everything else in her life. Over these past few months she had felt herself growing in ways and at speeds beyond anything she had ever experienced.

Best of all, it was an affair. A beautiful secret. She had a man.

Now the fact that he had become so much in her life so fast scared her. He was the only good thing she had, and what would that mean once he went away?

She was pissed off, she was scared, and yet — she still wanted to believe him. “I don’t understand,” she said, “why everything has to be so undercover with you.”

His patient look vanished then. Almost like she had offended him somehow.

But bitching at him wasn’t going to get her anywhere. This much she had learned from her mother, from her parents’ divorce.

“I can’t do this right now,” she said. It was only dinner they had planned, because he was working an overnight. But still: saying this took great courage. “I can’t stay. Don’t you see?”

“Stay,” he said. “Stay and talk.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I need to think, or something.”

Huge and scary, walking away from him like that. She was punishing him, yes, but she was also, if he could see it, demanding respect. A drastic move, but not a deal breaker. Not a relationship ender.

She hoped.

As she drove off in her old Ford, gripping the steering wheel, this seemed like just a preview of coming attractions. How it was going to end between them for good. Which made Tracy realize, for the umpteenth time, just how far she had fallen for him.

“I kept the boys out of the pool today,” said Heavey, standing over Maddox’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you, it wasn’t easy.”

“I appreciate it,” said Maddox.

Maddox, in his cop shirt and cap, squatted over the impression in the dirt near the aboveground swimming pool. The rest of the backyard was grass, but the boys had worn out a track between the small skateboard ramps and the pool ladder.

Heavey said, “It’s a sneaker, right? Adult size.”

Heavey could tell by the outline of the tread, the way it was broken with notches. The center of the tread had not made an imprint. Heavey brought out his two pairs of sneakers, as well as Gayle’s walking shoes, to prove he wasn’t crazy.

With the sun going down, Maddox brightened the impression with his flashlight beam. Marks before and after it indicated tracks from the treeline along the right side of the yard to the rear of the house. Heavey said, “Ground dried up a bit today with the heat.”

“Muggy last night,” said Maddox, eyeing the edge of the forest. “No AC in my patrol car. Your house air-conditioned?”

“Not centrally. We’ve got a unit in the bedroom window. I keep it on Economy and it cycles on and off. Does the job.”

“It cycled on soon after you heard the shot?”

Heavey remembered now, how after going around checking on the boys and double-checking doors and windows, he had jumped when the box started up again in his bedroom. “In fact it did.”

Maddox straightened and took in the yard in the dying light. Heavey tried to see what he saw, with a visitor’s eyes. The alligator float drifting in the pool, the safety-netted trampoline, the T-ball stand, the swing set, the three matching electric cars.

“Guilty as charged,” Heavey said.

“What’s that?”

“Spoiling three boys. We tried not to, but I guess it’s having all our kids in one shot. Treating them equally.”

“I was just thinking how private it is here. The land between the homes.”

“Summer leaves make it more so. Why?”

“Nothing’s missing, right?”

“No, not a thing. The boys would know, believe me. If one doesn’t have something that the other two have, it’s Armageddon.”

Heavey followed Maddox’s eye back to the house. Three orange heads ducked below the sill of the upstairs den window. His boys loved to play spies.

Maddox moved toward the house alongside the approximate foot trail. Grass grew sparsely around the foundation, despite Heavey’s repeated attempts at seeding — something about drainage, too much sand in the soil.

Maddox used his beam on the ground. Right outside the boys’ bedroom, he illuminated what could have been the toe half of another imprint. As from someone standing on the balls of his feet.

Maddox sized up the window while Heavey, alarmed, watched his reflection in the glass. “All right if I?”

“Go ahead,” said Heavey, and Maddox cupped his hand over his eyes, careful not to touch the window as he peered inside. Heavey explained, “We knocked down a wall to make one big room so all three boys could be together.”

“Your boys sleep with a night-light?”

“A desk lamp, dimmed low.”

Maddox kept looking. “And you’re sure it was a woman you saw?”

“Yes. Back a couple of weeks ago now.”

“If it was night, how did you know it was a woman? Could you see her face?”

“Here’s what it was. I heard something outside, or maybe just felt something was wrong, one of those parental things. I came down to check on the boys, and as I open up the door, I can see something moving outside the window. Running away. I tripped over toys, getting to the window just in time to see her disappearing into the trees. Dressed all in black, thin, with long dark hair.”

“A black dress?”

“No. More like a sweat suit or something.”

“And sneakers.”

“Apparently.”

“But it could have been a man in a wig.”

“Well — Jesus Christ.”

“It couldn’t have been?”

Heavey became flustered, unable even to consider it. “What I saw was a woman.”

Maddox turned his flashlight beam at an angle to the window. He breathed onto the cooling glass, his warm breath revealing a few smudges and handprints. But all boy-sized.

“Neat trick,” said Heavey.

Maddox turned and ran his beam over the yard to the forest, inside which it was already night. “This person ran into the trees. Where?”

Heavey showed him. Maddox skimmed his flashlight beam over the ground, but browned pine needles and last autumn’s leaves obscured any footprints. “Boys play army in here,” said Heavey. “I don’t know if I’d build a house on the edge of a forest again. You have kids?”

Maddox shook his head, looking back at the house, then circling to the right, just inside the perimeter. He kept checking the house, maybe looking for a good view of it from the trees.

Heavey said, “Real sorry to hear about your mother. She had a fall?”

“She had been sick for a while. Her lungs. Medication made her unsteady.”

“Stairs?”

“Bathroom floor.”

“Most dangerous room in the house. I lost my mother two years ago this September, to viral pneumonia. I was the baby of the family. Your mother was insured?”