Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

“If somebody else was throwing it away? Yeah.”

Maddox kept at him, his friends too, trying to shake something else out of them, but the story held up. Maddox took names and told the kid he was impounding the bike and let them all go with a warning.

He walked the bike back up the sidewalk along Main, trying to figure out what Sinclair’s ride was doing hidden or thrown down by the side of the bridge. He walked it around to the dirt lot behind the station, wondering where to park it while he figured things out. A voice from the back steps called to him.

“You Maddox?”

Maddox looked up at the trooper leaning out of the back door in his regulation summer duty uniform: wide-brimmed Mountie hat, straight-leg slacks, combat boots, a badge over the two pens in his left chest pocket, a small ceremonial silver whistle buttoned over the right.

“Yeah,” said Maddox.

“Trooper Hess to have a word with you.”

Maddox leaned the bike against the wooden slat fence behind the extra patrol car and followed the trooper inside to the old chief’s office.

Hess stood behind the empty desk scratching at the buzzed back of his neck. He wore a ribbed rayon shirt tucked into wrinkle-guard dress pants with a braided brown belt: conservative and professional, with a hint of the sportsman. His chest was jacked, but it was the arms that impressed, maybe a little too much. He had invested a lot of gym hours in those biceps. Like a woman with a big chest, they were his defining feature.

Maddox remembered his first look at the guy as he emerged from his unmarked to eyeball the station, Hess’s expression saying, They got me off the lat machine for this?

“So,” Hess said, dropping his hands into his pleated pockets and letting them run around in there. “What’s your take?”

“On Valerie Ripsbaugh?”

“We already know our doer isn’t a woman. He’s a man, right-handed, medium height, between five eight and six foot. Size ten and a half sneaker.”

This was Hess showing off, as with his arms. He liked to dazzle. Maddox said, “Okay.”

“Talk to me about the husband. Struck me as a little slow on the uptake.”

“Inward, maybe. He’s a town guy. His entire world’s about this small.”

“Any trouble from him you know of?”

“Less than none. He’s the town caretaker. Looks after this place like it’s his dying father.”

Hess nodded, arms crossed tight. “He’s not answering his radio, and we already tried his pager. Any idea where we can find him this time of day?”

“You’re bringing him in?”

Hess nodded, all confidence. “Yeah, we’re bringing him in.”

Maddox still could not believe it. He had thought nothing of Ripsbaugh leaving Kitner’s shop early, muttering good-bye as he moved through the door. “I don’t know. The dump, maybe.”

“You’re shocked.”

“I’m surprised, yeah. Ripsbaugh. Tearing someone apart like that. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Overkill. Know what that means? That it was very, very personal. A revenge killing. You ever been married?”

“No.”

“There’s nothing shocking about it. Especially with the quiet ones. Like yourself.” Hess smiled, feeling magnanimous. “You’re headed home? Do us a favor and drop Mrs. Ripsbaugh at her house. She’s free to go.”

Val stared at the floor of Maddox’s patrol car, sitting lumpily next to him, sinking into herself and her baggy clothes. She had always had what Maddox’s mother called “natural mascara,” a darkness tracing the wing-shaped contours of her eyes, different from the bruised quality of her lids. In high school it had been the hallmark of Val’s small-town exoticism.

Now it looked as though that mascara was starting to run. Maddox leaned on the gas pedal, the station receding on their right. He wanted to get her home fast. Because he was uncomfortable, and because he wanted to deliver this news to Pinty.

“Can you smell it on me?” she said.

“Smell what?” said Maddox.

She plucked at the skin on the back of her left hand, pinching herself. “The shit. I scrub myself raw, but the stink from his septic business — it’s in my skin now. It’s in my hair. Part of me. I can’t get it out.” Twisting at the back of her hand now, squeezing her flesh white.

“Val,” said Maddox, passing her brother’s place at the corner of Number 8 Road. “Things could still work out. Nothing’s settled yet.”

“Look at me, Donny. Look what I’ve become.” She raised her hands as though something warm and sticky had spilled in her lap. “ Look at me.”

She was weeping, and Maddox didn’t know what to do. He wanted to get her home, but she was choking on her sobs, dissolving in the seat next to him, and he couldn’t drive. He turned in fast at the Gulp, parking among the losing scratch tickets in back.

She cried hard into her hands, then pulled them away, reading something in the wetness on her palms. “He saved the letters,” she said. “He did care, I knew he did. It meant something.” Her hands closed into fists, and she turned to Maddox with sudden sobriety. “He helped me. When I met him, I was at my heaviest. The backaches — I was miserable. He turned it all around. He changed me, he delivered me. And, he was erudite. We talked. Really talked — about nature, about the stars. He knew so much. He had lived in California. He wanted me to go away with him. Everything he said to me was ice cream. I felt so good with him. I felt special.”

That last word twisted in Maddox’s side. He thought back to the Val Sinclair he had known in school: not beautiful, exactly, but different, mysterious somehow, with burgundy lips and licorice black hair and a hint of foreign blood in her winged eyes. Now the fullness of her face, the tired tangle of her hair, the coarse oatmeal texture of her skin — it was as though the town had exacted its revenge by blunting her features over time, like the Cold River’s current dulling its bed stones.

How shocked he had been, returning home from college that first summer, to learn that Valerie Sinclair had become Mrs. Kane Ripsbaugh. A girl who had once spoken of nothing other than her desire to escape Black Falls. Her marrying the town caretaker, a man twenty years her senior, had hit Maddox with the force of a classmate’s suicide. It made no sense. It never occurred to him at the time how bad her home life must have been — any family that could have produced Dill Sinclair...

Val was really pinching the skin on the back of her hand now, twisting it like the key to a windup toy. “Did they...?” she said, looking first at Maddox, then down to the floorboard again. “Did you see the letters?”

“I saw one.”

“Some of them,” she said, “they were personal, maybe a little...”

Her humiliation was nearly complete, and for Maddox, almost unbearable. “Yeah,” he said.

A smile of intense pain. Her palms came up to blind her eyes. “He made me feel something,” she said, trying to explain. “Something I hadn’t felt in a long time...”

She crumpled again, shuddering and crying there next to him. Maddox was searching for something — anything — to say when she turned toward him and began sobbing hard into his shoulder. He held her lightly as her chest heaved against him with bucking gasps, and he began to worry that someone from the store would come around back and mistake this clinch for something more than it was.

So concerned was he that he misconstrued her nuzzling sniffles for progress, an indication that she was settling down. It was several more moments before he realized she was in fact nibbling at his neck with light, wet tastes of his skin just above his collar, her kisses rising up to the jawline beneath his ear.