Mary Clark: Moonlight Becomes You

The dining room and living room both were orderly. Neil studied the vase of roses on the coffee table, wondering who had sent them. Probably Liam Payne, he thought. She mentioned him at dinner. Neil had only met Payne a few times, but he could have been the guy Neil had glimpsed leaving Maggie’s Friday night.

Upstairs, the smallest bedroom contained the evidence of Maggie’s packing up her stepmother’s personal effects: Neatly tagged bags of clothing, purses, lingerie, and shoes were piled there. The bedroom she had used initially was the same as when they had fixed the window locks.

They went into the master bedroom. “Looks to me as though Maggie planned to stay in here last night,” Robert Stephens observed, pointing to the freshly made bed.

Without answering, Neil started upstairs to the studio. The light that he had noticed last night, when he parked outside waiting for Maggie to come home, was still on, pointed toward a picture tacked to the bulletin board. Neil remembered that the picture had not been there Sunday afternoon.

He started across the room, then stopped. A chill ran through his body.

On the refectory table, in the glare of the spotlight, he saw two metal bells.

As surely as he knew that night followed day, he knew that these were two of the bells that Earl Bateman had used in his infamous lecture at Latham Manor-the bells that had been whisked away, never to be seen again.

Her hand ached and was covered with dirt. She had continued to move the string steadily back and forth, hoping to keep the tube open, but now no more dirt seemed to be falling through the air vent. The water had stopped trickling down, too.

She couldn’t hear the beating of the rain anymore either. Was it getting colder, or was it just that the dampness inside the coffin was so chilling? she wondered.

But she was actually starting to feel warm, even too warm.

I’m getting a fever, Maggie thought drowsily.

She was so lightheaded. The vent is sealed, she thought. There can’t be much oxygen left.

“One… two… three.. . four …”

Now she was whispering the numbers aloud, trying to force herself to stay awake, to start calling out again when she reached five hundred.

What difference would it make if he came back and heard her? What more could he do than he already had done?

Her hand was still flexing and unflexing.

“Make a fist,” she said aloud. “All right, relax.” That’s what the nurses had told her to do when she was little and they were taking a blood sample. “This is so you’ll get all better, Maggie,” they had said.

After Nuala came to live with them, she had stopped being afraid of needles. Nuala had made a game of it. “We’ll get that out of the way first and then we’ll go to a movie,” she would say.

Maggie thought of her equipment bag. What had he done with it? Her cameras. They were her friends. There were so many pictures she had planned to take with them. She had so many ideas she wanted to try out, so many things she wanted to shoot.

“One hundred fifty… one hundred fifty-one.. .”

She had known Neil was sitting behind her that day in the theater. He had coughed a couple of times, a peculiar little dry cough that she had recognized. She knew he had to have seen her, to have seen her unhappiness.

I made it a test, she thought. If you love me, you will understandthat I need you-that w as the thought she had willed him to hear and to act on.

But when the film ended and the lights went on, he was gone.

“I’ll give you a second chance, Neil,” she said aloud now. “If you love me, you’ll know that I need you, and you’ll find me.”

“Four hundred ninety-nine, five hundred!”

She began to cry out for help again. This time she screamed until her throat was raw. There was no use trying to save her voice, she decided. Time was running out.

Still, resolutely she began to count again. “One… two … three.. .”

Her hand moved in cadence with the count: flex… unflex.. .

With every fiber of her being, she fought the urge to sleep. She knew that if she slept, she would not wake up again.

While his father started downstairs to phone police headquarters, Neil hesitated for a moment, studying the picture he had found pinned to the bulletin board.

The inscription on the back read, “Squire Moore Birthday Anniversary. September 20th. Earl Moore Bateman-Nuala Moore-Liam Moore Payne.”

Neil studied Bateman’s face. The face of a liar, he thought bitterly. The last man to see Maggie alive.

Aghast at what he feared his subconscious was telling him, he dropped the picture next to the bells and hurried to join his father.

“I have Chief Brower on the phone,” Robert Stephens said. “He wants to talk to you. I told him about the bells.”

Brower came immediately to the point. “If these are two of the same bells Bateman claims are locked in the storeroom of his museum, we can bring him in for interrogation. The problem is that he’ll know enough to refuse to answer questions, and he’ll call a lawyer, and everything will get delayed. Our best bet is to confront him with the bells and hope that he’ll say something to give himself away. When we talked to him about them this morning, he went berserk.”

“I intend to be there when you confront him,” Neil said.

“I have a squad car watching the museum from the funeral parlor parking lot. If Bateman leaves the premises, he’ll be followed.”

“We’re on our way,” Neil said, then added, “Wait a minute, Chief, I know you’ve been questioning some teenagers. Did you find out anything from them?”

He heard the hesitation in Chief Brower’s voice before he answered. “Something that I’m not sure I believe. We’ll talk about it when I see you.”

“I want to hear about it now,” Neil snapped.

“Then please understand we don’t necessarily credit the story. But one of the kids admitted that they were in the vicinity of the museum last night, or more specifically that they were across the street from it. At about ten o’clock that kid claims he saw two vehicles-a hearse, followed by a station wagon-drive out of the museum’s parking lot.”

“What kind of station wagon?” Neil asked urgently.

“The kid isn’t sure of the make, but he swears it was black.”

“Take it easy, Earl,” Liam Moore Payne said for the tenth time in an hour.

“No, I won’t take it easy. I know how much this family has ridiculed the Batemans, and me especially.”

“No one’s ridiculed you, Earl,” Liam said soothingly.

They were sitting in the office of the museum. It was nearly five o’clock, and the old-fashioned globed chandelier spread a murky glow over the room.

“Look,” Liam said, “you need a drink.”

“You mean you need a drink.”

Without answering, Liam got up, went to the cupboard over the sink, got out the scotch bottle and glasses, then the ice tray and a lemon from the refrigerator.

“Double scotch on the rocks, with a twist, coming up, for both of us,” he said.

Mollified, Earl waited until the drink was set in front of him, then said, “I’m glad you stopped by, Liam.”

“When you called, I could tell how upset you were. And, of course, I’m more than upset about Maggie’s disappearance.” He paused. “Earl, I’ve dated her casually over the last year or so. You know, I’d call and we’d go out for dinner when I was in New York. But that night at the Four Seasons, when I realized she’d left without saying a word to me, something happened.”