The Killing Moon: A Novel

last bit of sweetness out of an orange half. 'What?'

'To start with? You have a husband.'

She stared at him as though this was the most hurtful thing he could have said. 'I know I have a husband,' she said. 'I have fifteen years of bad decisions behind me. Of wasted life. This I know, Donny. That's what this is all about.'

'Don't you think you should talk to him about it?'

Now she squinted, as though trying, really trying, but ultimately failing to see the logic. 'Do you think someone who is part of the problem would accept such a radical solution?'

'Because, Val, if this is truly what you want?leaving town, starting over?you don't need me. You can go.'

'Bullshit. I do need you. It has to be you. Can't you see that?'

The inflated smile was gone now, supplanted by something like panic and dying pride. He didn't want to be too sharp with her, afraid she might go off flying around his driveway like a stuck balloon. 'No, I can't.'

'Can you ignore the fact that you owe me?'

'Owe you?' It took him only a second. 'The scholarship.'

'Yes, the scholarship. Yes, that is what I'm still talking about. Poor me, right? Still clinging to this?right? Do you know what it was like? To have this whole entire town against me, for who my father was, and my freak brother? No one wanted to waste that scholarship on me. They wanted to give it to their favorite son. Somebody who'd make something of himself, who'd amount to something. Not an art student from a bad family. What's she going to bring back to Black Falls?'

'Val.'

'But who wound up wasting it? Who was the one who squandered that opportunity?for the town, and yes, for himself? Only to bounce back here fifteen years later with nothing to show for it? That chance you burned, you let slip through your fingers? That was my life, Donny. That was mine. Do you deny that you could never have won that scholarship without Chief Pinty behind you? Without his hand on your shoulder? Can you deny that now?'

'It was one-tenth of a percentage point, Val.'

'You don't understand. You should want this. You should want the chance to make this right. As a man. This is why you came back here in the first place?don't you know that? This is why you came here. Righting a wrong is the closest thing we have to going back in time.'

Maddox thought of Ripsbaugh, what he had said about her needing a stone for her chain. 'I'm sorry, Val. I am. But I don't think I'm responsible for whatever?'

'Is this about the farm girl?'

'What did you say?'

'You heard me.' Her face was twisted now, as though a mask had been snatched away but the adhesive still stung. 'I came by here last night, or tried to. Saw a truck leave your garage. Saw her behind the wheel. You don't think she's a little young?'

'Have you been watching me?'

'Are you going away with her? Going to have babies?'

'Val.' The anger in her face chilled him. 'Jesus.'

She shoved hair off her face so that he would have an unfettered view of her contempt. 'You owe me, Donny Maddox. You owe me a chance.'

Maddox felt heat coming up his neck. How quickly compassion can turn to enmity when someone forces her mania on you. When someone assigns you responsibility for her own frustrations. This came to him in his driveway like a lesson.

Val said, 'You could live with yourself? Leaving me here? The same way you left your mother?'

He nodded, not in answer to her question, but in acknowledgment of her audacity in throwing down the kicker: the Queen of Spades with his mother's face on it. 'That's the way to hurt me, all right.'

'Hurt you? Hurt you? How can you be hurt? You're skating through life. Hands behind your back, gliding along.'

'Go home, Val.'

'And talk to my husband, right? Discuss? You think Kane knows me?'

'I'm sure no one knows you.'

'That's exactly right.'

She looked at him with the pity of a madwoman, throwing open her car door and driving away.

PART V

AN INSTRUMENT OF VENGEANCE

56

MADDOX

NEXT MORNING, WHILE waiting for his toast to come up, Maddox heard a thump. A goodly weighted noise, followed by a lesser bump, coming from the rear of his house. An unnatural thump.

The mind takes unexpecteds such as these and tries to shape them into something understandable, tries to assign them meaning.

The mental image Maddox assigned to this noise was that of Dillon Sinclair stepping onto his back deck.

So powerful was the force of this image?the black wig and clothes, the eyebrowless eyes?that Maddox moved to his closet, getting down his holster from the top shelf. He undid the trigger lock in what seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, then moved to the sliding glass door off the serving area.

He stepped out into the wet heat, his revolver at his side. No one on the deck, the backyard empty. He scanned the trees around the yard and listened for movement. Then he saw the twisted black lump on the deck.

Closer, he made out the velvet fringe of wings. A dead crow, eyes and beak still open, its neck broken.

Maddox looked at the near trees, his mind still jumping with implications?Who threw a dead bird onto my deck? ?until he realized that the thump, so solid and quick, had been this bird striking the window. The bump that followed was its dead body falling to the wood.

You want omens? he thought. We got omens. A town full of them. Deer running antler-first into your car. Crows flying full speed at your house. Nature dispatching its assassins.

He carried the revolver back inside and returned with a shovel from the garage, scooping up the dead crow and walking it to the deepest part of the yard, pitching it into the woods near the spot from where Sinclair had snapped the photograph of his house. Maddox stood there a few moments, the weight of the shovel in his hands, looking into the trees. He realized that the crow indeed had flown out of the woods to tell him something. Something important.

It was time to let Sinclair go. To give up needing to believe in his innocence. Maddox's fear of the thump reminded him that Dill was as capable of murder as any man. Whatever his father had put him through, whatever had happened to him in that house at the other end of the street: it happened to Sinclair, not to Maddox. Dill had made his own choices since then. The rest was up to Hess.

Maddox went back inside. He picked up the phone and called Tracy. 'Let's talk,' he said, inviting her for dinner. He could sense, in the way she so casually affected to resist him, the hurt infecting her like a cold. But she did agree to come over that evening, then hung up without saying another word.

Outside, the air was stifling, the humidity at its breaking point, and yet Maddox felt good suddenly. He felt a change in the wind.

On his way to Pinty's house, he came upon Ripsbaugh patching a pothole and pulled over. Branches waved overhead, leaves flippering behind the sweat-drenched man. 'About as bad as it gets, huh?' said Maddox through his rolled-down passenger window.

Ripsbaugh bent over to see inside, shovel in hand. 'You can taste the lightning coming.'

'Hey, about yesterday at the cemetery. My grand theories? Just forget about all that.'

'Yeah? How so?'

'It is what it is. I'm not sure why I had to try and make more of it.'

Ripsbaugh looked almost suspicious. Maddox worried that he had awakened a conspiracy theory. 'Just forget it altogether.'

'I have.'

Maddox thought about saying something to Ripsbaugh about Val's visit yesterday. But enough. Val had made her choices too, whether she could admit it or not. Maddox drove away, leaving Ripsbaugh leaning on the long handle of his shovel under the darkening sky.

Inside Pinty's house, a stillness hung like the moisture. On a desk inside the upstairs bedroom that used to be Pinty's home office, an oval-framed photograph showed a younger, bare-armed Pinty standing with his hand on the shoulder of his towheaded, ten-year-old son, Gregory.

Maddox sat down in Pinty's chair, holding the photograph. Every community, it seemed to him, lost its 'innocence' on a fairly regular basis, usually once per generation. Each new