Moonlight Becomes You

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 understand that I need you-that was 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.

86

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.”

87

“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.”

“What happened was that you ignored her because you were glad-handing everyone at the party.”

“No, what happened was that I realized what a jerk I’d been, and that if she told me to go to hell, I’d have crawled there on my hands and knees, trying to make it up to her. But besides making me realize how important Maggie has become to me, that night gives me hope that maybe she’s okay.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The fact that she walked out without saying a word when she was upset. God knows she’s had plenty of reason to be upset since the minute she arrived in Newport. Maybe she just needed to get away.”

“You seem to have forgotten that her car was found abandoned.”

“For all we know she got on a plane or train and left her car parked somewhere and someone stole it. Maybe even kids joyriding.”

“Don’t talk to me about joyriding kids,” Earl said. “My theory is those same kind of juvenile delinquents committed the theft here last night.”

The shrill sound of the doorbell startled both men. Earl Bateman answered his cousin’s unasked question: “I’m not expecting anyone,” he said, and then smiled brightly. “But then, maybe it’s the police telling me they found the casket.”

Neil and his father joined Chief Brower in the funeral museum parking lot, and the chief cautioned Neil to control his tongue and to leave the questioning to the police. The bells from Maggie’s house had been placed in a shoe box, which Detective Haggerty now carried unobtrusively under his arm.

When Earl took them to the museum office, Neil was startled to see Liam Payne sitting there. Suddenly