Wife of Moon

by Margaret Coel

  “What is it, Vicky?” Adam leaned so close that she could make out the faint strands of gray hidden in his black hair and the worry moving in his dark eyes.

  Vicky glanced away, letting her gaze rest on the chair where Loftus had sat, the back cushion still folded in on itself from his weight. The odor of smoke hung in the air. “Maybe Loftus knows where his wife is,” she said, bringing her eyes back to Adam’s. “Maybe he’s responsible for her disappearance, and all of this”—a wave toward the chair—“is just the image of a concerned husband looking for his wife.”

  “You wouldn’t be alone so much if . . .”

  “I know,” Vicky said. “I’ve been thinking about your offer.” A business proposal, that was all, and the reminder bit into her like a wooden splinter. “I don’t believe it’s a good idea, Adam.”

  “You’re wrong, Vicky. It’s the best idea either of us has had in a long time. Look,” he hurried on. “I have an appointment with a realtor to see some office space tomorrow, so I’m staying in town tonight, and I was hoping you were free. We can argue about it over dinner.”

  23

  A PHONE WAS ringing across the distance. Vicky felt paralyzed, frozen to the door, fixed in place by the icy glare of the man looming over her. If she could get to the phone, Eric Loftus would leave the office. It was John O’Malley calling. No, that wasn’t right. Adam was on the line. She had to pick up the phone and tell Adam . . .

  Vicky sat up in bed. She was shivering, her nightgown clinging to her like an extra skin. It was a half-second before she realized that the ringing phone was on the nightstand. She threw herself across the bunched pile of blankets and grabbed the receiver. The green iridescent numbers on the clock looked shimmery, like numbers blinking under water: 2:39.

  “Hello,” she managed.

  “Vicky? Is that you?”

  The familiar voice made a clean cut through the fog in her head. “T.J.? Where are you?” A sense of relief washed over her, then gave way to discomfort and dread.

  “I’ve got to see you right away,” he said. “I know what happened.”

  “What are you talking about?” Vicky could hear the sleep still in her voice.

  “I know who shot Denise.”

  Vicky swung her legs over the bed and pressed the receiver tight against her ear. She’d left a window open a little, and the cold draft blew across her bare legs. “Tell me what you know.”

  “In the mountains.” His voice cracked. “I went up into the mountains and fasted and prayed for a way out of all this. I kept hoping that it was somebody who’d come after me and killed Denise ’cause I wasn’t home. But all the time, I knew the truth. I just didn’t want to see it. But up in the mountains, it was like I could see Denise getting shot right in front of me. That’s what the spirits gave me, Vicky, the true thing, and I saw what I had to do. I have to tell the fed the truth, even if I don’t have the evidence. I gotta say what is true. It can’t be a secret any more. Oh, I know they don’t think I’m ever gonna tell the truth. They think I’m scared shitless, and truth is, Vicky, I was scared, but the spirits gave me strength, and it’s time everybody knows what happened.”

  “Listen to me, T.J.,” Vicky began. She could picture the man in her head, gaunt, dehydrated, hungry, and probably drinking. He was drinking. “You’re not making sense,” she said. “Try to eat something and get some sleep. We can go over this in the morning.”

  “No, you listen to me, Vicky.” The words came down the line like shots bursting out of a shotgun. “I know where the evidence is.” He coughed into the line. It sounded as if he was choking. “This is big, Vicky. I’m telling you, this is big. I gotta see you right away.”

  Vicky was quiet a moment. “Where are you?”

  “At the house.”

  “The house! It’s a crime scene, T.J. It’s still part of the investigation. The fed hasn’t released the house yet. Go to Vera’s, and I’ll meet you there.”

  “No! Leave Vera out of it. It’s enough that they killed my wife. You want them to kill Vera, too?”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Just get over here, Vicky, before I lose my nerve.”

  “You’re asking me to violate the crime scene, T.J.”

  “You’re my lawyer. You’ve got to help me. The fed’s trying to get me indicted for Denise’s murder. That’ll be just perfect. They kill Denise and I go to prison. You’ve got to come now, Vicky.”

  Vicky let a couple of seconds pass. She kept her eyes on the shimmering numbers. 2:45. “I’ll meet you in front of the house,” she said finally.

  She was about to hang up when he shouted, “Hurry. You have to hurry. They’re waiting for me somewhere. I know that’s what they’re doing, ’cause I know the truth.”

  Vicky cradled the receiver between her shoulder and ear. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said.

  The line went quiet, and for a moment she thought they’d been disconnected. Then T.J. said, “There was something else I saw in the mountains, Vicky. The moon was swirling through the sky, laughing and taunting me. Moon was daring me to tell the truth about Denise’s murder. It’s like Moon wants to kill me, too.”

  Vicky was on her feet, struggling to pull her robe around her shoulders. The man wasn’t thinking straight. “Listen to me, T.J.,” she said. “Just stay quiet and wait for me. I’ll hurry.”

  SHE WAS OUT of the apartment in ten minutes, driving north on 287, the moon white and bloated looking in the silver sky. She could imagine T.J. in the mountains—three days with a bottle of whiskey and no food or water, the moon hovering overhead, growing fatter each night. No wonder the man believed that the moon was taunting him.

  She’d stared at the phone a moment after she’d hung up, debating whether to let someone know where she was going. Adam, maybe. She’d discarded the idea. If they were partners, she could call and leave a message, but they weren’t partners. In the end, she’d headed out, she realized now, leaving nothing behind that might hint to her whereabouts.

  God, she was as crazy as T.J. She stared at the asphalt unfurling into the headlights. Off to meet a client in the middle of the night, a man who might be a murderer. She should have told him she’d see him at the office in the morning and hung up. Why hadn’t she? What was it in his voice—the desperation beyond the words—that had made her agree?

  Vicky turned onto Blue Sky Highway, eating up the miles, flashing past the little houses set back from the road, silent cubes washed in the moonlight, nothing but open spaces spreading through the darkness. Outside Ethete now, she took a dirt road on the right, then drove into T.J.’s yard and stopped close to the house, the front fender bumping against the yellow police tape stretched between stakes in the ground. The windows were dark. No sign of anyone around, and T.J.’s pickup was nowhere in sight. It occurred to her that this was a joke, a sick excuse to lure her out here perpetrated by a desperate man.

  Then, at the far edge of the yard—the pickup, merging with the elongated shadow of a cottonwood. She bumped across the hard ground and drew up at a right angle to the pickup, her headlights splayed across the cab. She got out and opened the passenger door. There was no one inside.

  She glanced around, jamming her hands into her coat pockets and shivering in the cold, half-expecting T.J. to appear, but nothing moved. Except for the high-pitched wail of a coyote in the distance, there was no sound. She got back into the Jeep and pulled a U-turn toward the police tape, then stopped, her fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, the engine humming into the void. T.J. must be inside.

  Inside, sitting in the dark. Frightened. She’d heard the fear running through his voice. He’d parked the pickup in the shadows, hard to see from the road. He might have fallen asleep, she thought, exhausted from spending days in the mountains.

  Vicky got out and stepped across the tape. The toe of her sneakers caught the edge, and she had to catch herself from falling. She walked up to the concrete stoop and knocked. A hollow sound, as if she w
ere knocking on a false door with nothing but space behind it. She started pounding with the heel of her fist. “T.J.,” she called. “Are you there?”

  The coyote cried again, closer now, as if the animal was circling it’s kill. Vicky tried the doorknob. It turned in her hand, a cold and inert ball of metal. Shoving the door open, she called out again: “T.J.?”

  Still no answer. She stepped inside and reached around, patting the wall until her fingers found the light switch. A dim light cascaded from a globe in the ceiling down over the center of the small living room. She stood perfectly still, struggling to make sense out of the chaos before her: overturned sofa and chairs, foam leaking from the cushions, lamps twisted and smashed on the vinyl floor, picture frames strewn about, shards of glass twinkling in the light.

  She started to back through the door when she saw something—the smallest movement—through the doorway to the kitchen in back. “T.J.,” she called again. God, he could be in the kitchen. He could be hurt.

  She flung the door back against the wall, willing the cold air to fill the room, and began picking her way through the chaos toward the kitchen. She stopped in the doorway and, leaning sideways, fumbled for another light switch. A fluorescent bulb on the ceiling flickered into life. Vicky stared at cabinet doors hanging open, drawers tossed upside down on the floor, utensils poking from beneath the sides, broken dishes and glasses scattered among the jumble of papers. Across the room, the back door stood open a few inches.

  In the far corner—something moving. Vicky stood frozen in place, her breath a hot coal in her throat. A cat meowed, and she exhaled as the cat skittered past, its fur like a whisper against her jeans. The animal fled through the back door, pushing it open another couple of inches.

  It was then that she noticed the glint of light outside. She stepped across the debris and peered past the door. Light from the kitchen flared out into the yard toward a small shed. The door was ajar, and inside she could see something small and metallic caught in the moonlight.

  She hesitated. She should go back to the Jeep, she told herself. Lock herself in and call the police on her cell. But an hour ago, T.J. had called her from the house. He wanted to tell her the truth about Denise’s murder. In that hour, something terrible had happened. T.J. was still here somewhere; she could sense his presence.

  She gripped the doorjamb and pushed off across the yard. She stepped into the shed, taking in at a glance the cartons stacked in neat rows on the shelves and hanging from a hook, the silver harness glinting in the light.

  She took another couple of steps and gasped. T.J. lay face down on the dirt floor, his body wedged against the lowest shelf on the right. Blood pooled around his head, matting his hair and soaking like spilled black paint into the dirt. He was naked from the waist up. Arms pulled behind him; shoulders out of the sockets, jutting like knobs against his skin. A brown belt wrapped around his wrists. She couldn’t take her eyes from the bronze arms glistening in the dim light and the black gashes cut into his arms like graffiti.

  She flinched backward, her body moving on its own, her eyes still locked on the body, as still as a log washed out of the abyss. She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the shed. It was a half a moment before she managed to pull her gaze away from the body. She pivoted around and ran outside. Across the swatch of light, around the corner, and down the side of the house. She was almost to the front when she dropped onto her hands and knees and vomited until she felt empty inside and there was nothing but the sound of her own dry retching in the quiet.

  She lifted herself upright and leaned against the rough siding a long moment before she felt sure enough to start for the Jeep. She crawled behind the steering wheel and, hands shaking, dug through her black bag until her fingers wrapped around the cold plastic of her cell. She tapped out 911 and pressed the phone hard against her ear while trying to steady her hand. “This is Vicky Holden,” she managed when the operator came on the line. “I’m at T.J. Painted Horse’s place. Send an officer right away. Someone’s been killed.”

  T.J.’s been killed, she thought. She pressed the end key, dropped the phone into her lap, and wrapped her hands around the steering wheel, holding on as hard as she could. She couldn’t stop shaking. This was crazy. She’d gotten everything wrong. She’d been so sure that T.J. had killed his wife, and now T.J. was dead. And whoever had killed Denise had been waiting, biding his time, like a mountain lion watching its prey. The moment T.J. had returned to the house, the lion had pounced.

  It hit her that Eric Loftus could have found her client after all and tortured him. Tortured T.J. until he had told Eric everything he knew about his wife.

  Vicky stared into the moonlight skittering over the house, trying to see past the images imprinted on the back of her eyes. The gashes on T.J.’s arms, the welts blossoming around the brown belt tightened on his wrists. She was going to be sick again. She held onto the steering wheel and made herself take in several breaths and exhale slowly. God, would the images ever go away?

  She peeled her fingers off the wheel and picked up the cell. Her fingers pushed in a number—working on their own, as if they knew what was necessary. She listened to the buzzing sound of the phone ringing at St. Francis Mission, and after the third ring, the familiar voice: “Father O’Malley.”

  Sleepy and disoriented and matter-of-fact at the same time, as if he were used to answering the phone at four o’clock in the morning.

  “T.J.’s been killed,” she said, her own voice seemed to come from a vacuum.

  “Where are you?”

  “At T.J.’s place. I found him in the shed.” There was the cry of a coyote, she thought, or a siren. She couldn’t be sure, it sounded so far away. She said, “The police are coming.”

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  24

  THE HOUSE WAS ablaze in the darkness. Light spilled through the front windows and the opened door. Blue, red, and yellow lights flashing from the roof of a police cruiser spiraled across the front of the house, and dark uniforms moved past the windows inside. A photographer was also moving about, snapping pictures, the white light flashing intermittently into the living room. Vicky watched Ted Gianelli walk in from the kitchen, like a shadow moving through the light.

  She stood outside between the Jeep and John O’Malley’s pickup, gripping the fronts of her jacket, struggling against the sense that she’d wandered into a nightmare and couldn’t find the way out.

  The police had come—three cars, one after the other racing down the road and turning into the yard, yellow headlights jumping over the ground, officers spilling out of the opened doors. She’d gotten out of the Jeep and stumbled into the headlights. “He’s in the shed,” she’d heard herself shouting, and finally the officers had turned away and started around the corner of the house toward the back, leaving her alone again with the images in her head.

  After a long while, one of the officers returned and began asking her questions. What had brought her here? When did she arrive? Was anyone else here? She was trying to find the answers, gripping her jacket to keep from floating away, when John O’Malley’s pickup pulled in next to the cruisers. The door slammed shut, and he darted around the cars, plunging past the headlights toward her.

  She collapsed against him, grateful for the strength of his arms, the warmth of his breath in her hair.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “She’s had a bad shock,” said one officer.

  “You’re shivering. You should be inside.”

  “No.” Vicky shook her head against his chest, then stepped back. Something was warm on her cheeks, and she realized she was crying. She wiped at the moisture. “It’s horrible what they did to him.”

  “She found T.J.’s body, Father,” the officer said. “Around in back, in case you want to say some prayers. The fed’s on his way, and the coroner’ll be here any minute.” He nodded toward the house, as if he were urging him on. “Up to you.”

&
nbsp; “Go ahead,” Vicky said when she saw Father John hesitate.

  She could sense his reluctance in the way he removed his hand from her shoulder. “Why don’t you wait in the pickup? It’s still warm. Start the motor.” He pulled a key out of his jacket pocket and tried to press it into her hand.

  Vicky waved it away. “It’s okay.” She stopped herself from saying, ‘The cold air is real.’

  A moment passed before she felt him take his eyes from her and start for the shed, the officer in step behind. And she was alone again. He had his responsibility, she told herself. There were the prayers, the rituals, all the trappings that he brought with him wherever he went. It was who he was—a priest. He could never leave them behind.

  It was then that Gianelli’s SUV came bumping across the yard. It stopped next to her Jeep, and he was out in a second, ducking around the hood. “Vicky? That you? What the hell happened?”

  He stopped, like a bronco jerked backward. “Are you hurt?” he asked, his tone softer, suffused with concern.

  She shook her head. “The officers are out back,” she said.

  “Can you tell me about it? You want to sit in the car where it’s warm?” He tossed his head toward the SUV.

  Vicky shook off the suggestion. They were the same, she was thinking. Gianelli and John O’Malley. All she had to do was get warm and she’d be fine. She didn’t want to get warm, to have the image settle in. “T.J. called me two hours ago. He asked me to come to the house, but when I got here, he was already . . .” She could feel the warm moisture on her face again.

  “Let me take a look,” Gianelli said. “We’ll talk later.”

  She wasn’t sure how many minutes had passed—twenty? thirty?—before Gianelli stepped through the front door, took her arm, and guided her into the living room. It was as cold as the outdoors. They sat on the sofa and he produced a notebook that he placed on the table in front of them. “Tell me what you know about this, Vicky,” he said, his pen poised over the white page. “Start at the beginning. Why did you come here?”