The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

“No, I don’t believe him.”

  “I’m telling you—it’s your father. I knew this might happen. Now that you’re both grown, now that the work’s been done, he’s sick of being the bad guy and he’s trying to find some way to pin it on me.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s late, Mom. Too late for me.”

  Lilah looked at her suddenly, and Megan saw tears standing in the woman’s eyes. But she managed her best wobbly version of a smile and clasped Megan’s knee as she turned her attention back to the blur of exhaust-stained eucalyptus along the interstate.

  She had spoken the truth. She didn’t believe her father could have found anything to say to Cameron that would have won him over, just as she didn’t believe Cameron had ever been on a flight that had almost lost both engines between Hawaii and Los Angeles. But something had happened to Cameron, something that had caused him to take stock of his relationships in a serious way. Had the event itself had anything to do with their father, or was he just the lucky jerk who had benefited the most from Cameron’s sudden shift in perspective?

  9

  Rancho Santa Fe

  They were given a tour of the house by a young woman Megan didn’t recognize. Maybe she worked for the owners or maybe she worked for Lucas. Megan didn’t have the energy to ask.

  While no one referred to it as a safe house, Megan couldn’t think of a better term for it. Too bad the place was almost completely transparent, a giant U of plateglass walls supported by slender steel beams. The only privacy was afforded by the California oaks planted around the perimeter. When Megan pointed this out, the young woman pressed a button on a wall panel and a series of opaque shades descended over every glass wall, filling the vast rooms of the house with a sound like awakening bees.

  Her mother was shown to the master suite, which sat at the end of a long hallway with concrete floors covered by Oriental rugs, and Megan was shown to a guest bedroom, where a giant terra-cotta pot filled with fake bamboo took up the space between the edge of the queen-size bed and a sliding glass door. Outside was a large patio with high slate walls and an outdoor shower. There were no personal effects of any kind. The owners were out of town and they had been for a while.

  Her phone still had juice, so she listened to the condolence calls that had flooded into her mailbox throughout the morning. Interestingly enough, the messages stopped coming right around the time Cameron’s hasty exit from the hotel was first broadcast on CNN. For a while, she tried to find comfort from the fetal position. But she jerked awake the second she started to feel drowsy.

  There was a remote in the nightstand. She pressed Power, hoping there would be no cable service. But Ray Romano’s face exploded onto the screen and within seconds she had flipped channels to CNN. They were covering the story of a three-year-old British girl who had survived the blast because her parents had gone up the fire stairs instead of down them. The reporter asked her to describe the sound and the little girl placed her tiny hands over her ears and stuck out her lower lip.

  There was a light knock at the door. Lucas was still dressed in the suit and tie he had put on before taking them into San Diego. When he took a seat on the other side of the bed, Megan pressed Mute on the remote.

  “You want a drink?” he asked her. “The wet bar’s stocked, apparently.”

  “No thanks. Whose house is this?”

  “A client’s …”

  “Sorry. Confidentiality or whatever.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he asked. He seemed genuinely confused, then he cut his eyes to the silent television. More images of fire and emergency vehicles and general chaos.

  “Getting us here. Eric Reynard, the lawyer, he said there were reporters outside our house.”

  “Right. Sure.”

  “Are you OK?”

  For a while, Lucas stared at the TV with a glassy-eyed look, then he sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils and turned to her as if he had just remembered she was in the room with him. “This is really bad, Meg. This is really bad.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying.”

  “Then say it.”

  “I think you and your mother—I think all of us might have to prepare ourselves for tougher questions than they asked you today.”

  “How is that possible? It was like a witch hunt in there. They were casting suspicion on every little move he made before he left the other night. The fact that he was drinking. The fact that he came to the party in the first place. Nothing was safe.”

  Lucas turned to face her, the comforter rustling beneath him, his mouth opening but nothing coming out as he clearly adjusted the volume with which he was about to address her. “Nothing is going to be safe, Megan. You have to be very honest with yourself here. If he’s not hurt, if he’s not very badly hurt, then there is no good explanation for why he hasn’t been in touch with us. None.”

  “Are you saying you don’t think he’s hurt?”

  “I’m saying that I watched him leave the hotel along with the rest of the world.”

  “We don’t know how far he got. That footage was taken minutes before the explosion. He could have been standing just outside when it happened.”

  “They’ve recovered ten bodies from in front of the hotel and he wasn’t one of them.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice quavering. “And that’s good news. Isn’t it good news, Lucas?” They were the first tears she had allowed herself since she had seen him last, but she turned her back on her cousin to hide them. He gave her a few moments to compose herself but the best she could do was to bring her clasped hands to her lips and try to focus on the patterns the setting sun made in the ivy covering the slate walls around the patio outside.

  “I don’t want to be this guy, Megan,” Lucas said. “I wish there was someone else in your life that could be the one to prepare you for this. But your mother’s not up to it, and your father—Look, the other person they didn’t identify among those ten bodies in front of the hotel was the man Cameron walked out with. Now, mark my words, they are going to find out who this man is. And once they do, they’re going to bring you back in for questioning and they’re going to ask you hundreds of questions about him.

  “And it won’t matter if you say you don’t know him, or that you’ve never seen him before in your life, they’re going to repeat the questions again and again and again. And they’re going to do this to find out if you’re lying. So tell me now. Before it gets any worse. Are you lying?”

  Even though she was a mess of tears, she turned to face him. When he saw the look on her face, he said, “Don’t try to summon moral outrage here, Megan. It won’t make this easier.”

  “Can you just give me a minute, please? Just, please, leave me alone for—”

  “Answer the question, Megan.”

  “I have never seen that man before in my life. I have no idea who he is. And I will say it as many times as they want me to.”

  The best response Lucas could manage was a slight nod. She expected him to leave but he didn’t. He just stayed right where he was, staring at the television, as if they had bickered over what temperature to heat the swimming pool.

  “All morning you and Mom talked about him like he was a ghost. Now you have this to work with so you’re talking about him like he’s a terrorist. I know damn well things are going to get worse. But I’m not going to cut him loose just to make it easier on myself. And that makes me a hell of a lot more prepared for what’s to come than you are.”

  “I understand you’re angry,” he said quietly, then he got to his feet and turned his back on her. “You sure you don’t want that drink?”

  As soon as he crossed the threshold, she pushed the door shut behind him.

  In the bathroom, she splashed her face with cold water, trying to avoid the sight of herself in the mirrored walls. Her anger at Lucas was threatening to overwhelm her. She told herself she was ju
st using one powerful emotion to avoid another, fear, but it was an idea that didn’t sink any lower than her forebrain. It didn’t still her trembling hands or slow her heart rate. The superiority and condescension with which he had addressed her had left a film on her skin and a long shower would only dampen it.

  I wish there was someone else in your life who could have prepared you for this … as if that were somehow her failing. As if a boyfriend would have made this all easier. How many women had been walked into despair by that foolish belief?

  Did anyone besides her alumni association give a damn that she had graduated magna cum laude? She had so impressed the previous executive director at the Siegel Foundation that he had recommended her as his replacement, even though she had been with them for only a year and a half. Yes, she had made a bad mistake, and she had made it out of fear, but she was nobody’s ward and she was no slow leak. But perhaps this was the destiny of every woman, no matter how accomplished—they all ended up enduring lectures from men with fat wallets.

  The more she thought about it—and she was trying very hard not to think about it—the more it became clear that Lucas had never spoken to her that way before. But what situation could possibly compare to the one they were currently in?

  Her father was on television. She was so lost in angry thoughts she almost missed it. She raised the volume. He was sitting behind the driver’s seat of his maroon Toyota Camry and he had rolled the window down to address the reporters. “… ’cause as soon as he’s back we’re going to go see the Kings play at Staples Center.”

  One of the reporters shouted, “Your son likes hockey?”

  “No, but he took me to see Wicked when it was in town, so I guess fair is fair, right?”

  A few reporters laughed but they were drowned out by other reporters shouting outrageously leading questions. It was hard for her to see Cameron’s long, slanted blue eyes on the man, but the rest of him was padded enough by weight and the lines of age as to be almost unfamiliar to her. His hair had gone white and it matched the stubble on his rounded jaw. But his voice was utterly familiar; gentle and lazy sounding, with the faintest trace of a Texas accent. He and Uncle Neal had moved west together after her father came back from Vietnam.

  When Parker started speaking again, it wasn’t clear which question he was answering because there had been so many of them. “I believe my son hasn’t been in touch with us because there’s a lot of confusion right now and a lot of people who need to be helped and found. What I know—and I know this, folks, I don’t just believe it — is that he is a fine young man who lives by his conscience and cares for the people in his life. And if we’re going to start making a bunch of assumptions about where he is and what he’s up to, that’s where we should start. Now thank you. But I’ve got to—”

  They shouted more questions as he rolled the window up, and looked back over his shoulder to make sure he didn’t back over any of them.

  It was exactly the statement she should have made to the press, and it was coming from a man who had only truly been in Cameron’s life for—how many months? She didn’t know. She hadn’t thought to ask. But now the reporter was reminding viewers who might have been swayed by her father’s words that he had made his statement five hours earlier and neither Cameron Reynolds nor “the unidentified Middle Eastern male” with whom he had left the hotel had been located since then.

  And there was Lucas, wearing the same rumpled suit and purple tie he currently had on. He read from a piece of paper he held tightly in his right fist and he paused briefly every time he looked up at the camera like a novice public speaker, which he wasn’t.

  “I speak on behalf of the entire Reynolds family when I express my shock and horror over the tragic events unfolding in Hong Kong. The family wishes to extend their deepest and heartfelt condolences to those who have lost loved ones as a result of this tragic act. They brought themselves here today to extend their full cooperation with the investigation. We are all confident that a complete explanation of Cameron’s role in these events will be arrived at very soon.”

  For a while, she couldn’t move. The report moved on from the hotel blast altogether and she still couldn’t move. It took her a few deep breaths even to realize that she had brought one hand to her mouth. Cameron’s role in these events … These were the words she couldn’t let go of. Her cousin had just gone on television and described Cameron as having had a role in these events. Worse, he had taken care to avoid mentioning anyone in the family by their first name, except for Cameron.

  No wonder he had cut his eyes to the television when she had asked him if he was all right. No wonder he had turned his back to her when he sat down. Was he worried she had already seen his statement? Had he been preparing himself for her anger?

  Her pulse a drumbeat in her ears, she hurried into the living room, her shoes tapping out a fierce rhythm on the concrete floors. No sign of Lucas. The master suite, she figured. She was halfway down the hallway when she heard her mother’s wrenching sobs.

  The bedroom door was half open. Her mother and Lucas sat together on the foot of the bed, entwined like an inversion of the Pietà. It looked like her cousin’s embrace was the only thing preventing Lilah from sliding to the floor.

  The bottom dropped out of Megan’s stomach. There’s news, she thought. Someone called Lucas or they just saw something on TV, and oh dear God, Cameron is—

  But Lucas saw her through the half-open door and gave her a fixed, unemotional stare. He didn’t gesture for her to come in; it was clear he had no words for her. He just shook his head and furrowed his brow at the woman he held in his arms, as if the task of comforting her was wearying but just as routine as having his Maserati serviced.

  She could have confronted him right there. But her anger was too wild; she didn’t want to subject her mother to it. Not before she had time to think and shape her words. The split-second but crippling shock of believing they had received news of Cameron’s death had taken the momentum out of her. The best she could manage was to reach out and pull the door to the master suite all the way shut. If it was such a tiresome job, comforting her mother, let Lucas do it in peace.

  She couldn’t decide what made her feel more trapped, the house or her own anger. Either way, the solution wasn’t to be found within its glass walls.

  Outside, she found their thick-necked driver smoking a cigarette behind some hedges. She informed him brightly that something had slipped out of her purse in the backseat of the car. Could she have the keys? If this struck him as odd, he was too embarrassed at having been caught smoking to put up much of a fight. He handed over the keys to the Mercedes without so much as a word.

  A minute later, she was behind the wheel, backing out of the driveway, watching the man who had just facilitated her escape walk toward her down the driveway with a bewildered expression on his face. Once she passed the guardhouse for the subdivision, she pulled her wallet, keys, and cell phone from her pocket and tossed them on the passenger seat. She had left her purse in the guest bedroom so as not to arouse suspicion with the driver.

  A few minutes later, she was at the entrance to the 5 freeway. There were no cop cars in pursuit and no one had called her cell phone. South was Cathedral Beach, and the reporters camped outside her house. Instead, she went north, toward the only other person in their entire family who had managed to muster a suitable defense of her only brother.

  But the courage to call information for the number didn’t come until she crossed the Orange County line. She would have been ashamed to admit to anyone that she knew where her father lived. One night, after too much wine and too many old photographs, she had Googled him. Her search had yielded a write-up some podunk local paper had done on him; he had purchased a crumbling house on the beach in Playa del Rey, right at the foot of the runways for LAX, and spent almost fifteen years renovating it. The article mentioned that he was a retired police officer who had served with the Long Beach PD. There was no mention of the time he had spen
t farther south.

  It was full-on dark by the time she worked up the nerve to call. When he answered after the first ring, she knew he had seen her name on caller ID. Why else would he answer right away when reporters were probably ringing his phone off the hook?

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Megan,” she said.

  “I know—”

  “Caller ID. I figured.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the road.”

  “You’re safe?”

  “From what?”

  “Reporters, I guess. They’ve got me surrounded. Callie’s about to take out my old piece and start fir—Callie’s this woman I’m seeing. Well, it’s been a few years, I guess. …”

  “A few years since what?”

  “Since I started seeing her.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “What did you think I meant?”

  That it had been only a few years since you walked out on us, she thought. And even though it’s been a lot longer than that, I wasn’t sure if I was going to correct you because I’m not quite sure what I’m doing right now. But all she said was, “The FBI … Did you … ?”

  “Yeah. I just got home. You?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  There was a deep silence between the two of them, then she found the courage to say, “They told me he was living with you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Irvine.”

  “Which way you headed?”

  “North.”

  “OK, then …”

  “I’d like to see you.”

  In the silence that followed, she felt as if she were being dangled off the side of a cliff. Because if he said no to this simple request, if he brushed aside the opportunity provided by this shared peril, it was quite possible they would never see each other again. Perhaps he sensed this, but there was no way she was going to point it out to him. To do so would be to take away all traces of an illusion that he had ever cared about her.

  “Not here at the house,” he said carefully. “They’ll mob you on the front walk. Let me talk to the neighbor, see what I can work out. I might be able to hop his fence and …” Either his voice trailed off because he was trying to plot his escape in his head, or the implications of what he was about to do started to sink in.