The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries)

by Parshall, Sandra

  ***

  The crime lab found only Mother’s and Rosario’s fingerprints on the knife. Blood and tissue tests showed that Mother had been taking antidepressants, something I hadn’t known. Our lie was closer to the truth than I’d imagined.

  The police issued a statement saying that Judith Goddard’s death was suicide. The case was closed. Her body was released, and on Monday, five days after she died, we buried her.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  They sweated in the morning sun, sneaked glances at their wristwatches, and avoided looking at the casket, the grave, or my sister and me. Surely, I thought, they’d rather be in their air-conditioned offices listening to the prattle of neurotics.

  About twenty psychiatrists and psychologists showed up for the brief graveside service, the same people who came to the Fourth of July party. Men and women who’d thought they knew Judith Goddard. They stood apart from Michelle and me, crowding together on the opposite side of the grave.

  No neighbors had come, and no friends except Theo, who was at my side, his hand coming up now and then to touch my elbow, and Kevin Watters, who stayed close to Michelle. Rosario and her husband, looking unnaturally formal in a black dress and a suit, hovered behind us despite my efforts to coax them forward.

  Luke had wanted to come with me, but I told him I was going without him and the finality of my tone stopped any argument. Michelle had said, when she called to give me the time and place of the service, “If that man shows up with you, I’ll make sure he regrets it.” I wouldn’t even let him drive me because I didn’t want her to see him.

  Blank-faced, clutching a single red rose, my sister stood inches from me, but we didn’t touch. We didn’t comfort one another. She hadn’t yet spoken to me or to Theo.

  Her new black suit made her skin look bleached in contrast. I owned nothing black and wore instead a plain navy linen dress Rosario had found in my closet at home. I’d had trouble squeezing my cast through the short sleeve.

  My arm ached deep in the ravaged muscle. I’d exhausted my three-day supply of codeine two days before and now I was at the mercy of the pain, but I welcomed it, I fastened on it and let it drive everything else from my mind. I didn’t know what I would do when the pain subsided.

  The minister, an elderly, stooped man supplied by the funeral home, read from the Bible in a wavering voice. “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.”

  We bowed our heads in prayer when the minister asked us to. The sun’s rays pressed on the back of my neck like a red-hot iron. Only once did I let my gaze wander to Mother’s coffin, poised on a mechanized lift, and the deep hole beneath it. When the lift whirred into motion I began to shake, and Theo hugged my shoulders, steadying me.

  The casket descended. Michelle stepped to the edge of the grave and dropped in the rose. A cardinal as red as the flower perched on a nearby headstone and warbled his rich song.

  Together, flanked by Theo and Kevin, my sister and I received the murmured sympathy of the departing mourners. So sorry…so sorry…so sorry. Their eyes shifted, sliding past our faces and carefully avoiding any unseemly examination of my injured arm.

  I leaned to kiss Rosario’s cheek, because she looked as if she needed consolation as much as we did.

  At last only Michelle and Kevin, Theo and I were left. Michelle started to walk away without speaking, but Kevin, his fresh young face knotted with emotion, came to me and wrapped me in a gentle bear hug. He stepped back and scrubbed a hand over his chin. “Oh, man, Rachel, I don’t know what to say. You tell me what I can do to help, and I’ll do it, you just ask.”

  I spoke quietly so Michelle wouldn’t hear. “Help my sister. That’s what you can do. Don’t let her be alone too much.”

  He nodded. “You can count on it. I kinda love the girl, you know?”

  “She’s lucky to have you.”

  Michelle strode back to us with brisk steps. Theo murmured to Kevin, and the two men moved away to give us privacy.

  “I want to sell the house,” Michelle said without preamble. “As soon as possible. Our names are on the title, it doesn’t have to go through probate. We can put it on the market anytime.” She paused. “You don’t want it, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well. Okay then. I’m moving to an apartment as soon as I can find one. There’s no point keeping Rosario fulltime after I move out, but she can come in and clean a couple times a week until we find a buyer.” Michelle looked around as if taking in the scenery. The hot air stirred and lifted her pale hair from her shoulders. She faced me again. “You’ll have to do something about those cages of yours.”

  I nodded. “I’ll take them down.”

  “Good.” She turned away.

  “Mish.”

  She looked back at me, her expression guarded.

  “We need to talk. I could go over to the house with you now. I have to pick up some things anyway.”

  “I’m not going home. I’m going to lunch with Kevin, then I’ve got a class.”

  “We have to talk about all this sometime.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you even want to know who you are?”

  She stepped so close her face was inches from mine. “I do know who I am. And nothing you can say is going to change it.”

  With her chin high she walked away from me, across the bright green cemetery grass.

  Theo tried to talk me out of going to the house, and when he saw that was futile, insisted that I let him come with me. But in the end he took one cab and I took another and we went our separate ways.

  ***

  I entered through the front door. The house was utterly silent. I stopped to look into the sun-splashed living room, at the gleaming tables and all the small exquisite things Mother had accumulated. The jade figurines, the decorative plates, the antique marble clock on the mantel. The clock hands had stopped at 8:15. Mother had been the only one who knew how to wind the delicate mechanism properly.

  She would never walk through these rooms again. I would never see her or hear her voice again.

  I knew that neither Michelle nor Luke would understand my grief, Michelle because she blamed me for destroying our family, Luke because he blamed Mother for robbing me of my identity. But I grieved, for the simple reason that I had loved her. She’d been my mother for twenty-one years, and I had loved and needed her.

  With my aching arm pressed to my side, I climbed the stairs. In my room I found my blue canvas luggage lined up at the foot of the bed, along with several empty cardboard boxes. Rosario would pack all my belongings the following day and a mover would collect them and take them to Luke’s apartment.

  I knelt by the bed, felt under the mattress and drew out the book on locks. Somehow it seemed important that no one find it. I stuffed it into my shoulderbag, then went out to the hallway.

  Mother’s bedroom door was closed. When I touched the doorknob, I felt the same ripple of apprehension and shame that had gone through me when I’d sneaked in to look at the picture.

  I opened the door.

  The draperies were drawn and the room was dark and cool. I flipped the light switch. Everything looked as it always had, peach and blue perfection. In the air hung the faint flowery perfume of the sachet Mother used in her closet and drawers.

  The picture was gone from her dresser. Only Michelle would have removed it. What did she do with it? I wondered if she’d held it and tried to believe the child was her.

  I had to take what I was after and get out of this room. Opening the closet, I tried to ignore the neat row of dresses, the scent of sachet. Mother’s purse hung from a hook on the back of the door. The purse contained only a few things, and I found her keys quickly.

  Downstairs again, I went straight to Mother’s study, without allowing myself so much as a glance at the kitchen. I unlocked the file drawer where I’d foun
d the strange note on the night Mother was hospitalized. I pulled out the sheet of blue paper, leaving behind the folder that had held it. Although I didn’t know yet what it meant, I was certain this was a message from the past, a link to the life that waited to be discovered.

  …no regrets…the one beautiful thing I’ve got left.

  I read the words over and over until I noticed my hand was trembling. I folded the sheet, slid it into my shoulderbag.

  Next I moved to the closet, knelt and opened the box that contained the photo albums. Refusing to let myself dwell on the images, I flipped through one of the books until I found the posed studio portrait of the three of them: mother, father, little daughter. It was the same picture that had accompanied the newspaper account of the accident.

  For a moment I considered taking the albums away so Michelle wouldn’t stumble unprepared onto the photos of Michael and Judith Goddard and their real daughter. Like me, my sister was running on autopilot right now, and these pictures could bring her crashing to reality. The old urge to protect her, to cushion her fall, rose in me. But the time for that was past. I could not protect her from the truth of our lives.

  I laid the album back in the box and closed the lid.

  Unable to make myself go up to Mother’s room again, I left the keys on the desk. I went out through the front door and walked around to the back yard.

  The garden looked impossibly cheerful, neat, normal. Only five days had passed since I was last here, but if I’d found the blossoms shriveled, the foliage dried up, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, the dahlias and late roses bloomed on, oblivious to the absence of their owner, and a sweet powdery scent hung in the humid air. Cicadas droned in the trees, but the birds had fallen silent in the midday heat.

  I walked down to the edge of the woods, past the line of shrubs to the cages. The doors stood open, and when I approached a dozen sparrows burst out in a flurry of wings.

  The sight of the abandoned cages brought hot tears to my eyes. I drew in a long steadying breath. What needed doing here?

  Maybe some other rehabber could remove the cages as they were, load them on a truck and take them for his or her own use. But suddenly I was seized by a need to destroy them, to know they simply didn’t exist anymore.

  I dropped my shoulderbag on the ground and, almost running, returned to the house, entered through the front again, and clomped down the basement stairs and into the laundry room where the toolbox was kept. I grabbed a hammer and crowbar.

  Awkwardly cradling them in my unencumbered arm, I carried the tools to the cages. With one hand I set to work prying loose nails, screen, strips of wood. Every movement of my body made my wounds throb, and I was quickly drenched in sweat, but I worked on and on, piling boards on the ground.

  At last, when the cages were reduced to rubble, I pushed past the shrubs and staggered onto the sunny lawn, still gripping the crowbar.

  The dahlia blossoms in the flower bed before me were bright and jaunty, little jewels lifting their faces to the sun. Life, going on.

  I raised my arm high over my head, then brought the crowbar down on the plants, slashing leaves and stems, shattering flowers, raining yellow, red, pink petals onto the pine bark mulch.

  I swung again and again, until I had no strength left and fell to my knees, sobbing. I didn’t hear or see Luke approach, but when he knelt and folded his arms around me it seemed natural that he was there.

  “Let’s go home now,” he said.

  “It’s not over yet.” My voice was muffled against his shoulder. “I have to find out who I am.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Hours later, when we were in his small kitchen preparing dinner, Luke asked what I planned to do next.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I have to be careful. Look what’s already happened because of me digging around in the past.”

  “It’s not your fault, Rachel.”

  “Regardless of whose fault it was, it happened.” I leaned against the counter and watched him chop vegetables. The knife sliced through a succulent red bell pepper, down, across, again and again, leaving red stains on the wooden chopping block. With a shiver, I turned away, and busied myself stirring the rotini pasta that was boiling in a pot.

  “Maybe you ought to stop now,” Luke said. He scraped the pepper slices into a skillet that already held snow peas, mushrooms and olive oil, and turned on the burner under the pan. “Just come back to work when your arm heals, and we’ll get on with our lives.”

  It was something I’d said to myself many times in the last few days. I longed for the things that meant normality. I missed the clinic, the people I worked with, the warm little bodies and wide eyes of my patients. Even the smell of alcohol and antiseptic would be a balm to me now. But I was useless for the moment, unable to efficiently do exams, give injections, perform surgery with only one hand. And when my cast came off, I had to complete my search.

  “I’ll never have any peace if I don’t at least find out who Michelle and I really are.”

  Luke sighed. “Have you had any luck remembering your real parents’ last name?”

  I shook my head. “I looked through the phone book yesterday. I was hoping something might ring a bell, but nothing did. I know I was just a kid, but how could I forget my own last name?”

  “It’s a miracle you can remember anything after what that woman did to you.”

  “Luke, please,” I said wearily.

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

  “It would have been in the papers. Two little sisters disappearing together.” Olive oil sizzled in the skillet. I removed a spatula from a drawer and stirred the vegetables. “If I find the story, I’ll find the names.”

  “Do you remember when it happened?”

  “Well, she brought us here the summer after our father—after Michael Goddard died. So it must have happened just before that. When I was five.” Realization struck me like a blow. “I don’t even know for sure how old I was. How old I am.”

  We fell silent a moment, as I stirred the vegetables and he tipped the rotini into a colander to drain. Steam rose in a cloud from the pasta.

  ***

  August 26. The day Mother had chosen as my birthday. I had no idea why, and suspected it was a random choice. But it had been my birthday for twenty-one years, and when it came round again I woke with the thought, I’m twenty-seven today. It was almost certainly a lie but it still felt like the truth. I lay in bed remembering the year Mother had the weeping cherry tree planted as a gift to me.

  Luke had bought concert tickets weeks before—Mary Chapin Carpenter at Wolf Trap—but I couldn’t imagine rousing myself to go. Over an ordered-in dinner at home, Luke gave me his gift, an exquisite gold chain necklace made of tiny interlocking hearts. With a wry grin, he said, “I told you this would be a birthday to remember. I had no idea.”

  Earlier in the day a bouquet of yellow roses—Mother’s favorite, never mine—had arrived with a card that said simply, “Happy birthday. Michelle.”

  I heard daily reports about Michelle from Kevin. She’d moved into his apartment temporarily. He was careful to tell me that she was using the bedroom and he was on the couch. At night he heard her moving about, and when he woke at odd hours he always saw light under the bedroom door. She ate almost nothing. Poor Kevin thought he was witnessing a simple display of grief, and I couldn’t tell him how much the girl he loved was concealing.

  At our next meeting, Michelle sat two chairs away from me at a conference table in the McLean office of David Waterston, Mother’s attorney and executor. Waterston, a lean blond man in his late fifties, sat across from us. Next to him was Annette King, the glossy and severely professional woman he’d found to handle the house sale.

  My sister spoke only to the lawyer, never so much as glancing at me for agreement or clarification. I might as well not have been present. She looked even worse than Kevin had led me to expect. Always thin, she�
�d lost weight noticeably since Mother’s death and now approached gauntness. Heavy makeup under her eyes didn’t quite hide the dark circles.

  I tried not to stare at her, fastening my gaze instead on the table before me. Sunlight cut through the blinds and lay in slashes across the gleaming oak surface. I felt like a fraud, discussing my inheritance from a mother who wasn’t my mother. I tried to imagine how the discreet and scrupulous lawyer would react if I sprang the truth on him.

  I snapped back to attention when I realized he’d asked me a question.

  “Is this arrangement all right with you as well as your sister?” he repeated. “Your mother’s secretary handling the closing of her office? She’ll disperse the case files of those patients who have found other doctors, and destroy the inactive files.”

  As if recalling the distant past, I remembered when I thought Mother might have a file about me in her office. But no, she wouldn’t have committed such secrets to writing.

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  Except for a gift of $10,000 to Rosario, Mother had left her estate of more than a million dollars to Michelle and me, evenly divided. When we became adults she’d put our names on the title to the house so that part of our inheritance wouldn’t be delayed when she died. Michelle and I had protested at the time, telling her we refused to think about her death when she was barely fifty. Now her foresight meant we could put the house on the market quickly.

  Waterston had taken the real estate agent on a tour of the property the day before. She’d come to this meeting with a suggested price and a long list of things that would have to be done to Mother’s perfect house to make it marketable.

  Annette King, probably in her forties, had sleek chin-length hair of an unnatural shade of blond and wore a crimson linen suit and lipstick to match. She made me think of a gaudy Christmas ornament. I watched her long fingers dance over the papers and legal pad she’d arranged before her, and wondered if her red-painted nails were real or fake.