Hunter's Moon

by Karen Robards

  Should she take it back?

  Yeah, right, a little voice inside her head sneered. Just wait till 3:45 a.m. tomorrow, sneak back inside the barn with the money, and leave it where you found it. Like no one’s even missed it yet. Like they won’t even notice it’s been gone.

  What if they caught her taking it back? Molly shuddered at the thought. That would be the same as being caught stealing it. The consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

  Besides, she couldn’t take it back. She had already spent one of the twenties. Unable to help herself, entranced by the fact that she actually had that rarity, real cash money that wasn’t already earmarked for rent or food or something, in her possession, she had stopped by the Dunkin’ Donuts on Versailles Road on the way home. The kids had woken up to fresh doughnuts and milk. What a treat! All of them, even fourteen-year-old Mike, who lately had been way too cool to show enthusiasm for anything, had reacted with delight.

  Whatever happened, even if she did end up going to prison—or worse—Molly just couldn’t regret those doughnuts.

  Anyway, they needed the money. It was wrong to steal, but it was better than starving, especially since they would soon be kicked out of their house, which came with her job at a reduced rent of a hundred and fifty dollars a month. The job had been all that kept the roof over their heads and food on the table for herself and four kids—and she didn’t have that job anymore.

  What she did have was five thousand dollars, cash.

  But she sure didn’t want to go to jail. Or worse. What would the kids do then?

  Footsteps on the wooden boards of the ramshackle porch brought Molly’s head around. Firm footsteps. I-mean-business footsteps. Not one of the kids playing hooky. Not a utility company man, come to collect what they owed or turn off the electricity or gas. Not a social worker, or a truant officer, nosing around about the kids. From bitter experience, Molly knew what all those footsteps sounded like.

  These sounded serious.

  She jumped up from the picnic table bench from which she had been nervously eyeing the evidence of her guilt and snatched the burlap bag off the table. She barely had time to stuff it in the cabinet under the sink and grab the shotgun that was kept on the far side of the refrigerator before the knock sounded on the door.

  The gun wasn’t loaded—she was afraid to keep a loaded gun around the kids, so she hid the shells in a hole in the underside of the mattress in her bedroom—but whoever was at the door wouldn’t know that. Anyway, intimidation was what she had in mind, not murder.

  Creaking springs and a ferocious burst of barking announced that Pork Chop had heard the knock too. A huge animal, part German shepherd and part who-knew-what, Pork Chop was ferocious-looking enough to freeze the devil himself in his tracks. Black and tan, with a long, springy coat that added inches of bulk to his already impressive size, Pork Chop was in reality as harmless as a kitten.

  But whoever was at the door wouldn’t know that.

  Toenails scrabbling on the linoleum, Pork Chop almost knocked Molly down in his mad dash for the door. His hackles were up and he was making enough noise to wake the dead.

  Ox, Molly accused him silently as she moved to stand beside him. Then, the gun butt snuggled firmly under her armpit, she opened the flimsy wooden door and grabbed Pork Chop by the collar as if she was scared he’d devour whoever was on the other side of the still-latched screen if she let go.

  The spicy scents of perfect Indian summer weather greeted her. Ordinarily the sheer beauty of the day would have gone a long way toward soothing any agitation she might be feeling. She loved October, loved the way the bright sunlight looked spilling over the carpet of red and gold leaves covering the yard, loved the mild temperature, loved the smell of woodsmoke that tinged the air. But the agitation she was suffering at that particular moment was far from ordinary, and so she barely noticed what would on most days have given her a great deal of pleasure.

  There was a man on the other side of the screen door. Making no move to open it, Molly held firmly on to Pork Chop’s collar as he lunged at the barrier of fine black mesh. The dog’s huge jaws parted as he threatened the visitor, revealing rows of teeth that would not have been out of place on a Tyrannosaurus rex. Eyes widening, the man on the porch took a single look at Pork Chop, then stepped back a pace.

  A glance told Molly that she’d never seen the man before. Fortyish, of average height and lean build, he had sandy hair cut ruthlessly short, a deep tan, and piercing blue eyes. He wore a dark suit and tie and looked grim. A hit man? She let go of Pork Chop’s collar and leveled the shotgun at the man’s belt buckle. Pork Chop barked hysterically.

  “What can I do for you, mister?” Her greeting was hostile.

  “Miss Butler?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over Pork Chop’s ear-shattering din. Molly battled the urge to tell Pork Chop to shut up. The animal was deafening her—but he was also clearly worrying the man on the other side of the screen. On balance, it was worth it.

  “Nope.” He wasn’t looking for her. Or the kids. As she registered that the person he asked for was unknown to her, Molly relaxed. With her knee she shoved Pork Chop back from the screen, preparing to shut the door in the stranger’s face.

  “Miss Molly Butler?”

  Molly froze. The name was close. Too close. He was looking for her. He just had the name a little wrong. Molly fixed him with a wary gaze, her fingers tightening around the barrel of the gun. Without waiting for her to say anything more, he reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and produced a leather wallet.

  “Will Lyman, FBI,” he said, opening the wallet to flash a badge and some sort of identification card at her. “I need to talk to you, Miss Butler. Could you please put down the gun, and call off your dog?”

  She might have tried—he was with the FBI, after all—but calling off Pork Chop was easier said than done. Anyway, it was too late. Pork Chop’s attention suddenly found an object worthy of focus. Molly’s only warning came when the volley of barking ended in a high-pitched yelp. With that the dog leaped right through the screen, his hundred-pound body as deadly as a missile to the flimsy mesh. Landing clumsily on four huge, bunched paws, now in full cry, he leaped skyward again, exploding past the unwelcome visitor in a frenzied bound. Knocked clean off his feet, the FBI man went down with a yell and a crash. His head just missed the rusting metal glider.

  The neighborhood cat that had inspired such passion took one look at the behemoth tearing up the ground behind her, and swarmed up the gnarled trunk of a huge oak.

  At the foot of the tree, Pork Chop leaped and snapped at the intruder, who calmly settled herself on a lower branch and proceeded to wash a calico paw, twitching her black-tipped tail with disdain. A single leaf, turned gold by autumn, fluttered down to land on Pork Chop’s nose. He shook it off, and went mad at the indignity of it all.

  “Shut up, Pork Chop!” Molly yelled. For all the good it did, she might as well have saved her breath.

  The screen door, never very solid (she had put it up herself), had been knocked awry by Pork Chop’s assault. It was open now, the wooden frame hanging lop-sidedly from its hinges, stopped from closing by its low-dipping front corner, which was snagged on a board protruding from the uneven porch floor.

  She would have to get Mike to help her fix the door when he got home from school, she thought distractedly. Mike would complain as he did about almost everything nowadays, but he could hold the door up while she tightened the hinge screws. And she would have to buy new mesh.

  Thank goodness for the five thousand dollars. Without it, the mesh would have to wait.

  But she couldn’t think about that right now. Her first priority was to get rid of the man sprawled on her porch.

  Molly looked him over assessingly. He lay flat on his back, eyes closed, arms outflung, unmoving, utterly silent. It occurred to her that perhaps he was seriously hurt, even dead. A squiggle of fear invaded her consciousness at the latter possibility. What would she do with a de
ad FBI man on her porch? Under the circumstances, she didn’t dare call the police. She sure didn’t want to draw attention to herself with five thousand stolen dollars concealed under her sink.

  The FBI man opened his eyes, blinking up at the porch ceiling, and that particular fear was laid to rest. Molly could almost see the instant when he regained complete awareness, because the muscles underlying his face tightened visibly. He sat up, scowling. Warily she watched as he ran the fingers of his right hand through his close-cropped hair. His wallet with the badge and ID lay open against the worn boards about two feet from his left hand. He saw the wallet, reached for it, and got to his feet clutching it, brushing off his suit with his other hand. His tie was crooked. It was navy with a tasteful maroon paisley pattern, Molly noted. The shirt was expensive-looking white cotton, now adorned with a streak of dirt.

  His gaze collided with hers through the intact mesh of the upper half of the screen door. His expression, hard before, turned downright stony.

  Molly couldn’t help herself. She grinned.

  Clearly he didn’t like being the object of her amusement. His mouth tightened as he restored the wallet to his jacket pocket and moved toward her.

  “Miss Butler, I should tell you that we know you took five thousand dollars in cash from a barn at Keeneland Race Course this morning. Now may I come in?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he stepped past the damaged screen door, curled a hand around the barrel of the shotgun, and jerked it from her grasp with complete disregard for whether or not it might go off. Tucking the weapon beneath one arm, he walked past her into the house.

  Or maybe, Molly thought, stalked was a better word.

  3

  Rendered speechless by the bombshell he had just dropped, Molly swiveled to find the FBI man in her kitchen with his back to her, looking down the open barrel of her shotgun. Having ascertained that it was unloaded, he snapped the gun closed and set it down against the far wall. Then he turned, ignoring her as he glanced around the room.

  It was clean, but that was about all that could be said in its favor, Molly realized as she imagined seeing the kitchen through his eyes. The old linoleum was an indeterminate color, somewhere between brown and gray. The walls were mustard yellow and the counter-tops were nicked green laminate. A hodgepodge of washed breakfast dishes air-dried in a plastic rack beside the sink. A pair of hand-sewn, green-checked kitchen towels served as curtains for the one small window. The cabinets were dark brown wood veneer. The gas stove, chipped white enamel, contrasted with the newer refrigerator, which was Harvest Gold. The picnic table that they had long ago hijacked from a nearby park because they couldn’t afford to buy furniture stood in the center of the room, painted white. One of its pair of benches jutted out at an angle where Molly had jumped to her feet at his approach. A broom, dustpan, and mop took up the narrow space between the refrigerator and the far wall. The “pantry,” a freestanding unit of metal industrial shelving painted white to match the table, held what was left of the jars of tomatoes and green beans and corn that Flora Atkinson, a neighboring farmer’s wife, had given Molly for helping to get her house ready for her daughter’s wedding last spring. Three pounds of weeks-old hamburger, excavated from the depths of the freezer before Molly had left for Keeneland that morning, thawed in the sink for supper. A covered metal trash can, also painted white but badly chipped from much use, stood in the far corner next to the pantry. Nobody viewing the room could doubt for a minute that the people who lived in it were poor.

  Which was just fine, Molly decided with a lift of her chin. Being poor was nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of real fine people were poor. The Ballards included.

  “Come in, Miss Butler. And shut the door.” The FBI man was unsmiling. Deep lines, probably from too much sun, bracketed his mouth. Crow’s feet radiated from the corners of his eyes. Probably it was the way they contrasted with his tanned skin that made their blueness seem so unsettling.

  He couldn’t know about the money. Nobody had been in that barn. Nobody. Not even the groom. Just the horses, and a cat.

  But somehow he did know.

  Molly shivered. For an instant she toyed with the idea of darting out the door and just taking off running as fast as she could. He would never catch her. She was as fleet-footed as they came, and he was a stodgy old man in a suit. But then she thought of the kids and the thousand and one other ties that bound her to this place and realized that there could be no running away. She had to face him down, to do her best to convince him that he was wrong.

  But the FBI? Talk about sending a tank to swat a fly! She’d expected the police or even a hit man if she was found out, but not a federal agent! The butterflies in her stomach took wing.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and not taking so much as a step closer. “Anyway, if you’re looking for a Miss Butler, you’ve got the wrong person. That’s not my name.”

  “What is your name, then?” He had the quick, clipped speech of somebody from the North. He sure wasn’t from around there.

  “You’re the one who’s supposed to be from the FBI. You tell me.”

  “You took the money.”

  “I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t play games with me, Miss Butler. I don’t have the patience for it right now.”

  “Oh, my, did Mr. FBI man fall down and go boom? And did it make him cranky? I wonder what hurts more, your dignity or your bum?”

  He didn’t like that, Molly could tell. Instead of replying directly to her defiance, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a cellular phone, which he held up in a fashion that was clearly meant to be a threat.

  “If you’re not going to cooperate with me, Miss Butler, you leave me no choice but to have you placed under arrest. All it takes is one phone call.”

  Molly almost hooted. “You guys pack phones now? At least on Hawaii Five-O, the FBI agents carried guns.”

  His mouth tightened. “Are you going to cooperate?”

  “How do I even know you’re really with the FBI? Anybody can get a fake ID.”

  “In the circles you run with, that’s probably true. But my ID happens to be the real thing. If you want to, you can call the Bureau and check. I’ll give you the number.”

  Molly pursed her lips, then took the two steps it took to convey her to the kitchen phone. “I think I’ll call the police instead,” she said sweetly, looking at him as she brandished the receiver.

  “Go ahead,” He returned his phone to his pocket, crossed his arms over his chest, and fixed her with a steady gaze, clearly waiting.

  Her bluff called, Molly hesitated. What now? He saw it, too, the quick flash of panic in her eyes before she could school her expression. No way was she going to drag the local cops into this if she could help it. First of all, there was the small matter of the burlap bag full of cash stashed on top of the cleaning supplies in her cabinet. Then there was the fact that her friendly neighborhood police department would be all too ready to believe the worst of her—of any of the Ballards. She’d had run-ins with them before, mostly over the kids. Just this past summer they had caught the eleven-year-old twins throwing eggs at passing cars, and last Christmas, Mike had been arrested for shop-lifting a Pearl Jam tape. Only the kindness of the music store owner had saved him from prosecution. Versailles was a small town, where everybody knew everything about everybody else. Everybody fit into a category, and the category that she and her family occupied was troublesome poor white trash.

  No, she definitely didn’t want to call the local cops in on this. Left to their tender mercies, she’d be in jail before she could sneeze, and the kids whisked off into foster homes. Again.

  “Well?”

  Molly had the uneasy sensation that he could read her mind. The notion made her nervous. She hung up the phone.

  “All right, so maybe you are from the FBI, but I tell you you’ve got the wr
ong person. My name is not Butler.”

  “You got a VCR?”

  “What?” The question was so unexpected, it threw Molly. He repeated it.

  “What if I do?”

  Actually, Mike had a VCR. Last June he’d worked helping old Mr. Higdon set out his tobacco, and the used VCR had been part of his payment. Working for something, as Molly had tried her best to impress on him, was a whole lot better than shoplifting it. They didn’t put you in jail for working.

  How was she ever going to be able to take the high moral ground with Mike now, with that five thousand dollars hanging over her head? Unless, she thought, she was going to serve as a living example of the wages of sin by spending the next few years of her life behind bars.

  Those butterflies in her stomach did flips.

  “Where is it?” Impatient with waiting for an answer, he turned and walked through the narrow rectangular doorway that opened into the living room. Not wanting to let him out of her sight, Molly followed.

  The downstairs of the dilapidated clapboard farm-house consisted of three rooms: the kitchen and the living room, side by side in front, and Molly’s bedroom in back. The one bathroom was in a shedlike addition stuck onto the kitchen as an obvious afterthought; the remains of the outhouse still stood some little distance up a slope in back.

  The living room was as haphazardly put together as the kitchen. Time-darkened hardwood floors were covered in the center by a worn, oval-shaped braided rug in shades that had once been brown, green, and rust. A tweedy orange couch with a sagging middle, rescued from a Salvation Army donation bin, sat against one fake-wood paneled wall. Flanking it were an ancient brown Naugahyde recliner, the rips on both arms repaired with black electrical tape, and a brown-painted Adirondack chair with floral cushions Molly had made from pillowcases. Two mismatched battered wood tables were topped by cheap white bean-pot lamps. Faded gold drapes, opened wide to let as much light as possible into the dark room, adorned the single large window. A nonworking fireplace fronted by a black wood-burning stove on a round brick pedestal was built into the far wall.