MOON FALL

by Tamara Thorne

  "Guys," he began, "we gotta find Greg-" As he spoke, he glanced up at Paul again, and even from this distance, he could see the boy's back stiffen. Elbows moved slightly putting the weasel away- and then Pricket just stood there, unmoving.

  "Paul!" John yelled.

  The other three turned to look.

  Paul didn't answer, didn't move.

  "Paul!" John was running, running, and the little meadow seemed to go on forever before he reached him. "Paul?''

  Paul turned then, his face pale and strange. He stared at John with fathomless eyes.

  "What's wrong?" John asked, as the other three arrived, and suddenly he knew. As the pit of his stomach filled with cold sludge, he stepped closer to the edge of the cliff.

  "No." Paul grabbed his arm, tried to pull him back. "No, John, don't look."

  He barely heard him. Shaking Paul off, he took the final step and looked over the edge. Below, Greg floated, face down, just below the surface of the pool, his red windbreaker puffing out of the water. "No," John whispered, as he felt the others gathering around him, staring down.

  ''No!" he screamed. Without thinking, he bent and dived. The fall went on forever, then he broke the water. Ice cold, impossibly cold, it seized his body, crushed his chest.

  He pushed to the surface, saw Greg floating three feet away.

  "Greg!" he gasped, and with one powerful kick, moved close enough to grab his brother. "Greg!" He turned the boy in his arms, saw the open eyes, dull with death, the raw flesh and mashed cheek and jaw bones, and wanted to die himself.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered.

  "Is he okay?" Doug called from above.

  John looked up at the four pale faces lining the cliff. His voice deserted him, but he was dimly aware of the heat of the tears coursing down his cheeks. He looked at his brother again. The water's so cold, sometimes people come back to life after being in cold water ...

  ''Is he alive?" Beano called.

  John didn't answer, just held onto Greg and swam for the water's edge, to where a steep trail led to the top of the ridge. The air felt warm as he climbed out of the chill water. Turning, he grabbed his brother under the arms and pulled him out.

  Greg was stiff and John knew then he wouldn't be coming back; all the CPR in the world wouldn't do it. Dimly he felt tears coursing down his cheeks, but his emotions were dead as he grimly pulled the little body-so much heavier in death than in life-up the path.

  ''Here, John." He looked around, saw Paul squatting on a rock just above him. Beyond, the others were strung out up the trail, waiting to help. "Here," Paul said quietly. "Hand him to me."

  "No, it's okay. I can do it."

  "It's too steep," Paul insisted. "You can't do it by yourself. Hand him up."

  "He's dead." John's emotions, so ordinary a moment ago, nearly choked him now.

  "I know. Let us help you."

  With that, Paul reached down, and somehow, with those skinny little arms, pulled Greg up to the rock, then turned toward Doug, who reached down from his perch and took the body. John watched it all, until, waiting on the cliff's edge, Beano Franklin pulled the body up and out of sight

  "John?" Paul Pricket, his eyes dark, agonized, watched him. ''Take my hand, John."

  Dumbly he stared at Paul's fingers. Greg was dead, and it was all his fault.

  "John!"

  Unthinking, be grabbed Paul's hand and hoisted himself up, then waited while Paul climbed the rest of the way. He stood on the rock, unwilling or unable to move, and after a moment, he looked toward the waterfall.

  Far above, on the bridge over the top of the Falls, he saw the old witch, Minerva Payne, looking down at him, her gaze inscrutable. He looked away and began climbing. When he reached the ridge, she was gone.

  PART TWO

  August 1996

  Five

  "Who found her?"

  Sheriff John Lawson swallowed hard and forced himself to look over the edge of the cliff. "Anonymous caller. Female. Scotty didn't recognize the voice. So, do you think it's a suicide?"

  "Can't say yet." Frank Cutter, Moonfall's physician and coroner, scratched his round jowls thoughtfully. ''But I wouldn't be surprised. Wouldn't be surprised if it's foul play, either. You okay?"

  John could feel the doctor's eyes on him. "Yeah." Standing on the cliff at the rim of the Mezzanine at Witch Falls, staring down at the pond, at his deputy taking photos of the woman's body floating just below the water's surface, was almost more than he could bear. It reminded him too much of that terrible day over twenty years ago, when Greg . . . God I hate this place!

  Until now, he'd returned only three times since the accident: once on the one-year anniversary of Greg's death, again after Doug Buckman committed suicide here at age sixteen, and finally, six years ago, as a deputy investigating the death of a John Doe. Each time, it was more difficult and he wondered what he had ever seen in this place. "I'm fine," he said at last, not looking at Cutter, noticing instead the early morning dew, already drying under the rising August sun.

  "Go ahead."

  At the sound of his deputy's voice, John glanced down. Scotty Carroll was putting the lens cap on his camera as two EMTs waded into the red-tinged pool and began maneuvering the body into a stretcher basket they would use to haul up the corpse. As he watched, Scotty began climbing back up the same trail John had traveled so long ago. A moment later he arrived topside, wet to the waist and shivering despite the fact that it was already warm out. The water was always chill.

  "Her wrists are slit." Scotty's face was pale. This was his first dead body.

  John nodded. ''Go on back and get changed, then take care of the film."

  The young man nodded gratefully and walked off, keeping to the edges of the clearing to try to avoid damaging any evidence that might still be waiting.

  "Suicide, then," John said to Cutter.

  "I'll tell you after the autopsy." He eyed the sheriff. "It's not like you to make snap judgments, John."

  Morning sunlight streamed through the pines, highlighted the flowers, and glinted off the waterfall. The air smelled fresh and warm, fragrant with the forest and the cold scent of water. The Mezzanine was a beautiful meadow, but he hated it with all his heart. He feared it. "I'm not judging, Frank. I'm hoping."

  "John, you've got to let it go someday."

  His eyes burned. He couldn't look at Cutter. "I know." He shielded his eyes against the sun and stared up at the top of Witch Falls, half-expecting to see Minerva Payne, the old witch, watching him.

  Six

  The Moonfall sheriff's office had changed very little since John Lawson's father had been in command. Located in the town's historic business district just off Apple Hill Road, the small, square building, clad in wood siding and a western false front riser, was really concrete and stucco beneath. The "historic" facades of downtown Moonfall had been added in the early sixties, when the town council decided that a good crop of tourists was at least as profitable as a harvest of apples.

  Other than St. Gertrude's, a onetime monastery dating back to Revolutionary War days, a few cabins, and the Baptist church from the Civil War era, every building in town had been built after the turn of the century. The western look amused John Lawson: monks and then farmers had settled Moonfall, with nary a cowboy in sight.

  Despite this, he liked the look of the town, with its old fashioned soda fountains and tourist traps masquerading as general stores and smithy shops. Moonfall Market only sold meat from behind an antique glass butcher case manned by One-Thumb Isaacson, but Franklin's Pharmacy was Moonfall's jewel, with windows displaying rainbows of antique apothecary bottles and jars that cast prisms of delicate color across the sidewalk every afternoon.

  Even the lobby of the sheriff's office bowed to the western ambiance. An old-fashioned brass desk bell decorated the tall cherry wood counter that hid the dispatcher's desk. The walls were adorned with reproductions of photographs from the Lawson family albums: Tobias Lawson, the Baptist minister who'd b
uilt the old church, had arrived shortly after Jeremiah Moonfall, and the Lawsons figured as importantly in Moonfall's history as the Moonfalls, though they showed up less- probably due to their mundane surname and a lack of success with apple-growing.

  The Moonfalls had died out after selling their land to the Parker clan, who later became the most prosperous apple growers on the mountain. The Lawsons had stuck to preaching until Henry, John's father, turned to law enforcement. And although Henry had died in the line of duty in 1973, barely six months after Greg's death, John's desire to follow in his father's footsteps never wavered. If anything, his death had only strengthened his resolve. It must have, he reflected, for him to return to Moonfall after college and hire on as a deputy in a town he thought he never wanted to see again.

  Maybe, he thought as he pushed aside his half-finished report on the Jane Doe, just maybe, Greg's death had had something to do with it, too. He still held on to the hope that it hadn't been an accident, if only to assuage his own guilt, but the only indication he'd ever had of that was his and his friends' foggy memories. He swiveled his desk chair, then stood and crossed his disorderly little office. Hidden from public view behind a closed door, it was piled high with notebooks and papers, Wanted posters and mail, mostly junk. The scarred green desk blotter was the only relatively clear thing in the room. It held only a framed photo of his thirteen-year-old son, Mark, and two mugs, one filled with pens and chewed pencils, the other containing cold coffee.

  Three tall oak file cabinets against one wall dated from the thirties. The fourth, a beige metal one, had been added by his father around 1970. It was three-quarters filled, mostly with traffic violations and accident reports.

  He opened the top drawer and flipped to 1972, then pulled out a manila folder labeled "Lawson, Gregory," in faded blue ink. His fingers trembled as they closed around the tabs. He'd looked inside before, always wondering what he'd forgotten about that Halloween night so many years ago. Death by misadventure. That was the finding of his own father. But ... what if? He shut off the thought, knowing he was only trying to get around his own guilt.

  "Sheriff Lawson?"

  At the sound of his dispatcher's voice, his fingers opened, dropping the file back in place, a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Yes, Dorothy?" he called, shutting the drawer.

  She opened the door, her round face cheerful and motherly- grandmotherly, he corrected: Dorothy had worked for his father as well.

  ''There's someone here to see you," she confided. Anything Dorothy said sounded as if it were a state secret.

  "Isn't the intercom working?" he asked, as he did whenever she opted for knocking-which was all the time. She was great on the radio, so her dislike for the comm line seemed absurd.

  She gave him a long-suffering look, but didn't bother to dignify his question with a reply. "Shall I show her in?"

  "Show who in-"

  A bony hand appeared on the edge of the door and pulled it farther open. Dorothy looked surprised as a nun, in full-habit, came into view.

  ''This is important," said the nun, as she whisked past Dorothy, "and I'm in a hurry." Shutting the door in the dispatcher's face, she stared at John with squinty dark eyes. "May we speak?"

  She looked jarringly familiar, and the musty cinnamon scent she gave off was something he bad smelled before, something that made him feel slightly queasy. Occasionally, he saw the nuns in town, and he realized that's where he must have run into her. He returned to his desk chair, then gestured at the seat across the desk. Her long, angular face, faintly traced with wrinkles at the eyes and between the pointy nose and thin, pursed lips, made him think of the Wicked Witch of the West. If nothing else, this horse-faced nun had to be a creature from a Catholic schoolboy's worst nightmare; all she was missing was a ruler for knuckle-rapping. For an instant, his voice deserted him. He cleared his throat. "Please sit down, Sister."

  "Mother," she corrected him, as she settled into the chair. "Mother Superior Lucy Bartholomew. Head mistress of St. Gertrude's Home for Girls." She extended her hand. It was all stretched skin on bone, dry and hard and cool. The word "reptilian" came to mind.

  When her eyes bored into his, he had to fight an uncharacteristic urge to cringe. "What can I do for you?"

  ''I wish to report a missing person." She folded her hands on his desk.

  ''A student?" be asked, thinking that if he were a girl under this woman's care, he'd certainly run away. "Or one of your nuns?" he added.

  ''A lay teacher named Lenore Tynan."

  The sight of the imposing nun had momentarily made him forget about the Jane Doe found at Witch Falls this morning, but his professionalism came back in full force now. "How long has she been missing?"

  "We saw her at dinner last night. When she didn't show up for breakfast, I sent Sister Regina to her room to check on her. Miss Tynan wasn't there, but there was blood on the bed and splashed on the floor and walls."

  "Can you give me a description of Miss Tynan?"

  "Five foot six, one hundred and ten pounds, light red hair, twenty-five years old." The nun ticked off the data in the tone of a teacher repeating a lesson to a class of idiots.

  As John studied the woman's stern face, his stomach began to churn at the thought of visiting St. Gruesome's. He'd never gone near the place after Greg's death. There had been a call or two during his time on the force, but he'd never had to go himself. ''Mother Lucy," he began, ''we found the body of a woman matching your description this morning."

  "Where?" she asked, her composure firmly intact.

  "Witch Falls," he said, his insides puckering.

  Her expression hardened. ''That accursed place." There was no sadness in her voice, no remorse. "What was she doing there?"

  "Maybe you can tell us. I'd like to take you over to the coroner's office to identify the body."

  "Certainly, but I'm in a hurry." She rose and waited until he came around the desk and opened the door for her.

  Seven

  ''That's Lenore Tynan," Mother Superior Lucy Bartholomew said the instant Frank Cutter folded the sheet back from the young woman's bruised, lifeless face. The three stood in Cutter's tiny morgue, gathered around the body on the metal table. The room was cold and white, and the tang of antiseptic mingled with the vague odor of decay and the mildewed cinnamon scent that wafted from the nun. John wasn't sure which of these was the most nauseating.

  "You're certain?" John asked, as Cutter hesitated, the top of the sheet in his hovering fingers. "You don't need another look?"

  "I'm positive." Lucy clipped the words off. "Cover her up."

  ''I'll need to ask you some questions," John began.

  "I realize that, Sheriff." The nun stepped to the door, put her hand on the knob, and turned back to face the men. "I'll receive you at the school later today. Stop at Apple Heaven and ask the sisters to unlock the entry gate for you."

  With that, she opened the door and stepped briskly out.

  ''Mother Lucy?" John called, and she halted, turning to glare at him.

  "Yes?"

  "Don't let anyone into Miss Tynan's room before I get there."

  "Naturally," she practically barked, then pulled the door closed behind her. An edge of black hem caught in it and John grinned at Cutter as they heard a muted oath of some sort. The door reopened minutely and the black cloth flashed out before the door slammed closed again.

  The doctor crossed his arms, whistling low. ''That nun was worthy of Sister Mary Margaret, the meanest sixth-grade teacher at St. Martin's Elementary."

  "I didn't know you were Catholic," John said, averting his eyes from the sheet-draped body on the metal table beside them.

  "I'm not. I kept getting into trouble in public school, so my parents sent me to a Catholic boys' school." He chuckled. "I'm afraid it didn't take."

  "You? A troublemaker? What did you do?"

  "Played doctor, what else?" When Cutter smiled, as he did now, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Mel Torme. ''And I must adm
it, I did lose all interest in that game at St. Martin's." His smile faded and he glanced at the draped body of Lenore Tynan. "Mysteriouser and mysteriouser," he said softly.

  John followed his gaze. ''Have anything for me yet?"

  "You arrived during my first breather of the morning. You know that church potluck yesterday? Seems like about half the Baptists in town got hold of some bad potato salad." He shook his head. "Talk about having a run of customers!"

  John smiled in spite of himself. "Sure it's just the Baptists? That nun had my stomach clenching the whole time she was here."

  "Some nuns have that effect. Don't worry, if you weren't at the picnic, you're safe ... unless Gus brought you a plate. Did he?"

  "No. He's all right, isn't he?"

  "He'd better be. I ordered your grandfather to stay away from cholesterol-mayo, eggs, etcetera, so he wouldn't have touched the stuff."

  "No, that means he won't tell you if he did." John shook his head. Augustus Lawson, retired Baptist minister, was as old and spry as Caspar Parker, and he delighted in disobeying doctor's orders. John figured the old man would outlive them all, cholesterol be damned.

  "I'll call him later." Cutter's expression became serious as he looked down at the sheeted corpse. "You ready?"

  John took a deep breath and looked, too. "As ready as I'll ever be."

  Cutter folded the sheet back, revealing the nude body of the young woman. "See this, John?" He took one of the corpse's arms and carefully turned it to expose the wrist. The hand was bagged, and just above that, a deep horizontal gash revealed a white glint of bone beneath pale, bloodless tissue. ''The other arm's the same. She meant business."