Blood Moon

by Ed Gorman

  "I was afraid you were going to say that."

  "Do you blame me?"

  "I guess not."

  She put her hand on the door handle. Opened up a few inches. Rain hissed. The air was cold. "I had some real hope for us. I really did."

  I was going to say something soothing but she was gone, slamming the door, before I could form the right words.

  If there were any right words.

  2

  The plain pure smell of it, of human flesh as it rotted . . . Sometimes he would dip his head down into the darkness below and let his entire consciousness be suffused with the odors. And in the frenzy of it he would touch himself—that was all it took at moments such as these—touch himself and know an orgasmic ecstasy none of the women, not even the dead ones, had been able to give him. Nor was there any pity or scorn or smirk in the air because he had failed them and failed himself—the charge of orgasm was perfect, blinding, all-encompassing emotionally as well as sexually.

  He watched as they scrambled and scurried below. Sometimes they even climbed high up on the ladder, their claws digging into the wood. . . .

  He felt oneness with the universe, calmness, tranquility, wholeness—feelings he had never known before until the past few years.

  But now somebody was threatening this. Nobody had known anything until the man who called himself Hokanson had showed up here a few days ago. And didn't the ladies all love him, the sonofabitch. And you could bet that he didn't have any problems in bed, putting it right to them and riding them for hours if he wanted to.

  This way all he had—the corpses and their smells—and now it was in serious jeopardy.

  Hokanson had everything he wanted. . . .

  Just now he caught a glimpse of himself reflected in a window.

  And smiled.

  Weren't appearances deceiving?

  Somebody looked like one thing but they were actually quite another.

  "Boys will be girls, and girls will be boys."

  God, he hadn't heard "Lola" in years. . . .

  He had to do what was necessary with Hokanson. Had to. And right away. Before Hokanson figured everything out and destroyed this little paradise . . .

  He walked out into the rain, liking the cold clean bite of it, liking the way it cleared his senses, liking the contrast of its chills with the warm wetness in his underwear. . . .

  Damn Hokanson, anyway.

  Things had been going so well. . . .

  He got his car started and went in search of the only man standing between himself and his continued happiness.

  3

  "Joanna?"

  "Yes?"

  "It's Jim Hokanson."

  Pause. "I really don't want to talk to you anymore. I shouldn't have flirted with you yesterday. Now Sam's dead, and what kind of memories do I have? That I wanted to go to bed with somebody else on the very day my husband is murdered?"

  "I think I know who murdered him."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Yes."

  "Jane Avery was here. She seems to think that I know something about the murder, but I don't."

  "I'd like to come over there in a little while and look through your husband's office."

  "For what?"

  "At this point, I'm not really sure. But I'll know it if I see

  it."

  "I haven't been a very good wife," she said.

  And of course, I thought of Eve McNally, and her notion that she hadn't been a very good mother.

  But all I said was "I'll see you in a little while."

  No white Lincolns in the drive. No lights on in the windows of the house on the hill behind.

  I pulled up in front of the church, left my car running, and ran up to the double front doors. Locked. I stood for a moment under the porch roof watching the rain in all its drab fury. I didn't especially want to run back out into it. I hadn't been a good boy. I'd brought neither my rubbers nor my raincoat. But finally I had no choice.

  I ran back to my car, feeling the rain pound and soak my back. There were a few puddles already formed, and these soaked my shoes. I'm one of those people who can stay calm about having an arm broken, but let me sense a head cold coming on and I get very uptight, even surly. I hate being sick in any way.

  I got inside the car and aimed it up the hill to the house. The gravel was chunky. I kept fishtailing.

  This time I shut off my engine. Before getting out, I opened the glove compartment and took my Ruger out, dropped it into my jacket pocket.

  Even in the hard cold rain, the two-story Spanish-style house was imposing and attractive, the smooth texture of the white stucco exterior contrasting nicely with the roughness of the red tile on the various planes of the roof. It was a newly rich place, and one with no apologies to the more modest standards of the community.

  Nobody answered my knock.

  I walked down the side steps to the double garage and peered inside. Both white Lincolns were gone.

  I went back to the front door, tried knocking again. Nothing happened this time, either, except that I got a little wetter.

  I walked back to my car and was just opening the door when the first bullet shattered the glass of the driver's window.

  I haven't been shot at many times in my life. Despite a few feats of derring-do, most of my Agency work was conducted at a desk in the wilds of Virginia, where the most murderous people you'll find are reporters in search of another Agency scandal.

  My first reaction was that I must somehow be wrong. A shot? No. Something else.

  Then the second shot came and I knew I wasn't wrong at all.

  I dove into the car, slamming my knee hard against the steering wheel as I did so. I lay flat on the front seat.

  Two, three more bullets came in quick succession. Windows imploded into dense spiderwebs.

  Whoever he was, he was a good shot. He had to be hiding down behind a corner of the church. He also had to have a pretty high-powered rifle.

  I was huddled inside a cocoon of myself—all bad nerves and fear and anger and sudden heavy sweat.

  Oh, yes; and panting. I sounded like a big old sheepdog on a very hot day.

  Then, nothing. I lay there rubbing my sore knee, listening to the tinny sound of the rain on my car roof and hood.

  I don't know how long it was before I heard an aged truck grinding up the gravel hill to the house.

  I very cautiously sat up, peered down the hill.

  The killer was long gone, of course. No sign of him at all.

  The truck had G&H MARKET written on the side of its doors. It was a white Chevy that had to be a quarter-century old. The gearbox sounded awful.

  A white-haired man pulled it up to the garage and the door to the side, braked noisily and shut off the engine.

  He walked slowly over to me in the rain, his watery blue eyes fixed on the bullet webs in the windows. He wore blue-and-white-striped Oshkosh overalls and had a pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. He walked with a slight limp.

  "I was right. Them was gunshots I heard," he said, examining the bullet holes more carefully.

  "Yes," I said. "You were right."

  "You called the law?"

  "Not yet."

  He grinned. "If I was you, I'd be in taking a good long leak. I was in the South Pacific in World War Two, and every time the Jap fire would get close to me, I'd pee my pants. Wasn't ashamed to admit it, either. No, sir, I sure wasn't." He paused, examined the spider webs again. "You got any idea who it was?"

  "Nope."

  He shook his head, then looked at the house. "They home?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Hell, she just called me two hours ago and told me to get her order out here as fast as I could."

  "Sorry."

  "Between you and me, she's kind of a bitch, anyway. High-and-mighty, you know." Shook his head. "I probably shouldn't say that about her, with her cancer and all, but that's how she strikes me."

  I thought of what Mindy had told me, about t
he good reverend faking his wife's cancer as a means of raising money.

  I decided not to disillusion the old guy.

  I leaned forward and started my car. "Guess I better head back to town."

  "Good thing the rain's let up."

  As, suddenly, it had, not much more than a sprinkle now.

  "Yeah," I said, "good thing."

  I waved good-bye to him and drove off.

  4

  Eve came to the door after three knocks and peered out through the screening. This afternoon her facial bruises looked even worse: discolored streaks of purple and yellow on left forehead, right cheek, left jawline.

  "Have you heard anything about your daughter?"

  She shook her head. "I bet she's dead."

  She needed somebody to talk to. I felt guilty for not having more time.

  "I found out some things this morning, Eve. I think I'm finally figuring out what's going on. I also think that I know who may have kidnapped her and why."

  She touched a trembling hand to her face and started crying bitterly. "You know one time—what I did one time, I mean?"

  I couldn't take it. I opened the screen door quietly and stepped inside and took her in my arms and held her. She was very near the edge. Very near.

  "I got mad at her one time and I slapped her right across the face. She couldn't've been more'n five years old. And I slapped her right across the face. I just keep thinkin' about that now, how I treated her when she was so little. What a terrible mother I've been to her."

  Her sobs came in small eruptions now, and she choked on words the way a small child does who is crying too hard to speak intelligibly.

  "You've been a good mother, Eve. You've got to stop thinking that way."

  She had to cry herself out.

  I led her over to the couch and plumped up a couple of throw pillows, then found the bedroom and dragged out a blanket and got her covered up. In the bathroom, I filled a glass with cold water and snagged the Excedrin bottle. Sara, the sweet golden retriever, followed me back into the living room and gave Eve three affectionate laps with a big pink loving tongue and then went over on the far side of the room and sat and watched all the human stuff going on.

  I got three tablets down Eve and said, "Have you eaten breakfast yet?"

  She shook her head, her cheeks red and rough from her tears. Her eyes were watery and forlorn.

  "I really have been a terrible mother. You just don't know. Gabbin' on the phone when I should've been spendin' time with her. Bowlin' with the girls when I could've been taking her places."

  I knelt next to her and said, "We aren't perfect, Eve, and it's too much to expect we ever will be. All we can do is try."

  She looked at me and said, "Maybe he's dead, too."

  "Your husband?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "So you haven't heard from him?"

  She shook her head.

  I took a washcloth I'd run lukewarm water over and laid it gently across her forehead. She smelled of tears.

  "I'll check back with you later this afternoon," I said.

  "I wish my husband was like you."

  I smiled. "That's a nice compliment, but you don't know me very well."

  "I know you enough."

  "Well, I know you enough, too. And you're a very decent woman. And a very good mother."

  I kissed her on the cheek. "I need to ask you something, Eve. And you've got to tell me the truth."

  She looked at me tearily and nodded.

  "Has your husband come into some money over the past few years?"

  She nodded.

  "A lot of it?"

  She paused. "Well, a lot for us, anyways." She nodded to the new furnishings and the new TV. "And then he bought a brand-new Ford and paid cash for it. He's in trouble, isn't he?"

  "I'm afraid he could be, Eve."

  "I knew he was. But I was afraid to think it was true."

  She had angled her head away, was getting trapped in her own despair again.

  "Did your husband ever work for Reverend Roberts?"

  She turned back to me, tried to read my face. "This has something to do with Reverend Roberts?"

  "Not necessarily," I lied. "But I'm curious."

  "Well, sure, he used to have a kind of cleaning service on the side."

  "What kind of cleaning service?"

  "Oh, you know, clean rich people's houses."

  "But Reverend Roberts has a maid."

  "Richard didn't clean the house. He cleaned the church."

  "I see. How about Sam Lodge?"

  The eyes searching my face again. "How'd you know about him?"

  "Lucky guess."

  And it was.

  "Well, Richard, he used to clean the Lodges' house, with their antiques and all. Then Lodge started inviting Richard to go along on his antique trips, help carry the heavy stuff. It wasn't too long after this that he started . . . well, being unfaithful. I could smell the other women on him. And now he's gotten Melissa kidnapped."

  She broke again.

  I leaned over and put the fresh side of the washcloth on her forehead and held her hands as she gave into her tears, her entire body shaking.

  "I was such a rotten mother."

  "C'mon, now, Eve. You know better than that. You really do."

  "You don't know. You just don't know. All the times I could've spent time with her

  and—"

  Then she fell to crying again.

  As if understanding that Eve needed great care and fondness, Sara trotted over and gave her a few more love licks on her teary cheeks.

  Eve laughed through her tears. "Good old Sara."

  "She sure is," I said.

  Eve looked up at me, a sad stricken glance. "Please find my daughter. Please. You don't know how bad I wanted to call Jane Avery. But I can't. So you're my only hope. My only one."

  "Maybe I'm getting closer," I said.

  She reached up and took my hand. "I really appreciate all this. Don't think I don't."

  "You'd do the same thing for me."

  And she would, too.

  I leaned down, got her pillows straight behind her head, kissed her on the cheek again, got the washcloth straight on her forehead and said, "I'll try and call you early this evening. Let you know how things are going."

  She gave my hand a squeeze and then sighed deeply and closed her eyes.

  Maybe she'd take a little nap, after all.

  5

  I spent the next few hours in the old stone library, the one with the lion and the gargoyle respectively guarding the entrance.

  People came through the front doors knocking rain off their hats and shaking out plastic raincoats and smelling of fine chill air.

  I sat in the reading room looking through back issues of the New Hope Clarion, which was the weekly paper. I had dug out the papers from five years ago.

  I saw stories that made me feel I was in some kind of time warp. Pleasantly so. No banner headlines about serial rapists or shootouts at drug busts or four-year-olds mysteriously snatched from playgrounds . . . No, here the headlines ran to tractor pulls and VFW picnics, to softball tournaments and concerts in the town square. There was a great old Twilight Zone episode about a commuter who looked out his train window every day and fancied that he saw a peaceful turn-of-the-century town there just waiting for him to visit. So one night, sickened by a grisly job in advertising and an equally grisly wife, he jumps off the moving train . . . and dies. And when he wakes up, there he is, in the turn-of-the-century town. There are a lot of such towns in Iowa even today, and you don't need to jump from a moving train to find them, either.

  After an hour or so, I took a break, ambling down the hall to the restroom and then to a small room where a coffee vending machine stood next to a Frigidaire from the early 1960s, on the face of which was a sign that read PEPSI 25 cents. Who could pass up a bargain like that? The room had three small folding tables with a few chairs designated to each table. It was a room for sack lunche
s and lazy lunch-hour gossip.

  While I was sitting there drinking my bottle of pop, a white-haired elderly woman wearing a flowered summery dress and a cute little straw hat bought a Pepsi of her own and sat at the table next to mine.

  We smiled at each other in the way of polite strangers, and then I decided that if she was a long-time citizen here, she just might be able to help me.

  After introducing myself, I said, "Have you lived here a long time?"

  "Oh, my, yes," she smiled. "Nearly seventy-five years."

  "It's a wonderful little town."

  She laughed. "You must be from the city."

  "These days I am."

  "People my age who grew up in towns like these have a lot of great memories but not everything was so wonderful."

  "Oh?"

  "Well, we didn't have a hospital here until 1932, for one thing. A lot of people died by the time somebody could get them to Cedar Rapids. And for another thing, if you lived on a farm, the way my folks did, you didn't have running water and electricity until about the same time the hospital was built. And the state didn't get around to building good roads until well into World War Two. But the worst of it were the outhouses. There're a lot of jokes about them these days but believe me, back when you were a young girl trying to be a proper lady, outhouses were no fun at all, especially on winter mornings."

  I laughed. "You make it sound pretty bad."

  "No. I just make it sound realistic. It was a much better world back then, but you sure had a lot of inconveniences."

  I coughed. Getting drenched while ducking bullets was probably going to net me a nice strong head cold.

  "Did you ever know a man named Brindle around here?"

  "Stan Brindle?"

  "Why, yes. Stan Brindle."

  "Sure I knew him. Most folks did. He was a pretty prosperous farmer up until the late eighties," she said, sipping her Pepsi.

  "That's what I'm trying to find out."

  "Oh?"

  "What put him out of business, I mean. So suddenly."

  "Well, it's no secret. The same thing that put a lot of other farmers around here out of business. He came out of the seventies looking very good on paper but owing the bank a lot of money. In the old days, a farmer could always borrow against the next year's harvest if he needed to. But credit was drying up everywhere."