Biting the Moon

by Martha Grimes

  Well, she would have to practice. She could make a target out of something, paint a bull’s-eye on something, and practice shooting.

  She had done this several times, careful not to waste ammunition—her supply was, after all, limited. She put cotton in her ears and wound a scarf around her head like a wide ribbon to hold the cotton in place. She held her arms straight out and tried to position her hands as she remembered seeing cops do it on television (but why she should remember this and not her own name, she couldn’t imagine). The first time she’d thumbed the safety down, aimed, and fired, the discharge toppled her onto the ground.

  Over several weeks, she’d improved; she was steadier and actually managed to get several shots inside the bull’s-eye. But it was the feel of shooting she was after; she wanted the physical act of it to be less foreign to her. Not that she would ever get comfortable with it, just more familiar.

  Familiarity, though, did not lessen her fear of the Smith & Wesson. She would look at it often, almost as if it were some kind of icon, lying before her on the white porcelain table: hard as a trapper’s heart, cold as death, black as sin.

  • THE GIRL •

  1

  Along the highway, a few miles from the city and a short distance from the general store where she went to get her supplies, Andi got a ride from a woman with pearl-gray hair and rings on nearly all her fingers. As Andi was counting the rings, the woman was lecturing her about the dangers of hitchhiking, telling her she should feel lucky that she herself had come along; there was all kinds of trouble a girl might meet up with.

  Andi counted nine rings, mostly silver and turquoise, but she thought she saw a ruby and an emerald winking on the far side of the steering wheel. The woman went on talking about the awful things that could happen to a young girl—well, to anybody, really, if one weren’t careful. It sounded to Andi as if the driver enjoyed exploring the menu of crimes against one’s person that could result from getting in cars with strangers. Did her parents know she was hitchhiking? Her parents, said the woman, would be pretty upset.

  Politely, Andi agreed. “Yes, ma’am.” Then she thought she really should contribute to the conversation beyond no, ma’am, and yes, ma’am, so she told the woman about an imaginary aunt and how she was the only one in the entire family that the aunt liked, and why not? for she was the only person who ever bothered to visit her. This aunt had told Andi that when she passed on (Andi was careful not to refer to “death”) she was going to leave Andi all her jewelry. Her aunt loved rings.

  Andi had found that the solace of remembering nothing was the freedom to invent everything. She peopled her life with aunts, uncles, parents, dogs, and cats. “Olivier” was her family name. The O on her backpack had decided that, after she’d run down a list of possible O-names. Every day, she added a little bit to her Olivier history. There was a black cat named Ink and a dog named Jules. There had been no sick aunt; she had just at that moment invented her.

  But while she was free to improvise this history, she knew it was an awful freedom, for nothing, no one, was anchored. They had slipped the reins. They could be anywhere. They could be nowhere. She bent her head.

  The driver, whose own name was Foster, Mrs. Foster, clucked approval every so often at Andi’s attentions to the bedridden aunt. Mrs. Foster then turned the conversation to herself as she made a right onto Santa Fe’s Paseo de Peralta, chatting about her social standing, until they came to the cross street where Andi had asked to be deposited. Mrs. Foster told her that she had enjoyed their talk. “It’s not often one meets up with a teenager who has such a sense of family and family responsibility.”

  It was a quarter to six. The pharmacy closed at six, which was why she wanted to come at this time. It had happened purely by accident one day weeks ago, just before closing then, too. She was in line before two other customers and had paid for a tube of toothpaste. Afterward, she had stopped in front of the magazine display, which she hadn’t seen before, hidden as it was by tall shelves of soaps and shampoos. The flickering of the fluorescent lights had registered dimly in her mind as she stood reading a magazine. At the rear of the store, the lights had blinked off. And then the center rows did the same. Someone had been closing up.

  On that first visit she had observed the pharmacist in his white jacket at work in a very small room, a cubicle on a raised platform from which he could look out over the drugstore much like a lighthouse keeper. It was he who had been locking up; he must have assumed she was among those customers who had gone out. Through the rows of shelves, she remembered seeing him walking through the store up to the front, where he must have flicked another set of switches, for the fluorescent lights in the front part of the room had flickered off. All except for the small lights that illuminated the big plate-glass window and its displays.

  When he had started walking again toward the back, she had hunkered down so he wouldn’t see her. A door opened and thudded shut. All was quiet. He must have left through a rear door, perhaps to get in a car parked in back. She waited awhile, wondering why she was doing this. After she heard a car engine engage, she still waited, sitting on the cold floor, listening for the sound of the engine to die out in the distance.

  Finally, she had risen, acutely and uncomfortably aware of herself and the fact that she was alone here and doing something surely illegal by remaining. She stepped carefully away from the magazines and made her way past the shelves of Neutrogena and Clairol, past the film and flashlights, where she disengaged a palm-sized disposable flashlight.

  She walked up the three steps to the pharmacist’s cubicle, his glass-bound perch. It struck her as awfully exposed, perhaps to reassure customers that he was doing nothing at all that wouldn’t bear public scrutiny. The narrow beam of the flashlight played over the shelves. What she then realized she was after—it came to her in a flash—was a painkiller, liquid so that it could be injected. And a hypodermic needle. That, she thought, would probably be easy, but the drug would be difficult. She knew the names of one or two; beyond that, she knew nothing. In front of her was a cabinet with a metal clasp and a lock. On the glass shelves of the cabinet were several bottles, capped and stoppered. She ran the flashlight up under the shelf below the cabinet, thinking the key might have been secreted there. But the pharmacist would probably have all of these keys on a ring together and would keep the ring by him. She went on around the small room, playing the flashlight on copper-colored vials and white jars. Lord, there was enough Percodan and Valium to keep all of Santa Fe happy.

  Beside the jar of Percodan was a bottle of viscous fluid that had on its label MORPHINE. It was small enough to shove into a back pocket of her jeans, but big enough to make the pocket bulge. Another brief search of a few drawers exposed some disposable hypodermic needles, and she took several of these.

  That first visit had been three months ago. She’d been back once since, but had first made a visit to a veterinary office to get information. What she’d told him was that she had an old dog (named Jules, Jules invented on the spot for this purpose) who’d got arthritis in his hip and it probably needed some kind of operation. She was afraid of this (she’d told the vet), afraid it would be horribly painful.

  The vet told her they had pills to take care of that.

  But Jules won’t take pills. I’ve—we’ve (better make it look like a whole houseful of adults was solidly behind her and Jules in this venture) tried giving him pills and it’s just impossible. Don’t you have some liquid stuff? Stuff you can inject?

  You mean subcutaneously?

  She had said yes, wondering what it meant.

  But that’s not for amateurs.

  Well, you’ve got a lot of amateurs out there doing it.

  We’re not talking druggies here. Raised his eyebrow. Are we?

  Her sigh, being honest, was extravagant. No, I’m just saying there’s an awful high incidence of success for untrained hypodermic users.

  The vet’s mouth had twitched as if he was trying to keep fr
om laughing and didn’t seem to realize they’d drifted away from the subject of Jules.

  My mother’s a nurse. She can do a proper injection.

  If she’s a nurse, she can administer pills too.

  No, she can’t because she’s got arthritis. It’s in her hands and she can’t hold Jules’s mouth open the way you have to like—this. Here she twisted her hand around, showing how much strength it would take to hold open Jules’s mouth.

  Just what kind of dog is this?

  In the waiting room she’d seen small dogs and large, one that looked as big as a panther. It’s like that big one out there.

  The Rottweiler?

  Yes. Look, I’m not asking you to give me anything; I’m only asking for information. How could I go out and shoot up on information?

  Since that was true enough, the veterinarian showed her what he used to anesthetize and what he might use to keep the pain down during recovery.

  She had thanked him profusely. By the time she left the vet’s office, she was so convinced of Jules’s existence he became part of her Olivier family. Often, she had to shake herself out of whatever dream she’d fabricated.

  The second visit to the pharmacy had been far more productive. It had taken some time searching with her flashlight—she brought along her own, which was a halogen one and stronger; at the same time, it didn’t diffuse the light but concentrated its thin beam on what she was looking at.

  Fortunately, the codeine was not locked up. It was in tiny premeasured bottles of the sort she thought you’d stick a hypodermic into and draw the fluid out with. She debated how many of these she could safely take—none, probably, since the pharmacist would have his supply carefully recorded. Still, if she took three or four, it wouldn’t be enough to arouse suspicion right away (for there were at least thirty or forty of the little bottles). It might be a while before he realized they were missing.

  Thus, here she was for the third time. It amazed her how easy it was to “break in.” If she’d been a thief, a real one, she could probably work this trick in half the stores in town.

  He must’ve got in a new supply, for now there were perhaps twice as many bottles of the drug. She had found that a quarter of a bottle was really enough to stop the pain so that the animal could relax and even sleep. She was, of course, afraid of a lethal dose, so she had tested varying strengths on herself (hoping she wouldn’t become addicted) and had taken the dose down from there. She supposed an animal would need less than a human. Anyway, she told herself that such a death would at least be preferable to the slow and agonizing one of dying in a leg-hold trap.

  She put three more bottles in the outside pocket of her backpack and was about to leave the cubicle when its fluorescent ceiling light, directly above her, flickered on. Oh, God, she thought. He’s come back. She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted at the glass, but with the light on directly above her, the pharmacy was simply thrown into greater darkness. The only things she could make out were humps of shelving and the area around the front window, which had its own lights. She could see nothing else; she could see no one.

  2

  The girl inside the pharmacist’s cubicle could have been on a stage lit by footlights, trying to look out over a dark theater into an audience she couldn’t see. This image was enhanced by the little dispensary’s being raised on a platform. There was a set of switches inside the front door that operated all the lights, and it was one of these that Mary had flicked to flood the cubicle with light.

  Mary stood near the pharmacy’s soda fountain, wondering who this blond girl was. A druggie, probably. Why else would anyone break in and head for the small room where the pills and bromides were shuttled into little amber tubes and dark bottles? There was plenty of stuff back there, lots of codeine-laced painkillers. Valium, Demerol, Percodan. Heaven for an addict.

  But what had really stopped Mary dead in her tracks, had shut down that shout in her throat—Who are you? What’re you doing?—was that the girl made Mary think she was seeing things, for she looked like Mary’s dead sister. She looked so much like her that for a second Mary had grown giddy with the hope that Angela’s death had been a terrible mistake, that the body had been misidentified, that it wasn’t Angie they’d buried, and by some miracle she was back.

  Mary shook her head to clear it. Of course, as she looked at this person who could not see her (and that was an unaccountable pleasure, Mary thought), it had taken but a moment to show Mary she was wrong; the differences between the two were many, too many to comprehend, really, and the reason for confusing Angie and this girl was wishful thinking on Mary’s part. That and the long pale hair, the fragile look of the cheekbones.

  She flicked on the overhead lights in the rest of the pharmacy and started walking toward the back at the same time that the girl walked out of the cubicle. Mary saw she was much fairer than Angie had been and much younger. And Angie would never dress in jeans and an old shirt. She’d always worn loose dresses. Mary tried to sound authoritative. “What’re you doing? Were you after the tranks, the Valium and stuff?”

  The girl shook her head slowly. “I’m not an addict.”

  The girl didn’t follow this up with what she was, though. Apparently, she didn’t feel much need to explain herself. Mary rather liked that, but she wasn’t going to let on that she did. “Then what were you after?”

  “Painkiller.” She held up a small bottle. “This.”

  Mary frowned. “For what? If you’re not an addict, like you say.”

  The girl looked down and then (as Mary saw it) “adjusted” her expression. Or “arranged” it, to back up whatever lie she was going to tell. Mary knew this because she did it herself quite often. She waited, her own face expressionless.

  “I have this really sick aunt—”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  “My name’s Mary Dark Hope. I work here. My cousin used to own it, her name’s Schell. It’s still called Schell’s Pharmacy. Now it belongs to Dr. Rodriguez.” Wait a minute! Why was she answering questions? “So what’s your name?”

  “Andi.” She seemed to be thinking again, her eyes moving over the room, raking the air, as if she were trying to turn up something. She added, “Olivier.”

  “Well, glad to meet you. But what do you want painkiller for so much you’d break in and steal it? And not for your sick aunt.”

  “Coyotes, foxes, bobcats—anything that gets stuck in one of those leghold traps.” She blinked several times, her lashes fine as dandelion filaments. She gestured with her head. “Out there.”

  Mary was stunned. This had to be the truth because it was simply too outlandish for a lie. But she didn’t know what to say. She looked back toward the soda fountain. “You want an ice-cream soda? Or a milkshake? That’s what I came in for. Dr. Rodriguez lets me come in any time I want to.”

  With a great deal of relief and a brilliant smile, Andi said, “I haven’t had one in a long time.”

  “Come on; it’s over there.”

  Andi followed her down the aisle to the soda fountain and sat up on one of the tall stools. “Chocolate,” she said, pushing a strand of her silvery-blond hair back over her ear.

  Mary set out two ribbed glasses and started digging into the container of hard ice cream. Her head was into it so far that her voice, when she asked the question, echoed. “Do you live in town or outside of it?” Mary stood up straight. “This ice cream’s like concrete; I’ll have to wait a minute.”

  Andi had been leaning over the counter, watching the progress or lack of it. She looked disappointed. Actually, Mary thought, she looked as if she might be hungry. Pinched, a little. “Anyway, I feel like maybe I’d like a sandwich. We could have the sodas for dessert.” She wasn’t hungry; she’d just eaten what felt like a tubful of polenta with chicken and pozole, one of those heavy meals Rosella liked to cook. But now she opened the refrigerator under the counter and took out some cheese. “You want cheese or ham or—chicken,
there’s some chicken slices?”

  “Cheese would be great, thank you.”

  Mary set about making the sandwiches—she guessed she could eat a little so that Andi wouldn’t think she was a charity case—mayonnaise and some wonderful nut bread. She repeated her question. “Do you live in Santa Fe or outside of it?”

  “Outside, I guess you’d say.”

  Mary glanced up, thinking that sounded kind of vague. “Like in Tesuque or someplace?”

  “Well, no, I really mean outside.”

  “Camping?” Mary finished constructing one of the sandwiches and cut it in half.

  “Kind of. Thanks!” Andi looked at the sandwich as if it were spread with pearls instead of mayonnaise.

  “So you only kind of camp?” Mary put a slice of cheese on a slice of bread and folded it over. She took a small bite. Andi was eating her sandwich very carefully, as if she didn’t want it to be gone too soon. “And that’s how you see these coyotes?”

  Andi was silent, thinking and chewing. She said nothing more until she’d eaten the sandwich half. “Actually, it’s a kind of camping trip through the mountains and so forth. It’s more to study . . . trapping.”

  Mary knew this wasn’t true from the way she ended up so weakly on that word. But she didn’t contradict her. She hated it when people stepped on her own evasive answers to things. She went back to digging at the hard ice cream, and said, “I hate those traps. I saw some pictures once of a gray wolf with its leg caught in one.” She had actually only glimpsed the picture and looked quickly away. She thought of Sunny. How she’d feel—rather, how Sunny would feel—if he got his leg caught in one. “It’s like torture chambers that they used to have in castle dungeons. That’s just what it looks like. Iron jaws.” And then Mary realized that Andi had been trying to rescue animals. Not just one she’d stumbled on, but many. That she went looking for animals in trouble. She stared at Andi, who was eating the crust of her sandwich and who said nothing, only nodded.