Biting the Moon

by Martha Grimes

  Mary nodded. Andi said nothing. It was true—however it had happened, whatever had happened, there was nothing they could do now. The “how” and the “what” would have to wait. Any rescue of Floyd Atkins was clearly hopeless; Mary knew that. As the raft spun dementedly, Mary thought about the river. You made it through or you didn’t. Peggy, and now her dad. It was almost too much to bear. She hung her head and wiped water away, half foam, half tears.

  • • •

  Harry had managed to contact Ron on the cellular and told him what had happened, where they were, and how to get hold of a patrol boat. “Try Indian Creek or Little Creek.”

  Two patrol boats had found them at the camp on Camas Creek, and rangers had come with their diving equipment. They had gone down now three times in what appeared to be a fruitless search for Floyd Atkins. Harry Wine had gone with them to show them exactly where it had happened. He was here, now, the divers still back there on their unlucky mission.

  Their own group was solemn, even Bill Mixx deprived of his usual loud and bellicose manner. Honey and Lorraine were in tears, ministering to each other.

  Around them, rangers and state police, who had been brought to a nearby landing strip by helicopter, questioned all of them, especially the three who had been in the first boat. They concentrated in particular on Harry Wine. People had gathered, too. Near the Indian Creek Guard Station there were several camps, and news like this traveled like brush fire. Plenty of overturned boats, plenty of boats wrapped, rafters having to swim for it—lots of incidents, but deaths? No.

  Except, it seemed, for Harry Wine’s outfit.

  It wasn’t good for business.

  36

  “I’ve got to tell them,” said Mary. They were sitting by the truck that Randy had shuttled from Stanley.

  Andi shook her head. “I wouldn’t.”

  “But it shows he had motive.” Mary looked across the site where Harry Wine was standing talking to two rangers.

  “I don’t think so, necessarily.”

  “Why? Floyd threatened him! I heard him.”

  “Any parent might say what Floyd said; any dad might hold the man who was with her responsible. I don’t think the police would take what he said as a serious threat.”

  “Well, but wouldn’t they think it was just too much of a coincidence that first the daughter has this boating accident and then the father does too?”

  “Maybe. But we didn’t actually see Harry do anything.”

  Mary insisted. “But Floyd’s kept going on these trips with Harry . . . this is his fourth one.”

  “I know. But that might mean just the opposite: it might say how much Floyd trusted him, or liked him, or some such.”

  “Then why was he using a false name? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But what was Floyd trying to do? It still doesn’t prove anything. Anything they said is your word against Harry’s. And if Floyd knew something, why did he wait for three years?”

  Mary said, “But it wouldn’t hurt, telling the police.”

  “They’ll find out who he really is, anyway. If he has a driver’s license and so forth, they must be under the name Atkins.”

  “But they won’t find out what I heard.”

  “Look. Do you want to tip Harry off we suspect him? Do you want him to know you overheard them? If he finds that out he’ll just get very, very careful.” She got up from the truck’s running board. “Besides, we really were witnesses to the fact Harry didn’t crack Floyd over the head with an oar.”

  Mary made a dismissive gesture at the same time that she went on watching Harry, thirty feet away. “He didn’t do that, no.”

  “And he didn’t push him out.”

  Mary was silent.

  “And we have to tell them what we did see was Harry trying to rescue Floyd.”

  Mary turned her head quickly to deny this. “Pretended to, you mean. He appeared to want to rescue him. That’s different.”

  “Maybe not to the police. What we actually saw happening was Harry jumping in and going under.”

  “Harry could have killed him or just left him to drown under that rock ledge.”

  “He probably did. But we didn’t see him.”

  Mary had seldom felt so frustrated. She watched Andi watching Harry Wine. Her face looked carved out of ivory, or like one of those masks the Greek playwrights used for the chorus: implacable, emotionless. Mary remembered Mel telling Andi how she’d make a good poker player. It was true. It would be nearly impossible for anyone to guess at her hand.

  Mary said, “You’re doing it again, Andi.”

  Andi was puzzled. “Doing what again?”

  “You won’t go to the police. You don’t want to tell them what we know. Or don’t want me to tell them, same thing. Just like you wouldn’t report what happened at Patsy Orr’s to them. It’s almost like—” Mary stopped. “Like you want to track him down yourself.”

  “Well, I don’t. I’m just afraid that whatever we tell the cops, they’ll take it with a grain of salt, they won’t do anything. And Harry Wine would know.”

  He was over there, talking to the rangers, and it was as if Harry Wine heard their words, felt their stares. He looked around, and when his eyes stopped on Andi, he smiled.

  “He gives me the creeps,” said Mary softly.

  • • •

  They made the long trip back to Wine’s Outfitters in the van with the others, Ron driving. Harry and Randy were still talking to the police.

  Honey seemed to be the most upset of all of them. Her tears were genuine; Honey really did grieve for Floyd, though she’d known him for only two days. Bill kept patting her arm. Lorraine and Graham were silent. Not surprisingly, a pall had spread over the party.

  When they were finally going down the dirt road to Harry’s store, Mary said, “We should tell Reuel.”

  “By now, he’s probably heard.”

  37

  They would find him at the landfill, and that’s where they were heading. Mary was driving; she had wanted to drive because she thought just doing something physical might take her mind off the raft and the river. She said, “It’s like . . . something that couldn’t happen happened.” She gripped the steering wheel as if she needed something solid to hold on to. “The police won’t know it was anything but an accident. No one will know. Ever.”

  Mary was still arguing, more to convince herself than Andi, who remained certain of her own stand. Mary had really accepted the fact that telling the state troopers wouldn’t do any good.

  “Couldn’t the police reach their own conclusions?” Andi had said.

  “Maybe they’ll suspect it’s too much of a coincidence they both drowned floating that river in Harry Wine’s company,” said Mary.

  “Even so, there’d be no way of proving it.”

  They had reached a section of torn-up road where workers were laying pipe. A road worker waved them through, and several others stopped to look and leer. Whistles, catcalls, raised hard hats, arms held out, invitations to nothing.

  Andi turned to look back.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “That one.” Andi inclined her head toward one of the workers. “He reminds me of Andrew.”

  It was a few moments before Mary could recall who Andrew was. “The sandwich guy?”

  Andi nodded, looking off at the mountains, blue in the distance. “Sandwich Heaven.”

  Mary said, after a moment, “How about Sandwich Sanctuary?”

  “That’s wonderful. If I ever see him again, I’ll tell him.”

  “You’ll see him again.”

  Andi shrugged. “Maybe.”

  They drove in silence for a while before they got to the road leading to the landfill. “You know what we should be doing: going back to Santa Fe. It’ll take us two days to get there.”

  “If Rosella gets back before we do, can’t we just say we drove into the city?”

  “Not if it’s midnight, we can’t.” Mary to
ok her eyes off the washboard road to look at Andi. “I guess I really don’t want to make her anxious. She’d be afraid to leave me alone. She’d be afraid to go back to her pueblo. Rosella’s so conscientious.”

  “You know, I kind of miss the cabin. Isn’t that strange? You’d almost think it was home.”

  Maybe it is, thought Mary.

  “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny my name is buried in the word ‘Sandia’? Or not funny, but . . . I’m trying to find the right word for it.”

  They had come to the big gate across the road. “There’s probably a right word for everything, if you could find it.”

  “Prophetic, that’s the word. ‘Andi’ being buried in ‘Sandia.’ It’s prophetic.”

  “Of what?” asked Mary, looking at the row of Reuel’s junk sculptures lining the dirt rise above the Dumpsters. “Prophetic of what?”

  • • •

  Reuel was bent over his scrap metal: a hubcap, andirons, a piece of a wrought-iron gate, and a section of galvanized aluminum pipe he’d pushed down into the ground. “Jack Kite told me. He was here less’n an hour ago.” He stopped trying to do something with the hubcap and pipe. “I was going to look for you, but I figured it’d be better just to sit tight and let you find me.” He stood up and took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his forearm. “How are you girls, anyway? You holding up all right?”

  Andi said, “Okay, I guess. But I feel awful inside.”

  “That don’t surprise me.” He picked up an old leather-covered steering wheel and started cutting off the leather with a heavy hunting knife with a beautiful bone handle.

  “We don’t think it was an accident,” said Mary. “Just like his daughter wasn’t an accident either.”

  Reuel looked at them, contemplating this. “Never thought it was. I was pretty surprised when Jack said who he was.”

  “Tell him, Mary,” said Andi.

  Mary told him what she’d overheard.

  Reuel thought this over. “Well, well.” He cleared his throat, was silent.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Andi said.

  “Oh, I doubt that. I could never match anything you come up with.”

  “Yes, you could. She could have been pregnant, maybe thought he’d marry her, and told her parents. Something like that. It would sure be a motive. That’s what we think.”

  We? Mary sighed.

  “Anyway, the chances the Atkins girl would flip over and not be able to recover were practically zero. She was too experienced and the Salmon’s not that wild a river most of the time.”

  “Treated you-all pretty wild. Big Mallard can be rough, too. Just don’t go makin’ things up out of whole cloth, that’s all.”

  To Mary, it seemed whole cloth was about all Andi had of the world.

  Reuel leaned the steering wheel against the thick pipe and wiped his forehead again. He chewed his tobacco slowly, thinking. Then he said, “It’s true, you can’t prove nothing. But when they bring up Atkins’s body, I’d lay money on something being wrong with his life jacket, his ‘personal flotation device,’ as they say. I’d bet the police are going to find a tear, a rip in it. And jumping in to save Atkins—hell, that’s such an old trick it’s a cliché. Yeah, they bring that body up, I bet they find that life jacket’s tore up. But that’ll get explained away because of the undercut rocks that could’ve tore up a horse, much less a life jacket.”

  “What can we do?”

  Reuel went fishing in his scrap heap with a long piece of metal that looked like it might have been a harpoon, which he used like a hook. He shook his head. “Don’t know. Never has been any evidence Harry Wine did anything. He’s got people fooled, all right. Some like him a lot because he gives so much to charity and he’s such a charming cuss. He just ain’t like that at all; he’s a real bad man.” Andi and Mary were silent, watching Reuel use some kind of metal-cutting instrument to gouge a hole into the side of the aluminum pipe. He stopped and wiped the sweat off his face again and said, “What I need’s one of them small binoculars.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Mary, irritated with herself that she couldn’t figure out what he was making.

  “It’d be hard to convince lots of folks around here.” Reuel went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Specially the ladies. He turns them bright blue eyes on a woman, I expect she’d think she’s gone to heaven.” He cut another hole on the other side of the pipe, saying, “He was married once. A real pretty girl who I know he beat up on. Abused is what they say, right? God, he sure abused that wife of his.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because she told me, that’s how. She used to come out here hauling trash. A lot of empties of Wild Turkey and Bud cans. She’d come once a week, and after a while she’d stop and sit awhile and talk. Like you two.” He fished another length of pipe out of the pile and regarded it. “Most days she’d be sporting cuts and scrapes or have yellow-purple places on her arms the way you would if somebody grabbed you. One day she—” Reuel sighed. “I want to show you something.” He rose and walked over to his truck.

  Mary and Andi said nothing, only waited for him to come back. He did, bringing with him an envelope.

  Andi sat in a kneeling position, with her body resting on her heels, her forelegs out a little to the sides, her hands gripping her ankles. It was the pose of a little kid, a listening position.

  “It’s a letter from Beth.”

  He shook the close-written pages out. The writing was small and light. “This is something I don’t share with others, mostly because they wouldn’t take it to heart. But you two, that’s different, and I think Beth would approve me reading it, were she here.” Reuel cleared his throat, as if he weren’t used to speechifying. “It goes Dear Reuel and so forth.

  “I never will understand how people seem to hold him in such awe. I never knew a man to be able to fool people the way he does. Or not exactly fool people, more like he gets inside their heads and makes them look out of his own eyes. I guess you’d say he’s real plausible, someone you can’t help but believe in, someone you’re almost waiting to believe in. I’ll never understand that, not until the day I die.

  “I know you know he hit me, since you’d see me sometimes before the bruises ever went away, and you were the only one who did. He never touched my face; for this I guess I was lucky. He didn’t just in case I dared him and went into town. Nothing’s much worse than seeing a woman with a black eye, I guess he figured.

  “Now, I know women who never experience marriage this way, they would say they’d never put up with it, and any woman who would’s a damned fool. But women who never had a hand shoved in their face can’t really say what it’s like. ‘Why, I’d never put up with that kind of treatment’ they say and are inclined to hold a woman who does put up with it responsible somewhat. And I guess they’d be right to some degree.

  “The thing is this: by the time your marriage ever gets to this stage, a lot of other things have happened that corrodes your spirit. It makes sense—doesn’t it?—a man that’d raise his hand to you was hardly benign up to that point. So there are many other ways of getting under a woman’s skin before you ever start beating her.

  “Anyone who ever looked out into the night and saw a deer freeze in the glare of their headlights might understand what makes a wife stay. Understand why she doesn’t just look away and run like hell. You can’t, or a lot of women just can’t. For part of them’s been jacklighted just like that deer, even when you think he’s surely going to take it all the way and kill you one day. And I thought that day had come over at Devil’s Canyon. You know that strange rock formation that juts out over the canyon called Weeping Rock? Well, he kept calling me to come on and go out there to look at the canyon walls, how far down they went. I didn’t want to, but I knew it would just make things worse if I refused. He got behind me and curled one arm around me and told me to look down. It was like hanging in space, and when I looked down, I thought I was looking at my dea
th as sure as sure. And I think he did mean to kill me and then decided not to because he hadn’t finished with me yet.

  “You remember Stevie, that little old hound dog used to ride with me in the truck whenever I’d come to the dump? He killed him. When I asked why, he just said the dog had to be put down, his arthritis was so bad. I don’t know how he can still look me in the eye, all mournful, and say things like that as if I’d believe him. He could do that, you know; he did it all the time.

  “Poor Stevie. This broke my heart, it really did. I found out later from one of Bonnie’s kids—Earl, I think—just how he did it. Earl was there in the barn, forking up hay, when Stevie and him came in. Earl told me this as if he was ashamed to have seen it. He threw a bucket of water over the poor animal and then he took one of those cattle prods and went after the dog. Earl said he poked him again and again and every time the dog just let out the most awful wail that Earl thought he’d never heard the like of before. Earl said, ‘My hands were clawin’ air, Missus, but I couldn’t do nothin’ to help that old dog.’ Poor Earl hung his head down as if he was ashamed, as if it was his fault somehow. Poor boy. I told him never to mind, there wasn’t anything he could’ve done.

  “Reuel, I’m telling you this about Stevie because it’s what brought me finally to do something, made up my mind to get away. If it hadn’t been for something as hateful as happening not to me but to another, I might never have got up the courage. Frozen as I always felt in this marriage, still in some tiny pocket of my mind I had the choice to leave. But Stevie didn’t; Stevie never had any choice but to be killed like that. To vent that kind of hatred on a dumb animal, that’s his ticket to hell, even if he never did another thing.

  “It’s what I said before, Reuel, or what I asked. How can this side of him, which is the biggest part, be so hidden from other people when it’s so stark to us?

  “So I’m heading out, I’m going West. And I want you to know what a friend you’d been to me, and how I depended on you, even though we never outwardly talked about things. I guess we did inwardly, and that was the important thing.