Turtle Moon Part 14

Lucy's aunt and uncle smile at each other, but that doesn't stop Naomi from handing him the b.u.t.ter subst.i.tute.

"I should have called you when I moved to Florida," Lucy says. "But things got so complicated with the divorce."

"Divorce is never pretty," Jack agrees.

Lucy runs her fingers over the coffee she's spilled. She sees now how easy it is to be cruel without even trying; children do it every day.

"I'm sorry," Lucy tells her uncle."Don't worry," Jack says. "The tablecloth can be dry-cleaned."

But it will never be the same, Lucy knows that.

There will always be a slight yellow stain, and, if it's not thrown out, the tablecloth will never again be used with the good china. They drink their coffee and have their onion rolls and discuss the traffic on the Long Island Expressway until enough time has pa.s.sed for Lucy to leave politely.

"Scout," Jack says suddenly, after he's walked her to the door. The name escapes out of his mouth. He has never said his brother's name in Lucy's presence, and when she came here she was almost grateful for that. She took nothing from her parents' house, except her own clothes, and now she regrets not searching for her mother's pink scarf, for Scout's battered briefcase filled with sheet music. When Lucy looks at her uncle he explains, "It's just with your hair so short, I can see him in you. The profile. The nose."

They can hear Naomi in the dining room, as she clears the table. They can hear the hum of the pool filter out back.

"I was the baby," Jack says. "Believe it or not."

After Lucy leaves their house she finds she's having trouble breathing.

She remembers she's always been slightly allergic to lilacs. Keith was the same way. His nose was sniffly from May until July, then again during ragweed season at the end of August. When he was a baby, Lucy used to keep him indoors as much as she could during these months, but even before he could walk, he'd bang on the screen door until it opened and he could escape into the yard. She takes a hard left out of Jack and Naomi's driveway, so that fine bits of gravel hit against the paint of Evan's Celica, but when she reaches Middle Neck Road, she slows down, since it must be much more difficult to tail someone here in New York than it is in Florida. More traffic, for one thing, and faster, ruder drivers. She should probably be angry, since she told Julian not to follow her, but at least he's staying far behind. Still, it's disconcerting to be trailed, even when you know it, as if your shadow were lagging three blocks behind, instead of following right at your side.

If she tried to figure out why she wanted him so much last night, she would never be able to.

This is not rational, it's way beyond that. She's not going to think about Julian, that's all there is to it, although not thinking about him takes so much energy that Lucy is exhausted by the time she finds a parking s.p.a.ce in the crowded munic.i.p.al lot. When she gets to Salvuki's she has to introduce herself to the receptionist all over again before she's allowed access to Salvuki himself.

She approaches him as he combs out a whitehaired woman who already has a terrific tan, even this early in the season. Salvuki pauses for a moment after Lucy tells him who she is; he studies her reflection in the mirror.

"You haven't been here in almost a year," he says accusingly. Salvuki looks more like an accountant or an a.s.sa.s.sin than a hairdresser. "Whatdid you let them do to you?"

"I had a problem with cHorine," Lucy admits.

"It's almost all out."

"I don't know if there's anything I can do with that," Salvuki tells her.

"Actually, I'm just trying to find someone who was a client of yours,"

Lucy says.

She roots through her purse and brings out the photograph of her neighbor. Once he identifies this woman, Lucy will be free. She can swoop down on Verity with the victim's name, dazzling both the Verity police and Paul Salley; she may be able to rescue her son and get herself a frontpage byline all at the same time. If she's lucky, she won't even remember Julian Cash, she won't think about him every time she closes her eyes.

"This woman wasn't my client," Salvuki says, handing Lucy the photograph and reaching for his comb.

"She was," Lucy presses. "She told me Just look at her one more time."

"I'd remember that hair color," Salvuki says.

"I'd remember that face."

"The hair color is new," Lucy says, panicked.

She has never imagined the possibility of his faulty memory. It is quite conceivable that if someone had brought Salvuki a photograph of Lucy, with all her hair chopped off, standing beneath the Florida sky at noon, he would have never known her. She sees now that as Salvuki combs out his client, he's studying only her hair; the rest of her is nothing more than baggage.

"Please," Lucy says. Think back."

"Look, if you need help, I'll try," Salvuki says.

"But I can't make any promises. Your hair is too damaged for that."

Outside, standing on the sidewalk, Lucy can't catch her breath; it's as if she were caught in a net of lilacs. She has nothing to show for this trip, nothing to show for all her certainty. She had one simple fact and it isn't enough. Without a name, Keith will be the only lead; when they take him into the police station for questioning, he'll freeze, or he spit and utter a hundred curses, and if they finally have to restrain him, they won't believe a word he says. Lucy stands facing a children's shop whose window is decorated with a castle made of Legos. Soft pink dresses hang above the castle like clouds.

She remembers this place; she used to come here for birthday presents for Keith. On impulse, Lucy goes inside. She picks up a puppet in the shape of a dragon, with soft green wings made out of satin, and silk fire shooting from its mouth."Great, isn't it?" the owner of the shop calls.

Lucy carries the puppet up to the counter and takes out her wallet.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" the shop owner asks.

When Lucy looks at her blankly, she adds, "The new owner of the dragon?"

"A boy," Lucy says. One much too old for such nonsense as puppets.

"Boys love any sort of monster, don't they?" the shop owner says.

As Lucy reaches for her MasterCard she sees the dead woman's face right in front of her driver's license.

"Is that Bethany?" the shop owner asks.

Lucy looks up; she can feel her heart race.

"It is. I remember that adorable baby."

"That's right. Bethany," Lucy says evenly.

"She used to come in twice a week," the shop owner says as she rings up the dragon. "And then she just stopped. She special-ordered one of those." There is a pink rocking horse decorated with rhinestones and garlands of handpainted flowers at the rear of the store. "She gave me a deposit, then never came back to get it."

"She did that?" Lucy says.

"If Bethany's a friend of yours, you might want to remind her about the rocking horse. I can't hold it forever."

"No," Lucy says. Her lips are dry, and she runs her tongue over them.

"Of course not."

Most probably, Lucy is standing in the exact same place where her neighbor stood when she put down the deposit for the rocking horse. An impulse buy, Lucy thinks, a toy so exceptional she wouldn't have cared about the expense, or maybe, back then, she didn't have to care.

"I haven't seen her in ages," Lucy says. Her heart skips one beat as she lies; she imagines the same thing happens to Keith all the time.

"If I had her address, I'd go right over. That rocking horse is so cute it's a shame not to have it."

"Well, no one responded to the cards I sent, the shop owner says. "And when I phoned I got a recording, because the number had been changed to an unlisted one. But maybe you'll have better luck."

She looks up the address in her card file and writes it down for Lucy, then has Lucy sign her MasterCard receipt.

"Your little boy will love this," she tells Lucy.Lucy runs all the way to the parking lot. She throws the dragon into the backseat of Evan's car.

She's in such a rush that she doesn't look at the address until she is stopped at a red light and can finally pull a local map out of Evan's glove compartment. As it turns out, she has to head back toward Kings Point. The street where Bethany used to live is lined with lilac hedges, and Lucy's eyes start to water even though all the car windows are rolled up. When she sees the house number, her stomach lurches.

It's a lovely house, bigger than hers and Evan's; there are baskets of potted fuchsias hung along the porch ceiling and the driveway is paved with heavy bluestone. Lucy parks halfway down the block and walks up to the house, but when she gets to the door, all she can think of is her neighbor down in the laundry room and the look on her face when she heard her baby cry. Lucy realizes that she may have to give someone horrible news. She has always wondered how it was decided that her next-door neighbor should be the one to tell her that her parents had died; she'd wondered, back then, why it was her neighbor who broke into tears when Lucy was the one who had suffered the loss.

Standing beneath the fuchsias and a bluepainted ceiling, she finally rings the bell. She's rummaging through her purse in search of a comb when the door opens.

"I thought I was picking you up tomorrow night."

This is the voice of her neighbor's husband, and it turns Lucy to ice.

She has to s.h.i.+eld her eyes against the sunlight so she can see him.

He's just showered and he's wearing slacks and a clean white s.h.i.+rt.

"Don't tell me." Randy grins. "You couldn't wait."

"Right," Lucy says.

She goes in through the open front door, into the cool foyer, her cheeks and throat burning hot.

"What did you do?" he asks. "Follow me?"

"My cousin Andrea knows where everyone lives." It's amazing how easy it is to continue lying once you ve started. You don't even know why you're doing it; it just feels necessary. "It's a beautiful house,"

Lucy says.

"Let me show you around," Randy says, leading her into the living room.

"I just had it redone. I think it might be too much."

"I'm sure it's great," Lucy says. She really doesn't want to go any farther than the front hall. "Look, I have to talk to you about your wife," she tells him. This is going to be horrible and she knows it.

He may not believe her, he may break down and cry.

"Ex," Randy corrects her. "I'm no longer married. Remember?""Right," Lucy says.

"She was Dutch," Randy says. "I met her when I was traveling through Europe, and after the divorce she went back. She took the kid, naturally. That's the roughest part, the d.a.m.ned custody."

He has such beautiful eyes; they keep changing color as he lies. If she hadn't lived with a liar for so long, Lucy might not have noticed the way he ran his hand through his hair, she would never have recognized the flicker of yellow light behind his eyes.

"Now it's my turn, Randy says. "I get to ask about your past."

There are bands of panic expanding around Lucy's neck and shoulders.

She had considered going home with Randy last night, she'd wanted to.

"Were you sleeping with Evan in high school?"

Each time Randy was in a drama club production, the first three rows in the auditorium would be filled with girls, and every one had made certain to apply extra mascara and lipstick. Andrea wouldn't go into the lunchroom until she knew what table he was sitting at and could position herself near him. Lucy wonders if he was a liar, even back then.

"During senior year," she says.

She will admit to anything, but she won't tell him about the rocking horse, she won't say a word about Bethany.

"I thought so!" Randy says. "I could always tell. Now there's only one more thing I need to know." He has moved much closer to Lucy.

"Are you sleeping with me?"

"Never on a first date," Lucy says.

Randy studies her carefully. "Then why are you here, Lucy?"

She has Evan's car keys in her hand, and without thinking she moves them between her fingers, as though they were a weapon.

"If I came here today, tomorrow wouldn't be our first date," Lucy says.

"Ah." Randy smiles.

It's the smile he has used so well a million times before.

"Let's forget about the restaurant," he says.

"Why don't you just come back here tomorrow."

It is so hard to breathe in this house, Lucy can't imagine how Bethany managed it. Randy moves toward Lucy; his hair smells like coconut shampoo. He kisses her once, a brief, practiced kiss that has always left women asking for more."Seven-thirty," he whispers, and Lucy nods before she goes out the door. She walks down the driveway and along the street, but when she reaches Evan's Celica, she doesn't stop. It's not morning anymore, yet the street is quiet, except for the droning of hedge clippers in the backyards as landscapers tend to the shrubbery. She knows from experience, where there's one lie there are bound to be more. She keeps walking until the Mustang comes into view. It's there at the corner, parked beside a stop sign, still covered with red dust. All along the hood the seeds of strangler figs are embedded in the paint; nothing will ever get rid of them. Lucy grabs the door handle and gets inside. The car smells like french fries, and she has to swing her legs over the empty c.o.ke cans that litter the floor. She doesn't turn to look at him until she's locked her door, and when she does Julian Cash takes off his sungla.s.ses.

"Let me guess," he says. "You think you found yourself a murderer."

The meanest boy in Verity knows the difference between right and wrong though not everyone would agree with the choices he makes.

Since the night when he discovered he couldn't run away he's been breaking a rule, not out of spite but because he knows in his heart it would be wrong not to break it. That's what happens when someone comes to depend on you. You begin to consider feelings other than your own.

You know what it must be like to be caged as the darkness falls and the owls call from the trees.

That is why every evening, after Arrow has eaten his dinner and been given a bowl of fresh, cool water, the boy unlocks the chain-link gate and carefully swings it open. The first time he did this, the dog looked at him, puzzled. He wouldn't move until the boy crouched down and softly clapped his hands. Arrow tilted his head, then slowly walked out of the kennel. He looked out at the woods, where the scent of cypress and pine was thick and the darkness settled quickly, covering the air plants that grew wild, and then he stopped and sat down beside the boy.

The boy clapped a hand against his thigh and began to walk through Julian's yard, toward the woods. Still the dog sat where he was, watching.

The boy nodded and clapped his hands again, and after a moment the dog took off. He pa.s.sed rigLLt by the boy, and kept going. At first the boy could hear him running through the undergrowth, and he followed, but then there was nothing, not a sound. The boy sat down on a tree stump, realizing that he might have gotten himself lost. He could hear things moving in the woods, hats in the treetops, the soft, padding steps of opossums and cotton rats. He sat there in the dark, wondering how he could ever explain himself to Julian if the dog didn't come back, but when he looked up, the dog was suddenly beside him. He'd been running, hard, and his body was trembling. In his mouth was a large stick, an old root or a fallen mangrove limb. He carefully laid the stick at the boy's feet before backing away. The boy took the stick, lifted it over his head and threw it, as far and as high as he could.

Since then, they have played this game every night, walking farther and farther into the woods each time. Tonight, the boy made certain tocoat himself with bug spray before leaving Miss Giles's house, and he's brought along a flashlight, even though his night vision is rapidly improving. He jogs all the way to Julian's, and when he gets there the dog is waiting at the gate. Arrow yelps happily when he sees the boy; his tail starts to wave, slowly at first, then faster and faster. As soon as he's let out, the dog races for the woods, but he waits every now and then for the boy to catch up. There's some moonlight tonight, and the boy feels that he never in his life has seen a creature more beautiful than Arrow; he's grateful that the dog has the decency to wait while he lumbers through the underbrush. When they are deep within the woods, in a place where no one has gone since Bobby and Julian Cash were children, the boy finds a good stick and lets it fly.