The Killing Moon: A Novel

Maddox sized up the window while Heavey, alarmed, watched his reflection in the glass. "All right if I…?"

"Go ahead," said Heavey, and Maddox cupped his hand over his eyes, careful not to touch the window as he peered inside. Heavey explained, "We knocked down a wall to make one big room so all three boys could be together."

"Your boys sleep with a night-light?"

"A desk lamp, dimmed low."

Maddox kept looking. "And you're sure it was a woman you saw?"

"Yes. Back a couple of weeks ago now."

"If it was night, how did you know it was a woman? Could you see her face?"

"Here's what it was. I heard something outside, or maybe just felt something was wrong, one of those parental things. I came down to check on the boys, and as I open up the door, I can see something moving outside the window. Running away. I tripped over toys, getting to the window just in time to see her disappearing into the trees. Dressed all in black, thin, with long dark hair."

"A black dress?"

"No. More like a sweat suit or something."

"And sneakers."

"Apparently."

"But it could have been a man in a wig."

"Well—Jesus Christ."

"It couldn't have been?"

Heavey became flustered, unable even to consider it. "What I saw was a woman."

Maddox turned his flashlight beam at an angle to the window. He breathed onto the cooling glass, his warm breath revealing a few smudges and handprints. But all boy-sized.

"Neat trick," said Heavey.

Maddox turned and ran his beam over the yard to the forest, inside which it was already night. "This person ran into the trees. Where?"

Heavey showed him. Maddox skimmed his flashlight beam over the ground, but browned pine needles and last autumn's leaves obscured any footprints. "Boys play army in here," said Heavey. "I don't know if I'd build a house on the edge of a forest again. You have kids?"

Maddox shook his head, looking back at the house, then circling to the right, just inside the perimeter. He kept checking the house, maybe looking for a good view of it from the trees.

Heavey said, "Real sorry to hear about your mother. She had a fall?"

"She had been sick for a while. Her lungs. Medication made her unsteady."

"Stairs?"

"Bathroom floor."

"Most dangerous room in the house. I lost my mother two years ago this September, to viral pneumonia. I was the baby of the family. Your mother was insured?"

"Enough to cover the burial."

"Good for her. I tell you, most people around here, they've either forgotten or never learned how to plan for the future. They got no cushion in their lives. Living day to day."

Maddox found a good vantage point on the house, almost in line with the sneaker treads heading past the skateboard ramps. He scoured the ground with his flashlight beam, toeing at the soft forest floor. Heavey thought he saw something illuminated, white and small.

Maddox became very still, focusing his beam on this tiny object. Not as thick as a smoked-down cigarette butt, unless maybe it was the hand-rolled kind. It seemed important until, suddenly, with his hiking boot, Maddox scattered whatever it was back among the dead leaves, clicking off his light.

10

ZOO LADY

THE UPSTAIRS DOORBELL rang a fifth time, and Horton and Glynda scrambled back onto the front windowsill to scratch at the glass. Norman howled in despair from his pillow bed, unable to get up due to his leg splints. Felicia, the lamp-shade-collared beagle, fretted back and forth along the kitchen floor, trot-trot-trot, while Carlton, one of two skinny ex–racetrack greyhounds, sat up on the tea-rose-colored sofa and rhythmically sniffed the air. Belouis, a three-legged Canadian hairless, rolled onto his back on top of the refrigerator and caterwauled.

Penelope and Vernon would tear down her already shredded curtains unless somebody answered the front door. Miss Beverly shushed them to no avail, finally turning down Bill O'Reilly and shuffling through the living room to her door. She didn't realize she was barefoot until she was already out on the old black-and-white diamond tile of the entranceway, squeezing through with only two cats—Lucinda and Raoul—escaping.

She hated her damaged feet, her blunted toes and the perpetual bruising over the arch. The town knew her only as the Zoo Lady, foster mother to a menagerie of abandoned and rescued animals, but in her former life, she had been a dancer, and a great one. She had owned apartments in both Manhattan and Paris. She had hoofed on Broadway, and never in a chorus line. She had toured all of Europe, declined marriage proposals from four separate men, and once dined with a prince. She had danced for George Balanchine and with Gene Kelly. She had affairs with two movie stars, only one of which she regretted.