The Killing Moon: A Novel

"Look," said Maddox, firm but not agitated. "It's not that I have anything against it. No one's frisking me or anything like that. It's just unnecessary. They don't discuss anything in front of me. This isn't like before, when I'm a party to illegal activity. I'm just a snoop here. But what I get, when I get it, will be better than words on a wire. It will be evidence, hard and fast."

"You're that sure."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. You think another thirty days?"

"I hope." He sat back, extending his arm over the top of the booth. "Don't think I'm enjoying myself here."

Cullen looked him over again. Maddox smelled confident, a big change from when they started. "What about you? They'll want to know I asked."

Maddox soured the way Kyle did when Cullen made a show of touring the mowed lawn before paying out his allowance. His arm came back off the booth, his shoulders tight again. Tired of being checked up on all the time. "How am I, you mean?"

"How are you, I mean."

"How do I seem?"

"Tired. Frustrated. Impatient."

"That's about right," Maddox said, and then he was out of the booth, moving with surprising speed to the door.

14

VAL

HER DOORBELL NEVER RANG, but when it did, on this particular afternoon, the door opened back fifteen years.

"Donny," said Valerie Ripsbaugh, seeing him in the doorway with the haze of late-day heat behind him. She recognized him instantly, but not because he hadn't changed. There was more of him now, and in all the right places. As though the skinny boy she knew in high school had been ingested by this man.

With fifteen years rushing up on her, she looked down at herself. Red plaid pajama pants with a hole in the knee, flat-soled flip-flops, and a loose cranberry jersey. What he must have been thinking as he compared the Valerie Sinclair of yesteryear to the Val Ripsbaugh of today. She looked away, wishing he would too.

"Val," he said. "How have you been?"

Most people, she didn't care. She had let herself go a long time ago. But Donny Maddox, he was the one mirror she could not pass. In him she felt a sort of death. Though they had only been academic rivals, never boyfriend and girlfriend, Donny more than any other person had defined Val's high school years.

"If you're looking for Kane," she said, "he's gone." She glanced over at the fenced-in septic service garage adjacent to their yard, the reason why all the window fans in her house faced out.

"No," he said, "I came to talk to you."

Only then did it occur to her that something might have happened to Kane. She always thought of her husband as vulnerable to nothing and no one except her. "Is it Kane? Is everything okay?"

"Oh—yes." He reached up for his cap as though he had forgotten he was wearing the team uniform. Seeing him dressed as a local cop was so wrong. "Everything's fine."

Her reaction did not go quite as far as disappointment—she wasn't that callous—but it was something like readiness, a borderline eagerness, which was close enough. I could sell the house. I could start over. I could be free.

Donny had kept himself in shape. He had found balance in his life. A few years earlier he would have seen a slimmer Val Ripsbaugh. Always up and down with her. If she wasn't dieting, she was bingeing; if she wasn't exercising, she was sleeping twelve hours a day. She could never get any traction in the middle ground. Yet she never recognized this compulsive behavior for what it was until she was out of one rut and into another.

Donny said, "It's about your brother."

Val nodded, fighting that sinking feeling she got whenever Dill's name came up. "What's he done now?"

"Nothing. That I know of. He's just missing. We usually see him around the center of town, at least up on his porch. But no one has recently."

If Donny was coming inside, she'd have to stash the wineglass in the sink, cap the open jug on the kitchen counter. "He wouldn't come here. If that's what you're asking."

"No, no. Just if you've seen him, or heard anything from him."

"The police need to know where their sex offenders are."

Donny shrugged, allowing that that was the extent of it.

She stepped back, her hand still on the doorknob. "I can't believe it, Donny. I can't believe you're a…a cop."

"I know."

"I can't believe you came back. You got out. You had a free ride to college. You were gone. On my scholarship."

She forced a smile to leaven her bitterness, but it didn't work.

In the year of their graduation from Cold River Regional High School, one full scholarship had been offered to the Black Falls senior with the highest cumulative grade point average. Because her tax-cheat father wouldn't open himself up to the scrutiny of a financial aid application, this blind scholarship had been her one and only hope. Val led the class academically until their final semester, when she was edged out by Donny, by exactly one-tenth of one percentage point. Just like that, her art career dreams went up in smoke.