The Killing Moon: A Novel

"Look at me, Donny. Look what I've become." She raised her hands as though something warm and sticky had spilled in her lap. "Look at me."

She was weeping, and Maddox didn't know what to do. He wanted to get her home, but she was choking on her sobs, dissolving in the seat next to him, and he couldn't drive. He turned in fast at the Gulp, parking among the losing scratch tickets in back.

She cried hard into her hands, then pulled them away, reading something in the wetness on her palms. "He saved the letters," she said. "He did care, I knew he did. It meant something." Her hands closed into fists, and she turned to Maddox with sudden sobriety. "He helped me. When I met him, I was at my heaviest. The backaches—I was miserable. He turned it all around. He changed me, he delivered me. And, he was erudite. We talked. Really talked—about nature, about the stars. He knew so much. He had lived in California. He wanted me to go away with him. Everything he said to me was ice cream. I felt so good with him. I felt special."

That last word twisted in Maddox's side. He thought back to the Val Sinclair he had known in school: not beautiful, exactly, but different, mysterious somehow, with burgundy lips and licorice black hair and a hint of foreign blood in her winged eyes. Now the fullness of her face, the tired tangle of her hair, the coarse oatmeal texture of her skin—it was as though the town had exacted its revenge by blunting her features over time, like the Cold River's current dulling its bed stones.

How shocked he had been, returning home from college that first summer, to learn that Valerie Sinclair had become Mrs. Kane Ripsbaugh. A girl who had once spoken of nothing other than her desire to escape Black Falls. Her marrying the town caretaker, a man twenty years her senior, had hit Maddox with the force of a classmate's suicide. It made no sense. It never occurred to him at the time how bad her home life must have been—any family that could have produced Dill Sinclair….

Val was really pinching the skin on the back of her hand now, twisting it like the key to a windup toy. "Did they…?" she said, looking first at Maddox, then down to the floorboard again. "Did you see the letters?"

"I saw one."

"Some of them," she said, "they were personal, maybe a little…"

Her humiliation was nearly complete, and for Maddox, almost unbearable. "Yeah," he said.

A smile of intense pain. Her palms came up to blind her eyes. "He made me feel something," she said, trying to explain. "Something I hadn't felt in a long time…"

She crumpled again, shuddering and crying there next to him. Maddox was searching for something—anything—to say when she turned toward him and began sobbing hard into his shoulder. He held her lightly as her chest heaved against him with bucking gasps, and he began to worry that someone from the store would come around back and mistake this clinch for something more than it was.

So concerned was he that he misconstrued her nuzzling sniffles for progress, an indication that she was settling down. It was several more moments before he realized she was in fact nibbling at his neck with light, wet tastes of his skin just above his collar, her kisses rising up to the jawline beneath his ear.

Stunned by her sudden and inappropriate affection, he let it go many more seconds than he otherwise would have before abruptly pulling away.

She stayed where she was, on her side of the front seat, not ashamed or embarrassed, cheeks glistening with mashed tears, eyelashes damp and shiny black. "I think he did it."

"What?" Maddox said.

She stared into the middle ground between them, as though coming to terms with this herself.

Maddox, still mystified by the kissing, felt something else now, something like danger. He had a sense that marriages generated their own peculiar force field, some more powerful than others. Especially the less likely unions. The warped vibrations of this one were warning him to keep away.

"You need to get home," he said, throwing the car into drive and making for the road.

A STATE POLICE CRUISER pulled up across the street from Ripsbaugh's driveway as Maddox drove off after dropping off Val. It was only a matter of time before they picked him up, and Maddox felt a pang of sympathy for the hunted man.

Ripsbaugh the loner. Ripsbaugh the vengeful. Ripsbaugh the cuckold.