The Killing Moon: A Novel

Donny turned to look, just being polite. He seemed reluctant to tell her why he had come.

Val said, "Dill didn't do what they say he's done. You know that, right? He's a lot of things—he's sick—but he's not a murderer."

Donny nodded, still fretting. "You still have no idea where he is?"

She shook her head. "I go back and forth now between hating him and pitying him. He was always so lost and different and weird inside—but not evil. How I think of him now is like a piece of fruit left out too long. Parts of it are still okay, but the parts that are black and spoiled, you can't eat around them." She smoked. "They still trying to make something out of his magic? Cults and black masses and that?"

Donny said, "How'd you know?"

"The head trooper, when he had me in there, asked if I was a witch."

Donny frowned, either at the notion or at the mention of the head trooper. "What do you think of that?"

"It was just tricks. Stupid tricks. He was a lonely little boy cutting cards and waving scarves down in our basement. Obsessed with it. And my father—God, he hated it. Taunted him mercilessly. Humiliated him. I mean nightly. Calling him a fairy. So of course, what does Dill do but practice that much longer, that much more obsessively. Started dressing in black, you know, playing up the part. Living it. Becoming this kid his father hated." She picked at a ridge in the table with her fingernail. "Just tell me you'll try to help him, if you find him."

"They found a camera in the Borderlands today. His camera. You're not supposed to know about this—no one is. But inside, taken over the past few months, were these pictures of sleeping boys."

Val showed him that she was not shocked. "That's what you came here wanting to know about? Are you asking for that trooper? Or for yourself?"

"Just me."

She sat back. "I feel like everything with Dill, everything, is this attempt to get back his childhood."

"Get it back? From where?"

"I remember one time I found him in our basement with a noose all tied, elaborately coiled like in the movies, strung up over one of the ceiling supports. He said he was working on an escape trick. Sure he was. I told him at the time, I said, 'Don't leave me here alone.' That was my biggest fear. Now I know he would have been better off."

"Alone? But what about your father?"

She let stillness settle like night.

Donny started to ask, then thought better of it. He sat back a bit in his chair, not knowing what to say, what to do.

Val flicked some ash, surprised he hadn't known already. She smiled, not happily, and looked past him through the screens, through years. These were things she saw from this porch table.

"But then he did leave, he ran off to Boston. I threw myself into the scholarship as my way out. And then, after I lost that…I guess now I can say that I had a collapse. I didn't see anyone, I didn't do anything. Didn't eat or sleep. All I did was go on these marathon walks. With my sketchpad and a little bottle of water, anything to get away from my house. One day I wandered out near the dump. But instead of garbage, I smelled mulch. Wet, fragrant mulch, and it drew me. And there Kane was out in front, spreading it with a pitchfork. A steamy hot day, just like this one. Putting in a little stripe of garden in front of the dump, and I thought, you know, how perfectly odd."

She felt a smile bunching her cheeks. Not the sweetness of memory, no, but rather the wisdom of a girl grown so much older.

"I was heavy into contradictions then. Pretending I could still be an artist, live like an artist, see like an artist. The contrast, the poetic futility of the garden—all that appealed to me. Like when you find something in the outside world you think perfectly reflects what you're feeling inside? You respond to it. And I remember thinking to myself, about Kane Ripsbaugh, That guy looks exactly like how I feel."

She licked her lips in an effort to douse the bitter smile, then swallowed, as though memories were food you could chew down once and for all.

"You were nineteen," said Donny. "He was—forty? Older?"

"Well, marrying for love—do you know how new a concept that is? There are marriages of advantage and there are marriages of convenience, and I wanted out. If not from the town, then, at the very, very least, from my house. From my father. Kane owned his own house, and he wanted me. He promised me things. He even seemed to love me—who would have guessed that? The scrawny little mess I was at the time. I think I imagined I'd be like the heroine in some thick French novel, a peasant girl who claws her way out of the mud of the countryside into Paris society. I'd start with the septic man and move up, ruthlessly. Only, there never was any up."

"Kane's a good man," said Donny. "I mean, he may not be…" He was wise to give up on that. There were numerous things Kane Ripsbaugh wasn't: handsome, sweet-smelling, tenderhearted, talkative. Interesting. Young. "Nobody's perfect. But he'll stand by you."

"He took me back, you mean."