The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (22 page)

I was conscious of Luke lurking at the very edge of the boundary he’d set for himself, giving me space and privacy and freedom from pressure, but always watching for signs that I needed him. In fits and starts, I told him about the old newspaper story I’d found and what really happened the night Mother died. He nodded, silently agreeing to join Michelle and me in our conspiracy to hide the truth.

He was questioned because he’d come into the house while the medics were on the scene. He told the detective he knew nothing about Dr. Goddard’s mental state or her reasons for wanting to take her own life. His first visit to the house that night remained a secret between Luke, myself, and my sister.

***

On the telephone I asked Michelle to come see me. She coldly refused. Rosario, who brought clothes to me at Luke’s apartment two days after Mother’s death, told me Michelle was obsessed with erasing all traces of blood from the kitchen and bathroom.

I sat on Luke’s bed while Rosario hung my blouses and slacks in the closet.

“I washed the walls,” she said. Tears filled her eyes. “I thought I had cleaned them well—”

“Oh, Rosie,” I said. “I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

She pressed her lips together and took a moment to compose herself, blinking away the tears. “But your sister wasn’t satisfied. Already this morning is a man come, taking off the old, putting up new.” Her arms swung up and down in imitation of a paperhanger.

I saw blood-spotted wallpaper and quickly shoved the image out of my mind.

She closed the closet door. “And the floor, the tiles—what is in between?”

“The grout.” Blood soaking in, the stain spreading.

“A man come and take it out, dig it out. The kitchen and the bathroom, is all broke up. Two men working same time, walls and the floors, they bump into each other.” She shook her head. “I got out of the way.”

Her eyes, puffy from tears already shed, filled again. She pressed a hand to her mouth. I rose and went to slip my free arm around her shoulders, and for a moment we leaned into one another, my chin resting on the top of her head.

“She was good to me, your mother,” Rosario said, wiping at her nose with a handkerchief she’d pulled from her dress pocket.

I guided her to the bed and we sat down together.

“Your mother was not—” She searched for a word. “—warm, but she was good to me.”

She gave up her struggle against tears then. I stayed beside her, silent, while she wept.

***

Theo, too, came to see me and pour out his sorrow. I wasn’t sure I would ever tell him the truth. Maybe someday, when I knew all of it myself. But not now.

I was waiting. Waiting for the police to be finished with me, and for Mother to be laid to rest. When I thought of her, a swell of grief and rage and desperation rose in me, and I had to fight to subdue it and regain my equilibrium. I tried not to consider what I would do next, where my search would take me. Getting through each day took all my strength.

***

The crime lab found only Mother’s and Rosario’s fingerprints on the knife. Blood and tissue tests showed that Mother had been taking antidepressants, something I hadn’t known. Our lie was closer to the truth than I’d imagined.

The police issued a statement saying that Judith Goddard’s death was suicide. The case was closed. Her body was released, and on Monday, five days after she died, we buried her.

Chapter Twenty-three

They sweated in the morning sun, sneaked glances at their wristwatches, and avoided looking at the casket, the grave, or my sister and me. Surely, I thought, they’d rather be in their air-conditioned offices listening to the prattle of neurotics.

About twenty psychiatrists and psychologists showed up for the brief graveside service, the same people who came to the Fourth of July party. Men and women who’d thought they knew Judith Goddard. They stood apart from Michelle and me, crowding together on the opposite side of the grave.

No neighbors had come, and no friends except Theo, who was at my side, his hand coming up now and then to touch my elbow, and Kevin Watters, who stayed close to Michelle. Rosario and her husband, looking unnaturally formal in a black dress and a suit, hovered behind us despite my efforts to coax them forward.

Luke had wanted to come with me, but I told him I was going without him and the finality of my tone stopped any argument. Michelle had said, when she called to give me the time and place of the service, “If that man shows up with you, I’ll make sure he regrets it.” I wouldn’t even let him drive me because I didn’t want her to see him.

Blank-faced, clutching a single red rose, my sister stood inches from me, but we didn’t touch. We didn’t comfort one another. She hadn’t yet spoken to me or to Theo. 

Her new black suit made her skin look bleached in contrast. I owned nothing black and wore instead a plain navy linen dress Rosario had found in my closet at home. I’d had trouble squeezing my cast through the short sleeve. 

My arm ached deep in the ravaged muscle. I’d exhausted my three-day supply of codeine two days before and now I was at the mercy of the pain, but I welcomed it, I fastened on it and let it drive everything else from my mind. I didn’t know what I would do when the pain subsided.

The minister, an elderly, stooped man supplied by the funeral home, read from the Bible in a wavering voice. “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.”

We bowed our heads in prayer when the minister asked us to. The sun’s rays pressed on the back of my neck like a red-hot iron. Only once did I let my gaze wander to Mother’s coffin, poised on a mechanized lift, and the deep hole beneath it. When the lift whirred into motion I began to shake, and Theo hugged my shoulders, steadying me.

The casket descended. Michelle stepped to the edge of the grave and dropped in the rose. A cardinal as red as the flower perched on a nearby headstone and warbled his rich song.

Together, flanked by Theo and Kevin, my sister and I received the murmured sympathy of the departing mourners.
So sorry…so sorry…so sorry.
Their eyes shifted, sliding past our faces and carefully avoiding any unseemly examination of my injured arm.

I leaned to kiss Rosario’s cheek, because she looked as if she needed consolation as much as we did.

At last only Michelle and Kevin, Theo and I were left. Michelle started to walk away without speaking, but Kevin, his fresh young face knotted with emotion, came to me and wrapped me in a gentle bear hug. He stepped back and scrubbed a hand over his chin. “Oh, man, Rachel, I don’t know what to say. You tell me what I can do to help, and I’ll do it, you just ask.”

I spoke quietly so Michelle wouldn’t hear. “Help my sister. That’s what you can do. Don’t let her be alone too much.”

He nodded. “You can count on it. I kinda love the girl, you know?”

“She’s lucky to have you.”

Michelle strode back to us with brisk steps. Theo murmured to Kevin, and the two men moved away to give us privacy.

“I want to sell the house,” Michelle said without preamble. “As soon as possible. Our names are on the title, it doesn’t have to go through probate. We can put it on the market anytime.” She paused. “You don’t want it, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Well. Okay then. I’m moving to an apartment as soon as I can find one. There’s no point keeping Rosario fulltime after I move out, but she can come in and clean a couple times a week until we find a buyer.” Michelle looked around as if taking in the scenery. The hot air stirred and lifted her pale hair from her shoulders. She faced me again. “You’ll have to do something about those cages of yours.”

I nodded. “I’ll take them down.”

“Good.” She turned away. 

“Mish.”

She looked back at me, her expression guarded.

“We need to talk. I could go over to the house with you now. I have to pick up some things anyway.”

“I’m not going home. I’m going to lunch with Kevin, then I’ve got a class.”

“We have to talk about all this sometime.”

“No.”

“Don’t you even want to know who you are?”

She stepped so close her face was inches from mine. “I do know who I am. And nothing you can say is going to change it.”

With her chin high she walked away from me, across the bright green cemetery grass.

Theo tried to talk me out of going to the house, and when he saw that was futile, insisted that I let him come with me. But in the end he took one cab and I took another and we went our separate ways.

***

I entered through the front door. The house was utterly silent. I stopped to look into the sun-splashed living room, at the gleaming tables and all the small exquisite things Mother had accumulated. The jade figurines, the decorative plates, the antique marble clock on the mantel. The clock hands had stopped at 8:15. Mother had been the only one who knew how to wind the delicate mechanism properly.

She would never walk through these rooms again. I would never see her or hear her voice again.

I knew that neither Michelle nor Luke would understand my grief, Michelle because she blamed me for destroying our family, Luke because he blamed Mother for robbing me of my identity. But I grieved, for the simple reason that I had loved her. She’d been my mother for twenty-one years, and I had loved and needed her.

With my aching arm pressed to my side, I climbed the stairs. In my room I found my blue canvas luggage lined up at the foot of the bed, along with several empty cardboard boxes. Rosario would pack all my belongings the following day and a mover would collect them and take them to Luke’s apartment.

I knelt by the bed, felt under the mattress and drew out the book on locks. Somehow it seemed important that no one find it. I stuffed it into my shoulderbag, then went out to the hallway.

Mother’s bedroom door was closed. When I touched the doorknob, I felt the same ripple of apprehension and shame that had gone through me when I’d sneaked in to look at the picture.

I opened the door.

The draperies were drawn and the room was dark and cool. I flipped the light switch. Everything looked as it always had, peach and blue perfection. In the air hung the faint flowery perfume of the sachet Mother used in her closet and drawers.

The picture was gone from her dresser. Only Michelle would have removed it. What did she do with it? I wondered if she’d held it and tried to believe the child was her.

I had to take what I was after and get out of this room. Opening the closet, I tried to ignore the neat row of dresses, the scent of sachet. Mother’s purse hung from a hook on the back of the door. The purse contained only a few things, and I found her keys quickly. 

Downstairs again, I went straight to Mother’s study, without allowing myself so much as a glance at the kitchen. I unlocked the file drawer where I’d found the strange note on the night Mother was hospitalized. I pulled out the sheet of blue paper, leaving behind the folder that had held it. Although I didn’t know yet what it meant, I was certain this was a message from the past, a link to the life that waited to be discovered.

…no regrets…the one beautiful thing I’ve got left.

I read the words over and over until I noticed my hand was trembling. I folded the sheet, slid it into my shoulderbag.

Next I moved to the closet, knelt and opened the box that contained the photo albums. Refusing to let myself dwell on the images, I flipped through one of the books until I found the posed studio portrait of the three of them: mother, father, little daughter. It was the same picture that had accompanied the newspaper account of the accident.

For a moment I considered taking the albums away so Michelle wouldn’t stumble unprepared onto the photos of Michael and Judith Goddard and their real daughter. Like me, my sister was running on autopilot right now, and these pictures could bring her crashing to reality. The old urge to protect her, to cushion her fall, rose in me. But the time for that was past. I could not protect her from the truth of our lives.

I laid the album back in the box and closed the lid.

Unable to make myself go up to Mother’s room again, I left the keys on the desk. I went out through the front door and walked around to the back yard.

The garden looked impossibly cheerful, neat, normal. Only five days had passed since I was last here, but if I’d found the blossoms shriveled, the foliage dried up, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, the dahlias and late roses bloomed on, oblivious to the absence of their owner, and a sweet powdery scent hung in the humid air. Cicadas droned in the trees, but the birds had fallen silent in the midday heat.

I walked down to the edge of the woods, past the line of shrubs to the cages. The doors stood open, and when I approached a dozen sparrows burst out in a flurry of wings.

The sight of the abandoned cages brought hot tears to my eyes. I drew in a long steadying breath. What needed doing here?

Maybe some other rehabber could remove the cages as they were, load them on a truck and take them for his or her own use. But suddenly I was seized by a need to destroy them, to know they simply didn’t exist anymore.

I dropped my shoulderbag on the ground and, almost running, returned to the house, entered through the front again, and clomped down the basement stairs and into the laundry room where the toolbox was kept. I grabbed a hammer and crowbar.

Awkwardly cradling them in my unencumbered arm, I carried the tools to the cages. With one hand I set to work prying loose nails, screen, strips of wood. Every movement of my body made my wounds throb, and I was quickly drenched in sweat, but I worked on and on, piling boards on the ground.

At last, when the cages were reduced to rubble, I pushed past the shrubs and staggered onto the sunny lawn, still gripping the crowbar.

The dahlia blossoms in the flower bed before me were bright and jaunty, little jewels lifting their faces to the sun. Life, going on.

I raised my arm high over my head, then brought the crowbar down on the plants, slashing leaves and stems, shattering flowers, raining yellow, red, pink petals onto the pine bark mulch.

I swung again and again, until I had no strength left and fell to my knees, sobbing. I didn’t hear or see Luke approach, but when he knelt and folded his arms around me it seemed natural that he was there.

“Let’s go home now,” he said.

“It’s not over yet.” My voice was muffled against his shoulder. “I have to find out who I am.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”