The Killing Moon: A Novel

Her face was puffy. She had been doing a lot of crying, and the rawness at the rims of her eyes added to their uncertainty as she looked at him.

His mouth was off-kilter from the swelling, the bandages making his expression difficult to read. She wondered if it would be okay to hug him.

She went ahead and did so, gently. It was not reciprocated.

"God," she said, sniffling into his shoulder. "It's all such a nightmare."

"It's pretty bad," he allowed.

She pulled away, still unsure. He stepped over the threshold on the cane, favoring his left leg. The bridge of his nose was deeply bruised, the color of the sky on late summer evenings.

She said, "So you were state police? All these years. That's what you've been…"

"That's right."

"I don't know what to say," she said. "I'm so glad you are all right."

"Of course you are," he said, wincing, maybe from the pain.

She turned her head a few degrees as though for better reception, his flat intonation putting her on edge. "I am," she said, working the tissue in her hands, smiling out of confusion. She backed to the stairs, sitting down on the third step. "So much he hid from me. I think I never understood him."

"He understood you."

Donny was not going to make this easy. She looked up at him, waiting for some sort of signal. Some indication of release, of absolution. She always had trouble reading men. Except Kane.

"You wanted out of Black Falls," Donny said. "Now you can go."

"Yes?"

"And now you will go."

She blinked, looking at his uniform. "Are you saying that as…?"

"As a policeman?" said Donny. "Yes. You will take whatever you can pack in a bag, right now, and you will go away from here. That is the only deal I'm offering. Leave everything else behind and go. Right now. Tonight."

She searched for some sort of glimmer in his eyes, anything. "But, Donny—"

"You knew," he said.

Blinking bewilderment. "I didn't."

"Frond and Pail. You tried to talk them into taking you away from here. Both of them turned you down. Just like I did."

"Donny, I—"

"So you confessed to Kane. You told him everything, after the affairs were over. To clear your conscience, right? Wrong. To overload his. To punish him for your misery."

"But how could I have known—"

"You didn't. Not for the first two. You knew it would hurt him. You knew it would eat at him over time. But not so that he'd take it upon himself to do something about it. Something nearly heroic in its lunacy. Trying to make you happy again by killing off your sadness." The cool dispassion he had walked in with was gone. "But when you told him about you and me? And about Tracy? You knew, Val. You knew exactly what you were doing. You were sending him to me."

His glare was a hand around her throat.

"You had a killer in your pocket," he went on. "An instrument of your vengeance. Your revenge on this town that you hated. This town that he loved—almost as much as he loved you. I don't even think you want to leave. I think you want to stay. I think you need this place as an excuse for your misery. A place and a people to blame. But now you will go from here, tonight, and you will never come back."

Donny's hands were squeezed tight at his sides, the same way Kane's used to get. Seeing that emboldened her, and all pretense fell from her face like glass out of a shattered window. She reached for the handrail, waiting for the trembling to go out of her lips. She wanted to be standing when she said this. Wanted him to see her pride, her triumph.

"I have lived with monsters all my life," she told him.

Donny turned and limped away. "That is why I'm letting you go."

73

MADDOX

TRACY STOOD WITH BOTH forearms on the stall door inside the old cowshed. She and Rosalie, the mother llama, watched with equal pride as the new cria tottered around on spindly legs.

"Samantha," said Tracy. "I picked it because it's a happy name. You can't say it without smiling. Try."

Maddox eyed her legs beneath the strings of her cutoffs, tanned down to the tops of her boots. Clean now. He wondered how many showers and baths it had taken. How much soaking and scrubbing before she had begun to feel normal again.

"Samantha," he said, feeling soreness in his cheek between the second and third syllable. It hurt to smile. "And what about you?"

"What about me?"

"You feeling happy?"

Under her straw cowgirl hat, her pretty eyes lacked the sparkle they once held, her spirit of mischief. Maddox felt as though he had taken that away. "I'd like to feel happy," she said. "I'm trying."

Footsteps scratched the dirt outside. Mrs. Mithers coming. Tracy looked at Maddox, but without any trepidation or nervousness. She was past all that now.

Instead it was Maddox who readied himself, standing as straight as he could with the cane.

Mrs. Mithers looked in with a smile of greeting, walking up the cow ramp. Maddox presented himself, Tracy signing the introductions.