The Fall Moon Read online

  I saw her eyes well and her cheeks flush. Then she turned and left. The door slammed.

  I put a frozen lasagna in the oven, poured myself a whiskey, made a decision and climbed the stairs to retrieve my laptop. While the lasagna cooked, I searched for flights that night from D.C. to New York. I found one leaving at ten PM and booked a seat. After that, I found a notebook and penned a note for Dehan.

  I’m catching the 10 PM flight back to New York. Tell Turner I’ll forward my report to him.

  Let me know when you expect to return. I don’t feel great about how you handled this, Dehan, but we’ll talk when you get back.

  Stone

  I finished my whiskey, dropped the lasagna in the trash and called a cab to take me to the airport. On the way, I tried not to think. My mind drifted to Amy and Charlie, and how the whole thing had started, Dehan’s passion for the case, the parallels she had seen between Amy’s case and her own, and how it had echoed the first case we had worked together. I had thought it was that connection with Mick Harragan, with the Chupacabras, and her own parents’ murder that had fueled her passion. Now I wondered if I was wrong. Was she getting itchy feet? Did she need to move on? Was the fifteen years between us beginning to tell?

  I gazed out the window at the gathering evening, the headlamps coming on and the lights illuminating the shop fronts and the cafes and restaurants. I wondered if they’d moved on from Martinis yet, then dismissed the thought.

  I thought of Pamela, Charlie’s mother. I wondered if anybody had informed her yet about the remains, though his identity had not yet been confirmed. I wondered whose decision that would be.

  It had been a strange case: not so much a jigsaw as… The thought trailed away, like smoke from a snuffed candle. We’d come to the river and turned left, following the slow, steady stream of traffic. It had been like that: following one thing to another, and then another, not really fitting them together and resolving them, but following them, from the jurisdiction of the NYPD 43rd Precinct, to the jurisdiction of the FBI.

  The traffic thinned and we started to accelerate. Soon we were crossing the darkening body of the Potomac again. This time, small lights were dancing on it. It seemed I had only just arrived, and now I was leaving; but I was keen to leave, keen to escape. I surprised myself by acknowledging it. I wanted to escape. Why? What was it I wanted to escape from? Who did I want to escape from?

  My mind sheered away from the question toward Amy and Charlie. They had been escaping. They had been escaping from the Camachos. They had fled from Harlem to Vinton, in the Redferns’ car. And there the Camachos had tracked them down and killed them. And that was where the trail ended.

  Not a jigsaw, but a thread, and you couldn’t tell where it was, or how fast it was moving.

  We had stopped moving. The driver had turned and was staring at me. I looked around and saw we were at the airport.

  “You OK, buddy?”

  “Yes! Sorry! I seem to have drifted off.”

  I paid him and made my way into the strange, cathedral-like building. Odd sounds seemed to echo high above my head. It felt vaguely surreal and I knew I was not yet well. A clock on the wall told me it was nine PM. Not long to go. I went through departures and boarded the plane.

  I took my seat and closed my eyes.

  I was aware of the takeoff, but slept fitfully for the hour-long flight. I had sporadic, repetitive dreams of being at Ingrid Njalsen’s house with the sheriff. She was talking to me all the while about jigsaw puzzles, how they had to fit. It wasn’t enough that you follow the thread. In the end, it all has to fit together. She leaned forward and stared hard into my face, frowning. “It’s not good enough following the thread if it doesn’t all fit together!”

  And she reached over and gently shook my arm.

  “Mr. Stone?”

  I opened my eyes.

  “We’ve arrived in New York. Are you all right, sir?”

  I smiled at the pretty airhostess, who looked nothing like Ingrid Njalsen. “Thank you. I was just tired.”

  An hour later, I pulled up outside my house on Haight Avenue. I paid the cabbie and stood looking awhile at my front door. The dull amber from the street lamps made thick shadows of the trees against the walls. The scuff of a foot on the sidewalk made me turn and look. There was a small, thin man with a hunched shoulder approaching me. He looked lost and a little anxious.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I seem to be lost. Are you local?”

  “Sure. I live right here. How can I help?”

  “I’m looking for ten thirty-two, Clarence Avenue.”

  I pointed past him, where he had come from. “Take the first left up there, then your second right. Ten thirty-two is near the end.”

  He smiled. “Thank you so much. I hope I’m not too late!”

  He hurried away on old legs into the shadows. I pushed through the gate and made my way to my front door. As I slipped the key in the lock, I became suddenly aware of how accustomed I had become to having Dehan with me when I arrived in the evening and left in the morning.

  I pushed in and looked at my watch. It was fifteen minutes after midnight. I wondered briefly how Dehan’s evening was going, if they would be back at the house by now. If Turner had offered her a job and if she had accepted it. I dismissed the thought, poured myself a stiff Bushmills and carried it upstairs to bed with me, still hearing Ingrid Njalsen nagging at me in my head:

  “It is not enough to follow the thread. In the end, it all has to fit together!”

  I lay down and closed my eyes and slipped almost immediately into deep oblivion.

  When I next opened my eyes, it was eleven o’clock in the morning and I felt like I had spent the night making lots of red blood corpuscles. I had a long shower, dressed in fresh clothes and carried my bag down to the washing machine. I put bacon on to fry and coffee on to brew and stood looking out the window at the warm, dappled morning.

  In my head, I was having a conversation with Dehan where I was telling her that just because a string of events were connected in space and time, it didn’t mean that they shared a common meaning. In my mind, she raised an eyebrow at me and tied her long hair behind her neck in a loose knot. I felt a stab of adrenaline and wished she was there, hoped she would not leave. You wouldn’t find the meaning, I told her, until you connected the meaning of each event. You had to connect the meanings, not the events…

  And in that moment, I saw it. I froze, staring out at the plane trees. The coffee pot began to gurgle. The bacon began to crisp. I turned off the cooker and went and sat in the living room, staring at the rugs on the floor. It was crystal clear in my mind. I just had to confirm a couple of things, but I had no doubt at all that I had seen how it all fit together, just like a jigsaw puzzle, not a string of events. I burst out laughing.

  I switched on my cell to make a call and saw that I had a missed call from Dehan at 9 PM the night before. I also had a voice message and four Whatsapps. I hesitated, then called the chief.

  “John! Are you back? What the devils is going on?”

  “Ah, yes, sir, kind of, Dehan is still in D.C...”

  “Good lord!”

  “Yes sir, I agree. Sir, do you recall the Redfern case?”

  “Of course I do. I have been reviewing it...”

  “Can you check for me if Karl had a rap sheet?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Well he had, John, we know he had. But it was petty stuff. Small scale violence, couple of bar fights, couple of domestics. Typical thing, she wouldn’t prosecute, charges were dropped.”

  “Yeah, thanks, sir, that’s what I thought.”

  “So, what on Earth is going on with Dehan?”

  “Debriefing and questioning the witnesses. I was injured and came home.”

  “Injured? Nothing serious…?.”

  “Nothing serious. I should be on my feet by Monday.”

  I hung up and my next call was to Sheriff Rod O’Brien of Benton County. That call wasn’t as quick or as fr
iendly, but after I had explained what I wanted, he became interested and said he would get back to me.

  I hung up and looked again at the missed calls. Finally, I played the voice message. There was a moment of silence, then, “What the hell, Stone? I just got back and you’re gone? What the hell is wrong with you? In the three hours I was out, you booked a flight and ran? You couldn’t wait to say goodbye? And what’s with this fucking note? You know what? Screw you!”

  Nine o’clock.

  I opened the Whatsapps. The first was at ten fifteen: I guess you were at the airport and that’s why you didn’t pick up. I get you’re not well. But this is a crap way to treat a partner, not to mention your wife!

  The next was at eleven: I’m sorry I said screw you. But you really upset me. What the hell is going on?

  Twelve o’clock, when I was arriving home, with my cell still switched off from the flight. You know, I don’t know what I did, but whatever it was you could have told me, Stone. We could have talked. Was it what happened at the river? Or was it since the warehouse? Something I did there?

  One AM: I guess you have your cell switched off. You should know I am not happy at the way you treated me. Just give me a call when you get this.

  I went back to the kitchen and ate the cold bacon, drank the tepid coffee and thought about Dehan and what an asshole I’d been.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I called Dehan after I had cleared my breakfast things. It went to voicemail.

  “Hey, Dehan. I’m sorry. Looks like we had a communication breakdown. Delayed shock and pain killers. I wasn’t thinking straight. I miss you. When are you coming home?”

  I hung up and read through her Whatsapps again, thought about them and sent a single reply. My bad. Put it down to red blood cell deficiency. From my POV we’re solid. Please don’t read anything into it. When do you get back?

  I sent it, read it through and thought it sounded like a fifteen-year-old, thought about deleting it and decided she would see the deleted message and that really would look like a fifteen-year-old. Then I said aloud, “What the hell, Stone! Get a grip!” and startled myself by how loud my voice was.

  And how quiet the house sounded afterwards.

  I spent the rest of morning and early afternoon making a beef stew for my corpuscles, dusting, vacuuming, washing clothes and having existential conversations with myself. At three PM, the Jag rolled up outside my house. Two clean-shaven young men in jeans and denim shirts climbed out, smiling.

  I went to meet them and after they asked me for some ID, they gave me my keys, shook my hand and told me she was a sweet ride. A dark SUV rolled up, they climbed in the back and I watched them drive away.

  When I went back inside, my cell was ringing. It was the sheriff of Benton County.

  “Good afternoon, Sheriff.”

  “Afternoon. You weren’t wrong, Stone, and somehow I’m getting the feeling that’s something you hear a lot.”

  I sighed. “There are some cases it would be nice to be wrong.”

  “I hear you. You got a pen?”

  I told him I did and wrote down the details. After I’d hung up, I sat for a long while, staring at the slip of paper in front of me. I looked at my cell. My message to Dehan still hadn’t been read. I thought about calling the Bureau in Washington, but decided that would be a bad idea. I called her instead and left a message.

  “Hey, Dehan, listen, I really need to talk to you. Not just about… what happened, but something else you need to know about. Please call me…” I hesitated. “I know you’re mad and you have a right to be. I behaved like a jackass, but call me anyway. Please.”

  She didn’t call. I sat in the back yard drinking a mug of beef broth and watching the shadows of the rooftops grow long with the dying sun. The air turned chill. The tail end of summer was withdrawing at last. Fall was in the air. I stepped out onto the front porch and saw that the orange moon, in its first waning, was rising over plane trees and the chimneypots.

  I went in and looked at my cell on the table.

  I had no appetite, but I forced myself to eat. Then I went inside and tried to read. After reading the same paragraph seven times without absorbing a single word, I gave up and tried to watch the Maltese Falcon. That didn’t work either.

  At eleven o’clock, I checked my Whatsapp. She still hadn’t read my message. I tried calling, but this time I didn’t leave a message.

  I slept badly and fitfully, maybe a total of four hours. At six I got up, showered and had a quick breakfast of coffee, toast and liquid iron, then I booked a ticket on a United flight to San Francisco at ten twenty that morning. I threw a few things in a shoulder bag, locked the door and went to my car. It was seven thirty. I dumped my bag in the trunk and called Dehan on the phone. Behind me, I heard a voice from the street. “Good morning.”

  I turned. It was a man in his late forties or early fifties, slight, with oddly gentle eyes. I said, “Good morning…”

  “Your new neighbor from down the road. My morning constitutional. Wife not with you today?”

  I nodded and smiled. “No, she’s away...”

  He returned the nod and made his way slowly down the street.

  Finally, I checked my Whatsapp again and saw that she had read my message. I immediately sent another. Call me. It’s urgent.

  I sat on my trunk, staring at the phone. After a full minute, the two ticks turned blue. I waited. The phone startled me with a loud ring.

  “Dehan?”

  “Hey…”

  “How are you doing?”

  “M’OK…” and after a moment, “You? How’s your wound?”

  “It’s OK. I’ve been better. Look, where are you? You still in D.C.?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When do you get back?”

  “I’m not sure. A day or two.”

  “We really need to talk.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m going to San Francisco.”

  She was silent a moment, then asked, with a frown in her voice, “What’s in San Francisco?” I hesitated a second too long and she said, “Look, Stone, I have to go. I’ll call you when I get back.”

  “Wait! Look, I wanted to say…”

  She sighed. “I know. I can’t now. I’m at work. I’ll call you.”

  And she was gone.

  * * *

  I landed at San Francisco International Airport at one thirty that afternoon. We disembarked in a slow, shuffling procession and, after almost half an hour, I eventually made it to the Blue Line and from there to the rental car center, where I hired a Dodge Charger from Hertz. Finally, by three PM, I was accelerating onto the Bayshore Freeway, headed north, into San Francisco.

  San Francisco is probably my favorite town—at least in the U.S.A. But on this visit I made no detours into Chinatown or Fisherman’s Wharf. I let the freeway carry me onto the Oakland Bay Bridge and across the water into Emeryville. I had the windows open and the sun was brilliant on the waves beneath me. I had inside me a strange sense of exhilaration which I didn’t really understand.

  At the Emeryville interchange, I turned north and followed the Grover Shafter Freeway through the Caldecott Tunnel, through Orinda and the green fields of Lafayette to Walnut Creek. That took me the better part of half an hour and I became vaguely aware that I was feeling hungry, and I knew that in my anemic condition I ought to eat, but I told myself it was just half an hour more, and drove on, climbing through rolling parkland along the Ygnacio Valley Road until at last, at Pittsburgh, I joined the California Delta Highway headed east, and five minutes later turned off the highway onto A Street, in Antioch.

  From there, it was a short cruise down 18th and left into Noia Avenue as far as Harlow Drive. There I stopped and sat looking at the street. I liked it. It was clean and tidy enough not to be a slum, but shabby enough to be comfortable—a home. I studied the house on the corner, shaded by the vast pine tree that grew just inside the wooden fence. It wasn’t a white picket. It was almost six feet and made
of unpainted, treated wood. The lawn outside was overgrown, with shrubs and grass, and a couple of trees I didn’t recognize, though I thought one might be a jacaranda. Parked in front of it was an old, late ’90s Cherokee Jeep.

  I climbed out of the car. The street was quiet and the bleep of the lock was loud and jarring. There was sporadic bird song in the russet afternoon. I crossed the overgrown patch and peered over the fence. There was a woman in jeans and a loose T-shirt hunkered down on a well-tended lawn beside a long trough of turned soil. She was transferring the seedlings from a dozen small plastic flower pots to the soil. Her long, fair hair was tied into a loose ponytail with an orange, chiffon scarf. I moved to the front porch. The door had two frosted panes of glass, and after I had rung the bell, I watched a figure appear and warp as it approached. Then the door opened and the woman from the garden was half frowning, half smiling at me. I figured she was in her late twenties or early thirties. She had a cute spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose and slightly guarded eyes in an open, friendly face.

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Freeman?”

  “Yes.” Now she was more guarded than smiling.

  I pointed at the Jeep and asked, “I have a passion for pre-millennium Jeeps. Is that one yours?”

  She gave a small laugh. “Yes, but I am afraid it’s not for sale.”

  I gave her what I hoped was a cheeky smile and asked, “Would your husband agree? Could I ask him?”

  She paused and the amusement drained out of her face. “Just a moment. How do you know my name? How do you know I am married?”

  I nodded. “I apologize. I am a serious collector of certain vehicles. I happened to see it the other day, thought I’d like to buy it and checked the registration.” I smiled again. “Nothing sinister.”

  She hesitated. “Well, all the same, it’s not for sale.”

  She went to close the door. I asked, “How much would make it for sale?”

  Now her frown deepened, but it was tinged with curiosity. “You’re serious.”