The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

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  Also by Christopher Rice

  Blind Fall

  Light Before Day

  A Density of Souls

  The Snow Garden

  THE MOONLIT EARTH

  CHRISTOPHER RICE

  Scribner

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Rice

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Scribner hardcover edition April 2010

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009036510

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-7172-1

  For my mother, whose courage always inspires

  Prologue

  San Diego

  They brought her into the building through the back door so they could avoid the reporters out front.

  The interrogation room was a combination of so many she had seen on television, only without the deep pockmarks and stained walls production designers seemed so fond of. Everything was clean, institutional, bland. No shiny or polished surfaces. No messages from the accused carved into the table before her.

  She couldn’t help wondering what role television might play in the hours to come. Were the two agents sitting across from her accustomed to their witnesses taking cues from the most popular crime drama of the moment? Would she seem like an idiot, or worse, would she seem guilty if she uttered any of those stock phrases?

  You are not criminal, she reminded herself for what felt like the hundredth time. You are here at the insistence of your family to make it clear that your family had nothing to do with this nightmare.

  She caught herself before she uttered these words aloud. Fredericks, the male agent, leaned forward a bit with a sympathetic expression on his face, and Megan realized her lips had actually moved in time with her thoughts. Her cheeks flamed. She clasped her hands between her knees. But Fredericks waited patiently, with no trace of anything in his expression other than mild curiosity. Because she was so focused on the goal of keeping her mouth shut, Megan lost sight of the fact that she was staring at the man across from her like a slack-jawed idiot, as if she might draw some comfort from his close-cropped jet-black hair and his apple cheeks, tightly bunched above the expanse of his long, lipless mouth. When she realized this, the awkwardness of the moment overtook her.

  So she started talking, and when she did, she followed the whispered advice her mother had given her just moments earlier when they were in the car together. “Tell them the things only you can tell them, Meg. Don’t say he didn’t do it. They’re expecting you to say that. Tell them why. For God’s sake, show them why if you have to.”

  So instead of proclaiming Cameron’s innocence, she began telling them how she had taught her brother to swim in the ocean. She hadn’t taught him how to swim, of course. That had been the job of a counselor at the Pacific Beach Day Camp when they were both a few years younger. But getting him over his fear of the open water—guiding him by one hand to the small lip of sand on the southern shore of the Cathedral Beach cove and giving him the words he needed to tell himself to swim to the other side without freaking out and turning back—all of that had been Megan’s doing, and there were few accomplishments in her life she was more proud of.

  The rules were simple. Keep your gaze straight ahead before you start. Don’t even think of looking to the right, across the yards of rippling water to where the whitecaps finally break against the broad beach of mud-colored sand. Do that and you’ll realize how deep the water you’re about to swim actually is, and it’s over. Just plain over. And remember that the long line of orange buoys intended to keep boats out of the cove are attached to the bottom so you can grab on to one if you get tired. And don’t forget about the kayakers. One or two are sure to glide by every few minutes after they tire of nosing through the rocky outcroppings and tiny caverns that rim the cove. They can always help if things get dicey.

  But things wouldn’t get dicey, she assured him. Because his big sister would be right behind him, following him the entire way.

  And she had kept her word, dog-paddling for a good part of the way so she could monitor her brother’s progress. He took off from shore too quickly and veered off course within minutes, like a firefly trying to move through the hem of a taffeta curtain. Worse, his breaths came so quickly in those first minutes that it looked like he was keeping time to his kicks instead of his strokes. But a little more than halfway across the cove, he found his rhythm, got his bearings, made contact with that place that exists inside every person where the fires of fear run out of fuel on the hard bedrock of our ambitions.

  How long had she been talking? Neither agent had interrupted her, and it didn’t look like either one was about to. But embarrassment gripped her nonetheless, and in the respectful silence that followed, she tried to recall the cold caress of ocean water around her bare legs, the gentle deafening of the ocean’s surface lapping at her ears.

  “How long ago?” It took Megan a few minutes to realize it was the female agent who had spoken. Her last name was Loehmann.

  “Nineteen ninety-two,” Megan answered. Just saying the year out loud felt like some sort of irrevocable commitment. In attempting to share an innocent story about her love for her brother, she had steered the three of them toward a year in her life when everything had changed, a year that remained stenciled in her memory in bright red ink, like some sort of horror movie parody of those glittering numerals the ball in Times Square dips behind every New Year’s Eve.

  The truth was most people in Cathedral Beach changed that year. Maybe it had something to do with Bill Clinton’s being elected president. The town’s inhabitants became more contentious because they were scared, just like all the other rich white people in the country who suddenly felt less protected. And of course, there was Clinton’s promise to allow gays to serve in the military, which lit up all of San Diego County like a bonfire. Seeing how her younger brother retreated into himself when the other students at school berated fag-loving Clinton was Megan’s first indication that her little brother had feelings inside himself that were more terrifying to him than his nightmares of what might have been lurking below the surface of the cove prior to their first swim.

  Then the very face of the town began to change. The Village was the term by which residents referred to the plateau of boutique
-lined streets studded with Queen Anne palms that lay just south of the cove, and throughout Megan’s childhood, the town council had managed to keep the chain stores out of it. But in ’92 someone either got paid off or just got sick of shouting at soulless corporate types during planning meetings. Within a year, Judy’s Books was replaced by a B. Dalton and The Card Corner was replaced by a Hallmark. Then came a new waterfront condo development, which at seven stories of glass and steel was regarded by most of the town’s old-timers as an unacceptable, skyline-destroying high-rise.

  Then the first storm of controversy broke around the giant crucifix atop Mount Inverness. The base of the cross was lined with photos of dead veterans of the world wars, but to a small group of homeowners who lived at the base of the hill and across a verdant gully, the cross was an unacceptable endorsement of a specific religion planted squarely on city property by a small but powerful community of the obscenely wealthy. Seventeen years later, there was still no real end in sight to the dispute. Indeed, every phone call home Megan had made to her mother during her four years at UC Berkeley had been marked by some unsolicited update on the cross controversy.

  Were they trying to get her to let her guard down? Was that their motive for allowing her to walk them through these tedious civic details? Maybe they thought she would let slip some tale indicating that her younger brother had a depraved psychopathic streak running through him, the kind of tale that only two impassive FBI agents could hear the truth in?

  “Your father left you guys in ninety-two, didn’t he?” It was Fredericks this time. At first Megan wanted to be shocked. Had the man read her mind? Of course not. He had read whatever files there were on her. Files even she didn’t know existed. And maybe, at this very moment, two agents just like them were asking her father the same question.

  Maybe the man was trying to get to her. Trying to show off his superior knowledge of the calendar of her life. But she was the one who had brought them to 1992, and the cove, and her brother’s wild cross stroke.

  It was her fault that she was now walking the streets back to their house with her little brother after one of their regular swims, a walk that took them past the stucco pink palaces and modern concrete boxes that lined Sand Dollar Avenue, then downhill, and to the small corner of town where they lived, a block away from the elevated freeway that cut through the dry scrub-covered hills that separated the city limit from Interstate 5. The neighborhood they had been born in didn’t have a name, and in truth, it didn’t need one, because in Cathedral Beach, if your parents didn’t own their own yacht, or if they weren’t partners at a high-powered law firm or executives at a top-ranked military defense contractor, there were only four streets you could live on and theirs was one of them.

  That afternoon, their mother had been waiting for them on the tiny front porch, her thick mane of curly blond hair threatening to come loose from its ponytail, her breath smelling of a furtive cigarette. That afternoon, their mother had explained to them that their father had decided he couldn’t do the things for them that dads are supposed to do, so he wouldn’t be living with them anymore. The whole time, Lilah had kept them on the porch, as if she thought the words she spoke might poison the house if she spoke them within its walls.

  Fredericks said her name. After all she had already shared with them, Megan could sense how it might seem like a betrayal, lapsing into silent memory like this. Or worse, it made her look suspicious. But not until that very moment had she realized that the day their father walked out on them was the last time she and her brother ever swam the cove together.

  But what would Fredericks and Loehmann care? Megan could see that by breaking the flow, by going silent this long, she had stoked some impatience in both of them. When she first took her seat, she had been fully prepared to tell her entire life story rather than answer any of the questions she knew were coming. But she had gone too far, and the pain of her father’s abandonment had taken away her nerve.

  “How long?” she asked them.

  Fredericks furrowed his brow. Loehmann just peered at her. They didn’t understand her question, and she didn’t blame them. Now that she realized what it was she had meant to ask, she couldn’t give voice to the words.

  How long do I have to convince you that my brother is not capable of murdering sixty people?

  1

  Forty-eight Hours Earlier Cathedral Beach

  After thirty years, Megan still didn’t know how to say no to her mother. She was fairly good at deflection. And she was a veritable master at dumping the most unpleasant questions her mother could come up with at the feet of her cousin Lucas, who was so wealthy he could pay her mother to accept whatever answer he gave, even if it wasn’t the one her mother had been looking for. (Gifting was the term he used. Megan preferred to call it light bribery.) But turning down a simple request from her mother remained one of Megan’s great personal challenges, right up there with making it all the way through a Russian novel and keeping her grocery list someplace where she wouldn’t mistake it for scrap paper and toss it in the trash.

  That’s why she needed about fifteen minutes to stare at the cocktail dress her mother had brought to her as a welcome-home gift. She held it up by its hanger as she walked with it across the room. She picked up the hem in her free hand and changed the angle several times. She cleared her throat and grunted.

  This is only a dress, she told herself. One incredibly, profoundly ugly dress. Even if she is testing me with it, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s just a dress.

  The material had a metallic luster but it still looked like the kind of maroon velour you would find on the seats of a late ’80s Honda Civic. The spaghetti straps were lined with tiny rhinestones and there was a contained explosion of taffeta on the right shoulder that was supposed to be a flower, but it looked more like a gift bow assembled by a special-needs student. It was the bow that got her. It sent a maternal message that turned Megan’s stomach. Look, my daughter is home after her ill-advised sojourn in Northern California, and yes, she screwed up her life and isn’t exactly ripe for the picking anymore, but she’s still fairly soft and shiny. Try a squeeze.

  “How long is the party?” Megan asked. She had meant it to be an offhand question; but of course, all her mother heard was her daughter inquiring as to how long she would have to wear the dreaded gift. Lilah closed the distance between them with several sharp clicks of her high heels against the bare hardwood floor, and tugged the dress from her daughter’s grip.

  “Perhaps if there was some hemp in it,” her mother whispered.

  “Mom, really. Please. It’s great.”

  “The party is a fund-raiser for the Moonlight Foundation, as I told you already, and while we don’t have to stay very long, a lot of people will be there who want to see you so I would appreciate it if you would be a good sport and allow us to make the rounds, as they say.”

  “And what does the Moonlight Foundation do again?”

  “Oh, gosh. I can barely remember. Something with babies, I think.”

  “Crack babies?”

  “Clara Hunt can tell you when we get there. It’s her show.” Instead of tossing the dress onto one of the piles of cardboard boxes that ringed the entire apartment, Lilah hung it on the back of the half-open bathroom door, a gesture that said she thought this minor disagreement between them was merely ritual and she was confident that in another few minutes Megan would be squirming into the thing.

  Suddenly, her mother looked as if she had been about to take a seat at a coffee table that didn’t exist. She placed her hands on her hips and turned in place until she was facing her daughter again.

  Gone was the long mane of curls she had worn throughout Megan’s childhood. After Megan’s father walked out on them, Lilah had chopped off most of her hair as if she thought it had contributed to the dissolution of her marriage. These days she sported a pageboy cut with blond streaks that played off her gold jewelry and the BeDazzled buttons of her white pant-suit. There was alm
ost no vestige of the free-spirited woman she had been before she had lost her husband and become a single mother, dependent upon the generosity of her wealthy brother-in-law.

  But to her credit, when Lilah walked the Cathedral Beach walk, she always added a little extra kick to it. Six clinking gold bracelets instead of one refined one. High heels in the middle of the day. A champagne-colored Mercedes Cabriolet convertible that was ten times more flashy than the sedate sedans and luxury SUVs driven by the women Lilah attended church with. True, Lilah was the kind of woman who could provoke Megan’s San Francisco friends into spewing terms like normative gender behavior, patriarchal expectations, and class warfare. But her mother seemed to enjoy her life. Lately, Megan had come to consider that a worthy ambition.

  Could she dig deep and try to have just a little fun wearing her mother’s gift? Maybe if there was a way to get rid of that damn flower …

  Lilah took a seat on the windowsill. Behind her, pepper tree branches veiled the rooftops of the neighboring mansions. By day, the apartment had a partial view of the bald-faced bluffs surrounding the cove and a patch of blue Pacific beyond. Lucas had found her the place through one of his clients the day after Megan had announced her intentions to return home. Technically, it was a garage apartment, but it was twice the size of anything she could have afforded in the Bay Area, before she went broke. As usual, her cousin was doing a fine job of carrying on the tradition set by his late father, sparing no expense in caring for the family his no-account brother had abandoned.

  “Joe’s gone, right?” Lilah asked. She sounded as if she were inquiring after a repairman and not Megan’s on-again, off-again, shouting-at-her-about-the-need-for-a-green-economy-again boyfriend.

  “I drove him to the airport a few hours ago,” Megan answered.