Clea's Moon

by Edward Wright

  While the kid gassed up the Ford and checked it over, he pulled on his shirt and went to a diner next door for a cup of coffee. No one was behind the counter. He spotted the waitress and a couple of customers over in a corner, huddled around one of the new television sets. It was almost as big as a juke box, done mostly in wood, with a small glass window high up, like the porthole of a boat. The manager fiddled with the controls, and soon a black-and-white image took shape, a man on a galloping horse, firing his six-shooter at someone. Man and horse looked tiny and misshapen, as if they were made of modeling clay left out in the sun, and the gunshots sounded like crumpled tinfoil.

  “Look at that,” one of the customers said excitedly. “It’s a movie.”

  “Hoot Gibson,” another said knowledgeably.

  Tex Ritter, you idiot. Horn finally got the waitress’ attention. She brought him a coffee, then gave him a look when he took one of the doughnuts out of the bag and began to eat it. He left her no tip.

  The attendant was finishing up the windshield. “Lot of miles on that right rear,” he said as Horn paid him for the gas. “It’s almost bald. You’ll want to keep an eye on it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Or,” the kid said, grinning, “you could just leave me the keys and get yourself one of those.” He pointed to a billboard that loomed over the gas station, showing one of the new Cadillacs.

  “If I had five thousand burning a hole in my pocket, I might,” Horn said. “But what the hell are those bumps on the rear?”

  “They call ‘em tail fins,” the kid said. “Neat, huh?”

  “If you say so.” Another half-hour and he was into the mountains, climbing the narrow two-lane road that snaked along the crest of the San Gabriels east of Los Angeles. He was almost a mile up, and the air, although no cooler, was sweeter up here. The road wound on and on, through brown and rugged mountains, dotted by boulders and patches of evergreens. To his right, the road skirted a chasm hundreds of feet deep.

  The government was acquiring much of the San Gabriels, but pockets of the mountain land were held by a small number of companies or rich individuals who used their property as retreats for hunting or camping. Arthur Bullard had been one of those.

  A few miles past the road that led to the observatory atop Mt. Wilson, he turned off to the left onto an unmarked, poorly maintained dirt road. It quickly became a rutted lane shaded by big pines. A few hundred yards took him to a sturdy iron gate. The chain that usually secured it was wrapped loosely around the uprights, and Horn was somehow not surprised to see that the lock was broken. He opened the gate and drove through, slowing to a crawl as he fought the ruts with the steering wheel. Not a good place for a flat tire.

  But good enough for an ambush. Someone could still be around. He scanned the trees and underbrush on both sides of the narrow road, but saw nothing. Fifty yards down the road he came to a familiar clearing and a large, one-story building made of roughly hewn logs under a sharply pitched shingle roof. There were no cars in the clearing, which allowed him to relax somewhat. But to make sure, he got out and walked carefully around the perimeter of the lodge. Nothing. Whoever had broken through the gate had finished their business and gone.

  Three stone-and-concrete steps led to a porch that held chunky wooden furniture. The lock on the heavy front door had been forced. Inside, the pine-paneled rooms smelled of dust and mildew, but otherwise little had changed, Horn noted. The fire-blackened stone fireplace was clean and ready for use, the firewood piled on the hearth. The big sofas and chairs and tables in the main room were rough and functional. The three small bedrooms held bedframes and mattresses and crude dressers, with a dog-eared copy of Collier’s atop one of them. In the kitchen, he found that clean-tasting well water still flowed from the faucet.

  He took ten minutes to go through the place, every closet, every drawer, every cabinet. It was impossible to tell if anything was out of place, but the broken locks told him that someone had been here before him.

  He sat back on the couch, eating the last doughnut and pulling at one of the beers he had extracted from Scotty’s cooler. The pictures. It was only a guess, of course, but this is where the guess took him: Someone wanted them, and someone had searched Bullard Senior’s office for them. Somehow, they found out Scotty had them, and they killed Scotty for them. Horn, who hated and feared the police, was beginning to think he had no choice but to talk to them about this. He doubted that they would accept his flimsy theory based on what little he could tell them. But it didn’t matter who believed or doubted him. As he sat there, the guess grew into something more certain.

  He wiped the sugar off his hands on the sofa cushion and looked idly around the room. Just as he had recalled being in Scotty’s apartment, he had memories of this place as well. One winter, during one of the times when Arthur Bullard was not using the lodge, Scotty had impulsively invited Horn, Iris, and Clea up for a long weekend in the mountains. They had gone for walks in the snow, done some target shooting, and played three-handed poker in the evenings by the light of the fire. It was to be their only visit. Hearing about it later, Arthur had exploded at his son, telling him no one outside the family was welcome at the lodge.

  The fireplace, six feet away from where he sat, smelled strongly of soot. Clea had been about nine that weekend, he remembered, and was unusually quiet. After dinner, when the three grown-ups sat around with drinks, she would sometimes play by the hearth, talking softly to herself, arranging an assortment of pebbles she’d collected on their walks. At bedtime, the pebbles went into a Mason jar that she’d hide away until the next morning. Hide somewhere in the fireplace, he recalled.

  What was the other thing Scotty had said to him on the phone? Something about the pictures. He’d put them where the cleaning women would never find them. You probably could, though, he had said. So could she.

  Horn went over to the fireplace. The place was over to the right, high up, where a little girl could barely reach. He soon found the loose stone. Inserting his penknife between stone and mortar, he wiggled it until the stone edged out a fraction of an inch, then was able to pull it out with his fingertips. Inside was a ledge about ten inches deep, and there, folded into a V-shape in order to fit, was the manila envelope.

  He spread out the pictures on the small table in front of the sofa. They lay there like a deck of obscene playing cards, and the dark energy came at him again, a whiff of brimstone from some hidden place. The young faces and bodies, the male organs, the whole carnival tableau of children being dragged into the kind of knowledge usually forbidden to them, made his stomach clench. He was no stranger to his own animal side, indeed had reveled in it when he was younger, and he had to admit that there was a power in the photos that called to that side of him. But then he looked at the girls’ faces again, and he felt not desire but only sickness.

  His father, of course, would feel no such ambivalence, because he saw none in life. John Jacob Horn would look at these pictures, catch the scent of brimstone, and know it for what it was. Sin, he would call it.

  Horn himself never used that word. Although Sierra Lane would disagree, Horn had long since decided that not much in the world was easily reducible to questions of good and evil. In this case, though. . . . He focused on the photo of Clea. In this case, the word just might fit.

  There appeared to be a dozen or more girls in the pictures. Some, like Clea, were white. One or two were colored, some were apparently Mexican. One, he thought, might have been oriental.

  He couldn’t look at their faces any more, so he began looking elsewhere in the photos, to see if he noticed anything unusual. The youngest girls were sometimes posed alone, sometimes with a single male figure. The sexual tableaus involving the older girls featured either one or two men. As before, the robed and hooded figures were impossible to identify. But there were differences in body types and skin tones. It appeared that one was uncircumc
ised. Another appeared to be on the beefy side and wore a chunky ring on each hand. If Horn had to guess, he would say two, maybe three men were represented. And possibly a fourth behind the camera.

  The photos were all of excellent quality, he noted, printed on heavy paper. The details were sharp, the framing was expert, even the lighting was precise. The backgrounds told him almost nothing. Furniture was barely visible, except for the ubiquitous mattresses. Since he could see no windows, he couldn’t tell if it was day or night. About the only thing that looked distinctive was in the single photo of Clea. Just beyond the frame of the door the little girl leaned against was a strip of paneling—pine, apparently, because not far from her shoulder he could see an odd-shaped knot about two inches across. Stranger yet, it looked almost familiar to him.

  He got up abruptly and began pacing through the rooms of the lodge. When he came to the bedroom at the end of the hall, he turned and immediately saw it. He held up the photo to make sure. The pine knot was shaped like a slightly irregular horseshoe, a shoe for a tiny pony, perhaps, one that might have figured in a little girl’s bedtime story.

  He sat heavily on the dusty mattress. It had happened here. The pictures were taken here. I think there’s more to them than we thought, Scotty said to him the night before he died. His father hadn’t bought the pictures from someone, he had been present when they were taken. He, and a few of his friends. They had brought children up here, Clea among them. And when she came back with her family, years later, she had been quiet and withdrawn, playing alone, talking only to her collection of pebbles.

  Now he knew why.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I guess I can tell you my war story now. It won’t be what you expected, since most war stories have heroes in them, and mine doesn’t. But you asked for it. And since you’re dead, you have to just sit there and listen. All right?

  Horn sat in the back of the chapel. The place was nearly full, since Scotty had had a lot of friends. Nearby, a large floor fan drew in warm air, mixed it with the heavy scent of the floral arrangements, and pushed it noisily out the stained-glass Sermon on the Mount window, whose lower panel had been cranked open a few degrees. Because of the hum, Horn could barely hear the drone of the minister’s voice, but that didn’t matter, since Horn was sure the man hadn’t known Scotty anyway.

  It was in the mountains outside Cassino. We had been trying to take the old abbey for months. I can’t really tell you how bad it was, my 4-F friend, but I will say I’m glad you didn’t have to be there. The mud stuck to your boots like molasses in the daytime and froze rock-hard around you in the foxholes at night. We were hungry and tired all the time. Just dug in there, in the ice and snow, shooting and being shot at. Every now and then I would think about being a cowboy hero, riding a big horse, chasing bad men, saving good people. Then I would look around me, think about how scared I was, and laugh and be ashamed.

  His gaze absent-mindedly swept the crowd, looking for Iris, but he couldn’t be sure if she was there. The gray-haired woman with the dignified bearing, sitting up front, was Scotty’s mother, the widow Bullard. The minister was commenting, a bit melodramatically, on how Scotty had been prepared to carry on his father’s tradition as a “pillar in the business community.” Make that golfing and nightclubbing communities, Horn thought.

  One morning I woke up and found that three of my friends had been hit by a mortar round and were blown up. Just gone, barely enough left to bury. I must have been behaving a little crazy and careless after that, because a German sniper put one through my shoulder, just above the collarbone. They took me to a field hospital, where I hurt for two days. On the third day I was having a conversation with the guy on the next cot who was about to be shipped out. He had just finished wondering if his girlfriend would still love him with most of his jaw missing. Then he stopped, coughed, and died. Medics said it was a blood clot that had been swimming around inside him until it finally reached his brain.

  I cried all that day, and the next day I couldn’t talk. Couldn’t focus my eyes, couldn’t eat, couldn’t get up to pee, couldn’t do anything. They shipped me out, and I spent some time in a hospital and was discharged long before the war was over. For a while, I’d go places in my uniform, and people would buy me drinks, treat me like a hero. You were there some of those times, remember? But in my head I was still the guy in the hospital. Afraid people would find out who I really was. Maybe that’s one reason I went after Bernie Junior.

  So you see, Scotty, I’m not the guy you thought I was. I’m someone who’ll always remember that time I was so full of fear I would almost rather die than be that way.

  He heard scattered coughing and shuffling and realized that the service was over.

  I’m sorry you’re dead. I don’t know yet if there’s anything I can do about it.

  The crowd filtered out, carrying him slowly with it. Helen Bullard, Scotty’s mother, stood outside the door accepting condolences. Horn barely knew her, and his few meetings with her had been strained by her sour relations with her son. Standing straight-backed and wearing a long black dress with hat and veil, she looked small and lonely. But he knew the appearance was deceptive. “My mother’s a good match for my father,” Scotty had told him once. “Both of them can smell weakness in another person.”

  He started to edge out but was surprised to see Helen Bullard acknowledge him with a little wave. To his further surprise, she beckoned him over.

  “Thank you, John Ray,” she said quietly, squeezing his hand. “You were his best friend. I know he’d be glad you were here.”

  Horn squeezed back, smiled, and muttered something appropriate, then started to move on. But she held his hand. “Would you stop by sometime? I have something for you. Maybe day after tomorrow, in the afternoon, if that’s convenient? It would be nice to see you.”

  Seeing no way out, he said, “I’d be glad to, Mrs. Bullard,” and started down the stairs as a woman in a heavy floral scent moved up to take the widow’s hand. He stood under the shade of a tree, waiting. In the noonday sun, Horn was uncomfortable in his blue serge suit. It was the only good one he owned but was heavy for this time of year. Finally Iris came out. The man holding her arm must be her new husband, he thought. From what Horn could tell at this distance, the man wore his suit in a way some men have, the ones who don’t have to try very hard. Horn was disappointed not to see Clea with them.

  Iris wore an expensive-looking black suit with big shoulders and a nipped-in waist that emphasized her figure. For jewelry she wore only pearls. She looked almost elegant, he thought. The word had never before seemed appropriate for a woman who was married first to a hotel clerk and then to a B-movie actor, but it fit her now. He felt a stab of jealousy directed at this new man, angry that she should look this good for him.

  They paused at the top of the chapel steps, about fifty feet from him, and as Iris glanced around, she saw him. He lifted his chin in greeting, but she looked quickly away.

  Horn took off his hat and wiped his handkerchief around the inside. No easy way to do this, he thought, and began walking toward them. Seeing him approach, Iris touched her husband on the arm and spoke to him. They descended the steps and began crossing the lawn toward the parking lot, walking diagonally away from him. He quickened his pace, almost to a run. Iris glanced at him over her shoulder, and Horn could see the tension in the look. In another moment, she pulled her husband to a halt and spoke urgently to him. The man hesitated and seemed about to object but then, after giving Horn a dark look, he went on toward the parking lot.

  As Horn walked up to her, Iris smoothed her dress and set her face in a polite smile. “Hello, John Ray.” She pulled a pair of dark glasses out of her purse and put them on. He wasn’t sure it was entirely because of the glare.

  “Iris.”

  “It’s awful about Scotty. So soon after his father.”

  He nodded.
>
  Her look of discomfort surprised him a little, because Iris was anything but frail. Years of working as a secretary and rearing a daughter through a bad marriage—make that two, he corrected himself—had made her tough when she needed to be. The surprise gave way to satisfaction. I’m making her nervous, he thought. Good.

  He studied her. It was his first good look at her in almost three years. She looked fine. No, better than that. Iris had never been a great beauty, but that had never hindered her. Men had always responded to a sense of urgency about her, a kind of hunger that translated into sexuality. It also drove her to fiercely protect and nurture her daughter. And those who knew her well could discern another hunger in Iris, the need for comfort and security—even wealth. Horn had seen hints of it during their marriage and knew he could never satisfy that side of her. Now, apparently, she had a man who could.

  Her pale brown hair under her tiny hat was a little longer now, gathered in two large waves at the side, then allowed to fall down the back, where it pillowed out softly on her shoulders. The same two nervous tendons stood out on her neck. He couldn’t quite make out the wide-set brown eyes behind her glasses, but the sharp cheekbones were the same, along with that full upper lip she shared with Clea. And she still wore Evening in Paris, a scent he’d always liked. He still hated her, of course.

  “I hope you’re doing all right.” She was getting her nerves under control. And her voice, one of the things he’d liked best about her, was the same—soft and yet direct.

  “Me? I’m fine. Was that your new husband?”