Crimes by Moonlight

by Charlaine Harris

  “Mommy’s crying,” Paco told Charlie.

  “Mommy’s flowers are sick,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Maybe they don’t like it here. Maybe they want to go back to Pennsylvania.”

  Tooth ambled over to me. I expected him to lick my tears but instead, he threw up at my feet.

  “Oh, poor doggie—” I held his shoulders, as his body heaved convulsively. When he was still again, I told the boys to stay back, then went to the kitchen for a towel.

  “Tooth throw up,” Paco pointed out, as I made my awkward way to my knees to wipe up the viscous substance. The old floorboards were cracked, and I imagined the vomit seeping into it and settling, like rot.

  “Madeeda make Tooth throw up,” Charlie added. “Madeeda sick.”

  “Madeeda make everything sick.”

  I sat back on my heels and looked at my sons. They nodded in unison.

  I called the vet, and then I called Richard. The vet got back to me right away.

  “YOU’RE not making sense.” It was close to midnight when Richard came through the front door and collapsed into the recliner, still holding his briefcase. “First you tell me Tooth was poisoned, then you say he ate a plastic bag. What’d the vet say?”

  I moved aside a toy cell phone and perched on the sofa opposite him. “He barfed up the plastic bag in the car on the way to the vet. So the vet said it was probably the plastic bag, and I could leave him overnight, but I didn’t. I brought him home.” And saved us a couple hundred dollars, I thought, but didn’t say, because Richard would find that irritating, would respond with “Money’s no object,” as if saying it would make it so. And anyway, it hadn’t been about money; Tooth would hate to be away from us.

  “He looks okay now.” Richard snapped his fingers, and Tooth shuffled over to him, heavy tail doing a slow wag. “Is there anything to eat, by the way?”

  “Beef bourguignon. And yeah, he’s okay at the moment, but ...” I looked across the room. The African violets were doing better, too. No, not just better. They looked completely fine. Thriving, in fact. Robust.

  “So why are you going on about him being poisoned?”

  “I’m not,” I said, unnerved now, staring at the African violets. “The boys are. And they didn’t use the word poison.”

  Richard loosened his tie. “What word did they use?”

  “ ‘The witch make Toof fwowe up.’ ”

  He half smiled. “What witch?”

  “Madeeda.”

  The smile died. “What?”

  I blinked. “Madeeda. That’s her name. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” He bent over to untie his shoes. The hair on top of his head was thinning; how had I never seen this before? “Where’d they come up with that?”

  “The name? I have no idea. I’ve asked the neighbors if it sounds like anyone who lives around here, and I’ve Googled her, using different spellings. Among other things, I found a South African soccer player and a dessert recipe from Sudan.”

  Richard eased off his shoes. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you Googling her?”

  “Because ... I think, you know ... she’s haunting us.”

  Richard rubbed his eyes, then opened his briefcase. “I think your next call should be to Dr. Iqbal.”

  “Why? I feel fine. The baby feels fine.”

  He brought out a folder of papers and closed his briefcase. “Sweetheart, you think a soccer player is poisoning the dog and the plants. You call me at work, expecting me to do something about it. I want Dr. Iqbal to say it’s some hormonal thing. I’d feel better.”

  And I hadn’t even told him about the cracked kitchen window. “You can’t be that worried,” I said. “You never returned my call.”

  “It was a bad day. Big meetings. If you’d said it was an emergency, Jillian would’ve put you through.”

  “The meetings just now finished, at eleven p.m.?” I hated the edge in my voice.

  “I’m sorry, I should’ve called.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, briefcase and papers still on his lap. “We’re on a triage system at the office. Life-and-death matters get handled. Everything else waits, and ...” There was a pause. Was he asleep?

  “Wake up!” I screamed. “This is a life-and-death matter.”

  Richard’s eyes flew open, and he looked as shocked as I felt. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t a screamer. I was a happy camper, a team player. And why was I screaming, anyway? Tooth was better. My African violets were positively hearty. I made my voice calm. “Do you want dinner?”

  “Uh—” He was at a loss now, not knowing which comment to respond to.

  I sighed. “Okay, never mind all that. What’s with work? Why was it a bad day?”

  He closed his eyes again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t care if you want to talk about it. I want to know.”

  “I don’t want to worry you.”

  “Well, there’s a wrong answer. Now you have to tell me.”

  He shook his head.

  “Richard,” I said. “Don’t make me come over there and sit on you. I’ve been tiptoeing around this for days, around you, and I’m not in the mood anymore.”

  With an agonized squeak, the recliner flattened out, moving my husband backward until his feet dangled off the floor. He looked like he was waiting for a root canal. Just as I was about to yell again, his eyes opened and contemplated the water-stained ceiling. “A few weeks ago I was working on an account. I had a question about the California tax code, so I looked at the books of another account, just as a reference. A big client. Somdahl’s biggest.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Clarien Industries. Pharmaceuticals. Anyhow, I looked through the Clarien profit and loss statements and compared it to their tax returns and came across ... irregularities.”

  “ ‘Irregularities.’ Like, math errors?”

  “That would be one interpretation.” Tooth’s tail thumped on the wood floor. We both looked at him. Fast asleep. Dog dreaming. “I brought it to Werner’s attention.”

  “And?”

  “He said he’d look into it. Mention it to Somdahl.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t hear anything, so I brought it up again. With Werner. Then Somdahl himself summons me into his office. Offers me coffee, tea, fucking cappuccino, like I’m his best friend, like a prospective client. Then he blames the whole Clarien thing on Fenwick. The guy I replaced. Says Fenwick had a substance abuse problem and was unreliable, and that’s why he was let go. But now Somdahl is stuck with this Clarien problem, and what are we going to do about it? If we come clean, we’re talking millions in penalties, for them, maybe for us. We don’t just lose the client, we get sued for malpractice, other clients think ‘sinking ship,’ and they jump. The firm wouldn’t survive it. We’re already down 46 percent from last year. Layoffs up another 7 percent last month. I’m doing the work of four people. We all are. Probably what drove Fenwick to drugs.”

  My body was shaking. How had Richard kept this to himself? The clues had been lying around for weeks, like dust bunnies under the furniture, too troublesome for me to seek out. Somdahl & Associates, the job we’d left the East Coast for, the dream partnership, the hot corporation, the write-up in Fortune magazine, the big break. The opportunity of a lifetime, the one that, when it knocks, you throw open the door so fast the glass shatters. Richard hadn’t needed to think twice. That was my job, the second-guessing, but I’d packed up our life, sold our house, walked away from family, friends, history, a neighborhood filled with other kids. Other moms.

  “Richard.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t be part of a cover-up.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then, “I don’t have to. I just forget I saw it. Then Somdahl’s secretary misfiles Clarien.”

  “That’s the definition of a cover-up. You don’t have to be running the paper shredder to be part of it.”

  “Who do I te
ll? The SEC? And what if they don’t respond? Nothing comes of it. But there goes my career.”

  “Somdahl seems to think they’ll respond—”

  “Somdahl can’t take the chance.” Richard rubbed his face. “And what if it happens like he says? The firm goes under. Everyone you met last month at the picnic, all those people unemployed. Stocks worthless, pensions gone. Because of me.”

  “Not because of you, because of stuff that happened before you got there. Don’t let them guilt you into a conspiracy—”

  “Nobody likes a whistle-blower—”

  “I like you, I’ll—”

  “There’s no profit in it, no percentage—”

  “Goddamn it, Richie, you’re sounding like them.” I felt the edges of hysteria closing in on me. “And isn’t it illegal, by the way? What they’re hiding? What you’re hiding now? Because the thought of you behind bars is frankly scarier than who likes you or doesn’t like you at fucking Somdahl & Associates.”

  Richard was staring at me now openly. I hadn’t used the F word since the birth of the boys. “I don’t need you coming unglued,” he said. “That’s not helping. And I’m not making any decisions tonight.”

  Yes, you are, I wanted to scream. But I saw myself reflected behind him, in the mirror over the fireplace mantel. Big-bellied and wild-eyed. Paranoid. Hormonal. Hysterical. Sees witches.

  I took a deep breath, as deep as the baby pushing against my diaphragm would allow. Enforced calm. “Want some beef bourguignon?”

  Richard shook his head, still staring at me. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  I went into the kitchen, Tooth trailing me. I unplugged the Crock-Pot, dumped its contents into a colander, turned the faucet on it full blast, picked out the beef, and threw the rest in the compost bin. I fed the meat to Tooth, a piece at a time. He rewarded me by licking my fingers clean and not throwing up.

  I felt ill. I wanted to rewind the clock, go back an hour to when my biggest problem was witches. I wanted to know less, or I needed to know more. I needed sleep. I looked at the bay window, and all thoughts of sleep fled.

  The window was perfect. Uncracked.

  I walked, shaking, back to the living room. Richard was snoring now. I bent to put an afghan over him, then read, through his splayed fingers, the cover page of the report on his lap. “Somdahl & Associates Internal Memo—do not photocopy or distribute.” I began to ease it out of his hands, but he stirred, so I let it go. I covered him with the afghan and climbed the creaking stairs.

  I lay a long time with Tooth up against my belly in the king-sized bed. I didn’t think I could sleep, but suddenly I was dreaming, haunted by a series of numbers that I struggled to focus on. They were important numbers, I knew, like the gestational age of a baby, or a dosage of medicine, so I tried to memorize them. But there were ten of them, much harder to keep track of than twelvey twenty-one-y. I realized I’d been dreaming of the numbers each night, over and over, like the fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and that each morning the numbers were gone.

  And by morning they were gone.

  I woke to the sound of a door closing. Richard going for a run, maybe. It was just after five, still dark outside. My mind felt fuzzy, like bits of brain had been left behind in my dreams. I lay there drowsy, heart-sick, anxious. I tried to focus on what we’d do if—when?—Richard lost his job, how we’d live, but instead my mind came up with an alternate spelling of Madeeda: Matita. Paco and Charlie didn’t distinguish between Ds and Ts. I sat up, determined to Google this. It was a pointless impulse, as relevant as Madame Defarge knitting by the guillotine, but I couldn’t help myself.

  On the kitchen table was a note: “Gone in to work early. I’ll call. Don’t worry.” Early? It was practically the middle of the night. And was there ever a command as unenforceable as “Don’t worry”?

  I woke the computer and typed in “matita” and clicked on the first of a few hundred thousand hyperlinks.

  Matita Pereira, an elusive bird known for its melancholic song. The bird is one form taken by the Saci, a one-legged mulatto child, legendary character in Brazilian folklore, who wears a magical red cap that makes him disappear and reappear, and requires him to grant wishes to anyone who steals it.

  What was I to make of this? Brazilian folklore was no more meaningful than South African soccer players and Sudanese desserts. Although I did have a red baseball cap, left in the trunk of my car by someone from Richard’s office. Not stolen, of course, but not mine either. I kept forgetting to return it, and it often came in handy when I got caught bare-headed in the merciless California sun.

  I slumped in the desk chair. What did it matter? My Madeeda obsession was a distraction from the real problem, Richard’s ethical dilemma, now my dilemma. Could we, as Richard proposed, forget it? Was doing nothing the wisest course, financially? Almost certainly. Morally? No. But was this my decision to make? What about everyone else at Somdahl & Associates? What about our own three children? Didn’t we owe them a roof over their heads?

  Tooth came into the room and stretched, wanting to be let outside. “I wish,” I said to him, “that I knew what to do.”

  Something shifted inside me, something palpable, physical, and I realized I was sitting in something wet. As though my bladder had gone out of control, or my water had broken. But it wasn’t amniotic fluid or urine. The brown leather chair was darkening rapidly, and when I touched it, my fingers came away red with blood.

  “BLEEDING in early pregnancy can often be insignificant.” Dr. Iqbal sat on a swivel stool at the foot of the exam table. The wand in his hand made little circular motions on my bare stomach, now wet with gel. His eyes were on the black-and-white TV screen, which showed a grainy image of my unborn daughter. “However—”

  “However—?” I looked at his face, trying to find reassurance. The hospital lighting did not become him. “She’s okay, though?” I persisted. “You can tell, right? You’d know, right?”

  “There’s movement, her heart rate’s normal, cord’s not wrapped around her.”

  “But—?”

  “But bleeding in the last trimester’s never good.” He glanced at me. “This one’s a head-scratcher. It could be placenta previa, but it’s not. It’s not placental abruption. And it’s not labor. Also, you’re not bleeding now. You’re sure it was actual bleeding? Not just spotting?”

  “It was flowing. Gushing. All over the chair I was sitting in.” Which was leather, at least. I’d cleaned it as well as I could, waiting for the ambulance. Cleaned myself, too, although traces of blood remained on my inner thighs.

  “And the color? True red? Or brownish? Pinkish?”

  “Red. Ketchup red.” It was a relief to say it, with no equivocation. A relief to be here in the hospital, all antiseptic and stainless steel and charm-free linoleum. No creaky floors. No personality. No rustic appeal.

  Dr. Iqbal switched off the monitor, then grabbed a paper towel and wiped the gel from his wand and from my stomach. “Richard still here?”

  “He just left. Went home to take care of the kids. A friend’s been watching them since five thirty a.m., but she has to get to work.” She wasn’t really a friend; she was a woman I’d met exactly twice at a Mommy and Me class. But I had her phone number, and she’d come over at once, without hesitation. She was a friend now, I realized.

  “Well, let’s take a wait-and-see attitude. The baby’s thirty-six weeks, so if she had to come out now, she could. But she’s better off staying in, and without a clear reason to induce ... I’ll keep you here a day or two for observation.”

  I nodded, suddenly dead tired. If the baby was safe, that was all that mattered. Somdahl & Associates seemed very far away at the moment, and as I lapsed into a half sleep, I thought how absurd it was, in this overlit hospital room, to believe in witches.

  And once more I dreamed of numbers.

  “DON’T squish your mommy,” Richard said.

  “They’re okay,” I said. Charlie and Paco were in the hos
pital bed with me, Charlie holding the TV remote and Paco pressing the buttons that raised and lowered the mattress. I’d missed them. I was never away from them.

  “I’m gonna use the bathroom, and then we’ll go. The sitter’s coming at noon.” Richard had called a babysitting agency so he could go back to work. This was a good thing; I’d need backup help when I went into labor.

  “Is that your bathroom?” Paco asked, pointing to the door that Richard closed behind him. I nodded.

  “Madeeda has a bathroom, too,” Charlie said. “And Madeeda has a curtain in her room.” He pointed to the curtain separating me from the empty bed across the room. “Madeeda has a TV on the ceiling.”

  “Just like Mommy.” I smiled, playing along. “So Madeeda lives in a hospital now?”

  Charlie nodded. “In this hospital.”

  My smile faltered. “Really?”

  “Upstairs,” Paco said.

  I felt cold suddenly. “Do you know where upstairs?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You could take me there?” I asked.

  Paco shook his head. “Paco and Charlie can’t go there. Only Mommy.”

  “Why?”

  “Madeeda telled us.”

  “How would I find it, though? Her room?”

  Charlie said, “The numbers!” Paco laughed and bounced on the bed. “Twelvey twenty-one-y.”

  I waited until Richard and the boys left, then got out of bed. A nurse had just checked my vital signs and done fetal monitoring, so I was unhooked from everything and free to move around. I didn’t hesitate. I wrapped a second hospital gown over the first, backward, so that the gap in the back was covered, then padded out to the elevator banks in my socks and loafers. Once inside, I pressed the button marked 12.