The Measure of the Moon

by Lisa Preston

  “My future,” she echoed, staring at the distance between them.

  “Yes. Do this, finish this piece. You’ve got great shots and a breakout-type discovery. Put it out there for the world to see.”

  “How could I?” Gillian protested, shaking her head.

  “Because you’re a professional and—”

  She cut in, seething. “Don’t you understand? This is so personal and sad.”

  “This is business. It’s a story that needs to be told. Don’t abandon it. Come on, it’s business. This is our business. What would Tilda say?”

  There was no doubt what Tilda would say. Wha-a-at? Do it, do it now.

  Gillian shook her head. She saw Kevin for what he really was, saw herself as the same, but knew it was not what Kevin saw as he held his face in front of hers, arguing.

  “It’s art,” he said. “Our art. And you’ll regret it if you don’t pursue this. You will. So, come on. Shoot it. Do your focus hocus-pocus, get the rest of the facts, something we can verify with third parties and—”

  “No.”

  “Gillian, think of the story.”

  “It’s a terrible story.” Sorrow burbling in her throat, she turned away lest Kevin see her tears. “That woman is haunted. One of the children died and then they left the last one behind.”

  “No, it’s a good find, this story. Don’t walk away from it. It’s a good story. An important one.” He grabbed her hands, tried to put his arms around her, tried to kiss her. She shoved him, making herself stagger back as she pushed her thin arms against his blocky chest. He reached for her, tried to help her regain her balance, but she spun away and bolted for the door.

  CHAPTER 20

  Ryan Vesey figured his partner’s father as a judger before he and Ben were Ryan-and-Ben. Fine. Judging people’s actions was fair.

  He’d thought about refusing Ardy Donner’s request that he submit to the private investigator’s lie detector test, but the aspersion cast upon him if he didn’t go along was too much. In the end, he’d complied to get Ben to agree, and for the same reason.

  Of course, he was clean, they were all clean. Ardy Donner’s witch hunt turned up nothing otherworldly. Ryan had been a physician’s assistant for enough years now to have seen parents blow it with their kids, go off on unhelpful tangents, not enact good advice. Like Ardy was doing now.

  “Thanks,” Ardy told him. “I do appreciate that you went in.”

  Ryan could not believe that boy was here at their dinner table, not hospitalized in Seattle as had been recommended. Anytime parents didn’t follow the paid professional advice of the medical community, Ryan curdled. What were the Donners thinking?

  Let’s go cheer them up, Ben had said to him. They’ll be down.

  “Extra mile for you to talk to the deputy,” Ardy said. “’ppreciate that.”

  “Aw, Osten’s not such a bad guy,” Ryan said.

  Ardy raised an eyebrow. “You know him? You were already acquainted with that deputy?”

  “A work thing,” Ryan said with a vague wave of his hand. He couldn’t explain, not even to Ben, why he’d already had a private talk with the cop. He distracted Ardy with, “I’ll take you up on that beer.”

  Ardy fetched the drink that he hadn’t actually offered. Ryan heaved a tolerant sigh. He’d been in the Donner house about two minutes, and Ardy was still all about his little kid. Ryan figured they could make too much of the hyperventilating thing and create a bigger problem. He gazed out the window, where Ben and Greer gathered an armload of firewood. The Donners’ place was country, pastures, woods beyond. It looked idyllic, the whole town did.

  The town had secrets.

  He hadn’t been slow to raise his suspicions about his missing patient, a beaten woman, and Deputy Osten had listened, but the woman was gone, gone. When Osten let slip that he’d always suspected the man before the mistress, it left Ryan wordless and somber.

  Accepting the cold bottle, Ryan clinked it against the table and raised it to Ben coming in. While Bella was bringing a casserole to the table, shooing her young son to go wash his hands, and Ben went into the kitchen to carry another dish, Ryan got cornered again, thought he was ready, and prepared his grin.

  “How young were you when you knew you were gay?” Ardy asked, a hand on Ryan’s arm.

  Ryan saw Ben stalking up, murder in his eyes, and knew he’d overheard the question.

  “I wasn’t gay ’til I met Ben. He turned me.”

  Ben snorted as he set down the bread basket, and Ryan shook with laughter at Ardy’s confused expression.

  “Sorry,” Ryan said. Memories dried his laughter. “I always wanted to say that to a boyfriend’s parents. Actually, I always wanted one to say that to mine.”

  “They … don’t accept you?” Ardy asked, frowning. “I should have asked about your family long ago.”

  He only knew that Ryan’s family lived around the Great Lakes, but more he hadn’t asked. Ryan eyed him with new sympathy. The man looked like a redneck, now an embarrassed one, maybe for missing this, maybe for having been a complete tool to Ben, back in the day.

  “Not really.” Ryan looked at Ben, who nodded back in solidarity. “No.”

  “It is their terrible loss,” Ardy said. “To lose a child, it’s terrible. A stupid choice. I’m very sorry.”

  “Papa’s mellowed,” Ben said aloud, although he sounded like he was speaking to himself.

  “He has,” Bella and Ardy said together.

  After dinner, Ryan walked down to the barn with Ben, the little brother tagging along to toss hay to a bunch of horses.

  “Should we take him hiking or something?” he asked Ben.

  A nod and a smile. “The folks need some time to themselves. Doug wanted to take him again tomorrow, but I called dibs.”

  Ryan nodded. The kid had moped up a storm in recent weeks but seemed happier during dinner, probably because he had somehow conned his parents out of following the treatment plan. Ryan didn’t want to sully the family dinner or set a bad tone by bringing it up, just wanted to do the family thing, help out.

  Ben was happy to take his turn with Greer the next day, but considerably less pleased when they planned things and Ryan begged off. Greer’s school had Saturday tutoring for students in need. The kid was failing and had just missed two school days. Ben was going to pick the kid up from tutoring. Ryan’s shift at the clinic would end in time to come with Ben to the kid’s school, but he wanted to leave time to see someone else.

  “Actually, Ben, I’ve got to speak to a guy. It’s confidential, clinic stuff. See you after you get Greer? At your folks’ place, right?”

  Ben gave a gruff nod and turned away, muttering, “If you’re too self-conscious to pick up a kid from school with me, you’re too scared of this little town to be a foster dad here with me.”

  “I’m with you. Not scared, not dodging. This is clinic stuff,” Ryan repeated. “I’ll see you after.”

  All for naught, he’d pissed Ben off.

  When the cop called the clinic halfway through Ryan’s shift and said he wouldn’t be able to swing by for hours, too busy, Ryan told the deputy where he’d be after work.

  “I know the Donner place,” Osten said, a crackle of another conversation behind him, a woman’s voice that was somehow familiar to Ryan.

  Two baseball gloves were abandoned on the front porch of Ardy and Bella’s house. Ryan flicked down his Honda Valkyrie’s kickstand. Ben’s green MINI Cooper wasn’t there and no one answered his knock on the front door.

  He walked down to the barn, sweating in his leathers. Nothing. Standing there looking at the horses—he should take Ben up on the offer of riding—he thought of what he’d do if he were a real in-law, Maddie or Wes. He’d go right into the house and make himself at home. Probably Emma’s jackass boyfriend wouldn’t do that if he were here alone, probably none of Frankie’s rotating girlfriends would. But a committed partner? Yes, bomb right inside, like one of the family.

  He wal
ked through the front door and liked it.

  A car pulled up on the gravel outside. He’d thought it was so hick and backward to have a gravel driveway—and it stank for a motorcycle—but now he realized the crunching of rocks made a nice audible alert from inside the house. He decided to sit there so Ben, back from wherever he’d taken Greer, could just find him lounging in the living room on the sofa. He smiled and racked his brogans on the coffee table.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Ryan opened it like he owned the place. Deputy Nate Osten stood on the threshold in jeans and an untucked cowboy shirt, a big navy Chevy Tahoe behind him.

  “Hey,” Ryan said, uncertainly. “Are you working right now?”

  “My shift starts soon. I didn’t mind swinging by. You wanted to see me about that patient of yours we talked about before?”

  “Come on in. No one else is here. We can talk.” Ryan wanted the deputy to have the same sense of trepidation on his missing patient’s behalf that he did. And he wondered if her husband knew she was pregnant.

  As it turned out, they couldn’t talk in private. No sooner had Ryan brought the deputy into the house than gravel crunched again.

  A child’s wail sounded as car doors shut.

  Before Ryan even opened the front door, he could hear Ben talking faster, louder, trying to calm the boy.

  “Who’s here?” Greer shouted, staring hard at the dark blue four-door SUV in front of his parents’ house. His skinny chest lifted and fell, faster and faster.

  Ryan glanced at the kid, then noticed Ben frowning at the deputy behind Ryan in the doorway.

  “You know each other?” Ryan asked, but introductions got sloppy and interrupted under the kid having a fit.

  Greer sucked up another lungful of air, staring at Osten’s SUV. “Cars look different at night.”

  “What?” Ben asked, putting a hand on the kid.

  Ryan shook his head at the kid, who looked like he was about to run for it.

  Greer panted and thrashed wildly in Ben’s grasp. “A car could look black but not be black. It could be dark blue.”

  Osten gawked at the kid and raised his eyebrows alternately at Ryan then Ben.

  Ben clamped another hand on Greer’s shoulder. “Greer, get it together, buddy.” He stuck his chin at Ryan then Osten. “Ry, I’ve kind of got a handful here. Maybe your thing could wait for another time. Whatever it is you two need to do or talk about. Okay? Another time? Another place?”

  Ryan nodded and held a hand up at the deputy. “Sorry. Family thing. Ben and I need to spend some time with his little brother. Um, you know Ben? Ben Donner?”

  Ben hauled Greer up the steps, through the door, glaring at Osten. “Yeah, he’s the one who gave my dad information on getting everyone to take lie detector tests. Awesome.”

  Osten shrugged.

  Ben shook his head. “What a waste that was.”

  Ryan let out a long exhalation, questions forming in his mind. Did Osten get my patient’s husband to take a lie detector test?

  Greer let out a whimper and looked at his fingertips, rubbed them together.

  “Greer?” Ben forced the boy to look at him.

  “Here, use a bag. Calm down.” Ryan fixed a pleasant smile and reached for the boy, helped hold the heaving paper sack over his nose and mouth as Ben picked the boy up and carried him to the sofa.

  “Sorry,” Ryan muttered to Ben, rolling his eyes toward the deputy. “It’s just, look, Nate and I needed to talk, and he didn’t manage to get by the clinic earlier.”

  “Probably for the best,” Osten added, “to talk away from the clinic, away from town.”

  Ryan nodded and told Ben, “It’s a sensitive matter.”

  “Whatever,” Ben growled, pointedly focusing on his brother.

  “Any tingling in your fingers now, Greer?” Ryan asked.

  When the boy shook his head, then nodded that he would keep his breathing slow, Ben took the bag away from the boy’s face. Three men watched the kid in silence.

  “I want you to just stay put for a little while,” Ben told the boy in a few minutes when the bag was folded.

  Greer closed his eyes, his body motionless, eyes steady as though staring straight through his eyelids even after Ben stepped away.

  “I’m going to see if there’s any soda or iced tea or something in the house,” Ben said a little too loudly.

  Ryan winced at the obvious annoyance. Is this because I brought another man, another person to the house?

  While Ben was away, Ryan leaned forward and whispered to Osten. “My missing patient. What if—just what if—she were pregnant?”

  Osten scuffed one boot heel on the floor. “That’s a situation that’s been the motivation for a few wife beaters to end things. Thing is, there is nothing to indicate that he ended things.”

  Ryan plunked down in a dining chair. He’d been so creeped out by his thought that not only had his beaten patient met her end, but no one else in the town had noticed. “Then he didn’t kill her?”

  “Not if he was telling the truth, and the polygrapher said he was.”

  “He took a test? Huh. But people can lie on those, can’t they?”

  “They can, but that woman we use is good.” There was a smile in Osten’s voice. “You met her, right?”

  Ryan rubbed his eyes. After some doctor had told Ardy and Bella that their son showed signs of abuse, Ardy Donner’s pursuit of a bogeyman in their midst was no secret. So they had a weird kid, maybe a bit spoiled in his way, but man, Donner had asked for a police investigation, asked for it. If the Donners didn’t own this home free and clear, they’d be hurting for money, the way they spent it on doctors and investigators. Ryan first met Ben when Ben had run from his father. When the man eventually came after him and apologized, Ben went home. Ryan couldn’t understand it all. But when Ben came back for Ryan, persuaded him to try living here, the family and the town had grown on him. Like a fungus, he said. And the Donners laughed at his gibes, poured him a glass of tea as Ben did now.

  He took the glass Ben offered and frowned at the deputy. “But he might have done it?”

  Osten nodded. “Might have. Who knows? Well, he knows.”

  “What are you two talking about, please?” Ben asked loudly, having clearly had more than enough of his partner and the cop having something private between them.

  Ryan leaned over the back of the sofa. Greer appeared to be asleep.

  “One of my patients—” he started to explain.

  “Look,” Ben told Osten, “I’m not wild about you being here, and now is not the best time.”

  “Really?” Osten smiled.

  “Ben, do you actually have a reason for coming off like this?” Ryan asked. The unspoken answer was no.

  “He might, but I don’t think he knows about me and his sister,” Osten said, with a full grin.

  Ben raised a hand. “What the—”

  “Look, Ryan wanted to talk to me about this thing that’s sort of tricky for him to pass along, what with the privacy issue …”

  Ryan leaned toward Ben. “She was a repeat domestic violence victim. I tried to get her to talk to the cops. She disappeared, just vanished. Weeks ago, I suggested to the deputy that maybe there was foul play.”

  “I was already suspicious,” Osten said.

  Ben twisted, looking from one guy to the other. Ryan saw his slow recognition that it really was a work thing, as promised.

  “He beat the hell out of her,” Ryan said.

  Ben shook his head with them, commiserating that some relationships are so vile. Commiserating with it being so hard to get evidence, that so much has to be proved and suspicions don’t amount to much.

  “And it’s when they try to leave that they get killed.” Osten sounded cop-sure. “But we don’t have probable cause, no evidence. No nothing really, but I know more about his past. I think he did it. I think he’s done it before.”

  “Done what exactly?” Ben asked.

  Ryan l
ooked at his partner then at the deputy. Nate Osten nodded and the three men leaned in together, and Osten said it. “Murdered for money. Dollars to doughnuts, Harold Brayton killed his wife.”

  Greer peeked up over the sofa. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Greer, close your eyes. You need a nap, buddy,” Ben called.

  Osten’s voice outweighed him. “What’d you say?”

  “He didn’t kill her,” the boy muttered.

  Osten eyed the boy, waiting for more, indicating with a lift and thrust of the chin that the other guys should do the same. Then Greer clapped both hands over his mouth in a useless effort to stifle an incomprehensible wail.

  He bolted out of the room as he screamed, “Aaaiiiieegh!”

  All three men reached for him and missed.

  CHAPTER 21

  Gillian flung the front door hard enough to frighten Rima into scurrying down the hallway to seek reassurance from Paul. She kicked the door as it stood ajar and it bounced against the wall, twanging the doorstop.

  Paul rushed up. Rima eyed her from behind his legs.

  “Gillian? What on earth?”

  She gritted her teeth, sick with dread and horror of the past and future. Seething, she told him about the Istoks abandoning the injured boy on the seashore. He heard her out. He groaned and put his palms over his head, then over her hands. They shook their heads at the finally released, sordid scrap of history, of humanity at its best and worst on a personal level that had ended a young man’s life in 1944.

  “I wouldn’t judge them too harshly,” Paul began, empathy twisting his face.

  “Goddammit, Paul.” She made fists. His reaction to the news was as like and yet as different from Kevin’s as she could have predicted if she’d taken a moment to think. She pointed at him. “They left an injured boy behind. They left him.”

  The comfort of her life listened. Paul was reason, consideration. She was still ashamed and embarrassed, full of regret about her carelessness toward him.

  And worse, what she was going to do to him.

  They stood in the foyer, near the chairs but not sitting. The momentous impact of her revelation demanded they stand. She retold Paul everything, everything she had learned from the Istoks and wiped tears from her face as it ended. “So that old lady is tormented by the last kid being left behind. It’s heartbreaking.”