The Measure of the Moon

by Lisa Preston

  Gillian’s palm rested on Liz’s nearest forearm.

  Liz shot her a grateful glance and said in a small voice, “All I wanted was for my child and me to live. It was like an angel saved us. And that’s why I left that little boy in the woods. I drove a hundred miles away.”

  Emma stood next to the table bearing a tray of molten chocolate cakes dusted in powdered sugar. “Compliments of the chef.”

  Maddie sucked in her cheeks to keep from smiling at the welcome interruption.

  Liz excused herself to the restroom.

  Caroline reached for a tissue in her purse and blew her nose.

  Gillian tilted her face to the slice of sun from the window, leaning toward it like a plant. “If you’ve never been treated … like you’re worthless … by someone who should have loved you … it would be very hard for you to understand the doubt and want and confusion that can clog up that person’s little world.” She swallowed. “Liz shouldn’t have left Greer, but she knows that, and she’s so regretful.”

  “I think we get that,” Maddie said, pausing as her mother nodded. “It was really good of you to meet with us.”

  Liz returned with wet cheeks and bloodshot eyes.

  Gillian started shaking with soundless crying, waving an apologetic hand at Maddie and Caroline who sat, appalled. Gillian faced Liz. “That was Friday night. You came to Paul’s office on Monday. Where were you all that weekend?”

  “At rest stops along the highway, back and forth. That Monday I bought a twenty-dollar cell phone at a Wal-Mart and went to see Paul. I’d turned off my iPhone and I was afraid to use the credit cards. Paul gave me your address and said he’d get back to me.” Liz smiled with no trace of a grudge. “I was hoping he’d text me. And he did.”

  Gillian cringed. “Tuesday morning. He texted you to come Tuesday morning.”

  Liz nodded. “I was so grateful. I still am.”

  “I heard a cry that Monday night. You were in our alley then, weren’t you?”

  “Um, we both cried a little.” Liz pressed her lips tight and looked away.

  “If I’d known then …” Gillian stood, slipping her arms up to hug Liz. “Oh, I am so sorry, Liz.”

  Maddie felt like a voyeur, unsure what transpired in these two women’s pasts, and between them. She glanced at her mother, whose arched back showed discomfiture.

  “Ready to go?” Gillian murmured to Liz. And with the nod, she turned to Maddie and Caroline. “Excuse us. We’ll be leaving now.”

  “Well, Liz,” Caroline said. “It was awfully decent of you to come and share all of this. I am really sorry you had that entire experience, and I wish you the best. And Gillian, it was nice to meet you, too.”

  They watched Liz and Gillian leave together, arms around each other as they moved down the sidewalk. Maddie ate her little cake in quiet until her mother said, “So I guess we won’t kill her.”

  “We don’t kill anyone, Mom. We’re not that kind of people.”

  Emma slid into the booth with them, ruddy and beaming. “How’d it go?”

  “Heartbreaking,” Maddie said, considering Emma at length. She looked fantastic. Let’s see, hair the same, little makeup as usual. She cocked an eyebrow. “What’s different about you?”

  Emma laughed, reddening. “Everybody will be at the folks’ house for breakfast Sunday. You’ll come?”

  She beamed after their startled nods, then hopped out of the booth.

  Maddie watched her go back to the kitchen. “Hmm.”

  “Yes, hmm,” Caroline agreed.

  “I could totally eat the rest of those,” Maddie said, eyeing the abandoned chocolate cakes.

  “I wonder if Emma’s bringing that jerk again,” Caroline mused. “And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I’m quitting my job.”

  Doug had nothing to say, not for the longest time, when Maddie recounted Liz Brayton’s life with her husband, of being winded and beaten into the gravel for the last time.

  “He was going to kill her!”

  “He’d done it before. Osten told Dad. Brayton’s first wife …” Doug made finger quotes in the air, “… drowned in the Atlantic. The cops there thought he pushed her off the boat, but they couldn’t prove a thing. He got insurance money for her death. He claimed to have been asleep when his wife—who couldn’t swim—fell off without a life jacket. Just picture the poor woman dying, looking at her husband. He’s in the boat. And she’s in the ocean.”

  They sipped water together, since she would have no alcohol and he would not partake if she couldn’t. Days of an evening beer, the bottles chilled in the river under a shady maple, those days would be done for some time now that they were to be parents.

  It happened during the night that Saturday.

  Maddie awoke in the faintest light. From the loft window, she felt a flash of wonder at the forestscape, silver and pale gold on ferns under the canopy of second-growth trees, before annoyance festered as she realized she was alone in the cabin. Doug hadn’t left a note. He always left her a love note when he sneaked off for early fishing. She checked her little travel clock. Not much after midnight.

  As the hours wore on, she told herself it was the pregnancy making her so surly about his transgression, reminded herself he was the most devoted father-to-be. She would just go to the Donner family house for Sunday morning breakfast and dammit, Doug could figure it out and get his priorities straight.

  But once there, under the noise of too many people and the scent of coffee she wouldn’t allow herself, she wished she were cozy in the cabin. Frankie was there, having flown into Seattle on the red-eye, making his way home in the dark like a salmon. Clara and Wes pulled up in their Lexus, tires crunching on the gravel. Two more cars turned onto the driveway behind them. The first was a MINI Cooper. Maddie guessed that Malcolm would be coming with her mother. Just how many eggs could Bella and Ardy possibly have on hand for the occasions when the whole clan descended?

  “Are you on duty?” Bella asked as she turned from kissing Ben and Ryan and looked behind Maddie at the open door.

  Maddie turned and saw that deputy, Osten, wearing jeans and an untucked Henley shirt. His patrol car was parked behind a red two-door and Frankie limped up, hollering about the po-po being on the ranch.

  “No, ma’am. I’m dating your daughter.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Emma invited me. Said the whole pack was going to be here this morning, and she and I might as well get this part over with.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Ardy said. “You’re what?”

  “See? This is going to be great,” Clara said, whacking Wes in the ribs. “And we almost didn’t come.”

  He offered a sympathetic hand. “I’m Wes, married to Clara.”

  “Nate Osten, never married to anybody.”

  Out of the Donner family house, that’s what Maddie wanted.

  Greer followed her to the porch, but then she was alone as the boy spied Doug slipping in from the woods. He blew her a kiss and called Greer to come help feed the horses. She watched them go and turned, closing the door behind her.

  “All right, there’s news,” Osten said, his gaze switching from the window view of the brothers going down the scrubby driveway to the rowdy roomful. He waited until most of them were quieter and paying attention. “Harold Brayton’s body was discovered this morning.”

  After the flurry of indecipherable comments, oohs, and aahs died down, Osten continued. “A neighbor walked around the houses in the cul-de-sac after hearing a couple of gunshots. He saw Brayton through the window, slumped over in a recliner, and called 911.”

  “A couple of shots?” Ardy repeated, eyebrows raised.

  Osten nodded. “Not my case, but I swung by when I got up this morning and heard the address. The detective will be on scene for a while. But Brayton had an alarm system. Heck, that cul-de-sac is gated with an entry camera, ritzy neighborhood. So we know no vehicles drove in or out last night. And at the house, t
here was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no other injuries. The bullet trajectory fits with self-inflicted and there’s stippling on his hand. It’s his pistol. The detective is guessing Brayton took a practice shot at a photo, maybe testing the gun, working up his nerve.”

  “Well, that settles that,” Ardy said, with one affirmative dip of his chin.

  Osten laughed as he asked, “Where were you last night, Mr. Donner?”

  “Ardy. Call me Ardy. I was where I belong. Here.”

  The deputy nodded and leaned forward. “Your car is cold. It’s a twenty-mile walk.”

  They all laughed.

  “That guy was a coward to kill himself,” Frankie said. “’Course, he was a coward to terrorize a kid and to be a wife beater.”

  “I can understand him committing suicide,” Clara said, as Wes nodded agreement. “How could he go on as a businessman in this community with all that was brought to light? Even though he was going to see little, if any, jail time, the charges were solid. Domestic violence. Assault, battery, and threats to a child. He’d had a good reputation and he ruined it.”

  “It’s odd,” Caroline said. “He didn’t seem like the type of person who would go to such an extreme.”

  Emma drummed her fingers, looking around the family before offering, “There will probably even be a decent turnout at the funeral.”

  “We won’t make a party of the day,” Bella said.

  “Let’s eat,” Ardy said.

  Doug and Greer walked in. The parents enveloped the boy in hugs, resolute, telling him the news in low tones.

  Doug walked straight to Maddie, slid his hands onto her hips, and bent to kiss her belly. She felt a flush as realization dawned, blinked at her husband, and in an instant, made the decision for a lifetime. Who would have thought Doug was capable of … whatever this was? Revenge? No. A solution? And who would have believed she could set the thought away, choose to never examine it? The split second after the epiphany, Maddie decided she would take this understanding to her death, whenever that might be. She would never mention that she’d awoken when her husband’s absence no doubt drove her from sleep. She’d never voice aloud the fact that he’d crept out of bed, slipped away from their cabin under a thin slice of a shadowed new moon, and been gone all those hours.

  She would never tell.

  READER’S GUIDE TO The Measure of the Moon

  1. The Measure of the Moon explores what people hide from others. Do you think there are also parts of ourselves that we cannot fully know? How often might hidden shame or hidden information hinder people? What guides our decisions to continue concealing or to reveal things we have been hiding?

  2. What similarities exist between Greer and Gillian’s stories? In addition to the more obvious parallels, do you find softer echoes between the characters and their situations? What are the strongest contrasts between the two stories?

  3. Greer was a happy child with strong family support. Imagine an unhappy child with poor family support who is faced with Greer’s cataclysmic threat in the first chapter. How different might the outcome be?

  4. Adults who were deeply traumatized as children can be profoundly affected in their relationships and other areas of life. Discuss the childhood traumas experienced by characters in The Measure of the Moon and the different coping methods various characters use to deal with their issues. How successful have these methods been?

  5. Is the more marked link between the two stories a person, or is it the act committed by Alexandru during World War II that is repeated in the present by a character in Greer’s story? What do you think of the adage that history repeats itself or that we can be condemned to repeat it?

  6. How have Gillian and Becky’s reactions to their childhood with severely alcoholic parents differed? In what ways have they recovered or not recovered from their past pain? Have you known an adult who was profoundly affected by childhood trauma? How difficult is it to put yourself in the place of a person who has suffered a completely different life situation?

  7. The Istoks experienced and witnessed gross hardship and prejudice, yet Alex carried and still harbored prejudice toward a persecuted people. What role does insecurity play in fostering poor adaptation? How often do the bullied become bullies?

  8. When Paul first sees the photo of the orphans, he notices something familiar in their faces, but stops himself from articulating what he recognizes. What do you think he noticed? Why do you think he didn’t tell Gillian what he saw?

  9. In The Measure of the Moon, relationships are explored in hardship and in happier times, in childhood and adulthood, in both the Greer and the Gillian stories. Consider the interactions between siblings in both stories and how those relationships endured and changed over time. Which characters resonate the most with you?

  10. Gillian experiences inner conflict due to the past and the present, wants and needs. What is at the heart of her feelings for Paul? For Kevin? How different would her story be if she chose differently?

  11. Why do you think Caroline wanted to confront the woman who left Greer? How was she affected by the confrontation? What limits do you think the human desire for the satisfaction of expressing ourselves should have?

  12. Discuss the disparity in the last chapter between the law enforcement version of events and what Maddie guesses actually happened. What do you think of her choice? Could you not reveal that sort of information in a similar situation?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many wonderful, supportive people helped raise The Measure of the Moon. My editor, Jessica Tribble, thrilled me when she said that she loved, truly loved, this book, and she offered excellent feedback. The entire team at Thomas & Mercer rocks. My uber-agent, Mark Gottlieb, got my fiction into the world. My marvelous hubby, Barry, says he’s crazy about me and he proves it. My legion of writing friends always offer their time, thoughts, and more than one glass of good wine. A special shout-out to Anjali, Carla, Carol, Corinne, George, Jo-Ann, Karen, Kate, Laura, the other Lisa, Sandy, and Susan.

  I’d most of all like to acknowledge my readers.

  Dear Bookworms: I’ll forever connect, answer questions, join your lovely book clubs, and delight in how readers of Orchids and Stone know that surely Daphne put the roof on Paul and Gillian’s garage studio, and Kevin was the guy at work whom Thea complained about.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2016 Kristin Brewer Johnson

  Lisa Preston is the author of Orchids and Stone as well as several nonfiction books on animal care. Her experiences as a mountain climber, fire department paramedic, and police sergeant are channeled into fiction that is suspenseful, fast paced, and well acquainted with human drama. She has lived in Arizona, California, and Alaska and now makes her home in western Washington.