Bad Moon On The Rise (10 page)

I had not seen her since he left me to
be with her and her poise was disconcerting. She did not appear to
feel apologetic toward me. I didn’t blame her. He was not an easy
man to love. She probably earned the right day after
day.

Other women would have wanted to tag
along to hear what I had to say after so many months of silence.
But Helen had an odd quality of containment that went with her
inability to face the world outside her house. She lived in the
space immediately outside her body and she did not ever seem to
want to be anywhere else except exactly where she was. In a way, I
envied her.

“
Do you want me to show
you the way?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I can find
it.”

“
Can I get you anything to
eat or drink?”

Well, wasn’t she just the lady of the
house? The thought was a bit snide. Stop it, I told myself. It was
not her fault. It was mine.

 “
No, but he may need
a drink by the time I’m done.”

Anyone else who knew me would have
made a joke with a set-up line like that, but Helen just nodded and
turned away, willing to wait until the news reached her.

We were so different. Maybe that’s
what hurt so much.

As I walked toward the sunroom, my
footsteps echoed in the hallway, each slap of shoe on wood as loud
as a rifle shot to my ears. I entered the sunroom, not knowing how
I felt and only knowing I was, somehow, terrified.

He sat with his back to me, looking
out through the glass walls at the sunset, staring past the horizon
at something only he could see.

“
Burly,” I said
clearly.

He wheeled around slowly, instantly
recognizing my voice. He was backlit by the sunset and I could not
see his face because of the glare.

“
I have to talk to you
about something,” I explained, fighting to get my emotions under
control. All I wanted was to sound normal, to appear normal, to not
give him the satisfaction of looking like how I felt.

“
Is everything okay?” he
asked. His wheelchair was smaller than the last time I’d seen him,
sleek and low to the ground. It threw me off and I did not answer.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other,” he prompted
me.

“
Everything’s okay,” I
said. “My grandfather’s fine. I’m fine. Bobby’s fine.” I tried hard
not to babble. I took an envelope from my back pocket and extracted
the photo of Trey that Corndog Sally had given me. “Burly, I don’t
know any other way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. You
have a son. His name is Trey.” I placed the photo in his lap. “His
mother was—“

“
I know who his mother
was,” he interrupted. He took the photo and held it closer, staring
at it. “There’s only one person his mother could be.” He stared at
the photo, not challenging my pronouncement. He didn’t even ask if
I was sure. He didn’t want to question the verdict, I realized. For
him, a son was probably the greatest gift anyone could have given
him at this point in his life.

“
Burly?” I asked when he
said nothing. And that was when I realized he was crying. He made
no sound and he made no move to hide the tears. They flowed down
his face and over his hands, staining the photograph of
Trey.

“
Burly?’ I asked again.
“Are you okay?”

He looked up at me. “How old is
he?”

“
Fifteen. He’s a very good
student, apparently, a really great basketball player and, by all
accounts, a fine boy.” I hesitated.

“
What is it?” he asked.
“Why didn’t you bring him with you? You know me well enough to know
that I would want to see him, to be a part of his life.”

“
He’s missing,” I said and
I suddenly felt so close to tears myself that my voice cracked.
“His mother is dead, something to do with drugs, and the boy is
missing. Trey is missing.”

He could not take it all in. “He’s
missing?” he asked.

I nodded. “I’m looking for him
now.”

“
Looking for him where?”
Burly said.

“
I don’t know yet.” It was
all I had to offer.

It had taken awhile for all my words
to sink in. “Tonya is dead?” he asked.

“
Yes,” I said. “I saw her.
It was ugly.”

“
Why didn’t she tell me
about him? Why didn’t she come to me for help?”

I thought of her ravaged body, of what
she had become, of the way drugs had robbed her of all youth and
beauty. “I don’t think she wanted you to see her that way. I think
she wanted you to remember her like this.”

I handed him the photo of him sitting
on his Harley, legs outstretched, a younger, happier Tonya by his
side.

He stared down at it and I wondered if
he was remembering what it had been like, back before the accident,
when he’d been able to use those long, lanky legs, before his life
had shrunk to his wheelchair.

“
I would have stayed with
her,” he said. “But she didn’t want her parents knowing I was
white.”

“
They kind of found out
when Trey was born. I don’t think it mattered to them then. They
love him very much. At least his grandmother does. The grandfather
died a few years ago. It’s the grandmother who hired me to find
him. That’s how I found out about Tonya.”

“
You said he was a good
student?” Burly asked me. “He’s not into drugs or anything like
that?”

I shook my head. “Apparently not.
Whatever happened to his mother, whoever got to her, she kept it
all from affecting him.” As I said it, I realized how hard that
would have been and I decided that maybe Tonya Blackburn had not
been such a bad mother after all, that maybe she had been something
of a miraculous one.

“
Except that he’s
missing,” Burly said, unable to take his eyes off the photo of the
tall, confident boy, twirling a basketball on his fingertip, his
face filled with the same cocky grin I had seen on Burly so many
times.

“
Yes, and I have no idea
where or why. It may be that someone took him to keep him
safe.”

“
Then how are you going to
find him? Do you need money? What can I do to help?”

I shook my head at all the questions.
“I’ll find Trey,” I found myself promising for the second time that
day. “I will find him. If I need anything from you, I’ll let you
know.”

Burly was still staring at the photo
of his son, but then he looked up at me with his amazing dark eyes.
It was a look I knew well, a look that told me he knew what I was
feeling and what I was thinking and it was okay that I couldn’t say
any of it aloud. “I love you, Casey. You know that,
right?”

“
You don’t have to say
that,” I told him. “I’d look for him anyway.”

“
I know you would,” he
answered. “And that’s one reason why I love you.”

There are people we need to leave
behind in our lives, people we cannot leave behind in our lives
and, all too often, people who turn out to dominate both
categories. I spent the better half of that night and the next day
wondering if I would ever be able to leave Burly behind and if I
was doomed to forever  pursue hopeless cases simply because my
pride drove me to try and solve them. I thought of all these
things, and more, because I had no idea where to start when it came
to fulfilling my promise to Corndog Sally and Burly that I would
find Trey no matter what. How can you find a fifteen-year old who
has disappeared off the face of the earth?

I surfed the Internet, I made phone
calls to his former teachers, I googled, I hacked, I ate, I wanted
to drink. None of it got me anywhere. I found out one thing and one
thing only: that the Perry County authorities had finally
discovered Tonya Blackburn’s body, winning her two inside
paragraphs in The Perry County Herald that could pretty much be
summed up as “body found in rural trailer” and “cause of death
unknown.” Like so many others before her, Tonya Blackburn had left
this world, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

By the evening of the next day, I was
still at square one, my head ached from too much computer time and
my mind was on the house in rural Chatham County where Burly was
living with someone other than me. So, naturally, I did what I
always do under such circumstances: I went to find a
friend.

I did not come empty-handed. When
Marcus answered his doorbell, clad in a silk kimono with a green
mud mask covering his face (his usual evening wear when his partner
was not around) I handed over a gallon-sized freezer bag stuffed
with a fragrant green herb, the buds bursting with resin, the
leaves jammed in so tightly that you could barely see the
stems.

“
You shouldn’t have,”
Marcus said.

“
I know.”

“
No, really, you shouldn’t
have.” He took the freezer bag from me and held it up to the light.
“You know the new policy. Random drug tests.”

“
That’s catnip, you
idiot.” I brushed past him, expecting to see the crack-addicted
kitten I had given him dangling from his drapes or mangling a mouse
somewhere. Instead, his living room was as spotless as ever. “Where
is the little dickens?”

“
Catnip?” Marcus opened
the bag and inhaling deeply. “Fresh catnip. Where did you find
it?”

“
Farmer’s Market,” I
explained. “It costs more than pot. Make it last.”

“
Bless you,” Marcus said.
“Follow me. Theresa is in her room.”

“
Who is where?”

“
The kitten is in
here.”

“
You named your cat
Theresa?” I asked incredulously, but the question died on my lips.
I was struck dumb by the sight that greeted me. Marcus had
transformed his home office and occasional guestroom into something
out of Dr. Seuss. It looked like a carpet salesman on acid had
locked himself in his home workshop for three weeks to make all of
his LSD fantasies come true. The room was filled by a vast creation
of wood, burlap, roping and carpet consisting of platforms, stairs,
scratching posts and little tree houses, all joined by a series of
balance beams and tiny walkways. “Oh my dear god,” I
said.

What else was there to say?

“
Theresa!” Marcus called
out. The tiny calico darted out from behind the sofa then scampered
across the room until she was as far away from me as she could get.
She stood behind the curtains, peering out at me
suspiciously.

“
I keep her happy time box
behind the sofa,” Marcus explained as he dragged a cardboard box
out into view and poured half of my catnip offering into it. “She
loves to roll around in it.”

“
You bought her that
carpeted monstrosity and she’s spending most of her time in a
cardboard box?” I asked. “What exactly does that tell
you?”

“
That she’s addicted? Wait
until she smells the good stuff. She’s going to go crazy over
this.”

Marcus was right. Theresa got a whiff
of the fresh catnip all the way across the room, launched herself
through the air, sailed over a coffee table and landed smack in the
middle of the herbal mountain that filled the cardboard box. She
then proceeded to roll back and forth with her legs held straight
up in the air before burying her head in the stuff, all the while
purring as loudly as a six-hundred pound tiger.

“
I’ll have what she’s
having,” I said, staring fascinated at this display of feline
ecstasy. Why had I not been born a cat? Happiness was so… simple.
You just rolled in catnip all day long and no one ever nagged you
to go into rehab.

“
No,” Marcus said. “This
is what you want.” He took a stack of papers from beside his
computer and handed them to me.

“
What’s this?” I
asked.

“
Tonya Blackburn’s
Department of Corrections records and parole officer
reports.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “How did
you know I’d want these?”

Marcus looked away, his dark eyes huge
chocolate cookies in the green sea of his facial mud mask. “Burly
called me.”

“
Burly called you?” I
asked slowly.

“
Well, we are friends,”
Marcus said, beating me to the defensive stage and claiming the
high ground for himself before I could even start in that
direction. “Perhaps he wanted to discuss the fact that he had a son
with a friend.”

“
How much did he offer
you?” I asked coldly.

“
None of your business. He
just said to pull everything I could that could possibly help you
and to make sure you took the information and he’d pay me whatever
it took.”

“
Charge him plenty,” I
ordered as I grabbed the papers from Marcus, irked that Burly had
gone behind my back—but also mad at myself for being irked. It
wasn’t like I had gotten anywhere on my own, and it was his son,
after all.

“
I will,” Marcus said—and
I believed him. I’d lost count of the number of brothers and
sisters he had in college. He was a walking directory of university
and college tuition rates. At least he’d put Burly’s money to good
use.

“
Get me a drink,” I begged
him as I sat down and started thumbing through Department of
Correction records and Parole Officer reports on Tonya Blackburn.
It was good stuff, far beyond anything I’d been able to hack on my
own. Marcus must have been given a higher clearance level than the
last time I had bribed him to go fishing in the official State of
North Carolina database.