The Moon Tells Secrets (4 page)

Luna chuckled. “Some of our kin could definitely take the sweetness out of life. I'll tell you that. Geneva had her sweetness, but sourness was all she got back—from our folks, and from her husband. My father.”

“You have sweetness, too, Luna,” I said, finally letting go of her hand.

“I have my moments.”

“I was eight months pregnant when he died.” I looked away, not wanting Luna to see the tears that came into my eyes even after all these years.

“How?”

“Murdered.”

“And the murderer?”

“Never found him.”

I avoided Luna's eyes because I didn't want to talk about that day, about what was left and torn up so bad I didn't recognize him. It had ripped him inside out, taking every part of him I loved, everything I cherished. I nearly lost Davey the day I found Elan, thrown against the wall in the garage where he'd parked the car. Anna had come there, too, found me on the floor, hadn't uttered a sound, just called two men I'd never seen before to help her bury him someplace in the dark inside her land. She'd said no more about it except that it had gotten her son and it would come for mine.

I couldn't tell all that to Luna, so I went back to what she had first asked me.

“Davey has a gift, Luna. He changes when he needs to become something else.”

“Changes? What do you mean?” She tightened her gaze on my face, as if she could find out what lived behind it.

“His body changes. His mind. He can turn himself into anything he wants to be. It's small animals now, a mouse, a squirrel. But later it will be different. A wolf. Another person.”

Luna caught her breath, then let it out; she hadn't meant for me to hear it. “What do you mean turn himself into another person?”

“He can't do that now!”

“What do you mean?” she asked again, demanding to know.

“Take somebody's body. Snatch somebody's soul.”

She took a long, lazy swallow of her Bloody Mary. “His father, Elan, had it, too, this … gift?”

I thought about our family and the boon, they used to call it, that some of us were supposed to have, the one I missed, the one they said Geneva had; Luna must have gotten it, too, her “gift.” “I think he did, but he never told me. Anna had it. I know that. She never talked much about her side of the family. Just her cousin Doba, and an uncle, who Anna said was evil, who had done something that pushed him from the family.”

“So what did Davey see in church?”

“The same thing you saw, Luna. The thing that left. It was what killed Elan, the murderer they never found, because they couldn't. It's looking for us now. Davey more than me.”

Luna took another swig of her drink, then put it down on the coffee table, carefully mopping the ring the glass left with a Kleenex drawn from her bosom. “Best place to store them if you got as much as I do,” she said, pushing it back down between her ample breasts. “And what is this
thing
?”

I paused, not sure how much to tell her. There were so many things that were secret, vows Anna had taken, that she'd made Davey take, that couldn't be told outside the family.

“I just know what Anna told me—that it killed Elan and it would not rest until it killed Davey, too, because of the gift. He has what it wants. It can't live and let him live, too. Its time is coming to an end.”

“Like an old wolf or lion in a pride?”

“I don't know. All I know is that it or they are evil beings, Luna, and Davey has that in him, too.”

Luna smiled. “There's nothing evil about your boy.”

“Anna said there would be someday, when it comes out in him.”

“I've run into my share of demons, Raine, and there's no demon in him. I don't know about the thing that you say is chasing you. I only got a glimpse of it.”

Luna kept her thoughts to herself as she collected what was left over from the lunch, and after a moment or two she asked what we wanted for dinner. I told her I wasn't hungry but if she had any more sandwiches, Davey would probably like some, and she said she could do better than that. She went upstairs to check on Davey; he'd fallen asleep.

“Whatever he goes through takes a lot out of him, and you, too. Why don't you go upstairs and lie down beside him. I'll make up the bed in the guest room where you and he can stay tonight. It has a trundle bed you can pull out for now, and then, when he's ready, we can put him in another room. This old house is bigger than it looks. We can get your things later.”

“I don't know.…” I wasn't sure how long we could stay.

“Whatever that boy has after him it won't stop until it tries to kill him, because it knows the child will someday have the power to destroy it. It has to get him while he's young.”

“Anna told me that,” I said.

“Did she tell you that you can't take down evil without a fight, a good fight?”

“No, Anna said—”

“You've got to stand your ground, Raine. Or you'll be running for the rest of your life. You may keep him safe, but you'll cripple him while you're doing it, and you don't want that kind of life for Davey, do you?”

Had I been selfish, weakening him with too much protection? I'd never thought of it like that.

“In the meantime, you should try to bring some normalcy into the boy's world. I heard you say Davey's a grade behind in school. Cade's a teacher—maybe he can tutor him over the next few weeks until we figure something out.”

I was too tired to argue, but I knew what I would do regardless: We'd stay here for a couple of days, to make Luna feel better, then be on our way like we always were, like Anna said we should be.

So I went upstairs and the next thing I knew, Luna was calling us down for dinner: cream of chicken soup and toasted whole wheat bread she'd made the day before. Healthy food, she said, something we both needed. And I settled in that night, with Davey in the trundle bed beside me, the soft blue color of the walls drawing me into them.

“Mom,” Davey whispered after a few minutes, surprising me because I'd thought he was asleep.

“Yeah, son.”

“I won't be small like that again, like I was in church today. Never. I'm through with it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Try to go to sleep.” I leaned over and pulled the cover up to Davey's shoulders, and he shook it off, his reminder that he wasn't a kid anymore, and soon the stillness of the room and the sound of my son's breathing sent me to sleep.

At daybreak, something woke me, pawing at Luna's gate outside, and there was a howl—low and deep like a dog. But it could have been just about anything, I told myself. A stray dog trying to come in from the cold or Pinto, Luna's gray poodle, locked outside crying to come into the house. And I was tired and strangely peaceful, so I drifted back to sleep anyway, lulled by the sound of the electric fan whirling on the top of the bureau.

 

3

cade

“Dennie.”

Cade whispered his dead wife's name, and that brought fleeting comfort as had the lilacs he cut earlier that morning. He'd buried his face in the blossoms, leaving a trail of tiny purple flowers trailing behind him when he carried them into the house. How long had they been blooming? Dennie would stuff green branches of new lilacs into the square glass vase on the dining room table. “Officially spring,” she would always say, and so it was.

It was evening now. He sat across the table from where she'd once sat, books, pencils, and papers piled high and messy around her. He stared at the lilacs for as long as he could stand it, then dumped vase, flowers, and water into the trash can in the kitchen. It had been a year since her death, and nothing could dim his grief. Nothing would bring her back.

Six months ago, he'd put the house on the market, thinking that would make it easier for him to “move on,” as all the teachers at his school suggested. Better not to be reminded every moment each day of what he had lost, they advised. It would be a quick sale, the Realtor assured, this charming three-bedroom house with its brand-new kitchen, shiny floors, and wood-burning fireplace. But when potential buyers got wind of what had happened in the first-floor office, now neatly painted a cheerful daffodil yellow, they hauled ass away as fast as they could; the damned house could not be sold. Moving on was as impossible as moving out.

He pulled a bottle of Jim Beam, one of the three that lined the shelf in his kitchen cabinet, and poured himself a generous shot. Glass and bottle in hand, he settled down on the plush leather couch in front of the TV and downed its contents, enjoying the sting of golden liquid as it rushed down his throat into his belly.

He hadn't been in a church since Dennie's funeral. If he'd known that was where Luna was headed this morning, he would have found a way to get out of it, except that Luna, bless her soul, would have known he was lying and called him on it. It amazed him how close they had become since Dennie's death. She'd turned into the big sister he always wanted, the dependable buddy he never had. It was a good thing, too. If it hadn't been for Luna Loving Moore, he would have drunk himself to death by now or jumped off a bridge or taken that useless gun left on the office floor that night and blown a hole through his mouth. Damned, stupid gun, for all the good it did Dennie. For all the good it did.

He squeezed his eyes closed to blot out what he never wanted to see again: her face ripped off—that darling, square chin and luscious lips that never stopped smiling; her copper-colored skin torn from the bone; short, natural hair ripped from its roots. Her body gutted, the way his father used to gut the deer he butchered, insides spread out in ropes of red and brown and yellow on the rug, a butcher's killing floor. And her eyes, which had shone so brightly once, he swore she could see at night—like a cat, he would tease her, and she would scold him because she hated cats. I'm a dog person, she would say, and that was what he'd planned to get her for her birthday, a beagle puppy because she liked Snoopy.

Where were her eyes? Where had they gone? What had they done with them?

Luna had found him that night, whimpering and nearly unconscious. She covered what was left of Dennie with a pink sheet found in the hall closet on the second floor, then grabbed and held him until the cops came, his broken, jagged sobs shaking her body as violently as they did his own. The police eyed him suspiciously at first, questioning him relentlessly about what had happened in that room until the coroner explained that Dennie—the deceased—had been killed early that afternoon. Cade had been in school all that day. Yet there were no signs of a break-in. Burglars probably, the cops suggested, crazy men high on drugs like crystal meth. The door must have been unlocked, the cops said, and they had surprised her. It had had to be more than one; that was a given.

But why kill her like that, tear her apart so brutally? they asked among themselves even as Cade stood listening. They sought clues but found nothing—except the smell. Luna, sniffing the air upon entering, had slapped her hands over her mouth and nose, as if protecting herself from some unspeakable threat. Cade had caught a whiff of it, too, an animal odor that belonged in the woods, and he knew that because when his father would hunt, he would sniff the air as Luna had, determining what wildlife was about. His father was long dead, and Cade hadn't hunted with him since he was a kid, but he remembered how he sorted the air for that smell—even his grief hadn't overpowered that memory.

My God, how he had loved her. Luna had loved her, too.

Dennie had been the only neighbor in the decidedly upwardly striving working-class neighborhood to befriend the odd-looking woman often dressed in white flowing dresses who smelled of exotic spices and who more often than not pulled Pinto, her yelping poodle, on a rope behind her. He was a strange looking creature; about ten inches tall with thick, messy gray fur. His owner obviously balked at giving him a conventional poodle cut, so he looked and moved like an oversized puff of dust. Cade felt like an outsider when he'd come home from school that first afternoon and found Luna and Dennie giggling like schoolgirls as they sipped tea and swapped herbal remedies.

“Luna Moore is an old soul,” Dennie said meditatively after their neighbor left. “She actually understands the stuff I'm writing about.”

“That voodoo stuff?” He'd raised his eyebrow as he always did when it came to his wife's research.

“Not voodoo, Vodun—and that is a valid belief system if you know what you're talking about—but I'm not talking Vodun. I'm talking Navajo not Haitian, mythology not religion.”

“I thought Jersey was Lenape territory. Don't Navajos live in the Southwest?”

“But some of the myths and beliefs are similar. There are clusters of Navajo people around here, too. They're like black folks with our diasporas, intermarriages, mythical beasts coming together where you least expect to find them.”

“It's all witchcraft, as far as I'm concerned,” he'd said with mock gruffness. “And I don't believe in witches.”

Dennie continued sorting through a pile of papers. “You would if you read the stuff I've read.”

He'd grinned and let it go. Years of listening to his wife explain the passion that led her to seek a doctorate in cultural anthropology had left him charmed, curious, and finally, a bit bored. That stuff is over the head of a fifth-grade teacher, he'd joke. Study something I can get, like the cultural life of the typical eleven-year-old. I'll wait for my own kid to study that, she'd say, and they'd shared the grin they always did and he'd gone back to correcting papers and she to the myths that fascinated yet haunted her. Kids would come in time, they'd long ago decided. After she'd done her research, after she wrote her dissertation, after she got a job. They had the rest of their lives, after all.