The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 6

  I turned toward the house and saw Mother in the rear window of her study, the room bright behind her as she peered into the dark. She couldn’t see me, I knew. After a moment she moved out of sight.

  I wasn’t surprised that she’d wanted to protect me from memories of a ravaging grief. She’d always tried to shelter Michelle and me from the worst in life.

  But I sensed that something more, something far worse, that she couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about, still lurked behind her words. What was she holding back? What else was she protecting me from?

  Chapter Five

  With a tin plate of raw rabbit meat in one hand, I walked down the driveway to the front of the house, wondering what had happened to Luke after I heard his Range Rover pull in. He was in the front yard, contemplating the blossom-heavy weeping cherry.

  I watched him from the driveway. He looked different, dressed in gray slacks and a navy sports jacket over a white tieless shirt, with polished loafers on his feet. All this, no doubt, because he expected to meet my mother and sister. Today I was the one in jeans.

  He turned with a smile. “That tree’s a knockout,” he said.

  And so are you, I thought. “My mother had it planted on my thirteenth birthday. I got it in my head that I couldn’t live without one.”

  He nodded, seeming to approve the sentiment. “Someday I’d like to have a house with one of these in the yard.”

  For a moment we stood smiling at each other. More than once that morning I’d almost called and told him not to come. I couldn’t shake off the things Mother had said to me the night before; her words trailed through my head like smoke, poisonous and smothering. I couldn’t find the lightness of spirit to play flirtatious games with Luke. But now that he was here, all slicked up and making the same general impression as a gust of fresh air, I was ridiculously happy I’d let him come.

  He nodded at the plate of rabbit meat. “Lunch?”

  I laughed. “For the hawk. Let’s go down and see him.”

  The back lawn sloped away from the house, with Mother’s perennial beds on either side and her roses in the sunny center. Tulips and late daffodils dotted the borders with pink and red and yellow. The rosebushes bristled with thorns and tiny new leaves.

  Luke turned and walked backward for a few steps, looking up at the house, then around at the trees that ringed the yard. “How much belongs to your mother?”

  “An acre and a half,” I said. “All the trees on either side, and down to the stream in back. We’ve got our own private little woods.”

  “Sure beats apartment living. Now I see why you don’t want to leave home.”

  I let that go without an answer, unwilling to start a discussion of my living arrangements.

  At the bottom of the yard, we followed a path through a shield of evergreen shrubs and came into a streamside clearing. The four large rehab cages, which I’d built myself with lumber and chicken wire, were mounted on platforms four feet off the ground.

  Luke peered into the cages. His thick sandy hair had been neatly combed back but now drifted across his forehead again, and the inevitability of it made me smile.

  At the moment the only animal I had besides the hawk was a small raccoon with a serious bite wound on her flank. She slept out of sight in a nest box. Sunlight striped one side of the hawk’s cage, but the bird perched on a pine branch at the shaded end. He cocked his head, keen dark eyes focused on the dish of meat.

  I unlatched the feeding door at the bottom of the cage and slid the dish in, next to the wide shallow pan I’d filled earlier with fresh water. When I stepped back, the hawk crab-walked along the branch, talons scraping bark, and emerged into the sun. He swiveled his head to eye the food, then us.

  “Hey, handsome,” I said to the bird, “show us what a good job I did on your wing.”

  To my astonishment he lifted both wings, and in slow motion unfolded them, spread them wide. I caught my breath, waiting to see if he’d fully extend the injured one. He did.

  For a moment he posed in the sunshine, displaying his reddish brown underwings and chest and his dramatic black and white barred flight feathers.

  “Wow,” Luke said. “Talk about having a way with animals. Does he do everything you ask him to?”

  “I wish. I took the binding off a week ago and I’ve been waiting ever since to see him open that wing. You know, I don’t think he wants company. He won’t eat while we’re watching. Let’s go have our own lunch.”

  Luke straightened his jacket and brushed the hair off his forehead. “Okay. Do I look neat enough to meet your family?”

  I suppressed a smile. “Actually, they’re not here. They’re both at a professional conference downtown.”

  His eyes went wide. Then the corners of his mouth tugged upward as he realized I’d invited him knowing we’d be alone. “Well, then,” he said, “if we’re not keeping anybody waiting, how about taking me on a walk in your woods? I haven’t spent any time outdoors in so long, I’ve got a raging case of cabin fever.”

  “You should ease up on those sixteen-hour work days.”

  “All I need is a good reason.”

  When we turned I felt his hand on my back, a light touch, the briefest contact. Behind us, I heard the silky whisper of feathers and the thump of the hawk’s feet on the cage floor.

  The path along the stream bank was dense and cushiony with generations of fallen leaves, and so narrow that our bodies couldn’t stay separated as we walked. Our arms brushed, our hands touched. Above us a fuzz of new green colored the massive oaks and maples.

  “I put myself through a drill getting ready to meet your mother,” Luke said. “I had a lot of small talk rehearsed.”

  I stopped and faced him. “Really? Why’d you think you had to do that?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not great at socializing to begin with, and a psychologist—I’m sure your mother’s a very nice woman, but I’d probably feel like everything I did was being analyzed.”

  Oh, I thought, you have no idea.

  He was so close I could feel his heat. I took a step back and said lightly, “Then it’s just as well she’s not here. How’d you know she’s a psychologist?”

  “I asked around. Grilled a couple of the other vets.”

  This made me laugh, but at the same time it stirred a faint apprehension. “They must wonder why you’re so interested in my family.”

  “Well, they didn’t tell me much.” He grinned. “Am I being too pushy?”

  “I can’t decide whether you’re pushy or cute.”

  “Whatever I am, it got me this far.”

  “Just watch your step,” I said.

  “I’ll consider myself warned.”

  A half-smile on his lips, he followed a downy woodpecker’s jerky ascent of a maple on the far side of the stream. A cardinal’s rich throaty song rose above the happy racket of other birds. “I really like this,” he said. “Have you lived here all your life?”

  “Not quite. We moved here when I was five, from Minneapolis.” Was that true? I wondered suddenly. It was what I’d always believed, but my memory couldn’t provide any proof.

  “My family’s farm has a creek and a patch of woods like this,” Luke said.

  I pulled myself back to the conversation. “Oh, right, a country boy, you said. Where is this farm?”

  “Pennsylvania. And I’ve never milked a cow, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s a horse farm. Palominos and Shetlands. I’m the only one in the family who’s not part of the operation.”

  He told me about his mother, who was financial manager for the business, his younger sisters, Janet, Emily, and Margaret, all married with kids and all expert horse trainers, and his father, who loved a good joke as much as a fine Palomino.

  I could picture them: tall, lanky, sandy-haired, wholesome as wheat. Easy-going people who were exactly what they seemed. I imagined Luke laughing at the dinner table with his family.

  “Rachel?”

  Neither of us had spoken f
or a couple of minutes.

  His fingers brushed my shoulder, trailed down my arm. His hand closed around mine.

  A tremor went through me, delicious and alarming. I disengaged my hand from his, smiling so the action wouldn’t seem abrupt. “Ready for lunch?”

  He stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Whoa,” he said. “I think I could fit my whole apartment in here.”

  I glanced around, trying to see it as he did: walls lined with pale oak cabinets, center island, breakfast table in one corner. Bigger than many kitchens, I supposed. The spotless uncluttered surfaces, the white tile floor and white walls made it seem even more spacious.

  “Can I have the ten-cent tour of the house?” he asked.

  Leading him through the downstairs rooms, I had the acute sensation that Mother was somehow looking on as this stranger invaded her sanctuary.

  “It’s perfect,” he said in the living room. “I’d be afraid to touch anything.”

  Just as well, I thought.

  When he stepped into the den, a cozy space with plump blue-striped chairs and sofa, Luke exclaimed, “A proud mother wall!”

  “A what?”

  He waved a hand at a collection of framed photos. “My mom’s got a wall just like this in the den back home. All the high points in her kids’ lives. I call it her proud mother wall. She’s got one of these hanging up too.” He tapped a framed letter: my acceptance at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. Luke had attended Cornell ten years before me.

  “Our mother lets no milestone go unrecorded,” I said.

  Here we were, smiling through the years: me with my prize-winning science fair exhibits, Michelle in a filmy costume for a small role with the Washington Ballet, me in cap and gown between Mother and Michelle, Mish in cap and gown between Mother and me. Birthdays, Christmases, beginnings, endings. But no photos of our father, no pictures at all from our early childhoods.

  “Your sister?” Luke studied a shot of Michelle blowing out candles on her twenty-first birthday. “Older, younger?”

  “Three years younger. She’s a graduate student at GW, getting a doctorate in psychology.”

  “Ah. Any special interest?”

  “Autistic children.”

  “Whew. She must like a challenge.”

  “She has an incredible empathy with them. Maybe that’s what it takes to break through. I think she’ll be great at it.”

  “You two must be good friends. Not many adult siblings could live together in peace. And with their mother, to boot.”

  “Well,” I said, “there are different kinds of peace.”

  His eyebrows lifted quizzically. “What does that mean? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Never mind.”

  His gaze lingered on my face a second before he turned back to the pictures. “Are these your grandparents?”

  In my high school graduation picture I was flanked by Michelle and Mother on one side and a white-haired couple on the other.

  “No,” I said. “They’re old friends of my mother’s. Theodore and Renee Antanopoulos. But I guess they’ve always seemed a little like grandparents. Renee died not long after that picture was taken, but Theo’s still very much alive.”

  A thought struck me: How much did Theo know about my father? He was the one person Mother might confide in. He wouldn’t repeat those confidences to me, but surely he could give me a few scraps of information. If I dared to ask him.

  “Are your grandparents back in Minnesota?” Luke asked.

  The question brought me up short at the edge of a gulf.

  “No,” I said after a moment. “My grandparents are dead. All of them.” People whose faces I wouldn’t recognize, couldn’t recall ever seeing. I murmured, “It’s always been just the three of us. As long as I can remember.”

  “Are your parents divorced, or—”

  “My father’s dead.” Suddenly I wanted to talk about him, speak of him smoothly and without reluctance, prove to myself that I could, even here in Mother’s house. “He died in a car accident when I was five. He was young—” I realized with a small shock that I didn’t know exactly what his age had been. I added, making a guess based on Mother’s age, “A little younger than you are now.”

  “That’s rough,” Luke said. “Your mother never remarried?”

  “No.” Mother with a husband—impossible to imagine.

  As abruptly as the urge to talk had come over me, it vanished, and I couldn’t bear to speak or hear another word about my parents. I turned to the door. “Why don’t we eat now?”

  Luke shed his jacket and helped me carry our sliced chicken salads and iced tea to the breakfast table by the sun-brightened kitchen window. Sitting three feet across from him, unable to move away or escape his gaze, I was momentarily gripped by panic. All the reasons why this was a bad idea chattered in my head.

  What on earth was I thinking when I asked him to lunch? He’d wanted to see the hawk—no, he wanted more than that, he wanted the proper beginning of something, but I hadn’t been obliged to give it. An invitation for a quick visit would have been polite but noncommittal. Now I was alone in the house with him, the afternoon stretching ahead of us, no interruptions in sight.

  But he was easy to talk to, and didn’t resist when I nudged him away from personal questions. We compared our experiences at Cornell and swapped tales about a classic absentminded professor we’d both had. As long as I avoided looking into his intense blue eyes for more than a second, I could almost persuade myself that I wasn’t actually in the middle of a first date with my boss.

  We’d been talking for half an hour when he said, as if it were just another turn in the conversation, “I want to ask you about something.”

  “Mmm?” I said, forking a bite of chicken into my mouth.

  He twisted his sweat-beaded glass round and round on its coaster. “But I’m not sure you’ll want to talk about it.”

  I looked at him, suddenly wary. His face was serious. I swallowed the meat without chewing.

  “Exactly what happened the other day,” he said, “after the basset was brought in? I can’t get it out of my mind, that expression on your face. Like you’d seen a ghost.”

  I stared at the remains of my lunch, chicken slices and sugar snap peas and carrot slivers nestled in lettuce. I’d thought he’d forgotten, but all along he’d been puzzling over my crazy behavior.

  “What was it that rattled you like that?” he said. “I’m not asking as your employer. I’m asking as your friend.”

  I made myself meet his gaze. Warm eyes, full of honest concern. My heart lurched. What would this supremely sane man think of the turmoil inside my head? With a shrug I told him, “It reminded me of something, that’s all. An old dream.”

  He sat forward, interested. “A nightmare? About what?” He waited, patient and receptive.

  I shook my head. “It wouldn’t make any sense to you.”

  “Try me.”

  I was silent, scraping my fork back and forth across my plate until the screek screek of silver on china got through to me and I stopped. I didn’t want to offend him with a rebuff, but I had no intention of spilling out a story of dreams and strange faces and the father I couldn’t remember.

  When I didn’t answer, Luke sat back and said, “Do you ever ask your mother to analyze your dreams?”

  My head snapped up. “My mother?”

  “Don’t psychologists analyze dreams?”

  “I don’t want to have my dreams analyzed. To tell you the truth, the very thought of therapy of any kind gives me the creeps.”

  “Oh, that’s a great endorsement for your mother’s business.”

  That struck us both as funny, and we laughed together.

  “I apologize for what happened at the clinic,” I said. “You know I don’t usually go around scaring little children. Let’s not talk about it anymore, do you mind?”

  I rose and carried my plate to the sink, silently pleading for an end to the su
bject. He followed with his own plate and I scraped our leftovers down the garbage disposal. The machine’s growl stopped talk and allowed me to regain my balance.

  When I switched off the disposal I changed gears. “I had a dream last night that I’d defy anybody to analyze. You’ll be interested in this, it’s the kind of thing only a vet could appreciate.”

  “Tell me.” Hands in his pockets, he leaned against the counter next to the sink.

  I paused to recall details of the dream that awakened me with giggles during the night. It had been such a blessed change from the dark questions crowding my head before I fell asleep.

  “I dreamed that a horde of basset hounds showed up at the clinic. They walked in by themselves, they didn’t have people with them. They filled up the reception area and overflowed into the cat waiting area, with some pretty lively consequences.”

  Luke smiled. “And?”

  “They were all suffering from terrible halitosis, which I diagnosed as bassetosis.”

  I loved the sound of his laughter, so I kept going, embroidering the silly dream.

  “Pretty soon the place was carpeted with dozens of bassets standing around on their stubby little club chair legs, all looking mournful and very embarrassed by the whole situation. The smell they gave off was so overpowering, and the atmosphere got so dense with it, the staff was running around opening all the doors and windows and fogging the place with air freshener.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “Absolutely not. You know how crazy things are in dreams. I remember that my biggest problem was classifying the disorder. I had to examine every dog carefully to determine whether it had smallmouth bassetosis or largemouth bassetosis—”

  Luke burst out laughing, and I laughed with him, and somehow by the time we subsided to crinkle-eyed amusement he had an arm around my waist and I was leaning into his shoulder.

  He sighed, brushed a finger across my cheek, and murmured, “God, Rachel, you’re so beautiful.”

  His hand slid under my hair to caress the back of my neck, sending a shiver through me. I hadn’t planned on this. Had I? He was assuming too much. I’d allowed him to.