The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Read online

  I let him pull me closer, but I kept my arms up between us, hands splayed on his chest. His heart thudded under my palm.

  “You know something I’ve wanted to do since the first time I saw you?” he asked, his voice husky against my ear. His cheek, slightly rough, brushed mine.

  My fingers curled, clutching the fabric of his shirt.

  “The first time I came to see the clinic, you were standing by the desk with your back to me, I guess you were leaving, you didn’t have your lab coat on. I saw this beautiful long sexy back, and I wanted to go up and do this—”

  Slowly, with a gentle pressure, both his hands traveled down my back and up again, while he kissed my neck, my cheek, my forehead, my temples. Heat rose in my skin where his lips touched.

  Why not? One kiss. What was the harm in a kiss? I raised my arms, circled his neck, and met his mouth with mine. He drew me closer, locked me tight against him from shoulders to knees. His fingers were in my hair, cradling the back of my head.

  Suddenly I felt once again the sharp sense of Mother’s presence hovering and watching. I broke the kiss, breathless. At first I thought he wouldn’t let me go, then he reluctantly withdrew his arms so I could take a step back.

  A flush of color rode his cheekbones. “Zero to sixty in thirty seconds or less,” he said, then scrubbed a hand across his mouth and gave a short laugh. “I didn’t mean to come on so strong. It’s just that—” With his thumb he traced my moist lower lip. “In my imagination, we’ve already…”

  A shock of pleasure surged through me and heat flooded my face. I almost moved back into his arms.

  Instead, I managed a smile, smoothed down my hair with shaky hands, and said, “Maybe it’d be a good idea if we took this conversation out to the patio.”

  For a moment he stood with one hand braced on the counter, staring down at the floor. He looked up with a slow rueful grin, all his thoughts and desires playing across his face.

  “Okay,” he said. “Out to the patio.”

  ***

  We stayed on the patio into the afternoon, sitting in the sun and talking with the safety zone of the patio table between us. His visit stretched on so long that I began to worry about Mother and Michelle returning and finding him still there.

  When he said he had to check on a post-surgical patient, and rose to leave, the pang of disappointment I felt was mixed with relief.

  At the front door, his jacket slung over his arm, he said, “Have dinner with me tonight. I’ll come back in a while and pick you up.”

  “Oh, I can’t, I’m sorry,” I said automatically.

  “Tomorrow? We can spend the day together.”

  “I promised Mother I’d go somewhere with her.”

  He sighed. “Okay. Soon, though?” He stroked his thumb across my lips. “Real soon. Maybe next time you can come visit me.”

  He slipped an arm around my waist and gave me a lingering goodbye kiss, but I held myself back, kept a slice of space between our bodies.

  I watched him drive away, then closed the front door and sagged against it, releasing a long breath. If we hadn’t been in Mother’s house, we might have ended up in bed. If I’d had dinner with him, we would have gone to his apartment afterward and ended up in bed. I imagined us in a tangle of sheets, bodies naked and moist.

  It would be wonderful. But he wanted far more than sex. He deserved more. I was tempted to take a chance, surrender to his openness and warmth and see where it led, but the stronger part of me was already in full retreat. Not only because he was my boss. He didn’t know me. We could talk forever about books and music and work, and he still wouldn’t know me. I was beginning to doubt that I knew myself.

  Silence hung over the house, as it often did even when Mother, Michelle and I were all at home. A house of secrets, of unspoken things.

  In Luke’s eyes my life here probably seemed a comfortable convenience that nevertheless robbed me of independence and privacy. But it had been unimaginable for me to live anywhere else after I came back to McLean. Mother would have been wounded and bewildered if I’d chosen to be alone in some tiny apartment, and I wouldn’t have been able to bear her stoic show of pretended understanding.

  I walked down the hall, intending to tidy what little mess was left from lunch. Erase any evidence of Luke’s visit.

  I stopped outside Mother’s study, across from the kitchen. Normally the door stood open, but she’d closed it the night before and left it closed. This was her way, I assumed, of letting me know she was still displeased by my invasion of her personal space. The thought made me feel like a punished child, ashamed and resentful.

  I doubted the room contained anything I would want to see, among the old case histories Mother consulted when writing papers.

  But while I had the chance I might as well take a quick look just to be sure. I’d already committed the worst offense, searching Mother’s closet and dresser drawers. This would be minor by comparison.

  I grasped the knob, tried to turn it. The door was locked.

  I jerked my hand back. She’d never locked her study before. Did she distrust me so much that she thought I’d rifle through confidential patient records?

  Or was she hiding something that she didn’t want me to find?

  I stared at the closed door. The clock on the living room mantel chimed five times. The psychology conference was ending about now.

  I was at the kitchen sink scrubbing tiny red potatoes for dinner when my mother and sister walked through the back door.

  ***

  Michelle, deep into research and composition, spent evenings at her computer with a do-not-disturb expression hung on her face. Mother was always just across the hall or downstairs. How could I get my sister alone and in a mood to talk?

  In a fit of impatience, after waiting a couple of days for an opening, I walked into Michelle’s room one night and closed the door. She sat at her desk in a corner, inclined toward the computer monitor, long fingers busy on the keyboard. The screen was filled with words.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  Tap tap tap. “In a minute,” she murmured.

  I sat on the bed, watching her. She’d tucked her hair behind her ears, but a stray strand fell across her right cheekbone. Chewing her lower lip, an old habit of concentration, she looked so young that it was hard to believe we were both adults and everything had changed between us.

  I walked to the window. Beyond it lay the side yard, but I saw only my ghostly reflection in the glass. Michelle typed, engrossed in her task.

  “Mish,” I said, turning, “could I interrupt you for just a few minutes?”

  Her hands lifted and clamped into fists above the keys. When she swiveled in her chair, her long blue cotton skirt twisted around her legs. “All right, what’s so important, Rachel?”

  The second the harsh words were out of her mouth, her expression softened. Sighing, she said, “I’m so wound up, all this work to finish.” She pushed the tendril of hair off her face. “God, graduate school’s a grind. I should’ve stayed home Sunday and worked on this paper, instead of going off to the gallery to look at those ugly paintings.”

  I sat on the bed again. “Or maybe you should have gone sailing with Kevin and relaxed a little.”

  I hoped this would prompt her to tell me she’d seen Kevin only a few hours earlier. An accidental meeting, she was meant to think. Since she broke their boating date Kevin had called me a couple of times, wanting advice on how to win her over. I’d given him her seminar schedule and suggested he bump into her on the street and invite her to lunch. Today was the day he’d planned to do it. During the afternoon he’d called the clinic and left a message, conveyed to me by Alison: “It worked.”

  But Michelle wasn’t going to confide in me. At the mention of Kevin’s name a furtive look came into her eyes, like a curtain closing, before her gaze flicked downward. Like me, she wanted to protect her secrets.

  She tugged her skirt, straightening it. “What did you want
to talk about?”

  I leaned forward, elbows on my knees and hands together prayer-like. How could I get into this? Questions, a dozen of them, swirled in my head. “You’re studying childhood memory, aren’t you? What people remember from different ages and so on?”

  Looking faintly incredulous, she glanced at the computer screen. I’d interrupted her work for this? Then she folded her hands in her lap and assumed a patient, knowing expression that she might have copied from Mother and practiced in a mirror. I was on my guard before she spoke.

  “I don’t remember you burning the pictures,” she said. “If that’s what you’re about to ask me.”

  My mouth fell open. My suspicion was right: Mother and Michelle had been discussing me. Since Friday night I’d been keenly aware of Mother’s watchful gaze, keeping tabs on my psychic balance, but when it seemed that Michelle also looked at me that way, I told myself I was imagining things, going paranoid. I couldn’t stand the thought of them murmuring together over my emotional wounds.

  “When did she tell you about it?” I asked. “Saturday?”

  “That doesn’t matter.” Michelle leaned into the space between us. The strand of hair loosened and brushed her cheek again. “I understand why it upset you. Mother’s sorry she told you now. If you were able to deal with it you would’ve remembered it on your own. Sometimes forgetting is a blessing—”

  Parroting Mother, her very words.

  I sprang to my feet, wanting to run out. But need kept me where I was. “All right, since you two have been analyzing the whole thing, analyzing me, tell me something. If I was such a mess, why did Mother leave me alone? How long did it take, burning all those pictures? And where were you when I was doing it? You were practically a baby. Did she leave you in the house with your mixed-up sister—”

  “Rachel, Rachel.” She rose and crossed to me with three quick steps. “Mother wasn’t at home when it happened. It was the nanny, she wasn’t careful—”

  “Mother said she left me alone—”

  “Well, you must have misunderstood her. It was the nanny. Mother fired her for it.”

  I gaped, hardly knowing what to think. The Mother-like mask faded and in her face I saw my sister again, just Michelle, beseeching, anxious.

  “Why are you bringing all this up?” she said. “Can’t you see how much it hurts Mother? It tears her apart, having it all dredged up. Can’t you see that?”

  “Of course I can, it makes me feel awful. But we’re talking about something major that happened to me. Don’t I have a right to know about it? And don’t we both have a right to know more about our—”

  Michelle’s hand slipped into mine, and I was silenced by a sudden disorienting memory of her as a tiny child, little hands reaching for me, fingers clutching.

  “Please don’t dwell on it,” she said. “Please, Rachel. Don’t torment yourself.”

  I backed away, freed my hand. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  As I opened the door to leave I heard her sigh, softly.

  ***

  I paced my room, propelled by the questions that slammed around inside my head. Every answer created another doubt. Why hadn’t Mother told me about a nanny? I was positive she’d said she was the one who left me alone. Could I have misunderstood because I was upset when she told me about it? If it was a careless nanny who allowed me to destroy the pictures, could the same person have let Michelle and me get caught out in a storm? But why would our careful mother hire somebody like that?

  It was such a long time ago. Maybe she’d been a different person then, not as watchful and thorough. Or was she so grief-stricken herself that she hadn’t been thinking normally, had taken risks with her children? I could imagine what would happen if I went to her and tried to probe this subject. She would turn sad, reproachful eyes on me and the words would freeze in my throat.

  I flopped onto my back across the bed. She was downstairs in her study, the room she now locked because I couldn’t be trusted to stay out of it, the room whose closed door I casually ignored.

  I was exhausted by the effort of pretending nothing was wrong.

  Sitting up, I reached for the cell phone on my night stand. I had the next day, Wednesday, off work, and I would put the free time to good use. Theo Antanopoulos, Mother’s old friend and former professor, might have the answers to some of my questions. I flipped open the phone and punched in his number.

  ***

  “What a treat!”

  Theo stood in the morning sunshine outside his red brick townhouse, one arm flung wide and waiting to hug me. His other hand leaned on a four-footed metal cane. I walked into his hug and kissed his cheek just above the white beard.

  “What a pleasure to see you,” he said, patting my back. “Did you have to park far away?”

  That was always his first question of visitors to his Georgetown home. Parked cars lined the narrow streets, and finding a space near your destination was a wildly unlikely stroke of luck. “Not too far,” I told him. “Over on N Street.”

  “Oh, excellent, excellent. Your young legs can handle that quite nicely.”

  He shifted toward his door, the pain of the movement producing a wince. Theo’s barrel-chested body didn’t look frail, but the brisk stride I remembered from years ago had given way to a slow shuffle. I didn’t ask about the state of his knee and hip joints because I knew he considered his arthritis the single most boring topic under the sun.

  When he pushed open the bright red front door, two Siamese cats jumped back with a duet of unholy screeches. “Oh, now, now,” Theo chided. “Here she is, just as I promised.”

  When I leaned to pet them, Helen leapt onto my shoulder, where she dug in her claws for purchase and ecstatically rubbed her chocolate-brown face in my hair. Sophia shrieked and started climbing my slacks.

  “Good grief.” Laughing, I tried to extract Helen’s claws from my skin and the silk fabric of my blouse without doing further damage. “I think it’s time I gave these girls another pedicure.”

  “I’d be grateful, if you wouldn’t mind.” Theo waved a gnarled hand, scowling at it in disgust. He couldn’t manage the nail clippers anymore.

  “No problem.” I hoisted Sophia onto my free shoulder, and with Helen balanced on the other I followed Theo into the living room.

  I plopped, cats and all, onto an overstuffed green velvet sofa with shredded arms. The antique wedding ring quilt thrown over the seat cushions also had a few rips, I noticed. It was one of many quilts Theo’s late wife Renee had collected, and it still carried a faint scent of the lavender sachet that always called up her smiling image.

  Theo stood his cane to one side of a deep plump chair, then grasped the chair arms and lowered himself slowly to a sitting position.

  “You let these animals run wild,” I said, fingering a rent in the quilt’s delicate old cotton. Helen stood on the sofa back and licked my hair while Sophia circled in my lap preparatory to settling.

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Theo said. We’d had this exchange before. “But aren’t they charming little anarchists?”

  Sophia answered with an ear-splitting yowl. Theo and I laughed.

  “Now,” he said, “tell me how things are with you.”

  For nearly an hour, as I made coffee for us, trimmed the cats’ claws and brushed their creamy fur, I answered his questions. Theo—Dr. Theodore Antanopoulos, professor emeritus at George Washington University, semi-retired private practice psychiatrist—had known me since I was five and was acquainted with all the surface details of my life. I hoped he knew more, and would be willing to tell me. But before I could work back to the past, I had to satisfy his curiosity about the present.

  Eventually, as I knew he would, as he always did, he asked, “And do you have a man in your life these days?”

  Usually I gave him a quick no, or shrugged and said I’d seen some guy a few times but it didn’t amount to anything. This time I hesitated, grinning in spite of my effort not to.

  Theo’s eyes
widened. “There is someone,” he said. “At last! Who is he? He must be special to put that sparkle in your eyes.”

  “I’m not sure what’s going to happen. It’s just—” I stroked Sophia, curled on my lap, then gave equal treatment to Helen, whose hot little body pressed against my right leg. “It’s too soon to talk about it. I doubt anything will come of it.” I glanced up. “Don’t mention it to Mother, okay?”

  “Of course not. A true relationship takes time, you know. You mustn’t rush and make a mistake. But do give it a chance to grow. Promise me that?”

  I nodded. “I’ll try.” Luke and Theo, I thought, would be crazy about each other. Maybe I’d introduce them someday.

  Only after giving me his whole attention for so long did Theo ask about Mother and Michelle. Although he seemed fond of Michelle, the two of them had never been strongly attached, and his questions now seemed more politeness than genuine interest.

  His feelings for Mother were a different matter. He loved her the way I imagined a father might love a daughter. His wife Renee had felt the same. They had no children, and I sensed that Mother filled that gap in their lives, if only partially. The one time I’d seen my mother break down and sob was the moment Renee’s coffin was lowered into its grave.

  I tried to talk about Mother as if everything were fine between us. “She’s getting all her fear-of-flying patients together for a chartered flight in a couple of weeks,” I said. “Low altitude, and not too far from the airport. She’s got one person who might freak out, so she wants to stay near a runway. She doesn’t want a repeat of the Washington Monument experience.”

  Theo threw back his head and roared. “I have to take credit for that, I’m afraid,” he said when his laughter subsided. “I referred that poor man to her. But I swear I thought his only problem was a fear of heights. I had no idea he was harboring a latent claustrophobia.”

  “Well, it’s not latent anymore. She’s treating him for it now.” I glanced at my watch. It was almost 11:30, and I knew he had afternoon patients to see in his K Street office. I’d better get to the point.