The Moon Tells Secrets, Page 5

  “He’s easy to teach, eager to learn and—”

  “I know. I can tell he’s a nice kid.”

  “Thanks. For teaching and for saying that.”

  “Don’t thank me too soon. You need to be honest with me, tell me more about him, about what’s going on.”

  “Like what?” I was defensive, hearing the edge in my own voice. It was there because it had to be. It surprised Cade, too, I could tell that, but his eyes and voice softened.

  “Like what you want me to teach him, for one thing. Like why you don’t know if it will be the summer or a few weeks. Like what dreams you have for him.”

  “My dreams for him? I don’t know. Whatever he wants for himself. If you could just help him catch up with what you were doing this year so when we move he can be in the grade he’s supposed to be in,” I said, ignoring the second question.

  “So you’re definitely relocating like you said last night?”

  “Yeah, probably.” I studied the streaks the sponge had left on the table because I didn’t want my eyes to meet his. “I’m not exactly sure when—a few weeks, maybe.”

  “Or the end of the summer.” He shifted his gaze away then back to me. “Raine, you’ll forgive me for asking you this, like I know I just met you, but are you running away from someone? Like Davey’s father, maybe?” I heard in his voice what the kids in school must have heard when they were scared or in trouble, and what whomever he had shared this house with had probably seen when he held her close. I felt like one of those kids, wondered how it would be to unburden myself to someone with such tenderness in his eyes. I thought about Elan, then made myself stop.

  “Davey’s father is dead. I’m a widow. Davey’s father died shortly before he was born,” I said quickly, hoping that would be enough. He went to the counter and poured a cup of coffee, nodded at me, asking if I’d like some, too, and I told him I would. “So how long have you known Luna?” I changed the subject; I didn’t want to tell him anything else, let those thoughtful eyes pull anything out of me.

  “About a year and a half. She and Dennie…” He began again. “She and my late wife, Denice, were good friends. So I guess you’ve known Luna all your life.” He took a swallow of coffee; he was changing the subject, too.

  “No, I just met her.”

  “You’re not serious?” he said, sitting back down.

  “Yeah, actually I am.” The coffee was hot and bitter. I like mine sweet, half filled with milk. Two teaspoons of sugar, three when I’m by myself. He must have noticed my distaste.

  “Forgot to ask, want some milk? I take mine black. I’m out of sugar. Got some honey, though.” He took a carton of milk out of the refrigerator and placed it in front of me.

  “This is fine.” I’d picked up the whiff of sour milk when he put the carton on the table.

  “But then how did she know that you were coming? I couldn’t believe it. It was like she was waiting for you,” he asked, getting back to Luna.

  “Let’s just say my family has a sense of things to come. I’ll leave it at that.”

  “And do you have a sense of things to come, too?” He was obviously curious; I almost hated to disappoint him.

  “No. Mostly I try to believe in the here and now, what I can see, hear, feel, or touch.” I was lying and wondered if he knew it. I didn’t understand what was chasing us or why Davey was the way he was. There was no such thing as the here and now.

  “Mostly?” he said with a hint of amusement touched with something I couldn’t identify, but he didn’t ask me to explain, so I didn’t.

  Davey came in then, Pinto yelping at his heels. Seeing the two of them together like that, suddenly old friends, made me grin. Ever since he was old enough to see the “ideal” family on TV—mom, dad, two kids, family dog—he had yearned for a pet—dog, cat, guinea pig, anything—since the dad and two kids thing was obviously off the table. He’d begged me so often for a pet, I’d actually thought about giving in, and then I’d think about our reality and know it couldn’t work. Traveling around too much, I used to tell him. It’s hard to keep a dog in an apartment. But there was something else, darker, that I didn’t ever say, and when he got old enough to understand, he stopped bringing it up altogether. Animals were a threat to him. Even small ones. A pet might see him as prey or become his victim.

  “Did you all have a good time out there?” I asked, and Davey nodded.

  “He likes to catch. He’s kind of old, but he still likes to do it.” He rolled the ball to Pinto, who, as frail as he was, managed to catch it. Not a perfect playmate, but close enough for now.

  Pinto licked Cade’s hand, receiving a quick pat on the head in return. “Looks like you gave him a good workout. He needs some exercise.”

  “He’s pretty fast for someone his age.” Davey gave a low whistle, which brought the dog back to his side. “Can we come back tomorrow? I mean to play. There’s more space here than at Luna’s. I mean if we’re still around?” Warily, his eyes sought my permission.

  “Sure. Anytime you want to. But you might be coming back next week anyway. Your mom will talk to you about that.”

  Davey’s grin said he was glad we’d be staying here for at least a week, and he nodded at me with grateful eyes. Cade placed our coffee cups in the sink and left to join Luna in the room down the hall. Davey sat down in the seat he’d left.

  “So we can stay?”

  “For a while. A couple of weeks, maybe.”

  “What about—?” He didn’t need to finish.

  “We’ll figure something out.” It felt good to say that, telling him that we wouldn’t run, at least not right away. But his quick, doubtful glance told me otherwise, and I nodded, acknowledging that we couldn’t talk about it here, not in front of anybody. I told him then what Cade and I had talked about, explaining that he had gotten too far behind at school and needed to catch up. He scrunched his lips, letting me know whom he wanted to blame for that, even though I knew he really didn’t blame me, except on bad days when he needed someone to be mad at.

  “So what’s he going to teach me?”

  “Anything you want to learn. Stuff that will help you next time we need to—”

  “But you just said we wouldn’t have to leave again!” Anger sparked in his eyes. “You just said it!”

  “I know what I said, and I didn’t say that, not exactly.”

  “Almost exactly. So where did Luna go?” He was defiant now but hid it. Like Pinto, Luna was quickly becoming an ally. I’d heard the two of them laughing together when I came downstairs for breakfast. I had no idea what they were talking about, but it had been good to hear his laughter. He was as at ease with Luna as he was with her dog, and I was reminded again how narrow our lives were, how thin and devoid of fun. Except for school, I was his only company.

  When Anna was alive, she’d been there for him, too, in ways I never could. She’d understood him because of the bond—the shifting “gift”—they shared. He would tilt his head sometimes, in the weeks after she died, listening for a sound sung or whispered at a timbre I couldn’t hear. It scared me at first, that some unspoken secret seemed to be calling him, a thing that shut me out. I’d wondered how deep those family ties went, how deeply he was bound to Anna, even after death.

  Recently, the listening had grown less. Only every now and then would I catch him picking up his head, waiting for the voice of someone gone. But then he’d drop it when he saw me looking, unwilling to let me between them. Maybe Luna could become like Anna, with her own strange song to sing my lonely son, yet safer. Luna was bound to me by blood, so I’d be part of that song; I would hear it, too.

  “So what were you and Luna laughing about in the kitchen this morning?” I asked, knowing he wouldn’t tell me. Secrets were too big a part of our lives.

  “Between me and Luna. So where did she go?”

  “Down the hall,” I said, letting him have his space. “But knock if the door is closed.”

  “Why would the door be closed?�
�� With Pinto at his heels, he headed down the hall, and I heard him rapping hard, then entering when nobody answered.

  “Don’t come in here!” Luna yelled, too late.

  He had run inside, the dog prancing ahead of him, and then I heard him stop and scream, the sound as sharp and piercing as it always was when he was afraid. I ran down the hall and into the room, snatching him toward me.

  It was Pinto who knew he was shifting. His growl told me that, and his snarl, those little teeth sharp and white as he backed away from Davey almost into the wall. I pulled Davey close to me, as big as he was, trying to hide him from the dog, from anything that could hurt him.

  “Pinto!” Luna screamed. Whimpering but obedient, the dog slunk toward her, head down, but his eyes, so wide and friendly before, glared angrily and fiercely at Davey now. Davey was afraid, too. But it wasn’t Pinto that scared him. He had seen or sensed something in the room, and I felt his body changing against my own: his limbs shrinking ever so slightly, fist balling, mouth puckering against my breast like that of some beast he knew he would become.

  “Don’t, Davey.” I bent and whispered in his ear. “Don’t. Don’t. Breathe like you tell me to do when I’m scared. Breathe to stop it from happening. Nothing is here. I will keep you safe.”

  He couldn’t speak. His voice was lost somewhere deep inside him.

  Pinto growled from across the room, snapping, snarling at the air.

  “Stop it!” Luna ordered the dog as she whacked him across his snout, then grabbed his collar, holding him tight.

  I pushed Davey into the hall as far away from the door as I could, then stepped into the room lit by the morning sun pouring in through the curtain-less windows. A wedding picture sat on the desk. Cade and a pretty woman with a wide, bright smile. Stacks of paper and unopened folders piled around them, and on a small table in a far corner, dried daisies bunched in a white china vase.

  “Go sit on the couch and wait for me, now!” I whispered to Davey.

  “No! Mom, I’m scared.” He had found his voice, but it had changed. It was deeper, with a hoarseness to it.

  “I’ll be right there. Go,” I said, and he left, his body shaking as he tried to control what had begun to happen. Pinto growled again, barking at Davey as he left. Davey looked back at him, and the sadness in his eyes pulled deep into my heart.

  “Stop it, you foolish little beast!” Luna snapped, and Pinto, suddenly cowed, kneeled at her feet.

  “What the hell is going on?” Cade stepped forward, his eyes wide as he confronted first me, then Luna. “What’s wrong with Davey? How come he ran like that?”

  I said nothing. An object on the desk had caught my attention, a piece of a claw that lay a few inches from the wedding photograph, bone gray and as grotesque as the one I’d seen at Anna’s house all those years ago; the one wrapped in white cotton kept inside a lead box. They do that sometimes, Anna had told me. Leave bits of themselves behind to warn those who need to be warned, scare them before they tell their secrets. It was a token; its spirit still within. You can tell if you feel it, she said as she’d grabbed my hand, making me touch the horrible thing. I was back into that memory now, of her rough fingers grasping mine, of the sharp edge of the thing, which looked like a fingernail, when it pricked my finger, drew my blood. Never forget this, she told me. This is what you must protect him from.

  I looked at Cade and fear shot through me. How was he tied to the creature? Had I nearly given him my child? “What are you?” I said to him, barely able to speak.

  “What do you mean, what am I? Luna?” His gaze, unfaltering and angry, had shot to Luna for an answer.

  Luna answered, quietly but firmly. “You two are as bad as this damn dog. Both of you calm down,” she said. “Cade is fine. He’s just what he looks like. Children and animals have a sixth sense that picks up things we don’t. Something sad or evil happened here, and they know it.”

  “What happened here?” I was the one who needed answers now.

  “And what do you mean asking what I am, what are you talking about?” His voice rose as he confronted me; annoyance verging on anger was in his eyes.

  “Davey is waiting in the living room, and he’s scared.” I was afraid of him now, unwilling to answer or even look at him.

  “Why is he so scared?” Cade turned to Luna. “How could he possibly know—?”

  “Rooms have memories, like people do, that linger even when what happened is over. And Pinto? Spooked by his new buddy’s fear.”

  A good liar, I thought. Good enough for him, but not for me. The thing on the desk told me that. My first instinct was right—take my kid and run like I always did. Cade followed me as I started to leave and grabbed my shoulder. It was a strange touch, gentle but insistent, an answer to a question that wasn’t asked. I faced him, gazed into his eyes, not sure what I would find, and saw kindness and curiosity—no evil at all.

  “This used to be my wife’s office,” he said. “I found her here after she died. It’s been closed a long time. I haven’t been able to come in here much. Maybe there was something about it … I don’t know. There’s a lot of grief still here. Maybe that’s still there. Luna’s the expert on weird stuff like that, kids and animals sensing sorrow. Maybe there’s something to it.”

  “Mom, are you okay?” Davey called me from the living room. Fear was in his voice because he was as scared for me as I had been for him. The three of us left the room, Luna slamming the door behind her.

  “You okay, man?” Cade sat down beside Davey on the coach.

  “I’m good.” Davey hid his fear, manning up, the way boys do. His senses about what stalked us were stronger than mine, and he sensed no danger from Cade. His normalcy calmed me down.

  Luna, holding Pinto tightly, brought him toward the couch, but it was Davey who pulled away, fear plain on his face. “He’s a silly old dog, sometimes,” Luna explained. “He gets scared just like you do. Here, come close.”

  “Luna, I—”

  “He’s fine now,” Luna said. “Let him sniff your hand, and he’ll see that you’re okay.” Davey searched my face for an answer.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “Here,” Luna let go of Pinto’s collar. He hesitated, then ran toward Davey, and when Davey dropped his hand, he gave it an enthusiastic lick.

  “Watch him, though,” Luna warned. “He doesn’t have good sense. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Okay.” He wasn’t sure if he could trust the dog again, and neither was I, but for now things were okay, and the now was all we had some days.

  * * *

  Later that night, after dinner, Davey and I settled down in our room.

  “It’s still looking for us, isn’t it?” he said. He lay in the trundle bed that pulled out, and I sat on the edge of mine, pretending to read a magazine and waiting for him to go to sleep. I didn’t need to answer. He was smart, like I’d told Cade; he knew the deal. There was enough of Anna still in him to know the truth. “It’s going to kill me, isn’t it?”

  I found my voice, put some strength into it. “No. I think we’ve lost it, and if it finds us, I’m not going to let it.”

  “But it won’t be up to you,” he said quietly and with a certainty that alarmed me. “Are we going to run again?”

  “How you feeling?” I wasn’t ready to answer that yet.

  “Pinto knows, about me.” He turned over in his bed, his voice deep like it gets when he’s weighed down by sadness.

  “Yeah, I guess he does.”

  “But he still played with me—later on, I mean.”

  “That was a good thing.”

  “So Luna knows, too?”

  “Some of it.”

  “How about Cade?”

  “No, and don’t tell him anything either, understand?”

  As soon as he fell asleep, I checked my phone for Mack’s message. Someone had called him, looking for me, and he wanted to know if he should tell them where I was. I erased the mes
sage, not answering back. He thought I was on my way to Baltimore, and as long as I went nowhere near that restaurant, nowhere near that part of town, that was all he had to know. It was up to me to keep our secret.

  5

  cade

  The howl, so low and deep in the animal’s throat, woke Cade up and sent a shiver down his back. Poor thing must be hurt, he thought. It was three in the morning, but when he looked out the bedroom window, there was nothing to be seen, yet he couldn’t get rid of the sound; it echoed in his mind. Could it be Pinto? he wondered. But the snarl at the end of it told him it was a larger animal, a fiercer one, with teeth. Why had that notion occurred to him at all? Why would a bark make him think about teeth, fangs, like a wolf might have?

  It was back an hour later, a whimper this time, a baleful cry that twitched his heart because it made him think of how Dennie always threatened to take in some stray, tame it, make it part of their family, and he cried, swallowing sobs because he realized that he was and always had been the stray in Dennie’s life; she’d taken him in, opened her heart, then broken his with her death.

  So when the growl came back at first light, just as dawn was breaking, he lay still and listened to it, took it in, opening himself up to it like he knew she would have done. Maybe he’d put out some food in the morning, lure it close enough to pet, maybe even tame it. Davey might like that, a dog that was really a dog not a toy poodle like Pinto, bless his heart, with the occasional pink bow fixed on top of his head. The kid needed a rough-and-tumble dog, the kind that could catch a hard-thrown ball, like Blaze used to, the copper Lab his neighbor had had when Cade was a kid. Davey deserved a dog like that, and maybe someday if his mama could make up her mind about coming or going, maybe he’d have it. Here it was nearly July fourth and as far as he could tell, Raine hadn’t decided one way or the other. Not a good thing to hang on a kid—not knowing where he’d be the next year or the one following—especially a kid as sharp as Davey. But it wasn’t his place to comment.

  * * *

  They met three times a week, he and Davey—Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays—which surprised Cade because sitting around with a tutor was the last thing most boys would want to do on a Saturday afternoon, not with balls to toss and races to run and general mischief to plan. Raine suggested four times a week, more tutoring than any boy should endure, as far as he was concerned, so they compromised on three. He could tell Davey looked forward to their sessions, and truth be told, so did he. Cade missed the routine of school, the spirited horseplay and giggles of the kids he taught. The house was too damn quiet, too filled with sorrow for him to enjoy his solitude. And Davey wasn’t a typical child. He was mature in surprising ways and even though he was a kid, good company.