Dark Moon

Rushing in from the garden, her hands grimy with dirt, she picked up the phone in time to hear the soft click as someone hung up.

A nuisance, but she couldn’t change her number.

Not while there was a hope that Mellie would phone her. No real hope, an illusion she couldn’t shatter. Not yet. Sometimes hope was a necessary illusion that kept the heart beating.

In a lingering flare of orange and neon pink, the sun paused at dusk before finally surrendering to a velvet black night.

Ryder had said he would see her at night.

He was wrong. She had no intention of wending her way to his decaying house. Not in the daylight. Certainly not at nighttime.

By candlelight Josie sat at her kitchen table and lifted a spoonful of mango and yogurt, put it down. The yogurt gleamed faintly in the candle glow.

She wasn’t hungry. She didn’t want to turn on the television. Didn’t want to hear about the missing boy. Eric. “Eric Ames,” she whispered fiercely. The child had a name. Eric. She didn’t want to sit on her porch.

She wanted—

Something.

Restless, the weight of her loneliness and grief pushing her into aimless motion, Josie prowled like a jungle cat through the four rooms of her house, from rose-scented bedroom to the living room where the lock she’d snapped in the morning was still in its slot. She took a quick shower and turned on a fan to circulate the muggy air as she pulled on thin cotton underpants and a loose cotton blouse over her damp skin, skin that hummed with electricity, as if there were a storm on the horizon. She peered out her window, hoping for a storm. For rain. For an end to her waiting.

The trees in the woods were motionless.

There were no yellow-eyed dogs hiding in the darkness watching her.

No storm in that clear, dark sky.

Only the occasional warble of a mockingbird, the dry croak of a frog carrying from the edge of the river where it curved away from her house.

She found herself in her bedroom, lifting the flower, stroking it across her neck, down to her breasts, over the skin of her wrists.

He’d said he would see her tonight.

Finally, sighing, she went to her porch. As she lit the candles there, she wondered if Ryder had planted a suggestion in her brain that was making her so fidgety.

Maybe he had.

She swept her hair off her face, the heavy weight too much in the heat.

And still her skin hummed, as if answering something that whispered to her on a windless night.

When she unlatched the screen door of the porch so that she could take the evening garbage out, she turned on the floodlights all around the house. She went outside toward the garage. She wanted to put the bucket with the snake in the metal garbage can that clamped shut, safe from marauding dogs and raccoons. All day she’d avoided that final cleanup, but she didn’t want to wake up in the morning and find pieces of the reptile scattered about her yard.

As she approached the garage, she saw the empty, overturned bucket.

There was no trace of the snake she’d killed, no bits of paper, no trampled bits of earth where a ransacking animal had feasted. Alarmed, Josie paused and looked around, the light hairs on her arm rising with her uneasiness. Nothing. It was as if the snake had ever been.

The empty, shiny interior of the bucket gleamed mockingly at her.

She couldn’t look away from that empty bucket.

Holding her bag of garbage out, a shield against the sight of that shiny metal, Josie backed away. Halfway to her porch she froze as she caught the minute change in the shades of darkness at the edge of the woods.

Bugs swarmed around the bright porch light, banged against the wide bulbs, clustered there until the swarm grew too thick, and heavy bodies fell to the ground.

And then he came out of the woods toward her.

She gasped and the handle of the garbage bag slipped through her fingers. Keeping his lean form in view, Josie took slow steps away from him, her breath rattling in her ears.

She’d misunderstood. She’d thought he meant she would come to his house. Stupid of her. But she’d had that sensation of being drawn, of being almost hypnotized, and so she’d misunderstood.

On one side of the screen door, her mouth going dry with something beyond fear, she faced him, the hook-andeye lock nothing more than the illusion of a barrier.

In a glance, Josie took in his appearance. Ruffled, his hair looked as if he’d dragged his hands through it repeatedly. He hadn’t shaved since she’d seen him that afternoon, and a faint beard shadowed his pale skin. His jeans rode low on his hips, and his black T-shirt was tucked into the waistband. A silver snap caught the light from the floods and sparkled momentarily as he stopped, one foot on the lowest porch step.

He nodded, as if he, too, felt that humming. “May I come in?”

“No.” Josie saw the pinpoints of the candle flames deep in his eyes. “Absolutely not. I’d be crazy to let you in.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Right now I’d have to agree with you. You’d be crazy to let me in.” He took one step more, his sneakers soundless against the wooden step. That must have been how he’d approached her house this morning, soundlessly leaving the capsaicin and disappearing back into the woods.

“Stop,” she said, her voice cracking. “Don’t come any farther. I mean it.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said mildly, and settled down on the steps, his form a shadow flowing over dark water. “I told you. I needed to talk to you. That’s all. And you’re right to be afraid,” he added, tilting his head to look up to her. “It’s a frightening world we live in,” he said, and his voice sighed away. “I’m afraid, too, Josie Birdsong, if you want to know the truth.”

“What do you mean? Why should you be afraid?” Her voice was too tight. Tight with fear and that humming that strung her tight as a violin waiting for the stroke of the bow to make music. “I don’t understand you, Ryder Hayes,” she said, and realized only as she spoke that she’d called him by his given name.

Some boundary had been crossed.

“I don’t understand myself, lady green eyes.”

The birds had ceased their music and there was a stillness, a waiting that made Josie’s knees tremble. She tugged at the tail of the blouse. “What do you want to tell me?”

“I’m not sure.” Ryder watched the futile twitch of her slim fingers against the edge of her blouse. Sitting on the porch below her, he saw the narrow edge of elastic on her panties. Each movement she made sent a faint drift of roses toward him.

Regardless of what he’d said in the police parking lot about meeting her, he’d tried to stay away from Josie Bird-song.

He’d failed. He should have known he would. Her long, tanned legs were behind him. If he leaned back, all the way back, his head would be against her knees. He wanted to rest against her. He shut his eyes. He was so tired he couldn’t think straight anymore. That was probably why he hadn’t been able to fight the pull that drew him through the woods to her candlelit porch.

Even her legs smelled of tea roses.

He leaned his head against the frame of the screen door.

He thought she’d be less skittish if he weren’t looking at her, but her sudden jump as he moved told him that she was as aware of him as he was of her.

And equally reluctant.

He wondered if she’d laugh at him if he told her she terrified him. He didn’t dare touch her.