Hunter's Moon by Chuck Logan (the false prince series txt) 📗

sat up and smoothed the sweaty tangles in her hair. “Jay is just this guy who’s been seriously run over by the wheel of life.

He showed up last May, drove into town in a rattletrap truck full of tools, and started remodeling this place.”

“He’s driving a new truck now. Where’s he from?”

“He was in the service, then he had a contracting business HUNTER’S MOON / 211

up in the Pacific Northwest where it rains all the time. Seattle.”

“You wouldn’t know his birth date, would you?”

Slow revelation peeked in her eyes. “So that’s why you got me in bed. Shame on you.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re doing some kind of investigation. For the newspaper?”

“Help me out a little here, will you, Ginny?”

“What the hell. Sure, I did his chart. Aquarius. Jason Emmet Cox.

January twenty-first, nineteen forty-one. You want me to write it down?”

Ginny got up and hunted through the room until she found a pen and stationery on the desk. She wrote briefly and came back to the mattress.

Harry was genuinely distracted, watching her come willowy through the firelight. He reached for her.

“Oh my. One of those city guys who likes to get his ears greasy,”

she sighed deep in her throat as Harry nuzzled, sliding down her stomach.

A clatter on the porch brought him up for air.

He lurched and caught a glimpse of a shadow by the window.

He surged out the door, barefoot on the freezing mud porch. The kindling he’d stacked was toppled and footfalls pounded past the cabins. From the steps, he caught a flash of ponytail in the pole barn light.

“Who was it?” Ginny asked when he came back in.

“Becky Deucette, my guess. Playing Peeping Tom.”

“Crazy damn kid,” said Ginny, summoning him back beside her.

Her hand floated back to its perch on his hip, exploring the scar.

“You know, I think you’re all right,” she said.

Later, Harry walked Ginny to her car and she lifted a chaste kiss from his face in the glare of the yard light. A haze of burned wood and tires drifted around them.

“Ginny, you think you could talk to your brother, quiet-like? Find out if there’s really a serious investigation about Chris’s motives in the shooting?”

“You mean spy.”

212 / CHUCK LOGAN

“I mean help me out.”

Ginny cocked her head. “I might. If you tell me why you’re really here poking around in things. Is it for the newspaper? Or are you working for Bud Maston?”

“Working? Ginny, I have to know what happened with Chris so I can sleep nights.”

She drew a cool finger down his throat. “You know, I believe you mean that.”

He watched her taillights disappear down the drive. Ginny Hakala did not make a convincing tramp. And Jay Cox wasn’t the kind of guy to quit in a bar fight. The night had been choreographed. He’d underestimated these people. They were handling him.

35

Harry, in Bud’s baggy terrycloth robe, hunched over the dining room table drawing with a felt-tip pen while a CD of Beethoven’s Ninth rebuked the overcast morning.

He hummed along with “An die Freude” as the pen sketched spidery lines in the style of Heinrich Kley.

Jesse, in her moonlight mode, hair uncoiled in serpentine tangles; enough character in the eyebrows and dark eyes to be recognizable.

Siren torso, arms extended, hands open in offering but, where her belly curved down, instead of well-shaped legs, her hips became the twin slat uprights of a guillotine. The triangle where her thighs came together formed the weighted, suspended knife.

At the base of the sketch, a Yogi Bear with a sheriff’s star dragged a tumbril containing a plump Porky Pig. A raven perched on Jesse’s shoulder. Cox.

Harry Griffin’s cartoon theory of criminal investigation. Go with instinct. Offstage a banquet table would be prepared. The Hakala clan, in horned helmets, napkins tucked at their throats, knives sharp, waited to carve the ham.

HUNTER’S MOON / 213

It made a great picture. The problem was, Chris wasn’t in it.

And what about Ginny? He studied her penmanship. A distinctive, angular, printed hand. All lowercase letters. jason emmet cox.

Could he know Cox? Some collision from the past during a zombie blackout? Nah. Cox had loose marbles. Or did he? He’d looked the squared-away ex-jarhead at the funeral. Harry shook his head and crumpled the drawing and threw it at the fireplace.

He started another sheet of paper with names and a rough chro-nology. Bud drops out, comes to Stanley. Meets Jesse. They start the development Coop. Blue birds and happiness. Then last summer something happened and everything went kaput and Bud started drinking and getting fat. And Jesse decided to get her pound of flesh.

Harry circled the words: Last summer. Chris: trouble at school.

If they had planned a hunting accident Emery would be in position to cover it up to protect Jesse and Chris. Could Emery get Chris to do that? The Chris he’d met looked far beyond any adult’s control.

Then where did Cox figure in? And what about Emery’s animosity toward Cox? A falling out? Harry shook his head. Too complicated.

Too many people for a plan—he remembered the names on the monument in the graveyard—unless they were all in on it.

He wrote Karson’s name and a question mark. Chris told something to Karson that made him suspect Emery. Below Karson he scribbled the name of the high school teacher, Talme. Check him out.

He came to Becky’s name. Was she hiding something or hiding from someone? Harry wrote: Green Jeep Wrangler. He added Mitch Hakala to his list of names.

Becky was hiding, but she was snooping in windows, too?

Harry walked down the hall and stood before the closed door of Chris’s room. The thing he avoided. He put his hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it.

Start at the beginning. With Chris. The loop of film 214 / CHUCK LOGAN

flickered in memory. The deafening shot. The kick of the rifle.

Doubt. Bud’s weak-ass voice. “I was trying to talk to him.”

They could just be tolerating him out of deference to Bud. All of it…just…shock radiating from his rifle shot that precipitating