Page 67 of Blood Moon

“I didn’t see it.”

“It’s—”

“Not now.”

Jaw rigid, eyes implacable, he’d gone over to the door, yanked his rain jacket off the coat tree, and walked out without another word. Mutt had trotted after him, his tail almost getting caught in the door as it had swung shut.

Now Mutt was curled up on his blanket. As she emerged from the bedroom, he opened his eyes and looked at her but didn’t stir as she walked barefoot across the room to the dining table. “John?”

He lowered his hands from his head and sat up straighter, rolling his head around his shoulders. “Hey. What are you doing awake?”

“Why are you up? Have you slept at all?” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “How long did you stay outside?”

“Until your light went out and I thought you’d be asleep.”

On the table were a bowl of melted ice cream and a bottle of bourbon. The drinking glass beside it was empty. “Which came first? The ice cream or the whiskey?”

“I made a float.”

She pulled out the chair adjacent to his and sat down. “You told Mitch you were abstaining.”

“From beer. I didn’t say anything about bourbon.” He dug his fingers into his eye sockets. “I only had a splash.”

She thought it might have been more than a splash, but he looked beleaguered not drunk. “The times of those 2018 eclipses were in my notes.”

“I heard how both of them that year were particularly significant. The super blue… and so on. I missed the tidbit about their timing locally. And hearing it hit me at a bad time, just as I was trying to piece together something that sort of made sense.

“Of course I know an eclipse of any kind doesn’t look the same all over the world. But the picture I’d seen of a blood moon on TV the other night, the vibrant one that the weatherman was going on about, is the image I’ve held on to.

“It hadn’t occurred to me that not all would be that clear and total. It should have, but it didn’t. No wonder the detectives in Jackson and Shreveport were lukewarm on me. I was making a big deal out of nothing.”

“It’s not ‘nothing.’ Just because the moon isn’t visible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Those were still blood moons.”

He looked at her fully for the first time and gave her his wry, humorless grin. “Brilliant me. I deduced that on my own while I was outside. I looked up at the sky to curse the moon, but, even though it’s almost full, I could only detect it by a slightly lighter patch of clouds. I still cursed it. And it feltgood,” he added with emphasis.

“That’s when it hit me. Those four young women might not have known there was a spectacular moon, buthedid. Even if he couldn’t see it, the blood moon was feeding his twisted compulsion.”

“That’s right.”

“I sent Roberts and Cougar emails to that effect. Maybe it’ll shake something loose for them.” He reached for the bottle of bourbon, but only to recap it. “The good news is that I wrapped my mind around all that. The bad news is that it doesn’t do us any good. It doesn’t clue us to who or where he is, waiting for Thursday to roll around.”

Beth would have been devastated, but not surprised, if he’d called the whole thing off then and there. But when she hesitantly asked what was on their agenda for tomorrow, hesaid, “Carla Mellin, if I hear back from the officer trying to track her down.”

“Do you think she’ll see us?”

“If we ask first, no.”

“We just show up?”

“It’s not courteous, but we don’t have time to dick around. Better not to give her a choice.”

“We can’t force her to talk to us.”

“I’m a cop.”

“Not since this morning.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t know that.”

---