Read Online Bad Moon On The Rise by Katy Munger - Free Book Online

was unbearable. She’d been dead for
at least five days, I gauged. Inside her body, her organs had
turned to soup. If it had been summer, I would never have been able
to even recognize her. But cool nights and an open back door had
preserved her just enough to convince me it was Tonya. One thin arm
sprawled off the mattress and flopped toward the door, exposing an
expanse of brown skin dotted with scabs and scars. Her other arm
was curled against her chest. A dirty rag had been tied around the
upper half of it and a needle dangled listlessly from the
pockmarked skin.
    Live by the sword. Die by the
sword.
    And, yet, there was something staged
about her pose. The way the arm was cradled against her chest, and
the knot so neatly tied off on her right arm. Was she left handed
or had she been in the Navy? Because the knot seemed so... precise.
I didn’t like the looks of it. Maybe she’d been helped along by
someone?
    I knelt near her body, pulling my tee
shirt up over my mouth to mask the smell. Something else was off.
Her arms were pocked with track marks, but they were old scars, all
except for a few.
    I examined her body more closely and
discovered a series of small bruises ringing her neck in an
irregular line. Normal tissue decomposition or post-mortem bruises
bearing testament to a strangling? I was no coroner, but I had
watched one on TV plenty of times and, damn it, I had my
suspicions.
    It made me mad. After all the effort
she had made to get clean, Tonya hadn’t fallen off the wagon on her
own—she had been pushed and then thrown under the wheels. But who
would want to harm her and why?
    And where was the boy?
    I didn’t touch anything in Tonya’s
room. I backed out carefully and inched my way around a pile of
scattered schoolbooks and papers that led toward the end of the
hallway. I stuck my head out the back door for a few gulps of fresh
air before I continued on past a tiny bathroom that, apparently,
had not seen running water for some time. I found a slightly larger
bedroom beyond it. Unlike the rest of the trailer, the back
bedroom, while disheveled, was fundamentally clean. The floors and
walls looked scrubbed and the bed had been made, even if clothes,
shoes, notebooks, a handheld video game and the other signs of
young life were scattered across the bedspread. I checked under the
bed—this one had a frame, at least—and found nothing, not even dust
motes. I gave up and checked inside a tiny closet. A high school
athletic jacket hung from a hanger beside a single light blue tee
shirt emblazoned with a basketball and the UNC Tarheels logo.
Otherwise, the closet was empty.
    This was Trey’s bedroom—and Trey was
not in it.
    That meant he might still be
alive.
    It also meant he might have seen his
mother die. Or, worse, had something to do with her dying. I didn’t
know the kid, and if this was where he had been living, who knows
what he might have been driven to do. If that was the case, I owed
it to Sally to find him first, before the cops did, so I could
determine what had really happened here in Perry County.
    I knew one thing already: whatever had
happened here, someone had been looking hard for something. My bet
was on money or drugs. But all I could find that would lead me
anywhere was a stack of what looked like old mail wrapped with a
rubber band and tucked into the pocket of Trey’s athletic jacket. I
didn’t know what a kid would be doing going around with mail in his
pocket, and it was odd he had left the jacket behind; it had to be
one of his most treasured possessions given how little he had. The
mail was the only sign of the outside world I could find in the
trailer so I took it. Maybe it would help me figure out why Tonya
Blackburn and her son had ended up hiding in this godforsaken
trailer in the middle of nowhere. I grabbed the mail and backed out
of the bedroom. The smell inside the trailer was unbearable. I’d
have to burn my clothes, I suspected, which pissed me off. A good
pair of