The Moonlight Read Free

because with that face a smile would have been impossible.  His teeth were yellow, like ancient ivory.  Pieces of flesh, black and soft with decay, were falling away from his jawbone.  Maggots, fattened on corruption, were crawling through his hair.
    “You have this coming, Georgie,” he said.  “You were . . .”
    But George Patchmore never heard the end of it, because there was a terrible explosion inside his skull, and everything before his eyes turned red, and then black, as the emptiness of death overwhelmed him.

     
Chapter 2
    June 7, 1990
    Anybody who wants to make a living in real estate learns to keep his mouth shut.  Sometimes people like a house with a little history, but they don’t want to hear ghost stories about the place where they plan to sleep at night.  It can put them right off a sale.
    Besides, Jack Matheny didn’t know anything except the old ragbag of town gossip that was common property, so what could he have told Philip Owings that would have made any difference?  He didn’t know, but afterwards, when he remembered the way things turned out, he always wondered if he should have said something.
    It wasn’t as if he would have had anything to lose, because Owings already owned the old Moonlight Roadhouse before he ever stepped off the train from New York.
    It was a legacy, the roadhouse and a couple of thousand dollars, just enough to make it worth the inconvenience of coming all the way out from California.  So he was in this trouble before he even set foot in Greenley.  And it took about five seconds for Jack to figure out Owings needed this money too much to be warned off by anything he could have told him.
    It was the first really hot day of the summer, the kind that seems to switch itself on about eleven thirty and catches you unaware.  Matheny’s car battery had been giving him trouble, so he was afraid to run the air conditioning and thought he might boil in his polyester sport coat.  The parking lot behind the railway station in Greenley was as open as a soccer field, no shade anywhere.  And the train was late.  He just stood there, wiping out the brim of his straw hat, thinking that his commission on this sale, assuming that he could find Owings a buyer, probably wouldn’t be enough to cover two weeks’ expenses.
    But you can inherit obligations as well as real estate, and managing the Moonlight Roadhouse property, although it hadn’t been a real roadhouse for forty years, had been part of the business almost since the day Jack’s dad had first gotten his broker’s license.  George Patchmore had been a friend, so looking after the place and collecting the rent—when there was somebody to rent it—became one of those family favors that it is just about impossible to disown.
    Matheny had hopes that he could find a builder who would tear the old place down and maybe put up condos or something, and that would be the end of that.  Besides, until the week before, he hadn’t known that Philip Owings even existed, so he figured he didn’t owe him spit.
    Or maybe he did.  And maybe that was how it all came to grief.
    Anyway, the one-fifteen finally made it in, twenty minutes late and crawling like a wounded snake, and this guy steps off with a suitcase that looks like he got it from the Goodwill, and right away Jack didn’t like him.  His suit was too big for him and his hair was too long, and he had “loser” written all over him.  A flake, Jack figured, and from California yet.  He was probably a vegetarian or something and had a fetish about preserving dilapidated old buildings.  Jack knew he’d be trouble; he just didn’t know what kind.
    And, anyway, he didn’t like skinny guys.  Granted, Owings was probably fifteen or twenty years younger, but Jack just thought a man ought to begin to look a little comfortable when he starts pushing into his middle thirties, like he finds life easy to take and plans to stay.  Philip Owings looked as nervous as a