“I have no more understanding of what killed this fox than I do of my son’s preoccupation with anomaly,” says Schellbach. “Do you have children, Mrs. Merkle? Oh dear,” he adds suddenly, “I always assume marriage. Forgive me. Ethyl tells me it’s an insult to a lady. It makes her feel old.”
Jane laughs and says, “But surely Miss may be taken as an insult as well, a sign of undesirability. It’s a fickle world, Mr. Schellbach.”
“Louie,” he says quickly.
“Jane,” says she. “I don’t have a child, but from what I’ve heard, your son’s preoccupation with anomaly may well be inherited from his father. I hear you’re quite taken with the variations in wing patterns in dragonflies. To see the odd and unusual can be a kind of perception passed on in the blood. I certainly don’t have it. If anything, I have the opposite.”
“Which is what, may I ask?”
“I take great comfort in the familiar, I’m afraid. At least I always have. The familiar and universal. The ways in which we are the same.”
“Well, what could be better than that?” pronounces Schellbach. “Room for both, I say. This fox, for example. Come around here and have a look-see. I’ve opened her up, gullet to gizzard, and what you see in there ought to look pretty darn familiar. Stomach, liver, kidneys, the old ticker. Her . . . thing amajig. She’s carrying kits, isn’t she? No sign of trauma to her body. She wasn’t shot or hit by a car or mortally wounded by a coyote. I suspect poison. But have a look at this, Jane. The much-maligned intestines. Three meters of small intestine alone. Can you imagine all that intestine? Packed in there like a nest of nematodes. It’s a marvel, isn’t it? An absolute marvel.”
This fox, thinks Jane, is beginning to smell. Under the fruity fragrance of pipe tobacco she detects the sweetish smell of death. She is suddenly dizzy and sick to her stomach. “I . . .” she begins. “I’m afraid I must go.”
“Of course,” says Schellbach. “I’ve bored you, and I apologize.”
“No no,” she says. “It’s been very interesting.”
“A bit of forensic science to start your day.”
She nods agreeably, wondering what on earth that word means. Forensic. She’s got to sharpen her mind. It’s been idle too long, sitting with its feet up in St. Louis. Schellbach leads her back through the house. She’s aware of a radio playing in the distance and wonders if Ethyl has come home, or the son. Or perhaps it’s to soothe the dog.
She can’t bring herself to call him Louie, so she calls him nothing at all. She thanks him for his hospitality, and it isn’t until she’s mounted the bicycle that she suddenly remembers the reason for her visit. Good Lord, she thinks. What is the matter with me? My mind is a muddle. Schellbach answers the door once more, and once more Reggie applies himself to her ankles. This time she discourages him with a few discreet kicks, overlooked by the park naturalist.
“I’m so sorry to bother you again,” she says, “but I believe I left my purse here last night.”
“Purse,” says Schellbach carefully, as if exposed to the word for the first time. “I don’t know of a purse. What kind of purse would this be?”
“Oh, nothing the least bit unusual. A brown purse. A brown leather purse. It has a long strap that can be shortened.”
“A long strap.”
“An adjustable strap.”
“Yes, I see. So it might in fact be a short strap at the present moment. In our search for your purse we should not overlook straps long or short, is that right?”
Jane nods.
“Well, Ethyl’s the one in charge of purses. I would have to speak to Ethyl.”
“Of course.”
“We’ll find it,” he assures her, and closes the door.
The Perfect Confidante
Ethyl Schellbach is seldom satisfied with the quality of beef at Babbitt Brothers. She often buys pork or chicken instead. She has, on odd years, bought a whole spring lamb from Neez Charlie, but as soon as she makes space in the freezer, Louie fills it up with his dead rattlesnakes and birds. Today there was a nice smoked ham that beckoned to her, and as she drives home she’s trying to decide how to do the potatoes. Whether or not Miss Clover will eat potatoes is anyone’s guess. Perhaps, as a botanist, she’s against the consumption of plants. What Ethyl does know is that Donny likes potato salad with pickles, olives, and onions, but Louie likes good old-fashioned mashed. He’s not a fussy eater, whereas Donny is as picky as the day is long, declining this and that, demanding something else. Who, thinks Ethyl, would it be wiser to coddle? Her irascible son or her extremely even-tempered husband? “Potato salad it is,” she says to herself, and just then she spots Dotty Hedquist’s sister-in-law bicycling up the road.
She toots her horn and waves. The sister-in-law, whose name she can’t remember, waves back. But what a coincidence, thinks Ethyl, the very person I need to see. She drives onto the shoulder of the road and stops, expecting the sister-in-law to stop too. But the sister-in-law is traveling in the opposite direction at quite a clip. She has the proverbial devil on her back, thinks Ethyl. She turns the car around and comes abreast of the bicycle and gives another little wave to demonstrate harmless-ness and good intentions. “Hello,” she says, but the window on the passenger side is rolled up. She stops the car, leans over, and rolls it down and says, “Hello again. Ethyl here. Ethyl Schellbach.”
“Ethyl,” says the girl sadly. She really is quite young. “I’ve lost my purse.”
“I know you have, dear, but you can stop your worrying, it’s been found.”
“Found?”
“By a very nice young fellow by the name of Hugh. Don’t know his last name.”
“Hugh? Hugh! Insect Rape!” cries the girl.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, I’m relieved.”
“He promised to bring it by today,” says Ethyl. “I said today was far too busy, I’m expecting someone for lunch, an important someone, and I thought he might as well talk to you since it was your purse.”
“That’s right.”
“So run on home. He may have left it there already. I told him you were staying with the Hedquists. Hope it’s no secret.”
“Of course not.”
“Well, you never know, dear.”
In fact, when it comes to secrets, Ethyl knows more than most. If she hasn’t seen it all, she’s certainly seen the lion’s share, including Dorothy Hedquist’s various transgressions over the years, though Ethyl, whose mind is sharp and tongue is not—the perfect confidante—has never judged them to be more than misadventures. One thing she’s learned is that those who harbor secrets are often the last to know the secret’s true nature. There’s an innate innocence, a blindness, that shields a person from woe, and as this drops away like childhood, and the terrible weight of a wrongdoing makes itself felt, the bearer of a secret is as close as she will ever come to self-inflicted death. Indeed, Ethyl has talked more than one individual away from the brink. Sometimes she wishes she did not live in such an easy place for death, that Louie was stationed in a peaceful valley. But he is not, and she, who is at heart a nurse in the trenches, has found a way to be useful.
Her prescription for the guilt-ridden, remorseful, and bro kenhearted is to take themselves into the trench itself, to walk into the canyon and lie down among the shattered bones of deer and bighorn sheep, grateful for their own human knee-caps, shinbones, and thighbones that carried them there. To hike their own lucky bag of appetites and excretions over the trail from Hermit Creek to Indian Garden and on to Grapevine, Cottonwood, and Hance, while gossip and ill intentions run their course on the high ground like a bunch of skinny coyotes howling. If only the words were as harmless, thinks Ethyl, whose private opinion is that employment in the government regularly sends people upside down over the precipice. She walks among the fallen like a swami, like a saint. Saint Ethyl of Disappointment has a good nose for where trouble lies—an uncanny nose. In fact, her presence is ever-so-slightly suspect, for wherever she goes, trouble
and disappointment are not far behind. The truth is, they’re already there. They’re everywhere to begin with.
So Jane Merkle pedals home in her temporary state of grace, thinking only of her imminent reunion with her turquoise ring. Nothing of the chance encounter with Louis Schellbach’s wife troubles her. It strikes her only as felicitous, and she arrives at the Hedquists’ in a very good humor. The young man, Hugh, has not come by, but he has left a telephone number where he can be reached in the evenings and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Well, thinks Jane, it’s a Sunday, isn’t it? Oliver has gone back to bed, and Dotty is rooting around in the garden. She stands in the den, which since his retirement has become Oliver’s study, and dials the number of the young man on whom she feels her happiness depends. But the telephone rings in an empty house, or perhaps it fails to awaken the sleepy fellow. It isn’t yet afternoon, she reasons, though it’s pretty darn close. And then there’s the question of what is afternoon? To some it means a lengthening of shadows, a certain quality of light; to others it’s what follows the stroke of noon or the drowsy period brought on by lunch. To Jane it’s a feeling, usually an unpleasant one. It’s the time of day when she feels dulled to the world around her, wrapped in gauze, like Siam (which Morris’s friend George Runge once described as a kingdom of cocoons where every bed in every hotel is draped in mosquito netting). She decides to take her mind off the extraordinarily pokey passage of time and read her book.
One thing that may be said about Jane Merkle is that she is a diligent reader. She is working diligently through Madame Bovary at the moment, but she is not in love with the woman. And this is the problem. The book and the woman are, to her, the same. She cannot help but compare it to Anna Karenina, in which Anna’s personality and circumstances are only one tragic strand of what Jane feels to be an uplifting story. Hadn’t Kitty had her baby at the end? She turns the pages of Madame Bovary with apprehension, feeling quite dreary, as if she too must take to her bed—or take to Emma Bovary’s bed. The bed looms so large in the novel that Jane begins to consider it a sort of protagonist. She reads distractedly until lunchtime, when she joins the Hedquists for tuna fish sandwiches outside on folding chairs.
Oliver is wearing a wet towel on his head, turban fashion, and is terribly out of sorts. Dotty tries to ask the right questions about Jane’s morning, but when it comes to a dead fox in Louis Schellbach’s study, she can hear no more. “A smelly old thing like that in the house, with a party going on! Oh, it’s too much—it really is.”
“It wasn’t that smelly,” Jane lies.
“Of course it was,” snorts Oliver, who up until that moment seemed to be napping in his chair. “By the time things get to Louie they stink. That’s the nature of the job.”
“The butterflies don’t,” says Jane quietly.
“I’m speaking of the flesh, dear girl, the flesh.”
“Please!” cries Dotty. “Not another word about it!”
Jane glances at her sister-in-law with some alarm. Dotty has gone pale and sits staring in front of her, her mouth twitching in an awful way, as if the words are hammering at her lips from the inside, unable to force their way out. In the silence that follows, Jane is aware of many things, which she later recalls in detail: the butterscotch smell of the pines; the narrow plank of shade where the Hedquists have placed their chairs; the warmth of the sun in her lap, as if a cat has been sleeping there; the taste of mustard on the inside of her teeth; the sound of a jay calling, which reminds her of Missouri. She watches as Dotty gets up and gathers the plates, asking if anyone would like dessert. Oliver would. Jane would not. The telephone rings far away in the house, too far away to bother with—until she remembers her purse, the young man, her happiness. She runs off to answer it.
No Place for Corpses
Lunch went smoothly enough until Elzada Clover, amateur gumshoe, questioned her hostess about her relationship with one Lowell Dunhill, former ranger naturalist at Grand Canyon National Park. She later regrets her egregious timing but cannot figure out how the business of mystery solving is to be accomplished without making innocent people squirm. If she’d accepted seconds of potato salad, would Ethyl Schellbach have taken less offense?
“Innocent or not so innocent,” Lois reminds her. “We really have no idea.”
They are walking vigorously westward along the rim of Grand Canyon, on a narrow trail that leads to Hermit’s Rest. Elzada writes in the morning, or pursues interviews such as the one she attempted with Ethyl, but in the afternoon her intention is to keep fit. “Oh, come,” she says, breathing rag gedly but determined not to pant, “Mr. Schellbach didn’t invite us here to investigate a murder in which his wife is a suspect.”
“Not as far as he knows. But they don’t, you see, always know.”
“They?” asks Elzada.
“The husbands. And anyway, Elzie, everyone in the village is a suspect.”
“Why, what an extraordinary idea! That makes our job impossible!”
“Yes it does,” says Lois, “and I, for one, am ready to go home.”
This is discouraging news but not altogether surprising. Elzada has always known that Lois thrives on doing, while she herself is all too content to reflect. But even she has grown impatient. They’ve been here more than a week and have had no luck with Emery Kolb. He refuses even to see them, much less talk. Whatever his game is, it seems Lois is right: the entire village is suspect and willing to let the matter drop. More than willing—determined. Summoning “the professors,” as they’ve been dubbed, is only a way to satisfy some higher-ups who feel the national parks are no place for corpses. If anyone really wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, they would have hired a detective, not a botanist.
But Elzada Clover has a stubborn streak, a combination of raw ambition and a dislike of authority. Add to that the fact that the accused, Emery Kolb, once saved her life—she feels more inclined than ever to clear his name. At the same time, it’s entered her head that the skeleton in his garage isn’t Dunhill, which opens the fertile question, who the deuce is it?
“I have an idea,” she says suddenly. “But you’ll have to slow down if you want to hear it. You’re impossibly long-legged, did you know that?”
“I suppose I have my genes to thank,” says Lois crossly.
“You do indeed. Now listen. Mrs. Schellbach did mention something that might be important. It was a bit of information she offered me out of earshot of her husband. She had a strange look on her face as she said it, a look of disgust. She asked if I’d ever heard of . . .” Elzada struggles to recall that brief exchange, and specifically the name that entered her consciousness between bites of unpleasantly sweetened potato salad. Suddenly its foreign syllables form on her tongue and fly from her mouth, startling her and stopping Lois in her tracks. “Skłodowska, Loie. The Skłodowska Institute, that’s what she said.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“It’s not enough!” cries Lois in exasperation. “There’s nothing to go on. Two words that make no sense and a body in a garage.”
“A skeleton,” Elzada corrects her.
“Yes, bones. Nothing but bones.” Lois sighs and starts walking again. “I know what you’re thinking. Two words is two words more than we had yesterday. If there really is a Skłodowska Institute, I’ll find it. Libraries, telephone books—I’ll talk to Mrs. Schellbach myself, if she’ll allow it. I don’t guarantee anything,” she says over her shoulder. “It’s madness, as usual, tagging along with you.”
Madness? Was it madness to ask Lois to come? Madness to ask her to join the Nevills expedition of 1938, the chance of a lifetime? Was she, Elzada, mad to feel strongly about the girl, who is now no longer a girl but a tough and sensible woman? As a teacher she had strict rules about conduct with students. She was drawn to many of her students. So many of the young women were intelligent and attractive. But Lois had never been a student of hers. She arrived as a teaching assistant, a brilli
ant one, and this immediately posed a possibility and a problem. Elzada was thirty-seven years old, Lois twenty-two. Fifteen years separated them, as well as a good many other things, including Lois’s sincere attraction to the opposite sex. Elzada was not, and never had been, one to wear her heart on her sleeve. She did not believe that was what the sleeve was for. The sleeve was created to cover up, not to display. She expressed her feelings for Lois to no one, for she felt it was no one’s business but her own. Occasionally, however, after a glass of wine in the evening, she wrote in her diary, in prose unlike any she had ever used elsewhere in her life, entries that later embarrassed her, but because they embarrassed her she didn’t destroy them. They were mortifiers, humiliators, deterrents to any future peccadilloes. The entries acted as the pillory had in Puritan America—though in Elzada’s case she added effort to insult by having constructed the diabolic contraption herself.
Since that time she has written almost nothing of a personal nature—not in letters and never again in a diary. She keeps her field book, of course, and publishes the odd paper, but other than that, her involvement with words is as a reader, not a writer. “Like taking the bus” is the way she thinks of it. Letting a professional driver drive. There are several such buses in her life, operating in different neighborhoods at different times of day. On the bus of mystery novels, Ngaio Marsh is inevitably at the wheel. Elzada rides with her in the evenings when she’s too tired to think. She likes that bus at that time of day because it flies along, stopping infrequently, and the gentle hum of its motor often puts her to sleep. In the mornings, when she’s alert, she’s apt to ride the bus of scientific tomes, a slower, heavier vehicle. At the moment her preferred driver is Madame Marie Curie, whose understanding of radioactivity is of great interest to Elzada, who has taken it upon herself to explore the little-known relationship between nuclear fallout and deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
The Butterflies of Grand Canyon Page 6