Too Much Blood

by Jane Bennett Munro

  Thursday, December 25

  Chapter 32

  Some hae meat and canna eat,

  And some would eat that want it;

  But we hae meat, and we can eat,

  Sae let the Lord be thankit.

  —Robert Burns

  Christmas morning the younger kids were up before daybreak. They came trooping upstairs and pounded on all the doors. Elliott told them with dire threats to leave the freakin’ presents alone until everybody was up, but it was too late, and the ensuing racket got all of us up.

  Bambi and Kevin had played Santa Claus, handing out presents, and the kids made short work of them. I brewed coffee, Elliott made his famous eggnog, and Jodi made pumpkin pancakes. Then the kids went out and built a snow family in the front yard, while Jodi and I hauled a trash can in from the garage and cleaned up all the wrapping paper and trash.

  Hal gave me a tiny digital camera, small enough to put in my pocket; so that’s where I put it. My new coat was a wool peacoat like the old one, except it was black instead of navy blue and had gold buttons. It made me look thinner than the old one too.

  The kids watched more Christmas movies on TV, and then Hal and Elliott and the kids watched football. Jodi and I read. A lot of napping got done. All in all, the day passed pleasantly.

  Mum had been busy in the kitchen most of the day and wouldn’t let anybody help. It was supposed to be a surprise.

  Later she served up a celebratory feast of standing rib roast and Yorkshire pudding, with trifle for dessert, and nobody said much while chowing down on that awesome repast. It took me right back to the first Christmas dinner I could remember, when I was three. It had been my first Christmas in the United States, at Grandma and Grandpa Day’s house, where I lived until I married Hal—where Mum still lived.

  But Mum put an abrupt end to the nostalgia.

  “What on earth is going to happen to that poor child?” she asked the group at large over coffee and dessert. “It’s not a rhetorical question, my dears. Don’t you think we should do something about her so she doesn’t end up in foster care and turn into a drug addict or a street person or, God forbid, end up in jail like her mother?”

  Truth or consequences time; I could avoid it no longer. “Hal, what should we do?”

  Hal looked at me as if I’d punched him in the stomach. “What do you mean ‘we’? Are you suggesting … I mean, don’t you think I’m a little old to be raising a child now? By the time she’s in high school, I’ll be an old man!”

  Christ on a crutch. Hal was panicking even more than I was.

  “Hal, calm down,” Jodi said.

  “Easy for you to say,” Hal began, but Jodi laid a hand on his arm.

  “What I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to do anything about Emily,” she said.

  “We don’t?”

  “What Jodi is trying somewhat clumsily to say is that we’ve decided we want to adopt Emily,” Elliott said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, startled. “I mean, you already have five kids. What about them?”

  “What about us?” Kevin said. “We all talked about it. We’re all okay with it, right, guys?” he asked, looking around at the others. “I mean, she knows us and we know her, and she’s lived with us.”

  “Yeah,” Renee put in. “We don’t want her to go to some nasty old foster home where she doesn’t know anybody.”

  “Emily’s been through a lot of bad shit lately …” Jason began and then caught his mother’s eye. “Stuff,” he amended hastily. “She’s been through a lot of bad stuff—all those fires, and Kathleen and all the kids moving to Boise, and her mom going to prison and all. She needs to be with people she knows.”

  This was beginning to sound rehearsed. Maybe it was. But the kids all sounded sincere.

  “We got kind of used to having her around,” Cody added. “So now we get to have her back, and I don’t have to be the youngest anymore.”

  “I get to have a little sister,” Julie said.

  “Wow,” Hal said, looping an arm around me. “Sounds like you guys have got it all figured out.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Has anyone talked to Kathleen? I sort of assumed that she’d adopt Emily.”

  “I talked to her,” Jodi said. “I thought that too. But she doesn’t want to. Her kids teased Emily unmercifully, and she was always upset. I saw that when they were staying with us. Tiffany stuck up for her, but Tiffany isn’t going to be around anymore, and that’s going to be traumatic for her. She seemed a lot more comfortable around our kids, and our kids really took to her.”

  “Huh,” Hal said. “Who’d ’a thunk it?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Aren’t there a lot of hoops to jump through before you can actually bring her home?”

  “Not to worry,” Elliott said. “I’m a lawyer, remember? We’ve already applied to be her foster parents. That way she’ll be living right here while we deal with the complexities of the system.”

  “Huh,” I said. “What if you don’t get to be her foster parents? What happens then?”

  “Fritz Baumgartner,” Elliott assured me, “has friends in high places. He says it’s a done deal.”

  Lawyers. They think there’s nothing they can’t do. In this case, however, I sincerely hoped it was true. “Well, good,” I said. “I’m glad she’s got a home.”

  Bambi put her arms around both of us. “Me too,” she said. “After I thought about it, I realized that it was unfair to you and Hal to expect you to adopt a three-year-old at your ages after you’d never had children and had no experience taking care of one. You know,” she continued, “people aren’t born knowing how to take care of a child. You have to know what you’re doing, and you have to want children. People who don’t want them don’t take good care of them.”

  I pulled back to look her in the face. “My, aren’t we the authority on child rearing,” I teased her. “Where’d all that come from?”

  Her face was serious. “My mom never seemed to like me as much as my brothers,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to describe, and she never said so, but I knew. She was always kind of cold and impatient with me, even before the boys came along.”

  “What about your dad?” I asked. “Marty, I mean.”

  “He’s okay,” she said, “but he’s not home much. I mean, he’s always at the dealership, or at some meeting, or playing golf, or something. He and Mom don’t spend much time together anymore.”

  I had to bite my lips to keep from saying that Marty was probably having an affair.

  “But you guys,” Bambi continued, “didn’t even know me. You didn’t even know I existed until I showed up here, and you just accepted me as if I’d always been part of your family.”

  “Of course we did,” I said. “What else would we do? You are part of our family.”

  “See, that’s what I mean. What I’m trying to say is that I really feel loved here.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said, wondering where this was going.

  “What I’m saying is that, given a choice of living here or living with Mom and Dad, I’d rather live here,” she said. “If you want me, that is.”

  “Darling child,” I said, “of course we do.”

  God bless us all, every one.

  Friday, December 26

  Chapter 33

  The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men

  Gang aft a-gley;

  And leave us naught but grief and pain

  For promised joy.

  —Robert Burns

  Lance’s funeral was scheduled for two o’clock on Friday afternoon at the Episcopal Church, to be followed by interment at Sunset Park, the cemetery out on Kimberly Road at the south end of town.

  Hal would rather have his fingernails pulled out one by one with a pair of pliers than go to
a funeral, so he and Mum stayed home while the rest of us went to the church. I never objected to Hal staying in the house during a funeral, because I knew that houses sometimes got robbed by folks who cased the obituaries and death notices for that very reason.

  Ruthie sat alone in the front pew, all in black with a veil over her face, holding a black lace-edged handkerchief to her mouth. I walked straight up to her with Jodi and Elliott right behind me. I sat next to her and put my arm around her. “Ruthie, I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, trying to appear sympathetic.

  Ruthie wasn’t having any. She turned her head and gave me an angry glare. “I’ll just bet you are.”

  I squeezed her shoulder. “No, really. Aside from all that, I am really sorry that Lance died. I don’t think any of us realized how sick he really was.”

  She shrugged off my arm and turned away, stifling sobs. Jodi, on the other side of her, replaced my arm with hers. I got up and walked slowly toward the back of the church and saw the Burke family coming toward me. None of them looked particularly full of piss and vinegar, but Kathleen looked awful. She had visibly lost weight, her hair looked dull, and her normally rosy face was ashen. I wondered how much blood she had lost.

  She hugged me. “We heard about Tiffany and Emily,” she said. “I can’t believe it. Does this mean that she tried to kill all of us by setting fires to whatever house we were staying in? Why? What was the point?”

  I merely shook my head. This wasn’t the time or place for a complicated discussion of wills and inheritance, and if Kathleen still didn’t realize that Ruthie had been poisoning them all along, this wasn’t the time or place for her to find that out.

  Kathleen took my face between her gloved hands and looked at me closely. “Toni, you don’t look so good. Are you okay?”

  “I am now, but I was in the hospital too. I ate some of those cookies you left behind.” Well, okay, she’d figure it out now for sure.

  “We’ll talk later,” she promised. “Come along, kids. Let’s go give Aunt Ruthie our condolences.”

  Aunt Ruthie? Seriously? Oh, jeez.

  I continued on toward the back of the church to where I knew the restrooms were located. I ducked into the ladies room, pulled my jeans and L.L.Bean snow sneakers out of my capacious purse, and changed my clothes. I slipped out a side door and peered around the side of the church. When it looked like everybody who was coming had come, I dashed across the street to the parking lot and drove to Ruthie’s house.

  I parked around the corner, out of sight of Rebecca’s house, as I had before. I probably didn’t need to worry about that, because Rebecca was probably at the funeral, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.

  I left my purse in the car but put my cell phone in my coat pocket on vibrate. I put my flashlight in the other coat pocket. My Christmas camera was still in the pocket of my jeans. I put my car keys in the other pocket, buttoned up my coat, looked around to make sure nobody was around, and started down the alley between the houses.

  Ruthie’s was the third house down from the corner. The backyards of all the houses were hemmed in by six-foot fences. I looked for gates. The third gate I came to was securely latched, but it had a broken board, part of which was missing. I peered through. The house was painted dark green with white window trim. The back porch was also painted white, and recently too. It seemed to be in much better shape than the fence, which leaned into the backyard and had several loose boards. I wiggled them all experimentally. A dog started barking. I jumped and backed off. I didn’t know Ruthie had a dog. Shit.

  Then I came to my senses and realized that if Ruthie wasn’t staying in the house, her dog shouldn’t be here either. If she had one, she would have had a neighbor take it or boarded it in a kennel. I didn’t think the Blue Lakes Inn allowed pets. In any case, the barking dog was in somebody else’s yard.

  I wiggled boards some more. One seemed looser than the others. I continued to wiggle it, and it got looser still. Eventually it loosened enough that I could push it into the backyard. It left a six-inch gap. Could I squeeze myself through a six-inch space? It would be asking a lot of my hips to compress themselves that much. It would also be asking for trouble. What if I got stuck?

  Maybe if I took my coat off. I hung it on one of the loose but still attached boards and experimentally put a leg through the space. My thigh fit. If my thigh fit, could my butt? Slowly and carefully, I started to wiggle one butt cheek into the space. Too tight. Maybe if I tensed up my gluteus maximus. A little better. One butt cheek slipped through. Now I had a splintery one-by-six wedged into my butt crack.

  Oh God, please don’t let anybody come along right now. I was neither in nor out. I put a shoulder through. No problem, but my boobs got stuck. I hunched my back. I was still stuck. With my hands, I pulled my boobs to each side and managed to slide my upper body through, although my cashmere pullover would never be the same. I tensed up my other glute and tried to slide the other butt cheek in, but my jeans got hung up on a splinter that was threatening to come right on through into my butt. Was I going to have to sacrifice my jeans, or worse, my skin? I managed to get myself unhooked from the splinter by pushing my butt cheek back out through the space and then pulling my butt fat sideways with my left hand. I was in.

  Whew. Better not count on that as an escape route, should I need one.

  I retrieved my coat, but I’d worked up too much of a sweat to put it back on. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes had gone by. Damn. The funeral surely wouldn’t take more than an hour, and the funeral procession out to Sunset Park and the burial service might give me another hour; but I really had to get moving if I was going to be done before Ruthie was free and aware that I was no longer among the mourners.

  I surveyed Ruthie’s backyard. I couldn’t see much of it. In front of me stood a barberry hedge about four feet high, overgrown and impenetrable. Barberries have thorns. Lots of them. Too bad I hadn’t thought to bring a pair of gardening shears. I could see only one solution. I wrapped my coat around my head, shoulders, and arms and forced my way through. Thorns ripped at my jeans, making pincushions of my thighs, and my brand-new coat would never be the same. Hal wouldn’t be happy about that.

  Thirty minutes had gone by. I extracted the worst of the barberry twigs and thorns from my coat and put it on. I crossed the backyard and mounted the back porch steps, testing each one before settling my weight on it. They held, and so did the porch itself. But the back door was locked. Oh, hell.

  Or maybe not. Around the side of the house was the gaping hole I had seen from the street. For God’s sake, what was I doing kvetching about a locked door when there was a hole big enough to drive a truck through right around the corner? Of course, it was all charred and possibly unsafe, and I’d get soot all over me, but my clothes were already trashed, so why should I care about that now?

  Anyway, the only reason I had chosen to enter Ruthie’s house from the back was to avoid being seen going in the front. As I turned away from the back door, I noticed a trapdoor in the floor of the back porch and wondered what it was for. Getting into the crawlspace, maybe? If I didn’t find anything inside the house, I’d check it out.

  So I went around the side of the house, being careful to avoid being seen from the neighbor’s windows, and went in through the gap in the wall.

  Inside, it was totally black. What little light came in from the outside barely penetrated the gloom. The pervasive odor of smoke and gasoline burned my eyes and made me cough. I tried not to breathe too deeply.

  I turned on my flashlight and looked around. It became immediately apparent that nothing in this space had survived the fire. No point in looking for Lovenox here. I kept going, hoping to come out into something, anything, unburned, hoping the floor would hold me and I wouldn’t go crashing through into the basement or crawl space. This dank, black, smoky void seemed to go on forever.

  Eventual
ly I came to a wall. It had a window in it. The glass was shattered. Through it I could see the neighbor’s house on the side opposite Rebecca’s. I turned the flashlight off. Enough light came in through the window that I could see without it.

  I continued along the wall and eventually came to the kitchen. The appliances were still there but blackened. I looked inside the stove and saw nothing. The refrigerator contained food that was clearly way past its expiration date, and the stench made me gag. I closed the door hastily. I saw a light switch next to the sink. I flipped it and jumped back, expecting sparks, but nothing happened. I flipped it off again. I supposed that electricity was too much to hope for. The woodwork had been destroyed, and the contents of the drawers and cabinets had avalanched out across the kitchen floor, shattered and twisted. Apparently the entire inside of the ground floor had been gutted, and the walls and most of the floor were all that remained.

  No Lovenox there. I kept going. I came to a staircase. The banister was gone, but the treads looked amazingly intact. Did I dare risk it? I shone the flashlight on my watch. Forty-five minutes had passed. It’s now or never, I figured, and I put one foot on the lower tread, testing it. It held, and so did the other treads. Soon I was on the second floor, and it seemed even smokier and blacker than the ground floor had been. Small wonder, since heat rises. I could see holes in the floor where the light from below shone through them. I flipped the flashlight back on. The second floor looked in slightly better shape than the ground floor had—except for the floor itself. That looked decidedly unsafe.

  There were four bedrooms and a bathroom up here with lots of places to hide things: in drawers and closets and under mattresses. Unfortunately I could see no way to get to them and search them without breaking through the floor. Maybe I could distribute my weight by crawling on my belly. Christ on a crutch. This was going to take for-friggin’-ever.

  It occurred to me that if the furniture hadn’t broken through the floor, then maybe my weight wouldn’t either. On the other hand, it could be the straw that broke the camel’s back—and my back as well, if I fell through. So I started with the largest bedroom and moved carefully around the perimeter, looking in drawers and closets and under beds, feeling between mattresses. I even checked the drawers in the bathroom and looked inside the toilet tank. Then I eased my way back down the stairs.