Behind the Bonehouse

by Sally Wright

  “I reckon you know there was a big Spanish flu epidemic, hit right that year, brought back by our boys from France. Folks was dyin’ like flies. Just like flies. A quarter of a million right here in the States. Millions of folks died around the world. Think about that for a minute. Two hundred and fifty thousand folks—right in the blink of an eye. The schools got closed for a whole year. Families got wiped out. Two, three, four generations. And my Margaret, she died nursin’ the sick, with me out there in Kansas.”

  “Oh, Toss. I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  He nodded, she could see it in the light from the hall. But he didn’t say another word till he’d lit another smoke. “I was real upset. Real upset. I’d loved her as long as I could remember. I did. But the worst of it was … and I’m gonna tell you this ’cause you need to hear it. But I’ve never told nobody else, and I ask you not to repeat it.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “The worst of it was, there was this secret, hiding, cowardly piece in me that was actually kinda relieved.” He stopped. And Jo held her breath. Before he started again. “Lord help me, Josie, but I was real afraid of the responsibility. Of having a wife and kids. Of providin’, and makin’ a home. I felt like I might not make good, or do it right, or live up to the way I wanted to be, and that Margaret’d look at me one day, and wish she’d chosen another.”

  “Toss—”

  He held up his hand, with the Lucky in it, and Jo shut her mouth. “Not trying was safer than failin’. And I’ve lived that way ever since. I’ve squired one lady or another, from time to time. I’ve had me someone for companionship for awhile. Someone to flirt with, and go out dancin’. But I made damn sure I was never responsible for another human being. And I done that outa fear and cowardice, that’s shamed me all my life.”

  “Toss, you take such responsibility for the horses, and the folks who own them, and the help—”

  “That ain’t the same thing. It ain’t. Alan ain’t like me, Jo. He takes on folks and cares for ’em, and puts himself on the line. I reckon he worries about you and Ross, and what this’ll do to you, way more than he thinks about himself. He don’t moan and whine. He takes it in hand.”

  “I know. I agree. That’s why it felt so awful seeing him get drunk.”

  “Give him some leeway here, honey. It’ll be fine, I’m tellin’ ya.” He took another drag, then crushed the butt on the porch floor with an old scuffed boot. “’Nother thing I never told ya. Last time I talked to Tommy on the phone. Prob’ly a month ’fore he was killed, he told me ’bout Alan. ’Bout how he reckoned the two of you would fit real good together. Told me how Alan had thrown himself on some woman in France and took the blow from a grenade himself. That he was a man who’d stand up, and do his Josie proud.”

  There were tears on Jo’s face again, and she wiped at them, and blew her nose, before she said, “Thank you. I appreciate you talking to me.”

  “Least I can do.”

  “Uncle Toss?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  The silence went on for almost a minute, and then he said, “I love you too. You’re all I got in the world, girl. All I got in the world.” He stood up and leaned back like his back hurt, before he said, “I don’t reckon Abby’s gonna foal tonight, but I better get back and check.” He coughed then, long and hard, as he started down the stairs, before he said, “I’ll look in on Tracker too and get him fed and watered.”

  Then he was gone. Boots swishing through the unmown grass. Crunching away across gravel.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Saturday, May 9th, 1964

  When Jack and Camille had met at Flocelliere, when they’d settled in the sun, down the hill a little behind the ruins of the oldest part of the turreted stone chateau; when they’d sat self-consciously, catching glimpses of each other, and looking away as though too much might be said by half-familiar faces expecting to see the past; when they’d leaned back in old wicker chairs by clipped box parterres where sorrel and strawberries and tarragon grew, where they wouldn’t be seen by the Vicomte or Vicomtesse, or any of those who worked for them; when they talked about the white puppy first, who’d followed them down the hill—there was wonder, and worry, and interest between them that Jack had let himself hope for, but hadn’t begun to expect.

  First they talked about the early eighteenth century painting she was restoring—the woman in a sweeping dress of deep teal silk, that might’ve been an unattributed Fragonard, which Camille would finish varnishing by noon the next day. Then they touched on their lives since the war, quickly, lightly, without detail or emotion. Finally they turned to Tours in ’44, and the treachery that destroyed the Touraine Resistance.

  They worked their way slowly and carefully, as the sun sank beside them, to Jack’s suspicion that Henri Reynard had been the traitor. He told her eventually, as the air grew chilly and her eyes disappeared in the night, that being suspected had tortured him for years. That he’d drunk himself nearly to death, living in a shack in a North American forest, that he’d only stopped two years before and begun to reclaim his life.

  Camille listened, and nodded, and told him what she had witnessed during and after the war—the lives warped and lost and perverted, the souls saved and restored, the joy and gratitude that abounded in some, in spite of hatred and horror.

  But it wasn’t until the next afternoon, as Jack drove them northeast on winding roads as narrow as farm tracks, that Camille told him she knew for a fact that her former husband, Henri Reynard, had told the Gestapo and the Tours police where the Resistance would be meeting. He’d deliberately made Jack the scapegoat and laughed when he’d told her how he’d arranged his alibi.

  She’d left Henri long before that conversation, but he’d still chosen to appear from time to time, and it’d been in the middle of a terrible fight, early in 1945, that she’d accused him of having engineered the Gestapo raid and the death of Jean Claude Lebel.

  Henri had admitted it, three-quarters drunk and bragging, telling her how clever he’d been—claiming it’d been a political necessity, and a fine example of the political will that revolutionary history demands. The kind of will and vision she would never have.

  He’d said his goal, and that of countless others, was a people’s postwar France, and that leaders like Jean Claude Lebel who opposed the Communist wing of the Resistance had to be eliminated for the ultimate good of the people.

  He’d said too that he’d ensured her release, so what more could she have asked?

  Camille had long before filed for divorce, and it came three months later. Yet, he’d pounded on her door late one night a month after it was final, and shouted his way in. He said he knew she’d never reveal that he’d helped the Gestapo. He “knew” full well she still cared for him, no matter what she claimed. And more importantly still, she had no proof of his guilt. It never would be more than her word against his, and his political supporters would systematically destroy her if she spoke out against him.

  Camille stared out the window for a minute, as she brushed a shred of lint off her sleeve and smoothed her dark green linen skirt down below her knees. She told Jack then that Henri had tried to establish a political career—first locally, then nationally—but had never achieved any sort of success. Not even in the Touraine, in the whole of the Loire Valley, where his leadership after Lebel’s death had alienated rather than unified.

  Camille had sat quietly again, while Jack drove. She’d sighed and blown her nose, and folded her hands in her lap, before she went on to tell Jack that Henri had moved to Paris in 1948, and married a wealthy leftist dilettante, and had lived with her on Isle Saint Louis in a grand apartment two blocks north of Notre Dame.

  He’d done fashion photography, using her family connections with the haute couture community, which couldn’t have been easy to explain to his leftwing friends. But the day came when his wife threw him out. And where he went from there Camille had never heard. She’d tried hard not to k
now, deliberately choosing to distance herself from their mutual friends.

  Jack asked if she thought she could find out where he was now.

  And she’d said she could try, once she got home to Esvres sur Indre where she’d rented an old grist mill, twenty-five kilometers southwest of Tours, outside the tiny village. “Could I perhaps persuade you to converse in English? I would like an opportunity to improve my grammar.”

  “Isn’t that where Henri said he’d been—at Esvres sur Indre? And that he couldn’t have gotten back to Tours in time to have told the Gestapo where the Resistance was meeting?”

  “Yes. The one who swore Henri was there was nothing but a petty crook who lied in exchange for black market goods. It-tis only a … how do you say? … only a coincidence that I now live in Esvres sur Indre. A childhood friend purchased the mill, and refurbished it after the war. He allows me to rent three floors in a building that … is it sets or sits? Off on one side?”

  “Sits.”

  “Thank you. There I have a studio, and a comfortable home. From there I travel to fulfill commissions, or restore those sent to my studio.”

  Camille turned and looked at Jack, and her eyes were hard, and uneasy. “Why is it you wish to locate Henri? I cannot see that there will be a legal means for him to be punished. We have no … how would you say? … no evidence of his guilt? The governments of France too, ever since the war, they have hidden all actions then, to protect our collaborators no matter their crimes.”

  “I want to look him in the eye and tell him what I think of him, and maybe even knock him down, if he reacts the way I think he will.”

  “And how is that?”

  “With arrogance and contempt.”

  Camille nodded, and looked out the window. And there was silence again as Jack turned onto a one-lane road running through rolling farmland. Several moments elapsed uneasily before she placed her handkerchief in her purse, and reapplied her lipstick. Then she told him he was welcome to stay in her apartment at the mill while she telephoned those she knew who might help her find Henri. “There are two bed chambers. You must not feel an imposition.”

  “I’d like to. Thank you. Thank you for helping me. I was afraid you wouldn’t, him having been your—”

  “It is nothing. You deserve to accuse him to his eyes.”

  “So much for bourbon.” Alan was sitting at the dining-room table, toast and strawberries in front of him, a mug of coffee in his hand, staring painfully across the old walnut table at Spencer Franklin. “My stomach’s not doing well.”

  Spencer laughed, uncharacteristically softly, and said, “Mine too. And I left Toss to take care of Tracker. How could I do that? We’re old enough to know better.” He smiled, as though his eyes hurt, and drank all of a tall glass of water.

  Jo walked in, carrying Ross, and her own second cup of coffee, and said, “Don’t expect any sympathy from me.” She’d laughed when she’d said it, and tried not to look as though she were gloating.

  Spencer said, “By the way, do you know if the police checked the phone records to find out if Carl called you that night? To get you out to that farm so you wouldn’t have an alibi?”

  “I don’t know what they’ve got. We won’t until we talk to Garner after he’s seen the prosecutions’ files. Why?”

  “Just curious. You’d think that might help. Anyway. I’ve got to load Tracker and get home. I’ve got so much work to do to pull off this buyout, I can’t take off more time today.”

  “I need to get to the office too. I’ve been so distracted, I’m way behind at work.”

  Jo said, “I’m going to take Ross and go down to Shaker Village and see if they’ve started the renovations. I think I need to get away and do something fun.”

  “Good.” Alan was standing beside her, and he leaned down and kissed her. “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night. About the lab supply distributor, and what he was up to with Carl. Let’s talk when we get home.”

  “What did Garner say when he called this morning? When does he think he’ll be done with the file?”

  “He thought Monday. But it’ll probably take him all day to finish his notes and do the copying.”

  Monday, May 11th, 1964

  Alan asked Kevin Hardgrave, who worked on the lab bench, and did some pharmaceutical manufacturing in the fermentation room under Bob’s direction, to come in and talk to him after his lunch hour.

  When he did, he looked more or less like normal, calm and steady and hard to rattle, with humor hovering at the corners of his mouth. He was average size, and somewhere in his forties, and he sat down and looked at Alan, holding a notepad and a pen.

  They talked for half an hour, about short- and long-term projects, and what they needed to accomplish that week, and what milestones ought to be met by Wednesday.

  Then Alan asked him about the lab supply distributor they’d bought a lot from the year before.

  “Cecil Thompson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a strange bird. One of the old-style salesmen who think nothing matters but relationships. You know what I mean. Handing out tickets to a Wildcat game. Not price, or value, or the quality of a product.”

  “But Carl did a lot of business with him?”

  “Yep. He bought more and more from him last year as time went on, and less and less from other suppliers. Cecil would come in and Carl would take him into the supply room, and they’d stay in there for a considerable time, and then go out to lunch.”

  “Did Carl spend as much time with other distributors?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “So from Cecil Thompson Supply we were buying basic reagents, some proprietary raw materials, glassware, gloves, syringes, and maybe a balance, or a microscope?”

  “Yep. A lot of our glassware. Pipettes, stirrers, paper filters too, lab crayons, that kind of thing. His chemical line was limited. He wanted to expand in that direction, but I don’t think he had the scientific background. I know Carl would let him look in our cabinets, so he could’ve known the products we used and who else we bought from.”

  “What I recall, is that after Carl left in August of last year, you and I, when meeting with Fisher Scientific and others, found out we could save a significant amount of money by switching suppliers. We’d always used more than one supplier. We’d be fools not to. But it was after Carl left that we diverted most of our orders to two of Cecil’s competitors. Do I have the timeline right? I was busy with a lot of other things.”

  Kevin said, “That’s what I remember. And Cecil went kind of crazy when I told him. I didn’t just phone him, because he was a small outfit, and I knew we were a fairly sizeable customer for him, so I didn’t want to drop the bomb over the phone. I took him out to lunch and explained the situation, and told him we’d still buy from him occasionally, but that we had to find the best prices for ourselves.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He tried to talk me out of it, and then said he’d bought an unusually large inventory because of conversations he’d had with Carl, and it wasn’t fair for him to bear the brunt of Carl having overpromised.

  “I told him I didn’t know anything about that. That the orders I’d seen placed by Carl were for similar amounts to what we’d been ordering. That he had increased them in the summer some—last year, in ’63—but that we’d have to work through our inventory before we purchased more, and then it would be with suppliers who offered the best deals.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “He drank two martinis and ate hardly any lunch, and got more and more upset. By the end, he was almost begging me to give him another order. I was actually afraid he’d burst into tears.”

  “When was this?”

  “I can check my calendar from last year, but I’d say last September. He still called on us after that, at least once a month like usual, till … well, I guess it was probably late March. I haven’t seen him since. I heard from the Fisher Scientific salesman in Apri
l that Cecil’s gone out of business.”

  “Greg Zachman, right?”

  “Yeah. He works out of his house on Morgan Street in Versailles. His territory’s big, though. Cincinnati, Louisville. Indianapolis. Probably down to Knoxville. If he’s not working his territory here, he’s gone for at least a week.”

  “Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”

  Kevin started toward the door, then looked back at Alan. “It’s none of my business, but are you doing okay? I don’t believe for a second that you killed Carl.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that. I do.”

  Jo wouldn’t be home until seven, when she would’ve picked Ross up from Becky and Buddy’s, and when Alan got home at six, having talked to Greg Zachman at his house on his way home, he decided to squeeze in a ride on Maggie.

  They worked in the sand riding area for fifteen minutes, warming up and working on transitions, Emmy watching from the sidelines, hoping they’d go cross country.

  When they started off, heading north till they could angle west to the path in the woods, they were walking along the paddock fence where Toss had put all the mares without foals who had been, or were about to be, bred again.

  Alan had Maggie on a long rein, letting her stretch her neck after working with more collection, and he was humming something quietly to himself, more relaxed than he’d been in days—when a horse thundered close up behind him, running right at him on the other side of the fence. He was just starting to look over his right shoulder, when Maggie spooked, shying straight left in a fraction of second, unloading him on a fence post, as she bolted toward the woods.

  The same mare squealed and snorted a foot away from him as he landed on his right side on rock hard ground. He was stunned for a second, lying crumpled on his side—when Maude, the mare who’d charged the fence, galloped away down the fenceline with the rest of the herd behind her.

  Alan lay there, thinking about Maggie, loose somewhere in the woods, stirrups slapping her sides, where she could stumble, or fall on the reins, or tangle herself in branches and underbrush, or break a leg on a tree root.