Bad Apple 1: Sweet Cider

by Barbara Morgenroth

  “Why do I have to talk about it? It won’t change anything. Let’s just let it be in the past.”

  “That’s fine if it was in the past but you’re scared now of Joe. What aren’t you saying?”

  “Is it some kind of pathology with you people that you have to pry into each other’s lives?”

  “Yeah. It’s a pathology. But if you had been with us when whatever happened that you won’t talk about happened, you wouldn’t be shouting at me now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We can’t afford to take a day off of rehearsing so get a grip, Neal, and if you can’t talk maybe you can see your way clear to sing.”

  ***

  We rehearsed, somehow, most of the afternoon, had an awkward dinner and then rehearsed for a couple more hours.

  No one bothered me again about talking. I thought they probably brought the problem to Steve and he told them to give me some space.

  I was reading in bed when his phone rang. I thought about not picking it up but that wouldn’t get me anything but everyone coming to my door to find out what I had done to myself.

  I picked it up and pressed the button.

  “I have a question,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I’ll answer it.”

  “Why did Joe throw you under the tractor?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “There’s a story you tell and you’ve got it down pat. And it’s so awful that no one bothers to ask why it happened. You get a bye. Now I’m asking. Why would Joe want to hurt you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Either he’s crazy, and I’m not discounting that, but he did manage to find his way home, so he’s got some ability to think things through.”

  “Or,” I said.

  “He had motivation.”

  “Beyond hating me.”

  “Why would he work up all the emotion to hate you?”

  “You’re so much like your father.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “No.”

  “So there was a reason.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll stay here until the battery goes dead.”

  I believed him. Truly was tenacious like his father. I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want to think about it. And it was suffocating me.

  “Are you protecting Joe?”

  “God, no. I’m protecting myself. He threw me under the tractor as a warning. To keep me quiet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I saw him with Toby.”

  Chapter 18

  “I’ll see you in the kitchen in five minutes.”

  “I’m not leaving this room.”

  “We’ll see.” He clicked off his phone.

  I put his phone on the nightstand.

  Ten seconds later I heard the house phone start to ring. Once, twice. A minute later there was a knock on my door. “Family conference in the kitchen in five minutes,” Steve said and continued down the hall. A moment later, I heard Emily go down the hall and down the stairs.

  I pulled on some sweats and pushed my feet into sneakers, then went downstairs.

  Emily was heating water and had some butter cookies on a plate in the middle of the table.

  Steve looked at me. “Sit down, please.”

  “This isn’t really necessary,” I said, pulling out a chair. “Tru is making too big a deal out of it.”

  “That’s not how we do things here.”

  “In the middle of the night, you hoist yourselves out of bed to come down here for a conference?”

  Truly nodded.

  “Yes.”

  The only time the Kents gathered around the table at night was to play poker and drink beer.

  Emily placed mugs in front of everyone.

  Truly looked at the tag on the teabag. “Herbal muck?”

  “Chamomile is very calming,” Emily replied and sat down next to me.

  “Neal,” Steve began, “your story has been somewhat incomplete.”

  “You asked about Paul not me. I gave you the information that pertained to Paul and Joe.”

  “Yes. That was for the investigation. Now you’re a member of the family and...”

  “Wait,” I said. “You consider me a member of your family?”

  Emily put her hand on mine. “Yes, of course.”

  “Even after all you know about the Kents?”

  Truly moved a couple cookies from the platter to his napkin.

  “That has no bearing on how we feel about you. Let’s take things one step at a time. You can’t go back to the Kents. Now that the law, that would be me, is aware of the situation, leaving you there would be allowing further distress and abuse. Child Protective Services would be brought in.”

  “No. No.”

  “She’d hobble away first,” Truly said, reaching for another cookie. “A toddler on a tricycle would be able to catch up to her.”

  “We’re going to avoid CPS and have a lawyer working on it,” Emily assured me.

  “I can’t find any record of a marriage between your father and Jane,” Steve said. “Did you attend a ceremony? Was there a marriage? Did you all go to a church somewhere?”

  “They were living in sin?” Truly asked with a smile.

  “That’s enough,” Emily said to him.

  “They went away one weekend and...I don’t really remember. I was about six.”

  “There’s no record of it here or Canada. That makes it easier. Jane isn’t your family, she’s just a person you lived with for a while. We’ll get guardianship and that will be the end of your involvement with the Kents.” Steve looked at Truly. “That’s my foot. Her foot is too far for you to reach.”

  “I was just offering some support.”

  “In a few months we’ll go to court and make it final, so everyone can calm down about that issue,” Emily said.

  “Now that you’re really one of us,” Truly started. “You can tell us how bad the situation actually was.”

  I shook my head. “If I do, then you can’t go interview him,” I said to Steve.

  “That’s my job.”

  “Send someone else, otherwise he’ll make the connection and make me pay for talking.”

  “He holds a grudge for a long time.”

  I shrugged. “If he killed Paul, he waited twenty years to do it.”

  “Anything said tonight is between us only. Strict secrecy,” Steve said.

  “The only person I ever talk to is Tru, but I think he’s a big blabbermouth,” I said, giving him a look. “Otherwise I’d be in a warm bed sleeping right now.”

  “Let’s start there,” Steve suggested. “When you told Tru the reason Joe threw you under the tractor was that you saw him with Toby, paint us a picture. Explain it. Don’t leave anything out.”

  Emily squeezed my hand for encouragement.

  “I didn’t see them committing any indiscretion; I didn’t have to. They always went into a room and closed the door. Why would they do that, right? So yes, I was going to mention it to Janie. He knew that.”

  “How did he know,” Tru asked.

  “It had to be Shannon. She doesn’t think things through. She misses the implications of her actions. We know what happened next.”

  “He pushed you and then?”

  “After he laughed? He walked alongside me as I tried to crawl to the edge of the field and told me if I told anyone he’d take care of me the way he took care of the ... um ... kittens. I believed him.”

  “How did Joe get Shannon to shut up?” Tru asked.

  “She’s always been terrified of him. I saw him throw her around the room more than once for a lot less.”

  Emily squeezed my hand tighter. “Steve, you have to arrest this guy.”

  “I need a reason beside he’s the spawn from Hell. I don’t have the evidence.”

  “How can that be?” Truly asked.

  “Maybe he didn’t do it. If he did, it was two days between the last time Paul was seen alive and when
Neal found the body. Obvious that was sufficient time to take care of loose ends. Fibers? Hair? We might get lucky.”

  “I can’t picture anyone staying in a house for two days with a ...Joe cleaning up after himself, he’s such a slob. Maybe he wore gloves,” I suggested. “It’s not like he’s never been arrested. His fingerprints are on file.”

  “It’s so premeditated. How can anyone be that cold?” Emily asked.

  She didn’t know Joe or she wouldn’t be wondering something like that.

  “I think it was a crime of opportunity. The robbery was the initial goal, and something went wrong resulting in Paul’s death,” Steve said.

  “Maybe he had an accomplice,” Tru added.

  “There’s this guy, Nathan, in New Orleans. I think they share an apartment.”

  Steve grabbed for a pen and piece of paper. “Do you have a name?”

  “A French kind of name. Creole. Cajun. I think I only heard it once. Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, like Breaux. But that’s the bridge, isn’t it?”

  “Thibodeaux?” Truly asked. “Who was the songwriter for the Everly Brothers?”

  I shook my head.

  “Boudleaux Bryant, was that it?”

  “Tru,” Steve said.

  That gave my memory a shake. “Nathan Gautreaux.”

  Steve nodded. “Do you have any idea how to spell that?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That’s a lead,” Steve replied writing down the name phonetically.

  “Something is always left at a crime scene,” Emily pointed out.

  “We have lots of somethings. Unlike television shows, forensics can take weeks to return from the lab. If we get a confession, that’s a different story. We don’t have a print from Joe. We have lots of prints, some we haven’t identified. We don’t have Paul’s truck. And we don’t have the murder weapon.”

  “The baseball bat,” I said.

  “It was blunt force trauma but maybe not with the bat.”

  “Why was the bat taken then?”

  “Maybe he’ll explain it to us when we arrest him.”

  “Can’t you bring him in as a person of interest?” I asked.

  “Emily, have Court TV taken off the satellite dish and block Law and Order in all its permutations. He says he was in New Orleans. Until that can be proven otherwise, no.”

  “Sorry. I’ll let you do the investigating,” I said.

  Steve smiled briefly. “Go back to the relationship between Joe and Toby.”

  “I don’t know what they were doing. They were close. They had parties in their rooms. Shannon would turn up the music to block out the sounds. They could have been getting stoned. All I knew was it seemed wrong. She’s still hanging all over him.”

  “What did Shannon think?” Emily asked.

  “You don’t understand the Kents.”

  “They’re not like us people,” Truly said not picking his head up from the music he was now working on.

  Emily looked at me questioningly.

  “Truly means that you talk to each other like now. This kind of thing doesn’t exist on the mountain. I don’t know how much they can put into words. They always seemed as deep as a paper plate.”

  Tru didn’t attempt to cover his laughter.

  “Didn’t Jane see any of this behavior?” Steve asked.

  “Right before I left, she was crying about the baby she gave birth to thirty years ago. Every year she does this. Maude talks her back to relative equilibrium and then four months later she spends 6 weeks crying because he died. She’s unable or unwilling to focus on anything but her misery.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s why she’s isn’t curious about me. Her boy is back. Her Joe. Her replacement for Big Man.”

  “Big Man?”

  “The dead baby. But no one can really replace someone you’ve lost. They’re their own person. Joe isn’t Big Man and he knows it. He can’t live up to the perfection and purity of the idealized baby.”

  Truly put his pencil down on the paper and looked at the clock. “As much as I love spending time with you people, I have a full day tomorrow...”

  Steve nodded. “Let’s all go to sleep, we’ve had enough for one night.”

  ***

  Ten minutes after I had gotten into bed and the light was off, his phone rang on the nightstand. I picked it up.

  “You must be fit to be tied,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Now you’re one of us.”

  Chapter 19

  Between schoolwork and rehearsal, I lost all sense of time as the concert date approached. We ran through the songs as we were going to perform them many times. About halfway through, Truly planned a break for me to sit down and rest my leg, while he took over and the band did songs they had done in the past.

  Going to The Enchanted Gardens early in the day, Truly would set up the equipment, mic the instruments and the drum kit, do sound checks and make arrangements with the other band that was performing that night. Emily and I would drive down later in the afternoon, which meant I’d miss both the pumpkin judging and the canoe races.

  Emily treated me in the same way she would have fussed over Sydney. We polished the boots, pressed the outfit, she worked on my hair and helped me with the makeup. Then we got in the car, a whole day without mentioning the Kents, murder, tractors or the ballad of Little Big Man.

  As we started off down the road, Emily said the day was like taking one of her horseback riding students to their first show. She was probably more nervous than I was.

  I asked what was the first performance on stage Truly had ever given.

  The first was a school play in second grade when he was supposed to bang out a simple song on the piano in the auditorium for the rest of the students. When Tru got applause, he did three more songs, on his own, baffling his classmates who stood there like statues, except for the ones who started crying. Finally, the teacher came on stage and dragged Truly off the piano bench while he was still singing.

  “That’s when I knew I had another problem child.”

  “What was Sydney’s problem?” I asked.

  “It was horses for her, which was fine because I was already doing that. I didn’t know very much about music, though. Truly was born knowing more about music than most people do by the time they’re adults. I didn’t know how to help him.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “Steve and I stayed up and talked about it that night. It was impossible not to know he was musically gifted, we just had no idea we’d have to tie him down to prevent him from entertaining in the cafeteria or breaking out in song during class. I got an angry call from the principal because in science Tru was singing a song about the Periodic Table of the Elements.” Emily laughed. “I love that kid.”

  No one would doubt that.

  “Instead of the school seeing that as a positive, they thought he was disruptive and needed medication to keep him quiet. He never went back to school after that phone call. We got some help with the horses so I could homeschool him, which gave him more time for lessons and practicing. That’s all he wanted to do. He practiced the violin until his fingers were bleeding. We had to lock it away so he couldn’t get to it until his fingers healed. He howled his displeasure at us.”

  I could picture it. “When did he become the very short adult you always talk about?”

  “By the time he was ten, Tru settled down quite a bit. He was very focused and responsible. I never had to worry about him doing what he was supposed to do. I was concerned about him overdoing it, though.”

  I wanted to say something reassuring but didn’t know what that would be. I wanted her to know that even if I was nowhere near as clever about music as Truly was, and being in a band was a surprise that I never had foreseen, I wasn’t going to take off for Canada like Ed had. As long as Truly wanted me in the band, I would sing. I owed these people my life, it was the least I could do.

&n
bsp; “Then when he cut his hair last week, I knew something had changed.”

  “What?” I asked.

  She thought for a long moment. “He’s not practicing anymore.”

  The Enchanted Gardens was much larger than I expected. Set on the Nigamo River, there was a rustic Adirondack style log building at the center with quite a few outbuildings. In the distance, I could see a dock on the water’s edge. To the left side of the driveway, there were the agricultural displays as well as vendor tents. A few hundred people were walking around, children were running around in Halloween costumes, and I could see some wandering performers like jugglers making their way through the crowd. Lanterns were being lit against the oncoming evening.

  I don’t know what I expected, but this was more, a lot more and there was a moment of wondering if I had gotten in over my head.

  Emily probably noticed that because I was still riveted to the seat when she was already out of the truck and digging Truly’s clothes out of the back. “Nerves?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you need a pep talk?”

  I smiled as I eased myself out of the truck. “You never had to give Tru a pep talk, did you?”

  “No. When he was really small, I made him wear pants with a belt so I had something to hang onto until it was his turn on stage.”

  We started walking over to the stage area.

  “What do you think made him like that?”

  “God.”

  “Really?”

  Emily nodded. “God gives us all blessings. Sometimes we don’t recognize them and don’t use them the way we should. I think it’s a God-given talent that was boiling over in Tru and being seven he didn’t know how to contain it. Poor kid.”

  “Poor you, having to deal with a little whirlwind like that.”

  “Never poor me, I loved every minute of it. It was joy. It still is.”

  I stopped walking.

  Emily took my arm. “I know how hard it was for you but obviously your real parents loved you very much and you’ve held onto that.”

  I nodded.

  “Now you pick up where they left off. And you’re not alone anymore.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “Oops. Are you going to be able to sing?” She laughed.