“No idea what it was?”
Donna shook her head, and the tears spilled out again. She climbed heavily up the steps to Emily’s room. Alone with her granddaughter in the kitchen, Ruth felt she could use a good cry herself. For Camille, for Shep Noble, for Gwen and Donna. For Emily. For the whole goddamn mixed-up world....
Willa stared intently at her grandmother. Her face puckered in sympathy. Ruth opened the door—she had to vent her feelings. “Let people live out their lives the way they want!” she shouted at the sun.
But the sun went behind a cloud. It was the old cop-out.
* * * *
Donna skipped her afternoon chemistry class; it was no use, she wouldn’t be able to concentrate. Instead she got on her bicycle, rode toward home. Home was safe, away from the fresh crime scene that the entire college had become. It was like her world had spun crazily about and then crashed. It helped to ride, to try and make sense of what had happened. To remember Ms. Wimmet as she was, alive and in love with her subject—with Donna’s paper, with Donna’s ancestor Isobel who refused to leave her husband, the village they lived in together. Isobel had left no words behind; no one knew her feelings, her dreams. But she was an equal there, Ms. Wimmet had pointed out, it was a matriarchal society. Women were farmers, corn huskers, creators of pots and baskets.
Donna was impressed with that. The natives weren’t “savage” at all. People today just didn’t understand. They didn’t try to understand.
But Camille Wimmet had understood. She’d talked to Donna like a person, an equal, she said Donna was lucky to have that background. She said she hoped to look for some intermarriage in her own family, after she finished the research on this French-Canadian woman—a woman who had Abenaki blood in her, too. But that research had led to Ms. Wimmet’s death.
Donna held tight to the handlebars; the tears scalded her eyes. She blinked repeatedly to clear her vision. She was cycling through a wooded section of town, just before the road that led up to the mountain where she lived. It was growing dark; the trees leaned over the narrow pavement like they’d lurch forward any minute. Thoughts of death and murder made the foliage look darker, the mountain ahead look grimmer. She was sorry now she hadn’t called her mother for a ride. She thought she heard a whirring noise behind, another bicycle, and she pedaled faster. When she glanced back, she saw it wasn’t a bicycle, but a car. She edged closer to the side of the road. The car roared up behind her. She bent over the handlebars, her legs like logs on the pedals. Suddenly it was on her! She lunged hard to the right—and it struck her wheel. Bike and rider crashed into a ditch. She lay in it for long minutes, dazed.
When she stood up finally, her knees bruised, hands bloody where she’d tried to stop the fall, the road was empty. There was only dust from the car, which had raced on up the road. If she hadn’t swerved at the last second, it might have killed her. She stood there, numbed with the thought, her hands hanging like weights at her sides. It was a long time before she could propel her body toward home.
* * * *
This time the bees had swarmed next door at the Ball farm. Mert had answered the phone, assured Harvey Ball, in his unruffled way, that someone would take care of it. So now Gwen had to do it. And then, at four o’clock, she would drive over to the memorial service for Camille Wimmet, which was certain, like Shep Noble’s, to be a damp one, fall of fond students, including Emily and Donna, whose papers she would never get to read. But Donna had hardly said a word to anyone since she’d arrived home the night before, scraped and bleeding from falling off her bike; she hadn’t wanted to see or talk to anyone. “No one!” she’d shouted, and Gwen complied.
The problem was, with so many other things going on, Gwen hadn’t taken care of the hives on her own land, or on Ball’s— they had become overcrowded, and now the bees were taking off on their own. At least she assumed that was what had happened.
She saw Harvey plowing the field with his older son and so she knocked on the door, thinking Tilden or Ralphie might be there, know where the swarm was. She would prefer to take it down quietly, then steal away home without any words from the father.
Tilden looked surprised, then wary when he opened the door—she seldom came over in a neighborly way; she didn’t feel welcome. He had a book in his hand, but she didn’t comment; she merely inquired about the swarm.
“Toolshed,” Tilden said in his laconic way, and pointed to the east, beyond the red cow barn.
“Would you mind coming with me? I could use your help.” She glanced at his bare feet, wondered how he found shoes to fit. His toes were long and bony, almost fingerlike.
Without looking at her, he put down the book and led the way, still shoeless, to the shed. The swarm was wrapped around a lamp to the right of the shed door. She let Tilden hold the smoker while she got it down. As they worked, she asked what he planned to do when he got out of college. Small talk, but she felt he needed a little attention. The mother had died of breast cancer three years before; she knew he’d been closer to the mother than the father.
“I won’t farm,” he said. “I don’t like cows. I don’t like stinking barns.”
“You like the smell of diesel fuel and old engines,” she teased. He started to smile, but then frowned, as though the smile might be used against him. “You could start your own business, then. Sell cars?”
“Not if I graduate college. I’ll have to sell insurance or something.”
“Your dad would want you to do that?”
“It’d be my decision!” Tilden rose to the defense of his father.
“Well, then. You know what you’ll have to do.”
He didn’t respond, so she changed the subject to a more controversial one. “Your father wants me to sell my land so he can have a bigger farm. What do you think?”
“Dad wants it for Sidney. Dad loves the farm. It’s important to him.”
“The land is important to us, too. It belonged to my father— his father before him. I want to pass it on to Donna and Brownie.” She thought of the grave site, but decided not to mention it. Though it was no secret; there’d been a piece about it in the local paper a few years back.
Tilden walked on ahead. His father was rumbling up on his tractor, and the boy looked nervous. “She asked me to help,” he told Harvey, backing away as though he’d done something wrong. “I had to show her where the swarm was.”
“You’re not in class,” his father said, the dark brows clouding his eyes.
“Dad, I don’t have a ten o’clock. I’m going now.” The boy turned on his heel with a withering glance at Gwen as though it were her fault he wasn’t in class. He might have helped her back to the truck with the smoker, she thought, but then, the father’s appearance had changed the atmosphere.
She picked up the smoker, started back to her pickup. She could hear Harvey behind her—she could smell him, he’d been spreading manure. She moved resolutely along, but then he planted his bulk between her and the driver’s-side door. “I didn’t like it,” he said. “I needed a special tool of mine. Damn bees wouldn’t let me in.”
“Of course they would. Bees are benign when they’re swarming.” She waited for him to move so she could get into her truck.
“Quiet, is it? I got two stings. Here—and here.” He indicated his forehead, where there was a slight inflammation.
“You must have angered them. Harvey, I have to go now. Please.”
He moved aside and she climbed in. But he held on to the door handle. “I could go to the police. Tell them you planted that marijuana again. Even after they made you pull it up. Oh, yes, I saw. It was in a jar behind your house.”
“You were spying! You had no right.” The anger was up in her throat now, she was choking with it. She started the truck. She’d drag him along if he didn’t let go of her door handle.
“Sell!” he cried. “I’ll give you a good price. Only a hundred twenty-five thousand. How’s that? That’s a fair price. You don’t need all that land. You don�
�t use it right. You can keep the bees and live somewhere else. Down in the village. Some other place. Sell and I won’t tell the police who dragged that boy to the nightshade. Who left him to die there.”
“What?” Her foot trembled on the clutch.
“Sure. It was my son saw him. Ralphie. Ralphie can’t sleep on a full moon night. He was out walking, edge of our property. He saw a “shiny man,” he said, dragging that boy along. It was your husband.”
“No! How can you say that? Ralphie meant buttercups, that’s what he meant by ‘shiny.’ I pointed at them, and he nodded.”
“That getup your husband wears. All that silver. It shines in moonlight. You bet it does. Ralphie? Come over here, Ralphie.”
The little Mongoloid trotted over, smiling. “Shiny,” he said, “Ralphie see a shiny.”
“Shiny man, you said,” Harvey coaxed. “Shiny man. Right, Ralphie? Say it now.”
But Ralphie ran off, giggling. “Shiny,” he called back stubbornly, and his father’s ears reddened.
Russell was covered with silver, it was true, when he was wearing his full regalia. But that night, he’d been sleeping in the nude—except, of course, for the earrings he seldom removed, maybe an armband or two, she couldn’t remember. But why on earth would he have gone out stark naked?
“Russell was in Buffalo,” she said, going out on a limb. “You couldn’t have seen him.”
But Harvey just smiled. “Farmers are up early. We run out of orange juice—Ralphie had a cold. I went to that convenience store down in the village. Passed your husband, oh, yes, coming back up the road. He was just leaving your place quarter of six. Shiny man, you bet.”
She pressed down on the gas and the truck lurched forward. For a moment Harvey ran along with it, his hands still on the door handle. Finally he dropped off, shouting, “A good price, a fair price! And the police won’t know.”
She didn’t answer—couldn’t! She bumped down the stony driveway to the main road, tears crowding her eyes like angry bees.
“You’ll be sorry,” he hollered after. “By Christ, you’ll live to regret it!”
Chapter Eleven
Colm and Ruth had divided up today’s visits—Camille’s murder had goaded Ruth into action. This time she’d known the victim, bonded with her—so had Emily. Colm was to interview the four remaining male students in Camille’s sociology class, then follow up two leads from the professor’s date book: the director of the Brookview Reformatory and a Eugene Godineaux family in Ripton. Ruth was off to see the Petits, the foster family who had taken in Tim’s Joey, then chat with several girls from the sociology class. She dreaded those interviews. The young women were still in shock; according to Emily, they were lined up daily to see the college counselors.
The Petits, she found, had moved from Branbury to Winooski, Vermont, a mill town where Thaddeus Petit, a construction worker, had found a more lucrative job. “So we ended up here. And I don’t take in foster kids no more,” said Mabel Petit, who was “thrilled” to hear about “my darling Joey. He was the sweetest kid when we got him, never a bit of trouble—well, hardly ever, kids being kids. But,” she added, tapping a finger on her temples, “missing a couple of bricks, you know.”
She gave a tinkling laugh. She was a tinkling kind of woman, a dozen colored bracelets hanging from her arms, and dangly glass earrings that kept tangling up with her orange hair. She’d extricate them with her orange nails and say, “Ooh, ouch!”
After the amenities, the tour of the small two-bedroom house that was filled top to bottom with trinkets, Ruth settled in with a cup of tea and told Mabel about Camille Wimmet’s visit to see Joey, and then her death by strangulation.
“Oh, my gawd,” Mabel bawled, “I saw about it on TV. How awful, the poor woman! Who you think would of done such a thing?”
“That’s what we’d like to know. That’s why I’m here.” And when Mabel said, “Ooh, ooh,” again, and shrank back into her overstaffed chair, Ruth said, “I mean, it’s because of Joey being a Godineaux. The name might hold a clue. Can you tell me about Joey’s parents?”
Mabel was cautious. She pulled back her shoulders, examined her fingernails. “I’m not supposed to say. I mean, they didn’t tell me much. Really.”
“But you know something,” Ruth urged, holding the woman’s eyes with her own.
Mabel swallowed up her lower lip with her yellowish teeth and considered. “We-ell,” she said, “we-11, Godineaux was the mother’s name. The father run off, you see, before Joey was born—I mean, they never married, Joey’s parents.”
“Do you know the father’s name?” Ruth leaned forward. Somehow the male line seemed important, she didn’t know why. Though, to tell the truth, she was wholly in the dark. She didn’t know what she was searching for.
Wincing, Mabel pulled out another hair from her earring. “I’d tell you, hon, if I did, but I don’t, I just don’t. You’ll have to go talk to the foster child agency. You know, where I got the kids from? In Argennes? Gawd, I forget the name of the woman what runs it. I’m going through menopause now, you know.” She lowered her voice, leaned forward confidentially. “I get these hot flashes. I sweat in the sheets at night, my belly’s a balloon, you know what I mean?”
Ruth sucked in her stomach. She was wearing a skirt in deference to the visit—a striped cotton one that billowed out in front. Yes, she did know what it was to go through menopause: the heavy periods, the hot and cold nights. But she wasn’t about to discuss it with this woman. She nodded, in compromise. “Can I call you for that address—that name? I have to get back to my farm. Your Joey is there with my foreman—he’s a big help. You brought him up right.”
Mabel grinned. She’d just remembered the caseworker’s name. “Evangeline Balinsky. You can look the number up. I got my foster kids from different places, you see. Some of ’em Catholic like Evangeline’s, some not. I can’t remember them all.”
“Of course not.” Ruth smiled through a cup of Lipton’s tea, fifteen minutes more of conversation that yielded no rewards, then took her leave, smoothing down her puffy skirt—there was too much fabric. She made a mental note to give the skirt to Sharon, who was smaller-hipped than herself. From now on she’d stick to pants.
On her way back, she stopped in a used clothing store called Neat Repeats and bought a pair of black cotton jeans for $5.50. She looked pounds thinner in them. In the store mirror she wiped off the lipstick she’d rubbed on before the interview. Now she was Ruth again, ready to take on the college women.
She was halfway home when she realized she’d left the striped skirt in the store’s dressing room. Oh, well, she thought, skimming down Route 7 past red barns and open land rimmed with mountains, Sharon wouldn’t have liked that skirt, either.
Ruth was glad to get home after her hour’s meeting with the female sociology students. It had been a dead end, the girls still teary-eyed, blank when it came to any motive for the murder. They were saddened for Camille; they were worried for themselves—a killer was on the loose. It worried Ruth as well, to tell the truth: for herself, for her family. The grandchildren were in the pasture when she arrived, picking buttercups that stained their noses a bright yellow. Robbie ran at her with a bunch; the stems were crushed in his small hands. Not to be outdone, little Willa raced after him, thrust a dozen blossoms in Ruth’s arms. All heads, with no stems.
“Put them in water, Nana,” Robbie urged. The boy knew how to make things live. It was a comforting thought. She shepherded the children into the kitchen, gave them hugs and juice. Sharon was there in the usual outrageous getup: tall green rubber boots and blue long Johns under the purple skirt, an embroidered vest, and an Indian cotton blouse. Her heavy brown hair was pinned up on one side of her head, hanging straight and bushy on the other. Ruth embraced her. She was the perfect antidote for Mabel Petit.
“Colm called. He’s coming over at seven,” Sharon informed her. Sharon was always trying to get her mother together with Colm; she didn’t like Ruth living al
one. Ruth didn’t know which was worse: Sharon pushing her toward Colm or Emily trying to respark a burned candle with her ex-husband, Pete. Although Emily had cooled in that regard since Pete’s efforts to make her buy back his portion of the farm.
“He say anything else?” Ruth dropped her jacket on a chair. Sharon eyed her mother’s new black jeans. “Mother, they use a shoe horn to get you into those?”
Ruth was offended. “They’re a perfect fit.” She sucked in her stomach and pulled on a sweater. Admittedly the jeans were a little tight when she bent over. She’d change before Colm arrived. She didn’t need his opinion, too.
Sharon smiled snidely and hollered at the children, who were pounding up and down the stairs. “Oh, and earlier there was a call from Gwen Woodleaf. She wants you to sound out my Jack, see if he’ll testify for her next Tuesday. About how those bruises could come from the nightshade. I told her he would, but she wants you to call him. Mom, I have to go. Jack’s coming home. It’s my night to cook.”
“Tofu stroganoff with seaweed?” It was her turn to tease her vegetarian daughter.
“Nah. A tempeh stir fry.”
“Yuck,” said Ruth, who, though she’d given up on red meat— partly because it might be one of her slaughtered bull calves— still preferred fowl and fish to soy and seaweed.
When Sharon and the children left, it was like a storm gone out to sea. It was still early for milking, so she fixed herself a cup of peppermint tea, breathed in the steam—she might be on the verge of a cold. She relished these few moments of peace, alone in the house. Vic would be home from school late, he had softball practice. Of course, Emily might pop in at any time, depending on whether or not she needed something: an article of clothing, a book, Mom’s shoulder to wax indignant or bereaved on. She’d given Ruth an earful about her latest encounter with Billy Bozeman. Emily was convinced it was disgruntled fraternity boys responsible for the graffiti, even the damage to Gwen’s bees. She might have a point, Ruth thought. In college, Ruth had stayed clear of the fraternities, except for an occasional foray into Pete’s frat that had wholly abashed her. Too much rah-rah. Too much booze. Too much grabbing ass.
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