Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  “Don’t you say that! I took you in. You could of gone to a foster home. I give you a roof over your head. You’re ungrateful. Ungrateful little biddy.”

  Jill appealed to Donna. “She goes on like that all day. You see why I dye my hair? Gotta have somethin’ in my life. Some-thin’ to make me forget... her.” She pointed at the old woman.

  Emily appeared in the doorway, her face anxious. “It’s all right,” Donna told her, “I was about to leave. I’ve got the beads. I just have to know one thing more.” She turned back to Jill. “Who gave them to you? What boy? He’s the one stole our princess. He’s got her. You tell me or I’m definitely going to the police.”

  “Princess!” Jill gave a sneering laugh. “It was just some old Indian skeleton, he told me. Who cares about a pile of old bones? The police won’t.”

  Emily went to the phone, and Jill grabbed her wrist. “You put that down, damn it. You’re not calling no police.”

  “They might want to know ’bout that hair dryer you stole at Ames,” the grandmother said, grinning.

  “Shut up. Just shut up!” Jill cried, wheeling about to accost her grandmother. Hearing Emily start to dial. the girl spun back. “All right. All right, I’ll tell you. But you tell him you made me. You threatened me. He’s got something on me.”

  Emily waited, the phone buzzing in her hand. Donna stared into Jill’s eyes. “Tell the truth and we’ll help you. We’ll tell the police you had nothing to do with the theft.”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t have nothing to do with it! It was Tilden done it, he seen me stealing that hair dryer, said he wanted to sleep with me, he’d give me the beads. Jeez, he was a nerd. But he said he’d tell the cops about the hair dryer if I told him about him stealing those bones. Why’d he do it anyway? I asked. He had his reasons, he said.”

  Jill sank back into the armchair, her feet splayed wide on the linoleum floor.

  “Tilden Ball?” said Donna, “You must mean the father—Harvey Ball?”

  “Tilden,” the girl said, crossing her arms hard over her chest. “Why would I go to bed with some old man? It was Tilden. He been after me a long time. Just looking at me, not saying nothing. Till that time he showed me the beads, said they was worth something. Like I could sell ’em somewhere if I wanted, and keep the money. So—I said I’d sleep with him.” There were bitter tears in the girl’s eyes. She pressed her lips together, hard, until they looked bleached, like lumpy flour.

  When Donna and Emily turned to leave, she jumped up. “You keep your promise, now. Don’t you say nothing to the police about me taking that dryer! It’s a lousy one anyway—they can have it back. Don’t you tell Tilden Ball neither I told on him. Tell him you grabbed the beads off my neck, that’s all. Tell him I fought back. I did, too.”

  “Sure,” Donna said, feeling the scratches flame up on her neck, “you did.” She banged the trailer door shut behind herself and Emily.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ruth was at the kitchen table bent over a spread map of New Hampshire; a bottle of iodine stood on one corner to keep the ends from curling up. She’d used the iodine on Donna; the girl had gotten scratched by a high school girl—Ruth was glad Emily hadn’t gotten wholly involved in the fracas over the stolen beads. But Ruth had made Donna promise not to go after Tilden herself. “It’s a matter for the police, not you,” she’d warned, seeing the wild look in the girl’s eye. “Your parents will see to it—your mother’s policeman friend.”

  Finally Donna had agreed. She would spend the night in Emily’s dorm, the roommate being away.

  Ruth had been phoning the town clerks and chambers of commerce in all the New Hampshire towns that began with A, looking for a Pauline Godineaux. It could take weeks. Did she really want to do this? But Camille Wimmet had asked for her help. And Ruth was going to give it, no matter how long it took.

  Andover, Antrim, Albany, Amherst—she wasn’t through the list and already she’d counted eight A names. It was ridiculous. The New Hampshire border itself was an hour’s drive from Branbury. How was she going to find time to do this?

  She left the map on the table and got up to call Colm, with no luck. She left messages with his office secretary and his father, and then went out to prep the cows.

  But she could hardly concentrate on the task, thinking of tomorrow morning’s trip. Would she go it alone? Colm had been so ambiguous, she couldn’t count on him. “Tim,” she called. The hired man was herding in the cows, his cowboy hat tipped back on his head. She tilted her head and smiled at him.

  “Go ahead,” he hollered. “You’ve got that look. You’ve got some damn fool thing to do, I can smell it. Tonight, tomorrow, I don’t care.”

  ‘‘Tomorrow morning,” she said. “Right after milking. I’ll be back for evening chores.”

  “No sweat. But look, Ruth—Joey here doesn’t have to know where his relatives are. He’s got me, right, Joey? You got this old beat-up guy for a dad now?”

  “Thath’s right, I got you for a dad,” Joey lisped, and gave Tim a punch in the arm.

  “Watch it there, man,” said Tim. “You got a mean left hook. I’m gettin’ old. Christ, I’m one of these baby boomers, we’re all in our fifties now.”

  “Do you have to remind me?” Ruth called back.

  “Send Vic down here, we can use him to feed the calves, okay? Keep the kid out of trouble.”

  “Vic?” she called, running back to the house. “Get your arse down to the barn. Tim needs your help. And Vic, I’m leaving in the morning for New Hampshire. I’ll be back for evening milking. I’ll ask Sharon to be here in case I’m late. Okay?”

  “Not again?” Vic hollered down the stairs. “You’re always taking off. You’re always going somewhere. Why do you keep this farm anyway?”

  The question hung with her as she rolled up her map. Her youngest was growing up. Her pillowcase was soaked at night from the hot flashes. She could take estrogen, but how costly was that? How safe? She had these children to herd through their lives.

  She’d have to think that question through. But who could think around here? Not when the phone was ringing off the hook.

  “Hey, Ruthie,” Colm said in his real estate office, “I got your message. I been out walking land—nice day for it, huh? You really heading out tomorrow? You need a driver?”

  “No, but I’ll take on a passenger if you want to come. I found a Pauline Godineaux—or Godineau—or Gaudineau—in five of the towns. We leave first thing in the morning, after milking.”

  “Jeez,” Colm said. “Milking’s at, what—four-thirty?”

  “It’ll be over by six.”

  “Six-thirty?” he begged.

  “All right, pick me up at six-thirty. I want to see Vic ready for school anyway. We’ll go in your car. Emily has the pickup.”

  She put down the phone and picked it up again on the first ring. This time it was Gwen, looking for Donna, needing her help with supper—she was going out to Glenna Flint’s again. “There’s another swarm there—this time by her clothesline. The bees won’t let her unpin her underwear.”

  Ruth laughed and explained that Donna was spending the night at Emily’s. “She said she’d call you. She has some news you’ll be interested to hear, but I’ll let her tell you.”

  “She probably passed that chemistry test she was worried about. Mert will have to make his own supper, then—another peanut butter and honey sandwich, I’m afraid.” Gwen was on her way then, apologizing for the hurry, and both hung up.

  * * * *

  Donna rode back from the Willmarths’ in a state of high adrenaline. She was excited and angry all at once. She rode right past her own place, where Brownie was out pitching a tennis ball at the side of the house, and on up to the Balls’. She was going to see Tilden. She was going to bring back the girl skeleton. She imagined the joy her father would get from having his princess back. She’d thought about telling him first, of course, but then she’d decided against it; he would only rush up there and threaten T
ilden, the father would call the police, and they’d all be in trouble again.

  Whereas she would approach Tilden slowly, tell him what she knew, what Jill had told her—explain that she’d forced it out of Jill. He wasn’t to touch that girl, no, not one more time. Then she’d ask for the bones. If he balked, why, then she would call Uncle Olen.

  Tilden was there in shorts, working on his car. His long skinny legs were sticking out from under the chassis. Painted in red on the back end of the car was a huge angry-looking bee. Hearing her approach, he wriggled out from under, saw her looking at the bee, grinned up at her. “Killer bee,” he said.

  She leaned her bike against a tree, held out the beads—her hands glowed coppery red with them. She assumed a stance, legs apart, her demeanor cool, her heart bearing like ten drums. She looked him in the eye for a long moment. Then she said, “Beads. Beads you stole. Where is she?”

  He stopped grinning then, his eyes narrowed. “Where’s who?” But his eyes were fixed on the copper beads. She took a step closer, one hand on her hip, the other holding out the unstrung beads. “I said, where is she, Tilden? I know you took the skeleton girl. I have proof. I have a witness. You can’t hide it.”

  He stood there, like a tiger ready to spring. She saw the yellowish irises of his dilated eyes. He seemed to be baring his teeth. He was on something, she could tell that. She was suddenly afraid of him. But she couldn’t back off, not now. Her feet wouldn’t budge from the patch of grass they were sinking into.

  “If you won’t tell me, I’ll call the police.” Her voice was thin, like a plucked harp string. She managed to turn about, toward her bike.

  And felt his hands on her. He wrenched her toward him. “Come on, then,” he said, his voice sounding strangled. “She’s in the forest. I’ll show you.”

  “Let me go!”

  “All right, then. But get in the car. I’ll take you there. You’ll get the bones back. Come on, then.”

  She didn’t like the sound of his voice—there was something cold in its timbre. She hesitated. The sun glinted off the car and shocked her eye. There was a green smear on the passenger door. She squinted. It was the lime-green paint of her bicycle. Her heart froze in her chest.

  “It was you. You were the one who tried to run me down. You could have killed me! You’ll go to jail for that, oh, yes, you will.” She sprang at him, pummeled his chest. He fought back, got her in a headlock, pulled her toward the car, shoved her in, into the backseat, which had no doors; and the car roared forward, sounding furious, like a killer bee, up the road and on into the wilderness of the Green Mountain Forest.

  * * * *

  The Pauline Godineaux of Alexandria, New Hampshire, turned out to be a nine-year-old girl running a lemonade stand. Her birth name, she told them, was Mathilde, after her father’s mother; she’d changed it to Pauline and her mother went along. “Anyway, my dad’s gone now. He had an attack.” She clapped a hand to her heart, and Ruth said, “Oh.”

  They bought two paper cups of lemonade from her, watched eagerly by the brown-braided child, for whom they were the first customers. “It’s really yellow Kool-Aid,” the girl allowed after they’d swallowed it down, and giggled at her ruse. Ruth slipped her an extra quarter anyway; the Kool-Aid had quelled her thirst.

  The Pauline Godineau of Acworth, twenty miles south, was a waitress at a local diner—her overweight, octogenarian mother directed them there: “But they’s awful busy this time of day. They don’t like it you try to talk personal.”

  “We’ll be discreet,” Colm assured her, but she shouted after them, “Pauline can’t afford to lose her job. You mind what I said, now.”

  “We’ll order something and sneak in a question or two,” Ruth told Colm. She could use a bit of nourishment; she’d only downed a glass of orange juice before Colm arrived at six-twenty-nine. “But you don’t have to go overboard,” she warned when Colm ordered bacon well done, three eggs sunnyside up, and then a serving of Belgian waffles.

  “She’s too young,” Colm observed when the waitress dashed off with their order. This Pauline’s hair was dyed an orangy red, lips to match.

  “Look deep. Under the makeup. She could be in her sixties,” Ruth whispered. But the woman wasn’t about to divulge her age, and no, she’d never, ever been in Vermont, she said in her crisp waitress voice that betrayed a slight Southern accent. “You on the wrong track here, folks. You want decaf or regular?”

  “Regular,” they echoed, and Ruth thought of Tim and Joey struggling with the post-milking chores while she sat watching Colm drown his waffles in maple syrup and then gulp down every saturated hunk, without once looking up.

  She tried to make conversation, brought up Tilden Ball. “He’s the one who dug up that grave, and stole the copper beads—or at least the girls are pretty sure he did.” She told him about the visit to Jill’s trailer. “Did you ever speak with Tilden? He was on Camille’s class list.”

  He mumbled something through his waffle.

  “Speak up, please.”

  “Leshbian,” he said, swallowing. “He called the professor a lesbian, he’d seen her going into some bar in Burlington, he said—early last fall. She had her arm around another woman.”

  Ruth had heard about Camille’s sexual orientation from Gwen. “How awful, to be spied on. I suppose he spread it around—that he’d seen her.”

  “I suppose.”

  “That adds another dimension to the case, doesn’t it? It could be a hate crime, this murder. Hate crimes have increased in the state, I read, since the civil union legislation. All those TAKE BACK VERMONT signs?”

  “They’re not just about the civil union thing, you said that yourself.”

  “No, but for some people they are.” She kept her eyes on him while he finished his waffles. “So what do you make out of all this? Camille’s lesbianism—and then the theft of the skeleton. Where does it all fit in?”

  Colm looked thoughtful. “Could be a motive—I don’t know. We’ll have to look into it. The bones thing, though—probably just a prank. So we’ll bring him into the station, give him a good scare. Look, Ruthie, we’re here. This was your idea, not mine. So let’s get on with it.”

  “Then let’s go,” she said, and tapped her fingers on the table while he slurped the last of the heavily creamed coffee. She’d go crazy living with this fellow, who even chewed his ice cream twenty times—a legacy from his mother.

  Colm was unruffled by her impatience. He’d live to be one hundred, she told him, and he laughed and said he hoped not— “unless you’ll be around, too.” He picked up the check.

  “We’ll split it,” she said quickly. It was a small way to retain her independence.

  “Why can’t you let me do something for you?” His hand was still covering the check. “I’m not trying to own you, for chris-sake.”

  But she was already in his debt. He’d lent her money toward the farm payment. That was enough, without owing him breakfast. She slapped down a five-dollar bill and stood up. “I’ll pee, then meet you in the car.”

  Even then she had to wait five minutes for him.

  * * * *

  By early afternoon they’d gone through two more dead ends in Ashuelot, Alton, and Alton Bay. None of the Paulines were the right age, none had relatives named Pauline or knew of any in the area. They were driving in circles, it seemed, skirting lakes and mountains where snow still filled the deep crevices of earth and swamped the crocuses and narcissi poking up through. “Granite outcroppings,” she described the landscape, recalling the novel Ethan Frame—it had been her English teacher’s favorite novel, back in high school. It was deeply depressing, she recalled: that miserable Zeena crowing over the crippled lovers in the end. She’d never name a cow Zeena. She wouldn’t let the animal carry that crabbed image.

  Of course, Colm wanted a hot turkey sandwich and french fries at one o’clock in Concord, just off the Thruway 89, and then a hot chocolate break at three. They had visited Amherst and Atkinson in the sou
thwestern part of the state, both no-shows, and now veered north to Auburn, where the Pauline Godineau, again without the “x,” turned out to be a voluptuous thirty-something brunette, tending bar in a lounge on the outskirts of town. It was already five o’clock and the place had just opened. Colm had to have a drink, and this time Ruth lost her cool.

  “Why’re we staying?” she cried. “This isn’t the woman we’re looking for—she’s too young. You don’t need a drink. You can have one when we get back to Branbury.” And then, “No, I won’t sit down, damn it” when Colm patted the stool next to him. “Get up off that stool, Colm Hanna, and take me home. We should have driven my pickup.” She was close to tears now, it had been such a frustrating day. All those Paulines who had nothing to do with what she was looking for—whatever that was—and Colm acting like a—a lush, she thought, as the Pauline behind the bar slung a beer in his direction.

  “Then I’ll drive,” she said, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. “And I’ll take us straight home. I give up on Pauline and Nicole and all those other blooming Godineauxs. I give up on the whole damn case. I can’t keep wasting my time.”

  “Nicole?” said the bartender, hanging over the counter, her long dark hair spilling onto the polished wood. One could see she was a leaner, the way her shoulders slanted forward even when she stood up to mix a drink. “I got a relative named Nicole. Lived in Vermont, don’t you know. Some kind of great-aunt—she’d be in her eighties now.”

  Ruth felt a shiver of recognition run down her spine. “Alive? You knew Nicole? But I was told—”

  “Dead, yeah,” said Pauline the bartender. “I mean, she’d be in her eighties if she’d lived. Golly, it’s hard to keep track of all the relatives. But Annette’s still perking. Imagine! At a hundred years old. Sure, my mom goes to see her. My mom’s from her son Andre’s side. His was the good side. Stayed out of jail, you know. Old Annette, she had a tough life.”

  “Still alive, really?” Ruth mused, and ordered a beer—why not? They didn’t have Otter Creek Ale, but anything would do, just to keep this woman talking. Something good had to come from this trip away from home.