“Damn right, he can’t,” Russell growled, the bundle still gripped against his chest. He didn’t seem bothered that Olen was seeing him this way, the tears glazing his black eyes. He had his princess, he wanted to go home, return her to her proper grave, restore order. He didn’t yet know about Donna, Gwen realized, he didn’t know she was missing.
When she told him, he howled like a banshee and Olen had to restrain him. “Find her, Ashley, goddam it,” Russell moaned. “Get out the sirens. Just find her.” For the first time since he’d known Olen, his hands gripped the older man’s arms. His eyes begged.
A cry came from the direction of the woods, and Sidney Ball appeared in the doorway, pulling along a distraught Tilden. “He was hiding in the tree hut,” he told his father. “You gotta face up,” he warned his brother, “You gotta tell them what you told me.” Sidney’s face took on a stiff-lipped aura of self-righteousness.
Tilden’s face went dead white at the sight of the two policemen; he broke from his brother’s grasp and ran to his father, embracing him. “For you, Dad, that’s why I did it. For you! I thought you’d want it, I thought you’d be glad.” When his father didn’t return the embrace, he dropped, sobbing, at his feet.
“For chrissake, be a man,” Harvey bellowed, yanking his son up by the armpits. “What made you think I’d of wanted you to do that? Dig up a goddam grave? You thought that’d help? Now you only made things worse. I was getting what I wanted, in my own way.” He shoved the boy toward Olen. “Here’s your thief.” But the boy only sank down again at his father’s feet.
And was jerked up by an irate Russell. “Where’s Donna? Where’s my girl? What’ve you done with her?”
“How’d I know where she is?” Tilden blinked up into Russell’s eyes, his face a mask. He’s like a marionette, Gwen thought, pulled by his father’s strings—but he’d suddenly snapped out of control.
“Let me,” she told Russell, pulling the boy around to face her, stronger than she knew herself to be. “Brownie saw Donna hiking up this way. She was coming to find you, to bring back our skeleton girl. You intercepted her, didn’t you? Well, didn’t you?”
She saw Olen beyond the boy’s shoulder, his mouth open, almost panting, like he wanted to get at the boy and she was interfering. Wait, her narrowed eyes told him.
She was screaming inside now. “If you hurt her, Tilden—if you did anything to harm her in any way—I’ll kill you myself, I swear I will. Now tell me. Where’s Donna?”
“Up there,” he said, waving an arm toward the north. “In the camp—Dad’s hunting cabin. I drove her up, she was going crazy, accusing me of... all kinds of things. I couldn’t have her doing that. I just wanted to reason with her. I wanted to make her understand.” The sweat was streaming off his brow, soaking his T-shirt. He wiped his forehead with a hand, smearing the dirt and ash.
“Where’s this cabin? You lock her in?” It was Russell’s turn to yank him back. Tilden was taller than Russell by two or three inches but seemed smaller in his guilt.
“I was coming down to get food for us, that’s why. Then I was planning to let her go. Sure, I was, I—” He was trying to swallow, as though he had a huge lump in his throat that wouldn’t go down.
“Where’s that camp?” Olen demanded of Harvey.
It was Sidney who answered, sounding anxious, paranoid, as though he were guilty himself because his brother was guilty. “I can show you. I’ll take you up. I got the truck outside.” He ran out the door, Russell after him.
“Wait, Russ, I’m coming,” Gwen cried, but the two were already out, the truck revving up.
“Hammer! Go with them,” Olen shouted at his fellow officer, and the latter jumped into the back of the moving truck.
“I was trying to make her understand, why I did it, why I ran her down that time—I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
“It was you!” Gwen cried. “She called it an accident. All the time it was you. What else—what else did you do, Tilden? What other things that have happened around here? Omigod! I don’t want to think...”
Olen yelped, his face suffused with red, a match for Tilden’s. “You tried to run down that girl? What in hell you think you were doing, you little son of a bitch!” It was like a light breaking in front of Olen’s eyes. “The fire in Gwen’s truck. The hate calls—was that you, Ball? Was that you? And what about that teacher? You were in her class. You were failing the course, right? What’d you do then, did you—”
“No, no!” Tilden cried. “I never. Not that. I never!”
Olen slapped a pair of handcuffs on the boy, turned to Gwen. “We’ll find out what he’s done. He’ll tell us, all right. You’ll tell us everything, won’t you, Ball? What else, who else you hurt?”
Harvey Ball was pressed against the wall, his mouth slightly open; he was rocking on his feet, as though trying to get words out. Finally he pitched forward, gripped his son’s shoulder. “You tell him, boy. You tell him what you did. Wasn’t that bad, was it? Stealing some old bones? You didn’t try to hurt the girl, did you? Tell me you didn’t do that. No son of mine would hurt a girl.”
Tilden shrank away, refusing to make eye contact. He stared down at the handcuffs, like an animal caught in a trap, not comprehending where the trap had come from.
“Olen,” Gwen said, “I want to find Donna. Make him take us up there.”
“I have to take him to headquarters, Gwen. Then I’ll be back. You go home now. Sergeant Hammer has gone after the girl, and your husband’s with her.” He started out the door, shoving the boy ahead of him, slamming the car door on him. She heard the cruiser pull away.
Harvey stood looking after it, hands dropped at his sides like a man who had lost a race. Ralphie was whimpering. He hugged his father around the knees, and Harvey gathered him up in his bulky arms. There was love enough for that one, anyhow.
“Take me to the cabin,” she told Harvey; and sighing, pushing Ralphie off with a pat on the buttocks, Harvey started out the door.
But when they got there a quarter of an hour later, the cabin was empty. There were only a pair of dirty mattresses on the floor, a broken rocking chair, a board on two sawhorses to serve as table. She gasped. On the table was a package of Africanized bees. Killer bees! What was Tilden planning to do with those? All it took, she knew, was a lawn mower, operating within one hundred feet of a hive, to set killer bees off.
Behind the package she saw a familiar jacket. She held it up, hugged it. It was Donna’s denim jacket. “Where are you, sweetheart?” she cried, squeezing the fabric. “Oh, Donna, love . . .”
She ran outdoors with the jacket. Donna was out there somewhere. She’d escaped, she’d gotten disoriented; she was lost. She was hurt—there were bears, snakes, fisher cats lurking about. Gwen’s mind spun out disasters. “Donna!” she shrieked. “Russell! Oh, please, please, answer me!”
* * * *
Ruth woke up, disoriented. This wasn’t her room, the windows were in the wrong place; there was a large homely TV across from the bed—a king-sized bed. Someone was in it with her. He lay there on his back, in deep sleep, his salt-and-pepper hair like a bird’s nest—why, there was even a tiny piece of leaf stuck in it! His skin was slack from sleep—she saw the coarse hairs on his chin and cheeks where he hadn’t shaved, his arms bent back at the elbows the way a child sleeps, the breath wheezing like a bicycle unwinding from a long ride. She had never seen him like this, it was quite wonderful. He’d kicked off the sheet, yet his body was warm to the touch. It appeared lean and hard, any excess flesh fallen to the sides.
She stroked his belly. How long it had been. For months, even before Pete left, while he was fooling around with that “actress,” there had been little sex. She lay back down, already delighting in the feel of a body next to hers, touching, both of them at peace. There was the familiar fullness in her groin, from urine, from lovemaking. She and Colm were like the two half-empty wine bottles that stood on top of the TV. She changed the wording: no, they were half full.<
br />
Then she remembered the cows and sat up. “Colm!”
“Wha’?” His eyes squeezed open a crack.
“Who’s doing the prepping? Who’ll help with the milking?”
He groaned, rubbed his eyes. “The what? Oh, you ’member. You called home. Sharon’ll help. Ruthie, stay in bed a little longer, huh?” He touched her breast and she sighed. It was all right, then, she could have this time out. It had been months since she’d had a day away from the cows. She nestled into her lover’s armpits, closed her eyes... .
When she opened them again she saw it was nine o’clock. “That woman, Annette. The reason we’re here. I’ve got to see her.” She struggled out of bed, stood on the bland gray carpet. Gasped. There she was in the dresser mirror, stark naked—she hadn’t brought a nightgown. Her hair was wild, “like a middle-aged nymph,” he told her, and she flung a pillow at him. She sucked in her belly. Was he still looking at her? She flushed like a sixteen-year-old. His watery blue eyes smiled back at her in the mirror.
“Annette’s not going anywhere. You know what that hair woman said. She never goes out. Come back to bed.” He held out his arms.
“I should phone her, at least. Would she be in the book?” She pulled on day-old panties, her bra; looked under the Gideon Bible for the phone book.
“Jeez, Ruthie, the phone’s unlisted. Remember? You’ll just have to go there, that’s all. But first eggs and bacon, okay? Couple of Belgian waffles?”
Ruth was all business now. The honeymoon was over. “Go have your Belgian waffles—they’ll keep your stomach occupied while I talk to the old lady. Or try to talk to her. I’ll grab some coffee out in the lobby. You can save me a doughnut.”
“Waffles?” he said, looking dreamy-eyed. But before she could pull on her shirt, a little sweaty from yesterday’s running around, Colm was beside her, holding her, stroking. “You gotta live a little. You can’t work all the time. Lie down couple more minutes. Just a couple, okay? Time out, Ruthie. We don’t get many chances like this. Sharon’s there, so’s Tim. Please, Ruthie?”
His hands were on her back. She let him unhook her bra, pull her back down to the bed. Time out, time out, she told herself, and took it. Even enjoyed it.
* * * *
Gwen was pacing the kitchen floor when the phone rang. A search party was out looking for Donna: police, neighbors, scouts—Russell, Mert, and Brownie, too. Her job now was to stay by the phone in case Donna had blundered into a house, called home. Breathless, she grabbed up the receiver. “Yes?”
“Ms, Woodleaf? It’s Sergeant Hammer. You remember me, I was—”
“What is it? You’ve found Donna?”
“I’m afraid not, I mean, I don’t know. They’ve got me down here at the station. I’m calling because Chief Fallon thought you should know we found out about the fingerprints.”
Gwen waited. What fingerprints? She had no idea what the sergeant was talking about.
“In two places. On that pack of Juicy Fruit gum we found on the floor at the teacher’s place. And then on the living room window.” The voice was high-pitched, gaining in confidence. Gwen waited for the officer to make her point.
“And?” There was no time to waste. One of the searchers might be calling at this very moment, to say they’d found Donna.
“Well, they’re Tilden Ball’s.”
The voice went on for a few more sentences, but she couldn’t seem to concentrate. Tilden Ball, a killer?
Alarm bells rang in her head. Tilden had tried to run Donna down, hadn’t he? He’d admitted that. And now Donna was missing. Had he hurt her? Had he—no, no, she couldn’t think the word, or say it.
She hung up, held on to a kitchen chair. She knew now what it was to be helpless. She might as well be handcuffed, bound to the chair, for all the good she could do. She could only wait— and worry.
Chapter Seventeen
It was ten o’clock when Ruth arrived at the yellow trailer halfway up Bradley Hill and parked in the dirt driveway behind a dented black Honda. She’d gotten lost, had to ask directions in the country store, even though the town of Andover was small, strictly rural, except for the private academy at its center, bustling with boys and girls, who seemed to live in a kind of treasure island of their own.
The trailer was set back from the road, with no houses in sight on either side. It was in desperate need of a coat of paint. A porch had been built onto the front, too large for the trailer, like a sketch of what might have been. A pair of peeling green rocking chairs stood at one side of the front door, a rusted yellow swing on the other. A clump of daffodils nodded in a front garden; honeybees hummed in the unmown grass. Behind the house the woods were dark with evergreens and ancient-looking oaks. Through them she saw the glimmer of a pond. It’s the right place, Ruth thought, for a woman who doesn’t want neighbors nosing into her past.
She knocked, and after a few minutes the door opened; a tall, angular woman in her sixties, perhaps, stood there in denim shirt and blue polyester slacks, as though she’d been waiting for the knock, for something to happen, had watched from a window as the car pulled up. And yet she took a negative stance.
“If you’re asking for money, the answer is no,” she said in a monotone. She held on to the sides of the doorway to underscore her dissent.
Ruth explained her visit stammeringly, cowed by this woman, still disoriented from her night of loving. She gave the hairdresser’s name: “Annette Godineau, a namesake. It’s for my Joey, Joey Godineaux. Looking for roots, you see. I’m only wanting to help him.”
Hunting the queen, Ruth thought, remembering the swarm of Gwen’s bees in her trees, how Gwen had searched out the queen among the guarding workers—and suddenly there she was, long and bright-eyed and golden yellow. Would Annette look like that?
The woman examined Ruth with narrowed eyes; she might have been a bodyguard for the old woman and Ruth a suspicious person. Ruth wondered if the woman could hear her banging heart.
“Wait here,” said the bodyguard, and shut the door in Ruth’s face.
A book lay facedown on a ripped cushion of the swing. Ruth picked it up. The off-white paper cover read, Poems by Annette Godineaux. Ruth let out a whistly breath. She wrote poems, this old lady? It hardly fit the Godineaux image Ruth held in her mind. On the inside cover she read, “Ragged Mountain Press.” Self-published, she supposed. But did it matter? Annette wrote poems! Ruth was blown away.
“They’re not for you to read,” the bodyguard said, reappearing in the doorway, holding out a hand for the book. Something fierce in her dark eyes made Ruth give it over. “That’s where Annette sits, in that swing. You can sit here,” she said, pointing to a nearby rocking chair.
“Come on out,” she called, and a frail shrunken woman less than five feet tall, a long skinny braid of white hair down her back, plodded slowly along on a cane. She had on a red wool shawl over a purple print housedress, pinned with a copper brooch. The companion followed close behind, but didn’t touch her, as though she were indeed a queen.
Annette lowered herself so carefully on the swing, she didn’t set it rocking. She didn’t look at Ruth, as though at her time of life she needed no contact with others, no new friends or companions. She seemed to be content with the one she had, still nameless, sitting beside her on the swing. Ruth could literally hear the silence: a protesting bird, a harrumphing frog in the lake, a buzzing insect. They could sit this way all day, Ruth thought, and she’d gain nothing. She had to speak up.
“Your descendant, Joey Godineaux,” she began—unsure of what descent Joey actually was, though great-grandson came to mind, “works with me on my farm. I’m—that is, he—is anxious to know something about his family. He’s a foster child, you see.” She described her interview with Mabel Petit and then Evangeline Balinsky, while Annette stared ahead into space.
“This cushion is splitting at the seams,” Annette told her companion, seeming to ignore Ruth’s story. “I can feel it popping under me.”
“I’ll take it to that seamstress in town,” the other woman said, lighting up a cigarette.
“No,” said Annette, in a throaty voice stronger than Ruth would have guessed from a centenarian. “I’ll do it myself if you’ll buy some green thread.”
“I’ll do it, then.”
“No, I will,” said Annette, and that ended the subject.
“What Joey and I would like to know,” said Ruth, blundering on, wanting to get to the heart of the matter, thinking of her cows, and Vic, who probably needed a bath, clean clothes, lunch money—”is who Joey’s forebears are on the male side. I mean, his father, or grandfather. Or great-grandfather?”
“Nobody,” Annette said, her eyes trained on a high point beyond Ruth’s head, and for the first time Ruth realized that she was blind. “Nobody at all. Never stayed long enough to leave a name.” She dropped her shriveled chin, appeared to look inward. “Not one goddam man among ’em worth leaving his name. They were all liars. Who knows what names they had? Two or three, to escape the law.”
“Oh,” said Ruth, afraid she wasn’t getting anywhere, but plowing on. “I met a Marcel Shortsleeves. He seemed a pleasant, honest fellow. He came to visit Pauline when she was in the reformatory.”
There was a sound from the companion, and Annette smirked.
“Oh, you know about that, do you?” Annette gripped her hands together, rocked the swing with her body, though her feet didn’t touch the porch floor. “You been snooping into our family secrets, have you?”
“Only to find out.. . for Joey,” Ruth stammered. “The early records burned, they said.”
“Sure, they burned ‘em,” said Annette. “They didn’t want the world to know what they did to us.” Her eyes were luminous with sun as she spoke. She rocked faster. The swing made a jarring sound, metal grating on metal. The companion stubbed out her cigarette on the porch floor and pulled another out of her pack of Kools.
“I know about the sterilization,” Ruth said, taking the plunge. She couldn’t hide the truth under the Joey umbrella much longer. “I need to tell you. A woman named Camille Wimmet, a professor at our local college, was doing research into the thirties eugenics project.” She told the woman what little she knew about Camille’s work. “But,” she said, afraid to look at Annette, hearing her voice hoarse, “Camille was killed for it. Someone strangled her. We think it may have been because of the research she’d done. Someone who didn’t want his or her reputation, well... blemished.”
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