Donna thought of Shep Noble again, who had no choices at all anymore. She couldn’t get him out of her mind. Shep’s friends and coaches had liked him, their testimonials at the memorial service proved that. Had she gotten to know him, she might have made him realize that Indian girls were every bit as smart and feeling as white girls or boys, that they should be treated with dignity, as equals to boys and girls of any race. That females of any race or culture should be treated with respect.
One day she’d be a sociologist and devote her life to educating Indian girls, giving them the opportunities she’d had—for she was lucky, she’d never before realized how lucky. She wanted to learn more about her French ancestry, too. Camille Wimmet was a Franco-American—she’d been a role model.
Donna suddenly wanted to ride home and run in the house and hug her mother, tell her how much she appreciated and loved her. Her eyes watered to think of it; she raced back down the trail and climbed on her bike.
Someone was in her path as she pedaled around a curve in the road. She swerved and ran her bike off into a forsythia bush. “I’m sorry,” she told the bush, and tried to straighten the limbs.
“Soh-wy?” said Ralphie, standing there, looking down on her. He seemed concerned, and she smiled. “I’m okay,” she said. “I didn’t want to hit you, that’s all.” Ralphie was the best of the three boys, in her opinion. If you asked him an honest question, you got an honest answer. If he could answer the question at all, that is. He put a hand on her arm as she got up, handed her a broken stem of yellow blossoms.
“Ralphie sorry,” he said, speaking of himself, as always, in the third person.
One of her pedals had fallen off; it lay there in the grass. She would have to walk the bike back to her house. It hadn’t been right since Tilden ran her off the road. She shivered, remembering the night.
“Shiny,” said Ralphie, pointing at her silver earrings. They were a present from her father, made by an Abenaki woman up in Swanton. “Pup-pies,” said Ralphie, touching one of them.
“They’re bears, Ralphie. That’s my father’s clan.” She didn’t say her clan, too, although she supposed it was. She’d have to give more thought to that.
“Nice,” Ralphie said, “shi-ny.”
“Nice and shiny,” she agreed.
Ralphie soon tired of her earrings and went over to sit on a rock. He was taking things from his pocket, spreading them out on the grass.
“Shiny,” he said, “come see.” He held out a handful of objects. She saw a lucent stone, a dead orange caterpillar, a tarnished silver earring. “For you,” he said, dangling the earring between his thumb and forefinger. “Pretty. Take it.”
She shook her head. She didn’t need a tarnished earring. But he insisted; he got up and pushed it into her pocket. “Ralphie find it. For you.”
“Thank you. That’s very sweet of you.” She walked her bike back down to her house. The phone was ringing when she entered the kitchen; she dashed in to pick it up.
It was Uncle Olen with a message for her mother. “Tell her I’ve made a printout of that file for Colm Hanna. Your mother asked me to.”
“Oh, you needn’t have bothered,” Donna told him. “I made a copy myself. She could have had that.”
Olen was quiet. He was always quiet when he was annoyed for some reason. But how had she known he’d have to go to extra trouble for her mother? “You have it there, then,” he said finally, “at the house?”
“It’s in my file box.”
“Good,” he said. “Keep it there until I can get over. It’s evidence, Donna. If the wrong person should get his hands on it— well, you know.”
“Don’t worry, Uncle Olen,” she said, wanting to end the conversation. She had homework to do. “No one will touch it except myself.”
But when she looked in the file box after she’d hung up, the copy wasn’t there. Her mother, she supposed, had given it to Ruth Willmarth. Now Uncle Olen would be pissed.
This was exactly what had happened, she discovered fifteen minutes later when she was fixing herself a hot chocolate with whipped cream, ready to go over some history notes. Ruth Willmarth called to say she had the disk, Emily had printed it out. She had another question for Gwen—could Gwen call her back?
“I’ll tell her. Say hi to Emily, okay? I suppose she got her grade back on the soc paper?”
“Oh, yes, she got a B-minus. Now she’s blaming me because I gave her the material. I’m afraid I didn’t spend enough time with her.” Ms. Willmarth didn’t ask what Donna’s grade was. And of course Donna didn’t tell her, although she was bursting with the good news.
But, “An A, I got an A!” she sang to herself as she reached into her pocket and pulled out the silver earring where it had stuck into her hip. She examined it. It was a fairly anonymous shape, like a crescent moon, or sun, or even a plump animal, like a woodchuck.
“Shiny, shiny,” she said, smiling, and, feeling silly, she dropped it into the file box.
* * * *
Ruth was at her wit’s end, she told Colm when he arrived at eight. There were no Lafrenieres in the Addison or Rutland County directories, and only three in the Chittenden. When she phoned them, she drew a blank. One was a single girl, a UVM college student; another was a young couple come lately from Iowa; the third was a disconnected number. “That’s probably the one,” she told Colm. “And the fellow’s taken off for Cambodia.”
“There are lots more counties. And there’s Montreal,” he reminded her softly. They were sitting in the living room. Vic was upstairs doing homework. “We could go to my house?” he suggested.
“With your father roaming about? Lifting a knowing eyebrow, trying very obviously to stay out of the way but never does because he wants grandchildren? You’ve told me that, Colm. He doesn’t care who you sleep with, he just wants a grandkid. Well, I’ve got news for him. At my age, I don’t think I could get pregnant if I tried every night. And even if I could,” she added, thinking of her cows and their artificial insemination, “I wouldn’t want to. It’s too late. Too late.”
“It’s okay, honey,” he said. “We’ve got your three. They’ll do. Dad could be a surrogate granddad. Pete’s away,” he reminded her—not that he had to. She hadn’t seen Pete for months now. He’d come up a couple of times to see the children, but he and Violet had stayed at the Branbury Inn. He’d talked off and on about wanting weekend visitations with the boy, but it was obvious that the girlfriend wouldn’t like that. Now Violet had a bit part in an off-Broadway play; it kept the couple in New York. And thank God for that. She’d had enough of Violet last winter, stuck with Pete in Branbury during a four-day ice storm.
She wished Pete would marry, as though his commitment would somehow free her to be on her own, make her own life choices. Was she still hoping that Pete would come back? She didn’t think so. But then, who knew her own heart?
Needing to get back to business, sitting up straight on the shabby sofa, she said, “What does the name Lafreniere mean anyway? I took a year of French in high school, can’t remember a word now, except oui, non, and Où est la bibliotècque, s’il vous plaît? We had to learn those foolish phrases. Much good they do me now! I never did learn the French word for barn.”
Colm had taken Spanish and flunked it twice; he had a lousy memory, he said. He sipped his Guckenheimer—he kept a bottle in her pantry; he was moving in, inch by inch. He even kept clean socks on the pantry shelf—she’d threatened to make a stew out of them. He recalled that la meant “the.” “Big help, huh?” He took back the inch she’d withdrawn on the sofa.
“Emily has a dictionary. She took French in high school. I’ll look it up.”
“You’re wasting time, Ruthie.”
“Wasting time because you’ve got the finger on Tilden Ball?”
“Maybe, but it’s not that. You know what I’m talking about.” He put a hand on her knee. She smilingly removed it and ran upstairs after the dictionary.
“I’m doing it,” Vic called
out, on the defensive. “I’m almost finished with the math. Then can I watch TV?”
“For half an hour,” she said. “Then bed. You know the rules.”
She heard him mutter, “This kid” could stay up till ten, schoolnights, “that one” till eleven. It was the old story. But those kids didn’t have early morning barn chores.
“Nine-thirty, and that’s it,” she hollered, and ran back downstairs.
“The root frêne means a kind of tree. An ash tree,” she quoted. “Lafrenieres must’ve grown ash trees somewhere back in time.”
“Ash trees?”
“Ash. That’s a familiar root.” She told Colm what Tim had said about his friend’s son changing his name. “So he wouldn’t be embarrassed by it when he wanted to marry a WASPy kind of girl. So the in-laws could keep up their WASPy reputation.”
Colm was silent a moment. He rattled the ice in his glass. She disliked the sound of rattling ice. Her own father had been something of an alcoholic. Her mother had lived with rattling ice most of her too-short life.
“I know an Ashe in town,” Colm said. “He’s a jewelry craftsman—great guy, wouldn’t swat a mosquito. There’s an Ashworth just moved here from Massachusetts, a hockey coach—I’ll check him out for you. I ran into an Ashby in real estate—from Winooski, wants a piece of land in this area. He’s a musician.”
He frowned, rolled his tongue around in his cheek. “Then there’s Ashley. Olen Ashley. My colleague, a highly respected cop. A Freemason—pretty high up in the ranks. As a cop he’s ready to kill anyone who breaks the law.”
“Ready to kill.”
“You know what I mean. He’s a fanatic. I’ve told you that.”
“Highly respected, you said.”
“That’s what I said.”
“But he might have deleted the last page of Camille’s printout?”
“Might’ve been a printer error. I told you, Ruthie, we’ve had trouble with that printer.”
“Might not have been the printer. He might have deliberately deleted it. So we wouldn’t see it.”
She jumped up off the couch, a fine layer of dust springing up in her wake—when did she have time to clean the house? He grabbed for her leg and missed.
She waved him away. She needed to make a phone call.
Chapter Nineteen
“Olen?” Gwen was surprised to find him in the kitchen, seated at her computer. She hadn’t heard him knock.
He glanced up, his face the color of eggplant. “I came for that copy of the disk. You didn’t tell me there was another copy, Gwen. We can’t have it lying about where just anyone can see it.” He held up the plastic file box. “Find it for me, will you, please?”
She couldn’t understand why it was so terribly important when he already had a copy. “You gave one to Colm Hanna,” she reminded him, “knowing he’d show it to Ruth.”
“Please, Gwen.” He was still holding out the file box. His face was resolute.
“I didn’t know Donna had made another copy.” She was angry now at Olen: for barging into her house so familiarly, for being upset with her for something she had nothing to do with. She glanced through the files. SOC PAPER, ENGLISH LIT PAPER, HISTORY NOTES, CAPTIVE. There were eight disks, but none of them Camille’s.
“Only this,” she said, trying to smile through her pique. “Now, what on earth is this doing in here?” It was a silvery earring, tarnished, slightly bent out of shape as though someone had stepped on it.
Olen ignored the earring; he was on a single track. He grabbed back the file box, rumbled through with shaky fingers. “She said it was here.”
“Oh, that copy,” said Gwen, realizing; she was feeling out of sorts from Olen’s persistence. “I gave that to Ruth. I forgot, that’s all, so much going on. I suppose I shouldn’t have, but you were planning to make a copy anyway, Olen, right? You knew Colm would show it to Ruth. So what have I done that’s so bad?” She stuck her hands on her hips, stared him in the eye. She wasn’t going to let him browbeat her.
His eyes were a cloudy gray, his face like nightshade; he looked as though any second he’d reach out poisonous roots. He was in his blue dress uniform, coming from or going somewhere “important.” His gray hair was slicked back on his head, belying his inner distress.
“Olen, did you lose an earring?” she teased.
But already he was out the door without a response or a goodbye. She heard a car door slam, an engine grind. Tires peeled off down the drive and out onto the road.
She looked at the earring, tried to flatten it out in her hand. It looked familiar, shaped like an animal—a bear, maybe. One of her men, or a friend of Russell’s or Donna’s, might have lost it. She must remember to ask. The back side was greenish, as though it had lain a long time in the grass. Perhaps Leroy had found it, mowing. Or Donna. She put it on top of the computer.
The phone rang and it was Ruth, asking about a Lafreniere, a Lafreniere who might have changed his name to Ashley. What did she know about Olen Ashley’s background?
“Olen’s background?” Gwen said, pouring a cup of coffee with her free hand. Why was Ruth asking this? Why would she want to know about Olen?
“Just an oddball question,” Ruth soothed. “I’m trying, well, to think of everyone who might have been connected with Camille. We know that Olen was assigned to investigate the break-ins at her office.”
It took Gwen a moment to recover. Her Olen, under suspicion? Unthinkable! It couldn’t be Olen involved. “No, no, that’s impossible,” she said, thinking of Olen’s almost maniacal regard for the law. Lafreniere—the name was familiar, but not in connection with Olen, she told Ruth. She’d seen the name somewhere, but couldn’t think where. As for Olen’s personal life, well, her memory brought up a few pieces of his past that he, or her dad, had told her about.
“For one thing, he was always looking for a maternal grandfather, someone named Goodpasture. He was descended from some Englishman who fought in the Revolution. Olen wants to join a group called Sons of the American Revolution. He’s an intensely patriotic man, Ruth. He’s a Master Mason, and that’s a very big deal. I don’t hold with all that secret stuff: the handshake, the symbols and signs. But they do admit men of all faiths. And they hang together, take oaths to protect each other.”
“Do they admit women?” Ruth asked.
“Oh, no, it’s strictly a fraternity. Donna doesn’t care for that—she’d tease my dad—he was a Mason, too. But they do good things for people. The Shriners, who are some kind of offshoot, give millions to cure sick children.”
“Oh, yes—they’re the ones who scoot around in those funny little cars. They were in the Memorial Day parade, throwing candy. Vic loved them.”
“Right. Brownie, too. Well, I suppose that’s why Olen’s a Mason and a cop, he has this thing about making the world safe for us to live in. It goes along with his trust in the great American system of justice. Dad used to rib him about that. My father didn’t have quite such a blind faith in the system.”
“Did Olen say anything about his mother? Who she was? Where she came from?”
“He never mentioned her to me. I don’t suppose he knew. He has only what his adoptive mother told him to go on.”
“He was adopted? Was Ashley her name?”
“It was his, I understand. I only know that he was adopted as a child by a couple who’d known the parents.”
“Are the adoptive parents still alive? Would they have told him the truth about that revolutionary ancestor?”
“They died years ago. I never met them. But I don’t know why they’d lie about that ancestor. Unless to make him feel good about himself. There was always this need to be somebody. That’s why he latched on to the Freemasons, I suppose; it gave him self-esteem. Pride. I never cared for that quality in him. That terrible pride.”
She sipped her coffee; it was getting tepid. “Olen was good to my father—he saved his life once, did I tell you that? Dad was chopping down an old oak; it toppled toward hi
m, took him by surprise. He gave the sign—the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress, I think they call it. Olen grabbed him in time—he risked his own life! I’ll always be grateful to Olen for that. I think he’d give his life for Donna and Brownie, too, I really do.”
“And for you?”
Gwen gave a soft laugh. “Possibly. Yes. He’s stubborn that way. Loyal, you know.”
“Is it possible that Ashley’s not his real name?” Ruth persisted. “That his father could have been French-Canadian? Lafreniere? That’s the name on the disk, Gwen. Not on the disk Olen copied for Colm—a page was deleted on that one. It was on the copy you gave me, the copy Donna made from the original.”
Gwen was quiet a moment. She dropped into a chair as if someone had suddenly pushed her. She held the receiver close to her ear, in two hands. She felt she was betraying Olen, talking about him like this. But then, she rationalized, Olen himself would put justice over loyalty, wouldn’t he?
She took a deep breath, told Ruth about Olen’s frenetic visit, how upset he was at not finding the copy. How he’d rushed out, as though obsessed. “He didn’t take the earring.” She cleared her throat, coughed up phlegm.
“Earring?”
“Oh, a tarnished one Donna or Leroy found in the grass somewhere. I’m sure it has nothing to do with either death.” Her throat felt like gravel now. The grounds had seeped into her coffee.
“Do you know where Olen was going?” Ruth asked. “When he raced out like that?”
“I’ve no idea where he’s gone. Maybe to England. After that famous ancestor.” She tried to laugh, but it came out a gravelly cough.
After she’d hung up, Gwen downed a full glass of water, then slumped back in a chair, feeling exhausted. Yet it hadn’t been a hard day at all. She’d visited four farms and every hive had been intact. There’d been no more damage—beyond the usual swarmings, trachial mites, robber bees—not since Tilden had confessed to the malice. Yet no one in her household had died because of it. There had been cruelties, yes, to the bees and her family, but they’d all survived. She’d destroyed the package of killer bees Tilden had left in the Balls’ hunting cabin.
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