Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  Olen was on his way to find his grandmother, Annette Godineaux. He’d long ago heard from his foster mother that she was living in New Hampshire—no one knew where. He’d assumed that by this time she’d be dead, like his mother—he’d read about Nicole Godineaux’s death in the local paper, felt only surprise, maybe relief. He’d traced her to that Bridport farm but never went to see her. She’d never bothered to look him up, had she? She’d given him away. He recalled little about his father except the name Noel Lafreniere, passed on to him, along with his father’s allergies. Well, there had been men in the house, he remembered that. Some of them mean to him; he recalled a cigarette burn, bruises he woke up with on his face, chest, and arms. Not his father, no.

  When he turned eighteen he’d switched around the letters in his first name, changed the surname to Ashley, and moved to Burlington. He worked his way through a year at the university, got a job as a rookie cop. Married and divorced—she wanted kids, he couldn’t give her any, he couldn’t tell her why. He’d transferred to Branbury. A new man, a clean record. He met Donald Woodleaf—he’d saved Woodleaf’s life that time. It had felt good to do that. Gwen was just a kid then, nine or ten. But she knew, she saw. He had a family now.

  Hearing Annette’s name in Gwen’s kitchen had sent a series of shock waves through him. Annette, his grandmother—still alive ... his sister Pauline, living with the old woman? He’d kept track of Pauline awhile through police records—she was a suspect in their father’s death. He’d howled when he read that! She’d disappeared, probably into drugs, he figured, dead from an overdose. By then he had a reputation, he was a police lieutenant—he didn’t need any relationship with a murder suspect. He was a Master Mason, men looked up to him. Women, too:

  Gwen. What would she think if she knew he came from a family of degenerates?

  “Where we now?” the kid said in the backseat, waking up.

  “Almost there,” he said. “Keep quiet, now. I got to concentrate on my driving. I don’t want to miss the next turn.”

  Every ticket he gave, every break-in he went after, every drug case he busted—it was all to purge those lawless Godineauxs out of his life. To prove he was smart, clean—no stains on Olen Ashley. He was a success, a success!

  Then one night he picked up that college kid for speeding. Found his name on the ID; Shepard Perkey Noble. Perkey—an all-too-familiar name. He was stunned. It was Eleanor Perkey had come busting into his mother’s trailer that day back in the thirties, nosing around, asking questions, getting them on the list of degenerates. Degenerates! And him, a kid. Christ Almighty.

  The boy, Noble—bombed, stoned—told him, yeah, his grandmother’d been a social worker in these parts. She’d gone to Branbury College, yeah. The kid had family records, he thought he might use them for his sociology paper. Get him an A, absolutely. He could use an A. His grades weren’t so hot. “I’m an athlete,” he’d said, preening, flapping his wings, a young rooster. “That’s why I’m here. I play baseball. Had a .300 batting average in prep school.”

  Olen released him—with a stiff fine. It wasn’t the first time, he found out, that the boy had been caught drinking, taking drugs, making a racket in the fraternity. Olen despised those college boys. They were privileged, they thought they owned the town. He’d doubled the fine.

  Then that night coming back from the Masons, hearing the motorcycle, seeing Donna on the back, he’d followed them up the mountain, worried about the girl. He’d parked on the road, walked up, heard Donna cry out. But then he saw the Boulanger kid intercede, saw Donna run to her house. He left, came back hours later; found Noble on his back in the nightshade, drunk. Who dragged him there? Leroy? Probably. On an impulse he’d turned him over, rubbed his face in the stuff. Served him right, he’d thought, the bastard. Let him sweat it out.

  But Jesus, he didn’t think it would kill him! He didn’t know the kid was an asthmatic.

  He was sweating himself now, he turned up the air-conditioning. Someone was behind him, honking.

  “Where we at now?” Joey said. “This Greg’s Market?”

  “No, it’s not Greg’s Market,” he snapped. “The sign says Andover, two miles.” He supposed the boy couldn’t read, he had some missing links. Olen didn’t like that. It reminded him of the bad seeds in the family, the degenerates. Siblings sleeping together, the poverty, the overcrowding. Breeding degenerates. He felt the bile come up in his throat. He’d slept in a bed with his mother up to the time she was caught shoplifting, thrown in Brookview that last time, and him with her. That’s when they did it to him, just a kid.

  And she knew, that college professor. He’d gone into her office that afternoon, after she’d called the station saying it had been vandalized. She told him what had been on her screen, her paper. Her paper about the eugenics project—someone might have copied the work, she said. The words hit him like a rock. For a time he couldn’t speak. When he pulled himself together, he told her he’d find out who did it, who stole the work. One thing led to the next, like a waterfall, the water cascading down, rolling him over and over, among the rocks.

  His one thought then, his single purpose in life, was to destroy that work. No matter what it took.

  And now he had the disk. He knew the worst. And so did that farm woman, Willmarth. Bad luck that Donna had made a copy! And Colm Hanna—a fellow cop.

  The kid began talking again, gibberish, something about Tim, cows, his job at Greg’s Market. Would Olen take him back now. Christ! He should have made the kid get out in Branbury, he could only be in the way here.

  “Not now. I have business, I told you. Stay in the car and keep quiet.”

  “But I hafta go peepee.”

  “Jesus,” Olen said.

  * * * *

  “I swear he said east, he was headin’ east. New Hampshire? Boston?” Tim said when Ruth ran into the barn, begging him to stay just another half hour till Emily got home. “I asked him to drop Joey off at the store. But then the store called, said he hadn’t checked in. And when I called the police station, they said Ashley had called in sick. He didn’t look sick when I saw him.”

  “How long ago did they leave?”

  “Forty minutes, maybe. Not that long. But long enough to get Joey to Greg’s Market.” Tim didn’t like it. He took off his cap, mopped his brow with his bandanna.

  “He’s probably taken Joey with him. I think he has relatives in New Hampshire.”

  She wasn’t exactly telling a lie. Olen did have relatives there: Annette and Pauline. But she didn’t want to worry Tim unduly. If Joey was in a police car, he’d be easy to spot. Should they call now? she asked Colm when Tim had gone back to work. “Or wait till he gets to Andover? I suppose there’s nothing at this point we can prove. We have to catch him in the act.”

  “What act?” Colm asked, looking grim, and Ruth felt suddenly ill. “Let’s just go, then,” he said. “He’s not that far ahead of us, he doesn’t know where the place is. We do. Too bad we can’t get a phone number. We could warn them.”

  “We could call the New Hampshire police, ask them to go up there.”

  “He’ll just tell them he’s visiting relatives. Bringing another Godineaux with him.”

  Ruth’s head was aching. Joey was a Godineaux, yes. And Pauline wanted no part of him. It might be interesting, though, to see the woman’s reaction to the boy. That is, if Olen gave her a chance. Would he hurt her? His own sister? But why?

  Pauline had been to Camille’s apartment, the visit was on the disk. Who knew what they’d talked about? Pauline might suspect it was Olen who’d killed Camille, threaten to turn him in. Who knew the scenario in Olen’s crazed mind?

  “Get back in the car,” she said. “And we’re on our way.”

  * * * *

  Olen stopped at the Andover convenience store to inquire about Annette. He had her great-grandson with him, he told the storekeeper. The woman’s eyes popped to see his uniform. He tried to smile, but couldn’t force it. His heart rate was cli
mbing. Hurry up, hurry up, it was telling him. They’d know he had Joey, they’d be on their way.

  “She know you’re coming?” the woman asked. He dropped the car keys—they made a clatter that rang in his ears; he felt her eyes on him as he bent to pick them up. She gave him the directions anyway, the uniform worked. “She expects us—her directions were fuzzy.” He tried to act casual, taking deep breaths in and out, the way he did on a late-night call. He bought a candy bar for the kid, and that did it. She pointed up the road. “Two miles or so. Yellow trailer on the left. Go too far, you’re at Bradley Pond.”

  He remembered to thank her, his police training. Outside, a strong wind had come up. He was suddenly chilled. He tossed the candy bar at Joey. The boy caught it; he was looking, impressed, at the gun in Olen’s holster. “That gun loaded?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it’s loaded,” Olen said, his heart louder than the car engine, churning up Bradley Hill Road. “Now eat the candy and keep quiet. I told you I’m here on business.”

  There was the trailer at the top of the hill, patchy yellow in the headlights, a run-down front porch, sticking out like Joey’s buck teeth. A black car that belonged in the junkyard. Degenerates, he thought, they were all degenerates.

  He had to know things, though—before he did what he’d come to do. There were good seeds in the family. In the Lafreniere line—his father’s father. Those Goodpastures his foster mother told him about—somewhere back in the family history. Annette would know. If he was lucky, he’d find them.

  “You can’t come in,” he told the boy when they pulled into the yard. “I won’t be long. You wait here.” He climbed the porch steps. Christ! His foot caught in a crack. The place was a dump. He banged on the door. And banged again. She had to be here. Where would a hundred-year-old woman go at this time of night?

  “Fire!” he shouted. “Open up!” And when no one answered: “Woods on fire up the road, burning in this direction—a south wind. You’re in danger!”

  It worked. A light switched on inside the trailer. Eyes peered at him through the glass. He waited. A key turned in the lock. A moment later the door opened. A tall gaunt woman filled the doorway. Pauline. Looking scared, blank, she didn’t recognize him. How could she? It had been years. But he knew her, he’d seen her photo in the police files. He’d read of his father’s death from a hundred bee stings. It was odd, suspicious: after all, his father, he recalled, was careful, always carrying around his plastic case with the Adrenalin. Lucky for himself he hadn’t inherited the allergy, in view of Gwen’s bees. On the last page of Camille Wimmet’s disk, the page he’d deleted, was a note that Pauline lived in Andover, New Hampshire, where his father, according to the file, had died. But no one back then knew where Pauline was.

  He shouldered his way inside. “Just a min—” she cried, taking in the uniform, the badge. “What fire? No. Stay out!” The wind followed him through the door, the door banged, he glanced at the key, still in the lock, then back at his sister. She was almost as tall as he, her eyes black scars, the irises an ugly yellow. Everything about her ugly: the dress that dipped down at the sides, the hair gone an ashy gray when he remembered it brown, the pocked face indicating to him she’d picked up some disease— sexual, he didn’t doubt it.

  “What is it? Who?” Here was the old lady now, his grandmother. He had a bone to pick with her.

  “Hello, Annette,” he said. “Do you know me? Noel Lafreniere?”

  She looked at him—no, through him. Christ! Was she blind? “Noel,” she said, her eyes like empty plates, her skin papery white, like she was a ghost. “Noel? No!” She was thinking of his dead father, of course, she hadn’t seen Olen since he was a child. He wondered if he looked like his father. He had no pictures. No one had ever taken a picture of him. Not until Gwen, anyway.

  Pauline had gone from the room. It was all right, he’d deal with her later, he had questions to ask his grandmother. She was in her nightgown, a pale blue shift that barely covered her bony knees, her wrinkly feet shod in cheap pink slippers, the furry kind you buy at the discount stores. She smelled of urine—or was it the dusty plants filling the narrow room that gave off that fetid odor? A dead African violet sat on a windowsill.

  “I’m his son,” he said, “young Noel. Remember me? That reformatory in Rutland? You let them do it to me, didn’t you, sterilize me? You wanted to get out of there, you’d made a bargain.”

  It was in the teacher’s notes. He’d seen it the second time he went to her office, found her papers. He’d left in a hurry then, someone coming. He’d been in plain clothes; that was lucky, they’d only seen his backside.

  “What do you want here? How dare you barge in!” He could tell she was hovering between wanting to see him and wanting to preserve her pride, her sanctity. He could knock her down with a stroke of his hand, the thought occurred to him. He had that power over her. Still she stood there, defiant, in her flimsy nightgown; you could see through to the frail frame of bones— no breasts at all. The waxen face was full of gullies and hollows, the forehead dented in like someone had taken a hammer to it. The white hair shagged down over her shoulders, a mockery of what she’d been. The Godineaux women had been handsome, he recalled that. His mother Nicole had strong curving cheekbones, they were there in the photograph above her obituary.

  He didn’t sit down, she didn’t ask him to. He saw the packing boxes in the hall, beyond the narrow room they were in. They were going somewhere? There wasn’t a chair in the place that would hold his weight. It was a room for females: narrow raggedy chairs, the kind you found at the Salvation Army, a cot covered with a red throw, grayish lace curtains at the trailer windows. An unpleasant room at best, but he had his questions to ask.

  “My ancestor, Robert Goodpasture,” he said. “I need documentation. It was the Agneaus told me about him, my foster parents. They said it came from you.”

  There had been nothing on the disk—no mention of family before Annette. The Goodpasture connection would have come through his father. He’d tried for years to get back to that father, then found he was dead. By his sister’s hand, he was sure of it. She’d taken that away from him. Patricide! It couldn’t go unpunished.

  Annette crumpled into a chair like a pile of old bones. She was wheezing. Or was she laughing? He wanted to yank her up, shake her, tell her to shut up and talk to him. She had to know how important this was to him, that he sprang from a deeper, purer source than these poverty-driven roots. This crowd of thieves and murderers!

  “You knew my father,” he said. “He lived with you and Pauline till you got in Brookside for the last time. I lost track then. But Pauline—oh, Pauline knew where he was. When he came here to look for her, she killed him.” The words incensed him, raised the pitch of his voice, heightened the buzzing in his brain. “My father’s ancestor fought in the American Revolution. Goodpasture. The name’s on a monument down in Boston, I saw it myself—that’s when my foster mother told me, she took me there. She said, sure, it’s your ancestor, Noel.”

  “He was a good one, all right, our father.” It was Pauline, back in the doorway, a cigarette burning in her left hand. “Good in bed, good at keeping the locks broke on my bedroom door. Good at beating up Mother. You don’t remember those bruises on her head and chest? Ones she said come from tripping over the cat, banging into doors? Well, it was him. Your father. Noel Lafreniere. A good one, oh, yeah, a regular good ole beat-’em-up boy!” The laugh rose, then fell, strangled in her throat. She stuck the cigarette between her lips, inhaled. Blew out the smoke. He took it as an insult.

  “You can’t kill for that!” He lurched across the narrow space to confront her. He had business with Pauline anyway, it was mainly why he’d come. “You have to turn yourself in, Pauline. You can’t get away with killing. It’s the law. It’s in the Bible. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ “ He hadn’t, had he? Killed that Perkey boy? It was an accident, the judge declared it that. It was the asthma, a cut on the kid’s face—he hadn’t dragged him the
re! One day, though, he’d tell someone what he’d done. He’d have to. For his soul’s peace....

  “Pauline,” he said, “I have to take you in.”

  He stopped, shocked. He was looking into the mouth of a .45 handgun. Behind it, she was laughing, the cigarette between her teeth like a stuck-out tongue; she pulled it out with her free hand. He felt the wind blowing through a crack in the window;

  he was shivering.

  “You’re taking me nowhere, man. And you’re not telling nobody what we did and where we live. ’Cause we won’t be here after tonight.” She nodded at the packing boxes. “And if you’re smart, you’ll go back to your snug little nest in Branbury, Vermont—oh, sure, I know where you live—and keep your mouth shut. You always were a snotty-nosed loudmouth little bastard. Just like the old man.”

  “Tell her to put down that gun,” Olen told Annette.

  “Gun? No! Put down the gun, Pauline.” The old lady struggled up out of her chair, stumbled toward her granddaughter. “Tell him what happened, Pauline. Tell him who killed your father. Let him take me, I don’t care, I’m an old woman. Tell him, Pauline. Put down the gun now!” She clawed at Pauline’s sleeve. Pauline lowered the pistol. The cigarette smoldered in her left hand.

  “It wasn’t her. I’m the one killed him,” Annette said, defiant now, her voice sounding disembodied, like a robot’s voice. “I invited him up here—he’d found where I lived. This was years ago! I didn’t want him bothering Nicole no more. Sure, I emptied out the bees into his glove compartment—with a little smoke, you know. Later he’d open it and out they’d come, wide awake and mad as hell. It was cold out, he’d have the windows shut. I took away his adrenaline syringe, you see, that case he always carried. Well, I took a chance and it worked. They found him next morning—the car run into a telephone pole. Noel full of bee stings and the heart stopped.”