Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  She turned her face toward Olen; she looked to his blurred eyes like an antique doll, missing some parts. “They didn’t know who he was, where he been. Pauline wasn’t living here then, she wouldn’t tell anyway. I’ll tell the fuzz, why not? What’ve I got to lose?”

  “Me!” Pauline shrieked at her grandmother, the pistol loose in her hand, her breath coming hard and angry. She dropped the cigarette stub on the floor, stamped it out. “I’m what you got to lose. They find out who I am. They find out about—” She stopped short. Annette was pointing a trembling finger.

  Pauline’s eyes darted from her grandmother to her brother. The blood leaped in her neck and cheeks. The black eyes were sly on Olen. She backed up a step.

  Olen’s legs were trembling, his hands. “They were yours, the fingerprints on that key,” he said, his voice hoarse, the breath trapped like a small animal in his chest. He looked back at the front door, at the key with the purple blotch of paint. He’d only half recognized it when he came in. It wasn’t Tilden Ball, it was Pauline who’d strangled that professor. He was reeling with the knowledge, his body off balance—he grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself.

  Though he might have done it if he’d had to, if he’d been pushed to that extreme; the guilt of what might have been tortured him. The relief he’d known to hear she was dead, that someone else had killed her! He’d hardly been able to contain his jubilance that night, when the call came through. His hands had been violent with it. And the others thought him upset over her death. . .

  “How did you know,” he asked, his hands still clutching the chair back, “about her?”

  Pauline leered at him, her stance more casual now, her weight on the left foot, the gun in her dropped hand like a tool she might use to pick a lock. She was enjoying his surprise, his shock. “Eugene Godineaux,” she said. “The teacher went to visit old Gene with her busybody questions, she left her card there.” Pauline snorted at the thought of a business card. “Gene called me. What business she had, he told her, poking into his life like that? He was right. I thought, they find Granny and me here— then what? I went to see the woman for myself. I told her to stop. You can’t say I didn’t warn her.”

  Aware again of his uniform, she said, “I didn’t go there to kill her. I just went to wreck the computer, take her goddam notes. I saw her go out. But she came in on me unexpected. I... reacted.”

  He fought to regain his breath; his chest was hard, like marble. The grandmother a killer, too. His own blood! He felt sick; he clapped a hand to his mouth.

  Pauline laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re not glad. You wanted that thing printed? What’d they find out about you? Who you come from!”

  “The Goodpastures,” he murmured.

  He heard Annette snort. “She made it up, your foster mother. Noel Lafreniere’s father was a no-good, he got shot breaking out of prison up to Quebec. His mother was a Passamaquoddy. They were poor, dirt poor. Like the Godineauxs.”

  Pauline was laughing again. They were both laughing at him, all teeth, gums, mouths, splitting their faces. He was hot, his brains burning up. He rushed at Pauline. The gun swung up in her hand, fired—punctured his shoulder. His gun out in an instant, a reflex. He shot her—twice, three times, four—he was on fire, couldn’t stop! Emptied his gun. He’d never felt such fury, such hate for all that poverty, that depravity. The old lady was screaming, stumbling to find Pauline.

  He ran out of the trailer, banged into someone on the windy porch. “Hey!” A male voice, yelling at him. He jumped in his car, his shoulder a torture. Raced down the mountain, left hand on the wheel. The kid awake when he took the curve. “Hey, mister, we going home now? I’m cold, mister.”

  * * * *

  Joey worried about his job at Greg’s Market. Tim wouldn’t like it if he got fired. But the man wouldn’t talk to him—he was going too fast, Joey didn’t like that. “Slow up, mister!” But the car speeding along, crazy, lurching in the strong wind, zigzaggy, like the cow Zelda when she took off down the road once. The man breathing hard, coughing, blood on the wheel.

  “Hey, mister policeman, you cut your arm?”

  No answer, only the man hunched over the wheel like he got to win a race. Joey heard a siren behind, a police car, a truck, it was like a chase. Joey’d seen them on TV, cops in their cars, going fast, too fast, crashing—wham, bang! Now Joey in a chase. He liked it better on TV.

  “Stop! They after us, the cops!”

  But this man a cop, too. He couldn’t figure it out. The cops after a cop. Then, bang! A shot. And the car swerving, skidding, crashing in a pile of shrubs. The man putting bullets in his gun, then staggering out.

  “Stay put,” he yelled at Joey, and Joey stayed put. The engine still running. In the headlights he saw the man run, run toward the woods. His hat blowing off. Another shot. Bang!

  The man’s arms high in the air, like signaling somebody. Dropping his gun. Whirling back, smack in the arms of another cop—like they loved each other. “I killed her,” Joey’s cop howled. “I killed my sister.”

  Another bang then and Joey’s cop falling. His chest bright with blood. The second cop stooping down, his face broken up, like he’d lost something big. Joey’s cop saying something Joey couldn’t hear, and his head dropping down.

  Then the van, taking away Joey’s cop.

  Ruth! Lifting Joey out of the stalled car, crying, hugging him. “You all right, Joey? Answer me, Joey!” Blood on the front seat, the wheel. But not on Joey. Joey’s clean. Ruth crying now, all over her pretty blue shirt.

  “Take me home, Ruth?” he begged.

  “Yes, yes, I will,” she cried. And kept on crying. That’s a woman for you, right? That’s what Tim would say. That’s a woman for you.

  Joey didn’t mind. He didn’t mind being cried over. He didn’t want Ruth to let go.

  * * * *

  Ruth arrived at the trailer with Joey just as the medics, summoned by Colm, were loading the gurney into an ambulance. “It’s Pauline—she’s pretty well gone,” Colm shouted, and the doors clanged shut; the vehicle raced off, taking the first curve on two squealing wheels—or so it sounded in the dark.

  “I can’t believe you drove off without me,” Colm accused, giving Joey a bear hug, embracing Ruth as though she’d come back from the dead. “Didn’t you see me running after you? I tripped in a goddam pothole, skinned my knee. The wind almost blew me away. And off you drove.”

  “They needed you here. It was Olen who killed Pauline—all those shots we heard? He confessed to it. He told a local cop she’d killed Camille. The cop told me himself, after they took Olen away. But why didn’t Olen just bring her in?”

  “She’d turned a gun on him—I don’t know why. It was on the floor, she’d fired one shot.”

  “It was self-defense, then. But he must have provoked her, don’t you think? It’s weird, but the other cop was a Mason, he said he saw Olen do some kind of distress signal. Then Olen shot himself. Why, why did he do it? Why, if he didn’t kill Camille?”

  “Jeez. Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know. He looked bad.”

  “I mean, he’s got things to tell us. Though I found this in the door, and he held up a door key with a purple blotch. “It matches the one Pauline would’ve dropped in Camille’s apartment.”

  Colm ushered her and Joey into the trailer, where Annette Godineaux was in her chair, the stick legs splayed out, chin sunk, ducklike, into her chest, the hair like raggedy feathers on her shoulders.

  “Annette?” Ruth said. “It’s Ruth Willmarth. I’m so sorry about Pauline.” Not knowing what else to say, she said, “This is your great-grandson, Joey.”

  Annette raised her head an inch, her face expressionless. Joey clung to Ruth. Who was this ancient creature? his look said. It was no one he knew. No one he wanted to know.

  Ruth made the old woman a cup of tea that Annette waved away. Colm brought her a snifter of brandy he’d found in a kitchen cupboard; she drank it down. Glancing s
lyly at Ruth, Colm threw one down himself. Then, seeing Annette shivering, he wadded up his handkerchief to fill the crack in the window.

  “We can stay the night with you, so you won’t be alone,” Ruth offered. Though where she and Colm would sleep, she didn’t know. There was a single boxlike bedroom beyond the sitting room, a cot that Pauline perhaps had slept on. Would she and Colm have to share it? He could sleep in the truck, she decided. After all, Annette frowned on men in her house.

  “No,” Annette said, acknowledging Ruth’s presence for the first time. “I don’t need you here.”

  “Then come home with us. I see you’re packed.” She nodded at the boxes.

  “Those are Pauline’s. I never said I’d go. They’ll have to come and get me.” The head fell forward again on the sunken chest.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “What will they do to Uncle Olen?” Donna asked in a small voice. The Woodleaf-LeBlanc family was sitting around the supper table, except for Russell, who was in Buffalo and didn’t yet know what had transpired. The call had come in that morning from the New Hampshire hospital: Olen was on the critical list—the bullet had punctured his lungs, not the heart; he would survive. He’d kept trying to talk, he had things to tell the world, he insisted; but for now, the doctor said, they would keep him sedated.

  The family was exhausted but wired; they’d sat up half the night before while Ruth and Colm wound out the horrific story.

  “I don’t know.” Gwen shook her head. She was going to see Olen tomorrow, beg the nurses to let her in. “It had to be self-defense. Pauline, Colm said, shot Olen in the shoulder. It was after he’d made her confess, I suppose, that she’d killed Camille. He told the local police about that. But there were six bullets in her,” she said softly.

  “Overkill,” said Brownie, who watched taped videos of Law and Order with his grandfather. “They’ll make him pay for that.”

  Gwen nodded. She was still in shock, to tell the truth, that Olen would react so irrationally to Camille’s research. So he was a Godineaux, as Ruth had discovered. What was wrong with that? There were black sheep in every family, and Olen was a cop, people respected him. Well, that was the problem, she supposed. He’d created a new identity, worn it like an expensive new coat—he didn’t want people to see what was underneath.

  If only he’d talked to her about it! She would have made him see that Camille was trying to defend the family, show the world how those Godineauxs were unfairly judged and persecuted. Camille’s paper, in the end, she was certain, would have enhanced the family’s reputation, not destroyed it.

  “Poor Camille,” she said aloud, “she had every good intention. And now the poor woman is dead, for all her resolves.” She thought, too, of Shep Noble. And Pauline, whom she’d never met. Though Pauline was obviously a more violent sort, in her own way, than Shep. But Pauline would have had her reasons. They would probably never know the roots of that terrible anger.

  “People don’t like that,” Mert said, chewing on his salmon steak. “They don’t want to be out there for folks to judge. Now, when I saw that Perkey name on the motorcycle—”

  “What?” They all turned their heads toward the old man. He swallowed his fish, dabbed at his lips with a paper napkin.

  “You did what, Mert?” Gwen asked. “When you saw the Perkey name on the motorcycle—what?”

  “I knew the name,” he said, gazing into his water glass. “It was the Perkey woman snooped in my family business—I told the teacher that. It wasn’t just the Godineauxs Perkey was after. Took my aunt to that place, you know, they done it to her. Wanted to help her, they said. They had no goddam business.”

  “So what did you do when you saw the name on the motorcycle, Grandpop?” Donna was leaning toward him, her fork halfway to her mouth, motionless. This was something, Gwen saw, the girl had to know.

  “I moved the damn thing off our land,” he said. “Then I— well, I found the boy. It was that moon. I was taking a walk. He was asleep, dead drunk. I don’t know what come over me. I took him by the feet and I drug him. Drug him over by the nightshade—wasn’t far. Serve him right, I thought, bringing my grandgirl home, and him drunk like that. And him a Perkey.”

  Gwen reached in her pants pocket; it was still there, the tarnished earring. “Is this yours, Pop?”

  He held out his hand for it; nodded, dropped it into a shirt pocket.

  Donna wasn’t looking at the earring. There was something else she needed to know. “You put his face in it, Grandpop? In the nightshade?”

  Gwen saw Donna’s mouth drop open. She was holding her breath. Her own heart was hammering; she could barely hear Mert’s answer.

  “Naw, naw I didn’t do that, just left him on his back, that’s all. I hear him wheezing some. I know what it is to be out of breath. I was sorry then I’d drug him, but I couldn’t drag anymore, I didn’t think it would hurt him on his back. I thought he’d come to in the morning, go home.”

  “He must of turned himself over,” Brownie said, and Donna nodded. She sounded relieved, got up to clear the table.

  Gwen served the dessert: honey cakes topped with vanilla ice cream. Her head was churning, there’d been too much talk to absorb. She felt bloated with these new discoveries; she didn’t want any dessert.

  She excused herself and went outside. The bees were humming in the clover, which was just starting to bloom. It was early this year, from all the warm rain and sunshine. It was white clover that brought the honey, white clover that the bees would see as blue. When she looked closely at it, yes, it did have a bluish hue. Or was she beginning to think like a bee?

  “It smells so good out here,” Donna said, coming to stand beside her mother. She waved at Leroy as he drove off in the secondhand Subaru he’d bought through a loan—an advance against his small inheritance from Camille. Leroy looked surprised, then grinned and waved back.

  “Sometimes I envy the bees,” Donna said, “getting to drink up those juices.”

  “It’s delicious, I can imagine.”

  The two were quiet, listening to the bee song. Gwen smiled at the KEEP VERMONT CIVIL sign Donna had stuck in the grass by the hives in memory of Camille. The Balls would have to see it when they drove by, she’d said, looking sly. It’s more than a political slogan, Gwen thought, it’s a metaphor for all our lives. She wondered what Olen would think of it. Olen’s mind wasn’t always as open as it should be.

  “Lafreniere,” she said. “The name haunts me. Where have I seen it before?”

  Donna turned toward her, surprised. “You know, Mom. It’s in Elizabeth’s journal. There’s a Lafreniere married one of Isobel’s grandchildren. Sometime in the late 1800s. Why, he could be related to us! Uncle Olen, I mean, for real.”

  Gwen drew a quick breath. “He could be, at that.” A Lafreniere had married Isobel’s granddaughter. Mali, yes—she should have remembered. She and Olen might really be family. He has a revolutionary ancestor after all, she thought. What an irony.

  For some reason, out here in the spring evening, among the clover and the bees, the old superstition came to mind again: how you should tell the bees about a death in the family—how she hadn’t done it after her father’s death. If not, her father had told her, there might be another death.

  “It was a terrible thing Olen did,” she said. “Shooting that woman over and over. But I can understand it, that anger. Why, when Tilden Ball kidnapped you, Donna, then confessed to running you down, I could have killed him. Right then. Without a thought. Over and over, I was that angry.

  “But you’re alive, thank God,” she said, watching the girl kneel in a patch of clover, breathe in the fragrance.

  Impulsively, she knelt beside her daughter: the two of them, like honeybees, embracing the clover, sucking up the nectar.

  * * * *

  “What do you suppose Annette meant when she said, ‘They’ll have to come and get me?’ Who are ‘they’?” Ruth asked.

  She and Colm were sitting in her kitchen, spl
itting a bottle of Otter Creek. Colm was staying the night—Vic was at a friend’s sleepover party, there was no school tomorrow. Ruth hadn’t been able to get that old woman out of her head. A social worker had brought the news of Pauline’s death just before they left Andover; the woman was settling in for the night, in spite of Annette’s protests.

  “She probably meant the social workers—trying to put her in a home. Who else would want to come and get her? Not the police?”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so. But I can’t imagine her in one of those nursing places, can you? She just wouldn’t fit in. She’s the kind who has to be independent to the end. Live free or die— the state slogan, you know.”

  Ruth took a deep swallow of the ale.

  It seemed to have a life of its own, the way it traveled down into her chest and spread there in a warm pool.

  “Free or die,” she cried, shaking a fist. “The way I want to live my life!”

  Colm said, “Don’t I know it, Ruthie.”

  Dedication

  To the Abenaki Nation, the original Vermonters

  Acknowledgments

  Many people have helped bring this novel to fruition. I want to thank my son-in-law, Marc Lapin, ethnobotanist, for his special help with deadly nightshade and a hundred other details of nature; my daughter, Catharine Wright, for a critical reading of the work in manuscript; Greg Sharrow, folklorist at Vermont Folk Life Center, who led me into the world of the Abenaki; Mali Keating, Abenaki activist, who kindly granted me an interview; Cheryl Heath, who allowed me to watch her family video at the Folk Life Center; Jeanne Brink, basketmaker and Abenaki language expert; White Wolf Woman and Chaloner Schley; Cee at Computer Alternatives; and the helpful people at the Chimney Point Museum and at the Abenaki Tribal Headquarters in Swan-ton. I’d also like to thank Bill Mraz, who let me enter his world of bees, and Julie Becker, who lent me her taped interview with bee-master Charlie Mraz; my agent, Alison Picard; former editor, Jerry Gross; my copy editor, Dave Cole; and my assistant editor, Julie Sullivan, who all gave helpful suggestions; and of course, Ruth Cavin, my editor sine qua non and role model at St. Martin’s Press. And finally, my wonderful extended family, especially my late husband and former agent, Dennie Hannan, who encouraged me, in the midst of his chemotherapy treatments, to write.