by Jane Langton
When Homer drove into the Pig Road, he had to fit his car into an opening beside three heavy pieces of machinery—a backhoe, a bulldozer, and a gigantic rig with an enormous toothed jaw. Beyond the machines stretched the ninety-nine burdock-infested acres of Songsparrow Estates. At the end rose the rusty towers of Frederick Small’s sand-and-gravel company.
Homer found Kennebunk leaning against his car in the driveway behind the house. He was wearing a pea jacket and khaki pants. Homer nodded at the three big machines. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” said Kennebunk, “but I think we’re too late. Look, the back door’s wide open. I think he’s about to move out. Come on.”
They spent the rest of the morning roaming from room to room in Small’s house. It was unrewarding. There was a dresser in one of the bedrooms, but the empty drawers were stacked on the floor. The drawers of Small’s filing cabinet rattled open at Homer’s touch, but they too were empty.
“Maybe he put all his papers in these boxes on the floor.” Kennebunk opened the boxes one by one. They were tightly packed with books.
Homer looked at the books curiously, running his finger over the titles. “Nothing but gardening books. Disappointing. I wouldn’t have thought Small was interested in gardening.”
“Not Fred,” said Kennebunk, extracting one, “his wife.” He showed Homer her name, “Pearl Small,” on the flyleaf. “Look at this, Propagating Evergreens. She was really serious about all this stuff.”
Homer picked up another book. “Did I tell you what Small said when we were walking along the Pig Road? I asked him about the little trees growing up in the middle of the burdock. He said his wife planted them. And then he corrected himself. He said, We planted them. But I’ll bet it was Pearl.” The book in Homer’s hand was a text on the uses of ground cover. He opened it and found Pearl’s name.
Kennebunk knelt beside the boxes and extracted book after book, with murmured exclamations of pleasure. “What a collection.” He glanced up at Homer. “I propagate a lot of stuff myself. I’ve got a cold frame attached to my garage.”
The rest of the upstairs room had been stripped of everything but furniture. As Homer and Kennebunk went from room to room, their footsteps echoed sadly in the hollow spaces. The mattresses were bare. The closets were empty.
The downstairs rooms too had been stripped of curtains and bric-a-brac. Only one picture remained on the dining-room wall, as though forgotten, a drawing of birds in flight, two intersecting flocks. Homer stared at it. “You know, that’s nice, really nice. I wonder what happened to all the rest.”
There was a box on the floor here too, but it contained only heavy winter coats, not pictures.
But once again Kennebunk was interested. He took the coats out one by one and examined them, feeling in the pockets. “Look at this jacket, Homer. It’s covered with burrs.”
Homer plucked off a burr and stuck it rakishly on the collar of Kennebunk’s jacket. “No question where they come from. Small must have been inspecting his magnificent estate, figuring out how to divide it up into three-hundred-thousand-dollar parcels, complete with pig bones, tin cans, and feeding platforms. Come on. I’ve, seen enough.”
“Wait.”
Homer stood in the open back door and watched while Bill Kennebunk took a small plastic bag out of his coat pocket and plucked leaf fragments from the woolly fabric of Small’s jacket. “A forensic botanist will know what these are,” he said, depositing them carefully in the bag.
“A forensic botanist? How could a botanist identify a piece that small? Are you sure they’re not just cigarette tobacco?”
“No, no, they’re leaves, all right. And those botanists can do amazing things.”
They went outside. The machinery still stood beside the house. “Well, so long, Bill,” said Homer. “I don’t know if we learned anything, except that Small’s about to move out. Where the hell do you suppose he’s going? We’d better find out.”
“McNutt probably knows. Maybe I can get it out of him.” Then Kennebunk took a firm grip on Homer’s arm. “Why don’t we take a walk up the Pig Road? Half an hour, that’s all it’ll take. We’ll just see if there’s any place back there with freshly turned dirt.”
“You think he killed his wife and buried her back there, is that it? Oh, God, it reminds me of a sad little case in the town of Nashoba, a couple of years back, a guy who planted his wife in a tomato patch.”
Kennebunk set off through the burdock. “We’ve got to cover every square inch. Walk diagonally like this, then go back over the same ground in the other direction.”
Homer groaned. It would take all day. But he set off gamely after Kennebunk, tramping this way, then that, on one side of the Pig Road, while Kennebunk explored the other. Thorny brambles tripped him up, burrs attached themselves to his good pants, and he barked his shin on the corner of a feeding platform.
At the far end of Small’s ninety-nine acres, Kennebunk stopped to admire a cluster of evergreens growing along the property line, bushy little white pines, narrow spires of red cedar, hemlocks with light tips on their fernlike branches. “Look at them, Pearl’s plantings. I guess she wanted them to grow high enough to hide the towers of her husband’s sand-and-gravel works.” He shook his head sadly, and moved to the left along the chain-link fence. “We haven’t done this corner yet, and then there’s the other corner over there.”
It took them two and a half hours. Homer stayed to the bitter end, thinking regretfully about the papers stored so invitingly in his new file folders. They had found nothing. Bill Kennebunk was disappointed. “Sorry, Homer. No soap.”
They walked back to Small’s house, and found a big van parked beside the rear door. A heavy couch was coming out, lugged by a pair of moving men. They lowered it to the lift on the back of the van and pushed a button. With a whine the couch moved upward.
Homer exercised his ever-present curiosity. “Where are you guys taking all this stuff?”
“Northtown,” said the brawny kid in the truck, jumping down. “Warehouse in Northtown.”
Kennebunk was surprised. “You mean Mr. Small’s not moving to another house in Southtown?”
“I don’t know any Small. General contractor, Max Plank, he called us.”
Homer’s head was spinning. “Max Planck, you mean the physicist?”
“Physicist? I don’t think so. Big hairy guy, fat?”
Chapter 37
Annie’s perfect new house, the newly built wing that was the fulfillment of all her dreams, had taken every cent of the advances for her two successful picture books. For future living expenses she could depend on substantial royalties. For security in the future—in illness and old age—there was the comfortable reserve of her invested funds.
What invested funds? There were no mutual funds anymore. That madman Burgess had cashed in Annie’s savings and dumped everything down a hole called LexNet Software. And instead of bottoming out and zooming upward as Burgess had promised, the company went belly-up. It was not snatched up in a merger with a re-evaluation of its assets. It merely sold them off, distributed the profits to top management, and disappeared from the market.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Annie’s future royalties vanished too. She had a letter from her publisher. But instead of good old CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC., the letterhead was a bunch of crazy tippy letters, FATCAT FUN BOOKS, with a crazy cartoon feline grinning at the top of the page. Curtis Publishing had been bought out.
Dear Ms. Xwann,
It has come to our attention that the following titles
JACLK ANMD THE BEANSTALK
The OWL AND THE PUSSYCRAT
are being remaindered. 25,000 copies OF EACH are abvailable at 25 c a piece. This offer xpir4s June 22.
Tiffany Shrike
Sec’y to Boris Chirp, v. Prexzident
Fatcat Enterprises
Providence, R.I. 02902
Annie didn’t believe it. There was some mistake. She called her agent
in New York.
His voice on the phone was sepulchral. “Just another publishing takeover. I’ll get your rights back and then we’ll try to sell it to somebody else, but it’s the same everyplace. I’m thinking of getting out entirely and raising mushrooms in Vermont.”
“Raising mushrooms! You’re kidding.”
“Of course I’m kidding. But it’s kind of intriguing.” The agent’s lugubriousness changed to excitement. “You just order these little packages of spores. Then you grow them in your cellar and ship them to Boston. No investment, all profit.”
“How about rabbits?” said Annie sarcastically. “You start with two, pretty soon you’ve got a thousand.”
Her agent took the joke seriously. “Right! Rabbits too! I’ve thought about rabbits.”
The news from attorney Jerry Neville was worse, far worse. Annie sat in Jerry’s office and listened as he explained the out-of-court settlement with the Gasts.
He looked exhausted. “I’m sorry, dear. It was the best I could do. You lose the house, but nothing else.”
“The house! The whole house?”
“The whole house. But you can go on living in the new wing as a tenant at will.”
“As a tenant! Oh, Jerry, my God.”
He looked at her dolefully. “You don’t have to pay rent, just utilities, if that’s any comfort.”
“Goddamn them anyway.”
“Right. Goddamn them straight to hell. Listen, do you know if Homer’s come up with anything? He told me those people were really careless with their kid. He said he’d look into it.”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask him.”
Annie looked so desolate, Jerry said once again, “I’m sorry, honey. I’m really sorry.”
Jerry Neville was an old-fashioned American male, given to fatherly endearments. Annie didn’t mind. “Oh, forgive me, Jerry. I know you did better than anybody else could possibly have done. I’m really grateful.”
“Here, dear, I’m afraid I’ve got some papers for you to sign, agreeing to the whole thing.”
“Oh, God, Jerry, I don’t want to.”
“I know.” Jerry laid the papers tenderly on the table.
“Shit,” said Annie, but she signed.
Jerry took the papers and stood up. “I just happen to have a bottle of scotch in the back of the file cabinet. I think of it as reverse champagne.”
“Reverse—? Oh, I see. For the opposite of celebrating. Have you got champagne in there too?”
“Of course, filed under ‘R’ for ‘Rejoicing.’ We’ll get it out one day for you, Annie dear. Don’t despair.”
Charlene Gast won her backstroke event in Providence. But a week later she lost by two-tenths of a second in the two-hundred-yard medley to Cindy Foxweiler in Orlando, Florida. As one of the three fastest swimmers she would still be a contender in the Junior Olympics, but she was deeply disappointed. She couldn’t believe it had happened. Neither could her classmates.
Mrs. Rutledge was appalled. She took Mary Kelly aside. “How are we going to deal with it? Poor Charlene! We’ve got to show her we love her just the same.”
“Oh, don’t worry about Charlene Gast,” said Mary with a dry laugh. “She’ll survive.”
Charlene had an explanation about her loss when she came back from Orlando, after missing two days of school. “Cindy Foxweiler has her own indoor pool, that’s why she won. She can practice every day, like all the time. That’s what you’ve got to have, your own indoor pool.”
“Oh, my Lord Fish,” shouted the fisherman, his words nearly blown away in the howling wind, “my wife is still unhappy.”
The great fish rose from the tumultuous sea and cried, “What favor does she ask for now?”
“She wants—forgive me, Lord Fish—she wants to rule an empire.”
“Go home. She is emperor already.”
Chapter 38
… When the sky began to roar,
’Twas like a lion at the door….
Mother Goose rhyme
Sergeant William Kennebunk was an amateur horticulturalist and botanist. He was knowledgeable about all the trees and wild shrubs that grew in the fields and woods and swamps of Southtown, even on the fringes of parking lots and strip malls. He had found a Stewartia koreana with exfoliating bark in an abandoned garden behind a Wal-Mart on Route 72, and he himself had planted dawn redwoods on the conservation land around a cranberry bog.
Kennebunk knew how to identify trees and shrubs and wildflowers, but he didn’t know anything about forensic botany. Fortunately, as a police officer he knew how to find a forensic botanist. On the day after exploring Small’s property with Homer Kelly, Bill Kennebunk spent four hours directing traffic around a construction site, and then drove all the way to Boston, to the Bureau of Investigative Services. In the botanist’s office he handed over the leaf fragments that had been caught in the woolly fibers of Frederick Small’s coat.
The forensic botanist looked at Kennebunk’s little plastic bag doubtfully. “I don’t know when I’ll get around to it. We’re pretty goddamn busy. Whole department, we just been downsized. Me, I’m one of the lucky ones, only I don’t know about luck. I’m supposed to handle everything four, five guys took care of before. They’re out there on unemployment, going to Florida. One guy, no kidding, he’s in Paris, France. Me, I’d go to Italy. I’ve got aunts and uncles in Italy.”
“Well, would you call me when you’ve had a chance to look at it? My phone number’s inside the bag.”
The botanist looked vaguely at the bag. “You’re in Southborough, right? Lieutenant Kennedy?”
“Southtown. Sergeant Kennebunk.”
“Oh, right, Sergeant.” The botanist’s gaze wandered away to the wall, where there was a calendar with a picture of gondolas in Venice. “Sure, I’ll call you.”
Homer didn’t know what the hell to do about Annie. Those shyster lawyers were tearing at her like a pack of dogs.
His pursuit of her possibly copied key was a trivial piece of research, but it made him feel he was doing something to help. And it didn’t take much time to drop into hardware stores here and there.
So far nobody had recognized the faces in his picture of the Gasts. On the first of May, he went back to Biggy’s in West Concord, hoping to talk to Ron, the weekday clerk.
“Oh, sorry,” said the guy behind the counter, “he’s not here. He’s on vacation in the Caribbean.”
“The Caribbean! But you said—”
“He won’t be back for a couple of weeks.”
“A couple of weeks!” Homer stared at the clerk, who gave up on him and went looking for a grass rake for another customer. “Wait, wait. Do you know where he is in the Caribbean?”
“God, I don’t know.” The clerk raised his voice, and shouted toward the back of the store. “Hey, Mitch, where’s Ron? You know, where did he go in the Caribbean?”
“Ron? He’s in St. Martin. Lucky stiff. You been there? I been there. They got nude beaches, time-share condos. I told him about this really great hotel, the Caribbean Princess.” Mitch appeared, his arms dragged down by two gallons of paint, and beamed at Homer. “You want the address? No kidding, you ought to go.”
“Oh, no thanks,” said Homer, then changed his mind. “Wait a minute, I do want the address. Have you got the phone number of the hotel? I’ll call him up. Hey, I could fax him the picture. Do you think the hotel has a fax machine?”
Homer took down Ron’s full name and the address of the hotel, imagining the vacationing hardware-store clerk basking on the sand in St. Martin, gazing at the turquoise sea, or frolicking on the nude beach, tossing a Frisbee to a beautiful naked islander, his private parts jiggling up and down. Had Ron made a duplicate of Annie’s key for Robert Gast, so that Gast could slyly unlock the door of Annie’s house to allow little Eddy to walk in?
By midafternoon Homer had used all the technology available in Concord, Massachusetts, to send Annie’s photograph of the Gasts to one Ronald Barnes, a possible guest in t
he Hotel Caribbean Princess on the island of St. Martin.
He waited around for a while beside the fax machine in the drugstore, hoping for an instantaneous response. None came. Ron was probably out there on the nude beach, enjoying a cookout with all the other naked guys and gals. Or snorkeling in the turquoise water, gazing at exotic fish in Day-Glo colors and beautiful sea anemones, opening and closing their gorgeous petals.
Chapter 39
When the door began to crack,
’Twas like a stick across my back.
Mother Goose rhyme
Flimnap was there when Annie came back from Jerry Neville’s office, after trading her house for the agreement by the Gasts to drop the court case against her. There was Flimnap, big as life, standing in the driveway juggling plates. When Annie got out of her car he dropped one, and said, “I’ll never get the hang of four.”
Annie lost all dignity. She fell on Flimnap’s neck and sobbed out her wretched story.
He held her gently and said, “Bastards,” and led the way inside.
Annie had decided firmly that she was not in love with Flimnap. You couldn’t be in love with somebody who had a big hole in the middle, a lost piece of himself. Still, it was amazing how much she had missed him.
With her back to Flimnap, she put a kettle on the stove and said, “I’m sorry, Flimnap, but I can’t afford you anymore. I guess you’ll have to find work somewhere else.” This was such a terrible thing to say that she leaned on the counter and started crying again.
“Look,” said Flimnap quickly, “I don’t want to work for anybody else. I want to work for you. Why don’t I hang around for a while? You don’t have to pay me.” Then, as if this selfless remark made him uncomfortable, he looked up at her wall and changed the subject. “The face, it’s back.”