by Jo Macgregor
I knew it must’ve been a trick of my imagination, but for a split-second there, I could’ve sworn I’d spotted Professor Bradley Deaver.
– 27 –
I found a diner on the main street of Crowbury, took a stool at the lunch counter, and scanned a syrup-sticky laminated menu. There were no fancy risottos or ravioli here; it was all stick-to-your ribs fare. I ordered a burger with extra bacon, a side of fries and a Miller Lite, and then made a pitstop at the restroom. A woman with a toddler gave me an unflattering once-over as I came out of the toilet stall. I scrubbed my hands, washed my face, combed fingers through my hair, and wiped my smudged eyeliner and mascara away as best I could. When I returned to my seat, I downed a good half of my beer in one long swallow.
While I waited for my food, I chatted with the waitress, a forty-something woman with soft features and bad highlights, asking her about the old house with the round red barn outside of town.
“That old wreck?” she said. “It’s been empty for years.”
“Do you know who used to live there? I’m thinking of a family with a woman and her little boy, and an older man who was maybe her father?”
“Yeah, I remember them. The Kellys, I think.” She turned to an old woman nursing a cup of coffee at the far end of the counter and said, “Ruth, what was the name of those folk who lived out on the dairy farm with the round barn?”
“Kehoe,” the woman said.
“That’s right, Kehoe. The girl was called Mary Kay, like the cosmetics, that much I remember. But her father … Now, what was Mary Kay’s father called, Ruth?”
The woman scrunched up one eye and rolled the other skyward as if searching the heavens for the answer. “Might’ve been Melvin. Or Marvin. Can’t say for sure. We always just called him Mr. Kehoe.”
“And the little boy?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure he was called Derek,” the waitress said. “I was a grade below him at school. Derek Kehoe,” she said, testing the sound of it for recognition. “Yup, that’s it.”
“Was that the whole family?”
“Was that the whole family, Ruth?” she asked the old woman.
“I think there were some relatives in New Hampshire, but I don’t know anything about them.”
At the ping of a bell, the waitress fetched my burger from the serving hatch and set it down in front of me. It didn’t look half bad, but the knife and fork were smudgy with fingerprints, so I went in with my fingers.
“Do you have any hot sauce?” I asked the waitress after a bite of the burger.
“Of course,” she said and brought me a bottle of sriracha.
I squirted a blob onto my plate and taste-tested with a French fry. Too sweet, very salty, disappointingly tame. “What happened to the Kehoe family?” I asked. “The farm is completely deserted now.”
“Oh yeah, it’s been empty for years and years,” she replied. “I don’t remember the whole story. But Ruth will know; she knows everything about this town. And she’ll keep talking as long as you keep feeding her. You up for that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Ruth, this nice young lady wants to buy you lunch and pick your brains.”
The old woman beckoned me over. I grabbed my food and beer, leaving the mild sauce behind, and walked to her end of the counter.
When I was two seats away, she held up a hand. “That’s close enough.”
I sat down, taking in her appearance: white hair, black eyes, a sharp rabbit’s chin, and the wrinkled lips and stained fingers of a lifelong smoker. I estimated her to be pushing ninety but her gaze, when she studied me, was clear and shrewd.
“Interested in the Kehoes, eh? Why’s that?” she asked. “You one of those researchers who writes up the family histories?”
“Exactly right.” I grabbed a menu and passed it to her. “What’ll it be?”
Waving away the menu, she told the waitress, “Liz, I’ll have the meatloaf with gravy, mashed potatoes, and green beans. And you can throw in a side of fried onion rings and” — she considered my food — “another of crispy bacon. Just pile it all up on the one plate. And a short stack of pancakes with blueberries for after.”
“And to drink?” Liz asked.
“Just keep the coffee coming.”
“You got it.”
Ruth rubbed her hands together, either in anticipation of the feast headed her way or the opportunity to gossip, and said, “The old Kehoe place was originally a dairy farm. That’s why they had a cow on top of their weathervane. Did you see it?”
“The cow part is gone,” I said.
She nodded, seeming unsurprised. “Juvenile delinquents, that’ll be. It’s getting as we’ll all soon have to lock our doors. Last week, they stole my garden gnome and stuck the poor thing headfirst into the mud at the pond. And don’t get me started on the timber thieves or the hog-snatchers.” She craned her neck to check the food hatch then glanced at the front windows, where a state police car with lights flashing was passing by. “See what I mean?”
I nodded and gave a what’s-the-world-coming-to kind of shrug, even though I suspected the police were headed to the farm with the mysterious well house rather than chasing down pig thieves. “The Kehoe’s farm?” I prompted.
“Kehoe bought it … oh, that must have been in the late fifties or early sixties. It was a going concern then but not doing too good. Already, the commercial farms were doing it bigger and better, driving the small outfits out of business. Kehoe and his wife — a pretty young thing, she was — tried to make a go of it for many years, but it was a struggle, and then along came Belle.”
“Who was Belle?”
“What was Belle, you mean.” She blew on the coffee Liz brought her. “Belle was a hurricane. Made landfall down on Long Island before it turned inland. We had floods and drownings and power lines down for days. Bridges and trees washed away, and enough rain to float Noah’s boat. President Gerald Ford declared us a disaster area.” She sounded proud of the distinction. “Kehoe and his wife were out trying to save the cows from the flood when the river broke its banks, and she was swept away. It got most of the cows too. Kehoe was left alone with a teenage daughter, no more’n a handful of animals, and no money to start afresh. And things just kinda went downhill after that.”
“What did he do then?” I asked.
“Kehoe? He got a job in town, at a store that sold all kinds of fabric and ribbons, sewing machines, yarn, and needles, that kind of stuff. He wound up buying that store from the old owner eventually.”
Her food arrived then — a great mound that my mother would’ve called “a dog’s breakfast.” Deaver, with his preference for obsessively tidy piles of food, would no doubt have fled the diner, traumatized, but Ruth tucked in with relish.
“Where was I?” she asked around a mouthful of meatloaf.
“Kehoe’s fabric store,” I said. “Did he sell buttons?”
“Oh Lord, yes!” She dispatched a few forks full of mashed potatoes and gravy. “He had ’em stored in tubes with a button stuck on the lid and then stacked on these shelves that went nigh up to the roof. Any kind of button you wanted, he had it. People came from all over the state to buy their sewing paraphernalia from him. And he did well too. Better than he ever did dairy farming, anyway.” Loading bacon onto meatloaf, she crowned it with an onion ring, popped it into her mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Well, I guess wool and cotton are easier than cows. They don’t want milking at dawn, don’t catch blackleg or bluetongue, and don’t kick you when you tug their teats too hard.”
We both ate in silence for a while, then I asked, “And his daughter?”
“Mary Kay left school early, didn’t she? That old man wanted her working in the business, hauling down the bolts of cloth and cutting with those giant scissors, because by then he was already starting to get the arthritis.” She paused with a tower of green beans and potatoes loaded on her fork. “You reckon being pessimistic and bitter can put acid in your bones and make ’em grow all cr
ooked?”
“I don’t th— … I mean, perhaps?”
“’Cause he was not what you’d call a happy man.” She popped the food into her mouth and chewed meditatively. “Kehoe could look out on a sunny field of flowers and see only weeds that needed poisoning. It didn’t rain for a week, he’d be calling it a drought and bitchin’ about his vegetable patch.”
“He grew tomatoes, I think?”
“We all did that. Back in the day, we were self-sufficient. Grew our own food and made our own bread and moonshine.”
She glanced around the diner, and I couldn’t tell whether her deep sigh was one of disgust at the softness of the modern generation or of satisfaction with the enormous meal she’d scored from one of them. She leaned away from the counter, stretching her belly and belching into her hand. Then she tucked back in, hoovering up her food with impressive efficiency.
I ate a few more fries and, when she came up for air, asked, “Anything else you can tell me about Kehoe?”
She twisted her mouth and shook her head, as though saddened by her paucity of information on the man. “We weren’t what you would call friends. I never could abide a moody man, and he was that all right.”
… and then you do what you need to, to fix my mood.
Kehoe’s words to his daughter came back to me. He might just have meant she should bake him his favorite pie, but I had a horrible feeling that he’d wanted a different kind of favor from her. Was it possible that Kehoe had been not only Derek’s grandfather, but also his father? My stomach turned at the thought.
I finished my beer. I longed for another, but I still had a drive ahead of me, so I opted for coffee instead. The waitress started a fresh pot and above the hiss of the coffee-machine, I asked Ruth, “So, Mary Kay worked for her father in the fabric store?”
“Oh yeah. Well, until she was too far along.” Ruth cupped an imaginary nine-months’ belly with her hands. “And what a scandal that was!”
– 28 –
“It was all anyone could talk about for months. You remember, Liz? When the Kehoe girl got herself knocked up the year after her momma died?” Ruth said.
“Well, she was bound to get a bun in the oven sooner or later the way she spread it around,” Liz said, bringing Ruth a plate of pancakes.
Ruth clicked her togue in exasperated pity. “She never used to be like that. She was a good girl, quiet, well-mannered, but then her mother died, and I guess the grief changed her. It does that, you know?”
I nodded. I did know. I also knew that it wasn’t uncommon for girls who’d been sexually abused to act out sexually.
“Wait,” Ruth said when Liz started to clear her plate. “I’ve still got some bacon and gravy left, don’t I?”
At a nearby table, a kid sent a milkshake flying. Liz grabbed a cloth and went to clean up the pink puddle while Ruth drenched her pancakes in syrup and folded one around some gravy-coated bacon, taco-style. Fork halfway to her mouth, she caught my expression. “What? The savory brings out the sweet. Want a taste?”
“I’m good, thanks.” I ate the last of my burger and fries, then asked, “How old was Mary Kay when she got pregnant?”
“Fifteen or sixteen, I reckon. Thereabouts, anyway.” Another pancake taco followed the first.
“Who was the father?” I asked, trying to keep my tone casual despite my dark suspicions.
“I don’t know. I wonder if she even did, poor girl. She just wanted to be loved, you know? They think they’ve found it with the neighbor’s farm hand or the sweet-talking salesman passing through town, but all they get is used,” Ruth said and finished the rest of her pancakes.
“How did her father react to the pregnancy?” I asked.
“Not well, I think.”
I’d put good money on his reaction having been a lot more negative than that. But maybe he’d only let rip with the abuse in private. It wouldn’t have been good to let this town of potential customers know his true nature.
After scraping the last of the syrup off her plate with her fork, Ruth licked it off, looking around as if for the waitress. To place another food order? If she kept eating like this, I’d have to pay for the bill by washing dishes; I’d yet to get my first paycheck from Henry Mason.
“He never said a word to me about it,” Ruth continued. “And he would pinch his lips up like he was sucking on a lemon if I asked. But I got the sense he thought she was dragging the family name through the dirt even though it was the seventies, and things were changing, you know? Loosening up. And it wasn’t like he could’ve had religious objections. Why, if he ever as much as set foot in a church, I’ll eat my hat.”
I believed her; this old lady had the appetite of a bird, a pterodactyl.
Another cop car passed the diner. Liz stuck her head out of the door and returned to clear Ruth’s plate, telling us that something was clearly happening somewhere but damned if she knew what or where. The old lady watched her plate disappear with the sort of longing look that suggested she’d have liked to lick it clean too.
“And the boy, her son? What was he like?” I asked Ruth.
“Sweet little thing, he was. A bit soft, perhaps, and a little shy.”
“How did he get on with others?”
Ruth summoned Liz over and asked, “How’d the Kehoe boy get on with others?”
Liz leaned a hip against the counter, settling in for a good gossip. “Fine. He was a bit quiet — an introvert, I guess — but he had friends. The girls liked him because he was so cute—”
“He looked like a little angel. All big eyes and brown curls,” Ruth interjected.
“—and gentle. And the teachers loved him,” Liz finished.
“Why?” I asked.
“He gave them no trouble, I guess, and he really was very cute.”
“And real helpful to his mother and grandfather,” Ruth said, smiling fondly. “When he wasn’t at school, he was doing all the chores at the homestead or working at the store. The ladies who came in to buy their haberdashery and whatnot used to love to pinch his cheeks and call him cutie pie.”
“How did he and his grandfather get on?” I asked.
Ruth thought about that for a moment, sipping on her cold coffee. “I reckon the old man would’ve liked Derek to be tougher. More of rough-and-tumble boy, you know?”
“He thought the boy was too soft?” I suggested.
She nodded slowly. “He was a little hard on the kid, maybe.”
Lady, you don’t know the half of it.
“I remember I once went into Kehoe’s store to buy a zipper for a dress.” A dreamy smile crept over Ruth’s face. “Silver satin, it was and tight in all the right places. You wouldn’t know it to see me now, but I was once a hot tamale!”
“I can imagine,” I said, smiling.
“Anyhow, I was there in the store when what should happen but a bunch of people come in squawking, carrying the boy — limp as a noodle and out cold, he was! He’d been hit by a car in the street outside, see? They said he got catapulted into the air and landed square on his nut.”
“How old was he then?” I asked.
Ruth looked at Liz, who said, “Around thirteen or fourteen, maybe?”
“Yup, could be,” Ruth said. “Well, his mother took one look at him — as pale as a November frost and bleeding from the head — and she panicked and started screaming. The old man told her to wait in the storeroom because her hysterics weren’t helping the situation. I thought that was a bit harsh, I don’t mind saying. But she did as she was told. Well, I always thought she was a timid, mousy little creature, but judge not lest ye be judged, as the Good Book says.”
“Did she ever stand up to her father?” I asked. “Do you think she might ever have confronted him about being too tough on her or her kid?”
Ruth canvassed Liz’s opinion on this, placing an order for an iced coffee at the same time.
“You knew her better than I did,” Liz replied, tumbling ice cubes into a blender.
R
uth nodded, conceding the point.
“You want whipped cream on top?” Liz asked above the noise of the machine.
“Load her up!” Ruth yelled back. When the racket subsided, she said, “I’m battling to imagine Mary Kay taking on her father, but you never really know folks, do you? They can look like the sort who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but inside, they could be boiling mad.”
“Folks,” Liz said, setting a tall glass of iced coffee topped with swirls of cream and drizzles of chocolate sauce in front of Ruth, “can be pushed too far.”
“Anyhow,” Ruth said, admiring her towering beverage, “when they laid the boy on the fabric cutting table, Kehoe moved a bolt of cloth away so it wouldn’t get blood on it. Worried about his fabric at a moment like that, can you believe it?”
All too easily.
“I can still see it as clear as if it happened yesterday.” Ruth paused to consider and eat a spoon of whipped cream. “Well, as clear as last year, anyhow.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
Ruth stuck a straw in her drink and slurped up a good third of it at once. “The boy came around and started crying, clutching his head. Well, I reckon it would’ve been hurting like heck. And Kehoe told him to get control of himself, to be a brave boy and stop crying. As if he didn’t want the folks in the store to think his grandson was a pansy. By then, the boy had a goose egg swelling up on his head.”
“Did he get taken to a hospital for a head scan?” I said.
“We didn’t have a hospital in town, but Kehoe said he’d take the boy to Doc Caruthers to check and see if he was okay.”
I wondered if that had ever happened. Based on the visions I’d seen, I doubted it. If these ladies were anything to go by, the townsfolk hadn’t known a fraction of what went on at the Kehoe farm. They’d thought Kehoe was just a hard man made bitter by life, that he was a little unsympathetic with his daughter and wanted to toughen up his grandson. But I knew how truly abusive he’d been to both. My heart went out to the gentle little boy who didn’t fit his grandfather’s ideas of how a “real boy” should look and behave and feel. No wonder he never caused trouble at school — he needed someplace where he could be relatively happy and free from harsh criticism and punishment.