Buried Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  When Jane realized Charley looked sick and was about to say something, she felt her defenses rise. The old Jane rebelled every time she thought Charley was going to be protective, every time Charley was going to correct her. In fact, Jane knew that the old Jane got defensive even when Charley said nothing or was totally supportive. And, in wrestling with all this internal sorting out of possible reactions, Jane realized she had to ask herself a big question—when exactly had she become the new Jane?

  “In that garage, Charley, I was scared, but I knew what to do,” Jane said. “I don’t know how to explain it better than that. It was like passing a test I didn’t even know I was taking.”

  Charley nodded and pointed behind her. She turned and saw Fuzzy returning from the flower garden in the front of the house. In one hand he was clutching a bunch of zinnias and cosmos and in the other, he held two large, dirty bones.

  “Hey, kids,” he called to them, “I got some more.”

  While they waited for Munson to arrive, Charley reassured everyone that they were looking at the leg bones of a large dog. Everyone except Lula was sitting out on the side porch—Don and Nellie, Fuzzy. Jane saw her through the window staring into a kitchen cabinet. Jane thought maybe she was trying to figure out what to cook next, then she saw her take out a bottle and shake a few pills into her hand. Lula looked at them, poured herself a glass of water, then Jane watched her let the pills slide from her hand into the sink. Lula poured the water down after them, reached into another cabinet and got out a pitcher. “I’m making lemonade,” she called out.

  “Jeez,” said Nellie, “she’s driving me crazy with her make-work.” She stood and walked over to pull a few stray dandelions that had dared sprout by the porch steps.

  “Welcome to my world,” said Don softly.

  Jane had called Munson back, after Bostick had made a frantic call about more bones, and reassured him that they had not found a human skeleton, but if he could round up Dempsey and Hoover, who were likely somewhere on the property, it might be a good time for a little show-and-tell session.

  Tim and Claire had arrived just in time to see Fuzzy waving the bones over his head in the front yard when they drove up.

  “Where’s Bruce?” asked Claire, and Jane realized she had not seen or heard from her partner since the morning.

  “He and Nick walked the shortcut over to the Sullivans’,” said Charley. “He thought he might see something interesting on the way. And Nick was going to take him past the shooting range and back here by the corn path.”

  “Sullivan’s a nut, you know,” said Nellie. “Always has been.”

  Don gave her one of those looks that in the hands of a less-practiced husband might have shouted for her to be quiet. But since Don had been smoothing out the rough edges of Nellie for over forty years, he had his look down to a slight incline of the head toward Fuzzy, a tight, almost straight smile, and the barest of head shakes.

  Jane thought it eloquent and subtle. Lula, carrying out a tray with pitcher and glasses, saw it differently.

  “No need to coddle us, Don,” she said. “Fuzzy’s got the Alzheimer’s, and we all know what that means, don’t we, Fuzz?”

  Fuzzy stared straight ahead. After his excitement over finding the bones, he had gone quiet. Lula hadn’t wanted to be so forthcoming about Fuzzy last night, but something in her this afternoon seemed different. She had softened somehow. She had not gotten kinder or warmer exactly, she had just blurred a bit around the edges. Jane thought it was as if she had been holding her breath, standing up straighter than necessary, and now she exhaled. She looked like a woman who had made up her mind. Or had it made up for her, thought Jane.

  “My car smells like a Coney Island hot dog shop,” Tim hissed into Jane’s ear. He had thrown his notebooks and bags into the backseat. “Did you solve the mystery of what the Root Beer Stand puts in its Italian sausage?”

  Jane saw Oh and Nick walking single file along the corn path, still out of voice range. Oh was waving Nick ahead of him. It must be a narrow stretch on the path. She waved, then noticed Jack Sullivan walking along behind them carrying a fishing pole. Maybe the Hometown boys had been over there to discuss the trout pond.

  Munson came around the back and walked up the porch steps. Dempsey and Hoover were not with him, but he held the door for Elizabeth Sullivan, who stepped up and took a seat, nodding to every one. Dempsey and Hoover could have cut through the cornfield and be over at the Sullivans’ farm right now sneaking arrowheads into the front lawn.

  “I was over at the Sullivans’ when I got your call, and Mrs. Sullivan insisted on accompanying me,” Munson said. He wasn’t happy. “Mrs. Wheel, you’ve had a productive day?”

  Jane gave an uneven nod. Yes and no. Until her conversation with Lucille and her eavesdropping on Hoover, she had felt strongly that there was a case to be made against the Hometown USA partners. If Johnny Sullivan had been about to expose them as charlatans, they might want him dead. If Johnny himself had been trying to pull a little hoax, they might have wanted to cut him out. And there was the mysterious man unmasked—Michael “Ocupado” Hoover. But she had heard Hoover on the phone talking to Dempsey about Fuzzy as the shooter. If she told Munson about that, he would be even more certain Fuzzy had done it. Case closed. And Jane knew that wasn’t the way it was supposed to end.

  Jane was sure that Hoover had been out here on Saturday night with Sullivan. They had probably been planning on leaving a more convincing bone display somewhere that night. They didn’t want Charley to sign off on the site as the innocent burial ground of Otto the cat. Jane wanted to talk this through with Oh or Charley or even Tim, who was still glaring at her for eating in his car. She was not quite ready to intone the lugubrious “and the reason I’ve called you all here today.”

  Jane was thinking maybe she’d run out to meet Oh when Fuzzy stood up and began moaning. He was not saying anything intelligible but was just staring ahead and making a mournful cry. It might have been the sound of a person’s heart breaking.

  “I’m telling you, Don, if that happens to me, you get a gun and shoot me,” whispered Nellie. Jane winced. Nellie saw her and whispered loudly to Jane, “I mean it. You kill me if I get like that. And then you remember I …”

  “Oh no,” said Jane, seeing Lula’s face go slack watching Fuzzy. “Oh, no.”

  “Yes, Nellie, you want to be cremated,” Don said, stopping her. “I know. We all know. Maybe we could cut out the middleman and I could just set you on fire.”

  An unusual speech for Don, but Jane realized that Fuzzy’s wailing was affecting everyone. What must that effect have been on Lula, who had been hearing it alone for so long? When Jane had checked Fuzzy’s prescription bottle, she noted that the original date of issue had been over a year ago. Lula had been doing the heavy lifting for a long time. Jane watched Lula cross over to Fuzzy, take his arm, and begin stroking it. Lula saw Jane watching her, nodded, then turned all of her attention to Fuzzy. He quieted the sound but continued to cry.

  A popping sound made them all pay attention. Jane recognized it. “That’s it. The noise I heard that night. It wasn’t like thunder, it was more like that, a car backfiring, or a tractor …” She looked toward the cornfield and was momentarily confused. Why was Jack Sullivan pointing his fishing pole into the air?

  The entire group on the porch stood and faced the trio who stood at the end of the path. Nick stood in front of Oh who stood in front of Jack Sullivan who was pointing a rifle at them. Jane realized that it wasn’t a fishing pole, had never been a fishing pole in this landlocked Illinois farmland. Nor had it been about a narrowing of the path before, it was Oh trying to keep himself between Nick and Sullivan.

  Even in her panic, Jane noticed that Munson was scanning the entire yard. He had called off the officers he had stationed in the field’s perimeter. But Bostick and a few others should be somewhere on the property.

  “Hey,” yelled Sullivan, “Fuzzy up there? Damn sun’s so bright, I can’t see y
ou all so good. Is that you, Fuzzy?”

  Fuzzy had stopped crying and had come back to them. He squinted back at Sullivan and nodded. As an afterthought, he yelled, “Yeah?”

  “I hear that you killed my boy. That true?”

  “Nope,” said Fuzzy. He looked at Lula and shook his head. She shook her head back. “Nope, I sure didn’t,” he yelled back stronger.

  “I heard in town that the police think so because you have that senile Alzheimer’s.”

  “I haven’t been myself, that’s true, but I didn’t shoot anybody. You let those two come up here, Jack. You come, too,” said Fuzzy, starting to walk forward.

  “Stop right there.”

  Oh had been whispering to Nick at every exchange between the two old men. Jane could see his mouth move and saw Nick nod. She hadn’t seen any steps taken, but she could tell that Oh was telling Nick to move slightly ahead and over. Oh was cheating sideways so he could watch Sullivan’s face and see where he was pointing the rifle.

  Claire had not taken a breath.

  Charley, Jane noticed, was breathing heavily, almost choking. He was edging closer to the edge of the porch.

  “Let go, Lula. I’m going to go talk to him,” said Fuzzy.

  Munson said no, but Fuzzy didn’t pay any attention. He walked down the porch steps and stood in front of the assembled group.

  “I did not kill your boy, Jack.”

  Sullivan seemed to weave a little back and forth, but he held the gun, now pointed at Fuzzy, steady.

  Oh must have given Nick the word because Nick, quickly, but without breaking into a run, disappeared down the first row of corn. Oh had blocked him from Sullivan’s line of vision so that Sullivan did not even see that he was gone. Oh himself stood perfectly still.

  “What I did,” said Fuzzy, “was kill your boy’s cat.”

  “Oh man,” said Tim, “I’d love to see this one get torn from the headlines.”

  “Shut up, Lowry,” said Nellie, “this I want to hear.”

  Charley had backed off the porch by the side steps, and Jane could see him cutting over into the stand of trees and heading toward the cornfield, out of Sullivan’s sight. Jane knew that he’d reach Nick in a matter of seconds. They’d both be safe as long as they were out of sight. And Fuzzy was now commanding Sullivan’s entire attention.

  “I should have told you ten years ago. I ran over Otto with my tractor,” said Fuzzy, warming up to telling the story. “I mean the cat was a senile bastard by then, and he just didn’t move. I think he was sleeping under the tractor for the shade. I felt real bad, but Elizabeth told Lula that she thought he was going off to die somewhere every night when he limped away from the house, so I just buried him and figured you didn’t need to know the end had been like that for him.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. I forgot all about it and burying him and everything. Then at the pig roast I was talking to Johnny about something—he was asking me all about the bones and I said it wasn’t going to amount to anything—I just called in Don and Nellie’s girl and her husband to go along with a good story. I knew it wasn’t anything big here. Been planting treasure rocks for the grandkids for years and this was just an old pile of cat bones. That’s what I told Johnny. He laughed at me and asked how I could be so sure about it. So I told him it was Otto.”

  “So Johnny came back that night,” Jane said, “to take home the family pet.”

  They all heard another rustle in the cornfield, a thud like something was being dropped.

  “Who’s there?” said Sullivan. “Come out and show yourself or I’ll shoot you.”

  Jane held her breath. Had Nick and Charley gotten turned around and circled back to where Sullivan was standing with the gun?

  Oh spoke softly, but loud enough for them all to hear. “Mr. Sullivan? Let’s go up on the porch now and talk about this. Mr. Neilson would like to make his apologies.”

  Jane didn’t take her eyes off Sullivan, who was looking more and more confused.

  “Mrs. Sullivan,” said Jane, “can you call to your husband? Will he drop the gun and come up here if he knows you’re here?”

  “I’m telling you, come out and show yourself,” said Sullivan, into the seemingly endless rows of corn.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what anybody will do. I thought Johnny would never come back here. He was a college boy; he didn’t need to be a farmer. But he always wanted the farm, said he’d sell it and make us all enough money. Said he was going to make sure all the land around here went for top dollar.”

  “Call your husband before he hurts somebody or kills himself,” said Nellie.

  Sullivan fired a shot in the air.

  Dempsey and Hoover came out from the corn a few rows back.

  “Thank God,” said Jane.

  They all heard the cars on the road. No sirens, but they all knew that in a matter of minutes police would pile out of cars and surround the house and yard, all the way down to the corn path. If old Sullivan didn’t drop that rifle, they would shoot him down.

  “Too bad you police took all my guns,” said Fuzzy. “I could shoot old Jack from here.”

  “Don’t, Lula,” said Don, who was the only one to notice that Lula had returned to the porch from inside the house. She was standing a few steps higher than all of them, framed by the kitchen door.

  “I can get him, Fuzzy.”

  Lula aimed and lowered her twenty-two—they all knew it was hers by the loopy cursive Lula written on the stock—and fired.

  Jack Sullivan crumpled to the ground, clutching his leg and swearing. His wife walked out toward him, more slowly than Jane had thought she might. Bruce Oh, who was right there, took off his tie to use as a bandage on the leg. Jane could hear Claire mutter under her breath that it was a particularly rare vintage tie and perhaps he could have used Sullivan’s own sleeve, but Jane was sure she was the only one who could hear this complaint.

  “Is that where you were aiming, Lu? The leg?” asked Fuzzy.

  Lula nodded.

  She carried her rifle over to Munson, who was on the phone ordering the ambulance and reporting to whoever was in charge of the backup that had just arrived out front. Lula handed the gun to him.

  “Here you go, Franklin,” said Lula. “You’ll be needing this to test for your investigation, I suppose. You can give back all the others now.”

  Munson nodded.

  “This doesn’t change anything, though, Lula,” said Munson. “Just because Fuzzy claims to have killed the cat doesn’t mean he didn’t come out here and see Johnny, grab a gun from the barn …”

  “Franklin, I swear I am going to call your mother and tell her to start giving you some smart pills,” said Lula.

  Jane felt sorry for Munson. He wasn’t even trying to figure out what Lula was talking about. Jane went over to him and said softly, “This is the gun that you’re going to have to test.” He still looked blank. Jane thought she could picture little Franklin sitting with Will at the table, eating Lula’s homemade doughnuts. “This is the gun that killed Johnny Sullivan,” Jane said, almost whispering. Now Munson would really be sorry he came back to work in Kankakee.

  “Why didn’t you tell everybody right away, Lula? You shot Johnny because you thought he was a trespasser … it was an accident,” said Jane. But she knew the answer. Lula couldn’t admit anything because that would mean she’d have to leave Fuzzy alone.

  Charley and Nick came out on the porch, and Jane swept them both up in a hug. Nick had such a familiar look, a kind of giddy sparkle around his eyes. This is bad, Jane thought. He has that thrill thing going. Any minute he would announce that he wanted to be a detective, too.

  “Mom? I know this is going to sound weird, but I’m starving. Can I go in and …”

  Jane hugged him as hard as she could. Thank God the hungry part came first. Maybe she could head off that adrenaline rush, that thrill, for a few more years. She didn’t trust her voice with him yet, so she nodded and gestured toward the kitche
n.

  Munson stood there holding Lula’s rifle and said nothing. She turned her eyes from him to Fuzzy, standing in the yard. He had gone ramrod straight, staring out into the cornfield.

  “He’ll stay like that all night if I don’t go get him,” said Lula. “Last couple of years, he’s been about the same, not really getting any worse. A few months ago, though, he started going downhill fast. I stopped letting him drive. I’d say I had to go to the store or something and drop him off at the EZ Way every morning so he could stay in his routine; but it was getting harder to know when he’d just shut down like he’s doing now. And that crying, that crying is new. Doctor said things’ll probably be getting worse and worse, faster and faster.

  “When he told everybody he’d found those bones, that’s when the trouble started. The fool knew it was a cat, but he liked telling the story. Somebody called us and said the government would have to come in and … he got so agitated about it all. I couldn’t make him understand. Truth, I don’t know if that was the Alzheimer’s or not because I couldn’t understand it either. That’s why he thought it’d be good if Charley was here to help explain everything.”

  “And you knew he went outside every night?” asked Jane softly.

  “Yeah, he’d go out there and wander around. Plant things. I thought maybe one night he’d disappear into the cornfield and we’d never find him. He liked to eat though so I could keep getting him to come home by offering food. I planned to do this, finish it,” said Lula.

  Munson opened his mouth to stop her from saying anything further, but Jane saw that no words would come. Jane said, “Lula, maybe …” But Lula would not be stopped.

  “Thought out how it would all go, but would have never done the shooting when you all were here,” Lula said, looking at Jane and Charley, “if I’d been thinking straight. But that night, after the barbecue, he’d been so bad in the house, and time was just running out …”

  Munson reached out his hand and put it on her arm. “Lula, maybe you might want to have a lawyer before you …” Munson’s voice cracked, he cleared his throat, and a bit louder said, “Would you like to call your lawyer?”