“Not really.” The boy’s voice was so hushed Colm had to lean over the table to hear him. “Just say that one of them might be called Unsworth.”
Colm kept smiling. “Would any of them have worked at Larocque’s after school any time? Unsworth, or any of the others? There was a high school student, Tim told me. He didn’t know the name.”
“Them? I guess not! Jeezum, they wouldn’t be caught dead on a farm. Though Unsworth’s mother has sheep. And he’s stuck with them.” He gave a satisfied little smile.
Then he said, “That was Gerry Dufours’s big brother who worked over there at Larocque’s. He’s dropped out of school now, works down at that furniture factory. So does Unsworth’s big brother—not Wilder, the other one.”
“Thanks,” Colm said, getting up to leave. He’d drop in at that factory. “I’ll let you get to your chores now. You think of anything else, you get right to me or your mom, okay? I’ll keep this other business, about the telescope, between you and me. Must have been a nasty business to go through.”
Vic looked inward for a moment, froze. Then he sighed heavily and took the hand offered him. He gripped it hard, the grip quite strong for a little fellow.
* * * *
The woman was barging right into the barn where Ruth was waiting for the vet—he was half an hour late already, and she should be out mending fence. But Cleopatra had to be checked for heat, the heifers vaccinated for pinkeye—it was carried by flies, highly contagious, and Bathsheba’s calf had it. But here she was, a sitting duck for salespeople, or whatever this woman was. Ruth saw a stockinged leg scrawny as a bovine’s, a red polyester suit. She hated polyester. It always unraveled.
The heavily ringed hand tapped on the inside of the barn door. “I’ll only take a minute,” the woman shouted, as though Ruth was deaf. “I’ll get right to the point. I’m Esther Dolley. I’m a broker. I specialize in farms. I called you once.” She slapped a card down on the wheelbarrow where Ruth was scooping out sawdust. The fingers were thick as gloves inside the gold rings, tiny dark hairs grew on the knuckles.
“I know about your husband,” the woman said. “I’ve had correspondence with him. He wants to sell. That’s why I’m here.”
Ruth looked up from her work. “You thought you’d just drop in, did you? On a farmer?”
“I thought I might find you in here.” The woman’s smile outshone the glare from the window, it masked her face.
Ruth said, “I’ve been busy. He left me with everything to do.” She threw a pile of sawdust under the woman’s feet. The woman gave a whooping sneeze.
“Of course,” Esther Dolley said, like she was talking to a hurt child. “And he feels bad. He said so in his letter. All that next door—” she waved a polyester arm, “he’s worried.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“I have an interested party. He’s a developer. Oh, a Vermonter, yes. I have the plans here, very tasteful. Every house will be landscaped. We’ll keep the vista, the mountains.” She fished a map out of her briefcase, unrolled it with a flourish over the wheelbarrow of sawdust.
Ruth looked at it. Her fists pushed up inside the pockets other jeans. “You couldn’t get a hundred houses on my land. Not with trees between.”
“Of course not,” the woman said brightly. “This includes the folks to the west. They’ve already agreed. They’re not making it, you know, even with both working and a hired man. They want to live a little, get out and—”
“On the north?” Ruth squinted at the map.
“On the north? Well, I haven’t spoken to him yet, Lucien Larocque. It’s too ...” She pursed her lips delicately. “But I’m quite sure, with his wife, um, gone—an elderly man. His daughter is worried, you know, she doesn’t want it. I’ve spoke with her husband.”
“Who has nothing to do with the farm.”
“Well. Well, he came in, didn’t he? Yes, in my office. On her behalf. Looking for a job, actually. It was before, before the, um ... His wife was worried about her mother. And now—” She gave a little sigh, the lips parted like the Red Sea. “The funeral is tomorrow?”
“Mostly family.” Ruth didn’t want this woman barging in in her red suit with the fancy label. It was sticking up at the back of her neck. She’d dressed in a hurry, this woman, a hurry for something. Something more than money, maybe?
The woman threw up her arms; it was all simply beyond her: death and the universe. She rolled up her map, got up, her thighs swished together in the textured stockings. The smile was replaced by sympathy. Realtors throve on divorce and death, Colm had admitted that to her, even while he kept on with it. They were like crows, she’d told Colm (and he laughed), pecking at dead things. At least undertakers disposed of them neatly, burned them.
Two barns had burned, too. She shivered.
“I can see you’re disturbed by all this, and my dear, I understand. Yes, take your time, think it over and call me.” She shoved a card at Ruth. It said ESTHER K. DOLLEY, BROKER. SPECIALIZING IN FARMS. PLATTSBURGH, NEW YORK.
“I just moved over,” the woman explained. “I haven’t got a new card yet. But I put down my phone number. There.” She pointed a sharp fingernail.
Ruth followed Esther Dolley to the door. Outside Doc Greiner’s white pickup was turning into the drive; she was relieved to see him. “How did my husband happen to write you?” she asked. “There are other Realtors here. Ones he knows personally.”
The woman looked down at her leg—had her stocking ripped? She’d stepped in a cow pattie. Ruth smiled.
“Oh, I imagine he contacted us all,” she said, pulling out a cigarette. “Do you mind? I’m one of these bad people—but I’d never smoke in your barn! Darn. Forgot my lighter. I’ll have to—” and giggling, she galloped off, a red heifer, and squeezed herself into a small red car.
“Most Realtors, you know,” she hollered out the window, “don’t deal exclusively in farms. My daddy, my daddy,” she shouted, her voice vibrating, “he was a farmer. My daddy, he was killed in a threshing machine. It ground him up. Like hamburg. I know farms, all right.”
She struck a large wooden match on the car door and lit up. “I just happened to be driving by,” she yelled, the cigarette in her mouth now, “saw your barn door open. Farmers don’t have any privacy, do they? Time for themselves? Your husband says you always wanted to finish college. Maybe you could—”
Turning her back, Ruth went over to greet the vet. She’d take him to the heifers and then call Colm, Pete had contacted all the Realtors, had he? If so, Colm would have told her. No, there was some other liaison here.
She’d call Colm, ask him anyway. She just needed to hear his voice. Calm her nerves.
Chapter Six
Catamount Furniture was the town’s third largest employer after Agway and the Branbury Cheese plant; the place was built on an acre of town land given over to “industry.” The town didn’t mind, just so it was out of sight. Colm smiled as he walked up to the white colonial door—he and his father could use some new furniture, replace a couple of coffins maybe.
A secretary at the general manager’s office informed him that the manager was out, but if he wanted to wait, someone would talk to him. Minutes later the manager himself came in: a tanned young man with a receding hairline and a busy look on his face, he shook Colm’s hand weakly, sat on the desk slightly above Colm’s eye level, crossed his khaki-clad legs at the ankles, and frowned at the note Colm had extracted from Police Chief Roy Fallon.
“I read about this,” he said and shrugged. What did he have to do with it?
There was something about people in a hurry that made one want to talk faster, rise to the level of their anxiety. Colm refused that. He let the man wait.
He said, “You had a furniture raffle. Someone went to the Larocques’ farm, a ticket was found in Mrs. Larocque’s pocket. It was dated April sixth, the afternoon of the assault. She paid a dollar for a chance to win an armchair. Can I see the person who sold her that ticket?”
Colm’s head ached.
The manager said, “You can’t think the salesman had anything to do with a robbery?”
“A murder,” corrected Colm. “Mrs. Larocque died day before yesterday.” (The smile dried up on the manager’s face.) “We want to follow up on everyone who went to the house, that’s all. Tell your salesman not to panic. Oh, and one more thing.”
“Oh?” More foot kicking.
“You have a young guy working here named Dufours. He worked off and on for the Larocques. I’d like to talk to him.”
“Yeah, he works here. He’ll be on lunch break in about”—he consulted a huge watch that had date, year, and probably, Colm thought, century—”Forty-five minutes?”
“I’d like to see one of them now,” said Colm. “Either the raffle salesman or Dufours.” He didn’t think he had to explain. He hadn’t read Chief Fallon’s note, but it must have been a door opener. Fallon used to ask if he wanted to be a policeman one day, like his granddad. And remembering his granddad when they brought him home that day, the blood, the smell, he’d shake his head.
And here he was.
The manager looked put upon. “All right, I’ll get Dufours. It’ll take some to find the salesman. We had more than one selling tickets. In fact, maybe two assigned to that area?”
“I’ll wait?” Colm put a question mark in his own voice and adjusted his glasses. He was used to waiting, wasn’t he? He’d learned patience from the bodies brought into the mortuary. It was one of the prerequisites for undertaking.
Brian Dufours was a short-coupled young man with a pockmarked complexion and hands like hay rakes. There was something dwarflike about him, though he wasn’t abnormally short. He wore gray workpants covered with thick lacquer, a mask around his neck, and the green furniture company T-shirt with a catamount on the front. Colm was reminded of the story about the stuffed catamount that snarled toward New York on the Fay Tavern in old Bennington—back in the days of the Republic of Vermont, that was. Colm always loved the idea of Vermont declaring itself a republic.
Except that Brian Dufours wasn’t snarling; he was looking anxious. He stood like a child in a bearskin, wringing a red kerchief in his hands. His cheeks worked in and out, his black eyes looked startled, like he’d met up with a bear.
“I’m not a policeman, not really,” Colm said, trying to put him at his ease, though Dufours was literally sinking into his seat. The manager had introduced him as “Detective Hanna,” and Colm let it go—why not? He explained the situation in as easy a voice as he could. He only wanted to know the extent of Dufours’s work there, who and what he’d seen. What did he know about Lucien Larocque? His habits, and Belle’s?
When Dufours finally spoke, it was in a voice that might have come straight out of the spray can. “I worked, uh, weekends for a year there. Uh, last year, till I, uh, dropped out, got a job here. I been workin’ here six months now. I do most of the, uh, sprayin’.”
“You didn’t want to work on the farm?”
“Uh-uh. No money there, old man takes ‘vantage ‘cause I’m his kid. Here I bring home a check each week.”
“Home is . . .”
“I got a room. In town.”
Colm questioned him about the Larocques.
“Funny old guy. Never talked much, not like my old man— orders ten to the minute. I done haying, he taught me the round bales. They got, uh, machines now, but he done ‘em by hand. You tie ‘em with string and then put ‘em in plastic. They look like little mushrooms. Five-hundred-pound little mushrooms.”
He seemed amazed at his comparison, and amused at the same time. The red kerchief was wrung into a rag.
“Five-hundred-pound little mushrooms,” Dufours repeated. “Try an’ lift ‘at.”
“He was a good boss, then,” Colm said.
“Oh yeah. Bettern’ pa. Pa—”
“About Larocque. Were you aware of his habits? He was frugal, they say, never spent his money.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about that.” Was there the barest color rising in his neck? “He pay me every Sunday out of his pocket. Money stunk. Who cared? A fair wage. Miz L’rocque, she always run after me with cookies or somepin. They say she part Indian, but I don’t care. Ma say she don’t mix much, don’t come to Home Dem, but she always give me cookies.”
“There was no one who might have disliked her, anyone you might have seen hanging around the place? Arguing with Lucien or Belle?”
“No. No. ‘Cept—”
“Uh-huh?”
“Maybe that, uh, Willy next door. He’d give an argument. Too dumb to know better. He was in my class awhile that Willy, couldn’t read, do moren’ write his name. He got a temper, though, when he’s crossed. One time Mr. L’rocque, he say, Willy, you not diggin’ that hole right. You want to get up that rock you dig around it, get a pick under it. And Willy say, I’m doin’ it my way, it’s only way I can, or I quit.”
“And did he quit?”
“No, but he do it his way. Mister L’rocque, he give up. Besides, that guy Tim’s always there, takin’ Willy’s part. Spoilin’ him rotten. A retard.”
Colm dug his fingernails into his palms. It was everywhere, the old pecking order. The ants hated the worms, the worms hated the birds. What could you do?
He asked a few more questions but gained no more insight.
One thing, though, Dufours was a talker. Like talking was the only way to get rid of the nerves. Dufours told about Lucien’s habit of taking a beer every hour while he worked. It kept Lucien going, he said, and he “don’t mind having one with him.” And Belle, she let him. “My ma, she’d have a stroke, Pa’s bad enough nights when he gits going. Ma keeps him off the booze daytimes. ‘Nother reason I want out. I could work a place like L’rocque’s, but that’s only part-time.”
“He may need more help when he gets out of the hospital. Without Belle.”
Dufours spread his rakelike fingers. He earned more money here, he explained. Though he hated the lacquer. “Gits in my nose, mask don’t keep it out. Sometimes I think, them round bales, they smell good, bettern that lacquer. But I couldn’t keep my place then. I need my own place.”
“Other than lacquer, it’s okay here? The bosses are fair?”
“Okay. I do my work, punch in on time, and they let me alone. That it?” He glanced at the clock. He seemed nervous again, he had to get back to work. He didn’t want to get in bad with his boss.
“I hear there’s a raffle going on,” Colm said as he rose to let Dufours go. He didn’t know why the raffle was relevant, but it nagged at him. “You involved in that? They went to Larocque’s, I understand, day of the assault.”
“That was, uh, Smith, he’s one of the salesmen. I know ‘cause he ask how to get there. He’s always foolin’ around the rest of us guys, only salesman who does. Fat guy. Makin’ jokes and all. Rest of ‘em think they’re somethin’. College guys. They don’t ask me to do stuff like raffles. I just spray.”
“So you talk to Smith. Might have told him about working there, at Larocque’s?”
“I might. He likes a laugh. He thought that beer every hour pretty funny.”
“He’s here today? Smith?”
“Oh no, he quit. Quit couple days ago. He don’t like being bossed around, he said. Wants to be his own man.”
“I see. Thanks then, Brian. Thanks for your help.”
Colm’s hand was still sticky with lacquer when Brian withdrew his. He rubbed it on his pants, but the stuff wouldn’t come off. Voices sounded in the hall, and Brian looked panicked, almost ripped his kerchief in two.
“Oh, one more thing,” Colm said, and Brian wheeled about, a bicycle in a grease spill. “Did you see much of the daughter, Marie, whe
n you were working there? Marie and her husband, Harold?”
Brian thought a minute. “Know Harold from, uh, fire department. But never met her. Not once. You can ask Smith, though. He’s a cousin or somepin’, I dunno.”
“Cousin to who, Marie or Harold?”
But Brian was gone.
“It was Jules Smith,” the manager said.
Colm said, “But he quit, Brian told me. He worked alone, then?”
“Naw, there would’ve been somebody else with him, but we don’t know who. Nobody claims the privilege, right?”
“Then where can I find this Smith?” asked Colm.
“He left no address, okay? He was a good salesman though, smooth. But nobody knew much about him. He came from somewhere across the lake. Drove a red Alfa Romeo, Spent a lot of time with the spray crew. He told jokes and they laughed. Comical guy. We wrote him out a good reference, okay?”
* * * *
Ruth stood on the doorstep a long minute before she knocked. She hated herself for being in awe like this, it was against her principles, all money was tainted in her scheme of things. But the big white house, the well-kept lawn, the bronze sculpture in the front garden—a peregrine falcon it looked like, grasping a sparrow. If she had to wait another minute she might pass out.
And then the door opened. A woman stood there, in jeans like herself, a blue-striped sweatshirt, Reeboks on her small feet. Her blond hair looked freshly set, there was something frail about her, determined.
“Ruth Willmarth. Victor’s mother. Is this a bad time? You said one-thirty was okay. I had errands this way. I brought you this.”
She held out a pint of syrup. A peace offering. They’d discuss this amicably: no tears, no anger. One reasonable mother to another.
“Come in.” Mrs. Unsworth’s fingers trembled as she took the syrup. She looked fit for little more than sitting behind a porcelain tea set.
The living room was filled with teak furniture. It looked uncomfortable, all angles and peaks and pastels. Not like a room for three active boys, except for the TV that squatted in the middle like a giant snap turtle. Ruth lowered herself into a lemon upholstered chair. The hostess offered coffee.
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