Mad Season

by Nancy Means Wright

  And cursed himself for giving her even that opening.

  “All right,” she said. “I just happened to be going this way. I’ll keep in touch. You may need a willing hand. Jesus—”

  “Keep Jesus out of this, Bertha, please? Jesus wasn’t around when Vic was kidnapped.”

  “How do you know he was kidnapped? How do you know he didn’t go on his own, wasn’t scared to death, poor child, with what’s going on around here—he just left, wanting peace?”

  “Bertha, I need to close my eyes a minute. I’m worn out from the trip over to this chair.” He closed his eyes, he was spinning through a revolving door. . . .

  When he opened them again, Bertha was gone; in her place, Ruth, a rainbow after an acid rain.

  “I ran into Bertha in the hall,” she said. “She looked daggers through me when I came in here, said you were resting, you needed your sleep, you’d been looking for Vic. She said to tell you to stop looking, God’s watching over him. If I could only think so. Good Lord.”

  “Lord?” he said, holding out his arms. “Yes, I’m here.”

  And when she grimaced: “At least break out her cookies,” he said. “I got Jell-0 for lunch. I hate Jell-0.”

  “No, thanks, I’d choke on them.”

  Ruth. She was Florence Nightingale in a green beret. She pulled it off and her hair went wild underneath, uncombed, like she had other concerns these days. He wanted to drink her in.

  She was quiet for a time. Then, “You didn’t find Vic. That man didn’t have him.”

  And he nodded, hearing the break in her voice, reached out for her. She dropped heavily to her knees, by his chair.

  Here was a woman who cried out through her silence.

  * * * *

  Lucien lived one day at a time now. Today it was Marie come to visit, just when he wanted to get the chores done, relax after milking, lock up for the night. She had Harold with her, he didn’t need that, Harold’d complain about that Joey. Joey here with Tim, bringing in the cows: Joey or Willy? He wasn’t sure which now, something missing up on top, anyway.

  “Dad, we was driving out this way, Harold’s got a job offer, that new firm—whatsa name, Harold?” And before Harold could open his mouth, “We’ll be in the money now. I won’t say ‘bout time, but. Oh, well. Look!”

  She whirled about, landed with one leg stuck forward like a mannequin. He couldn’t see what it was—new dress? Harold touched the pink stuff, like he’d wove it himself. What was that fairy tale, Rumple-something? Belle used to read it to Marie. Rumple stole some baby, it ended bad.

  “Little Michelle, too. Show grandpop, doll. Harold bought it. He likes to see us look nice, he got taste, Harold.”

  Lucien squinted. The girl was in something blue, it had lace. He held out his arms. She shied away.

  “All right then,” he said, hurt. He knew he smelled of barn. If they’d said they was coming. But no, they just arrive, like he’s nothing to do but sit and yak.

  “Leaving you a ham, Dad. Harold cooked it, didn’t you, Harold?”

  Harold nodded, took a step backward. Harold wasn’t a talker. He didn’t like to come here, Lucien knew it. Harold knew he knew it. Harold was, what was the word? Fastidious. Fastidious. Marie taught Lucien that word. Fastidious. Humph. Lucien and Belle was fastidious they’d’ve gone under the first day of farming! Now the grandgirl was catching it. It made Lucien angry. He lunged after the child, grabbed her, he wouldn’t be rejected. Held her, squirming, against his stained overalls. “Grandpop’s a baby.”

  It was too much for Harold, he rushed in, yanked the child away. “She don’t like that.” He held her to him like a bag of gold. “We gotta get going,” he told Marie. “I can’t keep her waiting.”

  Lucien turned his back.

  “Dad, you gotta understand. They bring kids up different these days. You don’t force ‘em to do things like you did me.”

  That did it. He confronted her. “What’d I ever force you to do? You was the little princess! Go ask your mother.”

  “Dad, Mother is—” She sighed. “Okay, Dad. Okay. I was. Now sit down, Dad, we wanna talk a minute.” She turned to Harold. “Hold your horses, Harold, it’s important.”

  Lucien was suspicious. “I got help in the barn. I gotta supervise. They don’t know the way I do. We’ll talk some other time.”

  “It’s always ‘some other time,’ Dad. Five minutes. Sit down five minutes. Put that ham in the fridge, Harold. Dad, when you gonna get a new fridge? Mom wanted a new one. You could’ve afforded it. All that money they took—how much?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t know how much. He only knew there was always some to pay the vet, the plumber, machine repairs. Most things he did himself. He burned his own trash, buried on his own land. Why’d she want to know how much money?

  “The broker was here, right? Esther Dolley?”

  He tried to get up out of his chair. She put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Well, she was, she told us. She’s a smart lady, Dad, right, Harold? Harold knows. She got big clients. One especially. He’s land hungry. Got all he wants now ‘cept this farm and Willmarth’s. Esther thinks Ruth’ll sell, being Pete’s gone and that boy, you know—God, that gives me the willies! So that leaves you.”

  He managed to get up now, all the way. He’d forgot about the feed, the blend of it. Willy wouldn’t know, Tim would give too much. Ruth spoiled her cows, gave ‘em names. Lucien didn’t hold with that, he didn’t give names. He knew ‘em by their looks, their quirks. They were all Bossy. Vaches.

  “Dad, they’re saying milk’s bad for you now, it’s on the TV. Bunch of doctors speaking up. Already people drinking skim, soon it’ll be powdered milk, you watch, or none. Even babies, Dad. Mother’s milk and then—”

  “Pepsi Cola,” Michelle said, and giggled. She was sitting on her father’s lap, Harold holding on to her like she’d get contaminated if she moved. His chin down in her hair.

  “Pepsi Cola, sure, you silly.” Marie diddled the girl’s chin. “Anyway, you’re alone now, Dad. You’re seventy-one, or is it two? You can’t do like you used to. And without Mom ...”

  “I gotta go,” Lucien said. He’d feed ‘em too much, that Tim. He couldn’t afford the waste. He got up to go.

  “Dad, it’s for your own good. We care about you, Daddy.”

  He swiveled about in the doorway. “You care, then leave me be,” he said. And plunged out.

  When the siren sounded, the fire trucks rushing up his road, past his farm, past Willmarth’s, he just held his ears. Noise pollution.

  * * * *

  Colm was alone with the fat man, in the Branbury police station. He’d had to get Chief Fallon to allow the interview. They’d charged Smith with an unlicensed gun, that was all they could do. Fallon looked sorrowful, like Eeyore with his tail cut off. In the motel room where Jules Smith had checked out, there was no sign of a boy, the room clerk saw nothing amiss; the man had entertained them, told jokes in the lobby, had a leisurely breakfast in the coffee shop, checked out at noon. He’d paid cash, and no, it didn’t smell.

  “You were alone,” Colm said, and Smith nodded, there was no joking now, he was pissed, his cheeks wobbled, the bulgy blue eyes waxy, indignant. He’d done nothing—just trying to buy a car and suddenly all these men and guns. He was going to report it to ...

  “The police?” Colm said.

  The man saw the joke, for a second he smiled. He drummed his plump fingers on the chair arm. His hair lay in gray threads along the pink skull, the face was the color of ketchup. He’d go fast when he went: overweight, the blood pushing at the thin skin. You could see the veins jumping, he was that nervous. It gave Colm heart.

  “There was a murder,” Colm said, “two murders. You were seen before the second one, the boy, Willy. He went after you, the bartender saw that. He was found in Otter Creek.”

  He tried to keep calm. He gripped his fingers to keep them from shaking.

  “Sure, I was there,” the man s
aid coolly. “But I didn’t off any retarded kid.”

  “Did I say he was mentally retarded?”

  “Well he was! Ask anybody, ask the bartender. I was gonna pay him for a favor, but he refused. And I left. I didn’t do no killing.”

  Colm fought to keep his temper. The man was lying. “The Larocques. Night of April sixth. Around midnight. An old man and woman—farmers, defenseless. You had nothing to do with that?”

  The sweat squeezed out of the man’s face. His cheeks shook as he spoke. “What would I want with farmers?”

  “This,” Colm said, fishing in his pocket, unfolding a wad of money. “You gave this to a used-car dealer in Plattsburgh. This to the bartender at the Alibi. Smell it.”

  He held it up to Smith’s nose. The man jerked his head back.

  “Smells like money,” he said. “Old money. So? Maybe I got it as change. How can I remember?”

  Colm had to admit the smell had faded, but holding it close, there was the barn. No question. He could hear the mooing.

  “Lot of barn money around,” said Smith. “I was born on a farm myself, I seen other farmers at the Alibi, their money smells. I play cards, I win sometimes, you know.”

  “Most farmers don’t carry eight, ten thousand dollars in their pockets. You paid barn money for that Colt. It smells like a herd of Holstein.” He held out the money and the man turned his head.

  “You can’t prove nothing,” he maintained. He crossed his legs, the feet seemed crushed into the heavy boots, the legs swollen above the black boot tops; the silver points that decorated the boot right to the toe glittered in the slant of window light. The man looked calmer now. The red was fading in his cheeks.

  “We’ll see,” Colm said. “Meantime, I understand, you’re to stay around town.”

  “I’m a salesman,” the man said, getting up. He rolled on his feet, it was an effort. “I got appointments all over.”

  “They’ll have to wait.”

  There was something about the boots, the thistle-shaped filigree on the sides. Somewhere, Colm thought, after the man had left the room, he’d seen those silver thistles.

  Chief Fallon was on the phone when Colm hobbled in on his cane. Fallon had the phone in his hand, his face was red with frustration: his beeper was malfunctioning, it sat on his shoulder like a dead beetle. “We’re working on, uh,” he said into the receiver, “uh, look, Miz Asher, we don’t know who set your—if it was set, I mean we’re tryin’, I know, I know, what you lost.”

  “Barn fires,” he said when he hung up finally, his own face on fire, “three of them now. One over to Asher’s—gol, we haven’t a clue. Know anything about electronics?” He tapped the dead beeper. Colm shook his head.

  “We checked Plattsburgh,” Fallon went on. “Jules Smith is an, uh—real name’s Kosciusko, Jules Kosciusko. Worked as a salesman for some furniture company. Let go and came to Branbury, worked for, uh, you know. Left suddenly, three days after the Larocque uh—”

  “That broker,” Colm said. The woman’s card flashed into his mind’s eye. “Esther K. Dolley. Find out what the K stands for, would you? Granny’s second sight,” he said when Fallon looked at him blankly. “And by the way,” he said as he hobbled out—the ankle was like pulling along a tree stump, he had to get home, take a shot of Guckenheimer—”Smith, I mean Kosciusko, killed Belle. I think I can give you proof.”

  “Yeah? And I’ll give you a job,” Fallon said. “If you’ll learn how to shoot a gun. That Ann Arbor officer, uh, he said—”

  “Oh, hell,” said Colm.

  * * * *

  Ruth heard the phone ring: she couldn’t answer, Sharon was screaming, there was something wrong. Her heart leaped in her knees, the knees gave way. Was it the baby? Was it Vic? She raced out on the porch.

  Flames were licking at the north side of the barn, it looked like the milk room. There was only a swinging door between it and the heifers. They were bellowing, the mothers bawling from their stalls. “Call Tim,” she screamed back. “Call the fire department. Emily! You hear me? Ohmigod! Get out here. Get out!”

  Sharon had the barn door wide, she was flinging open the stanchions, the cows were alarmed, smelling smoke, they were charging into one another. There was no time to think how, why. The flames were in the milk room: “Get the calves out first!” she screamed.

  Here was Emily now, and Wilder—where had he come from? The four of them shooing the rearing heifers. They stampeded out, panicked by the rising smoke, the shrieks of their fellows. The newest, still with her mother—Charlotte! In the back of the barn.

  “Mother, we’ll get them, stay here. Don’t you go.”

  “It’s Charlotte, her calf. They’re still inside!”

  “Too late, Mother.”

  “I have to. It’s Charlotte!”

  “No,Mother, no.”

  They wouldn’t keep her back, damn it. She broke through, raced to the rear of the barn while they shrieked at her heels. The smoke was a gritty tent, smothering her nose, her eyes, she could only grope, low, for the bars. Charlotte was squealing, a high-pitched noise she’d never heard before, it was like a warren full of rabbits. Her calf could be on fire—what would they do? Her fingers failed her, her brain was sucked into a vacuum. The bellowing, the shouts, farther away now. She felt herself stumbling, flailed her arms, pitched forward. . . .

  When she came to she was flat on her back, on the grass, the air filled with running men and sirens. “Charlotte,” she gasped, and Emily shook her head. “Wilder got the calf. That was all we could do. Charlotte was like frozen, in shock. She was a dead weight, Mom. It was too late. Go in the house.”

  Behind them the flashing figures, a cascade of water, voices shouting: she saw Tim, with Joey. And Bertha—what was Bertha doing here?

  “Get away!” She waved her hands, but the woman just stared, her eyes lit up like small grass fires.

  Emily cried, “Wilder. Over here. Wilder!”

  Charlotte’s sickly calf was crying for its mother, licking at Ruth’s legs. “Get her in the pasture,” Ruth shouted, up now on her knees. “Never mind the mud. Give her to Bathsheba.”

  But no one was there to hear.

  She’d go herself, set the calf by Bathsheba, if she’d take, if the old girl would let her. The barn was out of her control. Was it gone? Her barn gone?

  Something was ringing. Her ears? The phone? If it was she had to answer it. But her legs wouldn’t take her there.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kurt Unsworth was already in custody when Colm arrived with Kosciusko. Faced with the photographs of Belle’s face, the marks that matched the boots, the fat man had burst into a waterfall of sweat, and named Kurt. It had been crazy getting here, Colm pulled aside twice for fire engines, the chief would be in a fury. Fallon was on the phone again: the farmers were hysterical, demanding police protection, a fourth barn today. He waved Colm into the meeting room, his neck pocked with hives. Kosciusko was already there. He had the boots on, the boots with the shiny thistles.

  When they brought in Kurt the boy gave a shout and raced over to the fat man, an officer had to grab him. Kurt seemed grounded, sober, they’d had him six hours: no time to shoot up, pop a pill. Colm couldn’t imagine it, that dependence on a drug, like being anchored to a slippery rock in Dead Creek.

  The creek made him think of Willy, his drowned bones. The boots had struck Willy, too—his stomach, though the marks weren’t so clear.

  “Get him out of here,” he ordered, and they jerked the fat man to his swollen feet. “Take those boots off him,” Colm said. “They’re evidence.”

  “He named you,” Colm said to Kurt. “I see you know that.” He nodded at the sergeant to turn on the tape recorder.

  Kurt was quiet now, slumped into a chair. The words coughed out of him.

  Kurt and Smith were doing drugs during lunch hour at Catamount; Kurt asked the latter for a loan, Smith said he could use some cash himself, and Kurt told about Lucien Larocque.

  “But
he already knew, he already knew about Larocque,” Kurt said. “He just decided to use me.”

  He squinted at the ceiling, like he couldn’t think for a minute who Lucien Larocque was, the name had just slipped out.

  “How did you know about the barn money?”

  “Barn money. Oh, yeah, from Dufours. He’d worked there once. Happened to mention it, we thought it was funny. He said everybody knew. The wife paid for groceries out of barn money.”

  “Smith—his real name is Kosciusko—said he’d never been to Larocque’s, had nothing to do with barn money.”

  Kurt laughed. The laugh came up slow and hollow out of his caved in belly. It looked like he drank his meals. “Sure,” he said, more animated now, like his memory was jumping back at him, knocking him out. “He had nothing to do with it. Oh, wow—it was his idea, man! We smoked together once, he had the stuff. But it was running out, he said. He knew about Larocque’s, like I said from Dufours—anyway, it was common knowledge, man, the cash never hit the bank. Christ, I never thought he’d do what he did. I just wanted the drugs. I was just the driver. I never went in.”

  He was lying, Colm thought. Lucien had seen two men.

  Kurt dropped his head in his hands, he looked like a runner dropping out of a race, like an old man, the hair was thinning on the back of his head. Cocaine, who knew what else?

  The sirens screamed through the open window, pierced Colm’s temples. “You went because you needed drug money. Okay. Wilder saw you, didn’t he, after he dropped off Emily Willmarth? He saw you and tried to stop you. Or didn’t try—”

  “I told him to leave. I said if he didn’t I’d tell something else he got involved in. Never mind, something to do with Dad. He left. I’d’ve killed him if he didn’t. I mean, at first I worried, I couldn’t think what he was doing there. I thought maybe Smith had got to him, too.” He jerked his thumb at the door where the fat man had disappeared.

  “But he wouldn’t, Wilder just wouldn’t. It was me. But I never touched that woman, I swear! I was the driver, I was only getting drug money out of it, damn little. I hid it in Wilder’s room, Dad’s always searching mine. I didn’t think Smith would hurt them. He seemed, well, the kidding sort. You know, funny. I knew where he hung his coats, I told Smith. Wilder’d told me, he sold the raffle tickets, I got it out of him. That’s why he waited that night, suspicious.”