“I want you to find them. See if there’s a pair,” Ruth said. “Vic said he saw one in your room.”
“You heard from Vic!” Carol squealed, wanting to be glad about something.
Ruth couldn’t talk now, she had this mission, she had to get back home. To the telephone.
It seemed forever that Wilder looked. Finally he bent down to search under the bed. And there it was. A single boxing glove, for the right hand. Not big enough for Wilder now, only a young boy’s hand would fit into it. Was it big enough to hurt Willy? The police had found a left-hand glove on the creek bank. She made him search: in his room, then in Garth’s. Garth was gone and she was relieved: she didn’t want to confront the boy. She didn’t want to look at him now, he was part of that group, the Billy Marsh, Jimmy Southwick gang. They might be at the police station, those two, for all she knew, there’d been petty thefts at the other burned barns, the police had questions. Had fifth-grade boys set the fires?
But he couldn’t find the matching glove.
“I don’t understand.” Carol’s face was scarlet, tears were threatening. “Isn’t it enough you have Kurt? Garth’s only a baby.”
Ruth embraced the quivering woman; Carol was stiff in her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to do this. It may not mean anything.”
Afterward she couldn’t remember leaving the house, getting into her car, stopping by the police station with the glove. She only remembered it matched the other. But somehow she got home.
And was met with two messages. The second, the most important one, Emily said, had come minutes before. Even so, Ruth scolded Emily for not calling her at Carol’s.
“But I did. You’d already left!”
Emily relayed the messages in order. The first was from the insurance inspector. “He said it was definitely faulty wiring that started the fire. One of the milking machines. It wasn’t arson at all.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Ruth, “but go on. Go on. The second message? The one you said is most important?”
A state trooper had tracked down a stolen car. “By chance, actually, Mom, he’d seen it weaving along the Northway. Two guys inside who failed a breath test but swore they didn’t have any boy in the car. But, Mom, the police found a knapsack in the back, olive-green, with kids’ books inside—and a map of Australia.”
“Vic’s!” Ruth screamed, “that was Vic’s! Why didn’t you tell them that!”
“I did!” Emily shouted. “You never listen to me, Mom.” And Ruth still wasn’t listening, she dialed Chief Fallon. “It was Vic’s, Vic’s knapsack,” she shouted over the phone. “But where’s Vic? What did they do with Vic!”
No one could tell her. They were grilling the thieves, that was all they could do, the chief would call back with any news—that was all he could do. The troopers were keeping the knapsack for now. The drunks claimed they’d found it in a rest area.
Now Ruth was bawling, for the first time maybe since Vic’s disappearance. The tears poured out, like someone had dumped a pail of boiling water over her head. The only thing for it was to scrub the kitchen floor. “But you only just washed it, Mom, yesterday,” Emily said. “It’s hardly dirty.”
“But not with a toothbrush. I didn’t scrub it with a toothbrush.” It felt good, down on her hands and knees. Like she was scrubbing away the sins, the sorrows of the world.
* * * *
Chief Fallon had Garth there already. Colm had left his father with a cadaver, hobbled down to the police station where Fallon was holding the gloves—they made a pair all right, he said, looking pleased. They were all there: three fifth-grade boys, looking insolent, scared, poking one another, their feet shuffling the floor. Fallon was leaning back in a chair, talking softly, like he was their uncle. He said Southwick and Marsh had denied seeing Willy that night by the creek—until Ruth brought in the boxing glove. After that they broke down. Marsh had just confessed.
“So let’s have it out, kids, the whole story,” said Fallon, sinking back into his chair, his eyes half shut.
Garth punched Marsh in the ribs, said, “Lenny Swaggart was there too, it was his idea to go down there and box.”
“Yeah,” said Jimmy Southwick, “he was there all right. He’s in seventh grade,” he told Fallon, like that excused the others—they were led on by a “big kid.”
“We fooled around till it got dark,” Garth said.
“Was that a crime?” said Southwick.
But they had nothing to do with Willy, Garth said, his voice loud, though his feet were moving, up and down, like on a treadmill, his snub nose twitching. “We just teased him a little, like we always do, I mean, it was fun, that’s all.”
“Fun to tease a boy who can’t fight back? Who doesn’t understand?” Colm said. “Fun to rub manure on a kid and steal his telescope?” He was getting hotheaded now, carried away, and Fallon put a hand on his arm.
“Go on,” the chief said to the boys. He sank lower into his chair, in a minute he’d disappear. “So what happened exactly? What did you do to, you know? Knock him around a little?”
The boys looked at Garth like they’d let him tell the story. Make up the story, Colm thought. But Garth looked innocent.
“Nothing, we did nothing,” he said in his loud young voice, his legs jogging in place, like he’d be out of here in a minute, if he kept moving. “We just went home.”
“Kids,” said Fallon after the boys were released, though he agreed with Colm they were holding something back. “Could’ve hit Willy with the glove, knocked him into the creek. Then run, scared.” But what else could he do but let them go? Book a bunch of fifth graders? “Three scared kids.”
He knew how it was, he said, he had a nephew around that age, “He don’t know his left foot from his right. That’s kids for you.”
“Willy’s dead,” Colm said. “That’s ‘kids for you’?”
* * * *
Colm and Ruth were in her kitchen: he with a whiskey, she with coffee, her fourth cup, she needed it. She was barely holding on. To take her mind off Vic, who could be lying hurt, or dead (her heart turned over) in a woods somewhere, she made him go back over the story of the boys a second time, in case he’d omitted something, she said.
Sighing, fiddling with his glasses that looked permanently crooked since the Michigan ordeal, he repeated the story of the interview, adding, yes, a detail he’d forgotten.
“I knew you’d forget something,” she accused.
“It was that blue pickup parked in the lower lot, it had a dent in the passenger door. Southwick remembered that detail—he’ll make a lawyer like his father. Harold has a blue pickup, remember? I’ve seen it parked at the fire station. Fallon will check out the dent. He’s about to close in on Harold.”
“Anything more?” she said. “Think!”
He shook his head.
“But there is. I know it and you know it.” It was Vic. She felt they were all holding out on her: Colm, Chief Fallon, even Emily and Sharon.
But he just waggled his head again—he was irritating!—and poured himself a Pepsi and a Guckenheimer, his third, she reminded him.
There had been more reporters, more sightings of Vic—that was all he could tell her. He was seen in a Getty station in the town of Saugerties, forty miles south of Albany. In a 7-Eleven east of Rochester, New York; in a shoe store up in Malone. The police were checking everything out. As for Bertha and her driver, they were out on bail till the hearing. Esther Dolley was being interrogated, though she was “too, too smooth,” Colm said. “Claims she knew nothing about anything.”
“She could have set the fires,” Ruth said. “She had the motive, she wanted the farms developed.” And then, her mind leaping from one thing to the next these days, “Did Chief Fallon question those kids? They could have set the fires!”
But Colm just spread his hands. Was he giving a blessing?
Pete had gotten his sister a lawyer, Ruth told him, her mind jumping again. “You won’t guess who.” And
when Colm shook his head: “Hampton Southwick, Jimmy’s father. He’ll get her a psychologist, too, Pete says, that’s what she really needs, and for once he’s right.”
Pete was still calling every hour: on the fifth call she’d made him hang up; she needed the line clear for Vic.
Now it was ringing again, the phone.
But it wasn’t Vic.
“Something new about Garth,” she told Colm, and Colm sprang to her elbow, though one could sit in the attic and hear Chief Fallon’s booming voice.
Garth had come back with his brother Wilder, he had more to tell about Willy. The boys had left him on the bank, he was “having a fit”—Garth “remembered” that after he got home (after Wilder jogged his memory, Ruth thought). The kids got scared and took off. Yeah, he could’ve rolled into the creek, Garth admitted. They hadn’t meant to hurt Willy.
“Goddamn kids,” Fallon roared, “they need a hiding. Was Willy bleeding? I ask ‘em. And the kid remembers, ‘Yeah, he was, bleeding, yeah, bruised some, he’d got in a fight.’ Something had ripped his pants, something sharp.”
“The boots,” Colm said, nodding at Ruth. “The fat man’s boots.”
“So they told him to take a swim, the Unsworth kid says, clean off the, uh, blood. They left him then, on the bank. They never thought he’d go and, you know.”
“They just left him there, just left him,” Ruth repeated, “knowing he was hurt, was having a seizure, that anything could happen. And never reported it!”
Colm put an arm around her shoulder.
The kid was crying in the end, said the chief, his voice thundering over the wire, and so was the mother. “She come running down to the station. She was quite—you know. I see I got my hands full. But what can I do? Ten-year-old kids?”
“Are we losing our children?” Ruth asked Colm after she hung up, her hands still trembling.
“You can only hope they learned something,” he said. “The parents have to teach what’s right—or wrong. I think Carol Unsworth is trying, or will, when she calms down.”
“I feel sorry for her.”
“It’s about time.”
“What do you mean by that?”
But he just stuck a tongue in his cheek.
She wanted to kick him. “Then who set the fires? We’re back to that. Bertha? That broker? Harold? Those kids? Oh it’s Bertha, I’m sure of it! Mine, too.”
“Ruth.” He looked at her under his thick brows. “Yours was faulty wiring. You know that. You said it was old, that milking machine.”
“Then why were there three other fires?” She glared at him.
“They think the Charlebois fire might have been matches, didn’t I tell you that?” She shook her head, furious. “You know, those ‘strike anywhere’ kitchen matches? Jeez, those things are dangerous. Police found two empty boxes outside. Mice carry them around, they like the smell of the sulfur. Matches contact a kerosene rag and—boom!”
“You’re telling me mice set those fires? Come on. Then who left the matches there in the first place. Not the farmer!”
Well, he couldn’t tell her that, but he did know about Rupert Sheldrake, that British biologist; he’d just heard him on PBS. “His talk about habits, about animals. Like why the tits ate the cream—”
“The ‘whats’?” she said.
“Tits, they’re a kind of chickadee. Anyway, back before War World Two, some tits began pecking the tops of the glass milk bottles and eating the cream, and suddenly, tits all over Britain and Europe were sucking up the cream from milk bottles. Same thing with rats, Sheldrake says. If lab rats learn a new trick in America, rats everywhere pick it up, learn it faster. Like it’s telepathy or something.”
“So what’s in it for the barn mice? I mean, ridiculous. Mice, matches, and mental telepathy. Mad!”
“Sure,” he said. “The world goes wacky now and then. Mad season.”
“I don’t care,” she said stubbornly. “I think it was deliberate, those fires. Someone left those matches there. To see what fate would do with them, maybe. Colm, I’m on a roller coaster. I’m so dizzy I don’t know where I am, what I think! Thank God I have the cows. They’re my grounding point. Though Charlotte’s gone,” she added sadly.
He nodded, his cheek ballooned with ice. Was that all he could do? Drink and nod? He gave a lopsided smile.
“Get your glasses fixed,” she said. “You look like a clown.”
She had to stay rational. When Vic was found she’d have to think straight. She poured more coffee.
“It’s funny,” she said, thinking of Brontë’s novel. “After Bertha, Rochester’s mad wife, burned the house down, herself with it, Rochester was blinded. And Jane found she was his equal, because he was maimed, he’d lost his power. They lived in a woods, on the ‘outside.’ Like this farm, maybe, once the heart of things, now on the ‘outside,’ right?”
“How do I fit into that?” he said, blinking through his crooked glasses, wanting to be part of her life, she saw that. “Am I Rochester? Or is he Pete?”
“Oh, Pete will always keep his power. Some men are like that. Besides, he’s a city man now. He never did like farming—it’s not all his fault. He’ll come to see because of Bertha, and the kids. Of course he loves his children, I know that, he’s not a bad man. He’s offered me the whole farm if I won’t prosecute Bertha.”
She was suddenly indignant. “Won’t prosecute? After that crazy woman took my child!”
“The whole farm? You’d like that.”
“I’d like my child more. A farm’s nothing to a son.”
“I know.”
They sat in silence for a time. When she poured a sixth cup, he put his hand on the pot. She stuck hers over his glass, too, told him it worked both ways.
He said, “You’ll be too wound up to listen if Vic calls. Look, Ruth, I need to say something. About the farm. When Vic comes back—he will, you know. He probably escaped, out of that car. He could walk in here any minute. The second sight, my great-gran—”
“Oh, hell,” she said, about the great-gran. “If he escaped,” she argued, “if he’s alive, if he’s not hurt, he’d get to the police somehow.”
“He’d be afraid they might ship him back to his father. Kids’ minds work that way.”
“But why would it take so long, all this time since they found the knapsack? Why wouldn’t those men admit they’d given him a ride—if they hadn’t hurt him?”
He had no answer for that.
She felt like a child, she needed consoling. She saw a spot of dirt she’d missed on the floor and went over to wipe it up.
Still on her knees, she said, “He’s alive. I have to cling to that. I have to believe that.”
He nodded. “As I was saying about the farm, when Vic comes home—”
“When Vic comes home, yes?”
“Jeez, am I talking to a scrublady?”
She got up, her knees were killing her anyway.
“Well, Tim’s a help around the place,” he said, “and Joey, the kids. But they have their own lives. What I’m saying is, you can’t run the place alone.”
“Not you too,” she cried. “Not you wanting me to sell! You real estate pirate!”
“Down, woman! You’ve a mean temper, you know that? I’ve seen a side of you lately I never—”
“Finish your sentence, you sound like Fallon.”
He smiled. “I mean, I’m thinking of leaving the body business. I’ve had it down to the bones. I’ll find someone else to help Dad. I’m wondering if you’d take me on, just part-time, couple of hours a day, a second hired man. Out in the pasture—That barn manure, I might be allergic.”
“You?” she said, incredulous. “You don’t know one thing about farming.”
“I could learn. I can pick stone good as anybody. And I know something about fathering. I mean, I’ve fathered my own dad. That’s what it’s been, really.”
“I see. You’ve something more in mind than farming.”
He looked
at her winningly (he seemed to think). “Just consider, that’s all, okay?”
“Okay.”
But she couldn’t really, not now. She couldn’t concentrate on anything else, nothing in the world—because outside a small boy was trudging up the walk, she saw him through the window. He was dressed in a dirty T-shirt and raggedy blue shorts; his bleeding, dirt-streaked arms were pumping up and down.
At the last he broke into a run, crashed up the steps, fell, got up again, and burst through the door. She was out of her chair in a shot, to meet him.
“Vic!”
“Mom!”
He sobbed in her arms, clung to her like he’d break in a million pieces if she didn’t hold on to him.
And she did, she did!
* * * *
When the phone rang again, Marie this time, about Harold, found “slumped over his electric trains,” Marie screamed—he’d shot himself in the head, Colm didn’t call for Ruth. He couldn’t keep a mother from her son, could he? They were out in the pasture, Vic wanted to see his pet calf, he’d neglected it, he felt bad, he’d worried it might have got burned. “From now on—” he promised, and they moved out of earshot.
“Hang on,” Colm told Marie, “I’ll be over,” and hung up on her screaming. He called Fallon, the ambulance, and jumped in his car.
“Divine retribution?” he said, and thought of Bertha.
Chapter Thirteen
Over her dead body that woman would get off! Ruth beat a tattoo on the refrigerator door. Bertha was out on bail, thanks to Pete, but wouldn’t come out of her house. She refused even to speak to the counselor Pete had hired, and tomorrow was the hearing. Pete was worried, he’d said on the phone, that his sister would do something desperate, shoot herself maybe, like poor Harold, though Ruth felt she wouldn’t. Bertha might be crazy, but she was a survivor.
And not wholly crazy either, Ruth told Colm on the phone. Just “calculatingly” crazy. Ruth’s mission was to see that the woman didn’t get off on any plea of insanity.
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