“A small glass, yes, oh yes.” Willard gave a little laugh, edged his way in, sideways, like a crab, and lowered his lanky body slowly into a chair.
“I, um, read about... what you found here,” he said, and she understood why he’d come. “Said to myself, she’ll be upset, seeing those bones. The new business and all.”
“That’s not the half of it,” she said, clunking down bottles of red and pink on the kitchen table, two glasses. She pushed the bottles toward him. Finally, he pointed to the red. “Winter coming on. I drink red in winter.”
“Good for you. So do I.” She wanted to discover things in common. She needed a friend. But the skeleton grinned between them, needed to be cleared away before the small talk.
“Colm Hanna—that friend of Ruth Willmarth’s—”
“Mortician’s son,” Willard said, “I made his daddy’s sign. Simple, you know, no frills. No frills in that business, right?”
“Shouldn’t be. Though I read about the bronze sarcophagi they bury the rich in down in New York for eighty-five thousand dollars. Anyway, the police drove it up to Burlington. Some guy there who knows about skeletons. How to discover its age, other stuff, I don’t know—like if it—he, she—got hit on the head or something, I guess. I mean, besides that arrowhead in the breastbone.”
“Oh, oh. Good idea. Very good idea. That’ll explain things.” He peered sideways at her, sipped his wine, made a slight burping noise, then peered at her again. “I think he must have been, don’t you? Hit on the head, I mean. Or somewhere. They said the arrowhead wasn’t very big. . . . Odd, about that arrowhead.”
“You knew him? I mean, if this is him. Glenna says it’s not—Mac MacInnis, I mean.”
“Well, once when I came out to touch up the sign—you know what weather does to a sign—there was, um, a small disagreement. He didn’t want a sign—too, um, commercial, he said. Wanted to sell her horse, in fact. Yes, I remember something about a horse. The mother just sitting there, looking from one to the other, not interrupting.”
“Whose side was the mother on?”
“Glenna’s, I suppose, but then, the husband was kind of a tease. I’d see the mother smile at him, make Glenna madder still.” He laughed. “I can see it now, Glenna’s face red as a tomato, Mac threatening—” He stopped abruptly.
“He was threatening?” Fay poured another drink. A skeleton found on her premises. She had a right to question.
“Maybe . . . maybe I shouldn’t use that word.” His big pale face blossomed to pink. “Said he’d leave, go back to the city, that Glenna could have her effing—pardon my French—horse. If Glenna wanted him, she’d find him there. Some city bar he mentioned—I can’t recall now. It wasn’t pleasant, not pleasant at all. She was a nice lady, Glenna, always kind to me. My mother liked her.” He threw down the second drink, his face a shiny beet, then waved his arms when she picked up the bottle. “No, no, I’ve work—home, you know.”
“Where exactly is home?”
“Well, at the moment”—he laughed, hiccupped—”I’ve taken over Mother’s garage—no electricity, of course. That’s a drawback, but I make the signs by hand, you see; I don’t need drills. Years ago they didn’t—anyway, it saves paying a bill.”
“I see what you mean.” Fay knew what it was to live without electricity. The first ten years, she and Dan had had no electricity or plumbing in the house Dan bought up in Cabot. Jesus, she’d hooked her rugs by candlelight, took her exercise running out to the outhouse. Even after they got plumbing, he’d never put in a bathtub—unnecessary expense, he said. She took a hot bath every night now, wallowing in it for a half hour. Did her serious thinking in that old copper tub.
“Look,” she said, “I’ve got it here—electricity. You need to drill holes or something, you just come over, okay? I mean it.” And she did. He looked adorable, really, hanging over the table in his paint-stained shirt and baggy jeans, his vegetable face, with all that rumpled white hair like daisy petals.
Something banged outside and Hartley burst in, Gandalf behind her on a leash. The dog would run off, they’d discovered, given too much freedom—like it was on a high, not that she blamed it. Willard Boomer sprang up at the girl’s entrance.
“Hey,” Hartley said, “you two getting loaded?”
Willard’s face was maroon now. “Oh, I, well, you see—”
Fay introduced them and Hartley grabbed his hand. “Enchantée. This doggy’s hungry. Got any food in the house?” She lunged at the old fridge. Gandalf knocked Willard into the door as it loped behind. “Sorry,” Willard said.
“Willard’s a sign maker; he made our sign,” Fay said. The bottles had been bought on Hartley’s credit card. She felt a teeny bit guilty.
“I make them all over town,” Willard explained; “there’s not much competition. Someone will come along, though. Oh, you bet they will. I’m not as, well, fast as could be. I don’t, um, have a car. On principle, you see. The pollution, you know. Why contribute? And then my sister . . .” His voice choked up. Fay waited. “Your sister?” she said finally, wanting to know.
“Drunk driver,” he said. “She never had a chance.” And before Fay could commiserate, Willard said, “Well, have to be going, yes, I definitely do. I just stopped, um ...”
“Say, you make a sign for that new Healing House?” Fay asked, following him out onto the porch. “Emily Willmarth told me about a ring. On the skeleton’s finger. Said it had a design like the one on that sign at that Healing House. You make that one?”
“Oh, yes, yes, I did, oh my, yes. And then did it again, just this fall, when someone painted out the arrows. Imagine that! Came up at night and painted them out. But a ring on the skeleton’s finger? Goodness.” And he hopped on his green bike and pedaled off down the driveway, veering aside for a pair of town police who’d come to check the trailer. The area was cordoned off with tape, off-limits they’d said, so Hartley was sleeping on the living room couch for the time being, and Fay had to use a roundabout route to the barn. She watched now as he bumped off down the dirt road.
“Don’t forget we’ve got electricity,” she hollered after him, then ran back into the kitchen, where Gandalf was finishing off two cans of dog food in practically the same number of gulps.
“Don’t worry,” said Hartley, “Daddy’s paying for it. For now anyway. Oh, Lordy, they’ll be back home tomorrow. They’ll find Aunty gone. Then what?”
* * * *
The floors were so highly waxed that Emily had to tiptoe across them—in her socks, of course; a sign at the door warned REMOVE YOUR SHOES! It was the exclamation point that made her do it. She found the inmates—was that the right word?—all at tea in a scrubbed white kitchen. She had to blink; she held on to the door so she wouldn’t slip on the shiny gray linoleum. Three women were preparing a meal: she saw carrots and rice and—yuck—tofu. A woman swiveled about in a wheelchair when she entered. She looked younger than Emily’s mother, but her face was scarred. She frowned at Emily from where she sat, a yellow bowl balanced on her plump belly.
“The door was unlocked,” Emily said, adding defensively, “I knocked, but no one answered.”
“I told you to keep that door locked,” a second woman told the first, “after—that last incident.” When Emily asked for the phone, the first woman said, “That will be thirty-five cents.” It was the wheelchair woman; her body filled the chair to overflowing, but her legs hung thin and useless in black cotton socks and red Chinese slippers. Her arms, though, were strong and muscular, and with quick, deft motions, she sliced the tops off half a dozen carrots. Emily took a step back, remembering Alwyn Bagshaw’s warning. But when she searched her pockets, she came up with only two pennies and a five-dollar bill; she held it out. “I’m sorry, but...”
The woman shrugged and whirled over to the sink. But a third woman jumped up, a thin woman with a drawn look, like someone had squeezed her features together—eyes, nose, mouth. Yet one could see she had been pretty; a wreath of curly brown ha
ir crowned the chalky white face.
“I’ll pay,” she told the wheelchair woman, “when the bill comes. None of us have any cash here; we pool our money,” she explained to Emily in a high, sweet voice. “You call your mother, child,” and she sat down on a high stool. She looked like she might fall down if she didn’t. The three faces, white as new milk, stared at Emily.
She dialed her number, but her mother was probably out in the fields, and she had to leave a message. Though she didn’t like the idea of waiting here in this place with these silent women, all of them sitting around a table now, sipping what appeared to be green tea—not offering her any either— like she’d accept if they did! It was as if each were in her own serene green sea world.
If it was tea they were drinking. She remembered Alwyn Bagshaw’s warning.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll wait out on the porch for my mother,” she said, but no one responded.
After she hung up, the women suddenly went, single file, after the wheelchair woman, into another room, ignoring her presence. A moment later, she heard gongs, and then a low, tuneless chanting, like women keening when they’d lost their loved ones—she’d heard people do that on TV. The smell of pine incense spilled into the kitchen. They are really quite rude, she thought, treating me as if I’m not here at all, and she decided it was her right to cut off a hunk of bread that was sitting on the spotless counter. She crammed it into her mouth; it was really quite delicious. The chanting went on and on, and she thought she’d look around a bit; after all, there was no telling when her mother would show up, and if she started to walk, she’d miss the green pickup altogether.
The adjacent room was filled with books, with titles like Living with Abuse, Rites of Healing, and Meditation for Mental Health; and there were candles—hundreds of them, though unlit, in various slumped shapes—all red or white candles, like it was Christmas already, when, in fact, it wasn’t even Halloween. Back in the kitchen was a door that led to a well-stocked pantry and a huge freezer—one could lock up a dozen people in it, she thought. She’d heard on the news recently of that very act of horror somewhere in Los Angeles. A wave of chill air hit her, and she ran past and out another door, which led to the backyard. Emily was startled when a bent-over shape—probably a raccoon—darted into a clump of berry bushes. She squinted, but saw only the sway of twigs. She hated the way the world got dark so early these days. This very weekend, daylight savings time would end, and then it would be black by five in the afternoon. Black when she got out of the barn from chores. Even the cows disliked the dark: They’d start bellowing earlier and earlier, wanting to be milked, wanting to go back into the warm, lit barn.
On the back porch, she saw a large kettle of soup—it looked like seaweed actually, but she presumed it was soup. She straightened the cover, which something—that raccoon?—had knocked awry. But she couldn’t bring herself to go back into that gloomy scrubbed house with those sad-faced women and their chanting. And so she ran around to the front and hunkered down by a maple tree until a car drove up. She was surprised to see that man, the one who was staying at the Flint farm, get out of a rented car and bound up the steps. He nodded at her politely—well, he’d only seen her once maybe, and then in the evening, so he wouldn’t know her, and she wasn’t about to reveal herself. Though if he came out soon, she might, and get a ride down the mountain to Branbury with him. He could let her out if she saw her mother coming.
Kevin Crowningshield knocked on the door. “Sorry, but no men allowed in here,” a voice called through a crack in the door. “But my wife,” he hollered back, sounding upset, and the voice said, the words evenly spaced, “She can’t see you. We have a rule. And please, send no more packages.” Then the door slammed shut.
“It was only chocolates,” he shouted. “Angie loves chocolates. Hey, I’ll get a lawyer. You can’t keep me from my wife!”
He was back in minutes. He looked stunned, like an animal transfixed in a pool of headlights. Emily could see that he was almost crying, and she felt sorry for him, but she didn’t dare ask for a ride then. She leaned, frozen, against the trunk of the leafless maple while he ran out to his car and sped off.
Moments later, a Toyota arrived, its right-front fender battered in, and her sister Sharon’s face appeared in the open window: “Hurry up, get in. Mother sent me. I’m feeling like a sick elephant, and I still have to get supper. What’re you doing here anyway? Why aren’t you home doing chores?”
Her sister was in her last month of pregnancy and looking huge, haggard, and put-upon—her naturalist husband not due back from Alaska for two weeks. Her little boy, Robbie, was whimpering in the car seat. But it was so good to see someone normal, someone familiar, that Emily laughed out loud. “Thanks,” she said, “thanks for coming, Shar. I love you, Shar,” and Sharon said, “Oh, get the heck in the car, will ya, dumbbell? Just ’cause you’ve got all day to gallivant around....”
****
Colm Hanna found Ruth practically nose-to-nose with that old smoothy who boarded over at the Flint farm. Colm had come to give Ruth the forensics report; he’d wheedled it out of Chief Roy Fallon, who was still trying to get Colm onto the local force full-time. Colm’s grandfather had been a hero in the department before he got killed up in Burlington while trying to stop a band of booze smugglers. But Colm was only available for short-term assignments—after all, he had the mortuary, he had real estate, and he had the part-time police work. He thought of a bumper sticker he’d seen—MOONLIGHT IN VERMONT—OR STARVE—and he smiled at the irony. He’d buy the bumper sticker for the Horizon.
“It was definitely foul play,” Fallon had said, a can of Pepsi in hand, “in regard to, um, the skeleton—I mean, skull—you know, bango! Puncture in the breastbone from that, um, arrowhead, um—” His big red face gleamed with intrigue, even though it had happened twenty-odd years before. “ She?” Colm said, and Fallon smiled.
“Well, that’s the rumor, you know—old lady Flint. Even she says so. And that skeleton—fifties at the time of death, the coroner says, like old Mac, you know. But if it’s not Glenna Flint, well, the murderer may still be around. Twenny or so years can’t stop the wheels of justice, you know.” Fallon loved to watch crime films on TV; he imbibed the dialogue like the Pepsi he was addicted to. But he did his job, Colm had to hand him that.
Colm agreed, of course: They’d have to find the murderer—if he was still alive: the name of the victim, too, although the authorities were already calling it Mac MacInnis. “The whole town knew about Mac’s disappearance,” said Fallon, who had been on the force when the scandal blew. “Same time as the other, um, Bagshaw, drowned; we think maybe Mac did that one in—you know, jealousy rears its ugly—at least that was the, um, rumor.”
As for Glenna Flint, Fallon said, “She’s handy with the shovel as well as the lip. But, as I say, we had no proof, no, um, body—just hearsay. But we got a body now, don’t we?” He giggled. “Well, bones anyway, um.…” He adjusted the beeper on his left shoulder, massaged under it. He was getting near retirement age; he had arthritis, he said, and to prove it, he’d heaved up out of his chair with a groan. And then Colm had headed for the Willmarth farm.
“What could I say?” Colm told Ruth when she protested Glenna’s involvement. “I know she’s an old lady, but—”
“If it is Mac,” Ruth said. “We don’t know that, do we?” Colm saw her smile at her “guest”—Kevin, his name was, an Irish name, but the guy looked more British to him: those close-set English eyes, something about the aristocratic set of the jaw. Colm couldn’t see much good in the English; his grandfather had talked Irish history to him. “Proddy Orangecoats,” his grandmother had called the men who controlled Northern Ireland; she was a fierce Republican. Crowningshield: the guy’s name proved his suspect origins.
Colm tried to be civil to the man, to include him in the conversation, though it was none of Crowningshield’s business, was it? The man was just a visitor here. “Staying long?” he asked, noting with
distaste the gleaming Florsheim shoes (Colm’s sneakers were developing vents); and then he said to Ruth, “They’re doing X rays, having the dental work looked at, a bite mold. Couple of teeth missing—from the impact of the blow maybe. We’ll know if it’s Mac—he had bad teeth, according to Glenna. If it’s not—Glenna have any lovers she wanted to get rid of, you suppose?”
“That’s not funny.” Ruth shoved her chair back, then tucked in her shirt where it had worked up from her jeans.
Colm thought she looked sexy as hell: those freckles, the thick flyaway hair, that pink button-down shirt open at the neck, the full breasts. You could see the muscles moving in her lightly perspiring throat.
“I don’t know,” Crowningshield said, as though continuing a conversation he’d begun with Ruth before Colm arrived. He couldn’t seem to get comfortable, kept shifting position. “I mean, it depends on my wife. They’ve got her a virtual prisoner in that place.” He looked at Ruth for sympathy, and Colm was disturbed to hear her make a kind of clucking sound.
“Kevin’s been to that healing place three times, and they won’t let him in,” Ruth told Colm, as if the fellow couldn’t speak for himself. “It’s a shame. It’s not the wife herself—she may not even know. It’s the woman who manages the place.”
“And it’s my wife’s property, too,” said Crowningshield.
That was a surprise. Colm took a quick breath. “How come some other woman can speak for her, then?”
“His wife started the group, got this woman to run it,” Ruth explained. “She’s a massage therapist and a midwife. Has this amazing upper body, according to Sharon’s midwife, who knows her. She just assists other midwives now, though, since her accident—whatever that was.”
Crowningshield looked skeptical; he reached for the doughnut Colm had his eye on. Colm was getting annoyed now. Ruth was so one-tracked that she didn’t refill the plate, either. “Kevin thinks the woman’s got the others hypnotized, brainwashed. Including his wife. And she’s not well. Emily said they all looked ... well, chalky, she said.”
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