“Fathers feed their children, too, Vic.”
He was thoughtful. “Dad fed me?”
“Sure,” she lied. Pete had been afraid of his children until they could walk. Then he’d take them out to the barn while he worked. He’d been a help that way. Until they’d begun to reason, though, the children were hers. But words weren’t lies if they comforted. Vic lay there, staring at the window, a small vulnerable figure outgrowing his clothes, it seemed, even as she watched. It was a clear, cold night. A half-moon sent a shaft of light into the room, striping the pine floorboards.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said, thinking of moons, pulling the quilt up around the boy’s shoulders: “Your astronomy magazine came this afternoon. I intercepted the mailman.”
He sat up. “You didn’t tell me.”
“It went clear out of my head with all—you know.” They’d had to bury the calf, Tim and Joey straining into the frozen ground; Vic looking on soberly, his lips set in a straight line, his hands locked against his small hard belly.
“There was a telescope, a wide field one, advertised last time. It’s bigger, better than the cheap one I got. It was only three hundred fifty, I got ninety dollars saved already. There might be a—a sale or something.” He was coming back to life. She smiled.
She ran downstairs to get the magazine, then back up again. He reached for it as though it were a gift from heaven.
“I hear the phone. You better go answer it.” He glanced up coyly. She knew what he wanted.
“All right. I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Then lights-out. Promise?”
“Promise,” he said, with a crooked little grin.
It was Colm calling, down in New York. Her heart raced a little as he spoke. He’d phoned his father; there was news she might want to hear. His voice was quivering with whatever he had to say. She’d felt his discomfort when Kevin was here; relished it maybe—some perversity in her? But the news was a shock; she sat down to hear it out.
“That’s right, they did an autopsy. Something funny— Dad suspected it when he saw the dead woman, the color of her skin. The coroner confirmed it.”
“What then?” She was thinking of those women circling the body on the bed, not wanting her to come close. They’d been abusing her, had they?
“Poison. She was poisoned. Something that worked slowly. Jeez—think of it.”
“My God,” she said. Colm didn’t mention Kevin’s name after that, but she knew what he was thinking. Her cheeks were hot with it. Anger? At whom? Kevin’s distraught face burned in her mind’s eye. He loved his wife; she felt that in him—she couldn’t be wrong. He wasn’t a man who would poison his wife.
Colm went on about his search for Mac, the dentists he’d visited: “My own teeth were squealing,” he said. “I wanted to crown every dentist who said ‘No.’ “ He paused to let the pun sink in, but she wasn’t in a mood for his levities. For one thing, she was thinking about those other women, at the Healing House. They’d all looked unhealthy, to tell the truth.
“My God,” she said again when he’d hung up—out of quarters, he called from a pay phone—and gripped the sides of her chair till her knucklebones went white.
****
“It’s cold in here,” Glenna complained where she sat huddled in a split wicker rocker. She pulled her shawl close around her shoulders. The novel Bleak House slid off her lap and onto the plywood floor.
“Emily’s bringing a heater. She’ll be here any minute, Aunty. Have patience.”
“You might have gotten it ready before you brought me here. Old people can’t take the cold; their bodies freeze up.”
“You know you don’t like to be called ‘old people,’ Aunty. You said so last week.”
“That was last week. This week, I’ve got old.”
It was true; Hartley could see it. Her great-aunt seemed more frail, more brittle than ever, as if she’d break in two if you sneezed in her presence. For this, Hartley blamed her stepmother. If they’d waited to see who that skeleton really was before they rushed Aunty off to Rockbury, making Hartley go through all that trouble to get her out of there— sneaking her down the corridor, dragging her through the bushes to the car, with Aunty complaining the whole way— why, then .…
“Look at this bruise,” said Glenna, interrupting the girl’s thoughts. “You did that.”
“Be grateful, Aunty. I got you out of there.”
“Got me where?”
Hartley looked around. It was true: The place was a shack. Ten-by-ten feet at the most, on the edge of the Green Mountain Forest—”Lonely Mountain,” Hartley called it. A hacked-together log house, the wind knifing through the chinks. No rug, just a pair of cots, a couple of log chairs and a plank for a table, teetering on a pair of splintery sawhorses. But it was isolated, a sanctuary in that sense. It was Emily who’d suggested it. She said her father used it for hunting; he’d helped build it, in fact. Emily and her boyfriend would come up here and neck. Ex-boyfriend, Emily had insisted, something about a city girl with a diamond in her nose. Of course, in a month or so the hunters would be in here, deer season, but by then Hartley would have found a better place. Or by then—hopefully—Aunty would be cleared of suspicion and could go home. Even now, Emily had said, her mother’s friend Colm Hanna was down in New York City, studying charts of old teeth.
Besides, Emily had remarked, this wasn’t far from that healing place where the woman died. They’d have a look around. Hartley was interested in that. It was Bilbo into the dark woods. It was fantasy; it was future. Not the dead past that Emily was so wrapped up in with her local history—dullsville! Anyway, Emily said she’d borrow her brother’s telescope. That at least was helpful. The thought of spying intrigued Hartley. She might join the CIA one day.
But what if Aunty was guilty? What if she really had murdered her husband and stuck him in that horse hole? A delicious irony, she thought. What guts.
“Aunty,” she said, “come clean. What’d you hit him with?”
Her aunt didn’t answer, just sat there like a bundled-up snowman, her lips stuck together like marshmallows. Her gold-rimmed glasses had gone crooked in the escape: The right glass angled up above the shaggy eyebrow like a question mark. The eyes were grassy slits in the plump pouches of skin. “I want my cat,” she said, “I want Puffy.”
“Fay’s got him. You know we can’t bring him up here. He’d make noise. Someone would come by, maybe steal him. He’s better off at your place.”
“I want to go back, then. To my place. You call this safe? I saw a catamount up here on the mountain once. I really did, when I was a girl. Came up with Father to cut a Christmas tree—not that he wanted one, but Mother did. She was the one kept the holidays; Father couldn’t care less. He was a Flint. So we came. And surprised it. There in a tree. Snarling down at us.”
“Aunty, they’re afraid of people, those big cats—if they’re still around. You probably saw a bobcat. I bet it ran.”
“It did.” Aunty giggled. “It was scared to death of us. That’s when I went home and looked in a mirror. For the last time, too. I didn’t like what I saw.”
“Mac must’ve liked what he saw.”
Aunty dropped her chin into her chest, considered. “It must’ve been my charming personality. He liked an independent woman. I didn’t tell him what to do all the time like those other females.”
“He wasn’t a bad guy, then?”
Glenna licked a tongue around her chilled lips, and her hands flew up, like wild birds. “He was okay—sometimes.”
“Then why did you kill him? Put him in that hole?” But her aunt just looked hard at her, then turned her head away.
Someone rapped twice on the door, and then twice again. “Don’t answer it!” Glenna hissed, but Hartley laughed, opened the door, and drew Emily Willmarth inside.
“I brought the kerosene heater,” Emily said, struggling in with a large cardboard box. “I remembered there was no electricity in here.”
“Well, set it up, then,” c
ried Glenna. “You want another corpse on your hands? I’m frozen.”
“ ‘Many are cold, but few are frozen,’ “ declared Hartley, quoting her father.
“Stop talking and start that damn thing.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Emily poured in the oil, fumbled with her mother’s kitchen matches. Her hands were bluish from the cold. But it wouldn’t light.
“Give it here.” Leaning forward, Glenna grabbed the match and lit it, her hands sure on the wick. “I was brought up with kerosene. You kids are spoiled.” A moment later, the heater was glowing, a slow warm-up in the chilly cabin.
But Hartley was more interested in a second object, wrapped up in a paper bag. It was the telescope. One could see deep into the woods through its scope. Beyond the window, she thought she saw something—a large animal, deer or catamount, staring in at them.
And squealed with delight. “Aunty, come look. Eyes!”
* * * *
Robert B.—”Mac”—MacInnis turned out to be a nephew, son of Mac’s half sister, Doris; he’d met Mac at a family reunion in Brooklyn. MacInnis had even modeled a character on old Mac. When Colm told him on the phone about the skeleton, he bellowed—a slight speech impediment, or was it too many martinis?—”Chrish, it’s gotta be a quick death, then. I jush interviewed the old man lash week—he’s not so good, but Chrish, wouldn’t turn into bones this soon. Must be somebody elsh ya got up there in that hole.”
Of course, the writer wanted to hear more about it. Gave him an idea for a plot, he said—he was having a dry spell. Colm promised to let him hear the outcome in return for old Mac’s address. Why not? Young Mac was willing; he laughed again. That phone call had made his day. Colm could hear the pages of the address book rattle as young Mac shuffled through. Then he said triumphantly, “Got a penchil?”
Colm found Glenna’s husband in an old journalists’ home down in the Village. At least, he thought, Mac got his wish:
He was among UN translators and Pulitzer Prize winners. They’d worked at the Times, the old Herald Tribune, the Post. If they didn’t know Mac had been only a proofreader, he certainly wasn’t going to tell. For one thing, they all looked like they’d fallen on hard times: split slippers and shabby trousers. The place was clean enough, although seedy, the furniture scratched and faded, a rug of uncertain hue on the floor, raggedy shades at the windows. The plump uniformed aide who scuttled about like a vacuum cleaner had suspicious yellow stains on her skirt.
Mac sat scrunched up in a black vinyl wing-back chair. It wasn’t a case of what he’d seen in Glenna, Colm thought, but what had she seen in him? He had the look of someone who’d been old at birth. He couldn’t be more than five-foot-six, even when he struggled up on his worn-down slippers—though age had probably shrunk his bones. “You from the Times!” he said hopefully.
“No, no. I said I knew you were. I’m from Vermont—Branbury, your old ... I think you knew my father. William Hanna—the funeral home? Well, I’m here because of Glenna, your wife? She’s back in Branbury, you know.”
Mac sank down into his chair again. His prune face looked wary; his hands tightened into fists. “I didn’t know as she’d left,” he said.
Colm explained about Homer Flint and his wife. How they’d threatened to put Glenna in a home, and how Hartley had taken Glenna back to Branbury. How Glenna was in Rockbury now, the state hospital for the mentally ill. “Well, she’s not there now,” he amended. “She’s gone already. We don’t know where.”
Mac chuckled. “Not surprised. You don’t coop that one up. She was a free spirit all right. So what do you want me to do about it? She threw me out. Years ago.”
“The reason I’m here, Mr. MacInnis, is to find out if you’re still alive. And obviously...” When Mac snorted, Colm explained about the skeleton, the hole; he watched the man carefully for any reaction. And he got one, though he couldn’t interpret it. Just a quick tongue darting, snakelike, up to the sharp nose. “You see, if it’s not you in that hole, and we know you dug it—common knowledge, right?—then who is it?”
“Sure, I dug it,” Mac said. “That goddamn horse of hers. Kicked me in the balls one time. It did! Threw me off when I tried to ride it. Sat on me. But hell, I dug that hole just to scare her. I wasn’t gonna shoot the blame thing. She just liked to react. Shoulda been an actress, that one. Always putting on shows. Got me fired, barging into the office one day, wanting a raise for me. Sure, I wanted one; wasn’t going to stick my neck out, though, get myself fired. But I was, anyway, wasn’t I? Fired? It was Glenna’s interfering. What could I do then but follow her up to that godforsaken clay pile she calls a farm.”
“You didn’t get along?”
He shrugged. “You married?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know. It ain’t easy. She had a problem. She shoulda married that horse.”
“That’s why you left? It had nothing to do with a hole in the ground, somebody in it?”
“Look.” The tongue darted in and out again. The body drew up to its full height, like a garden snake uncoiling, fixed Colm with a glassy eye. “We had fights, yeah, every day. There were problems. But if you think I stuck somebody in that hole over some fight with Glenna, think again.” The eye squeezed shut; the hands had a life of their own in his lap. “Maybe you should ask Glenna who’s in that hole,” he said coyly.
“You don’t read the Times anymore, Mr. MacInnis?”
“Not since they fired me. What then?”
“She’s confessed to killing you. And the police believe her. It was rumored around town, you see, after you left, that she’d killed you. You,” Colm said, pointing a finger. He was almost enjoying the confrontation. His grandfather used to love it, he’d said; it was like twisting off the stuck top of a bottle. The satisfaction of prying it open. And this old guy, he felt, was keeping something inside.
Now Mac was snickering. “That’s funny, funny as hell. So I’m dead, am I? To those hidebound Vermonters?” He stuck a finger in his mouth, bit it, as if he’d prove he was still flesh.
“Not anymore. They’ll want to see you. Somebody was buried in that hole, and they’ll want to know who. You’ll have to help them find out.”
Now Mac was annoyed. “I left. I got out of there. What do I know about who’s in that friggin’ hole? I’m seventy-nine, you know that? I got pernicious anemia. I got osteoporosis. I got osteoarthritis. I can’t leave.”
“You haven’t got Alzheimer’s,” Colm told him. “And you’re going to have to go. It’s here in a fax from the Branbury police. If I find you, alive, you’ll have to report to the station for questioning.”
“Kee-rist,” squealed Mac MacInnis. “Just don’t let it be Glenna. I can’t face Glenna. I had enough of her tongue all those years we were married. Not Glenna. Kee-rist!”
* * * *
Alwyn Bagshaw leaned into his rake, though the fire was still smoldering, giving out a stench that made him sick to his stomach. He sat back on a stump to ease his aching back—he wasn’t the man he used to be. Used to be he could hold his brother, Denby, down for hours—Denby had been a pushover, sure. And lazy, couldn’t keep a job. Denby’d been a juggler, juggled his ma till she give him what he wanted: pocket money, choice cut of meat, that stray mutt—when it was Alwyn that the bitch’d come to first, wandering in one day off the street: Lab mix, good legs, good for hunting. Got part of that piece of mountain land she owned, when she knew Alwyn wanted a hunter’s shack—then Denby up and sells it to Willmarth. Only thing Denby’d ever hunted was women.
Denby took away the one woman Alwyn had wanted. She was a good-looking one, curly black hair, mountains of it; in bed, the hair floating around the pillow like thunderclouds. Thunder and lightning, that’s what it was like to have her. And she’d give back. She was waiting for a divorce; then she’d marry Alwyn. His mother didn’t care; Alwyn could marry the town pump—just so’s the woman didn’t live with her. But Annie wasn’t a whore—at first, anyways; she was a decent woman, had
a bad marriage, guy had cheated on her. Alwyn knew him; he was a no-good. Annie was a hairdresser, independent, planned to have her own place. Though Alwyn would stop that: Married woman belonged home.
Then Denby decided he wanted her. Whatever Denby wanted, he took. He was a looker, Denby: taller than Alwyn, same color hair, but he slicked his shiny with grease. Women loved that grease. Alwyn found it disgusting. One night, he come back from hunting. He’d bagged a buck, a six-pointer, planned to freeze the meat so he and Annie’d have a Thanksgiving feast. His ma didn’t hold with holidays, but Annie did; she liked all that hoopla. Well, why not? He couldn’t wait to surprise her, told Ma he’d cook the venison.
Wasn’t out long; bagged the buck early, took it home, expecting only Ma. Only it wasn’t Ma. Annie there, too— with Denby. On Alwyn’s bed. His bed! Stark naked but for that cloud of hair. The pair wrapped up together like a Christmas package.
“You’re early” was all Denby said. “Annie was bored.”
Annie just laughed. Laughed and laughed there in his brother’s arms.
But Denby tired quick of women he could have. Then Annie wanted Alwyn back, she said. Sure, she cried and cried and wrung her hands. She pulled her cloud of hair till some of it fell out. But Alwyn didn’t want a used package. Twice used, come to think of it. After that, there was only Flora, from down the road. She was a warm body, that’s all. A companion for Ma when Denby was gone. When the baby came, that’s all she cared about, that baby, fussing around it all day, shut her legs to Alwyn. Then one day, she packed her bags and left, and that was all right, too. He was all Ma had then. Denby was gone; they said he drowned in the Otter. That was a time when Alwyn was content: He had his job, he had the occasional woman, and he had Ma to take care of his needs. He was content, even after Ma’s heart gave out three years ago.
Till that group moved in next door and let loose the devil.
He jumped up off the stump and waved his arms. “Git! Git, you devil. Leave me be!”
The wind swirled the ashes; bits of grit flew up in the air, then slowly settled back on the ground, some in his hair. He shook his head, disgusted. Time to dig now, he thought; he took up his shovel. Then looked up, to see that Willmarth girl spying on him, through some kind of tube.
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