Harvest of Bones

by Nancy Means Wright

  Angry, feeling invaded—when would they leave him alone?—he ran at the fence, shook his fist. “Git out of here. None of your business round here. Git out, I said!”

  She ran then, back across their land; there were two of them he saw, two young girls. He pushed through a clump of dead peonies to have a better look. Now the other one was peering through the tube. He didn’t like it. When they ran off, suddenlike, through the twilight, he heard them giggling. Stupid girls! Into everybody else’s business. Like in Annie’s hairdressing place, the gossip. He didn’t hold with gossip. Alwyn was a private man. What he did was his own business. Till that bunch next door brought him bad luck. The flocks of grackles, the girl coming round to interview him, that skeleton over to Flint’s—especially that.

  They were walking now, slower, up the dirt road; up the shortcut to the mountain. His mountain, for it was now—a patch of it anyway. With Ma gone, it was his, he reckoned. They was trespassing; sure, it wasn’t right. He heard them laughing up ahead, poking each other, laughing and laughing. Like Annie that time in his brother’s bed. He’d let her go then, though he’d wanted to kill her. Strangle her, sure, slow... But he’d let her go.

  He’d regretted it since.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ruth took Dr. Colwell with her. He was one of those old-fashioned, compassionate doctors: a tall, balding, big-boned man who still made the occasional house call. Though even he was skeptical. “The whole lot of them poisoned? Come on,” he’d said.

  But when they entered through an unlocked door in the rear—no one had answered their knocks out front—they found only one woman ill, in a bathroom, retching. She’d gotten into chocolate—the last in a box of chocolate-covered cherries that had come to Angie, a woman informed them. “Isis would be mad if she knew,” she said.

  Isis—the name related to corn. Ruth had a vision of a goddess with great curving cow horns. But when Isis wheeled in now, she looked more like a housefrau in her brown polyester slacks and short tan sweater, which only accentuated her belly. She swept Ruth back into the kitchen. It was spanking clean, just like the last time. A loaf of homemade bread sat on the counter and a pile of greens was soaking in a sieve. Isis supervised the cooking herself, she told Ruth as she spun about, opening and slamming all the drawers and closets she could reach with her robust arms, while in an adjoining room the doctor examined Ellen, a chubby, sweet-faced woman whom Ruth remembered from her last visit.

  No, not a morsel of anything she hadn’t sampled herself went down anyone’s throat, Isis insisted—”Caffeine!” she said with a grimace, and pointed to the can of Cafix on the shelf, a coffee substitute made of figs and beet root. “That’s what we drink here.”

  “And you can see I’m perfectly all right. It was the clotting problem that did in poor Angie; I worried about it when she came here. But I thought, with the blood thinner I insisted she take—well, it didn’t work, did it? But it was her place; I couldn’t send her away. And she needed the therapy.”

  “Oh?” said Ruth.

  “Well, part of the therapy was my teaching her massage. Especially to do the back and leg work. You have to stand over the person for that. I can only do the head and neck now, you see, the energy work, the foot reflexology.” When Ruth raised an eyebrow, she explained. “There are reflexes in the feet that relate to most parts of the body. Push in a certain way on a toe and it can help relieve a headache.” As she spoke, she was twisting a plain gold ring on her thick finger.

  “You’re married.”

  “Was. I left him to come here. He was glad to see me go, frankly. He had a girlfriend, you see. After the accident—he didn’t need ... this.” She nodded at her wheelchair. Then, as if to prove the degree of separation, she yanked off the ring, dropped it into a pocket. The corners of her dark eyes curved up into the fluid sweep of her shiny black hair.

  “I do see.” Ruth looked down at the ring on her own finger, a thin silver band with RM and WW engraved on the inside. Why was she still wearing it? For the children, she supposed. For Emily, who’d been on a mission lately, it seemed, to reconnect her parents. Well, Pete’s arrival was days away. Still, the ring was tight where her finger had thickened with hard work: a reminder of the decision she would have to make.

  “We’re all without husbands here, as you can see,” Isis said, and veered over to a table to snatch up a teapot. “Chamomile. Want a cup? Good for stress.”

  Was it that obvious? Hearing a groan in the next room, Ruth shook her head. Was she superstitious, not wanting to drink from a cup in this house? “You know Angie’s husband has been in town, wanting to see her. He was upset that she’d left. You wouldn’t allow him in, and now...” She looked hard at the woman.

  The black eyes took hers in calmly. “Angie didn’t want to see him. It wasn’t for me to let him in.”

  “You’re sure of that? I mean, why? It wasn’t you who persuaded her? I’m convinced he loved her. He was broken by her death.”

  Now the eyes looked away. “She had reasons, or she wouldn’t have been here. I don’t know what they were. All of them, anyway. It was her idea you know, this healing center for abused women.”

  “Abused?”

  “Yes, of course! That’s the raison d’être for this place. Angie wanted it that way. A sanctuary for abused women.”

  “But there were no ... marks on the body, no evidence of abuse. Just the discoloration, the poison.”

  “Abuse isn’t only physical.”

  “Of course not.” Ruth thought other sister-in-law, Bertha: “God’s plan, God’s idea,” the crazed woman had said when Vic was kidnapped. All that anguish. The trauma for the boy. Ruth’s hair already going gray.

  But she couldn’t imagine what the abuse was in this case. With Kevin Crowningshield, who seemed like compassion itself? He’d loved his wife—was that abuse? Perhaps there’d been some other problem with Angie. Some illusions, delusions, some pathological concerns.

  “She seemed perfectly normal, Angie? I mean, nothing.…”

  “Mental? As normal as the rest of us, I guess.” The woman gave a cynical smile. “What’s ‘normal,’ anyway?”

  Dr. Colwell came out into the kitchen. His face was grim. “I’m pretty sure, almost positive,” he said, “that you’re right, Ruth. Something has poisoned another woman here—maybe the lot of them. But the others won’t let me near them.” He shook his head as if to say, What can you do with a bunch of stubborn females?

  He yanked open the refrigerator door. “Better not throw anything away. Milk, broccoli, this white stuff—” He made a comical face; obviously, he was a meat-and-potatoes man.

  Isis looked weary, her shoulders collapsing under the thick neck. “The police called just before you came,” she said. “They’re sending someone from—what do you call it? Forensics. But we can’t starve while they sort things out! We’ll keep on eating, you know, though I admit we’ve had little appetite since Angie.…”

  “You bought the food in town?” Ruth asked.

  “At the health-food store?” It was presumably an answer.

  “I shop there myself, off and on,” Ruth said. “And I’m perfectly healthy. My daughter Sharon won’t go anywhere else.”

  “How do you account for poison, then?” said Isis, a trace of pink in her ivory cheeks.

  “How indeed?” Doc Colwell said to Ruth when Isis spun about, at his request, to call an ambulance for the sick woman—they’d have to pump her stomach at the emergency room. Ellen was a frail woman, according to Isis, allergic to “everything”: pollen, bees, strawberries, hay. Chocolates,” she added significantly. “I know. She sneaked them in. Caffeine.”

  “Keep her away from my farm, then,” said Ruth. “Hay and caffeine. I live off both.”

  * * * *

  Ruth was relieved to be home. She flung out her arms, breathed in the good farm smells; the round bales of hay stacked neatly in the fields fed the eye. She laughed even when she found things in a turmoil. Zelda had gone on a
rampage, as if she knew her calf was dead, had torn through the fence that Tim and Joey had recently mended, raced into the pasture on the Flint farm. Fay Hubbard had found her in the barn, munching alfalfa with Dandelion.

  “They’re soul sisters,” said Tim, emerging from the milk room, pulling on his salt-and-pepper beard. “I couldn’t drag her out of there for ages. And you should see the mess she made of that fence! Joey and me had it fixed up good after she broke through to have her calf, didn’t we, Joey?”

  “Yup, we had it fixed up good,” said Joey, who loved to repeat Tim’s words.

  “And now it looks like a herd of buffalo galloped through.” Tim mopped his forehead; his face glistened with sweat. Though Tim had “found himself” in farm work, he’d admitted lately. He is lucky, she thought, wishing she knew who she was: mother, farmer, sometime wife—or now, it seemed, some kind of interfering neighbor? She’d found herself for the second time in that role, and felt... well, not exactly comfortable in it, yet stimulated by it: There was the satisfaction of digging out the truth—justice! For someone else anyway, if not herself.

  “And this place needs serious work,” Tim reminded her.

  Of course it did, the house starved for paint, and the barn, too. They’d built it back up after last spring’s electrical fire but then ran out of money before they could give it a second coat of barn red. What they had put on was already peeling. The two cement-block stave silos looked as if they’d been underwater and drudged up out of the sea. There was a blight on the baby balsam and Scotch pines Tim had planted as a way to diversify. The sheep on the pasture she rented to her friend Carol Unsworth had practically munched it bare, but she couldn’t turn Carol out.

  “Tim, you know as well as I that we can’t afford it. Not yet. When the place falls down, then we’ll jack it back up. Look, winter’s coming,” she conceded. “We’ll have more time then for repairs.”

  Repairs to her life, too, she thought. Another letter from Pete in the mail today. Hints he’d start proceedings when he arrived in Branbury. “What are you waiting for?” he wrote. “You want to get on with your own life, don’t you? Remarry? Have a little fun, a little sex? I want that for you, Ruth.”

  So solicitous, she thought. Worrying about her welfare, her sex life (he loved to address that in his letters; his own was “terrific,” he constantly reminded her). Well, he could wait. He could just wait. She thrust out her lower lip.

  Then she remembered Emily, watching her read the letter. “A letter from Dad?” she’d said with an insinuating little smile.

  How much do we sacrifice for our children?

  Tim was smiling at her, waving as he revved up the John Deere. “Better keep old Zelda in the barn till we get the fence fixed.” Joey waved, too, important beside him in the bucket seat. Feeling important, she could tell. Nice. Nice for Joey. A person needed to feel important, to be needed. But she was, wasn’t she—by her children?

  She ran back to the barn to check on Zelda. A moment later, Kevin Crowningshield appeared; he’d been waiting for her in his car. He seated himself on an upside-down pail, the toes of his shiny shoes pointed up to avoid a pile of dung. “I need to talk, Ruth. I need your ear. I.…” He didn’t finish; apparently, he was too distraught. He buried his face in his hands.

  She waited. Zelda was lunging in her stall, battering her head against the stanchion bar. “Serves you right,” she said. “Oh, not you, Kevin,” she added when he looked up. “I was talking to my cow. She’s broken through the fence again.”

  He had seen her, he said listlessly. “In the Flint barn. She made a shambles of that, too.”

  She waited, leaned against a splintery beam; she felt Zelda’s warm breath on her back, now and then a thump where the old girl was butting at her. Mad as she was at the cow, she felt a certain affinity—that lust for open spaces.

  “The police have been back,” he said, looking hard at her, spacing his words, halting between them as though searching for the right ones to explain his troubles. “Asking questions, going over and over the same ground. Not accusing exactly—they’ve no direct evidence. But it’s clear what they think. They’re at that healing center now. My God, all I did was send a box of chocolate-covered cherries—Angie’s favorite. And they think I poisoned her? My own wife!”

  She could hear his quick breathing. “I’m sorry …I’m sorry. I don’t mean to break down. It’s all this—everything.” He waved his arms in a wide arc. “Everything that’s been going on. Her not wanting to see me. Her pain, her death. When I’ve .…”

  He was out of words. He looked pathetic, without defenses. It was almost as if it was her problem, too: as if it was Pete who had died—and someone blaming her. She was suddenly outraged. Zelda gave a bellow and lunged at the bar, banging and banging her head as though in penance. “Sorry, old girl, sorry,” Ruth said.

  She took Kevin’s arm. Led him, unprotesting, out of the barn, up to the house.

  “All right,” she said, settling down in a kitchen chair, “let’s talk. Don’t think I haven’t worried—since we found out about the poison. But they’re just grasping at straws—anything. Look, Kevin,” she began, then got up to pour coffee. She couldn’t sit still anymore, it seemed; the coffee might help to get his story out. “You’ve got to tell me everything. Angie was there at that place for a reason. Or what she thought was a good reason. Maybe I can help you. I mean, I’ll try. If you’re completely honest with me.”

  He looked affronted. His voice rose a decible. “What else can I be? Why else am I here?”

  “Then tell me about Angie. You and Angie. Your life together.”

  He cupped the mug she offered in both his hands, rotated his neck inside the confining collar. He was wearing a blue-striped shirt with a stain on the sleeve. His eyes were a muddy brown; there was a grayish stubble on his chin, as though he hadn’t given a thought to shaving, to appearance. His shoulders slumped, making him look wholly vulnerable. She had an impulse to put her hands on his shoulders, to steady him. But, hearing the grind of the John Deere returning to the barn, she held back.

  “We got along, so that’s what I don’t understand about all this. She was such a giving woman. If I said, ‘Let’s go to a movie tonight,’ she was ready, even if she was in the middle of a new design. That was the one thing she insisted on, in spite of my misgivings: her jewelry. And I let her do it. I did. I couldn’t give up my room for it, my study, because that was my work. I’m an investor, you see, and I work mostly out of my house. I wanted to be near Angie, knowing her health problem. I didn’t want her alone in the house. I... well, I have a lot of equipment: PC—I’m on-line; fax, files, endless files. You know. I was with a Chicago firm at one point, but I gave that up for Angie—I’d be away too often. I wanted us together.”

  “Where did she do her jewelry, her designs?”

  “In the basement. I gave her the full run of it; I gave up my workshop, or most of it. She didn’t mind I kept a few tools about. We shared some of them.”

  She waited while he thought what to say next; sat down across from him. Her brain was muddled today, with the Healing House crisis, problems with Zelda, and now this suspicion of murder. Poor Kevin! It was hard to concentrate fully, ask the right questions. She was more farmer than sleuth. Definitely.

  When he didn’t speak, she asked about the design on the Healing House sign, wondering if it had come from Angie. She didn’t mention the ring on the skeleton’s finger, a finger that forensics had found matched the “Flint Farm Skeleton,” as the police called it. To Colm, it was simply “dem bones.” Oh, that Colm.

  Kevin looked blank. “I don’t know about that. I don’t recall a design like that. A bone crossed with an arrow? Definitely odd. But then, I didn’t always look at her designs.”

  “She didn’t show them to you?”

  “Well, in the beginning perhaps. After a while, she discovered how obtuse I am.” He gave a short laugh. “I mean, I’m not an artsy type, I’m afraid.” He spooned a s
econd helping of sugar into his coffee, sipped it. “She was so willing, so ready to drop everything for me. I like to go out for dinner, you know; it’s one of my pleasures. The right place, the right meal. And she’d always come, though she was vegetarian. I used to kid her, call her ‘the Tofu Kid.’ She’d always find something to eat, though—an omelette, or pasta.”

  “They don’t serve tofu in the best restaurants.”

  He smiled at the obvious. “Anyway. She’d come. She’d dress up. I felt... well, good. Sipping wine out of a thin-cut glass—I do appreciate that sort of thing. A beautiful, well-dressed woman at my side. Makes a man feel . . . well, you know.”

  Ruth wasn’t sure she did know. She imagined herself that woman. What would she wear? Boots and a jean skirt—her only dress-up clothes? Though Pete must have encountered the problem down in New York. Did that woman pick out his clothes? Pete was never a dresser. It wouldn’t be easy for him down in that city, a seventh-generation Vermonter. There would be problems he wasn’t letting on about.

  “So you got along well. You saw no reason for her defection?” She recalled something he’d said earlier. “A child— you said she wanted a child. And couldn’t have one.”

  “There was some blockage, although she tried. I tried to make her feel it was all right, though I worried—about hemorrhaging, you know—that bleeding defect. But then, frankly, I was so damn busy, what time did I have for a child? Though I knew it would have given her something to do, besides the jewelry. She tried an outside job once, you know, didn’t even tell me. I wasn’t too pleased, mind you. Her health! She got a position in a women’s clothing store, thought she’d please me, I suppose—it was a quality store; she’d get a discount on things. But after a week of it, she got overtired. She agreed with me that she was better off at home.”

  “You said she wanted to adopt.”