“Sorry,” she said, sitting again with the fractious child, to whom she gave a cookie and achieved immediate peace. The baby settled back onto her mother’s chest, the cookie in both hands and her eyes filled with contentment.
Now Bee wasn’t sure if she was supposed to go on. She sipped her tea.
“I’m glad to hear she found a good man,” said Jilly. “She’s a nice person.” Jilly gently scrubbed some dirt off Cassie’s knee. “The other stuff,” she said. She shook her head. “I’m going to take some time to absorb it.”
“I know,” said Bee.
Jilly’s hand rested on the wide arm of the deck chair and she stared off at the ancient buildings across the yard. “To this day, I can’t believe that I was ever the kind of person who could do that: break up a marriage. What was I thinking? Well, I wasn’t. And I paid for it.” She shook her head.
“If it’s any consolation, Trish is kind of thankful you took Al off her hands.”
Jilly looked at her fixedly and then her face relaxed a bit and she rolled her eyes. “I don’t doubt that,” she said. “Not one bit. But back then . . .” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her face was set, grim and stubborn, not pleased with herself and not about to be coaxed out of it. Seeing her in repose, Bee could see that she was beautiful despite her evident weariness and the cast of her thoughts. Her lips were full, her cheekbones prominent, her skin firm and already tinted — though it was early spring — by the sun, not makeup. Bee had come for information, but Jilly seemed to only now be warming up to her and she was in no rush.
“Trish told me that Donovan loved to come out here,” she said.
Jilly’s eyes snapped open and Bee half wondered if she had drifted off to sleep. She looked so tired. And there was something else, wasn’t there? A sudden shiftiness. The woman lowered her eyes, took a sip of her tea, put down her cup, and looked at her baby. The cookie’s perfect roundness had been compromised by small teeth marks, but little of it was gone. It rested in Cassie’s plump little hand, which lay at rest on her mother’s breast. She was asleep, just like that. Jilly gently hitched her into a more comfortable position. “Yeah,” she said. “Dono had fun here. I looked forward to him coming out. We all did.
“My great big lunk of a brother taught him how to play poker,” she continued, glancing at Bee to see if this perturbed her. Bee looked startled. “True,” said Jilly. “They’d sit at the kitchen table and play for matchsticks: Merv and Al and sometimes another friend or two. I never told Trish. Maybe Donovan did, but I never got any flack from her about it.” And now she smiled, really smiled, for the first time, and it was a beguiling thing to see.
“I don’t think Trish would have minded,” said Bee.
Jilly nodded as if she’d thought as much. She looked out toward the fields. Bee became aware of the tractor sounds again, a long way off. She watched Jilly track the sound, find it, hold it.
“I’d take him places,” said Jilly. “I used to deliver baked goods and such over in Sugar Valley and Dono was always game to go along for the ride.”
“I passed the turnoff,” said Bee. “That’s where Al and Trish had their summer cottage?”
“Not quite,” said Jilly. “They were farther down the road, where Sugar Creek meets the Black River. But yeah, over that general direction.” She gestured to Bee’s right and Bee looked that way, across the fields. “Anyway, Donovan and I would trek across the hills. We never bothered with the roads. We’d take the shortcut across our land — we’ve got a hundred and some acres — right up to the shores of the river. One or other of the folks would come to fetch you if you rang the bell. Donovan loved to ring that bell.”
“It sounds cool.”
Jilly nodded, then stopped, and the expression on her face seemed to suggest she had stumbled upon another memory, not so pleasing. She abruptly snapped out of it. “Where was I?” she said.
Bee sipped her tea and looked over the rim at her host. “What were you thinking just now?” she said.
Jilly looked at her and the suspicion was there again. The shiftiness.
“Sorry,” said Bee. “If you don’t want —”
“No, it’s okay.”
“It’s just that I’m kind of hungry to hear about him, you know? I don’t exactly know why.”
“Really?” said Jilly, and her expression was easy enough to interpret. Level with me, her eyes said.
“I’m trying to figure out what happened,” said Bee.
Jilly nodded. “You said he spoke to you.”
Bee shrugged. “He was only semiconscious. It was garbled.”
“But he said my name?”
Bee nodded, and then to save her asking the question she knew was coming, she said, “And other things. Just snatches, but . . .”
Jilly’s stare notched down and now her eyes gave away a sadness. “I was thinking how it wasn’t all good times. When he was here, I mean. But you probably don’t need to know that.”
“I’d like to,” said Bee. “Anything.”
Jilly threw her a sidelong glance, assessing her again. “There was one time,” she said. Then she shifted again, as if to relieve a stitch. “Let me start that again. You see, my first husband never took too well to getting ditched.”
“Rory,” said Bee.
“Trish remembered him?”
“Only that he was bad news.”
“He sure was. Bad news when we were married and badder news when we weren’t anymore — pardon my English. Al didn’t seem too worried, which he probably should have been. Rory was a real roisterer. He had more swagger in him than brains. Heck, I don’t know what I ever saw in him.” She looked down at Cassie’s head with its haze of pale blond hair. “I was a pretty foolish girl. Anyway, Rory made a lot of bluster and fuss and swore this and swore that, but it all seemed to be okay. Then one day, Dono and I were out in the fields on some errand — picking juniper berries, maybe. I don’t remember. Anyway, he saw something off in the tall grass. He ran to look and I followed him and then he just stopped. He was looking at something on the ground.” Jilly took a swig of her tea, set the cup down.
“What was it?”
“The dog,” said Jilly.
“I’m sorry?”
“The dog. He hadn’t been around at breakfast. This was a big old Labrador named Minos. He’d go off sometimes. Venture about. Liked to have his little liaisons with the lady dogs.”
“And Turn . . . I mean, Donovan found the dog?”
“Yeah. Dead.” Bee had known that was coming, but it still made her gasp. “With an arrow through its neck.”
“An arrow?”
“That’d be Rory, leaving his mark.”
“So he was, like, an archer?”
Jilly raised an eyebrow. “You picturing Robin Hood?” she said.
Bee shrugged. She had been, she guessed.
Jilly chuckled. “He had this high-tech thing. Like something out of The Walking Dead.”
“And he killed your dog?”
Jilly nodded. “Poor Dono. He loved that animal. I felt so bad for him having to see that. I remember phoning Trish. We hadn’t talked much — hardly at all — and I was nervous about doing it. But I needed to warn her, you know. That he might be upset.”
“What’d you do?” said Bee. “I mean about Rory; did you know for sure it was him?”
“Oh, sure. Stood to reason. He was a nasty piece of work. But the cops weren’t as sure. It was early November, deer hunting season. There were lots of hunters out and about, and even though most of your local hunters ask permission to be on the property, not all of them are quite so civic-minded. Plus you’ve got your city hunters and tourists who stray, get lost — end up shooting a cow, for God’s sake. It happens.”
“But this,” said Bee.
“Oh, it was Rory, all right. But Rory, see, he could call it a mistake. I mean the land was mine, but he’d been living here with me — my husband and all — so he could claim a right to hunt there, wrongly or
rightly, and then just make a big fuss about shooting wild or whatever. He’d spin a yarn.”
“So nothing happened?”
“Oh yeah, something happened. The cops who came to the house, I knew one of them pretty good. He’d gone to school with me and Rory. Knew what he was like. Rory was on their books: drunken and disorderly, a few fights, resisting arrest — that kind of thing. But around here that’s as it may be — just boys being boys. Still, Harry Cameron — that was the officer — he did me a favor. Nothing official. Just led Rory to believe that maybe a long trip would be a good idea. Head out to Alberta, see if he could get work in the oil fields — something like that. Rory took the hint, and that was the last we saw of him.”
The image of the dog with an arrow through its neck made Bee feel nauseous. Turn had never mentioned it. Never mentioned Jilly or coming out to the country. It made her sad in a whole other way, she couldn’t figure why.
“My brother Mervin said he’d tear Rory limb from limb if he ever showed up in the county again. But when he did, it was years and years later and nothing much happened.”
“So he came back?”
“Sure. Probably got himself fired. He was good at that.”
Spinach came up on the porch then and decided to flop down at their feet. Bee reached down and scruffled his neck feathers. He opened his big mouth and panted happily, slobbering drool on the floor. Bee looked up and saw that Jilly was staring intently at her.
“What’d he say about me?” she said.
It took Bee a minute to realize what she meant. “Donovan?” Jilly nodded. “Nothing really,” said Bee. “He could barely string two words together. But he managed to say ‘Jilly’ pretty clearly. I didn’t know anyone named Jilly, so I asked Trish and she told me about you.”
Jilly nodded and looked somehow wise, as if she could understand why he had talked about her. As if it made sense. And that led to her turning again to Bee. “Would now be a good time for you to tell me what you’re really up to?”
“Like I said, I’m trying to piece together a puzzle,” said Bee.
Jilly looked at her through narrowed eyes, then seemed to realize what Bee was saying. “Based on what he told you — Dono?” Bee nodded. “But you said he could hardly string two words together.”
Again, Bee nodded. “I know. It’s probably insane, but I feel . . . I guess I feel like I have to do something.”
The baby whimpered and Jilly soothed her with a kiss on the top of her head. “I don’t know much about what happened,” she said, her voice low. “All I heard via the grapevine was that Al was dead and so was the boy. It looked like Al was murdered. But Donovan, from what I heard, was run over. I’m guessing there’s more to it than that.”
Bee took a deep breath. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she wasn’t going to find out anything unless she confided in someone with her theory, if that’s what it was. “Okay, so the cops want to put Al’s death on Donovan. He — Al — had his head smashed in by a baseball bat. Donovan’s bat, as it turns out.”
Jilly made a face. “I can understand the impulse,” she said. “But doing it . . .”
“Exactly. Turn — that’s what I call him . . . called him — Turn could never have done such a thing. Never. He had a temper, all right, but he . . .”
Jilly nodded. “I hear you,” she said. “Go on.”
“Turn was there at Al’s place. There was more than one witness who saw him come and go and then come back again. And both times he left the place, he was running.”
“So it looks bad.”
“It looks terrible. And the cops see him getting run over as an accident or maybe even suicide.”
“But you don’t buy that.”
Bee shook her head. “I think whoever killed Al murdered Turn because he knew too much.”
“What do you mean? There was something going on? Something illegal?”
Bee shook her head but suddenly realized that this was a whole other avenue of thought. No, she told herself, stick to what you were thinking. “What I meant was that he saw what really happened or something. Except I have no proof other than knowing Turn the way I do.”
“And these things he said to you.”
“Right. And that.”
Jilly considered what Bee had said. “And these words, are they just in your head?”
“No, when I realized he was actually trying to say stuff, I wrote it down in my journal.”
Jilly eyed Bee again and seemed to put two and two together. “And you’re out here, snooping around by yourself, which suggests you haven’t told the cops about what he said.”
The cat was now officially out of the bag. “Right,” Bee said, and immediately felt stupid. “You see, you could interpret the words in different ways. He actually seemed to be saying, at one point, that he killed his father, but that’s not really what he said. Only you’d have had to be there to understand that.”
“Or have an open mind, maybe,” said Jilly. She cocked her head to one side. “So?” she said.
Bee rolled her lips into her mouth and bit down hard. What the hell was she doing! She broke eye contact. Looked away. Looked at the old buildings across the yard, sitting in their shadows — shadows diminishing as the sun rose higher in the late morning sky. She looked again at Jilly. Why would Turn have said her name if he didn’t want Bee to know about her — someone he’d never mentioned before? Jilly couldn’t be wrapped up in any of this, could she? Not with a new baby and a happy marriage.
The baby whimpered again and Jilly cleared her throat. “I’m not sure how long you plan on taking before you decide to trust me,” she said, “but pretty soon Cassie here is going to want my sole attention.”
Bee nodded and took the plunge. She reached down into her purse and pulled out the journal. She opened it, handed it over. Jilly took the book in her one free hand. Bee felt she should say something, then stopped herself and leaned back in her chair. Her tea had gone cold. She was leaving a trail of cold tea behind her these days.
Jilly made a hmm sound. “Well, here’s something,” she said. “Kali.”
“You know her?”
“Since we were at school. She was just plain Kelly then. Kelly O’Connor.”
“So Al met her out here?”
Jilly nodded. “I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear they’d hooked up. I could tell she had her eye on him all those years ago when he and I were together.” She shook her head. “I’ve made my mistakes. Two of them, in particular: Rory and Al. But I’d like to think I learned something along the way. Live and learn, right? So I could be accused here of the pot calling the kettle black if I were to say that Kali doesn’t have a lick of sense when it comes to men.” She sighed. Then she returned her attention to the journal. “Did the cops talk to her?”
Bee nodded. “Yeah. But they don’t seem to be giving her much consideration. She broke up with Al over a month ago and moved back here. Nobody’d seen her around Al’s place — not even his busybody neighbor, the one who saw Donovan twice the evening of the murder.” Bee frowned, thinking of Inspector Stills. “Kali had an alibi: doesn’t drive, doesn’t have a car, and I don’t know what.”
“Mrs. Billy,” said Jilly.
“Excuse me?”
“Mrs. Billy is Ronny Farrow’s mother. Has Alzheimer’s. She’s got a place right near where Kali is staying now. Ronny was going to put her mom in respite care since she — Ronny — was heading off to Mexico and then, out of the blue, Kali offers to look after her. Doesn’t have a job and she’d always liked Mrs. Billy.”
“So she was with Mrs. Billy on April fifteenth?”
Jilly shrugged. “Who’s to know? The cops sure can’t ask the old lady.”
“But if Kali was looking after her, then she couldn’t have been in Ottawa, could she?”
Again Jilly shrugged. “It kind of depends on when Ronny handed over the old woman into Kali’s care. Kali could say she was there — at Mrs. Billy’s, I mean — on the nig
ht in question and no one can call her out on it. Ronny’s a weird gal, a true loner. She just takes off in her old Volkswagen microbus when she’s good and ready. Wouldn’t have stopped to say good-bye to anyone.”
Bee frowned. “So Kali’s alibi isn’t all that strong?” she said.
“Not as far as I can tell, but then neither is Kali.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she’s hardly someone likely to bash somebody’s head in with a bat. Skinny arms. Not much in the way of moxie. She wouldn’t be anyone’s prime suspect for a violent crime, that’s for sure.”
Bee had met Kali one of the two times she’d met Al. Well, not met her so much as nodded at her and Kali had nodded back. All she remembered was flaming-red hair.
Jilly, meanwhile, had lifted up the little Moleskine book and deftly turned the page without the use of her decommissioned left hand, holding the sleeping child. Bee watched her eyes hoping for something, anything. And there it was. Her gaze had stopped.
“What?” said Bee.
Jilly frowned. Then closed the book and handed it back.
“You saw something,” said Bee.
“Maybe I did.”
“Please, Jilly. If there’s any help you can give me. Anything.”
Jilly took a deep breath and the baby whimpered again. “My advice would be to take this book to the police and let them handle it.”
“But they’ve already made up their minds. They won’t —”
Jilly held up her hand, stopping Bee in mid-rant. “Well, you tell them that they need to talk to Kali O’Connor. Again.” She placed her empty teacup on the tray and began to straighten the cups there, the Brown Betty teapot, the jar of honey. “She may not have a car, but her new boyfriend does,” she said without looking up. Bee stared at her, wide-eyed, waiting — willing her to go on. Finally, Jilly looked up. “That would be Rory Tulk,” she said.
Bee was speechless.
Just then a truck rattled down Cedar Bog Road; Spinach leaped up from where he was lying at their feet and raced across the yard barking his head off. Cassie woke up in full howl.
The Ruinous Sweep Page 21