Behind the Bonehouse (11 page)

He heard the screen door slap behind him and looked around, disgusted with himself for having waked Jo, and saw Emmy trotting toward him across the wet grass, a shadow moving in dappled moonlight under the lace of the locust.

He'd sat down in an old Adirondack chair just past the willow by the pond, and she came and lay down beside him, and he stroked her smooth head and rubbed her warm ears, telling himself that he'd been wrong, even though he'd been justifying himself ever since it'd happened.

Why did I do what Carl wanted? He set out to goad me, and I fell for it like a fool.

It's not that I don't have good reason to be outraged, but yelling at him in public played right into his hands. It was nothing but anger and pride on my side. And I ended up looking like a petulant child.

The fact that that bothers me more than what he said is pride too. Which is not the way I want to live.

There's nothing I can say that'll change Carl. It's spittin' in the wind, as Dad would say, which doesn't end well.

So what am I supposed to do?

Go on.

Make yourself say it.

Forgive him for what he's done. And whatever he does next.

Yeah? How? God's gonna have to make a move here, 'cause that's the last thing I want to do.

I s'pose I could apologize. Sometime. Just for yelling at him in public. And tell him we need to get over this and learn to act like adults.

'Course I'd rather eat a worm sandwich and wash it down with lye.

“Right, Emmy? You don't ever have to apologize. You can just wag your tail and look ashamed and everyone tells you how cute you are.”

Alan pulled into Carl's drive at six-twenty that night. Carl's Chevy was there, parked in front of the unattached garage. And Alan sat with his hands on the wheel, talking himself out of shoving the gearshift into reverse and heading home fast.

He climbed out, finally, and walked to the front door, where he rang the doorbell, after another conversation with himself.

He waited. But no one answered.

And he went back to the car and took his legal pad out of his briefcase and wrote Carl a note of apology, then clamped it into the edge of the screen door right at eye level.

He backed out, and drove off, nodding to the elderly woman who was watching him, as she watered her gardenias, across the street from Carl's.

Wednesday, April 15th, 1964

Jo pulled into Jack Freeman's driveway on Pisgah Pike at a little before two, and drove through the deep ruts, climbing the long hill, then left past the creosoted tobacco barns and the smaller barn full of tractors that belonged to the man who rented the land. She parked under the cluster of hardwoods up the hill from Jack's house, then stood for a minute and watched the wind fluttering paths through the leaves.

It was the house Alan had rented before they'd married, the stone and clapboard Cotswold cottage halfway down the slope from a fenced in cattle pasture that ran west across the top of the hill.

Jo started down toward the back of the house, but Jack came out before she'd gotten fifty feet, carrying his army pack and a small canvas suitcase.

He was grinning, the way he never had when she'd first met him, and though he was probably forty now, or maybe forty-two, he looked ten years younger than he had two years before.

Jo waited for Jack to lock the kitchen door and walk up to her, watching the tall grass swirl in the breeze that came sweeping down toward Pisgah Pike, looking at the gardens too that Jack had planted—the vegetable patch beyond the rope hammock by the screened-in porch, the new boxwoods flanking the stone path Jack had laid to the tiny flagstone entry outside the kitchen door, the peony bushes where there'd only been raw red clay.

Jo said, “You're the kind of tenant
I
want.”

Which made Jack laugh, as he set his bags in the truck. “It's fun for me. Experimenting on my own gardens makes me relax. How long will it take to get to the Cincinnati airport?”

“We've got to count on three hours, though it probably won't take that long. What time does your plane leave?”

“Seven-forty-five.”

“Good. We've got time to spare for construction.”

“Thanks for driving me up.”

“It'll be good to talk. I've got Ross over with Buddy's wife, and I feel like a free woman.”

They talked about Jo's newest client, and the work they were both doing at White Hall (her renovation and his landscaping), and the difficulties he was having making his landscaping business profitable. They discussed Alan's job, and the troubles with Carl, and moved on to her Uncle Toss and their broodmare business.

They'd driven about forty-five minutes when Jack got quiet.

His thin face seemed pulled in on itself, the hazel eyes searching the distance, the sharp nose and the chiseled cheekbones, tanned now, when they had been pasty, making him seem strong and reliable in ways Jo couldn't have explained.

“What're you thinking about? Not that it's any of my business.” Jo laughed as she glanced at him.

And he looked back and crossed his arms across his sport coat, then sighed before he spoke. “I've been brooding about this trip since 1945.”

“I would've, I know that.”

“And yet actually going and doing it isn't without risk.”

“If someone had set me up to look like a traitor, I'd feel downright nervous, going back to find out who.”

“That would be an understatement.” Jack rubbed his hands on his thighs, and turned toward Jo. “Being made to look like I'd turned the Resistance into the Gestapo? It made me insane for years. You saw that yourself.”

“Well—”

“It's not that I don't want to go track down whoever it was. I want it more than anything else I've ever wanted. But I know it's a nearly impossible task, the way it always has been. That's what used to paralyze me. I absolutely have to try. But that doesn't keep it from being daunting, especially with limited time.”

“How will you go about it?”

“My number one suspect is Henri Reynard. He was a Resistance member who worked as a photographer for the Tours paper and the Vichy police. He photographed crime scenes, and any dead that turned up, so he knew what the police and Gestapo were up to from one day to the next. That information helped the Resistance, but gave him a network on their side too. I have no concrete evidence. And there's research I need to do first, but I think my best bet is to find his ex-wife.”

“She was a painter?”

“Who taught during the war in what we call a high school. She'd been trained as an art restorer, and that was her real love.”

Jack was silent then for quite awhile before he smiled at Jo. “Actually, and I've never said this to anyone else, I admired her a great deal. I could talk to her about all sorts of topics. Literature. Art. Legal practices in our disparate cultures. She made me smile at the oddest times, and I found her quite attractive.”

“Good for you! I hope you find her. Did she know you were an attorney before the war?”

“No. Agents in the OSS did
not
discuss their backgrounds. She's probably remarried, and she may well not want to help me, but I've got to at least try.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Did Alan ever tell you about the talk he had with me that first year I came here? I'd stopped drinking, so he was letting me stay in his spare room, and he—”

“He didn't mention a particular—”

“He was telling me I had to put it behind me—being set up and thought of as a traitor—so I could make myself a new life.”

“I know he talked to you in general terms, but—”

“He told me that holding a grudge, even when it was justified, was like taking cyanide and expecting the other guy to die. That may not have originated with him, but he was right. It made me absolutely livid at the time, but it helped in the long run.”

“I'm glad. He would be too. Especially since he's having to struggle with something similar now.”

“Funny how that happens.”

“Yeah.”

They talked about other things then. Styles of landscaping in Europe and the US. The integration crises in Louisville. The easier time they'd had in Woodford County, speculating too on why that might be.

Then Jack fell asleep, much to his embarrassment when he woke up. “I'm sorry to leave you to drive alone. Where are we?”

“Pulling in to the airport.”

“There was something else I meant to tell you. What was it?” He was putting his sunglasses in his army pack, checking his pockets of his corduroy jacket for his passport and his ticket, tightening the knot in his dark green tie. “I know what it was. This morning. Maybe quarter after five. I was driving to Equine Pharmaceuticals to mow the lawn and show the guy who's working for me how I want it done while I'm gone. I was on my way to the back lot, and when I passed the front driveway Alan's car was the only one there, but a man was standing in the lot, and it looked like Carl Seeger. He was—”

A car honked behind them. And Jack waved at the driver. “It's no big deal, but remind me to tell you later. I better run. Thanks, Jo.”

“I hope you accomplish what you want to accomplish, and that your friend isn't married.”

Jack actually blushed, then nodded and thanked her again, and waved as he walked into the airport to try to make sense of his past.

A
lan had just gotten home and put on a pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt, and had poured himself an ice tea from the fridge, and was telling Emmy that they'd trot up and down the front drive a few times, then feed Sam and Maggie an apple—when the phone rang in the study.

The man identified himself as Virgil Shafer, a farmer Bob Harrison had known for years, who'd asked to try their experimental equine viral arteritis vaccine on his daughter's quarter horse mare. She was about to take her to a series of shows where she could get exposed to the virus, so Bob had inoculated her that morning, and Virgil was calling to tell Alan what he didn't want to hear. “The mare's having a real bad reaction. I couldn't get Bob, and I've called out another vet, but I figure you oughtta come out right quick.”

Alan put on Levis and paddock boots in less than half a minute and drove to the north side of Versailles, while Emmy watched the world whip by through the back right window. Alan turned left onto Elm Street (which changed its name to McCracken Pike half a mile on), and drove five miles past Carl Seeger's house to the Shafers' farm, turning left into their driveway, climbing the hill through the woods in second, pushing the Dodge hard.

When they pulled up into the circle at the front of the old brick farmhouse, Virgil's pickup wasn't there. It wasn't in the back drive either, though Georgia's station wagon was. And when Alan knocked on every door, and looked in all the windows, there wasn't anyone home—not Virgil, or his wife, or his daughter.

Alan checked the barns and the paddocks, and found Susie, the mare who'd been inoculated that morning, cropping grass in the west field with two gray geldings.

Alan examined her as carefully as he could—not with the knowledge a vet would've had, but with two years' experience helping Bob Harrison with horses in field tests.

She wasn't sweating. There were no hives. She was breathing normally. He pried her jaws apart and looked at her throat, which didn't seem to him to be swollen. Her legs weren't swollen anywhere either—and she communicated clearly but politely, sniffing his hands and then backing away, that if he didn't have an apple or carrot secreted about his person, she'd appreciate it if he'd leave her alone to eat dinner in peace.

As he drove back toward Versailles on the winding one-lane road that followed a shallow creek, he gazed at horses and glanced at dry stone walls, but he couldn't pry his mind off the call. Because why would anyone drag him out on that kind of wild goose chase?

Whoever it was knew about the vaccine, and that Virgil's horse got injected this morning.

And maybe the point was to get me away from home. To hurt a horse. Or steal one. Or take something from the house.

Anyone who knows Toss would know we don't leave the horses alone for long. That he goes to his place before dinnertime during foaling, and comes back at nine or ten to oversee the mares at night.

So if whoever it is knows Jo and Toss were both gone, I'd be the one to get rid of.

Butch? He's not doing much that makes sense at the moment. Maybe he'd think it was funny.

Carl might do it just to inconvenience me.

And they both have contacts at Equine who could tell them about the vaccine and who was getting it when.

It could be something more sinister too. Though what that could be I don't know.

When he got home, he took Emmy with him and checked all the barns. Nothing was missing that he could see, and the horses were all accounted for, there, and in the paddocks. He went through every room in the house, where everything seemed normal. And though that was a relief, it made the call more inexplicable. Which made him more uneasy.

He scrambled some eggs, and sliced a tomato, and made a sandwich on whole wheat toast. He sat under the arbor in back, his plate on his lap, his iced tea on the side table, and read
The Agony And The Ecstasy
till he found himself staring into space, his ribs tight and his breath shallow, his eyes beginning to ache.

Who knew Jo would be gone?

Bob Harrison. And probably Brad. I think he was there when I told his dad.

I might've mentioned it in the lab too, though I don't remember that I did.

Jo could've told all kinds of people.

And me sitting here speculating won't do any good.