Frog Music (44 page)

A nervous shake of the head.

“You told that reporter. You said Louis got talking to a stranger on Wednesday, a big, dark man called Lamantia.”

The woman’s mouth trembles. “No law against that, I hope.”

“What did the fellow want?”

“He was inquiring as to buying property in the township.”

Property? Blanche frowns in confusion. Perhaps that’s just what Louis told his wife. “Did you talk to him yourself?”

“I don’t talk to men behind my husband’s back. Especially not Sicilians.”

“Why especially not—”

Mrs. Louis angles herself closer to whisper, “Cosa Nostra.”

“Oh, come.” The pompous importer, one of them?

“You don’t mess with those folks’ business,” she hisses.

So Lamantia’s a genuine mafioso who, out of some warped longing for Blanche, came down to San Miguel Station and paid the first idle man he ran into, Louis the Canadian, to murder Jenny? Whereupon Louis immediately fled town? This theory of Cartwright’s is so implausible, Blanche doesn’t know why she’s here badgering Mrs. Louis.

She turns away without another word to the woman.
Drop this nonsense
, she orders herself.
Get out of here
.

McNamara is emerging from his outhouse, pulling up his pants. He eyes Blanche, startled, and nods at her.

She knows what a sight she must be: bareheaded, in her filthy pink dress, one big toe sticking out of its stocking. She should cut straight across to the station and wait for the next train back to the City. (Though how she’s going to talk her way onto it without the price of the fare this time, she doesn’t know.) “Mr. McNamara,” says Blanche with a nod when she gets close enough to be heard. Holds up her hand to shade her eyes, like some squinting beggar woman.

“You’re back.”

She shakes her head. “I’m departing for pastures new,” she improvises drily.

“Well, now, I wish I could say the feckin’ same. This benighted spot!” The Irishman’s eyes trace the lines of the sandlots. “The fellow that foisted it on me swore blind San Miguel Station would be going great guns soon. I’m waiting and waiting, and still my best customer’s my wife, and she never pays her tab.”

Blanche manages a smile. “Well. I hope you manage to sell up one of these days.” She turns toward the depot.

“I’d a sniff the other day,” says McNamara under his breath.

She looks over her shoulder. “A sniff of …”

“A prospect, like.”

“Somebody who wanted to buy the saloon?”

McNamara nods mournfully. “A City gent, this was. Though I doubt he’ll be back, now the place is a byword for bloodshed.”

Blanche stares at McNamara. “Was this … Wednesday?”

“Could have been.”

“An Italian, was he?”

McNamara makes a face. “Don’t know about that.”

“His name—”

“Sounded more like your crowd to me.”

“His name sounded French?” says Blanche, too sharp. “Lamant, something like that?”

The Irishman’s forehead is creased. “You know this fellow?”

“I can’t tell if I do, that’s why I’m asking.”

“I forgot to ask his bloody name,” says McNamara, “but he sounded Frenchish himself.”

Her head is spinning. French, not Italian? “This was a tall man, dark, yes? Smartly dressed?”

McNamara nods.

Lamantia, it must be. Clearly this dullard can’t tell one European accent from another.

“Dropping off him,” adds the Irishman.

“You mean—his fat?”

“His clothes, dropping off him,” says McNamara irritably. “A living skeleton.”

Blanche can’t speak for a long moment. Then she manages to ask, “Had he … a mustache?”

“Longest I’ve ever seen. So he is a friend of yours.”

She shakes her head in dread. “I don’t suppose he was pockmarked at all?”

The Irishman shakes his head. “Face like a blank page.”

Blanche turns away so McNamara won’t see her expression. Ernest Girard. Posing as Lamantia!

Having somehow found out where the women were, Ernest must have rushed to San Miguel Station like a vindictive puppet acting for his absent master. And when he found Blanche and Jenny gone to the hills, he got into conversation with the first men he encountered, and soon chanced upon one desperate enough to kill a woman for cash in hand. Louis, familiar with the settlement and all its dogs. Louis, who must know how to use a gun to keep foxes away from his paltry flock. Blanche never bothered to exchange a word with the Canadian on Tuesday or Wednesday; he was just part of the scrubby landscape. Louis must have pretended to set off for San Jose that Thursday, then snuck back in the dark to do the shooting, and fled to San Jose for real afterward, to make his alibi. But for Ernest to give his name as Lamantia, ensuring that any suspicion would fall on another tall, dark man of Blanche’s acquaintance—now, that was brilliant. If she didn’t hate the bastard so much, she’d admire his style.

Headache worse than ever, Blanche thinks she might puke. Pulse beating its crazy drum. She must get back to the City and tell the detectives what she’s figured out.

As she stumbles toward the railway track, she sees John Jr. riding his pony in a wide circle. Not a bad seat. The palomino’s golden in this light. The boy’s mousier than the beast, but still worth looking at simply because he’s so young. That won’t last.

He flinches at the sight of Blanche. Pauses, tightens the reins as if to gallop off. How he must be missing Jenny, the way she’d ride into San Miguel Station with her jokes and her pistol-toting toughness and greet him like a comrade. Did she spin her awful upbringing into funny stories for John Jr.? Entertain him with tales of how she spat in the bogeymen’s eye in that prison for children just over the hill?

The pony remembers Blanche. Trots over, looking for a treat. Blanche reaches to pat her pale flank. Suddenly so dizzy she doesn’t believe she can make it to the railroad depot. The world contracts to a burning ring. Skin feels dry enough to crackle and slough off.

Blanche is on the ground. Wet suffocating cloth over her face, a winding sheet—

She fights it off.

“Just trying to sponge you some, Miss Blanche,” says the boy. “You keeled over. I reckon you took a turn from the heat.”

Blanche struggles to sit up. Sick as a dog, she shudders. She sips the jar of lukewarm water John Jr.’s holding to her lips. He’s fanning her ineffectively with his small hand. She takes the wet rag from him and presses it to her face, her throat, her chest.

“What can I—”

“Just stand between me and the sun,” she tells him in the voice of a very old woman.

The pony noses Blanche, tickling her neck.

John Jr. has a twisted look about him. “Your arm still pains you?” she asks.

She expects him to deny it, in the way of males, but he nods.

He might grow crooked around this injury. Blanche reaches up to check for a dislocation, as they always did in the circus, but John Jr. ducks away as if her fingers burn him. Does nobody ever touch this boy? Is he lost in that strip of time between the cuddles of childhood and the greedier caresses of adulthood, with nobody so much as laying a finger on him except to punish? Blanche thinks of Jenny, the whip scars forming a grid of pain all up her back. Is Blanche going to see her friend in every gangly boy now? “You poor lad …”

“I’m almost thirteen and that’s a man, or near as makes no difference.”

What a curious tone: pride mixed with something darker. A boy who thinks he’s a man. A boy who wanders at night, maybe, if it’s too hot for sleep. Maybe even puts his hands on what’s not his? Takes what’s there for the taking?

“John,” Blanche starts, gently, so as not to alarm him, “I don’t suppose you’d happen to know where the high-wheeler’s got to?”

He shakes his head. Not surprised by the question, though.

Maybe he couldn’t bear to let anyone have it after Jenny? Did he keep it, not to sell, even, but just for the gleaming glamour of that monstrous front wheel? To stroke sometimes, to keep hidden away so that when all the fuss is over, he can go for midnight rides along the dirt track toward the City and remember his friend Jenny?

“Tell me where it is, John Jr.” Stern, but also seductive, trying to bridge the gap between herself and this child, because Blanche must have the bicycle for the price it’ll fetch—she realizes that now.

And his arm shoots out as if it’s not part of him. One spatulate finger pointing at the pond.

Blanche stares across the sandlot at the flat water.

John Jr.’s taken off already, ahead of her, so fast she almost fears he means to throw himself in. Kids form such wild notions, it’s a wonder any of them live to be full grown. “John Jr.,” she bawls as she runs.

Blanche catches up with him at the edge, where he’s standing, staring into the pond. Her pity’s mixed with frustration at the thought of what he’s done, because the precious machine will be half rusted by now. Wasn’t it enough to burn Jenny’s books? Did he have to leave no trace of her? “Whereabouts?” she demands. “Was it this side you threw it in?”

“Don’t matter.”

“You need to wade in for me and drag it out.”

John Jr. shakes his head. “Best put all that behind you now.”

She stares at him.
All that
, meaning Jenny?

The boy gnaws his lip. “It weren’t none of your doing, Miss Blanche.”

But whose fault was Jenny’s death if not Blanche’s? Who else brought Ernest on her trail like a bloodhound, all the way to San Miguel Station?

John Jr. shakes his head so hard a drop of sweat flies off. “She’d got a hold on you.”

Blanche puzzles over the phrase.

“You can’t take the blame. I saw, I saw it all.” He’s purple in the face now.

Blanche squints at him through the brutal sunlight. “Saw what, John?” Fumbling his way to the toilet in the night, could the boy have glimpsed Louis with the gun?

“Couldn’t help it, could I, with the blind all askew?”

The porch. John Jr. must have been sleeping on the porch. Goddamn it, Blanche should have thought this through before. Even the McNamaras wouldn’t be stupid enough to let a boy of his age share a bed with his sisters. Where else would John Jr. stretch out with his blanket on a summer night but on the porch? Was he there, curled up in a shadowy corner or behind a barrel, when the chicken farmer climbed up with his gun? “What did you see, exactly?” she demands.

“Bad enough to watch,” he wails. “Don’t make me say. Ain’t you got no shame at all?”

Shame
. Suddenly Blanche understands. Not the murder, that’s not what John Jr. saw. He’s not talking about Thursday at all, but the night before. He witnessed what she and Jenny did when they thought the McNamaras were all asleep. While the blind was hanging askew, leaving a space the width of a blade, just enough to let a child outside glimpse what he shouldn’t.

She speaks with difficulty. “Whatever you think you might have—”

“Don’t baby me! I know dirt when it’s right in my face.”

Blanche takes a ragged breath. “Listen to me.”

“Always reckoned Jenny was just eccentric in her ways,” the boy says with a sob, “something of a character. But she turned out to be some class of he-she-I-don’t-know-what, making a whore of you!”

The awful ignorance of children. “John Jr.” Blanche feels as if she’s trying to be heard from the bottom of a pit. “I’m that already.”

He shakes his head, fierce. “It turned my stomach so bad I don’t think I’ll ever be right.”

“How it may have seemed—” She clears her throat. “That’s not how it was.”

“Try and whitewash her sins now she’s gone,” roars John, “but I watched her strip you bare as a twig. She held you down and hurt you bad, used you like a beast of the field!”

Blanche shuts her eyes briefly, remembering. “No,” she whispers.

He shakes his head as if he’s got a fly in his ear. “I should have done something then and there. Shouldn’t have faltered. Dadda taught me how to see to a mule-footed calf.”

A mule-footed calf? What the hell is he talking about? “You dumb boy,” says Blanche. Sorrow in her bones now at the thought of them all getting older and no wiser. (All but Jenny.) Sorrow that makes her reach out to enfold this hurting creature …

John Jr. presses a kiss on her mouth so hard it hurts.

She pulls away, covering her bruised lip. “Jesus, child!”

“It was for you.” He says it flatly, the way a man would, but with tears streaking down his face.

How was that kiss for Blanche—the kind of graceless, hungry kiss any twelve-year-old grabs from any woman, years before he’s allowed?

No.

Not the kiss; that’s not what was for Blanche.

Should have done something then and there
. It’s in the boy’s face, the besotted eyes that want to tell her everything. The truth punches her in the gut.

“No.” Catches her breath. “You couldn’t have.”

“Oh, couldn’t I just?” he answers with an awful attempt at cheek.

The boy’s in some class of sulk
, Jenny remarked on the last morning of her life. Had she figured out what John Jr. had seen the night before, how he felt about it? Had Jenny decided—as she decided about so many things—that it didn’t matter?

Blanche can picture it so clearly. John Jr. outside that bedroom window on Thursday night, leaning on the sill to peer through the gap where the blind had slipped away from the glass, the stock of the shotgun set irrevocably against his small shoulder. How fearful he must have been, how raging, aiming to blast away all his mortification. To expunge his weak fondness for a friend who’d turned out to be an obscenity in disguise.

Blanche’s hand clamps his shoulder so hard, he cries out. “You tell me everything,” she says in a voice she doesn’t recognize, “or I’ll drown you like a puppy.”

But the boy’s face has sealed up.

She lets go and tries mocking him. “Where’d you have got hold of a shotgun, even?”

John Jr. jerks his head in the direction of the scattered cabins. “Louis bought our varmint gun off Dadda, didn’t he?”

The old family weapon, the one the boy learned to kill pests with. Blanche didn’t even know a varmint gun could be a shotgun.
Saw this boy hit a can at thirty yards
, Jenny told her, proud of her protégé. But this time John Jr. didn’t hold it firmly enough, did he? This time his hands must have been shaking, though not enough to put off his aim, not when the young woman he meant to kill was sprawled against a headboard less than ten feet away. Just enough to let the weapon recoil and punch him in the shoulder.