Mad Cow Nightmare (14 page)

It was almost impossible now for Hamlet to walk: he’d lift a hoof and then it would sink into the murk and tangle of briars. Yet the stallion ploughed onward, as though he knew more than she did, was leading her to some fateful conclusion. Finally she tethered him to an alder and slogged on herself, not expecting to find the mare. Not even the smaller Ophelia could navigate this ooze— what monster would force her?

Yet someone had been through here. She came upon trampled and broken underbrush, like something had been recently dragged. She could see the outline in the path—or what could be called a path. A wavy, zigzaggy outline that the surf might make when it broke on shore. And beside it, omigod! a footprint. No, half a print, just the muddy heel of a shoe. And then the heel itself, broken off a shoe, but so muddy you couldn’t tell the color. Whether man’s or woman’s it was impossible to say. One couldn’t judge from a heel. Platform shoes were so chunky these days; she preferred the tiny satin heels of another century. She left the heel there—just in case it turned out to be important.

Curious, excited, but at the same time anxious, frightened even, she tramped on, in the wake of the broken underbrush. After a time the “path” veered off—south or east—she’d lost direction but could still hear Hamlet’s snortings back where she’d tethered him. She would find her way back. She needed to know what had been dragged here.

And she saw. It was the body of a man. He’d been strangled with—oh God, God!—Ophelia’s reins—the reins were still hanging from his neck. She knew they were her mare’s because of the way the reins were scraped and worn on the edges—a certain way Ophelia had of turning quickly and having to be brought back in line. The man’s neck was a dark red under the dangling reins, the skin bruised an ugly yellow above the T-shirt with its cruel message of
Death To Brits.
Feeling woozy, she grabbed a sapling for ballast; stood there, breathing hard to get her strength back.

She’d been right then, it was that Ritchie, the one she’d heard about on the radio, the one who’d abducted the missing traveller woman. Someone had strangled him and taken the mare, because she was no longer in sight. Franny lifted her chin and listened, but heard only a bird trilling overhead, a creature swishing through the tall grasses, a gurgle where something had splashed into the murk. There was no mare, no Ophelia. Franny had found the surprise the psychic had warned of—but it wasn’t her darling horse. She had found her thief, but not his murderer. A new thief had come along to steal the mare and take her—where? Was he riding her without reins? What would he do with her?

And was the murderer still in the swamp—perhaps, this very moment, watching her by the traveller man’s body?

Panicked, wanting the reins back but not wanting to touch the dead man—knowing anyway she should leave him to the police— she staggered out of the clearing. Stumbled back to Hamlet and flung her leg up over his broad back where she felt, somewhat anyhow, safe. Then she unclipped her cell phone and called Henrietta.

“Omigod, I found him, Hen—that traveller fellow. He took her all right, but the reins got him— Wha? Yes, strangled him! Never mind, Hen, I’ll explain when I see you. Just need to call the police— what’s the number? It’s stuck to the phone, you’ve seen it there, damn it! Go down and look it up, will you? Dead, yes, I told you, he’s dead! And she’s gone, Hen, she’s gone. Ophelia’s gone. Without her reins. And God knows where . . . No, don’t come out here, you can’t come here, Hen, you’ll get your feet wet and catch cold. You know what happens—last year it was bronchitis. Hen, please, please hang up and let me call the police, will you? I’ll be home when I can!”

Chapter Eleven

Sharon heard about the murder on the radio. It was breaking news, with few details, but one telling fact—that Ritchie fellow’s death. So she drove straight to Cow Hill Road, careening up the drive, shoving Willa and Robbie before her into the barn, where her mother was swabbing the decks. Zelda, her mother’s most ornery cow, under the weather with milk fever, bellowed when Sharon passed her stall, but Sharon was too excited to bellow back.

Uh-huh, her mother madly sweeping—same old routine, like nothing at all had happened, like a man hadn’t been killed. Like his companion—whom the police suspected now of murder—hadn’t disappeared without a trace.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the commotion down in the pasture. And not just cows mewling, but pickups gathering:

women, children, dogs. That keening again, like a croaky warning of Armageddon. One traveller dead, another on the lam. Worried all over again, she clutched her children’s hands: three-year-old Willa, five-year-old Robbie: sturdy, healthy, lively children. She ran back with them to her car. Better not to bring them into the barn. Superstitious, yes, but Sharon was a mother. She shut them in the car with coloring books, a doll, Robbie’s
Thomas the Train
book. “Stay,” she ordered, “stay. I’ll be back soon. I have to talk to Rooster.” Rooster was the children’s pet name for their grandmother, Ruth.

“What are you doing here?” Rooster asked, after she ran out to give the children a hug. “Don’t you work Fridays? What’s all that sweat on your brow? You look like you’ve been running the mile in ten seconds.”

Sharon told her, watched the horror ooze slowly across her mother’s face. “Ritchie O’Neill?” her mother said. “Are they sure?”

“The T-shirt with the stallion on it. Franny found him, I told you. Early this morning. Mother, you don’t listen. He was wearing that shirt he arrived here in—Maggie described it to me, she said it stank with sweat. Well, he’s dead, gone, strangled to death. And get this. With Ophelia’s reins.”

“Good God.” Ruth put down her mop, reached for Sharon. Sharon opened her arms. Never mind the cow shit, it was her mother. This was terrifying news. “Still breaking news,” Sharon said when Ruth mumbled something in her ear about “Nola? They think she’d been there, she might have done it?”

“Well, they didn’t
exactly
say, but they suspect her, yes. He’s a big man, they said. But hell hath no fury,” Sharon quoted from somewhere. Sharon had created the scenario in her mind: Ritchie riding up on Nola in the woods—maybe even the swamp, though the news said something about a dragged body—and Nola, in self-defense, wrapping the reins about his neck.

“But she was a sick woman,” Ruth insisted. “She was still recovering in that Healing House.”

“Healing House? She was there? How’d you know that?” Sharon didn’t like her mother holding back information, she wanted to be kept informed. Her mother could be spacey. She needed Sharon’s help now and then.

Ruth told her about James Perlman’s visit and Sharon said, “Ha! Another suspect.”

“Oh stop that. He’s a little odd, but perfectly normal. He had work at the Healing House, that’s all. He should have informed the police, yes, but I suspect he’s a little prejudiced, a little scared, like the rest of us. The travellers aren’t real people, according to people like James. They’re not like us regular working folk.”

Down in the pasture the keening was working up to a crescendo; mourners were gathering—some northern clan maybe, related by marriage. Whether they knew or liked Ritchie or not wouldn’t matter—he was one of them. He had to be mourned.

The barn phone rang and Sharon ran to pick it up. It was Colm. “I’ve already told her,” Sharon said, and handed it over. She picked up the mop and finished washing the yukky floor while her mother said, “Oh, oh. How terrible. Oh dear, that poor woman. Sharon never mentioned the horse.” When her mother hung up, Sharon said, “Well I can’t think of everything! Now what? Anything new?”

“The horse is gone. Poor Franny. And they traced Nola back to the Healing House—the director called in to confirm she was there, protesting a mile a minute that she didn’t know who Nola was. So Nola’s gone again.”

“On the horse, they think?”

“Could be, who knows? But they’ve no evidence that Nola even met up with Ritchie. The police are down there now, looking for whatever they look for. Footprints ...”

“Footprints in the Branbury swamp?”

“There might be something—an imprint on a rock or dry spot, a hunk of fiber on a berry bush. I don’t know—something to connect them to whoever did him in. Franny did find a heel from a shoe, I heard. But it could be anyone’s, lovers go in there to neck, I understand. I refuse to believe it was Nola who killed him. The police are just looking for motive, that’s all. And Nola would appear to have that.”

The phone rang again. Ruth said, “Don’t answer it.” But Sharon’s arm reached out automatically. “Oh, Franny. Oh, you poor thing, finding that dead body!”

After that it was Franny’s voice pouring words into her ear, shouting details that Sharon loved to hear—straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. “Strangled. With her own reins. Phelia’s reins! And she’s gone now, my beloved’s gone. That woman took her.” And then a non sequitur. “Did you hear that a horse up in Argennes was found dead, infected with West Nile virus? And two birds dead with it. Dead, Sharon! She could have West Nile as well as CJD! If it isn’t one thing it’s another. It’s a dying world, Sharon, dying! Rome—falling in a day.”

“Good Lord,” said Sharon, and passed the receiver to Ruth.

“Strangled him with Phelia’s reins!” Sharon heard Franny shriek again over the line.

“Mom-mmm, Robbie’s being mean to me, tell him to quit.” Willa was at the door of the barn. Sharon ran to her, scooped her up. “I told you to stay in the car. Now back we go, little worm. Oh, golly gee but you’re hea-vy! You’re getting so b-i-g.”

She staggered back with the child. Sharon was a small woman, short and roundish where her sister, Emily, was tall and svelte— cockeyed genes, you never knew. She deposited Willa back in her car seat. But no Robbie. “Now where did that child go? Robbie? Where are you?”

“Oh dear,” said Ruth, looking anguished. “Go find the child.”

“Mom?” The answer came from the farmhouse porch. A man and a woman were standing there beside the little boy. They waved at Sharon and strode down toward her. The woman was dressed in a severe black suit—she looked like a nun. In dark gray and black-striped tie the man resembled an undertaker. The Suits, she thought, and looked down at her ankle-length Indian skirt with the blue denim shirt hanging out over it, her scuffed sandals. Her outfits were Sharon’s protest to the world. “Mom?” the boy called, “they’re looking for Rooster.”

What did these Suits want with her mother? Sharon didn’t want to think. “Well, she’s not here, my mother’s gone to town. You’ll have to telephone her. Try in a couple hours. Come on, Rob, get in the car.” She shooed him off the porch.

The woman came down from the porch, practically skipped on down in her zeal. “Tell your mother she’ll hear from us about the calves.”

“What?” Sharon paused. These people were buying her calves? “What about the calves?” she asked.

The woman smiled, an oily smile. Sharon narrowed her eyes. “What about what calves?” she asked again.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t say,” the woman said. “I can only say it involves a devastating disease.”

“What disease?” said Sharon, sticking her hands on her cotton hips. She hated pretentious talk. “Spell it out.” Though she knew. Of course she knew.

“Bovine spongiform encephalopathy,” said the woman, still smiling that oily smile like it was sheer delight to say the words. “Your mother purchased two suspect Friesian calves that originated in the Netherlands. Oh yes, we’ve proof of that. We’ll have to take them as a precaution—someone will come for them. I’m sorry, but we can’t take any chances. Don’t worry, though, she’ll be compensated. Given fair market value.”

“What value is that?” Sharon asked, but the woman just smiled. “Oh not to worry, oh no.” Now Sharon was on her high horse. She reared back, pulled up her bones to meet the woman’s height—almost. She saw the man towering in the background; he was a challenge. “Compensated!” she cried. “Who can compensate a livelihood? Who can compensate a life? Those little black-and-white calves are perfectly healthy. I just saw them. All Mother’s cows are healthy. Well, one down with milk fever—nothing to it. Mother’s in there now nursing her.”

Oops—what had she said. . . .

“We’ll want to tell her firsthand,” said the woman, grinning at Sharon’s mistake. Then, seeing Sharon’s mouth quiver, the woman turned sympathetic. “My name is Leafmiller.
Ms.
Leafmiller. I’m here to, um, clear matters up. I know, dear, you were just helping your mother. You meant well.”

“No, I didn’t mean well,” Sharon shouted. “And neither do you!”

Already the man and woman were marching down the path toward the barn, like Tories and Indians two centuries before, preparing to set the barn on fire. All they needed were torches. Or guns to shoot the cows with. For that’s what they wanted, Sharon sensed. They wanted to take the cows. They wanted to destroy the farm. They wanted to ruin her mother’s life.

“Stay put and don’t move!” she shouted at the children, who were now back hanging out the car windows. She raced on down to the barn, squeezed through the door ahead of the enemy.

“Mother,” she cried. “Don’t let them in. They want the new calves.”

Ruth Willmarth loomed up in the alley between the stalls. She had her arm around Zelda. Ruth named her cows after famous or literary women: Zelda was the wife of Scott Fitzgerald, who stole his wife’s stories. It was almost as if the bovine Zelda knew. Sharon threw an arm around her mother’s waist, and together mother, daughter, and cow faced the enemy.

Zelda fixed the feds with a wild dark eye. Sharon smiled grimly to see them take a giant step back.

* * * *

Two weeks from tonight was Maggie’s concert up in Burlington and everything was going wrong. Ritchie dead in a swamp and sympathetic travellers swarming in to weep or celebrate. Well, mostly celebrate, she figured, the way they were lounging about, cooking up fancy foods, dancing and laughing, and only the older women keening. At least Ritchie had no parents to speak of—the father in prison somewhere and the mother he shared with Darren in a nursing home now, with Alzheimer’s.