Mad Season (7 page)

It was harmless, the FDA said. Sure, harmless as synthetic hormones, chemical additives, pesticides. Harmless as arsenic.

But she was getting stirred up again, just when she’d started to relax. It was worrisome enough having Vic miss the bus, Colm question her family—though she was glad to have his help in this, she was too busy to find out everything herself. And what had the police done? A dozen break-ins this past spring, and none of them solved. Not to mention the Charlebois fire. Who would have done something like that? Her neck got hot, imagining her own place on fire. It was unthinkable, that.

Three more and she was done. Emily had prepped the cows; Tim would come in to do the milking. She wasn’t crazy about machine milking: she tended to overmilk, never got the thing off at the right moment. Maybe a dozen cows was enough, milk them by hand. But there was no money in that, she had to think of money.

She glanced at her watch: 5:36. Vic should be home, even if he missed the bus. He’d call if he needed a ride. Through the stall window she saw Sharon coming toward the barn. “He was nice,” Sharon said as she entered. “He was nosy. He’s not bad looking. How come you didn’t marry him?”

“Who’s nosy now?” Ruth said. “Vic call?”

“Honestly, Mother, you’ve got to stop worrying about that kid. If he needed a ride he’d call.”

“It’s after five, he has house chores. I traded him the barn for the house because . . .” She paused, but it was too late.

“So he won’t smell like a barn,” her daughter said. “Well he lives on a farm, he’s a farmer’s kid. What’s he supposed to smell like, yogurt and honey?”

“Okay, let’s leave it. No other calls—from Marie Larocque? She promised to call if there was any change in Belle. Though she’s not exactly reliable. She gets scattered.”

Sharon put an arm around her mother’s neck. “It’s all right, Mother, it’ll be all right, stop worrying.” The baby whimpered on her back.

Charlotte gave a long low bellow, answered by her frail calf. Outside there was the hollow metallic sound of a truck door slamming. And then Emily’s voice calling, “Mother, telephone! It’s Marie. Better hurry up. She’s in hysterics.”

* * * *

Why did he turn back? Colm didn’t know, but he had this feeling—he was the paranoid one now. It was Vic all right, Colm saw the boy run up to the house and then Ruth dash out of the barn in a baggy blue sweatshirt. Sharon ran behind, baby bouncing on her back. Emily came out on the house porch, waving her arms, looking excited. The farmhouse door banged twice, the baby wailed.

He drove into the driveway—what the hell, they’d have seen him anyway. Of course he didn’t want to get into a family quarrel, it could be something about Pete. He’d go in on the pretense of making a time to see Vic, for tomorrow; he’d get here early, before the boy left for school. For some reason it seemed important to talk to the boy. And Ruth couldn’t do it, not with objectivity. Sharon was probably right, she overprotected the kid.

No one answered when he knocked on the back door, so he just walked in. They were all there, sitting around the kitchen table, looking up at their mother. They hardly noticed him. She was holding the phone in her hand, it was still buzzing.

“That was Marie. Belle’s dead,” Ruth said to the vase of grasses and pussy willow on the table. “She’s gone. An hour ago. They murdered her. Whoever it was, it was murder.”

Chapter Five

Marie insisted on laying Belle out, she wasn’t to be embalmed, Belle “wouldn’t like that.” She didn’t want Belle cremated, and she refused an autopsy. So the coroner had backed off: he’d known Belle personally, wanted Marie’s vote, an election coming up. Anyway, the coroner admitted, even an autopsy couldn’t prove exactly how a wound had been inflicted.

They had to have the funeral the next day, then, Colm’s father said, looking doubtful, stroking back his several white hairs—”I mean, with no embalming?” and Marie agreed. Already there was that waxy look, the corneas cloudy, the body frozen, face and neck going greenish red; in thirty hours the rot would set in. Colm was relieved about the embalming, to tell the truth. He didn’t think he could do that, not on Belle. Pumping in that stuff, like needling in crack or something.

Marie insisted on thick makeup: she’d do it herself to hide the bruises, though nothing could hide the distortion on Belle’s forehead where the blow had landed. There were still tiny red marks— Colm couldn’t think what put them there: precise as ellipsis points in a print machine or the prongs in a pitchfork, but too close together for that. His father photographed her, though; it seemed gross, but you never knew.

Marie wanted the oak coffin, the copper lining—the most expensive at fifteen hundred dollars. When Colm suggested the pine—his dad out of the room to take a leak, he did it every hour these days—she zipped up her lips like a small purse.

“I’ll pay for it out of my savings,” she said, her eyebrows shoved into a V, her pointed chin risen like a martyr’s. “I was saving for new carpeting. Harold knows how much I want it, but he can’t find work, though he’s got a lead. I won’t have linoleum like Mother put up with.”

“The pine lasts just as long,” Colm suggested. He was getting a double message here: she wanted the best but she didn’t.

The black eyes blazed at him. “The oak,” she said.

“They’re discounted now,” he said quickly, “I’d forgotten.” His father would have to accept it—jeez, he’d pay the difference himself. “You can take as long as you need to pay,” he offered, and she nodded, chin up.

Neither of them, he realized after Marie had gone, her slim hips grinding inside a brown vinyl skirt, had mentioned the word
murder.
Pulling the lids down over the opaque eyes, he sensed something cold pass through him. It wasn’t just the mortuary. It was something more. He couldn’t put a finger on it.

“S’funny,” his father said, coming back in the room, his pants open, he’d forgot to zip. He touched his groin: “I got some pressure down here, I don’t like it. She take the oak?”

Colm nodded. “You’d better see Dr. Collier. But zip up first or he’ll think you’re advertising.”

“Oh, shit,” said his father, zipping.

* * * *

When she died, Ruth told Colm after the wake, she wanted to be cremated, and he said he’d been thinking the same thing. There were only the bones left, like shells picked clean on a beach. The dead could rise again, if that’s what you believed, out of the ashes.

He’d give her a discount, he said, and winked. They were leaving the funeral home together. The wake was still going on, Belle in an open casket wearing makeup she’d rub off at once if she could see; Harold holding on to Marie like he couldn’t stand up by himself. Lucien visibly absent—he wasn’t to know yet, Marie said, in spite of Ruth’s protest.

Ruth couldn’t weep. Her initial shock, the sense of loss, had gone to anger. A life snuffed out over money! There was to be a funeral of course, full Mass—she’d see that Lucien got there. It would be well enough attended, like the wake. Half the people had come, most likely, out of curiosity.

“How can you live in a mortuary?” she asked Colm. “I know about your father. He looked frail tonight, though he had the old chin lift. Like a director glad his play was going well but afraid someone would blow it in the last act.”

He smiled. “You’ve got him.”

She glanced sideways at him. He was quite dressed up: gray suit, dark striped tie. He looked almost handsome: slightly beaked “black Irish” nose (the Spanish invasions, he said), the round glasses—the cerebral look. She found his thinness appealing, when once she’d been attracted to the macho-muscle type. So many of her old classmates going soft in the middle from overindulgence in one thing or another. Pete himself was heading that way. Maybe that was why he left—to be young again.

“It’s not so bad,” Colm said, “with the ones who die in their sleep. They’re at peace by the time we get them. You fall into a kind of partnership with death. But I admit I have trouble with ones like Belle. When Dad goes, I’ll sell.”

“This is your first murder,” she reminded him. “You’re still in shock.”

He didn’t say anything, just lifted his chin to the night—the Irish romantic.

“So are we getting anywhere?” she asked. “Are there any real leads? Where are we going next?”

“The Alibi,” he said, with a small laugh. It was a long thought from the funeral home to the local bar. The name of the place had never seemed so apt.

“To see about Willy? Check his story? Isn’t that what they do in detective fiction?”

He squinted at her, like she might be teasing him (maybe she was). “I don’t expect we’ll find any more than what he told me, but we have to ask. And we’ll want to see the bartender. See if they’ve passed along any barn money.”

“What about the other stores in town? Out of town, Burlington. The banks. Yes?”

“The police have already done that. I dropped in this morning. But nothing yet. I hope you told Vic they appreciate his lead. They usually forget to say.”

Actually she hadn’t, she’d hardly seen the boy since Mr. Dufours brought him home. The call came at that exact moment about Belle. Sharon and Emily had to make supper, she could only sink in a chair and talk, talk about Belle, ask why, why? When she finally dragged herself upstairs, Vic was in bed with the light out. This morning he’d complained of a sore throat, and though she felt he might be faking, she let him stay home.

“You’re coming along,” Colm said, almost shyly, pulling her out the door—he heard Bertha’s voice shrilling behind them. And to her surprise, maybe because of Bertha, who’d been circling them all evening, she came.

The Alibi was crowded, though it was a weekday night. All the rednecks in town were there, it seemed: some she recognized, most she didn’t; a scattering of students from the college, girls who looked under eighteen and probably were but had fake ID. She slid into a booth. She felt out of place here in her dark blue dress and blue heels (she preferred boots). She was sensitive about being out with a man, though there was no reason she shouldn’t be, Pete hadn’t thought twice about that, had he? It was her deceased mother-in-law’s values—or should she say “prejudices”?—carried on by Pete’s sister, Bertha.

Bertha had grabbed her at the wake: “I want you to stay out of this murder business,” she’d said, all breathy, like she’d run a mile in her black pumps. “There’s no telling what could happen.” She looked up like lightning would strike any second, then she went on about Emily: Bertha saw her get off the school bus once with Wilder, at his house, no car in the driveway, she’d said, insinuating. And Vic: Vic should go to Pete—a boy needed his father in a time like this. And why was Colm Hanna hanging around Ruth, a married woman? She didn’t like “any of it,” she said. The sister-in-law, warning of bad breath.

“Shut up,” Ruth whispered, “shut up.”

And Colm said, “What?”

“Not you,” she said. “I’m talking to a ghost.”

She shrank back into herself to see a familiar face: a woman who worked in the Natural Food Coop. And behind, at the next table, that woman who’d started the new boutique, some cute pun on
sense
and
scents,
she didn’t want to remember. The town was getting too boutiquey for her taste. The gourmet restaurants popping up! The New Grub Street, Cakes and Ale: literary names, places the locals couldn’t afford—only the new people, flocking into the town because it had a college, and that meant concerts, artsy affairs they could dress up for.

No one cared about the farms anymore. They were just there, pretty black and white cows to drive past on the way to the restaurants.

Colm was at the bar, ordering beers. He was leaning on his elbows, smiling, talking to the bartender, a big-bellied man with a red-veined nose—the stereotype of his profession. When the beer came she nodded at Colm and gulped it down. It had taken long enough. She felt she’d been groping about in a cave and couldn’t find her way out. There was the sense of claustrophobia, of panic.

He peered into her empty glass. “I remember you used to balk at even one. You’ve improved.”

“I don’t usually. I mean, I’m not that dying of thirst. It’s tonight, I guess, all that’s happened.”

He poured a little from his glass into hers. “Go on, you need it. Want to hear what I found out at the bar?”

“Tell me! I should have gone up with you.” She felt better now, flushed, even exhilarated. These wild mood swings, was it menopause?

“Willy was here like he said, with his friend Joey and another guy from the men’s group home. They horsed around some, bartender served them O’Doul’s. The group-home guy came around eleven to get them, Willy went along. He might have spent the night at the home, we know he wasn’t with Tim. I’ll give the Counseling Service a ring tomorrow.”

“Willy wasn’t involved, I’ve told you that.”

Stubbornly, he drank his beer. Of course they had to be certain. Still, she was piqued. Couldn’t he see that Willy was little more than a child? How could he carry out a robbery?

She told him so. He looked at her out of those hooded Irish eyes; she remembered that stubborn streak. He didn’t like to be reproved, even when he was in the wrong. It was a weakness in him. The arguments they used to have! Yet the fun of making up afterward. . .

She wiped her forehead with a sticky palm.

“What else?” she asked, getting businesslike. It was over, that relationship.

“The barn money. Last night, he noticed it when he was cashing up. Said he’d never smelled anything so bad, thought it came right out of the . .. ‘cow’s ass’ is the way he put it. Sorry.”

He was wasting his apology on a farmer’s wife, she told him. “No, a farmer,” she amended. She was a farmer. She propped her elbows in front other beer. “Who was it, then?”

He sank back in his seat, pushed his glasses up on his nose. “He doesn’t know, can’t remember. So many smells in here, on clothing, hands. If his memory comes back, he’ll call. If it happens again, he’ll know—not that it’s any proof.”

“It was him, whoever came here to the bar. Or one of them,” she said fiercely. “I know it. I feel it. If he came that soon after the murder, he’ll come again.”