Meadowlark (15 page)

I said, "Tell me what happened."

"Nothing's happened," Del snorted. "Not a damned
thing."

"You wish." Angie's lip curled. "Mary was supposed to help
me thin the spinach." She made a wide gesture that encompassed the
trays of greenery. "When she didn't show up at eight, I waited for her
ten minutes or so then I started in working. I thought she'd show up.
Sometimes she oversleeps."

"Lazy cunt," Del muttered.

Angie took a step toward him. "If I were you, Del, which
thank God I'm not, I would speak softly and watch my words."

"I'll say what I damned well please." Del's response seemed
automatic. I thought he looked worried.

"Because..." Angie cleared her throat. "Because you are the
only one on this farm who disliked Mary, and when the police find
her body--" Her voice broke. She stared at Del, blinking back tears.
"You shit. I hope you hang. We hang murderers in this state."

Bianca said, "Now, Angie, we're not sure Mary's been
harmed."

"Her parents don't know where she is." Anger steadied
Angie's voice. "I called them at ten, Lark, when she still hadn't come.
Her mother said her bed hadn't been slept in, and she didn't work at
the restaurant last night. It's closed Mondays. Mary is missing,
goddamnit."

Bianca removed her tweed hat and stuffed it in her pocket.
Her bangs stuck to her forehead. "I spoke with Mrs. Sadat, too. She
said Mary's book bag is gone, and the car. I got the license number
from her."

Del snorted. "Kid drives an old Volkswagen Beetle, bright
red. The cops should be able to spot it."

"Dale Nelson told me they won't do an official missing
person's report until Mary's been gone twenty-four hours."

Bianca ran a hand over her face. "He took the license
number, though. She is a witness." She drew a long breath. "I'm
asking you again, Del, and I'm not accusing you of murder. Did you
say anything to upset Mary yesterday?" She touched Del's arm.

Del shook her hand off.

"If you scared her," Bianca said, "or made her mad, she may
just have gone off to brood about it. Kids do that."

Del opened his mouth to reply, but Angie rounded on her
employer. "You people make me sick. Here's Hugo hacked to death,
and you're trying to deny the obvious. There's a killer on the loose.
How many victims do you need?"

Bianca spread her hands. "One is enough."

Del Wallace was as red as a turkey cock. Angie stared at him.
"This man gets a kick out of castrating sheep. Mary's a mere female.
Why should he hesitate to kill her if she knew something
incriminating?"

Del roared and went for her, hands clawing. Bianca shouted
a warning, and I took a step forward.

Angie kneed him. He dropped to the floor, moaning.

She looked at me. "The first week I worked here, Del called
me a ball breaker. Gee, I guess he was right." She turned to Bianca.
"Get him the hell out of my greenhouse."

"What's going on?" Keith McDonald's voice, behind me.

I turned. Bianca stared at him, too.

"Ask Del." Angie was brushing potting soil from her sleeve.
Del's charge had shoved her against the flats of seedlings. She began
to straighten them.

"Somebody at school said Mary Sadat was missing." Keith
paid no attention to Del or Angie. He was asking his wife. "Is that
true?"

Bianca nodded.

"How long?"

"We don't know. Probably overnight."

"This is awful. A student. Mary wouldn't harm anyone. We
have to do something, Bee."

Her eyes narrowed. "I notified Nelson. He said he'd send out
a bulletin on her car."

"Her car! What if... We've had one killing. We have to search
the farm."

I was trying to understand Keith's reaction. He seemed
genuinely upset. His hands shook and his eyes were scared.

I said, "Was she a student of yours, too, Keith?"

He gave me a distracted glance. "What? Oh, yes. She took my
ballad class last term. The Dean will have fits," he added in a more
normal voice.

I mentioned Jay's call to me.

"He's checking on campus?"

"Yes."

"Good, good." He shook his head as if to clear it. "I have a bad
feeling about this."

"Thank God somebody has sense," Angie snapped.

Del levered himself to his feet, wheezing. He shambled down
the corridor without looking at anybody. The door slammed behind
him.

"I thought you had a one o'clock class." Bianca tossed Keith
a glance over her shoulder. She was helping Angie tidy the work
area.

He touched his beard with a shaky hand. "I dismissed them
early. What are you going to do about Mary?"

"We could search," Bianca said without enthusiasm.

Angie slammed a tray of seedlings back in place. "I'm going
to search whether the rest of you do or not."

"Are the other interns here?" I said.

It appeared that Jason and Bill were moving sheep, the
Carlsens were plowing lime and compost into fields that would be
planted with spinach, and Carol Bascombe was home with the flu. Or
so she had said when Angie called to see if she was missing.

Bianca pulled her tweed cap out of her jacket pocket and
settled it on her head. "We can't search the whole farm, Angie. The
best we can do is the outbuildings. I presume you've already looked
through the greenhouses."

Angie nodded.

"Then we should pair up. Keith, you and Lark can look
through the machine sheds and the car barn--"

"Let Angie go with Keith," I said with elaborate nonchalance.
I had reason to think she could handle him should he fondle her
thigh. "You and I need to talk, Bianca."

Keith's blue eyes narrowed. Bianca shrugged. "Okay. I have
to stop by the house for a flashlight. Then I'm going to drive straight
to the old barn." She buttoned her jacket and turned to the other two.
"Lark and I will do the ice house and the sheep sheds on our way
back."

Angie glanced at her business-like watch. "Rendezvous at
the house at four?"

That seemed agreeable to everybody. I thought Keith was
pouting a little. Del probably was, too. Or maybe he was castrating a
sheep.

Angie and Keith decided to double-check the greenhouses,
so Bianca and I set out for the house without them. When we were
out of earshot, I raised the subject of the workshop. I waited until
then because I thought an audience just made Bianca
stubborner.

She stopped walking and turned to me. "I can't think about
the workshop now." Her eyes darkened under the cap. "I'm too
worried about Mary."

The implication was that I wasn't.

Bianca shook her head, mournful. "Mary, of all people. How
could Mary threaten anyone? She's so quiet."

"I would have said that of Hugo."

Bianca lapsed into grim silence. I felt fairly grim myself. We
trudged along. I was thinking that her detour to the house was a
pretext, that she'd dally to telephone the congresswoman and
assorted government agencies, but she just stuck her head in the
kitchen and asked Marianne for messages.

Half a dozen reporters had left their numbers on the
answering tape, Marianne said, and Dale Nelson would be at the farm
at five. Bianca grabbed one of the small electric lanterns from the
mudroom and we went to the car barn. She indicated that I should
get into a pickup so ancient it had lap-restraint seatbelts. There were
five other vehicles in the barn.

To my surprise she didn't follow the lane past the ice house.
She drove down to the highway, turned east, and rattled along the
road to the top of the crest. There an old-fashioned three-barred gate
led into scrub forest. I got to open the gate. And close it.

The barn sat in a natural meadow filled with incurious
sheep. I gathered that Jason and Bill had come and gone. Like many
old barns in the area, this one was built of unpainted vertical boards
under a peaked cedar roof. Weather had turned the wood silver.
Inside, it was darker than a deconstructionist short story.

"Watch your step." Bianca turned her electric lantern on and
swept the beam over decaying stalls and cribs. "Floor's rotting."

I followed her in, placing my feet with care. The interior
smelled of mold, musty hay, and ancient manure. We searched the
main floor methodically. It was a silent place but the silence seemed
to breathe. Darkness watched us from every corner, from behind us
and above us. I saw nothing but a few old implements and an
abandoned saddle that had fallen from the wall in a heap. Somebody
had cleaned the place out long ago.

I sneezed once but the sound was swallowed up in the
watching stillness.

When we had circled back through the labyrinth to our
starting place, Bianca pointed to a rickety ladder nailed to the wall of
the barn. "If she's here she's in the loft."

"Will that thing hold me?"

She shrugged. "I think so, but not both of us at once. You go
first. I'll light the ladder for you."

I inched my way up into a huge space that was half-lit by the
unglazed window through which hay had been winched. A timber
protruded over the yard from the peak of the gable, but the pulley
used to raise bales was long gone. Inside, heavy beams crossed the
width of the building about twenty feet up, one on each wall and one
across the center. A thick post supported the central beam. Patches
of gray sky showed through the roof. Mold-blackened hay bales
stacked as high as my head in some places rimmed the walls. Some
had tumbled to the plank flooring atop ankle-deep drifts of loose
timothy. Plenty of room to hide a body. I didn't see how we could
hope to find it, if it was there.

Bianca was more inventive than I, or better acquainted with
barns. She stuck the lantern in her jacket pocket and hauled an old
pitchfork up the ladder. The handle of the fork had broken off
halfway down and the tines were brown with rust. "Stay away from
the window." She lifted the pitchfork in both gloved hands. "The
floor's rotten over there where the rain blows in." She strode to the
far wall and began probing between the bales.

I waded through the loose hay at a more cautious pace.
When I reached the tallest heap of bales I began to climb. Unseen
creatures skittered away from my tread. Mice, probably. I thought
about spiders.

The bales formed a surprisingly steady stairs, rather like the
steps of a Maya pyramid, though the loose hay at their base was slick.
As I scaled the top, I jarred one of the bales with my left hand.

Something brushed my face, and a low cry rang in my ears.
My heart stopped.

"Barn owl," Bianca called from the far side. "She's probably
nesting."

She was. I watched her flutter out the opening, still emitting
mournful hoots. I had just escaped dislodging her nest with my hand.
It was a good thing I had stopped to pull on gloves. I sank back on my
bale-mountain and breathed through my nose, in out, in out.

My peering and poking discovered nothing more startling
on that wall than the owl. Relieved, I scrambled across to a tumble of
loose bales.

I was almost enjoying myself, and I remembered my father's
stories of the family farm in New York. The Daileys were prosperous
Quaker farmers. By my father's time, the farm itself had shrunk to a
handful of symbolic acres, and the great cobblestone barn with its
iron weathercock was used for family gatherings. Dad swore a
century of hay had polished the hardwood planks of the second story
floor like the surface of a huge ballroom. The local square dance club
used to hold its dances there.

I was envisaging a happy hoedown when something alien
caught my eye. I stopped dead and peered. I couldn't recall the color
of Mary's anorak. A fold of dull fabric protruded from the loose hay.
It looked purplish in the dim light.

"Bianca!" I croaked. I cleared my throat. "Bring the lantern
over here. I'm afraid..."

I heard her slither toward me. "What is it? Jesus!" The beam
of Bianca's light whirled and steadied.

"Your turn." I had had enough of finding bodies.

She swallowed and nodded. I held my breath as she waded
toward the telltale scrap. I even looked away, so I was startled when
she gave a short yip of laughter.

"Shit. Some other birds have been nesting."

I walked over and peered down. A plaid stadium rug lay
rumpled in the hay. Further probing revealed a couple of empty beer
cans and three used condoms.

"Yuck."

"Have you no romance?" Bianca swept her light around the
immediate area. "Jason holding court, no doubt. The kid's a stud, or
thinks he is."

Reaction made me cranky. I bit back a comment about the
other candidates for stud-dom at Meadowlark Farm. The blanket
was thick and looked expensive. The beer, on the other hand, was a
cheap brand sold at every twenty-four-hour market.

Bianca snorted again and went back to her methodical
probing.

I worked slower, and I uncovered nothing more harrowing
than an ancient gunnysack. It was empty. "I'm finished."

Bianca did not reply. I turned around. She was sitting on a
bale near the ladder, face in her hands, shoulders heaving.

I will confess my first feeling was exasperation. I stood there
flat-footed, telling myself that she had a right to be upset, that she
was not manipulating me. Then I went over and gave her a pat on the
shoulder. "Need a Kleenex?"

She drew a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. "I'm
sorry. I was thinking of Hugo."

"You said he liked the old barn."

"Yes." She gulped and blotted her eyes. "It was September
when we bought the place, after the harvest was over. The autumn
weather was wonderful that year. The first thing we decided to do
was clean out the barn. We were looking for pesticides and chemical
fertilizers, and we found some, not a lot. The previous owners had
kept horses, so there was old tack down below. When we finished
clearing that out, we climbed up here--Keith and Hugo and I, and the
three kids. It was great, full of fresh loose hay. Hugo..." She blew her
nose again. "He climbed up on that beam and did a perfect double
flip off it. We were all laughing."