Nobody Knows Your Secret (6 page)

“You nearly killed my son,” Claire screamed.

“He deserves it. My little girl’s got a bun in the oven!” Hardy yelled.

Candy had driven up about that time. She’d followed Hardy, who had stormed out after the news, but her car had run out of gas. She flagged down a friend in an old pickup truck who loaned her a couple of gallons of gas.

Hardy had gotten in a few good licks before Candy had driven up and screamed for Hardy to leave Kyle alone. That she took up for the little pip-squeak over her own father had broken Hardy’s heart.

He knew by the look in Candy’s eyes that her loyalty lay with Kyle. Once Claire saw that Hardy’s anger was spent, she slinked back into her trailer.

Must be time for another pill, thought Hardy, getting into his truck and driving away.

“She’s yours now, Kyle,” Hardy had yelled. “You better treat her right. If you don’t, you have me to answer to.”

It was a vague threat, but Hardy’s anger was so white, he couldn’t think of a better one. And bless Pat, if Candy didn’t move in with that no-good slug within a week. She got a job at a burger joint 10 miles away. She refused to have anything to do with Hardy, who, after he’d calmed down, offered to help Candy any way he could.

“Keep your money,” Candy had told him. “Kyle and I are fine. We’re renting a trailer. It’s just him and me and our baby,” as she patted her flat belly. “That’s the way I want it, Daddy. Leave us alone. Kyle wants nothing to do with you. Neither do I.”

Candy had Kyle’s kid seven months later and another followed soon after. A girl and a boy. From what Hardy heard, the kids were wild as bucks. How could they be anything but? Candy worked all the time, and that worthless Kyle laid around doing dope. Hardy spit on the ground in disgust.

Hardy was a grandfather, but you’d never know by how often he’d seen his grandkids. And Kyle didn’t seem to care that Candy was working herself ragged trying to support them all. All that Kyle did was find more trouble and do more drugs.

Hardy didn’t know who he hated more: Kyle or Candy. Kyle had stolen the only person besides Hardy’s mama that Hardy had ever loved. And Candy had turned her back on the only man who had ever treated her decently.

“Ain’t like you didn’t raise her like a princess,” Hardy’s mama said. “A lotta thanks you got fer all yer trouble, son.”

Mama was right, Hardy thought. No thanks and only heartaches. If he lived to be a hundred, Hardy decided, he would never understand women.

But, on the other hand, if he lived to be a hundred, he’d see to it that that dopehead who ruined his little girl’s life would pay. If it was the last thing he ever did.

Yes, sir. Hardy swore an oath that he wouldn’t rest until he made Kyle pay.

An eye for an eye.

It was biblical justice.

O
nus was fed
. Check. Baloney sandwiches and sodas and bottled water. Pecan pound cake. Check. Gloves. Check. Eustian’s keys. Check. Time to tackle more junk at Eustian’s empire of trash and rubbish. Hadley drove to Beanie’s modest house and tooted the horn. He came shuffling out of the door and got into the car.

“Good morning, Beanie. Ready to hit the trail?”

“We goin’ hikin’?” asked Beanie.

“Naw,” said Hadley.

“Figger ‘a speech,” said Beanie.

“You got it, Bean. “At least, it isn’t too warm this morning. That fog and those low clouds are going to keep the temperature down today.”

“Yeah, I hope that’s baloney in that big grocery bag. I can haul that entire house and put in the dumpster if there’s baloney waiting for me when I finished. I think you got the best baloney I ever ate in my whole life.”

“Well, thanks. And my baloney thanks you, too,” said Hadley.

They drove in comfortable silence.

“Road’s better today,” Beanie said.

“A couple of days without rain allows some of that mud to dry up,” Hadley said.

Eustian’s house loomed up ahead.

“Hadley.”

“Yeah, Bean.”

“That house don’t look no nicer, does it?”

“We’ll put on our nicest faces. Maybe the old place will warm up to us.”

Parking her car under a huge old oak tree, Hadley got out. Beanie sat in the car.

“What is it, Bean?”

“Nuthin,’ I guess. It’s gonna be a sad day when we finish up here.”

“What do you mean? You just said this house wasn’t nice.”

“Oh, I don’t mean about that. Baloney.”

“What’s the matter? You hit your leg getting out of the car?”

“No,” Beanie said. “I was just thinkin’ how much I’m gonna miss your baloney.”

“Oh, Bean. Don’t you worry about that. You’ll always have my baloney. Even if I have to hunt you down by a graveside to kingdom come to give it to you.”

“Harvey don’t like us eatin’ while we work, Hadley,” Beanie said.

“I’ll leave it with Harvey, then. And he can give it to you later.”

“Okay, Hadley,” Beanie said. “You know, the clouds are sleepin’ on the ground over yonder.”

Hadley looked across the meadow to the decaying remains of the amusement park. Gray tendrils of wispy fog swirled around the clown’s head, shrouding it like a veil. It twisted and moved, diving into the opened mouth of the clown and back out again.

“Looks like the clown is hungry,” said Beanie. “I’m glad we are a far piece away. Ain’t you?”

“It does look like it woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” said Hadley. “I never figured out why Vance Odis wanted folks entering his park through a giant face. And it’s not even a friendly or funny or inviting face. And who wants to be eaten by a clown? Never made sense to me.”

“Me, neither. I think it would hurt. I’d run out before it could chew me up. Then, they’d say Beanie was spit out by a clown. But I don’t care none what they say.”

Beanie studied the huge clown head.

“Anything that ugly’s probably got bad breath too,” Beanie said. “That clown scares me.”

“Good thing we don’t have to stand here all day and look at it. Come on. Let’s get to work.”

They turned to the house, climbing up the steps to the front door. Hadley unlocked the door and peered inside.

“Looks like the string is still intact, Beanie. Guess we will start here and just clear out the junk as we come to it.”

Hadley set aside several empty cardboard boxes. The entrance to the house was crammed from floor to ceiling. The first piles she encountered looked like remnants of court cases Eustian had filed against one Hope Rock County citizen or another down through the years. No one was safe from being sued by him. She separated the reams of legal documents she and Beanie found from the books, clothes, shoes, lamps, and other debris cluttering the room into the boxes.

“I think we should keep these papers separate in case the estate administrator needs them,” Hadley said.

“Okay,” Beanie said, bending over to pick up a broken doll that was missing an eye and a leg.

Its nasty hair was matted. A dark brown stain clung to its body.

“Look, Hadley,” Beanie said, “this doll’s winkin’ at me.”

“I don’t see why anyone would have saved that,” Hadley said. “It looks like it has some kind of contagious disease. Toss it in the dumpster heap, Bean.”

“Wonder who poked out her eye?” Beanie said, throwing the doll on the pile of debris that would go to the dumpster outside. “Hadley?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe Eustian Singlepenny was so crabby because he was so crunched in here.”

“Could be,” said Hadley. “But I got a feeling he was just born that way. Crabby, crotchety, and just plain mean.”

“Mean Beanie Bean. Hadley Badly Madly.”

“What?”

“I can’t make nuthin’ rhyme with Eustian, Hadley.”

“Don’t even try, Bean,” Hadley said. “You’ll only end up giving yourself a hemorrhoid. Too much strain on the brain is a crime on the
behime
.”

“You crack me up,” Beanie said.

“Well, like I said, a crime on the
behime.”

They worked for about an hour carting junk from the room to the bottom of the porch. Each load in the wheelbarrow was delivered to the dumpster, and the cycle started all over again. Together, they made about a dozen trips back and forth. Finally, the entire floor was cleared of debris.

“You know, Beanie,” Hadley said, “if you could cover all your floor up with piles of junk, you never have to worry mopping or vacuuming. How do you ever know if they are dirty if you can’t see them?”

“Hadley,” Beanie said, “that’s a hard question. It’s like if the moon is made of cheese, how come it’s not orange?”

“You’re right, my friend,” Hadley said. “Life’s full of mysteries.”

“Ain’t it, though,” said Beanie. “But I ain’t gonna strain over it. Them piles ain’t nuthin’ to laugh at, Hadley. Ardell Devereaux had hisself a bad case ‘a piles. Him and Lum was talkin’ outside the Spoon. Ardell said the itchees was so bad he’d back up to buildings and act like he was scratchin’ his back. Lum laughed so hard he started cryin’. Lum said he was the same way when he sat in a patch of poison oak. Them tourists must think we got awful itchy shoulder blades. Ardell told Lum to tell ’em your beer belly gives you an overhaul wedgie.”

Hadley smiled.

“Hadley! Look!” Beanie said, dropping a box of junk.

The dust cloud caused by this threatened to engulf Beanie.

“It’s a dead possum!” Beanie exclaimed.

“It’s not dead, Bean,” Hadley said. “We startled it.”

Hadley knew from her work with Ruth at the wildlife rescue center that opossums were North America’s only marsupial. Like kangaroos, opossums carry their young in pouches. If startled, the animal would “play dead” by curling up on its side and letting its tongue fall out of its open mouth.

“He’s hoping we’ll leave him alone,” Hadley said.

“Let’s wander over here to the other side of the room and take a break. We can keep an eye on him from a distance and make sure he’s not injured.”

“Do you think he’s got rabies?” Beanie asked.

“Ruth says that possums are seldom rabid. She told me once that they think their body temperatures are too low to let the rabies virus live.”

“Oh. That’s good. Ha! Look, Hadley. That ole possum is raisin’ from the dead.”

“He was never dead, Bean. Just playing like he was,” Hadley said.

Beanie stood looking solemnly at the gray fur slowly rise. The possum looked back at Beanie and gave him a big grin. Beanie grinned widely.

The possum ambled off out the open door and into the woods near Eustian’s house. Beanie still stood there smiling.

“Beanie,” Hadley said.

“Uh-huh,” Beanie managed to say through clenched teeth while maintaining his impossibly wide grin.

“What are you doing?” Hadley asked.

“Well,” Beanie said, rubbing his jaw muscles as if they were sore and cramped, “I was tryin’ to be neighborly.”

“Neighborly,” Hadley said.

“Yeah. If you was wrong and what I just seen was a possum ghost raise from the dead, I wanted to be sure I was on his good side. I think it worked, Hadley. Did you see him grin at me?”

“He wasn’t grinning, Bean,” Hadley said. “He was bearing his teeth. Possums have 50 teeth. Did you know that?”

“Fifty! And I thought I was doin’ good ’cause I got six.”

Hadley stifled a laugh.

“If a possum’s angry or scared, he’ll bare all those teeth. It’s his way of saying ‘go away.’”

“Well, anyway,” Beanie said, “if he did raise from the dead that means he’s a ghost. Fifty teeth or not. I ain’t about to tangle with no ghost. That’s why when he showed me his 50 teeth, I showed him my beautiful six. Just so he’d know I was the friendly type who don’t want no trouble.”

“He won’t give you any trouble, Beanie. Let’s you and me and your beautiful teeth get back to work.”

“Sure, Hadley,” Beanie said.

From the front room, they worked their way into the parlor. They moved mountain after mountain of trash.

“Legal papers in the boxes,” Hadley reminded Beanie. “Everything else into the wheelbarrow for the dumpster.”

Beanie and Hadley worked on.

“You know what, Bean,” Hadley said, “I think going through all this stuff is a lot like moving backward in time. Just think how many years it took Eustian to collect all this mess. No wonder he never let anybody in his house.”

“Probably was afraid he would lose them,” Beanie said. “If you got twisted up and went down the wrong path, you would never find your way out. I hope we don’t run up on any dried-up skeletons. This house is scary even when the rooms are cleaned out. It just feels mad, Hadley. Like it doesn’t want us to see it naked.”

“Don’t worry, Bean, if we run up on something like that, it will be dead. Besides, I think Bill and the crime tech gang cleared out all the skeletons when they processed the house after Eustian’s murder.”

“I hope so, Hadley,” Beanie said. “There are just so many places for them to hide.”

Moving, hauling, and dumping continued until lunch, when Beanie and Hadley stopped to eat and rest. Chewing on her baloney sandwich, Hadley sat in the shade of the porch with her back against the wall. She glanced over into one of the boxes of papers. The name “Kyle Winthrop’ jumped out at her.

Hadley began to thumb through the papers. They seemed to be pretty much in order despite being piled up and placed on top of chairs and couches. As Hadley looked closer, it appeared Eustian Singlepenny had filed charges against Kyle Winthrop for illegally poaching wild ginseng from his land without permission.

* * *

E
ustian had been mending
a broken fence line on the far edge of his acreage when he noticed a man on his side of the fence on the north face of the mountain. The man was wearing loose clothes and was covered in mud. On his back was a bulging backpack. The stranger was walking with his head down and had not noticed Eustian at all. Eustian grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun he carried to ward off bears and quietly began to follow the trespasser. The man bent down, and producing a small mattock, started to dig in the dirt.

“Dang ’sang poacher,” Eustian muttered.

At prices of upwards of $1,000 a pound, ginseng was a hot commodity. Eustian did not know the going rate for ’sang, but he knew it was illegal to be stealing it from his property without permission. And Eustian never gave anyone permission to stand on his property, much less remove valuable herbs from it.

Eustian crept up the slope behind the interloper as quiet as a mouse. He inched closer and closer. The man was too busy digging around in the dirt to notice the old man. The trespasser stopped his digging and unearthed a twisted dark tan root.

“Dad-blasted thief! Didn’t knowed I was nowhere ’round, did ya?”

Eustian raised his shotgun and let out a whoop, just to put the “fyear ‘a Gawd” in the poacher.

“What’s your name, young feller. They need to get it on your tombstone.”

Stop yer digging,’” Eustian said. “Stand up straight. I got ya dead in my sight. If ya run, I’m fillin’ ya full ‘a lead.”