Wrack and Rune (21 page)

“Horsefall,” he yelped, “did you know you have a charged wire here?”

The old farmer took a long time to answer. At last he muttered, “Like as not.”

“But why?”

“I built a little pen for Bessie out here last winter when I had my game leg. Thought she’d be warmer next to the manure pile. Had to get ’er out somehow. Bessie likes ’er fresh air. Gets moody if I keep ’er in the barn all day.”

“And you made this pen by setting some posts and stringing electrified wire?”

“Spurge an’ me. He set the posts, I strung the wire. All we could manage. Had to do somethin’. Bessie’s a wanderer.”

“How recently have you used the pen?”

“Eh? Oh, not lately. Take ’er up to the pasture now. Bessie likes the pasture better.”

“Then why is current running through the wire?”

“Damned if I know.” Henny didn’t sound as though he cared, either.

“You’d normally keep it shut off when Bessie wasn’t out here?”

“Yep. No sense wastin’ the juice. Dang light bills are bad enough already.”

“Where’s the shutoff switch?”

“In the barn.”

“Show me.”

Old Horsefall obeyed, apparently only because he had no will left to resist. He led Shandy and Roy Ames inside the vast, cool, empty structure and pointed to a jury-rigged connection that would have given a fire inspector fits. Shandy tested it gingerly and found the switch had been thrown to the on position. He then went back out to the yard, managed with a good deal of unpleasant poking and prodding to locate the other fence wires, and found that all except the one he’d happened to trip over had been torn loose from their connections. That was exactly what he’d hoped to find.

“I think we have our answer, Roy,” he said. “Start looking for a piece of metal.”

“What kind of metal?”

“Any kind. It might be a horseshoe, an old iron spike, a hoe head, something that might naturally be lying around a place like this. There should also be a gadget made from two different kinds of metal and a spring, probably attached to a piece of wood. This may be very small and it would quite likely have been demolished by the explosion, but we can try. Come on, Horsefall, help us hunt.”

The farmer didn’t even bother to shake his head. He just stood there, turning over and over in his twiglike hands one of the long gray wing feathers off a dead goose. Shandy gave him a worried look, then picked up a spading fork and went to work.

It was quite a while before Roy turned up a short metal rod, squared off on the sides and threaded at both ends. “Could this be what you’re looking for, Professor?”

“It could indeed, and probably is. Ah yes, see that?”

“You mean that piece of thin wire wrapped between the threads? What’s that supposed to mean? Hey, don’t tell me this is a bomb!”

“No, merely part of a detonator. The manure pile itself was the bomb.”

“Are you serious?”

“Certainly. What powers the college generators, Roy?”

“Methane gas.”

“And where does the methane come from?”

“Decomposition of animal wastes, mostly.”

“And what have we been wading through for the past hour or so? On the strength of the evidence, I’d say somebody rigged a little doodad out of two pieces of dissimilar metals such as zinc and copper, hitched one side to the charged wire and the other side to this hunk of whatever it is. He, or she, planted the device inside the manure pile and disconnected the remaining fence wires so that if anybody should happen to touch one they wouldn’t feel the juice.

“After that, it was only a matter of flipping the switch and going home to take a bath. Heat generated by natural fermentation inside the manure pile would gradually warm the metals in the detonator. The spring would get sprung and contact made, causing a spark that would set off the methane gas contained in the pile. The size of the explosion couldn’t be calculated in advance because you wouldn’t know how great a concentration of methane you were working with, but the odds were that it wouldn’t do anything worse than make a spectacular mess, which in fact it did.”

“You can say that again, Professor. How long would it take for the detonator to heat up?”

“I have no idea. The metal wouldn’t have to get red-hot or anything like that. Essentially you’re dealing with the same principle on which the earlier home heating thermostats used to work.”

“It would take a while, though? You’d have a chance to clear out before the thing let go?”

“Oh yes, I should think so. Plenty of time, probably. The detonator might even have been set last night during that big mob scene, or more probably after the crowd had gone home. You’d have to dig down into the pile, unless you could bore through from the side in one way or another.”

“Like with one of Dad’s soil augers or some such tool. Maybe one of those electric snake things plumbers use, since you’d have juice to work it with.”

“M’yes.” Shandy wondered whether Loretta Fescue’s son included plumbing among his repertoire of odd jobs. “Or you might use a posthole digger, or even a long crowbar, if you got enough beef on the end of it. You’d only have to make a small hole, then push in that rod with the ignition device wired to it and the fence wire trailing behind. I daresay that’s why this particular object was chosen to be the ground. The threads would keep the wire from slipping off, and it’s the right shape to go in easily. Let’s see the thing again.”

Roy handed over his find again, and again Shandy studied it carefully.

“I know damn well what this is a piece of, I just can’t think offhand. It will come to me, sooner or later. Probably isn’t important anyway. Shall we try to find the rest of the detonator? It will be like looking for a needle in a haystack, of course.”

“I’d take the haystack, with pleasure.” Yet Roy tried manfully to grin as he bent once more to his manure fork.

T
HEY WERE STILL GRUBBING
among the muck when the bomb squad from the state police finally arrived. Shandy displayed their finds, expounded his theory, and said he was sure the police would have made the same discoveries if they’d happened to get to the scene before him. The bomb squad experts said they were sure they would, too, but thanked him and Roy for saving them the trouble. They then reluctantly accepted the honor of continuing the hunt for the detonator, which they at last located in the shape of a few splinters from an old shingle and a glob of fused metals about the size of a walnut.

Meanwhile Shandy went back to the house to clean himself up and muse. What Roy had pointed out was perfectly true: nobody could know exactly when the device was set except the one who put it there, so neither could anybody be written off as innocent. For all he knew, young Ralphie might have had the contraption ready in his overalls pocket, wired it up, and pinched Tim’s soil auger long enough to plant his booby trap while he’d been allegedly showing so much interest in soil testing out there.

The detonator might have heated up faster than he’d thought it would, and hoist him with his own petard before he could think of an excuse to clear out. Or he might have hung around the manure pile out of kiddish bravado, not realizing how potent the explosion might be and thinking only about giving himself an excuse to reek of manure, though a whiff of the stable on a boy who did farm chores shouldn’t be anything for him to worry about.

On the whole, a pretty good case could be made out for Ralphie, but what could be his motive unless the kid was a bit crazy? And how could the boy be crazy when Timothy Ames believed Ralphie had the makings of a farmer? Shandy thought he’d almost rather believe in Orm’s curse than in his old friend’s fallibility on that score.

And while he was thinking of Orm, what about those two young surveyors out there, allegedly trying to determine whose land the runestone was on? Young Lewis, the Horsefalls’ next-door neighbor, was already doing a job for Nute Lumpkin, in a sense. Mightn’t he be doing two?

It was all very well to give Professor Shandy a song and dance about apple orchards. If Lewis had brains, and he must have since he’d managed to pass the college entrance examinations, he’d know Professor Shandy would automatically warm up to a young man who talked of planting an apple orchard. He’d know Professor Shandy’s reputation for sniffing out malefactors, and he’d be very anxious indeed to present himself to Professor Shandy as a model of rectitude.

Those were the Lewises’ own geese that had perished in the explosion, but what of that? Wasn’t it the oldest trick in the book to put yourself, or something of your own, in jeopardy as a way of demonstrating your innocence? The geese could be replaced at little expense. Lewis surely wouldn’t be fool enough to take on a dirty-tricks campaign for Lumpkin without being well paid for it. Moreover, a college man with enough wits to be a surveyor would be far more apt to know how to rig up that clever detonating device to explode the manure pile than would a teenager who appeared to be barely squeaking through high school.

Miss Horsefall had wondered why Nutie the Cutie had made such a production of coming to collect his dead cousin’s useless possessions. Shandy had brushed it off as petty harassment, but might the visit not also have afforded Lumpkin an excuse to meet with young Lewis? Or with the other chap, for that matter? Or with both?

But why should Nutie need Lewis at all? Why couldn’t he have blown up the dung pile himself? Might not that byplay with the mauve silk handkerchief been a subtle way of showing what a fastidious dandy he was, so that Shandy wouldn’t think to connect him with so vulgarly bucolic an explosion?

In practice, Lumpkin couldn’t possibly be so dainty as he’d made himself out to be. The antiques business had to involve a good deal of grubbing about with objects out of dusty attics and moldy cellars, not to mention hen coops and haylofts. Besides, whatever he might fancy himself to have become now, Nute must have been born and raised either on or near a farm. There hadn’t been much except farms out this way until the soap factory and the Gunder Gaffson types moved in. Lumpkin no doubt knew his way around a barnyard as well as most of his neighbors.

Shandy couldn’t see Lumpkin managing to rig that detonator during his visit to the house, though. For one thing, there was that pale beige outfit he’d been wearing. It had been spotless until he’d been forced to tote those cartons of tobacco boxes down to his car, and he’d thrown a fit about getting it smudged.

Might that be why he’d taken Spurge’s old clothes, to protect his own? But how could he have put them on, sneaked back here, done his dirty work, and got away without being caught? The Horsefall farm hadn’t been exactly a private place today. Even after the multitudes of relatives and assistant mourners had left, there’d been the Ameses and young Ralphie and Sven Svenson hurtling through the trees and God knows who else around the place. Lumpkin couldn’t have used the back way through the logging road and the bramble patch because Bashan was at one end and Thorkjeld Svenson at the other. Moreover, he’d driven in and out through that police cordon already, so they’d be sure to know who he was if he tried coming twice.

Ah, but what if Lumpkin had already worn the clothes? Suppose he’d managed to sneak into the house and dress himself in Spurge’s outfit last night under cover of the general hullabaloo. He could have set his odoriferous time bomb then easily enough.

He’d have had to put the clothes back afterward so they wouldn’t be missed and commented on, but that wouldn’t be hard. Spurge had slept in the little downstairs bedroom next to the woodshed that was always allotted to the hired man or the hired girl in these parts. If Lumpkin had been recognized as himself either going or coming, he could have spouted some garbage about his duty to his dead cousin, but the odds were he wouldn’t have been if he was reasonably careful. Lumpkin had one of those bland, forgettable faces that tended to make you think the person you saw was really somebody else.

Then the purpose of his performance today could have been to remove the clothes in case he’d got his own hair oil or something on them. That seemed like a piece of unnecessary conniving, but Shandy had a hunch Nute Lumpkin would rather connive than not. Furthermore, maybe he’d wanted more than Spurge’s clothes. Suppose Nute had reason to think his cousin possessed a small but valuable family heirloom, for instance, or some document that might either bolster or weaken his claim to the long-litigated Lumpkin estate? There weren’t many places to hide such a thing in that sparse little room except among that vast collection of tobacco boxes.

Nute wouldn’t have dared stay long enough to search through all those cartons, and why should he? He’d have done exactly what he did today, call in broad daylight and make himself so obnoxious that nobody would take time to look them over before he carried them away. Perhaps he’d hoped the explosion would oblige him by occurring while he shone in cleanly innocence up above. Perhaps he’d thought the diversion might give him time enough to find what he wanted without having to carry away all that junk. Who the hell knew?

Nobody could be let off the hook, not even Tim or Roy or Laurie. Or Eddie or Ralph or Jolene or Marie or any of their respective broods. Or Miss Hilda or Henny Horsefall, who was acting strange enough to make a person wonder whether he was safe out alone now. Fergy the junkman could have waddled across during the night, assuming he could have torn himself from the loving embrace of Millicent Peavey and wasn’t too drunk to find the manure pile, both of which assumptions would appear untenable on the strength of available testimony.

Fergy certainly couldn’t have been messing around the barnyard in that racetrack tout’s outfit he’d worn to the funeral, and he hadn’t stunk noticeably of anything except beer when Shandy had called on him later. Of the two, Millicent was no doubt the likelier suspect, were it not for the fact that she hadn’t been around Lumpkin Corners long enough to know where Horsefall’s barn was, much less find a motive to harass him, unless she turned out to be Gunder Gaffson’s long-lost aunt. Shandy wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was.

Would Gaffson himself risk coming here? The contractor was a big man. Shandy remembered how he’d towered over Loretta Fescue, who was no lightweight either, the one time he’d seen the pair together. And Gaffson was a short-tempered man, judging from the way he’d snapped at Mrs. Fescue and hustled her off the property. And he was used to getting what he wanted and doing what he chose regardless of the consequences to anybody but himself.