Stolen Honey (17 page)

“That’s what we’d like to know. That’s why I’m here.” And when Mabel said, “Ooh, ooh,” again, and shrank back into her overstaffed chair, Ruth said, “I mean, it’s because of Joey being a Godineaux. The name might hold a clue. Can you tell me about Joey’s parents?”

Mabel was cautious. She pulled back her shoulders, examined her fingernails. “I’m not supposed to say. I mean, they didn’t tell me much. Really.”

“But you know something,” Ruth urged, holding the woman’s eyes with her own.

Mabel swallowed up her lower lip with her yellowish teeth and considered. “We-ell,” she said, “we-11, Godineaux was the mother’s name. The father run off, you see, before Joey was born—I mean, they never married, Joey’s parents.”

“Do you know the father’s name?” Ruth leaned forward. Somehow the male line seemed important, she didn’t know why. Though, to tell the truth, she was wholly in the dark. She didn’t know what she was searching for.

Wincing, Mabel pulled out another hair from her earring. “I’d tell you, hon, if I did, but I don’t, I just don’t. You’ll have to go talk to the foster child agency. You know, where I got the kids from? In Argennes? Gawd, I forget the name of the woman what runs it. I’m going through menopause now, you know.” She lowered her voice, leaned forward confidentially. “I get these hot flashes. I sweat in the sheets at night, my belly’s a balloon, you know what I mean?”

Ruth sucked in her stomach. She was wearing a skirt in deference to the visit—a striped cotton one that billowed out in front. Yes, she did know what it was to go through menopause: the heavy periods, the hot and cold nights. But she wasn’t about to discuss it with this woman. She nodded, in compromise. “Can I call you for that address—that name? I have to get back to my farm. Your Joey is there with my foreman—he’s a big help. You brought him up right.”

Mabel grinned. She’d just remembered the caseworker’s name. “Evangeline Balinsky. You can look the number up. I got my foster kids from different places, you see. Some of ’em Catholic like Evangeline’s, some not. I can’t remember them all.”

“Of course not.” Ruth smiled through a cup of Lipton’s tea, fifteen minutes more of conversation that yielded no rewards, then took her leave, smoothing down her puffy skirt—there was too much fabric. She made a mental note to give the skirt to Sharon, who was smaller-hipped than herself. From now on she’d stick to pants.

On her way back, she stopped in a used clothing store called Neat Repeats and bought a pair of black cotton jeans for $5.50. She looked pounds thinner in them. In the store mirror she wiped off the lipstick she’d rubbed on before the interview. Now she was Ruth again, ready to take on the college women.

She was halfway home when she realized she’d left the striped skirt in the store’s dressing room. Oh, well, she thought, skimming down Route 7 past red barns and open land rimmed with mountains, Sharon wouldn’t have liked that skirt, either.

Ruth was glad to get home after her hour’s meeting with the female sociology students. It had been a dead end, the girls still teary-eyed, blank when it came to any motive for the murder. They were saddened for Camille; they were worried for themselves—a killer was on the loose. It worried Ruth as well, to tell the truth: for herself, for her family. The grandchildren were in the pasture when she arrived, picking buttercups that stained their noses a bright yellow. Robbie ran at her with a bunch; the stems were crushed in his small hands. Not to be outdone, little Willa raced after him, thrust a dozen blossoms in Ruth’s arms. All heads, with no stems.

“Put them in water, Nana,” Robbie urged. The boy knew how to make things live. It was a comforting thought. She shepherded the children into the kitchen, gave them hugs and juice. Sharon was there in the usual outrageous getup: tall green rubber boots and blue long Johns under the purple skirt, an embroidered vest, and an Indian cotton blouse. Her heavy brown hair was pinned up on one side of her head, hanging straight and bushy on the other. Ruth embraced her. She was the perfect antidote for Mabel Petit.

“Colm called. He’s coming over at seven,” Sharon informed her. Sharon was always trying to get her mother together with Colm; she didn’t like Ruth living alone. Ruth didn’t know which was worse: Sharon pushing her toward Colm or Emily trying to respark a burned candle with her ex-husband, Pete. Although Emily had cooled in that regard since Pete’s efforts to make her buy back his portion of the farm.

“He say anything else?” Ruth dropped her jacket on a chair. Sharon eyed her mother’s new black jeans. “Mother, they use a shoe horn to get you into those?”

Ruth was offended. “They’re a perfect fit.” She sucked in her stomach and pulled on a sweater. Admittedly the jeans were a little tight when she bent over. She’d change before Colm arrived. She didn’t need
his
opinion, too.

Sharon smiled snidely and hollered at the children, who were pounding up and down the stairs. “Oh, and earlier there was a call from Gwen Woodleaf. She wants you to sound out my Jack, see if he’ll testify for her next Tuesday. About how those bruises could come from the nightshade. I told her he would, but she wants
you
to call him. Mom, I have to go. Jack’s coming home. It’s my night to cook.”

“Tofu stroganoff with seaweed?” It was her turn to tease her vegetarian daughter.

“Nah. A tempeh stir fry.”

“Yuck,” said Ruth, who, though she’d given up on red meat— partly because it might be one of her slaughtered bull calves— still preferred fowl and fish to soy and seaweed.

When Sharon and the children left, it was like a storm gone out to sea. It was still early for milking, so she fixed herself a cup of peppermint tea, breathed in the steam—she might be on the verge of a cold. She relished these few moments of peace, alone in the house. Vic would be home from school late, he had softball practice. Of course, Emily might pop in at any time, depending on whether or not she needed something: an article of clothing, a book, Mom’s shoulder to wax indignant or bereaved on. She’d given Ruth an earful about her latest encounter with Billy Bozeman. Emily was convinced it was disgruntled fraternity boys responsible for the graffiti, even the damage to Gwen’s bees. She might have a point, Ruth thought. In college, Ruth had stayed clear of the fraternities, except for an occasional foray into Pete’s frat that had wholly abashed her. Too much rah-rah. Too much booze. Too much grabbing ass.

Then why did she marry Pete, a good ole boy?

To make babies with, she guessed. Pete had good genes. He was low-key, where she was apt to be high-strung; calm in a crisis, while she sometimes lost it. Outgoing, while she tended to be introspective. You needed those opposites to make babies. She’d never regret hers! She supposed these inverse attractions went back thousands of years.

Her teacup empty, she called her son-in-law to see if he’d testify, and Jack was intrigued.

Though he’d have to study up on nightshade, he hadn’t come across much about that plant before. “I’ll call the lady back,” he promised, “then do a little research. I oughta learn more about it anyway. First thing you know, Sharon’ll be growing the stuff.”

“No doubt,” Ruth said, and hung up.

* * * *

Colm Hanna arrived promptly at seven. He was an on-time kind of guy; Ruth liked that about him. She tended to be on the late side herself. Of course, one couldn’t always count on cows making one available for appointments. But tonight the milking had gone smoothly. While they cleaned up the milking apparatus, she’d quizzed Joey about his father—with no results. “He left,” Joey said, perhaps quoting Mabel Petit, “he just gone. Poof!” He flapped his arms like a bird. The mother had taken off with another man when Joey was four, Tim told her privately, and the grandmother was ill at that point; she couldn’t care for the boy.

Where was that mother now? That grandmother—if
she
was still alive? Ruth made a mental note to find out. Still, she told Colm, “It would help to know what we’re looking for. What answers to what questions.”

He shook his head. His interviews had yielded little beyond “one hell of a headache. That guy up in Ripton—a good ole mountain man if I’ve ever seen one. You should see that gun rack. How does he get a license for all those guns?”

“How do thirteen-year-olds?” she asked, reminding him of the latest high school rampage out West. It made her so afraid for Vic. For children in schools everywhere, for teachers and students.

Colm went on with his “day of woe,” as he called it. “I got nothing out of the man. When I mentioned Camille’s death, he just said he ‘wasn’t surprised, the way she was poking her nose in other people’s closets’ was how he put it. I asked him what she was trying to find out, and he shrugged. Took one of the guns off the wall, said he was going hunting. I said it wasn’t hunting season. He just grinned. He has a whole Green Mountain National Forest outside his door. Why should he wait?”

“He had no alibi for the night Camille was killed?”

“Said he was right there at home watching TV. His wife could verify. She looked at me like a scared rabbit and nodded. I know damn well he was lying.”

“When he left the house to go ‘hunting’—you didn’t ask her again? She might have been mum in his presence.”

“How could I? He wouldn’t leave till
I
left. He ushered me out at the point of a .22.”

She laughed at the picture Colm must have made: the rabbit running from the hunter. She poured him a glass of Otter Creek Ale and warmed up some leftover turkey and broccoli.

“The guy I liked even less,” he said, “was that administrator down at the reformatory. He was definitely hiding something. He wouldn’t say why she’d come to see him, just said she was writing some kind of paper. Well, I knew that anyway. He said he’d heard about that eugenics project, ‘but it was all in the past, wasn’t it?’”

“This woman Annette she was writing about, she was probably there in that prison, don’t you think? That’s all I know from Camille, it was something about Annette that interested her. And her offspring—I recall the names Nicole, Pauline. What happened to all of them? We have to find out.”

“I asked about Annette like you said—you could see he knew something. I asked if there were records we could see. Flashed my badge to put the fear of Jesus in him.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. Colm was not your typical cop. He was too laid back. He couldn’t spook a cow.

Colm was insulted. “Well, I did unnerve him, damn it. He jumped up out of his chair, said he had things to do. Said there were no records on her anymore. They’d had a fire, he said, all those papers got burnt.”

“I’ll bet. Send somebody else down there to get to the truth of it, would you? If they’re burnt, he probably did it himself.”

“I’ll send Olen Ashley. He’s a stickler about that kind of stuff. He’s been a madman lately, holds the record down at the station for traffic tickets, sniffing out bad checks.”

She asked about the college student Tilden Ball—”the one who’s failing two courses? Did you talk to him?”

He consulted his notes. “Tilden Ball. Yeah. He was doing chores for his father that night, he says—though I haven’t verified it. An odd kid. He needs a friend, I’d say, but he won’t open up to people. He seemed relieved Camille wouldn’t have to read his paper.”

“Would he kill because of it?”

“Hard to say. But sometimes it’s the quiet ones who hold things in.”

“Mmm. What about Camille’s will? You were going to check on that.”

“I did, didn’t I tell you?”

“Nope. What about it, then?”

“She died intestate, according to the lawyer. Hell, she was a young woman, never got around to a will. So it all goes to some aunt—I forget the name. But the aunt’s in an institution. And oh, guess who’s her legal guardian?”

“Don’t make me guess, Colm, just tell me.”

“Leroy Boulanger.”

“Whoa. The plot thickens.”

“He’ll get the money, I suppose—whatever there is.”

“Not a lot, I’ll bet. A young teacher, without tenure? Though she might have something put away from her parents. Interesting. You think he’d kill for a little inheritance? Talk to him, would you, Colm? Remind him we know about that stolen car.”

“Why don’t
you
talk to him, Ruthie? Seems to me you’re pretty flahool, handing out all these jobs.”

“I have the cows, Colm, remember that.”

“I have Dad’s dead bodies. My real estate.”

“You can handle it. More broccoli?”

“Jeez, Ruth, you know I don’t like the stuff. It’s like eating shrubs.”

“You should eat broccoli. Broccoli loves you. Grown in my own garden, too.”

“Do you love me, too, Ruthie? I’ll eat the whole damn dish if you’ll tell me that.”

She smiled, an enigmatic cat; she could feel her tail starting to swish—and helped
herself to
more broccoli. “Delicious,” she said, smiling at him through leafy teeth.

* * * *

When Gwen went out back behind the barn to check hives— and pay her respects to the grave site by leaving a gift of tobacco—she was confronted with a mound of dirt. For a moment she couldn’t understand what it was. But when she looked beyond and saw, she lost her footing in a wave of panic and fell on her knees.

The grave had been dug up! She hauled herself to the far side and looked down in. The hole was empty. The low white fence Russell had erected around it was in pieces. A few shells and birdstones were still there, the dirt the color of red ocher paint. But the skeleton was gone. Gone, too, the ancient copper beads some caring mother had put into the grave to adorn her girl-child for the hereafter. Gwen sat back on her haunches, staring, until she felt dizzy, ready to fall in herself, head first.

Was this one more punishment for the nightshade death? But digging up a grave! It was the worst kind of sacrilege. As if that young Indian girl were some old heap of bones, no more important than a dog or horse—and less so than the mammoth bone some archaeologist had recently dug up in the area.

Outraged, she struggled up off her knees and ran back, panting, to the house to phone Russell. The number he’d given her rang and rang, and she gave up. She heard her father-in-law’s hesitant footsteps, felt his hand on her shoulder. She looked up into his questioning face and blurted out the news of the theft.