Stolen Honey (19 page)

“Well, you must be a saint, then,” Russell said. “Those bees get away now and then. Look, I got me a sting.” He held out a tattooed arm and sure enough, there was a red welt below the elbow.

“That’s ’cause you moved that hive,” said Mert. “I saw you. Bees don’t like that.”

“I was trying to put it back, dammit,” said Russell. “It got knocked over when they stole my girl’s bones. You know about that?” he asked Ruth.

“Russ came in last night unexpected,” Mert told Ruth.

“Oh,” said Ruth, “I did hear about the theft, yes.” She looked properly contrite. “Could I see it—the grave site?” Was it sacrilege to ask?

Russell gave a bitter laugh. “There’s no grave site to see. Well, site, yeah, but they took the bones. They took some of the grave goods. The copper beads.”

“Could that have been what they were after?”

Russell scoffed. “What they were after was our land. It was that pack of rats up to the next farm, you can bet. They want us out of here. That’s what they want and that’s what they’re not going to get, by jeez.” He thumped three times on the wall, and a
Vermont Life
calendar jumped. “Well, come on, then.” He motioned her onward with his thumb.

“He’s crazy over this, you gotta realize,” Mert whispered. “Is all we can do to keep him from going up to Balls’, tearing the place apart. He called his buddies up to Swanton last night to storm the place. Told ’em to bring tomahawks’. Gwen and me had to call ’em off. Olen says he’ll have him in jail, he goes up there—he got no legal right.”

She nodded. “I can sympathize.” Though sometimes, she thought, you do have to take the law into your own hands.

Russell was already at the burial site when she arrived; he was on his knees, sifting through the dirt. “He done that a hundred times this morning,” Mert whispered, “found zilch. But he keeps hoping. I dunno, for a toe bone, maybe.”

Now Russell was jumping up and running into the woods beyond the site, as though he’d seen something. Ruth squinted but saw only sun and trees. There was a path there, Mert said, that led through woods and out into the Balls’ cow pasture.

“Hey!” Russell held up something shiny-white. It glinted in the late sun. It was a shell bead, he shouted. When Ruth and Mert caught up, she saw it had a tiny hole in the center.

“You have sharp eyes, Russell,” she said.

He grunted. “Ball would of dropped it. He had his hands full.” Russell gave a triumphant laugh and lunged forward through the path.

“No!” Mert hollered. “You’re not going up there, Russ. They told you not to. You’ll get in trouble if you do.”

“Just look around a little,” Russell yelled back, and he was gone, running swiftly around a curve in the path.

Mert sighed heavily, shaking his head. His hands dropped slack to his sides. “I can’t make him stop. I can’t do nothing. He’ll have to take what comes, that’s all.”

Ruth knew Harvey Ball from Agri-Mark meetings. He could be negative, abrasive. He’d defend his own without a qualm. And Russell, she’d seen in the fiery eyes, would defend
his
own. Though why Ball would want a skeleton was more than she could figure. Except as a form of blackmail, as Russell had said, so that Gwen would sell her land.

She followed Mert back to the house. Gwen had arrived in her pickup, with Donna in the passenger seat, Leroy in back. The rear end was painted a lighter blue than the front, she noticed, a makeshift job. Gwen got out, smiling. She halted when she saw the frown on Mert’s face. “What is it?” she called out. “Where’s Russ?”

When Mert told her, she cried, “No! He can’t do that.” She climbed back in the truck.

“Let it go, Mother!” Donna shouted.

Ruth ran to the truck, held onto the door handle. “Are you sure you want to go up there? I could phone Colm. He might be able to settle things before Ball calls the police.”

“I’m going up,” said Gwen, determined. “Get out now, Donna. You have homework to do.”

But Donna was grabbing the keys from her mother, shouting at her to “leave things alone. I don’t want both my parents in jail. Don’t go, Mother!” She ran into the house with the keys.

“I have to go,” Gwen yelled, and demanded an extra key from Leroy, who handed it over obediently.

“Maybe better to stay here like she says,” he muttered, but Gwen paid no attention, and seconds later, backed out of the driveway.

When Ruth went back to return her coffee mug, she found Donna sobbing at the table, beating her fists against the wood. “I hate my mother!” the girl cried. “I hate my father. Why can’t they be like other parents? Other parents don’t grow poison plants in their yards or attack people and accuse them of digging up graves. Every time I think about it I get depressed. I just want to be like everybody else.”

Ruth put her arms around the girl. “I know, I know,” she soothed. “Emily tells me that, too. She wants to live in town like other girls she knows. Not on a farm full of smelly cows. But Donna, are those other families any better off? Even the rich ones?”

She told Donna about the Unsworth boy addicted to cocaine, and a wealthy lawyer named Southwick whose son had victimized her own son. And Harry Rowen, whose parents belonged to a fundamentalist religion and wouldn’t let him bring a book into the house. “I think it’s wonderful that your mother grows these plants. She’s ahead of her time, that’s all. One day they’ll legalize marijuana—for medicinal purposes anyway. Look, it was just rotten, rotten luck that boy fell into the nightshade.”

The thought of nightshade started Donna wailing again.

“I think somebody turned him over, stuck his face in that nightshade,” Mert said, standing behind the pair. “It’s just a hunch I got. I seen a muddy footprint over beyond where he was—after the police was first here, I mean. Before they brought in the extra police. I smoothed it over.”

“Why would you do that?” Ruth cried. “It was evidence.”

He rumbled with a button on his shirt; the tattoos shone dark blue on the backs of his hands. “I thought it was somebody in the family might of done it—put that boy’s face in it, maybe hit him. Russell. Gwen. Leroy. Even you, Donna, I didn’t know, I didn’t want to take no chances—you had a right. Don’t you tell your mother about that footprint, don’t you get her all upset.” He laid a hand on Donna’s shivery shoulder. She gazed up at him, as though surprised by the depth of his feeling.

Mert glanced over at Ruth. “I guess I better tell the police, though. I’ll tell Olen. He won’t want to hurt your mother.”

“He’ll put you in jail!” Donna cried. “That’s all he cares about, the law. It’s right or it’s wrong.’ She appealed to Ruth. “He put Daddy in jail once for fishing out of season. He didn’t think about Mother’s feelings then.”

They were both looking at Ruth now, as though it were her decision, as though she were the moral judge. Her shoulders slumped with the weight of their expectation.

She looked out the kitchen window; the silence behind her was almost palpable. Beyond the glass Leroy was getting the lawn mower out of the barn. There wasn’t a lot of grass to mow—no more than an acre or two
.
Most of the land was wooded. But Leroy was cranking up the machine with a determined face. He was going to keep that grass under control. Though he couldn’t mow near the hives, could he? Lawn mowers, she’d discovered when Tim went to cut near the hives, upset the bees.

Ruth thought of her farm, where the grasses and buttercups grew wild. Tim only mowed around the Christmas trees. She liked the land wild. People had to allow a little wildness in themselves. They weren’t meant to be kept under wraps, controlled.

“Keep it to yourself, Mert,” she told him. “The footprint’s long gone. This family’s been through enough without you in trouble. But off the record, do you remember the size of it? I mean, give or take an inch?”

Mert ran a hand through his sparse gray hair. “I didn’t look too hard. I guess I was afraid to. It was a shoe, though, not a boot.”

Russell, Ruth recalled, had been wearing moccasin like loafers when he ran just now into the wooded path. Leroy, she saw, was wearing high black sneakers. Now she was disturbed at Mert for not reporting this footprint at once. It could have put them on the right track, after the right person. She still felt that Shep Noble’s death was not an accident. And the police were, cautiously, according to Colm, calling Shep’s and Camille’s deaths “possibly connected.”

But there was no point pursuing the subject. Mert was sitting in the kitchen chair, braiding a length of sweetgrass. He and Donna had twin expressions: both of them looking glum, defeated.

Ruth rinsed out her coffee cup and took her leave. The late sun was flooding through the windows, painting the walls and door white, making her squint. She called out a good-bye, headed out to her pickup. She still hadn’t looked at the swamp where the nightshade grew, but she didn’t need to. Mert had gotten there first. Worried about family, he’d blotted out evidence. Ruth thought of the Jane Austen biography she’d picked up in the town library: how Jane’s extended family had burned letters, not wanting posterity to know certain things—about Jane, about themselves, their secrets. But they had a right, hadn’t they? Ruth had named one of her cows Jane Austen, but her Jane couldn’t speak.

Secrets, she thought. Shep Noble, Camille Wimmet—all of them, all of us—harboring secrets.

She waved at Leroy, who had turned to look at her, his face expressionless, and driven off. She had put off talking to him, hoping Colm would do it. A police car carrying two men traveled past as she rounded a curve on the mountain road. She prayed that one of them wasn’t Olen Ashley—and on his way to the Ball farm.

* * * *

“You’re not afraid of me, are you, Ralphie?” Russell asked, and the boy pointed at Russell’s earrings and said, “Shiny man.” Russell held out the shell bead. “For you,” he said. Awed, Ralphie held it close to his face. The boy was the only one home, Russell told Gwen when she arrived, out of breath, pleading with him to leave. He’d only rummaged around in the outbuildings, he insisted, he hadn’t searched the house—just knocked on the door and Ralphie let him in.

“You come and see us, now,” she told Ralphie, hanging on to her husband’s arm. “But we have to go. Don’t tell your father we were here, okay? Keep it a secret between us?” Ralphie’s slanty eyes looked dubious, but finally he nodded.

Suddenly he cried out; the eyes rolled up in his head, his lips went blue. Before Gwen could get to him, he crashed to the floor; his body fell into a series of violent, rhythmic jerkings. Gwen knelt beside him, held up his head to keep him from swallowing his tongue. When the seizure was over, when the boy lay back limp and exhausted, she sponged off the perspiring forehead with a damp handkerchief. Ralphie looked up into her face, panting like a small animal, the brown eyes soft and watery,

“Are you all right?” she asked, and he stared back at her. For a time it was as though he were still in another space, somewhere she couldn’t go. He held up a limp hand and she saw that he’d dropped the shell bead.

“Pretty,” he wailed. “Ralphie lose his pretty.” He crawled across the dusty floor to find it. “Ha!” he cried a moment later, and held up the bead.

“Good. You stay quiet awhile now,” she told him. A serene quarter of an hour later, she shut the door carefully behind her.

Russell was already outside, his rear end wriggling out from under the porch. “She’s here somewhere. I know goddam well she’s here. I need a day. A whole day without the Balls around—I’d find her, all right. That pack of filthy thieves!”

“Not a pack,” she said. “Not all of them involved, I’m sure—if any of them. We can’t prove it, Russ.”

“They’ve got it. They took it,” he said stubbornly. “No question.” A cardboard
TAKE BACK VERMONT
sign was taped above the front door and Russell grabbed at it, but Gwen pulled him back. “It’s his opinion,” she said. “It’s his sign.”

Muttering to himself, Russell let her lead him to the pickup. They drove in silence back to the house.

When Gwen saw the police car in her drive, she put the pickup in reverse, backed into a wooded opening. But already Olen had seen them. He jogged over to the truck. “You weren’t up at Balls’, I hope,” he said to Russell.

“How am I supposed to find her if I can’t go look, damn it?” Russell lunged out of the truck, faced the officer, hands on his blue-jeaned hips. “Tell me that, Ashley.”

Olen, she saw, was trying to be calm, professional. He kept his voice low, though Gwen could hear the irritation beneath the words, like an engine full of super fuel, trying to go slow when it wanted to race full speed down a highway. “We’re on our way to question the Balls,” he said. “But we can’t search the place. We don’t have probable cause.” Sergeant Hammer got out of the car, hand on her hip, as though ready for an outbreak of violence. The Woodleaf-LeBlanc family seemed to have that reputation these days.

“No ‘probable cause’? Tell ’em, Gwen, what I found on the path.” Russell took a step closer to Olen. The anger hung, like a live coal, between the two men.

Gwen held her husband’s arm. “They just stopped to tell us about it, Russ. They’re going up there now, right, Olen?”

Olen stepped back. His voice softened. “Right, Gwen. We just stopped to see if you had anything more to tell us, that’s all.”

Scowling, Russell grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the house. “Sure, that’s all,” he called back over his shoulder. “That’s why you stopped. It had nothing to do with seeing my wife.”

“Quit that, Russ,” she cried, her turn to pull him along now. “Okay, LeBlanc,” Olen hissed, scowling at Russell’s T-shirt. “You were just taking a drive around your own grounds, right? But next time you’ll be in the lockup. I’m warning you, now.” His voice cracked. Gwen nodded briefly over her shoulder and followed her husband into the house. Mert was there with a teapot in his hand, along with Brownie, big-eyed and wary, home from school, glancing from one parent to the other, as though unsure if he should speak. Russell poured himself a tankard of beer. Gwen listened to the police car pull out of the driveway and then let out a long shuddery breath.

* * * *

Ruth had exhausted Joey’s memory of his real parents. He hadn’t remembered a male relative at all, poor fellow—not until Tim came along. Tim was father, uncle, grandfather, all in one. Joey worshiped him—and vice versa. Now Tim wanted to legally adopt him, even though the boy was almost of age. Joey had smarts, Tim insisted, he’d improved a hundredfold since he’d left the Petits. “Not that they weren’t okay to him,” Tim said, “it’s just that now the kid’s got a one-on-one.”