Stolen Honey (33 page)

Pauline had been to Camille’s apartment, the visit was on the disk. Who knew what they’d talked about? Pauline might suspect it was Olen who’d killed Camille, threaten to turn him in. Who knew the scenario in Olen’s crazed mind?

“Get back in the car,” she said. “And we’re on our way.”

* * * *

Olen stopped at the Andover convenience store to inquire about Annette. He had her great-grandson with him, he told the storekeeper. The woman’s eyes popped to see his uniform. He tried to smile, but couldn’t force it. His heart rate was climbing.
Hurry up, hurry up,
it was telling him. They’d know he had Joey, they’d be on their way.

“She know you’re coming?” the woman asked. He dropped the car keys—they made a clatter that rang in his ears; he felt her eyes on him as he bent to pick them up. She gave him the directions anyway, the uniform worked. “She expects us—her directions were fuzzy.” He tried to act casual, taking deep breaths in and out, the way he did on a late-night call. He bought a candy bar for the kid, and that did it. She pointed up the road. “Two miles or so. Yellow trailer on the left. Go too far, you’re at Bradley Pond.”

He remembered to thank her, his police training. Outside, a strong wind had come up. He was suddenly chilled. He tossed the candy bar at Joey. The boy caught it; he was looking, impressed, at the gun in Olen’s holster. “That gun loaded?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s loaded,” Olen said, his heart louder than the car engine, churning up Bradley Hill Road. “Now eat the candy and keep quiet. I told you I’m here on business.”

There was the trailer at the top of the hill, patchy yellow in the headlights, a run-down front porch, sticking out like Joey’s buck teeth. A black car that belonged in the junkyard. Degenerates, he thought, they were all degenerates.

He had to know things, though—before he did what he’d come to do. There were good seeds in the family. In the Lafreniere line—his father’s father. Those Goodpastures his foster mother told him about—somewhere back in the family history. Annette would know. If he was lucky, he’d find them.

“You can’t come in,” he told the boy when they pulled into the yard. “I won’t be long. You wait here.” He climbed the porch steps. Christ! His foot caught in a crack. The place was a dump. He banged on the door. And banged again. She had to be here. Where would a hundred-year-old woman go at this time of night?

“Fire!” he shouted. “Open up!” And when no one answered: “Woods on fire up the road, burning in this direction—a south wind. You’re in danger!”

It worked. A light switched on inside the trailer. Eyes peered at him through the glass. He waited. A key turned in the lock. A moment later the door opened. A tall gaunt woman filled the doorway. Pauline. Looking scared, blank, she didn’t recognize him. How could she? It had been years. But he knew her, he’d seen her photo in the police files. He’d read of his father’s death from a hundred bee stings. It was odd, suspicious: after all, his father, he recalled, was careful, always carrying around his plastic case with the Adrenalin. Lucky for himself he hadn’t inherited the allergy, in view of Gwen’s bees. On the last page of Camille Wimmet’s disk, the page he’d deleted, was a note that Pauline lived in Andover, New Hampshire, where his father, according to the file, had died. But no one back then knew where Pauline was.

He shouldered his way inside. “Just a min—” she cried, taking in the uniform, the badge. “What fire? No. Stay out!” The wind followed him through the door, the door banged, he glanced at the key, still in the lock, then back at his sister. She was almost as tall as he, her eyes black scars, the irises an ugly yellow. Everything about her ugly: the dress that dipped down at the sides, the hair gone an ashy gray when he remembered it brown, the pocked face indicating to him she’d picked up some disease— sexual, he didn’t doubt it.

“What is it? Who?” Here was the old lady now, his grandmother. He had a bone to pick with her.

“Hello, Annette,” he said. “Do you know me? Noel Lafreniere?”

She looked at him—no, through him. Christ! Was she blind? “Noel,” she said, her eyes like empty plates, her skin papery white, like she was a ghost. “Noel? No!” She was thinking of his dead father, of course, she hadn’t seen Olen since he was a child. He wondered if he looked like his father. He had no pictures. No one had ever taken a picture of
him.
Not until Gwen, anyway.

Pauline had gone from the room. It was all right, he’d deal with her later, he had questions to ask his grandmother. She was in her nightgown, a pale blue shift that barely covered her bony knees, her wrinkly feet shod in cheap pink slippers, the furry kind you buy at the discount stores. She smelled of urine—or was it the dusty plants filling the narrow room that gave off that fetid odor? A dead African violet sat on a windowsill.

“I’m his son,” he said, “young Noel. Remember me? That reformatory in Rutland? You let them do it to me, didn’t you, sterilize me? You wanted to get out of there, you’d made a bargain.”

It was in the teacher’s notes. He’d seen it the second time he went to her office, found her papers. He’d left in a hurry then, someone coming. He’d been in plain clothes; that was lucky, they’d only seen his backside.

“What do you want here? How dare you barge in!” He could tell she was hovering between wanting to see him and wanting to preserve her pride, her sanctity. He could knock her down with a stroke of his hand, the thought occurred to him. He had that power over her. Still she stood there, defiant, in her flimsy nightgown; you could see through to the frail frame of bones— no breasts at all. The waxen face was full of gullies and hollows, the forehead dented in like someone had taken a hammer to it. The white hair shagged down over her shoulders, a mockery of what she’d been. The Godineaux women had been handsome, he recalled that. His mother Nicole had strong curving cheekbones, they were there in the photograph above her obituary.

He didn’t sit down, she didn’t ask him to. He saw the packing boxes in the hall, beyond the narrow room they were in. They were going somewhere? There wasn’t a chair in the place that would hold his weight. It was a room for females: narrow raggedy chairs, the kind you found at the Salvation Army, a cot covered with a red throw, grayish lace curtains at the trailer windows. An unpleasant room at best, but he had his questions to ask.

“My ancestor, Robert Goodpasture,” he said. “I need documentation. It was the Agneaus told me about him, my foster parents. They said it came from you.”

There had been nothing on the disk—no mention of family before Annette. The Goodpasture connection would have come through his father. He’d tried for years to get back to that father, then found he was dead. By his sister’s hand, he was sure of it. She’d taken that away from him. Patricide! It couldn’t go unpunished.

Annette crumpled into a chair like a pile of old bones. She was wheezing. Or was she laughing? He wanted to yank her up, shake her, tell her to shut up and talk to him. She had to know how important this was to him, that he sprang from a deeper, purer source than these poverty-driven roots. This crowd of thieves and murderers!

“You knew my father,” he said. “He lived with you and Pauline till you got in Brookside for the last time. I lost track then. But Pauline—oh, Pauline knew where he was. When he came here to look for her, she killed him.” The words incensed him, raised the pitch of his voice, heightened the buzzing in his brain. “My father’s ancestor fought in the American Revolution. Goodpasture. The name’s on a monument down in Boston, I saw it myself—that’s when my foster mother told me, she took me there. She said, sure, it’s your ancestor, Noel.”

“He was a
good
one, all right, our father.” It was Pauline, back in the doorway, a cigarette burning in her left hand. “Good in bed, good at keeping the locks broke on my bedroom door. Good at beating up Mother. You don’t remember those bruises on her head and chest? Ones she said come from tripping over the cat, banging into doors? Well, it was him. Your father. Noel Lafreniere. A good one, oh, yeah, a regular good ole beat-’em-up boy!” The laugh rose, then fell, strangled in her throat. She stuck the cigarette between her lips, inhaled. Blew out the smoke. He took it as an insult.

“You can’t kill for that!” He lurched across the narrow space to confront her. He had business with Pauline anyway, it was mainly why he’d come. “You have to turn yourself in, Pauline. You can’t get away with killing. It’s the law. It’s in the Bible. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ “
He
hadn’t, had he? Killed that Perkey boy? It was an accident, the judge declared it that. It was the asthma, a cut on the kid’s face—
he
hadn’t dragged him there! One day, though, he’d tell someone what he’d done. He’d have to. For his soul’s peace....

“Pauline,” he said, “I have to take you in.”

He stopped, shocked. He was looking into the mouth of a .45 handgun. Behind it, she was laughing, the cigarette between her teeth like a stuck-out tongue; she pulled it out with her free hand. He felt the wind blowing through a crack in the window;

he was shivering.

“You’re taking me nowhere, man. And you’re not telling nobody what we did and where we live. ’Cause we won’t be here after tonight.” She nodded at the packing boxes. “And if you’re smart, you’ll go back to your snug little nest in Branbury, Vermont—oh, sure, I know where you live—and keep your mouth shut. You always were a snotty-nosed loudmouth little bastard. Just like the old man.”

“Tell her to put down that gun,” Olen told Annette.

“Gun? No! Put down the gun, Pauline.” The old lady struggled up out of her chair, stumbled toward her granddaughter. “Tell him what happened, Pauline. Tell him who killed your father. Let him take me, I don’t care, I’m an old woman. Tell him, Pauline. Put down the gun now!” She clawed at Pauline’s sleeve. Pauline lowered the pistol. The cigarette smoldered in her left hand.

“It wasn’t her. I’m the one killed him,” Annette said, defiant now, her voice sounding disembodied, like a robot’s voice. “I invited him up here—he’d found where I lived. This was years ago! I didn’t want him bothering Nicole no more. Sure, I emptied out the bees into his glove compartment—with a little smoke, you know. Later he’d open it and out they’d come, wide awake and mad as hell. It was cold out, he’d have the windows shut. I took away his adrenaline syringe, you see, that case he always carried. Well, I took a chance and it worked. They found him next morning—the car run into a telephone pole. Noel full of bee stings and the heart stopped.”

She turned her face toward Olen; she looked to his blurred eyes like an antique doll, missing some parts. “They didn’t know who he was, where he been. Pauline wasn’t living here then, she wouldn’t tell anyway. I’ll tell the fuzz, why not? What’ve I got to lose?”

“Me!” Pauline shrieked at her grandmother, the pistol loose in her hand, her breath coming hard and angry. She dropped the cigarette stub on the floor, stamped it out. “I’m what you got to lose. They find out who I am. They find out about—” She stopped short. Annette was pointing a trembling finger.

Pauline’s eyes darted from her grandmother to her brother. The blood leaped in her neck and cheeks. The black eyes were sly on Olen. She backed up a step.

Olen’s legs were trembling, his hands. “They were
yours,
the fingerprints on that key,” he said, his voice hoarse, the breath trapped like a small animal in his chest. He looked back at the front door, at the key with the purple blotch of paint. He’d only half recognized it when he came in. It wasn’t Tilden Ball, it was Pauline who’d strangled that professor. He was reeling with the knowledge, his body off balance—he grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself.

Though he might have done it if he’d had to, if he’d been pushed to that extreme; the guilt of what might have been tortured him. The relief he’d known to hear she was dead, that someone
else
had killed her! He’d hardly been able to contain his jubilance that night, when the call came through. His hands had been violent with it. And the others thought him upset over her death. . .

“How did you know,” he asked, his hands still clutching the chair back, “about
her?”

Pauline leered at him, her stance more casual now, her weight on the left foot, the gun in her dropped hand like a tool she might use to pick a lock. She was enjoying his surprise, his shock. “Eugene Godineaux,” she said. “The teacher went to visit old Gene with her busybody questions, she left her card there.” Pauline snorted at the thought of a business card. “Gene called me. What business she had, he told her, poking into his life like that? He was right. I thought, they find Granny and me here— then what? I went to see the woman for myself. I told her to stop. You can’t say I didn’t warn her.”

Aware again of his uniform, she said, “I didn’t go there to kill her. I just went to wreck the computer, take her goddam notes. I saw her go out. But she came in on me unexpected. I... reacted.”

He fought to regain his breath; his chest was hard, like marble. The grandmother a killer, too. His own blood! He felt sick; he clapped a hand to his mouth.

Pauline laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re not glad. You wanted that thing printed? What’d they find out about you? Who
you
come from!”

“The Goodpastures,” he murmured.

He heard Annette snort. “She made it up, your foster mother. Noel Lafreniere’s father was a no-good, he got shot breaking out of prison up to Quebec. His mother was a Passamaquoddy. They were poor, dirt poor. Like the Godineauxs.”

Pauline was laughing again. They were both laughing at him, all teeth, gums, mouths, splitting their faces. He was hot, his brains burning up. He rushed at Pauline. The gun swung up in her hand, fired—punctured his shoulder. His gun out in an instant, a reflex. He shot her—twice, three times, four—he was on fire, couldn’t stop! Emptied his gun. He’d never felt such fury, such hate for all that poverty, that depravity. The old lady was screaming, stumbling to find Pauline.

He ran out of the trailer, banged into someone on the windy porch. “Hey!” A male voice, yelling at him. He jumped in his car, his shoulder a torture. Raced down the mountain, left hand on the wheel. The kid awake when he took the curve. “Hey, mister, we going home now? I’m cold, mister.”