Harvest of Bones (16 page)

“You haven’t got Alzheimer’s,” Colm told him. “And you’re going to have to go. It’s here in a fax from the Branbury police. If I find you, alive, you’ll have to report to the station for questioning.”

“Kee-rist,” squealed Mac MacInnis. “Just don’t let it be Glenna. I can’t face Glenna. I had enough of her tongue all those years we were married. Not Glenna. Kee-rist!”

* * * *

Alwyn Bagshaw leaned into his rake, though the fire was still smoldering, giving out a stench that made him sick to his stomach. He sat back on a stump to ease his aching back—he wasn’t the man he used to be. Used to be he could hold his brother, Denby, down for hours—Denby had been a pushover, sure. And lazy, couldn’t keep a job. Denby’d been a juggler, juggled his ma till she give him what he wanted: pocket money, choice cut of meat, that stray mutt—when it was Alwyn that the bitch’d come to first, wandering in one day off the street: Lab mix, good legs, good for hunting. Got part of that piece of mountain land she owned, when she knew Alwyn wanted a hunter’s shack—then Denby up and sells it to Willmarth. Only thing Denby’d ever hunted was women.

Denby took away the one woman Alwyn had wanted. She was a good-looking one, curly black hair, mountains of it; in bed, the hair floating around the pillow like thunderclouds. Thunder and lightning, that’s what it was like to have her. And she’d give back. She was waiting for a divorce; then she’d marry Alwyn. His mother didn’t care; Alwyn could marry the town pump—just so’s the woman didn’t live with her. But Annie wasn’t a whore—at first, anyways; she was a decent woman, had a bad marriage, guy had cheated on her. Alwyn knew him; he was a no-good. Annie was a hairdresser, independent, planned to have her own place. Though Alwyn would stop that: Married woman belonged home.

Then Denby decided
he
wanted her. Whatever Denby wanted, he took. He was a looker, Denby: taller than Alwyn, same color hair, but he slicked his shiny with grease. Women loved that grease. Alwyn found it disgusting. One night, he come back from hunting. He’d bagged a buck, a six-pointer, planned to freeze the meat so he and Annie’d have a Thanksgiving feast. His ma didn’t hold with holidays, but Annie did; she liked all that hoopla. Well, why not? He couldn’t wait to surprise her, told Ma he’d cook the venison.

Wasn’t out long; bagged the buck early, took it home, expecting only Ma. Only it wasn’t Ma. Annie there, too— with Denby. On Alwyn’s bed. His bed! Stark naked but for that cloud of hair. The pair wrapped up together like a Christmas package.

“You’re early” was all Denby said. “Annie was bored.”

Annie just laughed. Laughed and laughed there in his brother’s arms.

But Denby tired
quick
of women he could have. Then Annie wanted Alwyn back, she said. Sure, she cried and cried and wrung her hands. She pulled her cloud of hair till some of it fell out. But Alwyn didn’t want a used package. Twice used, come to think of it. After that, there was only Flora, from down the road. She was a warm body, that’s all. A companion for Ma when Denby was gone. When the baby came, that’s all she cared about, that baby, fussing around it all day, shut her legs to Alwyn. Then one day, she packed her bags and left, and that was all right, too. He was all Ma had then. Denby was gone; they said he drowned in the Otter. That was a time when Alwyn was content: He had his job, he had the occasional woman, and he had Ma to take care of his needs. He was content, even after Ma’s heart gave out three years ago.

Till that group moved in next door and let loose the devil.

He jumped up off the stump and waved his arms. “Git! Git, you devil. Leave me be!”

The wind swirled the ashes; bits of grit flew up in the air, then slowly settled back on the ground, some in his hair. He shook his head, disgusted. Time to dig now, he thought; he took up his shovel. Then looked up, to see that Willmarth girl spying on him, through some kind of tube.

Angry, feeling invaded—when would they leave him alone?—he ran at the fence, shook his fist. “Git out of here. None of your business round here. Git out, I said!”

She ran then, back across
their
land; there were two of them he saw, two young girls. He pushed through a clump of dead peonies to have a better look. Now the other one was peering through the tube. He didn’t like it. When they ran off, suddenlike, through the twilight, he heard them giggling. Stupid girls! Into everybody else’s business. Like in Annie’s hairdressing place, the gossip. He didn’t hold with gossip. Alwyn was a private man. What he did was his own business. Till that bunch next door brought him bad luck. The flocks of grackles, the girl coming round to interview him, that skeleton over to Flint’s—especially that.

They were walking now, slower, up the dirt road; up the shortcut to the mountain. His mountain, for it was now—a patch of it anyway. With Ma gone, it was his, he reckoned. They was trespassing; sure, it wasn’t right. He heard them laughing up ahead, poking each other, laughing and laughing. Like Annie that time in his brother’s bed. He’d let her go then, though he’d wanted to kill her. Strangle her, sure, slow... But he’d let her go.

He’d regretted it since.

Chapter Eleven

Ruth took Dr. Colwell with her. He was one of those old-fashioned, compassionate doctors: a tall, balding, big-boned man who still made the occasional house call. Though even he was skeptical. “The whole lot of them poisoned? Come on,” he’d said.

But when they entered through an unlocked door in the rear—no one had answered their knocks out front—they found only one woman ill, in a bathroom, retching. She’d gotten into chocolate—the last in a box of chocolate-covered cherries that had come to Angie, a woman informed them. “Isis would be mad if she knew,” she said.

Isis—the name related to corn. Ruth had a vision of a goddess with great curving cow horns. But when Isis wheeled in now, she looked more like a housefrau in her brown polyester slacks and short tan sweater, which only accentuated her belly. She swept Ruth back into the kitchen. It was spanking clean, just like the last time. A loaf of homemade bread sat on the counter and a pile of greens was soaking in a sieve. Isis supervised the cooking herself, she told Ruth as she spun about, opening and slamming all the drawers and closets she could reach with her robust arms, while in an adjoining room the doctor examined Ellen, a chubby, sweet-faced woman whom Ruth remembered from her last visit.

No, not a morsel of anything she hadn’t sampled herself went down anyone’s throat, Isis insisted—”Caffeine!” she said with a grimace, and pointed to the can of Cafix on the shelf, a coffee substitute made of figs and beet root. “That’s what we drink here.”

“And you can see
I’m
perfectly all right. It was the clotting problem that did in poor Angie; I worried about it when she came here. But I thought, with the blood thinner I insisted she take—well, it didn’t work, did it? But it was her place; I couldn’t send her away. And she needed the therapy.”

“Oh?” said Ruth.

“Well, part of the therapy was my teaching her massage. Especially to do the back and leg work. You have to stand over the person for that. I can only do the head and neck now, you see, the energy work, the foot reflexology.” When Ruth raised an eyebrow, she explained. “There are reflexes in the feet that relate to most parts of the body. Push in a certain way on a toe and it can help relieve a headache.” As she spoke, she was twisting a plain gold ring on her thick finger.

“You’re married.”

“Was. I left him to come here. He was glad to see me go, frankly. He had a girlfriend, you see. After the accident—he didn’t need ... this.” She nodded at her wheelchair. Then, as if to prove the degree of separation, she yanked off the ring, dropped it into a pocket. The corners of her dark eyes curved up into the fluid sweep of her shiny black hair.

“I do see.” Ruth looked down at the ring on her own finger, a thin silver band with
RM
and
WW
engraved on the inside. Why was she still wearing it? For the children, she supposed. For Emily, who’d been on a mission lately, it seemed, to reconnect her parents. Well, Pete’s arrival was days away. Still, the ring was tight where her finger had thickened with hard work: a reminder of the decision she would have to make.

“We’re all without husbands here, as you can see,” Isis said, and veered over to a table to snatch up a teapot. “Chamomile. Want a cup? Good for stress.”

Was it that obvious? Hearing a groan in the next room, Ruth shook her head. Was she superstitious, not wanting to drink from a cup in this house? “You know Angie’s husband has been in town, wanting to see her. He was upset that she’d left. You wouldn’t allow him in, and now...” She looked hard at the woman.

The black eyes took hers in calmly. “Angie didn’t want to see him. It wasn’t for me to let him in.”

“You’re sure of that? I mean, why? It wasn’t you who persuaded her? I’m convinced he loved her. He was broken by her death.”

Now the eyes looked away. “She had reasons, or she wouldn’t have been here. I don’t know what they were. All of them, anyway. It was her idea you know, this healing center for abused women.”

“Abused?”

“Yes, of course! That’s the raison d’être for this place. Angie wanted it that way. A sanctuary for abused women.”

“But there were no ... marks on the body, no evidence of abuse. Just the discoloration, the poison.”

“Abuse isn’t only physical.”

“Of course not.” Ruth thought other sister-in-law, Bertha: “God’s plan, God’s idea,” the crazed woman had said when Vic was kidnapped. All that anguish. The trauma for the boy. Ruth’s hair already going gray.

But she couldn’t imagine what the abuse was in this case. With Kevin Crowningshield, who seemed like compassion itself? He’d loved his wife—was that abuse? Perhaps there’d been some other problem with Angie. Some illusions, delusions, some pathological concerns.

“She seemed perfectly normal, Angie? I mean, nothing.…”

“Mental? As normal as the rest of us, I guess.” The woman gave a cynical smile. “What’s ‘normal,’ anyway?”

Dr. Colwell came out into the kitchen. His face was grim. “I’m pretty sure, almost positive,” he said, “that you’re right, Ruth. Something has poisoned another woman here—maybe the lot of them. But the others won’t let me near them.” He shook his head as if to say, What can you do with a bunch of stubborn females?

He yanked open the refrigerator door. “Better not throw anything away. Milk, broccoli, this white stuff—” He made a comical face; obviously, he was a meat-and-potatoes man.

Isis looked weary, her shoulders collapsing under the thick neck. “The police called just before you came,” she said. “They’re sending someone from—what do you call it? Forensics. But we can’t starve while they sort things out! We’ll keep on eating, you know, though I admit we’ve had little appetite since Angie.…”

“You bought the food in town?” Ruth asked.

“At the health-food store?” It was presumably an answer.

“I shop there myself, off and on,” Ruth said. “And I’m perfectly healthy. My daughter Sharon won’t go anywhere else.”

“How do you account for poison, then?” said Isis, a trace of pink in her ivory cheeks.

“How indeed?” Doc Colwell said to Ruth when Isis spun about, at his request, to call an ambulance for the sick woman—they’d have to pump her stomach at the emergency room. Ellen was a frail woman, according to Isis, allergic to “everything”: pollen, bees, strawberries, hay. Chocolates,” she added significantly. “I know. She sneaked them in. Caffeine.”

“Keep her away from my farm, then,” said Ruth. “Hay and caffeine. I live off both.”

* * * *

Ruth was relieved to be home. She flung out her arms, breathed in the good farm smells; the round bales of hay stacked neatly in the fields fed the eye. She laughed even when she found things in a turmoil. Zelda had gone on a rampage, as if she knew her calf was dead, had torn through the fence that Tim and Joey had recently mended, raced into the pasture on the Flint farm. Fay Hubbard had found her in the barn, munching alfalfa with Dandelion.

“They’re soul sisters,” said Tim, emerging from the milk room, pulling on his salt-and-pepper beard. “I couldn’t drag her out of there for ages. And you should see the mess she made of that fence! Joey and me had it fixed up good after she broke through to have her calf, didn’t we, Joey?”

“Yup, we had it fixed up good,” said Joey, who loved to repeat Tim’s words.

“And now it looks like a herd of buffalo galloped through.” Tim mopped his forehead; his face glistened with sweat. Though Tim had “found himself” in farm work, he’d admitted lately. He is lucky, she thought, wishing she knew who
she
was: mother, farmer, sometime wife—or now, it seemed, some kind of interfering neighbor? She’d found herself for the second time in that role, and felt... well, not exactly comfortable in it, yet stimulated by it: There was the satisfaction of digging out the truth—justice! For someone else anyway, if not herself.

“And this place needs serious work,” Tim reminded her.

Of course it did, the house starved for paint, and the barn, too. They’d built it back up after last spring’s electrical fire but then ran out of money before they could give it a second coat of barn red. What they had put on was already peeling. The two cement-block stave silos looked as if they’d been underwater and drudged up out of the sea. There was a blight on the baby balsam and Scotch pines Tim had planted as a way to diversify. The sheep on the pasture she rented to her friend Carol Unsworth had practically munched it bare, but she couldn’t turn Carol out.

“Tim, you know as well as I that we can’t afford it. Not yet. When the place falls down, then we’ll jack it back up. Look, winter’s coming,” she conceded. “We’ll have more time then for repairs.”

Repairs to her life, too, she thought. Another letter from Pete in the mail today. Hints he’d start proceedings when he arrived in Branbury. “What are you waiting for?” he wrote. “You want to get on with your own life, don’t you? Remarry? Have a little fun, a little sex? I want that for you, Ruth.”

So solicitous, she thought. Worrying about her welfare, her sex life (he loved to address that in his letters; his own was “terrific,” he constantly reminded her). Well, he could wait. He could just wait. She thrust out her lower lip.