Harvest of Bones (29 page)

She needed a little healing herself after the ordeal with Eustacia. She’d go see Isis, see how the rest of the women were faring, now that they’d got the poison greens out of their systems, the rest of the “garden” pulled up, taped off by the police. She’d see what herbs she should be taking. Sharon had told her how important folic acid was. “You should take it, Mother, along with vitamin C. For an older woman ...” She was, yes. Menopause just around the corner. Then what?

So. She’d look at that ill-fated garden again, determine, if she could, whose property it was on. That wouldn’t violate the police ordinance, would it? Look in on Bagshaw’s cat. The cat wasn’t to blame for his shenanigans. She hoped it wasn’t locked up inside—it probably didn’t have a litter box.

At the Healing House, Isis said that Ruth needed a massage. She told Ruth that she could see the tension in Ruth’s neck, in the tight way she held her shoulders. She offered to do the massage for free, assuring Ruth that she could do it from a wheelchair: “Nothing is impossible!” she said. Her arms were steely; she was working out with weights. Even before her accident, she had sat on a chair-on-wheels for the head and neck work. Ruth had been a help to her, she said. And she told Ruth that she, Isis, had been a suspect—questioned “to the point of exhaustion” by the police.

Ruth said, “I’m sorry, but you know the police had to question everyone involved. “And I
will
get a massage,” she promised. “As soon as I have a minute for myself.” When would that be? she wondered.

“That’s the problem here, for all these women,” Isis said, nodding her dark head vigorously. “They’ve never taken time for themselves. It’s all gone into children, husbands, jobs, lovers—and how do they get repaid?”

Rena, standing in the doorway in a long rayon print skirt, her hair lank about her shoulders, burst into tears. Isis wheeled over to her, put an arm around the young woman’s waist. “It’s all right, dear. It’s okay to be yourself,” she soothed. And Rena, just back from the hospital, smiled through her tears. “I keep getting reminded, that’s all, when you mention—you know.”

“I’m trying to make her face what’s happened,” Isis confided to Ruth out on the porch. “With her stepfather, as well as the husband. Make her talk it out, break the silence, you know. That’s when the healing begins.”

Ruth could smell the piney incense even out on the porch; it was in Isis’s hair. She supposed it relaxed the patient during a massage. Did they make an incense that smelled of hay? “You should try it, the massage,” Isis repeated as Ruth descended the steps, and Ruth said, “Maybe I will. I’ll call you.”

“Do you think he’ll sell it? This house, this property?” Isis called after her. Her face was suddenly a downhill slope. “Is there a will? I mean, Angie wanted this place to continue; she might have seen to that.”

A will, Ruth thought. Kevin had said nothing about a will. After all, Angie’d been in her forties; she’d have thought there were years still to think about a will. Though she’d had that blood problem. She might have made a will. Might have stipulated that the place be kept as a healing center. Might even have left it to Isis. Who knew? After all, she’d left her husband. Ruth made a mental note to speak to Kevin.

The Bagshaw house looked dark—not just because of the peeling paint but also because of the windows, their heavy green shades. She imagined Alwyn and his old mother down through the years, huddled inside, peering out the raggedy corners at the world. She didn’t have a warrant, or whatever it was you needed. She just wanted to see for herself—what? Well, the cat, of course, but something else, too. Something dark that had been hiding in the back of her mind since the discovery that the tire prints matched up: Bagshaw’s, and the prints on the mountain road. They had Bagshaw; the police had already searched the house. Something more extensive was in the works. They clung to the idea that Glenna was out there—somewhere. Fallon doubted they’d find her alive; he’d made that clear.

It was odd that the store clerk where Alwyn had reportedly dropped Glenna off hadn’t seen her. Surely she would go in for some reason—chewing gum for relaxation, a chocolate bar for energy. Glenna loved chocolate. Ruth had made her a chocolate cake once, for her birthday. Glenna would be exhausted after all her comings and goings. Oh, those adolescent girls! They felt themselves invincible, thought others should be, too. A woman of eighty—or thereabouts.

Something rubbed against her right leg, and she jumped, then smiled. It was the cat, a mangy-looking beast, but alive, purring: a spindly-tailed tiger. Wanting food. She ran back to her car, brought out the bag of Meow Mix she’d brought for it. But she had forgotten to bring a dish. She rummaged around on the front porch, then the back porch, but found only old newspapers, rusted chairs, a watering can minus its nozzle. The cat was crying for food now, and she dumped a little on the ground; the animal attacked it voraciously. She’d leave the rest with Isis, let one of the women next door come over to feed it as long as Alwyn was in custody. How long would that be? His was a serious offense: not first-degree murder, maybe not even second-degree. But they might call it manslaughter.

And what about the birds? Vic’s hawk? That crow? How many other birds might have died in the chain of poison?

She walked around to the back, where the metal cellar doors jutted up out of the ground; she yanked on them. They gave a little, then banged back down again—rusted out. They hadn’t been opened in years, most likely. She tried them again; this time, they came up a foot before they clanged back. She thought she heard something down there, a cry, a whistle. But she figured it must have been birds overhead in the tamarack tree. Chickadees—sweet-faced little fellows they were, with those soft-looking brownish feathers and the coy black cap. She yanked again, but no luck.

She walked back to the Healing House with the bag of dried cat food, knocked on the back door. Marna opened the door warily, a kitchen knife in her hand. She put it down when she saw Ruth. “I’m sorry, but I’m paranoid,” she said. But she was pleased to hear about the cat. “Oh, I love cats. I’ve been trying to convince Isis. But one of the women here is allergic to animal fur. I’ll go over right now and make friends. Would you come with me?”

She sounded apologetic, but Ruth smiled. Anyway, it might be that with two of them tugging on the cellar doors...

She had to wait while Marna hugged the cat. “I adore tiger cats. I had one at home I fed. Used to let it in the house when my husband wasn’t home. But he was fatter than this one. This little guy needs food. He needs love. Kitty kitty kitty? What’s his name?”

“I’m sure he’ll answer to any name you want to give him— just as long you have food.” Ruth went back over to yank on the doors. They almost gave.

“You want to open that?” asked Marna, her eyes huge and filled with the sun that was already dropping behind the mountain peaks. “Isn’t that... trespassing?”

Ruth explained about Glenna. “Oh, she’s probably not here at all; the police have looked, after all. It’s just that... well, Alwyn Bagshaw had evidently picked her up that time—I mean, he admitted that, said he left her at the store—and then she disappeared again. She didn’t go home; that’s where we’d expect her to be. So ...”

Mama crouched down on her heels beside Ruth; together, they pulled, heaved, giggled, pulled again—and the doors swung open, throwing them off their feet. Marna thought she’d let Ruth enter alone. “Though call if you really need me,” she said, and Ruth nodded. The basement was musty, dark, and dank; something skittered across her path as she reached the bottom step. She saw stacks of old wood and logs for the woodstove, a rusted bedspring, piles of rags, an ancient mower, but no Glenna.

The window was broken; shards of glass lay on the floor below. She hadn’t noticed from the outside—all those thick vines growing everywhere. There’s nothing unusual about a broken window, she told herself. She was about to leave, when she noticed a part of the wall slightly askew. Only it wasn’t a wall at all, she discovered when she drew closer, but a gray door, made to look as though it were part of the cement wall. It was slightly ajar. She pushed through and, to her surprise, discovered a small room, filled with wood piled up in tiers, and in the far corner, something that looked like a mattress, with clothing heaped on it. She went closer, her heart drumming; and knelt down.

But it was just that, a heap of old clothing, a cup of spilled cocoa, a stained black sweater—a woman’s sweater. She was outraged to see it.... But no Glenna.

She went back to the broken window. A rusted hammer lay on the floor below. The window was hardly big enough for someone larger than a child to get through.

“But Glenna did it—she must have; she’s wiry,” Ruth said aloud, and Marna called down, “What? Did what?”

“Got out! Maybe after they came for Alwyn,” Ruth shouted, a little dizzy now with this revelation. “Only Glenna didn’t know that.”

“But you said the police searched the house.”

“That was right after they took Alwyn. If that door was shut, they wouldn’t have noticed there was another room.”

“Where is she, then?” Marna shouted. “Why didn’t she come to us, next door?”

And that, Ruth couldn’t answer.

Chapter Eighteen

The police chief was getting his kicks—you bet your britches he was, the way he kept grinning, asking damn fool questions, repeating them even after Mac had replied. Who’d he think Mac was, some ignorant clod? When Mac was a journalist, he had at least three articles published, one in the
New York Times
itself—well, so it
was
a letter to the editor. But they printed it. The fifties it was, that Communist uproar, that McCarthy. Mac hated that SOB. Couple of his buddies in theater, indicted, summoned to Washington, made fools of. And all because they were artists. Like Mac. Could have been anyway—he just didn’t get his share of old lady luck.

“And you admit you were quarreling, you and Glenna,” the chief said. “The day you, um, disappeared.”

“I just told you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were quarreling.”

The chief folded his hands patiently, as if praying. “And what was this quarrel about?”

“Oh, come on, it was twenty years ago. Maybe more—I don’t know. Ancient history.”

“Was the quarrel over another man?”

“I just told you that I—yeah, well, I guess, come to think of it, it was. One of the Bagshaws, I think, fertilizer salesman—or was. The milk tester. Testing more than milk. I don’t know which— They looked alike. Both with that spiky, yellow-gray hair.”

“That would be Alwyn; he was a milk tester. Denby sold fertilizer—for a time at least. At that time, anyway.”

“I thought he worked for that place up in Vergennes— made parts for war planes.”

“Oh, he did, yes indeed, he did, but he was fired. Um, over a woman, I’m told.”

Mac smiled. “That’s what the fight was about, then.”

“Fight? Another one?”

“In the Alibi. I told that guy about it, the one who got me up here. Hanna.”

“Colm Hanna.”

“Okay. I don’t remember names anymore. They escape. You know how it is.”

The chief rocked back in his chair; Mac heard the tape recorder whirring. He hated being recorded. Not when he couldn’t play it back, change it if he didn’t like what he’d said. That’s what he liked about writing things down. You could make changes. Revise.

“So Alwyn Bagshaw was, um, making out with your wife?”

“He was, yeah.” Mac remembered things clearly now. Some things stayed in your head, the big events. They’d argued and Glenna came at him with a shovel—or was it a pitchfork?—and he left. Got madder, though, sitting in the house, went back out. He’d walked in the barn—and she wasn’t alone. She was on her back in the hay, yelling—well, she always yelled when they made love; Glenna was a yeller. Bagshaw on top other, pants down to his knees, the cows bellowing like they were getting it, too. That was the clear part, the visual, brilliant in his mind, like a film running backward, then forward again. After that, things got shadowy. Mac grabbing Bagshaw by the churning legs, Bagshaw furious, Glenna lying there. Mac smaller than the other, but with the upper hand. Grabbed a shovel, hit him on the head, again and again, till he was quiet.

“It was self-defense,” he told Fallon. “He would have killed me. Then Glenna—”

Fallon leaned forward, his upper teeth swallowing his lower lip, although he was still smiling. But he was excited; Mac sensed it. “Then Glenna,” he urged.

“Glenna was hitting me. I called her a whore, a bitch. She didn’t like that; she was mad—I’d interrupted her lovemaking. Bagshaw, that ugly idiot! What’d she see in a moron like that?” He smeared his palm across his forehead, and it came off wet; he could smell his own sweat.

“And Bagshaw—Alwyn, you think, was lying on the barn floor. To all, um, appearances ... dead.”

“Bleeding, yeah.”

“Did Glenna go to him? Try to help? Call an ambulance?”

“She was fighting me, I told you. She had that shovel, or pitchfork. She chased me out of the barn. I ran. I kept running. I left most of my stuff behind—just grabbed my typewriter. The old lady was there in the kitchen—Glenna’s mother. I remember her coming at me with a steaming kettle, had to push her off. I had a taxi waiting. Man, I left.”

“Knowing you’d killed Alwyn Bagshaw.”

“Thinking that, yeah. But he would have killed me.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Fallon. “Interview ended,” he said, sounding oh so important, Mac thought. Then the chief motioned to his officer to switch off the recorder. “You can go now, Mr., uh, MacInnis. If what you told us is true, um ...”

“That I killed Alwyn Bagshaw?”

“That you didn’t kill him, yes. You see”—Fallon cleared his throat importantly— “Alwyn Bagshaw is alive and in prison!” He looked into Mac’s face to see the effect of his words. Mac looked away. “For destroying birds with illegal poison, with contributing to the demise of a, um, neighbor woman. Of course ...”

Mac waited. He was confused now; his memory was leaping about: from Glenna to Bagshaw, from Vermont to New York City, then to the retired journalists’ home Hanna had routed him out of. He’d never complain about the food again if he could just go back there—get out of this confounded cow country. He’d been a fool, taking a ride from that woman—May or Fay, or whatever her name was.