Keeping the Peace (21 page)

“For you.” He was an entertainer, after all.

“Okay,” Mia said cheerily.

“We’ll be back in a couple of hours.” John put his hand on the small of Melanie’s back and guided his wife out the door. “It seems the Mouse has caught the swing of the Great Pendulum of Emotions back the other way.”

They climbed into the police vehicle.

Chapter Fifteen

“I
T’S
G
IRLS
,” M
ELANIE
S
AID
as she fastened her seat belt. “Their nastiness is unfathomable. A teenaged girl is a force to be reckoned with. A force of nature.”

“I don’t remember you being that way.”

“That’s because I was
the
girl. You only remember what I wanted you to remember. Things boys remember.”

“Hmm.” He found himself remembering the things boys remember.

They drove in silence for a while. Then Melanie said, “Do you really think there’s a connection between old Bud Seeley and this Richard Seeley? I didn’t even think Bud Seeley was still alive.”

“According to Becky, records show Richard Seeley was born in Rutland. Bud Seeley is worth talking to. There’s got to be a connection there. It’s not that common a name in this area.”

They turned off the main route that ran through the center of the tiny village and took a secondary road to the north. Up they went, and up still, climbing the old narrow dirt road. John hoped they didn’t meet anybody on the way down. The snow banks on either side were higher than the car.

“Any of this seem familiar?” he asked.

Melanie sat quietly staring out the window of the vehicle. “Well, I guess, sort of. Only, I’m not sure it wasn’t some other back road in some other hill town. Oh, wait. Wait! Yes! There’s the old school house. I do remember that! It looks like somebody’s restored it—maybe living there. I think you take a left here.” She pointed up ahead. “Yes, right here.”

“That’s what the GPS says.”

“I haven’t been here since I was a kid. A little kid.”

“I think this is the driveway.”

“As I remember, it was a beautiful piece of land. The buildings were really run-down, but the land was beautiful, with high meadows and huge maple trees.”

They proceeded slowly down the long driveway. One narrow path, barely able to accommodate the Suburban, had been plowed. On either side grew huge sugar maples that John guessed may have been survivors of the 1938 hurricane and were over a hundred years old. They breached a little knoll, and the farmstead came into view. John looked around. Bud’s farm was a dilapidated homestead set away from any visible neighbors. This was probably a good thing. At one time, there had been a house, a barn, and solid outbuildings. Fences had separated the various farm animal species, and there had been a lawn and garden as well. That had been long ago. Now, only part of the barn stood, housing several ancient dairy cows. The rest of the building had collapsed, making good cover for myriad mice, rats, and rabbits. All the paint had long since been removed from the house by the winds of the two hundred winters it had seen. The fences had fallen into disrepair, and various poultry and mammals now roamed freely wherever and with whomever they chose.

John drove into the driveway. “It’s muddy underneath this snow,” he said. “I can feel the tires slipping around.”

“I think it must always be muddy. I remember being up here in the winter, spring, all the seasons. The driveway was always muddy. Hey! Look out for the dogs.”

What seemed to be hundreds of dogs came barking from all corners of the property. There was even a litter of fuzzy puppies bumbling through the snow behind one particularly scrawny bitch. The dogs kept up their cacophony as John brought the Suburban to a halt. He was afraid of running over the puppies.

“Think he’s home?” John asked as he looked around.

“I’m sure he is,” answered Melanie. “He’ll probably come out soon. Just look at those adorable puppies!” Then, more to herself than to him, she said, “It’s just the way I remember it so many years ago.”

Dozens of cats watched from the top of the rows of stacked firewood in the woodshed. Chickens, geese, and guinea fowl wandered in and out of the rundown shed that stretched from the house to the barn. A large draft horse and two Jersey cows eating from a round bale of hay nearby remained oblivious.

Suddenly, the door of the house opened and Bud came out.

“He looks exactly the same,” Melanie whispered.

Bud was a tiny man, bent over with either arthritis or scoliosis. He was dressed in dirty overalls and high black rubber boots. Unshaven and muddy and missing half his teeth, he looked a hundred years old. He waved at them from the doorway of the house, smiling, then kicked his way through the pack of assorted dogs.

“C’mon,” he called to them as he approached the car. “C’mon out. These dogs won’t touch ya.” His voice was that of the old Yankee, high and nasal with an emphatic twang on the vowels.

John got out of the Suburban and extended his hand. “Police Chief John Giamo,” he said. Melanie stepped up beside him from the other side of the car. The dogs pressed around them, wiggling and smiling. “And this is my wife, Melanie.”

Bud shook their hands heartily with a grubby, arthritic paw. “Glad ya came. Glad ya came,” he said.

Melanie stepped forward. “I used to come up here with my uncle to buy chickens,” she said. “He bought me some bantams. A trio of black rose combs. I won first prize at the fair with them.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s yer uncle?” He eyed her sharply, like a bird.

“My uncle was John Asher,” Melanie explained. “He died five years ago, now.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” sputtered the little man. “John Asher. Nice, nice man. I remember when he died. Too bad. Too bad. So you liked them chickens, did ya?”

Melanie nodded emphatically. “Yes, I did.”

“John Asher. He bought lots of poultry off’n me. Good customer. Bred some nice stuff himself.” The little man leaned closer to her, eying her intently. “You still got chickens?”

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “I have a small flock of laying hens.”

“What kind ya got?”

“I’ve got Buff Orpingtons and Brahmas and Cochins,” she answered.

“Yeah, the buffs set good. You raise any chicks?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I let one or two of them set once or twice a year.”

“That’s good,” he said. “You come to buy chickens today, did ya?”

“No, not today,” said Melanie. “My husband wanted to talk to you today.”

Bud turned a suspicious eye on John. “What can I do for ya, Chief?”

“Well,” John said, “I need to ask you some questions. First, I need to know, is Richard Seeley related to you?”

“I got a grandson Richard Seeley,” said the old man carefully. “You want ta come inside?”

Somewhat reluctantly, they followed him into his home. As they stood in the front hall, he hobbled around them and shut the door.

“There!” he said. “In where it’s nice and warm. Come on in the kitchen.” He led the way down the hall to where the kitchen stretched across the back of the house. He pointed to an old enameled table piled high with papers and dirty dishes. “Have a seat,” he said, swiping the detritus into a far corner of the table. “I’ll pour some coffee.”

John and Melanie pulled out chairs and sat. John looked around while the old man rummaged for cups and spoons. It was warm, that was for sure. A wood-fired cookstove heated the room, its back against a huge center chimney block on the inside wall. The chimney block was a beautiful thing, made of old, thin bricks laid in the Flemish Bond Pattern, unusual for interior work. John saw his wife examining the chimney block, too. She loved anything old, and their own house was filled with the eclectic conglomeration of antiques she had collected over the years. John’s family of recently landed immigrants prized anything new and modern. “Antique” to them translated to “used,” and “used” translated to “junk.” They had little use for anything that someone else had possessed before them, even houses. John’s father and all of his siblings had built the houses that they lived in. They were not in the least bit envious of John getting his grandmother’s house. Their houses had dry, finished cellars, where they put pool tables or kids’ playrooms. They did not see the charm of a cellar where a drainage hole had been left purposely in the stone foundation wall for the spring melt to seep through.

The old man crossed the room to the ancient wood cookstove that stood against the massive brickwork. John unzipped his jacket. He noticed Melanie’s cheeks were flushed.

Bud set the cups of coffee before them with a steady hand. “I got sugar, but I run out of milk. The cow dried up, and I forget to get it at the store.” He cackled and shoveled about four teaspoons of sugar into his own coffee and then pushed the sugar bowl toward Melanie. “Sorry,” he said. “I forget my manners, too. Ladies are supposed to be first.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Seeley,” she said, flashing him her warm smile.

John waited. Melanie passed him the sugar, and he helped himself. No one spoke as he stirred the dark liquid. John lifted the cup to his lips.

“You haven’t told me what you come here for, Chief.”

John swallowed and set the cup down. The little man was staring at him with beady eyes, very much like a chicken himself. “I need to know whether there is a connection between you and a person I’m looking for. Mr. Seeley, you say you have a grandson named Richard Seeley. Did or does he live in California? In his mid-forties?” John shared the driver’s license photo Becky had pulled from California’s DMV records.

The little man never missed a beat. His glanced quickly at the picture and then looked again at John, his voice clear. “Yep. That’d be him.”

“Have you seen him lately? Has he been here?”

“Well, yeah, he has. I ain’t seen him for twenty-five years, that’s the truth. Then, just like that, he shows up and wants to stay with me. He said he was on a ski vacation. What’s he done?”

John ignored the man’s question. “Can you tell me about him?”

Bud continued to stare at John. They were like two men bargaining over the price of a cow. It was a contest of patience. Who would speak first? Nearly thirty seconds passed before Melanie broke the silence.

“Mr. Seeley, we realize that even though you haven’t seen your grandson in twenty-five years, family is still family, and blood ties need to be respected, but, Mr. Seeley, this is a very important police matter. We wouldn’t be here bothering you, but people’s lives are in danger. My husband is very straightforward. We’ll tell you what we know.”

Melanie’s bit of diplomacy seemed to cut through the barrier the old man had thrown up. It was precisely why John had brought her. That, and some other stuff he’d been thinking about lately. He dragged his mind back to the business at hand. “Mr. Seeley?”

The old man pushed himself back in his chair and then leaned forward, both arms crossed on the table top. “I’ll tell you about Richard,” he said. As he talked, his nasal twang became more pronounced. John guessed he didn’t get many visitors and didn’t get to talk to too many people. An audience of this importance was an opportunity, no matter the subject. “It’s kind of a sad story. My wife and I had two kids. We had Al and Carol. Carol was the oldest. She was a good girl, went to school, got a job, got married. She’s a secretary or something, I can’t keep track, at the state house in Montpelier. Her husband’s head maintenance man there. Al was different. Him and me, we never got along. I know it bothered his mother bad, but there it is. He was always with the wrong friends right from the start. I got a nice place here. Plenty of land to make a living, even these days, but Al was never interested in farming it. He liked booze, girls, and making a quick buck, like his friends. He was still in high school, but he quit and got a job at the quarry in Barre. Lived in a flop house sorta place. Really upset his mother. He was eighteen when he started hanging out with Susan. She was only sixteen, but he knocked her up. Well, her old man was some upset, I’ll tell ye. He comes down here with the two of ’em and says, ‘What’re we gonna do?’ He don’t want ’em up there in Barre, ruining his precious reputation or some such nonsense. Well, my wife says they gotta get married and they can live here. You see, nobody knew her here. Al can live up in Barre and come home weekends till he finds something closer to home. So that’s what we did. They got married. Susan stayed here, waiting for the baby, and Al was coming and going.” Here the old man stopped and stared off into the space between John and Melanie. He ran his hand over the top of his balding head, took a breath, and continued. “Well, one night, a state cop comes to the door and says Al run off the road and was dead. They said he was drunk. I don’t know about that, but he was dead all the same. It broke his mother. Right there.” Another pause, then he spoke again. “The baby came. That was Richard. We had the girl—his mother—maybe three, four months after that.”

“Why?” asked Melanie. “Did she die?”

The old man snorted with disgust. “Nope. She run off. Run off and left the baby. Three-, four-month-old child. Left it.”

“Did she go home?” Again, Melanie asked the question. John was silent.