Poison Apples (32 page)

“Good. I’d like to have seen his face. They’ll be building on Lucien’s farm soon. I’m sorry, Ruth. They’ll be using your road. Cow Hill Road. Not so many cows now, though.”

“Mine! My cows will still be here.”

“You’re shouting, Ruth.”

She didn’t care. Her nose was running—those damned onions. She wiped it on a paper napkin. She wanted to talk to Colm about Adam, about Opal. But Emily was upstairs, she heard the girl in the bathroom, running a bath. She’d want a hot bath after working in the barn, she’d want the smell off her body. Ruth understood. She hadn’t had the problem when she was a girl, hadn’t been raised on a farm herself. Now she understood.

“I’ve something else to talk to you about,” she told Colm. She listened: The water had stopped running in the bathroom. She lowered her voice. “It’s about the orchard. Another thought, another possibility. Besides Rufus. Have you talked to Honey Fallon? About Cassandra and that minister? I half thought
he
might have been the third partner. I don’t want the FBI running him out of state till we find out what he’s involved in here. He’d been married to Cassandra, we know that. And she’s related to Rufus, I think.”

“What? You didn’t tell me that.”

“Emily’s seen the family cemetery. At least there’s a Cassandra buried there, and that’s an unusual name. There might be some connection. With Cassandra’s death, I mean, with the orchard mischief. All of them, mixed up together: Cassandra, Rufus, that alias-alias minister?”

Colm was quiet a minute. “Could be a connection. But what?” He said he’d look up Rufus’s background anyway. And then, yes, he’d go see Honey Fallon. “Pump her a bit.”

She smiled. “Pump her? Really? I thought you and Fallon were friends.”

He snorted. “You have a dirty mind, you know that, Ruthie?” She didn’t know why she’d said that. Sometimes dumb things dropped out of her mouth. But sex was on her mind more often of late. Maybe she wasn’t the prude, after all, that Pete said she was.

But here was Tim coming up the back steps, that meant another problem. He had something metal in his hand, a broken part. Good Lord! His shirt was bloody. She put down the phone with a quick “ ‘Bye,” flung open the kitchen door. “What happened?” she said, running to get a clean towel, to see where the blood was coming from.

“Brakes gone,” Tim said, waving away her concern, “on the John Deere.” He sank down into a chair, holding his chest. “We were going down a hill, Joey and me, Joey sitting on the fender. That hill behind the barn, you know, where we planted a new acre of balsams? I left him in the tractor, had it in gear, but angled, I thought, so it wouldn’t move—while I went to check the trees, next thing I hear Joey yelling, damn thing’s moving! Joey’s on his way downhill. He jumps in the driver’s seat, but the brakes are gone! Ruth, I’m in a sweat! Joey’s hollering his head off. No brakes! I’m running after, running like hell, grab the wheel, my shirt’s caught. I’m dragged along and the back tire rolls over me before it runs into a clump of bushes. Probably busted a couple ribs.” He dabbed at the blood with the towel. The blood she saw was largely surface, but he was undoubtedly right about the ribs.

“We’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

“Christ no, no hospital. No way! I’m alive, I’m okay, Ruth. But somebody did this, I bet. Somebody messed with the brakes.” He swallowed the coffee she’d handed him, grinned at Joey, who was bursting through the kitchen door: excited, breathless with the tale he had to tell. “I woulda been kill without Tim, he save me, Tim!” he shouted through his whistly teeth. “Tim, you aw right, Tim?”

“What is it? Who’s hurt?” Emily dashed down the steps in her blue cotton bathrobe. “Tim, what happened?” Then Vic clomped in, home from soccer practice. And Tim and Joey had to tell the tale all over again. They were laughing now, as though it were nothing: tampered brakes and a heavy tire rolling over the chest...

“See the marks? See, Ruth, see Emily, see Vic, where it rolled over on ’im?” Joey bawled, pointing at Tim’s chest, the mauled shirt. “Lookit. Big black tire marks. An’ blood!” Awed, he sat down beside his foster father, stroked his arm. Ruth would keep an eye on Tim—at least make him see a doctor, bandage those ribs.

She put an arm around Vic. It might have been Vic in that tractor, or Emily, Ruth thought. They knew how to drive it; there might not have been a Tim there to throw his body at it, stop it in time.

“Quit squeezing, Mom, you’re hurting me,” Vic complained, but Ruth couldn’t let him go.

Chapter Sixty-five

Colm met Honey Fallon at Calvi’s, the local soda fountain, established 1910. You could get a black and white soda there, or a butterscotch sundae with nuts and cherries—which was exactly what Honey did. Colm had a moment of panic that he didn’t have enough cash and ordered a glass of water for himself. “It’s all right,” he told Honey, “I’ve already had my sugar fix for the day. At work, you know.”

Honey said, “At work? I thought it was a funeral parlor, not an ice-cream one.”

That remark set the tone for the interview. Honey was in a jolly mood, she’d just won one hundred fifty dollars from the state lottery. “A hundred fifty!” she squealed. “Now I can buy that new winter coat I’ve been wanting. It’s seal. Roy likes me in fur, but he never puts up the money. He’s getting chintzier with every new year.” She giggled and dove into the sundae; her nose came up butterscotch.

“Why I’m here,” Colm began, “is about Turnbull—uh, Wickham. I’m wondering exactly how you did find out. I’ve a couple more things I want to know about him. But first—”

“Oh, that was easy,” she interrupted. “I went to see him, you see. It was before that high school thing, my niece was in that teacher’s class, the poor guy who .. . you know.” She made a motion as though to slit her throat, although it was a bullet that wounded Samuels, they both knew that. She popped a cherry in her pink mouth. Colm waited, while she smiled at him through cherry teeth.

“It was at Michael’s house, he didn’t like us coming there—we held church meetings in Cassandra’s barn. I was already getting disillusioned, you know, because of the way he treated that young woman.”

Colm shook his head, confused. “What young woman?”

“Oh, the one with the seizures. A pretty girl. She couldn’t help it, of course, it came on her suddenly, one time, in the middle of one of our meetings. She fell down on the floor, it was frightening—for her, for us. But Gertrude was a nurse before she got religion, she knew how to deal with her, how to pull the tongue out so she wouldn’t swallow it. She called the girl’s mother, she came and got her. Then afterward—afterward, Christ—that’s what he liked us to call him: Christ—said she couldn’t come back anymore, her seizures were a curse. Imagine that. A curse! On that pretty talented girl! She wrote poems, did I tell you? Had some of ’em published. She gave me one, it was about a waterfall. She only joined like me, she was looking for something special, spiritual. Well, after that comment about the curse ... I started wondering. And then, oh, there were other things.”

“Such as?” Colm was interested, though he resolved to keep the original question in mind—what was the original question? He couldn’t remember—oh yes, how she knew his real name. But he had a question out on the floor. Didn’t he?

“Goodness gracious,” Honey said, spooning up the sundae. A squirt of vanilla ice cream landed in Colm’s water glass. “Where do I start? Well, a lot of stuff about a nursing home he was going to start up, how prayer was going to cure the old people, cure us. Stuff about picketing Planned Parenthood, all that anti-abortion thing. He handed out literature about Lambs of Christ. It was such a sweet name! I love lambs. But I discovered they were pretty nasty lambs. That’s how I found out his real name. Umm, I lo-ove butterscotch. How many calories you figure in this sundae? I’m keeping count on a chart I have at home.”

Colm shrugged. “Just enjoy it. You said you found out his real name?”

She patted her bun, it was falling down, a soft gray curl swung like a pendulum in front of her nose as she spoke. “I went to his house like I told you. That woman was there, that Cassandra— oh, and I found out something else, too!”

Colm was dizzy with the sudden swerves in the dialogue; he swallowed his water, choked on it, coughed.

“That Cassandra, she was his wife! She wasn’t his cousin at all like she told us. She was his wife. Well, Roy said you knew that. You steamed open a letter or something. Naughty, naughty.” She shook a finger at him. “Anyway, they were arguing. It was the cleaning lady let me in. I could hear them in the kitchen. The cleaning lady didn’t even announce me—well, it wasn’t her job, I guess, she wasn’t a butler or something.” Honey giggled. “There was a pile of mail on the front table. Something from Lambs of Christ.”

She leaned across the table, peered into Colm’s face. Her eyes were a deep hazel, he could see the powder on her nose that was slightly sweating with what she had to tell. “It was addressed to one Arnold Wickham, at that same address. It had been slit opened, that’s how I knew it was him. He wasn’t Turnbull or Chris Christ at all, but Arnold Wickham! Not that I knew who in hell—pardon my French—Arnold Wickham was, it was just that now he had three names, and that was two too many for me. But that argument was going on, and being a policeman’s wife, well...”

She licked her spoon, slurped up the last of the butterscotch. “You wouldn’t be a good boy and get me a drink of water, would you?”

Damn, he thought, just when she was getting to the meaty stuff. But he got up obediently, waited while the kid gave change to an adolescent boy, then took the water back to Honey. She was practically gasping. “Mmm,” she said, and swallowed it down as if she’d been walking through a desert. She blew her nose into a tissue. “Where was I?”

“The argument. Between, um, Wickham—and Cassandra, who’s not his cousin but his wife. Or was.”

“Was, yes, now I remember. She had a daughter by a husband before Wickham. And he wanted Cassandra’s money for himself, not for the daughter.” She looked triumphant at the realization. Her voice was thick with butterscotch. “The vacuum was grinding away in another part of the house. They thought the cleaning lady couldn’t hear. They didn’t know I was there!” She marveled at her exploit.

“Money? For what purpose?”

“For development! For Cassandra’s cousin. And Cassandra’s cousin was—guess who?”

Colm waited.

“Rufus Barrow, that orchard man.” She leaned across the table as though Colm were hard of hearing. “She wanted her money—
her
money, mind you—not just for the daughter, but to invest in houses on the orchard. Because Rufus was into a development firm now, she said. But our dear minister wanted the orchard left alone; he wanted the money to go into his causes. Lambs of Christ, that Creator’s Rights party site on the Internet—you know that one? I had Roy look it up. Why, they’ve got our own Senator Leahy on their hit list!”

“But she wouldn’t give in.”

“Nope. She would not. Uhn-uh. Not only that, but it turns out she controlled the money. He’d married her for her money— she was yelling that at him now. He wasn’t getting a penny of it for himself, she said, for she had other causes, too. She belonged to some White Citizens’ Council—‘keep Vermont pure’ is their motto. Oh, it ain’t maple syrup she was talking about, or milk.” Honey winked at Colm. “Hate groups. No blacks, no gypsies, no gays, no Jews. Roy looked that up, too: They want to homogenize Vermont—can you believe it? Turn us into skim milk! Well, that’s when I got out. Out of the house, out of the church. I didn’t want to be on that hit list. I’ve got Jewish friends, I mean! For that matter, I’ve got pro-life friends, too, when I was in the Catholic church—but they don’t want violence, either. Well, Colm”—her voice was a low hiss—”I didn’t want to be in the house if one of those two offed the other, ’cause they were getting to that point. What would I do with a dead body on my hands? It’s bad enough being married to a policeman!”

She was finally quiet, drank her water, struggled up; she had a hair appointment, she said. “My hair is falling out, handfuls, every time I comb it! My hairdresser has some special shampoo supposed to keep it stuck to the scalp.” She grinned. “I’m already late.”

He thanked her, watched her scurry out; she reminded him of a rabbit the way her rear end wiggled. He liked her, though, she had sense. She got out of that church—if one could call it a church. He was suddenly hungry, decided he’d have a sundae after all. A chocolate fudge sundae. “With nuts, with whipped cream,” he told the kid behind the counter.

Then discovered he’d forgotten to bring his wallet.

But it was all right, the owner said, and had the sundae brought over by the kid. He knew Colm; Colm had sold his daughter a couple of acres. Colm could bring in the money later.

“And another glass of water,” Colm told the kid. Now, though, he was sorry he’d ordered the sundae. He wanted to call Ruth, tell her about the interview. Was there a phone in here? The sundae would have to wait....

Chapter Sixty-six

But why would Turnbull—whatever his alias was—bother the Earthrowls?” Ruth asked over the phone; she was confused. “I mean, if he didn’t want Cassandra’s money going to the developers?” She was in the barn, tending to a brand-new bull calf. Poor thing, he’d have to be sold. But Oprah thought he was beautiful, she was licking him down, her moist brown eyes focused on the spindly, sweaty fellow. Oprah was her newest cow, named after the TV queen. She’d named the cow that partly because the name Oprah reminded her of Opera, and this cow sang. She was humming even now, in a mezzo-soprano mewl. It was a duet with Madonna, in the next calf stall. “Can you hear her, Colm?” She held out the receiver.

He wasn’t interested in the bovine duet. “Jeez, I don’t know,” he said. “There must be a reason. There must be a link between him and the Earthrowls. Are they Jewish? Gypsies? Not gay, I don’t think.”

“Well, Moira’s Catholic. I don’t know Stan’s background. The name sounds Anglo-Saxon—Beowulf comes to mind. I could ask, I suppose.” The bull calf wasn’t sucking, she saw, she’d have to get him started. “Can I call you back, Colm? I’ve got a newborn here. It needs a helping hand.”