All Mortal Flesh (27 page)

Clare followed her to the table. “What do you mean?”

“The Traceys moved here in his sophomore year, which can be tough, since most of these kids have known each other since they were finger-painting in kindergarten together. Aaron kind of took him under his wing. Introduced him around to his friends, made sure he wasn’t left hanging on the sidelines.” She sipped her cocoa. “They’ve been good buds for three years now. But see, Aaron has always been one of those kids other kids like to be around. He has a lot of friends. Quinn, on the other hand, has Aaron.”

“He hasn’t made any other friends?”

“Not that exactly. It’s more—here’s an example. A bunch of the boys will all get together and hang out at Quinn’s house. But once Aaron leaves, everybody leaves.”

“Aaron goes over to the Traceys’ house?”

“Sure. I mean, we’ll have them over here in the summer, but when the weather’s bad, the Traceys have way more room than we do. And Quinn’s mother always has snacks and sodas and pizza for them. How she does it without breaking her budget, I don’t know. I have enough trouble feeding one teenaged boy, let alone five or six of ’em.”

Clare shook her head. “Quinn told us his parents didn’t want him seeing Aaron.”

Vicki laughed. “Well, if that’s how they feel, they hid it pretty well from us.”

Outside, there was a hissing and a clank, and then the sound of an engine revving up and pulling away. The garage doors rattled in their tracks, vibrating the kitchen.

“There are the kids now.”

The kitchen door banged open, and Clare had a glimpse of the mudroom beyond before a young man came in, already divested of his coat and boots. Aaron MacEntyre, Clare presumed. He had the look of a natural karate student: not too tall but powerfully built. Dark hair and dark eyes, his cheeks ruddy from the cold.

“Hey, Mom,” he said, glancing at Clare.

“Hey, babe. Did you have a good day?”

“Got an eighty-seven on that math test.”

“Good on you!” A girl of ten or eleven sidled in through the door. She had the same Snow White–style mix of dark and fair as her brother. “Alanna, honey, how was your day?” her mother asked.

“Okay,” the girl said. “Can I get on my computer?”

“Chores first,” her mother said. The girl made a face, slung her backpack onto one of the kitchen chairs, and retreated back to the mudroom outside.

“Aaron, this is Clare Fergusson,” Vicki said. “She’s a friend of the police chief’s. He’s in a bit of trouble, and she’s helping him out.”

The boy held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.” His smile was easy and infectious, making him seem less like a polite child and more like a man who genuinely was pleased to meet her.

“Hi, Aaron.” Clare couldn’t help but smile back. “Like your mom said, I’m trying to follow up on a few loose ends concerning the Van Alstyne case. You’ve heard Mrs. Van Alstyne was murdered, right?”

He plopped into the chair next to hers. “Yes, ma’am. Quinn and I were there the day she was killed. I’m surprised the police haven’t questioned us yet. Or—well, maybe not.”

“That’s what I’m here to ask you about,” Clare said. “I understand from Quinn the two of you saw a car in the Van Alstynes’ driveway that Sunday.”

“Yes, ma’am, but don’t ask me to tell you what it was. It was little and Japanese, that’s about all I can remember.”

“Quinn was able to give us the make and the license number—” Clare began, but Vicki interrupted her.

“Babe, what’s this about Quinn’s parents not wanting you to hang out with him?”

Aaron’s display of confusion was almost theatrical. “What?”

“That’s what Quinn said, when Chief Van Alstyne questioned him. He didn’t want the chief talking to his parents, he said, because he was with you, and his parents didn’t approve of that.”

“Ahhh.” The boy ducked his head. A thick lock of dark hair fell across one eye, and he looked up at his mother sheepishly from beneath it. “That may be because he’s not exactly allowed to have anyone in his truck with him when he’s plowing.”

“Aaron.” Vicki frowned. “You’ve been going out with him all the time when he plows.”

The look on Aaron’s face was one of perfect teenaged exasperation. “It’s just ’cause his dad’s got his nuts in a wad about the insurance. He’s afraid if anyone’s in the truck and there’s an accident, he’ll be on the hook. It’s a dumb rule, Mom. Really, it’s safer with two. One to drive and one to keep an eye out for cars on the road.”

“I don’t care. If that’s Mr. Tracey’s rule, you need to talk with him and get permission before you go plowing with Quinn again.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

His capitulation was impressive. Back when she was a kid, Clare would have whined and pleaded a full twenty minutes longer. Clearly, Vicki MacEntyre was doing something right. “Aaron, do you remember anything else from that afternoon? Anything you might have seen at the Van Alstynes’, or along Peekskill Road?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. Sorry.”

“And what was it you were doing out there that day?”

“We were just driving around.” He gave his mother a deliberately mischievous look. “Maybe finding a few icy spots to do doughnuts on.”

“Aaron!”

Clare hid her smile behind folded hands. Intentionally spinning a pickup wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do, but considering the range of misbehavior two boys that age could get up to, it fell into the reasonably harmless camp.

“Can I go do my chores now? I want my computer time, too.”

Vicki gestured toward Clare. “Anything else?”

“No. Thank you, Aaron.”

“Anytime.” The boy rose and ambled into the mudroom. After he had closed the door behind him, Clare could hear the rustle of a parka coming off the hook and the thud of boots.

“He’s a good kid,” she said.

Vicki knocked against the kitchen table. “I could wish he’d spend less time on the computer and more on his homework. But what the heck. So long as he graduates and has enough skills so’s the army doesn’t stick him on the front lines, he’ll do fine. Craig and me never went to college, and we’re doing just as well as the Traceys. And they have degrees up the wazoo.”

Clare collected her empty mug and spoon and stood up. “What is it you and your husband do?”

Vicki stood as well. “Let me take that.” She hooked both mugs on one hand and pointed toward where the enormous barn sat across the road. “Organic meats. Beef and poultry. Guaranteed free range, pesticide-and hormone-free.” She opened the dishwasher and set the mugs inside. “We bought this farm from my folks, back when it was all dairy. But, you know, it’s damn hard for a small dairyman to compete these days. You gotta have something the big agribusiness companies don’t have.”

Clare retrieved her coat from the back of a chair. “So you went organic.”

“Yep. It can be tough. You gotta get certified, you can’t use antibiotics or treated feed, but in the end, we net forty percent over what my dad did on a per animal basis—and that was back when the Northeast Milk Compact kept prices high. We’re thinking of expanding into exotic meats. Bison. The restaurant trade is hot for bison.”

One of the best meals Clare had ever had had been stewed bison. “Do you sell locally?”

“We butcher stock here for special orders, and we send some poultry to Pat’s Meat Market in Fort Henry. Turkeys before the holidays, that sort of thing. But most of it goes down to New York.” She gave Clare an entirely different sort of assessment than she had at the door and flicked a card out of a holder. “Here’s our number. Smallest order we do is a side or a half steer, but once you’ve tasted our beef, you’ll be glad you have the freezer packed with it.”

Clare took the card. “I may take you up on that.”

“You can get it cheaper, but you’ll never get it better.”

Clare pulled on her parka. “Thanks for the cocoa, Vicki. And thank you for letting me come in and pester your son with questions.”

Vicki smiled a little. “I got a lot of experience with quirky folks. Craig’s great-uncle holds meetings for a group that believes the Cubans are trying to spread Communism through fluoridated water. And my father-in-law down in Florida’s convinced a super-macrobiotic diet and sheep embryo injections are gonna keep him alive till he’s two hundred. So when you come along wanting to play detective…” She shrugged. “Seems like pretty small potatoes to me.”

It was full dark outside now, and the falling snow flashed like a thousand stars in the light from the MacEntyres’ garage. Clare was surprised to see Alanna MacEntyre behind the Subaru, stomping her feet and beating on her arms to keep warm.

“My brother would like to see you,” she said, jerking her thumb back toward the barn, where a row of cell-like windows glowed with liquid light. “There’s something he wanted to say without Mom listening in.”

So. She and Russ had been right when they guessed the boys had been up to something more than spinning tires on country roads. “Thanks,” she said. “Are you headed back that way?”

“Un-uh. My chores are done.”

“And you waited around in the snow to give me your brother’s message? You’re a good sport.”

The girl looked at her disbelievingly. “No,” she said. “I’m smart about not pissing my big brother off.” Then she shook her head—
grown-ups
!—and disappeared into the mudroom without another word.

Clare crossed Old Route 100 cautiously. The blacktop was whitetop now, even the recent boot prints of the MacEntyre children fading fast as the snow accumulated. The massive tractor-and haywagon-sized doors that had caught Clare’s eye when she drove past earlier were, she realized, on the second floor of the barn, atop an earthen ramp that was slick with snow. The row of windows was below it, at waist height. She found the door, an ancient accumulation of boards so low she had to duck to go through it, and entered into a blast of warm air and smells: the musky green of sweet hay and clover, the plowed-earth scent of manure, the acrid methane sting of urine. Once down four steps she could straighten comfortably, although a tall man would still have collected cobwebs in his hair.

“Aaron?” she called. She was in a narrow chute, its wooden walls hung with farm implements that could have doubled for medieval torture devices, its floor crowded by tightly covered galvanized cans. She walked forward and found herself near the midpoint of an aisle stretching from one end of the barn to the other, dividing two long rows of stalls where scruffy red-haired cattle gazed upon her in rumination. Halfway between where she stood and the far wall a low wagon squatted, half filled with a reeking mound of wet straw and manure.

“Aaron?”

“Down here,” he called, and emerged from a stall near the wagon leading a steer, which, as Clare got closer, seemed to be the approximate shape and size of an Abrams tank. He clipped the beast’s lead to a ring and pulled a pitchfork from where it stood quivering in the muck.

Clare skirted the behemoth and peered over the edge of the stall. “Your sister said you wanted to see me.”

“Yeah.” With quick, efficient motions, he began pitching the soiled straw out the stall door, grunting with the effort.

While Clare waited for him to continue, she glanced around. The beams and joists showed its age, but like every other working barn she had seen in the North Country, it was meticulously clean. Farmers might neglect their children, their spouses, themselves, but they never neglected their cows. She caught the dark and liquid eye of the stall’s inhabitant, and the steer lowed at her. Red freckles dotted its pink nose. It was so sweet-faced, it was hard to imagine anyone turning it into hamburger and ribs.

“It’s a Gelbvieh,” Aaron said in her ear. She jumped. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, no,” she said. “I hadn’t noticed you’d finished. What’s a Gelbvieh?”

“Prinz.” As if recognizing its name, the steer thrust its nose into Clare’s palm. It was soft and cool and snuffly wet. “It’s a German breed known for the flavor of their meat. They have just the right, you know, mix of fat and muscle.” He reached up, grabbed a long loop dangling from a trapdoor, and, stepping into the center aisle, pulled it open. Straw torrented into the stall. Clare couldn’t tell how much was enough, but apparently Aaron could, as he snapped the door back into place and picked up his pitchfork again. He had his routine down pat. The bedding scattered across the floor without a single wasted motion on his part.

“I told your mother I might think about ordering a side of beef,” Clare said.

He emerged from the stall and unclipped the animal, leading it unresisting into its pen. “Prinz here’s ready, ain’tcha, big boy? We could do him tonight, let him hang for a few days, and have him all wrapped up for you by next Tuesday.” Clare made a noise. Aaron stepped out of the stall and latched it shut. “That’s if you want to let it bleed out and age a bit. Tastes best that way, you know.”

The steer had found its way to its hayrack and was contemplatively munching its hay. “I don’t know,” Clare said. “It’s a lot harder to think of it as pot roast once you’ve looked into its eyes.”

The boy shook his head. “It’s meat. It just comes prepackaged in a way that lets it feed and water itself. Really, it’s not any different than a watermelon.”

“A watermelon doesn’t have a pink nose.”

He gave her a look that was sly and a little challenging. “Wanna see where we do it?”

Clearly, he expected her to recoil in horror and decline. “Okay,” she said.

He led her back the way she had come, past the narrow entryway and stairs, past the remaining rows of placid cattle, until they came to a door set in a track at the end of the barn. Of necessity, it was low, but wide enough to have let the two of them and Prinz pass through, side by side. Clare half expected to see ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE carved around the frame, but instead there was a permit from the New York State Department of Health, certifying that the premises had passed inspection and that the operators were licensed to process meat for human consumption, etc., etc.

Aaron rolled the door open and flicked on a switch. Fluorescent lights sprang up, mercilessly lighting every nook and cranny of the slaughterhouse. Clare could tell at once they were a recent addition to the barn. She and Aaron reflected blurrily in the stainless steel plating along the walls. Four sides of beef hung from the ceiling, with several hooks free for the taking. The butchering side, identifiable by its steel table, rolls of paper, scales, and an armory of knives, was separated from the—what should she call it? killing floor? abattoir?—by a steel and tile divider. One side was hung with a deep steel sink; the other had two heavy-duty hoses coiled on rubber drums. On both sides of the divider, the smooth concrete floor was centered with a large grated drain.