Dead Dancing Women (19 page)

“Why Ruby Poet? She doesn't own anything out here.”

“Who knows why? Maybe she said something to one of them like she said to me. Don't ask me why they're doing it, you just better take a long look at those folks, is all I'm saying.”

Harry was angry now, whether at me, Dave Rombart, the state police, the dead women—I couldn't quite figure out.

I told him I'd pass on his suspicions to Deputy Dolly, who was leading the investigation for the Leetsville police. He shook his head, his shoulders slumped. I guessed Harry was thinking we were all doomed for sure. “Thought she was out of it,” he said. He was busy picking up pieces of kindling from the ground and cradling them in his arms.

Even Harry, I thought. Old Harry, alone back in these woods with his dogs. He knew things like the rest of them.

“She's not.” I turned to go, but hesitated. “And Harry,” I said sweetly. “If you hear anything else you think we should know, please come on over. You'll tell me won't you?”

I got a grudging nod from Harry and headed back toward home.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Dolly had one hand
on her gun. Her head was down, lips moving, as she plodded up my drive, grumbling, long-faced, and in no obvious hurry to save me from Harry Mockerman. Poor Flora tip-toed along behind, huffing and puffing. This was my cavalry.

They spotted me at the edge of Harry's drive, emerging from the brambles and pulling fat, thorny pickers from my jeans. Flora waved and smiled. Dolly almost smiled, but caught herself. She scowled and yelled, “You took too damned long … what were you thinking? Had the two of us scared to death. Thought I was going to have to come shoot my way into Harry's house …”

And on and on.

“I'm fine,” I said, meeting them in the middle of the road, in the shadow of one of the rolling dark clouds overhead. The day was starting to match my mood: threatening, gusty, and not to be trifled with.

“Harry and I got talking. I forgot you were coming to get me in twenty minutes.” I looked pointedly at my watch. “Hmm. That was forty-five minutes ago. I could've been dead by now. I'm not depending on you two again.”

Flora had the good grace to give a sheepish laugh. Not Dolly.

“So? What'd he want?” she demanded, stepping out of the middle of the road so a car could pass.

“Want to go back to the house and talk? Or just stand here waving to the neighbors, who don't have enough to gossip about already?” I put my hands on my hips. The only way to deal with Dolly was to out “indignant” her.

Flora huffed and puffed. Her eyes, behind her pink-framed glasses, were large and uncertain. She looked down the drive, then off into the woods. “It's so peaceful out here. I don't think it's going to rain, do you? Could we just go sit someplace in your woods?” She
took a deep breath that turned into a sigh. “Somewhere close by. I feel at home here. Despite what's happened, it's not the forest doing these things. Never is. It's Man. Or Woman. We just don't know, do we?”

Dolly and I looked down. A little ashamed, I thought, that we hadn't put an end to this awful business, weren't even close to knowing what was going on, and that Flora Coy had a better outlook on life, despite everything, than either of us.

I figured Flora was out of steam after climbing the steep hill so I guided the women to a bench in front of my studio, where we could watch the leaves fall, smell the rich autumn smells, and turn our faces up to the sun, or clouds, or whatever happened by. Maybe, for just a minute, we'd forget the horror going on around us and sink back into what northern life was all about.

We settled along my wooden bench with a big, black metal eagle at the back. I'd put the bench on a bluff up from the small pond outside my studio windows. Here I watched fox and coyotes and, once, a blue heron circling overhead, casting a wide shadow around and around until it was gone. Here I learned I was put on the earth for sunny days and shining leaves and a huge buck drinking at the pond, furred rack of horns made golden by the light. Here I'd learned to stop thinking for a time and simply be.

Flora worked her way onto the seat on the other side of Dolly, settling like a hen, plumping her bottom down, wedging it around for maximum comfort, then folding her hands in her lap. She heaved a huge sigh and let her legs dangle in the tall, dead grass. There we were, lined up like a row of ducks, staring off at nothing much.

Dolly sat forward, shoulders working together under her dark, wool police coat. She wasn't giving up her anger easily.

“What was it Harry wanted to tell you? You gonna tell us or not?” She turned her body slightly toward me but looked out to the meadow where tall, yellowed grasses lay matted in a wide circle. A deer's bed. Many deer.

“He wanted to come over and pitch a tent, bring some of his dogs, and protect me,” I said.

Dolly gave me an openmouthed stare. “Isn't that like putting the fox in charge of the hen house?”

“Now Dolly,” Flora chided. “There's nothing wrong with Harry, and I don't believe the man had a thing to do with killing anybody. He's been odd for years. No odder now than when he was a boy. Nobody pays him any attention.”

“He wasn't happy with you and your friends out there in the woods, dancing around the fire. He said he thought you were all crazy,” I said, thinking I had to keep everybody right down to earth, dealing with what was, not life as they wished it could be.

Flora leaned up and looked around Dolly. I'd hurt her feelings. “Oh Emily,” she said. “That's not nice at all. Poor Harry. Anything out of the ordinary for him is dangerous, I suppose. When you're not, well, not quite like other people, you need your life very orderly, you see. That's the way it is with Harry. Always has been. That's why he keeps so much to himself. Poor man can't handle what seems strange to him, though he's strange to just about everybody else. I mean, for heaven's sakes—his funeral suit? As if somebody couldn't find the thing in that tiny house.” She stopped, sat back, and bounced her hands in her lap. “Just listen to me being mean about Harry Mockerman because he found fault with our little circle of women. Isn't that the end of everything though? You see what all this is bringing us to?”

She leaned out again and looked straight at me, hard. “You heard it was Eugenia said she saw Dolly coming out of the funeral home? Well, of course you did. Can you imagine? I told Dolly to go right over there and get it straightened out. People are calling Dolly and saying terrible things. Me and my friends getting threatening letters. This isn't the same Leetsville anymore. We've always been such a friendly place. I don't care if it was a blizzard, a fire, or that tornado came through the north end of town once, why, everybody was out as fast as the wind was gone. With their chain saws, with food, with ladders—whatever help anybody needed. Taking folks into our homes.”

We sat and listened to Flora Coy mourning the place she used to know before death came to town in a big way.

“I've been thinking.” her voice fell. “What we were doing in Jos­lyn's woods, me and my friends—well, you think we brought this on in any way?”

Dolly looked around at her. “What do you mean? In what way?”

Flora dropped her voice to a whisper. Her eyes nervously searched the nearby bare trees around us. I got the distinct feeling Flora was frightened.

“I mean, I wasn't into ‘being in touch with nature' the way Ruby and Joslyn were, but I was a part of the ceremonies we had. You think we touched something evil without knowing it? Could there be evil spirits in these woods that we somehow got a hold of and let loose after all? I'd hate to think …” Her hands were at her lips. Dolly reached over and awkwardly patted the woman's knee.

“Not a chance,” I told her. “Whoever is doing this—it's not an evil spirit. Evil, yes. But very human. What we've got to figure out is why? Who would commit murder? Who benefits?”

“There's only me left.” Flora Coy was talking to herself.

I couldn't come up with any comforting words because I was too busy trying to figure my way back through the horror of the last week, trying to find some thread to hold on to, a way through the maze of events.

“You know, girls,” Flora sighed, “we really had the loveliest circle. You should've seen us. Just because we're old we figured we didn't have to give up living, having adventures. Why, we'd put flowers in our hair and hold hands and circle the fire under the stars. Sometimes we'd just throw back our head and dance around by ourselves. It was like being a child and circling while you watched the stars. Remember doing that?”

Dolly and I nodded, remembering only too well. She was making me wistful for the times I'd felt that free.

“And we had songs. Didn't do anybody any harm. It's just that we'd been friends since back in that one-room school over to School House Road. Girls together. Used to have sleepouts. Sing songs around a campfire. Dance if we felt like it. Tell stories. We wanted some of that back, and maybe bring peace to the world, or show Mother Nature we were grateful for our blessings. That's not bad, is it?”

Dolly and I made demurring noises. We let her talk. Overhead, geese veered off and away south. It seemed ominous, everything leaving us behind.

“We all loved Ruby maybe best of everybody. Gingrich she was then, back before she married Wally Poet. Such a true lady. And so smart. Ruby should've been a teacher or something instead of marrying Wally. But that's neither here nor there. She married him and that's that. Anyway, when one day Ruby got mad at the pastor over to the Baptist church, she said no religion let any woman have a God that looked like us. She said: Why did God have to be male when, to tell the truth, the males we'd had in our lives weren't all that hot. Ruby said we aren't male and she said God was really no more than a way of looking for a perfect self—that's what we were all looking for, and how could a woman's perfect self look like a man? She said we could find our spirit in nature and that's what we did though it turned out only Ruby could see her. Mother Nature, I'm talking about. Gray-haired old woman, Ruby said, with a happy face. Ruby said she could see her, smiling and clasping her hands to her breasts while we sang and danced. Well, at least that's what Ruby said. I liked the dancing and the being together the way we'd always been. Ruby said maybe one day we'd have a lodge by the fire, a kind of chapel all our own, so we could keep meeting in the woods right on through winter. Not have to skip the winter solstice 'cause of our arthritis.”

She sighed and looked around, eyes damp behind her thick glasses. “Wouldn't that have been nice? Ruby thought maybe word of what we were doing would spread one day, and we'd have this place people could come to from all over, take part in our singing and dancing, sit by the fire and tell their stories.”

She sighed again and wiped away a single tear running from crevice to crevice down her old cheek.

Dolly pulled a wad of Kleenex from her jacket pocket, peeled one off as if it were a dollar bill, and handed it to Flora. Flora sniffed, blew, wadded the Kleenex up and handed it back to Dolly, who stuck it in her pocket.

Flora's voice went on, wearier now, with a waver to it. “Mary Margaret always made a fine poppy seed bundt. Ruby made us moon cookies. We had the best times. Sometimes their children didn't understand. Ernie and Amanda, well, they'd complain, but then children always complain, don't they? I mean, just carry on if their mother isn't plain and ordinary so nobody notices her and nobody comments or disagrees with what she's doing. They didn't like that people criticized and made fun, but not one of us gave a tinker's damn. Excuse my language.

“I think it was always more important to Ruby than the rest of us—the Mother Nature business. She was more serious than me and Mary Margaret. Joslyn, well, I think Joslyn went along with Ruby more. She thought what we were doing was the beginning of a huge movement that was going to start right there, in her woods, and spread around the world. People honoring the earth. People honoring Mother Nature as if she was real. I went along with it because I loved my friends. But I wasn't as … well … as close to nature as those two. Now look, they're gone. Mary Margaret's gone. And what'd we try to do? Bring some peace to the world, is all. Honor the place we live. Nothing bad. Don't see why my friends had to die.”

Flora Coy fell silent. I could see, being out here in the woods, the need to love a place where you lived this close to nature. I already knew things I'd never known before. How trees had different personalities. How flowers of the same species could be different. How birds lived within their own small orbits. The nature of the dragonfly. Knowledge I treasured; things I'd learned while living up here. Who knew what more I'd learn if I really paid attention? Dancing in the woods around a blazing fire, honoring this place—it seemed eminently sane to me at that moment, and eminently sad that four women who engaged in such a gentle pastime should be singled out for death.

“Harry thinks it's Dave Rombart and that group,” I said after a while. “Said he's seen them in the woods doing odd things. He thinks it's them and their goofy games. Maybe all of you saw something you shouldn't have seen.”

Flora didn't answer right away. She was deep in thought.

Dolly looked around at me and smirked. “He thinks it's Dave and his wife? Well, guess what? The chief called me on my way out here. He got a call from Dave Rombart. Said one of his men reported he saw Harry back in the woods with what looked like a human head in his hands. You know what I think? I think Harry and Dave are squabbling over the same hunting turf and are looking to knock each other out.”

I had to smile. So here we were, caught up in more internecine warfare. Tiresome, if not worse.

“What's the chief doing about it?” I asked.

“Told me, and he called Officer Brent. They'll be over to see Harry today.”

“Then we'd better call them and tell them what Harry said. I mean, just to be fair.”

Dolly nodded and got up. “I'll go call in.” She turned to Flora. “You'd better stay with us 'til this is over …”

Flora shook her head as fast as she could shake it. “No sir. I won't be chased out of my house. I've got my birds to take care of. Can't leave them unprotected. I'll be very careful and I'll call you if I hear anything around my house or if I get a single phone call that seems the least bit funny, or if I get another letter.”

It was Dolly's turn to shake her head. “I don't think …”

“You don't have to, young lady. I'll do the thinking for myself.” Flora stood up. “Now, if you ask me it's time for you two to be talking to Eugenia about what she saw at the funeral home. You know it wasn't you, Dolly, so why don't you find out just what was going on outside there? And then you can take me home and check my doors and do whatever detectives do.”