HardScape (14 page)

Chapter 13

Early next morning, Wednesday, I took the remote phone out to my cutting garden and moseyed barefoot on the cedar mulch. Sheltered north and west from early frosts by the stone foundation of an old outhouse, the garden was still producing mums, roses, snaps, some weary cosmos, and even a late surge of balloon flowers. Aunt Connie telephoned at seven to remind me of our lunch date with my mother.

“Shall I drive?” asked Connie.

“Oh, I'll drive.”

As we fox-trotted through that ritual, I held the phone in the crook of my neck and deadheaded the mums, which had exploded while I'd been chasing Renny's ghost.

“Well all right, if you prefer.…Would you like to drive my car?”

I told her that I'd be delighted, cautioning, “If you warm it first, Connie, please remember to open the stable doors.”

“I'll remember. You told me that Sunday. I'm not an idiot, I'm just old. What are you bringing your mother?”

“White roses.” They were her favorite John F. Kennedy hybrid teas. I had asked when she moved to Frenchtown if she wouldn't like to take her prized roses. “You can bring me flowers,” had answered wise mother she.

“What are you bringing?” I asked Connie.

“There's a pie in the oven. My russets are almost ripe.”

I suppressed a groan. Her Roxbury Russet apple trees were enormous, and the thought of her on a ladder…“I'll pick you up at eleven-thirty.”

“Now listen to me,” she said. “I'm told your mother is very upset about Renny Chevalley. This latest…‘event' will only make things worse.”

“What event?”

“You know very well what event.”

“I'm afraid I don't.”

“It's all over town. You've been calling on the Long woman.”

The Fish Line was bottom-trolling. I said, “‘Calling on' implies a connection that isn't there, Aunt Connie.”

“People are talking.”

“People should mind their own business.”

“People should also obey the Ten Commandments, but they don't, so we accommodate reality. The point I am making, Ben, is that you ought to try and put your mother's mind at ease. She's a worrier. Let her see you at the top of your form.”

I went back to my flowers.

“Morning, Ben.” Scooter MacKay's big voice boomed across the fence.

I snipped three red American Promises and brought them over for Eleanor. Scooter was juggling a cup of coffee and his morning cigarette, which Eleanor does not allow him to smoke indoors. Come winter you'll see him smoking in the snow. I laid the roses atop the hedge. Eleanor knew to cut them again when she put them in water. Scooter gave me a broad wink. “I hear your friend's out on bail.”

“Are you publishing that?”

“That she's your friend or that she's out on bail?”

“Publish that she's my friend and I'll sue you.”

“Would you trammel a free press?”

“Cheerfully.”

Scooter indulged me with a laugh. The
Clarion
's crime column inclined toward moving-violation stories, spiced with colorful quotes from Trooper Moody in the mode of “cited for failure to keep left.” This week I anticipated a page-two item headed “Deaths Fail to Mar Cookout Weekend.”

“Steve Greenan says she's a knockout.”

“The doctor is right. She's also in love with the guy she's supposed to have shot.”

“Do you think she did him?”

“No way.”

“How come they arrested her?”

“She's rich and beautiful.”

“I hear her fingerprints were on the gun.”

“Scooter, could you hit a buck at eighty yards with a slug?”

“Sure, if he walked into it.”

“It's long range, isn't it?”

In his youth, Scooter MacKay had been a legendary hunter. Even Chevalley boys would walk the woods with him. But like a lot of us brought up to hunt, he had lost the cold, blind eye. “Depends on the loads. And the gun, of course,” he said. “But it's long.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Did you happen to notice the make of the gun?”

“Ithaca Deerslayer. Twelve-gauge.”

“That's a fine shotgun,” Scooter mused. “First shotgun specifically designed for deer slugs.”

“But eighty yards is still long range.”

“When they test-fired the Ithaca at a
hundred
yards they got a seven-inch vertical spread. Six horizontal.”

“From a bench.”

“But your friend nailed him at
eighty
.”

“She's not my ‘friend.' And she didn't ‘nail' him at any yards.”

“That's fine shooting. Wonder who taught her.”

I changed the subject.

“What's the word on the new medical examiner? Do you think his autopsy will stand up?” Steve and the other doctors who part-timed as assistant medical examiners did the field work. The M.E. conducted postmortems at the Plainfield morgue.

“Name's DeAngelo. He wrote the book. One of the top medical examiners in the country.”

“What the hell's he doing in Plainfield?”

“He retired from Boston. His family had a summer place there.”

“So he's pretty old. Maybe he's losing it.”

Scooter smiled. “I met him at the animal shelter benefit up there. The man's pushing fifty, at least. He might be as old as fifty-two.”

“Terrific.”

Scooter took a last drag on his cigarette and announced in a voice that carried to the flagpole, “Your lawn looks like hell.”

“I gave up the weed service.”

“Bad move.”

“I had second thoughts about putting all that poison in the ground.”

“Notice you're spending less on ads too.”

“They were drawing zip.”

Scooter shrugged. He can afford to. He hires out the
Clarion
's presses to print most of the other town weeklies in our section of the state. It's as lucrative as printing money, and less trouble.

***

Connie had started the Lincoln, backed it out of her stable, and closed the doors herself. She was sitting in the passenger seat at eleven-thirty, wearing a cardigan sweater over a summery dress and a Lilly Daché hat she had purchased when invited to launch a World War II battleship. Her pie sat on the back floor, swathed in tinfoil. I laid my roses on the back seat, their stems bound in wet paper towels and Saran. As I climbed behind the wheel, I lifted her veil and kissed her astonishingly soft cheek. Her jaw was rigid.

“You hurt?” I asked.

“No.”

“Connie.”

“Drive.”

“Are you up to this?” She suffered from temporal arteritis, a relatively rare inflammation of an artery to the head, which created excruciating pain when it flared. There was an operation, but we'd been putting it off. Steve and the specialists down in New Haven were reluctant to put her through it. Only when the pain became unbearable would she take a pill, fearing addiction.

“You know, I could run out and get Mom and bring her to your house.”

“Drive,” she said.

I drove.

Just as Connie had always regarded my father as the son she never had, my mother was in some similar way the daughter. But whereas Dad made the perfect son in all his proper splendor, my mother was a Frenchtown girl. As much as she loved Connie, she could never feel comfortable in her presence. Typically, when we arrived at the farm, Mom was fluttering up the walls of her dining room, convinced that something must be wrong with the table setting. Bear in mind she was seventy-five herself, but this morning she was the eighteen-year-old that Bertram Abbott had brought home to a stunned Main Street. She was so distracted that she forgot to worry about me and kind of brushed my cheek hello as if I had just seen her for breakfast a couple of hours ago.

Connie, who had her blind sides, said, “Oh, let's eat in the kitchen. Dining rooms are so gloomy in the daylight.”

I saw my mother start to die and intervened.

“Let's eat here. The table's set.” My mother had probably set it the night before, reset it in the morning, and fiddled with it again as we came in the drive.

“Mom, can I help carry?” I asked as she headed for the kitchen.

“No, you talk to your Aunt Connie. I'll be all right.”

“He already bored me in the car,” said Connie. “Come sit with me, Margot. Let Ben serve.”

It worked. My mother gambled that I was capable of shifting her chicken pot pie and salad to the dining room without dropping it and conjured a similar leap of faith regarding the lemonade pitcher and bread basket.

After lunch Connie sat with her in the kitchen while she washed up and I went out and wheelbarrowed some firewood from the shed to the kitchen porch. There was a nip in the air and no question fall was descending on Frenchtown, which was always colder than Newbury. Sometimes I wondered why my mother came back out here, and sometimes I had the feeling it was for reasons I hadn't guessed. But on a fall afternoon, there is no place like it. One woman's dank swamp is definitely another's teeming marsh. The water draws the migrating birds. The sumac and red maple that thrive on moisture turn red early. The air is thick, damp, and full of life.

My mother came out while I was fixing the woodshed door, which was losing a hinge. She's a tiny little thing, almost as small as Connie now, and blessed with those dark Chevalley eyes and hollow cheeks that age with dignity. I could see she was pleased that lunch had gone well. “Connie's napping,” she said. “Are you warm enough?”

“I'm fine.”

“Would you like something?”

“Love a coffee.”

She hurried inside the house and came back with two mugs and a slice of Connie's pie for me. I sat on a stump, she in her favorite Adirondack chair, which I had carried down from the patio while she cautioned me not to hurt my back. Settled at last, the coffee still warm, we watched the birds on a feeder and talked about the weather.

“I missed you by five minutes at Renny's,” I said, after a long silence and a hesitant smile said she wanted to talk.

“I couldn't stay. I was so upset. I thought, Oh my God, it could have been you.”

“How so?” I asked carefully.

“He was your age. You used to be like two peas in a pod. His poor mother.”

The generations were skewed here. My mother had been forty when I was born; Renny's, barely twenty. Sisters-in-law separated by more than twenty years, they had nevertheless become like sisters.

I said, “Don't believe the stories. He wasn't doing anything wrong.”

“I'm sure he wasn't. If it were Pink or one of the others I'd say I wasn't surprised. But not Renny.”

“I feel the same way.”

“I'm sure there's an explanation for everything.”

“Everything,” I agreed.

“Even the money.”

“What money?”

My mother looked distressed. “Frances called this morning. The police searched the garage.”

“And?”

“They found forty thousand dollars in cash.”

“
What
?”

“Forty thousand dollars. In a shopping bag.”

“Where?”

“In back of a closet.”

I was stunned. Where the hell would Renny get forty thousand in cash? And why would he hide it in a closet? …Even if he was skimming—à la Rose—no garage in this neck of the woods generated that kind of extra cash.…Why? I glanced at my mother. She was hanging in there for her family, but the look on her face forced me to admit that she too had lost faith.

She looked back at me, blinking rapidly. She dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex and folded her hands, her fingers working.

“Were you involved?” she asked coldly.

“With Renny? No.”

“What about this woman who shot her boyfriend?”

“I was only there doing an appraisal.”

“I couldn't bear for you to get in trouble again.”

“I won't.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“It killed your father, and this time it will kill me.”

I took a deep breath, stood up, and walked rapidly down to the swamp, which started quite abruptly at the edge of the mown lawn. It spread for acres, spiked with the bleached gray trunks of dead trees. Mysteriously, the water table had risen when I was a kid, and suddenly the swamp was twice the size it had been and much closer to the house. I did not kill my father. But she thought I did, which was almost as bad.

I felt her eyes on me, and I imagined her stomach churning as she warred within, angry at me, and angrier at herself for showing she was angry at me. I took another deep breath, working hard at lightening up, and walked back to her, a light comment on my lips. “I swear the swamp's still rising. Gets any higher you'll have to swim back to Newbury.”

“
Never
,” she cried, startling me with her vehemence. This was one time we would not let things slide in the interest of peace, though God knows I tried, laughing, or trying to.

“Well, at least you know you've got the option.”

“I will never go back to Main Street. Ever. And when
I
die, don't you dare try to bury me up there.”

“Mother—”

“I've put it in my will. I want to be cremated.”

“Am I supposed to scatter your ashes on the swamp?”

“My brother will.”

“Running the gears” at Leavenworth meant thrusting a sharp object into your enemy and jamming it around, slicing up organs, until they pulled you off the body. Well, Mom was running the gears on me at the moment. This was the first I had heard about cremation or scattering ashes. Clearly, she didn't trust me with the job.

“I don't ever want to see that house again.” Her jaw was working and she was twisting her fingers like a nest of worms. I was terrified she would cry next.

“But you lived most of your life there. Your whole time with Dad.”