Mad Season (2 page)

So afterward she raced back to the Larocques’. Belle would be frantic, wondering where he was. She could phone the police from there. He must have been struck by a car, a hit and run. She balled her fists—irresponsible inhumans!

Was it true he kept money in his pockets? She’d heard that but couldn’t imagine it. Lucien was different, but not dumb. Anyway, Belle wouldn’t stand for it, Belle had smarts. Not classroom smarts, she never went past ninth grade, maybe tenth, but she could have, that was what counted.

Up on the porch Ruth saw where Lucien had come from, the blood stains on the old boards, the door cracking on its hinges where someone had banged it. It wasn’t a car that struck him, then, but something else. She entered slowly, afraid of what she’d see.

And she saw.

Chapter Two

It was crazy, she told her older daughter Sharon afterward, after the police arrived, after the ambulance came back for Belle, her old friend Colm Hanna leaping into the rear. They were in the Larocque house: Ruth was puttering, though she’d been told not to touch anything. A policeman, Mert was his name, was in the parlor, snooping around—Belle would have hated that. Belle was neat, things were always in order. Ruth picked up a fry pan off the floor, though the officer yelled at her, straightened Lucien’s overturned rocker.

“I thought, what a pretty nightgown,” she told Sharon. “It doesn’t suit Belle, I never see her in anything but ripped overalls, it’s like she turns into someone else at night. A sleeping beauty.”

“Lucien’s the prince?” Sharon said, and smiled, opened her shirt to nurse her baby.

Ruth couldn’t smile. “And then I saw the blood, it’d leaked out of her head, into the floorboards. And the dog, they killed the dog. That dog went everywhere with Lucien. It was all—”

“Don’t say anymore,” Sharon warned and held up her free arm. Sharon was like her father, Pete would pass out when you talked about blood; he fell once when she was bandaging Vic’s knee, pitched into the TV. And Ruth had two patients on her hands.

“You’re a woman, you’re a mother, you have to hear these things,” Ruth told Sharon, and Sharon looked secretive, bent to her child. “Belle would have gone out at once. It must have been a terrible blow to the head.”

“She’ll be all right.” Sharon rubbed her chin on the child’s fuzzy head. “She’ll come through.” She wouldn’t hear otherwise.

“You go home with the baby,” Ruth said. “Emily’ll be back from school. I have Tim.”

“Are you sure? You don’t need moral support?”

“Go home,” Ruth ordered, taking charge, though it was hard with Sharon. She waved them off. Her children underestimated her. She was shocked, yes, but charged with energy now—crazy! “Go, go! I’ll call if I need you.”

“I should get this child home for a nap.”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Go.” And Sharon went, appeased, the child bouncing in the backpack. “Bye-bye,” said Ruth, distracted, “bye,” though the boy was too young to wave.

With the door shut, the reality of it, the horror, leaped back on her. She couldn’t stay in this house a minute longer. She gave the policeman her number and ran back next door. She had work to do, didn’t she? A fire siren was sounding outdoors, but she only half heard it, like it was buzzing inside her head. She threw another log in the woodstove.

Stay calm, she told herself as she heated up pea soup for the men’s lunch. Move slowly or things will collapse. What things, she wasn’t sure, but she knew about the collapse. It came when least expected.

Like that old couple half dead in the hospital. Belle was in a coma, in intensive care, her friend Colm phoned back. Who knew when—if—she’d waken? And how awful to wake alone, a prisoner of tubes, and Lucien a corridor away, in a male ward.

The money was gone, of course. The police had searched the mattress, the closets, loose floorboards—there was only a handful of change in Lucien’s coat, all bloodied as it was, the pockets ripped inside out; matches for the woodstove, bits of hay, bent nails, receipts the detective examined and pocketed. And no fingerprints anywhere, except Lucien’s and Belle’s. Not a single one. The assailants were prepared.

“That’s what they were after, the money,” said Colm Hanna, the volunteer medic, when he materialized again on his way back from the hospital. It was a double trip for him: first Belle, and then the Charlebois barn up in flames, he said, the hired man burned getting the calves out. She’d have to send over a pie, she thought, even while the Larocques were still on her mind.

They didn’t have to know Lucien to have him open the door, she reminded Colm. “Lucien opens for everyone.”

“They knew he had money hidden in the house,” Colm said, looking foolish, his glasses on crooked, coat smudged with charcoal, his face black as his hair used to be when they went out together in high school—it was starting to gray now. He’d turned ambulance volunteer after he flunked out of med school, lived in the local funeral parlor with his undertaker father. But earned his “bread,” he told people, in real estate.

“They had to be local,” Colm said, “or heard from someone local.”

She nodded, watched him wolf down two sugar doughnuts. His face was rounder than when she first knew him, but you could still see the bluish hollows in the cheeks, hunger lines she called them. The family was poor, the grandfather a policeman who got shot on the job. At least the father could count on the mortuary— people kept on dying. He was wise, Colm, nothing pretentious about him. She just hadn’t wanted to marry him, was all. She was looking for the wrong things in a man in those days.

But when Colm asked her now who could have done it, how they’d know about the money, she had no answer.

“Rumors,” she said, spreading her long fingers. “That bar, the Alibi, the fire shed. Gossip gets around. Men can be worse than women.”

She smiled, saying that, and he grinned back, took off his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve. Everyone knew after a family burial you got all the local gossip from Colm’s father.

“I’ll think about it,” she told him. “I’ll talk to the other neighbors. I’ll talk to Pete. I’ll talk to Lucien. They said we could go in tonight to see him. I’ll talk to Belle, when ...”

He looked sympathetic, chewed on his doughnut, his jaw working hard. He chewed everything twenty times, even ice cream. He looked ridiculous doing it, frankly.

“What right did they have,” she said, “breaking into an elderly couple’s home, abusing their persons!” She jammed a fist into the palm of her hand.

The red flushed up into his neck, his cheeks. He liked Lucien too, he got his milk there, his spring corn from Belle’s stand. He’d drop in for a toddy now and then. Colm liked his toddies—too much, maybe.

“I’ll do everything I can to find out who did it,” she said fiercely. “I want them caught. I want them prosecuted.”

He nodded, coughed. “I’m with you.” He pocketed a doughnut as he got up to leave, gave a sly grin. It was good to have an old friend, she thought. She felt safer somehow, no one would violate her house. Would they? She felt a stiffness in her neck.

“They think it was set, no problem with the electrical,” he called back, on his way out. “The Charlebois barn.”

“Oh my God,” she yelled after. “How many bad things can happen in this town?”

But he spread his hands, like he’d just dropped something.

A farm wife was never alone. Now it was Pete’s unmarried sister Bertha barging through the back door, the pink beret that matched her pink lips pulled down over her permed hair, the skirt discreet below her plump knees, the shiny black pumps she wore through snow and mud.

The “disappointed woman,” Ruth called her. Disappointed in love, in school, in career—she’d wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t get into the university. So Bertha stayed home, turned to the church, was an eldress or something.

She didn’t wait for Ruth to speak, just whirled up behind like a motorbike: “You ought to keep your doors locked, Ruth. Anyone could get in.” Not bad advice, Ruth thought, for certain people. “I want you to send Vic down with Pete. Now, don’t wait! For Vic’s sake. Pete’s lonely without the children.”

“Lonely?” said Ruth, her head in the refrigerator. The men would be in for lunch, she had to concentrate on that.

“And Emily. A young girl! Horrible things can happen. The world’s full of sin. All those Hebrews moving in, attracted by the college. I read in the paper . . .”

“We’re all right,” muttered Ruth, her blood rising with her sister-in-law’s prejudice. “I need my children here. I have a farm to run. And I bank my money, what money there is.”

“He sends a check every month, he told me that. Though he doesn’t get that much in sales. I told him years ago to get the MBA, but Father had him take over the farm. Though he was never cut out. . . Oh, he’ll be back. Mother brought us up in the church. Of course it was just the Congregational. Thanks to the Lord I’ve seen the light. But Pete, well, he’s forty-two, that’s the problem, I read this book—the seven-year “scratch” or something? He can’t help himself, he’ll come ‘round.”

She made a little face, straightened her frilly shoulders. The fingers, yellowy with nicotine, though she’d quit smoking she said, combed through the frizzy hair.

Ruth didn’t remind her that Pete hadn’t seen the inside of a church since their wedding. As for the “scratch,” well, maybe Bertha had a point. Pete was just forty-two when they saw him in the post office nine months ago and lured him into that film. He had a bit part, a farmer fighting the gas pipeline—some need to show off, maybe. And afterward he took off with that woman, that so-called actress. It was like he’d gone mad, Ruth was struck dumb with it.

“Look up antidotes in that home remedy book of yours,” she told Bertha.

“What?”

“For ‘scratches.’ “

Ruth was relieved to see the hired man Tim coming through the door, turned her back to end the conversation. Bertha blew her nose into a pink handkerchief. She didn’t approve of Tim’s Willy, one never knew what a retarded boy would do. There was the time she’d had a boy from the group home to Thanksgiving dinner, and he’d swept the turkey right off the table, lickety split, down the street! When she told Ruth, when Ruth giggled, Bertha wept with fury.

“You hear about that fire up to Charlebois’?” Bertha said as she prepared to leave, not waiting for an answer. “The whole barn, gone, in a flash!” Her eyes gleamed red.

“They still won’t let you in the fire department?” Ruth remembered how Bertha had tried once, years ago it was. Ruth rather admired Bertha for wanting to get into that patriarchal fraternity, odd as it seemed in the face of the woman’s antifeminism. She got to some of the fires, anyway—something to do with her belief in hell, Pete said once. But he tolerated his sister the way Ruth couldn’t.

“They would if I’d really pushed it. They’d’ve let me.” And patting her permed hair, Bertha trotted off in her black pumps.

Tim had the state forester with him, come to advise on the trees. Of course the forester would stay to lunch—Tim looked sympathetic, but what could he do? She nodded, took a deep breath. A farmer’s wife was always changing gears, moods: think of the world’s wrongs and then smile, give out with the small talk. Trees, the weather—”We’ll discuss it at lunch,” Pete would say, while he invited tractor salesmen, artificial inseminators, town auditors, to “discuss it over lunch.” Her lunch.

And here they were, talking fertilizers and tree blights like it was an ordinary day and not the aftermath of a brutal assault.

“More soup?” she invited. But it was Willy who held out his bowl.

“He’s hungry,” Tim said. “He had a night on the town, hey, Willy? Worked up a thirst?”

“Girlfriend?” the forester said, winking at Tim.

“Nah, nah, no girlfriend,” Willy bawled, “no girlfriend. Girls are dumb,” and the men laughed again.

“He was down at the Alibi,” Tim explained, “with his friend Joey, one who lives at the group home. Till they got kicked out. Right, Willy? You made too much noise, got kicked out?”

“Sure,” Willy said, enjoying the attention. “Too much noise. Got kick out.”

He drained the chicken soup with a slurping noise, jammed a hunk of buttered bread in his mouth. “Got kick out.” He laughed loudly, and so did the two men.

Ruth served the Jell-0 and cookies, and Tim said, “Not having any yourself?” She shook her head. Food didn’t tempt her today: her mind was a grinding machine. Someone would have to milk the Larocque animals tonight; the daughter and her husband weren’t much help—Marie too flighty and Harold an out-of-work accountant who trembled in the presence of cows. How they’d managed that farm alone, the Larocques, no pipeline or milking parlor, all the time discing with that one rickety tractor! It was a miracle, really, they’d hung onto it when so many had sold—herd buyout or developers—or just shot themselves like the Mason brothers down in Rutland. And now when they should be slowing up, enjoying the fruits of their years of labor . . .

“It’s not fair!” she cried. “It’s not fair!”

And Willy, bringing in plates to the kitchen, glancing at her out of his wide gray eyes, intimidated by her mood, said, “I help clean up. Tim says so.”

She waved him off, put on a smile. “You go help the others.”

But the boy hung around, wanting to talk, his big fuzzy head waggling. She called him a boy though he’d turned twenty-one, with a body bigger and clumsier than he knew what to do with. Couldn’t swim, turn a somersault. Poor Willy! He’d lived in nineteen foster homes, almost one for each year of his life.

“I was plantin’ trees,” he said. “Tim say I find my, my ‘calling.’ “ It was a funny word. He smiled, showing his bad teeth. “What’s that mean, ‘calling’? Who’s calling? Yoo-hoo.” He cupped his hands about his mouth. “Who-ooo.”

“It means you’ve found what you’re good at. Like someone called you to it. Up there, so they say.” She pointed at the ceiling and his eyes followed obediently.

“Though some of us never get called,” Ruth said, bemused.

“It’s okay. Tim, he say his muscles turn to Jell-0, but I like it. I like it with the whip cream.”

“Well, here now. Finish the bowl.” She dabbed a scoop of cream on it. “You want another chocolate cookie, do you?”