She hated him at that moment, hated Colm! Everything was so black and white for him. Couldn’t he see how ugly Denby Bagshaw was? A womanizer, maybe a rapist. A blackmailer. Shoving his brutish way into someone’s personal life. If it had been her he’d been blackmailing, would she have been angry enough to kill?
“Angie,” Kevin said. “It wasn’t just me—it would have devastated Angie.”
Angie. Angel in the house. Why did that phrase suddenly come to her out of her school days? Ms. Manning, her feminist English teacher, junior year, that was it. It was what a Victorian called his woman. There she was, off balance, on a shiny marble pedestal. Angel in the house. Was this what Angie had wanted? What Ruth would want? She shuddered; she chewed the inside of her lip. She couldn’t look at Colm, or Kevin.
“So I picked up the shovel; it was there on the ground. He tried to grab it; he was up on his knees. But too weak, he fell back down. I... I hit him. I couldn’t have him telling Angie— that’s what he was threatening, even as he lay there. I knew he’d never be satisfied. I’d already given him six thousand dollars, and I didn’t have any more to give. Not to him .…”
Chief Fallon said, “So? You dropped him in the hole? Convenient for you, that MacInnis had dug it already.” He was looking at his watch. His cheeks were working in and out. He wanted this confession over with. It had all happened almost a quarter of a century ago; he had current affairs to deal with.
“I... I saw the hole. I’d heard about it—rumors—but I’d never seen it. But I didn’t put him in it. In case he wasn’t really ... you know, dead. I mean, I just hit him, that’s all. Out of anger. Frustration. But I wanted that truck out of there—the truck he’d bought with my money. I didn’t want him to have that new truck, dead or alive.”
Kevin looked self-righteous, as though he’d been accused of burying a live man. But he killed him, Ruth told herself; he killed Denby—a defenseless man, at least at that point. Mac was gone, Glenna off on her ride—it had to have been Kevin who gave the final blow. Her head felt the impact of that shovel.
“And you took his truck—must’ve had the keys in it? Or you took them out of his pocket?” It was Colm pressing now. Kevin’s face was mottled; his hands were jerking in his lap. Ruth was torn between pity and her vision of a murder.... But Mac had hit him, too; if it had been only Kevin, that final blow might not have been fatal. Did they realize that?
Kevin only nodded. He drove the truck over to the river behind the farm, he said, his voice splintering. Drove it in, jumped out—the water turbulent, at least ten feet deep, he’d heard, at that place. There’d been a lot of rain that October. Enough to destroy that truck. “I had to do it. I had to do that!” he cried.
They’d found the wallet floating in the water, Roy Fallon confirmed. It was assumed that Denby was drunk, drowned— a swift current would take a body out, eventually, into Lake Champlain. The truck was hauled off to Jimmy’s junkyard— a canoeist had complained to authorities of not being able to row around it. The Flint mother and daughter had claimed no knowledge of it. Inside the truck was Kevin Crowningshield’s hat, appropriated by Jimmy’s nineteen-year-old son, who’d helped haul it out.
Fallon patted Colm’s shoulder. “Good man,” he said, and Colm glanced wistfully at Ruth.
“You came back afterward, got in your car, I assume, and, uh, left the, uh...” Fallon asked, and Kevin nodded. “No one saw you? No one else was on the premises?”
“Not that I saw. Unless—Mrs. Flint, Glenna’s mother. But she was blind, I understood.” Kevin’s face was like a shattered plate; when he dropped it into his hands, Ruth could see the bald spot on the top of his head where the hair he brushed over it had gone askew.
“Then who put Denby in that, um, hole?” Fallon asked. “I don’t think he crawled in all by himself.”
And no one could answer.
Ruth was the first to leave the police station. She’d imagined before she came that she might go over and touch Kevin on the shoulder, show her support. The man was desperate; he’d been afraid of losing a woman he’d loved but had never really known, never really understood. It was the angel in the house he worshiped—not Angie, the woman.
And there was that other woman. Emma Stackpole’s heart-shaped face moved toward her on the street, on the body of a younger woman. Kevin had given Emma money for an abortion. He hadn’t given
himself.
When Colm loped after her, called her name, she kept going. Down Seminary Street to her pickup, back to the farm. It was snowing, fat, thick flakes cooling her hot face, blanching her shoulders. She thought of her cows, out shivering in the pasture—the calves in their outdoor pen. The truck was coming Tuesday for the bull calf. She’d give it a last meal (she’d have to tell Vic). This afternoon, she’d do the milking. She wanted to; she needed that good, clean work. For no reason at all, she thought now of Zelda, wondered if she’d broken through the fence again. Crazy, recalcitrant cow.
****
“I might or I might not have that massage,” Emily told Hartley. “For one thing, I don’t have a credit card like you. I don’t even have a decent allowance.”
“I’ll treat you,” said Hartley. “It’ll be a birthday gift.”
“My birthday’s not till June.”
“An early one.”
“We’ll see.” The girls were walking up the driveway of the deserted farm. Hartley doubted they’d find Aunty in the old barn, but she wanted to see the horse, and take a look in the silo, just in case. A quick look, that is, before the thing fell down with them in it. “Got that apple?” she asked Emily.
“In my pocket.” They’d begged it from Marna at the Healing House. “Quit it, Gandalf,” she said when the dog stuck its long nose into the folds other coat. “It’s not for you. You don’t like apples anyway.”
As if in protest, the dog sniffed at the air and, yanking his leash out of Hartley’s mittened hand, ran ahead to the barn.
“Let him go,” said Emily. “Probably a rat in there.”
“It might crumble on top of him. Gandalf, come back here.” Hartley grabbed the leash at the barn door. Gandalf threw his weight against it and the barn door caved in. They walked over it, like a castle drawbridge broken down before the enemy. It was a thrilling moment for Hartley. “Ho!” she cried, “Halt there.”
But there was no answer, just the old mare, in her stall, chewing noisily on a hunk of dried grass.
“Gandalf, heel,” said Hartley. But the worn leash snapped in her hand and Gandalf was away again, rummaging in a pile of hay. Bits of moldy straw flew up into the girls’ noses, and Emily gave a whopping sneeze. Gandalf was crouched now in the hay, wagging his tail, whining. He was nosing something—a body, Hartley realized, in ripped slacks and burlap, grimy with dirt. “Aunty,” she cried. “Aunty—Aunty, speak to me! Are you alive in there? Aunty?!”
But the frail figure curled up in the hay by the scrawny mare just blinked and held up a thin bruised hand to her grand-niece.
Chapter Twenty-one
Who was this they were dragging in to meet her? Glenna squinted through her weak eyes. She was lying with her pink-slippered feet on a pillow of the horsehair sofa. They’d tried to make her go to the hospital, but she’d held firm. “No hospital,” she’d told that interfering nephew’s wife, “no damn doctor. Or I’ll take off again.”
Glenna had had two whole days away with Jenny. Or was it three? She’d lost track of time. Or regained it—the ride had been exhilarating. She and Jenny had galloped everywhere, all over the county, forging their own trails. And no one to stop them. Till the relatives came. Oh, they’d brought her back, yes, but she wasn’t the old Glenna. Oh no. She was in command of her own life now. No one was going to make her do things. Things they’d once forced her to do. Like that Booby, that Bagshaw, barging into the barn when she was with Jenny... It was all out in the open now, exorcized. He’d raped her body but never her spirit. Never! She was free of him. She was her own woman; she didn’t care how old. She might live to be one hundred. She might—to spite them all. She clasped her hands together, bared her chipped teeth at the dark-haired man.
“This is Mac, Glenna,” the man said, “I’m Colm. Colm Hanna. We met. The day we found that skeleton?”
“That was Mac,” Glenna said. “I killed him. He came after me. He found me with that Booby.”
“I don’t think you killed him, Glenna. This is Mac, you see, and he’s very much alive.”
But Glenna knew better. She lifted her chin, straightened her glasses; it didn’t seem to help her vision. Squinted. No. This scrawny bent-over creature with the straggly white beard was not Mac. Mac had hair the color of a maple in November. Mac was a talker; Mac wouldn’t just stand there. She’d killed Mac.
Suddenly, the Booby rose up, pants down around his knees, as if he were a marionette, jerked up by its strings, and she heard a howl, Mac’s voice: She sat up to see the Booby—dragged out of the stall by his yellow hair; a string of oaths, bashings against the old boards, a high-pitched squeal, Mac’s bawl on top of it all. He was shaking her then, her. She was hay in his hands, small hands, a small man, but she’d never known his strength till now, the depth of his anger. Shook the words right out of her; she couldn’t explain. He wouldn’t listen. The fury was in her then; when he let go, she grabbed a shovel. Swung, connected; Mac lay on the ground, bleeding. She ran back in the barn, untied Jenny, led her out without looking at the other, the one Mac struck. She rode and rode in the clean wind.... And when she came back, spent, Mac was gone, the hole filled in. Someone running, or riding, down the road—she couldn’t see for the growing dusk. One of the ones who came around—to plumb, to fertilize, to buy syrup? “Good riddance,” her mother said. “Nobody in that hole. Mac’s gone, that’s all. Good riddance.”
“Good riddance,” she said aloud, then sank back down on the horsehair sofa. It was her grandmother’s; she’d always meant to replace the scratchy fabric but had never gotten around to it. She wasn’t one to worry about the inside of a house. It was the outside that counted: the silo, falling down now—they’d have to mend it; the barn, the fences, the tractor, the hay wagon. Not the cows, though. Horses were her love.
“Hello, Glenna,” the whiskery creature said, and her hands fluttered up, out of control. Uh-oh. Something familiar here now: the voice, the smell of nicotine, the way he cleared his throat, coughed. He shouldn’t smoke those things. They’d kill him; she’d told him so. At least
she’d
kicked the habit.
“Think you could kill me with that little shovel, Glenna? Knock the wind out of me, okay, but kill me? Not a chance. I took off, was all. Hit that other guy, that Bagshaw. But I was entitled, right? A busted head for a tit?”
“It wasn’t the way you thought,” she said. “It was nothing I wanted.”
The man who said he was Mac sat down beside her on the sofa. “You think I haven’t thought about this for years, do you? Think I haven’t gone over it in my head every goddamn night? I killed a man over a woman? Maybe over a mistake?”
“You were always so damn jealous. You had no good reason. I never once touched another man.”
“I almost killed him for nothing, then. That what you’re saying?”
“Not what I’m saying. I’m nothing?” She banged her fist on her knee, and winced with the pain. She had a bruise there. She had bruises everywhere. It was that man, that Bagshaw... “He’s alive,” she yelled. “Look what he did to me. Kidnapped me. Locked me in his house. Shoved pills down my throat. Stuck me in that stinking cellar. I ruined my knee going down there, hit my head. I cut myself getting out. I could’ve bled to death.”
“That was Alwyn Bagshaw, the older one; the other one’s dead, the one who hurt you,” the man called Mac said, pushing his whiskery head in her face. She smelled onions. Mac always ate onion sandwiches for lunch; the place reeked with them, and her eyes wept.
She reached out a hand, touched his arm. It jerked a little under her touch. “It is really you, Mac?”
Mac sighed. “I’m afraid so. ’Fraid so,” he repeated, and laughed out loud. “You’re something else, you know, Glenna?”
He always did have a laugh like a donkey, Glenna thought, and laughed herself. It was crazy. Life was crazy. But she was glad to be alive.
Both of us, she thought, back from the dead. And laughed again.
* * * *
It was the Willmarth woman got him released—on bail, they’d told him, though Alwyn suspected a rat: why’d she do that? Something about a cat, she’d said. Letting him go so he could feed a cat? Don’t run off, they said; he’d go up before some judge. But, hell, where’d he run to if he could? Sure, he was home now. He wasn’t going nowhere. No. They wanted to find him, they’d find him. He wasn’t going to that Rockbury they talked about! Not to that place, full of loonies. He’d be dead first.
The cat looked fed enough, yelling sure, always did, even on a full belly. He poured the dry food into the dish; the cat rubbed against his leg. Like a woman it was; he didn’t know why he kept it. Separate, ornery. No use for you when it didn’t need food, a dry place to sleep. Annie, he thought—where was she? He was confused. How long he’d been away, anyhow? He recalled something about the cellar....
He was relieved. Nobody down there but mice. His imagination, carrying him off sometimes. Annie long gone—he’d watched her go. California it was. No woman in that cellar.
There was nothing much in the old Kelvinator. That Hanna fellow just dropped him off here and left him; they took his truck. He’d have to walk to the store to get food, a good mile. In a hurry, that’s why, that Hanna, his beeper going. Somebody’d run a car up a pole somewhere; he had to go, he said. He’d be back, sure, he said, the Willmarth woman making up a supper. But go ahead and starve meantime.
He looked out the window at his corn. Couple of stalks still there, overripe, sticking out of the snow. Tomatoes, in their tires. Most likely froze while he was stuck in that jail. It was Halloween, Hanna said. He’d keep the lights out, didn’t want kids hanging around, wanting candy. Bellies full of sweets. Alwyn’s ma didn’t hold with that, never let him go out Halloween. Though he’d wanted to. Once or twice.