The Boy in the Burning House (6 page)

Jim looked away. He wanted out and yet there was something holding him captive.

“You really think he'd do anything to you?”

She looked at him with surprise. “Unless I do something first,” she said. “He's known for awhile that I was on to him. Now he acts as if maybe I'm getting too close for comfort.”

Jim fought off a minor panic attack. “Don't get mad,” he said as calmly as he could. “But why do you hate him? Because he prays for you?”

“I don't know if I can explain it,” she said. “I hated him from the start. Hated him for marrying my mother. The doctors tell me that's pretty natural. A lot of kids hate their steps, at first. But it's more than that.”

She paused, staring off across the wet lowlands to the meadow beyond, where a wind they could not feel down in the hollow was bending the heads of the tall grass.

“When he prays, he always starts out by saying how he himself is a sinner, a great sinner. I know, I know, we're
all
sinners. That's how the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration stays in business. But when Father Fisher says it, man, he sounds like he means it. I can feel it in here.” She pounded her fist against her breast bone. “Which is why I started watching him. Eavesdropping. Which is why I know what happened.”

She glanced nervously at Jim, afraid he was going to run away on her.

But Jim stood his ground. There was this bully at school,” he said. “I hated him. He beat me up a couple of times. I hated everything he did. If he was eating a candy bar, I thought, what a greedy pig. If he scored a touchdown, I thought, what a show-off. One day I saw him helping an old lady across a street and I thought, he's probably going to steal her purse.”

“Did he?”

“No,” said Jim. “That's the point. He wasn't so bad, except for being a pain in the butt. It was only because I hated him I figured everything he did was bad.”

Ruth Rose frowned, looked down again so that her hair hid her face. She folded up her chocolate bar and put it in her pocket. Then she got up and, without a backward glance at Jim, left.

It took Jim a moment to recover. “Hey,” he yelled. “What did I say?”

She stopped, but she didn't turn around. “Forget it.”

“Ruth Rose,” he shouted, surprised at how snappish it sounded, as if he was yelling at Snoot to get off the table.

Then she turned around. “Listen, if you can't take this seriously —”

“I do,” Jim interrupted.

“We're not talking here about a schoolyard bully.”

“I was just —”

“You were just telling me a story,” she said. “Like this is the Brady Bunch or something.”

“Okay, I'm sorry,” said Jim. “I want to know what happened.”

She came closer, stared at him and, despite the medication, it seemed to Jim as if she were looking right inside him.

“No, you don't,” she said. “You're too afraid.

Then she started to walk away again, towards the woods.

He couldn't let her go just like that. Letting go was a problem he had.

“I am not afraid!” he shouted.

“You aren't ready,” she shouted back.

“Ready for what?”

“You don't want to face the fact that your daddy is dead. D-E-A-D.”

Jim felt like he was teetering, suddenly. On the edge of a rushing stream and not sure whether to jump or go looking for a bridge. Not sure he could clear it, not sure he wouldn't drown if he fell in. Ruth Rose was on the other side of that stream and she wasn't the kind of guide he would have wished to lead him anywhere. But what was there anymore on this side of the stream?

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Leapt.

“Tell me,” he said. “Please.”

She turned and walked back towards him. When she was close enough, she looked him in the eye long and hard. He didn't flinch.

“Your dad saw Father a bunch of times right before he disappeared.”

“I know,” said Jim. “On account of his nerves. Father came out to the farm. They went on these long walks.”

“And your dad came to our house, too. Father didn't like him coming over. He always took him to the church where they could talk in private. The last time was September twenty-fifth.”

The twenty-fifth was the day before Jim's father went missing. He nodded for her to go on.

“They had a big argument. Something about a letter and what they were going to do about it. It wasn't the first letter, either, but it was the worst, as far as I could tell. Your dad was real upset. Father kept trying to cool him down.”

“I thought you said they met at the church?”

“They did,” said Ruth Rose. “I followed them there. There was no one around so they could talk more freely without Father having to shush your dad up all the time.”

“So what did they say?” demanded Jim.

“I told you. They were talking about this letter. Your dad mentioned Tuffy. Father told him not to talk about Tuffy. Not ever.”

She paused. “I couldn't hear much. The sacristy door is solid oak. I heard bits and pieces of stuff.'She's got nothing to go on,' Father said more than once. I think they were talking about someone called Laverne. I heard your dad saying,'I've suffered long enough.' Then I heard Father say this: ‘Tomorrow's a good day.' Those were his exact words. ‘Tomorrow's a good day.'”

Jim swallowed hard.

“And the thing is,” said Ruth Rose, “the next day Father wasn't around. He wasn't at the church. I checked. And where was your mother, Jim?
She
was at the church, decorating it with the altar guild for the Harvest Festival. You think Father didn't know she was going to be away from the farm all day?”

Jim's chin twitched. “Why didn't you say something then?” he asked. “I mean at the inquest.”

“Me?” she said. “Who'd believe me? Anyway, I didn't have any proof. So I decided to get some. I figured the letters had to be blackmail. I figured,
since I couldn't find them around our place, they were probably hidden in the sacristy somewhere. So one night, I broke in.”

Jim stared at her incredulously. “Into the church?”

Ruth Rose nodded proudly, but her expression soured. “I got in okay but then the fuzz came.”

“The cops?”

She nodded. “I got arrested,” she said. “Father called them. Can you believe it? His own
daughter
.”

“So you told the police what you were doing,” he said with a kind of weary resignation, already imagining the scene.

“You bet I did,” she said. “I told them about Father murdering your dad and that the proof was probably in the church office somewhere.”

“Let me guess,” he said. “They didn't go for it.”

She looked at him with something approaching a wicked grin lighting up her pale face. “I kinda pulled a Ruth Rose Way on them, I guess. Went ballistic. Gave one of them a black eye,” she added. “They released me into Father's custody. He didn't press charges but he made sure I wasn't around for the inquest.”

“What do you mean?”

Ruth Rose's grin dissolved. “I was packed off somewhere. I don't want to talk about it.”

Jim didn't want to talk about it, either. There was something more pressing he needed to know if he was to believe anything she said.

“So now I know why you couldn't get anybody to listen to you back then. But why are you trying now? And why me?”

Ruth Rose suddenly looked tired. She sniffed, rubbed her nose.

“I need your help,” she said. “Yeah, don't say it — I need lots of help. But seriously, I'm afraid. Father's really weird. Weird like… well, almost like your father was last fall.”

“What are you saying?”

She looked him straight in the eye. “I think you know what I'm saying.”

Jim could feel the anger rising in him. He tried to remember that he was talking to a crazy person. She didn't know anything. For all he knew, she was making it all up.

“You're saying, this blackmailer was blackmailing both of them — Father Fisher and my father. Then it stopped… after my dad disappeared. But now it's started again.”

She didn't move a muscle.

“Listen,” he said, his voice belligerent. “Maybe my father knew something — something Fisher did. Maybe. And maybe that's what drove him nuts, ‘cause he wanted to tell but he didn't want to get Fisher in trouble. But don't try and tell me he did anything wrong. You didn't know him. He was the best. And no freak is going to tell me different.”

She didn't punch him or argue, but he could see she was hurt. Well, she deserved it. She was nothing but trouble.

She looked down, looked up again with a little scornful smile. “Like I said. You're not ready for this.”

He was going to shout at her. But he didn't want to shout. Didn't want to be dragged into her game.

“All I meant,” she said, “was that things cooled down after Hub disappeared. Father was gloomy for a while but he wasn't on edge.”

“Yeah, well, you'd be gloomy if you lost a friend,”
said Jim. “If you had any.” He swallowed hard. He hadn't meant to say that.

For once, Ruth Rose was quiet. Then, after a long silence, she looked past Jim up the lane. “You ever wonder what happened that day at the cedar grove?” she asked, her voice pitched almost too low to hear.

Jim's head snapped up. “Are you kidding? I never thought about anything else for most of the year.”

“Well, try this,” she said. There was a look in her eyes as if what she was going to say was some kind of test. “Your dad meets up with Father that day, just like he told him to the night before at the church. He's somebody your dad trusts, right? They go out for one of their long walks or for a drive, maybe, to talk things over some more. There's a million places up this way they could go and nobody'd see them. Half the farms on this road are deserted. The wilderness stretches halfway to Hudson Bay. They could have gone anywhere.”

Reluctantly Jim nodded, feeling a little sick.

“Your dad wants to do something, talk to somebody, basically cave in — that's what it sounded like to me the night before. Father doesn't want him to. Father says it's going to be all right. But it isn't going to be all right if your dad starts blabbing.”

“Blabbing about what”

“If I knew that, I wouldn't be here,” she said. “Maybe what happened to Tuffy.”

“That was an accident,” snapped Jim. “Death by misadventure.”

Ruth Rose raised her eyebrows. The gesture infuriated Jim. Nothing was an accident to her, he thought.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Something else. That's
what we've got to find out. But something they were in together.” Jim was about to object when her eyes lit up. “You just don't get it, do you? You won't believe your daddy could do anything wrong. Fine, don't. But let me finish.”

“Okay,” said Jim. “So finish.”

She stared at him slack-jawed, shaking her head as if she had given up on him entirely. To his surprise, he didn't want her to give up.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

She sighed. “They go somewhere where no one's around. Fisher does him in. Maybe it wasn't intentional. Maybe they were having this fight and he killed him by mistake. But it's done. So then he drives the car down here and leaves it so it looks like your dad just abandoned it.”

“How?” said Jim, “There were just my dad's footprints down here. Nobody else had been in the car. They had those forensic guys go over it. They don't miss stuff like that. There were no ‘alien fibres' — that's the way they put it. Nothing.”

“I'm not talking about aliens,” shouted Ruth Rose.

Jim couldn't talk anymore. His head was clogged up with painful images. It wasn't as if he hadn't thought them before — thought of his father meeting up with some horrible end. He had imagined biker gangs and bears. Murderers of every shape and size had paraded through his nightmares. But he had never put a real face on the killer.

Ruth Rose lightly touched his shoulder. “Hey, I'm outa here,” she said. Her anger seemed to have passed. “You listened to me, at least. That's more than anyone else ever did. Thanks. If you find out anything, you could… you know…”

She left, headed back towards Ruth Rose Way. She left her pickaxe behind. Jim was going to call after her, when he looked more closely at the tool and realized that it wasn't hers, after all, and she hadn't stolen it from any railroad crew, either.

She had lied. There were initials carved into the butt end. HH. It was his father's pickaxe.

Hector Menzies had been a newspaper boy at the
Ladybank Expositor
when his mother was a reporter. He had been a cub reporter himself when his mother took over the reins as editor. And he had become editor when she took over from her father, Salvator Menzies, as publisher. Hector was publisher now and he was a busy man. But not so busy he couldn't spare a few minutes for Jim Hawkins.

Jim went to the
Expositor
office the next day after school. He hadn't thought to phone and make an appointment but, luckily, Hec passed by the front office just as Dorothy was explaining to Jim that he would have to come by some other time.

Hec led Jim into his cubby-hole of an office. It wasn't much for the publisher of a newspaper — a ceiling you could touch if you cared to reach up, no window, no carpet and an elephantine desk that just about filled the space and looked old enough to have been Noah's desk on the Ark.

“We don't have any money for frills,” Hec said to Jim. “The circulation of the
Expositor
has grown in direct proportion to the population of Ladybank over the last hundred years, which is to say, not at all.”

When Hub Hawkins had disappeared, there had been lots of regional press coverage of the story, even
in Ottawa and Kingston. Not because Jim's father was famous, or anything, but because it was a mystery. Besides, Hub had been a pillar of the community: a deputy reeve of North Blandford Township, a hardworking board member of the Ladybank and District Public Library, and a pretty good skip at the local curling club, which had once sent a team to the Eastern Ontario finals in Cornwall.