Harvest of Bones (22 page)

“Wherever did you find that mix, Grace?” a third woman asked, coming into the room. “I searched everywhere.”

“The convenience store,” Grace said, looking sly. “I sneaked out and bought it.” She did a little jig in her bare feet. Ruth noticed the pink-painted toenails. Here was a hedonist, in the Healing House!

“With what? We don’t keep money here,” the third woman said, turning to Ruth. “We buy our food out of a common pool.”

“It’s not what you think, Jo,” said Grace. “I didn’t take it! I’d never touch the cache. I had some . . . well, hidden, I’d never turned in. I know it’s illegal; Mother would have a fit— but I just felt I had to ...”

Jo pretended a stern face when Grace looked anguished, then broke down and laughed, put an arm around her friend. “Don’t worry, kid, I did the same. For a fag now and then. You can’t break old habits. I had to hide money with Jake— he’d shake it out of me. Half-killed me once when he found I’d kept the sewing money. I still worry he’ll find out where I am.”

A fourth woman entered the kitchen, went over to Ruth, grabbed her hands, squeezed them; then she gave an embarrassed laugh. “You’re here! I didn’t know. I’m Marna. Remember me? I called.” She wheeled about to address the cake makers. “I can’t believe this. Rena’s poisoned, Ellen barely recovered, Angie’s ... dead, and you’re making a cake. Don’t you see we’re all in danger here? Someone’s trying to kill us! One of the husbands maybe. Sneaking in and poisoning our food. Whose?” She glanced about wildly, her voice rising to a shriek. She clung to Ruth’s hands.

Grace held up a dripping wooden spoon. “But Angie’s was a preexisting condition. We knew she was fragile when she came here. Mother told us. And Rena—well, she always looked off balance, like she’d fall over her feet any minute. It’s a symptom of brain damage, the boyfriend knocking her around.”

The other cake maker agreed with Grace. “Rena was always the odd one. Didn’t want to talk about her problems, even in talk session. Mother asked her once why she was here.”

They keep using that word, Ruth thought.
“Mother?”
she said. “You mean Isis?”

“Oh, yes. We call her that. Her real name’s Anna Smith, but she changed it legally to Isis Blue Moon. She looks motherly, don’t you think? You hardly realize she’s in a wheelchair. She’s fierce about keeping up the massage therapy. We think of ourselves as a family here.”

“Not always easy to think of Rena as family,” said Jo. “Shrinking away from us all the time, not wanting to share what’s inside, get it out. Mother’s right. Why is she here, anyway? The rest of us share. That’s part of our healing.”

“Same as you and me, she’s here,” said a another woman, appearing in the kitchen doorway. She was dressed in a long green cotton skirt, bare toes sacking out from under; she had a pale pockmarked face, mousy brown hair parted in the middle. “I heard the story once, part of it anyway. First the stepfather—you know. Every night till the mother found out. Then the husband. He’d get drunk and hit her. When she cried, he’d hit harder. When she tried to leave, he’d throw himself at her feet, say he loved her—you know the bullshit. Then she was afraid to leave—keep quiet and you’re safe, you know. They don’t want to be found out, these bullies—they’ll come back and kill you! My man, well, he never hit. He just wouldn’t talk, that’s all. Wouldn’t have a telephone in the house, can you imagine? In this day and age? Said it was a nuisance, that the ringing made his blood pressure go up. He was a lawyer, said he had enough of the telephone daytimes. So I had to go out and use a pay phone to call a friend.”

The others murmured in sympathy. Grace emptied her batter into a cake pan, shoved it into the oven. Ruth felt her own blood heat up. “He could have let her have it,” Jo said, “could have turned off the ring when he came home.”

The woman in the doorway shrugged. “Anyway, it got to her eventually. I mean, in the house all day, no kids, the place still as a morgue. She’d pack to leave, and of course he’d threaten suicide. You know the kind.”

The others laughed. Ruth gathered that suicide was a common threat. “Most likely never carried out,” she said.

“You got it,” said Grace, clanging the oven door shut. “Homicide before suicide.”

“So you think this sudden attack, whatever it is, was brought on by Rena’s anguish, not letting it out? The husband brainwashed her too long—she couldn’t speak out herself?”

Jo considered. “Or something more. Something from the outside. I mean, her husband sent a threatening letter. He hired a detective to find her.” Mama shivered and peered earnestly at Ruth.

Everyone was quiet. Ruth could hear the vibrating hum of the refrigerator.

“Well, Angie was definitely poisoned,” said Jo. “I mean, the police are questioning the husband, right? That guy who kept trying to get in here? Sent her that candy? I’m glad
I
didn’t eat any of it. But they’ve got no proof, right?” She pointed a finger at Ruth.

“Of course they have no proof!” Ruth leapt to Kevin’s defense. “He loved his wife, I’m sure of it. If you could hear him talk about her. Why, he’s devastated. He’s just gone in the hospital himself, did you know that? A breakdown of sorts. The police have driven him to it. He’s not a well man to start with. And now….”

She looked up, to see the others smiling at her, ironic smiles. Pitying smiles. “Sure,” said Jo. “They all love us. They really do. But only because they love themselves more.”

The others agreed noisily. Grace banged a spoon on the edge of the sink. “Got to get this done before Mother comes back.”

“But you don’t think Kevin Crowningshield poisoned his wife?” Ruth said, backing off the love issue. She couldn’t argue with six women who painted all men with the same batter.

“Well, he wouldn’t have poisoned Ellen or Rena. Or the rest of us. I mean, we all had symptoms, but we got better with some stuff the doc recommended. I think it was something else we ate. And Angie’s was—well, we’ve already discussed that.”

“But we don’t know,” Marna concluded, “we just don’t know. I think someone’s trying to do us in. Someone—among us even. Who can get at the food.”

There was a hush while they looked down, almost to a woman. Not wanting to look at one another. Ruth felt chilled, the way she had when Pete left, not knowing exactly why, what she had done. Might have done, or left undone, around the farm. Wondering who might have spoken out against her, what child even. Or Tim, without meaning to, laughing with Pete at some inadequacy of Ruth’s: leaving the barn door open, not completing an account, missing a meeting of Agri-Mark because she was chasing after a wayward animal. Not knowing. Not knowing—that was the worst.

They broke apart then. Grace gave up on a frosting— there wasn’t any confectioner’s sugar; said she wasn’t hungry now. “Don’t know why I started the dam cake anyway. Sugar makes me hyper.” Jo went out to forage in the garden: “There’re still some beet greens. We need vitamin C.”

“There hasn’t been anyone else here?” Ruth asked Mama as they walked out into the front hall. “Anyone suspicious? I mean, anyone at all you can think of?”

“Just the plumber, an electrician when we had a power outage. Seemed harmless enough, Vermonters—though looking at us like we’re freaks, some weird cult, waiting to catch the next UFO. That old guy next door came over once. All upset about the sign out there. I’ll bet he’s the one defaced it that time. It was Angie’s design. Have you seen her jewelry, by the way? She was planning to take it to the craft center when she... died.”

Marna blinked, turned away quickly, and led Ruth to an adjoining room. There was a small table with gold rings and silver pendants. Ruth gasped. They were dazzling: full of loops and spirals and—
mystery
was the word Ruth would put to it.

“The designs look Celtic. My mother had a pin once, from the Hebrides, with intersecting circles like this one.” She picked it up. It felt electric in her fingers. “I still have it, in a drawer. And Angie made up her own designs? Worked the metal and all that?”

“Oh, yes. Mother set up a corner of the basement for her. Then she’d try to give them away. To us. Said they were nothing, just designs that came out of her head, as if that didn’t mean much.” Marna fingered a silver ring lovingly. It had a pattern of exploding stars, a purple amethyst in the center. Amethyst was her birthstone, Marna said; Angie had wanted her to have it. She meant to speak to Isis about it.

“She didn’t realize her own talent. Too bad.” Another thought entered Ruth’s mind, but she buried it before it worked its way into words.

“And here are Angie’s designs, on paper. Mother had them framed. Here’s the one for the sign. It was Mother’s favorite; she had a funny fellow on a bicycle make it up for us.”

“Willard Boomer.”

“Willard Boomer?” Marna repeated the name, thought it humorous. “I remember he caught a fly in his hands while he was here in the kitchen, let it out the back door. A true Buddhist.”

“But this logo. Your neighbor’s interest in it. His family’s been in town forever—the old mother almost reclusive before she died a couple of years ago, but decent people, for all that. I’ve never heard of any problems there.” Though she recalled something about the younger brother drowning in the creek. But accidental, though townfolks joked it was the work of the old girlfriends, conspiring to do him in.

Now she’d lost the drift of her thought. “What I’m saying is, did he say why he was upset about that sign, that logo? Unless he was just using it to complain about the place as a whole. They say he complains publicly. He’s not the only one, of course: Conservative Vermonters worry about places like this. They remember Island Pond, for one. Anytime a group of people stray from the norm—the nuclear family—there are suspicions. As though their own so-called family values don’t hide a hundred sordid secrets!” Ruth thought again of her sister-in-law, Bertha, and shuddered.

“Hear, hear,” cried Marna. And she added, “That’s why Mother keeps a low profile, wants us to stick around, not go in town, you know. Partly for the healing, but also so we won’t attract attention—or our men. She wants to make us forget we’re outsiders. ’Cause that’s what we are. What our husbands have made us. Outsiders.”

Mama was quiet a minute; her head seemed to shrink into the collar of her print housedress. She seemed to forget Ruth was there. Ruth asked her how she’d interpret the logo.

“Oh. Well. Angie always said the meaning was in the eyes of the beholder. So my personal interpretation, I guess, is that that arrow about to pierce the moon represents the abuse, the split in the family—what Mother is trying to heal. Mother wants it healed, but she doesn’t want us to forget it. We carry those arrows inside us all the time—in our bones. It’s hard to heal a heart with an arrow through it. It is!”

“I know,” Ruth said. Then she thought of the skeleton that wasn’t Mac, of the ring on its finger, bearing a similar design of moon and bone and arrow. Was it coincidence—or were the designs somehow linked?

And what was Alwyn Bagshaw’s interest in that logo? Was there a reason he went after that sign? As she stepped outside, the lights next door blanked out, almost simultaneously. Well, too late for a visit now, and she had work piled up at the farm. There might be a call about Glenna. There would be; she was sure of that. Who would want to harm an old lady?

Tomorrow maybe, after milking and graining, if she could prevail once again on Tim, she’d pay a visit to Alwyn Bagshaw.

* * * *

Alwyn Bagshaw watched the house after the Willmarth woman’s pickup squealed to a stop. But after awhile, he switched out the lights, sat down in the chair by the window. He kept that chair there now; he had watching to do. They never pulled their shades, those devil women, wanted him to see in, sure, get their kicks out of a man watching. Wanting more than a man—wanting his house, his land, what was left of it after Ma sold off that parcel. When Denby died, they got back the two acres up in the forest, but then Ma sold them back to the state. For what? For a year’s rent, the state fleecing its citizens like always, milking them. Ma’d had land in the swamp, too, but the state took that for sixty measly bucks. Though it wasn’t worth anything, all muck and bugs. Been in the family two hundred years, though. Two hundred! The Bagshaws one of the first families up to Branbury, the ancestor a doctor. Doctor, sure! Indians shot him when he was building a cabin for the wife and child, shot him through the shoulder, front to back—on the spot where Alwyn sat now—and he set the shoulder himself.
Himself,
he thought. Alwyn admired that. That was self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency was good; his mother had taught him that. “Grow your own,” she liked to say, “don’t let them greengrocers fleece you. Live off your land.”

Ma’d wanted Denby to be a doctor, like his ancestor, but Denby didn’t have the hands for it, the head. All Denby wanted hands for was women. Alwyn, now he could of done it, sure, learned what it took. But there was no money for the learning. He finished high school, too, a sight more’n Denby ever did—Denby dropping out after ninth grade. Then went to work, Alwyn did. Next thing to being a medical man, testing milk. Seeing that milk had nothing contaminating, nothing to hurt the children.

Alwyn liked children. Liked girl children, too. His cousin Oscar had one, cute little thing, used to set on his lap and he’d tell the story of his ancestor, about the arrow shot through, front to back, and setting it himself. She liked to hear it, too; she’d ask questions. “Did it get better, Cousin Alwyn? Did it heal?”

But they grew up, girl children. Changed. Turned into gossips, looking for men, sex. Ma no different, was she? Ma kept Denby in her bed long after Father took off, made Alwyn sleep alone. What’d they do in that bed? He shut his eyes, saw the hand stroking down the boy’s belly, down to the sex there, fondling. Denby wriggling, liking it—that’s how he’d got his sex drive, sure, that’s how it’d started. Taught by Ma. Ma, who’d locked him in the cellar that time a whole day and night. Left him sobbing there, his blanket soaked on the old mattress. And Ma never came.

She was coming out of the place now, the Willmarth woman. He saw her, saw her hesitate on the walk, look over toward his place, take a step in his direction. He let the curtain drop, though she couldn’t see him. It was dark inside, dark outside. She wouldn’t come over in the dark, would she? No, she was turning back again, running to her car like something was running after: the Antichrist, chasing her into the green pickup; engine grinding, racing off down the road, down the mountain.