Mad Cow Nightmare (5 page)

“Thank you, Bertha. But I’ve never accepted the label of righteous
or
sinner, and don’t expect me at your church.” Ruth had to milk the cows on Sunday as well as every other day and knelt only to the bovine underbellies. She’d have to do a little praying now, though, she thought, listening to the wailing out in the pasture.

“What
is
that noise?” asked Bertha. “It sounds like heavenly angels. Is it the radio?”

“It’s the Tabernacle Choir, Bertha. I have it on to comfort me in this time of need.” Ruth slapped the phone back into its wall cradle before Bertha could gush out a response.

A child in each hand, Sharon marched into the pasture, through the crowd of travellers, who had brought their lunches, fiddles, and pennywhistles as if for a prolonged festival, and into the trailer where Maggie was warbling to the strum of a guitar. Sharon was intrigued by Maggie and her vagabond life; she often daydreamed in the tub about running off and setting up housekeeping on some remote mountaintop. Or perhaps by the ocean side, she hadn’t decided which. She did long to travel, but was held back by children and a forester husband who was too in love with the Vermont forests and clay plains to leave the state.

Inside the cluttered trailer, which was hung with red and yellow India print cotton sheets and racks of sparkly skirts and blouses, the grandmother squatted on a three-legged stool, peeling potatoes. She was dressed in an orange cotton skirt and low-cut black blouse that revealed the tops of her wrinkly boobs. A potbellied pig with a pendulous belly and stubby snout sat at her feet, munching on the dropped peels and making little satisfied
ouffing
sounds. Seeing Sharon, it began a kind of
ha ha ha
pant that put Sharon quite off balance. But the old lady grinned. “She’s just saying hello.”

Sharon smiled back, decided she could do without a pet pig, and inquired after Maggie.

The grandmother waggled her thumb in the direction of a screened-off area in the rear of the trailer. “In there,” she said. “She won’t go out. She won’t speak. She won’t do nothing but worry about Nola and sing depressing songs.”

And sure enough, the tragic words “Laugh at death, but weep for those who die before their time” came warbling out of the back side of the crowded trailer, which Maggie shared with her husband, Darren. The lyrics switched into Gaelic, or was it Cant?— sounding something like “Gory at thasp, keener . . .” and, well, Sharon gave up trying to decipher the words, and knocked on the wooden frame of the screen.

Maggie went on singing.

When Sharon entered anyway, after cautioning the children to “Stay outside and don’t chase the heifers,” Maggie jumped up from her mattress and grabbed Sharon hard about the neck. Anyone who would listen to her songs was apparently her friend, and Maggie had seen Sharon at her concerts. The younger woman waited while Maggie finished pouring the end of the song into her ear—in English now. The girl in the song had drowned and her lover sat alone on the bridge where the girl had leaped, beating his chest for the guilt of having betrayed her.

Typical man, Sharon thought. She thought of the missing woman, Nola, and her lover. For she had a lover, didn’t she? The man who’d come with her from Canada, who’d taken—no, abducted—her from the Toronto hospital? According to the newscast, a witness had heard her protests. And if the fellow had abducted her from the hospital, wouldn’t he abduct her again, against her wishes, from the dairy farm? For it was Sharon’s theory that Ritchie had come in on her taking the bath, yanked her out of the tub, and hearing footsteps in the kitchen, shoved her out the window, giving her a bleeding knee or shin. Then he sprang through behind her and hurried her off the farm.

“So where is he? The boyfriend?” Sharon whispered when the last note quivered on the breeze that wafted in through the cracks in the rear door, and then died away. “Where did he take your Nola?”

Maggie stuck her hands on her shiny yellow hips. “Who knows, the selfish bastard? Aw, and he’s gone with her all right. Don’t want to see any cops. No, not him! Not with what he done.”

Sharon sat back on her heels. Here was something more intriguing than any distraught lover running off with a sick woman. Here was the hint of some hanky-panky, some foul play. Had the woman drowned in the bathtub? Had he pushed her under, then hauled her out? Had he disposed of her body somewhere and run off—not wanting the body dug up, given an autopsy? And where had this lover gone? This monster?

“What did he do?” she whispered, gazing into Maggie’s black mascaraed eyes. The mascara had run down her cheeks from all the weeping and into the creases beside her full red lips.

The eyes only gazed back soulfully at her. “ ‘S not for me to say. Do you want me killed, do you? I never told Nola, and that’s a fact. Ritchie would of knowed where the telling come from.”

“But it might’ve saved her life to know!” Sharon cried, for she had decided that Nola
was
dead—if not a homicide, then a suicide. Or maybe dead already from that chronic wasting disease.

The young sister burst into the tent and held up a small enameled box. A slim-hipped girl in her early teens, the sister was a match for Sharon’s sister, Emily, in her tight jeans and stretchy pink tank top that showed the small pointy nipples of her pancake breasts.

“Can I have it, Mag? It’s just the box for my earrings! Nola won’t have no use for it now, will she?” The girl folded her hands together, pleading.

“It’s locked, Liz,” Maggie said.

“Well? There must be a key somewhere in her stuff Ritchie brought, and if not, there’s always a way in, right?” Liz looked at Sharon for support. She was a smaller version of Maggie: carroty red hair, large, slightly oval eyes, and those deep pink Irish cheeks. “Pretty” was the word that came to mind; Liz and Maggie were both pretty. But the newscast had described the missing Nola as “a beauty”—a description sent out by the hospital, along with a photograph that was now in police files. Sleeping beauty, Sharon thought, envisioning the woman in the tub, her head floating below the surface of the sudsy water after the lover pushed her under and carried her inert body out the window. . . . Well, no, not sudsy, because the water was hard here on the farm, and Sharon’s mother did not have a water softener. An unnecessary expense, her mother insisted, when Sharon came to take a bath because the well was always running low at her own house in East Branbury. As a teenager on the farm, Sharon would wash her hair and have to trudge down to the beaver pond to rinse out the dull iron. Already she’d noticed a lavender tint to her mother’s graying hair. She must point this out to her.

Maggie grabbed the box, clutched it to her chest. “No,” she said, pushing out her lips in a pout. “No no no no. It’s Nola’s box. She gave it to me for safekeeping. Though it might give a clue to Nola. Anyway, I don’t want Ritchie to see it. Oh, he’ll turn up somewhere, you can bet on that—he’s a bad penny all right. Nola jumped out the window, oh sure, after he came in on her taking the bath. I don’t blame her! She wasn’t gonna let him steal her away again.”

Here was a new scenario Sharon hadn’t thought of: Nola fleeing alone and Ritchie in hot pursuit. And when he found her, what would he do? Gripes, Sharon thought, what
would
he do?

“Then if I decide—and if we can find the key—or maybe get it open some way or other,” Maggie told Liz, “you can maybe borrow the box till Nola gets back. But not till then.”

“Her and Ritchie aren’t coming back,” Liz said. “I heard Ritchie this morning talking to Darren when he was folding up the tent. He said he was going to buy hisself a pickup and go back to Uncle’s farm, and if Darren wouldn’t come he’d have the farm to himself when the old man died. He’d see that Darren didn’t inherit a bloody acre of it. That’s what he called it, a bloody acre.”

“Is that so? And why would Darren care a fig anyhow? Why did Darren run off if he wanted to own some old farm with a million rocks and stones and some old doddering cows? Darren hates cows.” Maggie glanced apologetically at Sharon. “Well, not all cows. It’s just that cows is all Darren knows how to do. Except play music. But right now the music don’t buy the food, you know. Even with me singing.”

“I know what you mean,” Sharon cooed in sympathy. Like her mother with this farm, she and Jack were barely hanging on, even with three part-time jobs between them.

“So here we are, right? Here we are,” Maggie repeated, planting her two feet firmly on the linoleum floor of the trailer, her blue-black eyes watering. “I hope he’s gone for good,” she said between her shiny teeth. “I hope he never comes back. I hope Nola’s alive somewhere and keeps hiding and he never, ever finds her.”

But the cloudy eyes looking off through the trailer window betrayed that hope. For a moment Sharon felt disoriented, as though Maggie and her cousin had fallen into a deep hole and there was no way Sharon could pull them back out.

Chapter Five

At first, looking out the bedroom window, barely awake, James Perlman thought it was a sheet, torn loose from his wife’s clothesline. But he didn’t have a wife—she’d gone off with that man who ran the hardware store. So now James sent his laundry to Mountain Fresh in town. The apparition was dressed in white, like a ghost. Only the ghost was moving fast, feet running so fast they were spinning but not gaining ground. Suddenly the feet were on top and the sheet plummeting. Decompressing into a crumpled heap, like a parachute—only a dark-haired head now, and in his backyard.

His first instinct was to leave the heap alone. But it didn’t move and he felt compelled to see what the trouble was. He threw on a robe, took a heavy flashlight from a closet shelf. In Batavia, New York, where James was from, good Samaritans were usually hit on the head for all their goodwill, left for dead. He’d read a number of cases like that in the Buffalo papers. This was the reason he and Maureen had moved to Vermont. One of the reasons, anyway. The other—well, the other he didn’t like to think about. Because, of course, it would never happen again. No, never, never! He’d told Maureen that—pleaded with her to believe him. She just shrugged. They hadn’t been in Vermont more than ten months when Maureen met that hardware fellow and moved out. Like she’d been waiting for such an excuse.

The head belonged to a woman. And it wasn’t a sheet she was wrapped in but a white nightgown. It had settled seductively over belly and breasts, and again he was afraid and he stepped back. The poet Emily Dickinson flashed into his mind. His wife, a middle school English teacher, had made him take a poetry class with her. Most of it bored him but he was intrigued by Emily, her white dress, her fascination with death. James was fascinated, too; it was why he was a hospice volunteer. Emily was dead. And maybe this one was, too.

Gripping the flashlight he tiptoed to the woman, heard a groan. “Hello,” he said, but no response. That was when he saw the blood on her sleeve, like she’d cracked her arm on something and broken the skin. Blood on her forehead, too, like something had struck it, though maybe she’d rubbed her forehead with the sleeve and that was why. And a purple bruise, or scar, where the top of her breast showed above the nightgown. She had something in her hand— looked like a necklace. He wondered if she’d stolen it. He said, “Hello, you’re hurt.” But still no reply.

He stood there, gazing at her. She was young, beautiful—the blood on the white gown. He thought of Poe’s Annabel Lee, who died in her prime. Maureen had a video of that poem.

There was that hot, needy sensation in his groin the poem always brought. He didn’t—couldn’t—move.

Though his brain kept working. Should he call 911?

No, he didn’t want to be involved with that kind of thing. Didn’t want to be involved with police or nosy social workers. Not that he’d been formally indicted—there was no real proof. It was just a local scandal, confined mostly to the hospital where he’d worked as a male nurse. The offense was kept quiet—till word got out, some officious reporter put it in the Buffalo paper, and he had to leave the neighborhood.

He didn’t want his past polluting his present. He had his twenty acres, his two dozen sheep that would fuel his retirement. He had a decent job with the counseling service. He was a caring person, he worked hard at hospice—had already helped three cancer patients to their final rest. The relatives had thanked him. One even sent a basket of fruit, invited him to attend her church, and he did, though he was bored. James was an agnostic, if anything.

But he couldn’t leave the woman here on the grass. She was moaning louder, a wailing sound that rose and fell with her breath. “Can you walk?” he asked. But again no answer. He put down the flashlight—he didn’t want to frighten her. Anyway, the sun was coming up, the mountains turning pink. He was still in his bathrobe—he slept in the buff these hot nights. James was a good person, he was! People back in Batavia had the wrong idea, his wife never understood. Sometimes his body overrode his mind.

He couldn’t leave her lying on the ground. He took a deep breath, picked her up in his arms—she hardly weighed anything, and that was good—he was a thin fellow, weighing in at 155. “Slight,” they’d called him in that newspaper article. He’d rather they’d have called him “slim” or “lean.”

A car pulled up in front of his house, startling him—he almost dropped the girl. It was the mailman; he had a package in his hand. He might bring it up to the porch, and then what would he see? James imagined him describing the scene to a coworker: “This fellow Perlman, with a woman in his arms—in a nightgown. Was there blood on the sleeve? Should they inform the police?”

It was too compromising. James laid her on the grass behind a tree. The day was warming up, the air wouldn’t hurt her. Later he’d go out and see. Bring her something to eat and drink. Bring her into the house maybe. He’d get dressed first, he didn’t want to scare her. He’d made all those resolves since the trouble he’d got himself into. He ran around to the front of the house.

“Hello? A package for me?” he called to the carrier. “Wait, I’ll come and get it. You stay right there.”