Stolen Honey (15 page)

She went back to work. After an hour on the computer, she felt a kind of paralysis creep up her back and knew that she had to move her body. When she got up, something snapped in her spine. She had a pinched nerve that required surgery—she’d kept putting it off. She lay on her back on the floor and pulled her legs, hard, up to her chest. But it didn’t help. She’d have to walk out the kinks. It was these late nights on the computer, the anxiety to get this paper researched and written, that had done her in. She would walk once around the block—twice, maybe.

It was a cloudy but warm night. Camille’s apartment was over a garage; the near-deaf couple who lived in the house were in bed by ten o’clock. Oddly, she felt safer out here on this quiet street than she did in her apartment: The houses were close together, a few had lights on upstairs. A car went down the street at least every ten minutes. She strode out, feeling her back unwind, her muscles stretch. She heard her heels click on the sidewalk, but when she paused, the street was quiet. She thought about her paper—walking stimulated the brain. So did the rain that was just starting to dampen her skin and hair.

For a moment she had the illusion that Annette was moving along with her, pouring out her story.
Help me,
the woman pleaded,
pull me up so I can breathe in the fresh air. Get them off my back!
Camille was sure that someone was behind her then, and she walked faster. But when she reached her apartment steps and looked back, there was no one. The footsteps were in her imagination. Annette, too, had disappeared. A car drove slowly by and then turned into a driveway up the street. Two cars were parked on the street—it was too dark to see the color or plates. It was a perfectly normal evening. It was her own paranoia she had to struggle with and overcome.

She fumbled for her key, discovered she didn’t need it. Usually the lock clicked shut automatically, but she realized that she had left it open for Emily, and afterward had forgotten to push the bolt. She went in—and gasped. Someone in a black hooded raincoat was seated at her computer, reading what she had written, then deleting it; she could hear the quick raspy breaths. Now, as she stood in the doorway, gripped with anger, the gloved hand reached down to yank the plug, both hands pulling the machine toward the table edge as though they would steal or destroy it.

She snatched up a chair by the door, went at the intruder, struck the back of the head. They were suddenly face-to-face. Her vision blurred. Things took on a life of their own. The computer crashed to the floor. The chair rose, sailed through the air. In a fury she attacked, barehanded. She was caught; she broke loose, dashed for the phone, dialed 911. Felt herself pushed; she fell, rolling over, hands, wires coiled about her neck, tightening on her throat.

And the room blinking slowly black....

Chapter Ten

Colm Hanna was the first on the scene, alerted electronically by a 911 dispatcher. He was the only one in the building when the call came in; the chief was home, nursing his aches and pains, watching a ball game. The others were off duty or on a beat somewhere: Sergeant Hammer at a fire in New Haven, Olen Ashley helping campus security—a fight in one of the dormitories. If they couldn’t have fraternities, they’d raise hell in the dorms. He was stunned at what he found. A young woman with a phone cord twisted around her neck, her face and throat a dark red, deep purple bruises on the back of her neck. The phone lay bleating beside her head. An Epson computer lay on its side, a black cat crouched nearby, wary.

A pile of papers rustled in the breeze from an open window. Colm picked up a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and a shiny key painted with a purple X that had fallen on the rug; he wrapped them in a handkerchief for forensics. There was no sign of activity in the bedroom; if the attack was sexual, it had happened on the living room rug. There was no pulse, poor kid. She didn’t look over twenty-five, though she might have been thirty. These things were hard to deal with. Colm could never do this police thing full-time.

The outside door was unlocked. Had she known the stranger? It was a man, it would appear, judging by the marks on the throat. “Jeez,” he said. “Jeez.” And then, “Too late for her.” And, “Don’t move anything,” when moments later Sergeant Hammer ran in, then Olen Ashley, who’d just checked back into home base. Ashley had heard of the woman; she was a college professor, he said—the department had listed her home phone after her office was vandalized, her files deleted. Ashley was still shaken—and shaking, he said—”at the degree of intoxication” he’d seen that evening in one of the men’s dorm’’. Could one of the drunks have stumbled into the professor’s apartment? He called the medical examiner while Colm alerted his father— Hanna’s Funeral Home was two blocks away.

The response wasn’t wholly unexpected: “Christ, Colm, it’s after eleven. I was sound asleep—my arthritis bad, bad! Can’t you take care of the body? I mean, if it’s homicide, they’ll wanna keep it, right? You know where the limo keys are.”

As it turned out, his father was right. The medical examiner had the body photographed, then wrapped and transported to Burlington for a complete medical-legal autopsy. Ashley and Hammer took charge of searching the apartment for evidence. Colm went home. Then, looking up at the darkened windows of the mortuary, he backed out of the driveway and just drove. How could he sleep anyway, after what he’d seen? He imagined what it must have been like for the young woman, finding an attacker in her apartment—or did she let him in? What had he been after, anyway? A copy of the exam? A kid might have panicked, tried to stifle her screams. What would drive him to do that? A demanding father? “Pass that course or else”? It happened, Colm knew. Parents wanting to make over a kid in their image.

When he drove past the Willmarth farm—for some reason the Horizon headed itself that way, like an old horse to Paddy’s Bar—he saw a light on in the barn. The car turned in, parked next to the green pickup. He and Ruth were vying, it seemed, for “oldest running vehicle.” He found her rubber-gloved and cleaning up a newborn calf.

This one was already rising up on unsteady legs; the mother—up, too, after her ordeal—licking at the calf, bawling her pleasure. It was a bull calf, Ruth said—it would go to the slaughterhouse. “Vic hates that. He gets overly fond of these calves.” And then, “What are you doing here at this hour?” She glanced at her watch, reported, “Eleven-thirty-five. Last week it was two in the morning. I hoped Emily would stay home tonight, but she had to hand in her paper to that sociology prof.”

He told her what had happened, and she cried out, “No! Can’t be! Who would do that?” and she sank down on an overturned pail. When she caught her breath and started talking, as if to chatter away the shock of the death, she explained how Camille had come to her, left a computer disk. “She was feeling paranoid. I didn’t take her seriously enough. I could have done something to save her, couldn’t I?” She pulled off her gloves, dropped them in a pile of hay. They were wet with mucus and blood. Colm felt queasy all over again to see them.

She brought him into the house. It was a warm evening, rain stopped, stars just beginning to wink through the clouds. The universe was carrying on, a young woman’s death nothing to that vast nonchalance. Inside he hit the Otter Creek Ale; she kept it for him, didn’t drink much of it herself. It kept her up peeing, she said. Tonight, though, she’d be up anyway. She had two young grandchildren upstairs in bed, the little one with a cold—Sharon and Jack at an overnight ecology conference.

“Someone wanted to see what was on that computer,” she said. “Or destroy what was there. That’s why Camille was worried. Her research had something to do with a eugenics project back in the thirties. Past history.”

Colm had read a piece about it in the
Boston Globe,
“Another religious war. At least your people were Protestant, Ruthie. We Irish Catholics were among the degenerates, you know. But in the pecking order, a hair above the French—mainly because there were more of them in Vermont. At the bottom, the Native Americans.”

“But who would kill over something that happened in the past?” she argued.

“Maybe she named names. People who think the past would hurt the present. Or it could have been a student. We’ll have to check the class lists. It could be a random killer—that’s the worst.” He poured a second glass. He needed it. Ruth was nursing a cup of herb tea. It helped her to sleep, she said. He’d help her to sleep, too, if she’d let him, he reminded her, and she only smiled and put out a hand. It was still smelly from the birth. He didn’t mind, did he? He’d take whatever she’d give him. Her divorce was final now. But she was still carrying some kind of cross. Or maybe the bitterness at Pete’s defection hadn’t yet subsided—she didn’t seem to be done with the old marriage.

He could wait. It seemed he had to, if he wanted her.

She jumped up, startling him. “What did I do with that disk she gave me? We can read it, see if she names any names.” Then halfway across the room she halted, slapped a hand to her head. “What a ninny I am! She took it back. She came rushing over after her office was vandalized, asked for the disk. She wanted to copy it onto her home computer, the office one was too accessible.” Ruth sank back into her chair, dropped her chin in her hands. “I should have reminded her to bring it back afterward.”

“How could you know someone was going to kill her?” He grabbed one of her hands. Patted it. Jeez, he felt like her father.

“I know, I know,” she said. “But someone wanted her work, she thought—maybe a colleague. Or it could have been an outsider. She was looking up the Godineaux family. It could have been any one of them. She throws her business cards around. She even gave me one. It has her number, her home address, her office at the college. How public can you get? She struck me as being rather naive.”

“They’ll take the computer to the station. If there’s still anything on it, I’ll get it copied. We can track some of these people down. You got a little time on your hands?”

She looked at him; he knew she didn’t. But he knew she’d make time. She said, “Emily. Emily was going over there tonight with her paper. She would have been one of the last to see Camille. I’ll call her tomorrow. She’ll have heard the worst by then.”

They sat in silence for a few moments while Colm finished his beer. He started for the refrigerator and she stopped him. “I’m going to bed, I’m bushed. I need to sleep this murder off, clear my head. If you want another one, you’ll have to drink it in your car. I’m locking up.”

Once he stood up, he decided he didn’t want another one anyway. He had stronger stuff at home. Guckenheimer whiskey. It would do the trick—for tonight anyway. Tomorrow he’d take a look at that computer. Jeez, two dead in the same month— and both from the college. Weird.

Upstairs a child cried out. Ruth was racing up the steps like the kid was about to leap out a window. “I’ll phone you tomorrow, okay?” he hollered.

There was no reply. He couldn’t compete with a grandkid.

The
ANNETTE
file was blank, someone had managed to delete all but the last few sentences, Colm said on the phone the next day, while he was lingering on the line. Receiver cradled between bent head and shoulder, Ruth was sweeping out the barn:

bits of hay, feces, caked blood, dried urine, straw. What a smelly world Ruth lived in! The granddaughter, Willa, was squatting on an overturned box, cooing to a stuffed rabbit, her honey-colored hair falling across her round face. That blank file, Ruth thought. If they didn’t know what was on it, how could they find any leads to the killer?

“But they didn’t get her date book,” Colm said. “Olen found that in her bedroom. She’d written down three or four Godineaux addresses—that should give us a lead. At least there was no sign of a sexual assault.”

“Thank God for small favors,” she said dryly. “There was a key, though, something I picked up from the floor. I’ll have forensics check it for fingerprints. Might not be anything important. But it didn’t fit her door.”

They were silent a moment. She heard the new calves bleating in their stalls—they wanted their mothers, out in the field. Willa said, “Mama?”

“Soon,” she told the child. “Mama will be home soon.” Colm said, “Now we’ve got two deaths and we haven’t a clue about either one. Although ...” He stopped talking. A cluster fly buzzed in her ear.

“Although what, Colm? You’re getting to be like your boss, Fallon. You don’t finish sentences. It drives the listener crazy, you know that?”

“Now you’ve knocked it right out of my mind, Ruthie. I don’t know what I was going to say. Wait—yes, I was going to say that Olen has a new suspect for the Noble boy’s death. Russell LeBlanc. Evidently he was there that night; he had means, he had motive. He knew where the nightshade was. He could’ve dragged the guy there.”

“What are you, Colm—undertaker, Realtor, or cop? Which is it, pal? If cop, remember that Russell is Gwen’s husband, even with a different name. I don’t like the idea of his being accused without proof.
She
won’t like it.” She surveyed the mess at her feet. She wished she could afford to buy a machine that would sweep it all away.

Colm sneezed. “ ’Scuse me,” he said.

“The fire in Gwen’s car,” she said, forcing her mind back to the two deaths. “Any fingerprints on that charred box of matches I gave you?”

“Not a trace. The guy must’ve been wearing gloves. So was the fellow who murdered the professor. No clues, I told you. Except for the key. And the date book.”

“Well, keep looking. Colm, I have to finish cleaning up in here. Talk to you later, okay? Unless you want to come over and help?”

“Uh, no, thanks. I’ll phone first.”

“Sure,” and she hung up. She rubbed her aching neck, swatted a fly. Help might be on the way, though. Two bicycles whirled into the driveway. “Just in time,” she shouted at the girls. “Come give the place a mop-down, will you, Em?” Though she knew what the girls really wanted, what they needed. “I know, I heard,” she said, hugging them both with her smelly arms.