Stolen Honey (27 page)

Alarm bells rang in her head. Tilden had tried to run Donna down, hadn’t he? He’d admitted that. And now Donna was missing. Had he hurt her? Had he—no, no, she couldn’t think the word, or say it.

She hung up, held on to a kitchen chair. She knew now what it was to be helpless. She might as well be handcuffed, bound to the chair, for all the good she could do. She could only wait— and worry.

Chapter Seventeen

It was ten o’clock when Ruth arrived at the yellow trailer halfway up Bradley Hill and parked in the dirt driveway behind a dented black Honda. She’d gotten lost, had to ask directions in the country store, even though the town of Andover was small, strictly rural, except for the private academy at its center, bustling with boys and girls, who seemed to live in a kind of treasure island of their own.

The trailer was set back from the road, with no houses in sight on either side. It was in desperate need of a coat of paint. A porch had been built onto the front, too large for the trailer, like a sketch of what might have been. A pair of peeling green rocking chairs stood at one side of the front door, a rusted yellow swing on the other. A clump of daffodils nodded in a front garden; honeybees hummed in the unmown grass. Behind the house the woods were dark with evergreens and ancient-looking oaks. Through them she saw the glimmer of a pond. It’s the right place, Ruth thought, for a woman who doesn’t want neighbors nosing into her past.

She knocked, and after a few minutes the door opened; a tall, angular woman in her sixties, perhaps, stood there in denim shirt and blue polyester slacks, as though she’d been waiting for the knock, for
something
to happen, had watched from a window as the car pulled up. And yet she took a negative stance.

“If you’re asking for money, the answer is no,” she said in a monotone. She held on to the sides of the doorway to underscore her dissent.

Ruth explained her visit stammeringly, cowed by this woman, still disoriented from her night of loving. She gave the hairdresser’s name: “Annette Godineau, a namesake. It’s for my Joey, Joey Godineaux. Looking for roots, you see. I’m only wanting to help him.”

Hunting the queen, Ruth thought, remembering the swarm of Gwen’s bees in her trees, how Gwen had searched out the queen among the guarding workers—and suddenly there she was, long and bright-eyed and golden yellow. Would Annette look like that?

The woman examined Ruth with narrowed eyes; she might have been a bodyguard for the old woman and Ruth a suspicious person. Ruth wondered if the woman could hear her banging heart.

“Wait here,” said the bodyguard, and shut the door in Ruth’s face.

A book lay facedown on a ripped cushion of the swing. Ruth picked it up. The off-white paper cover read,
Poems by Annette Godineaux.
Ruth let out a whistly breath. She wrote poems, this old lady? It hardly fit the Godineaux image Ruth held in her mind. On the inside cover she read, “Ragged Mountain Press.” Self-published, she supposed. But did it matter? Annette wrote poems! Ruth was blown away.

“They’re not for you to read,” the bodyguard said, reappearing in the doorway, holding out a hand for the book. Something fierce in her dark eyes made Ruth give it over. “That’s where Annette sits, in that swing. You can sit here,” she said, pointing to a nearby rocking chair.

“Come on out,” she called, and a frail shrunken woman less than five feet tall, a long skinny braid of white hair down her back, plodded slowly along on a cane. She had on a red wool shawl over a purple print housedress, pinned with a copper brooch. The companion followed close behind, but didn’t touch her, as though she were indeed a queen.

Annette lowered herself so carefully on the swing, she didn’t set it rocking. She didn’t look at Ruth, as though at her time of life she needed no contact with others, no new friends or companions. She seemed to be content with the one she had, still nameless, sitting beside her on the swing. Ruth could literally hear the silence: a protesting bird, a harrumphing frog in the lake, a buzzing insect. They could sit this way all day, Ruth thought, and she’d gain nothing. She had to speak up.

“Your descendant, Joey Godineaux,” she began—unsure of what descent Joey actually was, though great-grandson came to mind, “works with me on my farm. I’m—that is, he—is anxious to know something about his family. He’s a foster child, you see.” She described her interview with Mabel Petit and then Evangeline Balinsky, while Annette stared ahead into space.

“This cushion is splitting at the seams,” Annette told her companion, seeming to ignore Ruth’s story. “I can feel it popping under me.”

“I’ll take it to that seamstress in town,” the other woman said, lighting up a cigarette.

“No,” said Annette, in a throaty voice stronger than Ruth would have guessed from a centenarian. “I’ll do it myself if you’ll buy some green thread.”

“I’ll do it, then.”

“No,
I
will,” said Annette, and that ended the subject.

“What Joey and I would like to know,” said Ruth, blundering on, wanting to get to the heart of the matter, thinking of her cows, and Vic, who probably needed a bath, clean clothes, lunch money—”is who Joey’s forebears are on the male side. I mean, his father, or grandfather. Or great-grandfather?”

“Nobody,” Annette said, her eyes trained on a high point beyond Ruth’s head, and for the first time Ruth realized that she was blind. “Nobody at all. Never stayed long enough to leave a name.” She dropped her shriveled chin, appeared to look inward. “Not one goddam man among ’em worth leaving his name. They were all liars. Who knows what names they had? Two or three, to escape the law.”

“Oh,” said Ruth, afraid she wasn’t getting anywhere, but plowing on. “I met a Marcel Shortsleeves. He seemed a pleasant, honest fellow. He came to visit Pauline when she was in the reformatory.”

There was a sound from the companion, and Annette smirked.

“Oh, you know about that, do you?” Annette gripped her hands together, rocked the swing with her body, though her feet didn’t touch the porch floor. “You been snooping into our family secrets, have you?”

“Only to find out.. . for Joey,” Ruth stammered. “The early records burned, they said.”

“Sure,
they
burned ‘em,” said Annette. “They didn’t want the world to know what they did to us.” Her eyes were luminous with sun as she spoke. She rocked faster. The swing made a jarring sound, metal grating on metal. The companion stubbed out her cigarette on the porch floor and pulled another out of her pack of Kools.

“I know about the sterilization,” Ruth said, taking the plunge. She couldn’t hide the truth under the Joey umbrella much longer. “I need to tell you. A woman named Camille Wimmet, a professor at our local college, was doing research into the thirties eugenics project.” She told the woman what little she knew about Camille’s work. “But,” she said, afraid to look at Annette, hearing her voice hoarse, “Camille was killed for it. Someone strangled her. We think it may have been because of the research she’d done. Someone who didn’t want his or her reputation, well... blemished.”

Ruth looked up. Was Annette ill? A funny, raspy sound was coming out of her throat. Why, the woman was laughing! It was a bitter laugh that rose up out of the saggy pot of her belly. She glanced at the companion, but the latter just sat there, still as a possum. Ruth wanted to pick the old lady up—she couldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds—and shake her.

But she couldn’t, wouldn’t do that. She could only wait until the laugh died away and the woman was quiet again, except for the methodical creaking of the swing.

“So it’s come to that, has it?” Annette said finally, and something like a groan came up out of her lungs. Ruth saw her glance at her companion, but the latter was staring straight ahead, the cigarette pressed tightly between her thin lips.

“This is why I’ve really come,” said Ruth, leaning forward in the rocker, needing to be frank. “For Joey, yes, that’s part of it. But for Camille as well. To find out who killed her, and why. That’s why I want to know about the male side of the family—it was a man killed her, they think, the way the fingers had dug into the neck. Knowing all the names might lead us to someone.”

Annette turned her head toward Ruth as though she could actually see her. The eyes, when the sun went under a cloud, were dark holes. The white braid that lay on her chest was a stunning contrast to the red wool shawl. She smelled musty, like old books and papers. Ruth waited for her to speak.

“I had four children: Nicole, Jeannine, Cosette, and Andre,” she said finally, “by three different men—I only knew their first names. Jeannine died from scarlet fever, there was nobody to help. That Annette who does hair, she was Andre’s daughter, she comes sometimes to see me, but she talks too much—I have to cut it short. Nicole married at sixteen, but the bastard abused her. Finally . . . well, he left. Nicole came back to live with me, we didn’t have much. I stole some groceries, you know, we had to eat—other stuff we needed. Nicole got the habit, too, that eugenics woman ’round to talk to us, she thought she knew every goddam thing there was to know. She was the one got people sterilized. Her and the men with her.”

Annette’s voice was growing thin. The companion ran for water, but the old lady waved it away.

“They put Nicole’s kids in the training school,” she went on, “though they wasn’t backward. Way I got us out was I made a bargain. Sew up my cunt in exchange for a pardon. I took it. I didn’t know they did it to the kids, too—well, one of ’em anyhow, the boy.”

The old lady leaned back on the swing, gasping, exhausted from the long speech.

“She’s tired, can’t you see that?” her companion said, looking annoyed; she stubbed out the second cigarette, tossed it over the railing. “She’s not used to talking to people like this. Here,” she told the woman, “drink this. Don’t talk. You need your strength.” She sat back down beside the old lady, put an arm around her shoulders, and Annette leaned into it. It was as though they were lovers—or had been, once, and now were simply close companions.

Ruth stood up. She’d obviously been dismissed, but there were still questions. “Do you know where Nicole’s son is now? Where he came from? He might hold a key. You see, Camille Wimmet was trying to right a wrong, bring all this prejudice— this program—out in the open.”

She felt light-headed, standing there on the slanting porch, looking down on this odd couple; she glanced again at the book of poems. It was all so incongruous. The reformatory, the sterilization, the poverty: How could you get a poem out of a life like that? Was there poetry in poverty?

But the companion was hustling the old woman up out of the swing, back toward the front door.

As she went down the rickety porch steps, feeling off balance, Ruth heard Annette whine, “Fix me a cup of hot chocolate, will you, Pauline?”

Ruth wheeled about. Pauline? Why, this woman was Annette’s granddaughter. She was Joey’s mother. “Pauline?” she hollered. “You know those names I’m after. It was your own father and brother. And Joey’s father, who was he?” She stumbled back up the steps. “Pauline—don’t you want to know about Joey? Your son, Pauline!”

A door slammed. Ruth stood on the top step, feeling shut out, like the day Pete left and she’d watched him drive off in the taxi to meet that woman in town.

She was still standing there, her feet as though nailed to the wooden step, when the door opened again.

“How is he?” Pauline said. Her eyes were half shut; she was staring at Ruth’s car, or at a point beyond it.

“He’s fine, fine and healthy. My hired man has been a caring foster father, he wants to legally adopt him. But we’d like your permission. And the father’s. What’s his name, Pauline? You know, I know you do.”

Pauline stood frowning into space another moment, as though she might tell. Then she crossed her arms, thrust out her lower lip, and swiveled about.

“Tell me the names, Pauline. Call me! I’ll leave my number on the swing.” She drew pen and paper out of her pocketbook. “Call me or I’ll come back. With a policeman this time.”

Pauline pushed through the door. It banged behind her. And latched.

* * * *

Donna had been sleeping in the leaves. She’d wandered off the path and now she couldn’t find her way back. Once she thought she heard voices on the wind and she hallooed, but no one answered. She’d heard a helicopter overhead and waved, but the ’copter flew on. The trees were thick here, tall pointed pines so close together they made a canopy against the sun. The path she’d been on for what seemed hours would only lead back to the cabin. She didn’t want that, oh, no!

They’d be looking for her, though, she was sure of that. Someone would find her. A friendly human, she hoped, and not a fisher cat. Not Tilden, no, not Tilden. .. .

“I could kill you,” he’d said, “with this,” and he’d held up his little finger. Looking up at him where she was bound to the only chair, she’d felt it was true. He’d tried to kill her once, hadn’t he? He’d left the cabin, locking it behind, taking the key, announcing that he was going for food and she’d better make up her mind to listen to him, to “understand” why he’d done all those things: stolen the skeleton girl, run her off the road, gotten those killer bees. Oh, the bees were just a backup, he said—”in case.” It was for his father’s sake, he’d said, pleading with her— didn’t she know what it was to want to please a father? It was the bones, he claimed, that were keeping her parents from selling their land. He’d removed that obstacle, that’s all. She had to try and understand.

Why couldn’t
he
understand why the bones couldn’t be moved, why the land was sacred? she asked. But she was told to shut up. He was on something, it was obvious. She’d been afraid to cross him.

It took the better part of an hour to rub and rub the rope that held her hands against the splintered wood of the table, but the rope was old; eventually it gave; the lock that held the door was weak, and she pushed through. She stumbled up the path behind the cabin, in the opposite direction from her house to avoid Tilden, veered onto a less traveled path, thinking she could circle back toward her home. But the path disintegrated into brush; the day was overcast, there was no sun to orient her. She could only sit still—and wait.