Stolen Honey (32 page)

Only there weren’t any cherries in the refrigerator. Some days a kid couldn’t win.

* * * *

The place was ablaze with lights, but there was no answer when Ruth banged on the door. Olen wasn’t home. “What now?” Ruth asked.

“We go home,” he said, turning back.

“Hold on a minute. Check the windows. There might be one open.” He still didn’t move and she ran around back.

“You can’t do that,” he said, following her, “you can’t just break in. We don’t have a warrant.”

She’d discovered a bedroom window that was open an inch, enough to squeeze her fingers under. It was a warm night. A light rain was misting her hair. “See? We don’t have to break in after all.” She shoved it wide.

Colm said, “Jeez, that’s funny. He’s a stickler down at the station for turning out lights, shutting windows when it rains.”

“He would’ve left in a hurry, that Noel Lafreniere.”

“What! You don’t know that. About Lafreniere.”

“Ten bucks on it, Colm. Think about the name ‘Olen’.” She climbed through the window, scraping her elbow on the splintery sill. She was glad to be inside where it was dry. Colm followed, with a “Jesus! I shouldn’t be doing this, Ruthie.”

It was a spare bedroom in the literal sense of the word: a double bed with a plain pine headboard, a pine bureau, nondescript wooden chair, a closet. Clothes were spread out helter-skelter on the bed as though he’d been in a hurry to leave. He had to be wearing his dress uniform, Colm observed, because it wasn’t in the closet. A day uniform was hanging there, though. And in a corner, apart from his shirts and pants: a dark jacket and a white apron, fringed and trimmed with badges and symbols, a pair of pristine white gloves pinned to it. She recalled Gwen saying he was a Freemason. She’d seen pictures of Masons in the local paper, wearing those fancy aprons.

The living room was equally spare. An uncomfortable-looking black vinyl couch, a hard-backed rocking chair, a couple of massive mission chairs, a large oak desk littered with papers, a small oval blue rug on the hardwood floor. Yes, it was a man’s apartment. If Olen had had any women on and off, there were no signs. He’d been married once, Gwen had told her, but the female touch was gone now.

Colm shuffled through a pile of papers on the desk, held one up. “Sons of the American Revolution,” he read. “Here’s an application from the New Hampshire chapter. Why New Hampshire?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t one in Vermont.”

“Dated, um—1994? Jeez, what’s it still doing on his desk?”

“A reminder of who he might be? Hoped to be?”

“Ruthie, there’s nothing here about a Lafreniere. Let’s go, before he comes back. He could shoot first, then ask questions! I have to work with the guy. He could be our next chief.”

“Just a minute.” Ruth held up a genealogical book entitled
The Goodpastures of America.
There was no Lafreniere in the index. She wandered into the entryway, plucked a wrinkled map off the floor. “Map of New Hampshire,” she called back to Colm. She unfolded it; a town in the central area was circled in red. She gave a shout. “Andover, Colm. Look! That’s where he’s gone. To Andover. Looking for Annette.”

“Whoa, there, woman. Aren’t you jumping to conclusions? How would he know she’s in Andover? And why?”

“She could be a relative. He could be the son of a Noel Lafreniere who got a Godineaux pregnant. He’s, let’s see, in his late fifties now? Sixty? So Annette could be his grandmother.” She refolded the map. “But what do you suppose he’d want from her?”

“To do her in?” He was smiling, playing along with her, she knew the look. “He’s been hanging around the Woodleaf place, you said. He could have heard about our going there.”

“I suppose Gwen could have said something. He was there when I called her about going to Andover.” Now she was really worried. If she’d put that old lady’s life in danger. ..

“Ruthie, cool it. I’m leaving. You can stay here and get caught if you want to. Ashley’ll have you arraigned for breaking and entering.”

“You’ll have to walk, then,” she reminded him. “I’ve got the car keys. The only way to find out,” she said, as much to herself as to Colm, “is to go there.”

“Tonight? But I’m supposed to help Dad cremate a guy. And Emily won’t like it, either.”

She considered. “No, she won’t. But she’ll do her homework and go to bed. I’m her source of milk and meat, she’ll do what I say. Your dad has a fellow he can call on to help, hasn’t he? Come on, Colm. You might be right. He really could kill her.”

“Hey, I was kidding. Why would he want to do that? You haven’t got any proof.”

It was true. They’d broken into a policeman’s apartment—a policeman with a sterling reputation, as far as she knew. What reason did they have? What evidence? Just a name, a hunch. A deleted page from Camille’s disk.

“To keep her from talking, maybe?” Colm was interested now, he had her hands in his, was squeezing them, smiling at her. Placating her, yes, but respecting her concerns. “Her and Pauline—though he may not know about Pauline yet. He may not have known where they were till now.”

“To keep them from telling the world he’s a Lafreniere, not an Ashley, right? To keep them from telling
us.
He doesn’t know that we know.”

“0len...” Colm mused. “Switch the letters around—if the son had the father’s first name—you’ve got
Noel.
Hey!”

“See?” she said. She’d already figured it out.

Colm was hooked now, she could see that. He said, “We’d better damn well find out before somebody else gets killed.”

She followed him out through the bedroom window, dropped to the ground with a thud. It was still misting; she couldn’t see the house next door for the fog—a fog that matched her brain. “We’ll have to stop at the farm first, Colm. You can call your dad. I have to see to
Vic.
Ask Tim to stay till Emily gets there.”

“No so loud. You want the landlady to overhear us? Call the cops?”

“But you are a cop.”

“Never mind. Just get in the car. I’m driving.”

“Not my pickup, you’re not. Get in the passenger seat, mister. I’m driving.”

Chapter Twenty

The brakes screeched as Olen paused at a stop sign in New London. He’d gotten off the thruway too soon. It would cost him an extra twenty minutes to get to Andover. No one was coming in either direction, but out of habit he waited, to be sure. The boy was in the back, asleep. Greg’s Market had been out of the way, it would have cost him a good fifteen minutes to backtrack; he was on police business, he told the boy. And when the boy clapped his hands and pleaded, “Can I come, Officer? Please? Can Joey Godineaux help?” Olen had kept going. He didn’t know why—it was the shock of the name, maybe— Godineaux. Afterward, driving up over Bread Loaf Mountain, he was sorry he’d said yes. The boy was talking nonstop, nonsense. At the foot of the mountain, though, at the turn onto Route 100, the kid fell, thankfully, asleep.

Olen was on his way to find his grandmother, Annette Godineaux. He’d long ago heard from his foster mother that she was living in New Hampshire—no one knew where. He’d assumed that by this time she’d be dead, like his mother—he’d read about Nicole Godineaux’s death in the local paper, felt only surprise, maybe relief. He’d traced her to that Bridport farm but never went to see her. She’d never bothered to look him up, had she? She’d given him away. He recalled little about his father except the name Noel Lafreniere, passed on to him, along with his father’s allergies. Well, there had been men in the house, he remembered that. Some of them mean to him; he recalled a cigarette burn, bruises he woke up with on his face, chest, and arms. Not his father, no.

When he turned eighteen he’d switched around the letters in his first name, changed the surname to Ashley, and moved to Burlington. He worked his way through a year at the university, got a job as a rookie cop. Married and divorced—she wanted kids, he couldn’t give her any, he couldn’t tell her why. He’d transferred to Branbury. A new man, a clean record. He met Donald Woodleaf—he’d saved Woodleaf’s life that time. It had felt good to do that. Gwen was just a kid then, nine or ten. But she knew, she saw. He had a family now.

Hearing Annette’s name in Gwen’s kitchen had sent a series of shock waves through him. Annette, his grandmother—still alive ... his sister Pauline, living with the old woman? He’d kept track of Pauline awhile through police records—she was a suspect in their father’s death. He’d howled when he read that! She’d disappeared, probably into drugs, he figured, dead from an overdose. By then he had a reputation, he was a police lieutenant—he didn’t need any relationship with a murder suspect. He was a Master Mason, men looked up to him. Women, too:

Gwen. What would she think if she knew he came from a family of degenerates?

“Where we now?” the kid said in the backseat, waking up.

“Almost there,” he said. “Keep quiet, now. I got to concentrate on my driving. I don’t want to miss the next turn.”

Every ticket he gave, every break-in he went after, every drug case he busted—it was all to purge those lawless Godineauxs out of his life. To prove he was smart, clean—no stains on Olen Ashley. He was a success, a success!

Then one night he picked up that college kid for speeding. Found his name on the ID; Shepard Perkey Noble. Perkey—an all-too-familiar name. He was stunned. It was Eleanor Perkey had come busting into his mother’s trailer that day back in the thirties, nosing around, asking questions, getting them on the list of degenerates. Degenerates! And him, a kid. Christ Almighty.

The boy, Noble—bombed, stoned—told him, yeah, his grandmother’d been a social worker in these parts. She’d gone to Branbury College, yeah. The kid had family records, he thought he might use them for his sociology paper. Get him an A, absolutely. He could use an A. His grades weren’t so hot. “I’m an athlete,” he’d said, preening, flapping his wings, a young rooster. “That’s why I’m here. I play baseball. Had a .300 batting average in prep school.”

Olen released him—with a stiff fine. It wasn’t the first time, he found out, that the boy had been caught drinking, taking drugs, making a racket in the fraternity. Olen despised those college boys. They were privileged, they thought they owned the town. He’d doubled the fine.

Then that night coming back from the Masons, hearing the motorcycle, seeing Donna on the back, he’d followed them up the mountain, worried about the girl. He’d parked on the road, walked up, heard Donna cry out. But then he saw the Boulanger kid intercede, saw Donna run to her house. He left, came back hours later; found Noble on his back in the nightshade, drunk. Who dragged him there? Leroy? Probably. On an impulse he’d turned him over, rubbed his face in the stuff. Served him right, he’d thought, the bastard. Let him sweat it out.

But Jesus, he didn’t think it would kill him! He didn’t know the kid was an asthmatic.

He was sweating himself now, he turned up the air-conditioning. Someone was behind him, honking.

“Where we at now?” Joey said. “This Greg’s Market?”

“No, it’s not Greg’s Market,” he snapped. “The sign says Andover, two miles.” He supposed the boy couldn’t read, he had some missing links. Olen didn’t like that. It reminded him of the bad seeds in the family, the degenerates. Siblings sleeping together, the poverty, the overcrowding. Breeding degenerates. He felt the bile come up in his throat. He’d slept in a bed with his mother up to the time she was caught shoplifting, thrown in Brookview that last time, and him with her. That’s when they did it to him, just a kid.

And she knew, that college professor. He’d gone into her office that afternoon, after she’d called the station saying it had been vandalized. She told him what had been on her screen, her paper. Her paper about the eugenics project—someone might have copied the work, she said. The words hit him like a rock. For a time he couldn’t speak. When he pulled himself together, he told her he’d find out who did it, who stole the work. One thing led to the next, like a waterfall, the water cascading down, rolling him over and over, among the rocks.

His one thought then, his single purpose in life, was to destroy that work. No matter what it took.

And now he had the disk. He knew the worst. And so did that farm woman, Willmarth. Bad luck that Donna had made a copy! And Colm Hanna—a fellow cop.

The kid began talking again, gibberish, something about Tim, cows, his job at Greg’s Market. Would Olen take him back now. Christ! He should have made the kid get out in Branbury, he could only be in the way here.

“Not now. I have business, I told you. Stay in the car and keep quiet.”

“But I hafta go peepee.”

“Jesus,” Olen said.

* * * *

“I swear he said east, he was headin’ east. New Hampshire? Boston?” Tim said when Ruth ran into the barn, begging him to stay just another half hour till Emily got home. “I asked him to drop Joey off at the store. But then the store called, said he hadn’t checked in. And when I called the police station, they said Ashley had called in sick. He didn’t look sick when I saw him.”

“How long ago did they leave?”

“Forty minutes, maybe. Not that long. But long enough to get Joey to Greg’s Market.” Tim didn’t like it. He took off his cap, mopped his brow with his bandanna.

“He’s probably taken Joey with him. I think he has relatives in New Hampshire.”

She wasn’t exactly telling a lie. Olen did have relatives there: Annette and Pauline. But she didn’t want to worry Tim unduly. If Joey was in a police car, he’d be easy to spot. Should they call now? she asked Colm when Tim had gone back to work. “Or wait till he gets to Andover? I suppose there’s nothing at this point we can prove. We have to catch him in the act.”

“What act?” Colm asked, looking grim, and Ruth felt suddenly ill. “Let’s just go, then,” he said. “He’s not that far ahead of us, he doesn’t know where the place is. We do. Too bad we can’t get a phone number. We could warn them.”

“We could call the New Hampshire police, ask them to go up there.”

“He’ll just tell them he’s visiting relatives. Bringing another Godineaux with him.”

Ruth’s head was aching. Joey was a Godineaux, yes. And Pauline wanted no part of him. It might be interesting, though, to see the woman’s reaction to the boy. That is, if Olen gave her a chance. Would he hurt her? His own sister? But why?