Mad Season Read online

  Vic was mad then. The guys never let any of the girls into the soccer game, though Sue Ellen was a faster runner than any of them. He went to help her up, though she was practically twice his size, and when she was standing again, the tears flying out of her eyes, her chin bleeding, the jeers began.

  “Manure loves Sewer,” they chanted, “Vicky Manure loves Slimy Sewer.” The gibes swelled the schoolyard. Vic felt the shadows fall over him. A finger poked his arm, a foot stung the tender crease of his knee. He hit back at it.

  “Shut up!” he screamed. “Shut up, you bastards.” He got coughing, his nose filled up. He couldn’t breathe, it was the asthma.

  “Victor Willmarth, repeat that word and you’ll march straight up to the principal.” Mrs. Ronsard was mad, so mad her two chins were waggling. Vic saw the kids were glad, too, glad he was getting it from Ronsard.

  “They knocked Sue Ellen down,” he told her, gasping out the words. “It was Unsworth and that gang. They’re after her and they’re after me. You never see that. You think they’re just perfect. You think everybody’s just perfect! Well, they’re liars. They steal. They stole my telescope.”

  “Liar. Dirty little pigfucker. Dumb farmer boy. Cheap—”

  “That’s enough!” Mrs. Ronsard screeched. “Get back inside, every one of you. You’ll stay after school, the whole class. We’ll have this out once and for all. No one talks like that in this school-yard.”

  “I can’t stay,’ Vic said, getting his breath back. “I have to get back.”

  “Don’t you backtalk me,” she yelled, she’d lost it now. “I’m your teacher. If I say stay, you stay.”

  The kids poured back in the school. Sue Ellen walked close behind him. He could hear her raspy breathing in the back of his neck. She blew her nose practically in his ear, she had a cold.

  “You wait,” a voice crooned. It was Marsh. “You’ll get it for that.” He knocked Vic in the elbow and walked on.

  Sue Ellen caught up with him. As they entered the classroom her body squeezed against his and he pushed her back.

  “Your father works in a sewer,” he said softly, and saw her give him a swift hurt look.

  * * * *

  At nine that evening the phone rang: Pete was right on time. If he made the weekly call he was fulfilling his fatherly dudes. “Emily?” she hollered. “It’s your father.”

  Vic appeared at the head of the stairs. “She’s in the bathroom. Emily? It’s Dad. Hurry up! I need to get in there.”

  The phone went on ringing. A little breathless, belly aching— she was about to get her period—Ruth picked it up.

  “Oh, hi.” Pete’s voice sounded small, properly subdued.

  There was a silence. Then, “How are you? How’s the farm going?” Voice getting stronger. “I was going to write, ask about the trees, suggest Tim make some kind of irrigation system. You can lose the whole thousand in a drought.”

  “It rained last night,” she said.

  “Oh. Good.”

  Another silence. Where was Emily, for God’s sake!

  “So how is everybody up there? The kids? Tim and Willy?”

  Of course he didn’t know about Willy. “Willy’s dead. He drowned in the creek. Tim is distraught. We all are. We think it might be connected with—the other. We don’t know.”

  She heard the long slow whistle of breath. Pete had been fond of Willy, he’d tease him, he was good with him. Pete was a natural with children—other people’s children. ‘Careful now,’ he’d say, ‘do it this way, that’s it, good, man.’ And Willy was literally puffed up, pleased with himself. Pete knew how to make people feel good about themselves. Other people, not his wife.

  “Better keep the doors locked at night,” he said. She could picture him, furrowed brow, stiff upper lip: don’t let the emotion show. “Until it blows over. Bertha tells me ....”

  “It won’t blow over.” He could annoy her so with a word. “Deaths don’t ‘blow over.’ They leave a hole that can’t be filled.” What was it about death that brought on the clichés?

  His sigh made a hollow sound in the receiver. She knew he was annoyed, too. She was being prudish, precise again, like her mother; he used to say that in the early days of marriage. “Just like your mother,” he’d say, “down, woman.” A fist squeezed her bones, bore into her flesh with five fingers. He could say what he wanted, she couldn’t.

  Then relented. At least he was thinking of the family, suggesting they lock the doors. He never used to believe in locked doors. Vermonters don’t lock their doors, he’d tell people from out of state. “Do you lock your door down there in New York?” she asked, trying to sound light. It was hard to talk to Pete without the tears pushing through.

  He gave a half laugh. “Yeah, we do.” She noted the ‘we.’

  Emily was coming downstairs with Vic. “You talk first,” she told the boy. “I need a soda.”

  “Here’s Vic,” Ruth said, and added, in rapid succession: “We had the funeral this morning, Belle’s funeral. It was hard for everyone. Vic is still having trouble in school. I hope you’re having a good time in New York.”

  It was cruel, the juxtaposition, she couldn’t help it. She went to the refrigerator and got out a beer. She heard Vic say, “Hello, Dad,” and then stand there, the phone held away from his ear. She could hear Pete from here, something about a movie he’d rented; he wanted Vic there to watch it with him. The boy’s thin, angular face was expressionless, feet splayed apart in the ripped sneakers he insisted on wearing, though he had a brand new pair in his closet.

  Emily reappeared with a can of Pepsi, stood behind Vic, erect, her young face smooth, impassive, not looking at her mother. “I can’t come to New York, Dad, I just can’t,” Vic said into the receiver; and then “Here’s Emily,” and he ran upstairs.

  Ruth took her beer into the living room and sank into the old maroon sofa. There would be no money now for a new slipcover. The room looked so ugly with its ancient wingback chairs, her mother’s narrow black rocker, the scratched bookcase, the blue carpet, worn to the nub in places. She put her head back and let the beer ease her belly. Emily could say the final good-bye. Emily was closer to Pete than Vic; Ruth didn’t want to hear the conversation. Sometimes Emily looked at Ruth as if it were Ruth that had made him go away—and maybe it was. She finished the beer in one long guzzle. And felt her stomach turn over.

  Pete couldn’t take Vic away from her! He couldn’t—could he?

  * * * *

  Police Chief Roy Fallon seemed amused that Colm was involving himself in this “investigation.” “Maybe you’d consider coming on the force,” he said. “We might have an opening. One of our detectives, Wisnowski, thinking about retirement—after he solves this one, that is. Of course you’d need some, um . . .”

  Colm, who’d lately been thinking of that very thing, was turned off by the offer. For one thing, he’d just seen Mert Downes walk past. He remembered Ruth’s distaste for the man, his officiousness. The way he’d lift one arrogant eyebrow when you said something, like it was all wrong. The way he wore his hair, combed over from the back to hide the bald spot. It seemed a metaphor for his whole self.

  “Possibly,” he said. “Though I’ll need your official stamp again, in this, um, investigation.”

  “And how did it go, then, at Catamount? Place has been around a long time. Employs a lot of people. They wouldn’t like it if—I mean, a raffle ticket. Well, we’ll fingerprint. You think?”

  Roy Fallon had a way of not finishing sentences that left one’s head in a cloud. But Colm didn’t mind, really. The man was solid at bottom. For one thing, he’d admired Colm’s grandfather.

  Colm told him about the fat man. “Fat Man, I call him for lack of a better name. You realize we have two murders now.”

  “Well, the second is questionable,” said Fallon, lighting a cigar. “Do you mind? My father lived to be ninety. I don’t see why I should ...” He looked apologetic.

  “It’s on your conscience,” Col
m said. “My grandfather died at fifty. Of course he was helped along.”

  “I’m aware.” Fallon nodded at the portrait over his head. Colm’s grandfather looked like he wanted to be someplace other than on the wall: in the street, or the saloon. He looked the quintessential Irishman: hat shoved back on the head, the sly grin. Maybe Colm resented that, the stereotype of the Irish drinker. At least the Hannas had been able to hold it, he prided himself on that. Three good drinks and still sober as an owl.

  There was little progress to report on the detective sergeant’s work. Visitations to the local businesses—no one reporting an exchange of barn money. Interviews with Marie and Harold (Colm made a mental note to see them), with Tim and the Dufourses’ son who’d worked for Lucien. No real leads, though Tim wasn’t “out from under” yet, according to Fallon. No alibi there, for one thing. Some “iffy” stuff back in the sixties.

  “I guess you made the most of it?” Fallon said. “At the Alibi?” He winked at the wall.

  “What would be helpful,” Colm said, “is a check on the fat man, Smith. Is that his real name? Who he really is, was, where he comes from—anything you can find on him. Where he is now, of course.”

  Fallon stuck a finger in his ear, ran it around, examined it. “We’re trying. Nothing yet. We’ve no proof of anything there, but you know, we’ll. . . We’re not used to murders around here. Domestic squabbles, rape or two at the college, petty thefts, you know. But murder? In Branbury, Vermont?”

  Though he looked quite pleased. He was to appear on WCAX-TV tonight, he told Colm. Even now he was going home to shave. “Town’s back on the map,” he said, and Colm assumed by “back” he meant the Ferraro boy’s drug case, the famous son set up by a local detective. Fallon grinned, spread his hands, like it was a holdup.

  On the way out Colm ran into Mert Downes. The man was a puffed-up martinet, a primitive, something out of Aesop’s fables, the frog that blew himself up. Now he was bouncing up to Colm, confiding in him, the chief had bawled him out. Nothing was happening and it was three days already. The townspeople were nervous, there were fifty calls a day: women locking themselves in, walking their kids to school.

  There were sightings on the red sports car, of course, Mert said, in his too-loud voice, at the rate of four a day, and the chief wasn’t doing a “goddamn thing ‘cept running off to TV shows.” Mert looked disgusted. He would apply for detective when Wisnowski left—the guy was too old for this, he said. Did the chief want his murderer to get to China? Mert grinned at his joke. That would take care of him all right. The Commies would chop him up for Sunday dinner. They’d make chopsticks out of him. Hee-hee.

  Colm squeezed past the man, smelled something as he went. Had the man let out wind?

  They had to find that guy, Smith, solve this thing. Had to! He couldn’t name all the reasons.

  * * * *

  When he left the station, Colm went back to Catamount to see Kurt Unsworth. The boy (or man—already the hair was thinning, the forehead lined—cocaine, whatever else, though Kurt was just nineteen) appeared in the door, a forced smile on his face, the lips set like they’d let no negative come across the tongue.

  “You know why I’m here,” Colm said. He held out a letter Fallon had given him.

  Unsworth didn’t bother to look at it. He just stood there, tall and lean as a birch tree. Hands in his back pockets, lips pressing together till they turned porcelain. When Colm posed the question, about the fat man and the red car, the lips quivered, like they’d try to come unglued but couldn’t. Good-looking fellow in a dead way, the face around the lips was marble.

  There was still no answer, and Colm repeated the question. “You delivered brochures together, didn’t you? For the raffle?” He didn’t want Unsworth to think he was coming after him—just the other guy. He wasn’t prepared for the response.

  “I was always alone with the raffle tickets, man, when I took ‘em—but not that often.” His mother, he said, was a “sucker” for “that kind of thing.” Kurt had a thick voice, like he’d been drinking gravy.

  Yes, another man, Jules Smith, had worked here, Kurt said. Yes, he left. No, he had no idea where. “We hardly spoke, I mean everybody tells jokes, man, it’s how we get through a coffee break.”

  Anyway, Kurt Unsworth didn’t care much for jokes.

  As for the Larocque house: no, he hadn’t been there with tickets. If any were found it would have been that other one, Smith— “serious guy actually,” he said with the barest lisp to his gravy voice, “a loner, overweight, yeah, some.”

  But not Kurt Unsworth. “I’ve never been in the place,” he said and turned up his nose like he could smell it now, in this small white office. The lips relaxed, he seemed to feel he’d exonerated himself, he turned to go.

  “We have the tickets,” Colm said. “They’re down at the station. We’d like to have you stop for fingerprints.”

  This time he scored. Unsworth wheeled about in the doorway. His voice came out cracked but angry. “Anyone’s fingerprints could be on those tickets. We all handled them for chrissake. It was my job to divide them up for the guys to distribute. I’m not going to any fuckin’ police to be fingerprinted!”

  Colm breathed in the way he’d taught himself to do in real estate. One had to deal with all kinds. Time wasters, young couples who “might.” “We’ll see,” he said and nodded pleasantly, though his Irish was up inside.

  He didn’t have the temperament for this job, to tell the truth. There was that sudden anger up and he was off. It almost killed him once, up in Montreal, that anger, when he’d got out of his car to respond to a driver’s finger, and the driver pulled a knife. It was maybe that anger that brought on his granddad’s death.

  Well, he should never have mentioned the fingerprinting. Of course he couldn’t make this boy-man be fingerprinted. He had no evidence. He wasn’t even a policeman. Besides, there’d be any number of fingerprints on the tickets: probably Belle’s would cover the rest, and Unsworth knew it. He was smart. Though Colm was certain he now saw fear in the eyes. The eyes looked, well, haunted. He’d seen eyes like that on the dead, on the suicides. His father got a suicide once, twice a year.

  Unsworth took a step toward him. “If you must know,” he said, “it was my brother Wilder. He was the one sold those tickets. I was, well, under the weather. Wilder took them over to Larocque’s for me.” He headed for the door again.

  Then said over his shoulder, “He’s my half- brother. He’s straight. You understand?”

  Chapter Eight

  When Colm found Ruth in the heifer pen, flying at the end of a rope, he wondered if he’d stumbled into a rodeo. Seconds later she had it around the neck of one beast while two others charged about the pen.

  “Go, girl,” he shouted as she slid through the mud, or worse.

  “Don’t just stand there,” she yelled back, and he took a deep breath and plunged in, helped her drag the roped heifer to a corner post. When the animal was secured she took a metal ear tag out other jeans: “Now get a headlock on this girl.”

  He said, “What?” and she said, “Hold her tight while I get this tag on, or it’ll rip her ear.”

  “Darling,” he said, and grabbed the heifer. He hoped Ruth had good aim, he didn’t need a yellow tag in his ear.

  The heifer leaped: stood on two front legs, embracing Colm; then, as the tag sprang shut, sank down on all fours, staggering Colm back against the edge of the pen.

  “Is that all?” he gasped, “I came to tell you something, not—”

  “One more and we’re done,” she said. “Hang on now.” She roped the neck of a large heifer with a mean-looking black patch over one eye. When Colm tried to get the beast in a headlock, she lunged at the rear of the pen. Colm lost his footing on the shit-slippery floor and skidded six feet on his knees.

  The laughter behind him might have come out of a canned game show.

  Tim said, “Nice choreography.” He pulled Colm upright and brushed him off. Easy as swa
tting a fly, he grabbed the reluctant heifer and Ruth jammed in the ear tag.

  “Where were you when we needed you?” Colm said.

  Tim grinned. “Fixing fence. I told you to wait for me, Ruth.”

  Ruth said, “Oh, but I had Colm.”

  Colm smiled feebly and stumbled out of the pen. Maybe he knew now why Pete had quit the farm.

  It took a full five minutes to get back his breath, never mind his dignity. He couldn’t think why he’d come at all. He was wet and miserable, it had snowed two inches the night before—almost mid-April, jeez. One thing he did know: he had to get his boots re-soled if he was to keep on seeing Ruth; the wet manure had soaked up into his socks.

  “Any news?” she said. Now she was bent over a cow, feeding it something from her hand. He had to admit, she had a fine rump— should he make comparisons?

  “I was thinking how good you look. Like that.” Then kicked himself for saying it. They weren’t students anymore.

  She dove back into the cow to hide the flush that was spreading over her face. “Just tell me the news. No backhanded compliments.”

  There was the red car, that’s why he’d come. “The call came an hour ago. They found it in a used-car lot in Plattsburgh. Jules Smith—I doubt Smith is the real name, how obvious can you get? Traded it in for a tan Honda Civic. Generic looking car, every other car on the highway is gray or tan, a Honda. Of course he doesn’t know we’re looking for him, but he’d suspect. He knows the bartender would talk. Temporary plates—he’ll trade them in. He could be in Kansas by now. Or return here. We only know the trade-in was two days ago.”

  He’d said it all in one breath. He smiled to meet her smile, patted the cow’s rump. “This is Jane,” she said. “Jane Eyre, my yearling. Expecting soon, you might gather.”

  Artificially inseminated, he assumed. There wasn’t a bull on the place that he’d seen. Pete came to mind, and he stuck his tongue in his cheek.

  He said, “Pleased to meet you, Jane. But I don’t want to dance.”