Mad Season Read online

  Already they were banging on the door—at this hour of the night!—a pair of reporters from the Free Press. “Leave us alone!” she cried. “You’ll know when we know.”

  And then screamed to call them back, to give them Vic’s picture. She fished one out of a drawer. It was a bit out of focus, why hadn’t she taken more pictures of the children? What kind of mother was she?

  She had to be rational about this. Someone might have seen. She might have to go on TV herself, to plead—whatever one did. Was there no end to all this?

  For the next day and a half there was no news. There was only the media, the police with questions, a man from the FBI with the compassion of a fish. Neighbors, townspeople, bearing casseroles, desserts, people she hardly knew. They meant well, but they kept her from chores: farm life went on, like breathing and peeing. The cows had to be grained and milked, meals prepared—for Tim and for Joey, who’d taken Willy’s place, for Emily, for the grandson, because Sharon had moved in now, taken over the house. “Stop worrying, Mom,” Sharon would say. “It’ll be all right, just do your barn work, I’ll get the meals.”

  Sharon was wonderful, a comfort, a rock. But Ruth wanted to do the meals, she had to keep working, working! It was her only sanity.

  Colm called from Michigan, almost stopped her breath, but had nothing to report. Pete was still out of town, she had Emily try to get him, talk to the new woman. Nothing to report. The fat man seemed to have vanished again.

  On the afternoon of the third day of Vic’s disappearance, the phone rang and she felt the shock waves in her spine; she and Emily ran for it together. She practically ran Emily down.

  “All right! Who would call me up anyway?” Emily yelled and slumped back in her chair.

  There’d been some quarrel with Wilder, Ruth thought. And she was glad, she was suspicious of all the Unsworths now. Did Kurt have something to do with the kidnapping? Was his mother shielding him? She couldn’t trust anyone, Colm had taught her that.

  She kept coming back to Pete—wanting the boy down there, lonely for the children, hadn’t Bertha tried to tell her that? Didn’t it happen all the time, this custody battle? She warned Chief Fallon. She even hoped it was Pete, didn’t she? It meant Vic was safe?

  It’s Pete, Pete has him, she told herself.

  But here was Carol Unsworth on the line. There was no time for small talk, though she’d have to thank her for the turkey sent over when the news broke on TV. She’d stuck it in the freezer with the other stuff they didn’t have time (or desire) to eat. It was hard to be pleasant under the circumstances. And Carol Unsworth with those three sons. Bad seeds?

  But a mother loved a son on death row, defended him, covered up for him. She’d read about that.

  Carol was calling about the Dolley woman. “She’s been everywhere, the smallest pretense of a farm. Aggressive! Wanting to incorporate. She said she’d seen you, that your answer was indecisive, but she thought maybe. I hope you won’t sell.” She took an audible breath. “That’s why I called.”

  That got Ruth’s back up. Why shouldn’t she sell if she wanted to? It was her own damn business. Did someone take Vic to try and make her sell? There was a new angle. Oh, she’d sell then, she’d sell everything, to get Vic back.

  “When this is over, when you have Vic—I know you will,” Carol said, her voice sounding small, apologetic, “I mean, I’m praying every minute. Garth too, he’s upset, he’s so sorry”—Ruth stiffened—”I want to talk to you. I’m thinking, well, things aren’t working out here . . . Oh, I can’t talk about it over the phone. I thought, see, I’d like to talk to you about maybe renting a couple acres of your farm. I figure you could use the money. I mean, forgive me, I know you’re hard-pressed, I could help you keep the farm.”

  She kept on, she was a bee thrashing in the inner ear. Though Ruth got the part about renting; for a minute her heart quickened, like when Colm had called: “I have some news,” he’d prefaced the call, and her heart somersaulted in her chest, beat against the bones. And it turned out the news was no news, really. Almost three days Vic had been gone, and no word, nothing. Only the small verification at the start: the sharp eyes of Nedda Bump, the woman bus driver. Nedda had seen a boy Vic’s size pulled into a tan car as she rounded the bend, her lights already flashing red. “First I thought, well, a neighbor couple,” she said. “Then later I got to thinking. The boy looked upset, real upset.”

  At last there was silence and Ruth said, “I have to hang up, Carol. I have to keep the line open. They’ll want money maybe, if they have Vic. Why else would they take him?”

  And then she stopped talking, she didn’t know why. In case no one ought to know, in case the phone was tapped, someone listening on another line in the Unsworth house. Didn’t Vic say the oldest one had his own phone?

  How paranoid could she get?

  But with reason, right? The oldest boy sold raffle tickets for that furniture company, she knew about that. Wilder sold some, too, anything suspicious about that? Belle bought them when Lucien was in the barn, Lucien didn’t know who’d sold them to her. He was in fall denial, he didn’t want to think about anything to do with Belle’s murder, it was over and done. It was bad, she’d told him, to let it gnaw away inside. She knew what it was to have things eating inside. Lucien could be the next victim: his father had died in his fifties of a heart attack, Lucien had told her that.

  Was there no end to the victims? Where was she, anyway? Her mind was a labyrinth. Yes, the broker.

  “I told that woman I won’t give an answer till I get Vic back,” Ruth said. “She knows that.”

  She felt suddenly faint. Was the fat man connected with this woman? What was the name? Esther, yes, Esther with the scarlet fingernails. Something about Plattsburgh….

  Crime turned everyone into a victim! Her temples were on fire, sweat smoking out other pores. She saw that Emily had a fire in the woodstove, the flames appeared to be licking the walls. There was the illusion that the house was burning. And all those barn fires this spring.

  “Turn that stove down!” she hollered at Emily.

  “We’ll talk another time,” Carol Unsworth murmured. “But call if I can help. I don’t know much, but I’m a good learner. I love animals. I’m a country girl at heart I guess. I’m sorry to go on like this when your mind is—I won’t keep you.”

  And mercifully, the conversation was over. Ruth sank into a chair, felt nothing. Emily was moving the food around on her plate, she wasn’t eating.

  “How does that help?” Ruth snapped. “If you don’t eat? I can’t have you sick. Now eat, damn it!”

  “Listen to Mother,” said Sharon, back in the room, sticking a spoonful of squash into the baby’s mouth.

  Emily ate grimly, her eyes on the forkfuls of beans and rice she bore to her mouth, distastefully, like she was sipping worms. Then dropped her fork with a clang on the plate, and Ruth jumped. “I can’t eat another mouthful, I won’t,” Emily said. “I have a test tomorrow.”

  “You always have a test,” said Sharon.

  Emily said, “Yes, I do. I always have a test,” and stomped up to her room.

  Ruth yelled, “When I need you, you desert me!”

  And took ten breaths to calm herself.

  A moment later she heard a noise, like an explosion of wind through a pane. Warned, she ran upstairs. Emily was on the bedroom floor, sobbing into the braided rug, her body bunched like a snail on the hard pile. When Ruth stooped to put her arms around her, the girl didn’t move.

  “Tell me, talk to me,” Ruth said. “Come on, baby. We can’t fight among ourselves. We have to be a team.”

  She helped Emily to the bed, sat there with her, her arm holding up the girl like a rag doll.

  It was Wilder, Emily spoke between gasps of breath. “I wouldn’t speak to him, and now he won’t speak to me. He walks right past me, in the corridor, like I’m invisible.”

  It was that phone call to Colm Hanna, Ruth thought, she’d known when she made i
t. She’d betrayed Emily: telling about the car the night of the murder, about Wilder with time enough to . . . she couldn’t finish the thought. The father gave a pittance of allowance, Emily said, and she’d told Colm. Wasn’t that a motive? And then Colm confronted the boy with the suspicion.

  But it was important that Wilder tell what he knew! It was Vic’s life at stake now, no lovers’ rift could count. Emily must see that. They had to find the killers, the kidnappers.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, Em. But if Wilder knew anything about that night, saw anything he’s keeping back, it has to be out. It’s too late for the dead, but for Vic—”

  “How did you know?” Emily said.

  “What?”

  “About Wilder. How did you know it was because I accused him of holding back? Of lying? Isn’t that an awful thing to say to anybody? Not just anybody—someone you love! Mom, I love Wilder! And I told him he was a liar.”

  Ruth’s heart was a propeller inside her chest. Any minute she’d take off. And dive-bomb.

  “At first I said nothing, just ignored him. Then one day he caught me by my locker, made me tell. I was relieved, I know he didn’t drive away when he said he did. Then I saw another car come up, slow—I didn’t tell you that—and then I pulled the shade. I didn’t think anything of that other car, I didn’t actually see it stop. I guess I thought it was Marie or somebody. I never thought it might have been—might have—”

  She was sobbing again, and Ruth tightened her hold. “It’s all right, all right, darling.” Feeling guilty, though, that Emily didn’t suspect her mother’s interference: “You had to say it, you were brave. If Wilder’s hiding something he’ll have to tell. And maybe he isn’t. Maybe he was just sitting there.”

  “Looking at the moon, thinking of me. That’s what he said. That’s what I was doing, too. I didn’t want to think about someone else spoiling our moon together. Maybe that’s why I pulled the shade.”

  “Em, what did he say when you told him what you saw?”

  They had to quit being emotional about this, there was Vic. The boy would be suffering, alone, this minute, while she and Emily were together, touching, mother and child. She shoved her knuckles against her eyes.

  “Nothing. He didn’t say anything. He just looked all pale and unhappy, and that was the last we spoke. He’s avoided me ever since. He thinks I’ve broken our trust. Trust is important to Wilder, Mom. I’ve written him notes, asked him to meet me. We’ll talk it out, I told him. I said I loved him no matter what he’d done. Because I do! He didn’t hurt that old couple, I know that. If he’s shielding somebody, maybe, maybe—”

  She paused, drew a gasping breath.

  “Do you think it’s that older brother?” Ruth heard her voice coming from a far corner of the room.

  “I don’t know, I just don’t. Wilder won’t say anything. It could be a friend he’s—oh, I don’t know.”

  Ruth wiped the girl’s cheek with her sleeve. She hadn’t realized how thin Emily was, like the bones weren’t strong enough to support her head the way it flopped down on her chest. She drew the girl closer. They’d always found it hard to touch, she and Emily. But she’d make amends, she would! Just get this horror over with, she begged, and things will be different.

  She was filled with new resolve. She’d call Colm tonight, he’d left a number. Find out what he’d said to Wilder, what the boy’s response was. Then decide how to tell Emily. Because she had to tell, nothing could come between them: there had to be trust between mother and daughter, too. There’d been little enough with Pete, though some of that was her fault. If they’d communicated more, if she’d told Pete her concerns, made him listen, got it out whether he wanted to hear it or not, maybe. . . .

  Oh, she couldn’t believe Pete had Vic, without telling her.

  But she’d never thought he’d leave, either, not altogether like that. No, nothing was impossible.

  But it couldn’t happen with her daughter, this break, her flesh and blood. Emily was all she had at home now with Vic gone. Sharon had her own life, her child, she’d escaped somehow, she had some inner strength. But Emily. . . .

  “It will all work out,” she murmured, rocking the girl, “it will all work out.” Emily was rocking with her now, the two of them rocking to the easy words. And Emily sighing in reply, like any second her heart would break.

  Downstairs the phone was ringing again, it was a siren in the inner ear. When she got there Sharon already had it, was holding it up. “That woman again, very excited,” she said.

  “Wilder,” shrieked Carol Unsworth. “They came for him. They’re holding him down there.”

  Ruth, dumbly, said, “Who? Where?”

  “The police,” Carol screamed. “I need your help. Tell them he had nothing to do with that, that—He’s a good boy. He’s my son!”

  “I’ll talk to them,” Ruth said, her head reeling. And after she hung up, realized she didn’t know why Wilder had been arrested. They couldn’t prove he was involved, could they? Was there new evidence? The nausea was starting, down in her toes, making its way up to her throat. What would she say to Emily?

  She ran for the bathroom.

  * * * *

  Colm disembarked in Ann Arbor with a dozen university students: young men with backpacks and baseball caps on backward; women with skintight pants and colored combs in their long frizzy hair. He’d sat next to a stunning black girl who refused to talk to him, held her chin high, her hair in a hundred tiny snakes. He wondered how often she had time to do it—once a month? But she wasn’t telling, just swept up her canvas sack of books and moved swiftly down the aisle. He wanted to yell after her that he was black Irish, that his great-grandfather came over on a coffin ship, boxed for a living, till he got knocked out once too often.

  He imagined the girl’s look after he told her. “Talk to me about coffin ships, white man!”

  There had been a dozen sightings phoned into the Branbury police station. It seemed Vic was everywhere: in a Vermont shopping mall, a New York subway, an Ohio post office. A kidnapped child rang an alarm in the minds of the compassionate. But a more recent sighting, not a sighting exactly but a phone call from a used-car dealer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who happened to be a radio buff, sounded the most authentic. And so he was here. He was a private detective, Colm told the Ann Arbor police lieutenant, and flushed when he saw the man’s lip curl: he couldn’t produce a business card. But when he flashed a copy of the photo he’d conned for Fallon from Catamount Furniture—thirty employees, with Smith grinning beside Kurt Unsworth in the back row—the officer grudgingly gave out a little information: a fat man trading in an ‘89 Dodge Colt. This time the fat man, if it was Smith, had made a mistake: the contact rapped all over the world, picked up the latest police reports, sent for copies of their “Wanted” photos. Now he was hooking into the World Wide Web. How unlucky could a criminal get?

  The fat man had answered an ad for a Honda Accord that the dealer, whose name was Petronelli, was selling; had been to the place once, where Petronelli had recognized him, and contacted the local police. Smith would return that evening to trade in the Civic. All they had to do, the lieutenant said, was surround the place. For that the Ann Arbor force was prepared.

  “I’ve an even better photo than the one Fallon sent you,” Colm said, pulling it out of his wallet. “A close-up. One of the fellow workers took it, farmer’s son. Caught him with his eyes wide open.” Colm wanted in with this lieutenant, he wanted to go along on the hunt.

  The lieutenant barely glanced at it. He knew he had the right man, “no mistake.” Colm had to hope. There was no invitation for him to come along. But no turndown, either. He’d have to follow in his rented car. The police were on their way now to “case” it, form a plan.

  The dealer lived in town, practically on top of the university: he operated out of his house. Ten or fifteen used cars in the yard. The house was down the street from a white pillared building, archaeology department or something
. Colm was impressed with the university: it was the kind of place he’d always wanted to be part of, but there was never money. It looked like the pictures he’d seen of Athens, one Parthenon after the other: library, art gallery, Eisenhower archives—Eisenhower, a military man, in this lane of temples. He smiled at the irony. But wasn’t the playwright Sophocles a general, too? He’d read that somewhere. Jeez, he was jumping to conclusions again.

  He shivered, he was nervous, he couldn’t help it. He’d never done anything like this before. He’d make a lousy policeman. It was a bleak day, winter’s last blow in mid-April, even the mud had frozen. Ann Arbor seemed a city of wind. He wouldn’t be surprised to see snow. His shoulders hunched against the possibility.

  The dealer identified Fallon’s photo of the fat man, and the lieutenant looked smug, Colm was a fly on his shoulder. He might yield to praise, but Colm wasn’t ready to give it. He was worried about the plan. Four police stationed around the house, one inside. What if Fat Man had a gun? He probably did. And the boy in the car? But Vic wouldn’t be in the car, would he? To be transferred? Wherever he was, Vic would have to be gotten out safely.

  Nothing must happen to Vic—if Vic was alive. Christ, there was that, too. There was always the abductor—for sex, he hadn’t mentioned that to Ruth, he couldn’t, though of course it was in the back of her mind. Her face had been sick with worry, the ripe body bent forward. She’d wanted to come, it took all his bullshit to keep her in Vermont. A sensible mother, but emotional, a parent (that waste in his own life).

  If the boy was dead, how could he face her? It was easier to telephone, not have to deal with her one on one. Her eyes, blurring to sea; the breath, caught in the teeth. It had to turn out all right, that was all. He bit hard into his lower lip. And tasted blood.

  The fat man was due at six-thirty. Of course he’d wait until dusk, want to make his getaway in the dark. There was most of the day to plan. They stayed long enough at the dealer’s only to make a map of the house.