Harvest of Bones Read online

  “Angie couldn’t have any. For one thing, she has this, um, bleeding defect—something genetic. Supposed to take a blood thinner. Her own mother died in childbirth—a second pregnancy—hemorrhaging. I didn’t want Angie to get pregnant! So she wanted to adopt, but I—well, you hear things about that. You never really know where they come from. A neighbor was shot by an adopted child.”

  “It can work out. So many children, needing a home. I’ve thought of it myself.”

  “I guess. But. Well, she agreed with me later, didn’t want to take the chance herself. She got quieter and quieter. Joined this religion.”

  “What is it exactly? This religion? I mean, is it a religion?”

  He shook his head. “She’d never explain, though I asked her. Her stepmother runs a so-called healing center in California. I blame her for Angie’s defection—Angie took a trip out there, came back . . . well, different. Angie calls it ‘meditation.’ Healing. Something about the hara, words I’d never heard. New Age stuff. The head woman here’s a disciple of Angie’s step-mother. So after that California trip, Angie took up this meditating, squatting on a mat on the floor. I couldn’t watch. Say, could I have another cider? We still have”—he consulted his watch—”five minutes. Don’t get up. I’ll get it.”

  Vic came halfway down the back stairs, saw she had a guest, and halted on the bottom step, a scrawny boy in last year’s tight jeans—she saw him through the stranger’s eyes.

  “My son,” she said. “He’s glad you’re here. You’ve saved him from ten orders. Right, Vic?”

  “That magazine come today?” Vic asked, retreating a step. She knew what he meant, and she smiled. “Sorry. Maybe tomorrow. Astronomy,” she told Kevin. “He saved his money for a telescope. He made a perfectly good one, but it wasn’t strong enough, he said. He wants to see into the universe.”

  “Good for him,” said Kevin, “I wish I could.” He leaned his elbows on the table. “I worry about Angie. That’s why I’m here, you know. I have to get her out. I don’t know how. You seem a sensible woman, grounded, I thought you might—”

  Now she was wary. What did he want of her? “Me? I mean, I can’t just go invade ...”

  “I meant, some thoughts on how I might ... I heard about—your husband. I thought you’d understand what it is to be left, you know.”

  She flushed. She was glad of Vic, who was in the kitchen now, fumbling through a pile of letters, ads, flyers—junk mail. He gave the stranger a side scowl. “How’s Zelda’s calf doing?” the boy demanded, butting into the conversation. “It looked bad this morning when I left for school. It’s not getting what it needs.”

  “Calcium deficiency,” she explained to her son. “I gave it an intravenous shot this morning. You’ll have to bottle-feed it yourself. It’s your calf, if you want it. Obviously Zelda doesn’t.”

  “You mean that? Jeezum.” He started out the door in his shirtsleeves.

  “Vic, come back. Put on a coat.”

  He backed up, reluctantly, grabbed a denim jacket, and hooked it onto one arm. “This is Mr. Crowningshield; he’s staying at the Flint farm.”

  “Huh,” said Vic, and flung out the door, letting it slam.

  “Boys,” she apologized, hands over her ears. “I’d better—I mean, he’ll need help. And that calf isn’t right. It’s true— maybe it got dehydrated early on, with its mother leaving it.”

  “She died?”

  “No, just refused to feed it. Defected, you might say.”

  “Ah.” He understood what that meant.

  She considered. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called it Vic’s, in case—”

  “It dies,” Kevin said, looking sympathetic. He has cow eyes, she thought, deep brown; she looked away quickly. “That’s what worries me,” he said, “about Angie. You know, she abandoned her pills, the blood thinners, after she came back from California. Didn’t trust doctors anymore. Who’s going to take care of her in that Healing House? I keep thinking of that cult—Heaven’s Gate? They had a suicide pact. I don’t trust this place, Ruth.”

  When he used her first name like that, there was a small explosion in her head. He stood up, followed her out onto the porch; his shoes made a crunching sound on the old boards where they’d tracked up leaves.

  “Maybe you’d better go over there,” she said. “Talk to the head woman. Make an appeal. Or, I don’t know, just wait. Till your wife comes to her senses.”

  Wait, she thought, when Kevin had gone; she was running to the barn through a swirl of orangy-brown leaves. Was that why she couldn’t agree to the divorce Pete wanted? She was waiting for him to come back?

  * * * *

  Hartley couldn’t stand it. Another reporter at the door, and Fay in town at the Food Co-op. Aunty had refused to talk to the others; of course, she wouldn’t want to see this one, either, even though the woman was from the New York Times. Some Albany paper had gotten hold of the local Independent and blown up the skeleton find out of all proportion. Aunty was angry. Aunty was another Harriet Sedley, their cartoonist said, who took an ax and gave her parents forty whacks. Only this time, it was a pitchfork: “Glenna Flint, she popped her cork— and stuck her husband with a fork!”

  Actually, Hartley had had a good laugh over that—until she realized the seriousness of it. But the New York Times— whoa. Her parents got the Times. And now they’d read about Aunty. “She’s busy—she’s taking a nap,” she told the reporter. “She can’t see you.” But the woman said, “Oh, she knows I’m coming. I called,” and she shoved right past with a wave of her hand, as if Hartley were a fly on her nose. Behind her, a man with a camera on his shoulder like a gigantic chip muscled his way in. He spun about, photographing the kitchen, taking a hundred shots a minute. “Hey! Who gave you permission?” Hartley cried. But the man went on shooting.

  “What is it?” called Aunty from the living room, and before Hartley could answer, the woman announced, “Cheryl, from the Times,” gave the photographer a nod, and the pair shouldered their way into the living room. Hartley waited for the uproar. Aunty would have them out of there in seconds.

  Or would she? “Why, hello there,” Aunty said with an ingratiating laugh. Apparently, she wanted to see them! Hartley hung in the doorway. Aunty would need someone to defend her. Never mind that the police had no proof, and Aunty kept changing her mind about whether it was Mac in that hole or someone else. Today, evidently, it was Mac.

  “I did it,” Aunty was telling the woman. “He was planning to kill my horse. Why, he’d dug a hole.”

  “It was self-defense?” the woman suggested, hoisting a thin black-stockinged leg over the opposite knee, a greedy little smile on her hot pink lips.

  “No,” said Aunty, “I just did it.”

  “It was self-defense,” said Hartley, barging in. She couldn’t stand it one minute longer. “You know that, Aunty. You told me yesterday. He was shoving you around.”

  “I said nothing of the kind,” said Aunty sweetly. “Now who’s being interviewed here?” And the camera flashed, then flashed again—this time in Hartley’s direction. The girl threw up her hands.

  “Tell us about Mac. Your husband. What he was like? Why did you strike him—was it really an arrowhead?” asked the woman. Hartley felt the vomit lump up in her throat. Whistling to Gandalf, she ran outside. She stuck a finger down her gullet but couldn’t get anything up; instead, she swallowed hard, flopped down on the porch step, and sighed heavily. She couldn’t believe how this skeleton had changed their lives—how Aunty had denied it was Mac at first, and now was making a turnabout, seeming almost proud she’d done it. Why, it was as good as a confession. When the Branbury police saw it, they’d lock her up. Unless Hartley’s parents got here first. They’d throw Aunty right in the funny farm. They would! Either way, it spelled disaster.

  Hartley dropped her chin in her hands. If she hadn’t brought Aunty up here in the first place, there wouldn’t be all this hoopla. Already, the police were gathering things, fingerprinting, tak
ing tiny bits of earth and rock and analyzing the clothing, that Scottish cap. What if they found Aunty guilty? They’d lock her up for life.

  But these reporters were exploiting her. They were killing her! Hartley ran back inside to tell them so, but they were already leaving. Aunty was posing for one last picture, her chin uplifted, a hand shoving back her heavy hair. She looked like an aged movie star. Hartley burst into frustrated tears.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” she screeched when the crew had raced off in a red Fiat. “I can’t believe you told them you did it. We don’t even know it was Mac in that hole.”

  “It was Mac,” Aunty said, sitting down, slapping one trembly hand on the table. “There’s no denying it. He had on that plaid bonnet. It was his MacInnis clan plaid; he sent all the way to Scotland for it. It looked ridiculous on him, but he wore it anyway.”

  “Oh,” said Hartley, sinking down beside Aunty. “But why do you have to tell everyone? Who would know that except you? That doesn’t prove you killed him. Bad guys do things like that all the time. Planting stuff.”

  “I know,” said Aunty. “But...” She put a hand to her wrinkled cheek. Her hair was especially wild today. It resembled a mass of racing clouds. The Times would love that, they’d call her a Vermont loony. They’d make up things. The media always made up things, her father said.

  “Then tell me. Tell me just what happened. Blow by blow.” The girl amended her words. “I mean, from the beginning.”

  “I can’t,” said Aunty. “There was too much going on.”

  “You don’t know, then. You don’t know!”

  “I know. They told me. In a letter. They saw.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “How would I know?” said Aunty, flinging up an arm, shoving away from the table. “How would I know?” She stomped upstairs, her slippered feet banging out a tattoo on the splintered steps.

  “It’s murder, Aunty. You don’t realize it, but you’re telling the whole world you killed somebody. They’ll put you in prison. That’s worse than Lands’ End.”

  Aunty paused on the step, and turned. The green eyes blinked behind the shiny spectacles. “Over my dead body they will.” She climbed another step, then turned again, pointed a shaky finger at her grand-niece.

  “Mac was always wanting to get in the Times. He’d send them words, more words! But they just sent them back. Now I’m in the Times. My picture, too.” She threw her head back and laughed. “Hear that, Mac?” she shouted. “You hear that?”

  Then she sank down on the step and dropped her head into her pale veined hands.

  ****

  Alwyn Bagshaw’s place was even more run-down than the hired man’s trailer at the Flint farm. Emily wondered how many skeletons were buried in his place. It was an old yellow house with faded blue trim, a yellow veggie stand out by the road: FRESH CORN, TOMATOS, CUKKES, the sign read. The porch sagged; there were dead petunias in a hanging planter, an ancient cracked swing at the far end—sit on it and you’d fall through. A black Dodge pickup was parked askew in the driveway. Alwyn Bagshaw probably had twenty, thirty acres of land, but you could see that healing place to the south, its sign swinging in the wind. Later, she’d bring her new friend Hartley; they’d barge in together. She could use a little healing, to cure her of Wilder Unsworth and his diamond-nosed friend.

  She knocked, but no one answered. It would be just like an old hermit to forget she was coming—or ignore her arrival deliberately. She knocked again and then turned the knob. The door swung open. “Well, come on in,” a voice croaked from somewhere at the rear of the house. “I only lock at night. Don’t just stand there.” She followed the sound. “Never locked then, neither, till them kookies moved in next door. Though it don’t keep out the— Well, git in here, girl. Come on.”

  “Where are you?” she said. She felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter. She was intruding; she wasn’t wanted.

  “In the kitchen, of course. I ain’t got all day. Got an errand to run.”

  He was seated in a black rocking chair, his bony body squeezed between its spooled sides. His hands jerked in his lap as if he had some disease of the nerves. She saw he had a pinkie finger missing on his right hand; the middle finger of his left hand stuck up like a pencil.

  “Well, get to it. What’d’you want to know?” Without waiting or inviting her to sit down—although she did anyway, in a straight-backed chair with a cracked seat at the end of a white kitchen table—he said, “I’ll give you facts, that’s all. I don’t hold with that psycho stuff. I was born December, nineteen-twenty in a snowstorm. Father worked around different farms—left town after my brother was born. Mother bought me and Denby up. Not sure Denby was Pa’s boy.” He glanced sideways at Emily, and smirked. She bent to her notetaking. Vic had left his tape recorder at school.

  “Hardworking woman, Ma. Took in washing. Cleaned other people’s dirt so’s we could live. I made it up to her. Got a job selling fertilizer. Later, I was a milk tester, drove round to the area farms. Did my job. Fixed up this place good, sure— well, it’s run-down again. Live on Social Security now; government takes the rest away. Denby died; it shook Ma up. He was the favorite. She couldn’t see through him. Well, I got married, but then she left. Ma didn’t like her nohow—Flora, that is. No loss. The girl I had with Flora run off with some crazies. Ma and me made out fine, the both of us.”

  “No other children?” Emily asked, pencil in hand. He was talking so fast, she’d lost half of it.

  “Don’t interrupt,” he said, “I gotta take corn to town.”

  “Sorry.”

  “But they was others. Other women. They”—he gave a cracked laugh, “took to me.”

  “Was Glenna Flint one of them? She said she knew you.” She reddened. Why had she asked that?

  He was furious now; he rose up out of his rocker like a genie out of a bottle. She shrank back in her chair. “Kee-rist. That bag of bones! Thought herself so damn clever ’cause she went to college—though they laughed at her, them college boys.” He sneezed—or was it a laugh? “Took herself off to the city after that. Like she was some important lady!”

  “Did you know her husband, Mac? They came back here to live.”

  He took a step toward her, and she cringed in her chair. His face was a volcano. He shook all over—chin, hands, knees under the patched overalls—then appeared to think it over, stepped back to his chair, groped for the sides, and lowered his trembly body into it.

  “Seen him hangin’ around when I went to test the milk. Flatlander, sure. She did him in, you know. Sure. Whole town knows that. Ask any old Vermonter. If you can find one in this town. A takeover by flatlanders, that’s what. Nothin’ the same no more. And he was one of ’em, Mac, whatever his real name was. A flatlander. And that’s all I’m tellin’ you. No more.”

  He appeared spent by his fury, his skin paled and blotched; the rocking chair went still, his hands, too, except for an occasional twitch in his lap. She started to talk about the skeleton, then stopped herself. He might not have read the local weekly.

  But safe out on the porch, the road only fifty feet away, a house across the road, she couldn’t resist. She wanted to shock him, the way he’d tried to shock her—she knew that by how he kept looking up into her face, the barest smile, the curse words.

  “They found his skeleton,” she yelled back to where he stood in the doorway. “Mac’s. Glenna says it definitely was.”

  Bagshaw’s face split open like waxed paper ripping apart. His laugh was weird to hear, like someone sick and gagging. Wanting to stop the laughing, wanting to shock him further, she hollered, “We found its finger on our land. It had a ring. A ring like ...” She looked over at the healing place. The wooden sign was a bone crossed with an arrow, a moon. “Something like that sign next door, not exactly. Where do you think they got that?”

  “Don’t go there. Don’t ask!” he shrieked, moving toward her now. “You want to get trapped? Took by the devil? That’s what they want
, young girl like you. My daughter, my own girl—”

  She ran out into the road. A car was coming and she was relieved to see it. She stuck out a thumb (her mother would kill her if she found out), but it passed her by. She had to get to a telephone, ask someone to pick her up—she’d come by school bus. She started down the road; she could outrun that old guy all right.

  She glanced back. He was standing on the porch. Porch and man appeared to be leaning in opposite directions, or was it her eyes? She might need glasses; she couldn’t always see the blackboard. But she didn’t want to give her mother any extra expense—her mother had a poor risk rating at the bank. “I don’t believe in a devil,” she shouted back. And she turned at the sign, ran up to the door of the Healing House, just to spite the old man. They were all women there, she’d heard. Who could hurt her? At least they’d have a telephone.

  Chapter Seven

  Willard Boomer was at Fay’s door. He’d read the papers, and he thought she might need cheering up. Then, afraid his visit might be misinterpreted, he said, “Want to check that sign, you see. Um, all that wind lately, thought it might—”

  “But it’s okay; it’s fine,” she said, stepping back to let him in. She was hooking a rug, a rooster, had just drawn the design on the burlap; the wool strips were in a bag at her feet. She was using an antique homespun instead of new wool; it gave a more primitive look to the rugs. He stood over her for a minute, admiring the design. He smelled of soap and fresh air.

  “It’s a rooster all right,” he allowed, turning his cap in his hands. She saw the green bike, the empty cart behind, outside by the step. When he turned back, she put down the work, touched his sleeve. “Tea?” she said. “I have some nice wine.” She really needed someone to talk to. She’d just had a call from her ex, who had accused her of taking the new sheets he’d bought for the double bed. “When have I been in Cabot,” she’d said, “and why would I need sheets for a double bed?” But his voice just rolled over hers: “With you gone, I have to hire someone to collect the eggs.” And he hung up.