Stolen Honey

by Nancy Means Wright

  “Quit that, Russ,” she cried, her turn to pull him along now. “Okay, LeBlanc,” Olen hissed, scowling at Russell’s T-shirt. “You were just taking a drive around your own grounds, right? But next time you’ll be in the lockup. I’m warning you, now.” His voice cracked. Gwen nodded briefly over her shoulder and followed her husband into the house. Mert was there with a teapot in his hand, along with Brownie, big-eyed and wary, home from school, glancing from one parent to the other, as though unsure if he should speak. Russell poured himself a tankard of beer. Gwen listened to the police car pull out of the driveway and then let out a long shuddery breath.

  * * * *

  Ruth had exhausted Joey’s memory of his real parents. He hadn’t remembered a male relative at all, poor fellow—not until Tim came along. Tim was father, uncle, grandfather, all in one. Joey worshiped him—and vice versa. Now Tim wanted to legally adopt him, even though the boy was almost of age. Joey had smarts, Tim insisted, he’d improved a hundredfold since he’d left the Petits. “Not that they weren’t okay to him,” Tim said, “it’s just that now the kid’s got a one-on-one.”

  “It’s improved you, too,” she teased. “You don’t turn the air quite so blue with your goddamns.” Tim laughed, of course, and told how Zelda, Number One Ornery Cow, as he called her, had just rammed through “the fuckin’ east pasture fence.”

  So now Tim would have occasion for more four letter words. Ruth was going to leave him right after the morning milking to go to the Papineau farm in Bridport.

  “What in hell you going there for?” Tim cried. “You’re not planning on a bigger herd, are you?”

  “Lord, no.” The Papineaus had a thousand cows, a brand-new milking parlor, the latest in farm machinery. “I just want to look around. I might get some ideas.” She didn’t want to tell him she was looking for information about Joey’s relatives. Not yet anyway.

  “So don’t get any ideas I have to put in practice. There’s enough work to do around here as is. Especially with you gone half the time solving some neighbor’s headaches.”

  “When I’ve got enough headaches of my own, yeah, yeah,” she said, and tossed a hardened cow turd at him. It hit the knee of his muddy jeans and bounced off onto the barn floor.

  “Hey, lady,” he said. “I can sue for damages, you keep doing that.”

  She thumbed her nose at him.

  * * * *

  The Papineau farm was as grand and spanking clean as it had been pictured in the local Independent. She hadn’t been there in ten years and since then it had quadrupled in size. They would think her pretty small potatoes with only thirty-two milking cows—but then they didn’t have a Pete Willmarth wanting her to buy out his portion of the farm for a hundred thousand. No, it was down to seventy thousand now, but they were mostly loans, so how was she gaining on it? She was spreading around the debts, that was all. Pretty pathetic, Ruth, she told herself. You may be out of a job, woman. Quick.

  She found Adele Papineau in the kitchen—the men were out discing the soil, getting it ready for planting. Adele’s main job, it seemed, was to feed the hired men. She belonged to the grange, helped with the 4-H Club, was a staunch member of the Catholic church; a crucifix hung over the wall oven. There were blue polka-dot curtains in the windows, but practical blue oilcloth on the long center table where the help would come to eat. Thinking of the number of men needed to care for a thousand cows, Ruth was thankful to have a small herd.

  “I feed twenty at breakfast and lunch,” Adele said, following Ruth’s eyes, “plus the four kids. Though Jean, the oldest—he’s fifteen—he helps with the dishes. He likes doing it better than farm work. I tell my husband not to let the farm get any bigger. These kids aren’t going to take over when he gets long in the tooth.”

  “I can relate to that,” Ruth said. “My three have no interest in farming. For now I’ve just got Tim and his foster boy, Joey, to help. Joey’s why I came.”

  “Uh-huh?” Adele poured hot coffee into a blue mug; it had a cow and Papineau Farms glazed on it. She sold the mugs, along with a video about the farm, in one of the Branbury shops. “Gotta pay off the loans,” she said, grinning. One of her upper teeth was dark, needed extracting—or whitening. Did it really pay to have a state-of-the-art farm? It fed the male ego, Ruth supposed. But it didn’t pay for the wife’s teeth.

  “Joey doesn’t know anything about his family. But we heard that his grandmother worked for you. Nicole was her name, Nicole Godineaux. It would have been back in the late seventies, early eighties.”

  “Lord, that was twenty years ago, I was just married. I remember her, sure, she did chores in the barn, helped me with housework now and then when I was carrying. But I don’t know the background. Grandpapa?” she shouted into the next room. “Come on in here. A lady has some questions about Nicole Godineaux.”

  There were thumping footsteps, and finally an old man with a large brown hairy wart on his chin appeared in the doorway. Adele introduced him as Emile Papineau, her father-in-law. He’d been hurt in a tractor accident, she explained, he had only one leg. “Roll up your trousers,” Adele ordered, and he did, grinning. The prosthetic leg had several dozen signatures on it.

  “Oh,” said Ruth.

  “She wants to know about Nicole,” Adele shouted in his ear. “Where she came from. Where she went to.”

  The old man leaned back against the wall and considered. “Sure. She were here ten years or so. She been in that place down to Rutland. I took a chance on her, seemed a good worker. I don’t know nothing about her folks, least I can’t recall now, memory not what it was, but she got cancer, sure—breast, lungs, Jesus, it were all through her. We kept her in the trailer till she couldn’t work no more. Then we took her to the hospice up to Bristol. She could of died there, I dunno, it were eight, nine years ago now.” He shook his head—he had a healthy crop of white hair—and glanced up at the crucifix as though it would bless the memory of Nicole.

  “I remember that,” Adele agreed. “I remember they took her up to the hospice, poor thing. She looked terrible, flesh all shrunk—just skin and bones.”

  Emile started to hobble away and Ruth stood up. “Do you know anything else about her—husband, or man friend? We’d like to know who our Joey’s father was.”

  Emile bared his gleaming dentures, ran a tongue around the inside of his wrinkled cheek. “There was a fella come ’round once or twice, I recall. He was called . ..” He scratched his head. “Some name begun with an N. Norman? Ned? Anyhow, he asked about a job here. We didn’t have nothing for him, we wasn’t that big back then. ’Sides, Nicole didn’t seem to want him here.”

  “Were they married, those two?”

  “Well, I can’t tell you that. But she knew him, all right. If they was married, she was glad to get rid of him. Too bad. She was a good looker till she got that cancer.”

  Ruth thanked them both, gave them her phone number in case they thought of anything more about Nicole.

  Adele shooed her father-in-law out of the kitchen, and Ruth heard the television blare out a baseball game. “We record the games for him,” she explained. “He goes to bed early, but doesn’t like to miss a night game.”

  As she left, Ruth heard the old man holler, “Bad call. Bad call. That were a strike, you damn fool!”

  “Say,” Adele called out to Ruth as she was getting into her truck. “Any more news about those college murders? You think it’s the same guy? None of us can sleep till they get him.”

  “They’re working on it,” Ruth called back. “That’s all I know. But I don’t think the professor’s was a random killing. I think she might have been targeted.”

  “Yeah? What makes you think so?”

  Ruth waved her arms. She didn’t know, really.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Donna was in Hopewell’s Dress Shop looking for a new blouse to replace the one Shep Noble had torn—she’d tried sewing it, but it still looked tacky. Tonight she and Emily were going to a birthday dinner—she wa
nted to look nice. She picked out a mauve, a pink, and a lilac silk—she liked the luxurious feel of silk against her skin. With her black hair, the warm pinks, mauves, and lavenders looked good. She was entering a booth when she saw the saleslady staring at her. “Just trying them on,” she said.

  “How many?” the woman asked. Donna could see the gray roots in her dyed red hair.

  “Three.” She held them up. The woman snatched them from her, one by one, as though to count them, as though she thought Donna had deliberately undercounted and might stuff one into the Guatemalan bag she was carrying. Donna didn’t like that. But Hopewell’s was the only dress shop in town and she had to have a blouse for tonight.

  She chose the mauve silk, it was a perfect fit; it clung softly to her breasts, showed them off but not too much. She left the rejected ones on hangers and went out to pay. The saleswoman ducked back into the booth and swept the others across her arm; she looked surprised, as though she hadn’t expected them to be there.

  Donna paid for the blouse with two dozen one-dollar bills she’d saved up from her library job at the college and refused to say thank you to the saleswoman. The woman didn’t say thank you, either. She just crumpled the blouse into a white bag and left it for Donna to pick up.

  Donna was pausing by the earring counter on her way out when a young girl walked in. Donna had seen the girl before. She was a junior in high school—she had the reputation of sleeping around. The girl stopped near Donna to look at the earring rack, not acknowledging Donna’s presence, although she probably knew who Donna was.

  “Hi,” Donna said, to annoy the girl as much as anything. The girl looked at Donna a moment and jerked her head back. It was then that Donna saw what the girl was wearing around her neck. It was a necklace of copper beads. The beads had that dullish patina that age brings. Donna could see where the thin leathery string that held the beads together had frayed and been retied. “Where did you get those beads?” she asked.

  Now the girl looked wary; she shook her head and left the store. The saleswoman glared at Donna with pressed lips like she’d made the store lose a customer.

  Donna chased the girl to the corner. “I said, where did you get those beads?”

  The girl spun about, staring Donna down. “They’re a present, if you got to know. It’s nothing to you. Now leave me alone!” and she ran down the street.

  Donna ran after, grabbed her sleeve. “Who gave them to you, I said? They were stolen, I’ll tell you that. Or maybe you stole them. You’ll be arrested if the cops find out.”

  She had only seen the copper beads once, when her father first discovered the grave, but she’d been struck by the beads. It was high noon and they gleamed bright against the chalk white of the neck bones. It was a moment she’d never forget. She’d felt the awe of time passing, nothing left then of a young girl but her beads.

  The girl stared arrogantly back. “I told you, I was given them. Now leave me alone.” She dashed across the street and into the Ben Franklin store. A MacIntyre fuel truck swung around the bend, preventing Donna from following. But she was certain those were the beads. And she didn’t think the girl—her name was Jill, Donna remembered now—had stolen that skeleton. It would have been someone else. Someone who wanted to please Jill. Maybe to sleep with her.

  Well, Donna was going to do whatever it took to find out who that person was.

  * * * *

  Ruth couldn’t bear to go back to her hardscrabble farm after seeing the Papineaus’ place with its six-row free-stall barn and state-of-the-art milking equipment, and so she steered her course toward the Brookview Reformatory in Rutland. She took an alternate route, following the Otter Creek as it carved its way through the Champlain Valley, winking silvery-green at each twist. She thought of her ex-husband’s forebears back in the 1700s, rafting along the Otter to make their pitch in Branbury— on the same land she farmed today. How could Pete have walked away from it like that?

  A horn blasted. A face glared at her as she took the last turn, too wide, into the oncoming lane. Mea culpa, she thought. Too much daydreaming. Now she needed hard facts, something to bring down the greedy, the prejudiced, the avengers.

  She took three deep breaths before entering the door to the director’s office. After Colm’s experience, she was ready for a rebuff. If Nicole had been sterilized like so many “defective” persons of her day, it could be an embarrassment—even though sterilization had been legal up to 1973. Imagine! That late date! Ruth was twenty-three back in 1973, and three years married. In love with her husband, on the edge of a new world, and dreaming already of having Pete’s children. Her eyes were closed to outside affairs.

  How the climate had changed. Now there was global warming. But her own world gone cold with Pete’s defection.

  To her surprise a female voice called out a greeting. A middle-aged woman sat behind the desk. Mr. Godwin was ill, she said;

  she was June Keefe, his assistant. “I’m fairly new here,” the woman apologized, “but I’ll help in any way I can.” She was a tall woman, an inch or two over six feet when she stood up to shake hands. She might have weighed close to two hundred pounds, but she carried it well. She wore a hint of mauve lipstick to express her femininity. She waited, smiling, for Ruth to speak.

  Ruth told her about Joey; she asked about the Godineaux women; she didn’t mention the word “sterilization.” Once again, she felt like a schoolgirl going to see the teacher after class, needing information, but not knowing how to phrase her question. “Anything you can tell me about Nicole or Pauline would help. Pauline was in for petty theft or something, according to the foster care agent. It was after 1973. After the other records burned.”

  Ms. Keefe raised a blond eyebrow. She didn’t know about any burned records. “Like I said, I’m new here.” She clanked open a metal drawer, pulled out a manila folder. “Pauline Godineaux,” she summarized, “in for stealing panty hose and underwear at J. C. Penney’s. A microwave and radio at Sears. Bad checks. Punching out a sales clerk. Striking a policeman with a Coke bottle. It’s a long list. Do you want to hear all of it?”

  “No, thanks. Just the family connections. Is there any mention of Pauline’s father? Or a husband or lover who might be our Joey’s dad?”

  Ms. Keefe scanned the document. It appeared to be only two pages—mostly filled with Pauline’s misdemeanors. It seemed she’d serve six months, have six months off on parole, and bounce right back in again for another misdemeanor. “Oh, and she was pregnant the third time she came in,” the woman noted. “In 1982.”

  “That would have been with Joey. Is there mention of the father?”

  “Something here, but entered with a leaky pen.” She stood up by a window; it had bars on it like all the windows in the reformatory. “Under visitors: just two names. Nicole—that, I gather, was the mother—and a Marcel Shortsleeves. Do you think this Shortsleeves could be your Joey’s father?”

  Ruth didn’t know, of course, but she wrote down the name. Shortsleeves had known Pauline, at least, there would have been some relationship. She would look him up. This was turning into a merry-go-round of visitations. “Any mention of his whereabouts?”

  The blond woman shrugged. “No. But I know a Shortsleeves here in Rutland. On Maple Avenue. You can try him—I forget his first name. He is or was a construction worker. He probably has relatives he can tell you about.” She looked apologetic again, sorry she’d been of so little help. “I like to see families reunited. I was adopted myself. It took twenty years to find my real mother. And when I finally got there—she’d passed on.”

  “I’m sorry. You had no other siblings?”

  “None that I know of. My mother was a teenager when she had me. She was here in the reformatory for a time. For stealing a television.” Her face colored to the roots of her yellow hair. “I determined then I’d help these women. So many of them driven to stealing. Not their faults, really, they have to survive. A television may be a luxury, but it keeps the mind occupied. It br
ings a little laughter into one’s life. Romance, sometimes.”

  She held out a hand to Ruth. Ruth clasped it warmly. She tried to think of the right thing to say to this woman who’d shared something of herself with a stranger, but the words didn’t come. So she said, “Thank you. I’ll look up that Shortsleeves.”

  She hesitated at the door. “I suppose you had to do a lot of running around to find your mother?”

  “Like I said, twenty years.”

  But Ruth didn’t have twenty years to find Camille’s murderer. If she was even on the right track.

  * * * *

  Why on earth was she now in a gas station telephone booth, looking up a Shortsleeves? What did a man named Marcel Shortsleeves have to do with the murder of a college professor? Apparently nothing, according to the telephone that rang eight times with no answer, not even a machine. Well, she’d try again. Right now she just wanted to go home. She wanted to see that new heifer calf Madonna had birthed last night. An easy birth, a strong, well-coupled calf. And there were more freshenings to come this spring. For now she just wanted to think birth. Future. Growth. She didn’t want to keep milking the past.

  She raced on home, taking the curves of the creek in and out, like a skier on a mountain slope, and waiting at the bottom, hot chocolate—and, for Ruth, new life.

  * * * *

  Gwen was proud of the ethnobotanist, Jack Sweeney. He’d done his homework; he spoke eloquently, factually—first at the hearing, and now in court. The case had been brought by the state’s attorney to determine whether Gwen was liable or not for manslaughter because Shep Noble died in her cultivated patch of nightshade. “The so-called bruises stemmed from the nightshade,” Jack explained. “From the photos I saw, there was no evidence of blows from an outside source. Belladonna is extremely toxic. Small doses of it can cause coma, even death. People have been poisoned just by eating rabbits that fed on the berries of deadly nightshade.”