Earth Colors

by Sarah Andrews

  “Is she still there?”

  “No. Janice said Deirdre sent Cricket to live in a mobile home down on that family property in the serpentine barrens. Janice phoned her once or twice, but then she quit answering phone calls. Janice went down there to see her over Christmas but she wasn’t there.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Janice didn’t know. Some other family was living there, and they set their dogs on her. She figures Cricket hopped off somewhere else to have her baby and raise it in peace.”

  I didn’t like hearing about another woman put in the position of raising her child alone. And there was something about Cricket’s story that did not fit. If she had a baby coming, why didn’t she stick around and pick up her inheritance? But perhaps she was in touch in some way, and preferred to have it sent to her. An inheritance, but not a heritage.

  “Anything else you need?” Jenny asked. “This is kind of fun, using my networking skills for detective work.”

  “Yeah. What color were Mr. Krehbeil’s eyes?”

  “Deirdre’s father’s? Gray. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just sorting out a little genetics puzzle.” I thanked Jenny and ended the phone call. Wardlaw and I were just reaching our objective, namely the last turn Tert would make as he drove Faye and the baby home to the farm. It was a beautiful place surrounded by nice, old farmsteads. A tractor growled halfway across the nearest field, turning over the soil for this year’s planting.

  I parked the car, got out, and wandered over to where Wardlaw was picking himself a blade of grass to chew on. I said, “Murder. Not your gig, right?”

  “Not on the whole, unless it’s on federal land. It’s usually a local jurisdiction thing. People have to defraud the federal government or cross state lines to get me interested.”

  “What if someone managed to pull the trigger in Pennsylvania and the bullet struck in Wyoming?”

  “Now, that’s a firearm I’d like to see,” said Wardlaw. “What are you thinking?”

  “Aunt Winnie. What did she die of?”

  “Give me the particulars,” he said.

  “Give me a sec.” Thank God for cell phones. I got onto Directory Information and called Frank Barnes. Luckily, he was in. “I’m sorry I left Cody without getting together with you again,” I told him. “But something came up.”

  “That’s my Em,” he said evenly.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got a favor to ask of you. You remember you told me about the Krehbeil ranch out west of Cody there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the owner died recently?”

  “Winnie Krehbeil. Yeah.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “Lung cancer,” said Frank. “But you know … I mean, you know how people talk … .”

  “Yes I do, Frank, and that’s what I’m asking you to do.”

  “Well, my sister’s kid’s a nurse up at the hospital these days, and she said the X rays looked real funny. Blank spots, like she’d been inhaling metal filings. But she was real sick by the time they diagnosed, so they just did what they could to keep her comfortable as possible. And then, well, there wasn’t no autopsy, because everyone knew it was the cancer, y’know?”

  “Right … Anything else?”

  “She got real batty toward the end.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “She thought someone was poisoning her. She made accusations.”

  Frank made a small chuckling sound. “You always were a smart ’un, Em.”

  I rang off and turned back to Agent Wardlaw, who had taken a seat on the trunk of my car. “Lead chromate,” I told him. “It’s a paint pigment called Baltimore yellow, the same color as the Krehbeils’ front door. It’s what the family’s fortune was built upon.”

  “And you say it does what?”

  “Inhaled, it’s a carcinogen. Causes cancer and leaves radio-opaque spots on the lungs. Ingested, you can deliver the dose over a long time, and you get lead poisoning. The first symptoms are fatigue and loss of appetite. Eventually it causes nerve damage, even mental illness, and, finally, death.”

  “And it would be hard to prove that the dose had been maliciously administered,” he pointed out. “So, how you gonna prove this?”

  “We’re usually not exposed to it anymore. Baltimore yellow was a color of the nineteenth century. One hundred fifty years ago. A private citizen couldn’t get it anymore, not even as artists’ materials. It’s just not used, precisely because it’s too toxic.”

  Wardlaw’s face bent into a nasty grin. “But if it was the family heritage, you might have a sack of it lying around … .”

  “You got it, Brucie. He could have mailed it to Aunt Winnie as a Christmas present. He could put it in a nice box of talcum powder for the bath, or something. She goes in for her daily ablutions and puff-puff-puff, she gets her daily dose. And sending it in the mails puts it in your jurisdiction.”

  “But you say she’s already dead. What if she was cremated? And do you really think anyone’d be dumb enough to leave a dose like that lying around after she was gone? Nah, they’d toss it down the toilet when they came around for the funeral.”

  I laughed and pointed at a row of gravestones that rested against some trees at the edge of the nearest field. “Look over there: These people bury their loved ones right out here in the field. Dollars to doughnuts says she’s planted in some nice graveyard out there in Wyoming, maybe right next to her last five poodles. And the really good news is that heavy metals stay with a corpse longer than poisons. You can test for them in the hair and fingernails. Hell, the bones turn from calcium phosphate to lead phosphate.”

  A cloud seemed to have settled over his face.

  I said, “Sorry to call you Brucie. Is that a sensitive matter?”

  He shook his head, not looking at me. “No. I was just thinking of my father and my uncles working in those mines. Their lungs …”

  “Yeah.”

  He straightened up and stretched, pushing his gut out even farther over his belt. “So, you think your pals’ll come right past here.” He glanced at his watch. “Won’t be long. Eleven o’clock. Kinda early for lunch.”

  “Yeah, and I wonder what’s going to show up in the cuisine.”

  “You think he’s sprinkling it on the canapés?”

  “Well, Deirdre said her mother always seems to get sicker after ‘Precious William’ visits. Poor old dear, she won’t go to the hospital. He must be counting on that. Either that, or maybe he doesn’t know that it would leave a blank spot on X rays.”

  Wardlaw made a face that suggested that he had glue on his teeth. “So we got us a serial killer. Dad, Mom, Aunt Whosie, and who else?”

  “His sister Deirdre: peripheral neuropathy. Can’t feel her hands or feet. It’s another symptom of lead poisoning. Maybe he put it in the home-made jam.”

  “Lovely. And Hector’s just gonna drink himself to death. He got any more brothers and sisters?”

  “Cricket.”

  “What’s he got in mind for her?”

  “Well, she’s gone missing, but no one thinks anything of it because it’s a habit of hers. But last time she showed up she was pregnant. We don’t want another heir, do we? So she’s easy. She’d been sent to live out there where your pals the pooches live. You don’t even have to do it slowly with her; you can just walk right up to her and get it over with and bury the body somewhere out in the greenbriers. Everybody will figure she just wandered off again.”

  Wardlaw sucked his teeth. He looked at his wristwatch. “They’ll be along any minute now, so I should get out of sight. So, come on, tell me: What’s your plan for getting a confession out of him?”

  “I don’t have one,” I said.

  Wardlaw jumped to his feet. “Wha’? Then what the fuck are you going to do!”

  “I don’t know. Not much, probably.”

  His brows came together in a knot. “I been willing to go along with you this far because—”

  “Because you thought I was
going to finger my own client. Sorry, Wardlaw. I’ve given you everything I have, but I don’t have a magic wand. I have no idea what’s going to happen. You think Tert’s going to drive up and see me and just throw up his hands and say, ‘Ya got me’? Or you think I’m going to invite myself to lunch where they’ve got guess-what on the menu? Or maybe they’re going to dispense with the daily dose and just stand in a circle and point at the killer? Huh? If they’re anything like the family I come from, they’re going to clam up around any strangers. To tell you the truth, I got hardly anything out of Deirdre the other time I was here, and when she sees me again and finds out my name isn’t the one I gave her last time, she’s going to shut up tighter’n a tick.”

  He leaned toward me, his face strained with anger. “What am I supposed to do, then?”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “You could blow a year’s work for me, Hansen!”

  “I’ll do what I can for you, but I’ve got my priorities.”

  He threw up his hands, his fingers hooked with rage. “Then I’m gonna put you under arrest! You’re not going in there and mess up my—”

  “Mess up what? I’m just going to crash a luncheon party and get my friend and her baby out of there; that’s all the messier I intend things to get.”

  “Shit, I should have known better than to go along with some chick Jack Sampler came up with! That asshole always was too full of tricks!”

  Now, that was getting personal. I leaned into his face and roared, “I don’t answer to you and I don’t answer to Jack Sampler!”

  Wardlaw’s face popped with surprise. His mouth closed. He said nothing.

  My ears echoed with the words that had escaped my lips.

  A flight of blackbirds rose from a tree and decorated the sky. Somewhere a dog barked.

  I turned and walked a ways down the road. I felt the breeze against my cheeks. I smelled the first scents of spring. After a moment, I returned to where Agent Wardlaw waited. He was leaning on the hood of his car with both hands as if he had just collapsed onto it after a long run.

  I said, “Listen, I want to jail William Krehbeil the Third because I am concerned that he’s got the bad habit of murdering his relatives, sure. But mostly I want him out of action because I don’t want him trying to fill Tom’s shoes. I’m sad for Faye—really sad—because there never will be a replacement for Tom Latimer. And I’m almost thirty-nine and not married because I keep picking men like Jack Sampler, who can only love a woman from the other side of the world where she can’t bite him. So I keep finding rodeos to ride in to keep my mind off my loneliness, and this is just the latest. Shit, I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this!” I wrapped my arms around myself and looked away in embarrassment.

  Wardlaw grunted, “So this has all been a sham. You don’t have a plan to collar my guy.”

  “Nope, sure don’t. I’m no help to you.”

  Wardlaw gave me what he probably thought was a seductive look. “You could be good, Hansen. You could be one of the best.”

  I raised both hands to my head in exasperation. “Wardlaw, get it straight! I can’t prove a dang thing! I’d need a warrant so I could exhume the bodies and analyze hair and fingernail samples for heavy metals, or something like that. And you know what? It’s finally occurring to me that I don’t have to solve—or resolve—every bit of chaos that gets tossed in front of me. All I really have to do is what’s good for me and for the people I care about. Small, simple actions, like making sure the baby doesn’t bite into a poisoned cookie.” I spread out my arms, palms up, and stared into the sky. “And that, Mr. Wardlaw sir, is the whole and only reason I am here!”

  Wardlaw snapped away from me and stared off into the distant fields for a while. He fiddled with the change in his pockets, his jaws working like he was chewing steel. Bit by bit, he seemed to relax. Then he swatted me on the shoulder. “Time to get going,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get the little shit one way or another. I always do. Keep your nose clean. Give me a call if you learn anything you want to tell me.” And with that, he got into his bland-looking sedan and drove away.

  It was another ten minutes before a silver BMW carrying a man, a woman, and a child came down the road. I threw down the stalk of grass I’d been chewing on and moved to the edge of the road, where I stuck out my thumb. The BMW came to a halt. The window on the passenger’s side slid down silently. Faye’s astonished face peered out at me. “Em?”

  “It’s me, all right.”

  She opened the door and jumped out. She threw her arms around me in her good-old-buddy way, and, through clenched teeth, whispered, “Is there something wrong with your car?”

  “No.”

  “Then, quick, help me get the baby out of the backseat and get us out of here. Tell Tert there’s some kind of an emergency and we’ll come by Philly later to get my bags. Tell him anything—I don’t care; I’m just so sick of this precious, self-centered jackass, I could puke!”

  28

  NOW THAT I HAD WARDLAW OFF MY BACK, I COULD GET DOWN to work.

  I found Jenny sitting in the backyard of her little cottage in the Lancaster suburb of East Petersburg, making a watercolor painting of a flower that was just beginning to bloom in her garden. Sunlight played across its brilliant anatomy. The subtle shadows it threw on its own interior formed a delicate composition of inwardly spiraling curves. “Hello, Em,” she said, obviously pleased but not particularly surprised to see me.

  “Come meet my friend Faye. And her baby. They’re waiting in my car out on the street.”

  “I’d love to. Just let me finish this blossom before the paint dries.”

  I settled in to watch, and after a few moments asked, “How do you stay so relaxed? All day you deal with the encroachment of development and mediocrity on land that you love, and yet it doesn’t seem to get to you.”

  Jenny shrugged her shoulders. “Sure it does. It just doesn’t stop me.”

  “But how? I’m sorry, I sound just like Fred Petridge.”

  She smiled. “Remember those chestnut trees Fred was talking about? Look at my house. It was built of chestnut logs two feet square hundreds of years ago. It’s been stuccoed over, but those logs are in there, just as good as new, because it does not rot. Like Fred said, chestnuts used to be the main tree around here, but they got the blight. You never see even those sprouts anymore unless you walk deep into the woods, but you know what? All the old stumps are still there, and they’re alive and impervious to rot. And the roots just keep on sprouting again.” She shrugged, then dipped her brush into a lovely shade of yellow paint and laid it lovingly on the paper. “As soon as the sapling gets big enough to bloom, the blight kills it back again, and that’s very sad, but who knows? Maybe someday we’ll figure out a cure for all of this. Nothing lasts forever in this world, not even blight. So I think I’ll just honor my roots and keep on sending up my sprouts.”

  I sat with her awhile, watching her paint. Jenny was not a Remington or a Charlie Russell, but her little painting was better than George Catlin’s landscapes, a nice integration of the tension between darkness and light, and vibrant in its portrayal of color. And she was happy, a woman at peace in the job of embracing the disharmonies of human nature. I wondered if I could ever be as comfortable with myself.

  I said, “In all of your travels around this county, have you gotten to know anyone who drives an ambulance?”

  “Sure. My cousin, in fact. He’s with the fire department. I am a Mennonite, you know, so I’m related to half the county, if not three-quarters of it.” She lifted her brush and nibbled at the end of the handle. “Why, what’s going on in that busy mind of yours?”

  “I think Mrs. Krehbeil needs to get to a hospital where someone can take an X ray of her lungs. I’ll bet you doughnuts to Whoopie Pies that they’ll find the shadows of lead. Then she’d be kept in the hospital and properly treated, and might just survive long enough to get that easement you want her to have.”

&nb
sp; “An ambulance to save the Krehbeil farm, you say? Now, there’s a metaphor.”

  “Try tomorrow. If it’s a nice day, I wouldn’t be surprised if you wouldn’t find her out on the front porch in her wheelchair enjoying the air, and I’ll bet also that it wouldn’t be long before she falls out of that chair.”

  Jenny nodded. “There’s no one who could keep the fire department from loading her into an ambulance and getting her to town, now, is there?”

  “No one. Not even her doting children. Her doctor is named Abrams. Make sure she gets someone else.”

  “Oh, that old sawbones? Heavens, I’d thought he’d retired. He still thinks babies come from storks.”

  “I thought it was something to do with toadstools. But don’t wait any longer than tomorrow, okay? The old girl’s probably getting dosed again today.”

  Jenny gave me a lovely smile. “It’s a pleasure knowing you, Em Hansen. Here, have some celery,” she said, lifting a dampened tea towel off of a very stubby bunch of that vegetable. “It’s grown right here in Lancaster County. I go to Root’s farm market every Tuesday and get some, not only because it’s the most delicious celery you can find anywhere, but because Lancaster County is still a place that has farm markets like Root’s. It’s only open Tuesdays. Staying open daily would be like trying to be a part of the rest of the world, and that’s not their point. But on Tuesdays, you can get any kind of pastry or confection made in this county, you can buy pigs, and horses, and arrowheads … . Everywhere you’ll see men wearing flat-topped straw hats and women in plain clothes and delicate white caps, and not a lick of makeup. Not a one of them has ever seen the inside of a beauty parlor. And they don’t even speak English if they can avoid it.”

  “In this world, but not of it.”

  I took a stalk and bit into it. Jenny was right. It was delicious. It had more flavor than I had ever imagined a stalk of celery could have.

  Jenny said, “You can’t get celery like that from a factory farm. It takes love to grow it, not machinery. I bought this from a little old lady who lays out her produce on velvet.”