Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

  “We have plenty,” Willard said. “I planted more than we can eat.” Willard’s chin was thrusting up, he was looking belligerent. Was it a gardening competition? Willard grew beets, beans, broccoli full of web worms and zucchinis grown to baseball bats because Fay never picked them in time. Mostly she found them smashed into slimy green mats after Beets and Apple played ball with them.

  “By the way, Cedric, do you know who gave Marion this new controller?” She pulled it out of a box. Chance and one of the teachers had packed it up after the abortive show; she must give it to Nova.

  “No to both,” he said curtly and turned to go.

  “Wait a minute,” she called after him. “You want to find out who killed her, don’t you?”

  “I’m still not sure it was intentional,” he said, wheeling about in the hallway, his eyes catching fire. “That is – a homicide. She smoked, you know. A pack a day. You know what that can do to you? I used to tell her – ”

  “It wasn’t nicotine that killed her, it was yew,” Fay hollered. “And of course she was poisoned! Talk to Lieutenant Higgins. Talk to Sergeant Nova. Talk to the medical examiner. There was yew in her system, lots of it. More than it takes to kill an elephant.” She didn’t know about the elephant, but even so. She thought of the missing Ganesha puppet, and asked Cedric but he shrugged.

  He was just standing there: defiant, smirking, hands on his no-hips. Like he was announcing that the Holocaust never happened. She felt Willard come up behind her, as though he’d back her up in case of attack. “Get with it, Cedric.”

  Finally Cedric said through his teeth: “The yew got in her drink, absolutely. She bought it at the local co-op, you know, some fool could have put in the wrong herb. But the control stick couldn’t poison her.”

  They locked eyes a moment. She said, “It was you gave her that yew controller, wasn’t it. Wasn’t it? Cedric?”

  He was quiet a moment. She could feel the electricity in the air, like a storm was brewing in the room, ready to break. Willard put a hand on her shoulder; the rough skin of his hand gripped her Valentini Marionettes tee shirt, digging in, but she didn’t want him to take it away. Cedric’s back was against the wall; his shoulders curved like a bow that might spring any moment and loose the poison arrow. “You gave her that controller,” she repeated.

  “It was a gift,” he said finally. “For her birthday. I had it made. Yew is a beautiful wood. Supple, good for stringing, for operating marionettes. She loved it, she strung Beauty onto it. I was planning to lacquer it but she wanted to use it right away, so what could I do? You know Marion when she gets a bee in her bonnet.”

  He was breaking down, his face like a split egg, the yolk running down his cheeks, onto his hands that were holding his face. She mustn’t feel sorry for him. He knew plants, he probably knew wood. Knew yew, the yew sap that still bubbled in the untreated wood. He could have warned his wife, stopped her.

  Seeing his face she backed off. Willard’s hands lifted from her shoulders and she turned away. Her sign maker went back to his packing. He didn’t want any part of these accusations, his stance told her, he just wanted everyone to be happy. Willard the peacemaker.

  But Fay was angry. The man had lied! His grief was false, he was playacting; he had a new girlfriend. Now he was turning his back on her. She went after him, half running, into the kitchen. “You lied to me,” she shouted. “I don’t like that! I want the whole truth from you.”

  “I gave it.” The back door slammed. She opened it to follow but Willard pulled her back, his hands firm on her shoulders. “It’s okay, Fay, okay,” he said, and maneuvered her back into the living room. The day had turned dark. Rain was beating at the windows, and the ceiling was leaking into a box of puppet stuff. Willard moved it to a dry place. His calm voice asked, “What do I label this box of odds and ends?”

  “What? Oh. Well, ‘odds and ends,’ why not? But keep out that control stick. I want to drop it off at the police station. See how green the wood is, that forensics fellow will know. It’s evidence.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t you just go ahead and let me finish up here. I can get the marionettes in my car, half the boxes anyway. Unload them back at my house. These big pieces of staging, though, we’ll want your pickup. Maybe tomorrow morning?”

  “Uh huh.” She was feeling confused now, spent. Her anger at Cedric had dissipated. Now she could only hand over the controller and a second rosin pad she’d kept out of the boxes and let forensics examine them. And hand over the threat letters. See if there were any fingerprints or bits of DNA evidence or whatever they all talked about in the reruns of Prime Suspect she was watching now on Netflix – with a personal interest. She identified with Helen Mirren’s character, Jane Tennyson. They appeared to be of an age. She was Jane Tennyson.

  “Just let me know when,” she said, feeling rushed into a future she didn’t want to face. “I’ll call you when I get home. I want to help unload – be sure to wait for me. But first I have to stop at the market; we need everything. Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is bare.”

  Like her head right now, empty of words, of thought. What was the next step? Who should she see after the police? What should she do to help Marion?

  “Just carry on,” Marion’s firm sweet voice echoed in Fay’s head as she hurried out with her evidence.

  * * *

  Back at home, she found an elderly man squatting on the doorstep. “She won’t let me in,” he growled, pointing at the window where Glenna’s silhouette hovered in front of the flickering tube. “Locked the freakin’ door, she did.” He glowered at Fay through squinting eyes. With his head of clipped reddish-gray hair and face like a boiled lobster, he resembled a grown-up Beets.

  That’s who he was of course, she discovered when she unlocked the door that Glenna normally kept unlocked. “Rudolph J. Wolfgang,” he said. “I come to see my boy.” He was wearing a cheap blue suit and orange-striped tie, a prison issue, she supposed, a transition from jail to the outside.

  Fay searched in Ruth Willmarth’s file for Beets’s birth name. And retrieved it just in time. Rudolph Wolfgang, Jr., another reason for Beets taking on a nickname. The boy had announced early on that he wanted “no traffic” with reindeer, wolves or gangs – and now she understood. The foster folk had warned of the father’s release from prison – for good behavior perhaps, or simply because his time was up.

  “You’re supposed to let us know ahead,” she told him. “If you just show up like this, you take your chances.”

  Rudolph smirked and plowed into the kitchen in his big battered boots. He was above or below, Fay thought, societal manners. Even if he’d called ahead, it was a bad time for a visit. Beets had been suspended from school for walloping a young bully; Marion was dead, the marionettes were in limbo until they could create a new show – not to mention herself, equally in limbo.

  “My boy?” he repeated, looking about.

  “We’ll find your boy,” she said, when he marched straight for the refrigerator like a starving wolf. “You have a girl living here as well, you realize – your daughter Apple.” He was drinking orange juice right out of the carton now and the bile was rising in her throat. “Apple isn’t home from school yet and Beets is, well, somewhere about. I’m just home myself from town.”

  From the police station she’d started to say, dropping off evidence with Sergeant Nova. She’d put letters, controller, and rosin pad into a plastic bag – her fingerprints on everything, of course, and Chance’s too, since the girl had done most of the post-show clean up.

  Oh, whoopie, she thought. Our fingerprints.

  “Not mine,” the man said. “Joan was a liar.” Joan? Ah, the mother, she’d seen the name in the file. “Slept around, that ’un,” he went on, shoving a bunch of chopped walnuts into his mouth. “After they sen’ me up. Then said the girl is mine. Prove it, I said. She couldn’.” He swallowed the nuts.

  DNA would tell, but was it worth it? The mother was dead; the father couldn’
t help the girl, though it would be nice for Apple to think she had a father.

  “So where’s he at, I said? My boy?”

  “Seen Beets around?” she called to the living room.

  “Rode off on his bike,” aunt Glenna hollered back and turned up the sound on the TV. She’d locked the man out and wasn’t about to retract.

  Mr. Wolfgang was already sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of leftover lasagna – exactly what Fay had planned for dinner. But what could she do? It was already half eaten. Now she’d have to improvise. “Any decent coffee?” he asked. “They give us kerosene up to Northern State.” Northern State sounded like a college, but Fay recalled it was a correctional facility in Newport.

  She poured him a cup, ran a glass of iced tea to Glenna, who was frantically signaling – not for the iced tea so much as Fay’s ear. “Don’t leave me alone with that rude man, Fay. Eating our food!”

  “I have to do the milking, Glenna.”

  “Then take him with you.”

  “You have Gandalf,” Fay said. “The man was in for burglary, not murder. Three or four times, I understand.”

  “Three times, tha’s all,” said Rudolph, overhearing. “Third time it was a setup. Undercover cop! Fair ball, huh? Right!”

  “I have to milk my goats. If you want to come you can.” Foster mothers were expected to welcome the birth parents. They got money from the state, but not enough to feed the birth parents as well. And where was this man supposed to sleep? Fay would take her cell phone with her to the barn, call Willard if necessary.

  “No thank you,” Rudolph said, and wandered back to the refrigerator.

  “Then I’m coming with you,” said aunt Glenna, glaring at the man. This was Glenna’s house, her grandfather’s farm. Cousin Fay was just a renter, cheap rent, at that. Glenna had accepted the three foster kids and Fay’s grandson, but her generosity ended there. She didn’t need another interloper.

  “I’ll put you to work, Glenna.”

  “Fair enough.” They left the greyhound inside to watch Rudolph and moved slowly through the pasture to the goat barn. Glenna’s legs were failing but she was game. She clung to Fay’s arm, complaining about the intruder. “The boy’s got enough problems without a jailbird turning up in his life. If Apple isn’t his then she’s lucky.”

  “The girl calls him Father, you know that. She seems to need him. ‘When Father gets out of jail he’ll want me back’ – that sort of thing.”

  “When she sees him she’ll change her tune.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The goats were waiting at the barn door, ready to spill their load of milk. But they’d have to wait, the cell phone was ringing. It was Sergeant Nova. “The medical examiner came by after you left, Fay. I gave him the controller to look at, and that rosin pack.”

  “And?”

  “He sniffed them. Had his dog sniff them, too. Nice German shepherd, well trained.” Nova had a pleasant voice, the word mellifluous came to mind. “Seemingly no yew juice, but of course he took them back to the lab with him, to be tested.”

  “But if it turns out that the poison wasn’t in the rosin pack or on the controller, or in the thermos, then how did it get into her system?”

  “You got me there.”

  “Two of us then. Though I should know how, if I’m a suspect, right?” She heard him chuckle. It was getting to be a joke between them. “Well, keep looking,” she said.

  “Wait a min – Lieutenant Higgins wants to talk to you.”

  Oh dear. She hung on to the phone. The goats whined, wanting to be milked, wanting grain. Higgins did not have a pleasing phone voice; it was rather nasal in fact. He was going on about how they were going to “get to the bottom of this, Fay wasn’t to worry.” Or interfere. “Nova’s going to look into the local co-op where they had some kind of soup and salad before the show.”

  “Well, no one at the Natural Foods Co-op is going to poison a soup and salad.”

  “Of course not. So leave that to us,” Higgins said, as if she were a little girl with a big imagination.

  She clicked off before he could suggest next Monday’s lunch, and prepared to milk the female goats. They gathered about her, complaining softly, as if they’d rather be fed than milked.

  “Life can be tough,” Glenna said, speaking to the does, tossing them a handful of grain.

  “You got that right,” said Fay.

  Chapter Seven

  Family Tensions: Willard has a Tough Day

  Thursday, September 27

  A woman opened Cedric’s door when Willard knocked on it. Fay hadn’t said anything about a woman living here. The woman was wearing heavy perfume; she had a cigarette in her hand, and she was trying to shut the door on him. Bad luck came in threes, folk said. He’d had the first two already: that Wolfgang fellow taking over the trailer – just for a week, he’d pleaded. Willard had removed his favorite model engine just in case. Then Fay, who was busy making cheese, sent the fellow to help Willard to move the marionette stage. Which Willard could have done by himself. What did Fay think, he wasn’t man enough? The stage was in three pieces: he could do it alone or maybe Cedric would help, though Willard wouldn’t want to ask him.

  Now he recognized the woman from the memorial service. She was Marion’s sister, white, no blood relation – Marion would have been adopted. Tall, eyes thick with black stuff like blinders.

  “Willard Boomer here,” he said. “Come to pack up the puppet staging. Fay called ahead. Cedric knows. I got a helper.” He waved back at Rudolph but didn’t introduce him. Willard was no snob, but Rudolph needed a shave, needed decent pants besides those short shiny ones that were at least six inches above his ankles.

  “Pleased to meet you, miss,” Rudolph called out behind him.

  “Cedric!” the sister hollered over her shoulder, as if Willard and his helper were here to rob the house: “What’s this about someone taking the puppets? You’re not giving them away? I might like some of those stringed ones.”

  Willard’s heart sank into his toes. Here was bad luck number three. This perfumed woman, wanting to take over Fay’s legacy – at least that’s the way he looked at it. He felt protective of Fay. Though he had to be careful not to overstep. Ruin his own chances. But who’d want him? The Personal Ads all wanted a man who could dance. Or play bridge. Or water ski. He didn’t do any of those.

  “Hang on there, Puss.” Cedric came into the room, buttoning his shirt. “Puppets are being moved out of here, that’s all. I want my space back. I might want to make a movie theater out of the room. A little R and R.”

  “I should get something for all I’ve done,” Puss told Cedric. “Years I spent trying to get your wife into the country club, though I knew, Ced, they wouldn’t –”

  “Leave it, Puss,” Cedric said.

  “Getting dates for her, too,” she said, ignoring him. “Though she turned every one of them off with – ”

  “She obviously didn’t turn me off,” Cedric said. He winked at Willard.

  Willard did not wink back. He was just here to pick up the staging; he didn’t want to get into questions of race or gender. He just wanted to move the staging.

  “I was thinking of that Beauty puppet, for one,” the sister said. “Maybe that Harvey rabbit. He’s adorable. My clients would get a kick out of him.”

  “Take them both,” Cedric said. “They’re yours.”

  “But not the Beauty one, no!” Willard cried, and then blushed at his outpouring.

  “Oh?” Cedric said. “These are your marionettes, Boomer?”

  “I didn’t mean to… I mean Fay needs the Beauty puppet if she’s to finish the season.

  You see, the marionettes are all at my house now. You wanted them out of here so Fay said I should – ”

  “I said Puss can have it.” Cedric gave a dismissive wave. “You can bring Beauty and the rabbit right back here.”

  “This afternoon,” the sister said, pointing at the grandmother’s clo
ck, which needed rewinding, Willard noticed. “I have to leave at two. I have to get back to work.” She had some kind of consulting job, Willard had heard from Fay. Sold paint for women to put on their faces. Turn them into puppets like herself.

  “Tomorrow,” Willard said, fighting for his cause – or was it Fay’s cause. “I’ll have to make another Beauty, you see, if you take this one. I’ll need it so I can try to copy it. I’ll want to copy the White Rabbit, too.”

  The sister drew Cedric apart, whispering to him while he stood there, his face a stone. “He can send the puppets to you,” Cedric told her, beginning to sound impatient.

  “I’ll wait here. Till tomorrow noon,” she told Willard. “We need to talk anyway,” she said, turning back to her brother-in-law. “We need to see your lawyer. There are things in this house belong to me. Marion always said I could have that rug. I was with her when she bought it.”

  She pointed at the room-size antique Oriental under their feet, worth thousands of dollars, Willard bet. He saw Rudolph looking at it too, stretching his neck to take in the whole big room with its satin sofa and gold framed paintings – one of them at least six feet tall. All, according to Fay, furnished by Marion from the windfall her adoptive father had left her when he died.

  “I lived with her,” Cedric said, his nose reddening, “not you. It’s my rug. You never went anywhere with her. You got along like a couple of female cats and you know it. She never said you could have it.”

  Willard didn’t want to get into a family fight; he was only here to work. He beckoned to Rudolph and between them they hustled the staging out of the room. It wasn’t so heavy but it was awkward. Backing out, Rudolph lost his grip. The front panel fell from his grasp and landed on the sister’s foot. She shrieked out an embarrassment of epithets. “Who is that man? Get him out of here. Get that thing out of here. I think it’s broken. My foot. My God, the pain! Somebody get me to Emergency!”

  “Sorry,” Willard said for Rudolph, who’d picked up his end again and was backing out the open door. Then forgetting the three brick steps, he fell sideways under the load and plunged off to land with the sheetrock wall on his back. And now Willard had two cripples on his hands.