He would photograph, yes, but he’d better call the doc back in on this one. Maybe the police, but the doc could call that one. What was it about that Healing House? Didn’t sound like it was all healing to him, fatal hemorrhages and all.
Drat that son of his! Off on a wild-goose chase in New York City, when the real need was here. Here, in Branbury, Vermont. With his own dad.
****
Aunty turned her face away when Hartley came in the room. She looked like a bundle of old clothes, hunched over in the black leather chair. Her head was sunk into her chest; her feet splayed out on the floor. A second bundle of old clothes sat slumped beside her, asleep and snoring. A TV was blaring in one corner of the room, but no one was looking at it. Aunty never watched TV. It was phony, she said, all those advertisements. They just wanted your money, and she’d rather read a book, she said. Hartley went over to turn it off, and then, thinking better of it, turned it up even louder. So if Aunty made a fuss, an aide wouldn’t hear.
She stood over her aunt, hands on her hips. “Now listen here, Aunty, I had nothing to do with this. It was my parents again, and you know it.”
If Aunty knew it, she wasn’t saying so. She just pursed her lips, beaklike, and stared into her lap.
“I’m here to get you out, Aunty,” she whispered, not wanting to wake up the roommate. “Now listen to me. Emily’s waiting outside to help. I had to sneak in past the guards. This place is like a prison. God, they’ve got bars on these windows, like you’re some criminal! You don’t want to stay here, do you?”
Aunty looked up then, the irises of her eyes like hard green apples. “Don’t forget my red sweater,” she said. “It’s in there.” She pointed to a white-painted bureau. A photograph in a thin leather frame sat on top: Hartley recognized the family at a Vermont Thanksgiving dinner: a younger Homer, a plumper Hartley, and Glenna toasting the photographer (it must have been Matilda) with her glass, looking about the same as she did today—that is, frazzled. Glenna had cooked the turkey. It had been raw and pink inside, Hartley remembered, but they’d all nibbled at the outer pieces and pretended it was delicious. Later on, her stepmother had recooked it for three hours.
Hartley grabbed the red sweater and a couple changes of underwear and crammed them into a shopping bag. “Well, get up, then, Aunty.” And then, louder, for the sake of the roommate, who was shifting in her chair, she said, “We’re just going for a walk, right?”
Aunty started to protest, but then she caught her grand-niece’s drift. “Sure, a walk,” she said. And then, halfway to her feet, Glenna balked and sank down. “Where we going anyway? To the farm? They’ll just put me in the car and bring me back here.” She dropped her head in her hands, and Hartley wanted to pat it. But Hartley wasn’t the touching type. None of them were, not even her father. They loved one another, she supposed, but at a distance. One day, she’d get therapy. But right now, she had to get Aunty out.
“I have a hiding place,” she whispered, kneeling at Aunty’s feet—you had to do that with Aunty sometimes. “It’s neat. A little cabin in the woods. You’ll like it, Aunty, you will. It’s got a rocking chair and everything.”
Glenna looked up, licked her dry lips, considered. “Has it got a bathroom?”
“Sure,” Hartley lied. Actually, she hadn’t thought about bathrooms. It was Emily who’d come up with the cabin idea. It was a place up in the Green National Forest, a cabin her father and another man had built for when they went hunting. But it wasn’t hunting season yet. Not until mid-November, so Aunty would be safe. “You can have your scotch, too,” she said. “And we’ll cook tofu loaf for you, and cheeseburgers.”
“Cheddar cheese,” Aunty said. “That’s the kind I like. I hate that processed stuff. It tastes like glue.”
“Sure. Cabot cheddar. Sharp.” Hartley mounded up Aunty’s bed to make it look like she was sleeping there, stuck a white-haired wig she’d bought on the pillow. She smiled at her ingenuity.
“Get my black wool coat, too; it’s in that closet. They took away my scarf. Thought I might hang myself. They treat me like some loony. I don’t tell them a thing, mind you. They want to know who’s president of the United States, I tell them it’s Calvin Coolidge.”
“Right on, Aunty. Now, here’s your coat. And put on this big old black scarf to cover your hair. So if they spot us, they won’t think it’s you.”
“Extra sharp is the way I like it,” Aunty said as they stole out into the corridor. “A little excitement in your cheese.”
Somewhere at the far end, a woman screamed and footsteps ran toward her. “Hurry,” said Hartley. “This way.”
“Bye-bye,” said Aunty to the door of her ward, and let herself be hustled down a back stairwell.
* * * *
Fay was painting over Glenna’s room. Stark white, but she’d add a rose-colored quilt, rose-trimmed curtains. It was strange without Glenna around. First, the old lady had been an irritation, an embarrassment to the business, an interruption to her work. Now Fay rather missed her. And even the niece was gone half the time, visiting Glenna in the funny bin they’d taken her to. “She’ll die in that place without me,” the girl had shouted as she raced out that morning, leaving Fay, of course, to answer a call a minute from the stepmother. And Fay without a credit card with any financial backing. So Fay was on her own.
Well, at least the parents had gone, Homer apologizing, poor guy, saddled with that officious woman but too weak to assert himself. And he’d refused this month’s rent: an apology for the presence of daughter and aunt. Wait till he gets the MasterCard bill, Fay thought; he’ll be sorry. But sweet Jesus, she was practically destitute; Dan had all the money up there, wasn’t about to part with it. The woman always came off second-best in a divorce; Fay needed any handout she could get.
And worst of all, no word from Patsy. No answer on the phone. Patsy could be difficult at times, but Fay couldn’t help but love her. She wanted her child; she wanted her baby back. She wanted her grandson. Was she homesick? Paint dripped on the floorboards, and she stooped to wipe it up with her rag. She wasn’t any better a painter than a milker. The stuff came off in a thick white glob, like spoiled milk.
Or was Patsy right? Was Fay to blame for her daughter’s lonely childhood? She’d been busy, it was true: trying to put purpose into her life, trying to make it as an actress in a small-town theater—three plays a year, out nights. Though she’d given it all up for rug hooking after she and Dan saw that counselor one time, tried to stitch the marriage together. And failed at that, too. She’d told Willard Boomer about it.
“Never had one of my own,” he’d apologized. “I mean”— he laughed that sweet, ingratiating laugh of his—”never been married, you know. But my dad, I never knew him. Locked himself in the garage, turned on the gas—that’s another reason I don’t own a car. He had lung cancer, you see—all those Camels. He couldn’t stand the treatment, the pain. Mother and I, though, we’ve managed.”
“Of course,” said Fay, and he patted her hand, as though he’d help her manage, too.
There’d been no hugging yet. Willard was shy; it was obvious he’d been with few women. Fay could wait. She wondered what the mother was like. Mother and son, living under the same roof. Had they become entwined, like that elm beyond the barn where two trunks grew out of one? She imagined the mother a sweet lady, though; Willard said she was shy, spent her days upended in her garden.
Downstairs, a door slammed. Someone went to the refrigerator; it opened and clicked shut. “Hello?” she called down, spreading her hands, which now were pockmarked with paint.
“Kevin,” he called back, already climbing the stairs: click, clack, click in those polished shoes of his. He stood in the bedroom doorway, head tilted like a thoughtful Hamlet, his lips a bow that someone had just untied. “I’ve been to the undertaker’s,” he said, and waited for her response.
What was Hamlet’s reaction to the news of Ophelia’s death? Rather indifferent, she recalled—he was too
preoccupied with other matters, his father’s ghost, the murder. Why, Shakespeare wrote murder mysteries, he did! Old blood-and-guts man, he was.
“How awful for you,” she said aloud. “We’re all so sorry. Ruth, next door—she phoned me. I suppose you’ll be leaving soon, then? Will you bury her back in, um—”
“Chicago,” he said. “A suburb actually, Winnetka. I will, yes. I had her cremated. She would have wanted that.”
“You said she came from here, though. No relatives?”
“Relatives?” He drew a hand through a falling sheaf of hair, made himself comfortable in a chair. “No, no, not here anymore. She left Branbury when she was twenty-one. That’s when we married. She’d just come back from Rochester, New York, actually—some school there to study jewelry making. I... well, I rescued her, you know.”
“From jewelry making? But it sounds interesting. I hook rugs a little. Lately, with so much going on.…” She picked up her brush and it dripped across the floor. “Jesus.” She bent to dab it up. She wanted to weep. Oh, the mess! She wished he’d go away so she could concentrate on the work. It wasn’t a time to receive male visitors.
“She wasn’t always happy with it really.” He gave a little laugh. “All those boring craft fairs, shut up in a tiny booth for hours and nobody buying. And the competition? It wasn’t anything she’d make money at, she realized that. I could offer her a home where she wouldn’t have to make money.”
“How nice,” Fay said, and he smiled, having missed her irony. “You’ll be leaving …when?” She turned to look at him; she was worried now, her only boarder—and a handsome one at that. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he’d been weeping. She liked a man who could weep. It would be hard to lose a spouse, if you really loved the person. But there hadn’t been love on both sides, had there? The woman had chosen to leave him?
Of course, he couldn’t accept that. It was a blow to the ego. Her ex hadn’t either, could never understand why she left him. Then he’d rushed her into a divorce so he could date again with impunity: “How can I bring a woman here when we’re still married?” he’d complained. Now he had three women he ran around with. In one sense, she’d made him young again.
“Tomorrow,” Kevin said. “That’s what I came to tell you. But I’ll be back. There’s the matter of her land, you see. The place that so-called Healing House is on. It’s mine now, that land, legally. I’ll hire a lawyer. They’ll have to leave.”
“Oh,” said Fay, and bent back to her painting. She wasn’t going to get involved in this one.
Kevin finally left, his footsteps growing firmer, quicker as he moved on to his room. But other feet came clip-clopping up the stairs. She recognized them, ran to shut the door. But too late. Already he was inside, Gandalf, the victim, her partner. He’d been outside in the wire run Willard had fixed for him; apparently, someone had let him in. He smelled of fresh October air, a slight aura of skunk. He was thrilled to see her. He leapt up—and the paint can slid off the ladder. “Out, Gandalf, out!”
“It’s me,” Hartley hollered upstairs; “we’re back. Just to get food, and Aunty wants her black shawl, a couple of books, her scotch. I’ve got Aunty.”
“And I’ve got white boots and a white floor,” Fay yelled back. “Call off that dog.”
Then, catching her breath, she shouted, “What? But you can’t. You can’t just haul her out of that place without permission!”
“She’s got my permission. That’s enough,” Aunty yelled up. Fay heard the pair laughing like conspirators, as if they were watching a film of the Marx Brothers. A Night at the Opera, she thought, surveying the mess. A skeleton, a dead woman, now a kidnapped one. Let the Marx Brothers match this one.
“Glenna,” she said aloud. What were they going to do with her—escaped from the funny farm? Would Fay be an accessory to the crime?
“You can’t do this, Glenna,” she hollered down. But already the door was slamming. Fay went to a window, flung it open. “Come back! Where are you two going, anyway?”
They were getting into Hartley’s Colt, along with that girl from next door, Emily Willmarth; Hartley shutting the door on the hem of Aunty’s black wool coat, then opening it, stuffing the coat inside, laughing, closing the door again. “Hey, Fay. We’re going into hiding. We’re going to the Edge of the Wild.”
“The edge of what?” yelled Fay.
“Read Tolkien,” Hartley hollered back. “And Fay, if my stepmother calls, you haven’t seen us.”
Fay leaned on the windowsill and watched the dead leaves fly up from the rush of wheels. It was all the same, she thought, all the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. She was left with the excuses, the white lies. She might as well be back in Cabot, lying to the zoning guys about why Dan had put up yet a third shack on the property without the proper sewage. “He’s not planning to rent; no one will live in it,” she’d say, her nose growing longer. Dan out-Thoreau’d Thoreau when it came to civil disobedience. He reveled in it.
Well, she had to admire him for that.
But who was left at the ranch to face the authorities?
Chapter Ten
There were hundreds of dentists in New York City and at least six in the area around West Forty-first Street, where Mac had lived in his boardinghouse. It wasn’t far from the offices of the New York Times. Colm had to walk up and down forty-first in a cold drizzle for several grimy blocks before he found it. And it wasn’t a boardinghouse anymore, but a pizza “palace.” The owner recalled the previous owner relating its history: “But I don’t know no Mac Maginney,” he said, hurling a cheese pizza with mushrooms, peppers, and salami onto the grill. “You’ll have to look someplace else. Now move over, you wanna get burnt?”
“Sorry,” said all six dentists in the immediate area, and launched Colm into a wider circumference, where there were at least one hundred and fifteen dentists. With the twenty-fourth, he seemed to have scored. Mac was still a client, the secretary said, a busty woman with blue hair. The doctor had done a root canal only last year.
“Last year? You sure of that? We’re talking about Robert MacInnis? A man of—well, he’d be in his late seventies now. At least.” MacInnis was a common-enough name, it seemed. He’d already run into three Robert MacInnises—none the right age. Apparently, this was one more false lead.
“Oh, no, not this one. This MacInnis is a young man. Yeah, I remember, he’s a writer. Detective novels, I think. Yeah, it’s a series. Let’s see, yeah, gave us a paperback—if it’s still here in this pile of magazines. Hey, here it is. Mac MacInnis, the Mac O’Doughall detective series ...
Can you give me his phone number? It might be a relative.”
“Oh, no, hon, I can’t do that. We don’t give out phone numbers. Privacy, you know. In this town? Well... But wait. You want his publisher? They’d know maybe. You could write to him there. It’s right here in the front. St. something—must be a Catholic press. You can write to him there. Uh-huh.”
Write to him, Colm thought. And wait a month or more for a reply. He took off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve. There was still a spot of tomato from the pizza. The lenses came out doubly smeared, and he took that for an omen.
That night, he phoned Police Chief Fallon up in Branbury, Vermont. “Fax me a credibility note, will you, Roy? They think I’m a farmer down here.” And they were probably right. He was paid peanuts for these jobs—was it worth it?
“Keep looking. The guy never went near a dentist up here,” bawled Fallon, who always bellowed on the phone, as if he didn’t trust the message getting across through the wires. “And guess what? That woman has disappeared from Rockbury, yup. Glenna. She’s hiding out somewhere with that kid niece others. She’s guilty as hell, that old broad. Why else would she run off like that?”
“Would you like to be shut up in Rockbury State Hospital, Roy?”
There was a silence. Something that sounded like a laugh— or sneeze. “Even so,” said Fallon. Colm waited. “But just two days. You
don’t turn up something, you’re on your own.”
“Fair enough,” said Colm, and giving the number for the cheap hotel he was staying at, he hung up.
****
Ruth sat by her son’s bed: If he could only cry, it would help, but he wouldn’t break down. “There’ll be another,” she said, knowing the words wouldn’t help. He’d fallen in love with Zelda’s calf—maybe because it was undersized. Like himself? The shortest boy in the sixth grade? He’d gone in to bottle-feed it that morning, the way he did every morning; found the calf dead, flies buzzing around its bony head. The other cows had turned away from it, like it was some trash, some excrement. Zelda was out in the pasture. “I hate her. I hate that cow!” he yelled.
Was this what happened when someone died? Like that unfortunate woman at the healing center, Kevin’s wife. But a poor analogy, that. Kevin was beside himself. He’d come slumping into her kitchen, wanting her sympathy. Sympathy that had to be divided today. But there was something appealing about Kevin. Something almost tragic.
“I don’t want another calf,” Vic said. “I wanted that one. She had a star between her eyes, that white spot on her nose. When she sucked on the bottle, she’d look at me, like I was her—” He stopped, not wanting to say it. An eleven-year-old boy couldn’t be a mother.
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