“Once I knew about the peppermint pills, there was very little doubt. Getting hold of aconitine wouldn’t be so difficult. Making it into pills would be — unless you had a dispensary at hand.”
“Pity he got away, wasn’t it?”
“That’s your friend the coachman’s fault, not mine.”
The foolish man had flown to the kitchen in high excitement to tell them all about the discovery. From there the news must have come within half an hour to the doctor’s ears, because when I went back to speak to him I found only a disordered house and an empty stable.
“Will they catch him?”
“Depends how hard they try, and that will probably depend on Mr. Haslem.”
“Nothing will get done then. After all, you can’t expect a man to parade in front of the world with horns on his head.”
“That means Miss Thorn will never be publicly cleared.”
“You can leave that to me. I’ll see the story’s put about where it matters.”
And I knew I could indeed leave it to him. The gossip from the stables gets up to the drawing room and down again as quickly as we can put out an edition of our paper. When the governess walked up the aisle with her employer, there’d be nobody whispering murder. I never heard the report of that event because Harry had moved on long before it could happen. Two things, though, I did hear. One was that Miss Thorn came into Harry’s yard, looking by his account “like a linnet let out of a cage,” and thanked him and me most warmly. The other was that Mr. Haslem bought the bay pony for his son at a price ten guineas over what Harry should have had the nerve to ask for it. I like to think that was a sign of gratitude as well.
The Fruit Cellar
by Barbara Owens
© 1997 by Barbara Owens
“I keep being drawn to write about small towns,” says California resident Barbara Owens, “perhaps because I was raised in one. I can’t seem to resist burying volatility under those seemingly placid surfaces.” In her new story Ms. Owens reaches back eighty years, to a time when a small town really was, usually, a safe and placid place.
The bones were unearthed on a July afternoon so hot that nothing alive moved if it didn’t have to. Even trees drooped, stoic, waiting for a breeze that might or might not come.
Sheriff Carroll Farmer slid gingerly onto the vinyl-covered seat of his county car, cursing softly at the need to haul himself out into the open. But one of the honchos brought in to run the new automobile assembly plant was putting in a swimming pool, and the excavation crew had uncovered human bones. Resigned, Farmer adjusted his sunglasses and kicked the A/C into high.
The small town of Wayside cooked under its blue metal sky. Its rolling southern fringe, where the new upscale development lay, looked deceptively green and cool under tall old trees. The house in question was an imposing white brick, and near the foot of its sweeping back lawn was a large raw hole. The sheriff recognized all the work crew lounging in the shade. Laid out carefully on a tarp in the grass was a display of yellowish bones. Farmer and the crew foreman, Don Anderson, squatted beside them, wiping sweat.
“Well, they’re not recent, they’re old,” Farmer observed with some relief.
Anderson grunted assent. “Been there for years, looks like. Didn’t find any clothing. Prob’ly rotted away.”
Without touching it, the sheriff studied a skull crusted with dirt. “Not a whole body here.”
“I shut down soon as the scoop brought these up,” Anderson said. “Called you right away.”
“You did the right thing.”
“You suppose we’ve hit on an old cemetery?”
“I tend to doubt it,” Farmer said. “This was all King land out here. They’re buried in town.”
He took a pen from his shirt pocket and inserted it into an eyehole, tipping the skull slightly on its side. There was a round opening near its base.
“I’m going to call the coroner, Don. See that hole? What do you think?”
Anderson squinted. He whistled softly. “I think it looks like a bullet hole.”
“I think so, too. We’d better get Doc Ebenshaw out here before we do anything else.”
He radioed the coroner’s office from his car. Then he walked across the back lawn to introduce himself to the woman watching anxiously from the patio. Her name was Thorne, Virginia Thorne, she told him. She was his age, fortyish, a soft blonde with a worried frown.
“The county coroner’s on his way, Mrs. Thorne. I’ll know more once he takes a look. We haven’t got a complete body yet so we may have to do more digging. I hope you understand this is police business now.”
She sighed. “Just so it doesn’t take too long. My husband will be disappointed if he doesn’t get his pool in as soon as possible.”
Farmer gave her a smile. “We’ll try not to inconvenience you more than we have to.”
“I understand,” she said, trying to look like she meant it. “I guess I’ll just have to get used to the Midwest. We don’t usually find bodies in our backyards where I come from.”
The sheriff expanded his smile and made it kindly. “Well, ma’am, I’ve lived here all my life and this is the first I’ve found. I don’t expect it to happen again.”
Doc Ebenshaw arrived, pushing his barrel belly before him as he strolled across the lawn to the pool site, pungently assessing the weather with every step. He examined the bones for several long minutes.
“I’d say fifty years, maybe longer, they’ve been in the ground,” he announced finally. “I’ll have to have them tested before I can venture more. But that’s a bullet hole in the back of the skull for sure, so we’re talking murder. You’re not going to try to solve it, are you?”
“Pretty late in the day, I guess,” Farmer agreed. “But I’ll have to take a crack at it, won’t I? That’s my job.”
Ebenshaw snorted. “It’ll be interesting to see how you plan to go about it.” He wrapped the bones carefully in the tarp and tucked them under his arm. “I’m off. I’ll let you tell the lady of the house that we’ll be digging up most of her backyard.”
Farmer glanced across at Virginia Thorne waiting impatiently on her patio. No more kindly smiles. It was time to put on his law enforcement hat.
Dee Farmer had prepared a supper of cold fried chicken, potato salad, and homegrown sliced tomatoes. They ate it in the cool of the screened back porch where Carroll popped a beer to toast his wife’s wisdom and saintly soul.
“Just tell us about the bones,” Dee said. “Everyone’s talking about them. We’re dying to hear.”
The life of a sheriff in a small town was usually a quiet one. People there were the kind who married high-school sweethearts, as he and Dee had, raised their children, went to church on Sundays, and managed the best they could. Dee often joked they were poster images for the family values that Washington politicians treasured so. Even so, Carroll rarely discussed his work at home. But this was an ancient and harmless event. It wouldn’t hurt to share it.
Raney poked his arm. “Come on, Dad, tell. All the kids want to see those bones.”
He grinned at her. “You included? They’re just dirty old bones.”
“No, I don’t want to see them but I’d like to know what happened. I heard there was a hole in the head the size of a fist.” Raney Farmer had turned thirteen that summer, red-haired and freckled like her mother but with the Farmer soft brown eyes. With her older brother off at college, she and her father were getting to know one another better this year. So far he liked everything he learned. It was a little sad for him to watch his skinny-legged tomboy beginning to look like a woman. Life was knocking at her door and he sometimes found himself wondering if he and Dee had done everything they could to prepare her for it. But Raney surprised him more often than not with a maturity of outlook that seemed to come from nowhere. He guessed maybe she was going to do all right.