She placed her hand flat on the table’s scarred wooden surface. “This is how we all started out-when we left the caves and started working the land. We created the world like it is. Everything else followed from what we started. They try to tear it down and screw it up, and they treat us like dirt in the process-paying a hundred thousand dollars for a stupid car and demanding that bread and milk stay the same price they have been for decades. But we’re still here, ’cause in the end, even with their chemicals and fancy seeds, messing with Mother Nature and maybe poisoning the soil, they still need us to make it grow.”
Joe gave her a small smile. “A wild guess tells me you argued against letting Gregory list the place for sale.”
“You got that right.” Her cheeks were slightly reddened with the passion of her speech.
“Who argued for it?”
Her expression saddened. “Linda. Cal wobbled a bit when he saw she was keen on the idea-until he saw the rest of us weren’t interested.”
Joe nodded slowly. “So the ambivalence I picked up from her wasn’t totally off base.”
It wasn’t phrased as a question.
“No,” she admitted. “She’s had her troubles. The kids complicated her life. Got in the way of the dreams, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t like talking about that stuff.”
Joe thought about the vitriol he’d seen Marie pour over the heads of this family, visiting her own disappointment on them like a Bible-thumper invoking the devil. No wonder she didn’t peer at it too closely.
But he stuck with the topic at hand. “Just how heated did this conversation get?”
Some of her old fire flickered bright. “I told you that. She spoke her piece and it was done.”
Joe merely stared at her.
She shifted angrily in her chair. “For God’s sake. That’s all there was to it. This farm was everything to Bobby, it’s been everything to Cal and me, and Christ only knows, Jeff would be nowhere without it, so he sure as hell wasn’t for killing the golden goose. Linda said what she had to say and that was that-she gave it up. Why don’t you, too?”
She suddenly flared, a second wave building on the first. “Why are you so damned hot on this? We’re the victims here. You may be clueless about what happened-I sure don’t know why some rich flatlander bastard in a fancy car wanted my son dead-but that doesn’t give you the right to harass us just because you have nobody else to poke at.”
Joe sighed. Figuring he had little left to lose, he swung for the bleachers. “If I were you, Marie, and I resented this farm for how it reminded me of my father’s failure and I hated my husband for giving my son’s birthright away, I might do something drastic to force the rest of the family to accept an offer I’d never get again in a lifetime.”
Her face drained. Trembling with rage, she stood up, causing the chair to skitter away behind her, and shouted at him, “My son died in that fire.”
Joe stood also, slowly, deliberately, and spoke in a calm but firm voice. “Your son was killed by accident, Marie. His dying was no one’s intention. Maybe that’s what hurts the most.”
She staggered back as if he’d pushed her, hitting her shoulder against the wall. She gasped a couple of times and finally burst into tears. “You bastard. You total bastard.”
He circled the table and approached her. She held both her hands out to prevent him. “Don’t you come near me.”
He stopped. “Take your time.”
Catching her breath, she managed, “I want you out of my house.”
He considered arguing with her, or trying to console her-to somehow get across how her outlook and hostility helped make his suggestion appear reasonable.
But he saw it was a lost cause, just as her husband’s efforts to explain his giving the farm to Jeff had been futile, and Jeff’s persistent kindness and forbearance had been wasted. Marie Cutts was worse than a dog with a bone. She was hell-bent on martyrdom and righteous indignation and was now more committed to her suffering and loss than she could possibly be to the remnants of her family. The death of one of them had laid permanent claim to her spirit, and it would take more leverage than a mere love of the living to dislodge it.
“I’m sorry, Marie,” he said at last, and stepped toward the door. “I truly am.”
She said nothing and made no motion, so he turned, crossed the front hall, and showed himself out, pausing on the front porch to take in the view that had greeted this clan for generations, now missing its life-sustaining centerpiece.
He sighed and dropped his gaze to his feet, considering the conversation he’d just left, and his suspicions about the tortured train of events that this pain-racked, grieving woman had most likely set in motion.
For it was Joe’s growing conviction that Marie had conspired with Gregory to have the barn burned, in an effort to free her family of its tyranny, deprive her son-in-law of her son’s rightful inheritance, and yet still receive enough money to put them all comfortably on another track. Except that in a miscalculation of classically Greek proportions, she’d sacrificed that very son in the process-and had created a source of such enormous guilt that only more bloodletting could satisfy it.
Thus the murder of her happenstance accomplice-a hated, swaggering, city-born hustler on the fast road to riches. A man who’d probably accommodated her request for an arsonist to prove to himself that he had the makings of a real operator.
Joe shook his head, forever amazed at how the human species worked to tie itself in knots.
Joe looked back over his shoulder at the door he’d just shut, thinking he might try talking to Marie one last time, when he saw it hanging neatly from a wooden peg set into the wall, as conveniently located as a snow shovel.
It was a wooden-handled baling hook.
Chapter 25
Gail blinked and refocused on the man addressing them. As with so many before him, he was wearing a dark suit, immaculately tailored, but this guy had on a shirt with French cuffs, an affectation bordering on the absurd in Vermont. His hair was blow-dried, perfectly coiffed, and had probably cost the price of the small puppy it resembled. He knew nothing about the state in whose capitol building he found himself, and was lecturing them on the fine points of his 100 percent safe, in-house-tested, biologically engineered agricultural product.
Gail hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
All morning, she’d been attending such committee briefings, ostensibly conjured up to educate her and her colleagues, and all morning, she’d been struggling to stay focused.
She was sleep-deprived, it was true, having spent the remains of the night in a motel room Joe had rented, staring out of the window. She’d refused his offer of company out of pride and spite, which had further eroded her ability to rest. And the large meeting room her committee was now using for the overflow crowd was hot and cramped and encouraging of napping.
None of which fully explained her distraction.
Gail was scared and paranoid, and angry to be feeling that way yet again.
She sat back slightly and eased her bag open in her lap, glancing surreptitiously for the twentieth time at the face of the man who Joe said might be stalking her. Closing the bag, she made a covert survey of the crowded room, trying to take in all the faces lining the back wall, filling the chairs, and jammed at the door. Nobody set off alarms.
But as soon as she was done, she felt the urge to do it again.
The large man sitting beside her leaned slightly in her direction and whispered, “You all right?”
“Fine,” she said shortly, not looking at him. In contrast to their speaker, his suit was cheap, poorly cut, and built to survive a washing machine with impunity. Not that the suit was the issue. Both it and the man wearing it were in fact almost endearing. But he was still her police bodyguard, and his attentive presence only aggravated her emotions. To her mind, he was a neon sign of her own frailty and the danger to which she’d needlessly been exposed-an unintended source of something verging on resentment.