“I told you. They were talking about this letter. Your dad mentioned Tuffy. Father told him not to talk about Tuffy. Not ever.”
She paused. “I couldn’t hear much. The sacristy door is solid oak. I heard bits and pieces of stuff.’She’s got nothing to go on,’ Father said more than once. I think they were talking about someone called Laverne. I heard your dad saying,’I’ve suffered long enough.’ Then I heard Father say this: ‘Tomorrow’s a good day.’ Those were his exact words. ‘Tomorrow’s a good day.’”
Jim swallowed hard.
“And the thing is,” said Ruth Rose, “the next day Father wasn’t around. He wasn’t at the church. I checked. And where was your mother, Jim? She was at the church, decorating it with the altar guild for the Harvest Festival. You think Father didn’t know she was going to be away from the farm all day?”
Jim’s chin twitched. “Why didn’t you say something then?” he asked. “I mean at the inquest.”
“Me?” she said. “Who’d believe me? Anyway, I didn’t have any proof. So I decided to get some. I figured the letters had to be blackmail. I figured, since I couldn’t find them around our place, they were probably hidden in the sacristy somewhere. So one night, I broke in.”
Jim stared at her incredulously. “Into the church?”
Ruth Rose nodded proudly, but her expression soured. “I got in okay but then the fuzz came.”
“The cops?”
She nodded. “I got arrested,” she said. “Father called them. Can you believe it? His own daughter.”
“So you told the police what you were doing,” he said with a kind of weary resignation, already imagining the scene.
“You bet I did,” she said. “I told them about Father murdering your dad and that the proof was probably in the church office somewhere.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “They didn’t go for it.”
She looked at him with something approaching a wicked grin lighting up her pale face. “I kinda pulled a Ruth Rose Way on them, I guess. Went ballistic. Gave one of them a black eye,” she added. “They released me into Father’s custody. He didn’t press charges but he made sure I wasn’t around for the inquest.”
“What do you mean?”
Ruth Rose’s grin dissolved. “I was packed off somewhere. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jim didn’t want to talk about it, either. There was something more pressing he needed to know if he was to believe anything she said.
“So now I know why you couldn’t get anybody to listen to you back then. But why are you trying now? And why me?”
Ruth Rose suddenly looked tired. She sniffed, rubbed her nose.
“I need your help,” she said. “Yeah, don’t say it — I need lots of help. But seriously, I’m afraid. Father’s really weird. Weird like… well, almost like your father was last fall.”
“What are you saying?”
She looked him straight in the eye. “I think you know what I’m saying.”
Jim could feel the anger rising in him. He tried to remember that he was talking to a crazy person. She didn’t know anything. For all he knew, she was making it all up.
“You’re saying, this blackmailer was blackmailing both of them — Father Fisher and my father. Then it stopped… after my dad disappeared. But now it’s started again.”
She didn’t move a muscle.
“Listen,” he said, his voice belligerent. “Maybe my father knew something — something Fisher did. Maybe. And maybe that’s what drove him nuts, ‘cause he wanted to tell but he didn’t want to get Fisher in trouble. But don’t try and tell me he did anything wrong. You didn’t know him. He was the best. And no freak is going to tell me different.”
She didn’t punch him or argue, but he could see she was hurt. Well, she deserved it. She was nothing but trouble.
She looked down, looked up again with a little scornful smile. “Like I said. You’re not ready for this.”
He was going to shout at her. But he didn’t want to shout. Didn’t want to be dragged into her game.
“All I meant,” she said, “was that things cooled down after Hub disappeared. Father was gloomy for a while but he wasn’t on edge.”
“Yeah, well, you’d be gloomy if you lost a friend,” said Jim. “If you had any.” He swallowed hard. He hadn’t meant to say that.
For once, Ruth Rose was quiet. Then, after a long silence, she looked past Jim up the lane. “You ever wonder what happened that day at the cedar grove?” she asked, her voice pitched almost too low to hear.
Jim’s head snapped up. “Are you kidding? I never thought about anything else for most of the year.”
“Well, try this,” she said. There was a look in her eyes as if what she was going to say was some kind of test. “Your dad meets up with Father that day, just like he told him to the night before at the church. He’s somebody your dad trusts, right? They go out for one of their long walks or for a drive, maybe, to talk things over some more. There’s a million places up this way they could go and nobody’d see them. Half the farms on this road are deserted. The wilderness stretches halfway to Hudson Bay. They could have gone anywhere.”
Reluctantly Jim nodded, feeling a little sick.
“Your dad wants to do something, talk to somebody, basically cave in — that’s what it sounded like to me the night before. Father doesn’t want him to. Father says it’s going to be all right. But it isn’t going to be all right if your dad starts blabbing.”
“Blabbing about what”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “Maybe what happened to Tuffy.”
“That was an accident,” snapped Jim. “Death by misadventure.”
Ruth Rose raised her eyebrows. The gesture infuriated Jim. Nothing was an accident to her, he thought.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Something else. That’swhat we’ve got to find out. But something they were in together.” Jim was about to object when her eyes lit up. “You just don’t get it, do you? You won’t believe your daddy could do anything wrong. Fine, don’t. But let me finish.”
“Okay,” said Jim. “So finish.”
She stared at him slack-jawed, shaking her head as if she had given up on him entirely. To his surprise, he didn’t want her to give up.
“Go on,” he said quietly.
She sighed. “They go somewhere where no one’s around. Fisher does him in. Maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe they were having this fight and he killed him by mistake. But it’s done. So then he drives the car down here and leaves it so it looks like your dad just abandoned it.”
“How?” said Jim, “There were just my dad’s footprints down here. Nobody else had been in the car. They had those forensic guys go over it. They don’t miss stuff like that. There were no ‘alien fibres’ — that’s the way they put it. Nothing.”
“I’m not talking about aliens,” shouted Ruth Rose.
Jim couldn’t talk anymore. His head was clogged up with painful images. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought them before — thought of his father meeting up with some horrible end. He had imagined biker gangs and bears. Murderers of every shape and size had paraded through his nightmares. But he had never put a real face on the killer.
Ruth Rose lightly touched his shoulder. “Hey, I’m outa here,” she said. Her anger seemed to have passed. “You listened to me, at least. That’s more than anyone else ever did. Thanks. If you find out anything, you could… you know…”
She left, headed back towards Ruth Rose Way. She left her pickaxe behind. Jim was going to call after her, when he looked more closely at the tool and realized that it wasn’t hers, after all, and she hadn’t stolen it from any railroad crew, either.
She had lied. There were initials carved into the butt end. HH. It was his father’s pickaxe.