“Don’t you go to school?” he asked, when he got back.
She shook her head. “I’m home-schooled.”
Poor Nancy, thought Jim.
“Before the accident, Mom taught public school. We work all morning and then I have the afternoon off. I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Didn’t say you were,” said Jim.
“I know you didn’t,” she said. “But you were thinking it. You were thinking what kind of dumb chick spends her spare time snooping around trying to prove her stepfather is a murderer.”
Jim looked at her. “Actually, I was thinking what kind of a maniac goes around doing that.”
She smiled in a maniac kind of way. Then she thrust her hands into her jacket pockets and dug out two slightly battered Hershey bars. She offered one to Jim.
“I owe you this for yesterday,” she said. “I didn’t know how to talk to you.”
“That,” said Jim, taking the candy, “is the biggest understatement of the year.”
“It’s just that there didn’t seem an easy way to start. You know, it’s a pretty tough thing to try to tell someone. So I kind of used the Ruth Rose Way.”
“You mean roll over somebody like a freight train?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “I was thinking more of the track than the train. The Ruth Rose Way goes straight to where it’s going, cuts through people’s yards instead of going around, cuts across roads wherever it wants. Cars stop. People stay clear.”
Jim wasn’t sure what to say. “Well, thanks for helping with the dam.”
She bit off a mouthful of chocolate. “Hey, I’m asking you for help so I figure I should return the favour.”
The chocolate in Jim’s mouth tasted unpalatable all of a sudden. He had been enjoying sitting on a log sharing some candy with her, like ordinary kids. But nothing about Ruth Rose was ordinary.
“Did you find out anything?” she asked.
Jim swallowed and wrapped up the rest of the bar.
He started to hand it back to her but a flicker in her eyes stopped him.
Everything was quiet for a moment. Then he told her about the photograph of the Three Musketeers, about Frankie, the boy with the white hair. Francis Tufts.
Her eyes lit up. “Tuffy!” she said. Jim shrugged, but he was proud of himself nonetheless.
“Could be,” he said. Then he told her about Francis dying in the log house on New Year’s Eve of 1972.
“Holy cow,” she said. He watched her try to incorporate his news into her plot.
“I didn’t find out anything about the others,” he said.
“That’s okay,” she said. “You will. I know it.”
Jim took no pleasure from her encouragement. “It’s all ancient history. I don’t know how it’s supposed to help.”
“I don’t know how, either,” she replied. “But I know why. Because a life might depend on it. Mine.”
Jim looked away. He wanted out and yet there was something holding him captive.
“You really think he’d do anything to you?”
She looked at him with surprise. “Unless I do something first,” she said. “He’s known for awhile that I was on to him. Now he acts as if maybe I’m getting too close for comfort.”
Jim fought off a minor panic attack. “Don’t get mad,” he said as calmly as he could. “But why do you hate him? Because he prays for you?”
“I don’t know if I can explain it,” she said. “I hated him from the start. Hated him for marrying my mother. The doctors tell me that’s pretty natural. A lot of kids hate their steps, at first. But it’s more than that.”
She paused, staring off across the wet lowlands to the meadow beyond, where a wind they could not feel down in the hollow was bending the heads of the tall grass.
“When he prays, he always starts out by saying how he himself is a sinner, a great sinner. I know, I know, we’re all sinners. That’s how the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration stays in business. But when Father Fisher says it, man, he sounds like he means it. I can feel it in here.” She pounded her fist against her breast bone. “Which is why I started watching him. Eavesdropping. Which is why I know what happened.”
She glanced nervously at Jim, afraid he was going to run away on her.
But Jim stood his ground. There was this bully at school,” he said. “I hated him. He beat me up a couple of times. I hated everything he did. If he was eating a candy bar, I thought, what a greedy pig. If he scored a touchdown, I thought, what a show-off. One day I saw him helping an old lady across a street and I thought, he’s probably going to steal her purse.”
“Did he?”
“No,” said Jim. “That’s the point. He wasn’t so bad, except for being a pain in the butt. It was only because I hated him I figured everything he did was bad.”
Ruth Rose frowned, looked down again so that her hair hid her face. She folded up her chocolate bar and put it in her pocket. Then she got up and, without a backward glance at Jim, left.
It took Jim a moment to recover. “Hey,” he yelled. “What did I say?”
She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. “Forget it.”
“Ruth Rose,” he shouted, surprised at how snappish it sounded, as if he was yelling at Snoot to get off the table.
Then she turned around. “Listen, if you can’t take this seriously—”
“I do,” Jim interrupted.
“We’re not talking here about a schoolyard bully.”
“I was just—”
“You were just telling me a story,” she said. “Like this is the Brady Bunch or something.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” said Jim. “I want to know what happened.”
She came closer, stared at him and, despite the medication, it seemed to Jim as if she were looking right inside him.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “You’re too afraid.
Then she started to walk away again, towards the woods.
He couldn’t let her go just like that. Letting go was a problem he had.
“I am not afraid!” he shouted.
“You aren’t ready,” she shouted back.
“Ready for what?”
“You don’t want to face the fact that your daddy is dead. D-E-A-D.”
Jim felt like he was teetering, suddenly. On the edge of a rushing stream and not sure whether to jump or go looking for a bridge. Not sure he could clear it, not sure he wouldn’t drown if he fell in. Ruth Rose was on the other side of that stream and she wasn’t the kind of guide he would have wished to lead him anywhere. But what was there anymore on this side of the stream?
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Leapt.
“Tell me,” he said. “Please.”
She turned and walked back towards him. When she was close enough, she looked him in the eye long and hard. He didn’t flinch.
“Your dad saw Father a bunch of times right before he disappeared.”
“I know,” said Jim. “On account of his nerves. Father came out to the farm. They went on these long walks.”
“And your dad came to our house, too. Father didn’t like him coming over. He always took him to the church where they could talk in private. The last time was September twenty-fifth.”
The twenty-fifth was the day before Jim’s father went missing. He nodded for her to go on.
“They had a big argument. Something about a letter and what they were going to do about it. It wasn’t the first letter, either, but it was the worst, as far as I could tell. Your dad was real upset. Father kept trying to cool him down.”
“I thought you said they met at the church?”
“They did,” said Ruth Rose. “I followed them there. There was no one around so they could talk more freely without Father having to shush your dad up all the time.”
“So what did they say?” demanded Jim.