With those details off his mind,
Qwilleran drove home by way of Trevelyan Road and the scene of the fire. Yellow tape still surrounded the site, which now looked sadly small for a house, shed, chicken coop, and outhouse. One could see where each of them had stood twelve hours
before. The lone firefighter remaining on duty said, “We’re watching it because of the new building across the road. An easterly wind is coming up.”
The wind was blowing an odor of wet burnt rubbish across to the Art Center, and Qwilleran thought, Wait till Beverly comes to work and smells that stench! It was not yet noon, but there was a car on the parking lot, a magenta coupe, and a petite woman on the entrance porch was fumbling in a shoulder bag almost as big as herself. He recognized the Butterfly Girl. “Having a problem?” he called out.
“I’m looking for my key,” she said. “I guess it fell out of my keycase.”
“I have one.” He jumped out of the van.
“Isn’t it ghastly, what happened across the road? We’re so lucky it didn’t reach us! Want to come in and say hello to Jasper?”
“Not today, thanks. Have you been here since the breakin Sunday night?”
“No, but Beverly phoned me and told me about my Chinese vase. I’m crushed! My grandmother gave it to me. I phoned her in California, and she said she’s never seen another one like it. I think it was valuable.”
Qwilleran glanced at the devastation across the highway and said, “Too bad.”
Driving toward the barn, he could picture the Siamese raising inquisitive noses and sniffing the acrid aftermath of the fire, all that distance away. Their olfactory sense was phenomenal. He could see Koko through the foyer window, doing his jumping-jack act. That meant the phone was ringing. Qwilleran hurried indoors.
A weary voice said, “You called my house. This is Rollo. I slept in. That fire last night knocked me out - not just the work but the sadness, you know.”
“I understand. Believe me, I do. I talked to your wife, and we worked out funeral details.”
“Yeah, she told me. There’s somethin’ else I need to talk to you about, somewhere private.”
“Want to come over to the barn?” Qwilleran asked. “The gate’s not locked. We’ll have a cup of coffee.”
Rollo McBee was a typical Moose County man of the soil. Fortyish, he was a rugged figure in work clothes, field boots, and a feed cap that he never removed. He looked like someone who rode a tractor, milked cows, built fences, reroofed the barn, repaired his own truck, left mud on the highway, and stayed up all night to fight - a fire. Qwilleran had learned to admire the farmers for their wealth of specialized knowledge, skills, independence, perseverance, and ability to josh about bad weather and financial setbacks - also their willingness to help each other.
“Are you and Boyd twins?” he asked when Rollo arrived.
“Next best thing! Grew up together, sloppin’ hogs and muckin’ the cow barn. .
. Say! This is some place!” He gazed up at the balconies and catwalks. “I remember this barn when it was a rat’s nest. How come you fixed it up?”
“It was just standing here, empty, and breeding rodents, and I met a builder who needed a job. This is his idea.”
“I’ll bet it’s hard to heat.”
“You can say that again! … Let’s sit at the snack bar. How about a sweet roll from the Scottish bakery?”
“You’ve got a lot of books,” Rollo said, looking with wonder at the shelves on the fireplace cube. “My boy’s that way - always readin’. Not interested in bein’ a farmer. Maybe he’s smart. The family farm’s on the way out. Dawn says you borrowed some of his pictures.”
“Yes, and glad to get them. There’ll be two or three in today’s paper, front page. He’ll get a credit line and freelance rate of payment - not bad for a nine-year-old.”
“Don’t spoil him,” his father warned. “Kids get spoiled when things come too easy.”
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Rollo. He seems like a stable sort. And, by the way, the pictures they didn’t use are on the desk over there. You can take them with you.”
Rollo turned to look at the desk, where Koko and Yum Yum were sitting on their briskets, listening. “What are those? Cats?”
“Siamese… So, where do we stand, Rollo? Dingleberry is handling the funeral. Your wife said she’d line up the pastor. But we want to be sure it’s well attended. There’s nothing sadder than a funeral with only a handful of mourners.”
“No problem. Dawn can round up the Home Visitors Circle at the church. I can fire up members of the Farmers’ Collective.”
“The estate will have to be handled by an attorney, so I alerted G. Allen Barter. The K Fund will cover expenses. You may hear from him if he needs more information, such as whether she had any heirs and where she did her banking.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Rollo said. “When Maude sold her land, she insisted on cash - I mean greenbacks. She didn’t think checks were real money. When the deal was done, she showed me a boxful of money, and it sure didn’t look like a hundred thousand. I asked if she’d counted it. She hadn’t, so I counted one bundle of bills. You’d be surprised how many brand-new bills they can squeeze into one bundle. All hundreds, with Ben Franklin on ‘em. He’s the one said Early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. It don’t work for farmers. It was all propaganda… So, anyway, I offered to drive Maude to the bank right away with that dough, and she said, ‘Not onyer life!’ A lot of old people around here don’t trust banks after what happened in the Depression and last year in Sawdust City. So I wanted to know how she’d keep her money safe. She said, ‘None o’ yer business!’ And that was that! No arguin’ with Maude! Of course, I knew what she aimed to do with it.”
“Bury it?”
“What else? Old-timers bury their valuables ten paces north of the southeast comer of the barn. Then they die, and the stuff is never found. It’s been goin’ on since 1850. If Moose County ever has an earthquake, there’ll be another Gold Rush up here.”
“You think she buried it in the barnyard?”
“I know one thing for sure: nobody hides any thin’ in the house, where it could be hit by lightnin’. Everybody knows that! … See what I’m drivin’ at?”
Qwilleran stroked his moustache. “You’re saying that… as soon as the paper hits the street with news of the fire …”
“All the treasure-hunters will be out there after dark with shovels and lanterns!”
“That’s trespassing.”
“Okay, so the sheriff chases them away, but the new owners of the property will send a back-hoe to clear out the rubble; they’ll really be huntin’ for the buried bucks! I’d hate like heck to see those robbers get their money back that way! Do you realize they paid her one-fourth of what the farm was worth? I felt like tellin’ her she was robbed, but what good would it do? The idea of a hundred thousand knocked her silly! She’d never even seen a bill with Ben Franklin’s picture!”
“They were going to let her live there rent-free,” Qwilleran added. “Who bought the land?”
“A Lockmaster company called Northern Land Improvement. You can’t trust anybody from Lockmaster. All sharpies! Right away they raised the tillage rent to Boyd and me. They also said they wanted to be paid by the quarter - in advance. We’d been payin’ Maude once a month, and we’d paid for April, but they sent a bill for the whole second quarter. We’d already cultivated and bought seed, so we decided to go along with it for the rest of the year. There’s other land we could rent, but Maude’s tract was handy, right between Boyd’s farm and mine.”