“Ladies, I think I’ll go home. I’m exhausted and I’m embarrassed that I passed out. This is getting to me, I suppose.”
Harry walked him to the door and bade him goodnight before returning to Susan. Mrs. Murphy had taken over her chair. She lifted up the cat, who protested and then settled down again.
“He was distant tonight,” Susan observed. “Guess it has been right much of a shock. He doesn’t have a stick of furniture in his house, he doesn’t know any of us, and then they find pieces of a body on his land. Now this. There goes his bucolic dream.”
“The only good thing about tonight was getting to see BoomBoom faint.”
“Aren’t you ugly?” Susan laughed at her.
“You have to admit it was funny.”
“Kind of. Fair had the pleasure of reviving her, digging in her voluminous purse for her tranquilizers, and then taking her home. If she gets too difficult I guess he could hit her up with a cc of Ace.”
The thought of BoomBoom dosed with a horse tranquilizer struck Susan as amusing.“I’d say that BoomBoom wasn’t an easy keeper,” she said, using an equine term—quite accurate, too, because BoomBoom was anything but an easy keeper.
“I suppose we have to laugh at something. This is so macabre, what else can we do?” Harry scratched Mrs. Murphy behind the ears.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Are you?” Susan shot back.
“I asked you first.”
“Not for myself,” Susan replied.
“Me neither, because I don’t think it had anything to do with me, but what if I fall into it? For all I know the killer might have buried those body parts in my cemetery.”
“I think we’re all right if we don’t get in the way,” Susan said.
“But what’s ‘in the way’? What’s this all about?”
Mrs. Murphy opened one eye and said,“Love or money.”
23
Sunday dawned frosty but clear. The day’s high might reach into the low fifties but not much more. Harry loved Sundays. She could work from sunup to sundown without interruption. Today she was planning to strip stalls, put down lime, and then cover and bank the sides with wood shavings. Physical labor limbered up her mind. Out in the stable she popped a soothing tape into the boom box and proceeded to fill up the wheelbarrow. The manure spreader was pulled up under a small earthen bank. That way Harry could roll the wheelbarrow to the top of the bank and tip the contents over into the wagon. She and her father had built the rampin the late sixties. Harry was twelve. She worked so hard and with so much enthusiasm that as a reward her father bought her a pair of fitted chaps. The ramp had lasted these many years and so did the memory of the chaps.
Both of Harry’s parents thought that idle hands did the Devil’s work. True to her roots, Harry couldn’t sit still. She was happiest when working and found it a cure for most ills. After her divorce she couldn’t sleep much, so she would work sometimes sixteen or eighteen hours a day. The farm reflected this intensity. So did Harry. Her weight dropped to 110, too low for a woman of five foot six. Finally, Susan and Mrs. Hogendobber tricked her into going to the doctor. Hayden McIntire, forewarned, slammed shut his office door as they dragged her through it. A shot of B12 and a severe tongue-lashing convinced her that she’d better eat more. He also prescribed a mild sedative so she could sleep. She took it for a week and then threw it out. Harry hated drugs of any sort but her body accepted sleep and food again, so whatever Hayden did worked.
Each year with the repetition of the seasons, the cycle of planting, weeding, harvesting, and winter repairs, it was brought home to Harry that life was finite. Perhaps LIFE in capital letters wasn’t finite but her life was. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. She wasn’t quite at the middle yet, but she endured hints that she wasn’t fifteen either. Injuries took longer to heal. Actually, she enjoyed more energy than she’d had as a teenager but what had changed the most was her mind. She’d lived just long enough to be seeing events and human personality types for the second and third time. She wasn’t easily impressed or fooled. Most movies bored her to death, for that reason as well. She’d seen versions of those plots long before. They enthralled a new generation of fifteen-year-olds but there wasn’t anything for her. What enthralled Harry was a job well done, laughter with her friends, a quiet ride on one of the horses. She’d withdrawn from the social whirl after her divorce—no great loss, but she was shocked to find out how little a single womanwas valued. A single man was a plus. A single woman, a liability. The married women, Susan excepted, feared you.
Although Fair lacked money he didn’t lack prestige in his field and Harry had been dragged along to banquets, boring dinners at the homes of thoroughbred breeders, and even more boring dinners at Saratoga. It was the same old parade of excellent facelifts, good bourbon, and tired stories. She was glad to be out of it. BoomBoom could have it all. BoomBoom could have Fair too. Harry didn’t know why she’d gotten so mad at Fair the other day. She didn’t love him anymore but she liked him. How could you not like a man you’ve known since you were in grade school and liked at first sight? The sheer folly of his attachment to BoomBoom irritated her though. If he found a sensible woman like Susan she’d be relieved. BoomBoom would suck up so much of his energy and money that eventually his work would suffer. He’d spent years building his practice. BoomBoom could wreck it in one circle of the seasons if he didn’t wake up.
The sweet smell of pine shavings caressed her senses. For an instant Harry picked up the wall-phone receiver. She was going to call Fair and tell him what she really thought. Then she hung it up. How could she? He wouldn’t listen. No one ever does in that situation. They wake up when they can.
She spread fresh shavings in the stalls.
Mrs. Murphy checked out the hayloft. Simon, sound asleep, never heard her tiptoe around him. He’d dragged up an old T-shirt of Harry’s and then hollowed out part of a hay bale. He was curled up in the hollow on the shirt. She then walked over to the south side of the loft. The snake was hibernating. Nothing would wake her up until spring. Overhead the owl also slept. Satisfied that everything was as it should be, Mrs. Murphy climbed back down the ladder.
“Tucker,” she called.
“What?” Tucker lounged around in the tack room.
“Want to go for a walk?”
“Where?”
“Foxden pastures off Yellow Mountain Road.”
“Why there?”
“Paddy gave me an idea the other day and this is the first time I’ve had a chance to look in the daylight.”
“Okay.” Tucker stood up, shook herself, and then trotted out into the brisk air with her companion.
Mrs. Murphy told Tucker Paddy’s idea about someone parking off Yellow Mountain Road on the old logging road and carrying the body parts to the cemetery in a plastic bag or something.
Once in the pastures Tucker put her nose down. Too much rain and too much time had elapsed. She smelled field mice, deer, fox, lots of wild turkeys, raccoons, and even the faint scent of bobcat.
While Tucker kept her nose to the ground Mrs. Murphy cast her sharp eyes around for a glint of metal, a piece of flesh, but there was nothing, nothing at all.
“Find anything?”
“No, too late.” Tucker lifted her head.“How else could the body get to the cemetery? If the murderer didn’t walk through these pastures, then he or she had to go right down Blair’s driveway in front of God and Blair, anyway. Paddy’s right. He came through here. Unless it’s Blair.”
Mrs. Murphy jerked her head around to view her friend full in the face.“You don’t think that, do you?”
“I hope not. Who knows?”
The cat fluffed out her fur and then let it settle down. She headed for home.“You know what I think?”
“No.”
“I think tomorrow at work will be impossible. Lardguts will go on and on and on about the head in the pumpkin. She got her name and her picture in the paper. God help us.” Mrs. Murphy laughed.