Hippie House (17 page)

“For less than a dollar you can get a hamburger, fries and a pop. And—”

Envy and cabin fever and I don't know what else suddenly overwhelmed me. Not to mention I stabbed myself with a needle
at the exact same time. “You are so damn lucky you weren't born a girl!” I bellowed before he'd had a chance to finish his sentence.

Standing in the doorway, he went silent for a moment. I sucked my finger while he looked at me like I was a spoiled kid who had spoken out of turn. He finished what he'd been telling me. “Like I was saying. You can get all that and you still get change.”

I felt stupid. And without even knowing how close I'd been to falling apart, I started to whimper. “It's not fair. I haven't been to a movie without you or Dad or Uncle Pat holding my hand in a month. I'm going to live and die in this place. I'm never going to get to go anywhere good again.”

“Want to know something?”

“Not really.”

“Yesterday I was walking through the parking lot at the IGA and I saw Mrs. Gillespie had her arms full of groceries. So like the nice guy that I am, I stopped and asked if I could open her car door.”

“So? What's that got to do with anything?”

“You know what she said? She told me she could do it herself. Mrs. Gillespie,” he repeated in amazement. “The old bag who would normally yell at me and I'd hear about it from Dad if I didn't offer to help. And you know what else? If I hold a door for a girl at school, you'd think it was an insult. Malcolm picked up a book for Angie Lucas—she dropped it in the hall the other day—and she didn't even say thanks. I saw it. She gave him a look like he'd stolen it from her, grabbed it and walked the other way. There's one creep out there and all of a sudden we're all guilty. It's a great big drag for us too.”

“Us,” meant the entire male population. It had not even occurred to me how it affected them.

I didn't tell Eric, but in a way I could relate to Mrs. Gillespie being suspicious. Anyone could be the killer, and anything could
point to the murders if you were creative enough. Particularly when nothing was for sure.

Like the glove Uncle Pat found a few days later in his field.

It had always strained my imagination to think of Mom and my Uncle Pat growing up in the same household. This was because my mother was always so fastidious and conscious of proper etiquette. That's not to say that my uncle didn't have manners, or that he wasn't particular in his own way, but he loved being a farmer and working outside. I thought he looked as regal as any king, perched on his Massey Ferguson, sculpting Zen-like patterns in the brown soil every spring. Uncle Pat knew every inch of his land: the low swampy parts, the rocks and stumps he had to steer around and what crops grew best where. He never looked so happy as when he was mucking around the barnyard in his big rubber boots, ensuring that his cattle were healthy and well-fed. I always thought the winter months, when he was confined indoors, must have been particularly difficult for him.

At the first sign of spring we would see Uncle Pat tramping across his fields, checking what the winter had left behind. It was on a day like this, when the crocuses were just beginning to show and the awakening grass sweetened the air, that he set out across what had been a potato field the previous year. He wasn't too sure he would grow potatoes again. Last year's crop had been fine, but several farmers in neighboring counties had been hit with blight and he didn't know that he would take the chance.

The soil was particularly hilly, hoed up for potatoes and now still partially frozen so there were many large clumps. He had to watch where he was walking so that he didn't stumble, lose his balance and go over on an ankle. If it wasn't for the fact that he was so intent on watching his step, he might never have seen the glove. It was a man's glove lying in a small gully between
mounds of soil. It was sodden and badly stained. He turned it over with his foot and was about to pick it up when he noticed a long slash across the width of the palm. He called Detective Mather instead.

Uncle Pat stood guard over the glove. He would not let Megan or Carl onto the field while he waited for the police to arrive. I stood next to my cousins, leaning against the fence. My uncle was a solitary figure standing a quarter of a mile away in the wide expanse of muddy brown field.

“Why won't he let you go out there?” I asked.

“I don't know. I guess he thinks I'd freak out if I saw it, or maybe that Carl would wreck it somehow.”

I didn't actually see the glove. I got tired of standing there waiting for the detectives and I went back to the house for lunch. According to Megan, a small clutch of officers descended on it and it was whisked away in a plastic bag. She was only able to catch a glimpse of it as it went by. But what surprised her was that it did not seem all that big. She said she didn't know why, but as she stood at the edge of the field watching her dad stand over it, she thought it must have been huge. Like something a lion tamer would wear, or someone who trained guard dogs. Nevertheless, despite its being so small, it still gave her the creeps. She worried that the killer might remember he'd forgotten a piece of his property and that he might want to get it back. My uncle tried to reassure her that this probably wouldn't happen, that it was actually a good thing the glove was found. It might very well be the piece of evidence the police needed to solve the crime.

We could only guess how the glove ended up in the middle of the potato field. The most likely theory was that it had been picked up and dropped by the snowmobile when Carl was out jumping snowdrifts. Police officers began searching for its mate. If the killer dropped one glove, it was quite possible that he had dropped both.

Megan didn't put it into words, but I knew she also felt a little like we had when Katie's body was found on our property. Violated. Soiled, cheated and angry.

“What did it look like?” Hetty asked.

Megan shrugged. “Like a normal winter glove. Like the kind a normal person would wear.”

“What was it made of?”

“Leather, I guess.”

“What color was it?”

“Black.”

“Ah-hah,” Hetty and I both said.

“What do you mean, ah-hah? That's a very normal color for a glove. Anyway, at least I think it was black. I only saw it quickly through the plastic and it was all muddy and stained.”

“Have they found the other one yet?”

No, despite a thorough search of the woods, fields and ditches the second glove had not been found. I became convinced that I would be the one to find it, that I'd open my closet door and it would fall from the shelf into my face. That I would fold my hands beneath my pillow at night and find it lying there. One night I woke up suddenly from a dream. In the dream a bloody glove had been flapping over my head. Listening to the night sounds, I realized the toilet had just been flushed. I heard my father's footsteps in the hall and the scrape of the tennis racket as he lay it back down on the hardwood next to his bed.

We began to wonder what else the killer had left behind. What ghosts of Katie's murder still lurked in the shadows of our farm?

I'm not sure if we were more relieved or disappointed when tests on the glove came back and Detective Mather dropped by to deliver the results. The glove was stained with animal blood. Then, when Mr. Fraser came forward after reading a description of it in the
Pike Creek Banner
, the mystery was solved. He had
been so busy with calving, as well as looking into the prospect of mining gold in Costa Rica, that he'd fallen behind on his reading and had just learned of Uncle Pat's find. He'd immediately recognized the three-snap adjustable strap and the slash in the palm. He'd torn it when repairing the barbed wire fencing. When he thought about it, the last time he remembered wearing the glove was a month earlier. He'd been in the back field, which ran parallel to my uncle's property—it was there, behind a stand of alder, that he'd buried a stillborn calf.

M
EGAN'S SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY
fell smack in the middle of these feelings of unease and suspicion. Megan felt she was ripped off and that nobody cared. The truth was, it would have been difficult to get too excited about anything short of the police making an arrest. Her birthday also fell in the middle of exam week, which meant that a party couldn't be too distracting. And the day itself was not a good one for her mom and dad. They both had meetings they couldn't miss. Uncle Pat was voting on something important for the school board, and Aunt Alice had to chair the ladies auxiliary that night. Megan couldn't believe they wouldn't skip their meetings to celebrate her birthday on the actual day. Aunt Alice explained that if she expected to be extended the privileges that came with growing up, she would have to accept the drawbacks. At sixteen, she should be old enough to understand that a birthday is just another day. Things had to be accomplished like on all the others. The family would celebrate the following day when nothing was planned.

“So that's it. Nobody cares about me anymore. Their meetings are more important than I am.”

“I don't think that's what your mom was getting at. It's just more convenient for her to make a cake and have your birthday tomorrow night.”

“What would be more convenient for them is if I'd never been born. This is just lousy. I'm sixteen. Your sixteenth birthday is supposed to be all sugary and pink with guys fawning all over you because they've suddenly realized you're not a kid anymore. Not only do my parents not care, but I'm living in a place where if a guy looks at you, you run the other way.”

Considering the general doomsday atmosphere surrounding her sixteenth birthday, I didn't blame her for feeling ripped off.

I arranged a sort of party for her on the day she turned sixteen. We would meet a couple of her friends from school at the Dairy Bar, where we would give her our gifts. With my aunt and uncle busy, we needed a ride into Pike Creek. Dad had loaned his van to Eric for a band practice, so Uncle Bud volunteered for the job. He didn't mind, he'd sighed. He'd just wait around town until we'd finished eating. He assured Mom and Ruby that with all the frightening things that had happened around Pike Creek he'd keep a close eye on us girls.

I got a strange phone call from Hetty just before she and Uncle Bud left the castle to pick me up. “If he cries, Emma, try to pretend you don't notice. Just start talking about the weather or something else.”

“Uncle Bud? Why would he cry?”

“It could be any reason. It could be because he discovered a button is missing from his shirt or because his socks don't match. But just ignore it, he'll stop.” She hesitated. “Well, at least for a little while.”

Uncle Bud was a rumpled man with a stubble of beard, bright watery eyes, and shoulders that slumped in conspicuous defeat. Hetty said he had a great sense of humor when he wasn't crying, and he'd always brought her the most wonderful gifts.
For instance, she had been one of the first kids to have an Easy-Bake Oven. Uncle Bud was a cook and he'd given her one when they'd first come out.

But on Megan's birthday, Uncle Bud had been separated from his wife for exactly twenty-three days. I learned this within thirty seconds of slipping into the backseat of his station wagon next to Megan. His wife's hair, he informed me immediately after Hetty introduced us, was as curly and thick as my own.

I was about to make a joke. To offer his wife my sympathy because I thought my hair was such a curse. But I thought better of it because we had not even started down the lane and Uncle Bud was suddenly weeping. His arms were wrapped around the steering wheel and his head was down. Hetty looked at us in the back and rolled her eyes.

She let several seconds elapse before she said, “Uncle Bud, we should get going now. Megan's friends are going to wonder where we are.”

Uncle Bud attempted to pull himself together. “Yes, yes, you're right.” He took a deep breath as he let his foot off the brake. “I'm sorry, girls. It's best if you don't talk about my wife. You know we're separated. It's been twenty-three days.”

We didn't tell him that it was not us who had brought up his wife.

Of course he talked about his wife the entire trip into Pike Creek. This was intermittent between the buckets of tears he cried. He wasn't absolutely sure why she had asked him to leave the house. He thought they had a good life. They lived in a good neighborhood with their three teenage boys. He thought he had been a good provider. What was this thing about her getting a job? Hadn't he bought Helen the crushed velvet furniture she had wanted? The dishwasher she could roll over to the tap, and when the dishes were done, push back against the
wall? And two weeks before she'd asked him to leave they'd finally collected a twelve-place setting of Corel dinnerware. Fifty cents a plate. They had bought it at the grocery store, one piece at a time.