Bad Apple 1: Sweet Cider Page 3

“No. Tell me.”

  “I was young so I’m not sure. I mentioned it to your father but I don’t know what he made of it. Paul took Joe under his wing.”

  “If I can crack that code, my father could.”

  “I think Joe would have been crazy anyway. But it made him mean.”

  “He’s not here now.”

  Nodding, I got out of the truck. “Steve, your father, seems like a nice man.”

  “He is, but he made it nearly impossible for me to be a rebellious teenager.” Truly grinned. “Don’t worry. The bad part’s over. I’ll call you later.”

  The bad part didn’t seem to be over to me. Paul’s killer was still running around on the loose using his credit cards to buy crap no one needed.

  Chapter 4

  My stepmother, Janie, hadn’t been the same since my father died, not that I think she was in good shape before they married but at least he had kept her focused a little. There was no accounting for such things. It was just the way it worked out and I was told that without her own mother to manage her, keep her in line, Janie was prone to having more of her episodes than ever.

  The wooden screen door to the farmhouse banged open and Shannon bolted out.

  “You are the sourest bitch on the planet!” She shouted over her shoulder.

  “Right back at ‘ya!” Toby screamed, following her down the steps.

  Shannon stopped at her car door and looked at me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Good luck. I have to go to work.”

  I nodded as she got in the car, started the engine and drove away. This was the way it was. It was one fight after another between my stepsisters. Toby fought over everything real or imagined. Shannon was okay but she couldn’t hold her own against Toby who would have been right at home in elbow and knee pads in a roller derby.

  I made my way up the uneven stone path to the door.

  “Why are we stuck with Shannon? Isn’t she old enough to move out?” Toby shouted as I entered the kitchen.

  Aunt Maude was in the kitchen.

  “You’re older. Why don’t you move out?” Maude asked.

  “Why should I? This was grandma’s house. My mother lives here. I’ll be damned if I leave my home for that piece of flood trash.”

  That’s the term people here in Acre used. Flood trash was what washed up after the Nigamo River swelled its banks.

  “Then you must like arguing.” Maude replied.

  Janie was at the kitchen table, crying into a soggy tissue. Maude reached for the box of tissues and put it in front of her.

  “Did something else happen?” I didn’t ask because I cared, but because it would keep the peace somewhat.

  Toby pointed at the calendar hanging on the wall. “It’s Big Man’s birth month.”

  Her hair was in a tangle like the nest of a woodland animal, and Janie sopped at her eyes pouring forth the endless flood. “I have bad days.”

  “You memorialize them,” Toby nearly spat back. “The day he was born, the day he died, the day Larry died, the day my father died. The freaking year is crammed with these precious moments. Now it’ll be the day Paul died. Can we memorialize the day he moved here, too? That would be real special.”

  “Why don’t you go vacuum,” Maude suggested.

  “The baby died before I was born! He’s like a ghost haunting the house. Not dead, never far from our thoughts. Big Man, we miss you so much! Four months from now we go through this all again. Poor Big Man’s Deathday.”

  “I have bad days.”

  “When are the good days, Mom? Let’s celebrate those rare holidays!”

  “You don’t know what it’s like to hold a baby in your arms and know there’s something wrong and have the doctors tell you to relax, it’s all normal. It wasn’t normal.”

  “Right, right. We’ve heard it all before. No one would listen. It’s thirty years ago, give it a rest. Try living life for a change.”

  Maude took Toby’s arm and began to push her toward the door. “Cool off somewhere else.”

  Toby looked from one to the other. “Screw it.” She turned and left for her room.

  Maude pulled out an old oak chair and sat across from Janie at the kitchen table. “Are you taking your nerve pills?”

  Janie shook her head. “They make my mouth dry.”

  “Did you tell the doctor?”

  Janie took another tissue.

  “This isn’t good for you.”

  There was no reply.

  “Did you eat anything today?”

  With her index finger, Janie pushed at the glass mug on the table. “I had coffee.”

  “You need to eat. You want me to make you something? Some scrambled eggs and toast?”

  “I should have done something.”

  Maude stood and went to the refrigerator to get out the eggs.

  “You did something. You told the doctor. You told Liza. You told me. You told Roy. It’s our fault as much as yours, but it’s done. It’s a long time ago.”

  After turning on the gas stove, Maude cracked the brown eggs into a bowl and whisked them with a fork.

  “Everything would have been different.”

  “If I had been born into the British Royal Family, I’d be Queen Elizabeth,” Maude replied as she poured the eggs into a cast iron skillet.

  I had a hard time not bursting into laughter.

  “Remember the day Diana was married?” Janie looked up.

  “Yes.”

  “Remember the day she died?”

  “Yes. It was a big shock. Death is always upsetting, Janie, you know that. But people have to go on. Prince William isn’t sitting at home crying over his mother’s death, he’s married to Kate Middleton. Prince Harry is out playing polo.”

  “And that skunk Charles is married to Camilla.”

  Maude stirred the eggs with a spoon, grateful she had gotten Janie off the subject of Big Man at least temporarily.

  “Go live your life? Get past it? People die and they’re forgotten. It’s like they never existed. Big Man was my first born son. He existed.”

  “And I’m sure he appreciates that you remember him so fondly but I’m also sure he wouldn’t want you crying over him.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Maude tipped the eggs onto a plate and put it in front of Janie. “Eat.”

  “He depended on me for life and I let him down.”

  “Everyone fails in one way or another.” Maude looked at me.

  “Not this bad. This is unforgivable.”

  “Why don’t you leave that up to God to decide? Give yourself a break.”

  Maude poured herself some coffee and sat down at the table.

  Twice every year they had some version of this conversation and with always the same result. As Maude often told me, her husband used to say “Nothing changes, nothing gets any better.”

  It was some kind of crib death long before anyone paid much attention to the specifics. The baby died. Big Man seemed okay that night and then in the morning he was dead. There was no autopsy so no conclusive medical cause. Maybe that was his life expectancy–four months. Maybe that’s exactly what God had in mind. People shouldn’t second guess God. If everything happened for a reason, it was usually too difficult to figure out what that reason was. Better to just accept things as they were, deal with them and enjoy the good weather when it came, stay inside when it rained.

  Big Man was buried in the family plot along with all the Kents that went before him. Where Maude would be buried, near her sister, Liza, near the Kents who had gone off to war and not made it back alive and those who had. It was just the way of life that all things died. Janie should know that having grown up on a farm but the farm had been gone for so long, maybe she had forgotten. Some things are too important to forget.

  One thing I knew. I didn’t want to be buried anywhere near these people.

  Chapter 5

  My stepmother picked at her eggs like a child trying to avoid peas and fina
lly gave up by dropping her fork on the plate in resignation.

  “Why don’t you get dressed, comb your hair and go outside for a walk in the afternoons? It’s going to be winter soon enough and you won’t be able to go out at all. Get some sun. Stretch your legs,” I said.

  God knew she couldn’t stretch arms nor legs inside. The house was full of Liza Jane’s belongings that Janie had never had the heart to get rid of. Under the sink there were a couple hundred plastic bags left from her mother. Waste not, want not, was a phrase they had heard while growing up. But it wasn’t necessary to save every twist tie, every plastic bread bag and every piece of string.

  As it was now there were only paths through the house due to Janie’s saving of catalogs, magazines and newspapers. She didn’t know when she might have use of them and they grew in stacks higher and higher. My father had thrown things out. Now there was his stuff Janie was unable to part with. My room was positively Spartan compared to this mess. I wanted less.

  Out in the barn, there were jars of nails so old that the lids had rusted shut. But they were nails the original Kents had used to build the sheds and outbuildings. They had been saved over the years for the time when they might be needed. Now the hundred year old nails were in iron knots. I doubted that they could be pried out of the jars at this point but every time anyone suggested ditching them, Janie protested as if these were the family treasure. Along with the gunny sacks, hay forks that now hung on the wall and old milk bottles residing on the mantle.

  Toby didn’t prize these things. When her mother died, Toby would throw them into the garbage pit behind the barn and replace them with her new plastic gewgaws. I couldn’t believe the junk these people collected.

  On a shelf, there were ceramic Christmas Village buildings. My stepmother had lavished attention on constructing a little scene with a mirror to represent a pond and white batting to represent snow. This was the way Acre looked years ago she would tell anyone who would listen.

  It was never the way Acre looked.

  Acre had always been a town built by the lumber trade, populated by rough lumberjacks and muck-covered farmers. Wealthy Victorians settled elsewhere with their fancy gingerbread houses and anything on Main Street was utilitarian wood frame not brick like in Cooperstown or even Richfield Springs. There had never been much need for a town center and whatever businesses had been required weren’t any longer since there was no farming left and precious little lumbering. Acre had never been quaint. The Christmas Village on her shelf and in her mind was an illusion Janie clutched to her heart against all observable facts.

  Tears began to fill my stepmother’s eyes. “Remember how cold it was the day of the funeral, Maude? The ground was frozen.”

  Now we were going to relive the funeral. “Jane, I don’t remember. You tell me every year but it’s not my memory.”

  Out came more tissues to mop the flow.

  “Put your clothes on, come down to the cider mill and help me get it ready. People are calling and asking me when I’m going to start pressing cider this year. Make yourself useful and scrub the tub.”

  Toby cranked up the music in her room extra loud and it nearly drowned out the sniffling.

  “Okay,” Maude said. “I’m headed home. Neal, you come with me as I need help.”

  Glad for an excuse to get out of the tear emporium, I left the house with Maude and headed back down the road.

  “She’s getting worse,” Maude said.

  “I know. I’ve been meaning to ask. Do you think I could move in with you? I won’t be any trouble.”

  Maude put her arm around me. It was the arm of a substantial woman who had known how to do a full day’s work. “You’re never any trouble for me, don’t think that.”

  “So yes?”

  “It’s alright by me but we should ask Janie.”

  “What difference would it make to her?”

  “She loves you.”

  In her way. Her nutty way. The way I wanted no part of.

  “It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it?”

  “All my trials, Lord, soon be over,” I sang.

  “You have a beautiful voice. Pure.”

  “Toby says I sound like a cat with its tail caught in the door.”

  “Don’t listen to her. I don’t want to speak ill about anyone but that girl has been angry for most of her life.”

  “Why? Do you know?”

  Maude shook her head. “I don’t.”

  We walked in silence for a while.

  “Can you wait till Janie gets over this Big Man thing?”

  “You mean until his Deathday?” That was months. I would have to go into hibernation to tolerate it that long.

  “No, in a week she’ll be better. We’ll suggest it then, though I don’t know why you want to move in with an old woman like me,” Maude commented.

  I didn’t want to tell her why. I didn’t know if she knew how bad it was there.

  “Tell me about the young man. What was his name?”

  “Truly. It was his great-grandfather’s name.”

  “Are you going to give this performing thing a try?”

  Thinking of nothing else since he had shown up at the cider mill, I imagined myself forgetting the words to the songs and not able to get myself off the stage while the audience booed, or worse, laughed. I had nothing to wear. I’d been to the county fair where a few bands played and those people were dressed up. It was more than possible for me to look like a complete idiot and make a fool of myself. Why did I think I was ready to perform in public? Why did Truly think we’d be ready to perform together after one song in an old barn?

  “Everyone has to start someplace.”

  “But...”

  “Paul would have gotten a real charge out of seeing you up on stage with the fiddle he got for you.”

  I believed that.

  We went into her house, warm and comforting like an old quilt. I took off my jacket and hung it on the hook by the door.

  “At least Janie won’t care one way or another if I do decide to take Truly up on his offer.”

  She was too wrapped up in her own misery to appreciate what anyone did or how anyone else felt.

  Maude went to the sink and began running some water into a pot. “I can’t figure out why you’re still chewing over it. You should have said yes the first day.”

  “Yes is a big word,” I replied.

  She put the pot on the stove, turned on the flame, then the phone rang and Maude went to pick it up. “Maybe Janie got out of her funk and wants some company.”

  “Maybe the sun will come up in the west tomorrow morning,” I replied, glad to get off the subject of singing.

  It was too big a step to take without careful consideration. I didn’t know Truly. He seemed nice, he was wonderful on the guitar, he had a good voice and from what I could tell from the three minutes we played together, it did work.

  Was he staying here? Was he going to college? Was I going to put everything I had into some kind of partnership only to find next spring he’d lost interest or was moving out of state.

  I did recognize the benefit of being in a group with someone who knew more about music than I did. And I more than recognized the benefit of knowing someone who loved music as much as I did. That and the fact he was the complete opposite of any of the people I was stuck living with.

  “Hello. Yes. Yes?”

  I can’t say why but I knew something was wrong.

  “No. That credit card was cancelled. The owner is deceased.”

  Paul had been attacked in his home about a year ago. He never saw the assailant so there was nothing the town police could, do but afterwards he and Maude had spent weeks getting all his finances back in order, canceling the credit cards, making sure no one could ruin him by running up huge bills. She was put on all his accounts as next of kin.

  “Alright,” Maude said and hung up the phone.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It was Sears Security. Someon
e tried to use one of Paul’s credit cards.”

  “Did they stop the guy?”

  “They said they were going to see if he was still in the store.”

  “You should call Lieutenant Lambert.”

  A half hour later, he was at the door and Maude let him in.

  “I spoke to the security chief at the Sears in White Plains. They lost him in the store. We couldn’t even get an accurate description of the man.”

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “Dark hair, unshaven, ratty clothes.”

  “That’s the description of a hundred thousand people in the city,” I commented.

  Steve nodded. “It doesn’t help us much. The credit cards could have been sold the first day.”

  Maudie was confused. “Why would you do that?”

  “A criminal can see some value in a credit card but doesn’t want to be linked to it, so will sell it for a couple hundred bucks or drugs. Whoever winds up with it claims, truthfully, they don’t know who the original owner was.”

  “Being a crook is so complicated,” Maude replied.

  Steve smiled in agreement.

  “Would you like some coffee or some pie?”

  “Thank you, but no, I’m on my way home. Don’t worry, we’ll catch this guy. Make sure you lock your doors. Call the police in town if you get worried about anything.”

  “Thank you,” Maude said.

  “Would you like a ride back to your house, Neal?”

  I nodded. He probably wanted to say something to me. I gave Maude a hug and walked outside. We got in the car but he didn’t immediately start the engine.

  “Truly tells me you played together yesterday.”

  “Is that okay with you? I haven’t given him an answer yet and if you have reservations, then I’ll just say no and he doesn’t have to know anything else.”

  “You’re a very serious girl, aren’t you?” He started the car and backed it out of the driveway. “I suppose you would have to be given your circumstances. I’m curious. Why would I have reservations about you?”

  “You probably know everything about the Kents by now.”

  “They do run on the wild side, don’t they?”

  “The drunk and disorderly charges against Toby were dropped,” I pointed out.