Jim was tired all the next day but after school he dropped off his backpack at home, changed into his grubby clothes and set off for the beaver dam, bent on recovering the shovel he had left behind and undoing whatever the beavers might have gotten up to overnight.
Ruth Rose beat him to it. He could hear her singing to herself good and loud.
There was nothing to stop him from heading back home. But as he stood listening he realized she was straining at something as she sang. So he made his way soundlessly through the sopping wet grass until he caught sight of her.
She was hacking away at the dam, the same cavity he had worked at the day before. But she wasn’t using his shovel. It was leaning against a tree along with Gladys. She was using a pickaxe, and she wasn’t squeamish about it, either.
She swung it high above her head and brought it down into the guck up to its hilt. She had muscle, all right. She hauled at the axe and brought up a great gob of putrefied vegetation. The water spilled into the crevice and on through the busted dam but not with much force. By now, it was good and low.
She stopped singing. Without looking back, she said in a good clear voice, “You might as well come out. You’re not going to catch me giving Gladys a soaker.”
Jim blushed. He stood up tall, stepped out into the open and made his way towards her. Her red T-shirt was stained with sweat and splatters of mud. He looked out across the flats where the water had been so high just the day before.
“You did a good job,” he managed to say.
She scrinched up her nose, rubbed it, looking a little flustered, as if she wasn’t used to compliments. “The beavers didn’t do any building last night, as far as I could tell. I guess Gladys deserves some of the credit.”
Jim laughed nervously.
Ruth Rose came down off the dam and made her way towards him with her pickaxe over her shoulder like one of the seven dwarfs, but which one? Grumpy? Dopey? Crazy?
“Did you carry that all the way from town?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “There was a work crew on the tracks. They gave me a lift.” He wondered, from the hesitant way she said it, whether maybe she had stolen the pickaxe.
She put it down and went to get Gladys, planting her in the spot at the mouth of the breach where Jim had placed her the day before. She made Gladys wave to him. Jim gulped. Waved back.
“Care to give her another dousing?” Ruth Rose said. “I won’t peek this time, promise.”
Jim turned red.
“It’s your call,” she said.
There was something altogether different about her manner today. She joined him again and they walked up the lane a bit, found a dry log and sat down.
“I’m on my medication,” she said, as if she had been reading his mind. “Bummer, eh? Just when it looks like I’m a human being after all, it turns out I’m a real nut-case who has to be drugged.”
He looked at her and there was a glassy look in her eyes.
She looked down, picked up a small branch, broke it twig by twig.
“This isn’t the real me,” she said. “But the thing is, the fiend you met yesterday wasn’t the real me, either. I’m a mess, okay? I hate the drugs, but if I don’t take them like a good girl…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
“I didn’t talk to Father yesterday,” said Jim. “Honest.” He told her about the pastor being at the house when he got back. “Did you get in trouble?”
She smiled a kind of loopy smile. “I’m always in trouble.”
Jim looked sideways at her. “Does he hit you?”
Then she really laughed. “It’s much worse than that. You know what he does when I’m being recalcitrant, as he puts it?” Ruth Rose leaned up close. “He prays for me.”
She seemed to enjoy the surprise on his face. “He just drops to his knees, right there — wherever it is — and folds his hands in front of his face and he starts in praying for my recalcitrant soul. That’s what he did last night. Once he did it in the middle of a supermart. In the canned vegetable aisle.”
Jim shook his head in astonishment, “That must be awful.”
She nodded and was silent. “He prays all the time.” Then she smirked. “Like a hawk.”
The sky was plugged up with clouds, the temperature was dropping. Jim noticed that now that she wasn’t working anymore, Ruth Rose was shivering, her narrow shoulders up high, her shoulder blades sticking out like wings.
“I’ll get your jacket,” he said.
Her black leather jacket was hanging from a poplar bough. Something on the lapel glittered with reflected light. A mirror the size of a campaign button. She had been watching for him.
He looked at himself in the mirror. The pimple on his nose said he was fourteen. The bewilderment in his eyes said he was going on four.
“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.
“I told you. They were talking about this letter. Your dad mentioned Tuffy. Father told him not to talk about Tuffy. Not ever.”
She paused. “I couldn’t hear much. The sacristy door is solid oak. I heard bits and pieces of stuff.’She’s got nothing to go on,’ Father said more than once. I think they were talking about someone called Laverne. I heard your dad saying,’I’ve suffered long enough.’ Then I heard Father say this: ‘Tomorrow’s a good day.’ Those were his exact words. ‘Tomorrow’s a good day.’”
Jim swallowed hard.
“And the thing is,” said Ruth Rose, “the next day Father wasn’t around. He wasn’t at the church. I checked. And where was your mother, Jim? She was at the church, decorating it with the altar guild for the Harvest Festival. You think Father didn’t know she was going to be away from the farm all day?”
Jim’s chin twitched. “Why didn’t you say something then?” he asked. “I mean at the inquest.”
“Me?” she said. “Who’d believe me? Anyway, I didn’t have any proof. So I decided to get some. I figured the letters had to be blackmail. I figured, since I couldn’t find them around our place, they were probably hidden in the sacristy somewhere. So one night, I broke in.”
Jim stared at her incredulously. “Into the church?”
Ruth Rose nodded proudly, but her expression soured. “I got in okay but then the fuzz came.”
“The cops?”
She nodded. “I got arrested,” she said. “Father called them. Can you believe it? His own daughter.”
“So you told the police what you were doing,” he said with a kind of weary resignation, already imagining the scene.
“You bet I did,” she said. “I told them about Father murdering your dad and that the proof was probably in the church office somewhere.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “They didn’t go for it.”
She looked at him with something approaching a wicked grin lighting up her pale face. “I kinda pulled a Ruth Rose Way on them, I guess. Went ballistic. Gave one of them a black eye,” she added. “They released me into Father’s custody. He didn’t press charges but he made sure I wasn’t around for the inquest.”
“What do you mean?”
Ruth Rose’s grin dissolved. “I was packed off somewhere. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jim didn’t want to talk about it, either. There was something more pressing he needed to know if he was to believe anything she said.
“So now I know why you couldn’t get anybody to listen to you back then. But why are you trying now? And why me?”
Ruth Rose suddenly looked tired. She sniffed, rubbed her nose.
“I need your help,” she said. “Yeah, don’t say it — I need lots of help. But seriously, I’m afraid. Father’s really weird. Weird like… well, almost like your father was last fall.”
“What are you saying?”
She looked him straight in the eye. “I think you know what I’m saying.”
Jim could feel the anger rising in him. He tried to remember that he was talking to a crazy person. She didn’t know anything. For all he knew, she was making it all up.
“You’re saying, this blackmailer was blackmailing both of them — Father Fisher and my father. Then it stopped… after my dad disappeared. But now it’s started again.”
She didn’t move a muscle.
“Listen,” he said, his voice belligerent. “Maybe my father knew something — something Fisher did. Maybe. And maybe that’s what drove him nuts, ‘cause he wanted to tell but he didn’t want to get Fisher in trouble. But don’t try and tell me he did anything wrong. You didn’t know him. He was the best. And no freak is going to tell me different.”
She didn’t punch him or argue, but he could see she was hurt. Well, she deserved it. She was nothing but trouble.
She looked down, looked up again with a little scornful smile. “Like I said. You’re not ready for this.”
He was going to shout at her. But he didn’t want to shout. Didn’t want to be dragged into her game.
“All I meant,” she said, “was that things cooled down after Hub disappeared. Father was gloomy for a while but he wasn’t on edge.”
“Yeah, well, you’d be gloomy if you lost a friend,” said Jim. “If you had any.” He swallowed hard. He hadn’t meant to say that.
For once, Ruth Rose was quiet. Then, after a long silence, she looked past Jim up the lane. “You ever wonder what happened that day at the cedar grove?” she asked, her voice pitched almost too low to hear.
Jim’s head snapped up. “Are you kidding? I never thought about anything else for most of the year.”
“Well, try this,” she said. There was a look in her eyes as if what she was going to say was some kind of test. “Your dad meets up with Father that day, just like he told him to the night before at the church. He’s somebody your dad trusts, right? They go out for one of their long walks or for a drive, maybe, to talk things over some more. There’s a million places up this way they could go and nobody’d see them. Half the farms on this road are deserted. The wilderness stretches halfway to Hudson Bay. They could have gone anywhere.”
Reluctantly Jim nodded, feeling a little sick.
“Your dad wants to do something, talk to somebody, basically cave in — that’s what it sounded like to me the night before. Father doesn’t want him to. Father says it’s going to be all right. But it isn’t going to be all right if your dad starts blabbing.”
“Blabbing about what”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “Maybe what happened to Tuffy.”
“That was an accident,” snapped Jim. “Death by misadventure.”
Ruth Rose raised her eyebrows. The gesture infuriated Jim. Nothing was an accident to her, he thought.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Something else. That’swhat we’ve got to find out. But something they were in together.” Jim was about to object when her eyes lit up. “You just don’t get it, do you? You won’t believe your daddy could do anything wrong. Fine, don’t. But let me finish.”
“Okay,” said Jim. “So finish.”
She stared at him slack-jawed, shaking her head as if she had given up on him entirely. To his surprise, he didn’t want her to give up.
“Go on,” he said quietly.
She sighed. “They go somewhere where no one’s around. Fisher does him in. Maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe they were having this fight and he killed him by mistake. But it’s done. So then he drives the car down here and leaves it so it looks like your dad just abandoned it.”
“How?” said Jim, “There were just my dad’s footprints down here. Nobody else had been in the car. They had those forensic guys go over it. They don’t miss stuff like that. There were no ‘alien fibres’ — that’s the way they put it. Nothing.”
“I’m not talking about aliens,” shouted Ruth Rose.
Jim couldn’t talk anymore. His head was clogged up with painful images. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought them before — thought of his father meeting up with some horrible end. He had imagined biker gangs and bears. Murderers of every shape and size had paraded through his nightmares. But he had never put a real face on the killer.
Ruth Rose lightly touched his shoulder. “Hey, I’m outa here,” she said. Her anger seemed to have passed. “You listened to me, at least. That’s more than anyone else ever did. Thanks. If you find out anything, you could… you know…”
She left, headed back towards Ruth Rose Way. She left her pickaxe behind. Jim was going to call after her, when he looked more closely at the tool and realized that it wasn’t hers, after all, and she hadn’t stolen it from any railroad crew, either.
She had lied. There were initials carved into the butt end. HH. It was his father’s pickaxe.