A Gathering in Hope, page 14
part #11 of Harmony Series
He wasn’t sure any of that actually mattered, but it sounded terribly official and gave the DNR lady pause.
“What are you looking for?” Charles persisted.
“Animal or human remains,” the DNR lady snapped.
“People have been living in this house almost thirty years. Of course you’re going to find animal remains. Where else do people bury their pets?”
“We’re not looking for pets. We’re looking for something else.”
“So you’re just going to dig up the churchyard without telling us what you’re looking for? Did I wake up this morning in Russia? I don’t think so.” Charles had heard that line on television years before and had wanted to use it ever since.
The DNR lady glared at him. At times like this, she wished the department had given her a Taser. She had asked for one several times, without success.
“We’re coming back, and when we do, we’re going to dig up this entire yard. He’s hiding something,” she said, pointing to Sam, “and we’re going to find it.”
50
Whose bike is that?” Sam asked, after the DNR lady and her minions had left.
“It’s ours,” his mother said.
“Why are you wearing those funny clothes?”
“It was your mother’s idea,” Charles said.
“I thought you weren’t going to ride anymore after your accident,” Sam said to his mother.
“I made no such promise.”
Sam sighed.
“Why does the DNR want to dig up your yard?” Gloria asked.
“They obviously think I’ve hidden something there.”
“Have you?” Charles asked.
“Of course not. I haven’t even lived here that long. Do they think I’ve been killing people and burying them in my yard? That woman is crazy.”
“Maybe they think you killed the bats,” Charles said. “And that if you killed the bats, maybe you’ve been killing other things.”
“I’ve never killed a bat in my entire life,” Sam protested. “I thought maybe you killed them.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Charles said with great indignation. “Why would you even think that?”
“Because you said you would and you killed those snakes that one time, and the nest of mice,” Sam reminded him. “You didn’t think I knew about the mice, did you?”
“Who told you?”
“Mom.”
“I told you not to tell him I told you,” Gloria said to Sam.
“Oops,” Sam said. “Sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Charles said. “Everyone kills snakes and mice.”
“So did you kill the bats, too?” Sam asked his father.
“No, he didn’t kill the bats,” Gloria Gardner said. “I thought at first maybe he had, but then it occurred to me he was too lazy to do something like that. It would have been too much work.”
Charles listened, wondering whether or not to be offended.
“So what will they find when they dig up your yard?” Charles asked. “You got anything to hide? Old Playboy magazines you didn’t want Barbara to find? Whiskey bottles you didn’t want to set out in the trash for the neighbors to see?”
“Nothing. I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve not done anything.”
Then he remembered the bunnies.
“Well, I’ve maybe done one thing, but it was an accident. I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“What did you do?” Gloria said, dreading the answer. Sam had always seemed a little off to her. Maybe a little too much of a moral stickler, a little too eager to please. Those were the kind of people with secrets.
“I killed a bunch of bunnies,” Sam said.
“My gosh, that’s sick,” Gloria said. “Why would you do that?”
“It was an accident. They were in a nest in some high grass and I mowed right over them. It was terrible. Fur and bones and blood shooting out the side of the mower.” He shook with disgust at the memory of it.
“What’s that got to do with your yard?” Charles asked.
“I buried them in a Tupperware container next to the redbud tree.”
They stood there, silently contemplating the trouble it would cause if the DNR lady unearthed a Tupperware bowl of baby rabbits that appeared to have died at the hands of a sadistic lunatic.
“We better get those rabbits before they do,” Charles Gardner said. “Do you have a shovel?”
Sam hustled to the garage, grabbed a shovel, and led his parents to the slight mound beside the redbud tree. He began digging. The earth was loose and before long Sam’s shovel made a soft thump, and he dropped to his knees and began to clear away the dirt with his hands, exposing the Tupperware bowl.
“That’s Barbara’s salad bowl,” Gloria Gardner said. “She called me last week wanting to know if I had it.”
“Please don’t tell her, or I’m in real trouble,” Sam said.
He lifted the bowl from the tomb, set it aside, and began filling in the hole, topping it off with dirt from the flower bed, then scattering leaves atop it so it would appear undisturbed.
“Have you buried anything more in the yard?” Charles Gardner asked. “Any orphans, or hobos, or homeless people?”
“Charles, that’s disgusting. Sam wouldn’t do that.” Gloria looked at Sam. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Of course not. It was just the rabbits, and it was an accident.”
“What are we going to do with them?” Sam’s father asked.
“We can’t leave them here, that’s for sure,” Sam said. “That DNR lady would sniff them right out.”
“Give them to me,” Gloria Gardner said.
Sam handed the bowl of rabbits to his mother.
“What are you going to do with them?” he asked.
“It’s better you don’t know,” she said. “You’ll need deniability.”
There was a basket on the front of their bike. She had ordered it knowing it would come in handy, though she never imagined using it to dispose of evidence from a crime scene. She reminded Sam to wipe his fingerprints from the shovel and Tupperware, yet again grateful she had watched so many crime shows, then placed the Tupperware bowl in the basket, told Charles it was time to go, and pedaled away.
They turned right at the end of the meetinghouse lane and headed toward Main Street, taking the backstreets, ending up in back of Bruno’s, pulling alongside his dumpster, where she pried the lid from the bowl, shook out the bunnies, who, as a testament to Tupperware, were amazingly well-preserved in spite of their circumstances.
“If anyone smells them, they’ll just think it’s the regular dumpster smell,” she explained to Charles, who was duly impressed by his wife’s ingenuity.
She placed the empty bowl back in her basket.
“Throw that in there, too,” he said.
“A perfectly good Tupperware bowl? Not on your life.”
They pedaled home, meditating on the unshakable bond between parents and their children and how a parent’s work was never really done.
51
Hank Withers, Wayne Newby, and Wilson Roberts were gathered in Hank’s basement, seated around a poker table, the blueprints for the new meetinghouse addition spread out in front of them.
“If this is a trustee meeting, why aren’t Leonard, Dan, and Sam here?” Wilson Roberts asked Hank. “They should be here, too.”
“Because Leonard’s a stick-in-the-mud, and Sam and Dan can’t know anything about this. It’s too risky for them,” Hank said. “They have their careers to think of.”
“What’s too risky for them?” Wayne asked.
“What I’m about to propose,” Hank said.
He had phoned them the night before, asking them to come to his house the next day at one o’clock, during Norma’s naptime.
“Let’s hear it,” Wilson said.
Hank liked that about Wilson. Cut to the chase. No dillydallying. All business.
“These stupid bats are killing us,” Hank said. “I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a way to build around these trees, and there’s no way to do it, unless we go straight up, which we’re not going to do.”
“Yesterday at meeting you said you were working on a way to build around the trees and make a courtyard,” Wayne said. “What happened to that plan?”
“It’s impossible,” Hank said. “I’d have to squeeze a hallway down to four feet wide and code requires at least six feet. Unless, of course, they let us remove one tree, but they won’t, so it’s beside the point.”
“How do you know they won’t?” Wilson asked.
“I phoned the county planning this morning. They said the DNR only allows exemptions for buildings vital to public welfare, and even then we’d have to purchase suitable habitat elsewhere and relocate the threatened species. All at our own expense.”
Wilson and Wayne absorbed the news.
“So if we’d cut down the trees this last week, we’d have been free and clear,” Wayne said.
“That’s right,” Hank said. “There’s nothing they could have done to us. In fact, if we had cut those trees down even a half hour before that DNR lady came out and stopped our building, we’d have been free and clear. Now if something is wrong, it’s wrong all the time. Take murder. If I murder someone, then it’s wrong whether I do it now or a half hour from now. So how can cutting down a tree be perfectly fine one moment, but thirty minutes later be wrong?”
Hank looked across the table at them, studying their faces.
“Doesn’t make any sense to me,” Wilson said.
“Men, we’ve got a job to do,” Hank said. “I won’t lie, it could get us in serious trouble, but it has to be done if the Lord’s work is to move forward.”
Hank Withers had never seemed all that concerned about the Lord’s work until Olive Charles had kicked the bucket and left them a million dollars to spend.
“What do you have in mind?” Wayne asked.
“What I’m about to tell you goes no further than this group. You can’t tell Sam, Leonard, or Dan. You can’t tell anyone ever. You can’t admit to anything, no matter what pressure is brought to bear. Do I have your word?”
Wayne and Wilson nodded their agreement.
“We’re going to cut down those trees,” Hank said. “Tonight. At seven o’clock. There’s a Christian education committee meeting tonight at Wayne’s house. Sam and Barbara will be there, and Norma and Doreen will be there. I’ve asked Sam and Barbara to come by and pick up Norma at six forty-five. No one will be anywhere near the meetinghouse.”
“That’s right, I remember Doreen telling me we had to eat supper early tonight and I had to make myself scarce,” Wayne said.
Hank reached into his back pocket, pulled out a map of the churchyard trees, and placed it on the table, smoothing it out.
“These two trees have to come out,” Hank said, plucking a pencil from behind his ear and pointing at the offending trees. “They’re mostly dead anyway. We had had them slated for removal this fall. So we’re going to hurry the process along. With these two trees gone, we can get our addition built.”
“What about the bats?” Wilson asked.
“They’ll be out of there by seven,” Hank assured them. “The sun is starting to set and most all of them have left the trees by six fifty. I’ve been over there the past three evenings watching.”
“Where will they go if we cut down their trees?” Wilson asked.
“They’ll find someplace else to hang upside down and fornicate,” Wayne said. “What do we care? It’s not like there aren’t more trees. Geez, we own ten acres of trees.”
It hadn’t escaped Hank’s notice that Wilson and Wayne were using the word we.
“Men, we can’t afford any mistakes. Here’s how we’re going to do it. We meet at six forty-five, at the Panera on Washington Street.”
“The one on the back side of our property?” Wilson asked.
“Yes, that’s the place,” Hank said. “I’ll bring the chainsaw. We go behind Panera, enter our property from the east, cut through the woods, take down the trees, and get out. The whole thing shouldn’t take fifteen minutes. Twenty, at the most.”
“Can we have supper at Panera afterward?” Wilson asked. “I’ll be hungry after all that work.”
“No,” Hank said. “In and out. Like ghosts.”
“He could go to Panera before we cut down the trees,” Wayne pointed out. “Just so long as he was ready to go by six forty-five.”
“I love their chicken chipotle sandwich,” Wilson said. “I could eat one every day.”
“Their soup’s good, too,” Wayne said. “And Doreen really likes their applewood chicken salad.”
“Focus, men,” Hank demanded. “We’re not here to talk about the menu at Panera. Now let’s go over it again. What time are we meeting?”
“Six forty-five,” they said in unison.
“Good. Not a minute earlier, not a minute later.”
Hank ran through the plan again, then Wilson and Wayne left, before Norma woke from her nap.
52
Sam sat on their screened-in porch, watching the birds at the feeder. It was his favorite room, it looked out into the backyard, into the woods, and the little creek that marked the west side of the meeting’s property. If he were arrested for bat killing, he would certainly miss sitting here. He liked coming out here at night, when he couldn’t sleep. Over the trees, he could see the haze of lights from the city, but it seemed far away.
He felt bad for the bats, and had racked his brains trying to figure out who would squish a hundred and seven Indiana bats to death. Some low-life scum. He thought it had to be someone in the meeting, someone who had a key to the place. Then he remembered he forgot and left the meetinghouse unlocked half the time, so it could have been any low-life scum.
He had been so certain it was his father, he hadn’t given much thought to who else it might have been. Not that his father was low-life scum. He just wasn’t one to let a few rules get in his way if something needed doing.
Sam thought back over that day. He’d had oatmeal for breakfast, along with three pieces of bacon and a glass of orange juice. He and Barbara had read the morning paper on the screened-in porch, and she’d left for work. He’d washed the breakfast dishes, taken a bath, gotten dressed, then looked out the window to see several trucks and cars pull down the meetinghouse lawn. They had snooped around, found bats in the meetinghouse attic, then decreed the meetinghouse off-limits.
He remembered all that perfectly well. Then what? He racked his brain, trying to recall what else had happened. Oh, yeah, he had phoned Ruby Hopper to tell her about the meetinghouse being closed. Had he phoned anyone else that morning? Yes, he remembered talking to someone. He clicked on his cell phone and began scrolling through the list of calls made, flipping back to that date, and there, just after Ruby Hopper, was the name Wilson Roberts.
He remembered that now. Wilson Roberts. He pictured the portly, arthritic man squeezing through the attic access, chasing down all those bats on his bad knees, and bludgeoning them. He couldn’t see it. Maybe at one time, Wilson could have fit through the attic access, but that had been a lot of pies ago. No, it couldn’t have been Wilson.
Maybe a woman did it. Why did everyone automatically assume it was a man? He Googled the phrase women serial killers and came up with an extensive list of possibilities. So much for the fairer sex. He began writing down all the women who knew about the bats. Ruby Hopper, Barbara, and his mother. He ruled out Barbara. She’d been at work, and when she wasn’t there she’d been with him. He didn’t think his mother would do it. Maybe if his father were found murdered, he’d suspect his mother, but not bats. She’d always liked animals. He tried to recall everything he knew about Ruby Hopper. Hadn’t she once mentioned growing up on a farm? That was interesting. Farm women had a no-nonsense air about them, and thought nothing of killing chickens and pigs and cows. He could maybe see Ruby Hopper picking up a cleaver and dispensing with a colony of bats. But she wasn’t an idiot. She wouldn’t have put the bats in a trash bag and tossed it at the end of the meetinghouse lane for the trash man to pick up. Only a moron would do that, and Ruby Hopper was no moron.
So Sam thought of all the morons in the meeting. That narrowed the list of suspects down to two—Leonard and Wanda Fink. Plus, Leonard was skinny and could slip through the attic access like the snake he was. And they had a key to the meetinghouse and were constantly over there, nosing around, looking through Sam’s files. Yes, he’d known that. They hadn’t even bothered to put them back in order, the idiots.
At the moment Sam was thinking of them, Leonard and Wanda were in their third day of Lester Hickam’s weeklong revival, which so far had set them back a thousand dollars, money they didn’t have to spend, though Leonard had told Wanda that was a cheap price to pay to save America. Lester Hickam was passing the hat on the hour, every hour, men in suits circulating KFC buckets up and down the rows while Lester and Luella wept onstage. You couldn’t help but want to give them money. Lester would read aloud the names of the givers, his hand raised in the air, with Luella beside him, praising the Lord. If Luella knew about the women Lester was rubbing suntan oil on, it hadn’t appeared to bother her.
Leonard hadn’t yet been able to get Lester Hickam alone to seek counsel on his run for the school board. There were obvious obstacles to Leonard’s run, the chief one being Leonard’s dropping out of high school when he was seventeen, but he wasn’t one to let minor details discourage him. Wanda wasn’t quite sure she wanted to be married to a politician. There were too many temptations for men in politics, too many women throwing themselves at them. There was something about power that some women couldn’t resist. She prayed Leonard could withstand them. Leonard hadn’t given any indication of unfaithfulness. He wasn’t the kind of man to excite the imaginations of women, but one never knew.
Wanda was starting to wish they’d never come to Lester Hickam’s revival. The first day or two had been interesting, getting to see in person what she had seen only on television. Even though she had her doubts about Lester Hickam, he did know how to work a crowd. She had to give him that. And he had a Bible verse for everything. He’d even spoken briefly about the magazine article. It was Satan’s attack, there was not a shred of truth in it. The mansion at the beach wasn’t theirs. It belonged to one of the church members who had made it available to Lester and Luella in order to refresh their spirits after the rigors of ministry. Yes, he’d rubbed lotion on a young lady, but she had been in a dreadful accident, had lost both her hands, and had asked for Lester’s help. It was true you couldn’t see her hands in the photograph. Luella said how grateful she was to have such a kind husband who would help handless women, but if you watched her close, when the cameras weren’t rolling, she didn’t seem all that grateful.
