I looked at him. “Do they come here often?”
He poured the water into the teapot and steam clouded his face.
“Twice in the last couple of weeks. Weather’s been nice. You know how people like to do it out-of-doors in this state. The hikers generally save it for summer, though.”
My eyes scanned the room. He set the tea tray on the table. It was disconcerting to be witnessing the sexual activity of another couple while in the company of a man to whom one was attracted.
Pomeroy filled the mugs with tea. I couldn’t help noticing the way his shoulders moved under his soft flannel shirt. I wondered who did his laundry, and looked around the room for a washing machine. His couch, tables, and chairs were rough-hewn pine scattered with store-bought pillows. The furniture looked homemade. There were no modern conveniences besides a refrigerator and oven in the open kitchen. In the living area were several lamps, and by his bed in one corner were a radiophone and alarm clock. So he had electricity and water, anyway. If Patty Sue and Fritz had wanted a cool drink or piece of toast for a postcoital snack, they could have marched on up. Right.
I looked again at Pomeroy, this engaging hermit in the middle of his homemade couch in the middle of his homemade cabin in the middle of nowhere. I ran my fingers over the green-brown coffee table made from pine beetle-killed wood.
He said, “Well?”
I moved a ceramic pot filled with ivy from one side of the table to the other, and thought.
“It makes sense,” I said finally. “I was in his office last week looking for some files. Patty Sue had gone in to see him, but I never saw her come back out. This Monday I was over there and Arch showed me the back door to the office, which I never knew existed. So.”
Pom said, “What were you looking for in his files?”
I stood up and went over to the window. Patty Sue and Fritz were walking through the tall grass toward the trees where the Jeep was just visible.
“Oh,” I said dully, “you know I’m trying to get my catering going again. The cops aren’t making much headway so I’m looking into things myself. Trying to figure out what the connection between Fritz and Laura Smiley was, why someone would try to poison him at her funeral. Trying to answer big questions like that while he’s banging away on my roommate.”
“Find anything?”
“No.”
He stood up and walked to his cooking area, then came back with a plate of hot biscuits and a bowl of honey.
He said, “I made these for you. The honey’s from a new batch of bees I sent away for from a catalog. South American. Mean as can be—sometimes they chase me off. Good producers, though.”
He split one of the steaming rounds, plastered it with honey, then handed it to me on a paper napkin. It was delicious.
He said, “Surprised at a man’s cooking?”
“For heaven’s sake, Pom, will you get serious? Even the police have told me more than you have, which is that Fritz cheats on Vonette, which is something I already knew from his past, thank you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Do you know why Laura went to see Fritz? If you two were such pals, why wouldn’t she tell you something as important as that? She left an article in her locker. She was going to show it to Patty Sue and Trixie. It was about a mistrial. Was she trying to warn them about something?”
“I already told you, she didn’t tell me everything. She had known a student, Vonette’s daughter, who was her friend. Since Laura was the daughter of an alcoholic, she relived the whole scenario by seeing this neglected teenage daughter, who then had a stepfather coming on to her. She tried to stop it. When that backfired, and Laura’s parents died, she tried to let it go in Al-Anon. But she was shocked when I told her what was going on out here.”
“That was recent, wasn’t it?”
He looked at me and nodded. “Last few months.”
I said, “Was it at the athletic club, and Marla stumbled in on your conversation?”
“Yeah. Laura said, ‘He told me he’d cleaned up his act.’ ” Pomeroy looked at me. He said, “Those were her words. ‘After twenty years,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe he’s up to his old tricks.’ ” He paused and bit into a biscuit. “After we talked, she came out to work with me. She saw them out there in the meadow. She was angry, seeing this again after all these years, him going after a younger woman. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she kept saying, ‘he swore to me when I first moved back here that he’d changed.’ ” Pomeroy cleared his throat. “I do know this. She had something on Korman besides what I’m telling you. She said, ‘This time there will be justice, you can count on it.’ She was beside herself. I had to drive her home. That’s when she left the science text in my car, by the way. Anyway, maybe seeing them was what triggered her. The next thing you know, suicide.”
“It must be convenient for Fritz,” I mused, “the women in his life just offing themselves when the going gets rough. First Bebe Hollenbeck, then Laura Smiley.”
“Better keep an eye on your roommate,” added Pomeroy.
Suddenly I was exhausted by it all. Now that the landscape was empty of people I turned my attention out the window. Several gently sloping acres in what could roughly be termed Pomeroy’s front yard eventually met the creek, one of the high tributaries of the Upper Cottonwood. The white-hives where Arch and Pomeroy had worked so diligently last spring ranged along the hill.
“What are the bees doing now?” I asked. “Still producing honey?”
“When it’s warm in October like this, they’ll fly. Not many flowers now, of course, so the production’s real low.”
A series of posts jutted along the creek front, with rope between some of them. The rope led to several of the hives.
I said, “What’s all that heavy twine?”
He laughed. “Old-fashioned burglar alarm. Arch just loved it, said he was going to use it in one of his dragon-adventures, or whatever they’re called. Somebody comes up from the creek trying to break into your place, trips over the rope, the hives topple over and you’ve got yourself a swarm of bees that’ll do more damage than a shotgun.”
We were quiet for a few minutes.
I said, “Arch really thought you were the greatest.”
“I enjoyed him. I like all the kids. With Laura gone, I don’t know if the teachers will be willing to let the students come out here for projects. I’ll miss them. A lot.”
“Did you notice anything strange about Arch? I mean last spring, was he secretive or—”
“No.” Pomeroy waved his hand at me. “We had great talks, he was always very serious about everything. I could see why Laura got such a kick out of him.” Pom gave me a long look with those brown eyes, full of sadness and pity.
My voice was hard. “I’ve been thinking that she shared too much with him. I’m not convinced it was healthy.”
He shrugged. “I loved to talk to Arch, too. Sometimes it was like talking to a little adult. Maybe Laura felt the same way, I don’t know. But I know she and Arch did admire each other.” He paused. “Something else you should know, if you’re worried about your relationship with Arch.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Arch said his mother was pretty tough. He even said one of the reasons he wasn’t cool was that all the kids complained about how bad their mothers’ cooking was, slime and worms and mold and so on. But to be perfectly honest, he would tell me, his mother’s cooking was pretty good.”
And with that shred of good news amidst all the bad, I said goodbye to Pomeroy and smiled all the way down the dirt road through the trees, back toward town.
“Mom, I got the batting,” Arch announced when I strode into our house and banged the door behind me. “I opened the book to the lich illustration, so you can see what I need to look like. I’m going to wear it to the athletic club. Maybe some of the people will think I’m a midget and not a kid.”
I hugged him. “Not likely. Midgets aren’t as neat as eleven-year-olds.”
