Chapter Seven

posted by Cynthea McCoy -

A couple of weeks after he dumped the bones in Sheriff Sweet’s lap, Harlan came home with the newspaper, “Look at this,” he said, pointing at Susie’s column. “Rita Budreau is planning to have her DNA matched to the bones.”
 
     “It makes sense,” I said. “How did your visit with Deputy Hinterteil turn out?”
 
     “I told him a migrant worker found the bones.”
 
     “You’re kidding. Why did you do that?”
 
     “They weren’t going to leave me alone, threatened to charge me with disturbing a crime scene.” Harlan tossed his cap on the table and ran a hand over his forehead and through his hair. It was plain, he was disgusted.
 
     “Don’t you think they are going to figure out it’s not true?”
 
     “I just told them the man left the County and I don’t know where he is. Hinterteil doesn’t want to arrest me. Wilbur County doesn’t have the money to waste prosecuting me and I’m pretty sure he’s glad to have such an easy excuse not to.”
 
     Harlan turned out to be right. There wasn’t any more talk of charging him. A migrant worker was pretty nameless and faceless and easy to use. It left a sour taste in my mouth at how casually Harlan seemed to have used a Latino, real or not, to cover his tracks or the tracks of someone he was protecting. My people, I was thinking, you are using my people. Though to tell the truth my knowledge of “my people” was pretty vague.
 
     “What do you know about Charles LaFontaine?” I asked him. “Sit down here. I’ll rub your back.”
 
     Harlan sat down at the kitchen table and I stood behind him rubbing his neck and shoulders, working at the knotted up muscles. “From what I’ve been told Charles Sevigney LaFontaine showed up in Germaine about a year after the end of the war. Some say his car broke down and he only meant to stay here long enough to get it fixed. They say he was a fine musician who played the saxophone with some of the locals. He was the father of Rochelle LaFontaine. They say he disappeared the night she was born. Just vanished. Everybody thought he didn’t want to take responsibility. Just took off like a lot of deadbeat dads.”
 
     “I think I heard Faith Applegate talking to Susie and one of Rita’s daughters,” I said. “She said he was afraid of what would happen when the town found out that Faith’s baby was his. I’m pretty sure it was Faith. Do you know what she looks like?”
 
     “Like a damn queen,” Harlan laughed. “I always liked Faith Applegate, don’t get me wrong, but the woman carries herself like she is somebody and she has a way of looking right through you. All of us kids were a little afraid of her growing up. Nobody dared give Rochelle a hard time if Faith was anywhere around. Not that I would have, you know. There’s some that would and some that did.”
 
     I worked my thumb beneath Harlan’s shoulder blade and he gave a sigh. “What kind of hard time? Did they tease her for being Black?”
 
     “Doesn’t take a psychic to come up with that,” he said and gave me a strange humorless smile. “On top of that particular accident of birth, she was illegitimate.”
 
     “Like me,” I said lightly.
 
     He pulled me down into his lap and kissed me. “Like you. And she was beautiful, like you. She was the most beautiful girl at Old Paiute High. That made her popular on the surface, but jealousy and prejudice are an ugly combo. The thing that kept it all in check was the fact that she was Miss Germaine and had been since she was about nine years old.”
 
     “Miss Germaine?” In the years I’d been in Germaine I had never heard of anyone referred to as Miss Germaine.
 
     “The Seer of Germaine. That’s a weird thing that the Daughters of Germaine do. They claim that every generation there is a little girl who carries on the vision of Germaine Van Bibber. The girl has to be a descendant of one of the founders of the town and has to prove that she has prophetic visions like Little Germaine had.”
 
     “Oh, that’s just weird.”
 
     “Weird or not it likely saved Rochelle from a lot of grief. Any of the old families who might have been feeding their children a lot of shit about race, had to accept Rochelle and pretty much keep their mouths shut. There isn’t a Miss Germaine now. Maybe the Daughters don’t believe in it anymore.”
 
     “What happened to her, to Rochelle?” I asked. I hadn’t been out on that road with Faith, yet, and many of the local stories and myths ran underground still too far for me to reach, but I felt like I knew that something terrible happened to her.
 
     Harlan hesitated before he spoke. “Some memories,” he said and stopped. He gave a little shrug of his shoulders as if to toss off something he didn’t want to carry. “She died,” he said. “Car accident.” That was it. That was all he was going to say.