Chapter 8 #2
Obviously I couldn’t tell Halder I’d seen him, and I wasn’t sure how to tell Mrs. Kent what had been happening to her chickens.
Your employer is taking them at night without telling you and putting them in a shed that’s supposed to be full of gunpowder.
How did I even start that conversation? How could I explain that I’d been following Halder around at night?
Why should she even believe me? How could I prove it, short of dragging her out to watch with me?
Sally was far too young. I could tell Jackson, but he’d naturally tell his wife.
I could have sworn him to secrecy, I supposed, but going around swearing other woman’s husbands to secrecy and asking them to come lurk in the shrubbery with me at night …
No, that was not a road I wanted to start down.
I would have given a great deal for someone else to confide in.
My friend Esther from the school hadn’t really understood my devotion to science, but she certainly understood secrecy.
We’d covered for each other regularly—me when she had slipped out to visit the synagogue, and her when I snuck out to mail letters to potential employers.
Esther would have understood how bizarre the situation was, and she certainly would never have told Halder.
But Esther was two hundred miles away in Wilmington and I couldn’t think of anyone else to talk to.
Why on earth was Dr. Halder delivering hens to a small shed in the middle of the night? More importantly, who had he been talking to?
My mind seethed with possibilities, most of them bad.
Maybe he was having a secret meeting with someone.
The Klu Klux Klan had been active here for years, even if they were supposed to be as dead as the cougar now.
I could just about believe Phelps was a Klan member, since plenty of the miserable bastards claimed to be religious, and that he and Halder were having a meeting, except that a meeting would take a lot more than five minutes and why would they need a live chicken?
It was possible that he could have been talking to himself.
Plenty of people did. I did it myself, sometimes.
He’d sounded like he was answering someone else, but it had been late and I had been very nervous.
I might have misheard. “Worked a treat” was the sort of thing that you might say when you saw an experiment going well.
An experiment could explain what he was doing. He studied necrophagic insects, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he was laying out a dead chicken to see how long it took maggots to devour it, or even just to collect the insects themselves for his collection.
But why the secrecy? Everyone in the house knew about his work. He could just have ordered Jackson to kill a hen for him and done it in broad daylight. And why put it inside a shed, where it would be harder for the bugs to get at the body?
I rubbed my forehead. A comparison, maybe? Rate of decomposition in a closed space versus outside with more insects? But again, why the secrecy?
I could easily believe that Halder would decide that he had to test a theory right this minute.
Lord knows, Father would occasionally get an idea in the middle of the night, leap out of bed, and start rummaging through herbarium specimens.
Halder was likely no different. And certainly having done so, it might not occur to Halder to tell Mrs. Kent, and leave her baffled as to where her chickens had gone.
But to keep going back at night? And taking even more chickens? Was he feeding something? A colony of dermestid beetles … no, that made no sense, you could feed them just as easily in daylight. Was Halder working with a nocturnal species that fed on carrion?
A large insect had climbed over my hand. It could have been a beetle. Or a moth. Were there any carrion-eating moths? It wouldn’t surprise me, actually; you see butterflies on carrion regularly, licking at salt. If there were necrophagic moths, Halder would be the person keeping them, Lord knows.
I could almost believe that Halder was keeping an insect colony down there, except for the way he kept looking over his shoulder when he went to the shed. He had moved like a man doing something illicit.
What possible illicit acts could you get up to in a shed, with a live chicken? I wondered, and then gave the equivalent of a full-brain cough and had to compose myself for a moment.
Well. All right. Leaving aside certain … err … exotic depravities, that is. I had a hard time picturing specifics, but I will admit that I didn’t try very hard. You cannot grow up among biologists without a certain degree of open-mindedness, but there are hard limits.
Although in fairness, exotic depravities might explain both his reluctance to tell anyone and Phelps warning me away from the shed. But that assumed that Phelps knew what Halder did in the shed. Maybe Phelps had helped him dig the stairs out below?
I saw the Devil in the woods, Miss Wilson … and he was buggering a chicken.
I started giggling so hysterically that I had to shove my hand into my mouth to keep from alerting the house. What the fireflies thought of the shadowy figure making “huh … ahuh … ahaha…” noises, I suppose no one will ever know.
I slipped back into the house and went up to my room. Unanswered questions make an uncomfortable pillow, but at least I’d managed to prove that Halder was doing something strange, even if I had no idea what. I just wished that I didn’t have such a bad feeling about it.
I wished even more strongly that I could tell someone the next morning.
Mrs. Kent had not taken well to the loss of another hen.
She embarked on a savage spree of baking that left Sally and I tiptoeing through a house full of glorious smells and barely contained wrath.
I bolted my breakfast—bacon and toast, not eggs—feeling horribly guilty.
Even if I hadn’t been the one stealing chickens, I knew what the problem was.
I just couldn’t figure out how to tell anyone what I knew.
I snuck down for coffee a little before ten and saw the tray that Mrs. Kent prepared for Halder. The usual poached egg was missing. I wondered if Halder would care. His housekeeper certainly did. Her jaw was so tightly clenched that I was afraid her teeth would splinter.
I lurked in the library, the door open, and eavesdropped shamelessly down the hall.
I couldn’t quite make out what Halder said, but caught the end of Mrs. Kent’s reply. “… Jackson into town to buy some.”
Halder said something else.
“No, sir,” said Mrs. Kent coldly. She sounded angry. Had Halder confessed? I wished I could hear what he was saying. I leaned out of the library doorway, straining my ears.
“… going to stay up with a shotgun tonight. I’m about done with this.”
I gulped. He definitely hadn’t confessed. I inched farther down the hall until I could make out the doctor’s voice.
“Yes … err … quite right,” Halder was saying. He sounded as uncomfortable as I felt. “I’d rather not have anyone shot on the premises, however.”
“Oh, he’ll load it with rock salt,” said Mrs. Kent. “I ain’t looking to murder anybody. Just warning you in case you hear a gunshot.”
“Yes, yes, quite right. Thank you, Mrs. Kent.”
I lunged farther back into the library just in time to avoid being spotted.
My heart pounded and I pressed my hand against my chest. I knew that there are people who enjoy eavesdropping and get a thrill from going through other people’s medicine cabinets, but clearly I was not one of them.
I am really not cut out for all this sneaking around.
I don’t enjoy it at all. Actually, I feel sick.
Judging by Halder’s responses, he wasn’t cut out for sneaking around either. He hadn’t sounded at all like his usual abrasive self. He’d sounded worried. Guilty, even.
But they’re his chickens. He doesn’t need to steal them.
And scientists hardly ever feel ashamed about their work—quite the opposite.
You can’t stop them talking about it. And it’s not like he’d feel guilty for sacrificing a mere chicken in the name of science.
That one colleague of Father’s electrocuted a horse, for god’s sake, trying to prove something or other about alternating current.
So far as I knew, the only branch of science that didn’t eventually wind up experimenting on living things was geology. A chicken was nothing.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, maybe he was committing some kind of unnatural sex acts with the chickens.
No, no. He wouldn’t have had time. Granted I had only a hazy concept of how that would even work, but it would certainly have taken more than two minutes, wouldn’t it?
There’d be cleanup. Anyway it only started in the last week.
The first time you followed him to the shed, he wasn’t carrying livestock of any sort, and based on Mrs. Kent’s reaction, this is a new turn of events.
But if we’ve ruled out sex and science, what else is there? I had lived a fairly sheltered existence in some regards, but as far as basic human motivations went, I could only think of a few. Sex. Science. Money. Power.
I stared down at the tray of pinned insects in front of me without really seeing them. Halder had money, and I had serious doubts that he could increase his fortune by depositing a single chicken in a shed nightly. Same went for power. It just made no sense.
Sighing, I pulled out my sketchbook and set to work on the next round of illustrations.
It was clear that I wasn’t going to solve this mystery any time soon, and at least I could work on earning my daily bread.
Today was another Cuterebra. Halder had three trays of the damn things, one made entirely of C.
emasculator specimens. This discovery had annoyed the hell out of me, given how long I’d struggled with the killing jar and the botfly buzzing against the glass, refusing to die.
No, money and power made no sense as motives for Halder. If he had more money, he’d spend it on dead insects, and he used the power he did have to annoy his assistant.
It was only later that I realized that I’d left off a very important motive, but by then, it was too late to do anything about it.