Bloodlines

but firmly and cheerfully announces, “Mrs. Harold Appleyard,” as if she could possibly be anyone else. Today, as usual, a dog barked in the background. “Daisy, that will do!” Mrs. Appleyard commanded, then said, evidently to me, “Well, is someone there? I don’t have all day. Speak up !”
    “Mrs. Appleyard, this is Holly Winter,” I said.
    “Holly Winter! I was thinking about your mother just the other day. You know, dear, everyone remembers her.”
    I said that I did, too. Then I got right to the point. “I wondered if you could help with something. This has to do with, uh, rescue. I’m trying to find a man named Walter Simms. I wondered if you’d ever heard of him?” Mrs. Appleyard cleared her throat. “I have indeed,” she said. “I’ve even been out there, but the two of them won’t let me back on the property, and the fact is, it’s an extremely frustrating situation. We find this all the time. We know who these people are, we have a very good idea of what’s going on, and there’s not a thing we can do!”
    “Could you tell me... it’s his sister he lives with?”
    “Cheryl. Walter is perfectly compos mentis, you know, but poor Cheryl simply isn’t all there. It’s a terrible story. The house... Well, you can literally smell it from the road. The mother died five or six years ago, and that’s when things went from bad to worse.”
    “This is in...?”
    “Afton.” Mrs. Appleyard’s a was broad. “It isn’t really in our territory,” she added, meaning the Eleanor J. Colley Humane Society’s, “but it doesn’t really have anyone else, either.”
    “Afton’s somewhere near Westbrook? West?”
    “Northwest. Not too far.”
    “And the Simmses?”
    “Well, from what I can put together, both of the parents drank.” I could hear the creak of a wicker chair as Mrs. Appleyard prepared to settle in for a long story. “But things didn’t go completely to pieces until the mother died. Walter would have been seventeen or so. Cheryl’s about two years his junior. And then, let’s say approximately two years ago, the father took off. The family had had, oh, I suppose they called it a farm, but that’s a glorified term for it. And then, at some point, before the mother died, they got talked into one of these broiler businesses. A chicken farm. Some charlatan sold
    Simms on a get-rich-quick scheme, got him to erect one of these ghastly tin chicken-ranch affairs. Hideous thing. Absolutely enormous. What’s left of it is still there. Well, that little enterprise didn’t last very long.”
    “Is that where the dogs are? In this, uh, chicken coop?”
    “A few of them, I assume, on the first floor. I can’t imagine that there’s anything upstairs. Most of the roof’s gone. I never got close enough to get a look. Cheryl stood right there on the porch of the house with a shotgun in her hand and ordered me off the property.”
    “My God,” I said. “When was this?”
    “Two or three months ago. Three. The beginning of December, I believe it was. It seems that everyone in Afton knew what was going on, but it’s a dreadful little place, really, appalling schools and a tremendous sense that a man’s home is his castle, what one’s neighbor does to his dogs and his children is strictly his own business and all that sort of rot.”
    “So people know, but—”
    “Well, the primary concern is for Cheryl,” Mrs. Appleyard said crisply. “And the authorities are aware of her, and I don’t know how many social service agencies have tried to get involved and do something. That’s how I happen to be familiar with the situation, because one of the social workers finally had the good sense to get in touch with us about the dogs. But now, well, it seems that concern lessened somewhat after the father was out of the picture. There’d been some suspicions about just what was going on there when he was around.”
    “Abuse of some kind?”
    “Neglect, at best,” said Mrs. Appleyard. “What else doesn’t bear contemplation. But then the father packed up his bags and took off, and it was about the same time that Cheryl finished school. So, after that, there was a bit of out-of-sight-out-of-mind operating, and, besides, the father was the focus of the most extreme concern, and that little problem seemed to have cleared itself up nicely. And this Walter, the brother, is obviously a bad hat, but he seems prepared to provide for her, at least in the minimal sense that she’s