Past Imperfect (11 page)

XII

The cat was indeed out of the bag and had prowled over a remarkably large area in record time.

Upon accompanying Leonie to church Sunday morning, McIntire wondered if St. Adele might have been visited by some sort of divine presence, bringing about an attack of mass piety among its residents. After the services he found himself surrounded by townspeople, some skeptical, some outraged, some eager to give advice, but all consumed by a curiosity that he was in no way able to satisfy. He disentangled himself as soon as courtesy permitted. Leaving Leonie to join that hotbed of civic responsibility, the Ladies Aid, at their meeting to plan the town's upcoming Independence Day festivities, he walked the quarter-mile home. There he wasted no time in pulling on two pairs of wool socks and struggling into hip boots. He donned his father's ancient hat, complete with a few bedraggled trout flies stuck in its brim, picked up his fly rod, and struck out along the path that ran past the unoccupied barn and into the woods.

As promised, Pete Koski had interviewed the Lindstroms as well as the two other teams of commercial fishermen based in Huron Bay. He had informed McIntire of his findings, or lack of them, the night before over bottled beer at the Waterfront Tavern.

“If any of them was up to any skullduggery the others would know about it, and I don't think they would protect a murderer in their midst,” he had said. “Those guys are living in each other's pockets from four o'clock in the morning until way after dark. They fish pretty far out in the lake this time of year, and when they get back they still have to clean the fish and pack them in ice and get them into Chandler in time for the overnight train to Chicago. There's sure as hell no time in their day for sneaking off to harvest bugs. And they've all got families; they couldn't go roaming around in the middle of the night without somebody catching on, even if they did have the energy. It was all I could do just to keep old Simon awake long enough to answer my questions.

“And it doesn't sound like anybody had a real motive. None of them would admit to disliking Bertelsen. They just said he was kind of picky, and thought pretty much of himself with that big fancy tug, which, in my experience, is not something people generally get killed for. Unless,” he'd ruminated, “it started out as a practical joke, in which case they might all have been in it together.”

“What about Jonas Lindstrom?” McIntire had asked. “Nels might not have been easy for a kid to work with. Considering how he treated David…”

“Jonas didn't have any complaints. Well, Jonas didn't say much of anything, but he's worked for Bertelsen since he was twelve. They must have gotten along reasonably well. I don't suppose Nels could have afforded to take on a grown man for a partner.”

At this point Koski had wandered off for a bout with the pinball machine, returning triumphant in a few minutes with two more bottles of Pabst.

“Bertelsen usually left Jonas to clean things up while he took the fish into town,” he continued. “When he got back he'd take the kid home. Jonas says Nels always made sure the boat was shut up tight before they left, but he didn't lock it. Anybody could have gotten in at night. Jonas himself was there alone every night for at least an hour or two. Sometimes he fell asleep before Nels got back, and Nels would just leave him there. He'd have had to be back by four o'clock or so the next morning anyway.”

McIntire told him about his conversation with Nick Thorsen, mentioning that the mailman had been out late the night that Nels died.

“Yeah, I guess there was quite a wingding in here that night, the Touminen twins' birthday. You hear?”

McIntire shook his head.

“Probably went on long after closing hours,” Koski said, “but I'd be the last one to hear about that. Fritz says he was up mopping floors most of the night, and he didn't hear anybody drive by, but somebody sneaking onto Bertelsen's boat wouldn't be liable to advertise it; they'd have taken the back way. Otto Wilke says he heard some kind of commotion on the road in front of his place in the wee hours. His dogs went crazy, he says. When he looked out he didn't see anything but car lights moving away.”

So it looked like another dead end. McIntire twisted the neck of his bottle with both hands, like he was wringing the neck of a chicken. The bottle stayed intact. He'd never been much of a hand at killing chickens either.

“Thanks for checking anyway,” he told the sheriff, “and for not treating me like the hysteric that people around here seem to take me for. Damn! I just can't believe this is all coincidence…and he died so
fast
. He didn't look like somebody who'd spent fifteen minutes choking to death. It was murder. I know it, and I know we don't have a snowball's chance in hell of proving it.”

The sheriff's expression didn't change except for a slight lift of his eyebrows. “Don't be so ready to throw in the towel. I did get a
little
something out of Jonas.”

“What? Why didn't you say so? What was it?”

“A very small brown bottle. It had a rubber cork in the top. Jonas picked it up off the deck of the
Frelser
, he said. Just stuck it in his pocket and forgot all about it until I asked if he'd seen it.”

“The medication! Was there anything in it? Could you tell what it was?”

“Keep your shirt on! You're starting to sound like Newman. It was about half full of some kind of liquid. That's all I can say. I didn't open it, so I don't know what color it was or anything. The bottle smelled sort of fishy, but I guess that's to be expected. Everything around Jonas Lindstrom smelled fishy.”

“Guibard should be able to tell if it really is adrenaline.”

“Guibard? Shit! Maybe we could just feed it to a chipmunk and see if it dies. This is the twentieth century, John. I've sent it to Lansing to be analyzed. And in answer to your next question, I don't know how long it'll take. It depends on how complicated the testing turns out to be.”

“Actually, I was going to ask about fingerprints.”

“There weren't any decent prints on it.” The sheriff picked up his beer. “You might well be right, John,” he acknowledged. “I gotta admit it sounds like those bees didn't get where they were by accident, and when we find out what Nels squirted into himself, we'll know for sure. But we still might not have any way of proving who did it.” He had then drained his bottle, and with a bleak, “This place sure ain't the same without your old man,” headed for the door.

McIntire had stayed where he was, thoughtfully sipping his beer, trying not to make unpatriotic comparisons with that brewed on the other side of the Atlantic. Too late, he noticed the impending approach of the sagacious Arnie Johnson and reconciled himself to spending the remainder of the evening receiving the benefit of some small part of Arnie's vast store of Useful Lore and Fascinating Information. He was rescued from this fate by the arrival of Wylie Petworth, fresh from demonstrating his prowess at darts to a pair of poorer but wiser young strangers—probably some of those uranium prospectors that Koski had mentioned. Wylie slid into the booth and wiped his stump of arm across the table, using the folded excess flannel of his sleeve to erase the damp circles left by Koski's bottle. He fixed a gloomy stare on McIntire's face. “Well, Mac, don't see you here too often. I imagine it's hard to see the old place in the hands of strangers, eh?”

In fact, McIntire's only vivid memories of “the old place” were of the hours he spent behind the bar, up to his elbows in a basin of soapy water, while his father, equally facile with tongue or fists, deftly orchestrated the evening's drama of conflict and catharsis with a cast of unpredictable loggers and miners. He felt no nostalgia for those days. Sitting back and being served by Fritz or Hilda Ellman was fine with him. But he did sense Colin McIntire's presence here in a way that he experienced in no other place.

“Any sign of Davy yet?” Wylie asked. “I could sure use that kid now. I haven't really had much get-up-and-go these last few days, myself. You don't suppose something really has happened to him?”

“Well, we haven't found his car, and there haven't been any accidents reported. Dorothy says he took your Buick into town Sunday morning.”

“To pick up Paulson, yeah. But he got back okay. He could have gone to see that girl when he was there. Maybe this has something to do with her.”

“Actually, I did talk to her. She claims not to have seen him since last fall.”

“Well,” Wylie responded, “she wouldn't be the first female to be less than candid where her love life is concerned.”

“Unlike us forthright males, you mean?”

Wylie's smile was evanescent, and McIntire experienced a fleeting recollection of a flushed and laughing Ragna Petworth executing a brisk polka around the kitchen table in the arms of her red-haired husband.

Was it possible that Wylie still felt the pain of his mother's desertion? Was it even possible that her duplicity played a role in her son's present solitary state?

When you got right down to it, both Ragna and Roger Petworth had voluntarily abandoned their small son. His grandparents had barely lived long enough to see him fully grown. He had no family and few close friends. It was not surprising that he was taking Nels Bertelsen's death so hard.

McIntire had then signaled to Fritz and settled in for a long evening of reminiscing, an evening that left him with a heavy head, but for the first time since his return, a comfortable feeling of belonging.

He stepped over a reclining barbed wire fence. Ten minutes of fast walking later he was standing knee deep in a stream of icy water casting his line and watching the fly being carried rapidly back towards him.

Ten thousand years had passed since the creek in which he waded and the gorge through which it flowed had been left behind in the wake of retreating glacial ice. Stunted and twisted cedars projected at odd angles from the sides of the ravine, defying gravity and cutting off what sunlight might have otherwise penetrated here. Mosquitoes and blackflies battled for their share of any flesh McIntire had left exposed. He began a slow progression downstream, alternately casting and swatting as he trod cautiously on the slippery stones of the creek bed.

It was here that he felt that he had finally found that for which he had returned. Oh, not the fishing—there was plenty of that in Scotland—but for the sense of peace and…
completeness
that he experienced in these isolated pockets of wildness that had remained unchanged since his childhood and for an eon before. He stood nearly motionless in the mid-day twilight and flipped the fly through the air. No sound broke the silence save the gurgling rush of water over stone and the soft buzz of the line past his ear.

While still in England he had done his best to communicate this beauty and serenity to Leonie. She had listened patiently for hours while he rhapsodized on the splendor of his birthplace—the awesome power of Superior, that greatest of all inland lakes with icy waters clear as glass; the steep jagged cliffs overlooking streams and waterfalls filled with leaping trout; the forests with their sheltering groves of spruce and hemlock and cedar; and especially the great pines, hundreds of years old, that towered over the occasional house or barn where they had by some miracle of oversight not fallen prey to the voracious appetite of the mills. He told her about the Huron Mountains, dark and brooding hills where no human lived. He'd described the months of stillness, when all the land was muffled in white and in the mornings the lake steamed like a giant's cauldron until the final weeks of winter when it, too, was imprisoned in ice.

In an attempt to be perfectly fair, he had also cautioned her that winter came early and generally outstayed its welcome, bringing with it temperatures as low as forty below and snow to the rooftops. Despite his warnings, she had agreed to the move almost too readily, leaving McIntire grateful but with a niggling at his conscience that he had persuaded her into an action she would regret when actually faced with the solitude, forced inactivity, and bonechilling cold of a Northern Michigan winter.

He was only slightly off the mark. By the middle of January, John McIntire, child of the boreal forest, could feel his joints slowly freezing into immobility. He was sick to the core of shoveling snow and coal, and desperately bored. But he needed have no anxiety about Leonie's ability to create for herself an active social life anywhere on this earth, and probably elsewhere. She had joined every association and club in the county and, when she felt things getting slow, had started a few of her own. And she basked in the warmth of central heating, a luxury she had heretofore never known.

She was, however, singularly oppressed by what she called the pall that was cast by the shadows of the precious evergreens, in much the same way McIntire's father had been. She had openly rejoiced, as Colin would have, when a late fall windstorm laid claim to a forty-foot white spruce that stood near their kitchen door. She even went so far as to suggest that only luck had kept the tree from falling onto the house, and perhaps the remaining large conifers in the yard should be removed to prevent future disasters. McIntire had been secretly amused at this suggestion, but he took care not to let Leonie see it. He well understood that after spending the war years in London, his wife's fear of her home crashing down upon her was not something to belittle.

Leonie seldom talked about the past, but McIntire was convinced that the promise of escape from the memories of violence and tragedy wrought by two world wars, each of which had cost her a husband, was the major factor in her acquiescence to his plea that she leave her lifelong home, and her daughters and grandchildren, to return with him to Michigan—that and the opportunity of getting a little closer to Texas.

On their wedding day Leonie had said that she didn't give a damn about “love, honor or obey.” She only wanted his oath, preferably in blood, that he wouldn't die anytime soon. So far he'd kept that promise, but he wasn't sure he had been completely honorable in his other dealings with her.