Past Imperfect (13 page)

XIV

Mia had run only a few hundred yards before she was forced to slow to a walk. Wheezing with every stride, she strove to clear her head and hear her own thoughts over the roar of the blood pounding in her ears.

If she went home and called the sheriff, it would be an hour or more before he could get there. John McIntire would be quicker, but calling the constable from her house was out of the question. The sound of the McIntires' ‘two shorts and a long' at this time of the morning would send every one of the six curious parties on their line scrambling for the phone. The news would spread exponentially until it reached the Culvers themselves, probably in about fifteen minutes. If they had expected Cindy to be on the morning train they wouldn't have to guess twice at the identity of the victim. It was no way to find out your daughter had gotten killed.

She took the path that branched toward McIntire's house. It was not much farther than her own home, but the trail was overgrown from lack of use, and at one point she temporarily lost it. Concentrating on finding her way had a calming effect, and by the time she pounded on the McIntires' kitchen door, the racing of her pulse had slowed and her breathing had returned to near normal. But once inside she began to shake uncontrollably and could only extend the shoe to the robed and rumpled constable. It was several minutes before she was able to give a marginally coherent account of what she had seen.

McIntire roused his wife, who appeared in pincurls and turban, wrapped a coral-colored afghan about Mia's quivering shoulders, and put a kettle of water on the stove preparatory to the brewing of her remedy for every calamity.

He then put through a call to Mark Guibard. The doctor answered brusquely after a dozen rings. McIntire informed him only that there had been a death and asked him to come as quickly as possible to the old ski jump, and to please alert the sheriff's department. Neither the doctor nor Koski had to deal with the infamous party lines. Jeannie Goodrow, who had the job of overnight operator, could generally be relied upon to be reasonably discreet. Nevertheless, McIntire wasn't about to name any names or send the word murder hurtling out over the phone lines.

He dressed in seconds, and, with, “You stay here 'til I get back!” to Mia, was out the door.

The trip to the railroad crossing at St. Adele and along the path to the jump took only a few minutes, but the doctor was already standing in the clearing wringing water from the cuffs of his trousers when McIntire came puffing up the trail.

“I hope this business of dragging me out of bed in the middle of the night isn't going to get to be a habit. I retired to get away from this kind of shit.” Guibard ran his fingers through his uncombed hair, adding to his already uncharacteristically disheveled appearance. “I couldn't get hold of Koski; best I could do was that kid. He's on his way. What the devil's going on here anyway?”

Quickly, without allowing himself to think about what he would find there, McIntire walked around the trees to the underside of the jump. He saw a tangle of wet grass and weeds, but no evidence of either Cindy Culver or any of her worldly goods. He turned, nearly trampling the doctor who'd followed on his heels.

“Mia Thorsen just came to my house. She was the next thing to hysterical, said she saw Cindy Culver here this morning, dead. Strangled, by the sound of things.” He filled Guibard in on the sketchy information he had gotten out of Mia.

“Well, there's nobody here now. You don't suppose Mia was mistaken, the girl was just asleep or something? What the hell was
Mia
doing out here at this time of the morning?”

McIntire hadn't thought about that. “She didn't say,” he answered. “But Mia's not the fanciful type. She was positive that Cindy was dead.” McIntire looked at the broken and flattened ferns. “You can see somebody has been here. Oh-ho! Look at this!” Several streaks of red decorated one of the concrete footings that anchored the jump to the earth. “This look like blood to you?”

The doctor peered closely at the stains. “That it does, John.” He touched a finger to the edge of the blotch. “And recent; it hasn't dried much yet.”

McIntire began searching through the matted weeds. “There's no question about it being recent. It rained pitchforks and paper devils last night.”

“Did it? I didn't notice. Over the years I've learned to sleep soundly when I have the chance.” The doctor looked up at the leaden skies. “But it won't be long before it's coming down again. I'd better get a sample of this while I can. I'll have to risk another of Koski's lectures about not touching a thing until he gives the okay.” He picked up his bag. “By all rights, he should be the one waiting for the go-ahead from
me.”

McIntire looked at his watch. “I just hope he gets here soon.” What could possibly have happened to the body, if it was a body? Maybe Cindy
had
only been unconscious and had come to and wandered off. Please let it be true! In fact, he hardly dared hope that the girl was alive. Mia's description had been graphic and had not left much doubt. Even if she was still living, it was unlikely that anyone could get up and walk away with such injuries. Another possibility—that Mia might have interrupted the murderer and been observed by him—was unthinkable.

Guibard crouched over the bloodstains. “If you want to wait here for Koski,” McIntire told him, “I'll have a look down in the swamp. If I wanted to hide a body that's where I'd go.”

“Maybe Mia was mistaken, and the girl just got up and walked off under her own steam.” Guibard echoed his own prayers. “Shouldn't we check with her family and see if she made it home before we get carried away?”

McIntire pushed aside the thought of informing Cindy's parents of Mia's discovery. “We better just wait for Koski,” he said. “Anyway, if Cindy was on this path, she wasn't headed home.”

He traversed the cleared swath that extended down the precipitous slope, looking for signs that someone else had recently passed this way. He saw none. At the bottom, where the incline leveled off, the open area was dotted with tufts of swamp grass and decomposing stumps amid pools of turbid water. It was bordered on three sides by the desolate cedar swamps. He continued around the edges of the clearing, but saw no indication that anyone else had walked there recently.

He peered into the tangle of vegetation. It would indeed be a perfect spot to conceal a body, but transporting it into that no-man's-land would be arduous, bordering on impossible. It was as if all the detritus of Michigan's forests had been dumped here to slide downhill and rot into the ooze. Living trees, their roots entwined with the downed trunks of their ancestors, twisted over the soggy ground, creating an all but impenetrable barrier. Not a single foot-sized space of solid earth presented itself for the convenience of anyone passing through.

Clutching at the spindly branches of tamarack trees to steady himself, McIntire stepped from pulpy, moss-covered log to slimy exposed root and scrambled a few yards into the thicket before admitting defeat.

As he retraced his steps back to the clearing, he heard voices that he hoped meant that Pete Koski had arrived. He climbed back up the hill as quickly as his fifty-year-old lungs would allow to be greeted by boy deputy Cecil Newman.

“Uncle Pete takes Mondays off,” Newman explained in his piping adolescent voice. “He'll be bass fishin' somewhere. He's real secretive about his spots. So what's the story here?”

The deputy listened while McIntire told him, his baby's bottom cheeks growing more pallid by degrees. “How long ago did this happen?”

“Around six-thirty or thereabouts.” McIntire consulted his watch. “It's almost seven-forty now so it's been over an hour.”

“Quite a lot over an hour!” Newman's voice rose to a squeak. “Why in hell didn't you say that it was homicide? I thought some moron had fallen off the jump. Now you're saying murder! We could have gotten some people out, set up some roadblocks. That body could be in Wisconsin by now! Where's the witness?”

McIntire knew that his reasons for not being more specific on the telephone constituted a pitiful excuse for his short-sightedness and he didn't try to mask it. “She's at my house,” he replied. “My wife is with her,” he added. No need to appear even more incompetent than the pubescent deputy already took him to be. After all, he could hardly have known the body would be gone.

“Well, why don't you get back there and see what she can remember? I'll send somebody to talk to her as soon as I can. Call Pete's wife, and she'll get a deputy to shag him in. She's the only one will know where he is, and she'll be cagey about telling, so you have to make damn sure she knows it's an emergency.” He turned to Guibard. “Can you stay while I get my equipment from the car?” He followed McIntire down the path and sprinted past him, but not before turning back to the doctor one more time. “And don't touch anything!”

XV

By nine-thirty Sheriff Koski himself was on the scene, along with his three deputies and a swarm of volunteer searchers. Among these were Earl and Sandra Culver and two of their older children. They stood apart from the others, a stonefaced clique cloaked in the armor of impassivity. An assortment of hunting dogs had also been pressed into service. Most of these were unleashed and circled one another suspiciously, occasionally expressing their confusion at this off-season call to work with a quick, fierce battle. Koski's own German shepherd, Geronimo, sat aloof at his side, superciliously ignoring the antics of his less experienced cousins.

The searchers had been held off while the sheriff took the time to examine the scene and make a quick circuit of the area in order to give Geronimo the opportunity to pick up the trail of anyone who might have gone off into the woods. It was a futile exercise. At some time that morning either Mia, McIntire, Cecil Newman, or the doctor—who had come in on a shorter path leading from an unused gravel pit—had taken each of the trails leading to the ski jump.

Koski walked over to where McIntire stood under a dripping poplar. “You absolutely sure this wasn't just some figment of that woman's imagination?”

“Positive,” McIntire said. “And there was the blood. I take it you didn't find any sign of her then?”

“No. And once this bunch gets done trampling around out there, we won't.”

“But you're gonna let them go?”

“I got no choice. She could be lying out there somewhere.” He turned and bellowed, “Okay, people, listen!”

He lost no time in dividing the volunteers into groups and detailing areas to be searched. They would concentrate on the tract of land on which they stood and the roads that encircled it. Those searching the woods were instructed to stay in a line, remaining close enough to touch fingertips with the person on either side. An injured girl couldn't have gotten far, but in dense underbrush someone would almost have to trip over her before she would be found. The sheriff huddled briefly with the Culvers for a few private words then whistled to his dog. The two of them trotted down the hillside—Geronimo with his nose to the grass where McIntire had walked that morning—and plunged into the swamp. A contingent of about a dozen men, with Wylie Petworth in the lead, followed him.

McIntire, having neither a rugged appearance nor a fully operational dog, had been assigned to the group whose task it was to walk the surrounding roads, looking for signs that one of the numerous trails and primitive tracks entering the woods had recently been used, or that a vehicle had been concealed. The area, like most of the Upper Peninsula, was honeycombed with abandoned railroad grades and logging roads. They were seldom used in summer, when the abundant insect life and the lack of a season for killing anything legally kept most people out of the woods. If a car had been driven on one of them that morning it should be readily evident.

The threatening rain had not yet materialized, but neither had the sun appeared to dry the effects of the previous night's downpour or eliminate the morning chill.

By midafternoon the roads and the woods that covered the area around the jump and down both sides of the ridge had been thoroughly explored with no results other than a general consensus that the population of partridge was definitely on an upswing. A complete search of the swamps and adjacent slough areas could take days.

When McIntire returned home he found a yard full of vehicles and wet, weary volunteers, human and canine. Leonie was handing out sandwiches, without regard to species of the recipient, from a table set up near the front porch. She poured McIntire a cup of steaming, inky black coffee from an enormous enameled pot and handed him an open bottle of brandy. He added a healthy dollop to his cup and attempted a smile. “So you've finally figured out that tea has its limits. How's Mia?”

“She's inside with the sheriff.” Leonie threw half a tuna on rye to a mud-encrusted spaniel. “She's trying to convince herself she just dreamed the whole thing.”

“Afraid not. We know for sure that Cindy Culver was on that train this morning, and she hasn't turned up. Have Earl and Sandra been here?”

“Just long enough to eat and send one of the boys home to see to the younger children. They wanted to see Mia, but I told them the sheriff wasn't letting her talk to anybody. It's not true, but I don't think she could have faced Sandra today. They went back out again. Nobody could stop them.”

“They're probably better off doing something,” he assured her. “As long as somebody else doesn't get lost. Those woods are like a jungle. I doubt that she's there anyway. It would take a couple of hours to get far enough into the swamp to conceal a body, and anybody gone that long would be missed.” At Leonie's questioning look, he conceded, “I don't believe for a minute that child is still alive. Mia was right. Cindy Culver is dead, and nine chances out of ten the body was carried out to the road. If I'd been doing my job, we could have gotten out early, and there might have been a chance at catching whoever did it.”

“Oh John, don't be an ass. You couldn't know she'd be taken away, and anyway, the murderer had time to be long gone before Mia even got to our house.”

McIntire shrugged and walked up the steps. He was nearly mowed down by Lucy Delaney backing out the screen door with a tray of sandwiches balanced on one arm and a devil's food cake on the other. He made a quick dive for the cake and caught it just before it would have become an unaccustomed delicacy for a pair of vulturous Labrador retrievers. Lucy clutched at his arm with her now free left hand.

“The sheriff wants to talk to me,” she whispered. “Does he think this has something do with Nels? Do you reckon he thinks that David Slocum killed them both?”

Lucy's words probably reflected the unspoken thoughts of the majority of those present, but McIntire wasn't prepared to admit that such a possibility had occurred to him as well.

“He probably just wants to know if you saw anybody this morning,” he replied noncommitally.

“Well I didn't! Why does everybody seem to think I have nothing better to do than spend the mornings spying on my neighbors?” Lucy snapped. She reclaimed her cake and swept down the steps to the lawn, leaving a startled McIntire staring at her broad back.

He found the sheriff and Mia in the downstairs bedroom where his parents had once slept and which Leonie had converted into the “library.” Mia appeared spent. Her shoulders sagged, and her face had taken on a hue hardly differentiated from the misty gray of her hair, but she had regained her composure and was just completing her story when McIntire entered.

Koski motioned to him to sit down and continued to prod Mia's memory. “Tell me one more time, what was she wearing?”

Mia put her elbows on her knees and rested her forehead in her hands for a long moment. When she spoke, it was in the robot-like voice of one who had repeated the same words many times. “She had a coat on, a long sort of a raincoat. It was half pulled off, and underneath she was wearing a dress. It was a dressy type material, silk or something that looked like silk. It was a bright turquoise color and had beads around the neckline. Her clothes were pulled every which way and wet from the grass. She had on nylon stockings—they were all ripped up—and canvas tennis shoes. One tennis shoe.” Her voice dropped so she could barely be heard. “She had her toenails painted.”

“What else do you remember seeing on the ground besides the other shoe?”

“The handbag was lying in the grass, but the strap was still around her arm. It was flat so you could tell it was empty or close to it. It was good sized, a tan color, made of a kind of soft leather, expensive, I should think. There was another shoe—I mean a different kind, not the mate to this one.” She indicated the canvas oxford on the coffee table. “More dressy, a sort of high-heeled sandal. White, too.” She closed her eyes and pressed the tips of her fingers against her forehead. “A handkerchief, a gold colored compact, and a silk scarf, turquoise like the dress. It was folded up. That's all I remember.…No,” she added suddenly. “There was a book.”

“I don't suppose you noticed the title?” Koski asked.

“Not that kind of book,” Mia explained. “It was a little book, like for addresses. No, bigger, about yay….” She made a rectangle with her thumbs and forefingers. “A date book or diary maybe. I really can't remember anymore. Can't I go now? Nick will be home soon.”

“In a minute,” Koski assured her. “Do you want some coffee or something to eat?”

Mia shook her head. “Leonie's already poured me full of tea.”

“Are you sure,” the sheriff continued, “that you didn't hear anything Cindy or the person with her said?”

“I couldn't make out any of it. It was just two voices.”

“But you're sure one was male?”

“It was a low voice. It sounded like a man to me. But I might have just assumed it would be a man that Cindy was meeting.” Mia was silent for awhile. “The way she giggled…it must have been a man.”

“And it must have been someone she knew,” Koski said.

McIntire entered the conversation for the first time. “Don't be too sure. I suspect Cindy Culver could get on giggling terms in no time at all.”

He didn't know if the shock that registered on the faces of Mia and the sheriff was occasioned by his irreverence toward the dead or by the abrupt entrance of a wild-eyed Nick Thorsen.

The appearance of her husband brought about a remarkable transformation in Mia. The haggard lines of her face were replaced by a thin smile of resigned determination. She got to her feet, lifted her narrow shoulders, put her arm around Nick's waist, and led him out the door.

The sheriff also stood up, closed the door on the Thorsens' retreating backs, and beckoned McIntire to his side. “More good news, John,” he said, “I got the results back on the stuff in that vial.”

McIntire knew he could wait until Christmas for Koski to tell him those results without his asking. He was beginning to understand the frustrations suffered by Cecil Newman. “What was it?”

“Nicotine, enough to drop a horse.”

His expectations had not prepared him for the shock he felt at hearing the truth. He reached back to the nearby desk for support. “You mean from tobacco? The killer could have made it from cigarettes or something?”

“He could have, I suppose, but he didn't. It was an insecticide, nicotine sulphate, forty percent nicotine. Extremely toxic and extremely common. Probably most of the farmers and half the gardeners around here have some. We'll need to get an order to exhume the body.” He gave a John Wayne-sized sigh. “I might as well send these people home. The state police will be here in the morning. They'll be in heaven when they find out we've got two murders to play with. We'll be getting as much respect as Detroit…Oh, and they're bringing in Florida Mowsers.”

McIntire stared at him. “What the hell are they, some sort of a weapon? What are they planning to do with 'em?”

“It's not a what, it's a who. He's a tracker—or not so much a tracker as a finder. He's got dogs that could sniff out a grain of salt in the Sahara desert. If that girl's lying out in the woods somewhere, he'll find her…and I'd damn well like to get to her before the crows and turkey buzzards do.”