The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

Ma was already home when they got there. She was sitting by the table, reading a magazine and listening to the radio, same as always, but she seemed different. It had something to do with her having been someplace without them. She knew about things they hadn't seen. Claire couldn't put her finger on it, but it seemed like Ma'd been gone a month instead of only two nights. She seemed more her old self when she folded the magazine down the middle and flipped it over. “You've been cleaning, I see. It looks good.”

Claire put the box that had her and Joey's clothes in it on the floor. “It should look this way all the time.”

“Maybe not quite
all
the time. We'd be picking up constantly.”

“Other people manage.”

She didn't answer that, and Claire felt kind of ashamed. Ma was just home from the hospital, and she was sick, and here Claire was, already nagging at her about the mess. Sometimes Claire couldn't help it. She knew she was being mean, but she just couldn't stop.

Joey came in with Mia Thorsen. He stood by Ma and leaned against her knee.

Mia Thorsen put the sack she was carrying on the table. “It's just some bread and macaroni salad. You won't have to bother with cooking dinner. How are you feeling?”

“Thank you, that's very kind of you. I'm feeling much better.” Ma was using her company voice again. “And thank you so much for looking after Claire and Joey.”

“It was a pleasure having them,” Mia Thorsen said.

The nice words made tears burn in Claire's eyes, and she felt stupid. She kept her back to them all and took the pail out to the pump to get water for coffee.

Mia Thorsen let Claire make the coffee without butting in. Maybe she remembered what Claire said about Sister being bossy. Or maybe she just didn't think that making herself at home in somebody else's kitchen was polite. But she got a knife from the drawer without asking. She cut some of the bread and put it in the toaster.

It was a new toaster; Ma got it with green stamps. Claire wondered if Mrs. Thorsen would know how to use it. The toast didn't pop up by itself when it was done like it did with the Thorsens' toaster. You had to open it up and turn the bread around. It worked better than using a pan in the oven, but you could only do two slices at a time, so it was slow. Store-bought bread was better for toast.

Ma laughed when she heard about Father Doucet milking Opal. “Last run-in he had with Opal, she threw quite a scare into him.”

“Is that right?” Mrs. Thorsen started spreading butter on the toast. “He looked like an old hand—an ‘old cow hand from the Rio Grande'—when he came over yesterday.”

“Oh,” Ma said, “It wasn't much of anything. She just mooed in his face and gave him a start.” Then she looked at Claire. “I thought you'd be able to do the milking.”

She'd been itching to tell about it, but now she wasn't sure how. “I couldn't. I mean, I
was
milking, but than a burglar came.”

“A burglar?” Ma looked at Mrs. Thorsen.

“Claire,” Mrs. Thorsen said, “maybe you'd better check to see if anybody milked your cow this morning, and,” she looked at Joey, “you can collect the eggs. Do you know how to do that?”

She wanted to get rid of them, which was nothing new, but this time Claire couldn't figure out why. After all, she knew all about the burglar; she was the one who'd been here when he came, for Pete's sake. She felt like she might start bawling again. She went to the cellar to skim some cream off last night's milk. The can was full, so Father Doucet, or somebody, must have milked Opal that morning.

When she came back up, Joey had already gone out to pick the eggs. Then he'd head for his regular spot with his regular stupid rocks and scraps of wood. Mrs. Thorsen would get to tell all about the burglar, and she hadn't even been there.

Claire went outside too, but then circled around to go in the back door up to her bedroom. The boy's room was still a mess, because Claire didn't have time to straighten it up herself, and she was way too ashamed to let Mrs. Thorsen upstairs. Jake and Sam would probably like seeing what the burglar did, anyway, so they could brag about it.

Some of the pages had been ripped right out of
The Eagle's Mate.
She laid the book on the bed and set to work putting them back in the right place. The one with the picture of Anemone standing by a big fireplace was first. Anemone had messy hair and eyes that were put in with “the dirty finger of beauty.” Claire's hair got snarled, too, and her eyes had purple bags under them, but it didn't look beautiful.

She couldn't stop thinking about if the sheriff had caught the burglar yet. When he did, he was going to find out about the gun, and know they all lied. But maybe the burglar was a killer, too, and it would be better to catch him. Claire was starting to wish she hadn't panicked and lied about the car. When she said it was black or dark blue, she was thinking that it was really red. Now she couldn't remember for sure what color it was. That was the problem with lying. Sometimes you forgot what the truth was and started to believe your own self.

Ma hadn't told the whole story about Father Doucet and the cow, either, but Claire knew why. When they first bought Opal, Father went to have a look at her, and she walked right up to him and let out a long sad moo, right in his face. Father jumped like a scared rabbit. Then he laughed and said when he was a little boy, his grandmother was very superstitious. She believed in all kinds of signs that told the future, and she called them ‘advertisements.' She said a cow mooing at you was an advertisement that somebody in your family was going to die. That's why Ma stopped telling the story. Of course it wasn't somebody in Father Doucet's family that died, but it still gave you the creeps to think about it.

Father Doucet said he wasn't worried, because everybody in his family was already dead, except for his Great Uncle Sal, who was ninety-seven years old, and he didn't need a cow to tell him Sal couldn't last much longer.

Chapter Thirty-two

McIntire was beginning to feel like a vampire, prowling by night, falling asleep at sunup. At least today he was up before ten—by about four minutes. Leonie, who, like Beau Brummel, preferred her mornings well-aired, would be proud.

The cool front that had brought the rain stuck around, and he was grateful for it. It made sleeping in one's clothing a tad more comfortable.

It also made thinking marginally less painful. McIntire couldn't get past the idea that finding the murderer shouldn't be so difficult: A shot to the head from the edge of a field by a killer who had access to that field and knew Hofer would be there. Of course strangely carved stones and long-dead hands complicated things. Where in hell would somebody have dug up the artifact and the hand that held it.

Maybe Greg Carlson could tell him that. He'd do Koski a favor and fetch the professor himself. Even if the guy hadn't had the decency to stop in to say hello.

He'd have to call Koski to let him know that he was going, which meant he'd want to keep that call confidential, which gave him an excuse to beg Mark Guibard for the use of his private line, and, to complete the ingenious thought, get the chance to glean whatever information he could from the doctor.

He remembered to pump some fresh water for the horses before he left, and to leave Kelpie outdoors.

***

Marian Koski oozed such sympathy over Leonie's defection that McIntire wondered if she might have heard something he hadn't. McIntire gave his message and assured her that, the next time he went to town, he'd drop in for dinner.

He put the phone on its cradle and turned to Mark Guibard who had amassed an arsenal of equipment preparatory to forcing the wrinkles out of a pile of neatly rolled, dazzlingly white, shirts. “Many thanks.”

“Don't mention it, except maybe in the process of telling me what the hell that was all about.”

McIntire told him.

“In a human hand?”

“Human hand bones. A skeleton hand, all wired together and bent so it could hold the…whatever it is.”

“That sort of adds a new dimension to things.”

It did, McIntire agreed, “But I can't figure how it might be connected to the murder.”

Guibard frowned, touched his forefinger daintily to his tongue, and tapped the bottom of his iron. It apparently wasn't to his liking; he sighed and turned the dial before commenting, “It would seem damned odd if it wasn't.”

That was hard to argue with, too. “Could somebody be after the whole family? It seems like the only point in leaving the bones could be to scare them, but why?”

“Could be it's some lunatic,” Guibard said, “except that we're thoroughly familiar with all our village idiots. If we had one given to leaving body parts around, we'd know it. There's nobody new except the Hofers. Anyway, it's a good thing you found it before Mrs. Hofer or one of the kids did.”

“Yes,” McIntire said. “It would have been some great welcome. Speaking of which, will she be getting out today?”

“I took her home this morning.”

That put the kibosh on any chance McIntire'd have to extract information from the little boy. He could try the doctor, although he was only marginally less close mouthed than Father Adrien was likely to be. “Mark,” he ventured, “according to his sister, Reuben Hofer was a ‘harsh man.' Do you by any chance know how harsh?”

“Did he beat his wife, do you mean?”

“Or his kids.”

The doctor unrolled a dampened shirt and applied the iron to its stiffly starched collar with surgical precision. “I didn't see Reuben often. Whenever I was at the house, he was mostly outdoors working somewhere, and I only talked to him more than just to say hello once or twice. I couldn't help but get the idea that he was almost intimidated by his wife. Maybe that's why he stayed out of the house.” He leaned on the iron with both hands. “But the kids? I've no idea. He sure managed to keep them in line one way or the other. He kept the whole bunch on a rigid schedule every minute of the day, and night, too. He looked like the type to subscribe to the spare the rod and spoil the kid philosophy, but maybe that's just my bias showing. Even if he did administer a whack or two, I wouldn't call it a motive for patricide, if that's what you've got on your mind. If it was, half the men in the county'd get bullets to the head.”

“But it could be a motive for husbandicide. Mary Frances wouldn't want to die and leave her children at his mercy.”

“Mary Frances did not tippy-toe out to that field and blast her husband into the next world. I can guarantee you that!”

“She doesn't seem to be sorry he's in that next world.”

“I imagine she's ecstatic. Why the hell shouldn't she be? He only hung around long enough to get her pregnant and turn their home into a boot camp. She wasn't afraid of him, and she didn't hate him, but she was realistic enough to know that those kids would have a miserable existence without her around to protect them.”

Which sounded like a half-decent motive for murder to McIntire, and when there's a homicide, the first place to look was at those who had the most reason to want the victim out of the way. As a general rule that was right at home. But Guibard was right; Mrs. Hofer hadn't done the shooting herself, and probably wouldn't know where to hire an assassin or have the money to pay one.

There could be others with good reason to have wanted Hofer dead.

He thanked the doctor again, even though he'd not learned much more than the secret to his relentlessly crisp appearance.

Chapter Thirty-three

“Burglar?” Mary Frances wheezed out the word again.

“Didn't the sheriff tell you?”

“I haven't seen him.”

It shouldn't be up to Mia to tell the story. But it wasn't Mia's responsibility to keep it from her either. If Koski wanted to be the first to let her know, he could have done it by now.

“It's all right,” she began. “Nothing was stolen, but someone came into your house Thursday night.” She hesitated before admitting her own negligence. “Claire had come back to milk the cow. She was in the barn when they came, and she ended up hiding in the hay mow all night.”

Mary Frances Hofer's face reflected a horror that Mia was rapidly beginning to feel. What kind of idiot was she to tell a woman with a badly failing heart that her daughter had spent a night of terror hiding from intruders? Chatting about it over coffee, like it was the latest gossip. What would she do if Mrs. Hofer fainted or even had a heart attack? If she ended up on the floor, Mia would never get her up. She scrambled for water, saw no glass, and held the dipper to her hostess' lips.

“I'm all right.” Mrs. Hofer closed her eyes and let out a puff of air. She grasped the dipper in both hands and took a small sip. “Thank you.” She handed it back.

“I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have said—“

”Of course you should have.” She waved her incongruously dainty hand. “I hardly think you should keep it from me! Who was it?”

Mia shrugged and shook her head. The rest of the story didn't take long to tell. Whatever had happened last night, involving bones and stones and Pete Koski, she didn't know the details of, and didn't mention.

“Ransacked? But why?” Her agitation gone, Mrs. Hofer seemed unconcerned about what trauma her daughter might have suffered.

“Who knows? Is there something they could have wanted to steal? Something specific that they expected to be hidden, maybe?” It sounded ridiculous when Mia said it aloud. Mrs. Hofer apparently thought so, too.

“Now what do you think?” she asked. “We have nothing worth stealing. What reason could anybody possible have for ransacking this house?”

“Maybe some acquaintance of your late husband?”

“You mean that woman that was here? I hardly think—”

Mia also hardly thought the mess could have been the work of Wanda Greely. “There could be others,” she said. “For sure your husband would have met a fair number people during his time here. Did he ever mention anybody? Maybe somebody he'd gotten into some sort of tiff with?”

“My husband never mentioned a soul. During most of our marriage, I barely saw him. He was home long enough to give me four children, and that's about it.” She glowered, daring Mia to contradict her. “They were gifts I'll always be grateful for.” The scowl might have been meant for her husband; she went on, “He left us to fend for ourselves. He had a choice. He could have gone into the service as a non-combatant—a medic or something. He'd have been paid, and the boys and I would have gotten an allotment. We'd have been taken care of. There was no support for families of conscientious objectors. Reuben was paid five dollars a month, and he was expected to pay thirty-five for his keep.” She repeated, “He could have gone into the service.”

“And your other two children might not have been born,” Mia reminded her.

“No, probably not. But he had no right to have those children, desert them, and then come back expecting them to work night and day for him.” Her resentment brought some substance to her thin voice. “He hated that we managed to get along without him, but he was never bothered enough to stay and take care of us.”

“How
did
you get along? Alone, with four children to feed and clothe?”

“Oh well, I wasn't completely alone. We lived with my father. In the last few years before he died. That mostly just gave me another person to care for, but we always had a roof over our heads.”

Mia and Nick had lived with Mia's father, too. Her father had died suddenly, giving her no chance to nurse him, or even say goodbye. Well, she'd have her chance with Nick.

Like her children, once Mary Frances got started, she didn't stop. “Reuben was starting his second year of college when we met. He had to quit when we got married, of course. He wasn't doing well, anyway. He was smart, but he'd never been to a real school, his English wasn't so good, and there was too much he simply didn't know.”

“It must have taken some courage for your husband to try at all.”

“If there was one thing Reuben didn't lack, it was courage. It was a shame that he had to quit school, and of course that was partly my fault, but he never blamed me.” She took a long drink of the water. “My father was getting older and needed help running the farm, so Reuben moved in. There were no jobs then, anyway. We didn't have any money, but, like I said, we had a roof over our heads, and we had enough to eat, which was more than a lot of people could say. Reuben wasn't so happy about living off my father, even if he did do all the work, and it was really more that my father lived off him. You'd think it wouldn't have bothered him. He was used to the generations together.”

“Maybe it was too much like home,” Mia offered.

“Maybe,” Mary Frances agreed. “Anyway, as soon as he could, he went off and got a job at a meat packing plant in Des Moines. Then he was drafted, and the rest I imagine you know.”

Mia nodded. “That was that. We never knew what was around the next corner, so I stayed on my father's farm. He was good with the boys. They had to work hard, but no more than the usual for farm kids. We managed. “Reuben came when he could, I guess. During the war, that wasn't very often. He wasn't ever home long enough to…fit in, you know? And he was like a stranger to the kids, in Des Moines most of the time when Jake and Sam were small. Claire was barely a year old when Reuben was drafted, and after that he was hardly home at all.”

Mia wasn't sure if she should bring it up, but Mary Frances seemed in the mood to talk. “When did your health start to…?”

She smiled, “Deteriorate? I hadn't felt very well for a long time, not for years, really, but I started getting worse after the boys were born. My father was providing us with a home, and I didn't like to ask him for money for the doctor, and mostly I just felt tired. Then I began putting on weight like nobody's business. I had always been on the plump side, but nothing like now. No matter how little I ate, I just seemed to keep gaining, and I was too exhausted to do anything to work it off. The heavier I got, the more tired I got. Just staying awake was a chore.”

“How awful, and to have so many people depending on you.” Mary Frances would have been a young woman then. She was still a young woman, at least ten years younger than Mia.

“Then my hair started to fall out, and I noticed I was losing my hearing, so I knew something was definitely wrong. I went to the doctor. He told me it was just nerves, I should lose some weight, and I'd be fine, when my husband got home.”

“Naturally.” Mia wondered how may women ended up dying of their “nerves.”

“Not long after that, Reuben got out of prison, and he came back for good.”

Or for bad. Mia poured more coffee.

“My father had died a few months before. Dad owned the farm with his two brothers, and they insisted on selling, so we were out. We'd have never been able to stay there, regardless. Not with people feeling the way they did about Reuben, that he was a coward and a traitor. He had some money saved up, enough to buy this place outright, and here we are.”

“Do you plan to stay here, then?”

“We have nowhere better to go, and no reason not to stay for the time being. We haven't gotten acquainted yet, but these last few days people have been kind. Father Doucet has been a great help and a comfort. I'm not able to get to mass, or to take the kids. He's been seeing to Joey's religious education.” Her chins jiggled when she laughed. “Even milking the cow. My boys can handle things as long as I'm around to sign papers and that sort of thing until they're of age. That won't be much longer. Jake turned seventeen in April. And,” she cleared her throat before going on, “if I'm not here, there's always Jane.”

“Your sister-in-law?”

“She'll see that they're taken care of, when I'm gone.”

“Surely it won't come to that.”

“Almost certainly it will come to that.”

Mia wasn't sure what to say.

Mary Frances stuffed the crust of the toast into her mouth and swallowed. “It may sound harsh, but my mind is much more at rest now, knowing that I won't be leaving my children with their father.”

Once again Mia was left floundering for a response. Was the woman telling her that she was glad the old boy was dead? Her hesitancy gave her hostess the chance to really set her back on her heels. “There have been times,” Mary Frances sounded absolutely serious, “when I'd have seen to it myself if I'd had the means—and the courage. I don't know what would be the greater sin, breaking the sixth commandment, or abandoning my babies to slavery.”

The bloated features showed such utter sadness, that Mia forgot her own discomfort. “I'm so sorry. But surely—”

“I talked about it with Father Doucet. If it weren't for the manner in which my husband died, I'm sure he'd be agonizing right now over whether to turn me in to the sheriff.” A genuine laugh bubbled out. “I told him I was tempted to accidentally roll onto Reuben in the night! He wasn't terribly shocked, almost sympathetic, but then I suppose there's not much a priest hasn't heard.”

No, but there probably weren't many who'd heard that one. It might have worked, too.

“He promised to keep an eye on the children if I wasn't around to do it. But he wouldn't have been able to do anything. A man's home is his castle.”

“You're probably right about that,” Mia said. “People don't like to interfere.”

“I asked him, don't you think it's odd that God commands us to honor our mother and father, but doesn't make so much as a peep about how we should treat our children?”

Mia hadn't thought of it before. It was a good point.

“If I could get anybody to believe I'd done it, I'd confess right now and put an end to the fol-de-rol.”

Fol-de-rol? Investigating her husband's murder? “But you must want to know who's responsible. Apart from the rest of it, if it's the same person who rifled your house last night, your family might still be in danger.”

“I can't believe that!” She did sound incredulous. “We don't know anyone here, and we've done nothing that could possibly have got anybody mad at us. My husband, maybe—I don't have any idea what he might have gotten up to here, years ago—but me and my children? There isn't a person in this state that could possibly have anything against us.”

“Somebody made an awful mess of your home. Somebody vicious enough to break a little dog's leg.”

“There's no telling what people might do.” It was a matter of fact statement you could hardly argue with.

Mia hadn't intended to be so nosy, but Mary Frances didn't seem to object to frankness. She took a fortifying sip of coffee and asked, “Have you made legal provisions for your children?”

“As I said, Jane will see that they're all right. Their—Jane's and Reuben's—mother is still living. She's the children's next of kin. They have a rule at the colony that children born to outsiders aren't allowed, but they'll make an exception after I'm gone. Custody of the children will be given to their grandmother even without a legal agreement, if there's nobody to object, and there won't be. So they'll be with Jane at the colony. It's not the best thing, but at least they'll be taken care of.”

“In the community that produced your husband?”

“And his sister. No, Prairie Oak didn't make Reuben into the monster he was. It was leaving the place that started all the trouble.”

“Monster?” Mia couldn't let it pass. She'd said it in such a matter of fact way. No qualification and no animosity.

Mrs. Hofer's mouth worked for a time before any sound came out. “He allowed my children, our children, no peace. He controlled every minute of their lives.”

She coughed. Mia located a real glass, poured more water, and waited for her to sip and continue.

“None of it made sense. He'd wanted that education himself, but he forced Sam and Jake to leave school, and Claire had to sneak to read and do her homework, mostly when she should have been asleep. He'd hated the lack of freedom when he was growing up, but he gave his own children far less. They had not one minute to themselves or a single thing to say about their own lives.

“Things hadn't been all that rosy with my father, but the kids were doing okay, growing up to be responsible people, happy people, good people. Six months after Reuben returned they were frightened, nervous, angry, hardly kids at all. They'd learned to lie and sneak and…hate.” She repeated, “He allowed my children no peace. It was monstrous.”

It sounded ugly and, as his wife indicated, bizarrely at odds with Hofer's supposed beliefs. “How did it come about?”Mia asked. “His leaving the colony?”

“Like I said, when he was young, he hated the life there. He convinced them that it would be good for one of them to have a college education. I don't know where he got the idea. Since the GI bill, everybody and their brother is in school, but in 1931? How he even knew colleges existed is beyond me. Anyway, he managed to convince them that the outside world was changing, and they needed to be ready for it, so off he went to Drake University.” Her grin showed a missing molar. “He even got the colony to pay for it.”

The ceiling creaked overhead, and she lowered her already weak voice. “Then he married me, and they kicked him out for good. Even his parents would have nothing to do with him, or our children. Only Jane, who should have been the one to go to college, kept in touch. From the minute he knew he couldn't go back, ever, the colony started looking better and better. When he got drafted, he plunged head first into pacifism. By the time he got out of prison, you'd think he'd never left South Dakota.