The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies (2 page)

Chapter Two

It wasn't just in the house. Even the outdoors felt empty. The horses' heads jerked up at the slamming of the screen door. After a bug-eyed stare at McIntire standing on the porch, they went back to twitching and stamping at flies. Did horses really care? Wasn't the occasional bucket of grain all it took to keep them happy? Did it matter who brought it? McIntire wasn't sure, and he didn't have a bucket of grain handy to test the hypothesis.

Kelpie, he was sure about. He knelt and pulled the spaniel's floppy ears around her chin. “It'll only be another month.” He tried to raise the pitch of his voice and imitate Leonie's London accent. Kelpie wasn't fooled. McIntire picked her up in his arms. She felt boney.

A grinding of gears announced a car navigating the corner a half mile away. McIntire sank to the steps and settled the dog onto his knees. “Who do you reckon that is?” Judging from the roar of the accelerating engine, it was not someone out to take in the view. “Driving a B-52, you think?” McIntire leaned back into the railing. “What have we come to? Two old codgers sitting in the shade watching the world pass by.”

The car didn't pass by. Gears screeched again, and tires spit sand, as it slowed just enough to swing into the driveway. A dark maroon Buick headed straight for McIntire and stopped with its blinding shark's maw grill two yards from his feet. The man who leapt gracefully out was slim and dark, with a later-than-five-o'clock shadow. He was the last person McIntire expected to see and one of the last he wanted to see. Father Adrien Doucet leaned on his open car door and demanded, “Don't you answer your phone?”

“No.” McIntire considered standing up, but sitting on the steps kept him at about the same level as the diminutive priest. Besides, it was too hot to make any unnecessary moves. “Have you come to chastise me for my backsliding ways? Somebody spill the beans that my wife's not around to protect me?”

Doucet didn't smile or turn off his car's engine. “Maybe you can give me a rain check. There's been an accident. A death, near as I can see.”

McIntire couldn't bring himself to respond. He couldn't bring himself to think.
A death
. The words meant that he needed to get into that Buick and let himself be driven somewhere. Further than that, his brain refused to take him. He got to his feet and carried Kelpie into the kitchen. Struggling to keep his hand steady, he slopped a dipperful of fresh water into her bowl and reached for his hat. This time when the door whacked shut the horses didn't look up.

The Buick was a flashy but comfortable vehicle, or would have been if the seat wasn't pulled so far forward that McIntire's knees bumped his chest, and if it hadn't reeked of cigarette smoke.

He braced himself as they careened down the driveway and asked the question that would set in motion a ritual with which he'd become far too familiar, “Who?”

Doucet's flock was small. Outside of McIntire's own family, all either moved away or dead, and Nick Thorsen, fellow backslider, the only Catholics around that he could think of were Indians. The only Indians he knew personally were the Walls. Twila Wall was older than Methusela, but her death shouldn't require the constable's presence.

The father pulled out onto the road and hit the gas pedal. Hard. “Reuben Hofer.”

McIntire didn't even try to quell the relief. The man had only been around since late spring, when he'd moved his family into the old Black Creek schoolhouse and set to farming the land around it. Unlike most newcomers to St. Adele, the Hofers really were newly come, not ‘returners' or shirt-tail relatives of some current resident. McIntire wasn't acquainted with him, but he'd heard enough gossip to know Hofer wasn't Catholic.

“His wife is.” Doucet steered with his elbow as he stuck a filtered cigarette between his lips. “And the children.” His priestly vocation must extend into even the most mundane facets of his life; the man drove like he was in a race with Satan. Maybe he figured he had divine protection. Or possibly it was a plan calculated to urge McIntire into a desperate plea to his maker and thus back into the fold. Mercifully the ride was short, and the flirting with deep ditches and fishtailing around corners kept McIntire's mind off its conclusion.

They turned into a narrow side-road, not much more than a strip of weeds and grass between two sandy tracks that went nowhere. The sawmill it once led to had been abandoned years before when its young owner was drafted into the war, not to return.

The road was bordered on one side by a wide hayfield and the other by swamp thick with alder. They rounded a bend and skidded to a stop inches in back of Doctor Marc Guibard's Plymouth coupe.

A side-delivery rake blocked the way. The tractor that had pulled it there rested at a forty-five degree angle, nose in the roadside bushes, its front wheels sunk in the mire.

Guibard emerged from the brush, soaked to the knees of his impeccably creased trousers. He sagged against the fender of his car and wiped his sleeve across his brow, chalk white despite the heat. His words, “We'll need the sheriff,” crushed McIntire's hopes that Hofer's premature death had been the result of a simple stroke or heart attack.

Father Doucet re-started the Buick.

“Call from my place.” Guibard had the luxury of a private phone line and his home was also miles nearer than the priest's house in Aura.

Doucet gave a quick nod and drove off in reverse at approximately the same speed he'd come.

McIntire let the buzzing flies lead him to Reuben Hofer. The man hung, solid denim covered rump in the air and head—or what was left of it—down, wedged between the tractor's seat and steering wheel. Blood ran thick and black down the tangled beard, onto the crumpled hat and bright orange machine. Blood dripped over the leaves, disappearing into the surface of the murky water, and blood filled the hand that rested, palm upward, on the clutch. The hand was long fingered, elegant in its offering; not the hand of a farmer.

McIntire stood at the edge of the road, unable to force himself to move nearer, equally unable to take his eyes from the grisly scene. A crow perched on the top of a nearby tamarac in a similar attitude. McIntire turned back to the doctor. “Have you got something we can cover him with?”

Guibard shrugged and opened the Plymouth's door. He pulled a plaid flannel shirt from the back seat. “Koski won't like it.”

McIntire waded into the muck, each step sending up the sulphurous odor of rotted vegetation to mingle with the smell of blood and heat. He flicked the shirt to discourage the sluggish blue flies. The silent crow hopped to a higher perch. McIntire averted his gaze as he spread the fabric over the head and shoulders. The flies settled onto it, probing in frustration.

As he turned away, McIntire felt himself overwhelmed with anger. Pure, unmitigated ice-cold rage pounded in his skull. A life ended and how many more altered, devastated, or destroyed? It was those lives that made him the most infuriated. Which was worse, to die, or to be left behind to suffer the loss forever? The dead were dead. Past pain. Out of the line of fire.

Perhaps that was not quite true. Reuben Hofer would now be fair game, powerless to defend himself or his dignity. McIntire hadn't been acquainted with the living Reuben Hofer. He'd come to know him now, all too well. He'd pry into the most intimate details his life, question and probe and listen until a Reuben Hofer would materialize, moulded from all the snippets of perception and prejudice of those around him. Would it be a more honest depiction than his own narrow view might have been? Whatever the truth of it, the man himself would provide no information. The Hofer McIntire would come to know would be only a reflection.

He stumbled back onto the road. “Who found him?”

“The good father. He was on his way to pay a good-fatherly visit to Mrs. Hofer.” Guibard had never been in the habit of referring to Adrien Doucet with the respect that might be expected. Probably because the two of them were far too much alike.

“Sort of an indirect route, ain't it?” McIntire asked. The road didn't go to the schoolhouse. Doucet would have had to leave his car at the old sawmill and walk the rest of the way through the fields. He didn't seem like the kind of man who'd want to slow himself down that much.

“Apparently Father's a birdwatcher.” Guibard said it with the expression he might have used for “pick-pocket.”

“Did you know this man?”

“Not really. I've met him, but not to get to know. I've seen the wife a couple of times. She…” Guibard hesitated, perhaps on the brink of a further disclosure, but discretion won out.

“Is she sick? Maybe that's something we should know about. She's going to have to be told what's happened before much longer.”

“She has a few medical problems.” That could mean anything, but the doctor apparently wasn't going to say more.

McIntire had run into Reuben Hofer once in Karvonen's store and had introduced himself. Hofer seemed a pleasant enough person, if a bit…intense. His piercing
I-know-what-you've-been-up-to
eyes, combined with a full beard, put McIntire in mind of old illustrations of the John Brown whose body had lain mouldering in the grave for the past ninety or so years. He'd given the impression of someone who wasted no movement, no words.

When the family first moved in, Leonie had paid a duty call, but only saw a young girl who'd taken her rhubarb tart and said her mother was lying down. There were a pair of older boys, too. Potential hell-raisers if rumor proved correct. Maybe even more so with their father dead of…what? “A gunshot?” McIntire asked.

“That or a hand grenade.”

“Any idea of how close? What direction? What sort of gun?”

“Not a shotgun. Not pellets anyway. I shouldn't have said that about the hand grenade, it was most likely a single projectile. Possibly a deer rifle. In which case it could have come from quite a distance. Christ, I hate this heat.” Guibard opened the buttons on his shirt and waved the sweat-sogged fabric away from his skin. McIntire wasn't sure if he was more shocked—not too strong a word—at the dignified doctor's unexpected behavior or at the hint of suntan on the sunken hairless chest. “On the other hand,” he continued to fan himself, “it could have been fairly close. As long as the bullet hit its mark, the wound would look pretty much the same regardless of how far it had traveled, I guess, but what the hell would I know? I've never seen a gunshot wound to the head outside of on a deer. If we can figure out the angle it hit at, that might give some idea of the distance it came.” He shook his head. “I'm way out of my league here. I think I can safely say that it came from directly behind, though, but I can't be positive until I get the wound cleaned up a little.” He leaned back against the car and closed his eyes, for a moment resembling the old man he was, then straightened and began doing up his buttons. “Like I said, I'm no expert. I'll leave most of that sort of thing to my friends in Lansing.”

“Think it could have been an accident?”

“Hell, no.”

“He hasn't been here long enough to build up a stockpile of enemies.”

“It only took one.”

McIntire left the doctor decently clothed, wiping at the mud on his shoes, and walked into the field steaming with the cloying scent of sun baked alfalfa. The aroma of new-mown hay was not all it was cracked up to be. It was a big field, ten or twelve acres. He followed the course of the tractor and rake. Guibard thought the shot had come from behind, which seemed obvious even to McIntire. The far edge of the field was marked by a line of trees, maple and beech. They were spindly and widely spaced, but the patchy underbrush of hazel and dogwood might provide adequate cover for an assassin. If he even needed cover. There'd be no one around to see the attacker except Reuben, and if he was on a noisy tractor with his back turned…

The final row of cut hay was only slightly skewed. A bird's eye view might show up the point at which the tractor became driverless, but from his earthbound point, McIntire couldn't guess.

A patch of white flickered in the bushes, and a dog, one of the ugliest animals he had ever seen, skittered out of the tall grass. It stopped short at the sight of McIntire, gave a strangled yip, and darted back through the trees to a small girl standing in the shadows, not twenty yards from him. Thin and dark, with a mass of tangled hair stuck with some gluey substance and the odd cockleburr, she resembled an upended dust mop. She stared at him from wide, dark-circled eyes as she deliberately set down her syrup pail. Then she snatched up the dog and tore off, on toothpick legs, like a scared rabbit.

She'd tell her mother. McIntire only hoped that Sheriff Koski made it here before Mrs. Hofer showed up. He strode back through the stubble and said as much to Guibard.

“She won't come.”

He seemed confident about it. The medical problems must be something fairly serious.

A fast moving cloud of dust presaged the return of the Reverend Doucet. There was no emergency now, if there ever had been. His courting of disaster must be habit.

“The sheriff will be here in a few minutes.” He rummaged in the back seat of the car and stood erect, placing a stole about his neck.

McIntire was confused. “I thought Reuben wasn't Catholic.”

“That doesn't make him unworthy of our prayers.”

McIntire supposed that it didn't.

For the next few minutes there was nothing to be heard but the priest's low murmur, rising and falling in harmony with the buzz of the thwarted flies. Sound that had no beginning and no end, a consistent drone that just
was
. Like the glare of the sun and the weight of the air.

Did the dead man's spirit, that soul of which the priest was seeking redemption, still linger nearby? Did it hover at treetop height, reluctant to say goodbye, angry at being taken in the middle of its earthly task. Did the spirit know, or care, who the agent of its bodily death had been? Had Reuben Hofer realized, in the instant before he died, who had killed him?