Tradition of Deceit (22 page)

Thirty-Four
September 1921

Lidia picked her way
across railroad tracks and slid through the shadows to the mill. Don't think, she ordered herself. Enough thinking, for now. It was time to
do
something.

“I forgot to give Thomas his supper,” she told the night watchman, holding up a lumpy sack. The man let her inside. All the guards knew her, knew she spent many hours in the mill with her husband.

This Sunday night there was a problem with one of the enormous underground turbines that yoked the power of St. Anthony Falls. One of the auxiliary engines was down too, and the millwrights had done the almost unthinkable—halt the entire operation. The enormous building was oddly silent. Lidia faltered, disoriented by the absence of the familiar throb and rumble. But she could still feel Thomas's fingers like a manacle on her wrist, still hear his threat, still see the absolute conviction in his eyes.

Lidia started to cross herself, then checked. That morning, she'd whispered a plea in the confessional: “I—I believe my husband will kill me, Father, if I displease him. What can I do?”

“You must do what God intended,” the priest commanded. “Submit to your husband in all things, and pray.”

So Lidia knew she couldn't appeal to God, not anymore. She had to help herself.

She hurried down the passage to one of the roller mills, one floor above the turbines where her husband was working. As soon as the mill shuddered back to life, this machine was next on Thomas's list.

Thanks to the hours she'd spent watching Thomas clean and repair machinery, she knew a fair bit about cogs and gears and belts. But with no tools of her own, she'd initially been stymied. And after making his threat, Thomas had kept her in sight every moment that she wasn't working her own shift.

Then came word of the shutdown, and all the millwrights were ordered to assemble. “It isn't appropriate for you to be there,” Thomas had muttered. And as Lidia frantically considered this unexpected opportunity, she realized she did have one tool of her own.

Now she sent up another prayer.
I never knew you, Grandmother Magdalena. Please don't think I'm evil. I know I'm doing a terrible thing, but I don't know what else to do. And I don't want to kill Thomas, truly. I just want to slow him down.

She paused, eyes closed. And she fancied she felt the presence of Grandmother Magdalena there in the mill with her. A woman's voice seemed to say,
Do it
.

Lidia took a deep breath, reached into her sack, and pulled out Magdalena's sheep shears.

Thirty-Five

Since Owen had left
one gate and door unlocked, entrance to the mill today didn't require stealth or acrobatics. “Hello!” Chloe called as she and Sister Mary Jude came inside. “It's Chloe Ellefson and Sister Mary Jude!”

Owen appeared from an aisle of packing machines, carrying a carton. “Hey!”

“Getting set for the reception?” Chloe asked.

He nodded. “I am determined to have that roller mill operational by Friday night. We've replaced all the belts, and cleaned and oiled all the gears. We'll be doing a trial run later.” He almost quivered with excitement, like a boy setting up his first train set.

Chloe was again charmed by his determination. “I'll stop down.”

Owen held up the carton. “Say, can you pass this on to Ariel? Jay's team found some old stuff while cleaning out the women's floor in the Utility Building. No Man's Land, they called it.”

“I'll get it to her.”

He set the carton on the floor. “My undergrad mechanics aren't back from lunch yet, so let me help you set up.”

They put out the lunch fixings in the deep windowsills overlooking weed-choked railroad tracks. “Did you hear that Everett Whyte drowned?” Owen asked in a low tone. “Pretty freaky.”

Mary peeled plastic wrap from a tray of sandwiches. “We may never understand what happened.”

Chloe glanced over her shoulder, making sure they were still alone. “Maybe Dr. Whyte tripped, hit his head and blacked out, fell into the river, and drowned. If some of the residents saw what happened, and didn't know what to do, they might have … you know.”

“Everett was a small man,” Owen said. “Still, it's hard to picture somebody hauling his body over the gravel, up the slope, through the fence, into the mill, and up eight flights of stairs.”

Sister Mary Jude sighed. “You're thinking like people who have stable homes.”

Chloe and Owen exchanged a glance. “I'm not sure I follow,” Owen admitted.

“Every person who lives in this mill has an uneasy relationship with the police.” Mary began arranging apples, oranges, and bananas on a plastic plate. “They have no legal right to shelter here. Some have a history of drug abuse or prostitution or mental illness. While the notion of carrying Dr. Whyte to the eighth
floor seems bizarre to us, it might make perfect sense to someone who wants only to deflect unwanted attention.”

“It's all very sad.” Chloe ripped open a bag of cookies, imagining Star or Camo John or any other lost soul trying to decide what to do with the body of a man spotted floating face down in the Mississippi.

As if summoned by her thoughts, a shadow crossed the wall and Camo John approached. His face was impassive, his eyes inscrutable in the gloom, his big hands hanging by his sides. This man makes me uncomfortable, Chloe thought. Did the fact that he was big and dirty and uncommunicative make her feel that way? Or was there truly something to worry about?

“Hello, John.” Mary smiled cheerfully, banishing Chloe's momentary unease. “Will it be cheese or bologna today?”

“I better get back to work,” Owen told Chloe. “Come down in about ten minutes if you want to see our trial run with the roller stand.”

Other residents began slipping from the shadows, hunched into coats that too often seemed inadequate for the mill's damp cold. Chloe was struck again by the diversity—men and women, some elderly people, a few teens. A young woman clutched a baby in her arms. Mary produced disposable diapers and baby food.

A sad ache settled beneath Chloe's ribs. “I'll be back,” she called and headed for the closest stairwell with flashlight in hand. She didn't want to disappoint Owen, and if she didn't take a quick breather, she'd start to cry. I don't know how Mary keeps going, she thought. Day after day after
day
.

On the grinding floor she found Owen at the detached roller mill with two younger men. Owen grinned. “Good timing!”

Chloe stopped a respectful distance away. Owen nodded, and one of the young men threw a switch. The belts began their endless circles and the roller mill shuddered up to speed.

Owen reached for a bag of grain. “Watch this—”

The sentence ended in a wordless cry. Owen flew backward. A broken belt slapped the machine with a horrible sound, over and over and over.

Chloe ran to Owen, who lay motionless on the cement. Something buzzed in her brain. Not Owen. Not sweet, cheerful Owen.

“Turn it off!” one of the undergrads yelled. “Turn it
of
f
!”

“I don't know how!” the other student shrieked frantically.

“Just get away from it,” Chloe ordered. She felt for a pulse under Owen's jaw. Please, God. Not Owen
, too.

“That belt was fine
before lunch!” the first student cried. “It's like somebody—I don't know—it's like sabotage or something!”

“Calm down,” Chloe told him sharply. “Go get help.
Now
.”

Sister Mary Jude appeared and dropped to the floor beside Chloe. “I heard the shouting—what happened? Is he alive?” She put a hand on Owen's cheek.

Grateful tears welled in Chloe's eyes when she felt the steady beat of life beneath her fingertips. “He's unconscious. I don't see any sign of blood, so the best thing we can do is keep him still and warm until help arrives.”

“And pray,” Mary whispered, closing her eyes. “Mother Mary, please help us …”

Chloe yanked off her parka and laid it gently over Owen. He'll be okay, she promised herself. Surely he will.

But her brain echoed with the student's dire assessment:
It's like sabotage or something!
Taken by itself, Everett Whyte's death might yet be ruled accidental. But if someone had tampered with the machine Owen had been working on, it would be difficult to believe that someone wasn't trying to frighten or kill the people working to reclaim the abandoned mill.

Roelke drove from the city of Waupun back to Milwaukee's Old South Side. Donny D had said he'd seen Rick near Mitchell Street, a bit north of Lincoln Village. St. Stanislaus Catholic Church's glowing copper domes rose above another old-Polish, new-Latino neighborhood. Did Lobo stay here after leaving prison? Was that why Rick had been walking the streets here out of uniform, hoping no one noticed or identified him as a cop? Or had he been secretly meeting Erin?

Roelke parked on a side street and began walking. “I'm looking for a friend,” he told shop clerks and cashiers, holding up Erin's photo. “Have you seen her? She's blond now.” His hopes rose when a baker nodded. “Maria, isn't this that lady who comes in every day and buys one wedding cookie?”

Maria paused from washing the bakery case to take a look. “No way! That doesn't look anything like the wedding cookie lady.”

Roelke pushed farther down the commercial corridor, then branched out to the residential streets. He showed the photo to an elderly man pulling a market cart, the young woman bent beneath her bulging daypack, two moms with babies in strollers, a jogger. At a small house with a hand-painted sign hanging by the door—
Rose Cottage
—his hopes lifted when an elderly woman inspecting her dormant garden studied the photo with interest.
Something
flashed in her eyes, and he held his breath.

“My, she is a pretty one.” Her voice held the inflection of someone raised in a community of first-generation immigrants who spoke Polish at home. “She reminds me of an actress on
Dynasty
. Do you watch
Dynasty
?”

“No ma'am.” Roelke handed her his business card. “If you do see my friend, will you please give her this?” She nodded and tucked it into a coat pocket. He slipped Erin's photo away and on impulse, pulled the chicken-flower business card from the envelope. “Does this mean anything to you?”

“No, but I do like the colors. This reminds me of the paper cutting some of the old women used to do.”

“
Wycinanki
,” Roelke said breezily, like he knew all about it and therefore did not need to be informed that Poles preferred roosters. “Right. Thank you, ma'am.”

Don't get discouraged, he ordered himself. You're not out of ideas yet.

Chloe stood alone as the ambulance pulled away. Jay—after finally shutting the damn roller mill down—had gone with Owen. The grad students had left. Looking shaken, Sister Mary Jude had packed up her hampers and followed.

“Well, this day just keeps sucking more and more,” Chloe muttered. The mill would make a fantastic museum one day, but she was going to stay away until that transformation had taken place. She'd sensed a layer of fear the first time she'd walked through the mill. Finding Dr. Whyte's body had been horrid. Owen's injury was just too much.

Chloe hurried to her car with the carton he'd given her for Ariel. Once inside with the doors locked, professional curiosity demanded a peek inside. She pulled one of the corner cardboard flaps free. “Oh!”

The first thing that presented itself was a rectangle of heavy cream-colored paper, corners marked with pin holes. Despite a film of dust, and the passing years' inevitable fading, a collage of cut and layered paper still suggested a vivid rainbow of color. A central bouquet of stylized flowers was flanked on each side by a rooster. She gently lifted the piece. Pride in creation, determination, feminine strength … all those seemed palpable.

She was pretty sure that this glorious example of
wycinanki
had been made long before the mill closed in 1965. It so closely resembled what Roelke had tried to describe on the phone that an ice chip slid down Chloe's spine. Ariel had said that a motif of flowers and roosters was common. Still, it was uncanny that this piece, left behind in No Man's Land, echoed whatever it was that Roelke had found in Wisconsin decades later.

Was it even remotely possible that the same woman had created each
wycinanka
? “If so,” she whispered to whomever might be listening, “why did you leave this beautiful piece in No Man's Land? And how did you get from Minneapolis to Milwaukee?”

Thirty-Six
September 1921

Lidia took the train
from Minneapolis to Milwaukee. She knew there was a large Polish community there, and although she'd managed to hide away a few coins after grocery shopping these past few months, she couldn't afford to travel any farther.

Best of all, a train east was scheduled to leave fifteen minutes after she arrived at the station. She tried to sound calm as she counted out the fare, but her mind was back at the mill. Had the belt snapped, slapping Thomas with enough force to break an arm or knock him unconscious? The belt was an old one, made of buffalo hide, and she'd used the sheep shears to gnaw at the stitches holding the two ends together. Once the problem with the turbines was fixed and the mill growled back to life, the belt wouldn't have held for long. Perhaps it had given way before Thomas even began to work on the roller mill. Was he fixing the roller stand, fuming because she wasn't waiting for him? Had he grown suspicious of the sabotage, and her absence, and gone looking? He'd go to their house, and probably Mama's as well, before widening the search … wouldn't he? Or would he instinctively know she was trying to escape?

Ticket clutched in one sweating hand, Lidia made her way onto the train and found an empty seat. She watched out the window, braced for the sight of her husband running down the platform, bellowing, coming for her. It was hard to breathe until she heard the whistle shrill and felt the car lurch slowly forward.

But with every clack of the turning wheels she felt herself moving farther and farther from
Matka
and Grandfather Pawel. From Bohemian Flats and Minneapolis and the mill. From her whole world. She'd had no time to say good-bye—and she wouldn't have dared, anyway.

Lidia had to change trains in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She ap
proached a woman in worn clothes who looked to be about her size and offered to exchange clothes. “Why?” the woman asked suspiciously, eyeing her stylish dress.

“I need to disappear,” Lidia whispered.

Ten minutes later she emerged from the ladies' room wearing a heavy skirt and faded blouse. “Be careful,” the other woman said, before disappearing into the swirling crowd in her new finery.

Lidia pulled Grandmother Magdalena's old shawl over her shoulders and felt surprisingly comforted. She hated leaving Magdalena's beautiful
wycinanka
behind, tacked over the door in No Man's Land. But once Thomas discovered her absence, he might well storm the women's lounge. If one of the girls mentioned that her prized artwork was gone, he'd know for sure that she'd run away. At least, Lidia thought, my engagement scarf—the white cloth binding her to Thomas—has also been left behind. And the stylish hats he'd bought for her, too. How she had once loved them! It seemed ridiculous now.

“All aboard for Milwaukee!” the conductor hollered.

As Lidia climbed onto the train, a wave of nausea brought beads of sweat to her forehead. She'd felt sick for several weeks, now. Awareness had starched her resolve to leave Thomas—if not for herself, for the sake of their child.

Lidia closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the glass. Oh
Matka
, she thought, fighting tears. And Grandfather Pawel … how worried you must be.