Witch Cradle (14 page)

“Rosie had a hare-lip. She was one ungodly homely woman.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“It was an accident. It could happen to anybody.”

Mia couldn't believe what she was hearing. “No, Nick, it could only happen to you! Face it, you can't drive. You have to quit your job and that's final. We'll find some other way to get along.”

“I can get another car. It might have to have an automatic transmission.”

“We'll
have
to get another car. There's no question about that. But I'm not letting you near it!”

“Hiring a chauffeur, are you? That's pretty rich, coming from someone who spent less than a minute behind the wheel and managed to demolish two lilac bushes and a telephone pole.”

“The car's not still sitting there, though, is it? How much good has your great skill and experience done?” She stuck her crutches under her arms and wrenched herself to her feet. Nick turned back to the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Down cellar for a bottle.” He twisted the door knob and gave a yelp.

“What happened?”

“I don't know…I can't….” He stared at the back of his hand, tentatively turned it palm up, and gasped.

Mia sagged on her crutches. “Oh, lord. Don't tell me it's broken.”

“My wrist is maybe sprained a little.”

His face was damp and the color of cold dishwater, a face Mia had recently been on the other side of. “It's broken,” she said. “Sit down and I'll call Guibard.”

“Forget it. It's just a sprain. You can wrap it up for me, and I'll see how it feels tomorrow. But open the door first. I'll get that bottle.”

“You're crazy. It's not going to get any better overnight.”

“It'll be okay. Just open the damn door.”

Mia hobbled to the door and flung it open. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Bring up a quart of tomatoes while you're at it.”

After about ten minutes and a single crash of breaking glass, Nick returned with a bottle in his hand, a jar under his arm, and a splash of red on his trouser cuffs.

“I'll clean it up later.”

Mia put the jar of tomatoes on the counter and turned her attention to the bottle, using a knife to flip up the bail on its stopper. Nick took the glasses from the cupboard and poured them each a glass of the dandelion wine. He sat down and swirled the liquid, holding it up to the light.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“We'll manage.”

“We have to think about moving into town.”

“No!”

“This place is too damn big anyway.”

“No. Absolutely not. I can get more work.”

“Not enough to live on. Anyway, I'm not having my wife support me.”

“Go ahead and starve then.” Mia said it without emotion. This argument was growing stale. They'd had it too many times. They'd do whatever they had to do, and if it meant that what was left of Nick's pride suffered, so be it. She propped herself on her crutches and hopped off to the living room sofa where she could put her leg up—if she could make room for it on the coffee table among the last of her father's unsorted belongings.

After her initial foray into the fragments of his life, Mia had lost the heart for it, not getting much past stuffing the stacks of paper back into their boxes and recruiting Nick to carry them to the living room. Teddy Falk's visit had changed that.

Teddy had to have been telling the truth about giving her father that money. He couldn't have known they'd found it, so he couldn't have made the story up. If there was some clue in this pile of junk, something to explain her father's strange behavior, she intended to find it. It was impossible to believe that he'd known Rose Falk was dead and kept it to himself.

Still, she could barely bring herself to touch the stuff. It was increasingly painful to see the man these remnants portrayed. The postcards, the clipped advertisements. He'd left so much more, and these tawdry scraps did not reflect the man she knew her father to be. His wish to make the world a better place and his joy in creating something of beauty that would last long after he was gone and forgotten. Eban Vogel lived in clock cases and chests, not in sleazy men's magazines and drugstore receipts for laxatives and worse.

Only two boxes remained. She dragged the largest to her and slid her fingernail across the black electrical tape that sealed it.

A book was on top. It wore a purple dust jacket, a mysterious green symbol, and orange lettering,
The Male Hormone.
It promised “A new gleam of hope for prolonging man's prime of life.” A glance through its pages revealed that, although the author, a Mr. de Kruif, began by lamenting the waning of his endurance with ax and crosscut saw, maintaining a good supply of firewood was not his primary aim.

Under it were only more of the magazines.
The National Police Gazette
. Exotic Gypsy Nina wore two veils, neither of which veiled much of anything. Above the title, the headline screamed, “Brooklyn Girls Killed by Woman Quack.” She peeked underneath. The next issue's cover girl wore an even smaller costume, but a bigger smile. The box was full. How had he managed to bring them all into the house with nobody noticing? If they had come in the mail Nick would have…. She closed the flaps and shoved the box aside. Too hard. It hit the floor with a thunk.

The last of the cartons was larger and sturdier, but, blessedly, lighter than the others. She lifted its lid and was greeted by more paper. A quick fan through showed them to be receipts for property tax. Forty years' worth. She placed the stack on the table. A smaller box remained inside. Walnut, darkly stained, with ornate silver-colored metal hinges and clasp.

Mia remembered the day the package had come. It was not long after her marriage to Nick, and she'd expected it to be a wedding gift. Her father had cut the string and taken this case from its wrappings. He'd not opened it, only read the short note and informed Mia in a dispassionate voice that her grandmother Vogel was dead. He'd taken the box to his room, and Mia hadn't seen it again until now. Before she opened it she ran her fingers over the smooth walnut and the initials worked into the silver medallion,
LAV
. Lydia Ann? Laura Angela? Mia had never heard the woman's name. She lifted the clasp. Had her father not been curious enough to do the same? Had he never once looked to see what his mother had left?

He should have. Nestled in a snippet of rust-colored velvet was a watch. One he would have liked very much. Heavy, simple engraving on silver. With the tarnish polished away, it would be a handsome piece of work. Maybe it had once belonged to his own father. Inside the cover was more engraving, an inscription. Mia squinted at the ornate script, then set it aside and lifted out the gauzy material beneath.

It swaddled a tiny doll, only six or seven inches tall. Mia smoothed the robe of soft striped wool and the tiny fringed sash that tied it about her waist. The hands and feet were carved of wood. Her eyes were blue and her hair was painted a shiny black. It was old, old enough to have belonged to her grandmother, or even her great-grandmother. Mia propped her erect between two cushions and set the wrapping aside.

All that remained was a square of folded tissue. Inside, tied with a ribbon of faded pink, lay a tiny lock of the softest sooty black hair. Mia let it rest in her palm. Her father's baby hair? Or maybe her own?

Mia's mother had told her of the abundant black hair she was born with. Charlotte Vogel had, like her daughter, lost three babies. Unlike Mia she'd had the courage to become pregnant once more. This time she left her home and husband and traveled to put herself in the hands of her grandmother, a Potowatomi woman she'd never met. When she returned in the spring, carrying the red-faced infant with inky black hair, Eban had been suspicious. In a few weeks all color had faded from both the hair and complexion, but by that time, Charlotte Vogel said, “your father had fallen in love with you and wouldn't have given you back anyway.” When Mia's great-grandmother died a few years later, Charlotte insisted that Mia take her name, and little Ramona Vogel had become Meogokwe.

Mia touched the wisp to her cheek.
“Mama.”

A second crash of breaking glass. Nick stood in the doorway, eyes wide, feet in a puddle of pungent wine.

Mia felt her heart quicken. “Nick.” She extended her hand with the curl in the palm. “Whose hair is this?”

“Hair? I don't know.”

“Tell me.”

“How would I know? I never—”

“Tell me!”
It was a shriek, but didn't need to be. The look on his face told her the unbearable truth. “How could you? How could you have kept this from me? Part of her, and all this time, all these years and years, you kept it from me?”

“I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to ever think about it.”

“It was part of
her!”

He didn't move from his spot in the doorway. “You screamed when we took her from you. Screamed and screamed so I thought you'd never stop. I can hear it still.” His deadpan voice was uncaring, cruel. “You were lucky. You got sick and you forgot. How do you think it was for me? You weren't the only one who lost a daughter. I'd have done anything to trade places with you. I'd have done anything to be able to forget.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Mac, you gotta help me out.” Pete Koski had resorted to whining.

“I ain't coming to do your shoveling for you. Get Marian.”

“According to our star boarder—”

“Which one would that be?”

“Falk. Murder trumps everything.”

“Even sedition? Scheming against Mom and apple pie?”

“Around here it does.”

“How are the two of them getting along? It must have been quite a reunion.”

“Oh, they're thick as thieves. Which is what I damn well wish they were. The Feds are nagging at me to keep them apart. Only way to do that would be if one of 'em bunks in with me and Marian. They're welcome to take their commie off my hands. His hearing is coming up next week. It's in Duluth, so we'll get shed of him then. In the meantime they're jabbering away in that heathen language, plotting the great escape. I'm tempted to get Marian to bake a file in a pasty.”

“What is it you want from me?”

“Well, Falk says that before she left, or died, his wife opened a bank account. She needed it because of selling the farm. It was in her name only.”

“The farm or the bank account?”

“Both, I guess. She opened an account so that the payments for the farm could be deposited into it. The plan was that the money would be transferred to a bank in Russia. Talk about dreamers!”

“Did Sulo ever pay it off?” Irene hadn't shown McIntire a deed.

“Damned if I know. Maybe you can find out. If he did, he never bothered to change the title with the county. The place is still in Rose Falk's name. Rose Makinen, that is. Touminen paid the taxes for a while, then not another cent until a couple days ago. Now he's paid them up.”

“So he doesn't want to risk losing it. But, I repeat, what do you want from me?”

“Not much.” The sheriff's tone of voice gave McIntire to know that it probably was much. “Rose gave power of attorney to one of your neighbors, to take care of transferring the deed when the time came. Maybe you could just go talk to her. If she still has a copy of the document, try to get it so we can make sure it matches the one on file at the courthouse. Find out if the contract was ever paid off, and what the particulars of the deal were. Maybe Falk thought that with Rose dead he could get the place back. It's what he's got on his mind now, anyway. He figures as her husband he'll inherit her estate. ”

“Sounds like Teddy's pretty confident that he won't be locked up for the rest of his life.”

“He made it through thirteen or fourteen years in Russia. He might be an optimist.”

The job that Koski was tapping him for didn't sound terribly onerous. There had to be a catch. “Okay,” McIntire asked, “who is it you want me to talk to?”

“Well….”

McIntire waited. Koski coughed.

“You're gonna have to tell me, Pete.”

“Rose Falk, in her great wisdom, entrusted her fortunes to Myrtle Van Opelt.”

It might have been worse, but McIntire couldn't think how. “Only as a favor to you, Pete. One I'll expect you to not forget.”

“I'm sure if I do, you'll remind me.”

“Damn right.”

“I thought Myrtle liked you.”

“Justice Van Opelt is rigorously impartial. She doesn't like anybody.”

If McIntire had to face Mrs. Van O, he preferred to tackle it as he had back when he was sixteen years old. Go in cold. Thinking about it in advance only brought on a disabling attack of nerves. “Is Falk still sticking to his story?” he asked. “Still no inkling as to who his wife might have been passing the time of day with?”

“He is, and we haven't come up with a soul who disappeared about that time.”

There were fifty-one souls who disappeared in another hole in the ground about that time. McIntire hung up the earpiece and turned to his wife.

“Leonie, when those miners were drowned, were all the bodies recovered?”

“Heavens, no! They only found seven, at least by the end of August. There were forty-four left in the pit. Do you think maybe one of them wasn't really there?”

“Koski said there were rusty stains on some of the stuff in the well.”

“Maybe more of the remains were recovered later. I could ask Mr. Beckman.”

That's all he needed, Beckman sniffing around. “That's okay,” McIntire said. “Maybe tonight I'll make that call to Ma.”

***

Myrtle Van Opelt.
Miss
Van Opelt.
Justice
Van Opelt. Any way you looked at it, the woman struck fear into the very pith of McIntire's bones. He'd like to think it was only an irrational reaction to the memory of years spent anticipating the sting of her metal-edged ruler on his hand, or worse, the sting of humiliation she had such a natural talent for inflicting. But Mrs. Van O didn't need to rely on past ferocity to intimidate. Advancing years had honed her skills to a formidable level.

Pete Koski was usually a match for her. Koski had only contempt for the JPs of this world. And Koski was impartial in his own way. Being female and as old as Methuselah cut no ice with the sheriff.

McIntire simply did his best to avoid contact with her. Which sometimes meant looking the other way as much as possible when confronted with a legal infraction that might fall under Myrtle's jurisdiction. He reasoned that fear of the justice was a major deterrent to petty crime. He wouldn't want to risk criminals becoming inured to her court by dragging them before her for every little thing.

He'd never entered her house before. His concept of the justice's home life was much the same as it had been when she was the dreaded Miss Van O. Then it had seemed that when the last pupil scuttled gratefully out the door at the end of the day, Miss Van Opelt went into a suspended state, scowl fixed, ruler raised, until the first of them crept back in the morning. The concept that she, or any teacher, had a life outside the classroom was ludicrous.

Miss Van Opelt must have had one. For a start, she was not, even then, a Miss, a situation she'd kept under wraps back in the days when marriage would have gotten her booted her out of her job quicker than if she'd been a commie.

Mr. Van Opelt—Hans—kept milk cows and had the distinction of being able to squeeze more profanity into a single sentence than any other man around, and that included the odd visiting Great Lakes sailor.

Hans stood next to his ancient spike-wheeled Farmall wielding a wicked-looking oil can. His greeting contained only two goddamns and a single son of a bitch. Maybe age was mellowing the man in a way it hadn't affected his wife.

He waved McIntire off to the house and ambled to the other side of the old bastard of a tractor's engine.

McIntire knocked. He quavered as he listened to the thunk of Mrs. Van O's cane approach the door. She ushered him through a blanket-hung doorway into the living room with little taps of the stick, like a sheepdog nipping at his heels.

She was bundled in a heavy cardigan, and a glimpse of what must have been a pair of her husband's winter woolies showed below the hem of her 1930s style dress. McIntire hoped they were keeping her warmer than he felt. The room was heated, slightly, by an oil burner. A second doorway was also blanketed. As befitted her former profession, but coming as a surprise to McIntire nonetheless, the walls were filled with books.

She dropped onto a chair and gave the sofa a smart whack. McIntire sat, careful lest his elbow rumple the lace doily.

“What's up?”

“I don't like to bother you—”

“You already have. So what is it? Have you finally caught Stanley Larson in the act? Need a search warrant?”

Mrs. Van Opelt was certain that Larson, known as Chip to all but the rigidly formal JP, was conducting a thriving business dealing in stolen minks.

“No. Chipper seems to be lying low.”

The eyes locked on McIntire's and looked straight through to his brain. “Somebody's lying low, but I don't know that it's Stanley. He's waltzing in and snitching those animals right out of their cages.”

“I had a call from the sheriff.”

“Hah! Maybe now we'll get action from a man who knows a crime when he sees it.” The cane gave a thunk on the floor.

“He didn't call about Chip Larson. It was about Rose Falk.”

The glint of pursuit faded, and Myrtle rested her chin on the cane. “Poor Rosie. She was bound to come to a bad end one way or another. I remember—”

“Koski says that before Rose left, she signed a paper authorizing you to act as her agent in the sale of her farm.”

Mrs. Van Opelt sat erect and placed the cane against the side of her chair. She folded her hands in her lap. “Yes, she did.”

The words were politely formal. Almost wary. She touched a liver-spotted hand to her suspiciously black finger waves.

“How was the transaction to take place?” McIntire waited to be told to shove it—in a most judgelike manner, naturally. Myrtle's only expression of displeasure was a slight pursing of her thin lips.

“Rose sold the farm to Sulo Touminen,” she said. “He was supposed to make annual payments for six years. I was to deposit them in a bank account in Rose's name. Once she and her husband got settled they would tell me where to send the money. They never did, but there wasn't any money to send. Sulo didn't pay off the contract.”

“So the deed was never transferred?”

“No.”

“Then as things stand the place would belong to her husband as her sole heir?”

“Would it? Even if he killed her?”

McIntire didn't know the answer to that. “You must have known Rose pretty well if she trusted you with this. What do you think might have happened?”

The old Myrtle flashed in the eyes, but was quashed by whatever had brought on this civil streak. “She was a pupil at the school. When she bothered to come, which wasn't all that often. Always in some sort of trouble. She seemed to think her affliction gave her some special rights, and we should overlook whatever she did.” She took a breath and shook her head. “Oh well. Looking at that face in the mirror every morning couldn't have been easy, and she did get teased a lot. Children can be pretty nasty. I suppose she came to me because she didn't really have anybody else she could trust.”

“She had an aunt.”

“Adeline? Adeline Makinen didn't make it past sixth grade. And she was sickly. Rose didn't think that she'd live six more years. She didn't. Looks like she must have outlived Rosie, though.”

“Do you have a guess as to who this other man might have been?”

“I stay away from gossip.” A common enough claim. This was one time McIntire believed it.

“Is there anybody else who left or disappeared that summer? Do you remember?”

“There's nothing wrong with my memory!”

Another assertion McIntire did not doubt. “The man in that cistern with Mrs. Falk was most likely from nearby. Was there anybody else who moved away around that time and hasn't come back?”

“No,” she said. “Not that summer. I can't think of a soul.”

“Which bank was the account in?”

“I don't remember.” There was nothing wrong with Myrtle's ability to contradict herself. “It was closed out years ago.”

“Do you still have the paper? The Power of Attorney? If we knew what date Rose signed it, we'd at least know that she was alive at that time.”

“I probably have it. But I don't need the paper to tell you when it was signed. It was the day of that flood in the mine. I don't recall the exact date, but you can easily find out. We didn't hear about it until the next morning, but I remember thinking that while we were in Walfred Kettil's kitchen signing those papers, making those big changes in Rose Makinen's life, nature was doing the same for a couple of hundred other people.”

Nature hadn't exactly been responsible for tunneling a hole under a lake or of sending fifty-one men into it to die, unless the cave-in was an act of retaliation.

The door in the kitchen opened and closed followed by a shuffling, clanking of pans, and the single word
bastard.

Myrtle got to her feet, thumped across the room, and disappeared behind the blanket. “Ooh, Honey Bun, izz oo chilly?”

McIntire didn't catch the words of the mumbled reply and was glad of it.

“Us has tumpany.”

Until now, Myrtle Van Opelt's sugary cooing to her husband had been only a rumor McIntire'd refused to credit. Even hearing it for himself couldn't conquer his disbelief.

“Luvey Buvvy better tum in and get all cozy wozy.”

Lovey Buvvy pushed into the room and cozy wozied next to McIntire on the sofa. The stubble on his chin was still coated with frost. “Got that son of a bitchin' bastard purrin' like a goddamn kitten.”

McIntire congratulated him and wished the pair good day.

***

It was not yet four, but Sulo Touminen's barn windows glowed soft yellow. McIntire pushed open the door and stepped inside. A voice from behind the line of Guernsey rumps called out, “Be right with you.”

“No rush.” The barn was pleasant—warmer than the Van Opelts' living room and suffused with a sleepy aroma of hay and cow's breath. Leonie would not be thanking him for coming home steeped in the odors produced at the opposite end of the cow.

A whoosh sounded at McIntire's back and a cascade of hay dropped through a trap door, sending up a cloud of dust and seed. Sulo came forward and stuck his fork into the stack. He went down the line, pitching hay into the mangers.

A pair of denim-covered legs appeared through the opening, and Irene Touminen descended the ladder. She brushed straw from her knees. “How's by you?”

“Not bad,” was all she waited to hear before ducking through a door and returning with a stool and a metal pail. She seated herself under a cow and leaned her head against its flank. A mottled orange cat materialized from a murky corner and lowered itself to its haunches with a demanding meow. Irene bent the teat and sent a stream of milk into its open mouth.