Witch Cradle (19 page)

Chapter Thirty-Six

“So how'd it go?”

Leonie tossed her mittens and wool kerchief onto a chair but didn't remove her coat. “All right. I don't think Mia suffered over much. I wonder why she agreed to it.”

“She might be getting bored. Maybe even an afternoon sipping tea with the ladies looks good when you haven't been able to get out for a month.”

“She doesn't normally have much interest in getting out. Perhaps it's different when you can't do anything at home either. But I suspect an ulterior motive.”

McIntire suspected one, too.

“She kept steering the information around to Rosie and the mine flood. Not that it was too hard, but I think she was fishing for information.”

“Did she get any?”

“None that she could have liked very much. The ladies got to talking about how they heard about the accident. From all appearances, Mia's father was the first in this community to know.”

That was strange. Unless Eban Vogel had changed after McIntire knew him, he hadn't been one to go out much more than his daughter, outside of those wood-buying trips. “Maybe he got it from Nick.”

“Or from the late Mr. Stewart.” Leonie ignored the spot next to him on the sofa and flopped into a chair. “I brought up my cookery book scheme. The group wasn't too keen at first.”

“Until you appealed to their cut-throat competitive instinct.”

“They agreed to consider it. What do you suppose will happen to that poor girl?”

McIntire couldn't suppose. Importing thousands of soldiers' brides had been a major U.S. government happy-days-are-here-again operation following the war. How would they handle sending their grooms the other way?

“At least she has Orville for the time being.”

Leonie nodded. “I think I'll go warm up in the bath. Will you be okay without tea for a time? Sorry I didn't bring you any left-overs. I reckoned Mia needed them more.” She stood and let her coat slide off her shoulders. “She mentioned that Nick wouldn't be going back to work. I guess you didn't know.”

If McIntire admitted to knowing, that stupid lie would come out. He responded, “That's too bad. He doesn't seem to be in such bad shape, considering.”

“Did you know he was giving up his mail route?”

“I figured he'd have to. Especially after the flying car incident.”

She dropped her coat on top of the mittens and walked to the stairs.

She looked, McIntire thought with a start, older. Slowed steps, and, now that the frost-induced roses had warmed from her cheeks, washed out and tired. He wasn't sure of Leonie's age. She had to be older than himself by a few years.

If Eban Vogel had been the first in the neighborhood to learn about the mine disaster, he hadn't heard it from Nick. The cave-in had happened in the late afternoon or early evening, after Nick would have completed his daily rounds. If Eban had learned it straight from an escapee and failed to mention his source, that did sound suspicious. Wouldn't Massey-Davis have sent people out immediately to inform the families? Probably, but it would have taken time, and the ones who lived outside of Ishpeming and the company town would have taken a while to find. The families of the two miners from St. Adele could have easily been overlooked in the immediate aftermath.

What kind of a guy would use his fortuitous deliverance from a flood to escape an unpleasant life, leaving his companions to die? Desperate? Confused? Crafty? What kind of guy would blow that escaped miner's head to bits? McIntire could think of only one: the husband who found that miner naked in bed with his wife. If Teddy Falk had killed the two and gone to Eban Vogel that same night with the truth, including the story of Stewart's escape from the mine, Eban might have kept the deaths a secret. But would he have gone out later to pass the news of the cave-in on to Mike Maki?

Leonie's footsteps on the floor above had ceased some time ago, but McIntire didn't hear the tub filling. He put down his pencil, and put the teakettle on to boil.

***

Leonie sat at the dressing table in her chenille robe, her back to him. He heard a book slap shut and she turned around. “Just doing a bit of tidying up.”

“Drink this while it's hot. I'll prepare your bath.”

She looked into his eyes, perhaps recalling, as McIntire intended, the time—the first time—she'd spoken those words to him.

“Thank you.” She sipped the tea, and added, as he had then, “It's very nice.”

McIntire crossed the hall to turn on the water. When he returned he sat on the edge of the bed. “If you're good I'll let you have my secret recipe for your book. Are you going to take all comers or be choosy? That could get dangerous.”

“I think we'd better form a committee. As executive editor, I'll excuse myself.”

“Coward.”

“Well, you know what they say about valor and discretion.” She slid the book into the dressing table drawer and stood up. “Are you coming to wash my back?”

“Definitely. Just get yourself comfortable.”

She closed the bathroom door behind her.

McIntire stood for a time before he pulled the drawer open. The garish cover leered at him.
Lone Star Ranger
. It was an old book. She couldn't have been reading it, and she didn't ordinarily keep Zane Grey in her dresser. Her age was the least of what he didn't know about Leonie.

He didn't remove the book from the drawer, but lifted the cover and fanned through its pages. Keepsakes were tucked among them. A Christmas card made by her grandson, Chuckie; a tiny pressed daisy; a ribbon bookmark; and, just inside the front cover, a faded news clipping. McIntire didn't touch it, or read it past the headline. He knew what it said. A report of a car accident.
Victim, believed to be a U.S. embassy attaché, was identified as Michael Warren. No enqueries are being made into the death which has been ruled accidental.

Melvin Fratelli, your days are numbered.

What else had he told her?

“John,” she called, “my back is ready for you now.”

An insistent rapping at the back door saved McIntire from reliving the events leading to Mike Warren's death as well as keeping him from his wife's back. He closed the drawer and walked to the stairs.

“I come to tell you to call off your dogs.”

McIntire couldn't muster the strength for indignance or pretended ignorance of the nature of the dogs.

“Come on in.”

Uno Touminen wiped his feet and stepped inside.

“How long before the rest of us end up like Pelto?” Touminen gave McIntire an emphatic poke in the chest. “One of your buddies drives by Erik's place at least three-four times a day. Checking to see who might be there, taking licence numbers. Same thing for the Star Society. Two goons in a black car, sitting at the end of the road, taking numbers.”

“What makes you think that has something to do with me?”

“You're the one brought that Feebee snooping around here.”

“I didn't bring him!”

“That ain't what Orville says.” Another poke. “Didn't he come close to marrying your aunt?”

“No, he didn't.” It hadn't been Fratelli that Siobhan had almost married. “And Melvin Fratelli is no buddy of mine.” McIntire wondered what Uno would say if he told him that the agent suspected…what the hell, what could it hurt?

“Uno.” McIntire glanced over his shoulder and moved closer. “Uno, it's
me
Fratelli's after. He thinks I'm a Russian spy.”

“Are you?”

“What do you think?”

Touminen's eyes narrowed. “The judge set Erik's bail. Orville paid it so he'll be getting out for the time being. What I think is that damned well better be the end of it. Anybody else gets picked up, you'll be held responsible, spy or no spy. Tell your Fed cronies that.” Uno stomped the last of the snow off his overshoes before he left the house.

Had McIntire been the one to bring the FBI back to town? Melvin Fratelli had his eyes and ears peeled on Flambeau County before he'd ever heard of Teddy Falk. Before he'd heard of him from McIntire anyway. That was why he was holed up in Marquette. That was no excuse. McIntire should have been more careful about throwing around names. He'd opened the genie's bottle or Pandora's box, and there was no closing it. What he wouldn't give to chuck those bones back in that hole and cover them up forever. Maybe.

But someone had killed a young woman in her bed and put a shotgun to her companion's head. That person could still be walking among them. Unless it was Eban Vogel.

Maybe by finding who that killer was, McIntire could atone for his transgressions, assuage some of his guilt. Unless it was Eban Vogel.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“Can you get out?”

A plow had rumbled by an hour earlier, but McIntire wasn't about to commit himself to the sheriff until he found out where he would be called upon to get out to. “Don't know for sure, I haven't tried.”

“There ain't much point in going on about who killed Jack Stewart 'til we find out for sure whether it
was
Jack Stewart. Which we just might be able to do now.”

“How's that?”

“They found more pieces of the teeth. Pieces with lead pellets in 'em.”

“That makes it official, then,” McIntire said. Unless Rosie had used her daddy's upper plate for target practice, they belonged to the victim. Which might very well be why Nelda had turned evasive when he'd asked about her husband's teeth.

“Did you ever find out if Stewart had his own teeth?” Koski asked.

“No. I asked but didn't get a straight answer. Mrs. Stewart spooked me too much to pursue it. Maybe you'd have more luck getting the information from her kids.”

“They must have been only babies when their old man disappeared.”

“More like five or six. Old enough to remember if Pa could take his teeth out.”

“I'll try to track down one or the other of them. In the meantime, maybe you could just zip over and ask Mrs. Stewart about it. Most everybody I talk to is saying they never for one minute thought Stewart died in that mine. There were ore stains on the shoes. I'm ninety-nine percent sure he's our man.”

From what McIntire had heard, people hadn't always been so positive about Stewart's escape. And now the possible rusty tin can residue was ore stains?

Koski might have recognized his own grabbing at straws. “But, I suppose he was pretty young for losing his teeth. It's possible that it wasn't him.” Or maybe the sheriff was employing some of his heavy-handed psychology to save his back. He went on, “Could be I'm wrong. You can double-check, and if you strike out we can cross him off the list for good. That way you'll be able to set his widow's mind at rest.”

Discovering that the sheriff had concluded that her husband hadn't died in the arms of Rosie Falk might rest Nelda's mind for a time. It was going to be little consolation when she also learned that Koski thought Jack Stewart might be still alive. Massey-Davis Mining had paid out twice the normal amount as compensation to surviving families of that disaster. The mining company would be sure to get wind of it. They would not take fraud lightly. Of course they'd still have to prove it. Here was just another bit of muck he'd been responsible for stirring up. It had done nothing but add another layer of tragedy to a pathetic woman's life.

“I'll go over as soon as Leonie gets back with the car,” McIntire told him. She'd been right about those multiplying skeletons.

He'd have to face her with his own skeleton sooner or later. It was amazing the way she was carrying on as if things hadn't changed. She wouldn't have had that news clipping if she didn't know about his role in that fatal car crash. But she was behaving as if she'd never seen it. She seemed morose, but that had been going on for weeks. Sometimes he caught her looking at him curiously, no more than that. Maybe she was playing some sort of game, waiting for him to crack. That didn't seem like Leonie, but how did he know? How well did he really know her? Not much more than when they'd married, and she'd been a virtual stranger then.

Their meeting came about ordinarily enough. When he'd stopped at the unimpressive offices of
H. Harris and Sons, Publishers and Printers,
with his English translation of their twenty-page booklet,
The Railroads of Hungary
, it was Leonie who sat behind the desk. A nameplate said she was Mrs. H. Harris. Before McIntire knew how it had happened, he'd learned that she was the widow of the firm's founder; that she had sold out her portion of the company to her stepsons, changing her status from owner to employee, and that she was free on Saturday evening.

That first social engagement did not get off to nearly such a brisk start. Leonie was a shop window mannikin at his side at the cinema. Over supper she made polite responses to his questions but otherwise sat silently regarding him with an expression he'd seen only once since—when he accompanied her to a horse fair to choose a pony for her grandson. McIntire had tried not to squirm, prattled on like the lunatic he'd so recently been, and made an excuse to see her home as soon as was diplomatically possible. She'd acquiesced with discernible relief.

He was surprised when she invited him into her flat, astounded at his own acceptance of the invitation, and flabbergasted when that invitation extended to morning.

When he awoke, she sat on the side of the bed in a pale blue dressing gown. On the table was a tray holding a teapot, an egg, and two slices of toast. She was once again silently watchful as she poured the tea.

McIntire had sipped. “It's nice.”

She'd asked if he might not like such nice things for the rest of his life, and he'd allowed as how he probably would. She'd put aside the both the tray and the robe. Fortunately a short wait could cause no further damage to British toast.

Three weeks later, at her sister's house in St. Mary's in the Marsh, they became man and wife.

The zip of her overshoes sounded from the porch. She came through to the dining room with flushed cheeks, and dropped her purse and a sheaf of papers of various sizes and colors on the table.

“Got the go ahead for the cookbook, I take it.”

“Got the raw materials, so we're underway. Unless they prove to be forty variations on tuna hotdish.”

Her eager look faded as she leafed through the handwritten scraps. “No, it seems we have forty recipes for the pasty—with absolutely no variation.”

“Folks hereabouts don't fiddle with their pasties.”

“How did the Cornish pasty get to be Finnish ethnic food anyway?”

“People like Jack Stewart, I imagine. By the way, we should know soon whether or not he was Rosie's man.”

“I'm glad to hear that. Irene called in on Nelda a day or two ago. She says the poor dear is getting frightened and seems even more unbalanced. Her standing as a miner's widow is about all she has.”

“She might not have that much longer.”

Leonie unpinned her hat and listened to McIntire's news. “The children might not be any better source of information than their mother. They're not going to want to believe their father was shot to death.”

“Pa didn't think he drowned.” Neither did Nick Thorsen, but McIntire couldn't quite remember how or when he'd learned that.
When first we practice to deceive.
“If he lived through that mine accident, Nelda might know it, if she has any real comprehension of the situation at all.”

“What do you suppose goes on in that mind?”

“I have enough trouble figuring out what goes on in yours.”

She stretched to kiss his chin. “Women are supposed to be mysterious.”

“Leonie, has Melvin Fratelli been in touch with you?”

“Mr. Fratelli? Of course not! Now you're the mystery man. What would Melvin Fratelli want with me?”

“I don't know…he was after Ma.”

“What makes you think that was him?”

He hadn't denied it. Not exactly. “He might not have been the person who made the call, but I know damn well he was behind it.”

“Why? Are you sure you're not just over-reacting? What reason could he have?”

“I don't know,” McIntire said again. “I wish I did. I'll get over to see Nelda while the car's still warm.”

“Will you be long?”

“Chatting with Nutty Nelda? I should hope not.”

“You don't plan to go anywhere else?”

“No.”

“Good. It'll be dinner time soon. I'll put some potatoes going.”

Put potatoes going? His wife was turning into a Yooper before his very eyes.

***

The previous night's snowfall had buried Nelda Stewart's front steps. Near the wall, an eight-inch hole was tunneled through to the underside of the porch. A few black hairs clung to its sides. McIntire stooped to peer in. A whisper of cat urine hung in the air, a harbinger of things to come. He should have tried stuffing some Vicks up his nose. He mounted the bottom step, closed his eyes, willed his mind to go blank.

He rapped on the screen door. It thudded against the ice that kept it from closing completely but made little sound. He gave a yank forceful enough to dislodge the snow heaped against it and leapt back.

He stepped past a heap of frozen washing, stacked like cordwood with clothes pins still clinging to the shoulders of the faded dresses. His knock at the inner door received no response, not even the courtesy of a get the hell out of here. McIntire waited and shivered before knocking again. This time an answer came in the form of a plaintive yowl, nowhere near loud enough to have been uttered by Mrs. Stewart.

McIntire put his mouth to the glass of the small window in the door and blew until he'd melted an eyeball-sized gap in the frost that covered the other side.

The kitchen was devoid of life forms visible to the naked eye but for the cat on the table. It was so heavily furred that only its narrow eyes showed it to be other than a great black dust-mop. Snow clung to its tail and neck ruff, and its whiskers were tipped with frost that wasn't melting. The animal must have its own way in and out. A fruit jar next to it had a neat crack splitting off its base to expose solidly frozen string beans. The cat opened its mouth in another pleading cry.

The door wasn't locked. McIntire stepped over a dead bluejay and went inside. There is no place on earth so cold as an unheated house, but the air was none the worse for being frozen.

“Mrs. Stewart, are you at home?”

It didn't take long to determine that she was not. McIntire walked through the living room to the stairs, as steep and narrow as a ship's ladder but nowhere near so sturdy. It led to a hallway flanked by two tiny bedrooms. Strips of frost on the slanted ceilings showed where the roof beams lay.

The room on his right had no door and had almost certainly been the lair of one or both of the Stewart children. Pictures cut from magazines papered the walls—movie stars and horses.

McIntire rapped on the doorframe and waited a few seconds before he pushed aside the curtain sheltering the entry to Nelda's own room. The double bed was made up, threadbare blankets tucked under the mattress edges, two lumpy pillows stuffed into purple and blue bordered feed sack cases. A pile of moth-eaten wool coats lay at the foot, and two more hung on the bedposts. Whatever Nelda had done with that money from Massey-Davis, fraudulently acquired or not, she hadn't spent it for her own comfort. The only hint that the room's occupant was not a rag-doll was a new-looking cardigan of brilliant crimson lain flat on the bed along with a pale grey dress. The style of the dress showed, even to McIntire's untrained eye, that it was definitely not new, but it looked well made, little worn, and, like the sweater, brushed mostly free of cat hair. Finery laid out for a trip to town?

McIntire bent his head under the low ceiling and crossed to the window. There were no tracks in the snow that had fallen in the night, so if Mrs. Stewart had gone off it had been the day before. She could have taken the train into Chandler. That would have meant a walk back from the depot in St. Adele in a snowstorm. McIntire wasn't worried that Nelda was frozen in a snowbank. She'd lived here too long for that.

A narrow vertical box resembling an upended coffin served as a wardrobe. It held a single plaid dress and a short-sleeved blouse sagging on a hanger. McIntire approached the chest of drawers. A book rested on its bubbled veneer,
The Poems of Oscar Wilde
. Nelda didn't seem like the literary type. He opened the cover. It was a 1908 edition. Maybe her husband had brought it from his native England. As he reached to pull open a drawer, the crowing of a cock brought him to his senses. What in hell was he doing, lurking around this crazy woman's pitiful bedroom? Nelda Stewart had a right to leave home, and if a storm kept her from getting back, it was none of McIntire's business.

He descended the stairs and left the house with relief akin to joy. Whatever his problems, he had warmth, food, and his sanity, and, so far, Leonie.

His buoyant mood extended to fetching the shovel from the Studebaker's trunk and clearing the snow from Nelda's steps. The cockerel crowed again, and he turned his shovel on what he took to be the path to the barn. The chickens wouldn't have been fed or watered, and hens weren't nearly so resourceful as cats.

Clucking led him to a door at the side of the barn. Inside, a dozen reddish hens scratched in a two-foot layer of manure and straw. It might have helped to keep their feet from freezing.

A door on the far wall led to the building's interior, but probably hadn't been opened in ten years' worth of chicken shit. McIntire backed out and waded through the snow around the corner of the barn.

The wall afforded some shelter; vestiges of Nelda's path were still visible. Like every other barn door in the county, in winter this one opened only wide enough to admit its largest regular visitor. McIntire was slim, but not so skeletal as Nelda Stewart.

A bulging gunny sack topped with a rusty coffee can was just inside the door. He wedged himself into the doorway and reached to scoop a can-full of cracked corn.

A blast of wind through the open door elicited a creaking of beams and sent a shadow fluttering on the wall. McIntire peered into the dim space. He didn't see the expected barn owl. He saw rubber overshoes lying in the litter, and, some ten inches above them, toe to toe, a pair of feet. They were bare; they were blue; and they swung restlessly to and fro below the tattered hem of a flannel nightgown.