Witch Cradle (25 page)

Chapter Forty-Eight

The blanching of Pelto's wind-reddened cheeks when McIntire mentioned Rose Falk's possible pregnancy told McIntire what he wanted to know. Pelto added one more stick to the bundle of narrowly split birch cradled in his round-eyed grandchild's arms. “Take it to your mum.” He turned back to McIntire. “Are you sure about this?”

“No,” McIntire admitted, “but it's a strong possibility. The other victim was probably a Doctor Hudson. Hudson was a known…abortionist, I guess you'd have to say. Rose was terrified that any child she bore would inherit her cleft lip.”

Pelto's own lip would be shredded if he chewed it any harder. “And you think maybe Rose died from whatever he did to her? She wasn't murdered after all?”

“There are those who would disagree, but, no,” McIntire said, “there was no sign of injury on her remains, only a mattress stained with blood. Rose might not have died of natural causes, but she probably wasn't deliberately killed.”

“I never could see how anybody would want to kill her.”

“The doctor, on the other hand, had his head blown off. That was no accident.”

“Maybe he did it himself. Despondent over what had happened.”

“And put the shotgun back in the house just before he jumped into the well?”

“Yeah, I guess that's right.”

The grandchild, boy or girl, McIntire couldn't tell, bundled as it was with little more than a red nose showing, charged back across the yard and began rummaging through the discarded ends of lumber at their feet.

Pelto removed a knife from his pocket. “Poor little Rosie,” he said. “There's hardly been a day in the past sixteen years that I haven't thought about her and Ted. I talked them into leaving, them and a whole lot more like them. If they'd been shot or starved to death, I had to answer for it.” He opened the knife and tested the blade on his thumb. “Makes me glad to be an atheist.”

He seemed to be evading the point. He may not have sent Rose to starve in Soviet Karelia, but if she'd died aborting his infant, he was hardly absolved of complicity in her death.

The child extended a scrap of wood. “What's in it, Grandpa?”

Grandpa turned the wood over and peered at its cut ends. He held it up to the sun, as if he could see through its grain. “Well, Tony”—ah, a boy—“I can't be positive,” he said gravely, “but I'm pretty sure it's a boreal owl.”

“Aegolius funereus
.”
The boy smiled, showing gaps a jack-o-lantern would be proud of. “Dad likes owls.”

Pelto applied his knife to the wood. “It's been hard to grasp. All that time, wondering, imagining where she was, and she'd bled to death in her own bed and nobody knew it.”

“Somebody knew. Somebody who cared enough for her to take revenge on Cedric Hudson.”

“You thinking me, for instance?”

“You were with her that day.”

“Until about noon.” And he supposedly believed she was leaving a day or two later, yet he'd made no attempt to see her again, no saying goodbye.

“Where did you go after you dropped Rose at home?”

“What business is that of yours? Don't tell me you're investigating me?”

Anybody with Orville Pelto's political background knew his rights, among them that he didn't need to answer nosy questions from a passing township constable. Pelto surprised him by chipping away at his stick of wood and murmuring, “What did I do the rest of that day? I don't remember for sure. I took Rose home, and I felt a little down. We'd said goodbye, and I knew I'd probably never see her again. I must have gone into Chandler to file the Contract for Deed with the county. I would have picked up Erik from wherever he was.”

“It was the day the Massey-Davis mine flooded.”

It brought the former recruiter back to life. “Oh, Jesus, that's right. That's something I won't forget. It was hot as hell that afternoon. I fetched Erik and we stopped at the lake to cool off. Then I did go in to the court house. The cave-in happened around supper time. I went straight to the mine and stayed all night. They brought out seven men. That was all.” He went back to talking to himself. “So when I was there, watching them pull those bodies out, Rose was dying, too.”

“What about Erik?”

“What about him?”

“Was he with you?”

“No. Of course not. He was at home.”

“By himself?”

“He was fifteen years old!”

He was. A grown man in those days. How much had Erik guessed about the extent of his father's friendship with Mrs. Falk?

“When we talked before, you said that Rose seemed happy that day, excited to be going?”

“She'd been nervy up to then. I thought she might back out. That day, when we went to wrap things up, get the papers signed, she seemed more her old self. I thought it had to do with leaving home. I suppose if she'd had another problem, and had come up with a way to solve it, that could account for the change.”

It raised the question of why Rose had felt the problem to be entirely hers, one she needed to solve without help. She'd depended on Orville Pelto to take care of everything else. Why not this? A woman's mind was a hard thing to fathom, and Rose seemed inscrutable even to those who knew her best. Once again McIntire found himself wishing he'd been among them.

“You figure it was Teddy after all?” Pelto asked.

“No. It wasn't Teddy.” McIntire was reasonably sure of that. “You might have had as much reason as Ted to kill Cedric Hudson. Maybe more.”

The door opened and Delilah Pelto came out holding a sheet of paper, a sock monkey, and a well bundled baby. She placed the baby with its leggy companion on a bed of wood-chips and the paper in McIntire's hand. “Could you give this to Leonie? It's a recipe for the church cookbook.” The sand-colored locks escaping her kerchief made McIntire long for spring. “It's Erik's favorite.” She smiled. “Pasty.”

McIntire thanked her and filed the recipe in his pocket.

A graceful owl had, with the aid of Pelto's jackknife, shucked its bonds and lay in its liberator's palm.

At the sound of an approaching car, Mrs. Pelto gave a muffled gasp, snatched up the baby and bolted for the kitchen door. The familiar black Fed-mobile rolled slowly past the driveway.

Orville scraped a tail feather into the owl. “One of us is going to be suspected of keeping bad company,” he said. His smile faded as he added, “Poor little Wild Rose. She should have told me.”

***

The female mind might be an enigma McIntire would never crack, but those with them seemed to have an uncanny ability to understand one another. If Rose had told anybody about being pregnant, it might have been another woman. Even if she hadn't said a word, another woman might have suspected, recognized some mysterious signs, as only one with experience could. Sandra Culver thought Rose had miscarried, and Sandra was certainly a pro in such matters. Irene Touminen wasn't. Not from a personal standpoint, so far as McIntire was aware, but she was Rose's closest female friend, and, he remembered, she'd trained to be a nurse.

Sulo opened the door. He was in his relaxing state, feet in grey wool socks, suspenders hanging on his hips. “Come on in. Take a load off.” He shuffled back into the room. “Uno brought a cake over.” Mount Everest in sugar and coconut occupied the center of the table. Irene cut three man-sized slices and fetched forks from the drawer.

“Pregnant?” She might never had heard the word.

“Do you think it's possible?”

“Sure it's possible. I guess. I don't know any reason that she
couldn't
have been expecting. But I also don't have any reason to think that she was. What difference would it make?” The theory that Rose's partner in death had been Cedric Hudson must not yet have made the rounds.

“Maybe none. But we're no closer to finding who killed Rose than we were when we found her body. Any information might help.”

Irene placed the knife on the table, crossed her arms across her chest, and waited.

McIntire said, “If the father was someone other than Teddy, it might have a bearing on the case.”
A bearing on the case.
He was turning into Perry Mason. “You were Rose's best friend,” he added. “If she told anybody it would have been you.”

“She didn't say a word to me.”

Sulo left the table to pick up the broom leaning against the cupboard and pull out one of its straws. He returned and sat picking his teeth.

McIntire was willing to put up with the pesky shreds of coconut. Uno Touminen's reputation as a champion baker of cakes was well deserved. He took another bite before asking, “Did you see Rose in the days before she left? Other than at the party?”

“Sure. I went over in the afternoon. It must have been the day before she died. Teddy was off to take care of the last-minute things, putting stuff on the train. I stayed for a while and helped with some packing. Mostly we just talked about the past…and the future. Eban Vogel brought some eggs over. Rose had sold her hens. He only stayed a few minutes. He asked when Teddy'd be home and said he'd stop back the next day.” She licked at her fork. “Looking back, he did seem concerned about her, maybe even worried. I thought it was about her going to Russia. He was mad as all get out about that, had a big fight with Teddy, which was why he wanted to know when he'd be home, I figured at the time. But maybe there was more to it.”

“You think Eban might have known Rose was pregnant? How?”

“Only one way I can think of.” Irene's eyes twinkled. “No. Don't be silly. He couldn't possibly have known. If she
was
pregnant, which I do not believe for one minute.”

“Was that the last time you saw her?”

“We went to Escanaba.” It was Sulo's first contribution to the conversation. His chair scraped on the linoleum. “The next day, we took the train to the fair in Escanaba.” He stood up and shrugged into his braces. “I gotta get back at it.” The door slammed behind him.

“Time waits for no man, and neither does a barn full of cow…er…manure.” Irene touched her fingertip to a shred of coconut and put it to her tongue. “Don't mind Sulo. He was crazy about Rose once,” she said. “So was Eban Vogel. It seemed like a fatherly sort of thing, but who knows?”

Chapter Forty-Nine

McIntire flipped through the latest edition of
Time.
Groundhog Day had been a bust at the Vancouver zoo when the fisher ate the groundhog. Otherwise it was the same as last week and the week before: Death in Korea. Communist hunting at home. How close was World War III? Should the U.S. get out of Europe? How high would prices go? The background noise of existence, a blur of print or a grumble on the radio, something to tsk over, indulge in a bit of hand wringing, then switch off, use the paper to start the fire, and get on with peeling potatoes and mending the fence.

Unless, like Grace and Mike Maki, you had sacrificed your firstborn to Douglas MacArthur or, like Erik Pelto, you were in a face-off with Joe McCarthy. However uncomfortable Melvin Fratelli could make things for McIntire, he couldn't send him and his family to exile to Finland, and McIntire didn't have a job to lose.

A sixteen-year-old murder with a handful of suspects, all with the same possible motive. Anyone who loved Rose Falk might have walked in, found her dead or dying, her blood on Cedric Hudson's hands, availed themselves of the loaded shotgun and blown the doctor's head to kingdom come. Except that it wasn't quite like that. The doctor died outdoors, near the cistern into which his body was dumped, naked, or close to it. Had he been undressed after he died? Who would, or could, do such a thing? Had he been forced to undress at gunpoint? Why? To save the jacket and glasses for his eventual suicide? That would involve an element of premeditation.

Would one who truly loved Rose Falk leave her body in a hole, pinned under her killer's, hoping it would never be found? Cheating her out of a grave and her rightful chance to at least be mourned?

How had Eban Vogel got hold of that watch? Vogel was another puzzle. A puzzle who'd been out late the night Rose died and come back spreading the word about a mine flood. Where would he have been likely to have heard that news? Maybe somewhere near the scene?

“Leonie.” McIntire shoved aside his unread magazine. “Want to go for a drive?”

She didn't turn from her place at the sink. “Where to?”

“Maybe take a swing down along Forty-one.”

“It's snowing.”

“It's always snowing. Anyway, I think this is more just what's already here blowing around.”

She wasn't hard to convince. “We can take my car.” She dried her hands and reached for the bottle of Jergens. “You can drive.”

McIntire waited until he was behind the wheel of the Nash before mentioning, “I need to stop a minute to ask Nick about something.”

“What's that?” She placed her handbag and
Time
on the seat between them.

“How to find a woman of the streets in Sidnaw.”

“There are no streets in Sidnaw.”

Which meant that if Eban's lady friend was still around, locating her should be a snap.

“I need you to come up with some devious way of luring Nick away from Mia, or vice versa.”

“No deviousness necessary. He'll want to come out to see the car.”

He did. Leonie obligingly went to the house to ask Mia if there was anything they could pick up for her. Nick ambled out in his shirtsleeves. “Can I take a look?”

McIntire lifted the hood and ducked under it with him. Nick didn't show surprise at his request.

“Her house is on the corner in back of the filling station. Little place with lots of bushes. Handy for her.”

“You think she's still there? Or still alive?”

“She's still there. I don't know that she's in the business anymore though.” He prodded some wires. “Claudette.”

“Does she have a last name?”

“Damned if I know.” Nick straightened up. “Were you planning to pay by check?”

Leonie flatly refused to be a part of the interview. “Much as I'd like to see what a real…
Claudette
looks like, I'll decline. I'm sure she'll be much more forthcoming if you're on your own.” She headed for the café a couple of hundred yards down the road. “Join me when you're done. No shenanigans. I'm wearing my watch, and I'm thoroughly familiar with your routines.”

Routines? Was that why she'd been so out of sorts?

His knock on the door sounded timid, and he gave another, more emphatic rap.

“Claudette?”

The woman who answered the door would have been a disappointment to Leonie. McIntire was a bit let down himself. No painted lady, no faded and bitter-eyed jezebel with nicotine-stained fingers. Mrs. Mason, as she corrected him, was in appearance similar to his wife, aproned and comfortably rounded, with curls the grey that Leonie's would be without her fleet of bottles.

She waited behind the storm door. McIntire fumbled for a tactful approach, but only for a moment. He supposed anyone “in the business” couldn't afford to be oversensitive. He said, “I think you knew Eban Vogel.”

“I believe Mr. Vogel has passed away.”

When Mrs. Mason learned that McIntire was a lifelong acquaintance of Eban Vogel's, that he'd been born in his house, that there was an element of St. Adele's bodies-in-the-well in his curiosity, she pushed open the door and invited him inside.

“Yes,” she said. “Mr. Vogel used to call from time to time.”

“I know it was a long time ago, but I was hoping you might be able to tell me if he visited on a specific day.” Maybe she kept accounts, a ledger, a schedule in a log book, saved her old calendars.

That didn't seem to be the case, but from the set of her lips, she'd guessed at his line of thinking.

McIntire tried again. “Do you remember when the Massey-Davis mine flooded?”

“Nobody around here is ever going to forget that. I lost several good…friends that day. And, yes, I remember very well, Mr. Vogel was here that evening.”

“Would you have any recollection of what time he left?”

“He usually stayed for a cup of tea,” she looked him in the eye, “after. That night there was a lot of noise and carrying on out in the road. He went down to Mitchell's to see what it was all about, and he didn't come back. It wasn't late. Maybe around nine or nine thirty.”

Nine. It would have been tight, but it left time to go see Rose before he stopped off for a sauna with Mike Maki.

“A few minutes later my mother came pounding on the back door to tell me the mine had caved in and a hundred men were dead.” Her smile showed the glint of a gold molar. “Ma was one for exaggeration.”

Ma? McIntire supposed that even Claudettes had to come from somewhere.

“It gave me a start. Ma wouldn't normally have knocked when I had a visitor.”

“But Mr. Vogel had gone.”

“Oh, he just walked down to the saloon. His car was here for another hour or better.”

McIntire could have kissed her, but he'd left his billfold in his other trousers. At last a shred of good news. He'd join Leonie for a celebratory slice of banana cream pie. He felt twenty pounds lighter as he walked to the door.

“Anything else I can help you with?” The gold tooth gleamed.

Maybe she
was
still in the business.

***

His ebullience waned at the sight of Leonie's downturned mouth.

He sat opposite her and nodded to the waitress with the coffee pot.

“Look at this.” She shoved her magazine across the table. “The government's reduced the meat ration again. It's down to eight pence a week now. That's worse than during the war. The girls haven't said a thing.” She sounded more bewildered than angry. “How can you raise a boy on a lamb chop a week?”

As far as McIntire was concerned, a fella could get through an entire lifetime without ever eating a sheep and be the better for it. But it did sound pretty draconian. He looked at the article. It began with reporting the twenty percent reduction in ration, continued into a tirade on the folly of socialism, and concluded with a London butcher's apt quoting of Psalms.

“It sounds grim, but things will get better soon. I'm sure the girls are doing fine.”

Now she sounded angry. “And just how can you be so sure? They wouldn't tell me if they weren't. There's hardly any coal, flu going around, and smallpox in Bristol. What can you expect? How can people stay well if they can't even eat or stay warm?” She sighed. “Would you like a pudding?”

“No,” McIntire said. “I guess not. I think we'd better be on our way, if you're finished.”

He took time to drink the hours-old coffee and let Leonie know what had transpired with Claudette.

“I'll stop on the way back to let Pete know.” McIntire backed the Nash onto the road. It handled better in the snow than his Studebaker. “And we'll have to tell Mia.”

“I daresay she will be grateful.”

Grateful? It was a funny way of putting it. “I'm sure she'll be overjoyed. She hasn't had much good news lately.”

“And you must be overjoyed to be able to bring it to her.”

Once again Leonie was someone he didn't seem to know. Patrick Humphrey came to his mind. McIntire asked abruptly, “Are you going to stay?”

“I don't know. If there's another war….” After a long silence, she said, “You won't go back with me.”

Patrick Humphrey, hidden news clippings, concealed letters. He gripped the wheel of the new car, the one she hadn't mentioned until it stood in the drive. “Leonie….”

“You promised you would.”

There was nothing he could say. He had promised. “Give it two years,” he'd begged. If, after that, she wanted to leave, they'd go back to England. He couldn't see now how he'd ever be able to keep that promise. “I'm sorry.”

“So that's it? I finally get a husband who lives longer than the time it takes to unpack, and….”

“I'm sorry.” He didn't know what else to say.

“Not so sorry as me, I'm sure.”

“So you do want to go back?”

“What I'm sorry—no angry—about is that promises mean so little to you.”

“It doesn't mean little, it's just that….” Just that what? How could he explain? He'd found his home again after half a lifetime. He couldn't leave it behind now. Not forever.

“You lied to me. Why?”

“I didn't know how it would be. I shouldn't have promised that I'd leave here until after I had actually lived here.”

“I'm not talking about that.”

He'd been afraid that she wasn't. But he had nothing to say to that either. It wasn't important. He'd stopped and talked to Mia for a few minutes. That was all. He didn't mention it. He'd been gone all day, and she was angry with him already. “You don't always tell me everything.”

“I don't lie.”

Had she been sleep-walking when she called that lawyer? The one she'd never heard of? He couldn't bring himself to pursue it.

He would have to let Mia know what he'd learned today, and soon. Presumably relief at discovering that her father was miles away when Rose Falk died would override the sting of finding out where he had been. It might not do much to protect Nick when she learned who it was had pointed McIntire to Claudette.

***

“He could have done it earlier in the day.” Pete Koski vigorously polished the watch on his sleeve, maybe hopeful of a genie popping out to make all things clear. “There's no law says Rose had to have died at night.”

There wasn't. It just seemed that such a ghastly scene could never have been played out on a sultry summer afternoon.

“Mia remembered that her father had been out the evening that the mine flooded. She didn't mention him going earlier in the day.”

“She might not have such a reliable memory where her old man is concerned.”

“She didn't have to turn over the watch.”

“No. I wonder why she did.”

“She's absolutely convinced that her father is an innocent man, and she wants to prove it.” Koski would probably not give the late Charlotte Vogel's assurance much more credence than he might Nelda Stewart's angels.

“What do you think?”

“Me?” Koski had sounded like he really wanted to know. What did he think? McIntire leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “I think that sometime toward the middle of the long, cold, tedious winter of 1934, Orville Pelto came riding in on his four-wheeled charger and swept young Rose Falk off her feet. He was handsome and charming. He didn't notice how ugly she was, and, when she was with him, she forgot, too. He convinced her, and her husband, to give up their life here and take part in a great Utopian adventure. He convinced Rose of a few other things, and she got pregnant. In spite of her courage, or maybe because of it, she couldn't face bringing a child into the world that would suffer the way that she had. And she knew what she could do about it. When it turned out that Teddy would be away for a few days, she called upon Doctor Cedric Hudson.”

Koski looked up sharply, but he didn't interrupt.

“He probably did come at night, or late in the evening. The Falks had a long driveway. A car in their yard wouldn't be seen from the road, but, still, Rose would want to be discreet.

“They weren't discreet enough. Someone—someone who cared about Rose—showed up. Rose was in bad shape, bleeding and near to dead.”

The sheriff's glanced shifted to the photo of his daughter, then back to McIntire.

“He gave Rose a paper and pen so she could write a note to her husband.”

“He-who?”

“Whoever it was that came.”

“And Cedric Hudson hung around while this was going on?”

“Why not? He did fancy himself a doctor.” McIntire continued, “Rose wrote a note for Teddy, and she died.”

“And this person who was so fond of her dumped her body in the well?”