Witch Cradle (27 page)

He set out with giant strides. The surface of the lake was a marbling of ice swept bare, thin crusts of packed snow, and drifts into which he sank almost to his thighs.

“Mrs. Pelto!”

She turned and watched him for a bit without speaking, then wheeled and walked on. The largest of her children trudged alongside, holding, with its mother, the rope of a small toboggan carrying its younger sibling and the sock monkey.

McIntire trotted up behind her. “Mrs. Pelto, what are you doing out here? It's not safe to go any further.” He waved toward the water, close enough to see ripples lapping at the shelf of ice. “This is far enough.”

“It's too windy. When we turn around it's cold on their faces.”

“Not half so cold as they'll be if…. When will your husband be back?” He might have been demanding to learn the whereabouts of her daddy, he realized. He'd been reminding himself that Delilah Pelto wasn't really a child, but now was beginning to wonder. He added, more gently, “I heard Erik is in Wisconsin cutting wood.”

“He has to make some money to pay back Orville for the bail.”

“Not Wisconsin.” The little boy scuffed through the snow.

“Tony—”

“It's just pretend. Dad didn't go to Wisconsin, did he Mum?”

Why would they have lied about that?

Delilah sighed. “No.” She ducked her head against the wind and spoke into her collar. “Erik went to Canada.”

He might have guessed. McIntire didn't know what sort of immigration laws they had in Canada. But they didn't have Joe McCarthy.

“He's not coming back. When he gets a place to live, he'll send for us.”

It seemed extreme, an overreaction. The government could make life uncomfortable for those it wanted out, but they hadn't managed to actually deport much of anybody. Erik Pelto hadn't committed any crimes that McIntire was aware of. He was a U.S. citizen, and a war veteran. He had a family. Wouldn't running to Canada just make things worse? Still, Erik and his father knew more about the situation than McIntire did.

“Canada isn't such a bad place.”

“We don't want to go.”

“Well, right now you're getting off this lake. March!”

McIntire lifted the largest child in his arms. He had his mother's cinnamon eyes and his father's runny nose.

Delilah obediently flipped what McIntire assumed to be his sister—she had a pink hood—around to face the back of the sled. She gripped the rope and swung the sled around.

“Were you thinking about going back to Australia?” Would Erik Pelto lose his family as well as his home?

“We want to stay right here.”

That might very well be something about which neither of them would have a choice. The first thing McIntire noticed when he turned was a toenail moon high in the eastern sky. The second was a stretch of gun-metal blue water, slicing the ice on which they stood from the tree-lined shore.

Delilah gave a tiny gasp. That was all. They stood silent, staring into the stream that widened perceptibly even as they watched.

The hills were already dark shadows before the sinking sun. The shoreline was long, empty of human life. Except for Adam Wall. By the time he had galloped up to face them across the chasm it had grown to six or seven feet. “Come on.” He beckoned.

McIntire lowered Tony to the ice and took Delilah's elbow. “You first.”

“No!” It was a horrified whisper.

“You're the heaviest. The crack is getting wider by the minute. These two will be easy.” He didn't wait for assent. The months of slinging snow paid off. Delilah sailed across the ice with room to spare. Wall staggered only a little when her weight hit his chest. The children he caught like footballs.

McIntire backed away from the water. He took a few running steps and launched himself across the gap. The next thing he felt was the blinding pain of his knee cracking into the ice and a shock of disbelief when the water closed around his legs. For a moment his layers of wool kept him afloat, bobbing like a cork as he struggled to reach Adam Wall's extended hand. Then he felt numbingly cold water on his skin and the lake reached up and pulled him under.

Chapter Fifty-One

Flames leaped into the darkening sky. Gnomelike creatures with peaked heads flitted amid swirls of smoke. Fierce heat seared McIntire's face and naked chest. The rest of him was either numb or missing.

“Am I in Hell?”

“Yes.” Delilah Pelto's voice was inches from his ear. “Mr. Wall's gone for a car. Don't fall to sleep.”

Did that mean he was awake? This wasn't some bizarre nightmare after all? His cough sent a hot knife through his lungs.

“Get as close to the fire as you can stand.”

She wasn't making sense. He'd never be able to stand, not with his smashed knee and ice-armor trousers. He slumped forward and smelled the acrid odor of singing eyelashes. “My glasses?”

“Long gone.” She pushed him back. “Not quite that close.”

“Abies balsamea.
” Tony. His announcement preceded a shower of sparks and a rush of flame.

It was short-lived. The firelight died. Not far off, black water gleamed.

“What happened? Did they all get off before the ice went out?”

“No.” Delilah rubbed his hands. “I don't think so.”

“Betula lutea.”

Another burst of flame felt warm on his face. McIntire leaned back. Someone had thoughtfully propped him against a log, taken off his soaked jacket, and wrapped him in a dry one. Adam Wall. Adam Wall had pulled him out of the water. Mr. Wall had gone for a car. Erik Pelto had run to Canada. His wife didn't want to go.

“It'll be okay,” McIntire said. “Canada's not that much different from Michigan.”

The response was a piercing wail.

“Miranda!” Delilah started up.

The toddler dropped her firewood contribution and held out chubby fingers for her mother's kiss.

“Rosa acicularis.”
The boy's precocity reared its ugly head once more. “Prickly wild rose,” he added helpfully.

Prickly Wild Rose. Little Rosie. Had she been prickly or gentle? Courageous or cowardly? Loving or thoughtless? Ugly or beautiful?

Tony threw a piece of driftwood of indeterminate species onto the pyre and leaned against his mother's knee. Miranda stood clutching her monkey, scratched fingers in mouth, mesmerized by the flames. Her stubby figure brought an eerie recollection. Uno Touminen in miniature. It seemed years since Touminen had stood similarly transfixed by fire, similarly sucking his digits, waiting as Rose Falk's bones were being removed from under the
Rosa acicularis
that had bitten him. Nature, at least, had given Rose a suitable tribute. Or had it? Even wild roses can be planted.

Thoughts of Uno, and flora, and murder, were erased by the sweetest music McIntire had ever heard: The rumble of Adam Wall's Ford pickup.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Before he left the blessedly warm truck, McIntire turned to his rescuer. “Find Sulo Touminen.”

Ten hours later he emerged from the deepest sleep of his life. His first conscious feeling was of his aching knee. His second was of his wife's warm body against his back.

“Playing Eskimo?” he asked.

“If it's good enough for Nanook….” She lay still for a time. “You might have been dead, too.”

McIntire didn't need to ask what other deaths Leonie referred to. “I couldn't have done that to you—left you husbandless for the third time.”

“You already have done.”

McIntire felt cold all over again. “Don't talk about it now. We'll work things out.”

“You took my third husband.”

“I'm your third husband, and I plan to stay—”

“Fourth.”

He was still dreaming. He might as well go along with it. “And the third?”

“Michael Warren.”

Not dreaming, but delirious. Or was he as crazy as Buster—what was his real name?—said he was. On the other hand, maybe it was Leonie that had gone off her rocker.

“Michael Warren wasn't married,” he said.

“He would have been. He'd have been married on New Year's day, 1948, if he hadn't been killed the week before Christmas.”

It explained a lot, the change in Leonie's attitude toward him, her sadness, but it brought up more questions, more confusion. “But how could Melvin Fratelli have known? This can't be just a coincidence.”

The bed lurched as Leonie bounced to a sitting position and pushed her husband onto his back. “Melvin? What's he got to do with it?”

“I saw the clipping. I thought…. It didn't come from Fratelli?” How blind could he have been? Who would be more likely to have a clipping from a London newspaper? “You always knew.”

“I knew that it should have been you in that car. Mike died because he was taking your place.”

“Then why did you…?” He didn't want to say “seduce me the first chance you got?”

“You owed me.”

“So you hunted me down.”

“It wasn't hard. I knew Mike had gone that night because the man who was scheduled to work got sick, and Mike was the only other person at the embassy that spoke Hungarian. He'd taken someone else's place, and he died in someone else's place. That man was still alive. It wasn't hard to find the Hungarian railroad pamphlet and call the U.S. embassy to see if they could supply a translator.”

How simple, and how gullible he'd been to think that it had all been the product of fate and his overwhelming charm. How gullible and how vain. “You couldn't have started out with the intent of getting me as a substitute husband. For one thing, I might have been already married.”

“I didn't have any particular plan. I only wanted to meet the man who was responsible for Mike dying. Then I could decide the best way to get revenge.” She tickled her fingers up his ribs. “What better way than torture by inches, for the rest of your life.”

“It hasn't been all that bad.”

“After I met you, I thought, why not? Mike had taken your spot, you could take his. Of course I never really blamed you. I knew that crash wasn't your fault.”

He could let it go at that. But he was too tired for more evasions. “Yes, it was,” McIntire told her. “It was my fault.”

Leonie's face against his neck went still.

“It wasn't an accident.” He pulled the blankets away from his throbbing knee and leaned back into the pillow. He'd tell her now. Quick. Before his brain thawed out and cowardice took over.

“The British Foreign Office had a conference going with leaders of some Hungarian political parties, hatching up plans to keep the Russians from taking over completely. They were scrambling for interpreters. They sent a car for me. I got some ribbing about meeting their new driver, a young woman from America. It was the usual cold December London drizzle. When I came out she was waiting, ready to open the car door. She wasn't American.”

“You knew her?”

“Yes, I knew her. She wasn't American, but, to my credit, she gave a pretty good imitation.”

“To your credit?”

It was a story McIntire hadn't told before. One he hoped he'd never have to tell. He tried to clear his mind, remember how it happened and remember that it was Leonie by his side. “The U.S.S.R. had, still has I'm sure, a program set up to train operatives in the customs of target countries. A school for spies. The agents were steeped in the culture they were expecting to enter, mostly in Britain and the USA. I was an instructor in the habits of
Homo americanus
. Considering I had almost no first-hand experience, I must have done okay. For a time.”

Ludmilla Andropov had been one of the best students. A chameleon, a natural mimic, she was like a recording robot, and with just as little feeling. “It was Ludmilla who began to hint that my Russian wasn't quite what it should be.”

“Mr. Falk says it's perfect.”

“It is,” McIntire said. “Down to the last regional nuance. That was the problem. I was supposed to be from Philadelphia. A turncoat named Kenneth Richards. I had obviously gone to some pretty great lengths to gain such a command of Russian that I could have easily passed as a native speaker almost anywhere in the country. That was troubling.”

A knowledgeable ear might have been a whole lot more suspicious of his early twentieth century polyglot American English. But suspicion was aroused, and poor Mr. Richards died suddenly of a ruptured appendix while on a weekend holiday to the Black Sea. He left a pair of better-equipped colleagues behind.

It was concern for the safety of those two agents that caused McIntire to panic.

“She wasn't looking in my direction, but I didn't have any way of knowing if she'd seen me before I recognized her. I fumbled with my umbrella like I couldn't get it open, and went back inside. I could think of one thing and one thing only—if she'd seen me, I couldn't let her leave. If she could get somewhere to contact her bosses…. There was a little conference room where the coffee pot was always on. I poured two cups.”

“Thoughtful of you.”

“It wasn't a movie. I didn't carry a cyanide capsule,” McIntire said. “But I had some pretty potent sleeping pills. I used to take them to knock me out when I had a headache. I crushed three of them and put them in the coffee.”

“Which coffee?”

“I didn't think the pills would be strong enough or work fast enough to keep her there, but it was all I had. I asked the young marine at the door to take the coffee out to the driver and let her know it would be another twenty minutes. Then I rubbed my forehead and put on a glassy-eyed look, and went straight to the ambassador's office. I was hardly out of the room before Mike came by. He knew all about my headaches, knew it would be more likely twenty hours than twenty minutes. He said he'd go in my place.”

McIntire felt her tears on his shoulder. “I don't know if she saw me. I don't know if she knew I'd seen her, and I don't know if she drank the coffee. Maybe she drank it and it made her groggy. Maybe she knew she'd been recognized and was as panicked as I was. Maybe she chose death over being exposed. Anyway she drove the car into the Thames and took Mike Warren with her.”

If he'd drugged her and she died, he'd be guilty of manslaughter at the very least. Double manslaughter. “There was an autopsy. It didn't show drugs.” It didn't mean they weren't there.

“I didn't find out he was dead until I saw it in the papers,” Leonie said. “There was nothing in the news about that driver being a Russian spy.”

“No. There wouldn't have been.” He may as well tell the rest of it.

“I was up for retirement soon. I wanted out, and the army wanted me out. Most of all, the State Department wanted me out. They found one last job for me. Investigating a former army psychiatrist who was working with Wilhelm Reich. Reich and his crew had the theory that everything that can ail a human being stems from sexual repression. They wanted somebody to pose as a patient, and I was the perfect candidate, a middle-aged male who understood German, and was about as repressed as anyone could get.”

McIntire became a patient of Dr. Richard Grossman. In their first interview the doctor asked about his parents. McIntire told him. He went on telling him for hours, for days, for weeks. He branched out from Grossman. He told doctors, nurses, Buster, floor scrubbers. He talked to crazy people and sane; sometimes he could tell the difference. He talked about his father, his mother, Mia, his various dogs, Myrtle Van Opelt, his father, his father, his father. A father that would have rather seen his son dead than in an asylum.

When McIntire left the hospital on a soft shiny day in mid-May, he was not quite so repressed, and his father had been six weeks in his grave.

They'd all apologized. It had been an unfortunate mix-up. The army had him down as being on leave. The State Department hadn't heard from him in weeks.

He couldn't tell his mother that, when her husband died, their son was not on the other side of the ocean but a four-hour flight away, in a hospital, where he'd been for months without letting her know. He couldn't tell her then, and he couldn't tell her now.

He felt his wife's impatience. Could he tell Leonie? He began, “It wasn't national security at stake. They suspected Dr. Reich of running some sort of sex business. It was demeaning and sleazy, and,” he took her hand, “it was in New Jersey.”

The pounding on the kitchen door set the windows to rattling. Leonie reached for her robe and headed for the stairs.

McIntire heard only a murmur of a male voice, then the closing of the door and Leonie's tread on the steps.

“It was Adam Wall. He brought your car back, and he wanted to know how you are.”

“Did you tell him that now that he's saved my life, he's responsible for it forever?”

“No.” She didn't smile. “He said that they haven't found Touminen. They think they got everybody else, but if he's still out there….”

“Which Touminen?”

“He didn't say. Were they both on the lake?”

McIntire wasn't sure about that. He threw off the bedclothes.

“Where do you think you're going?”

Pain shot up his thigh as his foot hit the floor. “First I'm going to the bathroom, and then I have to make a phone call.”

He went to the phone first.

“Did Uno Touminen get picked up?”

Marian Koski's reply came after a flurry of tears and thank God you're alives. “Uno Touminen, yes. He was with the bunch that floated all the way to Munising, but last I heard they haven't found his twin brother. Mr. Touminen says they weren't fishing together.”

“That's what I was afraid of.”

Leonie took his arm. “Get back to bed. I'm phoning Guibard to come and look at that knee.”

“Just give me some aspirin. I'm going to pay a call on Irene Touminen.”