Hunter’s Dance (11 page)

XVII

Others may listen to tales of lovers and sunshine. I choose the dark night, full of visions and adventures, bitter destinies, sorrowful sufferings of wild hearts.

Siobhan's Lincoln was gone, and the house was blessedly silent. Even the pall of cigarette smoke had lifted. McIntire lit the burner under the coffee pot and lifted the lid from the cookie jar. Peanut butter, his favorite. Leonie hadn't made them before. He took a tentative nibble. When his wife attempted something new it was always best to be cautious. He smiled. His own mother couldn't have done much better. Taking up the pot, a cup, and the cookie jar, he settled himself in the dining room with
The Story of Gösta Berling
. It was time to begin.

McIntire had never taken on such an ambitious translating project before. He'd never done much of any work that fell into the realm of literature. But the small jobs he did for the defense department weren't enough to keep his hand in or to put much stimulation into life since retirement. He'd always said when he retired he'd do something
real
, something important. This was as good a place to start as any. He'd put it off long enough.

He'd read it long ago and hadn't found it to be the world's most exciting piece of fiction. A year in the life of a nineteenth-century Swedish settlement, although quite a frenzied year, at that. Maybe his past year in this community would give him a new perspective on it, a greater appreciation of these stalwart Scandinavians to whom anguish and guilt seemed to be mother's milk. Perhaps the title character, the defrocked priest, and his exploits could chase some of his own demons away. At least the systematic process of converting one tongue to another might clear his brain to think more logically about some of what he'd learned today.

Bonnie Morlen said that her son had become acquainted with Greg Carlson when he'd met up with him in the woods. That must have been on Club property. Why would a uranium prospector be poking around on the grounds of the Shawanok Club? There'd be no chance of developing a mine there. And he hadn't had his Geiger counter with him when Judy had seen him. It was remotely possible that he'd wandered in by accident, but unlikely; Greg Carlson was well supplied with maps, and it would take some effort to spend much time on Club grounds without being politely asked to get the hell out. Apparently Carlson had been there on his own more than once.

With the book face down on the table in front of him, he hesitated. Once he began, it was going to consume his life, trespass on his every waking thought. Did he have time for that now? Time? It would be a blessing! He flipped it over and fanned the pages. A word caught his eye.
Förkastad.
Outcast. Pariah. He read,
If you only knew what it means to be an outcast. One does not stop to think what one does.
Was that true in Marvin Wall's case? Was he so cut off from human society that society's rules didn't matter? Lord, it was starting already! With a single word Gösta Berling was insinuating himself into McIntire's life. He turned to page one.

He had barely picked up his pencil when a draft of cold air, bordering on a breeze, swept down from the stairwell. He sighed, stuck the pencil in his book, and trudged upstairs, nearly colliding with the pull-down attic ladder intruding into the hallway. Leave it to Siobhan to walk off with doors wide open. He folded the steps. The springs gave out with a twang.

His actions were greeted with a husky, “Hey, I'm not finished up there!” resounding from below. He let the door pop into its place in the ceiling. If Siobhan had opened it once, it wouldn't be beyond her strength to do it again. What had she been doing in the attic anyway?

He descended to find her in the room that had been his parents' bedroom and was now Leonie's library. As a child, McIntire's visits here had been limited to being tucked into the bed in the daytime on a few occasions when he was sick. Aside from that it had always been off limits, and he still felt the thrill of the forbidden upon entering. He'd never been able to bring himself to work here, despite Leonie's best efforts at a scholarly and masculine decor.

Siobhan stood with her back to the window. Her hair, thanks to either the setting sun or a fresh dye job, radiated with the glow of a new penny. Around her shoulders she wore a fringed shawl that had probably once been equally flamboyant but was now badly faded. She spoke with real sorrow in her voice.

“He's not here.”

“No,” McIntire replied, “he's mostly at the bar.”

He'd known immediately whom Siobhan referred to. And she was right, no vestige of the late Colin McIntire's formidable spirit resided here in his house. It had been a great relief to McIntire when he'd taken over his father's home that he hadn't met up with his ghost around every corner.

“When Pa was alive, he only came home to eat and sleep, and sometimes not even then. If you're looking to get in touch with him, the Waterfront's your best bet.”

An aroma of India ink and age sprung from a stack of paper-stuffed boxes on the table. “What's all this stuff?”

“Pictures,” Siobhan told him. “Leonie said she didn't mind if I brought them down. Looky, here's you.” Siobhan handed him the stiff cardboard-mounted photograph. Indeed, there he was, a stringbean in a doughboy uniform.

“Well now, I figured Pa'd have hung that up in the tavern for dart practice.”

“He did put it up in the tavern,
above
the picture of
our
dad shaking hands with John L. Sullivan.”

That came as a news to McIntire, and he wondered if it was true.

“John.” The melancholy look was still there in Siobhan's Granny Kate eyes. “Colin was so proud of you it could make a person cry, but you never had a good word to say about him, not when you were a kid, and, Leonie says, not even now. I know you didn't always get along, but that was a long time ago. How can you stay so bitter?”

McIntire's reconciliation with his dead father was one of Leonie's favorite crusades. Had she now enlisted his aunt in the cause? “I'm not bitter,” McIntire said. “I'm realistic. My father might not have outright hated me, but he came damn close. I was a weakling and a misfit and a complete disappointment to him. If he pretended to be proud it was only to save face.”

“You shouldn't have stayed away like you did. You never gave him a chance.”

“I gave him seventeen years, and he made every minute of it hell.”

“But you left when you were so young, and when
he
was still young. He still had power over you. If you had come back that might have changed. You'd have grown up, and he'd have grown old.” She made fists of her tiny claws in her effort to elaborate. “You put him into a kind of suspension…to you, he always stayed just as he was when you were a boy. You never saw him weaken.”

“And you did?”

“I saw him sobbing into my mother's dish towels the day your ship sailed.”

McIntire flatly didn't believe that. He'd never seen his father anywhere close to tears. Not even when the man's own mother, McIntire's cherished grandmother, died.

The ancient spaniel, Kelpie, toddled into the room. Siobhan lifted the animal in her arms and dropped onto the tweedy sofa and tucked her feet under her body. She stroked the dog's ears.

“Colin was the best brother a girl could ever have,” she said, “like a father to me after Dad was gone.”

“Ah, so that's why you, too, flew the coop when you were seventeen.”

“I was sixteen. By the time I realized my mistake I was too ashamed to come back. I couldn't have expected much of a welcome. But Colin used to talk about you all the time. He made the priest in Aura pray for you every Sunday. It is just so terribly sad that you went away and never spoke to him again.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” McIntire told her, “I did speak to him. We spent six weeks together in Ireland in nineteen thirty-eight.”

“And?”

“And he was a total stranger to me. But he sure as hell wasn't in any way weak.”

Siobhan stood and tucked her gypsy costume around the dozing Kelpie. “Okay, then, let's go.”

“To Ireland? It's almost supper time.”

“You said I'd find my brother at his tavern. You wouldn't expect an innocent maid like myself to go unescorted? Besides your wife's gone to Marquette in my car.”

“For what?”

“She's gone to the nursing home to see Wylie Petworth. I don't know how she can stand it.”

McIntire didn't know either. Leonie was about the only person in St. Adele who regularly visited Wylie. Maybe it was easier for her, since she'd never known him well. McIntire meant to accompany her someday. But after all that had happened, seeing his childhood friend locked in paralysis wasn't something he was ready for. Once one admitted to being a coward, life became so much simpler.

Siobhan went to her room and returned carrying an armload of soft brown fur.

“Won't you be a little overdressed for Pa's old beer joint?”

Siobhan placed the cape around her shoulders, gingerly, as if expecting it to go for her jugular. “No point in having it if you don't show it!”

XVIII

He came home again without wound or injured limb, but he had been changed for life by the battle.

The Waterfront Tavern was crowded by Tuesday night regulars, and McIntire was amazingly popular by constable standards. A half dozen men found him a stool in their midst, fixed him up with a Pabst, and began the inquisition. When he came forth with no new information, the unaccustomed attention quickly turned to his exotic aunt. McIntire left Siobhan at the bar, renewing old acquaintances and forming some new ones, and approached Adam Wall where he sat alone in a booth near the back door.

Wall sat up straighter and dropped the dart he'd been twirling between his fingers onto the table. He nodded at McIntire's approach, but he didn't smile. “If you're planning to grill me too, save it.”

“Had a visit from the sheriff, have you?”

“The sheriff, two deputies, that state police guy with the big ears. I'm expecting J. Edgar himself to show up any time now.”

“I'd have thought it would be your brother they're paying court to.”

“Oh, they got Marve scared shitless, but they haven't neglected the rest of the family.” He laughed. “Elephant Ears even tried to question Grandma, can you beat that?”

“I find it hard to believe that he could even catch her.”

“Cornered her in the pump house. She disappeared in her usual puff of smoke and left him holding his notepad.” Adam Wall stood. “Hang on a minute.” He picked up the dart, and walked the few yards to the line. McIntire winced when the dart stabbed neatly into the bull's-eye. He'd sent the board to his father from Ireland. A fiftieth birthday gift bought, after interminable nagging and haggling, from the pub in the McIntire family's home village.

Wall came back with two more beers. One bottle he placed in front of McIntire. He always insisted on a glass for his own, and he held it at a tilt to pour the beer carefully down the side.

“Talk is the kid was being held for ransom,” he said.

McIntire could see no reason to keep it a secret. It would be common knowledge soon enough. “Morlens got a note in yesterday's mail.”

“Asking, I take it, for seventeen thousand five hundred twenty-five dollars.”

McIntire felt his jaw drop. Adam grunted, “Pete Koski asked me three times what the amount was that the Shawanok Club was paying for sections nineteen and twenty. I didn't figure he was interested in bettering their offer.”

Why Adam Wall should be privy to the real estate dealings of the Shawanok Club was a bit of a mystery. “Wendell Morlen went through the roof when he heard the amount,” McIntire said. “Koski hustled him off to a corner to get more information. Are you saying you know what this is all about?”

“It's about twelve hundred acres of land, give or take a few, and two lakes,” Wall told him. “The Club boys don't figure their playground is big enough, so they're buying a little more from the state. I suppose I've been the Man of the Hour because I've been trying to throw a few roadblocks in their path.”

“Morlen mentioned that somebody else is claiming to have first dibs on it.” The light flicked on. “And that someone is….”

Wall gave a modest bow. “One hundred and sixty acres of that lakeshore should be mine.”

For an unemployed Indian, Adam Wall seemed to be doing okay for himself. He'd already managed to get one nice hunk of Lake Superior shoreline and was now apparently working on another. McIntire drank from his bottle and waited for the explanation.

“My great-grandfather, that's Grandma's father, was a member of the First U.S. Sharpshooters, in the Civil War. He was also a volunteer scout and made a bunch of forays into enemy territory. They gave him a medal for his services and also a hundred sixty acres of land of his own choosing. He picked the land at the mouth of the Potato River where his family had fished for…centuries, maybe. He lived there the rest of his life. Greatgrandpa died in nineteen-hundred. In nineteen-oh-two, Grandma and her brother sold the land to a member of the Shawanok Club.”

“So the land already belongs to the Club?”

“They sold it to a
member
, not to the association itself. The guy who bought it is long dead and it passed to his son, who is also dead. So it belongs to the son's widow. She lives in San Francisco.”

“A good story,” McIntire commented. “But it doesn't explain why you figure it should be yours. Are you saying Twyla wasn't mentally competent when she sold it?”

“Grandma is competent as all hell. Although I don't imagine she did have any idea what she was signing. But what I'm arguing is that in nineteen-two it was the custom for Indian lands to be held in trust by the federal government. An Indian didn't get title. I'm saying that neither Grandma or her brother had title to the place so they didn't have a legal right to sell it.”

It sounded good on the surface. “But if Twyla's father was given the land outright, not a part of an allotment program, is it still considered Indian land?” McIntire asked. “Does simply the fact that your great grandfather was Indian give him no right to hold title to land? Would the government have even known that he was Indian when the piece of land was granted?”

“You should go to work for Morlen,” Wall said. “That's what he's arguing, that it wouldn't have mattered. In some ways I'd like to believe that. But there's no record of a deed to the property before it changed hands in nineteen-two. Only a couple of certificates, one signed by A. Lincoln himself.”

“Okay, it sounds like a nice piece of land. But it's only a hundred sixty acres out of what? Two entire sections?” Wall nodded, and McIntire went on, “Like you said, over twelve hundred acres. Why's it causing such a brouhaha?”

“It's the northeast quarter of section twenty. That's the only place where the section joins Shawanok Club property.”

“So you're saying they have to pay you off to get access to the rest of the section?”

“No,” Wall replied. “I'm saying that as an adjoining land owner I have the first option to buy the entire section. At the price the state sets.”

“Seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty-five.” McIntire understood, at least in part. “But everybody's got to know you don't have that kind of money. So why would the Club be going to all this trouble to…I don't get it.”

“Don't matter. They won't see my check bounce until
after
I put in the bid. And allowing me to make the bid is admitting that I have the right to do it—admitting that the one hundred sixty acres deeded to my great-grandfather is legally mine.”

“No offense, but why would anybody at the Club, or the state government, be taking anything you say seriously?”

“Just another worthless Indian, you mean?”

McIntire shrugged.

“Well, you're right. I've filed suit with the Indian Claims Commission, but they don't deal with individual claims, only those of tribes. They wouldn't even open my mail, if it was only me. But it happens that when I was off saving the world for democracy, I also saved the ass of one Mikey Sanders. That's Mikey Junior. Mikey Senior is Federal District Attorney Michael J. Sanders.”

“Ah….”

“Ah, is right. I don't suppose it's going to make any difference in the long run. The Clubbers have no shortage of friends in high places. Shit, most of
them
are in high places. That's how they got that ridiculous valuation put on the land, to get it way out of my price range. Sure, they're going to a lot of trouble for nothing. Hell, fifty bucks would of taken me out of the bidding.”

“Maybe Lincoln's autograph is worth something.”

“Not seventeen grand.”

“But if you should be given title to that land….”

“That ain't gonna happen. I'm not looking for justice here. The Clubbers will get the land in the end. But Sanders ain't making it easy for them, and he's making them pay every penny he can. He's kept their hotshot attorney jumping.”

“Wendell Morlen.”

“Bingo.”

McIntire said, “I'm surprised you're not sitting in jail right now. What with the ransom amount, and the fight, and the sca….”

“The what?”

McIntire tried to hide his embarrassment with a long pull on his beer. “You know…the fistfight with your brother and the…evidence…at the scene.”

Wall put his own glass down. “So there was something more.”

“Bambi Morlen was…in a way…scalped.”

“Scalped? Are you saying…?” Wall looked quickly around the crowded room and spoke low. “The kid was
scalped?
”

His usually inexpressive voice was filled with incredulity that sounded not only uncharacteristic but, if McIntire had been forced to make a judgement, feigned.

“Sort of. A feeble attempt anyway. And,” there was no point in holding out now, “he had a hole drilled in his skull.”

“
Trepanation?”
The table rocked, and McIntire grabbed for his bottle.

“What?”

Adam Wall shook his head. “Nothing…a fancy word for brain surgery. I shouldn't have said it. This isn't a time for joking.”

Wall hadn't sounded like he was joking. And Guibard hadn't mentioned any similarity to surgery. McIntire felt a poke on the shoulder. Siobhan gave him an airy wave as she pranced by and swung out the door on the arm of a silver-haired stranger.

McIntire nodded and turned back to Wall. “Is anybody else involved in this little real estate diversion? Other Indians? Your parents?”

“Hell, no! Pa'd be the last one to make any trouble. He promised Ma he'd give up being Indian the day he married her.”

“But did he know the amount of the ransom? I mean, know the valuation of the land?”

“Sure, I told him. Are you hinting my old man's a kidnapper?”

“Can't you just picture it?
Charlie Wall, America's Most Wanted
. But your dad does get around, and he likes to talk. He might have mentioned the sale, and the seventeen thousand, to somebody.”

“Well, it's not a secret,” Wall pointed out. “Anybody might have known. It's a matter of public record.”

“But how many people pay any attention to public records? I hadn't heard about this. The Club people probably kept it as quiet as they could. Especially with the price they were paying being so high. No,” McIntire said, “I'd be willing to bet that the only people in St. Adele who were aware of the price of that land, or even that it's being sold, are you and your family.”

Wall abandoned his scruples and drank the last of his beer from the bottle. “What about Wendell Morlen and his family?”