Witch Cradle (15 page)

Sulo finished his job and spit into the gutter. “Teddy confess yet?”

“Not so far as I know. Matter of fact, I figured I should let you know, Teddy doesn't seem over worried about a murder conviction. He's looking to get the farm back.”

Irene crooned softly to the cow, and milk plinked into the bottom of the pail.

“Hell's bells! How's he got that figured?”

“He says the payments weren't made. Myrtle Van Opelt says the same.”

“I made payments. Things got tough for awhile, but I made payments. I got receipts.”

“The bank account was closed. Apparently there was no money in it.”

“Then maybe you'd just better ask Miss Justice Myrtle what happened to it.” His words were emphasized with a shaking of the fork, its tines a foot from McIntire's face.

So that was why the Wicked Witch of the North had died the minute McIntire uttered the words
Power of Attorney.
Myrtle Van Opelt a thief? If she had used the money for her own purposes, it might not have been strictly illegal, depending on the wording of the document, but it was stealing in McIntire's book. Did it mean that Myrtle knew Rose was dead? No, sadistic as the former teacher was, and however outraged she might have been at Rose's youthful misconduct, McIntire couldn't quite see her shooting the two illicit lovers and dumping them down a cistern.

McIntire stepped back from the threatening pitchfork. “Rose was still alive on the morning of August sixteenth. That's when she signed the Power of Attorney and the Contract for Deed. She missed an appointment the next afternoon, so she might have died that night.”

“What appointment?” Irene stood with her stool in one hand and a bucket brimming with white foam in the other. The scent of warm milk took McIntire back to those mornings when Sophie had dipped a cup full of just-out-of-the-cow milk for his breakfast. It had gagged him then, and the smell now did the same.

He backed up slightly. “Her aunt's birthday. Adeline Houtari. Were you there?”

“My stars! How would I remember that?”

“The sixteenth was the day all those men were drowned, the Massey-Davis mine accident. You might remember if you saw either of the Falks after that. They weren't scheduled to leave until a couple of days later.”

“I think we were gone for a little while then. Do you remember, Sulo? Is that when we were in Escanaba?”

“Maybe. Ya. I think we might have been at the fair.” Touminen jabbed his fork into the hay. “I'm going out with Uno tomorrow if you want to tag along.”

“Going out” meant going out onto the lake to freeze while staring down a hole in the ice waiting for fish that never came. “Thanks anyway,” McIntire told him. “Maybe sometime before the winter's over.” And then again, maybe not.

***

Sophie McIntire sounded far away, as well she might. She did not sound particularly worried.

“It was just strange. I thought I should let you know. He had a sort of funny accent.”

“Foreign?”

“Nooo, I don't think so. More like in the movies.”

“Cary Grant?”

“Edward G. Robinson. And he was right, of course.”

“About what?”

“I didn't hear from you. I couldn't contact you when your father died. You've never told me why exactly. Where were you?”

“I think just mentioning the place where I was can get you thrown in jail these days.”

“I won't snitch. Oo-yay an-cay el-tay e-may in-way ode-cay.”

“Ma.”

“Oh, okay, you can write me about it.”

McIntire was glad to switch the topic. As he knew she would, his mother remembered every detail of the mine accident and the two men from St. Adele who were lost.

“Were their bodies recovered?”

“Why are you asking? Or is that another top secret?”

“The man in the well with Rose Falk wasn't her husband.”

“Really? Goodness, who ever would have thought? And you don't know who it was?”

“No. And can't come up with anybody else who went missing. It looks like the murders happened about the same time as the mine accident.”

“Jack Stewart.”

“That was quick.”

“Jack used to come into the saloon a lot. Your father felt terrible when he heard. You know how sentimental he was.”

Colin McIntire was many things, but sentimental?

Sophie said, “But he didn't mourn very long.”

No surprise to McIntire. “Pa was always one to bounce right back.”

“John…,” she sighed but let it go. “You know Nelda?”

“Ya.” McIntire had seen Nelda Stewart, Nutty Nelda, as she was more commonly called, a time or two. He'd never spoken to her. The sight of her was enough to give him the willies.

“Well, a few days after the cave-in, one of the mining company's men went to Nelda. He said that they weren't quite sure Jack had actually been in the mine when the accident happened. The water broke through just before the shift change, and there was talk that Jack might have already gotten out some way. Nelda insisted that he hadn't showed up at home, and he had to be in the mine. They went around and around about it. The company insisted he wasn't there. But Jack had been at work in the mine that day, they knew that for sure, and he wasn't around after it flooded, so they finally had to admit he must have been lost along with the others. They ended up paying widow's benefits to Nelda.”

“But they never found his body?”

Sophie hesitated, then apparently decided to throw caution to the winds. “They stopped looking for any of the bodies after a few weeks. Every time they dug, more water came in. But…well, I guess I'm not saying anything everybody doesn't already know. There were definitely people who did not believe Jack was really there. Your father was in a position to hear plenty of talk, and he was sure Jack had just seen his chance and taken off.”

“And let his family think he was dead?”

“I guess so. The kids were just little tykes then. It was hard for them growing up, living on next to nothing with only their mother and her being…. Well,” her party-line discretion returned, “you can imagine. But they did fine. They were smart. Both of them went off to college.”

Jack Stewart. It sounded like a possibility. A strong possibility. McIntire should have felt a thrill of pursuit. Instead he felt only resigned to stirring up more grief.

“Aren't you going to ask about the weather?” Sophie laughed.

“No, Ma, I'm not, and don't you dare tell me.” McIntire promised to write and said goodbye.

He walked to the window. The sinking sun cut a path of color across the stark white of the field beyond the barn. A path that led to nothing now that the pines were gone. The sky had gone a deep blue, and a point of light shone bright above the horizon. Too large and too early for a star; it had to be a planet. McIntire didn't know which one.

Nelda Stewart. Another housewife to pump, and this one nutty to boot. McIntire was thoroughly tired of it. Sitting in kitchens with beige or turquoise walls; drinking coffee of varying degrees of unpalatability; asking nosy questions that got him nowhere. He ought to have waited until spring to look for those bodies. They'd been there sixteen years; another five or six months wouldn't have mattered, and he would at least have been able to get out the door without a shovel. His brain might have come out of hibernation.

What had he accomplished so far? A part of his life McIntire hoped was dead and buried was slowly being disinterred. A perfectly fine teacher was locked up. Two babies and a mother hardly more than a child herself would be left destitute in a strange country. Even if Pelto wasn't deported, he'd never teach again, and he might spend months in that jail. In the neighboring cell sat a man who'd most likely already had years of punishment worse than any the state of Michigan could mete out. Mia Thorsen had lost the father she idolized, and now that idol was about to be knocked off his pedestal. Sulo Touminen was set to lose eighty acres. Mrs. Van Opelt would be labeled a thief. Well, every cloud did have its silver lining.

Now Nelda Stewart's dead husband would be dragged from his grave. But not today. It could wait.

“How's your mother?” Leonie rinsed the dregs of chocolate from her cup.

“She sounded fine to me. Warm.”

“Did you ask?”

He hadn't. Not in so many words. Not in any words. Was Leonie right? Had he broken his mother's heart when he left home? No doubt he had. He wasn't about to do it again. He wouldn't break his mother's heart or his wife's either. He'd have to make that clear to Melvin Fratelli one way or the other.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Pete Koski was back behind his desk. The set of his lips said it would be a while before he was behind the wheel of his Power Wagon. “Whatcha got for me?”

“I talked to Myrtle. She confirms what you said. Rose gave her Power of Attorney to handle the sale of her farm. She was supposed to contact her about arrangements to transfer the money to Karelia when the time came. Myrtle never heard from her. She also says Sulo didn't pay up so it was a moot point.”

Koski nodded. “The account was in the old Superior Bank. It went under late in 1934. Everything was switched over to Chandler National. Rose Falk's account was closed in 1939, lack of activity. So I guess Teddy's got a chance at getting his hands on the place, if he's not sitting in prison.”

“Here's something to take your mind off your back.” McIntire handed Koski a slip of paper,
Received from Sulo A. Touminen, 200 dollars, August 30, 1935
, signed,
Mrs. Myrtle Van Opelt.

“And two more.” He placed them on the desk. “Nineteen thirty-six and thirty-seven.”

Koski's smile was one of genuine pleasure. “Justice Van Opelt. Petty larceny. My, my, my.”

“I don't suppose it was exactly criminal. Rose signed her rights over. Myrtle could legally do what she wanted.”

“Maybe not with Rose dead.” Koski opened a brown cardboard folder. He leafed through the papers it contained and produced the short statement naming Mrs. Myrtle Van Opelt as Rose Falk's agent in all matters pertaining to the property located at the complicated legal description that followed.

Rose Falk's signature was dated August 16, 1934.

“Have you got the bill of lading?” McIntire asked.

Koski signaled McIntire to fetch a heavy, official-looking book from the window ledge. He opened its back cover and removed a folded sheet of waxed paper. Pressed inside, the scraps of document showed the date. August followed by two digits, the second clearly a seven. The twenty-seventh was out. It confirmed what Adam Wall had told him, August seventeenth.

Koski said, “Rose was still alive on the sixteenth. Falk says he went to a freight agent in Sault St. Marie to arrange for shipping. He says he had to sign the papers and pay, but they'd already packed the stuff up and hauled it into Chandler. If Falk drove to Chandler himself and took the train from there, like he says—and he could be lying about that—he'd have been gone at least overnight, maybe two nights. He either had to leave on the sixteenth and stay that night, or leave early on the seventeenth and stay over until the eighteenth. Everybody agrees that he was gone on the sixteenth, so that clinches it. The date on the bill of lading is the seventeenth, the earliest he could have got home would be late that night. So if he killed his wife it was most likely after he got back.” He closed his eyes and inhaled a long breath. His words came through a locked jaw. “Could be he got home earlier than the little woman expected.”

“It looks like she was already dead by the afternoon of the seventeenth.” McIntire told the sheriff about the nagging aunt with the birthday.

“Rose was leaving the country,” Koski said. “She mighta been too busy for hen parties.”

McIntire turned back to the Power of Attorney. Below Rose's signature were that of Mrs. Van O; Walfred Kettil, Justice of the Peace; and—McIntire pushed up his glasses and looked again—a single witness, Orville H. Pelto. So the senior Pelto had been with Rose that day, which was possibly her last day alive.

Koski returned the shipping receipt to its protective wrapping. “You never did tell me where you got this.”

McIntire told him.

“Under a tree? Vogel buried a receipt under a tree? What the hell, was he some kind of…was this a habit of his?”

“Sometimes.”

“You do have a bunch of lunatics out there.” Koski shook his head but didn't ask for details. “Falk says he had quite a tiff with Eban Vogel before he left.”

“I don't imagine Eban was pleased about his leaving. Nick told me they got into an argument over it.”

“What they got into was a knock-down, drag-out brawl.”

“They came to blows?” Nick hadn't said anything about that.

“They came to shouting, shoving, and throwing furniture around. But,” the sheriff added, “Falk also says he got over it enough to go to Vogel and leave him seven hundred dollars.”

“He did.”

“You seem pretty certain about it.”

“The Thorsens found that, too.”

Whatever pain it cost the sheriff to lean back and casually swivel his chair wasn't apparent. “How long were they, and you, planning to keep this to yourselves?”

“They didn't know where the money came from until Falk told them.”

“It was with the bill of lading?”

“Ya.”

“So, until Falk said that he gave the money to Vogel, where
did
you figure he got it?”

McIntire tried not to sound defensive. “I didn't for one minute suppose that Eban Vogel killed anybody for seven hundred dollars. But I think now that he might have known Rose was dead. He could have figured that Teddy did it and pretended to swallow his story about Rose leaving with another man. Nick Thorsen thinks Eban could have been protecting Teddy, and Nick probably knew him better than anybody.”

“Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that Vogel wasn't protecting anything but his own ass?”

McIntire had to admit that was a credible possibility.

“Or,” Koski continued, “that Vogel might have been absolutely right when he figured Teddy Falk killed his wife.”

That would also not be an unreasonable assumption, but one McIntire couldn't quite accept. “Teddy Falk is behaving like a man with a clear conscience and a bright future,” he said. “And if Rose died on the sixteenth of August, I don't see how he could have done it.”

Koski's face grew stiff for a second. He sat up straighter and reached for a tin of aspirin. “What sort of guy was Eban Vogel?”

“The sort who did exactly what he thought was right, no matter the cost,” McIntire said. “And that included when what he thought was right was at odds with the rest of humanity.”

“Wanted his own way?”

“It wasn't so much that as wanting other people to do things his way.”

“Hard to get along with.”

“Not exactly. He was…it's difficult to explain. He was always good to me.”

Eban Vogel had been one of the few men that took the gawky young McIntire seriously. In fact, the only one. Mr. Vogel had shown him respect that he didn't get anywhere else. Knowing now how Eban would have felt about some aspects of the friendship between his daughter and Johnny McIntire…it didn't bear thinking about.

Vogel was a simple man and capturing that in a few words should have been easy. It wasn't. “He had absolute convictions about the way things should be, and he wouldn't settle for anything else. If he couldn't exercise his will, he could at least make it unequivocally clear that he did
not
approve.”

“He couldn't exercise his will with Teddy Falk.”

“No,” McIntire agreed, “but killing Rose and some stranger wouldn't have changed that. It might have prevented Rose from going to live in Russia, but it wouldn't have kept her living in St. Adele, if you know what I mean.” It also would have been admitting defeat, something Vogel never would have done.

Koski apparently had no wish to get into a philosophical discussion, but some of his thinking went along the same lines as McIntire's. “You ever hear of Jack Stewart?”

McIntire nodded. “He looks promising.”

“Always one step ahead of me, ain't ya? The wife do it for you again?”

“Nah, it was Ma this time. She says Pa was pretty sure Stewart took off for parts unknown.”

“Does she know if he had false teeth?”

“Should I have asked?”

“The crime lab has pretty much finished sifting through the shit in the well. They found part of a set of false teeth. Uppers. It wasn't close to either of the bodies, but…maybe you could ask around. See if Stewart had them, or if they belonged to Jarvi Makinen and just got tossed in the hole with the other trash. Falk didn't remember seeing any around the house, but then I don't suppose Rose would have been using her old man's teeth as table decoration.”

“Pete,” McIntire finally broached the subject, “you've got Adam Wall on the payroll. Why am I still doing the ‘asking around'?”

“Don't be an idiot.”

“Sorry, it's second nature. You'll have to be patient with me.”

“Wall's an all right guy, and he's handy to have around. But if he starts getting on people's nerves he ain't gonna be no goddamn use to anybody.”

In other words, Koski was saving Adam Wall for helping little old ladies to cross the road and handling anything that might come up that involved an Indian. Which meant Wall's law enforcement activities in St. Adele would be limited to keeping his father and younger brother on the straight and narrow, since they were the township's only Indian residents besides himself.

“You're forgetting that Adam's granddaddy had my job for about a hundred years. He didn't get on people's nerves too much.”

“That old buzzard didn't do shit.”

He sure as hell hadn't done Koski's asking around for him. McIntire gave it up.

There had been a lot going on that week in August. The
Monitor
told only a part of it. “Pete,” McIntire asked, “do you suppose you could get your hands on some of the Finnish language papers from around that time, say August tenth through the rest of the month?
Amerikan Suometar, Työmies, Paivalehti.
Any other ones I don't know about.”

“Sure thing, I'll get Marian right on it.”

It was probably a waste of time, but it couldn't hurt. McIntire stood. “Maybe I'll go along to say hello to the troops.”

Koski returned to his nonchalant chair swiveling. “Ummm…your buddy Fratelli called.”

“Lucky you.”

“He asked me not to let you see Teddy Falk.”

McIntire stared. Koski fingered the tin of aspirin, perhaps contemplating the driving distance between his office and asking around in St. Adele township. “Just see that you stick to English,” he said.

McIntire's reply was not in English, but the look on the sheriff's face indicated that he grasped its spirit nonetheless.

***

McIntire opened the door to the corridor that fronted the two jail cells. The hallway was more spacious than the cells and contained only a small oak table and a chair. The chair was tilted against the wall and held Cecil Newman, jaw slack, snoring lightly. A narrow trickle glistened at the corner of his open mouth.

McIntire let the door swing shut. The legs of the chair hit the floor.

“Have you got permission to be here?”

“Afternoon, Cecil. Nothing frostbitten, I trust. I'm here to see Mr. Falk.”

For someone facing possible life behind bars, Teddy Falk looked chipper. He lounged in the upper bunk with a book on his knees and reading glasses on his nose. The lower berth was occupied by a blanket-covered lump producing more robust snores than those of Deputy Newman.

Erik Pelto, being a dangerous subversive as opposed to a run-of-the-mill killer, had the adjoining cell to himself. He, too, had chosen the upper bunk and lay flat on his back with an open copy of
Life
magazine over his face.

Cecil Newman devoted some period of time to jangling his ring of keys, giving McIntire the opportunity to appropriate his vacated chair to carry it into the cell. Maybe if the deputy had to keep his vigil standing up he'd find something else that needed doing.

Newman paused with his key in the lock when McIntire returned Falk's
“
Privet.”

After the hello, there didn't seem to be a whole lot to say, and McIntire began to wonder why he'd come.

That didn't seem to be the case with Teddy Falk. He dangled his legs over the side of the bunk. “Eban Vogel didn't put the money I left with him in the bank.”

“No.”

“I wonder how come.”

“It was 1934. Eban didn't trust banks in the best of times.”

“He said he'd deposit it in Rosie's account.”

“You knew Eban as well as I did. Why do
you
think he didn't do it?”

Newman returned with another chair and parked it near the bars. Falk slid off the bunk to the floor, quite a drop for someone of his stature, and settled down next to his cellmate's feet. “Eban wouldn't have bothered if he knew Rose was dead. Oh, I ain't saying he killed her. He wouldn't have done that. If he knew Rosie had been killed and didn't say anything, it must have been because he thought I did it.”

“That's what I figure,” McIntire said. He hitched his chair closer. “Do you think Rose knew Jack Stewart?”

“Koski asked that, too. Ya, we knew Jack. You think he could be the one?”

McIntire told him about the mine accident.

“I didn't know. I didn't know who died, that is. Naturally, I heard about the flood. It happened right about the time I left.”

“Stewart's body was never recovered. There were rumors that he wasn't there.”

“So maybe it was him with Rosie.”

“What do you think?”

“Like I said, nothing surprises me anymore.”

The door to the hallway opened wide enough to let Marian Koski sidle through carrying her tray. She placed it on the table and called, “Come on through, Mr. Pelto.”

The paper in the next cell rustled, and a pair of feet hit the floor. Falk slowly stood. The door opened again. Orville Pelto flinched when it swung shut behind him.

The two old acquaintances faced each other. Orville must have been the elder by at least fifteen years, but their ages could have been reversed.