Witch Cradle (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

McIntire awoke as he had each morning since that visit from Special Agent Melvin, with the hollowness in his mid-section that told him something terrible had happened before he remembered what it was—the sort of feeling that follows a death. He left Leonie sleeping and made his way through the darkness to the cellar.

He poked up the cinders in the furnace and piled on a few sticks of wood. The heavy snow around the house's foundation provided insulation, and the cellar was a much more inviting place than its chill, dank summer self. The shelves filled with Leonie's canning gave a homey sort of feel. McIntire could have done without the tomato preserves, but they gave off a cheery glow.

Leonie had seemed happy when she'd filled those jars, singing along with Hank Williams, packing the sunshine away for winter. She hadn't shown any discontent since they'd arrived, other than the occasional tear over a letter from one of her grandchildren. Until now.

He turned down the damper and ascended to the kitchen. The thought of breakfast repulsed him. Even coffee seemed too…robust, and brewing it too much work. He lit the burner under the teakettle. He'd been drinking a lot of tea lately. Did that mean he was getting old? Or just lazy?

It was black outside the window, but the droplets sparkling on the pane let him know it was snowing again. Well, let it snow. Maybe hibernation was the best course of action.

It was far too tempting. If McIntire wasn't going to surrender to the impulse, he'd have to take some action.

Gösta Berling
lay neglected and would have to gather dust a while longer. Somebody else could track down the killer of Rosie Falk and her lover. It was time McIntire concentrated on one thing only: the suspicious, dangerous mind of Melvin Fratelli. It was better than sitting around waiting for the ax to fall. He scribbled a note for Leonie, gave Kelpie a quick rub behind the ears, and went out into the cold.

Icy flakes whipped past his headlights, the car moved through a tunnel toward an ever-receding vortex of dizzying white. The forest of snow soaked up noise; tires crunched softly. McIntire drove as in a dream, without thinking of his destination or what he would do when he reached it.

It was seventy-five miles or better to the hotel room that was the special agent's base of operations in Marquette, but once he got onto the main road, the snow slacked off and McIntire made good time. He should get there about time for Fratelli's morning coffee break.

He might have known better. Special Agent Fratelli did not waste time on sipping coffee, or at least interrupting his work to do it. Not when his nation was under threat. He answered McIntire's knock with an unsurprised nod and a telephone to his ear. “I'll try, but I ain't Superman.” He dropped the phone into its cradle. The flamboyant plaid uranium prospector was once more the brown and bland detective. No more intentionally laughable attempts to pass himself off as a native. He shivered as he closed the door. “What brings you out on this kind of…month?”

“I figured it's time we had a little talk.”

“Well, sit down. I'm getting a crick in my neck.”

There were two chairs; McIntire took the one with its back to the window. At least Fratelli would have to blink when he looked his way. “Calling my mother was going a little far, even for you,” he said, with an inward flinch at the pettiness of it.

“What makes you think it was me?” The agent shook a cigarette into his palm and crumpled the empty pack.

“What were you expecting her to tell you? ‘Oh yes, my son was off on one of those treason trips'?”

“I didn't need your mama to tell me where you were. And don't give me that shit about Moscow. You'd been out of the Soviet Union for a good year by that time. You were right here in the USA. You kept that to yourself, even from your own Dear Mother. I plan to find out why.” He put the cigarette to his lips. “And I will. You might as well tell me and save us both a lot of time and trouble.”

He hadn't been doing anything illegal, immoral, or traitorous. He hadn't been doing anything involved in saving the Western World. He'd been doing a job, a demeaning, degrading job, the only one his superiors felt he might be suited for. He'd been far more suited for it than they'd ever imagined.

“Where I was, and who I told about it, is none of your damn business. It had nothing to do with you.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about.”

“Do I look worried?”

“Ya.”

McIntire didn't feel worried at the moment. He felt like throttling the smug little bastard. He wasn't stupid enough to try. “So ‘trust me,' is that what you're saying, Melvin? J. Edgar and the boys play fair and square? I asked you for a simple piece of information, to help me find a man whose wife was murdered in her bed, and the next thing I know Erik Pelto is in jail, and you're threatening me with my lack of patriotism and who knows what the hell else.”

“You asked me to help you find a man who is most probably a Russian agent who came from your home town, and who left the U.S.S.R. around the same time you did. Came to Detroit by way of Canada same as you did. Went from there to New York, same as you. Ended up back in Michigan, same as you.”

“So if I was one of his trusty comrades, would I be so dumb as to bring you into it? Why would I have needed you to find him? Teddy Falk is a pathetic little man who suffered years of Soviet rule and doesn't want anything more than to get his old life back.”

“Not, it seems, what you had in mind when you flew into Toronto…ah, when was it?…February 26, 1948, or when you got on that train for Detroit. You were pretty close to your old life then, but didn't even drop in for a quick visit. Why is that?”

It had been the hardest thing McIntire had ever had to do. The bleakest time of his life. The train stopped in the late afternoon at a doll-sized station deep in the Canadian forest. Despite the mounds of snow, the sense of spring was strong. The sun shone warm on his back. Home was a few hundred miles away, and had never been so far.

McIntire ignored the question and asked, “What makes you think Teddy Falk is some sort of agent?”

“How do you think he got out of Russia?”

“If he had a U.S. passport it might not have been so hard.”

“Oh, he's got the passport, all right. It's some of the KGB's best work. He also has in his possession a certificate showing him to have been born in Virginia, Minnesota, also faked. And a photograph signed by his loving wife, Olga.”

In his possession.
So those possessions had been searched. If Fratelli said the documents were fakes, McIntire had no doubt that they were. And a birth certificate wasn't the sort of thing the average person carried around just on the chance that his citizenship was called into question. It probably meant exactly what Fratelli was hinting at. Teddy Falk had been sent back home with the blessing of the KGB, future services to be rendered. If Falk hoped to give his employers the slip, his arrest might not have been unwelcome. The notoriety afforded a jailed murder suspect could lead the Russians to cross him off their list. Afterwards, what better place to disappear to than a farm in the backwoods of St. Adele, Michigan. He might be expecting to do all right, if he didn't factor in Melvin Fratelli, and if he didn't worry a whole lot about what his defection might do for that wife back in the Old Country. Even if he hadn't murdered his first wife, he'd seemingly not had many qualms over walking away from her, and he'd showed no signs of heartbreak at her betrayal. Maybe it was easier the second time.

“If you think J. Theodore Falk and I are two of a kind, why tell me all this?”

“Don't make a hell of a lot of difference. Teddy ain't going nowhere.” The agent finally lit his cigarette. “And neither are you.”

***

It had been mostly a waste of time, but McIntire had discovered one thing: Melvin Fratelli didn't know why he'd spent those months in the United States, but he probably knew exactly where. Bizarre as it was, he really might think it was possible that McIntire was, or had been, indulging in espionage. He must not have much respect for McIntire's powers of deception. If he was trying to pull the wool over Fratelli's eyes, would McIntire have balked at the agent's request that he put on his spy suit and infiltrate the St. Adele branch of the Temperance Society? Insane paranoia had probably scrambled Fratelli's mind to the point where simple reasoning was out of the question and counterproductive to his aims.

How had the FBI found out about the flight to Toronto? They couldn't have known all along. Fratelli had only turned surly after McIntire's mention of Theodore Falk. His retirement from the army had gone off without a hitch, so they hadn't been checking up on him then. He'd gone on with the odd translating job for the State Department.

Those three months in New Jersey were hell, but the experience
had
given McIntire his old life back. He'd left Michigan when he was barely grown. Went straight from under his father's thumb to Uncle Sam's; moved from the unforgiving community of St. Adele to the even more rigid European society from which it sprang. The post-war America he returned to as an adult was a world he hadn't dreamed existed, one of fresh air and limitless possibilities. The anxieties of those months couldn't dampen the exhilaration, the opening of his mind, the loosening of the decades of constriction and claustrophobia. He'd gotten his life back, gotten Leonie to share it, and gone back to where he started. He was beginning to be a new person, and he wasn't going to let Melvin Fratelli interfere.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Smoke rose from the chimney of Erik Pelto's house, and a maroon late-model Lincoln stood in the driveway. Insurance agents must do okay, or like to look as if they do. McIntire pulled in behind it.

His knock wasn't answered, and he was about to give up when Orville Pelto waddled from behind the house, red faced and panting, with a pair of snowshoes strapped to his feet. His flush grew a shade deeper when he saw McIntire. “Nothing so boring as sitting around somebody else's house. Thought I'd give these things a try.”

“How was it?” McIntire had wondered about getting some himself. The sweat cutting channels in the frost on Pelto's three-day growth of beard wasn't encouraging.

“Awkward as all hell.”

McIntire waited while Pelto fumbled his way free of the contraptions and leaned them against the porch steps.

“If you came to apologize, save your breath.”

“I didn't. I came to find out why you lied about seeing Rose Falk just before she died, quite possibly on the very day she died.”

“Lied to who? Nobody's asked me when I last saw Mrs. Falk.”

“When I first asked information of you through your son, you neglected to mention that you had seen her as she was preparing to leave. In fact helped her make those final preparations.”

“Why should I think whether I saw her or not is any of your business?”

It was a fair question and one McIntire had no good answer for.

“Not to mention,” Pelto added, “that I don't have a ghost of an idea when Rose died.”

Pelto pulled open the door to let McIntire enter ahead of him. He removed his gloves and put them on the table next to a stack of papers pencilled with numbers and the hieroglyphics of mathematics. “Sorry it's so damn cold. I haven't got the hang of this stove any more than I do the snowshoes.”

He didn't ask for advice, and McIntire wasn't generally pushy, but desperate times…. He opened the damper on the stove, cranked on the grates to let out some ash, blew on the smoldering wood, and fed a few more sticks of maple into the flame. “Anything new with your son?”

“They're taking him to Duluth tomorrow. The hearing is the day after. Enkel, he's the attorney, thinks there's a good chance they'll throw the case out.” Despite the words, Orville didn't sound optimistic.

“How can they have a case at all? If Erik is a citizen and a veteran?”

“When it comes to the INS, a case is in the eye of the beholder.” Pelto hung his coat on an overcrowded hook. “I took Delilah and the kids into town to see him this morning. They wanted to have a train ride back, so I didn't wait around. That jail gives me the creeps.”

McIntire could understand that. Orville had been a lot closer to subversive than his son. He was probably wondering why he wasn't the one in that cell.

“You witnessed Rose Falk's signature on the document giving Mrs. Van Opelt power of attorney,” McIntire said. “That was August sixteenth, the same day she signed the contract for selling the farm. The Falks were set to leave a few days later. Rose was dead before then. She probably died on the day she signed those documents.”

“Then Ted didn't do it. He was off in Sault St. Marie. That was why I took Rose around to—I don't remember his name—the J.P. He notarized the Power of Attorney and the Contract for Deed.”

“How long were you with her?”

“It was twenty years ago, for Christ's sake!” Not quite twenty, but close enough. “Near as I remember, I picked her up in the morning. We had to go fetch that old biddy she signed things over to. The whole business didn't take long. We were done by dinner time.”

“Then what?”

“I dropped her off and went home.”

“Which was where?”

“I'd rented a little house in Ishpeming for a few months. The people who owned it were away.”

“Did Rose mention that she was expecting company?”

“The guy she was with when she died, you mean? She'd hardly be telling me about that sort of thing.”

“We don't know for sure that it was that sort of thing. Think hard. Maybe she mentioned a relative? Somebody coming to say goodbye?”

“You keep forgetting this was a long time ago.” Pelto shook his head. “I don't think so. I don't think either Rose or Teddy had any relatives nearby other than an aunt. Ted's parents lived somewhere in Illinois. They were going to stop to say goodbye to them on the way to New York.”

“Did you ever hear either of them mention Jack Stewart?”

The response came quickly. “No. It's not a name I've heard.”

“How did Rose seem that day?”

Pelto's memory came back to life. “She was excited about going. I remember that it surprised me a little, because she'd been pretty jittery for a while before that. I thought they might change their minds. Some nervousness was normal, but with Rose it was more than that. For a couple of weeks, she'd hardly said a word. She looked constantly on the verge of tears, and believe me she wasn't the silent or the crying type. But when the time came she was ready and happy to be getting the last few things taken care of. She wasn't crazy about selling the place to—?”

“Sulo Touminen.”

“Right. Rose had no use at all for Sulo, but she didn't have any other offers, and she was friendly with his sister, so she didn't like to make a fuss. She didn't want to meet up with him to sign the contract, that I
do
remember. He did his part and mailed it to her.”

“What did she have against Sulo?”

“Some old battle between him and her father. Over that pitiful eighty acres, I think. Sulo's father and Jarvi originally farmed together on a hundred-sixty they got when the old Gitchee-Gumee Association broke up. When the older Touminen died and Sulo inherited, they split the farm. Sulo thought he got the short end of the stick. He did. His half was three-quarters swamp.”

“So he got what he wanted in the end.”

“What Sulo really wanted was to go to Karelia himself. He applied and got turned down. I handled that application, too, so I was just as glad not to meet up with him myself.”

That was a surprise. Hadn't Sulo mentioned being manhandled by the Saari boys for his anti-Karelian views? “Why was he turned down?”

“He didn't have what the Society wanted. Tools and money, mostly, but the conviction, too. After he was turned down, he soured on the whole undertaking, and got pretty carried away ranting and raving and trying to talk people out of going. Sour grapes, I guess, but it turned out he was right.”

“I understand you organized the Falks' trip.”

“It was through the Karelian Technical Aid Society.”

“Which you worked for.”

“It should have been a great…. We couldn't know how things would turn out.” He folded his hands and placed them on the table. “I worked for the Society. I recruited people, took their applications, and arranged for the passage. They paid in advance. At first it was five hundred dollars apiece. The Society helped out with the Falks. They didn't pay that much.”

“And Teddy handled shipping their belongings himself.”

“I set it up for them, but Ted took care of the details. It was pretty simple. Once they had things arranged, they just had to get the stuff to the nearest railroad station. The shipping company contracted to get it from there to Petrozavodsk.”

“What about picking it up on the other side, how would that work?”

“He would have gotten a negotiable bill of lading. That meant whoever held it could claim the goods.”

“And if Teddy had gone and left the bill of lading behind?”

“I think by the time the shipment got to Karelia it wouldn't have mattered.”

No, the equipment would probably be put to good use, without much thought to its original owners.

“Falk was definitely away from home when Rose signed over the farm. They were set to leave a few days later.” Despite the intervening twenty years Pelto had invoked, his story was seamless. “They were going to drive to Niagara Falls and then on to wherever it was to say goodbye to Ted's mother. They planned to sell the car there—it wasn't worth shipping—and take the train to New York. The society had a rented house in Harlem where people could stay while they waited to sail out. The boat would take them to Göteborg, then they'd go by train on to Petrozavodsk.”

“If you arranged for the whole thing, how is it that you had no idea that they didn't leave town as they planned? You might at least have gone to say goodbye.”

“I did say goodbye, the day Rose signed those papers.”

“To Rose.”

“Yes.”

“Not to her husband.”

“We'd already made our farewells. All the arrangements were set. There was nothing more for me to do.” He scratched at a patch of dried milk on the oilcloth. “It was about that time I gave up my position with the Society.”

“Why?”

“I was getting disillusioned. The Soviets were taking over the party. More and more it was being controlled directly from Moscow. I'd thought about going myself, to Karelia, but we were hearing stories, a few people were already coming back, and the idea of taking Erik…. If I didn't have the guts to go, I couldn't be sending other people. I went to New York and resigned. Then I came back to Ishpeming for the winter. It was only after my son called, after he talked to you, that I checked and found no record that Rose and her husband had been on that boat. I can't tell you how relieved I was.” He stood to open the heater and throw on more wood. “Have the police been able to figure out how Rosie died?”

“Not really,” McIntire said. “She might have bled quite a bit. She was wrapped in a quilt or a rug. Whoever put her in that hole was careful about it.”

“I guess it had to be Ted. He must have come back earlier than he planned. Or earlier than Rosie planned.”

“You were fond of her, I've heard.”

“A lot of people liked Rose. There was something about her. Nowadays they can do surgery, maybe they could have then, too, but Rosie didn't get anything but sewn up, and whoever did that was no expert seamstress. She was pretty disfigured, and her speech was affected. She talked through her nose, especially if she got excited. But still…there was just something about her. You didn't notice how different she looked.”

If he'd communicated that feeling to Rose, if she, too, had forgotten her ugliness when in Orville Pelto's company, how would she have reacted?

He went on, “I spent sixteen years wondering what had become of her and Ted, if they'd survived the purges and the war, if her hair had turned grey….” He gave a small grunt. “I used to have a dream where I could see her. She was scattering feed to hens on a little farm next to a river bank. I always hoped that it might be true.”

As McIntire walked to the door, Pelto asked, “What do you figure Immigration has against my son?”

“Do they need anything special? He was a dues-paying member of the Communist Party.”

“They haven't come after me.”

“Maybe your time will come.”

“Somebody's been into that jail to question Erik every day, trying to get him to name people. One of those people is right in this room.” He smiled. “But they haven't asked him a thing about me, so far as I know.”

***

McIntire made one more stop before returning home. With Nick car-less and, from what he'd heard, a wrist that he wasn't admitting was broken, McIntire couldn't bring himself to just drive by.

Nick waved from his usual spot, chipping away at his fallen trees, now using his left hand only. McIntire returned the greeting and continued on to the door. His Good Samaritan tendencies fell short of cutting wood. As he tramped past the front of the house, Mia knocked on the living room window and beckoned him in.

He left his overshoes in the porch and passed through the kitchen. To call it disorderly would have been charitable. To call it sweet-smelling would have been an outright lie.

McIntire didn't get close enough to Mia to draw conclusions about her aroma, but her level of tidiness fell in line with her surroundings. She slumped on the sofa with her leg, its trouser leg split to accommodate the plaster cast, on a kitchen chair. Three grubby toes poked through the end of the cast.

“I just stopped by to see if there's anything I can do for you.”

“Were you thinking of the washing?” Her voice was scratchy and distant sounding. She said it without smiling.

“And if I said yes?”

“I'd faint.”

“But you wouldn't let me do it.”

She responded with a feeble smile. McIntire sat at the end of the sofa. “Mia, you know you can't keep on like this.”

“We'll be all right.”

McIntire reached to pat her arm, then pulled back.

“I'll have this thing off in a couple of weeks,” she said.

Mia's broken leg was far from being the greatest of their troubles. “Nick's still determined to subdue that tree, I see.”

“He'll have plenty of time. He's not going back to work.”

“For sure?”

“He says it's only until he gets rested up, but he won't be going back. He's already kept driving that route way longer than he should have.”

“Has he managed to rescue his car?”

That brought another ghost of a smile. “Not yet. I have to be the only person in the county who hasn't seen it.”

McIntire considered suggesting that he drive her to have a look but thought better of it. “Never fear,” he offered. “I took pictures. I'll show you when they get developed.”

“Speaking of developments,” she threw a knitted blanket over her exposed toes, “any news on Rosie?”