Witch Cradle (21 page)

Chapter Forty

“I can't do it. I just can't go.”

“You have to. There'll be few enough people as it is.” Leonie hooked the hanger over the door and began applying the clothes brush to the sleeves of her blue overcoat. “Think of the children.”

“I am thinking of the children. For God's sake, Leonie, it's because of me she's dead. I'm the last person those two are going to want to see on the other side of their mother's coffin.”

“It's not because of you. She did it herself.” She picked a wad of dog hair from the brush and waved it in the direction of the dozing Kelpie. “You should try hanging onto this stuff. Baby, it's cold out there.”

She turned back to McIntire. “Maybe we're all of us at fault. What did we do for her when she was alive? Her children had gone. She was on her own twenty-four hours a day. Even when the rumors started about her husband and Rose Falk, when we knew he might have been murdered, everybody prattled on about whether she was the one who had done it, but hardly anybody could be bothered to call in to see her. We didn't know then that she
had
done it. We still don't know that for sure. We might have shown some sympathy. It must have been beastly. She would have been frightened and very, very lonely. Loneliness can do things to your mind.”

She slipped the coat from its hanger. “I'm going, and I want you with me. Do you want to walk or should we drive?”

Snow was falling so heavily McIntire couldn't see to the end of the driveway. “We can walk,” he said.

Leonie was wrong about one thing. There was a sizeable group of mourners to see Nelda Stewart off on her final journey; more than might have been expected on a Wednesday afternoon in close to blizzard conditions. It was a far greater number of callers than she'd had in a year when she was alive. Five years. The two young people sat in the front pew, flanked by a pair of elderly women wearing identical collars of the sort made with entire mink pelts. Each sleek animal had its jaws clamped on the tail of the one before it in a gleeful romp around an old lady's neck. One of the women stood and waddled forward to touch Nelda's cloth-draped casket.

McIntire had an irrational wish to fling open the box and look once more into those probing eyes, beg them for some sign that her existence had not always been intolerable. How many of the people of this earth lived out their lives in misery and loneliness? Did Nelda have good memories buried somewhere? Had Jack Stewart been in love with her? Did a sunrise or a rainbow give her joy? Had she been saving that red sweater for a special occasion that never came? Until now?

The service was mercifully short. They'd be spared the trip to the cemetery. Nelda Stewart's earthly remains would be placed in the township vault until the frost was out of the ground and a hole could be conveniently dug, necessitating a repeat of this ritual at about the time people might have begun to forget. For the time being, the casket was left at the front of the church, and the assemblage trooped down to the basement where a few plates of sandwiches and cake awaited them.

McIntire was surprised to see Orville Pelto ambling his way to the table. He couldn't imagine that Orville had known Nelda. If he'd been acquainted with Jack and his reputation as a former strike breaker, it was more likely to have been as adversaries than friends. Maybe insurance salesmen were like politicians and made an appearance wherever people congregated. Or maybe he intended that tin cup in his hand for contributions to his son's bail.

He nodded to McIntire. “This is a sad business, but at least it's over.”

Of course, McIntire remembered, Orville had been fond of Rose, and he probably was gratified to take part in putting her killer to rest.

“We can hope so.” McIntire doubted they would ever know for sure. Maybe it was best for all concerned if they just followed Pelto's lead, assumed the killer had effected her own punishment, and let it go at that. McIntire ached to be able to believe that Nelda had hung herself over guilt at having committed double murder, not at panic instilled in her by the callous township constable.

“We have to feel for the kids,” Pelto said. “Well, young people can bounce back.” His voice held more of hope than conviction.

“I heard Erik is getting out.”

“On bail, until his appeal is heard.”

“Appeal?” McIntire had thought it was only a preliminary hearing, some procedure to decide what to do with the teacher until his case was formally heard.

“He's been ordered to deport himself.”

Orville walked off before McIntire could respond. He hoped young people were as resilient as the man professed to believe.

The young people. It could be put off no longer. Nelda's children stood together, accompanied only by one of the fur-clad ladies. The son, the younger of the two, smoothly handsome, shook McIntire's hand and nodded awkwardly at his expression of sympathy. The daughter introduced herself as Katrina and followed immediately with, “Was it you that found my mother?”

She was ruddy faced and strong looking. The word “strapping” came to McIntire's mind. She look more like a Brunhilde than a Katrina. You didn't have to look too deeply into her eyes to detect something of Nelda's wild animal aspect. McIntire suspected that here was one doctor whose orders would be followed to the letter. He nodded and added once more, “I'm sorry.”

“People are saying that my mother committed suicide because she didn't want to go to prison.” The young man next to her sucked in his breath. The elderly animal lover patted her arm.

She interrupted McIntire's stumbling attempt at denial. “They're right, I think. Ma was afraid of being locked up. She was terrified that she might end up in an asylum, or a jail.”

McIntire moved closer that she might lower her voice. It was futile. Katrina was her mother's daughter.

“But not for murder.”

“No one has said your mother was a murderer.”

“They don't have to say it. I know what they're thinking. Nutty Nelda killed her husband and his girlfriend, and when she was about to be found out, she hung herself in the barn.”

Her brother moved off. Several others moved closer. “Ma didn't kill my father. He wasn't in that hole with Rosie Makinen.” A clutch of women vied for the job of pouring coffee from the nearby pot.

Katrina accepted a cup and stirred sugar into it. “I'm sorry about Rosie,” she said. “She used to let me sit on their horses sometimes, and she showed me how to make a whistle from a willow stick.” She finally turned her back to the growing audience at the table and walked off a few steps, leaving McIntire to follow. She spoke into her cup. “If my mother was afraid of being exposed as a criminal, it was fraud, not murder. My father isn't dead.”

“Are you sure of that? Have you talked to him?”

“Quite sure, and no, I haven't seen him. We used to get money at Christmas time, and on our birthdays. Once we had cowboy outfits. Ma told us it came from the angels.”

Knowing Nelda, she might have really believed angels were behind it.

“My mother was terrified of being taken away and locked up somewhere. I always thought it was because people said she was crazy. But if she was afraid she was about to be exposed for fraud….”

If that fear was what had driven her to the barn with a rope, it had come directly from McIntire. “Miss Stewart, how old were you when your father disappeared?”

“I was six, almost seven.”

“Then you'd remember if he had false teeth.”

“False teeth? No.” She smiled. “I'll bet he does now though. But back then the few he had were his own.”

“Have you told the sheriff that?”

“We only got here late last night. Are you saying the victim wore dentures?”

McIntire nodded.

“Then for sure it wasn't my father. Maybe you can tell Mr. Koski.”

McIntire's opportunity to do that came sooner than he'd expected.

As he battled his way home through the mounting drifts—Leonie had prudently decided to stay behind to help with the washing up and get a lift home later—the rumble of an engine that could only belong to Pete Koski's Dodge Power Wagon slowed behind him. McIntire pulled the door open and slid onto the ice-cold seat.

Koski sat behind the wheel, ramrod straight.

“We're back where we started.”

“Back to being positive it was J. Theodore Falk that murdered his wife and Jack Stewart?”

“Back to still not knowing shit about it. He's old.”

“So am I, Pete, way too old to read your mind.”

“Looks like Rosie Falk's boyfriend might have been more of a sugar daddy. The police just got the report from Lansing. They're saying the false teeth were made sometime in the eighteen-eighties. The plate was made outa some sort of celluloid crap. Even if the guy had them since he was, say, thirty years old, he'd be seventy or eighty in nineteen thirty-four, unless he was borrowing his grandad's choppers.”

Koski pulled into McIntire's driveway. “So ask around,” he said. “Maybe you can find out if some old codger didn't make it home that night. Put out a bulletin, elderly male, five foot ten or better, disappeared around the middle of August, 1934. Naked as a jaybird. Got that?”

Eighty years old? Not likely to have been working in an iron mine or tripping the light fantastic with Rose, when she could have had Pelto, or Sulo, or maybe Eban Vogel. On the other hand what other explanation could there be, if Rosie was in bed in a silk nightie and he was indeed dressed, or undressed, like a jaybird?

And once again the question arose, why had no one noticed this naked old codger missing?

Chapter Forty-One

McIntire's satisfaction at being once again in the warmth and privacy of his own home soon began to wane. In the empty house, thoughts kept at bay by the demands of social intercourse pushed their way to the head of the line.

Nelda Stewart had taken her own life after learning that the authorities were interested in her maybe not-so-late husband. Learning it from McIntire. Erik Pelto had been ordered to leave his home forever, after the FBI learned he'd been a communist. Learned it from McIntire.

That was only the worst of what he'd stirred up with the uncovering of those bodies. Could he have done things differently? Aside from his blunder in dragging Melvin Fratelli into it, maybe not. His only other option would have been covering up, looking the other way. Maybe some things are best left buried, but McIntire didn't think a pair of murder victims was one of them.

That was what he'd done with part of his own life, tried to bury it, and it hadn't gotten him anywhere. If he'd told Leonie from the first how things had been, he wouldn't be in this fix. But she'd never have married him if she'd known, so he'd be no further ahead. Those months in New Jersey, and the events leading up to them, had happened before they met. They didn't matter now. Leonie might not see it that way.

She wouldn't be home for a couple of hours. The snow had abated. He had time to do a little more snooping around.

With no particular plan in mind, but a need for some sort of action, he started the car and left it to warm up while he threw some hay to the horses.

A smudgy plume at the far edge of the field created a ghost of the fallen trees. The Thorsens hadn't been at the funeral. McIntire put the fork back in the barn and headed for the car. If an old man who'd been around in 1934 suddenly wasn't, the mailman would know.

***

The piles of branches were shrinking, succumbing little by little to Nick's persistence and a can of gasoline. The fire smoldered without his attendance.

Mia called to McIntire to come in. “He went to lie down for a while.”

“Is he…?”

“Just played out, I think. He's been chipping away at those things from dawn to dark, and the time of year from dawn to dark is starting to get bigger.”

McIntire stepped inside but didn't remove his coat and refused the offer of a chair. He wouldn't stay any longer than necessary. In answer to his question her eyes widened.

“Old?”

“And he had false teeth.”

“In his mouth, I take it, not in a glass by the bed.”

“I can't say. Right now they're in the police lab in Lansing. Could he have been a relative?”

“Not one I ever heard of.”

“Do you really think he might have been a—for lack of a better word—boyfriend?” McIntire asked.

“Some old duffer? Rosie might not have been choosy but she was…lively. I can't see her in bed with some wrinkled old….” She convulsed in a shiver. “Oh, I get eebie-jeebies just thinking about it!”

McIntire mentally counted the years until he would fall into the shiver-evoking category.

“And besides, like I said, I don't think Rosie had a boyfriend, not that sort of one. She just wouldn't have done it. I'm surprised she even got married. But maybe with Teddy….” Mia fingered the end of her braid. “I can't believe Rose would…she really didn't want to have children. She was deathly afraid of getting pregnant.”

“Daredevil Rosie?”

“She paled at the thought.” Mia twisted the hair tighter. “Rose came to me for advice. I guess she figured…maybe since I didn't…she thought I could tell her how to avoid it. She was dying of embarrassment. So was I.”

“Well, I presume Rosie wouldn't have had much to worry about with Grandad.”

“I didn't think of that.”

“I suppose you're right,” McIntire said. “It probably wasn't a romantic assignation. But then why was this old man naked?”

“Naked!”

“According to Koski.”

“Ooooh, now I
really
can't think about it!”

McIntire would as soon not dwell on the image, himself.

“John….” Her expression was suddenly grave. “That detective was here the other day, the FBI guy.”

“Melvin Fratelli? He want to check what you might have stashed away in that cast?” Did the man never sleep?

“He said he wanted to use the telephone. That he had to call his office.”

“Did he do it?”

“He called somebody, but it was just an excuse to get in the door and pump me.”

McIntire felt more resigned than angry. “I don't suppose I need to ask about what, or who?”

“He pussy-footed around for a while but your name did come up.” She smiled. “He asked about your interest in mining. Don't worry, I didn't snitch.”

McIntire relaxed. If Fratelli was asking about McIntire and mining, it was unequivocal evidence that he had no definite suspicions of anything. “I knew I could count on you. What else did he want to know?”

“Not much, just asked how well I knew you and your parents.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I mentioned how well he knew your aunt. That put an end to it. How was the funeral?”

McIntire gave the highlights, asked that she put the question of disappearing old men to Nick when he awoke, and took a short detour to Karvonen's store for a newspaper before returning home.

***

Leonie stood at the sink peeling potatoes. He told her about the ancient dentures.

“I know,” she said. “Cecil Newman was here a few minutes ago.”

“For what?”

“He was going door to door, every house. Trying to find anybody might have a hunch who the old man could have been. If we know of anyone who went missing. Why did he waste his time on coming to me?”

“Cecil is conscientious. If Koski said every house, Cecil wouldn't quibble over technicalities.”

The sheriff was right. They were right back where they started from. “I guess there's not much else to do,” McIntire admitted. “If we're going to find out what happened, we have to figure out who it was in that hole with Rose.” Leonie looked weary. He added, “That's where I've been, to ask Nick if anybody stopped getting or sending mail.”

“Did you find out anything?”

“No.”

“I'm not surprised. And neither will the sheriff. You're going about it all wrong.”

“Give me a hint. Maybe I can go about it right.”

She rinsed her fingers under the tap and dried them on her apron. “Hunting for an old man who went missing is a waste of time. If that had happened people would remember. You have to give off looking for someone who died here and start looking for someone who lived here. He probably didn't come from a long way off. How many people over eighty lived in St. Adele or nearby at that time? Look at the tax rolls, check who owned property. Find out what happened to them. Everyone who was that old in 1934 would surely be dead by now, and there should be a record of their death. If there isn't one, there's your man. Find somebody who lived here, but doesn't seem to have died. It shouldn't take so long.”