Witch Cradle (24 page)

Chapter Forty-Six

It was beginning to look a little bit like a mitten…or maybe a sock. Mia sighed and speared her knitting needles into the ball of yarn. She leaned closer to the window. The pile of burning branches made an inviting oasis in the evening gloom and threw a glow onto Nick's face. Green pine spit out sporadic gales of sparks. It would be nice to stand in the glow of that fire. It would be nice to stand anywhere on her own feet, by a fire, at the sink, here at the window. It didn't matter.

Car lights arced across the snow. She watched as John McIntire parked close to the house and got out. Nick lifted a tin cup in his direction. John hesitated before nodding in return and trudging onto the porch.

Mia left the window and opened the door before he knocked.

His took off his glasses. His eyes had dark circles. “That was quick. You must be getting to be a dab hand with the crutches.”

A dab hand? She assumed that was good. “I'm making Guibard cut this thing off in a day or two,” she told him. “It's only been a month, but I can't handle it any more.”

“A month? Is that all?”

“It was a couple of days after the ice storm.”

He shook his head. “It seems like years since those trees toppled and the world went to hell.”

Her world was about to disintegrate even further. There was no point in putting it off. “Have a chair. I've got something for you.” She clumped toward the living room, asking over her shoulder, “Want coffee?”

“No, thanks. I've been out all day. I need to get home.” He sounded tired and indifferent, almost irritated. Mia felt a sudden burning of tears. It hadn't been easy to make that call. She should have gone straight to the sheriff. Maybe even Cecil Newman. Cecil would be interested. Cecil would crawl over burning coals to get to her.

The watch gleamed on its scrap of burnt-orange velvet. She could have thrown the damn thing in the lake. If he didn't care, why should she? Well, he was here now. It wouldn't make him any jollier to tell him to forget it. She folded the fabric over the watch and went back to the kitchen. He still stood near the stove wiping his glasses on the end of his scarf.

“Nick says Leonie bought a car,” she said.

He nodded. “The whole neighborhood probably knew it before I did.” He held a chair while she maneuvered into it.

“We have to be getting another one, too.”

“Mia, is this about Nick's Dodge?”

Nick's Dodge?

“No.” She tightened her grip on the watch, letting its screw cut into her flesh. “I've been sleeping in Papa's old bedroom,” she explained, “because of my leg. There were boxes of his stuff there, old papers and things, so I decided to go….” His eyes were glazing over. She opened her hand. “It belonged to Doctor Hudson. It was with my father's things.”

He only stared.

“If you're not interested—”

“Interested? Of course I'm interested. I'm just….” The smile brought him back to her. “Struck dumb. Twice in one day.”

She picked up courage from his eyes. “My father had Rose Falk's money, and he had Cedric Hudson's watch.”

“There might be some simple explanation.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

He sat and took the watch from her hand. “Mia, what possible reason could your father have had to kill Rose Falk and the naked doctor?”

Mia couldn't think that her father would ever have harmed Rose, but Cedric Hudson might be another matter. “Papa hated Hudson's guts,” she said.

“Why? Because he worked for the mining companies?”

“No. That might not have helped, but….” How could she say this? “John, Hudson didn't come to live here until he was more or less retired from medicine. He'd never exactly been considered a terrific doctor, and once he got old…he might have been called out now and then, if somebody was really desperate, but otherwise, no.” Mia felt her cheeks burn. “There's one thing he did keep doing.”

“Which was?”

“Well, it was…women who were pregnant, if they didn't want to be, knew that's where they could go.”

“He did abortions?”

“Ya.”

“Abortions? You mean…? Why wasn't he ever prosecuted? Surely it was illegal.”

“Of course it was illegal, but fairly common back then. Especially during the Depression. Everybody knew. When it comes to things like that, most people just look the other way.”

“You make it sound no more out of the ordinary than going to the dentist.”

“Dentist? Are you kidding? It wasn't anywhere near that unusual!” It was amazing how innocent men could be. “Hudson was reliable, far as I know. He kept his mouth shut, made house calls, and was reasonably priced. He was probably pretty much in demand.” She pulled one of the needles out of the yarn. “And I expect even Hudson beat using one of these.”

His wince was gratifying. “That's why Eban hated him?”

“Papa called him a butcher.” Her hand went of its own accord to her chest. “If my father had gone over to see if Rose needed help with anything and found her dead or close to it, and Cedric Hudson there,
and
a loaded shotgun behind the door, he might very well have killed him.
I
might have killed him.”

It brought only a nod. He asked, “How do you know for sure it's Hudson's watch?”

She flipped the back open and handed it to him. He read the inscription without comment. Didn't he see how it could have happened? She persisted, “Papa wasn't the kind to fly off the handle, but anybody in that situation would hardly be thinking clearly.”

He turned the watch over in his palm, still silent. Mia said,“But he didn't. My father was not a murderer.”

“From what you've been saying…how can you be so sure?”

Mia took a deep breath. It was only Johnny McIntire, after all. “My mother told me.”

John only gave a grave smile. Maybe he was sort of “odd,” as that FBI agent implied. If his acceptance of a chat with her mother was indication of his strangeness, what did that make her? She tried to explain, “The thing is, I can't think he'd have been so sneaky and cold-blooded about it, putting the bodies in the cistern, keeping the money and the watch, going over to clean up in Mike Maki's sauna, sending Hudson's boat out so it would look like he'd killed himself—” She stopped as she realized, “That doesn't add up.”

“What?”

“Grace Maki says Papa came by about eleven that night. He took a sauna with Mike, and he told them about the mine disaster. If it had been Jack Stewart with Rose, Papa could have heard about the flooding from him, but he sure wouldn't have gotten the news from Cedric Hudson.”

John rubbed at his eyes and replaced the glasses. “If your father didn't get to Maki's until eleven, it might have given him time to go somewhere else after leaving the Falks' place, before he got to Makis'. Maybe he heard about the accident later.”

“Gone out for a drink to celebrate after blowing Hudson's head to smithereens, maybe?” What kind of person did he think her father had been? “How could Papa have killed Rose and dumped her body in a hole, and then just headed off to catch up on the latest gossip as if nothing had happened? And how could he have faced Teddy the next day and never let on a thing?”

The springs on the storm door squeaked and Nick's coughing sounded in the porch. Mia hadn't shown him the watch. She resisted the urge to snatch it up and stick it quick behind her back.

“Why is it, no matter which side of a fire you stand on, you get the smoke in your face?” As her husband came into the room, John wrapped the velvet around the watch and slipped it into his pocket.

Nick's eyes were rimmed with red, and he smelled like a roast ham. “Hear your wife got a new car.”

It seemed to be a touchy subject; John gave a nod and asked how the storm cleanup was coming along. Nick nodded in return.

“Nick,” John said, “if the guy we're looking for was Cedric Hudson, it means he was gone weeks before he officially died. What about his mail? Was it piling up?”

“He never got any to speak of. Or sent any either. He had a long driveway and didn't come out to get his mail every day, so if there was some boxholder stuff left in it, I wouldn't have paid any attention.”

Nick turned toward the door leading back to the porch and the cellar stairs. He hesitated and, despite everything, Mia felt the ache of his humiliation. He wouldn't try to tackle those stairs with John McIntire there, no matter how badly he wanted something at the bottom of them.

The cause of his indecision might have been something else. “You know,” he said, “if it was Hudson with Rosie, there would have been only one reason for it.”

“Mia just mentioned that,” John said. “I don't suppose you heard any rumors to the effect that Rose was pregnant?”

“Not me,” Nick replied. “Ask Ted. He says he's coming tomorrow to lend a hand with finishing up the sawing.”

If Rose was pregnant and had gone to Dr. Hudson, her husband might well be the last person she'd tell. Once again Mia marveled at how naive the human male could be.

“I just might pay you another call.” John still seemed exhausted and remote, but his brain was apparently working. “There's one more thing that doesn't add up,” he continued. “What about Rose's farewell note?”

Mia had forgotten that. “We only have Teddy's word for it that she left a note,” she said, “and if he came home and found his wife had bled to death thanks to Dr. Hudson, he'd have had a lot more reason to go for that shotgun than Papa would have.”

“Teddy wasn't around three months later to fake Hudson's suicide,” John said.

“And Papa was,” Mia sighed. And Papa had his watch.

Nick retraced his steps, said goodnight, and disappeared into the living room. She didn't hear his footsteps on the stairs. McIntire stood up. “Fratelli been back to hobnob with you?”

“Not so far.” He joked about it, but Mia couldn't help feeling he might do well to take it more seriously. “You know, John. If that guy talks to other people, he might get different answers from the ones I gave.”

“Like what?”

Who knows? People talk. They do wonder what you were up to all that time you were away, and they can't figure why you decided to come back here of all places. I wonder about that, too, a little.

“Call it unfinished business.”

What could he mean by that? Mia felt a flush of heat in her face for the second time that evening. “There's talk that maybe you should quit,” she told him.

“Quit what?”

“Constable.”

Now he did smile.
“There are gains for all our losses, There are balms for all our pain.”

He was her same old John, odd or not. “Say hello to your wife,” Mia told him. “She sounded sort of strange when I called.”

“It's been a long winter.”

Nick hadn't been far off. He returned from the darkened living room, leaned heavily against the countertop to wash his hands under the tap. “What did he want?”

“I'm not sure.” It was the best she could do.

He dried his hands carefully and moved a chair close to her. “I want to see it.”

Mia's hand rose to her chest.

“She was mine, too. I want to see it.” For the first time in weeks he looked straight into her eyes. “Please.”

She untied the ribbon from her neck and opened the soft deerskin pouch. She placed the folded tissue on the table and opened it. The tiny wisp lay like angel's breath in its pink ribbon. Nick stretched a single finger towards it. His hand shook and he pulled it back. A second try failed. Mia ached to keep its softness, its silky blackness, for herself. He rested his hand, palm up, on the table. “Please,” he said again.

He'd betrayed her, in this and so many other things. And he could remember. It wasn't fair that he should have both this part of their baby and memory of her, too. He'd forced Mia to live all these years, over half her life, with neither. Maybe if he'd given this to her then, if he hadn't taken away every trace of their Nicola, it might have awakened her own memories. But he'd kept it, hidden it away from her, and he'd hidden away his memories, too.

She plucked the lock from the tissue and watched his hand close over it. “Tell me,” she whispered.

He didn't hesitate. “She was very, very small. Her hand was no bigger than my thumb. She had the tiniest, blackest eyebrows and her eyes were blue. She curled in your arms like a baby bear. You were so happy. You wouldn't put her down. You wouldn't let us—”

“No.” She put her hand over his. “Tell about
her.
Tell me all about her.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

It would be the simple explanation, and the simple outcome. If Eban Vogel was shown to have committed this homicide, there'd be no arrest, no trial, nobody imprisoned, no complications. It would make things easier for a whole lot of people. Easier for everyone but Mia.

But if Rose Falk was pregnant and had died trying to end that pregnancy, any one of that seemingly bottomless font of male admirers could have lost his head, grabbed the shotgun, and the doctor would have been the next one to lose his head. They had no reason to believe it was Vogel any more than Orville Pelto or maybe Sulo. There was the little matter of the watch, of course. But they had been prepared to overlook Rose's property in Vogel's possession, so why not Hudson's watch?

The crime-of-passion hypothesis didn't explain why the dead abortionist was unclothed, or the note left for the husband, if there had been a note.

The distant whine of dueling chainsaws meant that Falk had made good on his promise to help with dismantling Thorsens' trees once and for all. McIntire put aside the velvet-wrapped timepiece and pulled on his overshoes.

***

The two of them were going at it like a pair of mechanized beavers. The reignited brush pile shot flames twenty feet into the air. Acrid smoke battled with the heavy scent of pine.

“I guess it's not impossible. She could have been pregnant. She didn't tell me.” Teddy brushed snow from the three-foot horizontal trunk and sat. “I don't really see how, though. We didn't…very much…Rose didn't…she didn't want a family.”

To the point that she'd died trying to avoid it? McIntire asked, “Do you know why?”

Falk's skin was shiny with sweat and decorated with flecks of sawdust. “You wouldn't know it from how she acted. She wasn't bashful or anything. But Rose…the way she looked, it bothered her a lot. She was afraid a baby might be the same. Or even worse.”

It was understandable, McIntire supposed. Were things like that hereditary?

“Especially when we started talking about going to Karelia. We knew it would be a tough life for a while. She didn't think there'd be a place for deformed children there.”

She might have been right about that. “I don't suppose you still have her note?”

“I don't have anything I left this country with.”

“Except your passport.”

Falk must have been a hell of a poker player. “Ya. I got that,” he said. “I don't have the letter, but I can tell you what it said. You don't forget a thing like that.”

He proceeded. “‘Dear Jimmy T.'” He flushed. At least she hadn't called him Teddy Bear. “‘I'm sorry. I am leaving you. Don't feel too bad. There has been another man. Go to do our work without me. Have a glorious life.' She signed her name and under it she put, ‘Please don't let anyone know what I've done, let Addie think we are together.' The ‘please' was underlined. Three times. That was it.”

“English or Finn?”

“English. That was the only thing that was a little funny.”

The only thing? His wife leaves him a goodbye-forever note and it's the language that's a little funny? “You'd have expected the note to be in Finn?”

Falk nodded.

“Are you sure it was her handwriting?”

“Oh, ya, I guess so. It was a little shaky, but it was Rosie's writing. She'd missed a lot of school when she was a kid, and her penmanship wasn't so good. Nobody else would of wrote like that, unless it was a nine-year-old kid. English gave her more trouble. Too many letters that look alike,
g
s and
q
s and and
f
s and
b
s. When she wrote for the family it was always Finn.”

I'm sorry I'm leaving you. There's been another man.
Rose hadn't expressly said she was leaving Teddy in the company of that other man, and she'd died wearing her wedding ring. “She might have written those same words if she knew she was dying.”

“She might have.”

“You didn't think of that?”

“Hell, no! Why would I? She said there was another man and she was leaving me. She wasn't dead when I got back. She was gone!” A spark of temper from Falk at last.

“Did Rose show any sign of being pregnant?”

“Like what? She didn't get fat.” He shrugged. “She kept to herself a lot.”

So Rose could have been pregnant. The father of that child might have been someone other than her husband, still another reason she wouldn't have been pleased with her condition.

If not Teddy, who? Eban Vogel? Sulo Touminen? Orville Pelto? Maybe it was Jack Stewart, or how about Nick? He was the only notorious philanderer in the neighborhood so far as McIntire knew. How about Colin McIntire or the Fuller Brush man? It could have been any of them, none of them, or all of them. But they were all McIntire had to work with.

Of the front runners, Orville Pelto was the prime candidate. He was charming and persuasive, offered her travel and an exciting life, and he was the new boy in the neighborhood. Rose was an adventurer. She'd be attracted to novelty. If she'd wanted to fool around with any of the others, they would have been available for years. The pregnancy would have been instigated at about the time Orville was setting the Falks up for emigration, but too far in advance of their departure to be the result of a goodbye fling. Pelto was also the only person McIntire had spoken with who hadn't referred to Rose's ugliness. He'd only said she looked “different.” And he was the only one who had never claimed to have conveniently forgotten the events surrounding her leaving. He'd told his story in perfect detail.

McIntire turned back to Falk. “How did your wife feel about Orville Pelto?”

“He might have run second to God or Karl Marx, but I doubt it.” Falk stood up with a groan. “Jesus, I forgot what real work was like.”

“Orville still around?”

“You maybe can catch him. He's heading back to Superior today.”