Witch Cradle (6 page)

Chapter Eleven

The only thing worse than the pain in her leg was the miasma of dank and musty odors issuing from the mattress, the blankets, the curtains, the varnish on the floorboards.

Mia lay back on the narrow bed in the room where her father had slept in the years after her mother's death. It hadn't always held this dead, fusty atmosphere. When she was a little girl, the room had been a special place, warm and scrupulously free of dust, where the furniture Eban Vogel built with such artistry received its final polish. She'd spent the too short winter afternoons playing on the floor, building houses with the scraps from his work; watching the patterns and colors of the wood appear as if by magic from under his cloth: the golden swirls in the oak, the deep red rivers of the mahogany. The room had held its own distinctive aroma then. The smells of his mysterious waxes had permeated the house and still trickled through Mia's dreams. But when Charlotte Vogel died, her husband had moved the wardrobe and the creaky iron bed into this room, and Mia had seldom entered it again.

And she'd hardly entered it since his own death. Four years without the touch of a dustcloth or soap and water is a long time, and the present-day aroma was not blended of shellac and carnauba wax. She'd better get used to it; she wouldn't be climbing stairs for a while. It might not be long before Nick, too, would be confined to the main floor. A silver lining—her accident gave an excuse to get this room ready for him.

She wriggled into as near a sitting position as she could manage.
Manage
. How was she going to manage? There was no point in thinking about it. She simply wasn't going to manage, not for a while. It would be all up to Nick now—water, firewood, cooking, washing, ironing. Ironing? That would never happen. Mia had been contemplating—shuddering at—the prospect of taking over Nick's chores, not passing more onto him. She'd taken the car out a few times before the snow fell, trying to prepare for the time when Nick could no longer drive. That was out of the question now. He'd just have to keep on a while longer. And kill himself, most likely. He'd come close enough a few times already, and that was back when he was supposedly healthy. Guibard said she'd have the cast on for about six weeks. You couldn't starve to death in six weeks. For the first time in her life, Mia wished she'd been more ambitious when it came to putting up vegetables. And she also couldn't help feeling a bit cheated. When this chance to be coddled had at last come her way, she had nobody to do the coddling.

She gave a mighty shove to hitch herself up a little farther. One of the slats holding the bed spring hit the floor with a crack. Nick's footsteps sounded on the living room linoleum.

“You awake, Meggie?” He stood in the doorway. “I thought Guibard gave you enough to knock you out for a week.”

“No such luck,” Mia said. “The bed's broke.”

Nick sank to his knees and peered under. “God!”

“What?”

“It's pretty dusty under there.”

“Forget that. I'll try to move so you can put the slat back in before the whole bed goes down.”

“Here.” Nick grasped her legs and eased her around to a sideways position. “Just sit tight.”

He slid under the bed. “Whatever you do, don't make any sudden moves.” His words were followed by a twanging of springs and a scraping of wood. “Don't make any moves at all.” After a few seconds he emerged, dust-covered but smiling. He sucked in his breath but got to his feet without struggle. “That should hold for a while. We can bring the big bed downstairs. I'll get Touminen to help.” He swung her legs back onto the bed. “Don't bounce around too much.”

“I don't plan to do much bouncing for the foreseeable future.”

“You want some coffee?”

Had Nick ever in his life made coffee? If he had, Mia didn't remember.

He plucked a curl of dust from his neck. “Did it hurt a lot?”

It still hurt a lot. “Not too much,” she told him.

“Leonie McIntire came over to see how you were. She cooked me some breakfast. She insisted on breakfast even though it was past noon.”

“Oh, please Nick! Don't let her in here! Tell her I'm still sleeping. Tell her I'm dead!”

“She's gone. I gave her a ride home.”

Lord, how had she found out so soon? “She's not going to put this in her paper, is she?”

“Probably. It's the biggest news around here in months.” He tucked the blankets around her feet. “She said she'd come back over tomorrow to see what she could do to help. She'll probably be wanting an exclusive interview. Too bad she doesn't print pictures.”

For an instant Nick was his old boyish self. The image was reinforced by his parting words, “How much water do you put in?”

John had probably told his wife about their discovery under the pine tree, too. Mia could only hope she didn't decide to put
that
in her so-called newspaper. The story of her broken ankle would be bad enough: a plea for sympathy and aid for poor Mrs. Nick Thorsen who broke her ankle trying to see how far she could throw an empty thundermug. The last thing she needed was Leonie McIntire in this room, helping out by rounding up dust bunnies.

She leaned back against the headboard. The iron scrollwork bit into her spine, and she wriggled down to lie flat on her back. Her feet popped from the covers and extended past the end of the mattress. She hoped Nick was on the phone to Touminen now. Preferably both Touminens, Sulo
and
Uno. Getting the bed down the stairs could be more than a two-man job. Especially when the strength of one of those men might give out without warning.

What would it be like to sleep in the bed where, presumably, she'd been conceived? Would she be warm and comforted, cradled in the arms of her parents, or would her mind, vulnerable in sleep, be helpless against the intrusion of their restless spirits? Was the soul of Eban Vogel, right now, seething in the frustration of unjust suspicion, suspicion it was powerless to fight from the grave?

Mia didn't even try to curb the morbid flights of fancy. She would have little enough to occupy her time, and indulging in intercourse with the dead was as good an entertainment as any.

The idea that her father might have committed some terrible act of violence or larceny was absurd. Eban Vogel had definite views of how things should be and he didn't hold back in trying to convince anybody within earshot of the logic of those views, but he was not impulsive and certainly not violent. She had almost never seen him lose his temper. That night with Teddy Falk had been all the more terrifying because of the freakish change in him.

It was the money that was the most difficult to accept. It was conceivable that anyone could be driven to an act of passion, pushed beyond his capacity to endure. But theft? Stealing wasn't something done in the heat of the moment. Mia's father was impeccably honest. And he wasn't poor. He would never have stolen a single penny, let alone $700. It had to have belonged to him. But why would he have hidden it?

Besides, Eban had always been fond of Rosie Falk, treated her kindly, complimenting her, and doing things for her that she could easily have done herself. He felt sorry for her, Mia knew. She wouldn't have traded places with Rose for all the money in the world, but she had sometimes wished her father would show that kind of chivalry toward her.

Chapter Twelve

McIntire was relieved to see a snake of smoke issuing from the chimney. It wasn't like Leonie to balk at going into the basement to fill the furnace, even in total darkness.

It also wasn't like her to be sitting as he found her, hunched at the kitchen table with her chin barely above the rim of her teacup.

He kissed the top of her head. “Taken up reading the leaves?”

“Maybe they can give me a hint on when it will stop snowing.”

“I can tell you that,” McIntire said. “You'll be pretty safe around half-past June.”

“I don't seem to recollect that it snowed every day last winter.”

McIntire recollected it all too well. “It's like childbirth,” he said. “You forget.”

“Childbirth,” she said, “I
do
remember.” She stood up to refill the kettle and went about rinsing the teapot.

When his wife was giving birth to her daughters, McIntire was…where? On the other side of the world from her in one of those cramped desks; a gangly, pimply-faced high school sophomore. What would she have been like then? Much the same as now, he suspected, determined and pragmatic. But what had she really felt, evicting those twins from the shelter of her body into a world wracked by war, while her nineteen-year-old husband lay dying a few miles away? What did she feel now, separated from those daughters by an ocean and half a continent?

“What have you discovered about the elusive Teddy and Rose?” She held up the pot with a questioning look, and McIntire nodded.

Teddy and Rose
. It sounded like a team of oxen. “I don't think they're elusive,” McIntire said. “I think they're dead.”

“A lot of people who were in Russia before the war are dead.”

“No, Leonie.” He accepted the steaming cup. “I think at least one of the Falks, maybe both, died before they could leave, right here, at their farm, in their own house.”

Leonie looked as befuddled as McIntire felt.

“Just because nobody got a letter from them? On that basis my sister in New Zealand has been strumming a harp for the past four years.”

“If I dig up her handbag in the back yard, and discover bloodstains on the sheets, I'll be alerting the authorities.”

“You'd turn me in? You never met Esther, did you?”

Had Teddy or Rose Falk, or both of them, instead of finding a socialist Utopia, found death in their bed? All those years when anyone who thought about it probably assumed they had met with some terrible fate at the hands of Joe Stalin, had it happened right here? How? And what could be done about it now? There was no statute of limitations on murder, but the chances of finding how it came about were slim. If they were both dead, it could have been a case of murder-suicide. No. If that was what happened, at least one body would probably have been found. If they were dead, what did happen to the bodies?

There was, or had been, one other person who must have known that the Falks hadn't gone to Karelia—the person who buried their passage money in Eban Vogel's yard. Most likely to have been Eban Vogel. So why had he let everyone think that the Falks had gone abroad if he knew different? And why had he secreted the money?

McIntire examined the dregs of his own cup, found the leaves unhelpful, and walked to the phone. He picked up the receiver and cranked his way through to the Flambeau County sheriff's office.

Marian Koski's voice on the phone sounded pinched. “The sheriff,” she said, “is flat on his back
because
of his back. Shoveling snow.” Her sigh was audible even over the static on the lines. “Cecil Newman is in charge. Would you like to speak to him?”

Speak to Cecil Newman? It was too early in the day. Too early in the year. “Oh, I don't think we need to bother Deputy Newman right now,” McIntire said. “It's not urgent.”

“All right then. Let me know if I can be of help.”

“Same here. Give my best to Pete.”

Babyface Newman in charge? Well, with any luck, the weather might keep anyone with otherwise criminal inclinations at home.

McIntire made one more call. This one to Harald Anderson. “Harald,” he asked, “you still got that Ten-B?”

Chapter Thirteen

It had taken a bit of convincing to get Sulo Touminen to agree to McIntire's digging up the old well. He limited his revelations to the finding of the Falks' bill of lading. He didn't say where, but if Sulo had the mental powers of a walleye, he could easily figure that out. Given road conditions, there could have been only a limited number of places McIntire visited prior to coming to see Sulo himself on the morning of the storm. Limited to one—the Thorsens'.

Sulo's grudging acquiescence meant that McIntire didn't have to try to talk St. Adele Township's bristly justice of the peace, Myrtle Van Opelt, into issuing him a warrant. McIntire hoped his lack of discretion wasn't too large a price to pay.

Sulo was vague about the cistern's exact location, and he had no interest in joining the constable in digging around to look for it under two and a half feet of snow.
About ten yards west of where the house used to be
, was the best he could do. “I dumped in some sand and put the cover—a buncha planks—back over the spot,” he'd added, “just in case things loosened up. Didn't want the horses falling through. It's pretty much rotted away now, but there might be some sign of it.”

His sister had been a little more precise, sitting silently at her oil-cloth covered table, drawing a neat map on the back of the envelope the electric bill had come in, using the barn and remaining lilac bushes as landmarks.

McIntire stuck his shovel into the snowbank and rotated the chart to find some correlation with the scene before him.

Touminen used most of the acreage for hay, which he stored in the swaybacked barn, the only structure left to show that anyone had ever lived here. He hadn't begun using the fodder yet this winter, so the road into the place wasn't cleared. And it was a long road, a quarter-mile, McIntire reckoned. The Falk homestead would have been an isolated spot even in the thirties, when the area's population was considerably higher than it was now.

McIntire shouldered his shovel and waded into a drift up to his thighs. An investment in a pair of snowshoes was an increasingly attractive idea.

Map in hand, he spent over an hour scuffing through the crusty snow, prodding with a shovel, before he hit what sounded like wood. After getting rid of what felt like a ton of snow, McIntire had only to remove a few rotted splinters of board. Still, it was mid-afternoon before he'd cleared the space down to the slightly sunken frozen ground.

Leaning on his shovel, feeling the snow in his overshoes turning to slush and the sweat chill on his neck, he hesitated. What was he doing here? Was there really a chance that he was going to find some Robert Frostian truth at the bottom of a well, or was this excursion just another manifestation of cabin fever? An exercise to stave off the crushing monotony of the Michigan winter? Would his time be better spent ice fishing?

On the face of things, this seemed senseless, a shot in the dark, but maybe Occam's razor would prevail, the simple explanation would be the correct one. Mr. and Mrs. Falk had disappeared. It was as good a place to start looking as any.

He looked at the threatening sky, dragged a few of the bountiful supply of broken spruce branches to mark the spot, and drove off to the home of Harald,
aka
“Gopher,” Anderson and his Bucyrus-Erie 10-B shovel.

***

McIntire pulled his car into the shadow of a genuine man's vehicle.

After the war, Anderson had got hold of a couple of retired army trucks, including the flatbed on which he transported the masterpiece of his fleet, the real tribute to testosterone: the Bucyrus Erie 10-B shovel. He'd bought it from one of the mining companies, and he claimed to be able to dig up, move, or knock over anything smaller than a courthouse. The man was the envy of every male over the age of three. McIntire was no exception. He coveted the tractor-mounted plow with which Gopher, aided by the small daughter on his lap, was clearing away snow, scraping it down to his nicely graveled driveway. If snow removal could be considered an art, the precise rectangles and orderly banks in Anderson's yard made him the Picasso of the Plow.

Anderson left the child bouncing on the tractor seat, gleefully fiddling with the various levers, and came to lean on the hood of McIntire's milksop Studebaker.

“Can you do it? When the ground is frozen?”

Gopher chewed a grease-embedded thumbnail. “I can try. Might not be froze that far down. We got snow pretty early on. Anyway it's sandy around there, and it was a dry fall. Might not be too hard.”

“I could build a fire,” McIntire offered, “try to thaw the ground a little.”

“Heat goes up, not down. Wouldn't do much good. The Ten-B can do 'er.”

Anderson seemed illogically optimistic. Eager even. His next words gave a clue as to why.

“How come you want to dig out Rosie Makinen's old well?”

McIntire remembered the rock-hard feel of that earth under his shovel. Maintaining Anderson's zeal could be crucial. “Because I think Rosie might be in it,” he said, “maybe along with her husband. You think we can get at it tomorrow?”

Gopher nodded.