Powder Keg (18 page)

J
ust as I got to the street, I saw Loretta DeMeer going into the general store, a large straw basket hanging from her right arm. I thought of catching up to her but decided to visit the livery first.

A girl of maybe sixteen was raking out a stall when I got there.

“I guess I’ve never met you.” I showed her my badge.

She stopped raking, leaned on the wooden handle. She had black pigtails hanging below the Western hat she wore. A snub nose and lively blue eyes made her cuter than I’d thought at first glance.

“I’m Judy Whalen. I suppose you’re looking for Mr. Ralston.”

“I’m sorry to say that Mr. Ralston’s dead.”

She didn’t say anything, just gave me an odd stare, as if I’d just uttered the strangest words she’d ever heard.

“But he come over to the house last night and gave me the key and said I should open up for him the way I sometimes do. How come he’s dead?”

“Because somebody murdered him.”

“Oh, his poor wife. She’s my aunt. You sure he’s dead?” She was still struggling with the concept.

“I’m sure. But what I want to know is if you’ve seen him this morning?”

“No. He said he wouldn’t be in till late in the afternoon.”

“Anybody else come asking for him this morning?”

“No.”

Then, without warning, tears formed in her eyes and began traveling down her cheeks. Silent crying. She seemed unaware of her tears. “Nobody had anything against Uncle Tim. Everybody liked him.”

“Sure seemed that way.”

“And gosh—my aunt was just in here.”

“Where’d she go?”

“She said she was going to stop at the pharmacy.”

“Thanks. I’ll try to catch her.”

“You know, everybody always said that my dad would go before Uncle Tim on account of his heart condition. But it turned out it was Uncle Tim who died before he did.”

Still grappling with death. People spend their whole lives grappling with it.

Mrs. Ralston had been in the pharmacy but left; Mrs. Ralston had been in the dress shop but left. I caught up with her in the Catholic church, where the dress shop lady said she’d gone. The dress shop lady also told me that somebody had come into her shop and told her about Ralston dying. This person hadn’t re
alized until too late that Mrs. Ralston was in the back of the store, listening. The dress shop lady had said that Mrs. Ralston had gone pretty crazy for a time. Completely inconsolable. The dress shop lady had poured three belts of whiskey down her, which had helped some; had at least, if nothing else, gotten her past her screaming. “I never heard anybody scream like Mrs. Ralston did right there at the first. It was scary to hear. Never heard anything like it.”

She sat in the last pew, Mrs. Ralston did. The church was empty except for her. I sat next to her.

We didn’t talk for a long time. She had a rosary and a small handkerchief in her hand. Her left hand trembled violently.

Finally, she said, “Some of this is your fault, Mr. Ford.”

She sounded too calm. I was talking to a dead person.

“I suppose it is. I’m sorry, Mrs. Ralston.”

“That’ll be the worst thing of all, except for Tim dying.”

“What will?”

“Hearing everybody say ‘I’m sorry.’ Over and over again.”

“It’s hard to know what else to say.”

She wore a bulky cloth coat. She was child-small inside it. Her headscarf was black with small bright flowers celebrating spring. But right then in that ice-cold church, with a dead woman sitting next to me, spring seemed a long impossible way off.

“I need to ask you some questions, Mrs. Ralston.”

“You don’t care he’s dead, do you?”

I hadn’t realized until then that she hadn’t looked at me yet. Not even a glance. She stared
straight ahead at a wooden Christ on a wooden cross. This was a humble parish. No stained glass, no marble altar. The scent of incense hung melancholy on the air.

“I’m just doing my job, Mrs. Ralston.”

“Your job.” She finally looked at me. She was furious. “Your job is to go places and bring people misery. That’s what your job is. My husband knew something but he was going to let it slide. But you wouldn’t let him. You kept on him and on him. And you didn’t care that if he told you what he knew, he’d be killed.”

She was shouting by the end of it. Then, spent, she turned away to face the altar again.

After a time, I said, “Well, he didn’t tell me anything, Mrs. Ralston, and he died anyway. Whoever killed him would have killed him, anyway.”

“I’m sure it was Tremont. Tremont came sniffing around the same way you did.”

Tremont.

“When was this?” I asked.

“Two times yesterday. Tim had to hide from Tremont just the way he had to hide from you.”

“Did he ever tell you anything?”

“No.”

Was she lying?

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Now leave me alone. I never want to see you again. Ever. You understand? Not ever!”

Just then an old priest came in the side door at the back of the church. He needed a cane to walk. Her voice had been sharp. He said, “Is everything all right, Mrs. Ralston?”

“Yes, Father.”

“I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Ralston.”

“Thank you, Father.”

She’d been right about one thing, anyway. She was going to hear a lot of sorrys in the next few days.

L
oretta DeMeer’s wagon was still in front of the general store. There was one thing I needed answered and given what she’d said the other night, I was hoping she could answer it for me.

The general store smelled of pipe tobacco, saddle leather, coffee being heated on the stove, licorice, cottons—so many rich aromas. And so much promise. When you were young, a general store was like going to greed heaven. There were so many things you wanted to take home you couldn’t quite cope with it. Of course you were limited to the few coins your dad had given you the night before so your money was no match for your greed.

I found her looking at pots and pans. I had no idea what the various shapes and sizes were used for. To me a pan was a pan.

“Well, there’s a nice-looking man if I’ve ever seen one,” she said. “Except you look a little tired.”

“Too much going on. I need to get back East where things are calmer.”

She was turning a pot back and forth and upside
down for inspection. “Now that’s a new one. I’ve always heard about the Wild Wild East. We just rob banks and have range wars out here. We don’t get into any of that decadence that goes on in big cities.”

“I’ll have to look into that when I get back there. I hadn’t heard of it until you mentioned it.”

I moved closer to her. She wore a brown corduroy coat lined with lamb’s wool, a heavy sweater and dungarees. The sweater was pleasantly full with her breasts. I had the start of one of those totally unexpected and totally useless erections you get in public places.

But I’d moved closer with a purpose. I had to lower my voice. I surveyed the place. Nobody was close to us.

“You mentioned how much Mike Chaney got around. You mentioned a couple of married women he got pregnant.”

She said, “You want to talk about that here?” Even though she whispered, she seemed uncomfortable. Her perfect composure was broken.

“All I need are the names.”

Her gaze lifted and she said, “Why, Mr. Howard, how’re you this morning?”

“Didn’t see you come in, Mrs. DeMeer. I was in the back unpacking things and Ida didn’t mention it. Just wanted to say hello.”

My back was to him. I turned around and smiled at him. “Morning.”

“I thought that was you, Mr. Ford. I was just going to ask if you people knew anything more about poor Ralston. He was in Rotary with me, you know.”

He was a small, bald man who wore a leather
apron over a yellow shirt and a pair of work trousers. He had a yellow pencil stuck behind his ear.

“Sorry to say we don’t, though I haven’t checked in for a while.”

“He sure was a good man.”

“He sure was,” Loretta DeMeer said. And I could tell she meant it. Her tone was rich with the troubled noise only death can put in a voice. She was thinking of Ralston’s mortality but she was also thinking of her own. I was doing the same thing.

“Well, there’ll be a lot of people at the funeral, that’s for sure,” Mr. Howard said. “He was very well liked in this town.” He nodded to Loretta and then to me. “Well, sorry to interrupt your conversation, folks. Time for me to get back to work.”

“Seems like a decent man,” I said after he’d left.

“You’ve got the wrong impression of this town, Noah. Most of the people here are decent. You’ve just run into a lot of murders. And that’s not typical, believe me.”

I lowered my voice again. “I need to know the names of the two women you were going to tell me about.”

And then she told me. One of the women had moved away with her husband two years before, the husband apparently assuming the child was his. But then she told me the name of the other woman. The one still there. And when she told me I said to myself no, not possible. But then possible—maybe more than possible.

She said something else but I didn’t hear.

Then: “What’s wrong, Noah?”

“I need to get to the doc’s office.”

“Aren’t you feeling well?” “I’m feeling fine—just a little stupid is all.”

I arrived in time to see Wendy Nordberg leaving the doc’s office. She made a pretty mother, her child held so tenderly.

She must have heard me coming because she looked up suddenly. And just as suddenly turned away from the shoveled walk leading to the main street. She abruptly took a path that led down along the river. I wondered if she knew why I was looking for her. That didn’t make any sense. How could she know?

I walked faster. But so did she. She was walking along a shoveled path next to the river. It was probably a five-foot drop to the ice- and snow-covered water.

“Mrs. Nordberg! Wait for me! I need to talk to you!”

I moved as fast as I could along the path, too fast, because I lost my footing and slammed into an oak tree next to the path.

I was knocked unconscious. Not for more than a few seconds. But for those seconds there was—nothing. Not even pain. But the pain was there waiting for me when I returned to the world.

I had a headache that no hangover could ever equal. Somebody had sawed right through my skull, right down the middle. I touched fingers to the top of my forehead and felt hot blood there. I moved my fingers gently around the trail of blood and then I
came to the wound. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t deep. But it had been sufficient to knock me out.

Then I remembered Mrs. Nordberg.

I grabbed on to the tree that had nearly done me in and pulled myself to my feet. I had to blink my eyes several times to clear my vision. I decided against shaking my head. It might roll off.

I saw her way down the river trail. She was still moving pretty fast but not as fast as she had been. Carrying a baby had to take its toll on strength and energy, especially when you were trying not to slip and fall.

I started out running down the slope to the trail but that didn’t last long. My head couldn’t take the punishment of speed. I slowed down to a fast, awkward walk. I was afraid of tumbling again. For at that point I might not recover as fast as I had before. At that point—there was at least the possibility—I might not recover at all. People died in all sorts of winter-related accidents.

I gained on her steadily. She looked back once and saw me.

The only warm part of me was the trickle of blood on my forehead. I really did need to get that stitched up.

I had almost caught up to her. “I just want to talk to you, Mrs. Nordberg! Let’s just stop and talk!”

I made my voice as cordial as I could.

But she didn’t turn around again. She increased her speed by doubling the number of mincing little steps she took. She wanted to hurry but she wanted to be safe, too.

I was almost able to reach out and grab her shoulder when it happened. The accident had the air of
unreality about it—the mind’s first impulse to reject it as impossible—but that didn’t stop it from being real indeed.

In other circumstances, a stage comedy for instance, what happened might even have been humorous.

You have this woman hurrying along a path adjacent to the river five feet below. Clutching her baby as if her—their—lives depended on it. That noblest of all creatures—the mother protecting her child.

And then it happened.

She stumbled or started sliding. Whichever it was, she lost her grip on the infant she was carrying. And the baby, still swaddled in baby blankets, popped from her arms. It took to the air. And I think she and I both became paralyzed at the same instant, watching the arc of the child as it flew upward into the air. It seemed to hover there for a very long time—the way certain terrible moments in nightmares seem to linger—and it then began a descent to the icy river, where moments later it crashed.

She found her voice. Her scream was so piercing, so helpless, so horrified that I doubted I would ever be able to get it out of my mind.

Then I found my legs. Instinct took over then. I stepped to the edge of the trail.

Mrs. Nordberg was still screaming, crying out for her child. No sound sadder than that.

In that instant, I calculated that the ice would be strong enough to hold me when I slammed onto its surface. If it wasn’t, there was a good chance I’d smash through it and drown in the icy waters below. There wasn’t the faintest hope that Mrs. Nordberg would be able to save me. Or even lend a hand in
that effort. She wanted her daughter. That was her only concern. And I couldn’t blame her.

I jumped.

As I landed, my full weight touching the ice for the first time, I heard a muted cracking sound. Would it hold me? I could see the infant sitting maybe ten yards from me. When it landed, it had skidded up river. Making things even more difficult.

Mrs. Nordberg teetered on the edge of the snow above the river. She was steeling herself for a jump to the ice.

I shouted, “Let me get her, Mrs. Nordberg!”

But I doubted she could hear me. Her only reality was the baby on the ice below her. Her baby.

I started moving toward it. The deep cracking sound came again. My face was sheathed with sweat that made me tremble. The icy water would take care of the sweat. Unless I was very lucky, it would take care of me, too.

I started carefully, slowly across the ten yards separating me from the infant.

At that moment, Mrs. Nordberg decided to jump. The effect was startling. She seemed to hang in the air, irrespective of time and gravity, just as her infant had after popping from her mom’s arms.

This time the cracking sound was much more pronounced. She was a thin body but heavy enough to make a difference on that section of ice. She landed on her hands and knees. A thin line, thin as a thread, appeared in the ice between me and the baby. The woman was in no condition—she was still on her hands and knees—to grab her baby in case the crack got wider and a hole opened up in the ice.

I moved as fast as I could toward the kid. Saving her was the only thought in my mind. Nothing else mattered.

I covered five feet of ice, six, seven. And then the infant was within my reach. I bent down and picked up the blankets that hid the infant.

The big thing was to make sure that the infant had survived the fall. Sometimes they survived catastrophes; sometimes minor injuries killed them.

I guess in my frenzy, wanting to get the blankets off her so that I could see her face and make sure she was all right—I guess in that second I didn’t notice how little the blankets weighed.

But then I began undoing the blankets that kept her warm and hid her from public view.

There was no baby inside.

I was holding only a bundle of small bunched blankets that had been safety-pinned together to resemble the shape of a baby.