Witch Cradle (10 page)

Chapter Twenty

As McIntire drove up, Leonie emerged from the office of the
Chandler Monitor
. Juggling a folded newspaper and handbag while clamping her hat to her head with one hand, she battled the wind for control of the car door. If she'd given him time, McIntire would have done the gentlemanly thing and open it for her.

She arranged herself in the seat, pulled off her gloves, and unfurled the paper. “Look, you made page one!
Township Constable Locates Sixteen-Year-Old Murder Victims.
”

“Oh, I think Rosie was probably a little older than that. Don't know if she was a cradle robber, though.”

“I managed to resist pointing that out to Mr. Beckman.”

McIntire abandoned any discussion of the editor's command of syntax and told his wife of Erik Pelto's impending arrest. “He'll want to kill me and so will everybody else. Hell, I want to kill me.”

“It would have come out anyway. I expect those two skeletons are going to multiply like nobody's business,” Leonie told him. “You can't blame yourself.”

“Oh, yes I can! I sat right there in the kitchen and told a federal agent that Erik Pelto's family was red-hot communist. How dumb could anybody be?”

Leonie didn't dwell on her husband's stupidity or deny it. “Mr. Pelto is far from being the only person around here to have communist, or some sort of socialist, background,” she pointed out.

“That's what Fratelli says.”

“He's not arresting the rest of them.”

“Not yet. So far he hasn't had anybody else fingered by Yours Truly.”

The crackling of the paper as Leonie folded it in her lap put a temporary check on conversation. Was this only the beginning—Fratelli's shot across the bow?

“I'm muddled,” Leonie said. Mere muddledness put her way ahead of her husband's bewilderment. “It can't be illegal to have belonged to the Communist Party,” she went on, “or, surely, to have parents who did.”

“It's not illegal to be communist right now.” At least, McIntire didn't think so. “But there are laws against communists being on the public payroll. Even having been one in the distant past won't do you any good in getting a job as a schoolteacher, and if you don't happen to be a U.S. citizen, it can get you deported.”

“And Erik Pelto's not a citizen?”

“He must not be.” McIntire turned off Chandler's main street and reversed a few yards to make a running attack on the hill with its half-inch dusting of new snow. “I'm going to have to go see Erik before J. Edgar Newman shows up with his warrant.” He shifted into first gear and stepped on the gas. Neither of them spoke, or breathed, as the Studebaker zigged and zagged to the top.

Leonie exhaled first. “That would probably be best,” she agreed. She tucked her coat more snugly around her knees. “
Should
we have a communist teaching school?”

“He's teaching science, not socialism.”

“Even so….”

“That is, if he
is
a communist, which I doubt. He wasn't on Fratelli's ‘subversive' list until I tipped him off. Anyway, firing him is one thing, but throwing him in jail is something else altogether.”

“It does seem a trifle extreme.” Was that British understatement, or did Leonie have some sympathy with Pelto's ouster? Her next words expressed more compassion. “What will happen to Delilah and the babies?”

“Delilah
and
the babies? Delilah is a baby.” It was possible that Mrs. Erik Pelto wasn't as young as she looked, but it was hard to see her holding down the fort while Papa was in the jailhouse. “I can't imagine what she'll do,” McIntire said.

“Delilah Pelto is not the Helpless Hannah that she seems.”

McIntire hoped not. “I also can't think it'll be easy to get somebody in to take over for him at the school. Maybe Myrtle Van Opelt will have to come out of retirement. It might give her something useful to do, and she can give off badgering me.”

“Did Mrs. Van Opelt teach science?”

“No, I think it was supposed to be history, or civics, maybe geography. We were all too petrified to ask.”

Did Fratelli truly believe Erik Pelto was a threat to democracy, or was an arrest warrant for him another method of getting to McIntire? If it was, the agent was every bit as ignorant as he sometimes pretended to be. If word got out that McIntire had been instrumental in getting Erik Pelto shipped off to Finland, he would never get near the scheming Granny Jarvinen and her comrades, much less worm his way into one of their government-overthrow plotting sessions. And could Fratelli possibly believe that McIntire would consent to getting chummy with his socialist neighbors, once he saw what it could lead to?

Thinking about the situation with the science teacher was pointless now. He'd file it away for a better time, along with Fratelli's poorly disguised attempt at blackmail.

“What difference does it make, really?” Leonie sighed. “The Russians have the bomb. What more do they need to wipe us all off the face of the earth?”

“They won't dare use it.” McIntire tried to sound more confident than he felt. “They know it would be the end of them, too.”

“Do they care?”

McIntire was pretty sure that Stalin wasn't any more eager for annihilation than was Harry Truman, although he might not be overcome with grief at the loss of a few million citizens of the Western World. “I've been there, Leonie. Ordinary Russians aren't all that different from us.”

“Different? No, I don't think they are. Every time I pick up a paper all I see is war, war, war. People here don't have any idea what war is.”

That was true. McIntire hoped it stayed that way. “What about the papers you picked up today? Did you find out anything?”

“Nothing that seems significant to me. I went through every issue of the
Monitor
for the entire month of August, 1934. Cover to cover. From the date on the deed, the sixteenth, through the next ten days, the news was all about an accident in a mine. Water broke in and fifty-one men drowned.”

Massey-Davis. McIntire remembered that. He'd heard about it in detail from his mother. It had even gotten a mention or two in the papers in London. The shaft went under a swamp. It had given way, and in less than fifteen minutes the mine filled up with water, sand, and mud. Two of the dead had been regulars at his father's saloon.

“There was nothing about anybody else leaving or going missing,” she went on, “and only a little mention in the St. Adele column about the Falks going away. That was the previous week.”

“Well, thanks, Leonie. It was worth a try.”

She rubbed at the steamed-up window. “Maybe we could have a bite in town before we go back.”

McIntire assessed the size, number, and trajectory of the snowflakes hitting the windshield. “That might not be a good idea. We don't want to end up stuck here or halfway home.” He reached to pat her knee. “Sorry.”

Her skirt rustled as she moved closer to him. “It's just so dreary.”

Silver spirals danced in the beams of the headlights. The street ahead was an unbroken carpet of white. It didn't strike McIntire as dreary. January in London, now that was dreary for you. But McIntire knew what his wife meant. Life here was…limited, something that, from all outward appearances, his neighbors seemed to accept and even find rewarding. But McIntire was no more able to succumb to the simplicity of survival than was his wife. Maybe less so. And this was only the beginning; winter had barely gotten a good start. “Leonie, you could think about going back for a visit. You'll be wanting to do that sometime before too long, anyway.”

She gave the paper in her lap another fold before answering. “I'm not sure this is the best time. I'd rather wait until summer.”

“Wait until summer! How could there be a better time to get out of here than right now?”

“If I leave in the middle of July, when it's eighty degrees and sunny, I'll have a whole lot more incentive to come back.”

“I'm not incentive enough?”

“Of course you are, Dearest. But when I return here it will be sad to leave home again, and doubly so if this is what I have to face coming back to.”

It wasn't the glib reply McIntire had expected, and he wished he hadn't asked.

Chapter Twenty-One

It was long past time Mia should be asleep. Although she couldn't think of a good reason why. It wasn't like she had to be up and about early. It wasn't like she was going to be up and about much at all for a good long while. Besides, getting out of bed to turn off the light was just too much effort.

Nick had lain next to her for a time, squirming and turning from one side to the other until she thought she'd scream. He'd finally mumbled that the place was just too damn claustrophobic and gone upstairs.

It
was
claustrophobic. Claustrophobic and dingy, even though a little of the mustiness was dissipating, or else she was getting accustomed to it. Probably the latter.

She turned back to
The Good Earth
. Despite her feeling of sisterhood with the big-footed Olan, after a few pages both her mind and her eyes were once again wandering. The window was a great black hole; she should have pulled the curtains. A stain on the wallpaper resembled an ocean liner with a thread of smoke trailing from its stack. Maybe like the one that should have taken Rose and Teddy Falk to their workers' Utopia. Would Rose have fared any better if she had been on that boat? Or would it have only dragged out her suffering?

She leaned back against the headboard. Aside from the rumpled sheets, it was a comfortable bed. In the past, she'd thought now and again about co-opting it, but she'd hesitated when her father was still alive, and afterwards it seemed like too much of a bother. It weighed a ton. Black walnut, each of its four solid posts topped with a fat pineapple.

When she was a child those carved fruits had fascinated her, never so much as when she discovered that with a little muscle they could be unscrewed, furnishing lovely playthings on lonely snowy days. Somehow one had gotten lost. Her father had demonstrated no anger, only insisting that she replace it with another of her own making. After eighteen attempts' worth of nicked fingers and tears, she'd produced an acceptable substitute, and her fascination with the possibilities locked within a piece of wood was established.

The original had later turned up behind the kitchen woodbox, but her parents had never put it back in the place of the one she'd made, nor had her father given that gouged, lopsided object so much as a touch of sandpaper before anchoring it to the bedpost.

She closed the book, braced her hands against the mattress, and, after a couple of aborted attempts, managed to sit upright. She threw the covers aside, slid down to the end of the bed, and sat facing the mahogany wardrobe.

It was a splendid piece of work, its bulk softened by the simple, elegant lines that made Eban Vogel's furniture unique. Like the bed, it was something Mia would have commandeered for her own room if getting it up the stairs hadn't been a factor. It was in her own room now, if not exactly as she might have wished.

Leaning forward, she could just get her fingernails under the edge of the wardrobe's door. A pull swung it open, and she sat back. A few pieces of her father's meager store of clothing still hung inside, worn shirts, a couple of pairs of work pants. He'd been buried in his single good white shirt. The remainder of the space was taken up, bottom to top, with boxes. All that was left of two lives, one of them much too short.

When Eban died, Mia had eagerly sorted through those belongings of her mother's that he'd kept to himself. There had been disappointingly little. A few letters, articles clipped from magazines, a faded and flowery birthday card from her husband-to-be.

In contrast, Mia had packed away her father's piles of papers with hardly a glance, intending to get around to them someday when she had plenty of time. Someday had arrived. It was possible that he'd left something that would tell the real story of what they'd found under the tree. Information he'd assumed they'd find after he died.

She used her crutch to pull a chair near, swung herself onto it, and began flinging boxes onto the bed.

When Nick came in three hours later with a steaming cup in each hand, she was still engrossed in their contents.

“What the devil is all this?”

Mia grasped the extended cup quickly and put her tongue to the dribble down the side. He'd remembered the cream.

“I've got a bit of time on my hands,” she told him. “I should have done this years ago. Look! It's an IOU from Alfred Monson. Papa lent him fifty dollars. I'll bet he never paid it back, and now it's too late. He's dead, too.”

“Just like Alf, weaseling out of paying up with an underhanded trick like that.” Nick sat on the edge of the bed. “Anything else?”

“No, that's about it for excitement apart from a lot of ranting socialist essays and stuff that has to do with the old Association. They'd be worth reading, if a person had time. Which I do now.”

“He was an odd duck, your father.”

“He wasn't a thief,” Mia said, “and he wasn't a murderer.”

“No, but he'd have gone out of his way to protect a friend, even if that friend was a thief or a murderer.”

A pounding on the kitchen door kept Mia from thinking about it. Nick scrambled to his feet, slopping coffee onto the chenille bedspread. “Who the hell could that be at this time of the morning?”

He shuffled off without waiting for Mia's conjectures on that. The sounds of the door closing, foot stomping, and soft feminine laughter was followed by, “How is she?” in a brisk voice. A minute later Irene Touminen, pointy nose glowing crimson, burst into the room, bringing the frigid outdoors with her.

“Mia, this is so awful. I came to see what I could do to help.” Her coat hit the chair. “Notice I didn't say ‘can I help?' 'cause I know you'd say no. I'll just do what needs doing. You're in no shape to put up a fight. Are you warm enough?” After a spell of blanket tugging and pillow plumping, brushing Mia's cheek with tiny fingers of ice, she stood back.

“Looks like you're catching up on your reading.” She picked up a brittle newspaper clipping. “Nineteen-oh-three. You
do
have some catching up to do,” she said, and peered at the hazy print. “I thought it was just us Finns that read this sort of thing.”

“My father was an odd duck, as Nick just pointed out to me.” Mia flung the spread over the scattered papers. She didn't need to have her father's life exposed to any busybody that walked in. Mia wondered if Irene Touminen's curiosity meant that she was aware of the role her upended pines had played in locating the bodies in Jarvi Makinen's well. Her brother Sulo's well now. Irene had been pretty chatty with Rose Falk.

“Terrible about Rosie,” Mia said. “I know you were close.”

“We were. Close as Rosie was to anybody, I guess. Of course I always wondered what had happened to her. I thought maybe she'd died. No one ever heard from her or Teddy, and there was talk some of those people starved to death before the war. But who ever would have thought she could have been killed right here? And by Teddy himself.”

Had any of the people who emigrated been heard from? Mia thought a few had come back after a year or so, but didn't know about the ones who stayed. “I suppose it's not easy to send mail from Russia. They can't all be dead, can they?”

“Who knows? Can you picture Teddy doing such a thing? He was always so…easygoing, I guess you might say.”

“There's no telling what people might do in a fit of anger,” Mia said. What would she do if she caught Nick with another woman? Something that might have happened any time, if she was to believe the gossip. Would she be mad enough to kill him? Would she have a shotgun handy to do it with?

Irene settled on the edge of the bed. “It was the perfect crime,” she said. “Nobody noticed they were missing, because they expected them to be.”

“We all expected Rosie to be gone, but what about the other guy? Why didn't someone report him missing?”

“Good question, and why didn't somebody on the other end notice when the Falks didn't show up?”

“Maybe Teddy did show up. If he said Rosie'd changed her mind people would probably take his word for it.”

“No,” Irene said. “Old Man Pelto ran that show. If he thought that Rosie Makinen had stayed here by herself, footloose and fancy free, he'd have been knocking at the door. He was always on the lookout for a new mama for little Erik, and he took quite a shine to Rosie, for some reason. And now to find out she had another one on the string….” Irene shook her head.

“I don't suppose all men are only interested in looks.”

“No? Let me know if you find one that isn't. I'm not all that crazy about spending the rest of my days keeping house for my brother.”

“Teddy obviously didn't give a hoot about looks,” Mia said, “and he's out there somewhere, a free man for the time being. Maybe you can track him down before Pete Koski does.” Was that a tactless thing to say? Only if Irene really did consider herself homely, and Mia couldn't see why she would. At least she had the grace to laugh, and Mia went on, “Maybe they liked her spirit. Rose was always the adventurous type.”

“Ya, odd, as quiet as she was, you'd never suspect she was a regular Annie Oakley.” Irene stood up, smoothed the front of her dress, and took Mia's empty cup from her hand. “I'll bring you fresh as soon as you've had a little nap. You look like you haven't slept in a week.” She placed the cup on the dresser, re-plumped the pillow, and went back to tidying the bedclothes.

“Now get under the covers and shut your eyes.” She was speaking to Mia, but her attention stayed focused on Eban Vogel's papers as she collected them into a rough stack

Mia lay back and allowed Irene to tuck the quilt around her shoulders. The comforting rustle of paper and the smoothing of blankets went on for a time before she heard the light switch click, and the door softly close. A week? She felt like she hadn't slept in a month.