Past Imperfect (19 page)

“What was it that you said about Nels losing a brother, too? I don't remember hearing about that.”

“Oh, it was before they came here—the reason that they came here really. They were living in Minnesota then, on the North Shore, or in Duluth, I suppose, in the winter. They spent the fishing season on Isle Royale. It was early spring and Ole and his older son—Lars was his name—made a run to the fishing grounds around the Apostle Islands when the south shore fishermen were still iced in. A storm came up and Lars was swept right out of the boat. There wasn't a thing Ole could do. The boy sank like a rock and never came up again. Ole probably would have died himself if he hadn't been rescued by a freighter.”

“The Bertelsens sure had more than their share of bad luck.”

“It got worse.” Laurie spoke just above a whisper, causing McIntire to wonder if he should check behind the ferns for secret agents. “Tina was pregnant at the time, and she went into labor early, shock maybe. They ended up losing that child, too—stillborn.”

And the Mrs. Bertelsen that McIntire knew had always seemed so cheerful, at least to his child's mind.

“Then Tina's mother died and she inherited a little money,” Laurie went on. “She badgered Ole until he gave up fishing for farming, so that's how they wound up here.”

“Yeah, I guess you couldn't grow many apples on the North Shore.”

“Apples? Oh that's right, that's what it was. Well, there are probably better places to do it than St. Adele township, too, but some of the emigrants from Tina's district in Norway had settled here, so she felt more at home.”

“She didn't speak much English,” McIntire recalled. “I used to enjoy talking to her, or listening to her, I should say. She talked mostly about her early life in Norway. I imagine she was lonely and missed her home.” Or maybe she simply hadn't wanted to think about more recent events. “She never mentioned meeting anybody around here that she knew in the old country. She said she was the only one in her family to leave Norway, except for her grandfather, but that was before she was born, so she never knew him, and he was long dead.”

Laurie nodded. “Her grandfather was a wanderer, traveled all over the world. After Tina's grandmother died he found himself a new wife and left Norway for good. Tina's mother was a married woman herself by that time so she stayed behind. Maybe Tina inherited the old man's wanderlust. She came here to marry Ole more or less sight unseen. They had met once or twice as children, but really only knew each other through letters.”

The original mail order bride.

Laurie held the pot in both hands as she refilled their cups with the now lukewarm tea. “Not everybody found a better life here in the Promised Land. Tina Bertelsen just wasn't cut out for happiness, I think. Ole said she was always a little…different. She could do the work of three men for weeks, hardly stopping to eat or sleep, then all of a sudden it would be like she just didn't care. She wouldn't even get out of bed for days at a time. Finally one morning she'd just hop up and start in where she left off, like nothing ever happened.”

All the Bertelsens had worked like horses. McIntire couldn't see that it was odd if Christina had needed a little time off.

“When Julie died she really went to pieces. Ole didn't dare leave her alone for a minute. So he got me in, and we'd take turns staying with her around the clock. She never seemed to need to sleep. She was strong as a bull. And crafty. Anything she got her hands on, she could use as a weapon.”

“A weapon? Are you saying that Christina Bertelsen was—”

“Vicious! I fell asleep on my watch once—and believe me only once! When I woke up she was standing over me with a broken lamp chimney in her hand. Ole wasn't home. I screamed bloody murder, and when Nels came running in she went after him instead. He was just a skinny kid, hardly a match for her, but he managed to wrestle her down and get the broken glass away. She cut her hand to ribbons, and Nels ended up with a nasty gash on his shoulder.”

McIntire found himself without words. He could only stare until Laurie continued. “Oh, hers was a tragic case all right, and I'm sure it left its mark on her son. Having a father ‘living in sin' was the lightest of the crosses he had to bear.”

It certainly had left its mark, literally as well as figuratively. McIntire remembered the thin blue scar he had seen on Nels' body.

“If you don't mind my asking,” he said gently, “why didn't you and Ole Bertelsen get married?”

Laurie again regarded him with another puzzled wrinkling of her brow. “Mainly because bigamy is illegal.”

“I mean after Tina died, why didn't you marry Ole then? Not,” he added, “that it's any of my business.”

Laurie put down her cup and cleared her throat. “John, Christina Bertelsen isn't dead. Her mind may have left her thirty-five years ago, but her backside is still warming a chair at the state hospital in Newberry.”

XXIII

For once McIntire failed to be distracted by the awesome beauty of the landscape as he wound his way home over the forested hills and along the western shores of Keweenah Bay.

Christina Bertelsen imprisoned these past thirty-six years in an asylum for the incurably insane! And the man she had crossed the ocean to marry let all the world think she was dead. Had Ole actually lied? Had he
said
that his wife had died? McIntire didn't know. His own mother might remember. Given the Scandinavian predilection for bearing one's misfortunes in silence and, at least on the surface, respecting the right of others to do the same, it was just possible that no one had directly asked Ole about the fate of his wife. Ole would have been the last one to volunteer any information. It hardly mattered now. Tina's life had been effectively taken away. She must be a tough old bird, to have survived so long in one of those places. Mental hospitals were bad enough in this “enlightened age.” He didn't want to think what it must have been like in 1914, especially for a woman, a woman deemed violent.

Violent! Tina Bertelsen? He could hardly conceive of it. The Mrs. Bertelsen he remembered was robust and apple-cheeked, with a fat braid down her back like Mia's. In contrast to the rest of her family, she had been loquacious, and seemed delighted to converse with “Yonny” McIntire in her native language. She'd spent hours relating legends of trolls and elf-maidens as well as real-life tales of the fishing village where she grew up, all the while with her hands moving rapidly as her tongue as she flew from one task to the next. He wondered if she found anyone she could talk with in the asylum. Did Ole ever visit? Did Nels? Or did he think that his mother was dead, too? How could they have done such a thing?

Most disheartening of all was the knowledge that Laurie Post had stood by and allowed such an…
enormity
to take place. Laurie unselfishly sacrificing her good name to rebuild a home for two grievously bereaved men? Hardly. Try Laurie coolly and cruelly stepping into Tina's shoes the minute she had been yanked out of them—before, even—and Laurie sharing Ole Bertelsen's bed while his wife, the mother of his children, lay shackled to a narrow cot in a mental ward. Hell, the ever-competent Laurie could well have been the instigator of this outrage. It was she who was providing Tina's supposed medical care, she who presented that seductive aura of strength and serenity. Ole would have listened to her advice. Any wonder that she had spent her life with Ole—what were her words?—“seeing accusation in every sideways glance”? And how had she financed the purchase of that cozy little cottage if she had really left Ole's house taking nothing more than the clothing she'd come with?

He had left Laurie as soon as he could break away without excessive discourtesy, forgetting about the original purpose of his visit: the gleaning of information from the old woman concerning anything from Nels' past that might have contributed to his death.

Nothing she had said gave any insight as to who might have wanted Nels dead, although her revelations may have pointed out someone who would definitely have wanted him to stay alive, at least long enough to outlive his mother. With Tina still alive, Nels' estate could amount to even less than Warner Godwin had predicted. If Ole Bertelsen had died without a will, maybe a good share of the property he owned had gone to his surviving spouse. Maybe even all of it. It was conceivable that Nels owned nothing at all. Even that albatross of a boat might not really be his. If Lucy Delaney knew that Tina was still living, she might well be concerned for her own security in spite of Nels' will. She surely wouldn't have wanted Nels out of the way yet—
if
she knew about Tina.

Lucy was no fool, but, strangely, could the same be said for Warner Godwin? Would he, an
attorney
for God's sake, loan Nels money, taking his home and business as collateral without first making sure that Nels actually had title to that property? Maybe if Nels had been appointed his mother's guardian it wouldn't matter. Maybe he could encumber her assets any way he chose. And what about those “other financial plans” Godwin had been supposedly making on Nels' behalf, that he “was not at liberty to discuss”?—or was he just not at liberty to do anything about them until the old lady snuffed it?

The legal questions were mind-boggling, and who better to answer them than Nels' own attorney? Well, Godwin was looking for a translator and, according to popular opinion, McIntire needed a job.

XXIV

He was back in his yard, pushing the lawn mower over the sparse grass, alternately trying to dispel the vision of a gaunt and hollow-eyed Tina Bertelsen lashed to a chair and wondering what information Pete Koski might have extracted from the uncommunicative David, when the sheriff himself drove up. He emerged stiffly from the car and leaned against the rear fender, kneading the back of his neck, while he waited for McIntire to approach.

Mowsers and company, he said, had turned up Cindy's coat, wadded into a ball and crammed inside a cavity under a burnt-out pine stump, just off the trail between the ski jump and the gravel pit.

They didn't find any other sign of her, although there had been so many people in the woods during the search that the dogs hardly knew where to start. It looked like McIntire could be right, she'd probably been taken away in a car that had been parked in the pit. The area around the old slate quarries and railroad cut had been thoroughly searched, also with no results. Now the tracker had joined forces with the sheriff's department, and, with the aid of the game wardens, they were turning their attention to the more remote hills and the lakeshore.

“If we find anything,” Koski concluded, “it'll be just dumb luck. There are thousands of acres of woods out there—not to mention hundreds of miles of nice soft sand. We might have a better chance of finding her if she was buried along the shore. Once a few waves washed over, you could walk right on the grave and never know it was there, but the dogs could sniff it out with no trouble.”

“You know,” McIntire said, “if the murderer was somebody from this community, and it
must
have been, I don't see how he could have taken the body very far. The news of Cindy's disappearance was all over the neighborhood within a couple of hours, and every able-bodied man who wasn't away somewhere working was helping with the search. If anybody was gone for the length of time it would take to bury a body, or to haul it way back into the mountains, it would have been noticed.”

“Unless he just hid the body somewhere, stuffed it in the trunk of his car, maybe, until after the search started. It would have been easy to duck out for a few hours in that confusion, and if he came back tired and covered with mud all the better.”

“Yeah, I guess that's true,” McIntire conceded. “And on the other hand, if this alleged perpetrator was
already
missing…”

“That's what I stopped to tell you, I've let the kid go. We're hanging on to his car, so if he tries to take off again he won't get far, but see if you can keep an eye on him anyway, will you?”

“So you're still thinking he did it?”

“Shit, if I was really sure of that I wouldn't have let him go. I thought maybe the dogs could tell if the body'd been in his car, but if they know they're not saying. Our Davy's a weird one though, cool as a cucumber when we questioned him. Even the state guys couldn't get him flustered. He didn't seem to be overly upset about his girlfriend's death, either, just sat there with that hangdog look of his and kept saying—quote—‘It ain't my fault.' I figure if we let him go and keep a close watch on him he might do something to tip his hand, lead us to the body or make some slip of the tongue.”

He began to massage his lower back. “We managed to get a few words with Godwin's daughter. Warner sat right there of course, so we couldn't try out our new set of thumb-screws. I don't know what the hell he thought we were going to do to the kid. Anyway, Annie—that's her name—says Cindy got a letter on Saturday, and she thinks it was from her boyfriend. She said Cindy was all happy and ‘danced her around the room.'”

“The letter wasn't in her bedroom.”

“She could have had it with her. But you know we didn't find
any
letters in her room. David swears up and down that he never wrote to Cindy, and, according to Annie, Cindy hadn't gotten any letters at all before Saturday.”

“Maybe that accounts for her being so excited. Did Annie actually say the letter was from David?”

“No,” the sheriff answered. “She just said she thought it must be from her boyfriend because Cindy was laughing and dancing around.”

“So whoever wrote that letter could have arranged to meet Cindy on Monday morning and killed her, and who else but another kid would set up a meeting in the woods?”

Koski squinted into the sun. “Unless Cindy expected to be met at the train. She was pretty gussied up for a jaunt into the bushes. Maybe she just started walking because nobody showed up. But then,” he reconsidered, “according to Mrs. Thorsen she didn't wait any time at all, and she was wearing those tennis shoes, carrying her good shoes in the bag. It looks like she expected to be walking. You've got something there. It is hard to imagine a grown man, or woman, arranging a rendezvous at a ski jump.”

“But if the letter was from David he was taking a big chance that it wouldn't be found later.”

“I guess,” the sheriff agreed. “But maybe he asked her to destroy it for some reason, or made sure she'd bring it along, put a map or some directions in it. And then again, maybe David didn't write the letter, at all. If the writer thought the handwriting couldn't be traced, he, or possibly she, wouldn't care if it was found or not. Maybe it was typed. The fact of the matter is,” he concluded with an exasperated sigh, “we don't really know for sure that the letter had anything to do with Cindy's murder.”

“…or if there really was a letter.”

“Oh, I think she got a letter all right. So far Annie Godwin is the only person I've talked to in this investigation that I'd say was telling the truth, and even she seemed to be holding back a little.”

“Speaking of holding back, here's another tidbit to further erode your faith in human nature.” McIntire told him what he had learned about Warner Godwin and the loan Nels had gotten for the purchase of the
Frelser
.

“It looks like I'll have to have another little chat with Lawyer Godwin.” Koski stood up straighter and transferred his rubbing to the seat of his pants. “Lord, if anybody'd told me twenty years ago that I'd be spending ninety percent of my time behind the wheel of a car, I'd have gone into the hardware business with my old man. Arnie Johnson tells me if you sleep with a dog you'll never get arthritis.” He glanced fondly at Geronimo stretched out on the back seat. “I don't think Marian would go for it. Anyway, keep tabs on our young Dan'l Boone. He won't get far on foot. Come to find out he's never had a driver's license, either.”

He pulled open the car door and turned back to McIntire. “We've got an order from your,” he hesitated and sighed, “Justice, to exhume Bertelsen's body.” McIntire smiled outright at Koski's grudging mention of Myrtle Van Opelt, St. Adele's long-time school teacher, now retired but continuing to wield her considerable power as Justice of the Peace.

He gave a sad shake of his head before going on. “For tissue samples, but it probably won't be done 'til next week sometime. Guibard says once we get him out of the ground he can get things done in a few hours, but the samples have to go to Lansing, and they won't be in any rush. And by the way,” he added, “was there anything worthwhile in Mrs. Godwin's diaries? The ones I have are mainly about baby teeth and curtains.”

In McIntire's preoccupation with Christina Bertelsen, he had temporarily forgotten Nina Godwin and her transgressions. Now he informed the sheriff that at least one of the journals indicated that Nina had indulged in activities that might constitute grounds for blackmail. He steeled himself against the sheriff's reaction when he heard that the crucial volume was in the possession of Mia Thorsen. “Nina Godwin was Mia's cousin, I thought she might be able to get more out of them than I could.”

“…and did she?”

“I haven't heard from her, so I'd guess not. It turned out that she never really knew Nina that well. Their families were estranged.”

“Well, I'm going to need to turn the diary over to the state police. This won't be getting us into Warner's good graces. Having his baby sitter murdered wasn't exactly a bang-up way to kick off an election campaign. If it turns out that it had something to do with his dead wife, he can kiss any chance at that county prosecutor's office goodbye.”

McIntire marveled at Koski's calm acceptance of his blithely passing out evidence to the neighbors, and also at the sheriff's apparent lack of curiosity as to exactly what Mrs. Godwin had done for entertainment between bouts of decorating and child rearing.

“Pete,” he ventured, “Nina Godwin was involved with another man. She's dead. Is Warner going to have to find out?”

The sheriff shrugged. “We took the diaries from Godwin's house. They'll have to be returned to him eventually. If it turns out that Cindy was killed because of something she knew about Nina, it'll all come out.” McIntire's expression must have been as bleak as his thoughts. Koski looked at him with something close to sympathy. “Murder's generally not a barrel of laughs, John, except in the movies.

“When you pick up the diary,” he went on, “maybe you could have another go at your infamous mailman, being that you're a friend of the family. He was pretty closemouthed with me. He might have noticed if David ever mailed any letters. Find out exactly what he saw the morning Cindy was killed. According to your post master, he was late getting back with the mailbag from the train on Monday and came in looking like an unmade bed. She figured he'd been out on a tear the night before. I wonder if his wife actually saw him drive back into town after he picked up the mail. I don't suppose she'd tell
me
if she didn't, but maybe you could find out.” Koski grimaced as he stuffed himself into the car and pressed the starter.

“Say ‘hello' to Leonie. Maybe she should be handling this investigation. She sure pinned Cecil to the wall yesterday.”

McIntire watched until the sheriff drove out of sight. The prospect of “having another go” at Nick Thorsen was not a particularly agreeable one. He was finding that he had little stomach left for the whole dreary mess. Murder was indeed not a barrel of laughs.

Leonie should have been home hours ago. The plotting of the great Independence Day Extravaganza must have hit a snag. Maybe they'd decided that this was not the best time for a celebration.

Poor Leonie. She'd spent the better part of her life dealing with the problems wrought by sudden death, and he'd dragged her away from her home and children to give her more of the same. When she had extracted from him the promise that if, after two years, she wanted to return to England, he would comply without question, he'd had no doubts. She was guaranteed to fall in love with his homeland. Now he wasn't so sure that he wouldn't be the first to pack his bags. Instead of spending thirty years idealizing a North Woods Utopia, he'd have done well to remember why he left in the first place. No…that wouldn't have made a difference. It hadn't been any presence of evil lurking under the idyllic surface that had driven him away, although from what he'd learned lately, he wouldn't have had to dig far to find just that. There was really only one reason that he'd turned expatriate—Colin McIntire. He'd let his father drive him away from the home and the woman he loved. Well, it wasn't going to happen again. He wasn't a seventeen-year-old boy anymore. This time he would stand up to the slimy bastard who threatened to douse his homefires. It was a comforting, if melodramatic, thought, but first he would have to figure out who that slimy bastard was.