Past Imperfect (21 page)

“The diaries would give the dates of their assignations,” McIntire offered. “It might not be too hard to find out who was out of town on those dates.”

“Maybe, but I doubt if that will help much. The trip to Chicago seems to be the only one where they actually spent the night. And that was in late October,” she added. “Three-quarters of the men around here might have been away overnight, supposedly trying to put meat on the table.”

McIntire brightened up. “Then this should be a piece of cake. There can't be a half-dozen men in the whole county that would schedule a tryst with a mere female during hunting season.”

Mia laughed. “That's probably truer than you know.” They sat in silence for a time. Mia swirled the wine around the bottom of the glass.

“John,” she said at last, “do you think that whoever killed Cindy knew I was there? Saw me, or heard me coming down the jump, I mean. Do you think he could have been hiding somewhere,” she asked, “watching me?”

The same thought had occurred to McIntire more than once, and he was as unwilling to face the possibility as she was, though perhaps for different reasons.

“If he had been—or she, we don't know for sure that it was a man—I don't think he would have let you get away. He'd have figured you saw him for sure. You said you heard someone walking away.”

“That's what I thought then, but I only heard a few footsteps. He didn't have to go far. Maybe he heard me coming down and was right there watching.” Her voice was shaky. McIntire was terrified that she was about to cry.

“Mia, I think if the murderer saw you, you wouldn't be here now talking about it.”

Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “John, this must have been done by a person that we
know
,
and I don't know about you, but I can't think of anybody I'm acquainted with who I think could be a murderer. I mean, it's got to be somebody we would never suspect. So what if it was a…a good friend maybe, someone who wouldn't want to hurt me, or someone who hoped I wouldn't say anything? He might have just let me go for the time being, thinking he could deal with me later, and then when ‘later' came, found out that I didn't know anything anyway.”

Maybe their thoughts weren't so far apart after all, but McIntire still wasn't ready to bring it out into the open.

“I really don't think you were seen,” he insisted. “The killer probably panicked and took off and then realized that there might be evidence that he should get rid of—Nina Godwin's diary for instance. But Mia, by now
everybody
knows that you were there. I don't want to frighten you any more, but I do think you should be careful.”

“But everybody also knows I didn't see anything.”

“They know that you
say
that you didn't see anything. There's always a chance that we're just keeping what you saw under wraps, or that you could remember more later. There's an unbalanced individual out there who knows that you were sitting right on top of him when he broke a child's neck.” He gently touched her chin and turned her face toward his. “Please don't take any more solitary walks in the woods until all this is over.”

Mia entered the darkened kitchen and softly closed the door behind her. She stood for a moment with her hand on the knob and then pushed the small button that slid the bolt into place. She could not recall that door ever being locked before. Even during the first war, when her mother had so feared for her father's safety and had begged him to bar the doors, Eban Vogel had steadfastly refused to admit to any distrust of his neighbors. Now the latch moved with difficulty. She hoped she would be able to open it again. She hoped she would someday be able to live again without fear clawing at her stomach. She switched out the light and crossed to the living room, moving through the comforting darkness of the familiar home to the stairs where a hulking shape sent her heart rocketing into her throat.

“Mia, are you coming up now?” Nick sat huddled at the bottom of the steps, a blanket thrown around his shoulders.

“Nick, you scared me half to death! What are you doing up?” His eyes were dark caverns in his sallow face, and he was shivering. “Are you sick?”

“What did he say after I came in? Why is he asking all those questions?”

Mia sat down beside him. “Nick, two people have been murdered. Everybody is going to have to answer questions. I've been asked a few myself.”

“He doesn't know for sure that Nels was murdered, and for all we know, that girl might not even be dead. Maybe she staged the whole thing. She could be hiding out in some sleazy hotel room in Milwaukee right now. Why is he treating me like Jack the Ripper?”

Mia stood up and pulled him to his feet. “Come on to bed. You're worrying over nothing.” She firmly turned him around and led him up the stairs.

The porch light was burning, but the rest of the house was dark when McIntire returned home. He leaned against the warm hood of the car and looked upward.

Since his return to Michigan, he had spent hours gazing up into the night sky, marveling at stars so brilliant and so near that he seemed almost to float among them. Tonight though, the luminous globe of a full moon, hanging just above the barn, created a pattern of silver light and deep shadows on the dew-drenched grass and faded the stars to pinpoints.

He went inside and climbed the stairs in darkness. Leonie was sleeping soundly, the bed covers thrown off despite the coolness, the dim light emphasizing the fairness of her hair and skin. She lay on her side with an arm and a leg thrown over the pillow appropriated from her husband's side of the bed. The book she had been reading was face down on the sheets beside her. McIntire picked it up and placed it on the bedside table. He knew what it would be without looking—Zane Grey. A shaft of moonlight illuminated her face and showed the movements of her eyes under the translucent lids. As McIntire undressed he wondered where she might be in her dreams…riding across the Purple Sage? In a sunny garden with roses climbing stone walls? Sharing a cup of tea with her daughters in a chintz-covered sitting room? Or maybe trying to run, with legs of clay, through a dismal forest of twisted pine, fleeing an unknown monster.

He gently removed the pillow and insinuated himself into its place.

XXVI

Warner Godwin seemed inordinately thrilled with McIntire's offer of his services in translating the Bertelsen business records. He beamed across his desk with an expression of delight which bore all the signs of being hastily assumed to cover his astonishment at learning that a denizen of the backwater of St. Adele could not only converse in a foreign tongue—that wasn't unusual—but was actually literate in several languages. The lawyer was dressed casually, indeed almost ruggedly, his rotund body encased in flannel and denim. This being Saturday there would be no court appearances on his schedule. His entire demeanor was considerably more relaxed than at their first meeting. He even partially dispensed with his conversation-controlling speech tactics.

“You'll see that once Nels himself started handling things, the records are written in English, but that wasn't until nineteen thirty-six. They only run through forty-one. That's when Wylie took over. The first is dated nineteen-six, so that leaves thirty years of Norwegian. If it was just financial entries, I could probably figure it out, but this is like the Great American Novel—or the Great Norse Saga, more like. It's all written in paragraphs with just a number here and there. For all I know it could be weather reports or Ma Bertelsen's recipes for apple pie. I would imagine she had a few. And there are letters, and certificates, and contracts, and God knows what else stuck between the pages, some in English, some not. Don't bother translating all of it—just major transactions—anything you think might have a bearing on the worth of the estate.” He paused, and pinched his chubby chin between his thumb and forefinger. “On second thought, just to be on the safe side, translate everything, unless you know for sure it's not relevant. There could be important information hiding in there somewhere…maybe Ole Bertelsen owned an oil well.”

As he talked, Godwin stood up, and McIntire watched with downward-spiraling spirits as he pulled a box off the top of a metal file cabinet and dropped it with a huff on the desk. “One for each year for thirty-five years. Like I said, the last five are in English, but I'd like to keep them all together.” He plopped the ledgers that were stacked on the desk into the box with the others and shoved the entire collection across to McIntire. “Enjoy.”

McIntire made no move to get up, but instead leaned back in his chair and, striving for an air of nonchalance, said, “Speaking of Ma Bertelsen, have you heard how she's doing? Has she been told of her son's death?”

The effect of his words was everything McIntire could have hoped for. Godwin couldn't have appeared more dumbfounded if his new employee had tucked the ledgers under his arm and soared out through the open window. The lawyer's eyes widened and froze. His mouth opened in a perfect O and closed only to open again, but no sound was forthcoming. McIntire was hard pressed to contain his glee. This must be akin to the euphoria Leonie had experienced when she “scooped” the
Monitor
.

When Godwin did manage to speak, he was once again the self-confident lawyer. “I wasn't aware that Mrs. Bertelsen was still living.”

“Oh, yes,” McIntire told him airily. “She's been incapacitated for many years of course, but she's as alive as you or I. I'd have thought Nels would have mentioned that to you. Frankly, I was quite amazed that, from what you told the sheriff, he doesn't appear to have provided for her in his will.” Sure, after letting the state take care of her for thirty-five years.

“Maybe he didn't need to…” Godwin said, more to himself than McIntire.

“What do you mean?”

“John, what exactly is the nature of Mrs. Bertelsen's incapacitation?”

“She was committed to the state mental hospital—or ‘insane asylum' then—in nineteen fourteen.” The time for being coy was probably over. “Ole Bertelsen had his wife locked up thirty-six years ago. I don't know if he actually said in so many words that she was dead, but he sure didn't set people straight if that's what they chose to believe, and neither did the rest of the family. Now, Mr. Godwin, you know that it looks like Nels Bertelsen's death wasn't any more accidental than Cindy's. We think they might very well be connected. We need to know of anyone who might have benefitted from Nels' death. Just what are the legal ramifications of the fact that Tina Bertelsen is the last surviving member of her family?”

The attorney shifted his weight in the padded leather chair. “There's really no cut and dried answer to that. There are a great many factors involved: the law at the time she was committed, the type of legal actions that her husband took, whether Mrs. Bertelsen owned property in her own right. She could have been deprived of her right to inherit her portion of her husband's estate—her dower rights—on the grounds that she was insane, but if they had joint ownership… and the state or the county could have a claim, too. I'm afraid this is one of those cases that will end up being hashed out in court. Someone will have to be appointed to represent Mrs. Bertelsen's interests. This happened in nineteen fourteen, you say?” The lawyer let out his breath in a heavy sigh. The anticipation of a complicated lawsuit apparently lost some of its shine when he, himself, had a personal stake in its outcome.

He stood up and mounted the short stool that gave him access to the highest shelves of his pine plank bookshelves. Stretching on his tiptoes—resembling a baby elephant performing its balancing-on-a-drum trick—he pulled out a heavy volume and hopped to the floor in a shower of dust.

“When exactly did the elder Mr. Bertelsen pass away?” he asked. “He is actually dead, I take it? Not living the life of Riley in Rio?”

“So far as I know, Ole Bertelsen is well and truly deceased. He's got a stone in the cemetery anyway. He died in thirty-five or six—it would most likely be when Nels started keeping the accounts.”

Godwin extracted another book from its spot on a lower shelf and sat down heavily. “I just don't see how something like this could happen. When someone dies people know about it. There's an obituary in the paper and a funeral. They
have
a stone in the cemetery, for God's sake. Didn't people wonder why she wasn't buried at St. Adele?”

“The Bertelsens had only been living in the township for a few years, and they were a clannish bunch. Kept to themselves. They hired some help when they needed it, but usually their workers were transients, lumberjacks in the off season, people who would work for room and board. They didn't mix much with the locals. That's understandable now. They wanted to keep Mrs. Bertelsen's queer behaviors to themselves. And don't forget this was almost forty years ago, and the Bertelsens were dirt poor. Travel and embalming was expensive, and infectious disease was a rampant killer. If people thought that Tina had died from typhoid or flu in a hospital in a distant town they wouldn't have questioned her being quickly buried there.

“And even if they weren't sure, I doubt that anybody would have come right out and asked Ole what happened to his wife. She was sick, she went to a hospital, she didn't come back. She must be dead. If Ole didn't want to talk about it that was his business.”

“You don't suppose that the old man actually told Nels that his mother had passed away?”

“Did Nels tell you that Tina was dead?”

The lawyer went back to pinching his chin. “I don't remember if he used those exact words. He sure as hell never mentioned that she was living.”

“Maybe these records will shed some light on the question.”

Godwin looked for a moment as if he might want to take the ledgers back, file them under
“skull and crossbones,” and forget he'd ever seen them.

“What was it you said,” he asked, “that Cindy's and Nels' death's could be connected? How?”

“It's just more or less of a hunch—happening one right after the other and both in St. Adele.” McIntire sidestepped the question. Not that he could have had a good answer for it. They had no real evidence that the murders were connected.

“Has there been any headway made at all? I heard that they finally caught up with her old boyfriend, but they let him go. I called the sheriff's office yesterday and again just before you got here. I haven't been able to get a thing out of any of them, except that they got a specially trained dog in.”

He stood up abruptly, leaned with both palms on his desk, and addressed McIntire as he might a recalcitrant witness. “If I had taken her to St. Adele myself that day this wouldn't have happened. I was going out anyway. I could have gone that way and dropped her off, but she insisted that she just loved to ride the train.”

“She wouldn't have let you give her a ride,” McIntire assured him. “She wasn't really going home, remember. We think that she may have written to someone to arrange a meeting. I noticed that you sent out some campaign literature a few days before Cindy died. Could she have gotten one of your envelopes?”

“Cindy and Annie helped me with the mailing. I addressed some of the envelopes myself, and my secretary did the rest, but the girls stuffed them and sealed them up.”

So Cindy could easily have tucked in a message of her own—if she could be sure her note would get into the right hands. “Who were the mailings actually sent to? Were they addressed to specific individuals?”

“To heads of households,” Godwin replied. “You can be a little more certain that someone will actually open a letter that has a real name on it.”

Well, that would leave out David, even if he had been at home instead of who the hell knew where. “Could Cindy have gotten one of your business envelopes—an unused one?”

“Of course, there are plenty of them in my office at home.” David was back in the running—if Cindy knew where to send a letter to him during his defection.

“Then all of the letters mailed out were addressed in either your handwriting or your secretary's?”

“I handwrote the ones I did. Barbara typed the addresses on.”

“Did Cindy have access to a typewriter?”

“I have one in my office at home. So you think that Cindy might have used my stationery to arrange a meeting with someone who ended up killing her? If she went through all that subterfuge, it couldn't have been just an ordinary boyfriend. A married man do you think?” He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “She was so excited that morning, chattering a blue streak. I should have known no aunt could be responsible for that kind of enthusiasm. Pete says that she was all dressed up in my wife's clothes. Can you beat that? To meet some guy in the woods. She must have had such high hopes, and to think of what really happened…” He closed his eyes for a moment.

“The woman who found her was related to my late wife, you know. Although Nina never really knew her. She'd never even met of her until Mrs. Thorsen came into the library and introduced herself. After that she would stop to see Nina at work every now and then and talk a little, just say hello. That's about it. She sent a wedding gift. A jewelry chest that she'd made.”

“Was it among the things you gave to Cindy? There was a small chest in her room.”

“It's possible. I don't remember seeing it, but it could have been. I didn't look through the stuff to any extent. If it was it might be nice to have the chest back—for Annie, you know. I've heard Mrs. Thorsen's work is quite sought after. I thought that my wife had probably given it away herself.”

“That would have been very unselfish of her.” Or unfeeling.

“I never saw Nina use it. I figured it made her feel kind of guilty. She hadn't invited her aunt to the wedding.”

Nina had, of course, found a use for the gift—to secrete her diaries, and McIntire remembered, the pearls. A gift from the Nordic god?

“I think Mia was actually her
cousin
,” he informed the attorney. “But as you said, they hardly knew one another. Mia probably meant the gift as a peace offering. You know, a chance to bring the family together. She doesn't have much family left anymore.”

Godwin busied himself straightening some papers on his desk. “Well, there were…other circumstances.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe I shouldn't say anything, but my wife is beyond being hurt, and it still galls me when I think of it, and now you're telling me that Cindy was probably involved with some man…” His voice trailed off, and McIntire looked at him expectantly.

“Nina didn't know Mrs. Thorsen, but she was once quite…well acquainted with
Mr.
Thorsen, if you get my drift.”

McIntire knew now how the publisher of the
Monitor
felt. He effected his own beached carp imitation.

“I first met my wife when she came to me—her mother brought her—to retain my professional services. She asked for my help in bringing suit against Nick Thorsen. A claim of bastardy. A paternity suit.”

“A paternity suit? Your wife bore Nick Thorsen's child? But I never heard…Mia never mentioned…” It was a circumstance that McIntire could hardly grasp.

“Nina didn't come back after that first visit with her mother—didn't pursue the claim. She left town soon after, had the baby, and gave it up for adoption. I imagine she didn't want to face going to court, or maybe Thorsen paid her off. I never asked for the details.”

So Nick Thorsen had a child…a child who'd lived while Mia's had died…a child whose mother was Mia's cousin! McIntire tried to focus his attention on the attorney's words.

“I certainly never blamed Nina. She was of legal age at the time, but still only a girl, and I guess we know how impressionable young girls can be.” He brought a chubby fist down on the desk. “But, by God, I'd still like to wring that man's neck! Besides being married to her aunt, he must have been twenty years older than her at least. Believe me, I'm not looking forward to Annie's growing up. Do you have daughters?”