Past Imperfect (7 page)

VII

McIntire returned home to find his wife up and bright-eyed, sipping tea in her lace-collared housecoat. She foiled his attempts to join her by reminding him that there was someone else to whom he had not “tendered his condolences,” the only other person who had been really close to Nels—Wylie Petworth.

“He kept asking for you at the funeral, and you hardly spoke to him when he did catch up with you. I know he thought you were avoiding him.”

“Well, maybe I was,” McIntire admitted. “I just didn't know what to say to him. He and Nels have been close friends for a long time.”

“Closer than Nels and Lucy? You didn't seem too tongue tied around her. ‘Needles and stuff!' I came close to having a heart attack myself!”

“I wouldn't dare speculate on whom Nels felt a closer relationship with. The choice between Lucy Delaney and Wylie seems pretty cut and dried to me.” Leonie's eyes crinkled over her teacup, and he went on. “I know it's no excuse, I just have a hard time facing a sorrowful Wylie Petworth.”

McIntire could count on the fingers of one hand the times he'd seen Wylie unhappy or angry, but every one of those times was indelibly etched into his brain. Since they were babies together, the sight of Wylie in a negative mood had filled him with a kind of foreboding. He tried to explain. “If Wylie's not smiling, things aren't quite right with the world. It's like that opera, you know, the one with the clown.”

“I don't quite see Wylie Petworth as a clown.”

“Maybe not, but he was always the cheerful one. Compared to Mia he was a regular Emmet Kelly, even through all his misfortunes.”

“Losing his arm?”

“It started long before that, about the time the Association broke up.”

McIntire was only six years old when the dissolution of the Gitchi-Gumme Association occurred. He had no knowledge of the events leading up to it, but its aftermath would be with him forever: the confusion and sadness of separation, and the bewilderment when Ragna Petworth chose to leave, not with her husband and son, but in the company of one of the group's unmarried men, a laconic soul known to the children only as “Uncle Joe.”

A wan and silent Roger Petworth had moved with Wylie into the home of his aged parents. His wife was heard from only once again, when she came forward to claim her share of the proceeds from the sale of the Association's holdings. The following winter Roger Petworth died when his gun apparently accidentally discharged while he was hunting rabbits. To make the tragedy complete, the coming of spring brought with it the dismal discovery of the bodies of Ragna and her lover, spewed forth from the waters of Lake Superior, lashed tightly together, each with a single gunshot wound to the head.

After hearing the story, Leonie regarded him with sadness, almost as if it had been he that had suffered those adversities. Then she patted his hand and spoke with her customary briskness. “All the more reason he could use a friend now.”

McIntire sighed and raised her fingers to his lips.

Minutes later he was traveling between fields where the rows of Petworth's Small Fruits and Vegetables stretched lush, green and arrow-straight.

Wylie's forebears had not been farmers. His great-grandfather, St. Adele's founder, was a seafaring Scandinavian first attracted to the region by its fishing and sheltered harbor. He later attempted to exploit the area's slate deposits, an enterprise that soon foundered, but one that provided him with a Welsh son-in-law. When the slate business fell victim to the financial panic of 1873, that son-in-law, Llewellyn Petworth, left the community to turn his attention to other minerals. After a lifetime spent mining iron and copper, he'd retired here, a retirement that was cut short by the necessity of raising his newly orphaned grandson.

McIntire felt a twinge of sadness as he turned into the drive—for the little boy who had gamely persisted in the face of calamity, and for the unfortunate transformation that his eventual success had wrought upon this small portion of the earth.

After the turn of the century, the Petworth land had been one of the few wooded tracts left in a countryside as stripped and burned out as a war zone. But now, while forest was steadily reclaiming most of St. Adele's fields, the patch of ancient timber that had escaped the first round of the logging onslaught had vanished, replaced with raspberries and potatoes. Only the few acres surrounding the old homestead were virtually unchanged. McIntire looked with envy at the house, solid as the day Grandpa Petworth had constructed it of massive logs and native stone, using the mast of his father-in-law's schooner as a ridge pole. To its rear, spreading oaks, a rarity in the Upper Peninsula, still shaded open grassy spaces, and the creek still gurgled over rocks on its way to the pond that was just visible through a drape of willows.

Together with Wylie and Mia, the young Johnny McIntire had spent long hours in this child's paradise, playing cowboys and Indians, catching minnows in the creek, and vainly endeavoring to construct rafts that would actually float in the pond—rafts, he recalled, to escape the vile pirate “Gutter,” whose inspiration reposed just on the other side of a rusty iron fence in the form of the earthly remains of Captain Guttorm Gulsvagen, the earliest resident of what had become the St. Adele cemetery. In life, Gulsvagen must have been that great-grandfather who had first put down European roots here, but to the three adventurers, he was the personification of evil—the all purpose villain, a ready adversary for every game. They never tired of creating new tales of Gutter's sinister exploits, but they carefully avoided straying too near his grave after dark.

Odd, how it seemed that it was always summer then, especially considering that the reality was so much the reverse. Maybe those long frozen months only served to make the temperate days more memorable, but when McIntire let his mind wander back to his boyhood, as he did with increasing frequency, he remembered days filled with warm sun and blue water, and mellow starry nights chasing fireflies and executing hair's breadth escapes from old Gutter Gulsvagen.

He found Wylie seated at the table in his small, rigidly neat kitchen. He looked up unsurprised when McIntire walked in without knocking.

“Mornin' Mac. I'm afraid you didn't catch me in the best of spirits.” He ran his right hand down the front of his shirt and up over his hair. “I just can't get used to it. The whole business hardly seemed real, right up until the time we put him in the ground. It only really hit me last night that he's not coming back.” He stood up for a moment, then sank heavily back into his chair. “I have to get these books in order—maybe somebody else will be taking over the orchard—but I haven't had the heart to even open them.”

Wylie did indeed have the appearance of one without a functioning heart. He looked worse alive, McIntire thought, than Nels had dead. Seemingly not one drop of blood had found its way to Wylie's face. Its only color came from the gray semi-circular smudges under his eyes. His usually chiseled features sagged like putty left in the sun. The thick waves of his russet hair and the back of his rumpled white shirt were damp with sweat.

McIntire yanked open the curtains on the two windows. The high-beamed room was flooded with light, causing Wylie to recoil and revealing three identical stacks of leather-bound ledgers on the table alongside an open bottle of Seagrams. McIntire helped himself to a mug from the cupboard and filled it with coffee. He took a couple of quick swallows of the viciously black brew before he sat down opposite Wylie.

“It's been quite a shock for everybody,” he started awkwardly. “Of course, I know you and Nels were especially close,” he added. He didn't want to appear unsympathetic.

“Closer than most brothers.” Wylie lumbered to his feet, dumped the coffee from his own cup down the drain, thoroughly rinsed both cup and sink, and placed the cup on the counter to refill it. He added a splash of the whiskey and extended the bottle to McIntire. “Facemaker?”

McIntire shook his head. “I remember,” he said, “how you two were always together when we were in high school. You deserted Mia and me for Nels. We were in awe of the way you stood up to him. He had quite a temper in those days, as I recall.”

“Oh hell, that never changed.” Wylie took a swallow of coffee and another swipe at his hair. “As a matter of fact, he flew off the handle the last time I saw him alive.”

“About the Slocum kid, you mean? Lucy told me Nels didn't like him working on his place.”

“Actually it was about the sheep. Nels couldn't stand sheep, raised billy hell about those few scraggly ewes. He was a real horse's ass about David, though. Didn't want
him
anywhere on the place either; always harping that he was a lazy bum and accused him of being a thief.”

“A thief?” Lucy hadn't said anything about that. “Nels didn't report it to me. What did he steal?”

“Not a gol-damned thing that I know of. He thought David had gone into his house or left some building open, something like that. Nels was always bellyaching about something or other, and I didn't pay a hell of a lot of attention. It's not like he had anything a kid would want bad enough to steal it. Davy has his faults, but he seems trustworthy enough to me and works to beat the band as long as I make damn sure he knows what I want him to do. Nels just didn't care much for him.”

“Is that why David went to work at the crack of dawn? To avoid Nels?”

A look of mild confusion brought a faint spark of life to Wylie's face. “I don't know what time he went to work. I just gave him a job to do and paid him when it was finished. Most of the time I didn't even see him. But he'd hardly need to plan his work schedule to stay shy of Nels. Nels was usually out on the water by four or five in the morning and generally didn't get home until after dark. Anyway, this is the first time I heard anybody accuse Davy of being an early riser.”

“Lucy says she saw him already hard at work when she left for town the morning Nels died.”

Wylie smiled slightly for the first time. “Oh well, you know Lucy—sees sprites and fairies too, I don't doubt. She's even more of a dingbat than most of her gender. Will she be leaving now, do you know?”

“She's just staying put for the time being, afraid that every knock on the door is going to be the evil sheriff come to throw her out in the street. Do you know if Nels left a will?”

“I would imagine he must have. He wasn't the type to leave things to chance, and he was most assuredly aware of his own mortality. Ever since that first really bad bee sting reaction he was terrified he was gonna keel over any minute.…I kind of wish now I'd been a little more sympathetic, but it seemed almost funny to see that tough old buzzard scared like that…anyhow, will or no will, once the dust settles there might not be much of anything left for Miss Lucy. He mortgaged himself to the gills to buy that boat.”

“He must have wanted to get out of bee territory pretty bad, to risk all that,” McIntire observed. “In the end, how much good did it do him?”

“Well, he wanted to fish, that's for sure.”

“What kind of bees did he have in the hives in his orchards?”

Wylie's eyes widened. “Kind?”

“What breed, I guess I mean.”

“Just regular Italian honey bees, same as everybody else around here. Is that what stung him?”

“It looks like it. For what it's worth, he died quickly. It doesn't appear that he suffered for very long.”

Wylie grunted and pulled one of the stacks of ledgers towards him, an action McIntire took as his signal to go. Before he left he toasted and buttered two slices of bread, placed them in front of Wylie and watched while he ate. Some color seemed to be coming back into the haggard face.

VIII

McIntire decided to stop at home for a bite before seeking out David Slocum. Aside from a few glimpses of denim-covered backsides rapidly disappearing into the brush, his working knowledge of adolescent boys was derived mainly from old Andy Hardy movies and a few contacts with some excessively polite, stiff-backed sons of Leonie's friends. Somehow he felt that David would not fit either of those molds.

There was also the problem of coming up with a plausible reason for asking the kid any questions at all. Clearly, any interview with the young man needed some mental preparation, preparation that could best be accomplished over something more substantial than a brownie.

His apprehensions were wasted. Upon entering the kitchen, McIntire found a message in Leonie's exuberant handwriting informing him that Dorothy Slocum had rung. Her son “Davy” had not returned home for the past two nights, and she was beginning to get worried. As McIntire digested this information along with a baloney sandwich, the crunch of tires sounded on the gravel driveway. He walked outside to see Mark Guibard's Plymouth coupe jolt to a halt in the yard.

The doctor opened the door and swung his legs out but did not rise to his feet, leaving McIntire to scrunch down against the side of the car in an awkward attempt to get on a conversational level with him. A tackle box and assorted fishing rods lay on the tiny back seat.

“John,” Guibard began without preliminaries and without lifting his gaze from his shoes, “I just remembered something that maybe you should know. Nels lost one of his bee sting kits a few months ago. It was back in February or March, so it wasn't like he had to be overly worried about being stung, but he was concerned—to put it mildly—said he thought somebody had taken it. I figured he'd just misplaced it, or maybe Lucy moved it when she was on one of those cleaning sprees women seem to be so fond of, but looking back on it…he guarded that stuff with his life, and Lucy wouldn't have dared mess with it. Although, who knows? If she had accidentally thrown it out she might not have had the guts to tell him. He insisted that I get him a new kit right away. I told him that it might be just as well to wait until spring so it'd be fresh when he might need it, but he'd have none of that.”

“
Could
the epinephrine he used have been too old to work?” McIntire asked.

“No. If it had been I'd have given him a new supply.” The gruff response squelched any further questions, and McIntire straightened and stepped away from the car. Guibard removed his glasses, breathed on the lenses, wiped them methodically with his handkerchief, and held them up to the light at arm's length. Apparently satisfied, he donned them again, looked directly at McIntire for the first time, and continued in a more normal tone. “Anyway, I figured I'd better let you know that he lost his adrenaline last winter. It might not mean a thing, John, but on the other hand it could mean plenty.”

“Mean what? You think someone could have filched Nels' medication hoping he'd be without it if he was stung? But that would never have worked. Nels always seems to have made damn sure he had it. If he missed it even in dead of winter, there wouldn't be much chance of anybody putting something like that over on him.”

“What I mean, Sherlock, is that someone could have taken the kit, replaced the epinephrine with plain water, or maybe even something more lethal, and later switched it with his new one.”

McIntire thumped the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Were they exactly alike? They weren't dated or anything?”

“The date was on the case, but not on the vial itself. He wouldn't have noticed the switch.”

McIntire remembered Leonie's suggestion of the previous evening, that maybe it was the epinephrine that had killed Bertelsen. “Had Nels had occasion to use the antidote before? I mean, has it
ever
worked?”

“He'd never injected himself before, no. He only had that one life threatening reaction, and then he wasn't treated until he got to the hospital. It's not like bees go around hunting for people to sting just for the hell of it. I can't remember the last time I was stung by a bee.”

The doctor seemed to be changing his tune a bit. At Bertelsen's funeral he had put forth the argument that the world was “full of bees” and the fatal sting was bound to have happened sooner or later.

McIntire lounged against the car again. “If Nels had some other medical problem,” he ventured, “say, a heart condition for instance, could the adrenaline itself have killed him?”

“There was nothing wrong with Nels' heart.” The doctor turned back into the car. McIntire jerked out of the way of the slamming door. Guibard reached for the starter, then abandoned it and sank back into the seat. “Maybe I
have
bungled this, John,” he said through the open window. “Could be I'm just getting too old. But in forty years of practice I've never had anyone try to do away with one of my patients.” He gave a short grunt. “That I know of anyway. Maybe I've just had the wool pulled over my eyes and they've been bumping each other off right and left.”

“If somebody wanted to kill Nels Bertelsen, you couldn't have done anything to stop them.” McIntire straightened up and peered at Guibard down the length of his nose. “On the other hand, who would have had more opportunity than yourself, prescriber of powerful brews
and
medical examiner? The perfect crime!”

“What? Knock off my bread and butter? I have few enough patients left as it is…and no more Bertelsens.” He spoke as if that realization had just come to him. “And every last one taken on my watch.”

“So who else could have been on watch? That's what happens when you're the only doctor around.”

Guibard looked at McIntire for a long minute. Then he started the engine and grasped the gear shift. “I suppose you're right. If this was murder—and I'm not saying I think it was, not by a damn sight—if it was, I probably couldn't have prevented it, but if I'd been more suspicious I might have at least been able to show that it
was
murder. The way things stand now, I doubt that we'll ever know for sure.”

“Unless,” McIntire said, “it was ‘something more lethal' in that syringe. I sure wish we could get our hands on that bottle of adrenaline. Or maybe the body could be exhumed?”

“We'd need some kind of real evidence, before we could take a step like that.”

The doctor made motions to put the car into gear, but McIntire stopped him with a hand on his arm. “What about the second syringe? The one in the box didn't look like it had been used. Does that mean that Nels should have given himself a second dose?”

“I gave him two syringes, just in case he broke the needle on the first try. Well, frankly, I did tell him that if he seemed to be getting worse instead of better after fifteen or twenty minutes, and he couldn't get medical help, he could try another shot. There was enough epinephrine in the vial for at least two doses. But he didn't do it. There was only the mark of one injection on his leg.”

“So he died quickly then?”

“Very quickly.”

With that, the doctor threw the little car into reverse, spun it around, and took off at a reckless speed in the direction of the bay.

McIntire returned to the house and, with slightly shaking hands, put through a call to Sheriff Pete Koski in Chandler. The phone was answered in the high-pitched voice of deputy Cecil Newman. The surname was singularly appropriate. Cecil was a recent addition to the sheriff's department, and, from McIntire's point of view, to the family of man. Newman informed him that the sheriff had been called out but should be back around two o'clock. “Would you like me to track him down, or,” he offered eagerly, “maybe I can help?”

McIntire declined both offers and said he'd come in himself later. In the meantime, he turned his attention to Dorothy Slocum and the absent David.

The Slocums lived several miles northeast of town in a white frame house badly in need of paint. For starters, it was situated at the end of a long drive that, as a result of its position at the foot of a half-mile of downhill, was alternately choked with snow or awash in a sea of mud, depending on the season. McIntire shifted into first gear and charged through the remaining vestiges of the spring runoff. On the left side of the driveway was an obviously well-tended vegetable garden. On the right, a tangle of lilac, plum, and unpruned apple trees, despite their neglect, bloomed in feral splendor.

Clifford Slocum had been a year or two behind McIntire in school. He had gained a certain amount of fame when he attempted to put into practice a pet theory of Arnie Johnson's: If you get a newborn calf and go out and pick it up every day, you'll be able to lift it even when it's a full grown animal. The experiment continued for several months until the husky young man finally gave it up, admitting that he “just couldn't get a decent grip on the bastard.”

Cliff had been dead for seven or eight years now, killed when a tree he was cutting fought back. He left his widow with three children, David being the youngest. The two older were married and on their own now—a girl lived in Milwaukee and the other son was a barber in Chandler.

As he brought the car to a stop, Dorothy Slocum stepped out of her front door, ordered the two mongrel dogs to lie down, and stood waiting for him on the sagging porch.

McIntire had a photo-like recollection of Dorothy in a long-ago performance at the St. Adele Township School's annual talent show. She had worn shiny black shoes and a white dress with a huge bow, and had sung something about going to the fair. She must have been about five years old, and now, in her faded dress and ruffled apron, her moonlike face surrounded by sausages of tight brown curls, she looked so much the same that it was eerie.

She said a brief hello and led McIntire directly into her living room without the customary offer of coffee. From the radio in the corner came the static-ridden announcement that Helen Trent was just “setting out to prove what so many women long to prove in their own lives—that romance can live on at thirty-five, and even beyond!” McIntire smiled to himself as Dorothy turned the volume down just a notch. Miss Trent could get a few pointers from Leonie.

Dorothy seated herself daintily on the edge of the balding plush davenport. McIntire chose a spot on its companion overstuffed chair and soon discovered that his hostess' tenuous parking job was probably not occasioned by either nerves or formality. His bottom contacted the seat and continued firmly in the grip of gravity until he found himself several inches off the floor regarding Dorothy between his knees. Mustering what little professional dignity he could, while wondering if removing his glasses would reduce his resemblance to a praying mantis, he asked her to tell him what had happened.

David had gone off to work Sunday morning, she told him, and she hadn't seen hide nor hair of him since. “I didn't think nothing of it when he didn't come home Sunday night. He's stayed out all night plenty of times before. But he didn't show up last night neither.” She looked apologetic. “I'm probably just putting you through a lot of trouble for nothing.”

“Did he take anything with him?” McIntire asked. “Pack a bag or anything?”

Dorothy shrugged. “Most everything he's got is in his car anyway. He keeps a little money in a drawer, and that's gone, but that don't really mean anything. He would of taken it if he was planning on going out on Sunday night.”

“Does David have his own car?”

“Cliff bought it the year before he died. I suppose I could of sold it, but I thought I might learn how to drive it myself. Then Al, that's my older son, taught Davy—just on these country roads, he wasn't old enough to get a license then. Al thought one of us should drive, in case of an emergency, you know. It's been handy, having Davy able to take me in to town when I need to go.”

“Have you called any of his friends, people he might have been with?”

Dorothy twisted the wedding band, which she wore on her right hand. A dark red line was visible where it cut into her plump flesh. “I don't have a telephone. I called your house from the Lindstroms'. To tell the truth,” she went on, not looking up, “I'm not really sure who my son's friends are. They never come here to the house. I don't seem to know a thing about Davy no more. Maybe I never did. He was always different from the other two even when he was a baby. He didn't seem to care much about anything…except his dad. He took it real hard when Cliff died.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “He was there when it happened, you know.”

“No,” McIntire said. “I didn't know.”

A fleeting smile crossed Dorothy's face. “Davy was crazy about his father, followed him everywhere from the time he learned to walk. He should of been in school that day, but Cliff took him along to the woods for a special treat. It was Davy's birthday, you see. He was nine years old. After it happened—after the tree fell on Cliff—Davy hitched the horse to it and pulled it off. Cliff still didn't get up, and Davy wouldn't leave him. Of course we didn't look for them until suppertime. It was almost ten before they got found. Davy could of froze to death himself. The doctor said it wouldn't of done any good if Davy
had
gone for help. He said that the tree fell across Cliff's chest, and he was probably already dead by the time Davy got it off, but who knows?” She shrugged again.

“Anyway, after that there ain't nobody been able to tell Davy what to do, 'specially me. He wouldn't go to school unless he was dragged there. We gave up on it when he was fourteen. Sometimes he don't even come out of his room for days at a time. This job with Wylie is the first time he's stuck with anything for more than a couple weeks. That's why I can't believe he'd just take off. And Wylie still owes him money. If he planned on leaving, I think he would of waited until he got paid.”