Shadow of the Wolf Tree (7 page)

11

Iron River, Iron County

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2006

Service and Friday drove to the Knotty Pine Café in Gaastra, an old mining town six miles from Iron River. They took a table by the wall. The counter seats were filled with elderly gents in plaid shirts, suspenders, scuffed boots, and faded baseball caps, all of them smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and yakking in light-speed Yooperese.

“I called the retired sheriff last night,” Friday said. “He can see us this morning after mass, tennish.”

“You tell him what it's about?”

“Broad strokes only. He said perhaps we can help each other.”

“Meaning?”

She shook her head, shrugged, turned her attention to the menu.

“No reason for you to be here weekends,” Service said. “It's not like either case has critical mass.”

She stared at him. “You ever hear of postpartum blues?”

“I've heard.”

“I'm the poster girl. Right now, I need sleep, time to get my head straight.”

“Just trying to help.”

“Which I appreciate,” she said, “but I'm good to go. My sister's taking care of the baby. ”

His cell phone started to sing just as breakfast came. It was Denninger.

“Your boy Frodo keeps a four-wheeler back in the woods. There's a four-wheeler track that crosses a creek and comes out on Tunis Road, about a half-mile south of his driveway. Looks like it gets used a lot.”

“You follow it?”

“Not yet. I'm at the four-wheeler right now, maybe two hundred yards behind the camp. No surveillance out here. I got the VIN number off the ATV. It's registered, and I checked the records. It belongs to Lidstrom.”

“Cast the tires?”

“Didn't know you wanted that.”

“Me either, but I do. Anything else?”

“There's a load of big-ass old clay pots under tarps down near the creek, beyond the parking spot. They look new.”

“Get photos, and, if you can, the manufacturers' names, lot numbers, whatever you can find.”

“Okay, boss.”

“Send the digitals by e-mail to Grinda and hold onto the plaster casts.”

“You bet, boss.”

“I'm not your boss.”

“If you were, I'd have to do
anything
you ordered me to do . . .”

“Stop!” he said wearily.

“Joke,” Denninger said.

Service hung up. “Women,” he said.

“Present company included?” Friday asked.

“Sorry, not you.”

“Day-to-day life can be hard,” she said. “The job's a lot easier to cope with.”

“That
was
work-related. I don't need a pep talk.”

“Just trying to help,” she said.

They both laughed. She fumbled with her pants and undid the top button. “Just eight more pounds to lose,” she said, “all loose skin.”

“It doesn't show,” he said.

“With clothes on.”

He changed the subject. “You talk to your girlfriend in Marquette?”

“Last night. When I described the bear and porcupine, she wigged out. She said bird's-eye wood alone is worth thousands. There are dozens of bird's-eye carvings in that barn. Box is lucky some lowlife hasn't hauled them away. He may have a small fortune there.”

“Never know when the sun will shine,” he said, thinking about the unexpected fortune Nantz had left him. It had been worth $80 million more than a year ago, and with the stock market going the way it was, no telling the value now. He rarely thought about it. Money had never held much meaning for him.

Service thought about Box sending Penny Provo to Limpy Allerdyce. He'd have to make a point to visit Limpy, a distinctly unpleasant thought.

• • •

Retired Iron County sheriff Theokkilur Petersson lived in a well-kept brick house a block from the Iron River City Hall. There were ramps up to the porch, and Petersson came to the door in a motorized wheelchair. He let them inside and led them back to his office, the paneled walls covered with certificates and photographs of a considerably younger Petersson in Marine Corps dress blues. A tray with a coffeepot was sitting on a low table. “Help yourselves,” the retired sheriff said.

“Been to mass?” Friday asked.

Petersson pointed at a TV set. “Mass for shut-ins. If the homily gets boring I just hit the mute button.”

Service poured coffee for Friday.

Petersson said, “Them skeletons out in Elmwood really grabbed my attention. My great-grandfather and namesake disappeared out that way in 1927 and was never found.”

“The skeletons were those of a black man and a Native American,” Friday said.

The retired sheriff didn't look surprised.

“Let me tell you a story. Just before Christmas, 1927, my great-grandfather and a priest took a train to Elmwood to check on some black families who had come up the year before to work potato fields planted in logging cutovers in exchange for their own land. The folks were in real bad shape. One child had already died from malnutrition and exposure. Great Granddad saw this and arranged to get them out of there and back to Chicago where they'd come from. A half-breed named Roland Denu owned the land,” Petersson said, taking a deep breath.

“After the survivors were on the way to Chicago, Granddad went back to Elmwood to look for stragglers or more bodies, but he disappeared. The postmaster at Elmwood wired the authorities here, but there was a helluva blizzard going on, and then a real heavy winter settled in and no search was made until spring. The searchers found nothing.”

“Any ideas about what happened to him?” Service asked.

“The usual theories: He got hurt, snow came, he froze, end of story. Or he got lost, snow came, same result. The fact is, winter kills people up here. Killed a lot more back then than now.”

“What do you think happened?” Service asked.

“I don't know. Family history says he was a careful man, and a good man in the bush—with an internal compass second to none. He'd been a longtime timber cruiser before he became sheriff. I'm named for him,” Petersson said, moving his wheelchair to an open rolltop desk and fetching a large envelope. “Granddad was ahead of his time and kept a journal of daily law enforcement activities.” Petersson took an old black journal out of the envelope and handed it to Friday, who took it to a table where she and Service could look at it together.

There was a page marked. Friday opened it and read the text out loud: “December 28, 1927. The Negro families are on their way back to Chicago. Some are pretty sick, but they should all make it. We sent the body of the deceased child with them. The train's taking me to Elmwood tomorrow to look for stragglers and other survivors, which are unlikely, but I still have to go. Of the original group only the man called Lincoln is unaccounted for. Father John O'Neil escorted the families south and will return next week. Going out to Elmwood will give me a chance to talk to G. Bernalli. The day we found the families, Bernalli indicated he knew the priest, and the tone of voice he used makes me curious. Probably nothing, but people here don't just spit out things without reason. The hard part is getting them to open up, and you need to be patient if you want to collect useful information. Timber cruising made me a very patient man,” she concluded.

“G. Bernalli?” Service asked.

“Giuseppe Bernalli, Elmwood's postmaster back then.”

“Who's the priest your great-granddad refers to?”

“That's one of those sixty-four-thousand-dollar questions. In previous entries, Granddad wrote about a priest named O'Neil who turned up in May of 1927 to take over the St. Agnes Catholic Church. My great-grandfather had a lot of respect for O'Neil. The county commissioner for the poor died that summer, and the priest volunteered to take on the job without pay. Church records burned up in 1928. When I got interested I made inquiries to the dioceses in Chicago, Green Bay, and Marquette, but none has a record of any priest being sent to Iron River in 1927.”

“A priest named O'Neil?”

“
Any
priest,” Petersson said. “Bloody odd, eh?”

“Does your great-grandfather's journal have any more information on the priest—where he came from, his age, where he went to seminary, anything?” Service asked.

“No, and neither do the old newspapers. And since my great grandfather has also passed away, we don't know if the man he thought was a priest ever came back from Chicago, eh. The Crystal Falls
Diamond Drill
was published throughout the period until 1996. Crystal Falls is the county seat now. But Iron River was the seat then, and had spotty news coverage back in the 1920s. Publications would fold and disappear, or merge. The merged Iron River
Reporter
and Stambaugh-Caspian
Reporter
operated from 1927 until 1968. There was a period in 1927 when the papers came out intermittently, or were short of news. Both the papers in Crystal and here reported the priest's arrival, but gave no biographical information.

“What I do know from the papers is that St. Agnes was a much-troubled parish. In 1910 the Poles left the church to form their own congregation. Three years later, parishioners from Gaastra and Caspian formed their own churches. What remained of St. Agnes was in pretty rough shape for the next thirty years, and pastors pretty much came and went through a revolving door. In the early 1930s things hit bottom when a priest named Lenhart was murdered on the church grounds.”

“What happened to the man who owned the property where the Chicago people settled?” Friday asked.

“Roland Denu disappeared about the same time as my great-grandfather. I've been through all the old papers, but there's nothing about him.”

“Did he actually own the property?”

“Land records from early in the century got lost during the Second World War. My great-grandmother told my mother that Denu was a trouble­maker. People called him Snake. As a kid he used to bite the heads off live reptiles.”

“Did the local papers write stories when the black settlers arrived?” Service asked.

“None that I could find. Lots of people were passing through in those days, individuals and groups, and Elmwood isn't close to town. The postmaster was the Elmwood correspondent for both papers, but all his stories covered only the news about the Italian families out that way. Back then immigrants and ethnics didn't mix with each other socially, unless you count scraps.”

“What happened to the postmaster?” Service asked.

“He died in a fire in his store in 1940. He had four sons. Two died in logging accidents in their twenties, and pneumonia got the oldest. The youngest son, Vito, served as a ball turret gunner in a B-17 in Europe, was shot down, and spent almost three years as a POW in Germany. After the war he came home to Iron River and married an Italian gal whose family had immigrated from the old country just before Pearl Harbor. Vito and his bride moved to Iron Mountain where he opened a grocery store and ran it until he died five years ago. No kids, but his widow lives in a nursing home in Crystal Falls.”

“You ever talk to her?”

“Tried, but she wasn't around in 1927. She was polite but tight-lipped about her husband's family. I have to confess, I'm disappointed one of those skeletons isn't a white man. When a family member disappears it leaves a hole, even if the events were eight decades ago. So what is it you two want to talk about?”

“The ME has ruled homicide for the remains,” Friday said.

“You don't say!”

Before Friday could answer, Service said, “Was there much gold mining around here?”

Petersson raised an eyebrow and smirked. “More of that to the north where the big copper mines were—Marquette, Keweenaw, up that way. Gold and silver show up in trace amounts with copper as I understand it. Why?”

“Sorry,” Service apologized. “My mind's not focused right now. I just wondered.”

“You know, now that I think about it, there was one gold mine around here, but we never took it seriously,” Petersson said after pausing to collect his thoughts. “It was called Peter Paul's, out on the South Branch of the Paint River. Gold Mine Road is named for it. Old Peter Paul found color, and claimed he struck a rich, pure vein, but he didn't have cash or capital to develop it, and didn't want to share with partners. He tried to raise some money by selling blueberries to locals, but that was like trying to sell ice to Eskimos. Blueberries grow wild all over the bloody county. The old guy was never taken seriously, and died intestate as one of the town's eccentrics.”

Service thanked the retired lawman for his help and led Friday out to his Tahoe.

On their way to the Iron River post, Friday said, “Your question about gold mines came out of the blue.”

“I didn't want to tell the sheriff, but the forensic anthropologist who called me said there was gold dust all over both skeletons.”

She looked confused. “I haven't gotten the case file yet. You think gold's involved in this?”