Hunter’s Dance (13 page)

“Ma says so. And it wasn't the kind of stuff any of the kids around here would be able to afford.”

“Anything that didn't belong to Bambi?”

“A few things left over from Feldman.” Koski ticked them off on his fingers. “A pair of reading glasses. A couple of programs from concerts that Mrs. Morlen said were probably his. Feldman's a big music fan, too. Plays the violin, she says. That's about it…a tin of aspirin.”

“Fingerprints?” Why did he have to ask every single question? Couldn't Koski just once come out with something without his asking?

“Oh, a whole shit-load. Bambi might not have been the most popular kid around but his car sure was.”

“The most popular kid?”

“Eh?”

“Never mind,” McIntire said. “Anything else? Lipstick on cigarette butts?”

“No cigarettes or butts.”

The howl of an angry baby sounded from outside the office door. Seconds later Marian Koski appeared pushing a stroller that barely contained a squirming toddler. “Eileen Kruger would like to talk with you.” She stepped aside to usher in an anemic-looking redhead carrying the squalling infant.

“How are you, Eileen? Little shavers growing like weeds, I see.” Koski shoved the only empty chair toward the young mother and lifted the child from the stroller to his knee. The boy gave a gasp, and his chin began to quiver, but he made no sound and no attempt to free himself from the giant's grasp. “Seems like only yesterday I used to see
you
running around about this size. How old's the baby now?”

The girl smiled. “Six months.” She had a pronounced lisp, making it come out,
thickth
month
. “Her name is Caroline.”

McIntire wondered if he should leave. Maybe Eileen had some confidential business, but neither she nor the sheriff seemed concerned about his presence.

The little boy bravely whispered, “Horthie,” and Koski's knee began a rhythmic bounce. He leaned toward the baby. “Well, Miss Caroline, is there something we can do for you and your mother?”

The child stopped crying and began to suck furiously on its fist. Eileen giggled. “No, not for me. I've come about the car.”

The flush suddenly spread up the girl's neck and she waited for Koski's nod before continuing. “The car behind the courthouse. The one that belonged to the kid that was murdered.”

The horthie halted in mid-canter.

“I don't know if it's important, probably not, but I thought I should tell you. I was cutting across in back of the courthouse, on the way home from Mom's, and I saw the car, and Cecil was there, so I asked if it was his, and he said no, it belonged to the boy that died, and…. Well, it's probably not anything you're interested in.” She started to rise.

McIntire resisted taking her by the shoulders to shove her back into the chair and asked, “What is it, what about the car?”

“I saw it. I was up with the baby Saturday night, or more like early Sunday morning. She's getting teeth, and she's been so fussy. Patrick was such an easy baby. I never missed a night's sleep, but—”

“Eileen, the car?”

“I was rocking Caroline. I had the lights out and the drapes open so I could look out. Sometimes deer come out on the road, and I like to watch.” She removed a soggy fistful of her blouse from the baby's mouth. “I saw that car go by.”

Koski was oblivious to Patrick's squirming in his tightened grip. “What time was that?”

“Sometime between three and four. She woke up about three, and I know it was past four o'clock when I got back to bed.”

“Are you sure it was the same car?”

Eileen stared at the sheriff as if he were indeed that proverbial ox. “It's not the kind of car you see every day.”

“Could you see how many people were in it?”

“I didn't notice nothing about who was in it, just the car. It went by, heading toward downtown, and came back again only a few minutes later. I was surprised at seeing anybody drive by so late. Usually it's only the deer.”

The infant set up another squawk, and Eileen stood and rested the child on her hip. “I better get her home before she eats her fingers. I was just walking by, and I thought maybe I should tell you.”

“You were right about that, Eileen. You've been a big help.” Koski popped the toddler into the stroller and wheeled it to the door. “Say hello to your folks.”

He returned to his desk and sat staring morosely at its paper-strewn surface.

“What's the problem?” McIntire asked. “You don't look like you've had big help.”

“What? Oh,” he shrugged. “You know, John, that girl is only two years older than my daughter…and with a husband and a couple kids.”

Considering the guard her father kept over her, Marcie Koski would be lucky to ever experience motherhood, or her first date.

“Well,” McIntire said, “that pretty much lets Bonnie Morlen off the hook, if she was ever on it. At the time Mrs. Baxter heard her come home, her son was alive and well, tooling around Chandler.”

“His
car
was tooling around Chandler. And Mrs. Morlen's claim to have been tooling around in the woods sounds pretty flimsy to me. But what the hell difference does it make? The whole fam-damnly has spit the hook, flown the coop, done a bunk. However you want to put it, we've seen the last of that bunch.”

XX

The old people were always so careful of the young woman. Never could they bear to hear any evil of her.

Another murder, the woods full of patriotic prospectors eagerly seeking uranium to make their country's bombs, one more crop of boys being shipped off to die…ah, life. Mia scratched around in the nest of quack grass until she found what looked like the shriveled leaves of a rutabaga plant. She gave a yank. The pale, bulbous root popped up easily. She used the tail of her shirt to wipe off the bulk of the dirt and dropped it into a basket with its garden-mates. That should be the last of them. The harvest of her vegetable patch's feeble bounty was complete. Mia's weed-choked quarter acre was the scandal of the neighborhood, but it generally came through with enough produce to fill her needs. And when she got caught short, her neighbors were only too happy to supply her with their extra.

Leonie McIntire planted flowers—dahlias, glads, chrysanthemums—right in with her squash and carrots and beans. The sight of Leonie's exuberant plot had given Mia her first ever twinges of garden envy. She'd like to try it herself, but she didn't want to be a copy cat.

Anyway she'd have a hard time passing off her garden as being for show. She lifted the basket onto her hip.

Another war—oops,
police action
. How could it be happening again so soon? And this time with a bomb that could wipe them all out in a few seconds, like pouring gas on an anthill and setting a match to it. Poor Ross. Usually there was enough time between wars for the survivors to get old and start putting a romantic gloss over things to prime the next generation. But Ross Maki and his kind wouldn't be so easily bamboozled. Their notion of war wasn't formed by some doddering grandfather spinning tales of adventure, valor, and loose women. They'd seen their own brothers come home, if they'd come home at all, withdrawn at best, often tormented.

What an ungodly pack of fools men were. Mia kicked a clod of earth. Maybe women, herself in particular, were even bigger idiots for letting themselves get so dependent on that pack of fools. She looked at the storm windows, still leaning against the house, shedding flakes of paint into the grass. Her gaze traveled to the delivery van parked next to the workshop, dejected and Rossless.

As much as she hated ladders, she could handle the storms if she had to, but she'd never driven a car of any kind. If she needed something from town, Nick picked it up, or they'd go in together on a Friday night. Most of what they used came mail order. Nick handled that, too.

Mia had always managed to find a willing kid to drive her father's old van to pick up wood and other supplies for her cabinet making and sometimes to deliver the finished product. But they never lasted long. They grew up, got married, went away. Once in a while one of them even found a genuine job. In between she fell back on Nick. And Nick…Nick was starting to show his age.

Mia had faced the fact long ago that her husband wasn't going to grow up. Maybe that was why she'd expected him never to grow old. Nick wasn't always reliable, but he'd seemed invincible. Now the years were catching up with him. The drink was catching up with him. The level of brandy in the bottle was decreasing more slowly than usual, but Nick was showing its effects in ways he never had before. His ending up in the ditch was nothing new, but in the past driving the car off the road had usually followed some extenuating circumstances. Snow, mud, or an early Monday morning. Nothing like that had been going on this last time. And he was getting shaky, stumbling now and then.

She carried the basket of vegetables to the porch steps and walked across to the van. The door gave a screech when she opened it. It could stand a squirt of oil. She smoothed the old rug that covered exposed springs in the seat and slid behind the wheel. An absurd thrill of daring, almost guilt, beat in her chest. Like a high school girl smoking her first cigarette. With one hand on the shift knob, she began ticking off the bank of dials and buttons before her. Gas gauge, starter, choke, speedometer, lights, windshield wipers, heater, radio—ah, those two she could handle—gear shift, gas, brake, or was that the clutch? Horn.

She'd never liked cars much, never liked riding in them and never had the least desire to drive one herself. She could still remember her first automobile ride. Well, why not? It hadn't been all that long ago. Nick had owned one of the first cars around, a Model T Ford bought in 1927 to replace the team and sleigh, and the notorious motorcycle, he'd used on his mail route.

The motorcycle…even that didn't seem so long ago. Her introduction to motor vehicles had been her maiden voyage on that 1909 Indian cycle. They'd been married a week before Nick managed to talk her into it. She made sure there was no one around to see. Nick showed her where to put her feet. She tucked up her long skirt and climbed up behind him, seating herself on the platform he'd had welded on to carry the mailbag. Her knees came halfway to her chest, exposing her spider-thin legs almost to the garters that held up her black stockings. And then the thing took off. The machine shook until her jaws ached from the effort of controlling her chattering teeth. The wheels spit gravel into her eyes. She'd wrapped her arms around Nick's leather-protected chest and promised God that if she survived she'd never again skip her nightly prayers. She'd made it to the lake and back alive and, surprisingly, had always kept the promise. Three decades of marriage to Nick made prayer second nature.

A knock on the window sent her heart leaping and her elbow into the horn. Leonie McIntire beamed in at her, crimson-nosed below her kerchief-covered curls. Mia opened the door.

Leonie leaned on her bicycle, puffing. When John McIntire's fascinating foreign wife had turned up on that bike it had been the talk of the neighborhood. The sight of a middle-aged woman pedaling around the sandy roads had been a source of entertainment for weeks. Now it was only good for the occasional snicker. Too bad you couldn't haul many boards on a bicycle.

“Don't let me hold you up, Mia, if you're off somewhere. Are you having trouble with the lorry?”

“Oh, no,” Mia assured her. “I was just…checking things.” She got out and gave the hood a knowledgeable pat. “Come on in the house. You look like you could stand warming up.”

“I could that, but unfortunately I can only stay a minute, I'm sorry to say. I'm off to get the paper sorted out. I just popped over to see if you have any news for this week.”

Mia couldn't help her. No out of town relatives visiting, no birthdays. She and Nick hadn't even taken that Friday-night trip to Chandler. “Afraid not, Leonie. You'll have to depend on more sociable people than me for your headlines.” It wasn't unusual for Leonie to pop over to get her latest news. Though she usually called first, to see if it was worth her while. Mia wondered what this unannounced visit might mean.

They walked together to the front porch. Leonie leaned the bike against the rail and sat down on the steps.

“But what about you?” Mia asked her. “Do you have news? Have they found out anything about the murder?”

“Not that I've heard. The Morlens took their son's body home on Wednesday. They went on an airplane. John's been running himself ragged for the sheriff, pretending to hate every minute of it. They still don't have a new deputy to replace Mr. Corbin.”

Leonie removed her kerchief and gave her blond curls a thorough fluffing. “I feel a bit mean to say this, but I do wish John had more time to spend with his aunt. She's come all this way, and he hardly does more than nod to her. I do my best to entertain her, and it is nice to have someone to help exercise the horses, but she didn't come to see me. She seems sort of at loose ends. Wanders about the house, does a lot of bathing.” Leonie rolled her eyes ever so slightly toward the treetops. “Goes out every night. I don't know where. Into Chandler, I imagine.”

“Nick says she was with John at the Waterfront the other night.”

“They went together. He came home about tea time without her.”

“She has turned up since, I take it?”

“Oh, yes. But was out rather late, I believe. At least I didn't hear the water running until about three in the morning.” She smiled and donned her kerchief. “She'd gone off with…somebody.”

Mia wondered if the hesitancy in Leonie's voice meant that the somebody was Nick. Her next remark answered the question.

“A chap John didn't know, but he said they looked pretty chummy. From his description I think it was that man…the one that was at the dance. You know, the one that Evelyn Turner was so taken with.”

“Evelyn wasn't the only one,” Mia said. “Leave it to Siobhan to make the big catch.”

Leonie stood and made to mount the bicycle, then let it fall back against the rail and plopped back onto the steps. “Mia,” she asked, “how well do you know Siobhan?”

Mia shoved the basket of garden produce aside and joined her. “I
knew
her very well, a long time ago. She was an aggravation. Kind of a sneaky, secretive kid. She drove me crazy then, but, looking back, I have to feel sorry for her. She had an…unusual life. Her father was so much older, and, as you can imagine, there was quite a bit of talk when he married his sister-in-law and plenty of jokes when Siobhan was born so soon after. There weren't any other children her age around. She spent most of her time alone or tagging after us older kids. She was man-crazy from the time she was nine years old. Her mother couldn't do a thing with her, and her father, Jeremiah—that was John's grandfather—thought she could do no wrong. She pretty much ran wild. The old man died when Siobhan was sixteen or seventeen. A few months later she left with a man she met at the county fair, a gypsy.”

“Did you say
gypsy?”

Mia nodded.

“There are gypsies here?” Leonie looked around as if she expected to be ambushed that very minute by dark-skinned chicken thieves lurking in the lilacs.

“They travel with carnivals, running rides and games, things like that.”

“And Siobhan was taken by them? Didn't anyone look for her? Try to get her back?”

“She wasn't kidnapped! She left a note. Sure, somebody should have gone after her. She wasn't old enough to make that kind of a decision. Colin tried to find her for a while. But that was in the twenties, remember. It was pretty easy for people to disappear if they didn't want to be found. Siobhan's mother, Bridget, got a letter now and then. But Bridget didn't stick around for long after Jeremiah died either. Went to St. Paul, I think. So Siobhan really had no reason to come back here.”

“Until now,” Leonie observed, with what might have been a note of suspicion?

“She said she got homesick after reading that magazine article about uranium,” Mia said. It did seem a little strange that Siobhan had turned up after all this time and with no apparent plans to leave in the foreseeable future. Mia asked, “Leonie, has Siobhan said anything about where she's been all this time? Doesn't she have a home somewhere?”

“She's mentioned California now and again. She doesn't seem to want to talk about herself, and I don't care to pry.”

A Siobhan McIntire whose favorite topic of conversation wasn't Siobhan McIntire did indeed sound suspicious.

Mia had the feeling that Leonie would like to tell her, or ask her, something more. But after a few throat clearings, her moral code,
only if it's fit to print
, obviously won out, and she rose to her feet.

“Can't I give you some rutabagas, Leonie?” Mia asked. “I planted way too many.”

The panic in Leonie's eyes was at odds with her gracious smile. “Why thank you, Mia. That would be lovely. I can't carry many on a bike.” She eyed the misshapen vegetables. “Maybe two.” Mia retrieved a paper bag from the kitchen. Leonie chose two of the smallest and popped them into the basket on her handlebars. “
Rutabaga.
That's the funniest word I've ever heard,” she commented. “But I imagine referring to them as ‘swedes' around here could generate some confusion.” She swung the bicycle around and walked it to the end of the rutted driveway. Mia turned back to her truck.

At least she could clean the thing up. Madame Hollander wanted her clock case, and Mia wanted Madame's money. Ross was still around, and it was time to make that delivery.

She opened the double doors at the back and pulled out the chains that Ross had used for Nick's recent rescue. The bed of the van was covered in clumps of dirt and sand, not hospitable conditions for transporting highly polished furniture. In addition to saving drunken mailmen, Ross must have been using it in some of his uranium-hunting forays.

After the chains came a peach crate containing a couple pairs of yellow work gloves and—eureka!—a chisel she'd been looking for. Her jubilance faded when she saw its ragged edges. Had Ross been chipping rocks with her wood chisel? She shuddered.

The crate landed with a thud in the grass next to the chains. An unfamiliar object rolled across the dirty truck bed toward her, a dark leather cylinder about two feet long. A case for fishing rods? Didn't John McIntire have something like that? A twist opened it, revealing not rods, but rolled papers. She pulled them out and let them unfurl. Maps. A confusing maze of black lines and incomprehensible symbols.

She walked to the front of the truck and spread the maps on the hood. A network of penciled-in lines and X's dotted the two-dimensional landscape. Each sheet bore the name
Morlen
.

The case had the soft patina of age. Her fingers traced its intricate engravings. It looked expensive. Maybe it was an heirloom. It should go back to the family. Ross had probably forgotten that he had it.

She returned the maps to the tube and laid it in the grass next to the peach crate. It would have to be turned over to the sheriff, she supposed. Taking it to John McIntire would be easier.