Past Imperfect (12 page)

He had held up St. Adele as a peaceful refuge, suffused with the beauties of nature and untouched by the ways of the world. It was less than a year after their return that August Adams was found in his barn, his head beaten in with a manure shovel. That slaying was quickly solved but not so quickly forgotten. And now, Nels Bertelsen. It was beginning to look like the haven to which he had lured his bride harbored at least two murderers.

He was thoroughly convinced that the bees in Nels' clothing had been deliberately planted. Whether the actual intention was to kill the man or only to give him a healthy scare remained questionable. Nels' medication had earlier turned up missing. That was a strong argument for homicide. With any luck they'd know for sure when the fluid in the vial was analyzed.

Moreover, there could hardly be any doubt that the killer was someone from within the community. It was not likely that a stranger would come skulking into town and tuck a couple of bees into Bertelsen's shirts just on the off chance that he might be allergic. If he was murdered, it was by someone who knew his vulnerabilities and his habits,
and
who had access to his medication.

Stealing the adrenaline would have been simple. Nels wouldn't have been carrying it with him during the winter. Anyone could have walked into the house before Nels began locking the doors, and probably have found the medication in five minutes. Lucy had admitted that even after Nels put the locks on, she didn't always bother with them if he wasn't home.

Procuring the weapon would also have been a piece of cake. There was no dearth of bees in the neighborhood. They might have come from the hives in Bertelsen's own orchard, but plenty of other farmers kept bees, too. According to Jonas, Nels didn't keep the
Frelser
locked, so getting on board wouldn't have been a problem. But how were the bees kept quiet? He'd noticed the buzzing right away, even with the competing noise of the engine. Of course, it would still have been essentially the dead of night when Nels donned that fatal shirt. The bee could have been inactive until warmed by his body heat.

McIntire was jolted out of his contemplations by a sudden jerk on his line. He took his time landing the fish, a sleek rainbow trout. When it lay twitching in his net, glowing iridescent in the dappled light, he considered throwing it back, but rejected the idea. It would likely go over better than a chipped vase. He picked up a fist-sized stone and, grasping it firmly, rapped the fish smartly on the head. He then stowed it in his creel, picked up his rod, and worked his was back upstream toward home.

By the time he strolled into the yard, Leonie had also returned and was on her knees facing the final few survivors of the two dozen rose cuttings she had smuggled into the country in her luggage. She had planted them near the barnyard fence, well away from the heavily shaded yard.

“Praying?” McIntire inquired maliciously.

“A bit of manure here, a bit of prayer there, it can't hurt.” She regarded the spindly stems with resignation. “At home they would be three times this size by now. Well, where there's life there's hope, they say.”

“I myself fared quite well in my battle with mother nature.” McIntire extended the trout with both hands, “For you, my black thumbed one.”

“I'm overwhelmed,” Leonie assured him, rising and brushing the dirt from her knees, “and I'd be even more impressed if you'd cleaned it first.”

“How are the fourth of July plans going? I'm frankly amazed the ladies would allow a loyal subject of King George to be privy to their discussions.”

“There was some question concerning my reasons for being so keen to celebrate the day, but I wield the power of the press, don't forget. I'm meant to do the publicity, and,” she added morosely, “I'm on the washing up squad.”

“It's good to know,” McIntire said, “that even after almost two hundred years the Spirit of Seventy-six lives on.”

“The spirit of the monarchy lives on, too. We bid you to gut that fish and put it on ice. I've made lasagna for today. It should be almost ready now.”

McIntire picked up his rod and creel, and together they walked toward the house. “You may be an enemy agent,” he told her, “but thank God you've learned to cook American.”

XIII

Mia Thorsen strode down the driveway, crossed the gravel road, and stepped over the shallow ditch onto a well-worn path. She traversed an open area, rampant with wild rose and raspberry still glistening with the previous night's rain, and followed the trail into the woods. The going here was easy. The track was wide and the space below the canopy of straight-boled beech and sugar maple was open and light. The undergrowth was sparse, a carpet of low growing vines and wild flowers: wood anemone, clintonia, and, here and there, the delicate pink lady slipper.

Mia's feet, in canvas oxfords, were soon soaked, and each step on the previous year's decomposing leaves released a musky, sensuous scent, punctuated at intervals by the pungent odor of wild onion. She walked briskly in an attempt to generate some warmth in her limbs, and to avoid providing a stationary target for mosquitos. Occasionally she brushed away a spider's web that happened to be stretched at eye level across her path.

Presently the trail began to rise as it led up the sloping end of a narrow ridge. The angle at which it ascended grew steadily steeper over the course of several hundred yards and then abruptly leveled off when it reached the crest of the ridge. The trees grew closer together here, with the space between them taken over by bracken fern and thimbleberry growing thickly around table-sized stumps, fire-blackened and covered with moss. Mia bitterly regretted that the great pine forests had been leveled before she was born. Even when she was a child only a few of the behemoths had remained. In those days the hillsides around her home had been naked but for their severed feet, stark testimony to what had once been. Soon even those had disappeared, grubbed out with oxen and horses to create fields to feed a flourishing community. But here on this hillside, too steep to plow, eighty years after the trees had been cut, trimmed, and floated down to the bay, the stumps still remained, their roots defiantly planted in the earth, even in death providing food and shelter for a myriad of woodland plants and small creatures.

Mia stopped for a moment, as she always did, faced one of the rotting stumps, and screwed up her eyes until the image blurred. The tangle of undergrowth disappeared and she found herself standing on a carpet of needles in a cathedral of stately columns and softly filtered light. The air around her became still and warm, infused with a magical incense. All sound ceased, leaving only the soothing whisper of a light breeze threading its way through the canopy high above.

She shook herself from her trance. Someday, she promised herself, she would take a trip to Oregon or Washington, where trees even bigger than those that had grown here still stood.

She continued walking for a half-mile or more until the forest abruptly gave way to a weedy clearing overlooking a hillside blanketed with low growing evergreens. In the center of the clearing towered a structure of weathered wood and iron—a dilapidated ski jump. The trail passed directly in back of it and continued on along the ridge until it dropped into the lumber yard that marked the southeastern boundary of the town of St. Adele.

Mia, however, did not pursue this route but instead turned and walked down the hill to the front of the jump. Its timbers creaked as she mounted the short ladder that brought her up onto the slide. She sat for a minute on the damp boards and, leaning down, gave the sole of each shoe a brisk rub with the end of her sleeve. Then she pulled herself to her feet and began the climb. A wood railing ran along both sides, a solid wall of boards about four feet high. On the right side, the one next to the sliding surface, a few boards had fallen away, leaving gaping holes like the missing teeth in a jack-o-lantern, but the railing on the left was intact and continued to look reasonably reliable. Mia gripped it to steady herself, but prudently kept her weight centered over her feet. She avoided looking down over the edge. Wooden cleats were nailed up the incline to form steps and she counted carefully as she went. When she reached thirty-two she took an extra long stride, skipping number thirty-three. Sometime during the winter, a nail had worked through, causing one end of that foothold to come loose. When she stepped on it earlier that spring, it had slipped and sent her scrambling to clutch the rail with both hands. There was no real danger; her slide was quickly arrested by the cleat below, but it was unsettling all the same.

When she reached the platform at the top of the jump she kept her eyes on her feet and her back to the railing while she inhaled three deep breaths. Then she turned and felt the familiar clutch deep in her breast at the first look down from the dizzying height. Only after that initial split-second of terror had passed was she able to relax and take in the vista presented to her.

Looking straight down she could see only the tops of the small balsams that had grown up weedlike around the base of the jump. The area along the length of the slide was cleared in a wide swath extending down through the pine and spruce on the hillside and into the tangled growth of cedar and tamarack in the marshy area below. In past winters a makeshift road had been plowed through the swamp for the convenience of those young men who were given to demonstrating their virility by hurtling down the slide and flinging themselves off the end. The recent war had watered down the urge for such exploits, and its aftermath had seen a mass exodus of St. Adele's young people. The jump had been unused for close to a decade, accounting for its present state of disrepair.

With her back to this landing area, Mia could see only the forested hills stretching in yellow-green billows of maple, birch, and beech, striated with the deeper color of the groves of conifers. Here and there a massive rocky outcropping thrust an ebony shadow above the trees.

Turning a little to her right, she could look over the treetops to the small cluster of buildings that made up the village of St. Adele on the shore of the bay some half-mile distant. A little nearer, just outside of town, was the open area still referred to as the “lumber yard,” even though the sawmill had been gone for years, and the timber stacked there now was only waiting to be trucked away to be ground up for paper pulp.

Off to the northeast was the open lake, its foreground a smooth sheet of pewter under the heavily overcast sky. The invasion of clouds was not yet complete, and a thin band of buttery yellow marked the horizon. Far out on the water two boats crawled toward the west, trailing ribbons of silver like slugs on a garden path. It was a scene tranquil and timeless, but one that Mia knew could change in minutes to an unleashing of the powers of hell.

If Nels Bertelsen had to lose his life so soon it should have been in a fight with the lake, Mia thought. He must have hated dying the way he did, knowing he had been bested by an insect. But then again, she reminded herself, it might not have been the insect at all. If John was right, it was some enemy that Nels maybe didn't even know he had. Or, if he had suspected, didn't know who it was. She recalled Nels' recent behavior. He had always been cautious, but in the last few months he had become increasingly paranoid and downright belligerent. His attack on David Slocum was only one of a handful of similar incidents involving a half-dozen people, including her own husband. Maybe he hadn't been completely irrational after all. Maybe somebody was out to get him and he knew it. Well, he had always been a complainer, people could hardly be blamed for not taking his accusations too seriously.

The sound of a train whistle brought Mia out of her reverie. She looked toward the railroad crossing at the lumber yard. From her vantage point, she could just make out the figure of her husband, pacing while he waited to exchange mailbags with the brakeman. His car was nowhere to be seen, most likely hidden by one of the long piles of pulpwood. The train must be late. She was glad that the scene was out of earshot. The whistle blew again and the train chugged into view.

On most mornings the engineer slowed just enough for the brakeman to throw off his bag and grab the one Nick would toss to him, but this morning the train was apparently coming to a complete stop. That could only mean some heavier cargo to be deposited, or a passenger. Mia watched with interest as the train once again pulled away, leaving a lone figure standing near the tracks. Even seen from this distance, the new arrival was clearly female and youthful, and Mia wondered if Nick would break his self-imposed rule and offer her a lift the few hundred yards into town. Nick, however, had already disappeared. Mia was surprised to see that, instead of taking the road into St. Adele, the woman shouldered her small bag and struck out, with a childlike bounce in her step, on the path that led in her own direction.

The trail branched off in a few places to provide quicker routes, nowadays seldom used, between the town and various homes, but Mia could think of no one who might be expecting a visitor. Although maybe the women hadn't been met at the train because she was
not
expected. Before she came near enough for recognition, she entered the wooded area and was lost from sight.

Mia was about to descend from her tower when a voice broke the stillness, high pitched and feminine, rapid speech ending in a squeal of laughter. It was followed by the lower tones of a male. Someone had met the woman after all. Mia retreated to the platform and sat down to conceal herself in case one of the pair should look up as they passed under. Not that there was anything so odd about climbing the ski jump at six o'clock in the morning, but she would just as soon keep her habits to herself. She pulled the collar of her jacket up around her neck, shivered, and waited.

The voices marked the steady approach of the couple, with the girl speaking in a continuous stream, getting an occasional brief response from her companion. Mia could not make out the words.

After a brief period of silence, she raised herself cautiously and cast a wary eye over the railing. Seeing no one, she turned to leave her hiding place once more, when a stifled giggle sounded from directly beneath her. The two had obviously sought the privacy of the sheltered area under the base of the jump. Kids, Mia guessed, and nearly groaned aloud at the mating habits of the modern adolescent. She then smiled at her short memory. Things hadn't been so very different thirty years before, and probably thirty-thousand years before that. But at this time of the morning! And the ground must be soaked. She leaned back against the damp boards, mindful of the creaking—not that the little darlings would be likely to notice—and tried not to listen too closely to the scuffles, whimpers and panting that emanated from below.

Through their exertions the two must have worked up a hearty appetite for breakfast, for in a surprisingly short time she again heard footsteps scurrying off into the woods, and then all was silence. Just the same, she waited a few minutes before venturing out of her aerie and making her way down the incline.

Going down was slower work than climbing up. She walked sideways to grip each cleat, counting backwards this time to avoid the loose board. Now and again she had considered fixing it. It would be easy enough to bring along a hammer and a couple of nails, but somehow it always seemed too much like tainting pleasure with business.

She exhaled a long breath when her feet were at last firmly planted on solid ground, and trudged, with slightly wobbly knees, up the hillside to reach the path. As she passed the base of the jump, a small shiny object lying in the wet grass caught her eye, and she stooped to retrieve it. A lipstick. She looked at the bottom.
Passion's Flame
. Must be good stuff, she surmised. She placed it on one of the structure's cross braces in case its owner should return to claim it. In doing so, she noticed a neatly folded handkerchief and a white canvas shoe, similar to the ones she was wearing, lying in the grass farther under the jump. Mia brushed aside the balsams, ducked under the timbers, and bent to pick up the shoe.

On rising, she found herself staring directly into the glazed and sightless eyes of its owner. Cindy Culver lay like a cast-off doll, crumpled against one of the massive timbers. Mia froze, arrested in her half-erect position, transfixed by the horror of the scene—a child's dress-up game turned to mayhem: the halo of golden waves surrounding the cherubic face, horribly bruised and swollen under its layer of inexpertly applied make-up; the head hanging limply to one side, pillowed on a shoulder robed in grown-up silk from which an open leather bag dangled, its contents spilling into the weeds; legs in shredded nylon stockings, scraped raw and bleeding; and the tiny feet, side by side, one encased in a canvas tennis oxford, the other with the stocking torn away, exposing the most brilliant of crimson gracing the nails of its chubby white toes.

After what seemed like a lifetime, Mia tore her eyes away from the grotesque tableau, clutched the mate to that shoe to her chest, scrambled through the bushes, and ran back down the trail the way she had come.