Past Imperfect (15 page)

XVIII

Cindy's bedroom was one of four on the second floor. High-ceilinged and approximately half the size of a high school gym, it was furnished with heavy mahogany and strewn with the paraphernalia of budding womanhood. Koski strode to the tall windows and yanked open the curtains, but McIntire hesitated. He felt a tightness in his throat as he stood in the doorway, his gaze shifting from Clark Gable smiling intimately from his place on the yellow-sprigged wallpaper to the pink cotton pajamas that lay crumpled on the unmade bed.

The sheriff looked up from rummaging through the drawers of a mirrored dressing table. “Come on John, don't go squeamish on me now. We've got a big job to do here. God, have you ever seen so much junk?” He frowned at a half-full pack of Pall Malls secreted in the bottom of a box of stationery. “Is this what I have to look forward to with Marcie?” He shoved in the drawer and turned to removing a collection of snapshots that had been Scotch-taped to the mirror. “We can try to find out who these kids are. That's a start. Maybe there's a school yearbook around here.”

McIntire began a systematic search of the closets and wardrobe. They were packed with clothing. Most were the suits and dresses of a more mature woman. No doubt the legacy from the ill-fated Nina Godwin.

“Leonie would kill for clothes like these,” he observed.

“Well, that's a thought. Cindy done in for her second-hand wardrobe.” Koski lifted up the mattress with a grunt. “Blackmailed by My Lover's Son!” and “My Minister's Wife Stole My Husband!” screamed up at him from the cover of a well-thumbed copy of
True Story
. He lifted the magazine gingerly by its corner, examined closely the prime example of voluptuous femininity that graced its cover, and flipped through its pages. “That does it. I'm locking Marcie up 'til she's twenty-one.”

McIntire's musings that having Sheriff Koski for a father would do more than any locked door to keep a girl and her would-be suitors treading a straight and narrow path were terminated by the discovery of a miniature chest tucked under folded blankets in the bottom to the wardrobe. He removed it and swept aside assorted pots and jars to place it on the dressing table. It was made of polished walnut with a stylized design of three-lobed leaves and vines carved around the edge of its lid. A small heart-shaped padlock was attached to its clasp, a lock that was no match for Pete Koski and a manicure kit. The box was lined in cedar, and contained three lace handkerchiefs, a string of what looked to be genuine pearls, and four leather-bound diaries. They were also locked but took even less time to open than the chest.

The frontispiece of each read
Nina Everett Godwin
. Entries began the week of Nina's marriage to Warner and ended December thirty-first, 1948.

“When did Nina Godwin die?” McIntire asked.

“A little over a year ago—middle of May.”

“So unless she quit writing, we're missing the first five months of 1949.” McIntire thought for a minute. “Didn't Mia mention a book with Cindy's stuff?”

The springs of the bed issued a protesting shriek as Koski sat down. “Now what,” he wondered, “could have been in Nina Godwin's diary to send Cindy charging off to St. Adele with it? And,” he added, “get her killed in the process?”

The search was hastily completed, and the door to Cindy's chamber taped shut. The two men left, driving from the heights of the bluff down into the town and uphill once again to the sheriff's office, where they were greeted by a flustered Deputy Newman and two impatient state investigators. The detectives were uncannily alike in appearance, both small men with thin, humorless faces, oozing confidence from every pore.

They listened without comment while Koski imparted what paltry information he possessed concerning the death. They asked no questions. The one on the left jangled his car keys. “If you could just lead us to the scene.”

With a glance at their perfectly creased trousers and spit-shined oxfords, the sheriff nodded.

Once outdoors, they were joined by what appeared to be the shriveled husk of a human being, a bent and wizened man whose face, under his railroader's cap, had the topography of a raisin and whose slightest movement unleashed a curious effluvium of unwashed flesh and licorice. Florida Mowsers. He held the tethers of a pair of bloodhounds, each having a similarly corrugated visage and a lugubrious aspect suggestive of having seen much of life.

After brief introductions, the entire troop set out.

When dropping McIntire at his home, Koski handed him two of the diaries. “We might as well read these before we mention them to the state boys. They're not likely to get much out of them, not being local people. If they don't say anything important we can just slip them back to Warner.”

The house was quiet. McIntire found a note from Leonie informing him that she had gone to the Culvers' to help with the children. He settled in to read the innermost thoughts of Nina Godwin.

The entries were short, and McIntire completed the reading of the first volume while eating a lunch of sandwiches left from the previous day's impromptu gathering. The journal contained nothing of obvious significance, mainly tales of home decorating and morning sickness. The second covered the year 1948, and was the most recent save the one that Cindy likely had in her possession when she died. McIntire rapidly scanned the first few pages, then began to read with more attention. After a short time, he closed the book and sat methodically tapping its leather binding. Finally, with a sigh, he pushed his chair back from the table and stuffed the diary into his pants pocket. He donned a pair of rubber overshoes, stepped out the kitchen door, crossed the wet grass, and walked briskly toward the Thorsens' house, taking the reverse of the route that Mia had used the previous morning.

XIX

Mia was just leaving the workshop when he arrived. Purple half-moons showed under her eyes, eyes that were encircled by the red tracks of the safety goggles now pushed up onto her forehead. She did not look entirely pleased to see him. “Just have a seat for a minute while I wash up, and I'll make some coffee.” She wrenched off the goggles and attempted to smooth her hair behind her ears. “On second thought,” she decided, “you can make yourself useful by getting me some fresh water.” She disappeared into the house and emerged a moment later to thrust a galvanized pail into his hand. “You know where it is.”

The pumphouse was as cellar-like and clammy as McIntire remembered, but he was relieved to find that the old hand pump had been replaced with an electric powered model. The Thorsens were slowly but surely creeping into the twentieth century.

When he got back to the house she was already measuring coffee into the pot. He surveyed the room where he had spent a major part of his waking hours during his first six years of life. It was, like all such things are likely to be, much smaller than he remembered. It was hard to imagine that this kitchen was once the center of life for ten adults and their various progeny. The long table where the group had gathered three times a day was gone. The space it had required was now occupied by one less than half its size. That left room for a massive cupboard crowded with all manner of kitchen gadgets the purposes of which McIntire could not begin to guess. A modern gas range had usurped the position of the yellow enameled wood cookstove, but a small pot-bellied coal heater stood beside it. Missing, too, was the distinctive odor, a montage of new wood, varnishes, paint thinners, and mysterious glues, that had permeated every room in the house when Eban Vogel had done his work in the side room.

McIntire set the bucket down with a thump and a splash. “You should have married me, Mia,” he ventured. “I'd have given you indoor plumbing.”

“If I wanted indoor plumbing I'd get it myself.” Her hand shook slightly as she dipped water into the pot, and a small puddle formed on the counter. “Of course I never
carry
the water myself if I can possibly talk somebody else into doing it.” She held a match to the gas burner until it ignited with a poof, then busied herself with cups.

McIntire took a deep breath and looked intently at his hands. “Well, why didn't you?” he asked.

She kept her back turned to him as she replied airily. “Oh, you know how it is. We talk about it from to time, but we never seem to get around to actually doing it. It's only been a few years since we got electricity in this neck of the woods, you know.”

“You know what I'm talking about.”

She pulled out a chair and sat down without looking at him. “I don't remember that you ever asked me to marry you.”

McIntire smiled. “Well, I guess you've got me there. It's true, I didn't. You asked me, though. Twice as I recall. You asked me when were six and again when we were fourteen, and I said yes both times, so you can't get out of it that easy.”

Mia leapt up to turn down the flame under the sputtering coffee pot. When she turned around she faced him squarely. “And were you expecting me to wait thirty years?”

“I don't think a few months would have been too much to ask. I had hardly gotten off that boat in Liverpool before Ma wrote that you were engaged to the mailman.” It amazed him that the bitterness was still there, and that it showed so plainly in his voice.

He waited while she spent an inordinate length of time transferring the cups from the counter to the table and once again sat down. “It wasn't that soon, and you know it,” she finally said. “But from the day you left, I knew I'd never see you again. I thought it would be because you were killed, but I knew you wouldn't come home…and I was right. God, you never even
wrote
.”

“I'd have come back if I'd had anything to come home to.”

“Oh, no! It wasn't my fault you stayed away, and don't you dare try to pin it on me. Your mother would never forgive me!”

“We were babies together and we grew up together. We were meant to always be together.” Even to himself, McIntire sounded like a mulish child.

Her response was slow in coming, and was in the manner of a tolerant adult to a obstreperous child. “John,” she said. “We didn't grow up together. We were
growing
up, and then the war came, and all of a sudden you were a man. I was still a kid, but you were a soldier on your way clear across the world to kill people.”

McIntire sputtered, but she ignored him and went on. “In those days before you left, you were a different person, cold and tough…and frightening.”

“I was a terrified seventeen-year-old boy!” McIntire exploded. “I wasn't tough, I was scared out of my wits. I don't know what I dreaded more, facing the Germans or facing my father when he found out I'd enlisted.”

“I understand that now, but back then I didn't, and that's exactly what I mean. I was just a dumb kid.” She stood up and poured the coffee. “I was scared, too, you know, and not very brave. You can't have forgotten how I depended on you for everything. Good grief, I could hardly make a move without you to give me a shove. After you left things were unbearable. It was like losing half of myself. I—”

Her tone had grown intense, pleading, almost, and she halted suddenly, looking away. When she began to speak again, it was once more as the patient lecturer.

“Going back to school that fall was a nightmare. I didn't have a single friend there. Even Wylie was gone away to that farm school or whatever it was. People acted like Papa was the Kaiser's right hand man.
Papa
,
who worshiped the U.S. flag. Don't you remember how he raised hell with people who wouldn't speak ‘American'?”

McIntire remembered it well, remembered that he himself, even at age four, knew that one stuck to English when Papa Vogel was within earshot.

“And then they started remembering that Mama was nothing but a dirty Indian. Say what you will about your father, but he was the only person in this town who would even say hello if he met us on the street. You can't imagine how lonely it was. When Sandy Karvonen was killed, and then that kid from Chandler died in the training camp, the whole community came together—the whole country really—but we were shut out. And I knew I'd never see you again. I
knew
it. I didn't have the courage to admit that you wouldn't come back to me, so I pretended that you were dead too.”

She was silent again for a time, then shook her head in wonder. “You know, after a while, I think I really believed it. I even found a white rock and put it back under the trees in the cemetery for your headstone. Sometimes I would come and put flowers on it…but then somebody found it and threw it away.” A bleak smile played across her face. “They probably thought some kid was besmirching the sanctity of the cemetery by burying a dead bird.”

“Mia…” She gestured him to be silent.

“Then Nick came along, delivering the mail on a
motorcycle
, of all things. None of us had ever even seen one before. He was handsome, and exciting, and fun. He showed absolutely no sign of ever growing up. And furthermore, he wasn't going to end up drafted and buried somewhere in France. Carrying mail was too important.

“It all happened so fast. Every girl around was after him. Of course he didn't have a whole bunch of competition left. But he liked me best, and he made me laugh, and you never wrote.

“After Mama caught flu and died, Papa was so angry. He wouldn't have a funeral. He said it would only give people a chance to turn up their noses at her one last time. So it was just him and me and Reverend Jordan at the graveyard. Once Mama was gone he hardly ever stuck his head out of his shop. It got too sad being alone…so I married Nick.”

McIntire went back to studying his hands. “What did he say when he found out you weren't a virgin?”

Mia looked up in amazement, and then burst into laughter. “I see you haven't turned into the
complete
British gentleman after all!” She appeared to give the question serious consideration.

“To tell the truth, it never entered my mind to think about it. Of course I didn't know what a virgin was until long after I wasn't one. You mean he could tell?” She laughed again. “I guess he must have been too drunk to notice.”

“You mean even then—?”

“What? Oh, no, he wasn't always a drinker. It was only after we lost the babies that he really started.”

“Ma told me you had a miscarriage. I'm sorry.”

“Sophie
would
say that.”

“You mean it wasn't true?”

“I didn't have any miscarriages,” she said. “I bore three live children, two boys and a girl. The first two never really breathed. The third lived for almost four days.”

“Oh, God, Mia, I'm sorry. I didn't know. How awful for you.”

“After she was born I was really sick. Childbed fever, they called it. By the time I got better she'd already been baptized—Nicole Ramona—and buried. They told me she looked like Mama, but I don't know. I held her and I nursed her and dressed her, but I don't know a thing about her. The fever took my memory away.” She gripped her cup with both hands and stared into it. “It's the not remembering that's the hardest part. It's like she never really
was
, never really existed. Nick and Papa, and even the doctor and the priest—they all had her for a little while, but I,
me
, the one who gave her what life she had, might as well never have had her at all.” The cup clinked sharply against the saucer as she set it down on the table. “Forgetting was a blessing, they tell me.”

McIntire searched for words, but nothing came, and Mia continued.

“After that I couldn't try again. Maybe I should have. I was my mother's fourth child, and the only one to live. But I didn't have any Indian granny to run away to.” At the strident honking of the geese, Mia leaned across the table to look out the window, then sat back with a shrug. “Well, anyway, Mama always told me that I had gotten my life from her grandmother, and maybe she had something there. She lost two more after I was born, you know.”

McIntire's mind was invaded by a rush of buried memories: whispering, shushings, Mama Vogel absent from the kitchen, and Mia's father, seen through the foggy upstairs window, his long beard sparkling with frost, digging in a circle of lantern light. He looked out the window toward the lightning-scarred pine at the edge of the yard.

Mia followed his gaze. “There are five little bodies under that tree,” she told him. “My parents lived in Chicago when they lost the two who would have been my older brothers. My Nicole was the only one to hang on long enough to make it to the cemetery. We might have been a large family. Think how different things would have been if even some of them had lived.” A hint of moisture glistened on her colorless eyelashes. “I'm grateful for one thing. At least Mama wasn't here to see her grandchildren die, too.”

McIntire reached toward her, but a stiffening of her shoulders warned him away.

“How ever did you bear it, Mia? How can you bear it even now?”

Mia twisted her long braid around her fingers. “When my little girl died and I was so sick, and delirious, I suppose, from the fever, I dreamed that I would climb to the top of the ski jump and fly off. As soon as I could stand up, I dragged myself out of bed and headed for that jump. I could barely walk, let alone climb, but I got myself to the top, dead set on flying off into eternity. I don't know where I even found the courage to climb up. The jump was new then so it was in a lot better shape, but you know how I've always been about heights. Anyway, I sure didn't have the guts to jump off.

“I went every morning for almost a month, every day thinking that this would be the day. Then Nick got sick and I needed to take care of him round the clock. After that I gave it up. I figured the jump would always be there. I still go up every now and then, just to reassure myself.”

“Mia—”

“Sorry, I don't mean to be morbid. It's comforting…and a great view…or it was until yesterday.”

She suddenly sat back in her chair, ceased tugging on the braid and flipped it over her shoulder. “So things turned out for the best after all, as far as you're concerned. If I wasn't such a coward, I might not have married the first man that came along. I might have waited for you—and you
might
have come back. But then if I wasn't a coward, I also would have taken that leap. Those could be your babies under that tree, and you'd have a wife alongside them.”

McIntire opened his mouth to protest, but she put out her hand and touched his cheek. “It's been lonely without you, John. I'm glad you're back.”

Before he could respond, she said, “She came this morning—Sandra. I know I should have talked to her yesterday, but I just couldn't. I probably wouldn't have opened the door today but she caught me in the studio. I told her Cindy looked like she was asleep. She told me I was a liar.” She wrapped her sweater over her chest and held it. “I never felt such hate. It's like she thinks if I hadn't been there to see it, it wouldn't have happened.”

“She has to hate somebody. Right now you're the one that's handy.”

“I guess so,” Mia responded with a sigh. She stood up to refill the coffee cups. “Pete Koski was here last night.”

McIntire was surprised that the sheriff hadn't mentioned it that morning. “I suppose he thought you might remember something more. Were you able to tell him anything new?”

“He didn't come to see me,” Mia answered. “He was talking to Nick. He asked him a lot of questions about yesterday morning, made him go through every move he'd made and what he'd seen. He asked about his feud with Nels, too.”