The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

They were so thin. And, once again, so quiet. Mia cut two more slices of chocolate cake and refilled their plates. “Would you like a glass of milk?” She hadn't thought of it before. She never drank milk herself, but she supposed kids would. Joey nodded, but Claire just said “no” and picked up the cake in her hand. Then she said, “The coffee smells good.”

Did that mean she wanted a cup? Why didn't she just ask?

“Would you like some?”

She nodded, and Mia brought out another cup. “Cream?”

Another nod. The child diluted the coffee to the color of sand, and took a sip.

Mia shook the bottle and poured Joey's milk. “The frosting got sort of hard.”

“If you put a teaspoon of syrup in, it's better.” They were the first real words the girl had spoken since they sat down.

“Is that what your mother does?”

She searched Mia's face, apparently baffled by the question, before responding, “I know how to make cake…and frosting.”

Mia's cake had come compliments of Betty Crocker. She wracked her brain for a topic that wouldn't further demonstrate her inadequacies, and was saved by Joey, who swiped the back of his hand across his upper lip and stated, “I think I'll go outside.” The screen door slammed behind him before the words were out of his mouth.

“There's a young man in a hurry,” Mia said.

“He likes to play outside.”

“What about you?”

Once again her dark-circled gaze showed only bewilderment. Mia elaborated, “Do you like to play outside, too?”

“I'm too big to play.” She seemed genuinely incredulous that Mia should mistake her for a mere child. “I like to
be
outside.”

“I do too. Let's take this out.”

They picked up the plates and transferred themselves to the porch. Claire perched on the edge of the wicker chair, barely reaching the table.

Mia went back to searching for a safe topic of conversation. “I know you're a big help to your mother.”

She could have done better; Claire only took another bite of her cake.

“She'll need even more help now.”

That brought a nod.

“Maybe your aunt will come back to stay for a while.”

“Probably she will.” She picked a lump of the fudge-like frosting from her plate and popped it into her mouth.

“You don't sound particularly happy about that.”

“She used to come sometimes, when we lived in Iowa.”

“Wasn't that good?”

“She was always after us to talk German, even though we don't know how.”

Reuben had spoken with a pronounced accent that made Mia think of her father. “Doesn't your aunt speak English?”

“Sure. She just thinks we should learn to talk German, that's all.” She sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “And besides, she's bossy as all get out.“

“Oh?”

“She acts like she has to do every bit of the work herself, and she's all disgusted about it, but she can't bear to let anybody else do anything if they did want to.”

“A martyr?”

“What?” Was the child finally admitting to not knowing everything?

“A martyr,” Mia said. “Somebody who does things they don't really want to do just so they can make a big deal of sacrificing themselves for the good of others, even if the others didn't want their sacrifices in the first place.”

“Ya, that's Sister. One of her best martyr tricks is putting stuff up high where I can't reach it. Then she sighs and rolls her eyes when she has to get it down herself.”

“If she takes over most of the housework, won't that make up for the bossiness? Why not just go read a book and leave her to do it? Take a walk? Play in the sand with Joey?”

Although it was sometimes difficult to determine if Joey considered his activities play or work. Whichever, he was thoroughly engrossed in it now, turning a handful of spruce twigs into a three-inch high grove in Mia's driveway.

“I just might,” Claire asserted. She gave a grown-up snort. “She's forever telling me how to do things.”

“Things you already know how to do?”

“Ya.” It was accompanied by an emphatic nod.

“I know how aggravating
that
can get,” Mia agreed. “Since Nick got sick and had to quit going to work, he spends half his time telling me how to do things I've been doing just dandy fine for thirty years.”

“Why don't you tell him to do it himself then?”

Now that was a good question. “Is that what you tell your aunt?”

“No. I just act like I don't hear her.”

“Me too.”

“But someday I'm going to tell her to mind her own beeswax.”

“Me too.”

“Maybe I'll learn how to tell her in German.”

“Good idea!” Mia's words were drowned in the honking of the geese and the roar of a rapidly approaching car. They looked at each other. “Father Doucet,” Claire said. Mia nodded. She looked out to see Joey scrambling from his miniature landscape.

“Is this Thursday?” Claire asked. “Father comes to teach Joey his catechism on Thursday.” She walked to the rail. “He's not wearing his priest outfit.”

Indeed, outside of the Roman collar, nothing about Adrien Doucet said “man of the cloth.”

“It's Friday,” Mia said. “Maybe it's his day off.”

Claire continued to stare. “He looks…different.”

He certainly did, less like a priest than a down-home leprechaun, slight and brown-skinned in bluejeans and a faded work shirt. Even Joey approached his favorite person cautiously.

He waved to Joey and opened the car's back door. At the sight of the violin case in his hand, the boy's face lit up like a sunrise. The promised fiddle lessons. Perfect timing for it.

Mia remembered the sink full of unwashed dishes and hurried down the steps to head the priest off.

“Good afternoon, ladies.” He spoke, as usual, in a muted and tranquil manner, suitably clerical. “Have you caught up on your sleep?”

“Almost.” Claire answered for both of them.

“So have I,” Joey chimed in. The little tyke should have been caught up for the next month.

“That's good. I've been to see your mother. She's feeling much better and said to tell you she'll be home tomorrow.”

Claire smiled and turned her attention to Spike, straining at the end of his rope to make after the squawking geese.

“It's good of you to come,” Mia said, “but if you're looking for the hoe-down it was last week.”

The priest smiled with the same perplexed expression Mia had seen on Claire's face a few minutes before. “What's that?”

“Just a joke, Father.”

“Oh?”

How thick was this guy? She floundered, “You look kind of like you could be headed for the Grand Old Opry.”

The light apparently dawned. “Oh! I guess maybe I do. I thought I'd go over to milk that cow after I leave here. But first—” He waved the instrument case—“do you have a quiet spot we could use?”

“Most all our spots are quiet, you can take your pick.” Mia began to feel that she was needling the priest and took pity. “The living room is fine.” She touched the child's shoulder. “Joey, you'd better go wash up before you handle Father's violin.”

He scampered off, and Mia herded the priest along the porch to the front door, out of the way of her unsightly kitchen. “You've been to see Mary Frances? What sort of shape is she in?”

A twinkle danced in Doucet's eyes, but he answered gravely, “No better than before, but no worse right now, thank God.”

If she wasn't better why was she coming home? “Is she expected to get worse?” Mia asked.

“She's not going to recover.” The reply was blunt and seemed somewhat indiscreet, especially coming from a clergyman.

Claire's footsteps and those of her dog sounded on the wooden floor. Mia drew the priest inside and away from the open door. “What is it that's wrong with her, exactly?”

“Myxedema. An underactive thyroid. It went on for years and got way out of hand before she had any treatment. She takes medication now, but her heart is damaged far beyond repair, and with her weight, it only gets worse.”

“Will Reuben's sister take the children?”

“And raise them in that…
Deutsch
penal colony? I hope that won't happen. The last thing this world needs is three more Reuben Hofers.” There was a chill in the strong words, expressed, as they were, in gentle monk-like tones.

“They're going to need someone to take care of them,” Mia said. “Especially these little ones.”

“Yes, they will.”

“I've got a big house.”

“You've got a very sick husband.”

It was true. Nick didn't take so much of her time now, but he would. And he wasn't going to recover any more than Mary Frances Hofer was. Eventually he would need her twenty-four hours a day. But these two babies needed her now. Mia looked down into the priest's curious brown eyes. “Please let Mrs. Hofer know that I'll help any way I can.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Three local people had admitted to knowing Reuben Hofer when he was a prisoner—Nickerson, Olson, and Wanda Greely. Two of those three had so far not accounted for their whereabouts when Hofer's house was being ransacked. You could possibly make that all three; Wanda Greely's claim to having been with her family was only worth how much her husband was unwilling to lie for her. It wouldn't be a bad idea to find out how long Wanda's mister had been around. He might have known Hofer, too. There was no reason, so far, to suspect any of the old acquaintances of skulduggery, and McIntire was prepared to reject Fergie Olson as even the most remote of suspects.

Before taking himself back to his own empty house, McIntire decided to swing by the Hofers'. He'd sleep better knowing that things were as they should be.

The cow stood near the barn, a deeper shadow in the dusk. When McIntire approached, she pushed her nose between the bars of the gate and licked at his sleeve. Her udder hung limp. Someone had done the milking, and, McIntire saw, latched the hen house door.

It was all peaceful enough, but he might as well check the house, just to be sure, and turn off a light that had been left burning in the kitchen, attracting a cloud of insects to the windows.

The cloakroom was uncluttered and smelled only faintly of old shoes and cellar.

The inner door was unlocked and had shrunk back to its pre-tropical dimensions, opening without a whimper.

Mia and the kids had managed to do a fine job without his help. The kitchen was swept and scrubbed to an unrecognizable level of spickness-and-spanness. He walked through to the living room.

The single day of dry air had also gotten to the maple floorboards, and the ominous creaks drawn forth by his footsteps transported McIntire ever deeper into a segment of his past he did not look back on with misty-eyed nostalgia. His memories of time here were almost universally dismal, capped by the time, when he was about ten years old, that he'd been forced to spend the night, trapped at school by a blizzard. Despite the presence of twenty or thirty other pupils, some of whom appeared to be enjoying the experience immensely, he'd been petrified. While the whispers and giggles around him died away, he lay on the floor with his knees pulled up under his coat, shivering at the scream of the wind through the bell tower, and watching grotesquely elongated shadows cast by the oil lamp dance across the mournful face of Abraham Lincoln, an image that still figured in his nightmares.

During his visits of the past twenty-four hours, he'd been too distracted to pay much attention to his surroundings, and he now looked around with curiosity. The space had been considerably chopped up, so that the room was less than half the size of the original classroom. But Honest Abe was still there, spooky and sad-faced as ever, flanked by George Washington and…. What the hell was that? No dead president, but some sort of animal pelt. McIntire drew closer. A badger. Did they have badgers where the Hofers hailed from? Iowa or where ever it was?

A partition wall at the back separated off a small bedroom and the set of steps ascending to the two rooms under the eaves. McIntire didn't go up. Everything seemed to be in order, and he was beginning to feel uncomfortable about committing this invasion, even with the best of intentions.

He wasn't sure the remodeling would serve to put his goblins to rest. Even with the braided rug, and the lace curtains softening the tall windows, there was still more of bleak institution than family home about the place. He straightened the shade on a globe-shaped table lamp, flicked out the light, and hurried back through the kitchen.

That's when he saw it. Dead center on the jolly oilcloth covering the table, obscuring a robin feeding her young. A stone—smooth, shiny, doughnut shaped, sharply excised lines radiating from the hole in its center—lay glinting in the light, held delicately in the skeletal remains of a human hand.

Chapter Twenty-nine

It was dark. Pitch black, absolute dark. Claire couldn't even see where the window was. It was like she was wearing a blindfold. She could hardly tell if her eyes were open or shut.

Mrs. Thorsen had said it was bedtime and came upstairs with her. She talked while Claire got into bed, about what a long day it had been and Ma coming home tomorrow. Then she turned out the light and went downstairs. Just like that.

Claire stayed curled up stiff and quiet with the sheet pulled around her head like a hood and only her nose out poking so she could breathe.

She hated being scared. Some kids just snuggled down under the covers and went to sleep until morning. Joey did. But Claire was always still awake when Joey fell asleep. He didn't need to worry. Claire wouldn't be scared either, if she knew someone else was nearby, awake. It wasn't fair that she always had to be the last one to go to sleep.

Joey might be scared tonight, though; he'd never gone to sleep in a room by himself.

If only she could turn on the light. Even if she dared get up, she probably couldn't reach the string without a chair. Anyway she wouldn't want to reach for the string in the dark. Last year, at Angie Greenbush's Halloween party, Angie's cousin told a story about some kids that played a joke on a girl and tied an arm from a dead person to her light string. The girl went into her room and the other kids stayed outside the door to hear her scream when she grabbed the dead hand, but they waited and waited and didn't hear a thing. When they finally opened the door, the girl had gone crazy and was sitting on the floor, chewing on the arm.

Claire began to count in her head to push the memory of that story out of her brain.

At home she had a long piece of rag tied to the light string and then to the bedpost, so she could turn off the light after she got into bed. But she didn't. She never turned off the light until she could see the sky starting to turn pink. She stayed awake and she read. Even if she had to read
The Eagle's Mate
so many times that she knew it by heart. Even if she had to read the
Farm Journal
. She should have brought some of her books with her.

She heard a creak like somebody was coming up the stairs. Maybe Mrs. Thorsen really was a witch, or a murderer. She had a witch's cradle in her yard, and the biggest knife Claire had ever seen that she cut the bread with. She told Claire to be careful using it because Nick had started sharpening the knives every day. Maybe she tricked them into coming here to kill them.

Claire knew it wasn't true. When morning came, everything would be normal, and she'd wonder how she could have been so silly.

Being scared was a punishment for her sins. She knew that, too. Tomorrow she would be good. She wouldn't think any bad things, and she wouldn't tell any lies, like about Pa and the gun or about the burglar's car. But it wasn't fair. Jake and Sam committed lots of sins. They swore and they sneaked to the store and bought cigarettes, but they weren't scared of anything, and they snored like crazy all night long.

This was an old house. Mrs. Thorsen used to sleep in this room when she was a little girl, and she was old now. Sometimes old houses were haunted. Mrs. Thorsen's mother and father must have lived here, and they were both dead. Maybe their ghosts were here now. What if her mother's ghost knew Claire was in her daughter's bed and didn't like it? What if Pa's ghost followed her here?

Claire had dreamed about her father, that he was alive again. In the dream he was mad because she left the milk in the pail and let it go sour, and he wanted to take her lucky charm back. She tried to run, but her legs were too heavy.

A square of light flashed on the wall and moved around the room. It looked eerie, but it was only a car driving into the yard. The light disappeared and a door slammed, and Spike started barking.

The door at the bottom of the stairs opened, and Claire heard Nick say, “Get up there. One more yip and you're crow food!” In two seconds, Spike came bounding onto the bed, and Claire hugged him tight.

More doors opened and shut, and another man was talking. It was the google-eyed one. John McIntire. Mrs. Thorsen could like him if she wanted to, but that didn't change Claire's mind. He was mean to Spike, and she didn't like him hanging around Jake and Sam and asking her if they had a gun, and if Jake and Sam knew how to shoot. When she thought about that, it made Claire feel sick. Now he was coming to Mrs. Thorsen's in the night.

Jake and Sam weren't nice. They were mean, but they were her brothers. John McIntire was her enemy.