The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies (16 page)

Chapter Thirty

McIntire had hated leaving the house unguarded. Someone had been there, and that someone could be back. But he didn't have much choice. He couldn't take the evidence with him, and he couldn't lock the door. His best course of action would have been to leave his car to make it look like the house wasn't empty, and take the path to Thorsens' that Mia had been traversing so frequently of late. But he hadn't used that path in better than forty years, had no idea where to find it, and his flashlight batteries were dead. He'd finally decided to compromise by turning on a few more lights and moving Hofer's Oldsmobile from under the trees to a more prominent position. It might fool anybody who didn't know better.

He'd stood in the Thorsens' doorway only long enough to ask Nick to track down somebody from the sheriff's office, and to determine that Mia and her charges had left no bones or fancy stones on the table when they finished their cleaning.

“You might ask Father Doucet,” Mia told him. “He went over to do the milking.”

“Maybe you could call him?” McIntire asked. “Just say we'd like to talk to him. You don't have to tell him what it's about on the phone.”

“Really, John, I'm not a complete idiot!”

McIntire left without taking time to placate Mia's injured ego. Life would have been much simpler if the Hofers had put in a telephone.

The entire trip couldn't have taken more than fifteen minutes, twenty at the most, but as he rounded the corner toward the old school, he swore to himself. A hulking shape showed through the trees directly behind Hofer's car. When he approached, his headlights illuminated Periodic-Deputy Sheriff Adam Wall's pickup truck.

Wall stood waiting at the foot of the steps. “She back?”

“No,” McIntire told him. “How'd you get here so fast?”

“Fast? In my old beast? I was just driving by to check on things. What's going on?”

“Step inside. You just might be the man who can tell me.”

Wall stared at the grotesque centerpiece for some time before turning to McIntire. “Why? You figure I've had experience with this sort of stuff? Sneaking through the bushes in my loincloth, tracking down deer? Maybe chipping out a spear point or two in my spare time?”

The reply was cold, as it might have every right to be, if McIntire didn't know for a fact that Adam Wall
had
attempted once or twice, with pitiful results, to reproduce the weapons of his ancestors. He waited.

Wall gave in. “It could be a weight for a net.”

“Fish net, you mean?”

“Ya.”

“Would it have been used by Indians around here?”

“Indians and plenty of other people around here.” The hand glistened in his flashlight beam. “Where did this come from? Why would these people have it on their kitchen table?”

McIntire shook his head. It must have taken some trouble, shining up the bones, wiring them together, arranging them in a properly grotesque position. “Someone had to have come in early this evening or late this afternoon. What kind of person would leave such an object for a sickly widow and her children?”

“Someone who wanted to scare them?”

“It scares me.” Not the least because of its spooky resemblance to Reuben Hofer's slender hand in death, extended in an offering of his own blood.

“Are you sure it's not something that was here in the house? This was a school once, maybe there was a skeleton for the science classes?”

“There wasn't. At least not when I went to school here, and it closed not long after. Everything worth having would have been moved to the new school.”

The two men went silent as vehicles approached from opposite directions—Pete Koski's lumbering Power Wagon and another McIntire was rapidly learning to recognize, Father Adrien Doucet.

Apparently Wall did, too. “What's he doing out here?”

McIntire hadn't expected Mia's phone call to bring the priest running. He said, “Beats me. It's a little late for bird watching.”

“What's that?”

“Guibard says the father is a bird watcher.”

Adam Wall threw back his head and laughed like a lunatic. “Bird watcher? He's a bird stalker!”

“What does that mean?”

“He ain't admiring their plumage. He
eats
them. Tweety birds, robins, blue jays, hummingbird tongues, for all I know.”

Wall didn't sound like he was kidding. McIntire had heard of such in Europe, but…. “He
eats
them? You mean…? How?”

“Roasted, maybe with a dash of wine, wrapped in bacon, possibly, on a nice bed of rice.”

“I mean how does he catch them? Nets?”

“Bite your tongue! He shoots them with a twenty-two. He can pick the eye out of a sparrow at a hundred yards.” Now he did sound like he was kidding.

“Are you sure this isn't all just talk?” McIntire asked. “Have you seen it for yourself?”

“Seen it? I've tasted it. Not bad either. Not something I'd go to all that trouble for myself, but not bad.”

Adam Wall's parents were regular church goers, and Adam would be likely to know more about Doucet than McIntire did. Maybe the man had other unseemly habits.

“Has he been here long?” McIntire asked. “He seems fairly young.”

“He's older than he looks, I think. He was here before I left for the army, and he was here when I got back. After that he was away on sabbatical—odd thing to say, ‘sabbatical' sounds like something priests should be on permanently.” He glanced toward the door as the roaring of engines drew closer. “Anyway, he went home for a while after the war, back to France for a year.”

“Back to France? Does he have family there? I had the idea he was from down south somewhere. His bragging it up was one of the reasons my mother decided to head for warmer pastures.”

“He grew up in Louisiana, but his mother was from France, and I think he might have been born there. In a small village, Oradour-sur-Glane. He still
had
family there.”

“All killed?”

“I would imagine so.”

Brakes and gears shrieked like a covey of banshees, and a minute later the Mutt and Jeff pair of sheriff and priest trotted up the steps.

Koski circled the table, peering at the object from all directions, while Doucet hung back, staring as if he half expected the hand to hurtle through the air and grab him by the throat.

McIntire asked, “Was it here when you came to milk the cow?”

“No.” Doucet spoke distractedly, his gaze still trained on the bones, then gave a shake of his head and came back to life. “That is to say, it might have been, but I wouldn't have seen it. I only came inside to put the milk in the cellar. I didn't go into the kitchen.”

“What time did you get here?”

“I can't say, exactly. Seven-thirty, quarter to eight, something like that. I was here about forty-five minutes. I know, it's only one cow, but I'm a little rusty. ” His gaze went back to the hand, and he took a step closer. “What do you suppose is going on here? I can see that someone might have had a grudge against Reuben. Someone who knew him from the CO camp. But he's dead now. Why keep after his widow?”

“Did you know all along that Hofer spent time here?” Koski, leaning with his hands on the table, didn't look up. “You didn't say anything?”

The Adam's apple bobbed above the white collar. “I didn't think to mention it. I suppose I thought it was up to Mary Frances to tell you. She didn't like people knowing.”

“But she told you.”

“I'm a priest.”

Koski straightened up, eyes narrowed as if he might like to see proof of that, but then he smiled tolerantly and nodded in understanding. Obviously he still intended an attempt at availing himself of those priestly confidentialities. He turned his attention to McIntire. “What time did
you
get here?”

“Quarter past nine, maybe. I'm just guessing. It could have been later. It was getting dark when I got here, and completely dark by the time I left.”

“The bones look pretty old,” Koski observed. “Whatcha think?”

He addressed the question to Adam Wall, whose face froze as it had with McIntire's earlier implication of possible genetically bestowed expertise. “Believe it or—”

“That thing,” McIntire hastily indicated the carved stone, “is almost certainly pretty old.” A spark kindled in a far corner of his brain.

Koski tucked his shirt-tail in more snugly and hitched up his belt. “I'll get the camera and the fingerprint stuff,” he addressed Adam Wall, oblivious to the set of the deputy's jaw. “In the meantime, you might as well have a look around.”

McIntire followed the sheriff down the steps. He felt mildly guilty over his attempt to get out of earshot of Doucet, but nudged Koski off a few yards and asked, “Remember our pseudo-prospector friend from last summer, Professor Gregory Carlson?”

“How could I forget?”

“He's the expert on this sort of thing,” McIntire reminded him. “We could send him a picture.”

“No need for that. He's back. All settled into his old camp. Can't stay away from us. ”

He'd stayed away from McIntire, hadn't looked him up, let him know he was back in the neighborhood, and McIntire felt an embarrassing unmasculine discomfort at the slight. He wasn't particularly surprised that Carlson had returned; the guy had been positively enraptured with whatever it was he was snooping around for.

The narrow silhouette of Father Adrien appeared behind the screen. Koski slapped a mosquito on his neck. “I still think there's something funny about that guy. He looks like a Goddamn cat burglar.”

“Worse,” McIntire told him, “he's a bird watcher.”

***

The drive home was no where near long enough to sort through the Hofer family saga's latest episode. If Reuben Hofer had gotten hold of some sort of Indian artifact, he might have passed it on to someone he knew for safekeeping while he was in prison, and they could have wanted to give it back. Was that what Nickerson and Wanda were getting at? Then why not just turn it over to Mary Frances? Why give it back at all at this point? And why leave it perched on the kitchen table, offered up in such a macabre way, in a slightly used hand? Did this have anything at all to do with Hofer's murder, or was it just that his death let his old friends know he was still around?

The mailbox held another letter from Leonie, and the light bill—a bill that might be bigger than necessary; lights were glaring from the kitchen and bathroom windows. He'd have to be more careful to turn things off.

Kelpie waited at the door, thumping her tail without a hint of accusation, which only increased McIntire's feelings of guilt. She should have been let outdoors hours ago. He carried her down the steps to set her in the grass, and watched her toddle off into the dark. Her backbone was getting sharper by the day. How old was she now? Sixteen? He had no idea. It would be sad if she didn't last until Leonie got back.

He sat on the steps to read the letter by the porch light. Leonie had spent the past few days visiting Stevie and her husband, and the adored grandson, Charles. Charles must be growing up; he'd been “Chuckie” until now. Stevie had been out of sorts, and Leonie wasn't sure that she and Angus were getting along all that well. She missed him and wished he had come along with her.

McIntire didn't recall being invited. Not that he would have gone if he had been; he had scant interest in passing the time with out of sorts step-daughters.

Porch lights and summer nights were a bad combination. He hadn't finished reading the first page before the mosquitoes drove him indoors.

How had he managed living alone all those years? He'd seldom cooked his own meals, that was true, and he'd lived most of that time in a city of eight million people and gone out to work every day. And gone home alone every night. When he thought back on it, it made him sad. So much of his life had been wasted.

He cracked three eggs into the pan and shoved them aside to make room for the dry heel of the last loaf of bread.

It still nagged at him, the idea that it should be simple to discover who had killed Reuben Hofer. There were such a limited number of possibilities. Bruno Nickerson would probably not have come waltzing over to see the widow the next day if he'd done it, and certainly Wanda Greely wouldn't have. Sure, there were others, but presumably the sheriff had done a thorough job of checking around the neighborhood, and hadn't turned up anybody with either the weapon or a motive.

Try as he might, McIntire couldn't ignore it. There were two formerly independent young men who'd had every reason to resent, and despise, and fear, the virtual stranger who'd invaded their territory and rendered them slaves.

The girl had squirmed like an eel when he asked if her brothers knew how to shoot a gun. She'd been slippery as an eel, too, only staring off into space and singing the same old tune; her father didn't allow guns. It might be worth asking the youngest one. He probably wouldn't have the wit to lie about it. McIntire could have taken the opportunity to search the house again when he had it, but it would have been a waste of time. If they had owned a gun and were lying about it, it followed that they had a damn good reason for lying, and the gun would now be long gone. If they hadn't got rid of it, Koski and his deputies would most likely have found it in the aftermath of the ransacking. The minute Reuben Hofer turned up dead, the entire area, including his home, should have been closed down and every nook and cranny searched. No point in fretting about that now.

McIntire swallowed the last of his supper and got up to answer the clatter of claws on the steps and the scratch at the door. Kelpie's tail thumped as she sniffed at his ankles.

“Yes, I'm afraid I've been seeing another dog,” McIntire admitted. “He means nothing to me, I assure you.” He straightened the rug by the stove so she might have the pleasure of rumpling it to her satisfaction. “Time to turn in, tomorrow is another day.” He looked at the clock. “I stand corrected. Tomorrow is today.”