Free Witch Cradle by Kathleen Hills Page A

by June and indicated an even higher goal may be announced soon.
    It had taken a bit of convincing to get Sulo Touminen to agree to McIntire’s digging up the old well. He limited his revelations to the finding of the Falks’ bill of lading. He didn’t say where, but if Sulo had the mental powers of a walleye, he could easily figure that out. Given road conditions, there could have been only a limited number of places McIntire visited prior to coming to see Sulo himself on the morning of the storm. Limited to one—the Thorsens’.
    Sulo’s grudging acquiescence meant that McIntire didn’t have to try to talk St. Adele Township’s bristly justice of the peace, Myrtle Van Opelt, into issuing him a warrant. McIntire hoped his lack of discretion wasn’t too large a price to pay.
    Sulo was vague about the cistern’s exact location, and he had no interest in joining the constable in digging around to look for it under two and a half feet of snow.
About ten yards west of where the house used to be
, was the best he could do. “I dumped in some sand and put the cover—a buncha planks—back over the spot,” he’d added, “just in case things loosened up. Didn’t want the horses falling through. It’s pretty much rotted away now, but there might be some sign of it.”
    His sister had been a little more precise, sitting silently at her oil-cloth covered table, drawing a neat map on the back of the envelope the electric bill had come in, using the barn and remaining lilac bushes as landmarks.
    McIntire stuck his shovel into the snowbank and rotated the chart to find some correlation with the scene before him.
    Touminen used most of the acreage for hay, which he stored in the swaybacked barn, the only structure left to show that anyone had ever lived here. He hadn’t begun using the fodder yet this winter, so the road into the place wasn’t cleared. And it was a long road, a quarter-mile, McIntire reckoned. The Falk homestead would have been an isolated spot even in the thirties, when the area’s population was considerably higher than it was now.
    McIntire shouldered his shovel and waded into a drift up to his thighs. An investment in a pair of snowshoes was an increasingly attractive idea.
    Map in hand, he spent over an hour scuffing through the crusty snow, prodding with a shovel, before he hit what sounded like wood. After getting rid of what felt like a ton of snow, McIntire had only to remove a few rotted splinters of board. Still, it was mid-afternoon before he’d cleared the space down to the slightly sunken frozen ground.
    Leaning on his shovel, feeling the snow in his overshoes turning to slush and the sweat chill on his neck, he hesitated. What was he doing here? Was there really a chance that he was going to find some Robert Frostian truth at the bottom of a well, or was this excursion just another manifestation of cabin fever? An exercise to stave off the crushing monotony of the Michigan winter? Would his time be better spent ice fishing?
    On the face of things, this seemed senseless, a shot in the dark, but maybe Occam’s razor would prevail, the simple explanation would be the correct one. Mr. and Mrs. Falk had disappeared. It was as good a place to start looking as any.
    He looked at the threatening sky, dragged a few of the bountiful supply of broken spruce branches to mark the spot, and drove off to the home of Harald,
aka
“Gopher,” Anderson and his Bucyrus-Erie 10-B shovel.
    ***
    McIntire pulled his car into the shadow of a genuine man’s vehicle.
    After the war, Anderson had got hold of a couple of retired army trucks, including the flatbed on which he transported the masterpiece of his fleet, the real tribute to testosterone: the Bucyrus Erie 10-B shovel. He’d bought it from one of the mining companies, and he claimed to be able to dig up, move, or knock over anything smaller than a courthouse. The man was