Free Past Imperfect by Kathleen Hills

asking for you at the funeral, and you hardly spoke to him when he did catch up with you. I know he thought you were avoiding him.”
    â€œWell, maybe I was,” McIntire admitted. “I just didn’t know what to say to him. He and Nels have been close friends for a long time.”
    â€œCloser than Nels and Lucy? You didn’t seem too tongue tied around her. ‘Needles and stuff!’ I came close to having a heart attack myself!”
    â€œI wouldn’t dare speculate on whom Nels felt a closer relationship with. The choice between Lucy Delaney and Wylie seems pretty cut and dried to me.” Leonie’s eyes crinkled over her teacup, and he went on. “I know it’s no excuse, I just have a hard time facing a sorrowful Wylie Petworth.”
    McIntire could count on the fingers of one hand the times he’d seen Wylie unhappy or angry, but every one of those times was indelibly etched into his brain. Since they were babies together, the sight of Wylie in a negative mood had filled him with a kind of foreboding. He tried to explain. “If Wylie’s not smiling, things aren’t quite right with the world. It’s like that opera, you know, the one with the clown.”
    â€œI don’t quite see Wylie Petworth as a clown.”
    â€œMaybe not, but he was always the cheerful one. Compared to Mia he was a regular Emmet Kelly, even through all his misfortunes.”
    â€œLosing his arm?”
    â€œIt started long before that, about the time the Association broke up.”
    McIntire was only six years old when the dissolution of the Gitchi-Gumme Association occurred. He had no knowledge of the events leading up to it, but its aftermath would be with him forever: the confusion and sadness of separation, and the bewilderment when Ragna Petworth chose to leave, not with her husband and son, but in the company of one of the group’s unmarried men, a laconic soul known to the children only as “Uncle Joe.”
    A wan and silent Roger Petworth had moved with Wylie into the home of his aged parents. His wife was heard from only once again, when she came forward to claim her share of the proceeds from the sale of the Association’s holdings. The following winter Roger Petworth died when his gun apparently accidentally discharged while he was hunting rabbits. To make the tragedy complete, the coming of spring brought with it the dismal discovery of the bodies of Ragna and her lover, spewed forth from the waters of Lake Superior, lashed tightly together, each with a single gunshot wound to the head.
    After hearing the story, Leonie regarded him with sadness, almost as if it had been he that had suffered those adversities. Then she patted his hand and spoke with her customary briskness. “All the more reason he could use a friend now.”
    McIntire sighed and raised her fingers to his lips.
    Minutes later he was traveling between fields where the rows of Petworth’s Small Fruits and Vegetables stretched lush, green and arrow-straight.
    Wylie’s forebears had not been farmers. His great-grandfather, St. Adele’s founder, was a seafaring Scandinavian first attracted to the region by its fishing and sheltered harbor. He later attempted to exploit the area’s slate deposits, an enterprise that soon foundered, but one that provided him with a Welsh son-in-law. When the slate business fell victim to the financial panic of 1873, that son-in-law, Llewellyn Petworth, left the community to turn his attention to other minerals. After a lifetime spent mining iron and copper, he’d retired here, a retirement that was cut short by the necessity of raising his newly orphaned grandson.
    McIntire felt a twinge of sadness as he turned into the drive—for the little boy who had gamely persisted in the face of calamity, and for the unfortunate transformation that his eventual success had wrought upon this small portion of the earth.
    After the turn of the