Buttons and Bones

by Monica Ferris

  “Been waitin’ to get a word in edgewise,” retorted the little man. He went on in an old-fashioned Minnesota accent, pulling out some vowels and changing ths into ds. “Maybe some o’ yoo-oo remember dere was a German POW who escaped from a camp near here an’ dey never found ’im?” Two of the old men nodded, and the little man continued, “They had five men walk away from there, you betcha, an’ caught four of ’em. Two built a raft, they was going to float down the Mississippi to New Orleans an’ stow away on a ship back to Europe. Saw a big city an’ t’ought they was there, heh, heh, heh.” His laugh was soft and high-pitched. “But they was in Minneapolis. I guess they didn’t realize what a big country this is. The other two was found in the woods a couple miles from the camp,” he continued. “But one was never found at all. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen years old at the time and I remember he had a funny first name. It was ...” He thought deeply, the crinkles on his forehead and around his eyes deepening into folds. “Jeeter? No. I remember it rhymed with Peter, but it wasn’t Peter.”

  “Well, isn’t that interesting,” said Lars, who could move silent as a ghost, and was suddenly behind Betsy.

  The little man started and gestured sharply. “You betcha. They published his picture in the paper and put up posters, but they never found ’im. My Aunt Pauline told me a bear probably got ’im, it was in the late summer he ran off, and that time of year them bears are eating anything they can get a paw around to put on weight for their hibernation.”

  “My grandmother told me a bear ate a dishtowel she had drying on the line one autumn,” offered the largest old man. He had small, sad eyes, a long nose, and scanty white hair.

  The little man said, “That ain’t the point; the point is, I bet that skeleton is the missing German soldier.”

  “Awww!” scoffed the fat man.

  But the others were silent, thinking this over.

  Betsy was amazed by this conversation. “What were German soldiers doing in Minnesota?” she asked.

  “Well, they had to put ’em somewhere!” replied the little man. “We was turning the tide in North Africa, capturing thousands of ’em. But Europe was still overrun by Germany, except for England, an’ England couldn’t take ’em all—and besides it was looking like Germany was going to invade. So they packed ’em onto ships an’ brought ’em over here. Just about every state had camps set up for them, I heard. I read somewhere that most of ’em were converted Civilian Conservation Corps camps.”

  The largest old man said, “I remember my dad went to CCC over at Remer in the thirties. He used to talk about cutting trail and building shelters in this very state park.”

  The littlest old man thrust in, “You bet, and during World War Two they repaired them camps and built fences around them and brought captured Germans to them. Italians and Japs, too, though I never heard of any of them in Minnesota.”

  “But wasn’t that dangerous, bringing combat soldiers to America?” asked Betsy.

  The little man snorted. “Not really. They took away their weapons, o’ course, and made ’em wear clothes with big letters PW painted on ’em, set guards on ’em—not that they needed guarding. Brought to the middle of this great big country—where was they goin’ to run to?”

  Betsy thanked the men for the information, and they went out to the SUV.

  On the ride back, Betsy said, “So that badge they found in the cellar ...”

  Lars said, “I’m betting it’s some kind of ID tag. It didn’t look like a dog tag, but maybe they were issued them at the camp—or maybe their own dog tags didn’t look like ours.” He fell into a thoughtful silence. “You know,” he said after a while, “it was a double badge, with the same name and some numbers on the top and bottom of it, and what looked like a row of dashes cut across its middle, maybe so you could break it in half. That’s not a bad way to do a dog tag; our way, making two of them, means they clattered every time you moved.” Lars, unsurprisingly, was a former Marine.

  Betsy, more surprisingly, was a former WAVE. She nodded, remembering how noisy they could be. Less so for the females, who could tuck them into a bra.

  “Why two of them anyhow?” asked Jill a little while later, over bacon and eggs scrambled with sweet peppers and onions—plain for the children.

  Betsy and Lars looked at each other. “In case you get, um, terminated,” said Lars at last. “Someone, on his way somewhere else, finds you in the field and takes one dog tag as proof you’re, um, and leaves the other one with you for easy identification.”

  “Oh,” said Jill, now aware this was not a suitable topic with the little pitchers present. “More coffee?”

  “None for me, thanks,” said Emma Beth in a perfect imitation of an adult.

  Betsy choked back a laugh. Emma Beth took herself seriously and perhaps it was cruel to show amusement when her dignity was on display.

  “Do you think it’s really possible Dieter Keitel was here at the cabin back in the forties?” Jill asked, carefully avoiding saying scary words like “die” and “skeleton.”

  “I guess so,” said Lars. “The question is, what was he doing here?”

  “Is Dieter a friend of ours?” asked Emma Beth.

  “No, darling, he’s someone who may have visited this cabin back before even your father was born.”

  Imagining a time that long ago was beyond Emma Beth’s ability, so she returned her attention to her eggs. “’Kay,” she murmured.

  “Nice!” announced Airey, waving his spoon.

  “What’s nice?” asked Lars.

  “Aaaaaae-guh!”

  “Well, we’re glad you approve. Now eat it all up.”

  “’Kay,” he said, very satisfied to find himself in a place where an echo of his big sister’s reply was appropriate.

  “Maybe nobody was home when he got here,” suggested Betsy.

  “Then who, um, terminated him? He didn’t hurt himself falling down those stairs, not with wooden steps and a dirt floor at the bottom. There were three fractures, remember.”

  “Three?” said Betsy.

  “Two on his head and one to his right arm.”

  “Wow. All right, he ran into someone here.”

  “I runned into Minnie at The Common,” announced Emma Beth, paying attention again.

  “Ran into Minnie. Yes, you did, silly girl, not watching where you were going.”

  “I fell down and hurt my knee.”

  Airey made a sound like a car engine being gunned, his version of scornful laughter, and waved his spoon. “Faw down!”

  The adults surrendered and focused on the children and their own breakfasts.

  They had barely finished clearing away the breakfast things when there was the sound of a vehicle coming into the clearing. Lars looked out the front window and said, “Uh-oh.”

  “Is the sheriff back again?” asked Jill, dismayed.

  “No, the media.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Not going to talk to them?” asked Betsy, hurrying to the window to peer out.

  “Not on your life,” said Jill. “Up here we are private citizens and prefer to remain that way.”

  A big white van with a satellite dish on top of it and a television station logo on its side was in the clearing. Men and women had emerged, one with a television camera on his shoulder, another with a furry microphone on a boom, yet another in a close-fitting suit, her perfect hairdo being blown a trifle awry by a vagrant breeze.

  After they got set up, the woman stepped in front of the little porch and Betsy could hear her say, “On me in three, two, one . . . This is your KCCT reporter Marla Johnson from the scene where a human skeleton was discovered in a root cellar yesterday. Sheriff Randy Fisher refuses to speculate on the identity of the skeleton or how it came to be under this cabin.” Pause. “Cut.”

  The man with the camera let its nose drop toward the ground, and Ms. Johnson turned to knock on the door.

  Lars opened it and came out, and the camera came up again. The reporter sa
id, “Good morning. I’m Marla Johnson—”

  Lars interrupted her in a voice that brooked no argument. “We have nothing to say. Please clear off our property. Thank you.” He turned and came back inside.

  The reporter blinked at the closed door then turned to face the camera. “That was Lars Larson, new owner of the cabin in which—under which the skeleton was found.”

  She tried knocking on the door again, but it stayed shut. She looked around and saw Betsy at the window, but Betsy immediately withdrew.

  The crew filmed the cabin from various angles and went away.

  Lars, Betsy, and Jill spent the rest of the morning working to clear the beautiful white pine floor of its coverings of linoleum and musty carpet. The floor—whose wood looked more yellow than white to Betsy—appeared to be in good shape, no stains or severe scuffing. Twice cars appeared in the clearing bringing members of news agencies. Lars patiently repeated his initial reply to their request for an interview.

  Between visits the cabin was emptied of the carpet and linoleum coverings. Then the bathroom walls and floor were diagramed and measured. After a light lunch—spent ignoring the persistent knocking of another television crew—Lars said, “The heck with this. Emma Beth, my little sweetheart, how would you like to go see the turtle races?”

  The child’s face flushed pink and her mouth opened with delight, her light blue eyes fairly shooting sparks. “Can we go? Can we go right now? We should go right now so they won’t be over and we’ve missed them.”

  “Right now,” said Lars.

  Everyone piled into the SUV, and Lars, his foot a trifle heavy on the accelerator, took them out to Highway 6, down the other side of Thunder Lake, and past the shore of Big Rice Lake. He drove right by Laura Lake, between Upper Trelipe and Little Bass Lake, split Inguadona Lake, came within hailing distance of Rice Lake and Cooper Lake and on to the shore of Girl Lake—and Longville. All in less than twenty minutes and without even nearing all the lakes in the area.

  Longville was a pleasant little town with very broad streets and lots of shops catering to tourists. Lars found the street with the statue of the turtle, correctly surmising that it marked the site of the races about to begin. There was already a crowd gathering and he had to park in a lot two long blocks away.

  The “racetrack” was two circles painted in the middle of the broad street, one about four feet in diameter, the other circling it, about eight yards across. A low stage had been set up alongside it, fronted by five-gallon buckets filled with annoyed or frightened or confused turtles. On the stage, a man with a microphone was encouraging children to come forward and, for an entry fee of three dollars, select a turtle to race. All the turtles, he said, were fresh caught and would be released at the end of the day. “No professional racers allowed,” he asserted, mock seriously.

  Airey picked the first turtle he saw and promptly dropped it onto the asphalt when it came out of its shell and scratched his fingers lightly with its claws. Betsy picked it up and tried to interest him in it. He was willing to look, but not anxious to take it back. It was a lively, good-size turtle, so Betsy kept it for him.

  Emma Beth, on the other hand, was looking for a soul mate and went peering into bucket after bucket. She was on the last one before a turtle looked back at her with what she interpreted as a friend-for-life eye.

  The rules of the races were simple. For each heat, a child placed his or her turtle inside the smaller circle, holding it in place until the command to start was given. The first turtle to cross the border of the outer circle won.

  The turtles, new to the game and in any case not particularly interested in racing toward a shouting crowd of humans, mostly retreated to the security of their shells and refused to move. Others went in fits and starts. One or two wandered at random inside the larger perimeter. But occasionally, and inevitably, one would manage to cross the yellow line, to the cheers of its temporary owner—and sometimes the tears of a loser.

  Airey’s turtle was the vague sort—it set off with a will, but quickly lost its compass and began to draw a meandering line that never approached the finish.

  Emma Beth’s turtle set off in a determined straight path that should have made it the winner. But there was another turtle that apparently had grasped the rudiments of the competition and set off in a fast scramble for the border, crossed it, and nearly vanished into the crowd before its delighted owner could retrieve it. Emma Beth’s soul mate finished second.

  Jill made everyone who had handled the turtles wash their hands before taking them to the ice-cream shop for a consolation ice-cream cone.

  Nine

  ICE-CREAM cones eaten, they all lingered to watch more races. The crowd cheered the turtles on, and a small group of rowdies got busy taking side bets.

  “Excuse me,” said a female voice, and Betsy looked around to see a slender woman about her own height, with hair dyed a chocolate brown with blond streaks in it. Her face was lined, but her broad smile revealed good teeth, and her blue eyes were shining. Jill took the childrens’ free hands, prepared to retreat if the woman proved to be a reporter.

  “I’m Johanna Albright. Are you the people who found that skeleton in your root cellar?”

  “Why do you ask?” said Jill, taking two steps back while looking around for a photographer.

  “Because if you are, then I imagine you are also looking for information about the German POW camps in this area, and I know almost everything about them.”

  Lars said, “Who told you we wanted to know about the German POW camps?”

  The woman waved her hands impatiently. “It’s all over town that the skeleton is probably that German prisoner who ran off from one of the camps back in 1944 and was never found.”

  “Where were the camps, do you know?” asked Betsy.

  “There was one right in the area. I’m from here; I actually remember seeing German soldiers working in Longville. They painted our city hall. They were very handsome, I remember my mother and older sisters talking about how good-looking they were. They weren’t treated badly, my mother said a neighbor used to bake treats for them, and they had soccer competitions and wood carving contests with other camps. I have a memory of them going by in the back of a great big truck one winter, going to the forest to cut down trees. They waved at us and we waved back. They were only here for about a year, two winters and a summer. Then the war was over and they were shipped back home. They were all afraid of the ruin their country was left in. Some of them got engaged to women here so they could stay in America.”

  Johanna was bubbling over with information, which she shared with smiling enthusiasm.

  “Here,” said Jill, noticing that people were beginning to eavesdrop, “let’s get out of this crowd. Is there a place we can sit down?”

  With the crowd thinning, there were two vacant tables outside in front of the ice-cream shop. Lars led the way to the farther one, taking two chairs from the nearer so everyone could sit. The table and chairs were metal, spray-painted aqua and cream. The chair legs squealed on the concrete patio as they were pulled out and everyone sat down.

  “It’s nice of you to volunteer to talk with us,” said Jill. “I’m Jill Larson, this is my husband Lars, this is our friend Betsy Devonshire, and these are our children Emma Beth and Erik.”

  “I’m so glad I found you!” gushed Johanna. “I was afraid you’d get away before I had a chance to talk to you. I’m the local expert on the camps. I’ve written articles about them and everything.”

  “How did you find out about the skeleton?” asked Lars.

  “Well, it was all over the news last night, so anyone who didn’t already know found out then. But some of us knew before the news came on. It was Mavis Johnson who told me over lunch at the coffee shop about it probably being that lost German POW. I don’t know where she heard it, but when I told Allie Burnside after lunch, she’d heard that, too.”

  Betsy smiled; the famous Excelsior grapevine was not the sole member of its speci
es.

  “Do you remember some of the German prisoners running away?”

  “Oh, yes. Well, I remember the grown-ups talking about it. My father said two of them built a raft to float down the Mississippi on, intending to get to New Orleans and stow away on a ship bound for Europe. They drifted at night and slept in the fields by day and after many days came to this big city and were pleased they’d made it. But it was only to Saint Paul, where they were caught and sent back. They had no idea this was such a big country, you see.” She chuckled, and shook her head at the ignorance of the two unlucky POWs.

  “What about the one who was never captured?”

  “Yes, isn’t that interesting that they’ve found that skeleton in that cellar? Do you suppose they really are his bones?”

  “I think we’re going to have to wait for the police to finish investigating before we know for sure whose bones they are.”

  “Mama, can I have some more ice cream?” asked Emma Beth, exceedingly bored by this conversation.

  “May I have some more ice cream, and no, you may not.”

  Betsy asked, “Do you know where the POW camp around here was located?”

  “Down on a lakeshore, Woman Lake, I think. I understand there are ruins of the old barracks, nearly hidden among raspberry bushes. But you shouldn’t go for a look because this time of year there are lots of bears in there eating the ripe berries.”

  “Do you know anything about the Army major who disappeared about the same time?” asked Jill.

  Johanna frowned over that for a brief while. “I remember hearing about it years later, not at the time—I was just a little girl, and either the talk went sailing over my head, or they didn’t talk about it in front of us children. It was apparently quite a scandal—but that happened in the winter. I remember them saying something about him catching a train in a snowstorm, and the POW who never got found ran away in the summer.”

  So much for Betsy’s forming theory that the murder of Dieter Keitel and Major Farmer’s disappearance were related. She sighed.