How Merle had met his end was another puzzle, but the district attorney was certain that Diana Turney had been responsible for that public benefaction. Among her possible motives the most likely was a wish to be rid of an accomplice who might, if discovered, implicate her in Carl’s and (perhaps) Judy Johnson’s deaths.
And in how many others the district attorney did not want to speculate. For in the smokehouse in which she’d died, there were traces of other incinerated remains, which the forensic examiners had tentatively identified as human. Any more exact identification would have been impossible, and so this gruesome possibility was also withheld from the media. Merle was known to have assisted Diana in the slaughter of a number of pigs that had been raised in a sty on the property, and it might well have been the bones of these pigs that were found in the charred rubble of the smokehouse. Or, as the coroner suggested, six of one and half a dozen of the other. Sometimes it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. The county did not need the publicity of having been home to a team of Jeffrey Dahmers.
That left only Diana’s own misdeeds to be accounted for. It was she, certainly, who’d set fire to Navaho House, in which her own mother and Louise Cottonwood and one of the residents, a Mrs. Gerhardi, had perished. That the death toll was limited to those three was chiefly due to the heroic efforts of Louise Cottonwood. Diana had clearly intended for her husband, Alan Johnson, to be among the victims of the blaze. Indeed, in view of that insurance policy, his death had probably been her main object.
And she could have succeeded in her whole enterprise, inheriting her husband’s properties and a share of her mother’s estate, plus the insurance on Navaho House, not to mention money her mother had tucked away. Nearly a million dollars, all told.
That accounted for everything but the question of how Diana Turney herself had died. It was clear that after setting fire to Navaho House she had driven back to the Kellog farm, and very soon after that had died, trapped inside the burning smokehouse.
Diana Turney, surely, had not set the fire in which she’d been immolated. Nor had it been an accident. The old wooden siding had been doused with lighter fluid and gasoline. The empty containers had been found only a few yards from the smokehouse. And the door to the structure had been secured, from the outside, with a bent, rusty nail that had been serving in place of a padlock for years. It didn’t require a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that she, who’d murdered so many others, had finally been murdered herself.
But who could have done it? There were many who might have wanted to, but the likeliest candidates were all accounted for. Carl had been discovered, unconscious and half-starved, in the cellar of Merle’s cabin late the same night. Diana’s husband, Alan Johnson, had been left to die in Navaho House and was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital in St. Cloud at the time the volunteer firemen arrived at the Kellog farm, responding to the smokehouse fire. Diana’s sister, Janet, was discovered by those same firemen, locked in her own bedroom, in a state of stupor and confusion, and the key to the bedroom was later found in the pocket of Diana’s jeans.
That left only the most unlikely suspect, six-year-old Kelly Kellog. It was Kelly who’d reported that the smokehouse was on fire, having walked half a mile to the Kellogs’ nearest neighbor to use the phone. The Kellogs’ own telephone was later discovered in her brother-in-law’s car, which Diana had driven earlier to Merle’s cabin (there were clear tracks) and to Navaho House and, having set the fire there, back again to the farm. The district attorney had initially assumed that Diana herself must have taken the phone from the house to prevent its use while she was away.
But suppose that Kelly had put it there? Suppose the girl had killed Diana. An absurdity, on the face of it, but who else was there? She had motive, opportunity, and means.
She was also a very strange little girl. When he’d first questioned her, after the crew of the fire truck had reported Diana’s death and he’d driven out to the farm, Kelly had seemed almost weirdly calm. Trauma, you might think. But not so traumatized that she’d been unable to answer most of his questions. And her answers seemed too good to be true. Too pat, as though she’d been rehearsed before he got there by a canny defense attorney: she knew nothing of where her aunt had driven off to in the late afternoon, or how her mother had come to be locked inside her room. Why had she climbed up to the tree house in the apple tree from which, she claimed, she’d seen the glow of the burning smokehouse? Because, she said, she liked it there.
He’d let it go at that, not wanting to seem an ogre, but the next day, when the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall together, Kelly was even cagier and less forthcoming.
“Where is my aunt?” she’d asked him. “Is she all right?”
“Didn’t your mother tell you, Kelly?” he’d asked.
“Tell me what?”
“Your aunt Diana is dead. She was in the smokehouse when it burned.”
“Oh, dear,” she’d said, with no more reaction than if he’d told her the latest news from Serbia. “How terrible.”
That was when the first suspicion began to form. But it was already too late. He knew he’d never be able to nail her.
And anyhow, even if sweet little Kelly had begun to follow in the footsteps of Diana Turney, hadn’t the bitch deserved whatever she got? Kelly had been, in that respect, an instrument of justice.
The district attorney wasn’t going to make a public spectacle of himself by bringing charges against a six-year-old girl.
Still, he couldn’t resist one final shot, just to let her know he wasn’t that dumb. “Kelly, tell me one thing. Did you set that fire?”
Her eyes avoided his for a moment, and then ventured one triumphant glance that said, so what: he knew, and she knew that he knew, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“Wasn’t it an accident? That’s what Mommy said.”
And that’s what went into the report, death by accidental means. Case closed.
62
“And you don’t remember anything at all about that night?” Carl demanded of his daughter, whose answer this time was even less forthcoming.
Indeed, after a quick tremulous shake, she retaliated with “Mother says you had amnesia about the whole time you were away. And she can’t remember what happened since Mankato. Can’t I have amnesia, too?”
“Fair enough,” Carl agreed. “Let me ask you this, then. When did you start calling your mother Mother?”
“Well, what should I call her?”
“You always used to call her Mommy.”
“Aunt Diana said Mother is more respectful.”
Carl just nodded. He could imagine Diana saying that to Kelly easy enough, but there was something in the way Kelly talked about it that unsettled him. None of them were the same as they’d been a year ago. Maybe he had the same effect on the kid and on Janet. There was so much weirdness that they’d agreed they wouldn’t talk about, that it was like living in a Bluebeard’s castle in which every room was off-limits to everyone but the person inside it.
And now there was this latest weirdness for which Kelly had no explanation to offer, except that Louise Cottonwood had asked Kelly the last time she’d visited Navaho House if she would come along with her the next time she visited her son. Louise was dead now, but an old Indian from the rez had come round to the farm and asked if her parents would allow Kelly to go to Mercy Hospital in Duluth with him. The guy said he was Jim’s “spiritual advisor” and registered as such at the hospital, where Jim was still lying in a coma. He couldn’t explain exactly what Kelly had to do with it, except that Louise had recognized some kind of special spiritual power in the girl.
The whole thing made Carl uneasy and Janet suspicious. Both of them wanted to get back to everyday life and forget about all things misty and mysterious. But Kelly kept on pestering. She assured them that all she was going to do was kneel down by Jim’s hospital bed and pray for him alongside Gordon Pillager. Carl and Janet could be there too if they wanted.
At last, more from curiosity than from any belief in the power of Kelly’s prayers, they drove to Duluth in Carl’s Chevy and reconnoitered with Gordon in the hospital’s chapel, where he was all decked out in beads and feathers. Carl had been meaning to insist on getting an explanation from Gordon then and there, but it’s hard to get serious with someone who’s dressed up with such bizarre fuss.
Janet stayed in the waiting room, leafing through a copy of Minnesota Medicine, and Carl tagged along to Jim’s room after a nurse, a security officer, Gordon Pillager (already shaking a rattle and chanting), and his own daughter, who’d been equipped with a fringed buckskin shawl, a beaded headband, and her own rattle. If Carl had still been a pig, he could not have felt any sillier or more conspicuous bringing up the rear of such a procession.
In the hospital room the nurse helped Gordon get Jim’s limp body fixed up with its own array of beads and feathers, and then Gordon and Kelly really got to work with the noisemakers and bird imitations and even the Lord’s Prayer, which Kelly delivered in a loud, complaining whine, just as though she were at the Shop ‘n’ Save getting ready to have a conniption if she couldn’t get just what she wanted. Then, at some signal Carl hadn’t caught, there was complete silence. Gordon squatted down on his haunches and covered his head with his feathered arms, and Kelly placed her own hands over the mouth of the man in the bed.
The first thing Jim said, after his eyes had fluttered open, was “Carl Kellog! My God, whatever happened to you, man?”
Carl was too flabbergasted to reply. (In any case, it was a question he was not about to answer.) Evasively, he answered another question, one that Jim ought to have asked: “We’re at Mercy Hospital in Duluth.”
Whereupon, looking bewildered and dropping the medicine rattle onto the bedsheets, Kelly looked at her father and asked the question for which he’d just given an answer. “Daddy—where are we?”
First Gordon, then Jim, and at last even the security guard and the nurse started laughing.
Carl had finally caught on to what had been happening, but he couldn’t pretend to be amused. Kelly had been under some kind of spell (as Carl had been himself for such a long time), and that spell had finally been broken.
Kelly looked about the room in wonderment until her eyes fixed on the mirror fastened to the door of the wardrobe. “I’m all dressed up like Pocahontas!”
“That’s because you’re a Wabasha Indian now,” Gordon informed her. Then he let out a Wabasha whoop of celebration, which prompted the security guard to signal, by a wave of his hand, that the hospital had its limits on freedom of expression even with regard to religious ceremonies.
Kelly approached the mirror, entranced. “I am?” She looked over her shoulder to her father for confirmation. “Really?”
“If that’s what you want, honey, sure. But you’ll still live at home with your dad and mom.” Carl looked at Gordon, who had risen to his feet. “Right, Mr. Pillager?”
“Oh, yes. She can come to the Wabasha powwows, but she’ll live at home. Except on nights when she’s an owl, and then she’ll fly to the moon.”
“I will?” Kelly marveled.
Carl nodded, with some of the dismay that any parent feels on realizing that a child will grow up and leave the nest. “If he says so, darling, yes, I guess you will.”
63
State Highway Patrolman John Gerhardi would never know that the perp responsible for his grandmother’s death in the Navaho House fire was the same woman who’d made his own life so miserable by turning him into a pig. It’s not likely he would have mourned his grandmother’s loss that keenly if he had known of it. Having declared to his siblings, once and for all, that he was not going to help with any part of the never-ending expense of keeping the old babe in a nursing home, he had stopped visiting her. He had his own family to raise, after all, and he’d been too young to know his grandmother before she was sent off to Navaho House. He probably would have gone to the funeral if he’d been invited, his wife would have insisted, and he might have kicked in something for a wreath, but his only feeling would have been that kind of bite-your-tongue resentment we feel toward those to whom we’ve done a serious injustice.
In his few years of work on the highway patrol, John Gerhardi had accomplished more than his share of serious and not-so-serious injustices. He liked giving people grief: unlucky motorists, his wife, Lorraine, the kids, or anyone else who happened to get in his way. Usually there had to be a pretext for his lashing out when he did: somebody’d fucked up, and John was just setting the balance right.
Now that he was a pig, he didn’t need a pretext. He could be as mean as he liked, and who was going to know? He’d missed Nam, but he got the impression from some of his buddies’ more candid reminiscences that that was what it had been like there. The only problem with being as mean as he liked now was that a feral pig, living on his own, doesn’t get many opportunities. He had no drivers to harass, no children to bully, no friends to spar with, not even the proverbial dog to kick. He could snarl at smaller animals, but not pursue them; he could start deer, and snap at the few cows or sheep he came upon, but this was not grazing land. And he had to be wary of humans, even of children, for he knew he might be hunted down. Already the leaves were turning, and soon enough the hunters would be out with their rifles and scopes. John himself, if he had not become a pig, would have been out there with them in his new orange camo fatigues from the Minnesota Waters and Woodlands mail-order catalogue.
And so when he came upon Diana in the private hidey-hole he’d dug for himself, John was not disposed toward a policy of coexistence and tolerance. This was his last chance to wreak havoc and have some fun. Even if the human remnant of his mind had not recognized her as the one responsible for his present problem, the pig component of his nature would have gone after her. Pigs don’t like snakes.
The hidey-hole was under a ledge by a big rock at the edge of the swamp where the woods ended and bogland began. When John had first found it, the rock had been freshly swathed with yellow POLICE tape by way of marking the scene of a crime. The tape seemed unnecessary, for the spot attracted no other visitors than John himself.
As the days grew shorter and the rains set in, the space John had hollowed out under the rock ledge had a double benefit, for it kept off the rain from above and it formed a nice slurry of warming mud into which he could wedge himself for a night’s sleep.
Diana’s reasons for returning to the rock were more complicated than a simple need for warmth and shelter. Chief among them was John’s presence, for he was the last evidence of her witchcraft. By a quirk of topography of the sort that blacks out TV and radio reception in some areas, John had remained unaffected when others under the enchantment of Diana’s witchcraft and the mandragora had reverted to human form. Even those ectoplasmic anemones that had been the eruptions of Wes Turney’s unquiet spirit had vanished from the smokehouse area of the Kellog farm, for Wes Turney had achieved the vengeance that he’d sought and was, at last, at peace.
So all the evil that had swollen recently to such prodigious dimensions had shrunk back to just this innocuous garden snake, slithering nervously about lawn and pasture, woodland and bog, her human nature abrading more with each passing day, and snake in the ascendant.
Yet when Diana came upon John Gerhardi, enough of the witch still survived in her makeup, enough of the human in his, that the encounter was not just one more episode from the world’s endless miniseries of nature red in tooth and claw.
When John lunged at the snake that had so unwisely ventured into the shadowy warmth of his hole, and when he caught the luckless thing in his powerful jaws, there was still some ethical and human dimension to the encounter. It even appeared, for a little while, that Diana might enjoy some final, Pyrrhic victory, for even though John had done, and continued to do, irrevocable harm to her snake body, he had chomped down too far back from the head of the snake and its needle-sharp teeth. She got his right eye first. But John was an obstin
ate fellow. His own jaw remained clenched tight.
They died in that embrace. Only one of his eyes remained within range of her spasmodic jaws, and he found his way to the edge of the swamp, where bog gave way to quagmire. Her spirit, sensing his intention, begged to be released. She was more desperate than she had been in the flames of the smokehouse, for Wes had been with her then, and she’d known he had the power to save her. And so he had—for this.
John Gerhardi died quickly, but it takes a snake, even a badly wounded snake, a long time to drown. Indeed, some little shiver of sentience survived in the decaying tissues of the snake until the first firm freeze late in November. Then Diana Turney was gone, and even God Almighty could not have resurrected her.
64
On the night before he was to leave for the seminary, Alan Johnson came to dinner at the farmhouse, along with Jim Cottonwood. They had brought two bottles of French wine, but either it was spoiled or none of them knew enough about wine to appreciate its fine points. After they’d toasted each other with the fancy glasses, Carl and Janet switched to beer, and Jim and Alan opted for Shop ‘n’ Save diet cola, the only soda in the icebox.
The food was no better than the wine. A strict vegan dinner is hard enough to cook for company at the best of times, and the Shop ‘n’ Save produce department was a pretty sorry sight at the end of November. The main course was baked acorn squash, with a side dish of lima beans, and another of brown rice, but without butter, without eggs or cheese or milk, the veggies were pretty dull and a real dessert out of the question. Even Jell-O, it turned out, is taboo for vegans. But no one complained, not even Kelly. In its constraint and blandness, the dinner reminded Alan of those his mother had cooked at the rectory.
THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 32