Killer Smile (15 page)

Just then Mary heard an excited yelp from outside her window and looked up. The little boy’s fishing rod had bent almost to breaking, and he was reeling something in, braced against the strain and the moving water. His father held on to him with a sure hand. In the next instant, a fish shimmering with color and water burst from the river into the air, its long body torquing before it fell sideways into the river, with a splash.

Mary watched, transfixed; the fish was a strong, wild animal, fighting for its life, which is not the kind of thing you see at Tenth & Ritner. The boy cranked his reel, the father held on tight, and the trout jumped from the river again, thrashing more weakly. It happened one more time, the boy and the fish locked in a lethal battle that the boy eventually won, reeling in the fish close enough for his father to scoop it into the net. The boy jumped with glee, and the father gave him a hug. Then they bent together over the fish, and the father reached into the net. After a minute, they let the fish swim away.

Mary smiled at the happy ending. She had no idea that a fish could be so big or so powerful; they were so calm in the Chicken of the Sea can. Whatever the boy had tied on his fishing line had done the trick, and the line itself had to have been strong. She considered it. Fishermen had to know how to tie things onto other things. Knots were something that fishermen knew about. Even a city girl like Mary had heard the term fisherman’s knot.

On impulse she went with the
mamarella
socks to the borrowed laptop she’d set up on the desk, then hit the enter key to wake it up. She logged onto Google, typed in “fisherman’s knot,” and the cheery blue-and-white screen yielded the results of her search. She eliminated the first few links, which looked irrelevant, then about the middle of the page came upon what she was looking for: Get Knotted! Animated Knots for Scouts! She clicked on the link, and the screen changed as the computer found the website, which was for a Boy Scout troop in East Sussex, in the United Kingdom. Underneath the title was a bright blue list of all sorts of knots: bowline, clove hitch, figure-of-eight knot, fisherman’s knot.

Bingo!
Mary stopped there and clicked. Fisherman’s Knot, read the heading of the new page, next to a definition:

Instantly, at the top of the page, two animated pieces of rope, one bright red and one bright blue, started tying themselves into a very solid knot. She watched the rope tie and untie itself a few times, slowly enough so that even a Philadelphia lawyer could follow. She scanned the page and underneath were directions: Tie a thumb knot in the running end of the first rope — and Mary had to click on a link to learn about the thumb knot part — then tie a thumb knot in the second rope, around the first rope. Note the thumb knots are tied such that they lie snugly against each other when standing ends are pulled.

Mary double-checked the directions, picked up the
mamarella
socks from the desk, and followed the directions for the fisherman’s knot to tie them together. Then she pulled the reinforced toe of each sock. Presto! She had joined her
mamarella
socks! She yanked hard. Nothing would make them come apart. She was screwed if she needed to wear them, but she had taught herself one thing. No rope joined by a fisherman’s knot would ever come apart.

What had Mr. Milton said on the phone?
Problem was, he made the rope by tyin’ two ropes together…. The rope broke where he tied it.

Mary felt a bolt of excitement that was almost electric. The knot in the rope hadn’t held. Amadeo, a fisherman by profession, would have known how to tie a fisherman’s knot. So only one conclusion followed logically, and to confirm it, she didn’t need a ghost. Amadeo hadn’t tied that knot. Somebody else had, and there was only one other man with him in the beet field that day.

Mary reached for the phone.

“It’s almost closing time,” said the cashier at the Fort Missoula museum. It was the same woman in the denim shift, who had helped earlier today and was undoubtedly regretting it now. Mary was on a new mission, to find a mystery man.

“I know, and I’m sorry.”
Sorry, sorry, so very sorry.
They were upstairs at the museum, and on the way over, Mary had called Frank Cavuto and Jim MacIntire again and left more messages. Skinny Uncle Joey wasn’t in either, and it gave her a pang of homesickness she was too old for. She considered calling home and asking her mother why she was so frigging thin, but stopped because she’d have to reveal she was on Pluto.

“I do have some paperwork to finish up, but then I’ll have to get home.” The cashier hustled down the hall on the museum’s second floor, past the administrative offices, and halted at a door bearing a red sign that read: STOP!
YOU ARE ENTERING A
CURATORIAL ZONE! “Can you be done in an hour, Mary?”

“If I can’t, I’ll come back tomorrow, if that’s okay with you.”

“Certainly. The director said to help you in any way we can.” The cashier nodded. “What you’re looking for might be in here. If it isn’t, the U has a lot of archival information in the Mansfield Library, as you know.”

“Yes, thanks.” Mary had read as much, and was a library fan from way back. She would never have learned to love books if not for the Free Library of Philadelphia. She’d grown up in a household where there was only one book other than the Bible.
TV Guide.

“Our archive is more specialized, as you’ll see. It pertains strictly to goings-on and internees at Fort Missoula, during the internment.” The cashier opened the door with a jingling set of keys and flicked on the light in the small, windowless room, which was wall-to-wall history.

“Wow,” Mary said, meaning it.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” The cashier went to the end of one of the gray accordions, pulled a sheaf of papers from the last one, and handed them to Mary. “This may help you. It’s an index made by a volunteer named Dale.”

“Thanks.” Mary flipped through to a page in the middle, which read: P. 2001.048.223 — Photograph, Internees, Italian — Woods camp; P. 2001.048.224 — Photograph, Internees, Italians — Woods camp. Next to each catalog number was a description of the internees engaged in all sorts of activities: “doing forest work,” “bathing at camp,” “firing the furnace,” “working in laundry,” “raising chickens,” “feeding cats,” and “meeting with priest.” The index would save Mary tons of time. “Thanks so much, and God bless the Dales of the world.”

“I agree.” The cashier headed for the door with a little wave. “Good luck,” she said, and Mary got busy.

An hour later, the door reopened, and the cashier stood in the threshold, bearing a light jacket and her handbag, but it was an excited Mary who greeted her.

“Look what I found!” she said, putting the last of the accordions away. In her hand were two photos.

“Let’s see. I have a minute.”

“Great.” Mary set the two photos down on the top of the nearest box, and the cashier bent over them with her. They were two cracked group photos taken at different times; one was in the beet field on a sunny day, with eight Italian internees posed like a graduating class, four in front and four in back. Amadeo stood on the far right of the front row, recognizable from the alien registration photo. Mary pointed at him, delighted. “That’s the man I’ve been looking for!”

“Mr. Brandolini.” The cashier grinned. “Good for you! I guess these photos weren’t displayed downstairs because of the cracking.”

“I guess so.” Mary set out the next photo proudly, as if it were a trump card. It was another group photo, but of only five internees including Amadeo standing in a loose ring, leaning on hoes in the beet field. “Look at the first photo and the second. Notice anything similar about them, even though they were taken at different places and times?”

“Yes.” The cashier pointed. “Your man, Brandolini, always stands in the front row, far right. He was short.”

“True. That’s half of it.” Mary moved her fingernail past Amadeo’s head and one up, to the top row, where a tall man wearing a cap stood. “Also, in both photos, the man in the cap stands behind him.”

“He’s tall.”

Ouch
. “Okay, but he also has his hands on Amadeo’s shoulders in both photos.”

“Interesting.” The cashier looked over, intrigued behind her glasses. “And?”

“It suggests they were friends, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m wondering if this is the friend who was with Amadeo in the beet field, the day he died. Do you know how I can find out who this man is? Are there any camp records here? Any list of internees?”

“No records other than these.” The cashier gestured at the boxes, but Mary had looked through everything and still had finished before menopause.

“Would Mr. Milton know?”

“Probably not. He worked in the motor pool.”

Mary remembered. She’d double-check later. “Anyone else alive? Any of the other internees?”

“No. Some of the internees settled here, but they’re gone now.” The cashier shook her head, deep in thought. “There is the one internee, Bert, everyone knows him, but he’s out of the country now.”

Mary remembered that Mr. Milton had mentioned him. “What about any of the Japanese or German internees?”

“They didn’t mix, from what I understand.”

Mary had read as much. “What about anyone else from the camp staff? Mr. Milton can’t be the only one alive. Is there a listing of the staff, a directory I can use to track them down?”

“Hold on.” The cashier cocked her head, her steely hair catching the overhead light. “There was someone, the camp adjutant actually, who lives in Butte. He worked closely with the men, I understand. Maybe he would know.”

“What’s his name?”

“Aaron Nyquist.”

“Is Butte far?”

“Just down the road,” the cashier said, and Mary translated. In Montanaspeak, that meant two hours.

But the evening was young.

The Montana sky deepened from cobalt blue to a rich, grapey purple, until blackness fell like a bolt of felt in a photographer’s darkroom. Mary drove a very flat two hours into the pitch dark, leaving behind all the colors. A moonless nightfall obliterated the horizon and obscured even the peaks of Bitterroots. The only illumination on the empty highway was two jittery cones of light from her headlights, faint owing to the underpowered rental, and she flicked on the high beams for company. She thought she saw a herd of bighorn sheep running alongside the highway, but it could just as easily have been a group of Hell’s Angels in weird helmets. She hit the accelerator.

The Nyquist home was a small farmhouse of white clapboard with sharply peaked gables, typical of the Victorian houses Mary had seen out here. She pulled up in front and cut the ignition, looking over. Adrenaline had powered her drive, but it was ebbing away at the sight of the dark house. All the windows on the front floor were black, and the only light shone through the curtains on a second-floor window. The
FOR SALE
sign on the lawn told her she was just in time, but the lights upstairs told her that it was past Mr. Nyquist’s bedtime. She sat in the car, wrestling with her conscience. Was she really going to wake up the whole family, just to get the answers she wanted?

Go, girl
. If it was Amadeo talking, he was cranky from the drive. And his English was better than everybody thought.

Mary got out of the car into the darkness, but the lamp from the second-floor window cast almost enough light to illuminate the front walk. She headed up the walk, her gaze on the window, and the crunching underfoot told her it was made of pebbles, an oddly suburban touch. The house was silent, and she slowed her step. Maybe she should come back in the morning. She was about to turn around when she spotted it. A light, around the back of the house, shining down the gravel driveway. She walked toward the light and saw the outline of a small barn behind the house, on the right. It had a three-peaked roof, like the cut-off top of a star, which was barely visible against the night sky. Its bay doors hung open, and light poured from within. There were no animals inside; it was a barn converted to a garage, and under a bright panel of fluorescent lights sat a vintage pickup truck.

Mary walked toward it and got a closer look. The bed of the truck had shiny sides of varnished wood, and its green back door read
HARVESTER
in gleaming yellow paint. A large blue machine sat next to the truck, which looked like a compressor or something equally foreign, and the walls of the tiny garage were blanketed with white Peg-Board, displaying tools hung in graduated order. Mary reached the doorway and stood there a minute, not seeing anyone around the truck.

“Hello? Mr. Nyquist?” she called out, but there was no answer. She stepped inside the garage, which smelled of grease but was cleaner than her apartment. Plywood workbenches built into both walls on either side of the garage looked like they’d been wiped down, and even the cloth rags hanging on the handles of the homemade base cabinets underneath were white and fluffy. “Mr. Nyquist?” she said, louder.

“Wha?” came a voice from underneath the truck, and Mary peered around the front. A pair of wrinkled jeans stuck out from under the chassis, ending in a scuffed pair of Nikes. The Nikes walked themselves out on their thick rubbery heels, and the bottom half of a man in jeans was lying on his back on a dolly. The face hadn’t emerged, but a voice from underneath said, “Grandma?”

Mr. Nyquist’s grandson.
He’d be about the right age. “No, I’m Mary DiNunzio,” she called back, leaning over.

“Who?” The man rolled himself out from under the truck, and from the bottom up appeared a gray T-shirt too faded to read, a handsome, if grease-streaked face, brown eyes that wore a puzzled expression, topped by a green baseball cap that read
AGRO
. The young man did a sit-up with ease, boosted himself off the dolly, and rose, wiping his hand on his jeans before he extended it. “I’m Will Nyquist. What did you say your name was?”