Read Online Witch Cradle by Kathleen Hills - Free Book Online

wasn’t nothing in it but a few inches of slime. They had put down a sandpoint closer to the barn, and they were getting their water from that.”
    McIntire nodded. “How long after Teddy and Rose left did you buy the house? Was it sitting empty for any length of time?”
    â€œI don’t remember for sure, but it wasn’t long. They left late in the summer, and we had to get it back together here and roofed over before it filled up with snow. So it didn’t sit more than a couple of weeks or so at the most. Sulo was pretty anxious to get rid of it.”
    McIntire didn’t know what else he could ask. He struggled. “Did you notice anything odd. Anything you didn’t expect?”
    â€œWell, there was that body in the attic.” Earl chuckled and gave a suck on his pipe. “I don’t remember anything, but that was a long time ago. One of the windows was smashed. In the bedroom.”
    â€œCould somebody have broken in? A tramp, maybe? Looking for a place to spend the night?”
    â€œNo need, the door wasn’t locked.”
    â€œYou kept the bed and the mattress?”
    â€œI
took
them. Kept the bed, burned the mattress. Sandra didn’t want it.”
    Sandra Culver stood up quickly and turned to the washing machine. “It wasn’t clean.”
    McIntire nodded. Not wanting to sleep on Teddy Falk’s old mattress was understandable.
    â€œThat was only on one side. We could have scrubbed it up.” Earl grunted at his wife’s finicky ways. “It was a pretty good mattress.”
    Sandra switched on the wringer and stuffed the corner of a dingy towel between its rollers. A flush spread up her neck. Stained mattresses might be a bit tawdry but…. “Mrs. Culver, not to be….” McIntire stumbled. “This could be important. Are you saying…?”
    She snatched her hand back from the voracious wringer. “I thought maybe Rosie Falk miscarried. Maybe that was why they left without much of a fuss.”
    For someone who’d spent a good share of her adult life in the family way, Sandra Culver was certainly modest. “Blood?” McIntire asked.
    She nodded.
    â€œA lot of blood?”
    â€œQuite a bit.”
    McIntire swallowed his coffee and pushed back his chair.
    Sandra walked with him onto the porch. Once again she seemed overcome by embarrassment, wrapping her arms about herself and scuffling her feet. Maybe it was only the cold.
    â€œI never thanked you.”
    â€œThanked me for what?”
    The dog rubbed against her knees and she reached to scratch behind its ears. “Finding my little girl. If it wasn’t for you, she’d still be lying there, and we’d still not know.”
    The discovery of Cindy Culver’s body was a horror that would stay with McIntire forever. How much greater nightmare for her family?
    â€œIt must have been awful for you.” She straightened up and pulled her faded cardigan closer at her throat.
    McIntire struggled for something to say. Leonie would have known exactly the right words. He patted her arm, then the dog’s head.
    â€œSay hi to your wife.” Sandra slipped back inside.
    McIntire gave a thump on the door to dislodge newly fallen snow from the screen. Would it never stop?

Chapter Eleven
    DULUTH, MINN.—The request of Knut Heikkinen to move his deportation hearing to New York City has been denied.
    The only thing worse than the pain in her leg was the miasma of dank and musty odors issuing from the mattress, the blankets, the curtains, the varnish on the floorboards.
    Mia lay back on the narrow bed in the room where her father had slept in the years after her mother’s death. It hadn’t always held this dead, fusty atmosphere. When she was a little girl, the room had been a special place, warm and scrupulously free of dust, where the furniture Eban Vogel built with such artistry received its final polish. She’d spent the too