of miles of enemy territory. He’d killed many of the enemy, some with his hands. Something had changed in him. He was cold, bitter, a man who could kill easily. Perhaps that had always been part of him, in his history, in his anger at being an Indian.
“He learned of the birth of the girls, and of our annulment. I suppose something snapped when they told him. A combination of what he’d been through, of the shock of the news. Perhaps it was only a last straw. He talked about death, the horror of war, the horror of the whole world, the insanity of the white man’s world. He wanted his haven-me and his children.”
She recrossed her legs. “I don’t pretend to think that I acted well to Ralph. I never wrote to him about the girls, I had the marriage annulled without telling him. Yes, I thought he was dead over there, perhaps I even hoped he was, but that was no excuse. I did what I had to do for my own life. We had made a mistake, Ralph and I, and Ralph would have known that, too, if we had tried to go on. I had to correct it. Firm and final. There was no other way.”
She drank the drink Carter Vance had given to her, and seemed to realize she had it for the first time. She stared into the drink. “I was living with my parents while Martin was in Albany. That weekend, Martin was on his way home, but he hadn’t arrived yet. I’ve always given thanks for that. I think Ralph would have killed Martin.
“He walked into the house with a submachine gun and a pistol. All I did was move, and he started shooting. He shattered the living room, and hit my father! He almost killed my father. He made me get the children, and drove away with us. We drove all evening toward Canada. The girls had to eat and sleep, so he stopped in a motel in Utica. That was when I learned all about Korea, his escape, his anger at the world. He talked to me all night while the children slept as much as they could they were so afraid.
“He talked and talked that night, about all his horrors, and about his plans for a ranch in Canada. Nonstop, as if he really were insane.
“I’ve seen that night in my dreams a thousand times since, and I’m still sorry for Ralph, terribly sorry for what he had become in that war, for what I had had to do. But I have never regretted it. The girls had nightmares for years afterwards. He would have been hounded down eventually, and who knows what would have happened to the girls? I did what was right.”
She stopped, and sat back in her chair. She lighted another cigarette. She smoked as if that was all, the story over as far as she was concerned-she had done right.
“How did you get away from him?” I asked.
“The police came in the morning,” she said, her voice normal now. “Martin had arrived home soon after Ralph took us. He saved my father, and alerted the police. When they found us, Ralph tried to resist, and Francesca was shot in the melee. That was her scar, Mr. Fortune. Under it all, Ralph wasn’t a bad man. When Francesca was hit, he gave up, carried her out to an ambulance himself.”
I said, “Then?”
Martin Crawford said, “I defended Blackwind. I had Katje say she had gone with him voluntarily, to talk to him, and I had the kidnapping charge dropped. I got it all dropped-except the assault-with-intent-to-murder on Katje’s father. Mr. Van Hoek had been badly shot, and we couldn’t evade that charge even though he pulled through. Blackwind got ten-to-twenty in Auburn. Three years later he escaped with four other men. One was killed in the escape-so was a prison guard. Ralph and the other two evaded for three days. Two of them were cornered in Hancock, one was killed. The survivor said that Ralph had drowned in a Catskill lake where they’d hidden.”
“They found his body?”
“Not at first. They found his weapons at the lake, the food he’d been carrying, but nothing else. So they continued the manhunt for five months. They ran down every lead, every report, everyone who had known Ralph. No trace of him was found, not a whisper that he was alive anywhere. Then divers found a body in the lake, wedged under rocks. It was bloated and eaten beyond any recognition, but it was Ralph’s size, had the remnants of his clothes, and his identification. It had been in the water the exact time. He’s dead, Mr. Fortune.”
For a time we were all silent. I knew what we were all thinking-was Ralph Blackwind alive somewhere? Perhaps somewhere not very far?
Carter Vance broke the spell. “I never knew the whole story. He was already dead when I came to town. Awful.”
Katje Crawford said, “You think that Ralph is alive, Mr. Fortune?”
“Any time a body isn’t positively identified, you have to consider that, yes,” I said. “What about dental records, scars, wounds, old injuries?”
Crawford said, “Blackwind had no dental work beyond his childhood, and his reservation had no records. The body was too decomposed to show scars. His brother said he had broken his left arm once, and there was a break in the left arm of the body. Only it was a recent break, and the M.E. couldn’t say if it was a new break or the old one rebroken. The reservation had no X-ray records.”
“But the left arm did have the break?”
Katje Crawford said, “He’s dead, Mr. Fortune. How could he have eluded such a manhunt so completely, and how could there have been a body his size in that lake just at the right time? If he was alive, he would have tried to see the girls sometime during the last fifteen years. He had a tremendous love of children, I hadn’t known that about him. In fact, I knew so little about him.”
“Would Francesca search for a dead man?” I said.
“Perhaps, yes. For her identity, for the truth about her history. She’d want to know about Ralph.”
Crawford said, “And she wouldn’t ask us, no.”
“Was Abram Zaremba connected to Blackwind at all?”
“Not at all, as far as I know,” Crawford said.
“How about a Carl Gans? John Andera? Harmon Dunstan? Or maybe Joel Pender, or Frank Keefer, or Anthony Sasser?”
“No, none of them,” Katje Crawford said. “Tony Sasser wasn’t even in Dresden before Ralph was dead.”
Crawford said, “Wait. There was a Captain Dunstan at Ralph’s trial, Katje. His commanding officer in Korea, captured with Ralph, remember? He testified for Ralph.”
“I don’t remember, Martin,” Katje Crawford said. “It’s been fifteen years now.”
“Are you sure, Crawford?” I said.
“Pretty sure, yes. Captain Dunstan.”
“All right, maybe Francesca went searching out her past and a dead father. Maybe it has something to do with why she was killed, and maybe not. It could be a coincidence, or she could have stumbled over something dangerous, or someone could even have made a mistake about what she was after,” I said to them. “But maybe we better remember one thing-if Ralph Blackwind does happen to be still alive, he’s got the murder of a prison guard hanging over him still. He might do a lot to not be found.”
None, of them had an answer for that. Katje Crawford sat looking at the floor when I left. Maybe she was wondering if none of this would have happened if she had told the girls about their father a long time ago.
In my car, I drove back to my motel and checked out. As I drove south and east through the rain, it all came into focus. Francesca had been looking for her father. Now Felicia was. Dead or alive, I didn’t know. Maybe that was what the grandfather, Emil Van Hoek, had had to tell Francesca-one way or the other.
17
I stopped for lunch on the road, and it was late afternoon when I crossed the Throggs Neck Bridge and drove across the Island to Hempstead. The rain had stopped, the day clear and bright with a touch of early winter in its snap.
There were two cars in Harmon Dunstan’s garage. No one seemed to be watching this time, but when I rang at the door, not much else had changed. Mrs. Grace Dunstan opened the door in almost the same shirt and slacks, and with the same Bloody Mary in her hand. I had the sensation of time standing still. She looked at me as if time did stand still for her-one day exactly like another, the same things in the same way with no surprises and no need to think about tomorrow because it would be today and yesterday over again. A weariness in her.
“Mr. Fortune,” she said like fate. “Come in then.”
