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“Heard from them? No. Why? No reason I should have.”
    â€œNot at all since they left? You didn’t need to send payments or anything?”
    â€œNah, we settled all that before they took off. Well, come to think of it, Teddy’d figured to have a little bit coming from when I sold the potatoes. He wanted it to go to some outfit in New York City. He was supposed to send the address, but I never heard nothing. Potatoes weren’t worth the cost to ship them anyway. Maybe he didn’t need the money in Paradise, eh?”
    Sulo poured coffee from his cup into his saucer and stared into it for a moment. “Anyway, I didn’t hear nothing.” He popped a cube of sugar into his mouth and raised the saucer to his lips. Sulo Touminen was not an old man, but he was certainly in training for it.
    That took care of question number one. Waiting while Sulo slurped his saucer of coffee through the sugar gave McIntire time to come up with question number two.
    â€œWhen you bought the place, was the house still on it?”
    â€œNot much of a house, more of a two-room shack. I traded it to Earl Culver for a couple loads of hay. He hauled it away and added it on to his house for bedrooms.” Sulo chuckled. “If Earl spent a little less time in his own bedroom, he might not have needed to go around buying old shanties. Why Sandra Rindahl married an ugly son of a gun like that—he’d have made a better match for Rose—and to have all those kids…. What do you suppose that guy’s got that…?” He shook his head.
    The source of Earl Culver’s persuasive charm was one mystery that McIntire had no wish to pursue. “I suppose the house was pretty much empty when you got it?”
    â€œWell,” Touminen’s speech slowed and his eyes showed a definite glimmer of curiosity. “They left some furniture. Whatever wasn’t worth either selling or shipping across the ocean. Not much. I let Earl have it along with the house.” He refilled his saucer. “Teddy had some pretty good machinery, a dandy cement mixer, and a sawmill, but he shipped every last nut and bolt to Russia. There was Jarvi’s car. Twenty-seven Model A. They took off in it, but I don’t know if they took it over with them or not.”
    â€œWhat about household stuff, blankets, pots and pans, clothing? Was it all gone when you got the house?”
    Touminen spread butter on a slice of bread, careful to cover it to the edges. “Well, sure. They took along anything that was worth bringing. There was a buncha junk laying around. I told Earl to take what he wanted and throw out the rest.” He bit off half the slice and held what remained a few inches from his lips, shaking it impatiently while he chewed and swallowed. He stuffed in another bite and spoke around it. “How come you’re so interested in Teddy Falk?”
    â€œOh,” McIntire said, “somebody was asking about him, wanted to look him up.”
    â€œIn Russia?”
    â€œYeah.” McIntire hoped to divert Sulo from asking
who
might be looking to track Teddy down in the Soviet Union and what that had to do with whether he’d remembered to pack his socks and underwear. “It would be interesting to find out what happened to some of those people. The ones that went over. I don’t suppose they found that paradise they were looking for.”
    â€œThey were a bunch of damn fools.” Touminen slurped up another saucer of coffee. “I told the whole lot of them they were nuts to do it. Got thrown out of your old man’s saloon for my trouble.”
    â€œPa tossed you out?” For speaking out against a communist Utopia? Colin McIntire had been a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist.
    â€œNah, it was the Saari boys. And I do mean
threw
. They’d of done a whole lot worse, but your old man didn’t allow no bloodshed in his establishment, so I got by with a couple sore