Door County, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  Logan stood up and nodded curtly at Gerda. “Professor Howell and I are acquainted. How are you, Professor?”

  She gave a little sniff that said a lot. “Good morning, Professor Wagner.” She pronounced it “Vagner,” like the composer.

  “I’m an American, as you know,” he said. “We can dispense with the Germanic pronunciation of my name. And I believe you are American too? Interesting that your accent is growing faintly Nordic.” He breathed in and out in a labored way, disciplining himself. Carefully, he arranged his face in a smile. “Regardless, Gerda, I wish you would just call me Logan.”

  She lifted her chin in acknowledgment. “You are aware that I have read your books.”

  “Of course. You made that abundantly clear in your editorial rebuttals. And I, naturally have read yours.”

  She made a slight bow. “And I did not convince you?”

  “Of your genetic memory theory? I found it . . . an interesting concept. Hardly original, but this is the first time I’ve run across it in academia. Of course, you and I differ slightly in our fields of research, mine focusing on the Teutonic and yours on the Nordic.”

  “It makes very little difference,” she snapped.

  He disagreed.

  As they carried out a chilly interchange, a couple of pedants discussing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, I studied her. She certainly expressed herself in her choice of clothing. It looked to me as if she were wearing her Professor of Nordic Whatever-It-Was costume. Maybe she was expressing solidarity with the trolls.

  Her face showed the same weathering that Logan’s did, and she appeared to be about 45. She had her dark hair chopped into a no-nonsense style she could just wash and wear, falling in length somewhere between her chin and her shoulders, with bangs that were too short. Her eyes were small and dark, and her lips thin and wide. To the left side of her mouth, she had a mole that tended to move as she spoke. It took concentration to hear what she was saying and not stare at that mole.

  She had on a baggy, handknit cardigan sweater in a green heather mix, and my expert eye analyzed it and decided the knitter should have used smaller needles. The loops were pulling down. She’d paired it with a woolen skirt of muddy brown homespun, ecru-colored socks and well-scuffed brogues. Underneath the cardigan she seemed to be wearing a man’s shirt. Hanging around her neck was what looked like a string of rocks – some kind of tumbled jasper, with an icon that was carved out of some semiprecious stone resting at the level of her breastbone. The pendant kept slipping in and out of her cardigan and she seemed nervously aware of it, always handling it and pulling it out again.

  She was smirking at Logan in a superior way. “The male mind refuses to comprehend, sometimes,” she said obscurely. She zapped her hard-looking eyes at me and murmured something to herself.

  “I’m sorry, did you ask me something?” I said.

  “No. I asked myself something. Sometimes a fertile young woman such as yourself will intuit my meaning. Perhaps during our stay here, there will be time to explore ideas together.”

  Yeah, no thanks, I thought reflexively. Aloud, I smiled and said, “I’ll look forward to it,” and I fully intended to get Aunt Nettie to congratulate me on my behavior later, because I already thought it was madness to encourage this crackpot, but I’d been extremely civil about it.

  By that time, Matthew had come in, all spandexed and windblown, looking for breakfast after his dawn tour of the peninsula. I didn’t want him to hear me telling this lady to get lost, so I played nice, and Gerda seemed to pick up on my lack of interest in her as my antennae went up for Matthew. I don’t think I was rude, but she seemed frustrated at the distraction.

  Within the next few seconds, our breakfasts came, Logan told us to have a nice day and quietly left, and Professor Howell gave me another penetrating look before taking herself outside with nothing but her shirt and hand-knit sweater to protect her from the chilly wind.

  “Good morning, Matthew,” I said as he came in further. “Did you have a nice ride?”

  “Oh, yeah, hi,” he said, taking a closer look at me. “Paige, right? I couldn’t see you very well last night.”

  He was seeing me very well now, and I was picking up a vibe that said he liked what he saw. The feeling, I managed to communicate with just the right touch of feminine reserve, was mutual. In the morning light I could see his eyes with sparkling clarity. Why on earth had I wanted them to be green? They were a perfect, jewellike aquamarine.

  “Now that we can all see one another . . . .” I re-introduced Henry and Nettie and finished with, “and this is Gail. So, how far did you bike this morning?”

  “Just over to Bailey’s Harbor, on the other side of the peninsula. There’s a great county park over there, but I’ll check it out more later. Today, I just wanted to scope out the general area.”

  Impressive. He’d done twenty or thirty miles, depending on which roads he’d taken, and all while the rest of us were sleeping in.

  He didn’t join us; there was no room, and I did a little fingertip roll as he turned to move down to the corner table, far enough away that our voices wouldn’t reach him unless we shouted.

  Then, noticing my aunt looking at me, I said, “What?”

  With a little smile, she said, “Nothing, dear.”

  When she starts dear-ing me, I know she’s straying into Mom territory, and I watch what I say so I don’t encourage her.

  Concentrating on our food, nobody said anything for a little while after Matthew walked away. Then Gail quietly said, “He seems nice.”

  I looked up at her, but she wasn’t being maternal, as far as I could see. “What did you think of the professors?” I asked.

  She rolled her pretty eyes and muttered, “Good grief.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Being in a very Danish kind of place, it might be interesting to have two mythology experts around to tell us stories, if Arnie Klausen won’t.”

  “Oh, he will,” Nettie said. “We just have to ask him the right way. Or rather, have the right person ask him.”

  She was looking at something outside and behind me, toward the front door of the porch, and I turned to look. Standing between two adults who had to be her parents was little Faye.

  I turned back, thinking what a clever aunt I had. What storyteller could resist a pretty little thing like Faye who asked to be told a story?

  Then I heard talking outside, and when the family didn’t seem to be coming inside, I turned for another look.

  Gerda had them buttonholed, and she had modulated her voice to the tone you’d use on a child, bending down over the girl. Through the screens, I could just hear the sound of her voice, but not what she was saying.

  Gerda’s voice sounded cloying, even creepy to me, and I heard a little mewling sound from Faye in response. I was glad to see Faye’s mom and dad forming a protective wall around their daughter as the professor with the witchy mole bent down and talked directly to the little girl. She did everything but call Faye, “My little pretty.” I would have been very concerned if I was Faye’s mother, and within a few minutes, her dad ended the tête-à-tête smoothly and moved his family away from her.

  Gerda stood outside for a moment or two looking after them, then turned and went on her way.

  Chapter 7 – The Forgotten Child

  From the first it was obvious that Faye’s parents had just had a fight, and it was still eating away at them, despite the little interruption they’d just had from Gerda. There was a cold formality in everything they said to one another, and they only spoke when absolutely necessary. At the same time, they had decided to top one another by fussing over Faye, addressing things they should have been saying to one another to their daughter instead. It was terrible. Whatever their fight was about, it seemed as if they could barely be civil to one another. There was even a moment after they first came in that the father paused in the doorway, looking over our heads into space, as if he were praying for strength.

&n
bsp; Faye’s dad’s name was Mark, and he was handsome in a metrosexual way that didn’t seem to fit in with Trollhaven, or Door County in general. I had begun to notice that a lot of the local men were wearing longish beards, like the professional baseball players were doing. It was a look I had a hard time getting used to, but I wasn’t sure I could get used to Mark O’Neil’s look, either. It seemed as if he were still at work, somehow. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I didn’t like about him, because he was the type I was usually attracted to – confident, successful, professional-looking. I put it down to not liking the way he was acting as a daddy. Otherwise, he was my prototype for zeroing in on at parties and bars.

  He was groomed like a mannequin, and it made him stand out from the local crowd. Away from Starbucks and his urban network, he just didn’t belong. I was surprised he wasn’t carrying a laptop, but then he whipped out a cell phone as soon as his family got settled. Just as good as a laptop, most of the time.

  Mom was named Gillian, and she took the time to explain that it was spelled with a G but pronounced as a J. I wondered why she bothered. We weren’t going to write to her. She probably did that to everybody, and it wasn’t a big thing, but somehow it wasn’t a good start. It made her seem very self-absorbed. After impressing her own name on us, I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to remember ours.

  Faye had gotten her delicate, fair looks from her mother. Gillian was tiny, probably five-foot two, and a size zero. She was wearing resort clothing meant to make you look good sitting in front of a fireplace in a ski lodge, but not for going skiing much. Her husband was wearing a blue shirt that had a collar and cuffs, along with a pair of jeans that look as if they had been ironed. Casual Friday attire.

  I remembered the awkwardness with Faye from the day before, and since she was facing my way, I caught her eye and asked her if she was having fun.

  “Yeah,” she said doubtfully, like a shy kitten. “I guess.”

  “Well, today,” Evaline said, coming up briskly with the coffee pot, “I’m going to try to get Faye to help Justin. He’s cleaning up out by the shoreline, and I’d like somebody to keep an eye on him so he doesn’t fall in. Unless your folks have other plans for you today?”

  “Oh, that’d be great,” Mark said quickly. “I think I’ll take the car and drive back into Sturgeon Bay this morning. There’s a café we stopped at on the way here that had great wi-fi.”

  “We have wi-fi,” Evaline said.

  Mark gave an apologetic shrug. “I need to live-stream a webinar this morning. It can get . . . frustrating if it’s always buffering. No big deal. Really.”

  Evaline inhaled and exhaled and carefully refrained from speaking.

  “Perfect,” Gillian said. It sounded angry, not gratified. I got the feeling she was only one-upping her husband for deserting her. “The stores are having their end-of-season sales, and there are some great high-end shops not two blocks away. Would you like that, Faye? Helping Justin today?”

  “Who’s Justin?” the girl said.

  “He’s my nephew,” Evaline told her, ignoring the two parents and speaking only to Faye. “He lives with my brother-in-law, here in Fish Crik, year-round. His mom was my sister, but she’s in heaven now. His dad is a travel writer so he’s on the road a lot, and while he’s away, Justin spends a lot of time with us here at Trollhaven. He’s 15, a little bit older than you, Faye, but he’s a really good kid. I hope you’ll like him. He does odd jobs around here to make a little spending money on the weekends, when he’s not in school. Today I want him to go down by the shoreline behind the main house and clean up a mess some kids made. I’ll be working in the kitchen, at the back of the house, so I’ll be keeping an eye on the two of you.”

  Faye considered all this, then solemnly said, “I’m sorry your sister died, Miss Evaline.”

  It took us all by surprise. Out of all that information, Faye only commented on the part about death. Evaline nodded in acknowledgment, but didn’t say anything.

  Then Faye asked, “Is Justin going to be working near the troll’s mound?”

  Evaline froze. After a moment she reorganized her smile and said, “Yes. Down in that area. We have a hard time keeping some of the local kids away from it, especially when Halloween’s coming up. How did you know about the troll story?”

  “Everybody knows, don’t they? The lady who cleans our cabin was telling me.”

  “Is that what you were talking to the maid about all that time?” Gillian asked absently.

  “Oh, yes, Paula,” Evaline said, with an edge to her voice. “She’s worked at Trollhaven for forty years or more. A real institution around town – seventy-five years old, and more energy than you have, I bet.”

  “I like her,” Faye said simply.

  “Everybody likes Paula,” Evaline said. “And most of us around town know how much to believe of the stories she tells.”

  “Oh, she’s telling the truth,” Faye said placidly. “I can tell.”

  “Now, Faye,” her father said, jumping on it. “Don’t think you can read people’s minds, just because of some tall stories you’ve heard about your grandmother and her second sight.” He drenched the last two words in acid.

  Gillian objected immediately, and Mark went on with, “If you weren’t always filling her head with wild ideas,” and the crux of the running argument became obvious. Or maybe they were just focusing everything on Faye instead of working out their real problems with one another directly.

  I wanted Evaline to bop them both on the head with the coffeepot, but mostly I felt sorry for Faye. Like so many children of spoiled parents, she was going to have to be the grown-up in this family, if it managed to hold together long enough for any of them to grow up.

  * * * * *

  We all finished up at the same time and left the main house together. A tallish, loose-looking boy in baggy jeans was just walking across the parking lot, and Evaline came out and called to him.

  “This is Justin,” she said to Faye when he was still ten feet away from us. “Justin, this is our guest, Faye. She wants to help you today.”

  My doubts about trusting a fairylike creature to an unknown teenager evaporated as soon as I saw him. He seemed like a nice, normal kid, and there was enough of an age difference between them that he immediately assumed a protective, almost paternal posture toward her. It was charming to see. Being a semi-orphan himself, I could see him identify with her right away, and I wondered what his Aunt Evaline had told him about Faye’s parents, who had so blithely decided they could spend the day without her – or each other.

  While Evaline was introducing the two kids, Gillian and Mark took no more than a passing interest in the tallish (for 15) teenager to whom they were entrusting their only child, and then went on ahead, full of their own plans for the day. If you can play hooky from parenting, I can too, they seemed to be telling one another.

  Justin had floppy brown hair and deep blue eyes, and big hands and feet that made me think of those puppies – the ones you know are going to end up the size of Shetland ponies. He was awkward in his clothes, as if he were still growing into them, and awkward in his body, too; the kind of kid that’s always knocking things over and barking his shins. Still, his aunt had bragged about his handyman skills and cleverness at fixing things, so I decided he just needed to jell. The next three or four years would take care of that. One day, Justin was going to be a very big man, and he already had the look of a gentle giant.

  “So, just clean up the mess down by the shoreline today?” he asked Evaline.

  “That’ll do for a start. Bring a big trash bag with you, and a pair of gloves.”

  “What about the lock on the toolshed?”

  “That’s on the list, but not at the top. It’s high season just now, and our guests are going to be walking the grounds. We need it looking good down there.”

  “Okay.” He turned to look down at Faye. “It’s gonna be kind of cold, down by the water today,” he commented, looking at the sk
y like an old salt. “You might want to run into your cabin and get a warmer jacket, Faye.”

  The girl looked after her parents, but Gillian was already heading toward the shopping district on foot and Mark had already driven away.

  “I don’t have a key,” she said.

  “They left you without a key?” Justin said, but he quickly reeled it in. “Hey, no problem, Cookie. Come on, we’ll get the master key from my grandfather. Then we’ll go get you into something a little warmer. Time to get to work. Day’s a-wasting, and that litter isn’t going to clean itself up, you know.” He turned toward the main house and took her small hand in a very natural way.

  She accepted this, only asking, “Why did you call me Cookie?”

  He looked at her as if he were surprised about it himself. “I dunno. You look like a cookie to me. One of those fancy little ones at the bakery, the ones they roll in powdered sugar.”

  He said it teasingly, like he was trying to make a joke or a compliment out of it, I couldn’t tell which, but Faye considered it solemnly.

  “Okay, I won’t call you that if you don’t like it,” he said when they were almost out of earshot.

  “No, you can call me Cookie if you want to,” she said. “I like it. My grandmother used to call me that. Nobody else ever did, but I don’t mind if you do.”

  I was struck by that, but Cookie is a common enough nickname for sweet little girls. Heck, my own mom had called me that a few times, and I wasn’t even all that sweet. Still, it was odd.

  The kids were on the steps of the main house by then, and Gail, who had tagged along with us, said, “He doesn’t take after his granddad, does he? Arnie is very compact.”

  “Justin is going to be tall,” I agreed. “Did you hear the part about calling her Cookie?”

  She nodded.

  “Kind of gives you a little woo-woo in the back of your neck, doesn’t it?”

  Gail just shrugged, but my aunt said, “Yes it does.” She was still looking after the two kids, even though they were inside the house by then.