Door County, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  “Only hard enough to keep the peace, believe me.”

  I jumped in, feeling the push should come from me, not my aunt. “Way too hard, if you ask me. He’s outright harassing her, and he’s from a generation where harassment was not only legal, it was almost required. Women were supposed to tolerate it and be demure. You ought to give him a poke in the nose, is what I say. With creeps like that, you need to be very clear that you’re not interested.”

  “But he’s a good neighbor in other ways,” she said. “There are some things a woman needs help with, and when I do, Duke has always been there for me. That time my garage door wouldn’t go up and I didn’t know what to do, he showed me how to pull on the thingie to disengage the chain whatsit, and when my garbage disposal jammed up, he knew how to crank it from the bottom and unjam it. He’s always very nice about things like that. He’s a good neighbor, really. I just wish he’d stop pressuring me to marry him.”

  I tried not to give her a high-five. That’s the stuff, auntie! Make him want to be the man who shows you how to pull on the thingie to disengage the whatsit. Make him yearn to fix your garbage disposal. I quickly assessed Henry’s reaction, was extremely satisfied with it, then sat back and pretended to be listening to something Gail was saying. Auntie, I decided, was doing just fine, now that I had her on the right track.

  As I turned to say something to Gail, I caught Logan’s eye and saw that he was totally aware of all the undercurrents at our own table, and I was amused by it. I winked, something I rarely do, and he winked back.

  A good time was had by all, which just goes to show you how contrary the fates can be. Horrifying things were afoot in the night, but we didn’t find out about them until the next morning.

  * * * * *

  After the fish boil we went back across the street to Trollhaven, laughing and having such a good time we didn’t want to part company. Even Arnie was caught up in the camaraderie.

  “Why’n’cha come on up on the porch and warm up with some hot cider?” he said as we walked across the parking lot. “It’ll be cold up there but I’ll turn the heaters on, and the cider will warm you up. You can keep your coats on, if you like.”

  We were happy to accept, and after fifteen minutes or so, we had the pleasure of meeting another member of Arnie’s family. His son, Karl, the black sheep of the family, had arrived suddenly for one of his flying visits. I gathered from the way Arnie and Evaline acted that Karl always blew in with the wind and then went away with it again.

  He was Evaline’s younger brother, and he seemed to be quite a bit younger. I found out later that he and Logan were exactly the same age: 40. In fact, they’d been at college together, in the same fraternity, but they acted like acquaintances, not real friends.

  Karl was a slightly taller version of his father, but the lack of hard work had made him a different sort of man. He was lean and healthy-looking without the rawboned toughness of his dad. They had the same washed-out blue eyes, but where Arnie still had a thick head of hair, Karl’s was thinning. He was dressed in Eddie Bauer-style outdoorsy stuff, which was only going to make him stand out from the locals even more, because everything he had on was crisp, new and expensive.

  Karl greeted Logan tentatively, saying, “So, you’re still involved in researching that folktale stuff?”

  “Something like that.” But Logan didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and instead of going into the things he’d been telling me about his work, he changed the subject. I wondered in passing what kind of teasing Logan had put up with in college when the other guys found out what he was studying. A reserve had come over him. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but Logan suddenly seemed withdrawn.

  Old wounds heal slowly, I thought, or sometimes not at all.

  When we finally broke up, Logan walked me back to Cabin 2 while Nettie and Henry went on ahead of us.

  I decided to risk bringing up old wounds, because I was that curious, but kept in mind that I would drop the subject quickly if Logan didn’t want to talk about it.

  “So you knew Karl in college? Is that how you found out about Trollhaven?”

  “Yes. I met Arnie and Bess on Parents Day. She was much more open about the Trollhaven legend than her husband, and when she found out what my major was, she spent a long time with me, telling me everything I wanted to know about it. She was a wonderful, warm woman. Trollhaven isn’t the same without her. Arnie was defensive about the legend even then, and Karl thought it was all bulls- . . . hogwash. He still does, as far as I can tell. I never bring it up around him. But Bess made me want to come and see for myself, and I’ve been coming here every five or six years ever since. Actually, more often lately. There’s a peace and remoteness about this place, in spite of being in the middle of a busy tourist area, and I find it healing. It feels like home, somehow.”

  We were in front of Cabin 2 now, and we paused to say good night. There was an awkward moment, where it would have been time to decide whether or not to kiss, if this had been a real date. When I hesitated too long, he told me a friendly “Good night” and went on down to Cabin 7, at the end of the row, where he was staying.

  I stood watching him walk away for a long moment. I don’t know what I was thinking, but for some reason, I started to walk slowly after him. But I stopped when I noticed a glow of light coming from a window around the back of one of the cabins. It wasn’t a bright light, as if the room’s lamps were on. If it had been, I wouldn’t have wondered about it, but this was more like a flashlight, and it was coming from a back room of the little house where Faye’s family was staying. It was pretty late for them to be up, especially little Faye, so I took a few steps closer and there was Faye’s little face looking out the window, with the glow from a nightlight below her. I said her name and waved to her, but she immediately popped down out of sight. Little rascal, I thought, you should have been asleep hours ago.

  That seemed to wake me out of my trance, and I stopped following Logan and went back to Cabin 2. When I walked up the steps to the porch, I found Nettie and Henry sitting there waiting for me under the dim light fixture over the door. They were probably hoping I would tell them that I’d just had a red-hot good-night clinch with Logan. That bothered me somehow, so as soon as I sat down I brought up something else, just to throw them off.

  “What, no Gerda?” I said. “She must have regrouped by now. I figured she’d be back for round two.”

  “What a fruitcake,” Henry said without emphasis.

  “I’m afraid so,” my angelic aunt said. “She must have a fine mind underneath all that nonsense, but she’s let it be hijacked by dreams. Well. At least she’s harmless.”

  Henry spoke so seriously at first that he caught me off-guard. “What a sad waste of braincells. It’s just too bad that Gerda keeps chasing after imaginary trolls when she’s got a genuine Martian princess right in front of her. I knew there was something different about you, Paige. Do you get back to the home planet every now and then?”

  “Not so much these days, but they were always clamoring for me when I was a little girl. So exhausting.”

  “You’ve known since you were that young, have you?”

  “Oh, yeah. We all go through phases, thinking we must be changelings, but some of us really are.”

  He hadn’t cracked a smile yet, but finally the corners of his mouth moved up a fraction. It was the first time I’d seen a flash of humor in him, and I liked it.

  I stood up. “Well, I think I’ll go inside and get ready for bed. Why don’t you two sit out here and spoon a while?”

  “Spoon?” Nettie said in a fluttery voice.

  “I believe I have the terminology right? Spoon by the light of the moon in June, singing a naughty but happy tune.” I was talking myself away from them, but I stopped to pose grandly in the doorway. “Good night, goodbye, I’ll see you soon, and away goes the princess from over the moon.”

  I bowed and closed the door, leaving them to themselves. To spoon. Or whatever.
>
  * * * * *

  I woke up to the sound of a bump, then some rustling and scratching. Coming awake like that, I couldn’t be sure if I’d heard something real or something from my lingering dreams, so I lay there very still, listening. I couldn’t figure out if what I had heard was from inside or outside the cabin.

  “Aunt Nettie?” I said quietly.

  “I’m here, dear. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “Did you just hear that?”

  “It’s just the wind. Go back to sleep.”

  I was halfway back into my dreams by then, and it seemed like too much trouble to open my mouth and say, “But it’s not windy tonight.”

  But it wasn’t windy that night.

  Chapter 13 - Death

  Faye almost saw a dead body the next morning, and I’ll always be grateful she didn’t.

  Sometime that evening or that night, somebody beat Gerda to death on the rocks, out by the troll’s mound. After some time and lots of interviews, the police were able to ascertain that we – Nettie, Henry, Logan and I – had been the last ones to see her alive, when she left us just before the fish boil. But determining the exact time of death was going to be difficult, because her stomach was empty – she hadn’t eaten dinner – and after she was killed, she lay outside by the bayside, where it was nearly freezing.

  All we could tell the sheriff was that she’d been alive and feisty the previous night until just before six o’clock, when we left for the fish boil. She had been killed sometime after she walked out of our cabin. Some hours after, in fact. The M.E. narrowed it down to sometime between 11 pm and 4 am, which meant she might still have been alive before we’d all gone to bed that night.

  I thought about those scratching noises I’d heard. I couldn’t tell the sheriff what time it had been, because I didn’t know, but Nettie said it was right after she’d gone to bed, around 11:00.

  Justin might very well have been the one to find the body, since he liked to hang around the bay, but he’d been given the job of putting the windows up in the main house’s porch right after breakfast was over, so he never went down there that morning. And any other tourist might have found her, but when it came right down to it, they didn’t. It was Faye and her parents, and it wasn’t until about 10:00 the next morning. After breakfast, Faye had insisted on showing her parents the troll’s mound, and maybe because they had ditched her the day before, they agreed.

  Mark was the first to realize what they were seeing. He quickly had Gillian hold Faye back and went forward himself to investigate. Then he stayed with the body while Gillian took Faye away and went to call for help. So the little girl, thank goodness, didn’t see Gerda’s body, because the face had been horribly smashed. But Faye did know there had been a murder. Her big concern after that was convincing everybody that the trolls hadn’t done it.

  So sometime after we left her and went off to feast on simple, hearty food – while Matthew stowed his gear and fooled around with his bike – while Faye tried to stay awake and watched out the back window of the cabin for trolls – or possibly later, while we all slept – Gerda was brutally struck down next to the troll’s burrow and left to die on the rocks. What she was doing there at that time of night became a matter that absorbed all of us for the rest of our time at Trollhaven.

  I thought about it more than I should have, maybe feeling guilty because I hadn’t liked her. I lost some of the joy in my knitting project, thinking how her body had gradually gone cold while wrapped inside her own handknit woolen sweater. She had been alone, eccentric and unloved, with no cabin-mate to realize she was missing, and the trolls, if they existed, felt no pity for one of the big folk who had chosen the wrong night to wander around by the bayside.

  The only thing that made me feel less generous toward somebody else than I did toward myself was the way Gail overreacted. We were all shocked, maybe all of us even felt a little guilty, because nobody had liked her. But the rest of us weren’t making a big drama about it. It wasn’t as if Gail had even known Gerda before she came to Trollhaven, I thought indignantly. Some people will do anything for attention.

  After our first police interviews, I was sitting on the porch with Nettie and Henry talking about the murder. Our interviews had been pretty short; we didn’t know much that was helpful, I’m afraid. I had described the mysterious bumps in the night, but I hadn’t gotten up to look out the window at the time, so I didn’t really know what had caused them. The detectives tried, but they couldn’t make very much out of it. And our alibis amounted to, “I was asleep in bed when it happened,” just like everybody else’s, I figured.

  Gail couldn’t possibly have had anything substantive to tell the Sheriff’s people, but I was surprised at how long they were in her cabin with her. Almost as soon as they came out, she did too, and she walked over our way. She’d been crying uncontrollably, and her face was ravaged.

  Nettie, affected by the way the woman was almost stumbling, went out and got protective, taking her by the arm and bringing her back up on the porch to join us. As they approached, I heard my aunt say, “Well, of course you shouldn’t be alone now. None of us should. Come sit with us awhile and we’ll talk.”

  I gave Henry a look, but as usual, he was inscrutable. Yes, it was all very shocking, but I couldn’t see why Gail was doing a meltdown over a complete stranger, and an obnoxious one at that. But apparently we were going to soothe and comfort her, so I finally gave up and put my knitting away. I’d been doing nothing but dropping stitches anyway, and that’s not like me. I can knit in my sleep.

  “Why don’t I go up to the main house and get us a round of hot drinks?” I suggested as my aunt settled Gail in the other chair beside me. Nettie and Henry were on the loveseat across from us.

  “How about some tea, dear?” Nettie asked Gail.

  The question seemed to confuse her for a moment. Then she just shrugged indifferently. Nettie nodded her head at me firmly, and I got up to escape the post mortem for a while. I decided to take my time about it.

  I got a variety of drinks so everybody could take their pick. I had no preference between coffee, tea and cocoa, so I got one of each and then added an extra tea. Chamomile. It’s supposed to calm you down. Putting the teabags in to steep, I put everything on a tray and carried it back to Cabin 2. Henry stood up and opened the screen door for me.

  I more or less forced the Chamomile tea on Gail, and then sat myself down with the cocoa. As soon as I was in my seat, Nettie stared into my eyes, getting my attention more forcefully than even my mother ever had.

  In a warning voice, she told me, “Gail is Gerda’s mother, Paige.”

  In my shock, I gawked at Gail, and as I did, she gave a convulsive shiver.

  “You’re cold,” I said softly. “Why are we sitting outside like this? Come on inside and I’ll start the fireplace.”

  Listless, she let us guide her inside the cabin and sit her down at the end of the loveseat nearest the gas fire.

  Once I had her settled, I glanced around and realized for the first time that Henry hadn’t followed us in. Looking out the corner window behind the loveseat, I saw three men standing in the driveway, talking tensely: Henry, Logan and Mark O’Neil.

  * * * * *

  Needless to say, I had a lot of questions. Nettie was still guarding me with her eyes, and finally I had to give her a silent, “Seriously?” look to get across that I wasn’t going to go after Gail with intense questions. But boy, I had a lot of them, and they were burning to get out.

  After about ten minutes, Henry came in and he brought Logan with him. I didn’t see where Mark had gone, but he wasn’t with them anymore.

  Nettie had taken the seat next to Gail on the little sofa, and Henry settled into the armchair. Logan came and sat across the table from me, asking in a near-silent voice, “How is she?”

  I shrugged and looked at him, worried and confused. He gave me a reassuring nod, then shivered suddenly.

  I pushed what was left of my cocoa ac
ross the table at him and he drank it down as if we’d been sharing a germ pool for years. Somehow at that moment, it didn’t seem odd.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss, Gail,” Logan said at last, “I’ve known Gerda for years, but when you came here, I didn’t realize you were her mother. You two never . . . .”

  She gave a hopeless shrug. “Oh, it was a big secret,” she said, still shaky. “At least while we were going to be here. She’d asked me to do a favor for her. We’ve never had a good relationship, and I was ready to do whatever she wanted, just to try to bring us closer, however I could.”

  It hit me like a vibe straight out of the psychic world. “She wanted you to charm the troll legend out of Arnie,” I said flatly.

  Gail nodded. “Lily was worried he’d give her trouble over it.”

  “Lily?” several of us asked at once.

  Bitterly, she told us, “I named her Lillian Gertrude – Gertrude after a great-aunt – but we always called her Lily. When she went off to college, I found she was telling everybody there to call her Gerda, as if she were adopting another persona. Shedding her old skin, and her old life along with it. I suspected she thought the name Gerda sounded better for a professional folklorist, and at the same time, she began to change her look to the traditional homespun clothes she always wears. Wore. She’d always been a difficult child, but after college, we were never close again. Still, I never lost hope. A woman never gives up on her child, especially her only child. The name Lily never fit her, though; I realize that now. She turned herself into a Gerda because that was who she wanted to be.”

  “And she asked you for your help in getting the troll story?” Henry asked. “How?”

  Embarrassed, she said, “She told me to seduce him. Her word exactly – seduce. She said men were always attracted to me, and I knew how to ‘use it,’ whatever that means. I suppose it was because after her father died, I married again, instead of putting on widow’s weeds for the rest of my life. I had relationships – a lively social life – the kind of lifestyle she never had, because she never seemed to know how.”