Door County, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  “How does your second husband feel about what Gerda wanted you to do?” Nettie asked.

  “Oh, I was widowed a second time.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Nettie murmured.

  “Don’t be. I’m not sorry for myself. It was good while it lasted. But I think my daughter held it against me. She was the kind of woman who never even wanted to get married, and there I was . . . well, you see. She thought I could make men do anything I wanted. She wanted me to play up to Arnie, and then he was supposed to tell me anything I wanted to know. You have to understand that Lily has never been a romantic girl. She doesn’t . . . didn’t . . . understand men, or how to flirt to them. As far as I know, she’s never been attracted to any man.”

  I glanced at Logan but he wouldn’t look at me. He was looking past me, out the window.

  Gail went on. “She knew she couldn’t wheedle anything out the kind of stubborn man Arnie was reputed to be. She knew her limitations, and she had no . . . charm. No finesse. He’s notoriously guarded about that legend. His father would tell it to anybody who would listen, and Arnie told me he saw people laughing at his father all his life because of it. He got sensitive about it. When his dad passed away and Arnie took over Trollhaven, he was having no more of that. It’s funny, though. I think he believes the trolls are really there himself.”

  She glanced at Logan, as if he would know, and he simply shrugged.

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. But my daughter asked me to do this one thing for her, and I simply couldn’t say no. She told me I had all the sex appeal she would never have, and if she should fail, she knew I would succeed.” Simply, in a change of voice, she added, “I like Arnie. He’s a good man.”

  “And then,” I said, wanting to work the thing through, “it turned out she managed to get the story for herself, just by eavesdropping.”

  “She did?” Gail’s eyes, swollen as they were from crying, popped open at me. “But then she’s been avoiding me. Since I was on such a secret mission,” she added bitterly. “I’d hoped, since we were both guests here, that we’d have some time together. Something we haven’t had in many years. She always said she was too busy giving lectures to come visit me, and whenever I wanted to visit her, she’d say she was just about to leave on a trip to some remote area of Norway or Denmark. I hadn’t seen her in years. And now that we were both here, she wouldn’t even let me come near her, because we were supposed to be strangers.”

  “Why do you think she wanted Faye to go somewhere with her last night?” Henry said suddenly.

  Stunned, we all stared at him without speaking.

  Finally, Gail said, “What do you mean?”

  “Logan and I were just talking to Faye’s dad. After Faye heard the troll story, they couldn’t settle her down again. She wanted to go down by the water and see the mound where they’re supposed to live, because she thought the trolls could only come out at night. She wanted to see them. And apparently she spent some time staring out the window of her bedroom, which looks towards the bay.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “I saw her. After I said good-night to Logan. I tried to talk to her, but she popped down below the windowsill. But she talked to Gerda? And what the heck was Gerda doing, wandering around after dark? We didn’t see her. She must have been out after we all went to bed.”

  “She was,” Henry said. “At some point in the night – Faye has no sense of time yet, and doesn’t know when it was – Gerda was sneaking along behind the cabins and noticed her in the window.”

  “Behind the cabins?”

  “That’s what Faye said. She remembered seeing you and ducking down below the window, and she says Gerda came along sometime after that. She doesn’t know how long. Gerda caught her by surprise because she didn’t come from the lighted area in front of the cabins, like Paige did. She was already behind the cabins, and without warning, she was below Faye’s window talking to her before she could duck down again.”

  “Was Gerda alone?” Logan asked.

  “As far as Faye could tell. She was just suddenly there, talking to the girl, trying to persuade her to come outside. She said she needed a witness. It’s a wonder she didn’t go with her, because Gerda knew just what to say, tempting her by promising her she would see the trolls. But there was something about Gerda that Faye didn’t like, and she wouldn’t go with her. Can you think of any reason your daughter might have wanted Faye to go somewhere with her, late last night?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  I had at least one guess. “Gerda had some theory that young people are more in tune with fantastical creatures than grown-ups,” I said. “And she was found out by the troll’s mound, from what I’ve heard. I bet she wanted Faye to go with her out there, thinking she might see the trolls where a grown-up couldn’t. Oh, and another thing – in Arnie’s legend, the trolls lose their daughter, Essie. Maybe Gerda thought the trolls would be attracted to Faye, and reveal themselves. Would she have gone that far?”

  “It sounds like her,” Gail said wearily.

  But I happened to glance at Henry’s face, and I saw a jaded cop taking a whole different view of the incident. It made me cringe.

  “Paige heard some noises outside our bedroom last night, not long after I went to bed,” Nettie said. “Our bedroom is on the back wall of the cabin.”

  “What time was that?”

  “As near as we could work out, it was around eleven.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “We tried to figure it out for the Sheriff.”

  “Didn’t you hear it?” he asked Nettie.

  “I did, but I didn’t pay any attention. I thought it was just an animal, maybe a deer. I was more worried about it waking up Paige.”

  He turned back to me and asked, “What kind of noises?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I groped for an answer. “It woke me up out of a deep sleep, and the first thing I thought of was a tree branch scratching against the cabin, but there was also a bump against the wall beside me. I couldn’t be sure what caused it, and I didn’t get up to look.”

  “Well, from now on,” Aunt Nettie said to me firmly, “you’re sleeping with those curtains pulled together over the window.”

  Like a signal from the great beyond, suddenly we heard scratching noises at the back wall of the cabin. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how keyed up I was. It completely unnerved me and I almost screamed. Logan reached across the table and took my hand.

  “That’ll be the sheriff’s people,” Henry said. “Either they’re looking around back there, or they picked up some branches and deliberately ran them across the siding to try to reproduce what you heard. If so, they’ll be in here in a minute, asking you if that was it.”

  I looked at him blankly. “But it wasn’t.”

  He looked back at me, and a slight lowering of his eyebrows showed concern.

  “What do you think it was, then?”

  “It was . . . heavier. A bump, and then some scrambling around.”

  “Like somebody falling against the cabin and then trying to get their balance?”

  “Maybe.”

  At that moment, two deputies, one male and one female, came inside and asked me exactly the same questions Henry had just asked me, and I gave them exactly the same answers.

  Resigned, the lady said, “Okay, we’ll try that next and see if that was it.”

  They did, and it was. I mean, having somebody trip and catch against the siding of the cabin for balance was just the same as the sound I’d heard the night before, as best I could remember. I really wanted to get it right, and I kept telling them I couldn’t be sure, but inside myself, I was sure.

  It must have been Gerda. Who else could it have been? It was dark, there were a lot of tangled roots and branches out there, and she was walking along behind the cabins in the dark, God only knows why. Then she tripped. Faye hadn’t gone with her when she’d tried to lure her out, so Gerda must have been alone.

  And then it hit
me. She hadn’t been alone. She hadn’t gone out to the troll’s mound and beat herself to death. Somebody else had done that. So what I’d heard had either been Gerda stumbling along on her way to be killed, or her killer, following her in the dark.

  If only I’d gotten up to look outside, I might have been of some help, but as it was, I could only say that something had been going on outside my bedroom wall at about 11:00 the night before, and I only had a groggy memory of exactly what it had sounded like.

  Chapter 14 – A Gumshoe and His Sidekick

  The sheriff’s deputies kept at me about it for much longer than seemed necessary, until I began to feel I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d heard. But after a while, they told me they’d be back with a statement for me to sign, and they finally went away.

  “I want a look back there behind the cabin,” I said when they were gone at last.

  “Can’t,” Henry said. “They’ll have it taped off.”

  “Oh.”

  Well, he would know. He’d been a professional gumshoe. He knew all about crime scene tape. He’d probably wrapped gifts with it.

  Conversation became sporadic after that, and we were all relieved when Arnie came and peeked into our cabin.

  He zeroed in on Gail, bypassing all the rest of us.

  “I been looking all over for you,” he said, coming in and standing over her. He looked at the cheery fire and the half-empty teacup beside her and nodded, pleased that she’d been fussed over.

  But he still wanted to take personal charge of her, right now, this minute. “Why don’t you come on up to the main house with me? I’ve got the fireplace going in the kitchen, and we can sit at the side table and watch Evaline bake cookies. It’s nice and warm in there, and it smells so good . . . .” He gave her a crinkly grin. “Evvie always bakes when she’s upset. We’ll go keep her company, huh?”

  Gail was agreeable to that, and he took her away.

  I looked through the doorway after them, then turned back to Aunt Nettie. “Charm,” I said simply, summing up Gail and the effect she had, even on difficult men.

  “Yes, I think she would have gotten any number of legends out of Arnie for Gerda if she had put her mind to it,” she replied. “Knowing that, it was dishonest of Gerda to take matters into her own hands. Logan, what on earth do you think made her go out by the bayside in the middle of the night like that?”

  “Arnie Klausen,” he answered simply. “If she’d gone out there any other time, especially during daylight, he might have seen from the back of his house and come out like a raging bull. And one way or the other, she was going to document the suspected troll’s mound. There’s always a reason people think there’s something supernatural going on in a particular place. A graveyard, a strange-looking rock formation, a hanging tree, anything that makes people shy away from an area . . . those are the kinds of places that usually have legends attached to them. Gerda probably wanted to scan the setting, look for features that might have triggered the story. Or,” he added, “she might actually have been hoping to have an encounter with a troll. Who knows?”

  “You’re probably right,” Nettie said, as if she had something else in mind. Something specific.

  Suddenly, I had to get out of that cabin or I was going to go crazy. Logan had been watching me, and he seemed to read my mind.

  “Why don’t we go for a drive?” he asked me. “Anywhere you want to go. Up to the tip of the peninsula or over to Baileys Harbor or anywhere.”

  I considered. “There’s a county park over by Baileys Harbor. The Ridges. It’s got a nice walking path. Matthew was talking about it. He said he was going to go over there on his bike.”

  “In that case, let’s go up to the tip of the peninsula. We can have lunch and look out over the bay towards Washington Island.”

  I smirked. “Matthew didn’t say he was going to The Ridges today. We could run into him anywhere in Door County.”

  “Then we’ll just have to be ready to take evasive maneuvers.”

  I grinned, then turned to Henry and Nettie. “Will you two be okay?”

  “I think we can manage by ourselves for a while,” Nettie said. Then she turned to give Henry a level look. “It’ll give us time to talk, just the two of us.”

  He raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  Oho, she wanted to know what else Mark had told them out there, I thought. Well, I had my own source: Logan had been there, too. If he and Henry had learned anything else that was interesting, I’d get it out of him. I was beginning to think Logan had noticed that I, too, had charm.

  * * * * *

  It takes about half an hour to drive from Fish Creek to Gills Rock, which is the end of the road on the peninsula, but we stopped along the way at Sister Bay. I was curious to see the goats grazing on the sod rooftop of Al Johnson’s restaurant, but we didn’t see any. Maybe it was the wrong time of the year. Still, we stopped in town and looked through some shops along the main street. Logan was a remarkably patient shopper, as menfolk go, and good at light conversation, when he wasn’t nervous. After spending the morning immersed in discussions about death, we both seemed to need a break.

  After walking around town, we suddenly realized we were starving, and we had a brief discussion about whether or not to make it all the way up to Gills Rock, as originally planned, or just eat right there in Sister Bay. In the end, it came down to memories, not food. Logan really liked the view from the restaurant that overlooked the mouth of the bay, (which was ominously named Porte des Morts – the Door of Death), (the bay, not the restaurant!), and I vaguely remembered having been there with my parents, years before. I also remembered that view, so I agreed.

  We got back into his SUV, which was huge and practical but not especially luxurious, and went on up the road.

  After you get past Sister Bay, there are long stretches of virgin countryside going north, and we pretty much had the road to ourselves. Once we were settled in for the ride, I casually asked him, “So what else did Mark tell you this morning?”

  I could tell I was onto something by the way he whipped his head around and gave me a guilty look. “What do you mean?”

  “You know – after he told you about Faye admitting she’d talked to Gerda through the window last night. He must have told Henry something else, and Nettie knew it. That’s what she meant by having time to talk, just the two of them. I haven’t learned to read Henry very well yet, but I know my aunt.”

  “Oh, there was nothing much.”

  I leaned forward and tried to get him to look at me. He gave me a lightning glance, but otherwise kept his eyes glued to the road.

  “There’s a woman, isn’t there?” I said.

  “How did you know that?” he asked before he could stop himself.

  “I knew it! Or at least, Nettie did. She was suspicious about him going all the way to Sturgeon Bay for wi-fi. Henry guessed it too, didn’t he? He’s probably concerned about how this is going to affect little Faye. He probably wanted to talk some sense into the guy before he did something he couldn’t undo. Oh, he’s good, that Henry. How in the world did he get Mark to admit to having an affair while you guys were talking about a homicide?”

  “A homicide?”

  “Gerda, remember?”

  “Of course, that, but . . . an affair? What affair?”

  I was wise to him by now, and I gave him a look. “A little misdirection did it, right? He got him talking about Gerda and then suddenly – wham! – and what’s this about you and that lady you’ve been sneaking around with. Something like that, right?”

  Logan was actually squirming now, breathing hard and very uncomfortable. “If you don’t mind, Paige, I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody about it.”

  “Oh, of course not. I wouldn’t breathe a word. But you can’t fool me. Nettie may have figured it out first, but after that I could see it from a mile away. You didn’t actually see his mistress, did you?”

  “What? No. Um, actually.” He steadied himself by gripping
the wheel. “Yes. I did see her.”

  “Get out! She’s at Trollhaven!?”

  “But you have to be discreet about this, Paige.” He sounded desperate now. “Please! Promise me you won’t gossip about this – don’t talk about it to anybody. I mean it.”

  “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt little Faye, even if her jerk of a father would. Cross my heart, I’ll never mention it.”

  “Not even to me,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  How sweet. A middle-aged, masculine prude. “Not even to you. After all, it’s really none of our business.”

  Somehow, I liked him better after that. Embarrassable men have always appealed to me, and more importantly, he hadn’t been able to lie to me, even though I could see he wanted to.

  * * * * *

  We lucked out at The Shoreline restaurant and got a window seat. The view was vast, as I’d remembered it – deep, cold water that looked deep and cold, with islands dotted around picturesquely.

  Lunch was sandwiches and soup, and we indulged ourselves in pie afterwards. We walked out of the restaurant stuffed. The chill of the morning had burned off by then, but the breeze from the bay was cold. I stood at the top of the rise over the dock for a moment letting the air rush around me. A feeling came over me of having nowhere to go, no worries I needed to tend to right away, and being quite content in the company I had beside me.

  The terrain at that point was almost vertical, going straight down to the water, and after we had walked down to the dock just for a look around, we had a strenuous walk back up the hill to where the car was parked. Once we’d made it, I think we were both a little reluctant to get back in the SUV and head back to Trollhaven. That’s where all the trouble was. I guess that’s why it seemed like the return journey was faster than the drive out had been. Before I knew it, we were getting close to Ephraim again, and the next village after that would be Fish Creek.

  “Logan,” I said, during these last ten or fifteen minutes while we were alone, “do you think Gerda could have just fallen on the rocks and hit her head?”