Door County, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  The sense of impending doom was so palpable I started skipping pages, wanting to know what was going to happen to this . . . well, whoever she was. I wasn’t going to find out what her name was until another character called her by name, because the narrative was in the first person. By the time the vacuum cleaner noise suddenly stopped, I was itching to know what was going to happen to this priestess of Ran, and I didn’t want to stop reading.

  Logan reached over the table and lightly tapped my hand, which was holding a few pages of the typescript up while I read what was on the table before me. I gave a start and said, “What?” Then, shaking my head to clear it, I said, “Oh,” coming back to the present.

  Paula . . . soft interrogation . . . right. I blinked and got back in the game, straightening the pages and handing them back across the table. Logan took them and stashed them in his briefcase, like he was hiding them.

  I had liked my opening gambit from before so I tried it again. “A lot of drama around here today,” I repeated.

  “You were smart for getting lost for a while,” she said without looking at us. Since the customers were watching, she was flicking a dirty-looking duster around. “Where’d you go?”

  Logan made a long story of our drive up to Gills Rock, and every now and then I popped my eyes at him, unhappy that he was keeping her off the subject for so long.

  By the time we were done with the story of finding Matthew by the side of the road, we were getting cozy with her and she’d stopped working. She didn’t exactly sit down, get comfortable and light up a cigarette, but she definitely unbent, forgot about Napoleon, and settled down to a good gossip.

  Unfortunately, she wanted to gossip about Matthew.

  “I know his type,” she said. “They’re all alike. The ones that just shove their wet towels at you, ask for clean ones, and shut the door in your face.”

  “Do you think he’s hiding something in the cabin?” Logan asked.

  “Yeah, my tip money. Folks are so cheap! If they don’t let you make the bed and run the vac, they figure they don’t have to leave a tip. The cops told me not to go in and clean it until he got back and gave them consent to search, but I told them I never go in to clean it anyway. Thank you very much, by the way,” she told Logan. “I appreciate the tips. You’re Cabin 2, right?” she said, transferring over to me.

  I told her I was. “With my aunt.”

  “You too,” she said with a stiff head duck. “Thanks.”

  “No problem. We know you work hard.”

  “So he just meets you at the door with his dirty linen and you make the exchange?” Logan asked.

  “Not even that. He leaves his wet towels on the table on the porch and I’m supposed to just leave the clean ones there for him to pick up whenever he gets back. He’s always out on his bike already by the time I get to work. I don’t know why he bothered renting a cabin. He should just sleep in the woods.”

  “He said somebody had been in his cabin today.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me.”

  “No, of course not,” Logan said soothingly. “I was just wondering if the police searched it.”

  “I don’t know. They searched the ones where people were here to give consent, but I don’t think the bike freak was around at the time.”

  “So that’s why you’re running late today? The police held you back while they did their search?”

  “Right. They took their time about it, too. And boy did they search her cabin,” she added, jerking her head back to indicate Gerda’s. “I won’t be getting in there for a while now, I think. They already searched this one, right?”

  “Yes. This morning, before we went on our drive.”

  “What about you – do you think anybody’s been sneaking around in here besides the police?”

  “Um, we just got in the door when you knocked. If anything would have been stolen it would have been this laptop. I just left it sitting here, in plain sight. Other than that, I haven’t looked around yet.” He did so now. “Nothing looks like it’s been disturbed.”

  “You don’t have much stuff. Not as much as most people. You’d think a man alone wouldn’t have much with him, but you’d be wrong. Some of them are worse than women. I wonder what Evaline’s going to do about turning the dead lady’s cabin over. It’s rented, starting next weekend and on for the rest of the season.”

  “Did they find anything in Gerda’s cabin?” I asked.

  “Her stuff. All her clothes are the same. Did you get a load of her getup? Ugliest clothes I ever saw in my life.”

  “Did they say what they were looking for?”

  “Well, they weren’t looking for a suicide note, I can tell you that. You don’t fall and hit the back and the front of your head on the rocks at the same time. Somebody knocked her down and while she was helpless, they made sure they finished the job with a couple of bashes from the front. Face was a mess, they said.”

  I shivered. She hadn’t been overly ghoulish in her tone of voice, but the way she put it was so graphic.

  “The police must have wanted to look at her notes,” Logan said. “I know she was obsessive about keeping a journal, and writing down all her ideas relating to her research. She liked to map out her plans going forward. She probably wrote down her goals for viewing the troll’s mound last night. I bet she even wrote down the exact time she planned to go down to the bayside. I’m sure someone’s told you she was interested in the legend of the trolls.”

  Paula had a coughing fit that may have begun as laughter.

  “That old thing?” she said when the pipes were clear again. “I should’ve known. The old fool. She kept asking me questions about it, and I took offense and told her I never heard of it.”

  She would. “But you told Faye about it,” I said.

  “That’s different. Faye’s a kid. Stories like that are for kids, not middle-aged nut cases, like that Gerda.”

  “It is an interesting story,” I said. “Arnie gave Faye the official version, and my aunt and I happened to be there at the time. It’s not exactly a happy story, though, is it? And I remember him talking about some woman long ago who went down to the troll’s mound and never came back.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, giving the vacuum a rock back and forth as she stood beside it. “That happened a long time ago. She fell in. Those rocks are slippery down there.”

  “Arnie said she was never found.”

  “He did? Well, she was, and he darn well knows it. He must have just been trying to scare the little girl so she wouldn’t go down there by herself.”

  “Yeah, that’s the impression I got at the time,” I admitted. “So the police are pretty much nowhere?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I came to attention, and Logan gave her a mildly inquiring look.

  “My lips are sealed,” she said.

  “Sworn to secrecy by the police?” I said.

  “I didn’t say that, either. There’s more than one mystery going on here, and one’s got nothing to do with the other, so the police aren’t interested in that one.”

  I prepared myself for more nonsense about the trolls, but she was dying to tell us, so I went ahead and asked what she meant.

  “That man O’Neil. The father of that pretty little girl, who ought to know when he’s got it good and not be messing around on the side.”

  Logan and I gave one another a hard look. “He’s messing around?” I asked. “Cheating on his wife?”

  She nodded almost violently.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I saw him with her.”

  “Her, the other woman?” I asked. “Here?”

  “I saw him with some woman, and she wasn’t a cop, because I know all the cops around here. And she wasn’t interrogating him, because it was much too friendly to be an interrogation.”

  “Friendly? Friendly how?”

  “Well, not kissing friendly,” she admitted, “but they were right out there in the driveway in front of the
cabins for all the world to see. But I know it when I see people who’ve got something going on. Those two weren’t meeting for the first time. They knew each other, and they were being very coy about it. When that wife of his came out of the cabin, he and that woman walked away from one another right away and he went on up to his wife, all smiles and how are you darling.” She nodded to give it all emphasis.

  “All the way to Sturgeon Bay for wi-fi,” I said softly.

  Logan looked at me but didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah, wi-fi here’s lousy,” Paula said, looking around as if she could see it. “People are always complaining. Why they care about wi-fi when they’re on vacation and should be out sightseeing I’ll never know. Well, I gotta go. Napoleon’s probably eating my curtains by now.”

  By that time she’d been talking longer than she’d been cleaning, and I figured Napoleon was just her favorite excuse whenever she wanted to get away from whoever she was with and go home.

  Chapter 16 – Love Blooms All Over the Place

  It was the first time Logan and I had been alone together since that sudden kiss, and we should have felt a little shy, or awkward, or something, but somehow we didn’t. Nothing about Logan ever made me feel awkward, I realized, and I looked at him curiously and said, “Huh.”

  “See,” he said calmly. “I’m not what you thought I was. And I can surprise you.”

  “Just a little,” I said lightly. Then I gave a thoughtful frown and said, “I wonder who the woman is.”

  “Woman? What woman? I only see one of those, and you’ve known her all your life. I’m the one still wondering who she is.”

  “I mean the woman Paula saw with Mark.”

  “Oh, that woman.”

  “Ah, yes, that’s right,” I said with a tight little smile. “You’ve been sworn to secrecy. You’re letting Henry handle it, if it can be handled. But I don’t need a roadmap, thank you very much.”

  He looked at me with concern. “You promised me. You said you wouldn’t gossip or ask questions.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, I’m not an idiot. I can make one and one come out to two, here.”

  “Actually, it would make three,” he said. “No, four.”

  Slowly, I recited, “One and one make four?”

  “It would in this situation. The mysterious lady, Mark, Gillian and Faye. Four.”

  “Oh, yeah, I see what kind of math you’re doing. Well, maybe Mark didn’t allow her to show up. Maybe she just did. But if she’s that bold, do you think she would just slink away when Gillian showed up?”

  “You promised . . . .”

  “I am not gossiping or asking questions. I’m thinking out loud. You know, Paula didn’t exactly say the woman slunk off. They just broke it up and she walked away.” Seeing the look on his face, I finally said, “Yeah, I know. I promised.”

  “You did.”

  I brushed his lips with my own. “You’re very sweet and very innocent and spend most of your time in another, better world. And I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  He was blushing now, and I could only shake my head.

  “Maybe it’s different in academia,” I said. “People out here in the real world can be pretty trashy sometimes.”

  “Academicians can top them every time, when it comes to trashiness. You have no idea.”

  I wiggled my eyebrows at him. “Good to know. But you do spend a lot of your time among the ancient heroes, and they had a whole different set of values.”

  “They were trashy, too, especially when it came to sex. Don’t be too hard on Mark. He’s trapped in a difficult situation.”

  “Of his own making.’”

  “Maybe so. Just keep in mind that we’re getting all this information second-hand from Paula. People like Paula always see what they want to see, and they just love it when they think they’re seeing something naughty.”

  “Paula’s the kind of lady who knows naughty when she sees it, honey.”

  He gave me a sort of sidelong look and said, “Let’s go see what Henry thinks.”

  He reached for the doorknob with one hand and took my elbow with the other, getting ready to drag me outside.

  “Now wait just a darn minute, buster,” I said, folding myself into his open arm. “I don’t think you fully realize the advantages of the situation we’re in now. You’ve awakened the sleeping passions of a woman you at least seem to be interested in, and more than that, you’ve got her alone in your personal territory where nobody can hear her feeble cries for help – feeble because she doesn’t really want any help; interrupting us now would just be rude, but you gotta play the game – and you’re letting yourself be distracted by anything, anything, that’s going on outside this little cabin, right here, right now?”

  “Did your teachers ever talk to you about sentence construction?”

  “Shut up. Pay attention. A real man doesn’t need to have these things explained to him.”

  He was amused. I’ll admit I was being adorable, but light amusement wasn’t what I was after just then.

  “Sleeping passions? I’ve known you for,” he checked his watch, “forty-seven-and-a-half hours now, and in technical terms, I’m already standing on first base. Or is it second? Is first base just a date? Wait.” He looked toward the ceiling and began to count. “First base is a date, second base a kiss – how does it all go again? I haven’t thought about this since high school.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Anyway, in my world, you’re practically a vamp.”

  “Thank you for using a nice old-fashioned word instead of what gets slung around these days, even by little children.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, opening the door.

  “Wait – aren’t you going to try something while you still have me in your power? There are so many bases left.”

  He arm-clinched me and planted a really impressive one on me. Then he pulled back and gave me a deep, smoldering look. As I stared at him, breathless, he said, “I’ve made a lot more progress than I thought I was going to. For now, I’m happy.”

  I was perversely aware that I could have made him happier – not that I would have, but he didn’t even try – but by then we were out into the October dusk and I realized that lunch had been a long time ago.

  “Well, at least give a girl dinner,” I groused.

  “Good idea. Let’s get Henry and Nettie and figure out somewhere to go.”

  “Chaperones? Really?”

  He’d been striding across the path between the cabins and the parking lot, and he paused to shake his head at me. “And you think those passions of yours were asleep?”

  “Hey, when I flip, I flip. Anyway, you may be right after all,” I said. “Did you know Henry was a retired cop?”

  “Way ahead of you, Sleepy. Did you know that your aunt was a retired detective?”

  “She was never a detective. Her husband was. She only did a little undercover probing for him, every now and then.”

  “Sherlock and Watson,” he said definitively.

  “I beg your pardon. Sherlock and Sherlock.”

  “If you insist. Let’s go see what they’ve been up to today. They’re probably in your cabin.”

  They were. We found them sitting inside Cabin 2 with the fireplace on, looking all cozy and content.

  “Has anybody had dinner yet?” I asked as we came in.

  “You’re just in time,” Henry said, standing up. “We ordered a pizza.”

  “You what?” I was indignant. Pizza is for when you don’t feel like grocery shopping and the food runs out. I was on vacation. I expected apps, mains with two veg and a fancy dessert, especially since I had a guy with me and we’d already gotten to first and/or second base.

  “Now, Paige,” Nettie said in her auntly way. “After last night’s feast, we thought we’d stay in tonight. The pizzaman should be here any minute now.”

  “Great idea, you two,” Logan said. “I think we can squeeze around this table and
eat. That way, we can talk freely.”

  “Exactly what we were thinking,” Henry told him as they looked at one another, man to man.

  “Well, it wasn’t what I was thinking,” I said.

  “Oh, darling,” Aunt Nettie said, “it’ll be fun. We’ve still got plenty of wine. What’s more fun than pizza and wine in our own little cabin, just the four of us?”

  “Yeah,” Logan said. “Loosen up, Sleepy.”

  “Oh, good grief, are you going to call me that for the rest of my life?”

  He deepened the eye contact and said, “You know, maybe I am.”

  “Not if you keep feeding me pizza.”

  “Pizza today, filet mignon tomorrow. Deal?”

  I stood my ground, but it didn’t do me any good; it was three against one. All it did was let Henry and Nettie know that Logan and I had been running the bases and were at a playful stage in the game.

  The pizza arrived, and while I still grumbled about eating out of a cardboard box on vacation, Aunt Nettie sailed around the room getting glasses from the bathroom and opening a bottle of the cherry wine. At this rate, we’d have to stop in Algoma again if we wanted to bring any home with us. We had bought two stemware glasses at the winery, and she gave them to the men. As she came near to hand me the glass my toothbrush had just been in, now rinsed out and full of wine, she murmured, “And what have you two been up to today?”

  “Probably the same things you two have been up to today.”

  Her guilty blush confirmed everything.

  “Cheers,” I said, taking a swig. Leaning in, I asked her, “You didn’t order anything on the pizza that would give us all bad breath, did you? I mean, the night is young.”

  She tried to act scandalized and told me to behave myself.

  * * * * *

  It was actually a pretty good pizza, and after a couple of glasses of wine, I was willing to admit it.

  The men seemed to think they were way ahead of the ladies in working out what had happened to Gerda, but they were communicating in nods and winks, almost, agreeing on their theories before they bothered to put them into words.