Door County, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  Karl lowered his head and stared at Gail. “You going to stick to that bullshit story of yours?”

  She wilted, and Arnie spoke up, holding her protectively. “If she saw you, she saw you. It’s up to you to explain what you were doing there.”

  Karl lowered his voice and spoke with thick intensity. “For the last time, I wasn’t there! I don’t know who she saw, but it wasn’t me.”

  “Folks, if you don’t mind,” Sheriff Appleton said, leading the other two in. Once he had our attention, he said, “Good morning. Or is it afternoon already? I know you all know Mark O’Neil as a guest here. From this point on, he’s Special Agent Mark O’Neil, with the Drug Enforcement Administration. This is his partner, Special Agent Abigail Leach.”

  Mark and Abigail held up their badges, and Abigail used her other hand to push her glasses up her nose. They were still crooked.

  “Now these two need to talk to you,” the Sheriff went on, “and they’ll take you one at a time. You first, Karl, if you don’t mind.”

  Karl shot out if his chair, furious. “She’s lying!” he yelled. “It’s a lie. I did not bury those saddlebags – or anything else, for that matter – back behind the cabins where you found them.”

  “Now, that’s interesting, son,” Sheriff Appleton said in a quiet voice. “This lady, you mean?” He pointed at Gail, then turned to Mark. “Want to start with her instead?”

  * * * * *

  Whatever Karl had majored at in college, it hadn’t been Knowing When to Shut Up. The agents hadn’t known a thing about what Gail saw yet. Matthew had finally begun to talk, hoping to cut a deal, and that was what they wanted to talk to Karl about.

  It had been no coincidence, of course, that Karl had shown up suddenly and unexpectedly while Matthew was a guest of Trollhaven. They’d done a handoff of whatever product they were distributing, and Matthew had simply handed over everything, saddlebags and all. They didn’t want to make the exchange at Trollhaven, where there were lots of guests and Karl’s father might be keeping a suspicious eye on him, so they must have met somewhere in the interior of the peninsula where they could be sure they wouldn’t be observed. Unfortunately, Matthew didn’t know what Karl had done with the contents of the saddlebags once he’d taken them away in his car. Whatever it had been, it was no longer in Karl’s possession when the deputies searched his room and car.

  Logan and I had found Matthew sitting on the ground by the side of the road around 2 pm, as near as we could figure, so we must have gotten him back to Trollhaven around 2:30. He didn’t have his saddlebags with him then, so the handoff had already been completed. Asked if we had noticed exactly when Karl had returned to Trollhaven, I simply told them I hadn’t seen him at all that day. I’d been blind to the rest of the world all day, falling for Logan, but I didn’t tell the DEA agents that.

  So Karl could have gone anywhere on the peninsula and delivered the goods. It was a pretty sure bet that Karl would be stubborn about keeping his mouth shut about everything he’d been doing since he got to Trollhaven and only opening it to deny everything that Matthew said.

  We were all interviewed, of course, and asked who had been seen wandering around that area early that morning. Since we were interviewed separately, I only knew what I told the investigators, which was that after going back to bed after the peeping tom incident, I hadn’t seen or heard a thing.

  But Gail had seen something, and not knowing how explosive it was going to be, she’d spoken up about it innocently enough.

  Going into the main house that morning before breakfast, she’d expressed surprise – and relief – at finding Loki alive.

  Looking up at Karl while she knelt to fuss over the dog, she’d said, “I’m so relieved he’s all right. I thought I saw you burying him this morning.”

  “You what?” Karl had said.

  “Well,” she said, starting to look sorry she’d mentioned it, “I saw you behind the cabins with a shovel, digging. It was just before dawn, and it seemed awfully odd to me. I thought Loki must have died, and you were burying him before it got light, so the guests wouldn’t be upset, seeing you do it later in the day. But Loki’s just fine this morning, aren’t you boy?”

  “Are you high?” he’d asked her. “Get your eyes checked. It wasn’t me.”

  Arnie had flared up at him, and the battle was on.

  Then, some little time later, they found out about the saddlebags when Evaline came in crowing about what a good boy Loki was, saving Faye and finding the missing bags just behind the cabins, buried exactly where Gail said she’d seen Karl that morning, digging. Everybody put two and two together at the same time. It got ugly after that.

  I wondered at the time if Gail would have retracted what she’d said and never mentioned seeing Karl back in the woods, if she’d known what it would lead to. It was becoming clear to everybody that she was falling for Arnie. He had a manly toughness about him and a determination to pull his own weight in this world. He’d known for a long time that his only son was hiding some shady things, and he’d reached the point where he didn’t want to know what they were.

  Now, Arnie was ready to face whatever the boy had brought upon them, and he wasn’t about to let his family and business be ruined by it. It was the worst time of Arnie’s life, and he was facing up to it like a man.

  A vulnerable woman who’d just lost her only child, being tenderly treated by such a man with problems of his own, would be a push-over. Arnie had a fussy, old-world way of tending to a lady, and Gail needed that just then. During that terrible, confusing time, I was glad that Gail and Arnie had one another to lean on. I had a feeling there was worse yet to come, and about that at least, it turned out I was right.

  So the police took an extra special interest in Karl from the get-go, and Gail was horrified, but not Arnie. It must have been killing him, seeing his only son, his one-time hope for the future, getting involved in something so dishonorable. But he was too stubborn to let it show.

  The rest of us were interviewed at Trollhaven, but the police decided to get Karl off his home turf and up to Sturgeon Bay, to the Sheriff’s office, where Matthew was being held. Whatever Matthew was involved in, Karl was part of it. His homecoming at that precise moment had only been because Matthew was there – with a delivery.

  After our police interviews, we were all feeling pretty ragged, and completely talked out. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was getting towards suppertime by then, but nobody had the energy to go out to eat. And I was darned if I was going to eat more pizza for dinner, after a day like that.

  Evaline saved us the trouble. Apparently, baking wasn’t the only thing she did to relieve stress. She’d been cooking all afternoon. She came out to our cabin and told us she had a mess of pot roast in the pressure cooker, and we were all coming into the big house for dinner.

  Since Mark was working, Evaline went down to Cabin 5 and invited Gillian and Faye, too. Then she gathered up the rest of us, including Justin, who was home from school by then, and told us to come on in. We weren’t eating on the porch. Things had gone far beyond the point of us being innkeepers and guests.

  We were bound up together as a family now, she told us, and her resemblance to her father got stronger as she said it. Any other woman would have been getting weepy by then, but Evaline pulled herself together and got tougher.

  Chapter 22 – The Calm Before the Storm

  The inside of the main house was a surprise to me. I had expected it to have been modernized at some point in its 100-year history, but neither Arnie nor Evaline had changed it much. It wasn’t sad, or worn looking. It was vintage, and very cozy.

  The furniture was probably Arnie’s father’s, carefully maintained. The thick floorboards were well-varnished and sturdy-looking, and the plaster walls had been whitewashed. There was deep wainscoting to keep the rooms from looking too stark. Under the dining-room suite was a dark red carpet, and eight feet beyond the end of the table was a fireplace with logs blazing away.
By one of the long sides of the table was an old breakfront, larger than the one on the porch, but in the same style, and Evaline displayed her grandmother’s fancy dishes along its shelves.

  The kitchen was the only room that had been updated, but since this had always been a lodgekeeper’s home, it had been built with open access between the kitchen and the other rooms. We were able to go back and forth to the long table without having to pass through doorways.

  Between light from the fireplace and the rustic wall sconces, the rooms were suffused with a golden glow. Only the kitchen lights were bright, and they were just far enough away from the table to avoid disturbing the candlelight effect.

  “Now you get busy and set the table,” Evaline said to Gail, pointing at the breakfront. “The flatware is in the top middle drawer.”

  Gail got busy. She needed something to do, and I knew that was the only reason Evaline had put her to work.

  Evaline went into the kitchen and told us to line up, take our plates and come past her so she could serve out the pot roast and cornbread. “Then you just go sit down and stay out of our way. Water’s on the table, and I’ll come around and ask what else you want to drink once we’ve said grace.”

  “I can get the drinks,” Justin said.

  “Good. You do that, when the time comes.”

  Arnie was standing back, quietly observing his daughter and grandson, watching Gail make herself useful, and I thought how good it was that he was seeing something go right in his own household.

  Arnie said a quiet grace, and after being thankful for the food, he only made a glancing reference to “our troubles,” not asking for them to magically go away, only expressing confidence that guidance would come when it was needed.

  Then Justin got up to ask around about drinks, and Faye insisted on helping him.

  It was like a balm to all our tired souls, this Holiday-like gathering. The only sour note was when Sheriff Appleton came in, about five minutes after we’d started eating, and Arnie pulled another chair up to the banquet-sized table for him. He sat down near the end of the table, adjacent to Arnie and next to me.

  The rest of us stiffened up slightly, but Arnie gave us a chuckle and said, “Cops gotta eat, too.” He looked down at the Sheriff’s slight paunch and added, “Maybe some a little more than others.”

  Even the Sheriff laughed over that, and we went ahead with the meal, though some of the family feeling had been dampened.

  * * * * *

  We took coffee at the table, after Evaline, Gail and I had cleared the dinner dishes away, and Evaline seemed ashamed to be serving that afternoon’s cookies for dessert.

  “I didn’t have time to bake anything special,” she said.

  “These are very special,” I told her, biting into one, though after all the cookies I’d had that afternoon, I really didn’t want one.

  I caught a look that passed between the Sheriff and Henry, so I should have known what was coming. I can only plead that it had been a long, strange day and for most of it, I’d been running on cookie power, which isn’t the best brain fuel.

  Also, Logan was sitting next to me, and I was far gone enough by then to wonder what had been wrong with my eyes the first time I’d looked at him. I remembered thinking he was kind of weather-beaten and comfortable-looking, and I kind of liked his ashy-blue eyes, but he was definitely not my type. The not-my-type fallacy had persisted for an unbelievable amount of time – forty-seven-and-a-half hours, to be exact. Looking at him that night at dinner, I was amazed at myself for not having noticed right away that he was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. That’s what love does to your normal senses. It makes them way better. But it also gives you tunnel vision. I was about to find out how much I’d missed.

  Chapter 23 – Love Hurts

  We’d been having desultory, careful conversations here and there along the table. During one of those unaccountable lulls, we all heard Faye asking Justin, “How did you get your shovel all wet this morning. Did you have to wash it?”

  “I didn’t get it wet, Cookie,” he said. “It was that way when I found it. Somebody threw it into the water, down by the bay.”

  “Why did they throw it into the water?” she asked.

  I thought it was more to the point to wonder what Justin had been doing down by the water, early in the morning before school, and I asked him.

  “I was looking for the shovel,” he answered. “It was missing from the toolshed. I knew the cops had the ladder, but they didn’t know anything about the shovel. After I looked all around Trollhaven and couldn’t find it, I went down by the bay. I’ve been checking everything in the toolshed all week, because the lock was broken and it worried me.”

  “That hasp and staple assembly is old,” Arnie said. “It’s rusty, and the screws holding the hasp in place pulled loose this week. I didn’t put it at the top of the to-do list at the time because we’re in our busy season now. The winter months are coming up when we’ll have nothing much to do. Plenty of time to fix it then, but first I needed the windows put up on the porch.”

  “The hasp was loose already,” the Sheriff said, “and Matthew Grant simply pulled it out of the doorframe. That’s how he got the ladder he was using to spy on Miss Dowd, here.”

  “Must have been,” Arnie admitted. “I didn’t worry about it at the time. Nothing was missing. Justin can be hard on things. I figured he’d just pulled the hasp out of the doorframe when he was trying to pull the padlock off.”

  Justin hotly denied ever doing any such thing, and Arnie nodded an apology. “Nothing ever gets stolen around here,” he said, “least of all from the toolshed. None of my tools are fancy and new. And the shed’s right outside my bedroom window, in the back corner of the house. It’s set back a little, but you can still see it from the house and from Cabin 1, too, so I don’t worry about anybody sneaking back there and getting into mischief.”

  “And who’s in Cabin 1?” the Sheriff asked.

  “I am,” Henry said.

  The Sheriff said, “Oh, that’s right,” and didn’t ask a follow-up question.

  Faye spoke up. “But why would somebody take your shovel and put it in the bay? Were they digging, out by the troll’s mound?” She asked the question innocently enough, but it startled everybody.

  “I don’t know why anybody would have been doing that,” Justin said.

  “Maybe the trolls were trying to bury that lady, and they couldn’t because she was too big,” Faye suggested. “So they just stopped and threw the shovel away.”

  “Faye,” Gillian said in a quiet, warning voice.

  “But the lady was found on Sunday morning,” Justin said. “The shovel wasn’t missing until this morning – a whole day later.”

  “Well it must have been the trolls,” Faye insisted. “It was found right outside their burrow, right?”

  “No, not that far north. It was just at the head of the path to the bay, right before the beginning of the seawall.”

  I realized with a start that that was where I’d found a nice flat rock to sit on and waited with Loki that morning. If you walked straight through the wood-path from Trollhaven to the bay, you’d end up exactly there. Anybody even vaguely familiar with the area could have done it blindfolded.

  “Well, it still could have been the trolls,” Faye was saying. “Maybe they wanted to dig up some of their gold.”

  Gail bowed her head and closed her eyes, and Gillian told her daughter that that was enough.

  “Finish your milk. I think it’s about time we went back to our cabin and got ready for bed.” Gillian said it very firmly, and Faye didn’t argue. She finished her milk, responded to her mother’s “What do you say?” by thanking Evaline for dinner, and we all told them good-night.

  Evaline, Justin and Gail started quietly clearing away the remains of the dessert while the rest of us sat silently over our coffee.

  Just as Gail was sitting down again, Henry asked her, “Did you see Karl going off toward the bay with th
e shovel last night?”

  She froze. “Why . . . no. Of course, I couldn’t have. He just walked away after burying the . . . well, I thought he was burying the dog at the time. I couldn’t think of any other reason he’d be digging back there while it was still dark out. When he was done, he just walked off in the direction of the toolshed.”

  “And yet he didn’t put it away in the toolshed. He threw it into the bay. He must have been the one who did that, right? It’s hard to understand. Can you think of a reason he would have thrown it away?”

  “Me? How should I know?”

  “I’d like to know why were you looking out the window at that time of night in the first place,” the Sheriff said.

  “I couldn’t sleep. Finally, I gave up and got out of bed, thinking if I took a shower and got dressed, I could go down to the main house and help Evaline prepare breakfast. I tried to take my time about it, but when I was dressed and ready, it was still too early. So I turned on the TV, but it was even too early for the morning news. The sun wasn’t up yet, and I felt so alone. I don’t know why I went back into the bedroom and looked out the window, but for whatever reason, I did. And I saw . . . well, you know what I saw.”

  “Strange,” Henry said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “No, I mean – how could you be so sure it was Karl? There aren’t any lights back there, and you said it was before dawn, so how did you know it was him?”

  Arnie made as if to say something then stopped, frowned, looked at Gail and waited for an answer, like the rest of us.

  “Well, the way you know anybody is anybody,” she said. “By the way he walked, by his general shape . . . I don’t know how. I just knew it was him.”

  She tried to think of more detail, and Henry cut her off with, “You’d just met the man. You couldn’t have spent much time around him, and yet you could recognize him by his walk? While he moved among trees, on uneven ground, in the dark?”