Door County, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  “He was very close to my cabin.” Her voice was getting shrill, but she was sticking to her story. “Almost directly behind it, in fact, but enough to the side for a little ambient light from the parking lot to fall between the cabins and make him just barely visible. Maybe the light from my window – ” She stopped herself, realizing it didn’t make sense. If there had been light from her window, whoever it was behind the trees would have seen her better than she could see him. Regrouping, she stubbornly said, “I don’t know how I knew it was him, but who else could it have been? Mark is taller, and Matthew had been arrested and taken away – ”

  “You already knew that?”

  “I heard the commotion behind the cabins in the middle of the night. That must have been what woke me up in the first place, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I looked out and saw the Sheriff’s people taking him away.”

  “Really? It’ll be interesting to see if you can really see that area from your cabin’s back window. After all, Matthew’s cabin is between yours and Paige’s.”

  “Naturally, with all the commotion, I went outside for a look. Of course I went outside for a look. Who wouldn’t?”

  It began to seem as if she were making it all up as she went along, and yet she had a look of utter blamelessness about her.

  The Sheriff asked her, “Are you still willing to swear that it was Karl that you saw back there?”

  Gail looked at Arnie helplessly.

  “Just tell the truth,” Arnie told her softly. “It’s all you can do.”

  “I thought it was him,” she said. “I’ve hoped all along I was wrong, and maybe I was wrong. But I don’t think so.”

  Of course, I had to put my two cents in. “But who else would have had the saddlebags? Matthew had passed them off to Karl. We know that, because Matthew said so, right, Sheriff? Karl must have come back to Trollhaven that night and found out about Gerda’s death. That meant that everybody and everything was going to be searched. The bags implicated him in drug-running, so he panicked and got rid of them, fast.”

  Evaline started to say something, but Logan interrupted her, with, “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “So however she did it,” I finished up, “Gail must have recognized Karl in the dark. Yes, Evaline. What were you going to say?”

  Evaline was staring at her father now, and slowly she asked him, “We should just tell the truth, right? Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

  He nodded firmly, staring at her.

  “It couldn’t have happened like that, because Karl wasn’t out all day. He came back more than an hour before you did, when you brought Matthew back. I told him about the murder then. So he knew about it early in the afternoon. He didn’t have to go out before dawn to bury those saddlebags behind the cabins. He had plenty of time to put them in a better hiding place than where they were found. He could have taken them anywhere on the whole peninsula.”

  We were stunned, and so was the Sheriff. “Why didn’t you come forward with this information sooner?” he demanded.

  “Nobody asked me. They wanted to know what I’d seen Matthew doing. Nobody asked about Karl.” We could all see that unless she had been forced to, she hadn’t been about to tell the police anything about her brother.

  “You were told, though, weren’t you,” the Sheriff said, through nearly clenched teeth, “that as soon as you saw your brother you were to send him to my people to be interviewed, were you not?”

  “I did tell him you wanted to interview him,” she said tersely. “But I couldn’t very well force him to cooperate, could I?”

  When the Sheriff continued to glower at her, she said, “I looked outside, but I didn’t see any of your people just then. I think most of them were still working down by the shoreline, where they found Gerda.”

  “So he was forewarned, and he managed to sneak around and avoid us. What exactly did your brother do after you told him about the murder?” the Sheriff asked.

  “He . . . .” Evaline looked at her father again. Then she steadied herself and went on. “He took the master key to the guest cabins. There are times when I don’t ask him questions, and this was one of them. He had that look about him. But I did watch to see what he was going to do. He took something away in a big black plastic garbage bag. I saw him go outside and walk behind the cabins with it. A couple of minutes later, I saw him going up the steps to Matthew’s cabin.”

  “Dropping the hot potato,” the Sheriff said. “He had the saddlebags, and the first thing he did was get rid of them.”

  “And putting them in a big garbage bag gave him cover – he could pretend he was cleaning up litter,” Henry added.

  “They weren’t anywhere in sight when I looked around the sitting room,” I said, “but they might have been back in the bedroom. Anyway, Matthew was right about one thing: somebody had been in his cabin and moved that camera bag, only it wasn’t the police.”

  “That explains why he didn’t bring his camera along on a sightseeing bike ride,” Logan said. “He was just planning to hand the saddlebags over, and he wanted to keep the camera.”

  “It’s a digital camera,” the Sheriff said. “Karl went in and took a good look around, and he probably looked through the photos on that camera. He needed to be sure Matthew hadn’t been stupid enough to take a shot of himself with the cargo. I wonder if Karl deleted any of them. If so, we can probably recover them. People really are dumb enough to take pictures of themselves committing crimes. What did Karl do after he left the cabin?” he asked Evaline.

  “He brought the key back, shoved the garbage bag back in the box – ”

  “Empty?”

  “Empty. I pretended I didn’t notice.”

  “We’re going to want that bag. What then?”

  “I don’t know. I had work to do in the kitchen.” After a moment, she relented. “But I could see him out the back window. We park our own cars back there, away from the guests’ cars. I saw him getting into his car. I went out to try to stop him, but by that time, he was gone. I didn’t think he’d be coming back, and I was afraid.”

  “But he did come back.”

  “Yes. He came back sometime after 10:00. And then,” she added, “I was even more afraid.”

  The Sheriff looked around the table at all of us as if he were very disappointed in somebody or something.

  “All right, folks,” he said, “I know you’ve all been interviewed before, but obviously some things were missed. Let’s go around the table and everybody tell me what you were doing all day Sunday, even if it doesn’t seem important. Let’s start with you,” he said, looking at me, since I was sitting next to him.

  “Well, after your people were done interviewing us, Logan and I set out around noon and went up to Gills Rock for lunch. On the way back, we saw Matthew down on the side of the road. He’d been grazed by a pick-up, but he was okay. We took him and his bike back to Trollhaven – about what time was that, Logan?”

  “I think we got back here around 2:30. We got Matthew and his bike into his cabin – ”

  “ – and that’s when he noticed the camera had been moved, and said somebody had been in his cabin.”

  “Right.”

  “We left him there and went down to Logan’s cabin in time for the housekeeping lady, Paula, to come by, and after she was done, we went down to Cabin 2 and had dinner with Henry and Nettie. They had already ordered a pizza. After that, we all went to bed.”

  Next on that side of the table was Logan, and I told the Sheriff, “So Logan and I were together all day, really.”

  Gillian and Faye had been on the other side of Logan, but they’d already left, so he went to Evaline at the head of the table.

  “I did the same things I do every day,” she said. “Got up early, started breakfast, set the tables out on the porch . . . I don’t know.”

  “When did you find out about the murder?” the Sheriff asked.

  “Right after Mark and his family found . . . her.” If the Sheriff wa
s oblivious to Gail’s feelings, Evaline wasn’t. “After that, things were kind of a fog for a while.”

  “What time did your brother leave Trollhaven that morning? I mean the first time.”

  “Early. It was while I was serving breakfast. I was coming back into the kitchen after serving the O’Neil family, and I heard his car starting up behind the house. I looked out and saw him pulling away. It must have been around 9:00. Maybe a little earlier, but no later.”

  “And the next time you saw him?”

  “Twelve-thirty? One o’clock? Our housekeeper, Paula should have been just about finishing up by then, but your people kept her waiting around while they did their search. She came back to the house and complained about it until she was finally told she could get back to work. Right after she left, Karl came in.”

  “And you told him about the murder, and he immediately went down to Matthew Grant’s cabin.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And then he came back to the house and drove away again.”

  “Yes. I didn’t see him again until about 10:00 that night.”

  Justin was sitting on Evaline’s right, and he went next.

  “We’re talking about Sunday? I went to church with Wally’s family. I’d spent the night with them, since my Dad’s still out of town.”

  The Sheriff asked if he meant Wally Southern, over on Greywood Road, and Justin told him yes.

  “Then I went home and changed into my work clothes. As soon as I got here, I went and checked on the toolshed. I’ve been worried about it since I haven’t been able to lock it up. Everything seemed okay in there, but I still went to talk to my grandfather about it. He always had other things for me to do, but I thought that hasp should be fixed. It’s a bigger job than it sounds – the wood’s splintered, and I can’t just screw in a new one. But then Gramps told me what had happened to that lady, that she was dead. I wanted to go make sure Faye was all right, because she was there when her dad found the body, but Gramps said not to, her folks would take care of her. He wanted the windows put up on the porch, and I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon getting them out of storage, cleaning them and putting them up. Then I went home, showered and went over to Wally’s house. We played video games until Wally’s folks said we had to go to bed. That’s about it.”

  Henry was next.

  “After we heard about Gerda – by ‘we’ I mean myself, Nettie and Paige – we were sitting on Cabin 2’s porch talking about it when Gail came out, sat down with us and told us that Gerda was her daughter. Do you want the whole conversation?”

  The Sheriff said, “No, I think you already covered that in your interview.”

  “Right. The ladies decided to bring Gail inside the cabin then, but I noticed Mark O’Neil and decided I wanted a word with him. Logan joined us while the ladies went on up to the porch. That’s when I asked Mark just what the hell was going on at Trollhaven. I explained that I’d been in law enforcement myself, and I could tell he was watching Matthew Grant. The moment he saw Matthew at breakfast on Saturday morning, he reacted. I’ve had that reaction, too. You recognize somebody or something, then immediately cover yourself and pretend that nothing happened. And Matthew was the only one visible behind our table at the time. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.”

  “How’s that?” the Sheriff asked.

  “Because I was already watching Matthew Grant myself. He’s obviously a serious bicyclist, and yet his bike didn’t have reflectors. Why not? And I didn’t like the way he was always looking at Paige. When she would talk to him, she was friendly, almost flirty, but he didn’t seem to want to play. But when she wasn’t looking at him . . . let’s just say he had a way of staring at her that disturbed me.”

  “Yeah, you told me that part, when you warned me about him,” the Sheriff said. “You didn’t say anything about reflectors, though.”

  Henry shrugged. “It didn’t seem relevant at the time. His off-hours hobby had nothing to do with his day job. But something about him had always hit me the wrong way. And Mark O’Neil, for no apparent reason at all, seemed to feel the same way. I’d been nervous before, but once there was a murder, I wanted to know what Mark was all about, and I asked him straight out. He admitted he was a DEA agent, but he asked Logan and me to keep it quiet.”

  “So that’s why he was here?” Gail asked. “He was investigating Matthew?”

  “Not directly. He was investigating Karl. He knew Karl’s father ran a bed-and-breakfast, but at the time, nobody at the DEA thought Trollhaven had anything to do with drug-running. Karl almost never came here. But Mark decided that as long as he was bringing his family to Door County for a vacation, he’d stay here and get a feel for the place, check out the family. He never expected to see Karl here. Then Matthew Grant showed up and Mark recognized him as a bit player from Karl’s operation. He called it in, and he was told to keep a watch on Matthew. It was the last thing he wanted to do, with his wife and daughter here, so he went back to Sturgeon Bay to try to argue his way out of it, but it was just too perfect a set-up. He was told to stay put and keep his eyes open, and in the meantime, other members of his task force would be coming to the area. Then, suddenly, Karl was here.

  “I didn’t like what I was hearing, and I asked Logan to get Paige away from Trollhaven for the day and keep her busy, which he did. With both Matthew and Karl here, and a DEA task force to boot, I wanted to keep Paige and Nettie out of the way. There had already been a murder, and I didn’t know whether or not it was connected. I kept Nettie with me, and we sat tight in the cabin. By evening, we decided to order a pizza, and right after that the kids came back. We all spent the evening together.”

  “How did you know about Matthew Grant’s off-hour hobby, as you so quaintly put it?” the Sheriff said.

  “Like I said, I didn’t like the way he was looking at Paige. I called in a favor and found out about his bad habit. So Logan and I decided to keep a watch behind Paige’s cabin that night, and around 11:30, here came our peeping tom. He didn’t know anybody was onto him yet, and he was finding Paige . . . irresistible.” He shrugged and blew out some air. “That part of things was easy. It’s the rest of it that’s a tangle.”

  “The rest of it being the murder,” the Sheriff commented.

  “Actually, I’m still concentrating on those saddlebags. Follow the trail that led up to the discovery of the buried saddlebags and you’ll have your murderer.”

  “I will?” the Sheriff said without emotion.

  “Oh, I think so. They were put there for a reason.”

  It seemed obvious to me, and I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Karl needed to get rid of them when he knew the police would be searching his things. It’s simple, isn’t it?”

  “And while he was doing it, sometime before dawn, you, Gail, were looking out your back window and saw him.”

  Gail looked at the Sheriff as if he were being unfair. “Yes,” she said firmly. “I’m sure it was him.”

  “That’s interesting,” Henry said, “because the only one I saw walking around in the dark before dawn that morning was you, Gail.”

  She stared at him. “Me? I was in my cabin. How could you have seen me?”

  “As it happens, I couldn’t sleep that morning, either. Only after showering, shaving, and doing everything else to waste time I could think of, I got into my coat and went onto my cabin’s front porch to wait for sun to come up. And who should I see walking past my cabin and heading for the toolshed but you, outlined in the porch lights of the main house. Maybe you were so sure about who it was because you saw him at closer quarters than out your back window. Or maybe,” he said, bearing down on her, “you didn’t see anybody back there at all.”

  “But I did!” she insisted.

  “With the saddlebags?”

  “I don’t know. I already told you that.”

  “Because when you walked by my cabin toward the toolshed, you were carrying something bulky, and it looked to me very much like a pair o
f saddlebags from a bicycle. Would you care to explain that?”

  Chapter 24 – Henry Springs the Trap

  When Gail didn’t respond, Henry settled back and went into a more conversational tone of voice.

  “Poor Karl,” he said, watching Gail all the time. “When he said he didn’t bury the saddlebags he was telling the truth. He did get rid of them, but not there. I was surprised when they were found buried behind the cabins, because the logical thing for him to do was to put them back into Matthew’s cabin. As far as he knew, there was nothing to show they even knew one another, and the cops were investigating a murder, not a drug operation. But if the police found those saddlebags in Karl’s possession, there would have been questions. One thing might have led to another, and the cops might have gotten curious about the bags and had them tested.

  “As soon as he took delivery from Matthew, Karl must have passed the drugs on to his local dealers. I don’t see Karl standing on street corners selling pills at $20 a pop. He had to have people doing that for him. Now he was in danger of being caught literally holding the bags, at a time when the police were all over the place. His best bet would have been to get them back into Matthew’s possession as soon as possible.

  “It seems obvious to me now that that’s exactly what he did do. And he was shocked when the bags weren’t found where he had put them. He even struck up a conversation with me after breakfast, trying to find out if I had any inside information about it. He knew by then that I’d been the one to tip off the Sheriff about Matthew’s hobby.

  “But if Evaline could see him taking something into Matthew’s cabin, you could too, Gail. You were here in the main house that afternoon. Like everybody else, you knew Matthew wasn’t there; the police had been looking all over for him, wanting to interview him and get consent to search his cabin. He wasn’t at Trollhaven at all. So why did Karl go into his cabin, if Matthew wasn’t even there? Maybe he was going into the cabin because he knew Matthew wasn’t there.

  “After Karl dropped something off and before Matthew was brought back by Logan and Paige, you decided to go in and take a look for yourself. He’d been acting suspiciously, and you wanted to know why. He’d gone in with a full garbage bag and come back out with an empty one. There was something he wanted to plant on Matthew, and if anybody was going to look guilty, you wanted it to be Karl. He stood to inherit a chunk of Arnie’s estate, assets you were already thinking should be yours someday. If Karl had secrets, it might be to your advantage to expose them.”