Door County, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  Gail kept making indignant little blurts, but Arnie, adjacent to her at the head of the table, began to keep a hand on her arm to quiet her, all the while keeping his eyes on Henry.

  “Matthew kept practically nothing in his cabin, so it must have been easy for you,” Henry went on. “The backpack had nothing in it but toiletries, but the saddlebags were empty. Why would he have brought back empty saddlebags? Why was planting them on Matthew the first thing Karl did after finding out about the murder? Were they incriminating, somehow? As far as anybody knew, there was no connection between Karl and Matthew. Well, you knew by then that there was one, and you wanted everybody else to know it, too. They were up to something shady, and if they were moving illegal goods around, people might also jump to the conclusion that they had murdered your daughter. They’d be the perfect patsies.

  “But you wanted Karl out of the way, not Matthew, so you had to expose the connection. You took the saddlebags and dropped them out the back window of the cabin, so you wouldn’t be seen coming out with them. You hoped not to be seen coming out of Matthew’s cabin at all, and you were lucky there. Looking around to make sure the coast was clear, you retrieved the bags and quickly got them into your own cabin, which had already been searched.

  “Then, all you had to do was pick the right moment when you wouldn’t be seen, move the bags back where they were sure to be noticed, and ask Karl what he’d been doing in the area where they were eventually found. You were also smart enough to ask him before they were found, so Arnie wouldn’t feel that you had betrayed his son.

  “But then you had some bad luck. Matthew was under stress, worrying that cops sniffing around after a murder would uncover his drug-running. He gave in to his urges during the night, and when he was found looking into Paige’s bedroom window, the back area behind the cabins was suddenly full of deputies. You couldn’t go out and plant the bags somewhere until just before dawn, when things had quieted down, and you couldn’t just fling them into the woods or the cops would wonder why they hadn’t seen them sooner.

  “But you had a few hours to think it through, and you came up with a good plan. You’d bury them, and then claim you’d seen Karl doing it. You knew the lock on the toolshed was broken, so you went in for a shovel, and that’s when I saw you.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Arnie’s hold on her arm tightened, but she went on anyway. “I never went into Matthew’s cabin that afternoon. I spent the entire rest of the day in this house, with Arnie and Evaline.”

  Father and daughter were sitting at opposite ends of the table, and the rest of us began to look back and forth between them. Arnie’s eyes slowly went blank and he broke off physical contact with Gail, but Evaline looked furious.

  “We were trying to comfort you,” she said to Gail. “We were treating you like one of our own. And all the time . . . .”

  “Did you see her going into Matthew Grant’s cabin?” the Sheriff asked.

  “No. But at one point, she went back to her own cabin, which is right next door to his. She said she wanted to lie down for a bit, but then she came right back, about fifteen minutes later, and said she couldn’t rest.”

  “Was this before or after your brother left?”

  “After. Definitely after.”

  “Could she have gotten the master key somehow?”

  Evaline paused, thought about it, looked straight at Gail and said, “Yes. She could. She was in the house while Paula was complaining about not being able to do her job. Paula said something like, ‘I may as well put the master key back in the top drawer of the desk, because I can’t do my work anyway.’ Gail was right there, and she heard. There are two master keys, and we keep them in the same place, in case one of them gets lost.

  “I was so upset about Karl, I wasn’t paying as much attention to Gail then. In fact, when she said she wanted a nap, I was relieved. I wanted the house quiet, so I could think, and with her there, I was concentrating on being good to her. And all the while, she was doing something to get my brother into trouble. Even more than he was already in.”

  “Oh, Evaline, how can you even think that?” Gail said, and she was so convincing, even I had a moment of pause. “I’d never do anything to hurt Arnie, or any other member of his family. I’ve come to love you. I’d do anything for you.”

  Arnie just looked blank, and Evaline stared. Nettie was shaking her head and smiling that gentle smile of hers.

  “My dear,” she said to Gail, “you were sending up red flags from the moment I met you. I’ve known Evaline and her father for years now, and Evaline and I have come to be close friends. I felt it was my duty to see if your intentions towards Arnie were, ahem, honorable. You seemed intent on him from the very beginning, as if you already had an agenda before you got here.”

  “I explained all that to you,” Gail said. “My daughter wanted me to soften him up so he would tell me the story about the trolls.”

  “I’m sure she did,” Nettie said. “I didn’t know that then, but I recognized a certain type in you. I asked the Sheriff if he’d do us all a favor and check you out. After all, Arnie is his friend, too. The results made me very sad.”

  “There’s nothing in my past that I’m ashamed of.”

  “Ah, yes,” Nettie said gently. “The equivalent of, ‘plenty of indictments, but no convictions.’ But there have been a few charges brought against you, haven’t there?”

  “In-laws can be spiteful. I can’t help that. I loved my husbands.”

  “All of them?” the Sheriff said. “Let me see, how many were there? Your five husbands? The ones you collected so much life insurance on, and who left you such nice estates. Only the last one you had to give up to a daughter who suddenly came out of the woodwork, waving a new will your husband had made. You must have done something to make him suspicious after you married him, because he changed the terms of his will without telling you, not long before he died. That must have pissed you off. You’d worked so hard, only to lose everything to some twit who couldn’t even get along with her own father, right?”

  Nettie spoke up again. “Five husbands. That must have been why Gerda thought you’d be able to help her pry the troll legend out of Arnie. You were good at manipulating men, and she knew it. Only when you got here and saw the kind of business Arnie owned and what a good mark he was, you couldn’t resist, could you? You decided to marry him, and your daughter was furious about it. She said she’d tell Arnie the truth about you. Whatever Gerda was, she wasn’t a criminal, and she was disgusted with your black widow marriages. Maybe she was even afraid you’d kill Arnie. After all, some of your other husbands died under suspicious circumstances. Here he was, the guardian of a family legend, maybe even a group of trolls – Gerda was capable of believing that – and you threatened to upset everything here, perhaps even bringing retribution down on her own head for what you were about to do.”

  “Good God, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Gail said flatly.

  “Really?” the Sheriff said. “Maybe so, but ridiculous things can be true. You certainly had time and opportunity to move those bags, and you could only have been doing it to implicate Karl.”

  “I’d never have done that! I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never even seen the goddamn saddlebags everybody keeps talking about.”

  “Then why did you say you saw him, out there in the dark before dawn, when you could hardly see the hand in front of your face? Once you realized he had something to hide, you decided he’d be the best one to pin your daughter’s murder on. Well, now that Matthew has been talking, and with this new theory of what happened, I’m sure we can get Karl to admit what he did with the bags. It’s better than facing a murder charge. We might even find your fingerprints in Matthew’s cabin somewhere, and your DNA is bound to be on those saddlebags you claim you never even saw. You covered yourself by throwing the shovel into the bay, so we won’t get any evidence off of that, but now that we know who you really are, we should be
able to follow your trail.”

  “Matthew and Karl are criminals,” Gail said. “They’ll say anything to get reduced sentences.”

  “With your record, I think we can let a jury decide. Your daughter was an excellent record-keeper, you know.” The Sheriff stood up. “She kept a journal, and it’s very detailed. You were the only person outside of the O’Neil girl who knew she was going to investigate the troll’s mound that night. She was confident that she’d get evidence of their existence that night, and she wanted to have a witness. Her journal says she asked you to meet her there. For you, it was the perfect opportunity, once and for all, to get rid of a daughter you’d never really loved.”

  Gail turned to Arnie. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  She was so appealing, I had to look away.

  In the lowest voice that could be audible, I heard Arnie say, “Tell the truth and shame the devil. And then have the courage to face the truth.”

  He stood up and left the room.

  Evaline didn’t even watch him go. She stayed in her chair, staring hard at Gail, never taking her eyes off her until the Sheriff led her away.

  Chapter 25 – Home to Sleepy Hollow, and Duke

  In the end, Gail’s own arrogance was her final undoing. She was so confident of getting away with it, she’d kept the gloves she’d worn the night she killed her daughter. They were Italian leather, soft as butter, and had been a gift from her third husband. A kind of trophy, I suppose. She couldn’t bear to throw them away. She had simply rubbed them clean with a damp towel, but it wasn’t enough to remove Gerda’s blood from between the stitching.

  Henry somehow got invited to come back to Sleepy Hollow with us and spend a few days visiting. Nettie’s good at that kind of thing. All of a sudden, things are arranged, everybody’s on board, and you’re not sure how it all happened. I recognized her game right away, but that’s only because I’ve been watching her work for years. Henry probably did, too, but he decided it was a game he wanted to play.

  He followed us down the road in his own car, and we stopped for lunch along the way. We finally made it back to Sleepy Hollow around 5:30, just before sundown.

  There red maple on Nettie’s front lawn, which had burst into fall color before the other trees, had now lost most of its leaves, which were laying all over the lawn. I told her I’d rake them up, but she said she had a neighborhood boy for that, and he counted on the extra money. The other trees up and down the block were glowing yellow, orange and purple.

  Nettie pulled her car into her garage, leaving room for Henry’s car, but he parked in her driveway instead of pulling in beside us, for some reason. Then he got out of his car, stretched, and took a look around. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  “Nice neighborhood,” he remarked as we came around the back of Nettie’s car.

  “I like it,” she said.

  Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to get the suitcases and get into the house, and my suspicions about why were confirmed within about two minutes.

  Duke was out of his house so fast he must have only paused to throw on a jacket. He was still in house slippers. He had just stepped onto his own lawn, heading our way, when he stopped in his tracks, staring at Henry. Then, like a soldier on the march, he came the rest of the way.

  “Who’s that?” he said, jabbing a thumb at Henry and looking him up and down.

  “Duke, I want you to meet my good friend, Henry,” Nettie said. “Henry Dawson, from Wisconsin.”

  “Is that where ya been? Shacking up with this guy?”

  “Why Henry,” Nettie said, “I never take my niece along when I shack up.”

  I grinned at him and did a toodles roll with my fingertips. “Hi Duke.”

  “I’d invite you in for coffee,” Nettie said, “but we’re tired. We just drove in from Door County. Now if you don’t mind, Duke,” she added, lifting her car’s key-remote to pop her trunk open, “we’d like to unpack.”

  “Pleasure meeting you,” Henry said.

  Duke stared at him, gargled, then turned around to walk slowly home.

  I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  And I decided then and there that Nettie was capable of handling her own affairs in her own way. It wasn’t anywhere near my way, but I was beginning to think I could learn a thing or two from her. Her way was so much calmer, and there was no breakage involved. Well, maybe there was, to Duke’s heart, but I’m not sure it was his heart that was yearning for Nettie. As far as I’d been able to make out, he was looking for cooking, nursing and housekeeping, not lovemaking.

  The mittens came out great. I finished them the next day. They’re just right for those frosty days in the Midwest, when the steering wheel of my car feels like a ring of ice, and I’ve lost track of the times I’ve heard, “Where did you get those?” One tries to be demure when one replies, “Oh, these? Why, I knitted them myself.”

  As for Logan, he was headed our way soon, too. Saying goodbye to him, even for a short time, was surprisingly hard. At the last moment before we got into our cars, I felt my facial muscles giving away my feelings, and he noticed. I was glad. I wanted him to know.

  “I’ll see you again soon,” he said, coming closer for an intimate moment, even though Nettie and Henry were standing outside the cars, waiting. “You’re coming to see me soon, right? I’ll show you around Hoffman Estates. We’ll do lunch.”

  “I know my way around Hoffman Estates,” I said, trying to blink away the look in my eyes. “I’ve been going to Aunt Nettie’s house all my life, and it’s less than an hour away from your apartment.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows for some silly reason, and I laughed.

  “You knew all along,” I said softly.

  “As soon as I met you.”

  It was a beautiful thing to hear, but it hadn’t been what I’d meant. “You went to college with Karl. You liked his parents. And you knew . . . .”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “Let’s just say I had vague suspicions. I’ve made it a point to visit Trollhaven more often lately, since I heard the rumors from my old college buddies about what Karl was up to.”

  “It wasn’t chicken franchises, was it?”

  “He couldn’t make a go of that. His restaurant failed in the first year, because he was more into collecting income than managing a fast food joint. He left the place to run itself, and you can’t do that. So he turned to . . . other things, and it worried me.”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, you didn’t want him ripping Arnie off.”

  “Right. I wasn’t happy to see him suddenly arriving out of the blue for a family visit. I didn’t know exactly what it was that worried me about it all; I just knew I should be worried. And I was glad I was on-site when he came home to roost.”

  “But that wasn’t really an accident.”

  “Let’s call it an act of providence and put it behind us, shall we? When are you coming to see me? I’ll be driving home on Friday.”

  I smiled, in a trembly sort of way. “Is Friday too soon?”

  His answering smile didn’t tremble a bit. “Not at all. I’ll send you a text when I get home, and you can come right over.”

  I gave a last backward glance at the cabins of Trollhaven. “It won’t be the same, though.”

  “Oh, I think it will. It’ll be even better.”

  His apartment in Hoffman Estates was even closer than I’d thought – just a 30-minute drive straight out Route 72. Even less, if the traffic was good.

  Even while we were still at Trollhaven, he’d started making vague remarks about needing a literary secretary. Someone to get him organized, help with the kind of social networking you need to be good at to get anywhere with anything these days, set up a website for his new series of books, which were going to be nothing like his other books. With my skillset, I could do that. These absent-minded professor types are so helpless, he might even need somebody to tuck him in at night. My skillset included that kind of thing, too.

  I ha
d been forced to admit to myself, though, that my skillset was not what I’d begun to hope when it came to sleuthing. I thought I was a genuine Sherlock for a little while there, but it turned out I was a Watson after all.

  Nettie had been the one to realize that Gail was a con artist, and that she was about to target Arnie Klausen. That’s what she’d wanted to talk to Henry about after Logan and I had left to go to Gills Rock. She asked him to have Gail checked out with whatever police contacts he still had, and they’d found out about her past. Nettie already realized something was off about Gail, and it worried her that Arnie seemed to be falling for her.

  Henry had been the one to realize that Matthew was a creep, which led to finding out that he was a drug-runner, too. The way Henry had stood up to guard me wasn’t something I was going to forget anytime soon. Of course I love him for my aunt’s sake, but he’s also my hero.

  And Logan, while not exactly a Sherlock, had turned out to be something of a literary genius. His first book caught fire right away, and the sequel did even better. The desperate way people howl for the next one in the series, and the next one and the next one, surprises me a little. There’s a whole generation of people out there who have grown up reading Harry Potter and watching Hobbit movies, and I was able to find ways to connect them with Logan’s mythological saga, but I have to admit it, the old horse-to-water saying is true. It’s a darn good series – okay, brilliant – and he’s even got me hooked. And the best part? I get to find out what happens next before any of his other fans do.

  He draws the line at dressing up like a wizard at Middle Earth conventions, but he collects a lot of fees giving talks about his books at them. And sometimes I help him with readings, doing the voices of exotic creatures.