by Gail Lukasik
She shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose I would. Not to sound insensitive, but it isn’t me. And quite frankly, I think you're partly to blame for what happened.” Her contrite manner had disappeared. “I warned you about pursuing this Carl Peck thing. You were downright rude to Sarah at the dinner party. I wanted to kill you myself.”
Realizing what she had said, she flushed. “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. It’s just that I can’t understand you. Whether Carl Peck died accidentally or was poisoned has nothing to do with you. From what I know of him, he was a nasty man, and the world is probably a better place without him.”
“Those are pretty harsh words from someone who’s dedicated her life to healing people.”
“Some people are beyond redemption. Didn’t you say that at the dinner party?”
I was starting to feel nauseous again. “That doesn’t mean we have the right to kill them. And in case you haven’t noticed, this Carl Peck thing now has a lot to do with me.”
“Look, I can see we’re getting nowhere with this. You need to rest. I’m going to take off.”
She picked up the necklace and turned it in her hand. “You really are going to need this.”
I looked at her skeptically.
“Besides helping flush your system of the poison, malachite has spiritual properties. It can reveal one’s deepest fears about change and growth. It’s sort of like a mirror of your soul. Of course, you have to wear it in order to receive its benefits.”
She placed the necklace in my hand. As she turned to go, I called out to her. “Lydia, thank you for saving my life.”
“No problem. It’s what I dedicated my life to, remember.”
* * * * *
“So you see, it had to be one of four people,” I explained to Stevens, who had his size eleven cross-trainers propped up my bed and was leaning back on his chair. “Eva, Sarah, Rob, or Renn Woulff.”
He had shown up around 7:30 with a book of poetry by someone named Jean Valentine. I knew it was to keep me quiet. When I asked him who Jean Valentine was, he replied, “Just read it and find out.” Neither one of us brought up our last exchange at my cottage.
“So according to your reasoning, whoever poisoned you also poisoned Carl Peck. That leaves Woulff out,” he decreed.
“Not necessarily. He was at the Olde Stagecoach when I was there with Eva. He could easily have slipped something into my drink when I went to the washroom.”
“Most of the time, Renn Woulff can’t remember where he parked his truck. I don’t see him doing something like this. He’s a pathetic drunk who blames everyone else for his own screw ups.”
“Maybe,” I said, debating whether to tell Stevens my suspicions about Woulff leaving me that freek-y message on my mirror.
He leveled his infamous blue stare at me. “What?”
“Nothing. Let’s forget about Woulff for a moment. So you do believe someone poisoned Carl Peck?”
“It’s possible.”
“It’s more than possible and you know why.” My throat hurt from talking.
“Because someone poisoned you.”
“Are you making fun of me? “
“I’m only following your deductions.”
“There’s something else.” I said, pinching the stiff sheet between my fingers.
“Out with it, Girard. You’ve got that look.”
I told him what I knew out about Joyce Oleander and her illegitimate child, skipping the part about breaking and entering and stealing important papers. “I don’t see how any of this ties in with Peck’s murder, but I’ve got a gut feeling that it does,” I concluded.
“Who told you this information about Joyce Oleander?” His face went blank except for that almost imperceptible nerve twitching along his jaw. I was beginning to read this faux blankness as an indicator of some strong emotion he had to keep in check. The stronger the emotion, the blanker his expression. And not for the first time, I wondered what his story was.
“Ida Reeves,” I revealed softly. Suddenly driving home my point became secondary to Stevens maintaining that blank look.
He stared out the window, lost in his own musings. Finally he said, “That explains a lot.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he just kept staring out the window.
“Joyce had exhausted every avenue to find her child.” I reached for my notepad from the bedside table. “She even called a detective named Barry Snyder.” Earlier I had checked my answering machine for messages. Wonder of wonders, Snyder had finally called. He said if I wanted to talk to him, I should call today before 7:30. After that, I’d have to wait until he got back from New Mexico.
“You’re lying here with tubes sticking out of you, and you’re conducting research?” He shook his head. “What did you find out?”
“Not much. The guy didn’t have anything to go on. Joyce couldn’t even say for sure if the child had been adopted in this state. She did tell him about the friend who took the baby. But when he asked for the friend’s name, she clammed up. He said, ‘It was pretty much like finding a needle in a haystack.’”
I laid back on the pillow. “Do you know the last time she contacted this guy?”
“The day she died?”
“Right,” I rasped, more than a little disappointed. “She wanted him to widen his search to other states. He told her she’d be wasting her money. But if he could talk to her friend, then maybe he could gather something more to go on in the search. She said that she’d think about it.”
“And you think this ties in with Peck, how?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know.”
We sat quietly for a moment. A disembodied voice kept paging a Dr. Andrews to surgery.
“Has it occurred to you that Sarah’s shooting her mouth off about how much she detested her old man was pretty stupid if she did kill him?”
Maybe he did believe Peck was murdered. But he still couldn’t see Sarah as a murderer.
“Or maybe it goes along with her whole victim mentality. She feels guilty and wants to be punished.”
“That’s stretching it.” He crossed arms and pushed back against his chair.
“I’ve been doing some reading on this abuse thing. The way Sarah acts, it fits the symptoms.”
He held up his hand. “You mean her extreme anger, self-destructive behavior—drinking, smoking, sex, her problems with relationships?”
I frowned at him.
“If you make it through a few winters up here, you’ll see that long about January, after we’ve been snowed in for weeks, about an eighth of the population decides to beat up another eighth of the population. Usually the population they’re related to. Alcohol, the Door County antidote for all those long lonely nights, is usually the culprit. We periodically run a few articles on warning signs and where to get help.”
“Can’t wait.” I said. “But those symptoms could also apply to sexual abuse.”
He leaned toward the bed and put his hand on my forehead as if feeling for a fever.
“It’s not that much of a leap.” I pushed his hand away.
“Doesn’t fit. Sarah would be shouting from the rooftops if her father had touched her. Besides, abuse victims—and victim is the crucial word here—don’t often turn to murder. They usually take their anger out on themselves, not others. Suicide or self mutilation is usually the route they take.”
“But sometimes they don’t.”
His mouth turned downward with skepticism.
“If Sarah did kill her father, and she’s so guilt-ridden, then why not come out and admit to killing him?”
“I don’t know. That part has me stumped. Unless Rob killed him, and she’s protecting him out of some weird sense of loyalty.” My head was starting to hurt again.
“You’re forgetting Eva Peck.”
I knew he was playing devil’s advocate. “I haven’t forgotten her. The problem is, what motive would she have to kill her husband? She surely already knew he was dying of alcoholism. But o
f course, that would also apply to Sarah and Rob, and old Woulff-ie as well. According to Doctor Porter, if Carl Peck didn’t stop drinking, he would have been dead by December. Why hurry the process?”
“An act of premeditated passion.”
“Are you making fun of me again?”
“I just wanted to see how that mind of yours works.” Stevens sat up in his chair. “Look, Chet called me this afternoon. He’s following through on what you told him. So right now, the best thing you can do is let him handle it and get out of this hospital. We have some unfinished business.”
I squirmed under the sheet.
“That is, if you want to finish it.”
I fiddled with the malachite necklace. In a sudden fit of superstition, I had slipped it around my neck.
“What’s that?” He touched the necklace.
“Get well present from Lydia. Supposed to help heal me from poisoning.”
He laughed. “Is it good for anything else?”
“You mean besides conversation? I think she said it’s a mirror of the soul.” I looked down at the shiny, greenish-black stone. It reflected my face in miniature. “Sometimes Lydia’s a little too clever for her own good.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look.”
He leaned over and looked at the stone.
“If only it were that easy.”
“Maybe that’s the point.”
28
Tuesday, November 21, Present day
A spatter of blues and greys littered the indeterminate sky as I drove north on Highway 57. A sharp wind whipped across the truck, sending gusts of cold air inside the cab. A few snowflakes melted on the windshield. My dull headache was gone, but I still felt as if a horse had kicked me in the side.
I was supposed to be at home, getting a week's bed rest, but Rob Martin had called me around eight. Said he had to see me, something that couldn’t be discussed on the phone. I didn’t want him coming to the cottage. Since the attempt on my life, I needed to feel that my home was sacrosanct. So I agreed to meet him at the Ridges Sanctuary, a protected boreal forest bordering Lake Michigan. I knew that the grounds would be strewn with volunteers. The third Tuesday of every month, volunteers work on various projects—from repairing the boardwalks to gathering seeds. So I felt I’d be safe. I was used to Door County people viewing the vast outdoors, even trails close to the water’s edge or deep in the woods, as normal haunts to meet for a chat. After all, this much nature was one reason I’d come here myself. In the short time I’d been here, it seemed obvious that the natives grew up on this peninsula so tied to the natural world through their art, their recreation, and their livelihood, that “off the beaten path” never occurred to them.
As I walked the circular path toward the Nature Center, I saw Rob Martin bent over what looked like a bunch of scraggly weeds. His red hair stood out against the surrounding pines like a cardinal’s wing. He was so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t hear me approach.
“Picking weeds?” I asked, coming up behind him.
He turned his head in my direction but didn’t get up. “Hardly. Blue fringed gentian.” He pointed to a small blue flower. “Very rare, especially this late in the fall.”
“I thought it was winter already. Okay, I give, what makes a fringed gentian so special?” I figured he was going to tell me anyway.
“First of all, it’s a native wildflower and quite beautiful. If you look real close, you can see where its common name came from.”
I squatted gingerly down beside him to get a closer look at the fragile plant. Sure enough, the deep blue flower’s petals were delicately fringed as if fashioned by a seamstress.
“It’s lovely,” I whispered, as if we were in a church.
“What makes this plant so fascinating is its habit of turning up in the most surprising places. That happens because its seeds get blown great distances from the parent plant.” He gave me a sidelong glance to see if I was listening. He must have been satisfied because he continued. “There’s a Hungarian folk tale that credits this plant as named after a King Ladilas. According to the legend, during a terrible plague, the King shot an arrow into the air, asking God to let it fall on a plant he could use to cure his people. The arrow landed on a gentian, which as the legend goes, the King then used to stop the plague in his country.”
It was obvious why Martin was such a good naturalist. Chet wasn’t half wrong, plants and animals probably provided him a world he could decipher and count on. “That’s a big claim for such a fragile flower.”
“Sometimes a plant’s appearance can be deceiving. But in the natural world, it all makes sense.”
“You didn’t ask me here to talk about botany.” I was starting to get cold.
“Still in a big hurry, huh? Okay, let’s walk the trail to the beach. That way I can check out some plants along the way. And you can keep warm.”
“Fine by me. Where are the volunteers?” I asked, as casually as I could. I hadn’t seen any around.
“Upper Range Lighthouse. They’re painting the interior walls.”
I shoved my right hand in my pocket and felt for the thick cylinder of pepper spray I put there just in case.
As we crossed the wooden bridge that led into the forest, the bark chip path quickly narrowed and became jagged with stones. The preservationists had done a convincing job: except for the numbered signs, I felt as if I had entered the forest primeval, a green tangle of ferns, cedars, pines, spruces, so many deciduous trees that I couldn’t name, and here and there where light had found a way in, clumps of asters persistent as an errant wish. I followed Martin’s blue checkered back at a distance. Occasionally he stopped and jotted something down in his notebook. Ideas for his column, I figured.
As the trail became increasingly overgrown and dark, mushrooms began to appear. They sprang from fallen trees, between rocks, along the forest floor, wherever something needed to be consumed. Martin bent over and examined a group of mushrooms the color of Halloween pumpkins.
I stepped off the trail to get a closer look at the abundant variety of mushrooms. Some were smooth and white, some a smoky yellow, some had convex caps, and some concave. Others looked soft and shiny. “Deliquescence,” I whispered to myself, squatting down to look closely. Too lovely a word to describe decomposition, that stage when a mushroom’s flesh softened and then turned to liquid. I remembered the term from the book I'd borrowed from Joyce Oleander's condo.
“Deliquescence.” Martin came up behind me.
I stood up to face him, slipping my hand in my right pocket. “I know,” I said. But he had already moved away down the trail.
It wasn’t until we reached the wooden bridge that we were able to walk side by side, and he shoved his notebook into his rucksack. “This walkway leads to the beach.” Without waiting for a response, he crossed the one lane road and headed down the beach. I was beginning to wonder why he had suggested meeting at the Ridges, and why we were on this secluded stretch of Lake Michigan beach. All my senses clicked into high gear. What if this was more than just "the Door ways?" One attempt on my life was enough for a week, thank you. I looked back over my shoulder toward the upper range lighthouse, but no one was looking out. I can still turn back, I told myself.
Instead, I increased my pace and caught up with Martin. The sky had gone slate grey, and snow was falling. The wind was fierce off the lake, and I had to shout to be heard.
“Where are we going?”
He strode ahead of me without answering. I had no choice but to keep up with him. Finally, he slowed his pace and headed inland. About ten feet ahead was a snug shelter of pine trees. By the time we reached the pine shelter, I was shivering.
I plopped down on the hard white sand next to him. “Now that we’ve had our morning constitutional, will you please tell me what’s going on?”
He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, pulled out a crumbled piece of paper and handed it to me. Two sentences were scribbled in pencil o
n the paper. “I killed him. God help me.” It was signed, “Sarah.”
“Where did you get this?”
“It was next to Sarah on the bed, the night I found her when she took the Vicodin.” His hands were shoved under his arms as if he were holding himself together.
“Did you show the police?”
“Sarah said she didn’t write it. She looked confused when I showed it to her.” He gnawed at the corner of his mouth, not making eye contact.
“Is it her handwriting?”
“It looks like hers. I can’t be sure.”
The handwriting was erratic. But considering what Sarah’s condition would have been when she wrote it, erratic fit. “Why are you showing this to me?”
I was watching him intently. His green eyes narrowed with a fierce determination. I realized that he had been debating that question for himself the entire way here. He probably hadn’t resolved it until just now.
“Because of what happened to you. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t out of any concern over your welfare.”
“As long as we have that straight.”
He ignored my remark. “Chet called this morning and told me about the Antabuse. He asked me a lot of questions about the dinner party.” He stopped. “I’m afraid for Sarah.”
“You think she poisoned me?”
“I can’t protect her anymore.”
“You’ve got to give Jorgensen this suicide note.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” he spat in my face.
“Let the police decide if Sarah wrote it. It’s out of your hands now.”
“I won’t do it. I can’t do that to her. She would see it as the final act of betrayal in a long line of betrayals by people who were supposed to love and protect her.”
So that was it, he wanted me to turn the note over to the police. “I can give the police the note, but I’d have to say where I got it. It would all come down to the same thing.”
“Here’s the way I figured it. I let you see the note, because I thought you deserved to know. Now it’s in your hands. Do what you want with it. But if you give it back to me, I’m going to tear it up.”