by Loretta Ross
All three of the other men turned to look at Death.
“I’d certainly be interested in looking into it. I was wondering earlier what you knew about it. Mrs. Sandburg said you had someone do a facial reconstruction?”
“We did,” Salvy replied. “It’s online at our department website and on several other sites that specialize in locating missing persons
and identifying John and Jane Does. Or you can come by the station and see the actual sculpture in person. We had to make a reverse mold from the skull, then cast a polyresin replica and send it to an artist back on the East Coast. It’s very lifelike. How close it is to how he actually looked, of course, remains to be seen.”
“When did they find him?” Edgar asked. “During bow season, I know. Bow hunters found him. Was it ’84?”
“Eighty-five, I believe.”
“Of course. The year the Royals won their first World Series.”
Growing up in St. Louis, Death was used to his dad and the other men relating things to what the Cardinals had done or to which football team they’d had at the time. It felt like a familiar measure of time, and it warmed him a bit to see Wren’s dad doing the same thing.
“Where was he?” Death asked. “I know he was in the woods somewhere, but that covers a lot of territory.”
“It does,” Salvy agreed. “They found him out by the lake, over near Thibeaux Bend.”
Death traced a map of the area in his mind. Truman Lake was a big, sprawling body of water with dozens of different arms and inlets. Its shoreline was longer than the coast of California.
“Thibeaux Bend—isn’t that out by Cold Creek Harbor? Where the old yacht club is that the Keystones are getting ready for auction.”
“Other side of the lake,” Edgar said. “You’re not wrong, they’re probably less than a mile apart. But most of that mile is water.”
“Oh, I see. Was anything found with him? Clothing or change or anything? If he was hunting when he died there should have been a rifle or bow or something, right?”
“Fragments of a belt, I believe,” Salvy said. “And one boot with the foot bones still inside. The remains had been out in the weather a long time and suffered significant predation. The bones were scattered and we—I say ‘we,’ but of course I was just a schoolboy at the time—we didn’t begin to recover the entire skeleton.”
“They did a forensic analysis of the remains, though. Right?”
“Of course. They went to the state crime lab. There’s a full write-up in his file. We know he was a young adult, probably eighteen to twenty-five, 5'10", medium build. He was probably Caucasian, but they weren’t able to tell definitively. The teeth they found showed no signs of any dental work and suggested Northern European ancestry, but they didn’t find all of them.”
“And there was no sign of what might have killed him?”
“Nothing at all. The pathologist thought he might have died of exposure. One of his leg bones was broken, but they couldn’t tell if it happened before death, while he was dying, or afterward. It had been, ah, chewed on, I’m afraid. But if it happened while he was alive, it’s possible he fell down the hill and broke his leg and then lay there and died waiting to be found.”
“What a horrible way to go,” Randy said.
Death tipped his head as a familiar sound reached his ears. It was the rumble of Wren’s pickup. “There’s the girls,” he said. Two car doors slammed and again the men in the back yard watched the screen door expectantly.
Wren came through first, picking up the flowers Death had abandoned. “Look! Someone brought flowers! I bet I know who!”
Death stood to greet her and got an armful of redhead. He kissed her chastely on top of the head, mindful of the fact that her parents were watching, then took the flowers and presented one bouquet to her and one to her mother.
“Sweetheart. Ma’am, I hope you like alstroemerias.”
Wren’s mom beamed at him, a glint of something he hoped was humor in her eye. “They’re lovely. Thank you.” She looked around and cocked her head. “No Geiger counter?” she asked innocently.
Death felt his face grow hot.
“Here, Wrennie,” her mom continued. “Give me your flowers and I’ll go find vases for them. I think I saw a couple in the living room. On the floor.”
She disappeared into the house and Wren leaned down to hug her dad, then saw Randy and hugged him too.
“Randy! You’re here! I’m so glad. I’ve missed you, working all those hours. Did Death tell you our news?”
“I don’t know. What news?”
“We found a house we want to buy! And there’s a body buried in the rosebushes!”
“Odd bit of synchronicity,” Wren said. A muffled shout and a series of thumps and bangs came from overhead. She paused and glanced up. “Are they going to fall through the ceiling?”
“I hope not,” Leona said mildly. “Though I’d lay odds that if one of them were to, it’d be Roy.”
“No bet there. What are they doing?”
“They’re still worried about the possibility of a fire. If it’s cold on the day we hold the sale, it would make sense to hold it inside. But the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire was horrendous. We want to keep the customers warm. We do not want to kill them.”
“I understand, but I still don’t get what they’re doing crawling around in the ceiling.”
“Part of the reason that fire spread so fast was because there were no firewalls. So the guys have got some sheets of nonflammable insulation and they’re making partitions.”
“Oh. Cool.”
“So what were you saying about synchronicity?”
Wren lifted four chairs upside down on a small round table and used chalk to mark a 7 on the bottom of each, to match the 7 in the middle of the table. They were sorting the furniture now and moving it into long rows to make it easy to go through and auction off. A few more days work on the main building and they’d be ready to move on to the boathouse. Leona had the sale penciled in for Sunday of the week after next, the weekend before Thanksgiving.
“Death was up in Columbia on Tuesday to meet someone about his investigation into that missing picture. Well, he wound up talking to one of the art and archaeology professors and the man had a missing persons poster for Ingrid Larsen on his wall.”
“Well, isn’t that something?” Leona was doing even numbers. She put together another set of table and chairs and labeled them with an eight. “Of course, her dad was a professor there, wasn’t he? So I suppose it’s not that strange.”
“Yeah. Death said the professor knew Dr. Larsen. He knew all about this place, too. He’s been to the Viking village, and he’s also been here, to the club. He told Death basically the same thing that Jacob Larsen told me—that the guy who owned it was a wealthy history buff and the department chair would bring the professors down to try to sweet-talk him into donating money for their different projects and things.”
“Bender?”
“You know him?”
“I don’t know him. I’ve met him a time or two. You know, he tried to buy this place back? Must have changed his mind after he sold it. But he wanted the Vikings’ land too and they wouldn’t sell, so he gave it up. I gather he had some grand idea about opening a fancy resort hotel.”
Wren snorted. “Why would he think that was a good idea? For that matter, why did he think a yacht club was a good idea? I mean, we’re kind of out in the middle of nowhere here.”
Leona laughed. She put three chairs up on the next table, but simply slid the fourth one out and sat down in it. “Unbridled optimism. There was a lot of that around here then.”
Wren took a chair of her own. “I don’t understand.”
“Back in the sixties and early seventies, things were pretty bleak around here, economy-wise. There had been a few things to keep people working over the
years—Warsaw had a button factory, until they drove the river mussels to extinction. East Bledsoe Ferry had a couple of fireworks factories until one of them blew up and killed several people. Coal and Lewis Station had coal mines that collapsed. Clinton had a white sulfur spring that was a tourist attraction until the hotel burned down, and a thriving mail-order baby chick business until everyone moved into the cities after the Second World War. By the time 1970 rolled around, there wasn’t very much going on. And then they built the dam and started talking about all the tourism and industry it was going to bring. A lot of people were walking around with dollar signs in their eyes.”
“I see a lot of failed businesses and buildings sitting empty,” Wren agreed.
“Yup. Everybody and his brother was opening some kind of store or venture, determined to get rich. Boat storage, campgrounds, restaurants, bars, flea markets, souvenir shops, bait shops. You name it. Some of them stuck, but a lot of them didn’t. For one thing, it took years for the reservoir to fill and back up along the tributaries to create the lake. People with businesses along the fringe went broke before they could strike it rich. This place was probably doomed from the start. When it opened, as I recall, there wasn’t a lot of lake here yet. The channel was shallow, and there were drowned trees everywhere they didn’t specifically clear them.”
“So when did it go under, do you know?”
“That I couldn’t say. Early eighties, maybe? My youngest brother graduated in ’82 and I know it was closed by then because he and his class rented the place for an after-graduation party. I remember helping raise money for it.”
There was a loud bang and Wren and Leona both jumped and looked up, thinking the twins had broken through the ceiling. But it was Robin, slamming the door open as he rushed in from where he’d been working in a garden shed out on the edge of the property.
“You guys!” he said. “Come quick. You gotta come see this!”
A ceiling tile slid to the side and Roy stuck his head through upside down. “What’s all the commotion?”
“Grandpa Roy! Grandpa Sam! Come look at this!”
“What is it?”
“Just come look!”
“Well, go get our ladder. It’s in the other room.”
Robin ran to fetch the ladder and the two men came down bickering amiably.
“Nice luck,” Sam said dryly. “Now you don’t have to admit that you walled us off away from the other opening.”
“I didn’t wall us off. You were as much responsible as I was.”
Wren and Leona were waiting for them at the door. “What are we looking at?” Leona asked Robin.
“Come over this way, down by the lake.”
The back door of the yacht club opened into the overgrown formal garden, with paved, symmetrical walkways and a dry fountain in the center collecting weeds and dirt. They followed the paths through it, then crossed a field and came to a stop on the shore.
“Well!” Wren said. “Will you look at that?”
It was a beautiful fall day, with the water reflecting back a cloudless sky and the reversed image of all the blazing red and orange and gold trees at the lake’s edge. Sailing across the blue expanse, like a dream image or a phantom from the distant past, was the Viking longboat under full sail. Canvas billowed over it and half a dozen young men, stripped to the waist, manned the oars, adding to the boat’s speed.
“I feel like we should be running to hide all our valuables and take up arms,” Sam said.
“Really?” his brother asked. “I feel like I should be standing in the middle of the boat, telling them to row faster so we can conquer the world.”
“I think it’s beautiful,” Leona said, “but I’m glad I live in this century and not that one.”
Wren could only nod and wish that Death was there to see this with her.
ten
“Why does someone forge something?” When the door between his office and the tiny apartment behind it opened, Death spoke without looking up.
“Bleaargh.”
He looked up.
“Good grief, Randy! You gonna make it?”
“Oh yeah.”
Randy scrubbed a hand through his already tousled hair and stumbled toward the coffee maker. He wore a loose robe over a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts and there was a mark on his left cheek from a fold in his pillow.
He poured a cup of coffee, took a sip, then hugged it like a teddy bear. “What time is it?”
Death glanced at the wall clock. “About three o’clock.”
“A.m. or p.m.?”
“P.m., doofus. It’s light outside.”
“Oh, yeah.” He wandered over and dropped into the chair across from Death. “Still Thursday?”
“Last time I checked.”
“Oh. Good.”
Death sat back in his own seat and dropped the pencil he was holding. “Man, you gotta stop working so many hours. All work and no play makes Jack a dull zombie.”
“Ha. Ha.” Randy cuddled his coffee close. “Rhianna’s vacation ended yesterday and Jay’s back as soon as he gets cleared by a doctor.”
“Good. What happened to Jay again?”
“Fell off his kid’s hoverboard. Presumably after saying, ‘Hold my beer and watch this.’ What were you blithering about? Forgery? Forging stuff ? What?”
“Forging things,” Death explained. “I asked you why someone forges something.”
Randy shrugged. “Because it’s the best way to shape the metal?”
“Not that kind of forging. Forging! Forgeries. Fake paintings and such.”
“Oh. I dunno. Because you want to steal the original, I guess?”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Death objected. “Not by itself. If you steal something, you only have to take it without getting caught. But if you replace it with a forgery, you have to, one, get a forged copy—and where do you do that? And two, you have to sneak the copy into wherever the original is kept. Three, you have to switch them. And, four, you still have to take the original out without getting caught.”
“Do we have any cinnamon rolls?”
“Over there in the cupboard,” Death said, pointing back into the apartment. Randy went to get one and Death kept talking. “Now, with most art forgeries, the point isn’t to replace an existing painting or whatever, but to convince the experts that you’ve found an unknown one, or one that’s lost, and get them to pay you a lot of money. But obviously that doesn’t apply in this case.”
“What case?” Randy demanded. “What are you even talking about?”
“Boy, are you cranky when you sleep too long! I’m talking about the case I’m working on. I have a new case.” Death grinned. “The Case of the Counterfeit Lady.”
“Did you hit your head again?”
“No. Listen!” He explained to his brother about the missing portrait. “So whoever took it had to not only remove the original, which would have been nearly impossible, but they had to replace it with a copy without getting caught.”
Randy stuffed the last bite of cinnamon roll into his mouth and spoke around it. “What do you think happened? Why do you think someone forges something?”
“I think someone forges something because they want to steal the original and they believe replacing it will help keep them from getting caught.”
“That makes sense,” Randy said. He thought about it. “Okay, no. Actually it doesn’t. I mean, yeah it does, but, duh. Obviously if you’re gonna steal something you don’t want to get caught. Are you just grasping at straws here?”
“No, really. I have a theory.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“The person or persons who replaced the painting with the forgery needed to replace it rather than simply steal it, because otherwise it would be obvious who had taken it as soon as it was discovered missing.”
“Drink more coffee. I think I figured out when and how the paintings were switched.”
“When? And how?”
“In all the years that portrait was at the museum, it remained in the same location, on the wall above the stairs. In full view of anyone in the area, and with a glass case full of breakables under it.”
“Are you sure of that? I mean, yeah, the museum people said that. But do you have any way of verifying it?”
“Wow. You’re suspicious when you’re sleepy.”
“One of us has to pretend we have a brain. Answer my question.”
“Yes, I have verified it. Frank Appelbaum, the painting’s owner, who has no reason whatsoever to lie, backed the museum’s statement. I also found a variety of old pictures from events and things that have taken place there and every one that shows that patch of wall above the staircase shows the painting there.”
“Okay. I’ll accept that. Go on.”
“Thank you,” Death said dryly. “Now, security could have done it, if there were two or more guards in on it and they planned it out in advance. But the Warner Museum has used the same security company forever. Their guards are all bonded and thoroughly investigated before being hired. Also, the security company has contracts with a bunch of public and private buildings, and they assign the individual guards at random just before their shifts start. They literally draw numbers to see where they’re going to be working on any given night.”
“So they couldn’t plan a heist.” Randy stopped and grinned. “We’re talking about people planning a heist!”
Death sighed. “Could you send your inner child back to bed for a while and concentrate here?”