Peak Season for Murder

by Gail Lukasik

  In the year and a half since I’d heard from Tom, I’d made no move to contact him. When I’d come to Door County to heal from my mastectomy, I’d wanted to erase the part of my life Tom represented. The breast cancer had been too much for him to handle, and every day I stayed with him was like another day I had to see how I had let him down.

  He reached for his jacket that he’d hung on the booth’s edge and pulled out a packet of papers from an inner pocket. Though I knew what was coming, my stomach did a flip-flop.

  “Leigh, it’s been over a year since you left. I haven’t heard from you. Nothing.”

  “Could we skip the recriminations and cut to the chase. You could have called. You could have come up here.” I wasn’t going to let him put this all on me. Though, in truth, I probably bore the majority of the blame. My year and a half of silence had been my way of punishing him.

  “I did call, and you didn’t call back. What would be the point of my coming up here?”

  To woo me back, I wanted to say. To convince me that the cancer made no difference. To see me, just to see me. To show me that love conquers all—even disease.

  “So I moved on.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, taking a big swallow of my chardonnay. Its dry tartness felt good in my mouth. I looked over his head as the door opened and a man and a woman came in. I couldn’t see them clearly, but something about them seemed familiar.

  “Leigh,” Tom said. “Are you listening to me?”

  He had pushed the papers toward me, and I read the words “Decree of Divorce” on the top page.

  “You can get a lawyer if you want. But it’s all pretty straightforward. The assets are split fifty-fifty. I’ll buy out your share of the house. It’s more than fair.”

  The couple sat down on the wooden bar stools. As they turned toward each other, I recognized them from the Bayside Theater—Harper Kennedy, the upstart ingénue, and Alex Webber, BT’s artistic director and co-owner. They were sitting very close and whispering back and forth.

  I picked up the papers and leafed through them quickly. “Anyone I know?”

  He sat back in the booth and crossed his arms. “Look, Leigh. What did you expect me to do? I’d like to have a family.”

  I shook my head. That hurt. The chemotherapy had wiped out my chances of ever having a family. Maybe he had forgotten that, though I doubted it. Underneath his stylish exterior still resided that cruel streak as sharp as a whip, and as certain. What had I ever seen in him?

  “Sorry,” he said. “You don’t know her. Someone I met at work. We’re getting married as soon as the divorce is final.”

  I dug in my purse, pulled out a pen and signed my name in big, bold black ink by all the Xs. And just like that, it was over.

  “You want another drink?” Tom asked.

  “To celebrate?” I lifted my glass, clinked his and gulped down the rest of my wine.

  “Leigh, c’mon.”

  “Sure, why not.” I blinked back the tears that were building behind my eyes.

  Tom got up from the booth and went to the bar to order another round.

  Sixteen years of marriage over with the flourish of a pen. It was like taking a long, deep breath and exhaling till there was no air left—the exhalation not visible to anyone, but out there floating somewhere, waiting to be inhaled again, by some unlucky bastard.

  I glanced over to where Tom was standing at the bar next to Harper Kennedy and Alex Webber. Their shoulders were touching, and they were whispering into each other’s ears. I noticed they were holding hands.

  Now isn’t that interesting? I thought. Considering Alex and Nina Cass, Nate Ryan’s ex, were an item. Why wasn’t Alex with Nina instead of holding hands with Harper in a bar? Alex had to be twice Harper’s age. But if I’d learned anything from interviewing actors, it was that their emotions and relationships were as reliable as Door County’s weather.

  Tom placed the drinks on the table and slid into the booth.

  “Isn’t that woman one of the actors from the play?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “Alex Webber, artistic director and co-owner.”

  “You know them?”

  “Apparently not,” I said as I watched Alex raise his hand, still holding on to Harper’s hand. Then he slowly kissed the back of it.

  Tom had been watching too. “Actors,” he said, folding the papers and slipping them into his jacket pocket. “One big, happy family.”

  I was glad I had brought my own transportation, but not so glad that I’d stayed after Tom left, downing three more glasses of chardonnay. My head felt stuffy, and whatever surge the alcohol had given me was turning into a low-grade headache.

  “Sweetie, you should have just ordered a bottle,” the blond middle-aged waitress said, as if in apology as she put down the bill. “It’d been cheaper for ya.”

  It was after one in the morning, and she wanted to close up. I was the only one left in the bar. Harper and Alex had left shortly after Tom. Neither one had even noticed me sitting in the dark booth.

  I left her a big tip.

  “You sure you’re all right to drive?” she asked as she flipped off the lights.

  “I don’t have far to go,” I lied.

  The night air felt heavy. The persistent heat wave that had descended on the peninsula in mid June didn’t show any signs of leaving.

  It took me two tries to get my keys into the truck door lock. I pulled out onto Isle View Road and headed toward Highway 42. There were no streetlights, and I was having a hard time seeing. Everything had a kind of blurry glow to it. I put on my bright lights and that just made the blurry glow more pronounced.

  I pulled over and sat in the idling truck. Joe Stillwater lived off Isle View on Timberline. Joe and I had become friends after some horrible murders last year. But that was the extent of it. We’d decided to take things slow, after a very fast start.

  I eased the truck back onto Isle View. Joe deserved better than me showing up at one in the morning, drunk and divorced on his doorstep.

  By the time I’d made it home, it was 1:45. I’d driven under thirty miles per hour the whole way. Salinger, my faithful Shetland sheepdog, was howling and scratching at the door when I pulled into the gravel drive.

  When I opened the door, she immediately sensed something was wrong and instead of running out into the woods, jumped up at me.

  I knelt down and held her to me, inhaling her musty dog scent.

  “He didn’t even ask how you were,” I told her. “Who needs him?”

  I couldn’t sleep, so I read an essay on bats from Linda Hogan’s book, Dwellings. Better to think of bats than a failed marriage.

  The windows were open, and I could hear the faint rush of Lake Michigan against the shore. Like the bats, if I really listened. What else could I hear? What undercurrents were moving through the warm July night? Alex and Harper: what game were they playing? Were they like the bats living between worlds, at the edges of their lives? And right now, can the bats hear the silent rush of emptiness inside me?

  In the blue dusk, a bat is flying toward me, and there’s nowhere I can hide. I duck, but it flies right into my hair. I beat at it with my fingers, but it just keeps flapping and flapping, pulling on my hair. I feel its breath and can smell its ammonia scent. I’m terrified; my heart is pounding. Then Tom is standing before me telling me to calm down, to hold still. He raises a pair of large scissors and begins cutting my long, beautiful hair.

  I woke in a sweat with Salinger sleeping on my hair. Slowly I pulled my hair from under her, trying not to wake her. A thin trickle of dawn seeped into the mobile home, making everything appear both light and dark. I got up and stumbled to the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet and reached for my migraine tablets. My head felt like a building was being erected inside it.

  “Don’t take with alcohol,” the label read.

  I tossed the pills in my mouth, put my mouth under the faucet and drank enough water to sw
allow the pills.

  Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time, I told myself as I crawled back into bed.

  CHAPTER FIVE: MONDAY, JULY 10

  As I punched in the numbers for my cell phone voice mail, I rubbed at my throbbing forehead. The heat was already rising in the mobile home. Everything was damp and sweaty. Even the walls were slick with humidity.

  “Message one. ‘Leigh, it’s Sarah Peck. I’m leaving Chicago in a few weeks and need my place back. I’m sure you can find a rental. If not, you can stay on with me until you do. Sorry.’”

  Thanks, Sarah, for the short notice, I grumbled to myself. Add looking for another place to live to my to-do list.

  I pressed seven, erasing her message.

  Too bad Tom hadn’t moved faster on the divorce, I thought bitterly, sipping at my coffee. At least then I could maybe buy a place. With the depressed real estate market, there were plenty of homes to choose from at reduced prices.

  Message two snapped me out of my self-pity. “Why the hell aren’t you answering your phone? And if you haven’t heard, Brownie Lawrence is dead. I want you to write an obit article STAT. Where are you? You were supposed to be here this morning.”

  “It’s still morning, and I know about Brownie already,” I shouted into the phone, causing Salinger to let out a sharp bark.

  Jake’s bossy tone sent an angry spark up my spine. Ever since we’d ended our relationship last summer, he’d turned into the Editor-in-Chief from hell.

  That’s what you get for sleeping with the boss, I reminded myself.

  I punched seven and took another gulp of coffee.

  “Message three. ‘You find anything out yet about Brownie? Police came by again yesterday hassling me. I told ’em you were looking into Brownie’s past and that they should talk to you.’”

  I pressed nine and closed the phone. “Great,” I moaned. Ken Albright had sicced the police on me. It would only be a matter of time before I got a warning from Chief Burnson to butt out.

  Quickly, I showered, threw on khakis, a mauve tank top, my hematite necklace and red wedged sandals. It was going to be a long day. First stop, the Door County Gazette, soothe Jake’s ruffled feathers, then grab some lunch before heading over to the Bayside Theater’s rehearsal at one p.m. After that I could start looking for a new place to live—without doubt, a rental.

  As I pulled away from the mobile home, Salinger was standing at the kitchen window, howling as if she knew we were homeless yet again.

  “How’s the Bayside Theater’s article coming?” Jake asked, shuffling through the stacks of papers, books and magazines piled pell-mell on his battered antique desk. Even after a year, I still couldn’t get used to his short, trim haircut, which I considered a symbol of our breakup. Not that I wanted the return of the long gray ponytail, just the man who’d once sported it.

  “Okay,” I answered, massaging my aching forehead. A part of me wanted to tell him about my divorce. My refusal to end things with Tom had been a contributing factor to our breakup, as had Jake’s disappearing a year ago last May for a month and not telling me where he was. But I hesitated, afraid I’d dissolve into a weepy mess. The last thing I wanted from him was pity.

  “You get the interview with Nate Ryan?” He stopped shuffling and stared at me, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head. He must have calmed down since leaving his curt message on my cell phone.

  “Short and perplexing, but probably enough for the article. I’m going to try him again at today’s rehearsal. He was all charming and cooperative until he discovered a dead bird in his fridge. Not a real one, as it turned out. But after that, he couldn’t get me out the door fast enough.”

  “You yanking my chain, Girard?” Jake plopped his big feet on his desk.

  “Nope. According to Ryan, he and Julian Finch like to play pranks on each other. Though how a fake dead chicken is funny is beyond me. Then last night in the middle of the performance, Gwen Shaw fell over some rigging backstage and broke her arm, apparently distracted by a berserk bat. Speaking of which, you should have seen how many bats were on stage. It was like the stage was a bat magnet. It was weird.”

  “Don’t get sidetracked. You need to get that article done before the end of the month. Wallace Bernard stuck his neck out for you at the Chicago Reporter.”

  Wallace Bernard, a retired journalist and Jake’s mentor, had been instrumental in helping me solve a series of murders last year. Now he’d greased the wheels at the Reporter for my article on the BT.

  “Don’t you have any faith in me?” It was a question that had little to do with the article.

  “That’s the problem, Leigh. I have too much.”

  If only, I thought.

  “You heard about Brownie?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Ken Albright called me early Sunday morning, and I went out there to talk to him. He’s in bad shape. I’m afraid he’s going to relapse without Brownie. And he left me another message this morning about the police hassling him. I wish there was something I could do.”

  “I know you have a soft spot for these guys. Why, I don’t know. But stay out of it. I need you to write Brownie Lawrence’s obit article and have it on the computer before deadline on Thursday.”

  “You mean Lawrence Browning.” I retrieved the dog tags from my bag and put them on Jake’s desk.

  He took his feet off his desk and picked up the tags.

  “How’d you get these?” he asked, studying the tags.

  “Ken Albright. He’s feeling guilty about not being there when Brownie died. He also told me Brownie’s from around here. I promised him I’d find his family.”

  Jake was still holding the tags running his long fingers over the raised letters and numbers. I waited, watching his fingers, studying the breadth of his broad shoulders. I could almost smell the fabric softener in his blue shirt mingled with his musky scent. Stop it, I cautioned myself. You’re hurting right now, and it’s making you vulnerable.

  He looked up as if he could read my thoughts, his eyes full of questions. “We’ll run a short obit instead of a longer piece. Once you’re through with the BT article, follow up on this. If he’s from around here, it’ll make a good human-interest story. But only after you’re done with the BT.” He pushed the dog tags toward me, but I didn’t take them.

  “Okay, I know that look. What aren’t you telling me?”

  He knew me too well. “It’s probably nothing. But Ken found wine bottles near Brownie’s body. Cherry wine. Of course instead of leaving them for the police, he threw them in the bay. He didn’t want the police to think Brownie had started drinking again. But he was adamant that Brownie would never drink cherry wine even if he fell off the wagon.”

  “Ken’s whacked from all the drugs and booze, and you know it. Let the police handle it.”

  Rather than show him the red shard I’d found near where Brownie died, I stood up and reached for the dog tags, not wanting another lecture about staying out of police investigations.

  “Everything else okay? You seem . . .” He struggled for the right word.

  “What?” I challenged him.

  “Tired.”

  “Sarah Peck’s reclaiming her mobile home, and I need a place to live ASAP. Any ideas?” Coward, I thought.

  “You can always crash at my place.” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. What was he really saying?

  I was holding the dog tags so tightly in my hand, the jagged edge pierced my skin. “You think that’s a good idea? Considering everything.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and looked away. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But if you get desperate.”

  “I’ll know who to call,” I finished.

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  I stood outside his door for a few minutes, trying to still my racing heart by taking in long, slow breaths through my nose and letting the air out through my mouth. That was always the problem between us. Neither one of us had the courage to put our feelings
on the line.

  “You all right, honey?” Marge, the Gazette’s office manager, called from her desk near the door. She must have spotted me leaning against the wall. I pushed away and strode into the room as if I didn’t have a worry in the world.

  “Could you do me a favor?” I put the dog tags on her desk.

  “Depends. You gonna introduce me to that hunk Nate Ryan after the play?” I’d made sure Marge had an invitation to the invitation-only party after the opening performance of The Merchant of Venice.

  “What would your husband say?” I teased.

  She swatted her hand at me. “He’d be happy to have the house to himself. Anyway, what’s the favor?”

  “I need you to run Brownie Lawrence’s Social Security number.” Jake hadn’t said anything about someone else following up on Brownie.

  “So his real name was Lawrence Browning,” she said, holding the tags in her hand. “So sad about him dying like that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The yellowed grass outline of Brownie’s body flashed into my mind. “See what you can find out. Anything would be helpful.”

  “Okay if I get to it tomorrow? I’m swamped today with work, then I gotta run home and change before the meeting.”

  “Which meeting’s that?” Marge was a notorious joiner, from knitting groups to animal rescue organizations. Pretty soon she’d have to arrange her job around her volunteer duties.

  “Door County Historical Society. I’m helping put everything on computer. You wouldn’t believe what a mess the records are in.”

  “When do you sleep?”

  “Plenty of time for that when I’m dead. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “You know of anyone on the peninsula looking for a renter? Someone who doesn’t mind pets and is in my price range?”

  “When’s Sarah coming back?”

  “Too soon.”

  “I’ll ask around,” Marge offered.

  I went over to the communal desk and phoned Deputy Chief Chet Jorgensen, a personal friend and contact with the police department.

  “I wondered when you’d get around to pestering me,” Chet said. “And before you ask, Brownie’s cause of death has not been determined.”