Pineland Serenade

by Larry Millett

  As I drove home, I found myself thinking about the hateful message left on my driveway and about a famous photograph taken in Pineland in 1924. Called “Night Rally at the Courthouse,” the photo is the work of an unlikely genius named Wilford Shay. The photo features my grandfather, Paul William Zweifel, who died before I was born, and it exposes my shameful family history.

  The fact that the photo is perhaps Shay’s masterpiece doesn’t help matters. A lifelong resident of Paradise County, Shay between 1910 and his death in 1937 recorded in large-format, black-and-white images everything he could about our little slice of the world. He was a classic rural eccentric, a farmer’s son who became a full-time tractor mechanic and part-time antiques dealer when he wasn’t busy behind the camera. He lived his entire adult life in a tiny cottage along the Paradise River. When he died, his “estate” was valued at less than five hundred dollars.

  Yet Shay had one invaluable possession, a fabulous eye, and it was God’s own gift. His photos—found carefully titled, numbered, dated, annotated and stored away after his death—are the closest thing to high art ever produced in Paradise County. There are nearly six hundred in all, most of them still owned by the county historical society, to which I proudly belong.

  Shay took photos of threshing bees, farm families, political rallies, old barns, small-town businesses and anything else that appealed to his dazzling eye. He was no Grandpa Moses, however, and his images aren’t the usual sentimental stuff celebrating the glories of pastoral existence. His portraits show faces hard-edged and broken, and the buildings and places he memorialized always look on the brink of ruin. Hardship and loss were his themes, but he also found strange beauty in the midst of both.

  “Night Rally at the Courthouse,” now in the collections of the Chicago Art Institute, was taken in Pineland on July 19, 1924. It shows a rally of the Ku Klux Klan, then nearing the apogee of its power, in the courthouse square. From my office window I can see the exact spot where the local Klan chapter’s ridiculously titled Grand Giant, my grandfather, addressed the crowd. Dear old granddad was the first Zweifel to practice law in Pineland and was known to be a forceful speaker. According to newspaper accounts, he spewed out a witch’s brew of hatred for Blacks, Jews, swarthy immigrants and anyone else lacking good Aryan bloodlines.

  Shay was right there, his camera mounted behind my grandfather. The image Shay took has a Satanic sheen, torches flaring in the darkness amid a small cluster of men in white robes and peaked hats, their sweaty faces emerging out of the light as my namesake delivers his toxic oration. The photo, widely reprinted, has appeared in several books tracing the history of the Klan, thereby immortalizing Pineland for all the wrong reasons.

  The Klan is long gone from Pineland, but the idea of white supremacy isn’t. A few skinheads slunk out of the woods a while back and staged a small rally by the courthouse. It wasn’t a success. A crowd consisting largely of protesters showed up, and the skinheads were shouted down before slithering away. I’d been among those who spoke out against them, and I wondered if they’d burned the cross on my lawn. But it didn’t seem likely because I doubted they knew anything about Cassandra. Nor did I think they had the collective cranial capacity to think up or manage the elaborate scheme by which she was lured to Pineland.

  The Serenader, on the other hand, clearly knew about her and very probably wrote the purported letter from Peter. But why did he want her in Pineland? And who’d come to my lawn in the dead of night to threaten Cassandra, if not the skinheads? And what about Peter? Was he dead or gone into hiding for reasons yet to be discovered?

  It was a puzzle with more pieces than I could manage, at least for the moment. When I got home, I put some Mozart on my turntable and sat down for a long talk with Camus. He was very understanding but offered no immediate morsels of wisdom.

  11

  When I reached my office Tuesday morning, my secretary, Jane Niskanen, told me Vern had called.

  “Okay. Any other messages?”

  I was hoping Cassandra had gotten back to me, but Jane said Vern’s message was the only one. “He said it’s very urgent,” she added.

  “Of course he did. Anytime Vern wants to tell me I’m screwing up, it’s always urgent.”

  I knew my favorite county board chairman wanted to talk about Cassandra Ellis and the Serenader and whatever crap Arne was peddling at the moment. He’d also want to remind me how I could serve the greater cause of humanity by recusing myself from the case of Peter’s disappearance. But I was in no rush to speak with Vern. Let him stew for a while.

  The usual paperwork awaited on my desk and after an hour of heavy legal lifting that included such scintillating items as vetting a new contract for the county’s dog catchers, I called Vern. The conversation went exactly as I expected, Vern probing me for more information about Cassandra and telling me once again to step away from the case or else. I refused, unpleasant words were exchanged, and I hung up.

  Even so, I assumed my removal from the case, forced if necessary, was merely a matter of time. How long did I have? For an answer, I went to the adjoining office for a chat with Doug. As usual, he was hunched over at his desk, staring at the giant, home-theater-sized computer monitor he’d somehow finagled the county into buying for him. I’d caught him once watching porn—no great offense, but not a wise thing to do in a government office—and after that he’d always been more discreet.

  “Hi, Paul,” he said, his bright little face a study in poorly disguised duplicity. “Quite a deal at your house this morning, wasn’t it?”

  “Excitement is my middle name,” I said. “I suppose the news is all over town already.”

  “Could be. I heard it at breakfast from a deputy I know. I’m betting we’ll have a bunch of news people up here by the end of the day. A burning cross! Wow! That’s something. The reporters will want to talk to you, that’s for sure.”

  His words came tinged with regret, and I knew why. Doug wanted desperately to be the county attorney, and he’d been laying the groundwork to run before I blitzed him with my out-of-nowhere campaign. When I took office, the county board all but forced me to keep Doug on— he’d been an assistant for a number of years—and I reluctantly agreed.

  Tall, thin and swarthy, Doug wears seersucker suits and white shoes year round, likes to talk in a low conspiratorial whisper, and favors antique terminology, once informing me that a Black woman he’d seen working at the casino was “probably an octoroon.” I told him he was probably an idiot for trotting out that word, which left him deeply offended. He’s not a native Pinelander—he grew up in Iowa, or maybe it was Indiana—and somehow landed here, for reasons he’s never explained. My guess is that he loves the weather.

  Despite Doug’s manifest eccentricities, he’s a decent lawyer. He’s also an able and practiced maneuverer who functions as king of the courthouse gossip circuit. Vern and his cronies seem to love him, and I’ve often wondered whether he has some sort of hold over the board, knowledge perhaps of an indiscretion here or a little payoff there that ensures his continued employment. I have no doubt he regularly reports on my activities, so I’m always cautious around him.

  “I’ll be avoiding reporters today and in the days ahead,” I said. “If they call while I’m out, just say I’ve gone fishing.”

  Doug, whose sense of humor suffers from being nonexistent, immediately noted that the county’s lakes were still iced in and that fishing season had yet to begin.

  “You can share that insight with the reporters, too,” I said. “By the way, what’s the betting on how long I’m going to be on Peter’s case? I’m sure the rumor mill is working full time as we speak.”

  Doug at first feigned ignorance. “Oh, I really couldn’t tell you, Paul. But people are talking. You know how it is.”

  “No, I don’t, Doug. Enlighten me.”

  “Well, there are a lot of questions what with that text from Peter and
all and you being mentioned in the Serenader’s message. Vern and the board just think you’re a little too close to things and that bringing in an outsider may be the way to go. You know, just to be on the safe side.”

  “Well said, Doug, but how about we try being honest with each other? Do I have a week before the board tosses me off the boat?”

  A coy smile appeared on Doug’s lying face. He very much liked that I was in trouble with the board. “Gosh, Paul, all I can say is I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  Knowing what a high place Doug holds in the ranks of weaseldom, I saw no reason to doubt his forecast.

  Back in my private office, I logged on to my computer to check the day’s e-mail. It was all the usual stuff except for a message from Dale Shiffley, who runs the only funeral home in town. Dale is married to one of my cousins, Merrilee Swaboda. Merrilee, a vacuous woman I try to avoid, inherited the mortuary but found little inspiration in sucking the innards out of corpses, so Dale does the embalming and runs the business.

  The funeral home itself is a landmark in Pineland. It was designed in the 1950s by Frank Lloyd Wright, and it’s a weird circular building unlike anything else in town. Dale, on the other hand, doesn’t have an unconventional bone in his body, and I don’t see him very often because he’s sort of a bore.

  His e-mail, however, grabbed my attention. It read: “Paul, I was out at Memorial Cemetery for a funeral this a.m. and happened to go by your dad’s grave. Looks like some jerk knocked over the headstone. You might want to have a look and talk to the caretaker about having the stone reset. Dale.”

  I’d buried my father only a month after returning to Pineland. Cancer drained the life out of him, and it was a hard, sad time. I don’t make a habit of visiting his grave, but the news that someone had vandalized it upset me more than I thought it would. So after lunch I took Dale’s advice and drove out to the cemetery to see what had happened.

  Memorial Cemetery is just west of town along the county road that leads from Interstate 35 to the casino and resort hotel. The cemetery has one outstanding feature. At its center, atop a slight rise, lies the largest mass grave in Minnesota, home to about three hundred victims of the great Pineland Fire of 1892.

  The fire is Paradise County’s original sin, a ghastly storm of flames that one hot September day roared through the combustible remains of a vanished forest before heading straight for Pineland. It was a man-made disaster. The loggers who had cut down all the pines cared nothing for the vast heaps of dead limbs and branches left behind. The violated land was a catastrophe waiting for a spark, and when Armageddon came, it must have seemed like God’s fiery vengeance.

  Nearly four hundred people in all died in the incinerator. Temperatures reached two thousand degrees Fahrenheit as the firestorm swept through, consuming a half-dozen communities, Pineland among them. The collapsed walls of two brick buildings—a railroad depot and a school—formed all that was left of Pineland, which had been home to nearly a thousand people. When the time came to sift through the debris, survivors found charred bodies scattered through town like grotesque lumps of charcoal. No one could identify most of these unlikely remains, and so in the end three hundred or so lumps believed to be bodies or parts of bodies were buried in the mass grave. Six years later, a forty-foot obelisk was erected near the grave to commemorate the fire and its victims.

  The obelisk, which still towers over the grave, holds a particular significance for me. It’s made of a beautiful, fine-grained sandstone with the trade name of Paradise Pink. It was quarried by a firm whose owners included my great-grandfather, Johannes Zweifel. He’d come to the United States from Bavaria as a boy in 1870 and eventually found his way to Pineland, where he opened a general store and became involved in the quarry business in the late 1880s. By the time of the fire, he was married and had a year-old son.

  Johannes was behind the counter of his store when the fire appeared at the edge of town like a “red demon,” as the newspapers of the day described it. According to an account left by his clerk, Johannes took off his apron, put down the pipe he smoked constantly, and told his wife to take their son and “run like the wind” toward the Paradise River. Then he went out to warn others of the impending inferno. He was last seen heading for the river, but he never made it, and he presumably lies now in the mass grave, a quiet hero lost to time.

  My great-grandmother and her son, my grandfather, survived in the cooling waters of the river. With nothing left for them in Pineland, they moved to St. Paul, where my grandfather eventually studied law. Around 1910 he returned to Pineland, by then fully rebuilt and beginning to revive as a small trade and manufacturing center. He put out his shingle and built a successful practice before involving himself in the Klan. He didn’t marry until he was forty and had only one child, my father, born in 1934. All of Pineland’s Zweifels are buried at Memorial, and it’s where I—likely the last of the line—will go into the ground as well.

  By the time I reached the cemetery the day had turned to classic April crud, with sharp little particles of sleet cutting through the air beneath a cold pewter sky. I drove up to the family burial plot, which isn’t far from the memorial obelisk, and searched for the overturned headstone, but I saw no evidence a vandal had been at work. I got out of my car and went for a closer look, hunched over against the pelting sleet. I found that my father’s black granite headstone was perfectly upright. I also found the Serenader’s second message.

  Protected by a clear plastic envelope, it was taped to the headstone. A thumb drive was visible inside the envelope. I got down on one knee to read the message, typed like its predecessor on a standard sheet of copy paper. It said:

  Peter will not return. The conspirators cannot hide their terrible deeds for long. Ask how Jill Lorrimer really died. THE WOMAN has arrived. Let the truth shine forth.

  The Serenader

  12

  My discovery of the message was no accident. The e-mail from Dale, I soon learned, was a fake. Someone had hacked into his account and sent the e-mail to lure me out to the cemetery. It had worked beautifully, and now I was once again left with all manner of explaining to do.

  The explaining took two hours once Arne, several deputies and the two Jasons arrived at the cemetery. The Jasons began documenting the scene while Arne took my statement. He listened impatiently, then suggested I’d planted the message, even after I showed him the phony e-mail from Dale.

  “It’s funny how you just seem to turn up where these messages are,” he said as we huddled in his car.

  “Somebody is playing us, Arne. Can’t you see that?”

  “Or maybe you’re the one who’s doing the playing. I just don’t get why.”

  “Come on, why would I go around posting messages and then make sure to find them myself so everybody will suspect me? Or setting a cross on fire on my lawn, for that matter?”

  “Could be that’s going to be your defense. How could a smart guy do so many dumb things, etcetera, etcetera. Lawyers love that kind of shit.”

  “Believe me, I’m not that subtle. But you know what, you might have some problems of your own, Arne. Our friend the Serenader seems to think we need to take another look at Jill Lorrimer’s death. Why do you suppose he dredged that up?”

  “How the hell would I know?” Arne said. “It was a clean investigation.”

  Jill Lorrimer been found dead in her car, parked outside her apartment building not far from the Paradise Pines Casino, just after dawn on New Year’s Day. Toxicology tests revealed she’d died from a lethal mix of heroin, crack cocaine and alcohol. It looked like an accidental overdose, and a regional coroner in Duluth ultimately issued a finding to that effect.

  But there were lingering questions because of documents found in her apartment. One was a list of clients, including several prominent Twin Cities businessmen, from whom she’d received up to five hundred dollars for “special massages” at the Paradise Res
ort Hotel. Two county deputy sheriffs were also on her list, but their “massages” cost a mere fifty dollars. And finally there was notebook showing payments to Dewey Swindell averaging close to one thousand dollars a month.

  It was all highly suspicious, and Arne called in the BCA to investigate. He also suspended the two deputies, but only after Tommy Redmond at the Tattler got wind of the story. I recused myself from the case, and the assistant state attorney general who took over—a haughty jerk by the name of Chad Barrington—kept me in the dark. As far as I knew, the investigation remained active. Dewey had been worried enough about it to bring up Jill’s name to me, and now the Serenader was also interested.

  Before the BCA assumed control of the case, I’d read the coroner’s report on Jill’s death, but nothing jumped out at me. Her death had all the hallmarks of a classic misadventure with drugs. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “So you don’t have any doubts about what happened to her?” I asked Arne. “Not even with the prostitution and the fact Dewey and maybe even Peter were involved with her?”

  “Like the coroner said, she accidentally overdosed. Case closed. There’s no reason to go fucking around with it now.”

  “You’re one hundred percent sure?”

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure the sun will rise tomorrow, but I have my hopes.”

  “Well, I think we’ll have to take another look at the case.”

  “What, you don’t have enough to do now?”

  And so it went, another round of the Arne and Paul show. The Jasons finally came over to declare a truce. They also wanted to take their own statement from me. I told them exactly what I’d told Arne, but they didn’t appear to believe me. I couldn’t say I blamed them. I was looking more suspicious by the minute.

  It was nearly dark by the time I escaped the land of the dead and headed home. Cassandra was on my mind. I wondered why she still hadn’t bothered to call me back. I also wondered if Arne had told her about the cross burning. Now there was another message from the Serenader referring to her as “THE WOMAN.” It was an ominous development, and she needed to know about it.