Pineland Serenade

by Larry Millett

  “You mean other people at Peter’s parties?”

  “Right. I don’t know their names but I’m sure you could find out. They were mostly high-roller types from Twin Cities. The parties were a perk for people who stayed at Peter’s hotel and gambled at the casino.”

  “How nice for them. Let’s get back to Arne. What exactly did he say when he called you yesterday?”

  “He said that if I talked to anybody about him and Jill I’d be ‘done for.’ That’s how he put it, ‘done for.’”

  “And you interpreted that to mean what? That he might hurt you or even kill you?”

  “You know Arne. He’s a scary guy. He’s shot people. So, yes, I’m worried what he might do. Maybe I need one of those protective orders to keep him away.”

  “That might be a stretch, Marty. Did he actually say he would harm you?”

  “Well, not in so many words, but I knew what he meant.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not enough for a protective order. There has to be a more specific threat.”

  Marty got out a handkerchief and daubed his eyes. “I don’t know what else to do. I’m in a corner here, Paul. Do you understand that?”

  “I do, but there’s a way out if you want to take it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “First get a lawyer. I can recommend some good ones. Then go to the state prosecutor who’s coming up here to take charge of the investigation into Peter’s disappearance and Dewey’s murder. His name is Chad Barrington. Tell him your story, but only after you’ve received immunity from any possible criminal charges.”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to testify, wouldn’t I?”

  “You would if the case goes to trial.”

  “Okay, let me think about this some more. Can I call you if I need to?”

  I jotted down my cell number and gave it to Marty. “Any time.”

  He stood up and reached cross the desk to shake my hand. “Thanks a lot, Paul. I knew I could count on you. It’ll all work out, won’t it?”

  “I’m sure it will,” I promised. “Just do the right thing Marty, and you’ll be fine.”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon hip deep in the usual dreary paperwork, doing my level best to keep Paradise County on the right side of the law. There were minor criminal and civil matters to be dealt with, motions to be filed, letters to be written, paving contracts to be approved. I also had to prepare for an upcoming court hearing centering on a tricked out, eighty-thousand-dollar Yukon Denali seized by one of Arne’s deputies in a drug case. The owner wanted his big toy back and I could sympathize. The seizure laws were ridiculous. Then again, who but a drug dealer in Paradise County could afford an SUV worth eighty grand?

  Still, no matter what flotsam floated across my desk, I couldn’t help but think about Marty, glum-faced and anxious, caught up in something that threatened to destroy his life. I was all but certain he’d been at Peter’s mansion the night Jill Lorrimer died. Had Arne been there, too, and was that why he’d made the ominous call to Marty? If so, Arne might have done more than merely cover up Jill’s death as a favor to Peter. Maybe he’d killed her, for reasons unknown, and Marty had witnessed the crime. And then maybe Arne had made Peter disappear and murdered Dewey, because . . . .

  Slow down, I told myself. There’s nothing like a conspiratorial frame of mind to stimulate wild thinking, and it’s easy to leap right off the cliff and nosedive into all manner of craziness. I was just making guesses. I really didn’t know what Marty had seen at Peter’s mansion, and I wouldn’t know until he decided to tell me. I made a mental note to call him by the end of the week to see if he was ready to speak out. In the meantime, I’d keep what Marty had revealed about Arne’s sexcapades with Jill as an ace in the hole, ready to play when the right time arrived.

  24

  The next day, amid a trickle of rain and fat whirling snowflakes, the national media swooped down on Pineland like big dark birds hunting for prey. A CNN crew led the way in search of bad news in the heartland, and their report, full of drama and angst, was merely the beginning. FOX, CBS, and NBC quickly followed. The New York Times, not to be outdone, sent a reporter to suss out the situation. He spent two days in Pineland, looking painfully out of place amid the rustics, and then produced a long story—“A Town on Fire”—filled with piquant details about the hockey-playing, God-fearing, Budweiser-drinking, Trump-loving hosers who inhabit our remote backwater. It was quite a read, and wrong in a hundred ways about Pineland, which like all small towns is not nearly as simple a place as outsiders like to assume.

  The glare of the media always attracts moths eager to fly into the light, and plenty of Pinelanders stepped forward for a once-in-a-lifetime chance at self-immolation. Arne, to my amazement, was chief among them. I thought he’d try to duck the press, but instead he embraced the cameras and microphones, quickly morphing into Pineland’s very own media celebrity. His rumpled, grumpy presence and tart manner made him a natural for television, the classic Podunk sheriff, and before long his ornery face was showing up on screens across the country.

  He presented himself as a folksy-but-sly lawman, full of old-time country wisdom, and even talked in fake drawl like a good old boy from south of the Mason-Dixon line. “We got a skunk here we need to smoke out and you can bet we’ll do just that,” he told one interviewer. He assured another that while “we’re just simple people up here in Paradise County, don’t think for a minute we’re stupid. We got some whip-smart folks investigating this thing and they’ll get to the bottom of it pretty quick.”

  Big city media types are easily snookered when they venture into the exotic realm of small-town America, so they fell for Arne’s aw-shucks routine and depicted him as a man of shrewd, if not downright dazzling intelligence. But as the Einstein of Pineland exhaled his mighty gusts of wind, he made sure to throw me under the media eighteen-wheeler, suggesting I was “a person of interest” in the investigation. He didn’t specify what made me so interesting, not that it mattered. Calls started coming into my office, producers for some of the on-air correspondents began nosing around and before long my mug appeared on CNN. “Questions raised about county attorney,” read the Chyron beneath the image.

  I wanted to blast back at Arne—Marty had provided me with plenty of ammunition—but decided against it. A big public war of words with Arne would just draw more attention to me and I didn’t want that. I also figured the national media would decamp after a day or two, looking for chewy mayhem elsewhere, and we’d all catch our breath.

  It didn’t quite work out that way.

  The media weren’t the only irritant I had to deal with. Just before noon, Chad Barrington from the Minnesota Attorney General’s office in St. Paul showed up to formally dismiss me from the case and demand that I turn over any and all investigative files. I’d first met him when he took over the corruption investigation involving Dewey and two sheriff’s deputies after Jill Lorrimer’s death. I didn’t like him then and I liked him even less now. He’s tall and thin, in his late thirties, a frequent marathoner who loves recounting his running achievements mile by dreary mile. He wears more expensive suits than I’ve ever owned, possesses a law degree from Yale and speaks with an affected East Coast accent. What’s there not to dislike about him?

  “Of course I’ll cooperate in any way I can,” I said in my politest manner. “You can count on me, Chad. Incidentally, how’s that corruption investigation going? Now that Dewey Swindell has been murdered, I imagine it’s heating up.”

  “I can’t comment on that,” he said.

  “I suppose not. Well, have fun with Arne. I’m sure he’s eager to work with you to clear up everything here. Should be a piece of cake, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said, and I couldn’t have agreed more. He didn’t know—about Pineland, about Arne, about all the cross-currents at work—but he was in for an education.
>
  While the news media were busy carving up Pineland for the amusement of America, the investigation of which I was no longer a part gave scant evidence of progress. Peter remained lost, and even though I had an idea where he might be buried I wasn’t ready yet to present my theory to Arne or anyone else in law enforcement. It was too risky for me, and I saw no harm in waiting awhile to speak up.

  Dewey’s murder wasn’t proving any easier to crack. No trace evidence of the killer was found at the Glenning, in the ruins of the old Swindell mansion or on what was left of Dewey’s body. Dewey’s phone records revealed no suspicious calls or messages. His e-mail was equally unremarkable. No useful footage was found from the few surveillance cameras in the vicinity of the Glenning or the mansion, nor did any eyewitnesses come forward. Whoever shot Dewey and hauled his body to the mansion to be incinerated had managed to move unseen through the night.

  Investigators were able to determine, to no one’s surprise, that arson was the cause of the fire that destroyed the mansion. The arsonist had gone about his work skillfully, setting at least two fires simultaneously to ensure a rapid burn. He used accelerants—paint thinner and lamp oil —found on site and constructed timers from simple household items all but impossible to trace.

  Dewey himself went from the fire to a refrigerated drawer at the coroner’s office in Duluth, and he stayed there for weeks because no one claimed his charred corpse. When I learned of the situation, I filed legal work to arrange a county-sponsored burial. Even jerks deserve a decent farewell.

  Kat Berglund called as I was leaving the office just before five.

  “Heard something you might be interested in,” she said. “Got a minute?”

  “For you, always. What’s up?”

  “Do you know Jimmy Shields, over at the Paradise Pines Hotel? He’s one of the desk clerks.”

  “The name’s vaguely familiar,” I said.

  “Well, he comes into the bar every afternoon after his shift at the hotel is over. He has a couple of bumps and then plays euchre with his buddies.”

  “Euchre?”

  “I know, who plays that? But he does. Anyway, while he was enjoying his afternoon shots of Jim Beam he mentioned he’d seen ‘that fancy Black lady from Chicago,’ as he calls her. Apparently, she checked back into the hotel today.”

  This was good news, if only because I knew Cassandra was all right. At the same time, I wished she hadn’t taken the risk of returning to Pineland. She’d decided to investigate on her own—leaving me and everyone else in the dark—and I had no doubt she was convinced she could ferret out the truth. Maybe she could. Or maybe she was unknowingly setting herself up to become the killer’s final victim. In either case, the sooner I could speak to her and try to regain her trust, the better.

  “Well, I’m glad she’s safe and sound,” I told Kat. “I’ll have to go out to the hotel and have a long talk with the wondrous Cassandra. Maybe she’ll open up a bit and share what she knows. She hasn’t exactly been candid with me.”

  “Or maybe she just doesn’t like you,” Kat offered. “She wouldn’t be the first woman with that problem.”

  “Sad but true, despite my inherently lovable nature. So did your barfly pal Jimmy have anything else to say about Cassandra?”

  “Actually, he did. He said she asked him a bunch of questions about Pembroke Woods Park.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “How big the park is, if it’s really isolated, whether other people would likely be there this time of year. Questions like that. I guess she gave Jimmy quite a grilling. Sounds as if she’s planning to go out to the park.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I serve drinks, Paul. I don’t read minds.”

  “Damn, I was sure you did. Thanks for the info. I owe you one.”

  “No problem. Talk to you soon.”

  Pembroke Woods County Park is two miles northeast of town along a quiet stretch of the Paradise River. Although the park encompasses only forty acres, it holds a great prize in the form of a virgin stand of red and white pine that eluded both loggers and the Great Fire, in large measure due to a crusty character named Thomas Pembroke. He homesteaded the land in the 1870s and refused to sell his patch of woods to Jonathan Paradise’s all-consuming lumberjacks. No one knows why he kept the loggers at bay. Maybe he just liked trees or maybe he saw beauty where no one else did and believed, against all odds, that it was important. He was also lucky. The Great Fire somehow swooped around his woods, as though giving him credit for his preservation efforts.

  Pembroke’s descendants kept the woods in their pristine state for almost a hundred years before donating the property to Paradise County in 1970. The park’s big trees, some three hundred years old and over a hundred feet high, are the last of their kind in Paradise County, giants from a lost age. The park draws hikers in summer and cross-country skiers in winter, but there are few visitors during the damp, chill days of April.

  I used to roam the park as a kid, lost to the everyday world and dreaming of great things. The dreams are mostly gone now but the park remains one of my favorite places, and I often go there in summer to enjoy its fragrant air and deep, soothing quiet. It’s even better in winter, insulated in deep snow and immune to the world’s noisy nonsense.

  After talking with Kat, however, I wasn’t feeling at all peaceful. What would possess Cassandra to go out to the park, if in fact she had? I put in a call to the hotel and asked to speak to her, but there was no answer. Maybe she’d gone out to dinner. Or maybe she’d gone somewhere else. There was only one way to find out. Instead of heading home, I drove north out of town, toward Pembroke Woods.

  25

  When I reached woods around five-thirty, I saw a red BMW in the parking lot. Cassandra presumably had a rental car and she’d be just the type to go first-class with a Beamer. There are times when your gut is way ahead of your brain, and I could feel my stomach tightening as I parked next to the car. I checked the driver’s side door and was surprised to find it open. The interior was clean and tidy, nothing in disarray. I looked in the glove compartment and found a Hertz rental agreement with Cassandra’s name. Not good. What was she doing out here in the woods by herself? It didn’t feel right.

  I wondered why Cassandra hadn’t locked the car. Was she just in a rush or had someone grabbed her, or worse? I popped open the trunk latch. My stomach was double knotted by the time I went around to look into the trunk. It was empty.

  I closed the trunk and looked out toward the old forest, a dark green wall at the edge of the parking lot. The mix of snow and rain had stopped, patches of blue poking through the clouds as angled shafts of sunlight sliced through the big trees. But night wasn’t far away and once it clamped down Cassandra would be lost to the woods. A stiff wind had come up from the northwest, crashing through the crowns of the pines with a whooshing, jet-engine roar. I suddenly thought of my Hopper print, with its ancient American darkness closing in on the lonely gas station. Paradise County is like that, the woods and their hidden mysteries never far away, mocking the thin claims of civilization.

  Although I had no proof anything was wrong—for all I knew Cassandra had a deep interest in forestry and was simply out for a hike—I felt a roiling sense of unease. I got out my cell phone and called 911. I identified myself to the operator and asked that a sheriff’s deputy be dispatched at once to the park.

  “What is the nature of the emergency?” the operator asked.

  “I believe a woman named Cassandra Ellis may be in danger.”

  Everybody in Pineland knew about Cassandra, and the mention of her name had an immediate effect.

  “All right,” the operator said, “we’ll send out a unit. Will you meet the deputy there?”

  “Yes, I—”

  The crack of a gunshot tore through the wind, close enough to startle me.

  “I’m hearing gun
fire,” I said. “Send more deputies. I’ll be in the woods.”

  A well-maintained trail circles through the park, and I ran toward it. The wind was still blasting through the trees, and if Cassandra was somewhere in the woods I doubted she could hear my voice above the roar, but I tried anyway.

  I called out her name and said, “It’s Paul Zweifel. Where are you?”

  No response. I called out her name again. Nothing.

  The park’s pines stand in dense, huddled groves, and once I started along the trail the parking lot quickly faded from view. Nothing much blooms in Paradise County until May, and the forest’s understory of aster and hazelnut and chokeberry was still struggling to thrust through the thick layer of pine needles covering the ground. I moved quickly down the trail, the wind pushing at my chest like some bruiser trying to knock me off my feet. The branches of the pines swayed overhead, blotting out much of the sky, and I had the eerie sensation that I’d left the familiar world and passed into another far older and more dangerous, home to Little Red Riding Hood and the big bad wolf.

  I called out Cassandra’s name every few steps, to no avail. Maybe she wasn’t in the woods after all or I’d somehow missed her and she was back at her car. Or maybe she’d been taken away or even murdered by the same the man who appeared to be waging war against the Swindell family.

  About a quarter of a mile in from the parking lot I reached a sign along the trail pointing to Old Tom, the largest and tallest white pine in the park, named after its savior, Thomas Pembroke. A narrow path leads to the three-hundred-year-old skyscraper, long a popular rendezvous for late-night teenage beer fests. I glanced over toward the stately old giant, in the shadow of which I’d committed my share of youthful follies, and that’s when my heart almost stopped.