Foursome (6 page)

Willis said, “Ironic, eh?”

The rest of the boathouse was crammed with conspicuous consumption. Water skis, water sleds, Jet Skis. Lounging rafts with drink-holder pockets. Two aluminum canoes, one painted yellow, the other orange. Other paraphernalia I could only guess at.

Something made a clittering noise above my head.

Willis said, “Just a bat. Dormant during the day.”

I said, “Can we try the house, walk me through it?”

“Sure can.”

The climb back up the slope was a little tougher, but not much, a total of less than a hundred feet from the water’s edge. Rather than use one of the cutesy footbridges, Willis walked around the gully, and I did, too. The worst part was looking up at the house. The architectural hand was no more evident here than at the rear. The structure fit its setting like a beer fart at a wine tasting.

I said, “At least the chimes seem right.”

Willis grimaced. “Bear scares.”

“What?”

“Bear scares. Folks up here rig things to keep the black bears away from the trash and food smells. Most use tin cans with stones in them. Others have a deadfall.”

“Deadfall?”

“Like a log or some lumber. It gets tripped, the noise and movements send the bear a-packing. Your client, though”—she moved her hand at the house the way she had at the footbridges—“he likes chimes.”

The deck was supported by eight-inch square posts that went up twelve feet or so to the joists of the deck itself. Back at the northeast stairs, Willis stopped.

She said, “We figure Shea was somewhere between here and the brush when he shot the Vandemeer woman on the deck up there.”

“How about innocent till proven guilty?”

Willis left her face neutral. “You didn’t see the bodies or Shea that night, mister. I did.”

“You even have a motive, Sheriff?”

Still neutral. “In this county, we like to leave that to time of trial.”

I swung my head from the brush to the deck above us. “You’re going by the angle of entry of the bolt into her chest?”

“And body position. Apparently your client didn’t try to move her.”

“Okay.”

Willis climbed the steps. “We figure he got up here before the doctor—the husband Vandemeer—come out.”

“Why is that?”

She stopped at the deck itself. “Had to reload. Once the lab boys finished with the crossbow, I tried it. Takes a time.” Her arm moved through the air. “The husband got it out on the deck, crashing back through the screen door. Figure he come out because he saw or heard something, closed the screen behind him. Your client must have already been ready with the next shot. Got the husband straight through the heart. Lab found some tomato juice on his hands and a couple of seeds under his nails, and there were tomatoes sliced out in the kitchen, like he was helping Shea’s wife make a salad or something.”

“Which door?”

Willis walked to the center of three sliding doors. “This is where the doctor went through. We figure your client stepped over his body here, got some blood on the shoes, then went toward the kitchen and caught his wife coming out of it.” The sheriff turned to me without looking at me. “You saw the photo of … her and the paper towel?”

“Yes.”

Willis nodded once, abruptly. “Your client must have noticed he was tracking blood and went upstairs there to his bedroom to change shoes. He drove to the country store as cool as you please to buy his little bag of groceries, then come back and play the horrified husband.”

I thought about it. Shea’s changing shoes still didn’t feel right. “Can we go inside?”

“We can. Let me just go around to one of the doors with an external lock on it, use the key.”

“Sheriff?”

“Yes?”

“I understand they kept a key to the house outside it, like they did with the boathouse.”

She nodded. “Back stairs, on a nail under the riser for the third step. But like I said, we figure your client come from the front deck and worked his way through the house from there.”

Willis walked around the north side of the deck. I heard a key and a door open, then saw her through the sliding glass door coming toward me across the big room at the lake or east side of the house.

She unlatched the glass door and slid it open for me. “Come on in.”

A combination living room/dining area with vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, and hardwood floors with some discoloration in dark brown that didn’t match the grain around it. Blue leather couch and imitation Eames chairs with ottomans, some kind of dhurrie rug on the floor in front of a walk-in fireplace. Teak entertainment center with television, VCR, stereo amplifier, CD player, the works. Chrome stools around an art deco dining room table that was a foot too high, the stools having seat slings and backrests in the same blue leather. The walls were festooned with modern art, cubes and slashes with no sense of pattern I could see. A set of bannistered stairs with a beige carpet runner went up to a second floor.

“Can I see the bedroom?”

Willis shrugged. “Mister, you can see the whole damned house.”

She led me up the stairs, some more of the dark brown discoloration on the carpet runner. At the top, a corridor branched left and right, double doors in front of us.

Willis opened the double doors inward, and I moved past her.

The room was huge, a king-sized bed occupying barely a quarter of the floor space. A triple window provided a great view of the sheriff’s Blazer on the gravel below. The sheets, carpeting, and other furnishings, in yellow and orange, would have been loud in an artist’s loft in the SoHo section of New York.

Behind me, Willis said, “Kind of hard on the eyes, eh?”

“Kind of.” There were faint discoloration marks near a set of louvered doors. “This the closet?”

“It is.”

I opened the doors. Double poles of clothing, both men’s and women’s. About half and half, as far as I could tell.

“We found the shoes your client was wearing back in that corner to your right.”

I knelt down. You could just see a discoloration in the yellow carpeting on the bottom.

“He buried the shoes under a couple of cartons, but one of the state troopers spotted the stain.”

I went through the master bath, then the two guest rooms and baths on either side of the master suite. The house looked large from the outside, but it didn’t have a lot of living space on the inside. From the window in the southside guest room, I could see a small stone garage. “That where they kept the crossbow?”

“So your client says.”

“Can I see it?”

“Crossbow’s back in my evidence locker. The garage, sure.”

We went back downstairs, Willis leading me out toward the kitchen. “Sheriff, just a second.”

She stopped and turned to me.

I said, “This is about where Sandra Newberg was found?”

“About. Ma Judson said when she came in on your client, he was holding his wife and rocking her, so we figure he moved the body some from its original position.”

“You also figure he killed them first, went to the store, then came back and made enough noise to bring his neighbors.”

“That’s about it.”

“Then why did he change his shoes?”

“What?”

“Shea checks on his wife when he gets back, sitting with and rocking her body, he’s going to get blood all over his shoes. Why change them between ‘killing’ them and ‘finding’ them again?”

Willis kept her face neutral. “Because he doesn’t want to get any blood in his fancy new four-wheel-drive. It’d wreck his carpeting and his story of just finding them here when he got back.”

“But then why go up the stairs with them on? He’d leave tracks here that way. And why not ditch the shoes somewhere other than his closet? Hell, he’s got a forest for his backyard and a lake for his front.”

She just looked at me. “You want to see the garage or not?”

Outside, Willis said, “I’m going to radio in. Key’s just under the third eave there on the left.”

She walked up to her vehicle as I went to the garage. It had two old wooden doors painted dark green that would have to be opened outward, one at a time. I found the key the way Willis had the one for the boathouse. Unlocking a door, I pulled it toward me far enough to let in light to see by. The contents were a land version of the boathouse. All-terrain vehicles, fancy mountain bikes, and so on. Under some gardening equipment, I found a target the size of a round cocktail tabletop with concentric rings of yellow, blue, and red around a black bull’s-eye. Above the target was a bare ten-penny nail where a crossbow and bolts might have hung.

I was just pulling the target free of a rake and a hoe when a raspy female voice behind me said, “Probably staple you to that, I was to let loose both barrels.”

Her cadence was a lot like the sheriff’s, but older. Without turning, I said, “I’ll put the target down.”

“Might tell me what you’re doing here, too.”

From a ways off, I heard Willis call out. “Ma! Ma, now don’t you shoot that man. He’s a detective from down to Boston.”

“Boston? The hell’s he doing here?”

Willis sounded closer. “He might like to talk with you about that.”

“H
OW’RE YOU DOING
back there?”

“Fine, Ms. Judson.”

“Christ come to earth, man. Don’t be calling me ‘Miz’ anything. ‘Ma’ does just fine for folks up here.”

I was following Ma Judson along the winding, overgrown path from the edge of the clearing for the Shea house southward toward her place. Sheriff Willis had a call she had to cover, but before leaving in the Blazer she said Ma Judson or Dag Gates could run me back to the inn when I was finished talking with them.

Judson herself was a study in contrasts. A round, rosy face with gray, milky eyes, the kind that a cookie company would cast in the role of grandmother. However, the scent trailing behind her was less sugar and more garlic, and her hat was a man’s snap-brim in green felt, what looked like a nip taken out of the back of the brim. The little I could see of her hair was white, thin, and short. She wore an oxford shirt with a tattered collar under a buckskin jacket that never saw the inside of a boutique. Her pants were baggy, olive drab corduroys, the wale wide. I was pretty sure her shoes were L. L. Bean duck-boots, the corduroys bloused into them like an airborne trooper would his or her fatigues. The contrast was capped by the over-and-under shotgun she carried, breech broken as a foolproof safety.

As we walked, the sound of the barking was getting louder.

Judson said, “You’re the cause of that, you see.”

“Of what?”

“The dogs. A-baying and a-howling some fierce for them. Don’t care for the idea of somebody sneaking up on me.”

Over the sound of the dogs another noise came from the lake itself. This was more the long and haunting cry of a creature cutting its heart out.

“What the hell is that?”

“Loon. We’re blessed with seventeen adults, we are, and four chicks made it through the end of last summer. We’ll be doing a formal count this July, but after a while, you get so you can pick them out. That was ‘Diver.’ ”

Another one of the cries, this one sounding briefer than the first.

“You see?”

“See what?”

“That second cry. That was ‘Two Hoots,’ I call her. She stops after only two—they call them ‘yodels’ or ‘tremolos.’ ”

Through a gap in the trees I spotted a huge bird hanging low in the water. It looked like a cross between a Canadian goose and a cormorant. “That a loon?”

Judson came back to me, craned her neck. “It is.”

“Which one?”

“Can’t tell from here. Have to wait till it calls.”

We waited. It didn’t.

I felt a trickle of sweat working its way down my cheek. “Maybe next time.”

“Presumptuous.” She looked up at me, then smiled. “I see one of them got you.”

“One what?”

Judson reached an index finger toward my face and touched the sweat. Her finger came away bloody. “Black fly. Mostly gone now, but there are still a few on the wing.”

I put my hand to my face and felt a lump just under my eye.

“Don’t be itching that, now. Welt’ll be bad enough without it.”

“Why don’t they bother you?”

“The garlic. Eat it for six weeks before they hatch, they don’t know you’re around. Other folks do, though, I expect.”

She turned and continued down the trail.

After another fifty yards of hiking, we reached a clearing more subtle than the one around the Shea house. In the clearing stood a rustic cabin made of hewn logs, weathered to the color of shake shingles, the round ends of the logs showing the rings and checking of old wood. The foundation and chimney consisted of mortared fìeldstones, laid flat but jutting out irregularly, smooth with age and plastered with moss. Two Cape Ann rockers and a small table, hewn from the same kind of wood as the logs, sat on a shallow porch nobody could mistake for a sundeck. Rusty nails driven halfway into the porch logs supported all sorts of wood-handled tools with crescent metal blades, from logging or farming, I assumed. The window frames were weathered two-by-fours, three joined together to form the vertical jambs, one each for the lintels above and sills below the small windows. Screens were held in place by brads driven into the boards. The roof was covered by large green squares, like somebody had stripped two dozen pool tables of their covers and tacked them down.

To one side was an old, two-door utility vehicle that looked like an International Scout, with a cream metal top and an aquamarine body. The spare was under the side window behind the passenger’s seat. The rear bumper was roped onto the chassis, the license plate taped in the rear window. Behind the truck was a garage full of old junk and an outhouse with the elbow of a tree limb for a door handle. The garage and privy formed the corners of a chicken wire run, three big, mongrel dogs in it, each going crazy to be the first one to come through the wire at us.

“That’ll do.”

At Judson’s raspy command, all three dogs stopped making noise and sat down on their side of the wire. Two big-headed, short-haired dogs could have been twins and looked a lot like Old Yeller, tongues out and tails wagging. The third dog drew his gene pool somewhere between a German shepherd and a malamute, and his ghostly blue eyes didn’t give any indication he was happy to see me.