Murder in Death's Door County (7 page)

“Are you serious?” I squinted up at him.
“First you-.”

Before I could get really started, Lizzy
ran up and grabbed my arm, “Okay, Annie Oakley, let’s get you outta here.
Janie, can you please put the sweater on hold? Thanks!”

Lizzy and I heard Janie’s “No problem!”
as Lizzy dragged me to the restaurant next door.

On the sidewalk outside Dublin’s Irish
Pub, Lizzy let go of me. I turned to face her, expecting her to be appalled.
All she said was, “My, you are a feisty one, aren’t you?”

That is when I guessed I had made a
friend for life.

I had the grace to look penitent for my
outburst. I hung my head a little, “Yeah, I’ve had a busy couple of days. What
with this project, moving up here, and, uh, hitting that guy with my car door.”

“Oh! Do tell! So you know that guy?”

“If breaking someone’s nose counts for
knowing someone, then yeah.”

Lizzy cocked her eyebrow, “A broken nose
is included in this story? Oh, this is going to be good!”

We promptly went into Dublin’s and got
seated immediately.

L
IZZY AND I ORDERED OUR
FOOD
and drinks. I took
Janie’s advice and got the salmon sandwich. Lizzy opted for the Shepherd’s pie.

“Okay, give. You realize you kind of made
quite a scene, right?”

“Good thing it was just you and Janie in
there, then, isn’t it?”

While we waited for our food, I filled
Lizzy on how I got into a little fender-bender. I also shared that I slammed my
car door in Donovan Archer’s face. In context, she said she understood the
exchange a little better now. We had just gotten our food when Janie came into
the restaurant.

Janie asked. “Sorry to interrupt, but I
got a chance to take lunch and thought I’d crash your party. Is that okay?”

“Sure! The more the merrier!”

“Of course!”

While I devoured my salmon sandwich,
Lizzy filled Janie in on the highs and lows from my interviews with Marcos.
They took a brief break for Janie to order her own salmon sandwich for lunch.
Once Lizzy finished telling Janie about Marcos, Janie wasn’t sure what to make
of him either.

“I feel for ya, Annie. That’s a tough
one,” Janie commiserated with me.

“At least the woman who wrote the book
for Liberace was consistently nice. Crazy, but nice,” I bemoaned.

Janie started at my mention of Liberace.
She looked at us questioningly.

“Yeah, consistency really makes a
difference,” Lizzy agreed.

“She certainly wasn’t ‘normal’, but she
never raised her voice. However, I’ll just have to 'man up' and deal with it.
Harry is driving up tonight and I’ll tell him what’s going on then.” As an
aside to Janie, I explained how she wrote the book with Liberace as her
audience.

“Dedicated to him?”

“No, no, he was her actual intended
audience.”

“Wow. So, who’s Harry? How does he
figure into it?” asked Janie.

Lizzy interjected, “He’s Annie’s
Big-time Editor. Go on, Annie, tell Janie what you told me about him.” She took
the last bite of her Shepherd’s pie.

“Eh. He seems okay, but I’m not sure how
vested he is in this project. I have a feeling like this is a personal favor
for someone. He gave me a huge bonus after I almost bailed on the project. He’s
supposed to be bringing it tonight.”

Once Janie had her food, we switched
over to more fun topics. They filled me in on some of the colorful characters
in the area. Lizzy and Janie seemed to know everyone from Egg Harbor to Gill’s
Rock, the southernmost and northernmost towns on Door County’s west coast. I
filed this useful information away for later.

They explained that Door County’s formal
name was “Death’s Door County.”

“Isn’t that a little dark?”

“Well, that’s really why it’s been
shortened,” explained Janie. “I mean, I suppose people would still be attracted
a macabre name like that, but Door County just sounds lighter.”

“Why was it called that anyway?”

“Because of the dangerous strait between
Washington Island and Gill’s Rock. Back in the day, a lot of shipwrecks
happened there.”

“Hence, the large number of lighthouses
up here. That makes sense. What’s Gill’s Rock like?”

Janie laughed a little, “Oh, that’s all
the way on the northern tip of the peninsula. We don’t go there.”

“Don’t let Janie fool you, Annie,” Lizzy
smiled. “She’s just having fun with you. The peninsula isn’t that big. Gill’s
Rock is only 20 minutes away. I’d be happy to show you around there sometime
next week.”

“Thanks. I’d love that.”

After we all finished lunch, we parted
ways. Of course, I was still nervous about my upcoming call from Marcos, but
the lunch definitely helped take my mind off it. I was relieved that Janie hadn’t
asked about Donovan and my abrupt exit; I gave her a lot of credit for being
discreet. Coming from my nosy family, I had come to value discretion highly.

—
–

Once I got back to the inn, I continued
writing until I got ready to meet my boss face-to-face. We had
decided that we would meet in the inn’s restaurant.

So, until about four o’clock, I
continued working on a book that may never see the light of day.

I really didn’t think I’d ever hear from
Marcos again. He had been so unstable and illogical. Imagine my shock when he
called about two hours before Harry was due to arrive. When the phone rang, I
thought it was Harry and picked it up without even looking at the Caller ID.

“Hello, Annie! How’s my favorite
ghostwriter doing?” Marcos cheerfully asked when I answered the phone.

“Um, fine. Great. How are you?” He
sounded really happy. Was Marcos giving a class on 101 ways to confuse your
ghostwriter? Because he was succeeding mightily.

“Very well, thank you. Okay, let’s get
to work. Where did we leave off yesterday?” Um, you wanted to fire me from the
project and have Harry assign a new writer, I thought.

“Sure. Great. Yeah, let’s get to work,” I
muttered. “I didn’t write out any questions for today. I just thought we’d
continue with your narrative. If that’s okay with you?” He seemed to like
hearing the sound of his voice, and it took the onus of communication off of me.
Win-win.

So, he proceeded to repeat EVERYTHING he
had shared yesterday.

Since I didn’t need to pay attention to
take notes, I completely stopped listening to him. He went on unfettered for
about 40 minutes. Suddenly, I realized, he was talking about something
different.

“…and I was out walking with my wife. When
I stopped to talk to a different neighbor, I walked away from my wife for a few
seconds. Literally, in the blink of an eye, the dog lunged at Diana. She was
only trying to pet him and that damn dog scratched her. I know that dog would
have done further damage but in the nick of time, I was able to reach Diana.
With one hand, I pulled the dog off of her in order to prevent any further
injuries. Feeling that the dog might cause more injury to others if it
continued to run wild, I took the dog and put it in my car. I intended to take
the dog to the dog pound.”

Hesitantly, I asked, “What kind of a
dog?”

He ignored my question completely and
kept trucking along. I reasoned it was probably for the best.

“My neighbor saw me from her front door.
She screamed for me to let the dog go and that she’d already called the cops on
me. Sure enough, I heard squad cars in the distance. One of the cops got me
with his stun gun.”

A stun gun? Wow, I didn’t anyone who’d
been zapped with a stun gun before.

“When I came to, I was on my way to the
police station again. I didn’t know what had happened to my wife. Let me tell
you, this was police brutality and torture at its finest. I screamed at the
cops, ‘where is my wife? What have you done with her?’ They just looked at me
oddly, and asked if I wanted to be stunned again. Once they got to the station,
they booked me and jailed me. When my friend paid the bail, he told me that my wife
was okay.”

“Did the whole thing come to trial?”

“It did. I asked my other neighbors if I
could have them tell my lawyer about the dog incident and the danger her animal
posed. I wanted to tape record their conversations with my attorney, Jim
Donaldson. They knew the kind of people we were and they said yes. While I
listened to these conversations on the other line I couldn’t believe what my
ears were hearing.
MY
lawyer. The lawyer who I
was
PAYING
. This man betrayed me. He was defending
the police, saying that this incident probably happened because I had a
Doberman pinscher, and the Westie could smell the dog on my wife.”

Oh my gosh, all this fuss over a West
Highland terrier? They were like little toys. He claimed that a Westie brutally
attacked an adult? I wasn’t even sure that was physically possible. You could
put them in your pocket. Focus, Annie, focus! I told myself.

“Soon after that incident, I had gone to
the coffee shop. As I went back to my car, a cop confronted me and asked if I
could produce any ownership papers for the car. I couldn’t. He told me the car
had been reported as stolen. His partner came out of nowhere and knocked me in
the head with his flashlight. Again, they dragged me into jail. This time, they
brought me up on charges of Grand Theft Auto. They were accusing me stealing
MY OWN CAR
! Needless to say, I was outraged!”

“What did you do?”

“What could we do? I was becoming afraid
for my life. To make matters worse, my lawyer, Jim Donaldson, seemed to be in
on the set up. He tried to convince me to stop recording my conversations with
him. He told me that through these recordings, the police were claiming I had
gone off the deep-end, and that the recordings actually would hurt me in
court.”

“And the court case did happen, right?”

“Yes, while the two other cases were
pending, they sent me to Joliet State Prison on other trumped-up charges.”

And then I asked the magical question.
When in doubt of any kind, always ask this question: Why?

I phrased it thusly: “Why do you think
all of this is happening to you and your family?” I did not expect what
happened next. Especially when he had sounded so cheerful at the beginning of
the interview.

“Are you in on this? Who sent you?” he
hissed into the phone. “Unless you tell me who is putting you up to these
questions, I will find you.” I tried to stifle a shiver. No luck.

With that, he hung up the phone. I sat
in stunned silence for a few minutes, wondering what to do.

I
TRIED TO CALL HARRY ON
HIS
cell phone. No answer. I
didn’t want to leave a message. What would I even say at this point? Besides,
Harry was already on his way. Since talking to Lizzy and Janie, I had a growing
suspicion Harry knew way more about Marcos and this project than he had shared
with me. I wondered what was really going on and how deeply Harry was involved.
I also wondered if Marcos was completely sane. He seemed a little insane to me.
I had relatives who were a little insane and Marcos trumped their behavior in
spades. Deep breaths. I looked at the clock and was shocked back into reality. I
had only 20 minutes to get ready before I needed to meet Harry downstairs. As I
hopped in the shower, I could hear thunder and lightning outside. Great,
atmosphere. Just what I needed.

By the time I got out of the shower and
dressed, the storm raged full blast. Lightning electrified the sky outside the
window. I dressed in my jade sweater and a pair of black pants and beat the
buzzer by ten minutes. As I tousled my curls, and put on make-up, someone
knocked on the door. I jumped about 10 feet. The storm and situation with
Marcos had made me edgier than I realized.

When I had opened the door, I fully
expected to see an inn employee. Instead, a man, who I could only assume was Harry,
stood there, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that my mental image matched
what he really looked like. That almost never happened. Yet, before me stood an
Elliot Gould lookalike, and the first words out of his mouth were, “Hey, doll!
Good to see you!”

“Great to meet you face-to-face, Harry.”
We shook hands and he came in.

He said he didn’t want to wait
downstairs since he had brought a little gift basket for me. I was touched by
the gesture even though I knew it was a marketing thing. The gift basket
included a white mug with the name of his vanity publishing company emblazoned in
black on the side, a sticky notes pad, keychain, and a couple of pens. Regardless
of the marketingness of it all, a gift is a gift and I smiled as I thanked him.

We made our way down to the Lighthouse
Inn’s bar slash restaurant. Harry got his room key and arranged for his
suitcase to be taken to his room while we waited for them to clear a table for
us. Briefly, I made eye contact with Lizzy, who was tending bar. She mouthed, “Is
that Harry?” I discreetly nodded. Once Harry had his room reserved, we were
shown our table.