The Heirloom Murders (2 page)

“Good Lord.” Chloe Ellefson’s
jaw dropped with dismay as she climbed the final steps and emerged into the attic. “Geez, Dellyn! When you asked for my help you didn’t mention we’d need a backhoe.”

Her friend winced. “Don’t abandon me now. I’m begging you.” Dellyn Burke wiped sweat from her forehead. The attic was broiler-hot.

Chloe pulled a string dangling from a light fixture, and was immediately sorry. The bulb’s sickly yellow glow only accentuated the bewildering assortment of
stuff
: a butter churn, three dressmakers’ dummies, chairs upholstered in chintz and horsehair, several trunks, a cradle … and boxes. Hundreds of boxes, pushed low under the eaves and piled high beneath the crest of the ceiling.

Dellyn clutched her elbows, crossing her arms across her chest. She was shorter than Chloe, and younger too—late twenties, probably, to Chloe’s thirty-two. She wore paint-spotted jeans and a faded T-shirt that might once have been blue. Her hair was pulled into a simple ponytail. She was lovely in a straightforward way; a woman who didn’t waste energy on what didn’t matter, like make-up. But her expression was strained.

“In the interest of full disclosure,” Dellyn said finally, “I should tell you that you haven’t seen half of it. There’s twice this much stuff in the barn. And my dad’s study is crammed, too.”

“Collection obsession,” Chloe said bleakly, then immediately wished she hadn’t. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” Dellyn’s parents had died suddenly, in a car crash, only a few months earlier.

Dellyn touched a child’s rocking horse, setting it in motion. “It’s OK. But most of these aren’t family heirlooms. My parents helped found the Eagle Historical Society—oh, probably twenty years ago. They were only collecting stuff until the society can afford a building of its own.”

“That was a good goal,” Chloe said charitably.

Dellyn nudged the rocking horse with her toe, keeping it moving. “Both of my parents grew up in Eagle. They did more to preserve and protect this village’s history and heritage than anyone. Once they began talking about starting a little museum … well, people started giving them stuff. My folks didn’t know how to say no to anyone. Things obviously, um, got out of hand.”

“Well, I can understand that. I got a call at work yesterday from someone who said that she had a lot of valuable antiques she was
sure
Old World Wisconsin would want, but if I didn’t come take them that afternoon, she was putting them out for the garbage collector.”

Dellyn shook her head. “I wouldn’t want your job. I’m much happier collecting seeds. They’re small.”

“Small sounds good,” Chloe agreed wistfully. “And to think I took the curator of collections job because I thought working with artifacts would be easier than working in education.” She’d only been employed at the huge outdoor ethnic museum on the outskirts of Eagle for about two months, but she’d quickly learned that collections work had its own share of problems.

Dellyn shoved her hands in her pockets. “I shouldn’t have asked for your help.”

“It’s OK,” Chloe said quickly. She’d been glad to give up her lunch hour when Dellyn had asked. It felt good to be needed. Besides, Dellyn was nice. Chloe had been in short supply of friends lately.

“I just don’t know what to
do
with all this!” Dellyn’s voice rose. “I have no idea what’s valuable and what isn’t.”

“There’s monetary value, and there’s historical value,” Chloe said. “But first, who actually owns this stuff ? Did your parents legally transfer it to the Eagle Historical Society?”

“No. That was the plan for … one day.”

“That’s good.” Chloe lifted the flap on the closet box. Flow-blue china, packed in straw. She tucked the flap back into place. “You’re free to cull.”

“I definitely want to save whatever might be of value to Eagle.” Dellyn leaned against a dresser, smudging a fur of dust. “But …”

“But?”

“I’m pretty tight on cash right now.” Dellyn began swiping dust from furniture. “I’m an artist, for God’s sake. It took everything I had just to move back here from Seattle.”

“Ah.”

“My parents left me the house and its contents, but they didn’t have any real savings. My sister and her husband paid for the funeral. If there are even a few things I could sell with a clear conscience—things that have no meaning for Eagle’s history, I mean—it would help. A lot.”

Chloe could relate. Her own job at Old World Wisconsin was a permanent one, with benefits and a reasonable salary. But although Dellyn was head gardener at the historic site, she was an LTE—a Limited Term Employee with the state. Low salary, no benefits, no security.

“You never know,” Chloe said, striving for a cheery tone. “People find treasures in their attics all the time.”

“Maybe I’ll find the Eagle Diamond.”

“… Beg pardon?”

Dellyn waved a hand. “I forget you’re not local. About a century ago, some guy digging a well in town found this huge diamond.”

“No way. Don’t diamonds come from Africa?”

“Not this one,” Dellyn insisted. “It’s a true story. My dad was collecting information for a book, and this woman I know just published an article about it.”

“So, where is this diamond?”

“It disappeared. It was stolen, but nobody really knows where it ended up.” Dellyn smiled ruefully. “You figure my dad might have gotten his hands on it, and socked it away?”

“Probably not. Let’s just settle for something antique collectors are hungry for. An ambrotype of Abe Lincoln. A signed first edition of
The Jungle Book
. Betsy Ross’s girlhood sampler. Something to give you a little pocket change.” Chloe scanned the attic again. “Did your parents keep records? Knowing provenance—where an item came from, how it was used—will make a big difference in deciding what to keep.”

“I think so. It’s probably all down in the study.”

Chloe slapped her palms against her thighs. “Well, let’s see if we can find the records. Once we do, we’ll just start sorting.”

“
Thank
you.” Dellyn’s shoulders slumped with relief. “I didn’t even know where to begin. I want to show you the barn later, too. There’s a lot of agricultural stuff out there. Some of it might work nicely for the Garden Fair at Old World.”

Chloe regarded her. “Don’t take this wrong, but what on earth compelled you to propose a new special event? You’ve only been
on staff for what, a month more than me? I’m still learning
people’s names.”

“I just thought it would be a nice idea to showcase the historic site’s heirloom vegetables and flowers.” Dellyn’s tone was both defensive and apologetic. “I want to help visitors understand how much diversity we’ve lost. And how important fairs were to nineteenth-century families.”

“Oh, it’s a great idea,” Chloe assured her. “It’s just ambitious for someone who already has more work than she can handle.”

“I’ve got some great volunteers to help. One in particular—
Harriet Van Dyne—have you met her? And the interpreters are
excited …” Dellyn cocked her head. “I think a car just pulled into the driveway.”

Chloe followed Dellyn down the stairs gratefully. By the time they’d descended to the ground floor, the temperature had dropped by at least twenty degrees. Chloe lifted her long blonde hair and held it massed on top of her head, wishing she’d been smart enough to pin it up that morning. Maybe Dellyn had some iced tea or lemonade in the fridge—

“Oh God.” Dellyn froze in front of the screen door.

“What?” Something prickled nervously over Chloe’s skin. “Dellyn, what’s wrong?”

Dellyn didn’t answer. Chloe peered over her friend’s shoulder and saw a police car in the driveway. Officer Roelke McKenna was walking up the sidewalk, followed by a second man she didn’t recognize. A man wearing a clerical collar.

“Oh God,” Dellyn whispered again.

Roelke’s eyes widened when he saw Chloe, but he masked his surprise quickly and focused on Dellyn. “Miss Dellyn Burke?” he asked.

Dellyn grabbed Chloe’s hand. “Yes.”

“I’m Officer McKenna, and this is Reverend Otis. May we come in?”

Dellyn didn’t move. Chloe gently pulled her backward so Roel-ke could open the door. The four of them stood in the narrow hall. The walls were lined with old family photos, making the space feel even more crowded.

“You are Bonnie Sabatola’s sister?” Roelke asked. Dellyn nodded, her eyes wide.

This is going to be bad, Chloe thought. Bad, bad, bad.

1876

“Let’s go,” Charles Wood
said brusquely. “The day’s getting away.” He grabbed his pickax.

You’re welcome, Albrecht Bachmeier thought. Sure, neighbors helped neighbors. And Charles was paying him, a bit. But was a word of thanks too much to ask? Digging a well on a hot day was harsh work. The two men had dug through almost ten feet of loose gravel the day before, and here Albrecht was again, neglecting his own chores, giving Charles a hand.

Charles began climbing down the shaft. Albrecht glanced toward the house. Clarissa Wood was turning sod with a shovel for a vegetable garden behind the small log house. Her dress was already dark with sweat. Her sweet face was hidden beneath her sunbonnet. She used one foot to force her shovel blade into the earth. It took obvious effort to toss the slice of sod aside.

Albrecht felt his fingers tighten on the shovel in his hands, aching—actually aching—to turn his back on Charles and help Clarissa instead. She was a thin thing, game for work, but not strong. It would probably be easier for Charles to dig a well alone than for Clarissa to dig her garden.

“You coming?” Charles called.

“
Ja
,” Albrecht barked back. Taking one last look, he grabbed the rope and started backing into the pit.

Eight hours after leaving
Dellyn Burke’s house Roelke hesitated, his hand on the phone in his apartment. Should he call Chloe? Yes, he should.

No, he should not.

“Damn it,” he muttered, and dialed the familiar number. There was a time, after he’d met Chloe in June, when he would have sim
ply driven to her house, wanting to see for himself that she was OK. No way could he do that now. Not with Alpine Boy in the picture.

While the phone rang, Roelke stepped to the window of his tiny apartment. It was early evening. After the shock of seeing Chloe standing beside Dellyn Burke that afternoon, Roelke had done what he needed to do at the house, and back at the station. Now he was off-duty. A pleasant twilight was slowly descending on the village of Palmyra, where he lived. It would be a good time to walk to his cousin Libby’s house, see her kids, play T-ball, grill brats, and try to forget about Bonnie Sabatola and Dellyn Burke. But first—

“Hello?”

She sounded a little breathless. Had she run from outside? Or was Alpine Boy—

“Hello?” Chloe said again. She sounded more impatient than breathless, now.

“It’s me. Can I come by?”

“Sure.”

Roelke felt a tight place in his chest unwind a notch. “See you in a few,” he said, and hung up before she could change her mind.

Chloe lived in an old farmhouse in the next county, a pleasant fifteen-minute drive through the Kettle Moraine State Forest. Roelke found her sitting on her front porch, a glass of what he was pretty sure was diet soda and rum in her hand.

“Hey,” Chloe said, and raised the glass. “You want anything?”

“I want to make sure you’re OK.” Was that too personal? Avoiding her gaze, Roelke latched on to something else. “Why do you have a piece of moldy wood on your porch rail?”

She gave him an exasperated look. “It’s not mold, it’s lichen. I brought it home because it’s beautiful.”

“O-kay.” He settled into the empty lawn chair beside her. Maybe he should clarify his first remark. “I want to make sure you’re OK after what happened this afternoon.”

Chloe sipped, staring out over the hayfield across the street. She was still too thin. The angular planes of her face were accentuated because she’d pinned her braided hair in a twist behind her head. Roelke couldn’t imagine a more beautiful woman.

“I’m alright,” she said finally, looking back at him. “Just sad for Dellyn. And Bonnie too, of course.”

“Did you know Bonnie?”

“No.” She blew out a long, slow breath. “After you left, Dellyn kept saying, ‘I’m all alone now.’ It’s horrible! After her parents …”

“Yeah.” Roelke sighed. “Did she say anything about why her sister might have done such a thing?” He’d asked a few perfunctory questions while at the house, but hadn’t wanted to press.

“She has no idea. She’d been living in Seattle, and only came back after her parents died. Dellyn’s a painter and a gardener. Bonnie was an executive’s wife. I guess they didn’t have much in common anymore.” Chloe lifted one slender hand in a gesture of futility. “But Dellyn was already feeling guilty for not spending more time with her parents before they died. Now she’s thinking the same thing about Bonnie.”

Roelke pulled an index card from his pocket, and wrote
artist/gardener, executive’s wife
.

“Why are you writing that down?” Chloe frowned at him. “Dellyn and Bonnie had drifted apart, that’s all. Since Dellyn got back, she’s had all she could handle with the house and stuff.”

“I’m going to talk with Bonnie’s husband tomorrow.” Simon Sabatola had been in the resort town of Lake Geneva, near the Illinois border, when his wife died. “Do you think Dellyn was OK to leave alone?”

“She’s not alone. Libby’s there.”

“My cousin Libby?” Roelke blinked. “How does Libby know Dellyn?”

“Dellyn’s in our writing group. She’s working on a children’s book.”

Roelke digested that unexpected tidbit. “Is that how you know Dellyn, too?” He knew Libby had talked Chloe into attending her writers’ meetings.

“Dellyn works at Old World. She’s in charge of all the gardens.” Chloe flicked a box elder bug from her jeans. “She’d asked if I’d come over today and look at some antiques her parents left behind.”

Roelke watched fireflies blinking in the twilight. This was one of his favorite times of day, in one of his favorite times of the year. The air was still. A few bats swooped overhead. “I just need to know you’re OK,” he heard himself say. “I hate that you got caught up in something to do with … you know. This.”

“A suicide?” Chloe asked. “It’s OK to say the word. And this is about my friend, not me. I’m better now.”

He wanted to believe her. But he didn’t understand suicide. Never would. And without understanding, he didn’t think he could ever
not
worry about Chloe. She had been crawling out of a deep depression when he met her. How could he ever be sure she wouldn’t slide back to that dark place?

“Roelke.” She put one hand on his arm, and he felt an electric tingle. “Are
you
OK?” she went on, clearly oblivious of the effect she was having on him. “Is this the first time you’ve been called to a suicide scene?”

“I wish,” he said curtly. His first case had been a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl in Milwaukee who’d lain down on her pink-canopied bed and shot herself in the head. She’d been one of the few dead people he’d seen who did
almost
look as if she was sleeping, with nothing but a small neat hole in her right temple and a little brain matter spilling onto the pillow to argue against it. His second case had involved a guy in a convertible sports car who drove into a tree at 120 mph. Not much left to find of driver or vehicle after that. Of course, that was still better than the guy who—

“Roelke?”

“If you ever feel that way again, for the love of God, don’t use a car. It doesn’t always work, and—”

“Roelke, stop it!” Chloe jerked away from him. “I said, I’m
better
. I’m not as fragile as you seem to think.”

Maybe. Maybe not. “I don’t accept suicide,” he said.

Her eyebrows rose. “What does that mean?”

“There’s something about Bonnie Sabatola’s death that just feels … wrong, somehow.”

She sighed, and sipped her drink again. She looked more sad than she had when Roelke had arrived. Great. Just the effect he’d wanted to have.

“I imagine that it always feels wrong when someone so young dies,” she said.

“Yeah, but …” He drummed his thumb on the arm of his chair.

“But what?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But could you maybe sound Dellyn out about Bonnie? I mean, they must have spent a little time together, right? They had to handle things after their parents died. Could you ask Dellyn if Bonnie had seemed depressed or something?”

Chloe’s mouth twisted with distaste. “I’m not going to pry into her family life, especially right now.”

“You’re going to see her anyway, aren’t you?” Women always did that after someone had a loss. They took over casseroles and stuff like that. Roelke’s grandma had always kept something ready in the freezer.

“Well, sure,” Chloe said warily. “I’m going over tomorrow morning.”

“So, just let me know if she says anything about Bonnie. Her state of mind. That’s all I’m asking.” Roelke stood, feeling clumsy. “I gotta go. Thanks for letting me come by.”

She stood too. “Geez Louise, Roelke. You don’t have to thank me for
that
.”

He placed one palm on the porch railing. It wobbled. He should come back with his toolbox. “I don’t want to assume anything. Not with … Not until you decide what you want.”

Even in the fading light he could see color stain her cheeks. “I haven’t even agreed to see Markus, Roelke. I didn’t know he was coming to Wisconsin, and I don’t know what—if anything—I’m going to do about it. It doesn’t have anything to do with … us.”

But there is no ‘us,’ Roelke thought. There might have been. There almost was. In fact there
had
been, one glorious afternoon in June. But not now.

“Right,” he said. “We’ll stay in touch.” He thought he’d hit the right note with that. Calm. Cool. Leaving things open.

Then he ruined his exit by putting his palms gently on her cheeks. She seemed OK with that, so he bent his head to kiss her. A real kiss, the one he’d been fantasizing about.

At the last second, he remembered that Chloe’s Swiss ex had flown halfway around the world to find her.

Roelke kissed Chloe’s forehead. Then he headed home.

_____

Chloe was still sitting in the lawn chair on her porch, thinking about Roelke, when the phone rang. It might be Libby, or her best friend Ethan—calls she’d gladly take. It might be her mom—a so-so proposition. Or it might be someone she wasn’t ready to talk to.

Indifferent, the phone kept shrilling. Chloe put her drink down, went inside, and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”

“Chloe. Hello.”

You lose, said a voice in her head. “Markus.”

“How are you?” Markus’s diction was excellent. Only a light
Suisse-Deutsch
accent revealed that English was his second language.

“Um, OK.”

“We need to talk, Chloe. In person.”

She felt the same spasm of panic that came every time he called. “I don’t—”

“I’ve been in Wisconsin for a month already,” he reminded her. “I’ve already used up half of my sabbatical. Just give me a chance. I don’t want things to be this way between us.”

Chloe watched a firefly through the glass as it climbed the living room window. Spark, dark. Spark, dark.

“I’ll meet you anywhere,” Markus said. “Any time.”

Chloe clenched one fist. She had to get this over with. “This Saturday morning. Eleven o’clock. Pick a place in New Glarus.”

“You don’t need to drive over here. I’ll—”

“Pick a place in New Glarus!” She’d rather drive an hour than allow Markus Meili to invade her own geography.

“The New Glarus Hotel,” he said, the words breathy with relief. “They have great food. I’ll see you then.” He hung up quickly.

Chloe replaced the receiver more slowly. Her kitten, Olympia, barreled from the shadows and pounced triumphantly on the coiled phone cord. Chloe scooped her up and pressed her cheek against the soft fur. “Oh, Olympia. I think I just did something stupid.”