Destroying Angels (Leigh Girard Book 1) Read online

  “Not interested in talking now. You know where the door is.”

  “I’m not going away, Sarah, until you tell me why you tried to kill yourself.” My persistence matched the beat from Seger's drummer.

  “I said, I’m not interested in talking.” She turned back to the canvas.

  I looked around the room. There were canvases everywhere, multiple paintings of this view from these widows in a variety of styles, from the realistic to the imaginary. It was as if she couldn’t decide who she was or what she wanted to say.

  There had to be a way to reach her, to get her to talk. “Rob feels responsible.”

  She put her brush down and stared out at the sunlit water. “He has nothing to feel responsible for.”

  “He thinks he should have done something.” I hesitated, “About your father.”

  In the glare from the windows, her eyes were as flat as glass. “I repeat, what should he feel responsible for?”

  “Your suicide attempt, he feels responsible for that.”

  “There was no suicide attempt.”

  “Then how do you explain the pills they pumped out of you?”

  “I can’t.”

  For some reason, I believed her. “Then tell me what you remember, what happened?”

  “My memory’s not too reliable, you know.”

  It sounded like she was talking about more than that night. “Why don’t you let me decide that?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I came home. Left a message on Rob’s machine. Drank a bottle of wine. Couldn’t fall asleep. So I took a few Valium. That’s the last thing I remember. Satisfied?”

  “How do you account for the rest of the pills?”

  “How do I account for feeling nothing but anger since my father’s death? How do I account for my mother’s enormous grief for a man who belittled her and betrayed her every day of her life? I can’t.”

  She picked up on my sense of shock at her frankness. “Can’t you see I don’t care? Doctor Porter thinks I had traumatic amnesia. He thinks I’m an alcoholic like my father. That I took the pills during a blackout. Maybe he’s right.”

  She tossed the palate down on the worn wooden floor. Some of the paint spattered across the floor. I watched in fascination as she very slowly and purposely stroked the canvas with her right hand molding the colors, thinning them in some places, thickening them in others.

  “Did you know that Van Gogh painted with his fingers?” she said. “Sometimes the paint on his canvas dripped on the floor. As if the painting was bleeding. Can you see it?”

  “I can understand it.”

  “No, I asked if you can see it?”

  “I think I can.”

  “You think.” She smirked at me. “Then you can’t see it.”

  “Maybe I need you to show me.”

  Her fingers swirled and streaked the paint as she talked. “It starts with a child and her nightmares. They’re so frightening that sometimes they have to slap her to wake her. And she never knows when they’ll come. And the nightmares never go away, even after she’s an adult. Until finally she sees them in the daylight. And the funny thing is that after she sees them in the daylight, the nightmares stop. I mean the ones at night.”

  I waited for her to continue. “So maybe I did take those pills.” The paint was running down her arm. She wiped her arm against her shirt, which now looked like another canvas. “He also ate it—the paint—Van Gogh.”

  “That’s probably what made him crazy,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Yeah, you would think so.” She licked a drop of blue paint from her index finger and smiled.

  “Sarah, tell me the rest.” For once, I held back. I would ask her about the bones later, when she didn’t look as if she were made of air, more spirit than body.

  She walked past me toward the door. “I’m tired,” she said, and left.

  I switched off her tape. I had let her go, hadn’t called after her. How many others had done the same, I wondered. Just let her walk away carrying that immense pain, so they didn’t have to know, didn’t have to feel it too.

  I turned to leave and knocked over several paintings resting against the wall. The first painting fell forward revealing the painting underneath. The painting was of an enclosed space—all done in muted shades, as if the room was in an attic or a basement. What riveted me to the painting was a doll, painted near a corner as if it had been thrown there. It didn’t look like any doll I had ever played with. Although it had a thick child’s body, it also had small pointy breasts. The doll wore a gingham dress, black Mary Jane shoes and lace anklets. Its dress was crumpled and pushed up. Under the dress, the doll had on black lacy panties, the skimpy seductive kind you see on Victoria Secret models. Its shiny dark hair was braided. The glass green eyes were open but dull, the dullness of death. The image was both repulsive and fascinating.

  As I picked up the painting that had fallen, I noticed the words "Lynd Point Trail" painted on the back. I put the painting over the doll picture. It was a nature scene done in a realistic style. Sarah could evoke the Door scenes quite well. The painting was of the deep woods. Conifers, birches, and oaks crowded each other on the canvas. A filtered shaft of light pierced through an opening between two trees. I followed the light to where it fell on the forest floor and created a dim halo. I looked closer. It wasn’t a halo of light, but a group of white mushrooms clustered at the foot of an oak. I was no expert but those mushrooms looked a lot like amanitas. Sarah had titled the piece, “Destroying Angels."

  * * * * *

  As I drove down Highway 57 toward Sturgeon Bay, the images in those two paintings kept flashing behind my eyes. It was becoming clear to me that the evidence in the death of Carl Peck, although circumstantial, was pointing to his daughter. If Sarah did poison her father, how had she done it? How did she get him to eat poisonous mushrooms? Her painting proved that she knew about amanitas and where to find them.

  Then there was the suicide attempt. Had she become overwrought with guilt? Yet she claimed that she didn’t remember taking the pills. I turned right abruptly on County E toward Egg Harbor. Lydia would know about traumatic amnesia. I’d call her from home, where I could be assured that neither Rob Martin nor Jake Stevens would be listening in the background.

  “Calling to make an appointment for an MRI?” Lydia asked in her professional voice.

  I had half expected the question, but it still rankled me. “I thought we had an agreement?”

  “Okay, I give up, for now. What’s going on?” I could hear her shuffling papers.

  “Can you talk?”

  “For a few minutes. You’re up to something. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “I just saw Sarah.”

  “I have to say one thing for you, Leigh, you’ve got guts. Well, I know you weren’t there to discuss the weather. So why did she try to kill herself? No one around here seems to have a clue.”

  “She claims that she doesn’t remember taking the overdose. And that Dr. Porter attributes it to traumatic amnesia. Is that possible?”

  “Considering the amount of alcohol in her system, it’s very possible. What it amounts to is that she had a blackout. Quite common with alcoholics. That’s why they never seem to remember dancing on the table or screwing their best friend’s wife. Convenient, isn’t it?”

  “So, she could have tried to kill herself?”

  “What else? Some other person overdosed her?” She took a deep breath. “Leigh, you’re not still thinking Carl Peck was poisoned?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? There’s Sarah's strange behavior the night of our meeting in the woods. And then the incident of someone running me off the road. And now her suicide attempt. If that is what it was. . .” I was holding back on the two paintings I discovered at her studio.

  “Nothing you’ve said implicates Sarah. You’re way off. You haven’t even proven Peck was murdered, let alone that Sarah did it.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe you shoul
d let this go, Leigh. For your own good. Just stop a minute and think. Maybe something else is going on here that has nothing to do with Sarah or her family.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you obsessing about the Pecks so you don’t have to deal with your own problems.”

  A cold rage shot up through me. “Was it before or after you burned out in the cancer ward that you moved on to the psyche ward?”

  “I’m going to pretend that I deserved that.”

  For a second, neither of us said anything. Then Lydia broke the silence.

  “There’s something I was going to ask you, but now I’m not certain this is the right time.”

  I should have apologized, but I couldn’t. For some reason, her being angry at me felt good. “You brought it up so you might as well ask.”

  “I’m having a small dinner party at my place Friday. You’re invited.”

  “Who’s going to be there?” I was stalling, trying to figure out how to get out of it gracefully.

  “The usual suspects: Sarah, Rob, Chet Jorgensen, and Jake Stevens. I'd think Jake's being there would be enough incentive for you.”

  “I’ll think about it and let you know.”

  I was about to hang up, when she added, “Leigh, you’ll see that as winter closes in up here, people get strange. They start to imagine all kinds of things. That’s why it’s important not to spend too much time alone.”

  “I said I’d think about it.”

  22

  “So you finally dug up a murder, literally,” Stevens confirmed, as he leaned back in his chair and stared out at the bay. His feet were propped up on the radiator. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and his one sock had a hole in the heel.

  “My dog did,” I responded, flopping down on the chair with the smallest pile of papers. That familiar soreness radiated across my chest and under my left arm. Although the pain had lessened, it was still with me.

  My editor swirled around, folded his arms across his chest, and tilted his head sideways, as if he was trying to get another view of me. “Like I said, that dog suits you.”

  He wasn't mentioning our last exchange. So it was like that—whatever happened between us on the beach had been a mistake. We weren’t going there again. “I’ve got the preliminary results on those bones,” I announced, all business, and flipped open my notebook to the page where I’d written down what Deputy Jorgensen had told me.

  Stevens rocked back and forth in his chair as he recited: “Human, newborn. Possible trauma to the crown of the head. Bones sent to forensic anthropologist.” He stopped rocking, picked up a pencil and stuck it into the back of his ponytail.

  I closed my notebook. No need fighting over the effectiveness of the Door County grapevine. “Did Jorgensen also tell you who led me to that cave?”

  “Sarah Peck. On the very night she tried to kill herself.” He took the pencil back out of his hair and began moving it back and forth between his fingers.

  “C’mon, Stevens. You’re not going to tell me that's just a coincidence.”

  He raised one eyebrow and gave me that sideways look again. “Girard, do you do it on purpose or does it just happen to you?”

  “What?” I asked, knowing he was going to tell me anyway.

  “This talent you have for trouble. You’re like the eye of an endless swirling storm. Debris is flying all around you, but somehow you stay in the center, serenely watching things get blown to bits.”

  He put the pencil down and leaned toward me, making me wish I was invisible. “I’m curious. What’s it like in there? What do you see on that private inner screen, Leigh Girard?”

  “This isn’t just grist for another one of your poems, is it?”

  He smiled. “Only if you want it to be.”

  We were now clearly alluding to that kiss on the beach. “You didn’t answer my question about the coincidence of Sarah’s going to the very cave where the bones were buried.”

  “What about it?” His teasing tone was gone. “Lots of people hike around those caves. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You know anything about Sarah having a baby when she was a teenager?”

  He shook his head. His expression reminded me of a disappointed parent dealing with unruly offspring. “What is this thing you have about Sarah Peck?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I spat back.

  He bent down and reached for his shoes. “Look, first of all we don’t even know how old those bones are. Even if they’re fairly recent, it could be anybody’s baby. Think about it. Some young girl gets knocked up, gets scared, kills the kid. It happens. It’s not pretty, but it happens. So drop it.”

  I was beginning to see that when it came to Sarah Peck, Jake Stevens was as blind as Rob Martin. “Anything else, boss?”

  “Keep it clean.”

  “What?” I felt a flush creep up my neck remembering our kiss on the beach.

  “The story. When you write it, keep it clean. No editorializing. No five dollar adjectives. No speculating.”

  “Got it.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Yeah?” I got up casually, trying to ignore that slight ache under my left arm.

  “Get that dog of yours a leash.”

  23

  It was 3:40 PM, and the sun was already dancing dangerously close to the water’s edge. I sat in Sturgeon Bay at the Bayside Café, nursing a lukewarm cup of tea and watching a large freighter maneuver its bulk into the harbor. Plain and simple, I was stalling the inevitable moment when I would go home and open the door on the empty space inside the cottage. Lately even Salinger’s presence didn’t dispel the lengthening nights and what they implied.

  I had written the story about the discovery of the bones just the way Stevens had wanted: clean, no speculation, no editorializing. And I didn’t like it. Just like I hadn’t liked Joyce Oleander’s suicide. Someone had robbed a child of its life. There had been no catcher in the rye, I reflected. Whether the bones had been there ten years or twenty years, a child had been buried under mysterious circumstances.

  My jacket was hanging next to the booth. I reached over and pulled out the crumpled photo I'd retrieved from Joyce's desk at the library. I laid the photo on the table and smoothed it with my hand. In the intense glare of the November sunset, the photo’s subtleties sharpened. I bent toward it and studied it closely. Then I noticed something I hadn't seen before, as I was focusing on the other girl in the picture. How had I been so blind? There was the woman in the making, she of the translucent white skin, black hair, and a fierceness already in place even as she smiled for the camera. The girl standing next to Joyce Oleander was Sarah Peck.

  At once I had an explanation for Sarah’s presence at Joyce's funeral. After all, they'd been friends since childhood according to Lorraine Birch. I took in a deep breath. Two friends, a single proclivity for suicide. I was more sure than ever that their connection had something to do with Carl Peck’s death. I was reminded of Joyce's comment to Lorraine Birch that "she thought she’d feel relief when it was over." Despite the suppositions of others as to what she meant, I was sure she had not been referring to her hysterectomy.

  I looked at my watch, knowing the confidence in my conclusions would either reveal long hidden crimes, or bring disaster upon my own head. Still, I made the decision to hurry so I could make it to Joyce’s town home while it was still light.

  * * * * *

  That sense of abandonment came over me again as I pulled into the parking space in front of Joyce’s town home. The lowering sun and the cloud-dappled sky created a backdrop of grey and slate washes that only added to this place’s desolation.

  I turned off the engine, and took the flashlight and a screwdriver from the glove compartment. I couldn’t count on the back door being unlocked this time. I shoved them into the pocket of my down jacket and got out of the truck, careful not to slam the door in case someone was around.

  But the building seemed as bereft of people as before. I rang the ne
ighbor’s bell anyway. The plastic flip-flop had moved and become entangled under the shrubs with the other assorted debris, and the front screen door still held a fist-sized hole. No one answered. I rang the bell two more times, then headed toward the back of the building.

  As I expected, the glass door was locked. But there was enough give between the door and the lock for me to maneuver the screwdriver in and push back the lock. A trick I’d learned in college on those nights when I’d not made curfew. Not bothering to look around, I went inside. Again my nose was assaulted with the scent of pine fires and patchouli. I breathed in the loamy smells and let my eyes wander around the room. Everything was as I remembered it—the cumbersome worn furniture, the tiled fireplace, the bookcases overflowing with books.

  “Books,” I thought to myself. “Her antidote for loneliness.”

  I walked over to the couch and forced myself to look at the bloodstain. Its redness had faded and turned brown. It was as if the green carpet was absorbing Joyce’s blood along with all trace of her existence.

  I swallowed hard. “You don’t get away that easy, Joyce.”

  This time, I did a much more careful search of the living room. There was a set of coasters on the coffee table, with different designs of nautical flags. I’d missed the magazine rack the first time. Her taste was eclectic—Harper’s, Audubon, Nature Conservancy, Elle—the last one was a surprise. I flipped through each magazine. Nothing between the pages but those ubiquitous inserts.

  I walked over to the bookcases. Joyce had arranged the books in alphabetical order by author, and also by genre. She had fiction, poetry, art and nonfiction sections. I scanned some of the books that were not shelved. They included the usual fiction classics as well as a slew of mysteries. Her poetry section was small but rich—Elliott, Whitman, Dickinson, William Carlos Williams. Even an Audre Lorde collection.

  Her nonfiction section consisted mostly of nature books, and books about Native American mythology. She had all the Audubon field books—from North American Birds to Mushrooms of the World. I pulled out the mushroom field book. The cover was creased and dirty, yet the spine wasn’t broken. It had the appearance of much use but good care. I opened it to the table of contents. On the opposite page was a short dedication, and under the dedication Joyce had written: "Joyce Oleander, 5387 Spruce Lane, Ellison Bay, Wisconsin." I took down the other field books. None of them had her name in them.