Destroying Angels (Leigh Girard Book 1) Page 5

  Joyce Oleander, 36, daughter of the late Frank and Helen Oleander, died Wednesday, November 2 after a brief illness. Ms. Oleander, a native of Door County, had been a librarian at the Egg Harbor Library for 20 years.

  “She will be sorely missed,” said Ida Reeves, head librarian. “You could always count on her.”

  Ms. Oleander’s devotion to the library was extraordinary, only matched by her volunteer service and devotion to the children’s ward of Bay Hospital.

  Ms. Oleander attended Gibraltar High School, and graduated in 1982. She was a member of the GHS French Club.

  Funeral services will be held at St. Patrick’s Church, Monday November 6 at 9:30 am, to be followed by interment at the church cemetery.

  I surveyed my paltry effort. Stevens wouldn’t be pleased. I needed more “stuff,” as he would put it. No one at the high school had been able to offer much of an impression of Joyce, except for what was on record—her B+ average and her French Club membership. I’d have to track down someone from the hospital children’s ward who had worked with Joyce. Maybe they could add further dimension to the meager details I'd gathered.

  I took out the photo of Joyce and her friend and studied it. Details emerged that I hadn’t noticed before. One of the straps on Joyce’s suit had slipped down her arm. Her pencil-thin legs were so tightly held together that they almost looked like one leg. The hand on her hip was held in a fist.

  I continued to write. As a young girl, Joyce had posed for a suggestive photo with a friend. The unidentified friend said, “No one really knew Joyce.”

  With a sigh, I realized my need for a story was over stimulating my imagination. The photo could as easily be read as two young girls imitating poses they’d seen on Charlie’s Angels or in some magazine like Seventeen.

  I put my pen down and pulled out Stevens's edited version of my obit on Carl Peck that I’d printed off the computer before leaving the office. It was twice as long as what I had written about Joyce Oleander.

  THE DOOR GAZETTE, November 3, PAGE 10

  Carl Peck, Egg Harbor, one of Door County’s most well-known master carpenters and restorers of Door County buildings, died Tuesday, October 31, at Bay Hospital. He was 67.

  Mr. Peck, who came to Door County after the Korean War, was responsible for the restoration of such Door County landmarks as the Cupola, the Stone Gull Inn, and The Meadows. His restoration of the Stone Gull Inn was featured in Wisconsin Yesterday and Today. The magazine praised his attention to historic details and his use of native limestone and other local materials. Olin Forrest, another Egg Harbor resident and a historian, said, “Carl was always a perfectionist when it came to his work.”

  Mr. Peck served in the 10th Engineer Battalion and was awarded the Purple Heart in 1953. He was born in Chicago, Illinois.

  From 1985-1986, he was the president of the Mycology Society. He was a familiar sight roaming the woods in search of rare mushrooms. The current Mycology president, Hank Sullivan, commented to the Gazette, “Carl really knew his mushrooms. Not only did he gather them, he also cultivated them.”

  “Mr. Peck enjoyed helping other people,” said Rebecca Brandt, owner of Rebecca’s Antiques. “He must have played Santa Claus for the Egg Harbor Annual Christmas Breakfast at least a dozen times. The kids loved him.”

  He is survived by his wife, Eva Peck (nee Adams), of the home, and his daughter, Sarah Peck, of Baileys Harbor.

  He will be greatly missed by everyone, friends and family alike.

  There was no mention of funeral services, because the body had yet to be released by the M. E. I looked at my watch. I still had two hours until I met with Sarah Peck. I got out of the truck and walked toward the pay phone across the street, cursing myself once again for not recharging my cell phone. Someone on the children’s ward must have something to say about Joyce Oleander other than, “You could count on her.”

  After one lost connection, three transfers, and a ten minute hold, I finally reached someone who knew Joyce Oleander and was willing to talk to me: Joe Stillwater, an RN on the children’s ward. He ended his shift at three and would meet me at the Land’s End Inn in Egg Harbor, where he began his second job as the night clerk. I wondered what his relationship was to Elliott Stillwater, Joyce’s ex-fiancé.

  * * * * *

  “Two jobs? What slacker told you that?” Joe Stillwater had a barrel chest and salt-and-pepper crew cut hair that badly needed pruning. His profile was as sharp as his gaze. “Only rich people on the peninsula have just two jobs.”

  The Land’s End Inn was a twenty-three-unit motel off Rt. 42 at the foot of the hill that led into Egg Harbor. The Inn was built amongst pines and birches. It didn’t have a water view, but the surrounding trees were supposed to give lodgers a feeling of “sleeping in the woods under nature’s canopy,” or so the brochure stuck into each menu proclaimed. From what I could see after I parked and went inside the restaurant, that only applied if your room didn’t face the asphalt parking lot. The cozy lobby boasted a floor-to-ceiling fireplace in a sunken seating area. But the briskly burning fire couldn’t mask the smell of stale coffee and damp cedar.

  I took a sip of the coffee Joe Stillwater offered me. It tasted burnt. I took another sip. I needed the jolt. “What’s your third job?”

  “On weekends, I run the boat rental in Rowleys Bay. You should come out. I’ll teach you canoeing. You don’t look like a kayaker.”

  “I don’t, huh?” And I don’t look like Dolly Parton either, I thought to myself.

  “Kayaking would be too lonely and confining for you.” He cocked his head as if to see me better. “You’re a people-person.”

  “Yup, that’s me, Ms. Congeniality.” He had no idea how wrong he was. Since the cancer, I had trouble connecting with people. Cancer separates you from people, whether you want it to or not.

  “You don’t think so, but I’m never wrong about people. It’s a gift.” He patted his chest where his heart was. The gesture suggested such vulnerability that I felt my natural wariness recede.

  “What’s there to canoeing anyway? You just get in and paddle, right?”

  “Ever been in a canoe?”

  The very thought terrified me. I had never learned to swim. “My water sports consist of standing on the shore and watching the sun sink into the bay.”

  “You come out to the boat rental. I’ll show you.”

  “Sure,” I answered, laughing. “When a woman becomes president.”

  “Okay. I can see you’re not biting. So what do you want to know about Joy?”

  Joy? That nickname was a surprise. “What can you tell me?”

  “For starters, she was almost my sister-in-law. My younger brother, Elliott, was engaged to her for about a millisecond. Then she called the whole thing off. I always thought his loss.”

  “Did she give any reason?”

  “Some garbage about not being cut out for marriage. At least that’s all I could get out of Elliott. It was something else, though. Something had soured her on marriage.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because after their split, she changed, she even looked different. Too thin and sort of dried-out looking.”

  “So you and she kept in contact?”

  “Oh yeah, I’m the one who put her on to the kids’ ward at the hospital.”

  So Ida Reeves wasn’t her only friend. I was liking Joe Stillwater more and more.

  “That’s the thing I couldn’t figure about the breakup with Elliott. Joy loved kids. In fact, it was a big reason for their engagement.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My brother was always complaining that Joy wanted to wait. You know, until marriage. Of course, being the horny bastard that he is, like most guys, he wanted to, you know, before. Jeez, I shouldn’t be telling you this stuff. Elliott’ll kill me. But hey, he lives in Indiana. You get what I’m talking about.”

  “I get it.”

  “But this suicide thing, man, I can’t figure it.” He ran
his hand back and forth through his ragged hair. “I mean, Joy didn’t get much out of life, but she loved those kids in the ward, and believe it or not, she loved working at the library. Told me she was going to run it once Dr. Reeves retired. Hey, did you talk to her? I hear she found Joy?”

  “I did, but I admit, she wasn’t very helpful.”

  “You sure you just couldn’t hear her?” He lowered his voice.

  “I heard her too well,” I said, smiling.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Man, that woman, well she’s harmless, but you ask her one question and suddenly she’s talking genes and glands and hormones. I get enough of that stuff at the hospital.” He watched me cross and uncross my legs. “Sorry, what else you need?”

  “When was the last time you talked to Joyce?”

  “Let me think. D-day.” He smiled. “Discharge day. Halloween morning, after her surgery. She was packing up her stuff. I carried her suitcase out to her car.”

  “How did she seem? Was she depressed?”

  “Not depressed, more like, distracted. Like there was something on her mind. Like she was preoccupied.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Joy was never much of a talker. I think that’s one of the reasons Elliott wanted to marry her. We’re a big family of talkers. As I was saying, I noticed she was distracted because I had to remind her to take the bag of meds beside her bed. She was walking out of the room without them when I called after her. ‘Joy,’ I said, ‘you don’t want to forget these.’ She kinda looked around like she’d forgotten I was there.” Joe mimicked a distracted look. “‘Oh,’ she says, ‘sorry.’ I go, ‘Hey, you’re the one who’ll be sorry if you forget these.’ Shit.” Joe stared into the fire for a few moments. There was nothing for me to say.

  Then he got up and poured himself some more of the bad coffee. “I haven’t called Elliott yet. Not sure I can even reach him anyway. He’s up in Canada on some fishing trip. Won’t be back for a couple weeks. I guess the bad news can wait till then. I mean, it’s been 20 some years since they were involved. Still, he took it pretty hard when she dumped him. We didn’t see him for a long time. He hitchhiked all over the country. We’d get these post cards from places like Intercourse, Pennsylvania. He’s got this strange sense of humor. Finally, he settled in Indiana, of all places. Still a bachelor.”

  “Can you think of any reason why Joyce would kill herself?”

  “Like I said, I can’t really figure it.”

  “Anything. A guess.”

  He looked at me hard, his dark eyes poring into mine. I shifted in my chair. “You’re interested in this more than for the story.” He wasn’t asking me, he was telling me. “But I can’t help you with reasons. I can’t even guess.”

  “Okay, then how about before the discharge day, right after the surgery, while she was recovering. How did she seem?”

  “I know what you’re trying to do, but I gotta tell you, there’s nothing to tell. After the surgery, I’d come by the days I was on shift. At first, she was in a lot of pain. But hey, a hysterectomy is big time surgery. Other than that, she seemed fine—her usual quiet self. The only thing, hey . . ." He looked at me and grinned. “You’re good at this, huh? The only thing, the day before D-day, when I got there, she wasn’t in her room. So I says to the duty nurse, ‘Where’s Joy?’ She says, ‘She should be back any minute, she went to visit another patient.’ ‘Then I must have just missed her,’ I says. ‘No,’ she says, ‘she didn’t go to the children’s ward because I saw her press the up button on the elevator.’ I was going to ask Joy about it and then I forgot.”

  “Any guesses as to who she visited?”

  “Nope. Couldn’t say. You might want to ask Lorraine Birch, she’s the nurse I’m talking about.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  As I got up to leave, Joe followed me to the door. “One more thing,” he said. There was hesitation in his voice. “Don’t take this wrong. But I got to tell you cause I like to be up front with people. I said I couldn’t figure it, the suicide, but what I didn’t say is, I respect it. What she did. It’s not my way. But I knew Joy well enough to know she must have had good reasons."

  I didn’t know why Joe Stillwater felt compelled to tell me this. “You think there are ever reasons good enough for suicide?”

  “Like I said, you had to know Joy. I only wish she’d talked to me about it. Maybe I could have done something.” Stillwater opened the door for me.

  “What could you have done?”

  He looked across the parking lot, toward the highway. “If you find out anything about why Joy might have done this, could you let me know? It would mean something to me.”

  “Joe, this is an obit piece. I’m not doing any kind of investigating.”

  He put his hand out to me. Gave me that, "I can read you like an open book," look and said, "No, you're not doing any investigating. But like I said, Joy must have had good reasons. Just let me know what you come across.”

  “Okay,” I answered, shaking his hand. He’d given me a charge and for some inexplicable reason, I’d accepted it.

  As I walked to my truck, I wondered what he would say if I told him that Joyce might have changed her mind. I was struck again by the irony of Joe’s calling her Joy. That name had probably fit her when she was in high school and engaged, working at the library, looking forward to a life rich in family and friends. But something had caused her to lose all the joy in life. I took a deep breath. The crisp afternoon air felt clean in my lungs.

  7

  Sarah Peck had been so adamantly anal about our meeting time, I looked at my watch as I opened the heavy wooden door of the White Cliffs Restaurant: 4:15 PM. I was on time, give or take a second.

  Sarah Peck was waiting in the bar area at one of the round glass tables near the bank of full-length windows. Not surprisingly, she was lighting a cigarette as I approached her.

  “You have nine minutes.” She took a long drag on her Marlboro Light and blew the smoke in my general direction. I thought about the way some people invite disaster. And that sometimes it comes without invitation.

  “Ten, by my watch.” I sat down on the black leather swivel chair, trying to control the anger Sarah Peck’s open hostility unleashed in me.

  “Nine.” She flicked her ash with a jerky motion. She was dressed in a chef’s uniform, complete with a white kerchief around her neck. Her blue-black hair was knotted near the nape of her slender neck. Divested of her distractingly tight clothes, her face became prominent. She had the fine chiseled bones of a fifties model. Her delicate beauty seemed to be at odds with her mouth, as if she had to defend herself against it.

  Since time was a factor, I decided to go for the big question right out of the gate. “Why were you upset at the Medical Examiner this morning?”

  “I see the grapevine’s working overtime, as usual.” She took another drag on her cigarette, this time lingering over it. Then she looked me up and down. “You know, my mother’s paranoid. That’s what living with an alcoholic for close to forty years does to you. Makes you think the world’s out to get you.”

  “So you admit your father was an alcoholic.”

  She laughed so suddenly that she choked on her smoke. “Alert the media. Anybody who knew him could see he was an alcoholic.”

  “Some people seem to think he was a nice guy. Not everyone knew about the drinking,” I countered.

  “Look, I lived with him, they didn’t. He was drunk every day of his miserable adult life. Even though he was one of those quiet drinkers, at least in public.” She paused and chewed on her lower lip.

  I waited. When she didn’t continue, I asked, “What do you mean, quiet drinkers?”

  “He never was a falling-down drunk. Too much pride. Instead, he drank just enough to keep a constant buzz going. Trouble was, he had to keep drinking more and more to keep that mind-numbing buzz. Toward the end, he had bottles stashed all over the house, in the garage, at work. He even kept a bottle under the seat
of his truck. I’d say that makes him an alcoholic.”

  “But the M. E. ruled your father’s cause of death as liver failure. So why would that upset you, since it's totally consistent with alcoholism?"

  “You think you’re real smart, don’t you.” She snubbed the cigarette out in the ash tray and pushed back her chair. “Why would I care if he died from liver failure or heart attack? He’s dead, that’s all that matters.”

  “Then it wasn’t either, was it?”

  She moved away from the table. “Your nine minutes are up.”

  8

  As I drove north on Horseshoe Bay Road toward home, I counted to four, inhaling slowly and making sure that my lungs filled with air and my diaphragm expanded. Then I exhaled to the same four count, forcing all the air out. These exercises had gotten me through the worst of the chemo symptoms. I’d hoped never to use them again, or at least not so soon. I kept breathing deeply, slowly hoping to calm my jittery brain. It had been a frustrating, disturbing day. I’d learned nothing more tangible regarding the circumstances of Carl Peck’s death, or Joyce Oleander’s, for that matter, but I definitely had learned that Sarah Peck seemed glad her father was dead but wasn’t likely to tell me why.

  What had she said exactly . . . “He’s dead, that’s all that matters.” I still didn’t know what the autopsy report revealed, and her rampant hostility had put a knot at the base of my skull and set my nerves tingling. As for Joyce Oleander's suicide . . . I glanced at my open notebook. Across the top of the page, I'd written in all caps, JOYCE OLEANDER, SUNSET SHORES, followed by the short obit I’d written earlier. I flipped to the next page. It was filled with notes ending in question marks. I read one: “If hit head falling, why body face up?” Without answering any of these questions, I wasn't sure I had enough copy to satisfy Stevens.

  If I hurried, I might make it home in time to see the sunset over the bay. The rain had cleared out earlier, and now the sky had all the drama of a purpling, yellowing bruise. Instead, I slowed the truck and turned right on Bluff Pass to follow the winding road up to Sunset Bay. After all, it was on my way home, I reasoned. I had no plans for the evening. There’d be other sunsets.