The Bone House Part 11

'Exactly why do they call it "Door" County?'

Bradley laughed without humor. 'The peninsula juts out into the water between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. The area where the waters come together at the tip of the land is extremely treacherous. A lot of people have lost their lives in those waters. So the pa.s.sage got the French name Porte des morts.' Porte des morts.'

'I'm afraid I studied Spanish and German, not French,' Cab said.

'It means Death's Door.'

Chapter Thirteen.

Sheriff Felix Reich drove his Chevy Tahoe off the Was.h.i.+ngton Island ferry, and the vehicle clanged over the s.h.i.+p's metal gate on to the mainland at the tip of Door County in Northport. The crossing through the Death's Door pa.s.sage had been rough, but Reich had made the journey thousands of times in his life, and he was immune to the jockeying of the waves. Most of the travelers on winter midweek mornings were locals who had iron stomachs even in the worst weather. On this crossing, Reich had shared the ferry with only three other vehicles bound for the peninsula.

Reich turned off Highway 42 beyond the port on to a gravel road known as Port des Morts Drive. He drove between winter trees that clawed for his truck with bare branches. Through the web of trees, Reich could see secluded, expensive waterside houses hugging the cliff tops, but there was hardly anyone in residence to admire the panorama below them. Most of the owners only arrived during the high season, leaving the empty land to the small tribe of year-round residents in other months. Even in summer, most tourists didn't venture beyond the main highway or travel north of the shopping towns like Fish Creek, Ephraim, and Sister Bay. When you got as far north as Gills Rock and Northport, you were usually alone.

He drove to the very end of Port des Morts Drive, where he parked in a sheltered turnaround. He got out of his Tahoe and walked up a muddy dirt driveway toward Peter Hoffman's log home. It was a small house on a large lot that was thick with mature oak trees. Pete had lived there since he and Reich returned from Vietnam together. His friend kept it impeccably maintained; the house was his hobby and his pa.s.sion. There was not much else in Pete's life, not since the loss of his wife to cancer seven years ago. Not since his retirement.

Not since the fire.

Reich rang the bell, but the quietness of the house told him that Pete had left for his morning hike. He knew where to find him. He got back in his truck, retraced his path for a quarter-mile, and turned toward the water at Kenosha Drive, which led into the county park. Toward the end of the short road, he could see the bay through the grove of towering spruce trees, and under the dark sky, the water was so blue it was almost black. He parked in the dormant gra.s.s, where remnants of snow clung to shaded patches of earth. Ahead of him were two gray benches, angled toward the water. Sitting on one bench was Peter Hoffman.

Reich climbed down from his truck. He could see his breath. The morning was cold, with a gusty breeze that had tossed the island ferry like a whale heaving up and down through the waves. Even in summer, it was cold here, but he never felt the cold himself, or if he did, he shut it out of his mind. At sixty years old, he woke up every morning with a bone-deep aching in his limbs, but he didn't let it stop him from the ch.o.r.es of the day: shoveling his island driveway, splitting and chopping wood for the fireplace, or lifting weights religiously in his bas.e.m.e.nt gym. As far as Reich was concerned, he may as well have been forty-five.

He wore a brown sheriff's department uniform, which fitted perfectly and was pressed into sharp creases. He hadn't gained a pound in years. His badge glinted like gold on his chest, and he s.h.i.+ned his boots to a high polish every night, cleaning off the grime of the job, which took him into muddy, dusty corners of the county. His white hair was cropped to a half-inch length and was as flat as it had been in his Marine days. He wasn't tall, about five feet eight, but he had fought and beaten men who were thirty years younger and fifty pounds heavier over the years. He figured he still could.

Reich watched the water with a grim expression. You could live here your whole life, as he had, and find something different in the colors of the waves every day. On the horizon, he saw the rocky outline of Plum Island and, beyond it, the low shelf of Was.h.i.+ngton Island, where he'd bought his home in the 1970s and stayed there, alone, unmarried, ever since. He felt a kins.h.i.+p with the island and the rocky pa.s.sage to the mainland, but he was no romantic about it. Every season, they fished out the bodies of those who underestimated Death's Door.

Not saying a word, Reich sat down on the bench opposite Peter Hoffman, who didn't look at him. Tree stumps dotted the clearing around them. Spidery shadows from the birches made a web in the gra.s.s. Pete drank coffee from the plastic cup of a Thermos, and Reich could see steam clouding above the mug. He could also smell whiskey on his friend's breath.

'Pretty early for the sauce, Pete.'

Pete held out the Thermos. 'You want some?'

Reich shook his head. He liked to drink, but never on duty and never when he was flying or driving. And not at nine in the morning.

'You heard?' Reich asked.

Pete swallowed his doctored coffee and wiped his mouth. His eyes were focused way out in the bay. He nodded, but he didn't say anything.

'Glory Fischer,' Reich murmured. 'Like that little girl didn't suffer enough.'

Pete took a loud, ragged breath. Reich thought his friend might cry. He was worried about Pete and had been for the better part of a year. When they'd served together, Pete had been just like himself, a hard nail you could pound and never bend its shape. That had stayed true for most of their lives. Both of them were natives, which made them a rare breed in Door County. They could practically see each other's homes across the four miles of the pa.s.sage. They'd hunted, fished, and gotten drunk together more times than Reich could count. They had identical values about G.o.d, life, and evil that had stayed rock solid while the rest of the world went to h.e.l.l.

But this was not the Pete he knew. The old man drinking on a bench in the early morning. Letting himself go. Drowning in his sorrow. Limping around his empty house, thanks to the bullet he'd taken when he stepped in front of a rifle aimed at Reich in 1969. His rigid bearing had begun to slump, and only his hair, which was still oddly black, resembled the man who had been Reich's best friend for his entire life. Pete was eight years older, and he looked as if he, like the water, was at death's door.

'I talked to Delia,' Reich told him. 'She's been in Florida with Tresa and Troy Geier for a couple days, trying to get the local cops off their a.s.ses. She'll be home today. Tresa's not going back to River Falls this term. She's staying here.'

'Good thing,' Pete rumbled.

'Delia and the cops think it was that son of a b.i.t.c.h who was banging Tresa,' Reich added. 'The teacher. Mark Bradley. He was down there at the hotel. The cops are pretty sure he was on the beach with Glory.'

Pete turned to him with bloodshot eyes. 'Is he going to get what he deserves this time?'

'If I have anything to say about it, you're d.a.m.n right he will.'

The two men sat in silence. The wind roared between them, waking up the trees. Early-season birds chattered in agitation. Peter Hoffman pushed himself off the bench, and his body swayed unsteadily. Reich made a move to help him, but Pete waved him away. Pete leaned against a tree stump and overturned his Thermos, letting the coffee splash into a puddle in the dirt. He straightened up as well as he could and looked down at Reich with immense sadness.

'It's going to come up again, isn't it?' Pete asked. 'The fire.'

'I imagine it will.'

'I really thought we were done with it. I thought it was over.'

Reich said nothing. He knew the fire wasn't the kind of event that was ever really over. No matter how much you tried to lock the past in a cellar, it found a way to get out. That had been true for Pete since it happened, and it was hard to blame him. He'd lost his oldest daughter. Two of his grandchildren. All of that, the year after his wife succ.u.mbed to a slow, horrible disease. It was like having his whole life leveled to the ground with napalm.

'I guess the fire got Glory after all,' Pete went on.

Reich shook his head fiercely. 'This has nothing to do with the fire or with Harris Bone. Mark Bradley is the one who did this to Glory, and I'm not going to let him throw up a smokescreen.'

Peter Hoffman shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the sky through the tangle of trees. 'Harris Bone,' he said fiercely.

Reich found himself getting angry with his friend. 'We can't change the past, Pete. This is about getting justice for Glory. OK? We owe it to that girl. We were the ones who found her.'

It was over before anyone knew.

It was over before there were sirens and lights and before a single high-pressure fire hose blasted water over the super-heated remains. By the time a neighbor near Kangaroo Lake awoke in the middle of the night and smelled the sharp aroma of burning wood in the air, and called 911, the Bone house was gone, its walls consumed into ash, its roof caved in over scorched Sheetrock and stone. The fire was complete in its destruction.

That night, Felix Reich and Peter Hoffman had been playing poker with two of Felix's deputies in a farmhouse east of Egg Harbor. The air had the deadness of summer, humid and warm. Mosquitoes and moths clung to the screens. Their T-s.h.i.+rts were wet with sweat. They were on County Road E, only three miles west of the home where Pete's son-in-law lived. Harris Bone was married to Pete's daughter Nettie, father to his grandchildren Karl, Scott and Jen. That was the man's only redeeming quality in Pete's eyes.

Reich knew that Pete had little time for his son-in-law of seventeen years. Harris had taken over his mother's liquor store in Sturgeon Bay after she pa.s.sed away, but it had failed when a larger compet.i.tor opened in town. Since then, he had spent most of his life on the road, sc.r.a.ping together money as a vending machine salesman around the state of Wisconsin. Even when he was home, there was no peace. He and Nettie tore into each other like feral cats. It was a house painted over with thick coats of bitterness and bile.

In truth, Reich knew that Nettie was no prize, but you didn't say that to a friend. He'd listened to her pick apart her husband for years. Harris was a failure. He wasn't religious enough. He wasn't successful enough. He didn't know how to work with his hands. He was always wrong. Reich, who'd never wanted a wife and never missed having one, felt the tiniest sympathy for Harris every time he was in the house, listening to the man's ego get chipped away by this tiny, overbearing woman, who dominated his life from her wheelchair. The boys had begun to pick up the same habits, running down their father to win their mother's approval. For Harris, being home in that house must have felt like being in a cage.

Reich knew they would never divorce. G.o.dly couples didn't do that. He had just never imagined where it would all lead when Harris finally snapped.

He heard the call on his radio as the poker game was winding down. The report of the fire. He jumped in his truck to respond, and Pete, who'd driven with him to the game, joined him for the ride. They had no address, but the closer they got to Kangaroo Lake, the more the smoke guided them, until they spotted a black column above the trees that was even darker than the night sky. It had never occurred to either one of them where the fire might be, and it was only when they turned down the road leading to the lake, where Pete's family lived, that Reich began to get a sick feeling. He drove faster, and the loose gravel made a roar under his tires.

He could sense it in Pete, too. The fear. The horror.

When they were half a mile away, he saw the glow of the fire, but it was too late. He parked on the road, and both men got out and ran, but the flames were already smacking their lips, popping and belching as they picked over the remains. A hundred tiny fires glowed throughout the wreckage, spreading across the wooded lot. Reich felt the heat on his face. He coughed violently as he inhaled smoke. He smelled gasoline and wood, and above all that he recognized a foul odor he hadn't smelled in decades and had hoped he would never smell again.

Burnt human flesh.

Next to him, Pete began to disintegrate. His eyes widened in terrified disbelief, as if he'd been ushered into the belly of h.e.l.l to witness the conflagration. He moaned his daughter's name and the names of his grandchildren. He crumpled in the driveway and then ran, stumbling, directly for the fiery core where the house had been. Reich chased after him, knowing that Pete wouldn't stop; he would run into the fire and let it kill him. With a shout, he threw himself on his friend's back and drove Pete into the earth, holding him down while he cried and beat the ground. Reich winced, listening to the primal agony screeching out of Pete's throat, hearing it devolve into whimpers of despair.

When Reich got to his feet again, covered in dirt and ash, he saw Harris Bone.

Harris stood thirty feet away, silent, motionless, watching the work of the fire. His Buick was parked in the gra.s.s. Sparks flew around him like fireworks, landing in his hair and making black burn marks like cigarette holes on his clothes. He seemed oblivious to the presence of Reich or to the tortured desperation of his father-in-law. Reich approached Harris carefully, and as he did, he realized that the man reeked of gasoline, and his face was streaked with soot. Harris's eyes, reflecting the fire, were blank and devoid of emotion.

'What happened here, Harris?' Reich asked.

Harris Bone shook his head and murmured, 'I'm sorry.'

'Were they inside? Was your family inside?'

'I'm sorry,' he repeated, continuing to watch the fire as if it were something distant and detached.

Reich heard Peter Hoffman bellowing behind them. 'YOU DID THIS! YOU DID THIS!'

Before Reich could stop him, Pete had Harris on the ground. The old man had the younger man's throat in his grip, and he hammered his son-in-law's skull against the rocks as he squeezed off the air from his windpipe. Harris barely struggled to save himself. Reich grabbed Pete's shoulders and threw his friend bodily away and stood in his way to block him as he charged for Harris again.

'Pete, stop'.'

Crying, breathing hard, Pete backed off and stood with his hands on his knees. Reich took Harris and pulled him up by the collar of his s.h.i.+rt and held him. Without thinking, he made a fist with his left hand and crashed it into Harris's face, where he heard the snap of cartilage breaking. The man's nose erupted in blood, and Harris staggered back and sank to his knees.

Reich rubbed his knuckles, which were bruised and raw. He cursed himself under his breath for losing control. Pete watched him, saying nothing at all.

That was when Reich heard it. A tiny voice, hidden under the roar of the fire. 'Help me!'

He looked up with a sudden urgency.

'What the h.e.l.l was that?' Reich asked. 'Did you hear that?'

Pete shook his head. A mile away, they both heard the sirens of the fire trucks growing louder.

'Someone's alive,' Reich told him.

He marched into the gra.s.s, dodging pockets of smoldering fragments blown from the house. He scoured the burnt yard, pus.h.i.+ng through tall weeds. He listened but didn't hear the voice again.

'Hey!' he called. 'Hey, where are you?'

No one answered.

Reich tramped toward the woods on the west side of the house. He made his way around the burnt sh.e.l.l of the old garage, which had disintegrated except for one wall that seemed to defy gravity and cast a shadow into the meadow. He squinted, trying to see through the darkness. The field was a mess of brush and flowers, but just outside the spotty cl.u.s.ters of flames, he saw a flash of pink huddled amid stalks of Queen Anne's lace.

As he watched, the pink bundle moved. He saw a girl's face. Scared eyes. The fire was moving closer to her.

Reich ran.

'I don't want to hear you talking about the fire,' Reich told Peter Hoffman.

Pete nodded slowly. 'I hear you, Felix.'

'Mark Bradley didn't pay for what he did to Tresa, but he sure as h.e.l.l is going to pay for what he did to Glory. So it's not going to help I anybody if you and me start dredging up the past.'

Reich smoothed his uniform and headed for his Tahoe, leaving Pete alone on the trail, looking out on the water. Before he could climb into his truck, he heard Pete calling after him.

'Felix?'

Reich stopped. 'What is it?'

'You know it doesn't matter what we say or don't say. Somebody's going to make the connection to the fire anyway.'

Reich said nothing. He knew Pete was right.

'They'll say it was Harris Bone who did this to Glory,' Pete went j on, and his voice was broken and old. 'They'll say he finally came back.'

PART TWO.

THE GHOST.

Chapter Fourteen.

Five years ago, the buzz around Hilary Semper's high school in Highland Park was about the hot new subst.i.tute teacher who'd joined the district. The grapevine already had him pegged: six feet tall, buzzed brown hair, a golf pro who'd given up the tour because of an injury. Loud, confident, funny. Married once, divorced quickly, now unattached. In a school where most of the teachers were twenty-something blondes looking for a husband, this was big news.

Hilary herself had no interest. It wasn't that she'd had no relations.h.i.+ps in her life. She had fallen in love at least twice, but in both cases she'd realized that she was dating someone who wanted a wife, not a partner. In those days, she had tried to change herself into more of what a man was looking for, but she'd eventually decided that love wasn't worth pretending to be someone else. She knew she intimidated men with her brains. She knew she was outspoken to the point of driving people away. If the man didn't exist who could live with that combination of qualities, so be it.

She was the only one of six Semper siblings who hadn't walked down the aisle. Two had divorced and remarried; three had marriages that had barely survived the arrival of children. They all looked at Hilary at holiday gatherings and asked her in amazement why she wasn't married yet. They weren't amused when she asked them why they were.

In truth, she did want to get married. She wanted to be in love. She wanted kids. If a relations.h.i.+p came, she would throw herself into it. If it never happened, she wasn't going to cry about it or spend time regretting what she hadn't found. She simply went about her life, without wasting her time hunting for a man who might never show up.

Her family, who already looked at her strangely for staying single, hadn't understood her choice to go into teaching, either. She'd graduated from Northwestern summa c.u.m laude with a major in finance. Brokerages and banks in Chicago and New York had dangled six-figure salaries in front of her, and she'd turned them all down. Instead, she did what she'd always said she would do, teach math and dance to high schoolers. It wasn't the road to riches, although her own expenses were low, and she'd invested well. Her loud criticism of everything that was wrong with public schools didn't win her any fans among the school district or the teachers' union, but her students loved her. She loved them, too. She was exactly where she thought she wanted to be in life.

Then Mark Bradley became a subst.i.tute teacher in her school.

She'd already prepared herself not to like him. The more the naive young teachers swooned over him, the more she'd steeled herself to meet an egotistical womanizer who was overly impressed with his looks. He worked in the district for six months before she got him as a sub. She did what she did with every sub for her cla.s.s - meet him in advance to go over lesson plans for an hour and a half, map out what she wanted him to do, and provide him with bios on the strengths and weaknesses of every student. All that for two days while she attended an education conference in New Orleans. Most subs groaned at her thoroughness, and few did what she directed them to do in her cla.s.sroom. She expected that Mark Bradley - English and art major from the University of Illinois, former pro golfer - would be among the worst, with little interest in what she wanted from her math students. She'd already leaped to the conclusion that he was nothing more than a dumb jock.

She knew - because he told her so later - that she'd been rude and condescending to him. She'd barely looked at him, although even a glance was enough to realize that he really was as attractive as the other teachers had said. If he wanted an opening with her, she wasn't prepared to give him one - and she doubted that an ex-athlete pursued by most of the cute twenty-somethings at school would have much interest in a tall, pushy teacher in her mid-thirties, with a handful of stubborn extra pounds on her frame.

Mark surprised her. He kept his ego and his jokes firmly in check when they met and listened to her instructions and took detailed notes. He had a brain and the same kind of pa.s.sion for kids that she did. When she returned to school after her two-day conference, she was shocked to discover that Mark had followed her guidelines precisely and kept the cla.s.ses on pace with her lesson plans. She was less surprised that half her girls had already fallen in love with him and were begging her to bring him back.