The Bone House Part 14

He wasn't convinced the distinction would sway a jury if it came to that. When a teenage girl died, everyone wanted to see someone pay the price.

Mark felt a wave of anger. It was happening to him more and more now. Moments of rage. He was naturally claustrophobic, and when the walls began to close in, he beat on them and tried to fight his way out. If he couldn't find an escape, he wanted to punish the ones who had put him there.

His phone rang on the table beside him. It was Hilary, and he relaxed when he heard her voice. Sometimes she had a sixth sense for when he needed her.

'I'm in Northport waiting for the ferry,' she told him. 'I'll be home in an hour or so.'

'Good.'

'How's it going?' she asked.

'Better. The house is looking better.'

She listened to his voice. He could feel her divining his mood. 'You OK?'

'Not really.'

'What's up?'

'Not on the phone,' he said. He was already paranoid, wondering if the police were listening in on their calls.

'Let's go out for dinner tonight,' she suggested.

'Are you sure? You know what it'll be like.'

He was reluctant to go out anymore in the midst of other people from the island. He was sick of the dark stares and muttered hostility from people around them.

'Screw everybody else,' Hilary told him. 'We can't let them stop us from living our lives.'

He smiled. 'd.a.m.n right.'

'See you soon.'

She hung up. He picked up his beer again and continued drinking. He reminded himself, as he did on most days, how lucky he had been to find Hilary Semper. Some men weren't secure enough to marry a woman who was smarter than they were, but he'd had plenty of experience with women who only wanted him to show him off to their friends. He'd even married one when he was twenty-five, a bubbly brunette who had stalked him on the pro tour and seduced him into bed and then into the courthouse. He was young; she was young. She talked a good game about loving all the same things he did, when all she really wanted was a ring and a husband who made her girlfriends jealous.

It had lasted two long years. When he divorced her, he'd sworn to himself: never again.

Not long after the split, he'd had ten beers too many and driven his car into a median on the Kennedy Expressway. Stupid. He could have died. Instead, surgery gave him back his life, but not his career. After rehab, he had ninety per cent range of motion in his left shoulder, but a pro golfer needed about a hundred and ten per cent. A hundred and twenty if you're Tiger. He wasn't going to play professionally again. Golf was dead to him.

What seemed like a curse at the time turned out to be a blessing. He was insanely compet.i.tive when he stepped on to a playing field, but he learned that he was something more than a golfer, a compet.i.tor, and an athlete. He went back to something he hadn't done since he was a teenager. Painting. He took up reading again and devoured the cla.s.sics. He found himself attracted to teaching because it was so unlike his prior life and because it gave him time to become someone he liked a lot better than Mark Bradley, pro golfer.

It made him poor, too. That was the downside.

As the money dried up, he a.s.sumed the come-ons would vanish, but he discovered that looks were enough for plenty of women of all ages. He could have slept his way to a comfortable lifestyle, but he'd already been through one loveless marriage. He said yes to the occasional fling, but nothing that ever felt serious for either of them. Not until Hilary. Hilary, who was s.e.xy and didn't even have a clue about it. Hilary, who blew him away because everything she said was so d.a.m.n interesting, and because she didn't seem to care about what anyone else thought about her.

Hilary. It took his breath away sometimes to think that she she married married him. him.

That was why the anger kept coming back. It was the fear that he might lose everything he had. He had already lost his job, and now he worried that he would lose his house, his freedom, and the one woman he'd ever really wanted.

All because he took a walk on the beach. All because of Glory Fischer.

Mark went back into the house, where the sickly sweet air freshener covered the stench of the filth that had been thrown against the walls. He decided to take a run to offload his frustrations. For the first time, he took a key with him and locked the front door as he left the house. This was Was.h.i.+ngton Island. No one locked their doors. There was no one to fear, because the rest of the world was half an hour away across Death's Door.

Not anymore.

He stretched among the dead leaves in their dirt driveway, loosening his muscles. The forest around him was still. As he bent and touched his fingers to his toes, he noticed his Ford Explorer sagging at a queer angle in the clearing among the trees. When he looked closely, he saw that two of the tires were flat. The rubber had been slashed, and the rusty ax that had done the damage lay next to the truck in the weeds.

They were sending him a message. He could cover it up with paint, but no one was going to let him forget. Killer. Killer.

Mark picked up the ax, which was heavy and old. He weighed it in his hand. He felt his anger rush back, and he threw the ax at the flaky white trunk of a young birch tree, where it impaled itself, its handle quivering. He dug the ax out and swung it again, making a deep wound in the side of the tree. He did it again and again, wood and bark flying, until he ran out of breath and the immature tree stood on nothing more than a ragged fraction of its trunk. He wrapped his hands around the tree as if it were someone's throat and pushed until the tree groaned and cracked away from its base and toppled into the forest with a crash.

He staggered backward into his driveway. His chest heaved. His face was flushed. The ax dropped from his hand.

He heard a noise from the road and swung round fiercely, expecting to see them coming for him. The vandals. The punks. He was ready to take them on, hand to hand.

It wasn't anyone from the island.

A purple Corvette was parked at the base of his driveway, looking oddly out of place in the island wilderness. He saw a ridiculously tall man in a business suit standing next to the Corvette's door, leaning on it and watching him from behind sungla.s.ses that made no sense on a dark day. He'd been watching as Mark exploded with rage.

It was Cab Bolton.

Cab climbed back into the rented Corvette under Bradley's hostile glare. He had no interest in having a conversation with Mark Bradley right now, but he wanted the man to know he had followed him home. The investigation wasn't over, and if Bradley thought he had escaped with his freedom that easily, he was wrong. Cab also knew, watching Bradley erupt in fury with the ax, that his original opinion of the man had been correct.

Mark Bradley had a temper. Push him hard enough, and he lost control.

Cab did a U-turn and returned to the road that led past Schoolhouse Beach and out to the island's main highway beyond the cemetery. It occurred to him that he'd been in most corners of the world, and he didn't think he had ever felt quite as remote as he did now, on this island at the tip of the Door County peninsula. The entire stretch of land north of Sturgeon Bay felt as if he were driving through a winter ghost town, with shuttered storefronts and long stretches of forest and dormant farmlands. It was beautiful and ominous, like a transplanted corner of New England where someone had posted No Trespa.s.sing signs to keep out the rest of the world.

He'd never spent much time in the Midwest. In his head, he'd always thought of it as a place where winter lasted nine months, the cows outnumbered the people, and the land was flat and endless. Nothing he'd seen so far had changed his mind.

On the way back to the ferry port, he found a Western-style saloon in need of paint, immediately adjacent to the road. The sign said Bitters Pub. When he parked in the gravel in front of the bar, his Corvette stood out like a Hot Wheels play car next to the row of dusty pickups and hulking SUVs. He got out and smelled a waft of pine blowing in with the cold lake air. Inside, the odor of stale cigarette smoke choked the bar. He stripped off his sungla.s.ses. He saw a long oak counter with stools on his left, square card tables scattered across a hardwood floor, and two pool tables at the rear. The walls were crowded with knick-knacks like logging saws and skis.

Three men with huge bellies drank beer, played pool, and blew smoke rings. A bored bartender, young and cute, eyed him in his expensive suit with a curious smile. A grizzled fireplug of a man sat at the bar with a mug of coffee in front of him. Cab approached the bar, and the bartender sauntered his way. She had her black hair loose, and she wore a rust wool sweater and frayed jeans.

'Help you?'

'I'm looking for Sheriff Felix Reich,' Cab told her. 'One of his deputies told me I could probably find him here.'

The girl nodded her head at the fireplug seated at the end of the bar. 'Sheriff,' she called, 'somebody's looking for you.'

Sheriff Reich's head swiveled slowly, and he took the measure of Cab from head to toe with the pinched expression of a man biting into a lemon. His eyes started at Cab's spiky blond hair and moved down his long body, taking in his pinstripes, tie, and polished loafers, and then traveled back up again, focusing on Cab's manicured fingernails and gold earring. When he was done, Reich turned away to study the steam rising out of his coffee cup, as if that was more interesting than anything Cab was likely to say.

'What can I do for you?' Reich said. His voice was as gravelly as the back roads on the island.

Cab took a seat two stools from the sheriff, with his back to the bar and his stilt-like legs stretched out into the middle of the hardwood floor. He balanced his elbows on the bar behind him. The white cuffs of his s.h.i.+rt, which were closed with onyx cufflinks, jutted out from the sleeves of his suit coat. He was accustomed to looking like an outsider and immune to the stares and silence when he went somewhere he didn't belong. This place was no different from a hundred others.

'Sheriff, my name is Cab Bolton,' he said. 'I'm a detective with the Naples Police in Florida.'

Reich, who wore a heavy flannel s.h.i.+rt tucked into corduroys, sighed and slid sideways on his stool. He wasn't a big man, but he was packed tightly into his clothes. His face was weathered, as if he had a permanent case of frostbite, and his blue eyes were hard and impa.s.sive.

'A detective?' he asked.

'That's right.'

'Well, Detective, if one of my cops came into work wearing an earring, he'd have a choice. He could either yank it out and go home until the hole closed up, or he could quit.'

Cab grinned, but Reich didn't smile back. He could see the old sheriff studying his smile and thinking: Look at how white those teeth are. Look at how white those teeth are.

'I guess it's a good thing I don't work for you,' Cab told him.

'What did you say your name was?'

'Cab Bolton.'

'Cab? What kind of name is that?'

'I was named after my grandfather;' Cab replied, selecting a new explanation and a new name to go with it. 'Cornelius Abernathy Bolton.'

'Abernathy?'

Cab just smiled.

Reich grunted and reached for his coffee. 'You here because of Glory Fischer?'

'That's right.'

'You planning to arrest Mark Bradley?'

'For now I just want to find out more about him. About Glory, too.'

The bartender wandered closer and gave Cab an interested smile. She was about twenty-five, with no ring on her finger. She had big brown eyes and round cheeks. 'Can I get you a drink?' she asked Cab.

Reich gestured at the line-up of alcohol bottles behind the bar. 'Yeah, what is it you people drink down in Florida? Mojitos?' He p.r.o.nounced it moh-jee-toes. moh-jee-toes.

'No thanks,' Cab said.

The bartender winked. 'Maybe you want to join the club instead.'

'What club?'

Reich snuck a smile at the fat men playing pool. They drifted closer and the smoke in the bar thickened. 'Detective, you're not just in a pub,' the sheriff explained. 'This is the worldwide headquarters for the Bitters Club.'

'Oh?'

'That's right. It was started on the island by Tom Nelsen back in eighteen ninety-nine. Nelsen was convinced that Angostura bitters were an elixir of health. Sort of like you Florida folks and orange juice. He drank a pint or so a day.'

'A pint pint of bitters?' Cab asked. of bitters?' Cab asked.

'It's not exactly Guinness, but you get used to the taste. It's right up there with motor oil. You don't have to down a whole pint, though. If you can put back a shot gla.s.s of the stuff, you're in the club.'

Cab wasn't going to let this man win his macho game. 'Sure, set me up.'

The bartender smirked and reached under the bar. She placed a shot gla.s.s in front of Cab and filled it with a black liquid that did look suspiciously like motor oil. Cab brought the gla.s.s under his nose and smelled it. Reich eyed him carefully, and so did the others, watching for his face to screw up with distaste. He didn't react, despite the noxious aroma that would have awakened a coma patient. He figured it was all or nothing. This wasn't brandy you sipped and savored. He swirled the liquid in the gla.s.s, tipped it to his lips, and gulped down the bitters in a single swallow. His lips pinched together involuntarily. His throat contracted. The taste reminded him of chewing cigarette b.u.t.ts picked out of the gutter.

'Like it?' Reich asked.

'Great,' Cab croaked.

'Welcome to the club.'

'I'll call my mom,' Cab replied.

Reich relaxed and smiled, as if Cab had pa.s.sed a Door County test of endurance. 'So give me the dirt, Detective. What exactly do you have on Mark Bradley?'

Cab played with the empty shot gla.s.s. His mouth still tasted like weedkiller. 'Honestly? Not much.'

'I'm sorry to hear it,' the sheriff replied. 'I couldn't nail Bradley for s.e.xual a.s.sault last year, because Tresa Fischer was so moon-eyed in love with the b.a.s.t.a.r.d that she wouldn't say a word against him. You ask me, a teacher poles one of his kids, he ought to be hauled off to a pig farm for castration. We wouldn't have to worry about repeat offenders.'

'You're sure they were having s.e.x?'

'I read the girl's diary. Her imagination's not that good.'

'Can you think of a reason why Bradley would kill Glory Fischer?' Cab asked.

'I can think of lots of reasons. Maybe he tried to rape her, and she fought back. Maybe he just popped his cork and went off on the girl. Take your pick.'

'You may be right,' Cab told Reich, 'but right now, I can't even prove Bradley was on the beach with the girl. We're still running the forensics, and I hope we'll get lucky. Otherwise, we need to find somebody who saw something.'

'So what do you want to get done on my turf, Detective?' Reich asked pointedly. 'You're going to stir up a lot of people who are already hurting because of what happened.'

'I'd like to find out if Bradley had some kind of previous relations.h.i.+p with Glory Fischer. I'd also like to know if there was anything else going on in that girl's life.'

Reich put down his coffee mug on the bar. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Glory saw someone she knew in Florida. It scared her. I want to know who it was and whether it had anything to do with her death.'

'Someone she knew?' Reich asked. 'You think it was someone from around here?'

'That's what I'd like to find out.'

Reich's lips crinkled unhappily. 'My advice is to keep your eyes on the ball, Detective. I spent a lot of time with Mark Bradley last year. Having him in the middle of this thing doesn't surprise me at all.'

'No?'

'No. That man is a powder keg.'