“What happened?”
“For nearly a year after the festival, it was a real struggle to get a gig, but we kept working together, waiting for the shadow to pass. George said we had to release a new album. He said this would reestablish our reputation and help absolve us of the past. Annabelle agreed to the plan but something had gone flat. Her playing was off, less than it should have been. She started arriving late for rehearsals and then started to not show up at all. George and I tried to coax her along, but Annabelle drifted away from us and further into her own world. She said we were doomed, that we’d been branded musicians non grata and that there was no going back to where we were before Dixan I. George and I did everything we could think of to convince her otherwise, but neither of us could reach her.”
“Do you have any idea why she reacted so strongly?”
“Maybe because music came easily to her. She was a prodigy and the only child of two accomplished musicians. Annabelle was born with music in her blood and didn’t have to work as hard at it as the rest of us. Before Dixan I, her gift was a blessing but afterward it became a curse. She didn’t know how to fight for what she wanted because she’d never had to. She didn’t know how to struggle.”
“But you and George did?”
“That’s how we got to where we were! The Dixan I fiasco knocked us down a few notches, but we’d climbed to the top before and we knew that to do it again we had to put our backs into our work. More than that, we had to want it and had to reembrace the drudge of routine practices, working ourselves as hard as we ever had. We couldn’t afford to waste our energies brooding over what had happened, the way Annabelle did. Eventually the stress pushed her over the edge, and she had a bit of a breakdown. Once she fell apart, the group was no more.”
“And she sold her viol to George?” Cubiak said, stepping back to the case that housed Annabelle’s instrument.
“Sold? No, she gave it to him. It’s a fine viol, and she knew he coveted it. George refused to take it, but she said if he didn’t she’d pawn it. She didn’t want to ever see it again, she said.”
Mayes dimmed the light over the posters. “If you ask me, I think that losing Annabelle was as nearly as great a loss for the world of the gamba as the loss of the yellow viol.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Oh, I don’t know exactly. Three decades at least.”
“Then her daughter showed up and asked to be cast as an extra in the documentary of Dixan V.”
Mayes colored. “Not exactly, Sheriff. I made that up. I don’t know why. I apologize. Lydia wanted to see George. She said her mother had died and that she needed to tell him directly.”
“You didn’t know that Annabelle had died?”
“No, and I was so shocked by what she’d said, that I could hardly think. But that’s not the only reason she’d come to the festival. She was quite blunt about her other motive. She told me she knew that there was money due the ‘estate’ and that as the rightful heir she was here to collect it.”
“Money from . . .”
Mayes switched off half the lights. “From the recordings we’d made decades earlier. I told her that I handled the books, and that the last royalties had been paid out years before. She was very upset and wouldn’t take no for an answer. ‘There’s money here, I know there is,’ she insisted. I told her she had to wait until the festival was over before trying to see George and that if she was patient a little while longer, I’d talk to him and we’d see what we could do to help her out.”
“You were stalling.”
“Of course I was. I didn’t know who she was. She claimed to be Lydia Larson, but as far as I was concerned she was a complete stranger. I didn’t even know if Annabelle had a daughter. What if Annabelle was alive, and this woman was a scam artist?”
“Did you say anything to the festival organizers?”
“Are you kidding? They’d go berserk. Even the whiff of scandal sends them into paroxysms of hysteria.”
“But you told George.”
“Of course. As soon as I could. He was devastated by the news about Annabelle, but then he agreed that we should look into things further. Annabelle had dropped out of the music scene, but it seemed odd that we didn’t hear as much as a whisper about her passing. George and I agreed that if this Lydia woman’s story was true, we’d do everything we could for her. If not, we’d send her packing.”
Mayes ushered the sheriff back into the small anteroom and then hit another switch. Behind them, the room went dark. “But now she’s dead, too,” he said. “And such a young woman. How did she die?”
“Suspicious circumstances.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t know yet for certain.”
Mayes frowned. “But you have a theory.”
“Several.”
They were in the upstairs hall again when Cubiak asked Mayes about his career.
“My life as a musician ended twenty years ago,” he said. Mayes was in front and as they walked, he held up his hands. His right index finger was crooked and both rows of knuckles were grotesquely swollen. “Rheumatoid arthritis. It wasn’t easy giving it all up, but I had no choice. Since then I’ve kept plenty busy serving as George’s booking agent, accountant, and publicist. In fact, I can honestly say that I take a great deal of satisfaction in supporting his career. He was always the more talented player anyway.”
In the foyer Mayes gave a CD to the sheriff. “The GAR group at its finest,” he said. Then he opened the door.
It was early evening and the yard blazed with the orange of the setting sun.
“What about Annabelle?” Cubiak said, squinting against the hot glow.
Mayes stepped out the door as if he were drawn by the light. When he turned back he was smiling. “Annabelle? Of the three of us, she was the best.”
6
FATAL DELAY
Cubiak headed south again. After his talk with Mayes, he wanted to know more about Dixan I, and, as he so often did, he sought out Bathard. The retired coroner was not only a lifelong resident of the county but also a music aficionado, and there was a good chance he had attended the ill-fated festival. Forty years was a long time to cast back through the fog of memory, but the sheriff figured he had nothing to lose by asking.
When he reached the end of Bathard’s cinder driveway, the old boat barn was lit up and strains of opera spilled into the yard. He rolled back the door and found his friend at his workbench. Bathard’s hair was gray and longer than in his doctor days, and his shoulders had stooped slightly with age. He moved more slowly than when they had first met, but he had lost none of his mental edge.
“What do you think?” Bathard said, looking up from the replica of the Viking ship that was taking shape on the counter in front of him. The boat was three feet long and richly detailed.
“It looks great but will it float?”
The doctor chuckled. “It had better. I promised Sonja’s grandsons they could try it out on Kangaroo Lake when it was finished, and I would sorely hate to see all this effort go to waste.” He put down the crochet hook he was using to adjust the rigging and rose from his perch.
“And that?” Bathard said, pointing toward the vaulted ceiling where dust motes danced in the air.
Cubiak thought he meant the place where the Parlando had sat in its cradle while the two of them reworked the wooden sailboat, the most ambitious venture of Bathard’s postretirement woodworking projects. Then the sheriff realized he was asking about the music flowing from the speakers that hung from the rafters.
“Verdi’s La Traviata.”
The coroner frowned. “Too easy. You’re getting good at this.”
He walked over and, ever the gentleman, formally shook hands. “If you’re not heading home for dinner, come join us. I believe we’re having leftovers. Swedish meatballs and whatever else Sonja warmed up. There’s always plenty.”
When Cubiak first met Bathard, the doctor had been ma
rried to his high school sweetheart. Cornelia died soon after, and two years later, Bathard had remarried. Sonja was a notoriously good cook, and the sheriff knew it would be futile to refuse the invitation. Five minutes after he and Bathard left the boat barn, the three were sitting around the worn butcher-block table in the kitchen. Wine had been poured and platters of food were being passed.
“I’ve actually come to ask you about music,” he said to Bathard.
“Ah.” The physician smiled and raised his glass.
“Dixan I.”
The smile faded.
“You were there?”
“Indeed. It was a proud moment in Door County history, until it turned into something quite different. I couldn’t attend every performance, but I went to as many as possible. I wouldn’t have dreamed of not going. Dixan I was the first viola da gamba festival held in the state. Musicians came from across the country, and, of course, the headliner was the famous Franz Acker, who, until that fateful weekend, was one of the world’s premier gambists.” Bathard glanced at his wife. “Sonja and I didn’t know each other at the time, but she was there as well.”
“You’re a fan of early music?” the sheriff said.
“Not especially, but I lived on Washington Island then. I think all of us locals showed up at some point, out of curiosity if nothing else,” she said.
Bathard shook his head. “All that preparation and promise and then, out of nowhere, disaster. First the death of Acker’s wife and then the mysterious disappearance of the famous yellow viol. Afterward there were mad accusations and finger-pointing all around. For a while it seemed that everyone on the island was a suspect.”
“Practically everybody on the peninsula really,” Sonja said.
“True, all except for the unfortunate Franz Acker,” Bathard said.
“Oskar Norling said something about a woman dying after leaving the island, but I didn’t realize she was Acker’s wife.”
“Yes, it was all so terribly unfortunate.”
“How much do you remember?” Cubiak said.
The coroner closed his eyes for a moment. “About the festival? The music, of course. Such exquisite harmony. It was a chance to hear rarely performed pieces by Abel, Boismortier, and Marais. And the wonderful musicians. They all seemed very young.” He laughed. “I guess we were all very young then. They were so eager, so thrilled to be playing together, and the music was beautiful. It’s a different sound from what we think of as classical music—simpler and purer. Everyone was so caught up in the euphoria I don’t think they could have imagined the twin tragedies that lay ahead.” Bathard sipped his wine. “What’s most disturbing is that things didn’t have to go so terribly wrong. To this day, I believe that the disaster could have been averted if Franz Acker had only listened to reason. Don’t misunderstand, the man has my sympathies. He suffered greatly because of what transpired, but to an extent he was an architect of his own doom.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, to begin with, the yellow viol didn’t belong to him. The instrument was on loan from one of the old, aristocratic families in Germany, an offshoot of the Guttenbergs, I believe. Acker was entrusted with it on one very simple and basic condition: that he keep up the insurance premiums.”
“And he didn’t?”
“Unfortunately, no. Of course, there were various circumstances that he blamed for this misstep. He’d been recording and performing in New York for nearly a year and had the check ready to mail but he forgot, and then he brought it here to post from the island. With him also was his pregnant wife—Heike, I think her name was. She was seven months along but on the afternoon of the day he had to mail the check in order for the payment to arrive on time, she unexpectedly went into labor. Premature labor comes with its own potential complications, but her situation was even more problematic.”
“Why?”
“Frau Acker had a condition called placenta previa.” The doctor looked across the table at the sheriff. “It means the placenta is lying low in the womb. In her case, it was both blocking the birth canal and causing her to hemorrhage.”
“You were there when she went into labor?”
“I wish I had been, but no, I was dealing with an emergency at the old clinic in Sister Bay. There wasn’t a physician available on the island, so they called a midwife, which normally would be fine.”
Sonja set out a tray with coffee, cookies, and sherry. She explained, “The midwife was my neighbor. Her car wouldn’t start when she got the call, so I drove her. There was a huge gale bearing down. The reports said it was a hundred-year storm, the worst anyone could remember. I don’t think I’d ever witnessed such wind and rain. There were moments I couldn’t see the road and had to go by memory as much as instinct. Afterward, she told me that she did everything she could to stem the poor woman’s bleeding. She even stayed with Heike on the ferry.”
“The ferry was running?” Cubiak looked up from pouring the sherry.
“The schedule was put on hold because of the weather, but Acker went down to the landing and persuaded Norling to take his wife across,” Bathard said.
“Oskar Norling’s father?”
“No, his uncle Sven. The old captain had a reputation as something of a daredevil and was the only pilot willing to try. I don’t know how he talked the owners into letting him take the boat but he did, and somehow he managed to get Acker and his wife over to the mainland. This was long before the ferry landing at Northport was built. So he had to dock at Gills Rock, and in those conditions it had to have been a real challenge. The ambulance was waiting, and as soon as they got Frau Acker on board, the EMTs radioed me. When they reached Sister Bay, I traded places with the midwife. I assumed we were headed to the hospital in Sturgeon Bay, but Acker wouldn’t hear of it. He seemed to think we were a bunch of country rubes and insisted that his wife be flown to the university hospital in Madison.”
Bathard grimaced. “What a horrible mistake. I tried to talk him out of it, but he said he had a colleague there, someone he knew and trusted from his student days. The man’s arrogance was galling and worse. Heike had lost a lot of blood already, and I knew we were running out of time. I told him this. ‘We can care for her here. You don’t have to go to Madison,’ I said. But Acker was adamant. He’d already called ahead and arranged for a private plane to transport her. I had no option but to stay with Heike. The ambulance tried to outrace the storm and get to the airport before the squall hit. It was the only chance we had. Ten minutes more and we would have made it. But just as we turned off the highway, the wind roared in off Green Bay and the airport was forced to shut down.”
“Why didn’t you turn around and go back to Sturgeon Bay?”
“If only we could have, but the rain was a deluge and the roads flooded almost instantly, making it impossible to get through. We were stranded at the airport for more than an hour. I did what I could but . . .” The elderly doctor shook his head. “It was all so sad and avoidable. Eventually the plane was able to take off for Madison. They landed in time to save the infant, but by then Heike had lost too much blood.”
“The delay cost that poor woman her life,” Sonja said.
“And that’s the night the yellow viol disappeared.”
“Sadly, yes. Acker returned to the island the next afternoon and discovered it missing. He sounded the alarm immediately,” Bathard said. He turned to Sonja. “You were there; you know what went on.”
“It was instant chaos. Nothing like that had ever happened on the island, and suddenly we were all under suspicion as possible thieves. The next day, when Acker announced he’d give a reward for any information about the viol, everyone became a detective.”
“How many people were on the island at the time?” Cubiak said as he refilled his glass.
“Easily six or seven hundred. There were the musicians and the tourists, and the summer people who hadn’t left yet,” Sonja said.
“Dutch Schumacher was the sheriff back then, and he put t
he island on what we’ve come to know as lockdown. The search went on for a couple of days but there was no trace of the instrument. There’s never been a trace since. Because of the theft, Acker was left in financial ruin, and Washington Island was blackballed from playing host to the event for years. Of course, all that has changed now.”
“Because of George Payette.”
Bathard looked up. “You’ve done your homework.” He added a touch of sherry to his glass and took a leisurely sip. “Now perhaps you’ll tell me what this is all about.”
“Does the name Annabelle Mary Larson mean anything to you?”
The coroner leaned back and studied the shadows on the ceiling. “Annabelle Mary Larson. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. I always thought of her as one of those human beings blessed with an ability the rest of us can only dream of. She was an accomplished gambist, one of the few women in her day, and a delicate beauty as well. And if I remember correctly, she was part of a trio that performed at Dixan I. They had an odd name . . .”
“The GAR group.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“You heard them perform?”
“Oh, yes, and they were quite good. Superb, in fact, especially Annabelle Larson. There was something about the way she played, the intimacy of her connection with the viol, that set her apart from all the other musicians. I wonder whatever became of her.”
“According to a woman who claimed to be her daughter, Annabelle Larson is dead. But the daughter, a Lydia Larson, is also deceased.”
“This is the unfortunate woman whose body was found on the ferry from Washington Island yesterday?”
“Yes, that’s her.” Cubiak described the circumstances and repeated Emma Pardy’s initial assessment.
Bathard set down his glass. “And you think Lydia Larson was murdered?”
“I consider it a possibility.”
“Why was she on the island?” Sonja said.
“I don’t know. I have the feeling she was there because of the festival but I’ve got nothing to back that up. No one affiliated with the event recognized her photo. And Richard Mayes, who was part of the GAR group, said that as far as he knows Annabelle isn’t dead. So he thinks Lydia might be lying both about Annabelle’s demise and about being the daughter. I haven’t talked to George Payette yet—he was the third member of the trio—to see where he stands on any of this. Mayes said that Lydia was trying to see him and that she was after money.”
Death Rides the Ferry Page 6
