Guilt Trip

by Donna Huston Murray

  When at last it subsided, I assured the young widow she could get back to me about Toby and the business. Then I handed her my smartphone. “How about putting the cabin into the GPS for us? I think I’ve screwed up your directions.”

  Four miles later we stopped for lunch, choosing a family diner over a hamburger chain because the parking lot was fuller. Chantal ordered waffles and sausage; I ordered the chicken pot pie special and regretted every bite.

  “Who was there?” I inquired after requesting the key lime pie, another risk this far north but fortunately one that paid off.

  Chantal met my eyes over her thick white mug of herbal tea. She knew perfectly well I referred to the night Toby died. Nothing else was on either of our minds this close to the cabin.

  “You really believe he was murdered, don’t you?” she said with grim resignation.

  I lifted a shoulder, glanced at the ceiling. Waited.

  “Everybody was there,” she answered as she set down her drink. “Gavin, me, Toby, Mom, Dad, Abby. Dad’s birthday comes during light-goose season, so we always have his party at the lodge. It’s a family tradition.”

  “You said everybody. Was Gavin’s girlfriend there too?”

  “Oh, no. God forbid.”

  Right. God forbid.

  “You mentioned the key to the place is available for other guests. Was anyone else expected?”

  “Not this year. Dad’s people had just celebrated the lawsuit win, an impromptu thing that got out of hand and lasted well into the night. Mother suspected everybody probably had enough of each other for a while.”

  “By ‘Dad’s people’ you mean the Roitman Industries management team?”

  “Yes. My guess is most of them were delighted to skip the hunting party. Not too many business types are into shooting geese, and anyhow who wants to be on their best behavior on their time off?”

  “Not the bonding experience the weekend was supposed to be?”

  “Exactly.”

  Of course, if light-goose season stuck in your memory, as it would now stick in mine, and if you happened to remember directions to the Roitmans’ hunting lodge and had a pressing reason to kill the CFO…

  “There.” Chantal alerted me to an arrow-shaped board pointing to the right. It’s fading white letters said “Chinook Acres.”

  “Why Chinook?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I think maybe the previous owner had one of those Chinook dogs.”

  The crushed stone lane, rutted and pocked by former puddles and littered with detritus, meandered into a woods ready and eager for spring. Squirrels foraged for acorns they’d planted last fall beneath underbrush blooming with fresh, almond-shaped leaves. Above, the oak trees were tipped with swollen red buds ready to burst.

  I took it all in with an eye toward sneaking up on the Roitman’s lodge. Way back at the road I’d noticed a half-moon clearing large enough for one vehicle, but considering the woodsy surroundings a parked car or truck probably would be remembered.

  Walking in from the road was also rife with hazards. Toby’s death had occurred well after dinner, so an intruder who didn’t want to risk a branch in the eye or tripping and breaking a limb would have needed a flashlight. Between what seemed like thousands of tree trunks were rocks laced with moss. Pine straw and leaves obscured runoff ditches you could spot in the daylight but probably not at night. Tramping through sticks and leaves and underbrush wouldn’t exactly be quiet either. Even the lane had drawbacks—potholes, open exposure, and distance, for we’d driven easily half a mile already and I still hadn’t spotted a building.

  “Turn left,” Chantal ordered suddenly.

  “Where?”

  “Between those two trees. See it now?”

  Barely visible was another small board shaped like a shotgun nailed to a tree. Since Chantal chose to mention the trees rather than the firearm, I worried once again how returning to this place would affect her.

  A quarter mile later we finally arrived, and I have to say I was underwhelmed. Built of logs, the one-story structure spread across a clearing of about half an acre. The lichen-laced cedar shake roof had grayed and curled with age. All the windows were simple squares edged in “hunter” green. Cordwood stacked between two pines had been winnowed down to a low pile shaped like a camel’s back, a clue that a fireplace was a primary heat source. The absence of electric lines suggested that one of the small out-buildings housed a generator, and three large propane tanks seemed to confirm my guess. Ankle-deep leaves blown against the door told me no one had been here in a while, perhaps not since light-goose season.

  Chantal climbed out, slammed the car door, and hugged herself. Trying not to interrupt the internal adjustment she appeared to be making, I closed my own door with extra care.

  As soon as I could, I asked the whereabouts of the key. The ground was musky-damp and the air crisp. We could think our thoughts just as well indoors.

  As expected, the key hung on a nail on the cabin side of the nearest tree, a convenient five feet from the doorknob.

  Chantal led me into a kitchen Daniel Boone’s mother might have admired, but probably not Lana and certainly not Marsha. Linoleum countertops in beat-up yellow, the interior wall papered with yellow wallpaper resembling tiles sporting red roosters and whitish chickens, a dulled stainless steel sink, a white oven topped with thick black burners, a once-white refrigerator with rounded corners, an ancient Starbucks coffee can sprouting spatulas and spoons on the four-foot long prep counter—it was old to the point of being unsanitary. I could envision cans of Dinty Moore stew being opened and heated but very little real cooking.

  I felt Chantal watching me. “You look shocked,” she remarked.

  “Sorry. I guess I am.”

  She nodded as if she once felt the same. “Poor Lana. This is the only place my mother leaves her alone.” Hearing that Chantal didn’t care for Marsha’s interference any more than I did made me warm to her even more.

  We proceeded into a long room almost blocked off by a lengthy mahogany dining table. Although it once may have been somebody’s prized antique, now it was quite beat up and surrounded by a dozen neglected chairs sporting a fan design on the backrest.

  The farther part of the room was defined by a narrow storage cabinet supporting a lamp featuring a ceramic duck. Next, a U of three brown leather sofas faced a stone fireplace large enough to roast a beast on a spit. A couple of trite hunting prints moldered on walls covered in water-stained wallpaper.

  Inside the lodge felt only marginally warmer than outside, and a whistling draft seeping in from a screened porch (presently storing lawn furniture) wasn’t helping. As soon as Chantal seemed ready to talk about the here and now, I would ask her permission to light a fire. In the meantime I made do by tucking my fingers deeper into my pockets.

  Beyond the porch lay a patio (I think) and some open space sloping down to a lake about three times the size of the lodge’s footprint. A crow squawked from the top of a naked oak, and others answered back from the woods. I couldn’t tell from their voices if they were warning each other or inviting their friends to a late lunch.

  Chantal crooked a finger to suggest I follow her down a back hall to the right of the fireplace.

  Several bedrooms on either side contained twin beds except for a slightly larger room to the right. Two bathrooms faced each other across the center of the hall. At the end we turned right, passed a linen closet and another bedroom and four strides later faced the infamous gun room.

  Chantal waved a hand at it like a reluctant tour guide. “I think this is what you want to see,” she said, “but there really isn’t anything left.”

  Except for the sensation that something repellant had happened here, the eight-by-eight room was practically empty. A barred and padlocked display case of shotguns hung on the left-hand wall, and a formidable black safe sat back in a corner. No curtains covered the barred window that faced the direction of the road. The knotty-pine paneling had been cleaned within an inch
of its life, and the floor lacked anything but the lightest coating of dust.

  Chantal had slouched against the doorjamb, and I joined her respectfully on the other side. If we’d been sisters, we might have held hands. I monitored her face for a second, discreetly I hoped, and saw a sorrow that seemed to come from her very bones. But no tears. Thankfully, no tears.

  “Can you talk about it?” I asked.

  She blinked before meeting my eyes. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  That was when I got it. She had only come to assuage my suspicions. Had I not offered an alternative to Toby deliberately leaving life—and her—she would never have stepped foot in here again.

  “Yes,” I answered, and so we began.

  Chapter 32

  “What’s the combination for the cabinet?” I asked as Chantal and I stood fixed in the doorway of the gun room. We’d started the information ball rolling, and I wanted to get as many answers as I could before Niagara Falls resumed again.

  “Dad’s birthday,” she admitted with a wince, because now the day would always remind her of her husband’s death. The date would also be easy for the hunting guests to remember and scarcely a chore for anybody else to guess.

  “Who cleaned out the room?” Whoever it was not only eliminated any trace of Toby’s demise, they also removed every bit of furniture.

  “A company that specializes in…in jobs like this. The sheriff recommended them.”

  “There must have been furniture, right?” At least a chair.

  “Sure. A table in front of the window, an old wooden chair, a lamp, a rug.”

  More detail would have been helpful, such as which way Toby had been facing, the position of the body after death; but I might be able to get that information another way.

  With little else to do I went over and jiggled the window. Nailed shut, and all the glass panes were evenly etched a dirty white/gray by years of rain. Nobody had broken directly into this room.

  “Tell me more about the evening. Anything strike you as odd?”

  Chantal shrugged. “Dad got drunk.”

  “He doesn’t usually?”

  “It’s rare.”

  “Why that night? Any guesses?”

  Here Frank’s oldest daughter balked.

  “What?” I prompted.

  “Toby and Dad exchanged a couple of looks I didn’t understand.”

  “Ah. And Toby didn’t say anything to you that might explain the…what was it? Tension?”

  “Not tension exactly. Discomfort? My father’s a brilliant businessman, but he’s also a hardheaded SOB, and it wasn’t Toby’s job to always tell him what he wanted to hear.”

  “For example?”

  “Oh, maybe Dad was all hot to buy some company Toby thought was a dog, or sometimes he had to tell Dad one of the subsidiaries wasn’t performing up to expectations. Stuff like that. That’s really all I thought was going on.”

  So maybe being Frank’s son-in-law and closest advisor wasn’t such a lucky coup after all. Maybe Toby was performing for an audience of critics eager for a trapdoor to open under his feet. And maybe he got tired of it.

  “Know of anybody who was rooting for Toby to fail?” Your brother, for instance?

  A wry laugh. “Sure,” she said. “Absolutely. But if they did anything to undermine Toby, they were really undermining Roitman Industries; and if Dad caught wind of that, they would have been fired.”

  Right. Disgruntled ex-employees equaled suspects. When the time came, I would request a list.

  “Your brother?” He was already on my list.

  “No. Oh, no. He and Gavin got along. They even invested together now and then.”

  “Any idea how that worked out?”

  Chantal shut her eyes and shook her head. “Up and down, I guess. I don’t really know.”

  I pointed my chin toward the nearest bedroom, the last one before a tiny bathroom and only half a dozen feet from where Chantal stood. “Who slept over there?” I wondered.

  “Abby usually. It’s got that little bathroom, but mostly it’s away from the adult’s late-night shenanigans.”

  My heart clenched hearing how close the eleven-year-old had been to the shotgun blast.

  Although now that I thought of it, the child exhibited surprisingly few outward symptoms of trauma. The resilience of youth? Exposure to TV violence? Those books she reads? A top-notch therapist? Whatever it was, I was glad for the girl.

  If only I’d recovered from Brent W. Cahill’s reaction to my cancer diagnosis so well. I can still see his perfectly photogenic face turn away, watch the roll of his clenched jaw in the candlelight, follow the movement of his closed eyes as he previewed the rest of his life with—or without—me.

  “I can’t,” he announced, standing so suddenly the chair from the bistro set in my attic apartment crashed to the floor. Breath coming in short, greedy gulps, he looked like a captured animal frantic for escape. I loved the man, but suddenly he frightened me.

  “Please,” he said extending his hand.

  Please what? What did he want?

  When I failed to respond, he curved his fingers in a come-on gesture.

  Finally, I got it. His right hand had been signaling to my left, obscenely demanding that I return his ring.

  In time I understood that breaking our engagement was the best thing he could have done for me. Yet in the four years since that awful night I’ve only had half a dozen second dates.

  I eased past Cantal to check the adjacent bathroom’s window, another possible entry. It had a lever type of lock that moved as if it had been opened many times. Of course, with no exhaust fan in the room that made sense.

  Chantal shuddered from the cold, reminding me of my vow to light a fire ASAP. She readily agreed, which bode well for satisfying my curiosity. We would need to stay long enough for the fire to burn itself out.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to get one started,” Chantal admitted. “Do you?”

  “Farm girl,” I said. “Piece of cake.”

  I moved the empty grate aside and used the poker to check for a cinder depository. And there it was, a metal plate in the back of the hearth that pivoted open.

  As I began to sweep ashes into the hole, something clinked. I swept it toward me on the gray slate hearth, brushed away the ashes, and picked it up. It was a J-shaped piece of lightweight wire about two inches long. Rubbing it revealed a hint of pink and dirtied my fingers with sticky goo.

  Was it important? Hard to say, but I was curious why someone had thrown it into the fire.

  Behind me Chantal stretched and yawned. “Lana,” she suddenly exclaimed. “I remember now. Lana stayed in the back room that night. Dad snores when he’s drunk, so Abby and my mother slept in that green side room together.”

  Mention of the Roitmans’ cook made me realize what I’d found was a knitting tool. I’d seen Lana using one to make a cable up the sleeve of the yellow baby sweater. Since the hook was sticky—maybe with birthday cake or toasted marshmallow—Lana must have set it aside and reached for another or, depending on her mood, tossed it into the fire herself. Either that or somebody who didn’t know what it was couldn’t find a wastebasket.

  The only way to satisfy my overactive curiosity was to return it to its owner. However, putting the sooty, sticky item in my pocket would cause me—or Karen—a laundry problem, so I stuck it in a sandwich bag I found in the kitchen and stashed it in my purse.

  Naturally, thinking of my sister-in-law and laundry summoned up my anxiety about how Karen and Ron were getting along and how soon I needed to move out. I admit I was grateful to delay those answers a few hours longer.

  By the time I’d brought in kindling and extra logs, built the fire, opened the flue, lit the kindling, waved a lighted twist of newspaper up the chimney to start a draft, and replaced the fire screen, Chantal was half asleep under a fleece comforter.

  I disturbed her only long enough to tell her I was going outside for a while.

 
; The solid log exterior revealed no signs of forced entry into the “lodge,” a description that flattered what was essentially a clubhouse for overgrown boys. I could not for the life of me imagine Marsha here. Deciding which jewelry went with a sweatshirt and jeans must have been agony.

  Two outbuildings had been plunked down at the edge of the clearing, strategically away from the sightline to the lake. Both of plywood siding, they seemed to be recent additions, perhaps only twenty years old or so. One had a window I couldn’t see through; but with two vents under the eaves and propane tanks flanking the far side, I assumed it housed the generator and possibly some tools.

  The other was about six feet by eight. Its double doors were trimmed with white Xs like a barn. I fiddled with the padlock for a few minutes, but I didn’t know Frank’s birthday so I had no luck getting inside. Maybe when Chantal woke up.

  For a few minutes I stood listening to the woodsy noises—the breeze through the high branches, the squirrels crunching across last year’s leaves, the squawk of ducks as they landed on the little lake. Silver ripples formed Vs behind the water fowl, a fleeting, beautiful sight. I was pleased nobody was around to shoot at them.

  Back inside Chantal’s sleeping face remained a smooth canvas of contentment, her eyelashes twitching with what I hoped was a pleasant dream.

  I added a few logs to the fire. Then I took my phone into the kitchen where I’d noticed a ragged phone book in a drawer. The book had expired years ago, but the non-emergency number I needed probably hadn’t changed.

  “Sheriff’s office,” answered the dispatcher. “How may I direct your call?”

  I explained that I was “former police” and that I was “only in the area for the afternoon.” Then I asked if it would be possible for me to meet with the sheriff.

  As if he’d been right there listening, the gentleman himself came on the line.