Chapter Eighteen
At ten that morning the sun on the snow across the field was dazzling. And deceptive. Stepping out of the warm kitchen to follow Ray and Bruce off the back deck, Judith reeled back, her cheeks seared by an uncompromising wind out of the north.
Ohmygosh was Ray right about needing something to cover my face, she thought, pulling the fleece neck warmer she had borrowed from Mallory up and over her nose. She had resisted at first, anxious to keep her makeup unblemished. Earlier that morning she had fussed in front of the mirror even though she knew better: Fishing is not a girly sport.
Talk about wasted effort, she thought as she tromped through the snow behind the two men, but looking beautiful is not worth freezing to death.
“Hey, wait for me,” came a shout from the side of the house. Kenzie Steidl waved as she ran toward where everyone had gathered in the driveway of Rudd’s house. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Not to worry,” said Ray, “but it’s so cold I thought maybe you decided not to join us.”
Judith noticed Kenzie was well prepared for the cold: Black insulated boots came almost to her knees, where they met the edges of a heavy sheepskin coat. A red plaid hat with earflaps had been pulled so far down on her forehead that Judith could barely make out her eyes. Like Judith, she wore a neck warmer up to her nose, but hers was reinforced with a rainbow-colored wool knit scarf. Sheepskin-lined mitts covered both her hands.
Ray and Bruce had paused to wait, too. “C’mon, ladies, stand still too long and you’ll freeze in place.” They were pulling long plastic sleds with blue tarps covering their contents.
“Why aren’t we driving out?” asked Kenzie when she reached them. “Warmer that way.”
“Nah,” said Ray, “that’s sissy fishing. We’re tough—we can make it across the field easy and fish right off the shore in that little bay. Too many razzbonyas further out. I want quiet water where it’s not too deep. Ready, everyone?”
Crossing the field was easy. Rudd had contracted with a neighbor to plow a trail wide enough for cross-country skiing. The trail started behind the house and ran down to the shoreline where it continued parallel to the shore. The good news was the trail made it easy to walk in their heavy boots; the bad news was no protection from the wind.
Turning her back whenever a gust hit so hard that her eyes watered, Judith began to wonder if she had been too eager to give ice fishing a try. “Honestly, Ray, this is brutal,” she shouted into the wind.
All she got was a thumbs-up from the well-padded, six-foot-six figure wearing a fish on his head. She shook her head and smiled to herself. How on earth did I get here? But she kept going.
At the shoreline, they plunged through snow over a foot deep to where they could walk along a snowmobile trail leading into the bay where Ray wanted to fish. To Judith’s relief, they hadn’t gone far when a stand of balsams crowding the shoreline sheltered them from the wind.
“This is good,” said Ray, pulling his sled to a stop. He had been right about too many fishermen. Peering out across the big lake, Judith saw what seemed like a city of wooden shacks and pickup trucks dotting the ice and clustered as if to keep one another warm. But there was no one in the bay.
“First, we need a fire,” said Ray. He yanked the tarp off one of the sleds to expose several lengths of firewood.
“That’s not much wood,” said Bruce. He glanced back at the distance they had just trekked. “A lot of effort for twenty minutes of fishing.”
“No,” said Ray, “I’m sending you into the woods over there to see if you can find some more.” He looked chagrined after pulling the tarp off the second sled. “Actually, I thought I brought more. Guess I was in too much of a rush. Damn.”
“Hold on,” said Kenzie, pointing behind them in the direction of the field they had just crossed. “I see a pile of logs over by the trees there—on the left. I’ll run over and grab some.”
“Yeah,” said Ray, looking in that direction, “looks like someone clear-cut a small section. Sure, go see what you can get.”
“I’ll help,” said Judith, anxious to keep moving.
“Wait,” said Ray as he bent over the second sled to unload six tip-ups, four folding chairs, a bucket full of minnows, a cooler, a thermos of hot chocolate, another thermos of coffee, five jig poles, and plastic containers of waxies and nightcrawlers.
“What’s in the cooler?” asked Judith.
“Sandwiches—peanut butter and liver sausage. Now, you two take this sled with you. That’ll make it easy.”
The snowmobile trail wound close to the shoreline so the going was easy. Even so, it appeared someone had run a plow up to the woodpile.
“I’m not sure about this,” said Kenzie, staring down at the logs. “These look so freshly cut, I’m not sure the wood will burn. But what the heck, let’s give it a try.”
With that, she and Judith began stacking the split logs onto the sled. As Judith reached for one that was near the bottom of the pile, she was surprised to find what appeared to be a metal pipe right beneath it. She pushed several pieces of wood back, exposing bare ground and another pipe-like object.
“That’s odd,” said Kenzie. “Looks like someone cut the wood to keep whatever this is covered. I wonder if someone is trying to put in a well? That shouldn’t happen—this land belonged to my dad. Well, to Rudd’s museum now. It’s posted, so no hunting and stuff. Weird.”
Minutes later, as they unloaded the sled by the bonfire, which Ray had started, they mentioned what they had found. “Really?” asked Bruce. “That’s an odd spot for a well. Maybe it’s a sprinkler system.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Kenzie. “I’ll ask Greg if there’s some building going on around here. I know Vern bought a back forty from my father years ago, but that’s further down the road and there’s already houses on it.”
“Hold on while I finish these holes,” said Ray, who was hard at work with a gas-powered ice auger. When water had splashed up through the fourth hole, he stepped back and turned to scan the field behind them. “Tell me again what you saw . . . ”
Judith repeated the description of what they had uncovered.
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Ray. “That land isn’t cultivated, so it can’t be a sprinkler system.”
“I wonder if Rudd had the architects out to walk the site for the museum,” said Judith. “She didn’t tell me she’d gone that far yet. I know the conceptual plans have been drawn but not site development. And in the middle of winter?”
“Ladies, let me get you set with tip-ups, then Bruce and I will take a look,” said Ray. “Judith, you ready?” asked Ray, demanding her full attention as he knelt in front of one of the holes in the ice. “This wooden platform here . . . is rigged with this fishing line here . . . and a spring with a red flag on it. Now, watch me . . . ” He slipped a shiny silver minnow onto the hook and dropped it through the hole in the ice. “When that red flag pops up—you’ve got a fish.”
“Ohmygod, then what do I do? Yikes.”
“You holler at me or Bruce. We’ll take care of it.” With that, Ray rigged another tip-up for Judith and two for Kenzie. Then he and Bruce headed toward shore to see what it was that had been hidden beneath the woodpile.
Chapter Nineteen
After the two men had moved half a dozen more of the split logs, they uncovered yet another metal pipe stuck in the ground. Ray shook his head and glanced over at Bruce with a question in his eyes. “I have no idea what this could be. Maybe someone planning to build a deer stand?”
“Looks to me like a half-assed attempt at soil testing,” said Bruce, kicking at one of the pipes that had been sunk down into the ground. “Just recently my brother-in-law had a crew out to his place to bore down and check out the quality of the sand on his property. The mining team brought in a similar setup. This looks pretty do-it-yourself if you ask me, though I wouldn’t blame ’em for trying.
“After all, if you’re sitting on good silicone sand
—and they recently learned that northern Wisconsin has the best in the country—then it could be worth a lot of money. The oil companies who are fracking for oil in North Dakota are desperate for quality sand.”
“So . . . if you had a field full of the right kind of sand,” said Ray, turning to gaze across the field and back toward the faint outline of Rudd’s winged home, “what would that be worth?”
“Millions,” said Bruce. “If I want to believe what my brother-in-law said, we’re talking serious money. Worth futzing around like this to see if you can get enough of a sample to justify the cost of bringing in a team of experts.” Bruce looked across the expanse of snow reaching all the way to the main house. “And if you had a whole field full? Probably build and operate a full-scale mining operation right there.”
“So Rudd Tomlinson may have wanted to build her museum on land worth millions?”
“Could be. But who knows how the testing went?”
“I’m more interested in who did the testing.” Ray’s eyes met Bruce’s. “That cell phone of yours take okay photos in this cold?”
“Believe so.” They paused for a moment to study the bay and the bonfire. “I sure hope that new wood burns okay,” said Bruce. “When we finish here, I’d still like you to teach me your jigging technique.”
“We’ll have time,” said Ray, watching as Bruce held his phone out to take a series of photos from different angles. “Hey, how many bars does that phone show—enough to make a call?”
“Looks like it. Want me to call Chief Ferris?”
“We’d better. My instructions were to let her know if I saw anything unusual on the Tomlinson property. Since it didn’t occur to me to walk the property lines this far from the house, I’d feel better if she was aware someone has been in the area.”
Lew took Bruce’s call immediately. After listening to his theory and checking the photos that he had emailed in before they spoke, she said, “Good. Now if you and Ray can ballpark when that testing might have happened that would be very helpful.
“But whatever you, do don’t say a word relative to any soil testing to Kenzie or Judith. Sand mining has become a hot potato in this county, and I don’t want news like this to get out until we know more. Meanwhile, thanks. This puts a whole new spin on things.
“Gotta go. Tim Tomlinson is due here later for his interview with Doc and myself. It’ll be interesting to hear if he knows anything about someone fooling around with soil testing.”
As Bruce tucked his phone back into his parka and pulled his mitts on, he said, “She’d like to know if we have any idea when this testing might have taken place.”
“I figured as such,” said Ray. “While you were talking, I checked the stand of balsams running along here for sign of anyone entering from a nearby logging road, but I didn’t see anything.
“I think they came by snowmobile. The lake has been frozen over since early December, so they could have been here any time over the last six weeks or so. I know how deep the snow is out on the lake, so I compared that with the height of the snow on these logs, which is a lot less. Since we haven’t had a melt in weeks, I’m guessing the wood to cover the test site was cut within the last three weeks.
“Ray! Ray! I got a fish, hurry!” It was Judith hollering from one of her tip-ups. She was jumping up and down like a kid on Christmas morning.
“Okeydoke, I’m coming, I’m coming,” Ray shouted back. He winked at Bruce. “Hope I can get her that excited later tonight.”
“Pradt, you are incorrigible,” said Bruce, grinning as he shook his head. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Back at the fire, Ray helped Judith slip her fish from the hook. “This is a decent-sized walleye, Miss Fordham. May I invite you . . . later this evening . . . to my humble abode where . . . I will sauté this beauty . . . in the finest Wisconsin butter? You,” he pointed his mitt at her, “deserve only . . . the best for such a prize. May I?”
Judith giggled. “Oh, all right. You’ll have to put your address in my GPS, though. I have no idea where you live.”
“I can do that,” said Ray, slipping another minnow onto her line.
Meanwhile Kenzie, sitting near the fire with a mug of hot chocolate between her mitts, asked, “So what do you guys think about those weird pipes we found?”
“Just something left from years ago,” said Ray. “Once upon a time your dad might have wanted to put in a tank to hold minnows or a fish hatchery. Something like that.” Kenzie shrugged, satisfied with Ray’s answer. She kept both eyes focused on her tip-ups.
“Hey, my turn, Ray,” said Bruce before Judith had a chance to quiz Ray further. “You keep bragging you have a secret lure for jiggermen. Better show me before I freeze to death out here.”
“All right already,” said Ray.
He picked up the ice auger and drilled two new holes in the ice—one for him and one for Bruce. Then he pulled over two of the folding chairs and beckoned for Bruce to sit beside him. Holding a short jigging rod in one hand, he sorted through his tackle box while saying, “Last time I used this, I caught a thirty-one-and-a-half-inch walleye—so be prepared.”
He pulled out a lurid green jig and showed it to Bruce. “Here’s the secret: This is an eight-ounce jig and it has to be chartreuse. Not red like every other jabone uses. But chartreuse. And . . . you have to have a very sharp tip . . . now you add a one-and-a-half-inch nightcrawler . . . ” Ray fished in his tackle box for the plastic container holding his worms. “Then you jig . . . but keep your jig within a couple inches of the bottom . . . like this, see?”
“Ah,” said Bruce, “that’s why you wanted this shallow bay, huh? I wondered why. And no Vexilar?” he asked, referring to a fish locater that is standard equipment for most ice fishermen. Ray shook his head. “Nope. No need to hook that up. I know who’s lurking down below us.” He raised his eyebrows as he grinned an evil, happy grin.
“You do that with no gloves?” asked Judith, who had walked over to watch.
“You have to,” said Ray. “Can’t feel the tug otherwise. Like they say . . . the tug is the drug, doncha know.”
“Oh, my fingers would freeze.” Judith shivered at the thought.
“Your turn, bud.” Ray handed Bruce one of his chartreuse jigs and the container of worms. Bruce got his line ready with jig and nightcrawler. He moved his chair so he could sit over the other hole in the ice. The two men sat jigging in silence, their hands naked in the below-zero weather. Judith, watching, finally asked, “Does that lure you’re using have to be chartreuse?”
Ray didn’t answer her question.
Instead he said, “These two fishermen were out in their boat one day when they heard a woman screaming. So they rushed across the water to her dock, where she told them that her fluffy little dog had been swimming when ‘all of a sudden Tiffy was gone. Eaten by a big fish!’ ‘How big a fish?’ asked one of the fishermen. She held her hands four feet apart. ‘This big—I saw it grab my little Tiffy.’ ‘That’s a heck of a big muskie,’ said the other fisherman. ‘So, lady, what color was your dog?’”
Judith stood with a perplexed look on her face for a long minute, then she laughed. “O-o-kay, I get it.”
Bruce, meanwhile, was aware that Ray had told his story without his usual hostage-taking pauses, which meant one thing: He must have sand on his mind. Like Bruce, he was ready to get back to town.
Time, they agreed half an hour later, to stop by a certain office before it closed.
Chapter Twenty
Judith had expected to be out on the ice for at least an hour. But in spite of Bruce’s excitement after landing two good-sized walleyes, one right after the other, Ray started loading the gear back onto sleds. “Quitting so soon?” asked Judith, taken aback.
“Hey,” said Kenzie, “what’s the deal? We’ve been here less than an hour.”
“Had a text from Chief Ferris,” said Ray as he folded the canvas chairs and wedged his cooler into one of the sleds. “She needs Bruce and
me in town to check on something. Sorry, ladies, but I promise we’ll walk on water another time.”
“Hope so,” said Judith, wondering what had happened while the two men were checking out the woodpile. Ever since they’d walked back to the bonfire, they had seemed jumpy.
Even Ray’s manner had changed: less teasing, fewer jokes. Yes, she was sure something had happened, something related to those odd metal pieces stuck in the ground. Hoping that Ray and Bruce’s behavior had something to do with why and how her dearest friend had been pushed to her death, she pitched in to help load the sleds.
As the four of them trudged back to the house, Judith asked, “As far as dinner at your place, Ray, are we still on or—”
“Yep.”
“Shall I bring Mallory along, too? If Bruce is going to be there . . . ”
“Oh, I won’t stay long,” said Bruce. “I’ll eat and run.”
“Bring Mallory?” Ray repeated Judith’s query with a perturbed look on his face. “Maybe not . . . Not sure if I have enough fish. We’ll include her next time.”
“Oh, okay,” said Judith. She liked the sound of “next time.”
Reaching the house, they walked around to the front where Kenzie had parked. Bruce opened the door of a small red sedan and helped her climb into the driver’s seat. As she backed out of the driveway, he turned to Ray. “Didn’t you say that the car seen parked behind the Grizzly Bear Café right about the time that Rudd Tomlinson was killed was a red sedan?
“Was it a Honda Accord like the one our friend is driving?” He pointed to the red car disappearing down the road toward the Steidls’s house.
“Yeah,” said Ray, “the guy who saw it didn’t know what year, though. But yes, he said it was a red Honda.”
“Chief?” Dani poked her head into Lew’s office. “I found those records you wanted. They moved the archives down to the courthouse basement so it took me awhile. They’re kinda hard to read.” She handed two files over to Lew. Dani was right. They looked hard to read.
Dead Rapunzel Page 12
