Pineland Serenade

by Larry Millett

  “Christ, Arne, don’t be such a dick. I was just being careful. In case you’ve forgotten, Peter has disappeared and he was probably kidnapped. I didn’t want to be the second victim.”

  “Well, we’d certainly miss you. Tears and lamentations would engulf Paradise County, I’m sure.”

  I wanted to punch Arne, but he had a big gun and I didn’t. “All right, be a shithead, but the message is pretty disturbing, if you ask me.” Like the Serenader’s earlier communications, the message—affixed to the door with four thumbtacks—was brief but evocative. It read:

  Who will be next? Old sins are the worst sins and evil is casting its shadow. Only THE WOMAN can see through the lies. Do not forget Lorrimer. Let the truth shine forth.

  The Serenader

  The Jasons, who seemed to have become permanent residents of Pineland, arrived at my house less than an hour later and seized the message and thumb drive as evidence. Arne was apparently under orders to defer to the two wizards from the BCA, so he was content to stand around and smirk when the Jasons turned their attention to me. As the man who appeared to be doing public relations for the Serenader by conveniently finding his messages, I was naturally a subject of great interest.

  Jason Braddock, who was taller and smarter than the namesake who tagged along with him, immediately hinted, as had Arne, that I’d posted the message and thumb drive myself.

  “And why would I do that?” I asked. “To get attention? To be irritating just for the hell of it? Because I have an old typewriter that’s growing rusty and needs some use? Or because, as Arne seems to believe, I’m simply a moron?”

  “I like that last one you mentioned,” Jason said with a smirk.

  “You know, I’m really tired of the accusation that I’m the world’s stupidest human being. It offends me, Jason. For the life of me, I don’t know why you and Arne are so convinced I’ve concocted some stupid scheme to write and then find my own messages. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe you’re just being doubly clever. You’re a smart guy who’s pretending to be dumb. I’ve seen it before.”

  Arne had once made the same argument and I was tired of it. “So by your logic, if I were pretending to be smart, you’d never suspect me. Did you ever read Catch-22, Jason? You might find it enlightening.”

  “I’ll put it on my reading list. But here’s the deal: this is becoming a very suspicious pattern with you. Do you really expect us to believe somebody is going to such elaborate efforts just to make you look bad?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, “with all my heart.”

  What more could I say? Jason wouldn’t believe the truth, which was that I was being targeted by the Serenader as part of his game, so I finally dummied up. “We’ve been through all this before. I’ve told you what I know, and that’s all I can do. But here’s a friendly suggestion: Maybe you should be looking into the Jill Lorrimer case. The Serenader thinks something untoward occurred. Why don’t you see what Arne has to say about it? You might even discover a big cover-up. That would look good on your resume.”

  Jason, who made an art of condescension, emitted something from his tight little mouth that resembled laughter and said, “You’d like to send me off on a wild-goose chase, wouldn’t you? Won’t work. Nobody gives a shit about some hooker who ODed.”

  The BCA’s resident genius would live to regret those words sooner than he could imagine, but in the meantime he kept after me until I finally told him he should get the hell out of my house. He was sitting in a big stuffed chair Camus had always viewed as his own, and when he stood up to go, Camus made a beeline for the chair, growling at Jason along the way.

  “Sorry, but my dog is something of a rebel,” I said. “He’s suspicious of authority figures.”

  “Seems to be a trait in this household,” Jason said. “By the way, before I leave, I’d like to search your house for additional evidence. Just a routine thing.”

  “I’m sure it is and you’re perfectly welcome to do so as long as you have a warrant.”

  “Have it your way,” he said, heading toward the door. “We’re not through.”

  “Good to hear. I’m always delighted to see you.”

  17

  The message on my front door was the beginning of a frantic spell of days. Pineland, where time usually beats with a slow, steady pulse, unhurried by circumstance, lost all sense of rhythm and order. There were new crimes and revelations, and a sense that our little town was unraveling. The news media, attracted to mystery and mayhem, arrived in force to broadcast our miseries to the world. All the while the Serenader moved among us, our ghost in residence, and we couldn’t be sure if he was our nightmare or our savior.

  I was preparing for my nightly battle with insomnia just after eleven when Arne called.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you up,” he said, not very convincingly. “You’re not with that Ellis woman, are you?”

  The question irritated me. Did everyone in town, Arne included, think Cassandra and I were an item?

  “No, Arne, she’s not here, so you can dismiss whatever prurient thoughts you’re having.”

  “I’ll leave that sort of thing to you, counselor. Any idea where she might be?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Well, we went over to the hotel to ask her a few questions but were told she’d checked out. We found her cell number and called it but it went straight to voice mail. So we’re just wondering if you’ve seen her today or talked with her.”

  “I haven’t, but that’s not surprising. I’m sure somebody told her about Tommy Redmond’s blog post. I doubt she wants that kind of attention. She doesn’t seem to have much confidence in me of late, either. I have no idea where she went or what she’s up to. She’s never shared her cell phone number with me, so I wouldn’t even know how to reach her. Maybe she went back to Chicago.”

  “If she did, her office doesn’t know about it.”

  “Well then, I guess it’s a mystery. But you know the woman. Cassandra isn’t the trusting sort. I get the impression she thinks she can figure out what’s going on here all by herself.”

  “Yeah, well, let her think what she wants. All I know is that we need to talk to her right away.”

  There was urgency in Arne’s voice, and it worried me. Had something happened to Cassandra? “What’s going on, Arne? Are you suggesting she may have met with foul play?”

  “How the fuck would I know? All we’re sure of is that she left the hotel in a hurry early this evening even though she’d been booked for the full week.”

  “Did she say why she was leaving early?”

  “Well, that would have been mighty nice of her but, no, she didn’t.”

  “Why are you so eager to talk to her? Rumor around town is that you’ve identified the Serenader. Does it have something to do with that?”

  “No comment,” Arne said. “But if you do see her, you let me know pronto.”

  “Sure. There’s one other thing you should be aware of.” I told him about my run-in with Dewey and Cassandra’s request for his DNA. “Maybe Dewey knows something.”

  “Okay, I’ll check with the fat boy,” Arne said and then disconnected.

  I stared at my phone for a minute as though it was the Rosetta Stone, holding the key to a great mystery. But the phone offered no immediate answers. Where had Cassandra gone? Dark thoughts rose up from the depths and the night suddenly seemed alive with danger. There wouldn’t be much sleep for me.

  The only work of art on my living room walls is an expensive print of an Edward Hopper painting called Gas. It shows a man tending a rural gas station’s pumps at twilight. Across the road from the station and its bright lights a dark green forest fades to black, suggesting mystery and menace. Like many of Hopper’s paintings, Gas turns light into melancholy and darkness into a threat, and maybe that’s the reason I like it so much.r />
  Drive out of Pineland along a rural road as night falls and before long you’ll feel the woods closing in and the darkness becoming as deep and final as darkness can be. It’s Hopper’s night, and there’s a kind of lonely exhilaration in it, a sense of leaving one world for another. And yet if you know Paradise County you know that bad things lurk out on the woods, and darkness can be your enemy.

  When I somehow fell asleep on the couch, beneath that lonely gas station, I dreamt of being in the woods and seeing Cassandra there in a white gown and bright red scarf. She seemed to be floating through the trees, as though carried by the wind. I called out to her but before she could answer a sharp pinging sound startled me awake. I looked at my phone and saw that a text message had just come in, at twelve forty-five a.m. As far as I knew, no one except Arne, Doug and Cassandra had the number of my new cell phone. I assumed the message was from one of them. I was wrong. The text was from Dewey Swindell and all it said was, “Are we set?”

  I’d never had a text message from Dewey before and I certainly had nothing “set” with him. Had the message been intended for someone else? Or, for that matter, had Dewey actually sent it? Was I being played by someone? And how did Dewey or whoever sent the message know my new number?

  The message left me uneasy. Peter had sent me a puzzling message in the middle of the night and now his son was doing the same. I decided to respond because if I didn’t, it might look like I was actually plotting something with Dewey.

  “I don’t understand,” I replied. “Set for what?”

  “You know. The mansion. See you there.”

  “No, I don’t know. Who is this?”

  I waited for Dewey to text back but it didn’t happen. Now what? Call the authorities to report Dewey, or someone pretending to be him, had sent me a message I didn’t understand? Not exactly the stuff of an urgent 911 call. About all I could do was contact Dewey in the morning and see what he had to say.

  I somehow fell asleep again but my dream state was short-lived. Around two thirty Camus started barking and, just to make sure I’d heard him, ran his tongue across my face. Unlike the night a week earlier when I’d slept through the explosion at Peter’s mansion, I woke up immediately and heard distant sirens. Normally, I would have bribed Camus into silence with a strip of beef jerky and then gone back to sleep. But I kept on hearing more sirens, a regular parade of them, and that was unusual.

  I got up and went to the kitchen, where I have an occasionally operable police-fire scanner. I fiddled with it until I found the Pineland Fire Department’s frequency, and I quickly discovered what all the excitement was about. The old Darwin Swindell mansion was on fire.

  Long before Peter built his sprawling estate outside of Pineland, another member of the family—his grandfather, Darwin—did the same thing, only in town. Darwin’s gleaming white mansion, built in 1922 to resemble a Southern plantation home, stands on Adam Street a few blocks from the courthouse square. Like all rich men in love with their own importance, Darwin decided his mansion required an impressive-sounding name, so he dubbed the place Pinehurst. With its columned portico and grounds occupying an entire block, the mansion in its brief prime must have seemed like a shimmering antebellum mirage, Pineland’s very own Tara.

  No one seems to know how Darwin made his initial pile of money, but he had already amassed a small fortune by the time he became a major investor in, and then president of, the Paradise Paper Company, which opened its mill in Pineland in 1922. By then Darwin was married and had a young son, Harold, who would go on to become Peter’s father. Once Darwin assumed command of the paper mill, which employed three hundred workers, he became Pineland’s undisputed nabob. Like his grandson, Darwin loved the role of big man in town and played it to the hilt.

  Wilford Shay, our resident photographic genius, took a wonderful picture of the mansion and its grounds in 1928, when Darwin was still on top of the world. The photo, titled “At Play on Pinehurst’s Lawn,” presents a sweeping, deep-focus view of a croquet game in progress. Men in white linen suits and women in light summer dresses occupy much of the scene. But the picture, like so much of Old Willy’s work, offers a subversive surprise in the foreground, where an elderly Black servant, tray with icy drinks in hand, stands at the ready, his weathered face offering a subtle study in contempt.

  Every time I look at the photo, I wonder who the Black man was and how he ended up that long ago afternoon on Darwin’s perfectly manicured lawn. According to the 1920 census, Paradise County had just four African-American residents, none older than thirty-five, so Darwin must have recruited the servant from elsewhere. I suspect he wanted a Black servant to complete his Southern plantation fantasy, and so he got one, much in the way he might have chosen a piece of furniture to create the proper décor.

  The servant didn’t stay for long because Darwin enjoyed only a brief ascendancy at his magnificent estate. He was a plunger, deeply leveraged with optimism and debt, and his paper fortune went down with the stock market in 1929. A few years later, after declaring bankruptcy, he was forced to move out of his heavily mortgaged dream. Pinehurst remained vacant during the Great Depression, but a new owner finally acquired the property around 1940 and turned into a boarding house. Later, it became a nursing home, then cheap apartments as it gradually took on the air of a genteel ruin. Even so, a dozen tenants called the place home.

  But when Peter came back to Pineland, he announced plans to purchase the mansion and restore it to a state of luminous grandeur. It was matter of family pride, he said, and he promised to spare no expense to make Pinehurst once again the jewel of our town. In due time, he tossed out all the tenants, who were too poor to object, and hired a contractor to begin work.

  Reality soon intruded. Pinehurst turned out to be a mammoth money pit, full of rotten wood and bad plumbing, and it was too daunting even for Peter’s deep pockets. After a few months he abandoned the project. In the process, Peter stiffed the contractor for a hundred thousand dollars, claiming he’d done shoddy work.

  I sued Peter on the contractor’s behalf. It was my first big case in town, and I went after it with all I had. After eighteen months of thorny litigation, I won a settlement, though not for the full amount. Smarting from his loss, Peter decided to give a giant finger to his perceived tormentors by tearing the mansion down and replacing it with a big apartment complex intended to attract casino workers. So much for family pride. The neighbors objected, however, as did the handful of people in town interested in historic preservation.

  Another legal battle ensued, but I wasn’t involved. Peter finally prevailed in court early this year, dooming the old mansion. After all the legal dust had cleared, he called me one afternoon—just as he had in the case of the sweetheart hotel road project I’d blocked—to reiterate what a pain in the ass I was. “I should have burned the fucking place down,” he said, “and saved myself a lot of trouble.”

  Now, it seemed, his dream had come true.

  18

  Lawyers aren’t supposed to chase ambulances, but there’s no rule against following fire trucks, so I drove into town. I had to park three blocks away from the mansion because a huge crowd had already gathered to watch the conflagration. A dozen fire trucks were at the scene, their crews shooting arcs of water into the roaring flames. The old mansion was a giant bonfire, flames leaping from every window and bursting through the roof. Crews from neighboring communities had joined Pineland’s volunteer fire department to fight the blaze, but their efforts looked futile. There would be no need to tear the mansion down. It was gone.

  I roamed around a bit and spotted many familiar faces. Tommy Redmond was there, no doubt working on some inflammatory prose for the next edition of the Tattler or his blog. I spotted Marty Moreland chatting with Ken Michaels, perhaps getting in an early coffee order. Our local Lutheran pastor showed up and so did Reverend Ronnie. Mayor Mary Jane Bakken, looking suitably appalled, was talking to Kat B
erglund and Vern Blankenberger. Even Dale Shiffley, keeper of our local dead, had been roused out of his slumbers to take in the pageant of destruction. I didn’t spot Arne, but a couple of sheriff’s deputies were milling around, trying to look as though they actually had something to do.

  The one person notably absent from the crowd was Dewey Swindell. His message to me had indicated he’d see me at “the mansion.” Now, the only mansion of any consequence in Pineland was burning down before my eyes but there was no sign of Dewey. It was all very strange.

  “Holy cow, isn’t this something!” Doug Wifferding said, interrupting my thoughts. I hadn’t noticed him until he suddenly appeared beside me. His ferret face glowed from the fire’s reflection. Or maybe he was just excited. He had a tablet with him and was shooting video. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Think of it as desperately needed entertainment for the masses,” I said. “Looks like everybody in town is here.”

  “It’s kind of funny, isn’t it?” Doug said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know, first Peter’s mansion explodes and burns and now this. Two mansions owned by the same family gone within a week of each other in the same way. I guess it could be a coincidence, but—”

  “I really doubt it,” I said. “Any word on how the fire started?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  I left Doug to his video endeavors and went over to talk with Mary Jane Bakken. She’s one of Pineland’s good souls. Her lesbianism produced its share of foul talk around town when she ran for mayor. But she ended up winning by more than three hundred votes, and now the talk has subsided to a few lonely whispers. Attitudes change, even in Pineland.

  “Looks like a lost cause,” I said. “I’m hoping no one was in there.”

  “Me, too,” she said, “but you never know. Kids like hanging out in there at night and we’ve had to shoo them out more than once. The funny thing is, Peter had a demolition permit and the place was supposed to come down next week. Makes a person wonder.”