Pineland Serenade

by Larry Millett

  “Fuck you, you motherfucker,” Cassandra said, as only she could say it.

  She tried to go faster, but Phillip was gaining on her. I had the weird sensation I was watching a play, a life-and-death drama with a cast of two.

  Make that three.

  I stood up, ahead of my thoughts for once in my life, and made a run at Phillip, not worrying whether the ice would hold me. It simply had to. He heard me coming across the snapping ice and was just turning around when I hit him full force. Our combined weight was more than the ice could bear and we broke through into the water as though we’d smashed a giant pane of glass.

  Breath rushed from my lungs and my heart seemed to stop for an instant, shocked by the cold. Then I was alive again, and all I could think of was keeping Phillip away from Cassandra, forever. I pushed down on his shoulders and I remember looking into his fierce dark eyes as he disappeared beneath the water. But he kicked away and I couldn’t keep him under. He came up, screaming and fighting, and got his hands around my throat, slowly forcing my head down. I tried to grab his gun but I couldn’t reach it and I started gulping in water, a dead man in the making.

  Then Phillip pulled away and when I popped out of the water, gasping for air, I saw Cassandra at the edge of the ice, lying on her stomach. She was handcuffed but had managed to grab Phillip by the hair and was yanking at him with all her strength. Then she started losing her grip. She slid forward on the ice, screamed out a loud “fuck” and splashed violently into the water.

  The cold was inviting me into unconsciousness like a curtain dropping down on my life. The play was about to end. There were sounds—Cassandra crying out, Phillip cursing, water splashing everywhere as though we were just three kids having fun in a backyard pool. Then Phillip had a gun in his hand and I recall thinking, pointlessly, whether it could actually be fired when wet.

  “Keep fighting!” Cassandra shouted and I saw her struggling with Phillip, trying to get the gun. But he had a madman’s wild strength and bashed the butt of the pistol against her head. She fell away and that’s when I heard a muffled sound. The gun dropped from Phillip’s hand and I saw blood gushing from a hole in his neck. He looked right at me, with a kind of stony regret, and said, “Almost.” Then the man known to everyone in Pineland as the Reverend Ronnie Peterson slipped away into the unforgiving waters of Fortune Lake.

  45

  I don’t remember all of what happened afterwards. Arne told me he tried to reach me after shooting Phillip, but the ice was too thin. I know I struggled to keep Cassandra from going under. She’d received a vicious blow to the head and appeared to be unconscious. I treaded water for as long as I could, holding on to Cassandra by the collar of her blouse, but I began to feel numb, confused and sleepy, a dying man ready to drop out of this world. Then I heard someone yelling at me to “hold on” and that’s where my memories end.

  Arne saved us with the help of two state troopers who found a ladder and a plastic sled in Arlen Sandquist’s garage. One of the troopers, a very brave man, managed to reach us on the ladder. He yanked Cassandra out first and Arne got her into the sled and pushed her back to shore. The trooper held onto me until more help arrived to pull me from the water, a dubious trophy fish if there ever was one.

  After that there was movement and light and I was aware my clothes were gone and I was a newborn, swaddled in blankets. I later learned my core temperature registered 88.4 degrees when I arrived at Mercy Hospital in Pineland—cold, but not cold enough to kill me.

  Recovering Phillip’s body took more time. Rescue crews chopped a channel in the ice and went out with boats and dragging hooks. They found him in fourteen feet of water, his long black beard turned into an icy tangle, as though he was some tentacled, prehistoric fish. Arne’s shot, fired from thirty feet away as he lay on his belly, had torn through Phillip’s carotid artery, and he was dead by the time he reached the bottom of the lake.

  Arne told me later at the hospital that he’d gone out on the ice after hearing Phillip shout Cassandra’s name, followed by the gunshot. Like me, he quickly discovered how treacherous the ice was. He was creeping ahead on all fours when another sound caught his attention.

  “I heard you go through the ice,” he said, “and to be honest, I thought I’d be next. But I kept going and then I saw you and Phillip in the water just as Cassandra was crawling up to help. I have to give it to her: that woman’s got genuine brass balls. From what I could tell, it looked like Phillip was pretty well on his way to drowning you, so I had to take the shot.”

  “I’m very glad you did.”

  Arne grinned and said, “I suppose I’ll be going to hell for saving a lawyer’s life.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be there to keep you company.”

  Cassandra’s condition was much worse than mine. She was severely hypothermic by the time paramedics got her to the hospital. I found out the next day that she’d also suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. Phillip had shot her as she ran out on the lake and vanished into the fog. It wasn’t a critical wound but the doctors said the bullet had missed her femoral artery by less than inch. She’d come that close to bleeding out.

  The blow to her head was far more serious, causing a nasty concussion. She was airlifted to Regions Hospital in St. Paul, where she was in intensive care for three days as doctors fought to control swelling of her brain. I went down to see her as soon as I could, but she was in and out of consciousness so we couldn’t talk much. Her adoptive parents—the Ellises of Wheaton, Illinois—came up to be with her and I had a chance to meet them. They seemed very nice, but also very quiet and pale, and I knew Cassandra’s powerful drive must have come from elsewhere, deep in her genes.

  Cassandra finally turned the corner after three days, and the doctors didn’t think she’d suffered any permanent damage. By Friday she was well enough to speak to investigators about her terrifying hours with Phillip, and she offered up an immediate revelation, based on what her brother had told her. Hours later a team of Paradise County sheriff’s deputies and BCA agents dug out the patio behind Arlen Sandquist’s house and found the remains of Patricia Gordon, right where Peter had buried her thirty-two years earlier. An autopsy showed she’d been shot once through the head.

  I’d suspected the same thing, especially after seeing the flowers Phillip had placed on the patio. But I had no proof, so I was reluctant to call in the diggers until I had solid evidence that Patricia Gordon was buried there. Cassandra provided that.

  The exact circumstances of Patricia’s death may never be known, but I believe Peter shot her the day after she arrived at his lake cabin with their infant son. Maybe she threatened him with exposure or demanded he marry her or maybe Peter simply decided she was a problem he couldn’t afford to deal with any longer. After burying her behind the cabin, he poured the concrete for the patio himself, sealing her away. Then he arranged for Phillip’s adoption, claiming Patricia had left for points unknown after abandoning the baby. No one questioned his story—not Arne’s father or Marty’s father or mine.

  How Phillip knew his father had murdered Patricia and buried her behind the lake cabin is a mystery to this day. But Phillip had a genius for finding things out—he spent his whole adult life detecting his own history—and at some point he ferreted out the truth.

  Once Cassandra had given her statement, I was able to talk with her. It was a warm Saturday afternoon and she was in a regular room by then, eager to leave her confinement. “Shit food, shit gowns, shit TV and no fucking sleep” was her summation of the hospital experience.

  “You forgot to mention how your life was saved,” I said. “I think that’s a fairly important oversight on your part.”

  “I know, you’re right. The doctors and nurses have been great.”

  She was propped up in bed, wearing a loose gown and the usual hospital jewelry in the form of tubes and ports and monitors. She looked tired and a little
down, her smooth sass chastened by the always informative experience of nearly dying. She was wearing a throwaway hospital cap—a chunk of her hair had been shaved off—and there were bags under her eyes. But she was eager to expel the poison memories of her terrifying hours with Phillip. I think she believed the more she talked about the experience the better she’d feel.

  “Well,” she began, shaking her head, “I guess it should have been pretty fucking obvious all along. The name was a dead giveaway.”

  “I suppose, but Peterson is a really common name in these parts. I looked in one of my venerable old phonebooks and found thirty of them in Pineland alone. So I think we can be excused for not making the leap from Peterson to Peter’s son.”

  “Maybe. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone else, either. Ronald, by the way, is his real middle name. Phillip Ronald Gordon. It’s a name I’ll never forget.”

  “Me either. So tell me, what happened when he snatched you from the funeral home?”

  Cassandra said Phillip knew we were at the funeral home because he’d attached a tracking device to my Prius—a likelihood I should have accounted for. When Cassandra went out to the parking lot to fetch her granola bars, Phillip suddenly pulled up in a white van and aimed a gun at her head.

  “He said he’d kill me in a second if I screamed or made a scene, but I did anyway. I thought I was dead right there so why not at least put up a fight? That’s when he whacked me the first time with his pistol. I was stunned. He dragged me into his van and handcuffed me in the back. Incidentally, you’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “No, I don’t mean what happened at the lake. Phillip wanted to go into the funeral home and shoot you before he left with me. He figured you were the only other person who might know his true identity. But a car pulled into the lot—somebody must have thought the funeral home was open—so he decided to leave.”

  On the way to Sandquist’s house, Phillip delivered what Cassandra described as “a raging madman’s monologue. It just went on and on and on. Peter had arranged a wonderful life for me but treated him like shit. I’d gone to Harvard, he’d been abused by a child molester. Nothing was fair. He’d been screwed and now he was exacting the justice all of his tormentors deserved.”

  “Did he tell you what happened to Peter and Dewey?”

  “He confessed to everything. He said he killed them and gloated about it. Your friend Marty was a different story. Phillip didn’t plan at first to kill him, but apparently Marty began to suspect who Phillip actually was. After that, Marty had to go.”

  “And I became the fall guy for his murder.”

  “You did. Phillip went to a lot of trouble to set you up. The whole Serenader thing was pure genius from his point of view. He was just as proud about what he did to the sheriff. Care to guess where he got that incriminating photo of the hooker in Arne’s lap?”

  “I’m guessing it came from Peter.”

  “No, he got it from Marty after that hooker—what’s her name again?—died.”

  “Jill Lorrimer.”

  “Right. Phillip claimed Marty was actually involved in covering up her death.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Marty was a decent man but he just fell in with the wrong people. How did Jill really die?”

  “She overdosed at Peter’s mansion and died right in his living room. The prospect of explaining away a dead hooker didn’t appeal to Peter, so he convinced Marty, who’d been partying with him, to put her in her car and drive back to her apartment. You know the rest.”

  “How did Phillip figure out what happened?”

  “Marty was a member of Phillip’s church, remember? I guess Phillip became his father confessor of sorts and Marty must have spilled out the whole story. Phillip was really good at insinuating himself into other people’s lives and he knew how to make useful friends. He told me he also got a lot of dirt from that scumbag who publishes the Tattler.”

  “Tommy Redmond. That’s interesting. I used to wonder why the Call of God Church advertised so much in Tommy’s rag. Now we know.”

  Cassandra shifted in the bed, looking for a more comfortable spot. “God, I want to get out of here. The doctors say maybe tomorrow if everything looks good.”

  “I hope that happens. What else did your learn from Phillip? It sounds like he wanted to unburden himself.”

  “He did, and I think I know why. When he kidnapped me and couldn’t get at you, he knew the game was over. I was going to be the last piece before he died. I’m pretty sure he planned to kill himself once he killed me.”

  “The Alexander the Great thing? No more worlds to conquer?”

  “Exactly. He’d gone as far as he could with his scheme of revenge and he had nothing else to live for. Even if he somehow managed to claim Peter’s estate, I don’t think the money would have meant much to him. He would have been a man without a purpose.”

  “And all that seething anger and hate went back to his time at the Biersdorf home. Did he talk at all about being molested?”

  “In graphic detail, believe me. It sounds like it was horrific. That’s where that song comes in.”

  “You mean ‘Pineland Serenade.’”

  “Right. Biersdorf played a recording of it every afternoon at his group home as a call to dinner. Once they heard it, the foster kids would come marching down the steps and stand at the table. When the music stopped, they’d eat. Phillip told me he played it over the house’s speaker system when he shot the Biersdorfs.”

  “The song must have haunted him. That’s why he left snippets of it behind with his messages. In a terrible sense, it was the story of his life.”

  “I suppose you could say that. In any case, he certainly took his vengeance against the Biersdorfs, but only after they’d revealed Peter was his real father.”

  “So that’s how he found out. What year was that again?”

  “The Biersdorfs were murdered in two-thousand-one. Phillip was just sixteen then. He told me the voices heard behind the music on some of the audio files were his and Biersdorf’s. He said that on one of them you could hear him say, ‘I’ll kill you.’ The BCA guys confirmed that when I talked to them. It’s pretty chilling when you think about it. A kid makes a death threat and then not only carries it out but gets away with the crime.”

  “Yeah, he was amazing in a terrible sort of way. He commits a double murder at age sixteen, but no one can pin it on him. Presumably, he then goes out on his own when he turns eighteen in two-thousand-three. So what was he doing all those years before he came to Pineland as the Reverend Ronnie?”

  “He didn’t talk much about that, although he hinted he’d spent some time in prison.”

  “For what?”

  “He was involved in some kind of financial scam, maybe in Texas. The way he put it, he was ‘out of commission’ for quite a while before he arrived in Pineland. Which was when?”

  “Twenty-fourteen,” I said. “The same year I was elected county attorney. I remember because he started showing up at court hearings for criminal defendants. He introduced himself and said he was there doing God’s work.”

  “More like the devil’s work. Do you know how he took over that church of his? He downloaded child porn on the pastor’s computer and then notified the police. The pastor was never convicted because it couldn’t be proved he actually downloaded the stuff. But the congregation booted him out anyway and Phillip, who’d gotten one of those phony online divinity degrees, talked his way into becoming the new pastor.”

  “That’s nasty.”

  “No shit. But you know what? Phillip was bent from the start. Being sexually abused as a child made everything much worse but even before then there was something wrong in his head.”

  “You think he was a psychopath?”

  Cassandra nodded. “Gold-plated. Also nuts, yet incredibly smart
and organized. A bad combination.”

  “I agree. Okay, what happened once you got to Sandquist’s house?”

  “I knew he was going to kill me and I decided I wouldn’t go down without a fight. I tried to keep him talking as long as I could. Everything he said was crazy, wild stuff. It was like the safety valve that allowed him to function as a rational human being and make all of his plans suddenly burst open, and out came the boiling madness. He went up to me at one point to lecture me eye to eye, and that’s when I got hold of a big ceramic gnome and hit him right across the face. I think I broke his nose. I ran out the door and onto the lake. He shot at me and I remember it felt like a really bad bee sting. But I kept going until he lost me in the fog. And then the Honorable Paul Zweifel came to the rescue.”

  “I think I’d give more credit to the gnome. And to Arne, for sure. All I did was fall into the water.”

  “Well, I thank you for it,” she said. “You are now officially my favorite person in the marvelous town of Pineland.”

  “I take that as a high honor. So if you do get freed from hospital jail tomorrow, what’s your plan?”

  “Back to Chicago. The partners have called to offer their deepest sympathies and oh, by the way, will I be able to handle that important case coming up next week? It’s nice to know how highly valued my life is.”

  “Well, I for one appreciate you and all you’ve done. You just may be the most remarkable person I’ve ever met.” I bent over and kissed her on the cheek. “Take care.”

  “What about you? Any big plans?”

  “I’m too old to have big plans. I’ll be going back to Pineland. Camus needs my exquisite company.”

  “You can’t get away, can you?”

  “From Pineland? No, I guess not, but I probably should. ”

  Cassandra shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. You’re a Pinelander through and through. It’s where you belong. You know that, don’t you?”