Dead Hot Shot (Loon Lake Fishing Mysteries) (10 page)

Sounds like a challenging life,” said Lew, her tone so offhand you would think everyone she knew was either a severe alcoholic or dedicated to controlled substances. “You plan to keep talking or do we ask questions?”

Osborne tucked his chin down so Blue couldn’t see the amused expression on his face. Lew had a way of letting people know she was unfazed by outrageous behavior. It always had the desired effect: the bad actor found her blasé response so unsettling they were left speechless. Blue was no exception. Her grin vanished and her eyes darkened with thought.

“All right, I’ll talk, but first I want to show you something,” she said, getting to her feet. “We’ve been told it’s okay to be in the house now, right?” Lew nodded. “So follow me upstairs.”

The three of them went up the stairway in silence. The spacious upstairs hallway, like the rest of the house, was tastefully furnished with rustic furniture and wildlife paintings. A crimson Oriental runner protected the pegged wood floor. Blue motioned for them to follow her to the end of the hall where she opened a door. “This was my mother’s suite,” she said. “I was rarely allowed in here.”

Lew and Osborne stepped into the unlit room behind her. Floor to ceiling drapes of a rich, cream-colored fabric were tied back to frame an expanse of glass overlooking the lake. Even though it was mid-afternoon, a combination of grey sky and cloud cover generated little light: the room was in shadows.

A pristine white coverlet was spread across the king-size bed with not a wrinkle in sight. Six matching pillows were lined up against the headboard — each angled the same degree and placed one overlapping another in identical spacing. Osborne wondered how long that took. Two etageres held a collection of paperweights sandwiched between books and albums. Elegant mahogany dressers hinted at drawers filled with expensive garments.

The door to the bath stood open and Osborne followed Lew inside. The bath might have been a display in a high-end furniture store: its fixtures of tinted glass and stainless steel along with sets of snow white towels appeared untouched by human hands. Artful arrangements of perfume bottles decorated the few shelves.

“Does anyone live here?” asked Lew. Osborne wondered the same — he saw no sign of everyday life.

“My mother. She was obsessive-compulsive. Everything had to be perfect. She made the housekeeper dust and vacuum this room twice a day, wash the bathroom floor daily and never, never move a book, a picture, anything. And one more thing.”

Blue strode across the bedroom to one of the etageres and reached for an album. As she turned towards Lew and Osborne, she flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. She turned a page, then another and held the open album out for them to see. A family photo of what had to be a young Nolan with her father and the woman likely to be her stepmother. The man’s face had been cut out of the photo.

Blue turned the page to another photo of the same man with his arm held high to display a trophy northern pike — his face cut from the photo. Blue turned several pages and opened to a photo of a youthful Nolan standing beside a dark-haired man with hornrimmed glasses. Nolan was cradling a baby in her arms so that both faced the camera. The child’s face was cut out. On the same page was a photo of what appeared to be a christening: two parents and a baby with no face.

“And you want to know why I’m fucked up,” said Blue with a wry laugh as she slammed the album shut and set it back on the shelf. “Those are the only pictures of me you will find in my mother’s family albums. Lucky for me my grandfather took lots of pictures of me — or I would never have known I had a childhood.”

• • •

Back in the kitchen, they settled down to the table again. “Blue,” said Lew, opening her notepad to a fresh page, “I’d like the name and phone number of your family’s housekeeper. She may know if anything in the house has been disturbed or is missing.”

“It’s Mrs. Schultz,” said Blue. “She took the week off to visit her family in Madison but I know she’ll be back Sunday. She lives in Rhinelander and I think her husband’s name is Albert.”

“Thanks,” said Lew, jotting the name down. “Now,” she leveled her gaze at the young woman, “we’ve been told that you were late arriving for your engagement party and that your mother was upset by this. Tell us about that, would you please?”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“It’s your house,” said Lew. Blue pulled a lighter from the pocket of her jacket, tapped the end of one cigarette on a placemat and lit up. She inhaled, then blew smoke away from the table.

“I was at my weekly AA meeting over in Minocqua,” said Blue. “Mother deliberately planned the party to conflict with my meeting so I deliberately planned to go anyway. I have a neighbor who goes, too. A young guy, lives up the road from here. We drive over and back together. Once a week, sometimes more often. Depends.” Blue hesitated as worry crossed her face. “I said too much — I don’t have to tell you his name, do I? My neighbor, I mean.”

“If I need to know, I’ll give you an opportunity to ask your friend for permission to give us his name,” said Lew.

“You’ve been recovering for a long time?” said Osborne.

“Six years,” said Blue with a nod of satisfaction. “Not always easy.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Osborne. Blue gave him an inquiring glance and he nodded.

“Ah,” she said. “So you’ve been there.”

“Yep. I go to meetings here in Loon Lake.”

“Is that how you know Ray Pradt?” asked Lew. “He indicated you two are friends.”

“Y’know, I really can’t answer that without being sure that Ray — ”

“Tell you what,” said Lew. “How ‘bout I assume how you know Ray and we’ll leave it at that. I’ll assume you see him on occasion in Minocqua. I don’t need to know where exactly.”

“And that’s true — when he’s been guiding in the area I run into him. Great guy. Tells bad jokes but he’s cute.” Blue put out her cigarette and relaxed into her chair. Osborne was relieved when she didn’t reach for another.

“Let’s go back to my relationship with my mother. See, the conundrum of being my mother’s daughter was that even as she didn’t like me, even as she forced me to live away from home all those years — she saved my life. She kept me from being around people I was likely to drink with, which is why I’m here today. And I like being alive. So I have no compelling reason to want to hurt my mother.”

“But she was forcing you into marriage.”

“Oh, right. Look at me, Chief Ferris. Do I strike you as someone who could be forced into anything?”

“But — ”

“I know what you’ve heard. Chances are the wedding was going to be called off. Barry and I kind of went along with the idea when our mothers cooked it up years ago while we were still in high school. Even then Barry and I both knew he was gay.

“But the thing is — his father doesn’t. His father is very elderly, Barry loves him dearly and he is convinced that if his dad were to find out that he’s gay — it could kill him. So we kept up the pretense when Barry was visiting and things kinda snowballed. Our mothers set that date. I’m okay with it — after all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about friendship? We’re good buddies.”

Lew studied the girl’s face, saying nothing. “Yes — well,” said Blue, breaking the silence, “there is also the fact that I owe Barry and I will do whatever he needs me to. It was Barry who found me passed out at a party years ago and got me to an emergency room. If he hadn’t, I would have died from alcohol poisoning. Like I said, I owe Barry.”

“Blue, there has to be an easier way to pay that debt than marrying a man who would much prefer a different lifestyle,” said Lew.

“It was only to last until his dad died — and he’s ninety-six!”

“So your relationship with Barry, your pending marriage has nothing to do with money?”

Blue shook her head. “No. No matter what people might think. Barry and I are like brother and sister. I would do anything for him.”

Lew flipped her notebook pages back as if looking for questions she had forgotten to ask. Osborne took the opening to ask the question that had been in the back of his mind since seeing the photo of the baby’s face so carefully excised from the family album.

“Do you have any idea why Nolan hated — maybe that’s too strong a word — why you say your mother didn’t like you?”

“Hey, no, hate is a good word for it, Dr. Osborne,” said Blue.

“And, yes, I do know why. But, first, let me make some coffee. You guys want any?”

“Yes, please,” said Lew and Osborne simultaneously. Osborne glanced out the window at a sky the color of duct tape — a little too dark for three in the afternoon. Oh well, he thought, that’s November for you. Thank the Lord for black coffee.

When I was a little kid, there were times I’d turn quick and I’d catch my mother staring at me with this weird look on her face. It was a look that made me feel ugly from the inside out. In those days, too, I heard her tell people I was called ‘Blue’ because I was born premature and looking like a little old man — skinny and wrinkled. But that wasn’t true. My grandfather called me ‘Blue’ from when I was a baby: he loved my eyes.”

Blue pushed her chair back, crossed her legs and sipped from her coffee cup. Osborne had the sense she had told this story many times before. Lew sat listening, her eyes on Blue’s face and no sense of urgency about her. Osborne knew from experience that she was happy to let Blue talk — and for as long as she needed. When they compared notes later, it could well be the words not said that might be most telling.

“It’s not like she was angry all the time,” said Blue, “but I never knew when she might turn on me. When she did it was a full-frontal assault: she would accuse me of lying, of stealing, of all sorts of bad behavior. When I tried to say I hadn’t done anything, she would fly into a rage and come after me, start hitting me. If it hadn’t been for Andy.

“It wasn’t until I was older, in my early teens, that I would hear her insist that other people were telling lies about her, that they hated her; things I knew weren’t true. By then I was old enough to understand paranoia and someone being emotionally ill, but not when I was a little kid. I was fifteen when I said to myself: My mother is sick, her reality is not my reality and I am never going to be like her.”

It must have been the serious expressions on their faces that prompted Blue to give a slight laugh and say, “Now, hold on. My entire life wasn’t tragic. Grampa loved me. He was always happy to see me.

“Grampa was my mother’s father. He knew she could be wacko so he made sure I spent a lot of time with him. Even when I was a toddler, I would live all summer at his house up here — the one Mom tore down. We’d go fishing and stuff. Sit in his porch swing together and watch the sun go down. It was wonderful — until Mom would arrive to take me home.”

“What about your relationship with your father? Andy?” said Osborne, his voice cracking slightly as her words reminded him of his own distance from Mallory, his eldest who had been her mother’s favorite and had seemed to shut him out. Only now were they finding their way towards each other: late, yes, but not too late, thank goodness.

“We weren’t close when I was real little — he was in the background always but not real affectionate or anything. Andy’s never been comfortable around young children. Thing I remember most from those days is that he would step in when Mom was hitting me and make her stop. And when I was in my teens and got in all the trouble, he stood by me.”

Blue’s face seemed to age as she spoke. The memories hardening her eyes, deepening the lines that years of tension had etched into her features. She had been young once but at the moment that was a long time ago. Osborne had seen a face like hers before: his own in the mirror during those months in rehab.

“Then one day Grampa wasn’t well and Mother decided to take over the family business, which was a relief to me because all of a sudden she wasn’t around to criticize all the time. I could breathe. She enrolled me in the same boarding school Barry was attending: Harmony Country Day.

“Now I had friends that Mom didn’t know and couldn’t say mean things about. That was the good part. The bad part was my friends were as confused as I was. My friends had parents who kept them in boarding school all winter, summer camp all summer and let them come home to empty houses on holiday weekends. Houses empty of people but well stocked with whiskey, beer, and liqueurs. You better believe, they partied hard.

“That’s when I started to drink. We made a concoction once that ate the porcelain off a kitchen sink. I drank to have fun, to not worry, to forget my awful mother. I mean, I wasn’t the only kid with a screwed up parent. Trust me. I considered myself lucky I didn’t have some of the parents they did. Those were the days: Binge Drinking 101.

“I crashed during one of those weekend blowouts — that was the night Barry got me to the hospital. Thank goodness he was there, too, because no one else was sober enough to get help. A couple days later, Mother and Andy met with the headmaster who said that I was a ringleader and Harmony Country Day would be better off without me.

“Oh, man, the next few weeks were awful. My mother spent hours telling me I was an embarrassment to the family, that I ‘always did it’ — meaning I always screwed up and she had no hope I would even make it into college.”

Blue gave a little chuckle at that. “I did just graduate from UW Madison with honors so she was wrong on that point. But she packed me off to rehab in northern Minnesota and for four years I was not allowed back to our home in Lake Forest — except for one visit with my grandfather before he died. He made her let me come to see him. So we had a little time together. I was pretty shaky still.”

Blue paused, her eyes misted as she said, “Bear with me now because I’ll probably start to cry.

“Grampa was so tired and he knew he was dying. He gave me a framed portrait of my grandmother, who had died right after my mother was born so I never knew her. He showed me how I had her smile and her blue eyes. He said I was growing up to look just like her. She was very pretty. Do you know, that is the first time I began to feel like I could be pretty, too. Then he told me that he knew I was strong, that he knew I could make it through rehab and even though he didn’t say it.,” Blue paused, her voice cracking as she said, “I heard him forgive me.”

“Did he tell you about your inheritance?” said Lew.

“No, he just said I needed to go to a good school because I was smart like him and could run a business someday. And he said not to let my mother get to me. He said that I was an heiress and she couldn’t change that — but that’s all he said about money. So I have no idea if I get five thousand or fifty thousand. From what I’ve overheard this summer, which is that my mother has lost a lot of money — I imagine that Andy and I will have to sell this place. And that’s fine,” said Blue with a wave of her hand, “I don’t need all this.

“But I had a surprise for Grampa that day. I told him I knew the family secret.”

“The family secret?” said Lew.

“Yes, I was a senior in high school, at a boarding school run by the rehab center, when I finally discovered why it was that my mother was always saying I had ruined her life.”

“Blue,” said Osborne, “before you say anything more, I need to know: why are you here? Why didn’t you move away from your mother a long time ago?”

Blue gave some thought to his question, then waved a hand towards the window facing west. “The lake. I love this lake. It’s in my bones. It fills my heart. And, remember, up until this summer I was away at college. I’ve managed to duck and cover. But let me finish — because this lucky thing happened just before Grampa died — and it changed my life.”

“My counselor at the rehab center was running late one day and I was waiting in her office when I saw my file on her desk. And I had this ‘come to Jesus’ moment: do I look? Do I not look?

• • •

“I looked. And what did I find? A copy of my birth certificate was in there and, surprise, Andrew Reece is not my father.”

“So I asked Grampa about that. Who was the man whose name was on my birth certificate? Grampa said I was old enough to know the truth. That the summer my mother turned twenty she became pregnant by a local boy. He’s dead now — died in a car accident years ago. Grampa and his second wife didn’t believe in abortion or adoption — they wanted her married. But the guy who got her pregnant wouldn’t have anything to do with that.

“Mother knew Andy from her chemistry class at Northwestern. I guess they had dated a couple times. Grampa offered him a lot of money to marry my mother and he agreed. Later, Grampa had to offer him even more money to stay married to her. He told me that Mother might not love Andy but she needed him. She was a nut case and he was stable. So that’s the love story of Nolan and Andy Reece.”

“Your grandfather told you all this?” said Lew.

“Yes. He said maybe he was wrong to have forced that marriage, forced my mother to have me — but having me around made it okay with him.” Blue laughed.

“Now I had a better understanding of why Mother was so angry with me, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Keep in mind I was eighteen and still living in the rehab community. Shortly after my grandfather died, my regular therapist became ill and I was assigned to a different psychologist, a woman who specialized in working with people with personality disorders.

“She was very interested in hearing about my mother — her mood swings, her accusations, the paranoia, the rages. She was the first person who wanted to hear every detail. She asked lots of questions, I cried. But when we were done, she gave me a big hug and sat me down to explain that none of my mother’s behavior was my fault. She couldn’t tell me the source of my mother’s problems. Was she schizophrenic? Was she bi-polar? Had she been normal as child but changed in adolescence? No answers to that.

“But the psychologist had this great line — she said ‘Blue, you have to understand that people with personality disorders think that they’re perfectly normal — and you’re nuts. You are never going to convince them otherwise.’ Those are the words that changed my life.

“All of a sudden I could step back and see my mother with new eyes. I could take that abusive behavior and set it aside. I could try to find a few things about her that I could like — maybe even love.”

“And?” said Lew.

“I’m working on it,” said Blue with a rueful smile. “Maybe her good taste?”

“Her interest in helping the Dark Sky sisters,” said Osborne.

“I have a hard time with that,” said Blue. “Frances I can deal with even though you can barely carry on a conversation with her — but that Josie. Mother adored her. I dunno, I guess if I’m fair, I’d have to say they were Mother’s way of feeling needed.

“Now, please, I’ve been through enough therapy to be honest with myself so I’m working hard to get past my feelings about Josie. It’s not her fault that Mother made such a deal over her. Mother’s death, Mildred murdered — those poor girls are so alone right now and I feel sorry for them. So I’m trying. I was happy to help out last night. They needed a place to stay and there was plenty of room over at the Murphys’. The last thing either one of them needs right now is for me to come down on them. Still,” said Blue with a wry grin, “it was Frances who helped me with breakfast.

“And it’s Mother who kept shoving Josie at me. Not Josie herself. That’s why I showed you her room and the album and made you sit through my emotional history here — because I think it’s critical that you see what an emotionally disturbed person my mother was. But while she couldn’t hurt me — not anymore — that doesn’t mean she didn’t hurt others. She did. Sometimes I could stop her, sometimes Andy could. But we weren’t around her all the time.”

“She was hard on the people working here? The housekeeper, the caretaker?”

“Yes, she could be nice one minute — holler at them the next. But I don’t think anyone here would have hurt her. They figured out how to manage her. plus she paid them well.”

“She paid them to be abused,” said Lew.

“You could put it that way.”

“Andy, too?”

“Oh yes, but he was artful at avoiding her.” Blue lowered her voice and pointed towards the door to the den, reminding them that Andy was just a room away.

“He doesn’t know, by the way, that you know he’s not your father,” whispered Lew.

“He does now. Just before you and Dr. Osborne got here today, he tried to tell me. He was afraid that it would come out in the investigation and upset me. I told him I’ve known for years. He was pretty shocked.”

“That’s why you’re calling him ‘Andy’ instead of ‘Dad’?” said Osborne.

“You noticed,” said Blue, surprised.

“That’s why Doc’s here,” said Lew, throwing Osborne an appreciative glance. “I listen for the answers to my questions while he’s an ear for things I may miss. But, tell me, Blue, why didn’t you tell Andy that you knew about your adoption a long time ago?”

“I was afraid he might tell Mother that I knew and who knows what fresh hell that might have caused. I saw no reason to rock the boat.”

A sudden commotion outside — a loud thumping accompanied by the barking of dogs, caused all three to leap from their chairs and run to the kitchen door. The green pick-up had pulled in next to Lew’s cruiser and was idling. Two golden retrievers raced back and forth in the truck’s deep-walled bed while three heads could be seen inside the extended cab. The two in the front seat were bouncing to strains of raucous music. The third head was bent, pushing its way past the front seat to the door.