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The Bodies Left Behind Excerpt
Silence.
The woods around Lake Mondac were as quiet as could be, a world of difference from the churning, chaotic city where the couple spent their weekdays.
Silence, broken only by an occasional a-hoo-ah of a distant bird, the hollow siren of a frog,
And now: another sound.
A shuffle of leaves, two impatient snaps of branch or twig.
Footsteps?
No, that couldn't be. The other vacation houses beside the lake were deserted on this cool Friday afternoon in April.
Emma Feldman, in her early thirties, set down her martini on the kitchen table, where she sat across from her husband. She tucked a strand of curly
black hair behind her ear and walked to one of the grimy kitchen windows. She saw nothing but dense clusters of cedar, juniper and black spruce rising
up a steep hill, whose rocks resembled cracked yellow bone.
Her husband lifted an eyebrow. "What was it?"
She shrugged and returned to her chair. "I don't know. Didn't see anything."
Outside, silence again.
Emma, lean as any stark, white birch outside one of the many windows of the vacation house, shook off her blue jacket. She was wearing the matching
skirt and a white blouse. Lawyer clothes. Hair in a bun. Lawyer hair. Stockings but shoeless.
Steven, turning his attention to the bar, had abandoned his jacket as well,
and a wrinkly striped tie. The thirty-six-year-old, with a full head of unruly hair, was in a blue shirt and his belly protruded inexorably over the belt of his
navy slacks. Emma didn't care; she thought he was cute and always would.
"And look what I got," he said, nodding toward the upstairs guest room
and unbagging a large bottle of pulpy organic vegetable juice. Their friend, visiting from Chicago this weekend, had been flirting with liquid diets lately, drinking the most disgusting things.
Emma read the ingredients and wrinkled her nose. "It's all hers. I'll stick with vodka."
"Why I love you."
The house creaked, as it often did. The place was 76 years old. It featured an abundance of wood and a scarcity of steel and stone. The kitchen, where
they stood, was angular and paneled in glowing yellow pine. The floor was lumpy. The colonial structure was one of three houses on this private road,
each squatting on ten acres. It could be called lakefront property but only because the lake lapped at a rocky shore two hundred yards from the front door.
The house was plopped down in a small clearing on the east side of a substantial elevation. Midwest reserve kept people from labeling these hills
"mountains" here in Wisconsin, though it rose easily 700 or 800 feet into the air. Presently the big house was bathed in blue late-afternoon.
Emma gazed out at rippling Lake Mondac, far enough from the hill to catch some descending sun. Now, in early spring, the surrounding area was
scruffy, reminding of wet hackles rising from a guard dog's back. The house was much nicer than they could otherwise afford—they'd bought it through
foreclosure—and she knew from the moment she'd seen it that this was the perfect vacation house.
Silence. . . .
The colonial also had a pretty colorful history.
The owner of a big meatpacking company in Chicago had built the place
before World War Two. It was discovered years later that much of his fortune had come from selling black-market meat, circumventing the rationing system
that limited foods here at home to make sure the troops were nourished. In 1956 the man's body was found floating in the lake; he was possibly the
victim of veterans who'd had learned of his scheme and killed him, then searched the house, looking for the illicit cash he'd hidden here.
No ghosts figured in any version of the death, though Emma and Steven couldn't keep from embellishing. When guests were staying here they'd
gleefully take note of who kept the bathroom lights on and who braved the dark after hearing the tales.
Two more snaps outside. Then a third.
Emma frowned. "You hear that? Again, that sound. Outside."
Steven glanced out the window. The breeze kicked up now and then. He turned back.
Her eyes strayed to her briefcase.
"Caught that," he said, chiding.
"What?"
"Don't even think about opening it."
She laughed, though without much humor.
"Work-free weekend," he said. "We agreed."
"And what's in there?" she asked, nodding at the backpack he carried in
lieu of an attaché case. Emma was wrestling the lid off a jar of cocktail olives.
"Only two things of relevance, Your Honor: my le Carré novel and that
bottle of Merlot I had at work. Shall I introduce the latter into evid . . ." Voice fading. He looked to the window, through which they could see a tangle of
weeds and trees and branches and rocks the color of dinosaur bones.
Emma too glanced outside.
"That I heard," he said. He refreshed his wife's martini. She dropped olives
into both drinks.
"What was it?"
"Remember that bear?"
"He didn't come up to the house." They tinked glasses and sipped clear liquor.
Steven said, "You seem preoccupied. What's up? The union case?"
Research for a corporate acquisition had revealed some possible
shenanigans within the lakefront workers union in Milwaukee. The government had become involved and the acquisition was temporarily tabled, which nobody was very happy about.
But she said, "This's something else. One of our clients makes car parts."
"Right. Kenosha Auto. See, I do listen."
She looked at her husband with an astonished glance. "Well, the CEO, turns out, is an absolute prick." She explained about a wrongful death case
involving components of a hybrid car engine: a freak accident, a passenger electrocuted. "The head of their R&D department . . . why, he demanded I
return all the technical files. Imagine that."
Steven said, "I liked your other case better—that state representative's last will and testament . . . the sex stuff."
"Shhhh," she said, alarmed. "Remember, I never said a word about it."
"My lips are sealed."
Emma speared an olive and ate it. "And how was your day?"
Steven laughed. "Please . . . I don't make enough to talk about business
after hours." The Feldmans were a shining example of a blind date gone right, despite the odds. Emma, a U of W law school valedictorian, daughter of
Milwaukee/Chicago money; Steven, a city college B.A. from the Brewline, intent on helping society. Their friends gave them six months, top; the Door
County wedding, to which all those friends were invited, was exactly eight months after their first date.
Steven pulled a triangle of brie out of a shopping bag. Found crackers and opened them.
"Oh, okay. Just a little."
Snap, snap . . .
Her husband frowned. Emma said, "Honey, it's freaking me a little. That was footsteps."
The three vacation houses here were eight or nine miles from the nearest shop or gas station and a little over a mile from the county highway, which
was accessed via a strip of dirt poorly impersonating a road. Marquette State Park, the biggest in the Wisconsin system, swallowed most of the land in the
area; Lake Mondac and these houses made up an enclave of private property.
Very private.
And very deserted.
Steven walked into the utility room, pulled aside the limp beige curtain and gazed past a cut-back crepe myrtle into the side yard. "Nothing. I'm thinking we—"
Emma screamed.
"Honey, honey, honey!" her husband cried.
The face studied them through the back window. The man's head was
covered with a stocking, though you could see crew-cut, blondish hair, a colorful tattoo on his neck. The eyes were halfway surprised to see people so
close. He wore an olive-drab combat jacket. He knocked on the glass with one hand. In the other he was holding a shotgun, muzzle up. He was smiling eerily.
"Oh, God," Emma whispered.
Steven pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open and punched numbers,
telling her, "I'll deal with him. Go lock the front door."
Emma ran to the entryway, dropping her glass. The olives spun amid the
dancing shards, picking up dust. Crying out, she heard the kitchen door splinter inward. She looked back and saw the intruder with the shotgun rip the
phone from her husband's hand and shove him against the wall. A print of an old sepia landscape photograph crashed to the floor.
The front door too swung open. A second man, his head also covered with mesh, pushed inside. He had long dark hair, pressed close by the nylon.
Taller and stockier than the first, he held a pistol. The black gun was small in his outsized hand. He pushed Emma into the kitchen, where the other man
tossed him the cell phone. The bigger one stiffened at the pitch, but caught the phone one-handed. He seemed to grimace in irritation, from the juvenile toss, and dropped the phone in his pocket.
Steven said, "Please . . . What do you . . .?" Voice quavering.
Emma looked away quickly. The less she saw, she was thinking, the
better their chances to survive.
"Please," Steven said, "Please. You can take whatever you want. Just leave us. Please."
Emma stared at the dark pistol in the taller man's hand. He wore a black leather jacket and boots. His were like the other man's, the kind soldiers wear.
Both men grew oblivious to the couple. They looked around the house.
Emma's husband continued, "Look, you can have whatever you want.
We've got a Mercedes outside. I'll get the keys. You—"
"Just, don't talk," the taller man said, gesturing with the pistol.
"We have money. And credit cards. Debit card too. I'll give you the PIN."
"What do you want?" Emma asked, crying.
"Shhh."
Somewhere, in its ancient heart, the house creaked once more.
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"How'd it go?"
"Joey's fine," she said. "He's just fine."
Graham was in the kitchen, two skills on display, Brynn observed of her husband. He was getting the pasta going and he'd progressed with the new
tile. About twenty square feet of kitchen floor were sealed off with yellow police line tape.
"Hi, Graham," the boy called.
"Hey, young man. How you feeling?"
The lanky twelve-year-old , in cargo pants, windbreaker and black knit hat,
held up his arm. "Excellent." He was nearly his mother's five foot, five inch height and his round face was dusted with freckles, which hadn't come from
Brynn, though he and his mother shared identical straight chestnut brown hair. His now protruded from under the watch cap.
"No sling? How're you going to get any sympathy from the girls?"
"Ha, ha." Graham's stepson crinkled his nose at the comment about the
opposite sex. The lean boy got a juice box from the fridge, poked the straw in and emptied the drink.
"Spaghetti tonight."
"Al-right!" The boy instantly forgot skateboard injuries and female
classmates. He ran to the stairs, dodging books that were stacked on the lower steps, intended for putting away at some point.
"Hat!" Graham shouted. "In the house. . . ."
The boy yanked the hat off and continued bounding upward.
"Take it easy," Graham called. "Your arm—"
"He's fine," Brynn repeated, hanging her dark green jacket in the front
closet, then returning to the kitchen. Midwest pretty. Her high cheekbones made her look a bit Native-American, though she was exclusively Norwegian
-Irish and in roughly the proportion her name suggested: Kristen Brynn McKenzie. People sometimes thought that, especially with her shoulder
-length hair pulled back taut, she was a retired ballet dancer who'd settled into a size-eight life with few regrets, though Brynn had never danced, outside of a school or club, in her life.
Her one concession to vanity was to pluck and peroxide her eyebrows; more long-term tactics were in the planning but so far none had been put into
practice. If there was any imperfection it was her jaw, which, seen from straight on, was a bit crooked. Graham said it was charming and sexy. Brynn hated the flaw.
He now asked, "His arm—it's not broken?"
"Nope. Just lost some skin. They bounce back, that age." She glanced at
the kettle. He made good pasta.
"That's a relief." The kitchen was hot and six-foot three-inch Graham Boyd
rolled his sleeves up, showing strong arms, and two small scars of his own. He wore a watch with much of the gold plate worn off. His only jewelry was
his wedding band, scratched and dull. Much like Brynn's, nestled beside the engagement ring she'd had on her finger for exactly one month longer than she'd worn the band.
Graham opened cans of tomatoes. The Oxo's sharp round blade split the lids decisively under his big hands. He turned down the flame. Onion was sizzling. "Tired?"
"Some."
She'd left the house at five-thirty. That was well before the day tour started
, but she'd wanted to follow up at a trailer park, the site of a domestic dispute the afternoon before. Nobody'd been arrested and the couple had ended up
remorseful, tearful and hugging. But Brynn wanted to make sure the excessive makeup on the woman's face wasn't concealing a bruise she didn't want the police to see.
Nope, Brynn had learned at six a.m.; she just wore a lot of Max Factor.
After the pre-dawn start she was planning to be home early—well, for
her, at five, but she'd gotten a call from an EMS medical tech, a friend of hers. The woman began: "Brynn, he's all right."
Ten minutes later she was in the hospital with Joey.
She now puffed out her tan Sheriff's Department uniform blouse."I'm stinky."
Graham consulted the triple shelves of cookbooks, about four dozen of them altogether. They were mostly Anna's, who'd brought them with her when
she moved in after her medical treatments, but Graham had been browsing through them recently, as he'd taken over that household duty. His mother-in
-law hadn't been well enough to cook, and Brynn? Well, it wasn't exactly one of her skills.
"Ouch. I forgot the cheese," Graham said, rummaging futilely in the pantry
. "Can't believe it." He turned back to the pot, and his thumb and forefinger ground oregano into dust.
"How was your day?" she asked.
He told her about an irrigation system gone mad, turned on prematurely April first then cracking in a dozen places in the freeze that surprised nobody
but the owner, who'd returned home to find his backyard had done a Katrina.
"You're making headway." She nodded at the tile.
"It's coming along. So. The punishment fit the crime?"
She frowned.
"Joey. The skateboard."
"Oh, I told him he's off it for three days."
Graham said nothing, concentrated on the sauce. Did that mean he
thought she was too lenient? She said, "Well, maybe more. I said we'll see."
"They oughta outlaw those things," he said. "Going down railings?
Jumping in the air. It's crazy."
"He was just on the schoolyard. Those stairs there. The three stairs going down to the parking lot. All the kids do it, he said."
"He has to wear that helmet. I see it here all the time."
"That's true. He's going to. I talked to him about that too."
Graham's eyes followed the boy's route to his room. "Maybe I should have a word with him. Guy-to-guy thing."
"I wouldn't worry about it. I don't want to overwhelm him. He got the message."
Brynn got her own beer, drank half. Ate a handful of Wheat Thins. "So. You going to your poker game tonight?"
"Thought I might."
She nodded as she watched him roll meatballs with his large hands.
"Honey," a voice called. "How's our boy?"
"Hey, Mom."
Anna, seventy-four, stood in the doorway, dressed nice, as usual. Today
the outfit was a black pantsuit and gold shell. Her short 'do had been put in place by the hairdresser just yesterday. Thursday was her day at Style Cuts.
"Just a few scrapes, a few bruises."
Graham said, "He was skateboarding down stairs."
"Oh, my."
"Just a step or two," Brynn corrected quickly, sipped the beer. "Everything's fine. He won't do it again. Nothing serious, really. We've all done things like that."
Graham asked Anna, "What'd she do when she was a kid?" Nodding at his wife.
"Oh, I've got stories." But she told none of them.
"I'll take him paintballing or something," Graham suggested. "Channel some of that energy."
"That'd be a good idea."
Graham ripped up lettuce with his hands. "Spaghetti okay, Anna?"
"Whatever you make'll be lovely." Anna took the glass of Chardonnay her
son-in-law poured for her.
Brynn watched her husband take plates from the cupboard. "Think there's some dust on them? From the tiling?"
"I sealed it off with plastic. Took it down after I was done."
He hesitated then rinsed them anyway.
"Can somebody take me over to Rita's tonight?" Anna asked, "Megan's got to pick up her son. Just for an hour and a half or so. I promised to take
over bathroom duty."
"How's she doing?" Brynn asked.
"Not good." Anna and her dear friend had been diagnosed around the
same time. Anna's treatment had gone well, Rita's not.
"I'll take you," she told her mother. "Sure. What time?"
"Sevenish." Anna turned back to the family room, the heart of Brynn's small house on the outskirts of Humboldt. The nightly news was on. "Lookit.
Another bomb. Those people."
The phone rang. Graham answered. "Hi, Tom. How's it going?"
Brynn set the beer down. Looked at her husband, holding the phone in his large hand. "Yeah, I saw it. Good game. You're calling for Brynn, I'm guessing
. . . . Hold on. She's here."
"The boss," he whispered, offering the handset then turning back to dinner.
"Tom?"
The sheriff asked about Joey. She thought he was going to lecture her about skateboards too but he didn't. He was explaining about a situation up in
Lake Mondac. She listened carefully, nodding.
"Need somebody to check it out. You're closer than anybody else, Brynn."
"Eric?"
Graham lit a burner on the Kenmore stove. Blue sparks ascended.
"I'd rather it wasn't him. You know how he gets."
Graham stirred the pot. It was mostly the contents of cans but he still stirred like he was blending hand-diced ingredients. In the family room a
man's voice was replaced by Katie Couric's. Anna announced, "That's more like it. What the news should be about."
Brynn debated. Then she said, "You owe me a half day, Tom. Give me the address."
Which turned Graham's head.
Dahl put on another deputy, Todd Jackson, who gave directions. Brynn wrote.
She hung up. "Might be a problem up at Lake Mondac." She looked at the
beer. Didn't drink anymore.
"Aw, baby," Graham said.
"I'm sorry. I feel obligated. I left work early because of Joey."
"But Tom didn't say that."
She hesitated. "No, he didn't. The thing is I'm closest."
"I heard you mention Eric."
"He's a problem. I told you about him."
Eric Munce read Soldier of Fortune magazine, wore a second gun on his
ankle like he was in downtown Detroit and would go prowling around for meth labs when he should have been Breathalyzing DUIs and encouraging kids to get home by ten p.m.
From the doorway, Anna said, "Should I call Rita?"
"I guess I can take you," Graham said.
Brynn put a stopper on her beer bottle. "Your poker game?"
Her husband paused, smiled, then said, "It'll keep. Anyway, with Joey
being hurt, better to stay here, keep an eye on him."
She said, "You guys eat. And leave the dishes. I'll clean up when I get
back. It'll be an hour and a half is all."
"Okay," Graham said. And everybody knew he'd clean up.
She pulled on her leather jacket, lighter-weight than her Sheriff's Department parka. "I'll call when I get up there. Let you know when I'll be back
. Sorry about your game, Graham."
"Bye," he said, not looking back, as he eased the jackstraws of spaghetti into the boiling pot.
©2008 Jeffery W. Deaver
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