“The point,” Strayhorn said, “is that he didn’t find his way around so well last night.” His gaze settled on me once more. “Right?”
I ignored him again and asked Judson, “Did you check the cottage to see if it’s secure?”
“We checked it. Locked up tight.”
“The outbuildings?”
“Same.”
“No signs of trespassing?”
“No. None.”
“Cops,” Dyce said. Some of his snotty sullenness had returned. “Jesus Christ. The old guy fell down and hit his head and killed himself. Period, end of story.”
“But you don’t think so,” Strayhorn said to me.
“Did I say I didn’t think so?”
“You seem to have doubts.”
“No doubts,” I lied. “It was an accident, just as Dyce says. That’s pretty obvious.”
“So you’re satisfied.”
“I’m satisfied. Aren’t you?”
Either that comeback put an end to his little game, or he tired of it; in any case, he shut up and drifted into the background, the way he had in the cafe on Saturday evening. None of us had any more to say. We were seven men alone with our own thoughts, like mourners at a grave site, when the sheriff s deputies and an ambulance arrived from Quincy five minutes later.
8
The whole thing felt wrong to me.
It felt manipulated, arranged. It felt like homicide.
In my mind’s ear I kept hearing Nils Ostergaard’s words to me on the lake yesterday: I think maybe one of the other first-timers ain’t what he seems to be. Connection? If it was a homicide, that was the most likely angle. Who else would have a reason to kill a proddy but harmless old man like Ostergaard and then try to make it look like an accident?
But what motive would a man who wasn’t what he seemed to be have? Something that involved those missing padlocks on the Dixon property, maybe? Or was that stretching things too far?
And what was this guy and why was he at Deep Mountain Lake if he wasn’t a fisherman?
None of it added up to anything but wild speculation. Which was the main reason I hadn’t voiced any of my reservations or suspicions to the sheriff’s deputies. There were ordinary explanations for Ostergaard leaving his pickup where he had, for him not taking his flashlight and skulking around in the dark. The wound on his temple had looked to be deep and long, more in keeping with a bludgeoning than a fall; but with all the dried blood I couldn’t be sure of the dimensions, and, besides, I was no forensics expert and an old man’s flesh is thin, his bones brittle. A fall could have done the damage.
I told myself, as I walked away from the Stapleton property, that I ought to just forget it, let the county authorities handle it as they saw fit. None of my business, was it? Except that it was, in a way. Ostergaard had been planning to confide in me — involve me in whatever he’d nosed up. By the same token, his death had passed the gauntlet on to me. There were other arguments, too: It had been pretty obvious from the way the deputies talked and acted that there wouldn’t be much of an investigation, if any at all; accidental death would almost certainly be the official verdict. And I could not shake the feeling of wrongness, or the sense of obligation it carried. If Ostergaard had been murdered, I owed it to him and his widow to try to prove it. Once a cop, always a cop, he’d said to me. Right, and good cops look out for their own and do what they can to uphold the principles of duty and justice. Those principles don’t seem to mean as much nowadays as they once did, but they mattered to me and they’d mattered to the man I believed Ostergaard had been.
Talking myself into it was what I was doing. Not that I needed much convincing.
Too much death on my mind today. That worried me a little, that I might be developing a preoccupation with it. But you can’t be confronted by death and not have it affect you in some way. An emotional empath like me couldn’t, anyway. Besides, there are different kinds of death and dying, the explicable and the inexplicable. I’d come up against both this morning, one right after the other, and it was the second kind, not the first, that kept troubling me. If I had a preoccupation, it was the same one I’d always had, the one that had motivated me for fifty-some years: an obsessive involvement with life and the need to solve at least a few of its mysteries.
The last cottage on the western shore was a green clapboard affair with a steep alpine roof: a burnt wood sign at the foot of the drive said The Ostergaards in Spencerian script. A dark blue van was parked near the front door, which I took to mean that Callie Ostergaard was still here. I’d half expected to find the place locked up. the widow gone away to Quincy to be with family or friends.
An older woman with hennaed hair and a take-charge manner came out to meet me as I climbed from the car. Not Callie Ostergaard; one of the summer residents, who announced that she was staying with Mrs. Ostergaard until her daughter arrived from someplace called Graeagle. I identified myself and asked how the widow was bearing up.
“As well as can be expected,” the woman said. “She’s a very strong person, thank God.”
“I’m sure she is. I’d like to speak to her. if I could.”
“Well. I don’t know…”
“Would you ask her if she’d mind seeing me? Just briefly? I have a few questions that might be important.”
“Questions? About what happened to Nils?”
“Please ask her.”
“…All right. You wait here.”
I waited about a minute. Then the door opened again and the woman motioned me inside, led me along a central hallway that emptied into a large lakefront room. Dark and cool in there: the drapes had been drawn. The woman sitting in one of two matching armchairs was in her seventies, trim. tiny, with short shag-cut white hair and a nut-brown face that seemed smooth, almost wrinkle-free in the half light.
“I’m sorry to intrude. Mrs. Ostergaard—”
“Not at all. It was good of you to come by.” Strong voice, with just an undercurrent of the grief she must be feeling. If she’d done any crying, it was long finished: she had her public face on, the one that a woman in a time of crisis applies with lipstick and rouge and an effort of will. “June said you have questions?”
I glanced at the henna-haired woman. She understood what the glance meant; her eyes shifted to Callie Ostergaard, who smiled wanly and said, “It’s all right, dear.” No argument from June; she nodded and left us alone.
Mrs. Ostergaard invited me to sit down. When I’d done that, she said, “Nils spoke well of you. He doesn’t… didn’t always care for strangers.”
“I liked him, too. I’m really very sorry.”
“Thank you. It’s so hard to believe he’s gone, that I’ll never hear his voice again. It hasn’t really sunk in yet. I expect him to walk in the door any second…” Her head moved: a sad and bewildered little negative. “We were married fifty-seven years, you know. My father, the old coot, said it wouldn’t last six months.”
“Mrs. Ostergaard—”
“Callie. Everyone calls me Callie.”
“Callie, did Nils tell you where he was going last night? What his plans were?”
“No. No, he didn’t. He often went off by himself at night. On patrol, he called it. It gave him something to do that made him feel useful.”
“Did he mention the Stapleton property?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Does it seem odd to you that he’d park his truck off the road and go patrolling on foot, without a flashlight?”
“Odd? Well, he might have seen or heard something that made him suspicious. All sorts of things made Nils suspicious, not always with good cause.”