Kenney just looked at him. “What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean, in this county, being a good cop isn’t quite enough, Lou. This job, this post, it asks a lot more of a man than that. It asks him to be the keeper of all the dirty secrets the county cannot or will not admit even to itself. All the filthy, unpleasant things nobody wants to talk about.” He dropped the manila envelope in front of Kenney. “And it’s always been that way, God help us. Always. So I carry that broom and I do the sweeping, keep the county sparkling, make damn sure nothing awful crawls out in the sunlight where folks might see it and ask questions.”
Kenney looked down at the big manila envelope. “And this?”
“What you have there is a file kept by my predecessor, a man named Albert Susskind. Susskind was just another garbage collector like yours truly, as was the man before him and the man before him and so on.” Godfrey went to the window, looked out at the gray, moist afternoon, the raindrops rolling down the pane. “That file there has been handed down, sheriff to sheriff, since before the First World War. I heard tell there was another file before it… but it’s long gone and that’s just fine with me.”
Kenney sucked in a breath, let it out. Carefully then, he opened the envelope, dumped out its contents on the sheriff’s desk. For the next five minutes, he perused them while a knot of something twisted in his belly. Yeah, here it was, just as Godfrey had alluded to, all the county’s dirty laundry. All the things people maybe suspected or gossiped about, but could not prove… and maybe they preferred things that way.
Kenney was beginning to think he might have preferred that, too.
For campfire stories and old wives’ tales were easy enough to dismiss, easy enough to tuck in a box and throw up on some dusty closet shelf in your mind. But what Kenney was looking at, this was something else again. What he had was a devil’s stew of newspaper clippings, police reports, missing persons files, crime scene notations, and coroner’s reports. Assorted photocopied magazine articles and even a few pages from books to round things out. The most recent were twenty-odd years old and the oldest dated back to before Prohibition.
The newspaper clippings were mostly from the Haymarket Weekly Mirror, the Sawyer County Record, and the Ashland Daily Press.
He began to read…
16
INTO THIN AIR?
August 21, 1958:
Haymarket—Apparently, Charles Nielsen and his wife Clarice have disappeared from their Charing Street home without a trace. Their handsome little brick ranch stands empty some two miles outside of Haymarket. The house is filled with a lifetime of belongings and, according to police, a quantity of cash that “someone deciding to make a run would surely take with them.” The only thing peculiar, according to Bayfield County Sheriff’s deputies, is that the front door was found standing open and an odd note was left on the kitchen table complaining that “those voices from below” were becoming unbearable…
MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY
November 12, 1962:
Bayfield County—Donald Brazelton was found dead in his Bellac Road farmhouse Wednesday evening by a neighbor, Douglas Rogers, who claimed Brazelton had been acting oddly for some time. Police report that the Brazelton farmhouse had been completely boarded up—windows and doors—from the inside as if Brazelton had been afraid of something getting in. Neighbor Rogers said, “I knew something like this was going to happen. I just knew it. I think if I live to be a hundred, I’ll never get the sight of Don’s face out of my mind—all twisted up like he was scared to death…”
FARMER’S FIELD COLLAPSES
May 28, 1966:
Bayfield County—Watch your step, so says John Crywck, and he ought to know: on May 26 several hundred feet of his east pasture simply collapsed. Luckily, there were no animals grazing in said area. “It happened in the middle of the night, I guess,” Crywck said. “I slept through the whole thing.” Upon waking, Crywck discovered that a good portion of his eastern pasture, what he deems is “enough to drop more than one good-sized barn into,” had simply fallen into a great central pit some fifteen feet deep. The pit is even now filling with subterranean water.
Old-timers in the Haymarket area might recall a similar episode that occurred back before World War I at the old Bayfield County Cemetery. In that instance, no less than thirty graves and part of the north wall collapsed into a thirty-foot trench due to sub-surface subsidence.
Both of these peculiar episodes bring to mind certain colonial folk tales about the entire region being honeycombed with passages and caves. Dr. Carl Lancer of the University of Wisconsin’s Geology Department says there might be a grain of truth to the old tales. “Bayfield County sits on the copper-bearing Keweenaw range of ancient Proterozoic rock. People have been mining copper in both northwestern Wisconsin and upper Michigan for centuries,” he explained. “There’s no doubt miles of naturally occurring limestone caves exist beneath the surface, and probably miles of shafts cut out by prehistoric Indian miners and the later white colonists. Most towns in Bayfield County are probably sitting atop ancient mines. So it’s not surprising that the earth might give from time to time…”
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT?
June 7, 1969:
Bayfield County—Apparently so. Roger Horsley and family have decided that enough is enough. In 1968 they purchased an abandoned farm on Old School Road bordering the Namekagon River. A prime chunk of real estate with no less than fifty wooded acres. The Horsleys, who had retired from Madison, built their dreamhouse, a beautiful Cape Cod of well over $100,000. Despite continued complaints lodged with the sheriff’s office, strange things continued to happen on the old farm: The sound of fists rapping on windows and doors in the dead of night, figures seen skulking about the property, voices heard whispering after dark. “Enough is enough,” Horsley said. “People will think we’re crazy, but they haven’t seen the things we’ve seen. A high-crime inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood would be peaceful compared to this place…”
HUNTERS VANISH WITHOUT A TRACE
November 25, 1972:
Sawyer County—There are oddities and then there are oddities. Not six weeks after two trout fishermen disappeared north of Spider Lake, three hunters, it seems, have joined them. Paul Marsalis, Frank Pence, and Wilbur Stanchely, all of Red Cliff, have gone missing. The three have hunted together for years, according to Pence’s wife. She reported them overdue to both Sawyer County and Bayfield County sheriff’s offices. A search party located their tent camper on the Namekagon River in the northern Sawyer County/southern Bayfield County area. Sheriff’s deputies admitted that the camper was “in a terrible state,” the canvas torn and camping equipment scattered about. A great deal of blood was found in the camper and officials are not ruling out foul play. “It looked like the mother of all bears went at that camper,” another hunter who prefers to remain anonymous said upon reaching the site with sheriff’s deputies. “Everything was smashed and broken, sleeping bags shredded. There were rifles laying around and it smelled like they’d been fired…”
THE STRANGE SAGA OF GHOST-BOY
June 20, 1973:
Pigeon Lake—When it comes to offbeat and spooky tales, Wisconsin has no shortage. Particularly in Bayfield County, where the tradition of dark legendry and old wives’ tales are particularly rich and apparently still quite active. Well, with that in mind, it’s time to add a new chapter: Ghost-Boy. Yes, you heard me right. Ghost-Boy. If you are conjuring up images of Casper, the Friendly Ghost, then you are way out in left field. For according to the dozen or so reliable witnesses, Ghost-Boy is anything but friendly. Yes, our local haunt has a nasty tendency to knock on doors in the dead of night and peek through windows. He is described by witnesses as being “hunched over like sort of an evil dwarf or goblin” and having a face “all white and distorted with big yellow teeth.” And if that isn’t enough to make you sleep with the lights on, consider this: Ghost-Boy’s eyes are said to be luminous.