I pulled up the emails I’d downloaded from the Pickrons’ computer, checked the times they were last opened, and found that almost all of Donnie’s emails on Mondays and Fridays were last accessed before 6:00 a.m. In some of them he’d written that he was “on his way out the door” so it seemed reasonable to move forward with the working hypothesis that he checked his email and left for work soon afterward.
I made a note to find out when he was expected to arrive at the sawmill on those days, then reviewed my notes, specifically what we knew about the murder weapon.
Apparently, Donnie had a gun cabinet in his basement. An empty rack and. 30–06 cartridges told me that Deputy Ellory’s guess about the type of gun used was probably correct. Two handguns were still in the cabinet.
Why take the rifle with you on the snowmobile? If you wanted to either kill yourself or protect yourself, why not just take one of the handguns along?
I couldn’t help but think that a hunter like Donnie would have chosen a shotgun or maybe a handgun for the crimes. Rifles are better for long distances. Why use a rifle in the close quarters of a house? Did the shooter fear that Ardis or Lizzie would flee and want to be able to pick them off before they got away?
And where was Donnie now? At the bottom of Tomahawk Lake? And if not, who drove that snowmobile off the ice?
That last one was the key question to address this morning.
At last, at 7:55, with all of this cycling through my mind, I laced on my boots, gathered my coat, gloves, and cap, and headed for the lobby.
The continental breakfast offered at the Moonbeam Motel consisted of sludgy, cold coffee and a box of day-old donuts. Instead, I opted for two large glasses of orange juice, telling myself that it was the equivalent to a plateful of fruit. As I was finishing the second glass, my phone rang.
Tessa’s ringtone.
“Hey, Raven, how are you?”
“Good.”
“How was the winter session yesterday?”
“Lame. I bailed so I could check out the places Mom wrote about in her diary when she went here. So that’s been cool.”
I wasn’t excited about her skipping the class, but knowing Tessa, her reply didn’t surprise me. “Has the food gotten any better?”
“They have, like, no vegetarian dishes. Just hamburgers or steak, or whatever, every day. It’s troubling.” I would’ve expected that the university would offer vegetarian alternatives, but I took Tessa’s word for it.
As a big fan of cheeseburgers myself, I’d been trying for months to come up with good reasons to get her to expand her culinary interests to include animals. I had a zinger. “Tessa, if God didn’t want us to eat cows he wouldn’t have covered ’em with meat.”
“He covered you with meat.”
Okay, that was not a bad comeback.
“Um.” I had to take a second to regroup. “So you got my messages then? About leaving early? Are you on your way up?”
“You said it’s like a four-hour drive?”
“Maybe a little longer to get to Woodborough.”
A pause. “There’re still some places here I want to visit. I’m not sure when I’ll be back in the Twin Cities. I’d like to see ’em before I leave.”
I flipped open my laptop and checked the weather one more time. “I can understand that, but if you’re going to come”-NOAA was now calling for up to eighteen inches-“you should probably leave right now.”
A small, tight silence. “The Walker Art Center doesn’t open until 9:30. Mom used to go there all the time.”
“Then I guess it makes the most sense for you to stay there in the Cities. I can try to catch up with you later this weekend before you fly back home.” Actually, because of the storm, I was a lot more thrilled about this scenario. The last thing I wanted was for Tessa to get stuck somewhere on a back road in Wisconsin in a blizzard.
“Listen,” she said, “I’ll just swing by the center, then get going. I shouldn’t have any problem.”
“Just stay in-”
“Patrick. We live in Denver. I can deal with a little snow. Besides, I’ve never met Amber and I haven’t seen Sean in like forever.”
As a girl who often seemed four years younger emotionally than her real age and yet four years older intellectually, Tessa had always been an enigma to me, and now I couldn’t tell if she was excited about driving over or not. “All right,” I said, “here’s how we’ll play this. For now, as long as you leave by 10:00 I’m good with you driving over. But if the storm moves in faster and I give you the word, you need to stay there in the city.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“And on the way you’ll stop at a hotel if the roads get too bad.”
“Yes, Dad.”
Dad-lately that word had been coming out more and more often and sounding more and more natural and welcome to me each time.
“So,” she said, “we’re staying at a hotel there, right? I mean, instead of at Sean and Amber’s?”
She knew a little about my history with my brother and his wife, but we’d never talked specifics. And now she was displaying a little more intuition than I liked. “A motel. Yes. It’ll give us all some privacy.”
“Privacy.”
“Yes.”
“They invited us to stay with ’em, didn’t they?”
I tapped my finger against my leg. “It’s better if we don’t.” I tried not to be too stern but to also make it clear by my tone that we were done discussing the topic. “Text me when you leave and call me if anything comes up.”
“I will.”
I reserved a room for her, and as I was slipping the keycard into my pocket, Jake emerged from the doorway. After a quick “Good morning,” he filled up a coffee cup, grabbed two donuts, and we headed for the car.
It had to be close to zero outside, and the windchill made the air feel like a wire brush scraping across my face.
“Gonna be a cold one,” he said.
It already is.
“Yes,” I replied.
Though the sun was still low, the day had started shockingly bright, with the early morning sunlight splintering sharply off the snow. It didn’t look at all like a blizzard was on its way.
Looks can be deceiving.
I used the voice recognition on my phone’s GPS program to ask for directions to Tomahawk Lake, and we took off.
17
Snowmobile trails paralleled us on either side of the road, just beyond the snowbanks that had been shoved onto the shoulders by the plows.
If you’ve never seen a snow-covered field or forest in the North, you might imagine that the snow all looks the same, but it doesn’t. Because of the various angles of the flakes reflecting the sunlight, the woods look like they have thousands of tiny diamonds winking at you as you drive by.
Although we were a little north of Wisconsin’s prime farm country, I still saw a few cement silos resting beside barns nestled on rock or concrete foundations to help the boards weather the snow.
But most prominently, I was impressed by the sight of the forests all around us, rolling dense and thick over the hills. Birch and poplar filled in the gaps between the picturesque pines, most of which were burdened with a thick layer of postcard-worthy snow. And, from growing up in this state, I knew that beyond those trees, hidden deep in those woods, were impenetrable marshes and countless isolated lakes-Wisconsin has over fifteen thousand lakes, more than nine thousand of which still remain unnamed.
But the one we were going to was not.
We arrived at Tomahawk Lake and parked at the north shore boat landing.
No state troopers or sheriff’s deputies were there yet, and I was glad because it gave me the chance to look around uninterrupted.
Rather than police tape, yesterday’s responding officers had set up wooden blockades and orange highway cones enclosing the snowmobile tracks that led to the broken ice. Considering the locale and the likelihood that this was the scene of an accident rather than a homicide, it was about all they could do.
A twelve-foot extension ladder was chained to a sign beside the boat landing. I guessed the officers or state troopers had laid on it in order to get closer to the break in the ice when they were placing the cones.