Brian Freeman - The Bone House

What seemed like a curse at the time turned out to be a blessing. He was insanely competitive when he stepped on to a playing field, but he learned that he was something more than a golfer, a competitor, and an athlete. He went back to something he hadn't done since he was a teenager. Painting. He took up reading again and devoured the classics. He found himself attracted to teaching because it was so unlike his prior life and because it gave him time to become someone he liked a lot better than Mark Bradley, pro golfer.

It made him poor, too. That was the downside.

As the money dried up, he assumed the come-ons would vanish, but he discovered that looks were enough for plenty of women of all ages. He could have slept his way to a comfortable lifestyle, but he'd already been through one loveless marriage. He said yes to the occasional fling, but nothing that ever felt serious for either of them. Not until Hilary. Hilary, who was sexy and didn't even have a clue about it. Hilary, who blew him away because everything she said was so damn interesting, and because she didn't seem to care about what anyone else thought about her.

Hilary. It took his breath away sometimes to think that she married him.

That was why the anger kept coming back. It was the fear that he might lose everything he had. He had already lost his job, and now he worried that he would lose his house, his freedom, and the one woman he'd ever really wanted.

All because he took a walk on the beach. All because of Glory Fischer.

Mark went back into the house, where the sickly sweet air freshener covered the stench of the filth that had been thrown against the walls. He decided to take a run to offload his frustrations. For the first time, he took a key with him and locked the front door as he left the house. This was Washington Island. No one locked their doors. There was no one to fear, because the rest of the world was half an hour away across Death's Door.

Not anymore.

He stretched among the dead leaves in their dirt driveway, loosening his muscles. The forest around him was still. As he bent and touched his fingers to his toes, he noticed his Ford Explorer sagging at a queer angle in the clearing among the trees. When he looked closely, he saw that two of the tires were flat. The rubber had been slashed, and the rusty ax that had done the damage lay next to the truck in the weeds.

They were sending him a message. He could cover it up with paint, but no one was going to let him forget. Killer.

Mark picked up the ax, which was heavy and old. He weighed it in his hand. He felt his anger rush back, and he threw the ax at the flaky white trunk of a young birch tree, where it impaled itself, its handle quivering. He dug the ax out and swung it again, making a deep wound in the side of the tree. He did it again and again, wood and bark flying, until he ran out of breath and the immature tree stood on nothing more than a ragged fraction of its trunk. He wrapped his hands around the tree as if it were someone's throat and pushed until the tree groaned and cracked away from its base and toppled into the forest with a crash.

He staggered backward into his driveway. His chest heaved. His face was flushed. The ax dropped from his hand.

He heard a noise from the road and swung round fiercely, expecting to see them coming for him. The vandals. The punks. He was ready to take them on, hand to hand.

It wasn't anyone from the island.

A purple Corvette was parked at the base of his driveway, looking oddly out of place in the island wilderness. He saw a ridiculously tall man in a business suit standing next to the Corvette's door, leaning on it and watching him from behind sunglasses that made no sense on a dark day. He'd been watching as Mark exploded with rage.

It was Cab Bolton.

Cab climbed back into the rented Corvette under Bradley's hostile glare. He had no interest in having a conversation with Mark Bradley right now, but he wanted the man to know he had followed him home. The investigation wasn't over, and if Bradley thought he had escaped with his freedom that easily, he was wrong. Cab also knew, watching Bradley erupt in fury with the ax, that his original opinion of the man had been correct.

Mark Bradley had a temper. Push him hard enough, and he lost control.

Cab did a U-turn and returned to the road that led past Schoolhouse Beach and out to the island's main highway beyond the cemetery. It occurred to him that he'd been in most corners of the world, and he didn't think he had ever felt quite as remote as he did now, on this island at the tip of the Door County peninsula. The entire stretch of land north of Sturgeon Bay felt as if he were driving through a winter ghost town, with shuttered storefronts and long stretches of forest and dormant farmlands. It was beautiful and ominous, like a transplanted corner of New England where someone had posted No Trespassing signs to keep out the rest of the world.

He'd never spent much time in the Midwest. In his head, he'd always thought of it as a place where winter lasted nine months, the cows outnumbered the people, and the land was flat and endless. Nothing he'd seen so far had changed his mind.

On the way back to the ferry port, he found a Western-style saloon in need of paint, immediately adjacent to the road. The sign said Bitters Pub. When he parked in the gravel in front of the bar, his Corvette stood out like a Hot Wheels play car next to the row of dusty pickups and hulking SUVs. He got out and smelled a waft of pine blowing in with the cold lake air. Inside, the odor of stale cigarette smoke choked the bar. He stripped off his sunglasses. He saw a long oak counter with stools on his left, square card tables scattered across a hardwood floor, and two pool tables at the rear. The walls were crowded with knick-knacks like logging saws and skis.

Three men with huge bellies drank beer, played pool, and blew smoke rings. A bored bartender, young and cute, eyed him in his expensive suit with a curious smile. A grizzled fireplug of a man sat at the bar with a mug of coffee in front of him. Cab approached the bar, and the bartender sauntered his way. She had her black hair loose, and she wore a rust wool sweater and frayed jeans.

'Help you?'

'I'm looking for Sheriff Felix Reich,' Cab told her. 'One of his deputies told me I could probably find him here.'

The girl nodded her head at the fireplug seated at the end of the bar. 'Sheriff,' she called, 'somebody's looking for you.'

Sheriff Reich's head swiveled slowly, and he took the measure of Cab from head to toe with the pinched expression of a man biting into a lemon. His eyes started at Cab's spiky blond hair and moved down his long body, taking in his pinstripes, tie, and polished loafers, and then traveled back up again, focusing on Cab's manicured fingernails and gold earring. When he was done, Reich turned away to study the steam rising out of his coffee cup, as if that was more interesting than anything Cab was likely to say.

'What can I do for you?' Reich said. His voice was as gravelly as the back roads on the island.

Cab took a seat two stools from the sheriff, with his back to the bar and his stilt-like legs stretched out into the middle of the hardwood floor. He balanced his elbows on the bar behind him. The white cuffs of his shirt, which were closed with onyx cufflinks, jutted out from the sleeves of his suit coat. He was accustomed to looking like an outsider and immune to the stares and silence when he went somewhere he didn't belong. This place was no different from a hundred others.

'Sheriff, my name is Cab Bolton,' he said. 'I'm a detective with the Naples Police in Florida.'

Reich, who wore a heavy flannel shirt tucked into corduroys, sighed and slid sideways on his stool. He wasn't a big man, but he was packed tightly into his clothes. His face was weathered, as if he had a permanent case of frostbite, and his blue eyes were hard and impassive.