Hidden in the pines, p.1
Hidden in the Pines, page 1
HIDDEN IN THE PINES
A Lew Ferris Mystery
VICTORIA HOUSTON
For Mike
There is but one thing of real value—to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger, in the midst of lying and unjust men.
—Marcus Aurelius
Prologue
The banging on the front door was so loud it woke the eight-year-old from a deep sleep. She lay still, listening to the gravelly voice coming from the living room. Was that her father? Was her sister Maggie home late again?
Tossing back the light blanket she’d pulled up to keep her cozy in the breezes blowing through the open window, she crept to the bedroom door. Turning the knob slowly so as not to make a sound, she cracked the door open. Now she could see into the living room and also hear better.
Someone had turned on all the lights. She could see her father standing to the right, his back to her. Her mother was on the sofa with her head in her hands. The police officer was talking.
“Dr. Hanson, Mrs. Hanson, I am so sorry to have to tell you folks this, but we had a call—less than an hour ago—and we got there within five minutes. Your daughter was lying on the bank of the Coon River. A fisherman casting in the weeds along there spotted her and called 911. Dr. Hanson, I recognized her right away. She’s in my daughter’s class.
“I called for an ambulance, and they got there within ten, maybe fifteen minutes. But she was … she was gone. She was gone before we got there.”
His voice lowered, but the girl could make out words, words she knew were about her sister: “… head injury … assaulted … marks on her neck … I had the paramedics take her body to the hospital and called the coroner—”
“No! No—God, no.” Her father grabbed the officer’s arm. “Keep that horrible man away from her. You hear me? I don’t want him taking photos of my daughter. You know the kind of morgue photos that creep takes of women—and shares them with everyone at the bar. No, I won’t have it, goddammit. You keep that bastard away from my child. I don’t want him touching her.”
The police officer backed away, both hands up. “Yes, yes, I understand, but what—”
“I will go to the hospital with you right now. I will arrange for my colleague, Dr. Fieldstone, to do the exam. He can confirm my daughter’s death. Isn’t that what you need to authorize an official autopsy? But don’t you let that creep near my daughter’s body or I will sue the bejesus out of you, out of this town—”
“Okay, okay, we can do that,” said the officer, sounding doubtful. “I’ll call my chief, and if he’ll deputize Dr. Fieldstone to be acting coroner, then he can take care of the death certificate.”
“Yes, please. If you will do that, then Dr. Fieldstone can call the Wausau Crime Lab to handle the autopsy. There has to be an autopsy. I’ll pay out of my own pocket if I have to. Look, Officer, that’s all I ask.”
The girl in the bedroom could hear her father trying to calm himself down.
“Well … I …”
She could hear hesitation in the police officer’s voice.
“Tell you what, Officer,” said her father in his most authoritative MD’s voice, “all you need to do is say the coroner could not be reached at two in the morning and as a medical professional, Dr. Fieldstone was available to step in and confirm the … the situation. Sound okay?”
“Yes, I guess so,” said the officer, after a moment. “Will you come with me now?”
“Let me call Fieldstone and ask him to meet us there. I’ll be right behind you.”
“And me,” her mother said. “I have to see—” She didn’t finish.
“Alice, you need to stay here with Judith,” said her husband.
“She’s sleeping—she’ll be fine. I. Am. Coming.” Her voice had a tone the girl had never heard before.
The front door closed. The room was silent.
* * *
The young girl lay awake until she heard her parents return. It was dawn, too early for her to get up. Again she crept to the door to listen, but all she could hear were snatches of conversation, as her parents were standing farther away in the dining room.
“Camp counselor … accident on pontoon …”
She crawled back under her blanket and drifted off to sleep. When she got up, her parents were in the kitchen waiting for her.
“We have terrible news, hon,” said her mother, her voice breaking. “Your beautiful big sister was killed in a boating accident last night.”
Judith stared at her mother, then her father, then said nothing.
She knew that wasn’t true.
Chapter One
Fifty years later Judith Hanson still did not know the truth. Fifty years might have gone by, fifty years of no answers, but she had no intention of giving up: at age eight, she had made up her mind to find out what really happened, and she remained determined to find the person—or people—who had killed Maggie Hanson, her big sister.
With that thought in her mind, Judith placed the last of her personal belongings in the leather tote before turning off her computer. A knock on the office door caused her to glance up.
“I’m going to miss you, boss,” said Dan, her right hand and assistant manager at the printing firm. The company had tripled in size over the twenty years they had worked together, fielding successes and disasters in tandem.
“Nice of you to say,” she said, smiling up at him, “but it’s your turn now, and I’m ready to take life easy.”
“Yeah, you said you’re heading back to your folks’ place in Loon Lake for a few months. Then where?”
Her phone rang, and Judith reached for it. “Excuse me, Dan,” she told him. “It’s Kate, my daughter. I’ll catch up with you on my way out.”
Judith turned her attention to the phone. “Hey, hon,” she said, “I’ll have to call you back. Just going out the door for the last time.”
“That’s why I’m calling, Mom,” said Kate. She was in her early thirties now, married, the mother of two young children and not hesitant to speak her mind. “I’ve thinking about this, and I’m convinced you’re making a big mistake. You know going back to the old place always upsets you. When you’re there, you’re not yourself. And I want you down here with me and the family.”
“I know, I know, but it’s time I close down the place and put it on the market. Shouldn’t take me more than a month or two. Then I’ll be down and find a condo near you.”
“There’s a lovely one for sale right now. Why don’t you hire an estate sales firm to clear out the house and a real estate broker to take care of the rest?” She paused for a moment before continuing. “Mom, you should move down here right now. Right now—hear me?”
Judith laughed. “Kate, you’ve inherited my worst traits—you are way too bossy. Yes, I hear you. Yes, you may be right. But I have to do this.”
She could hear an exasperated sigh from her daughter before Kate spoke again. “Okay, then make me one promise, please? Get down here by Christmas.”
“That’s easy. I absolutely promise to be there for the holidays, maybe even Thanksgiving. Evanston, Illinois, here I come.”
“Good. Love you, Mom.”
“Love you too.”
* * *
Judith’s marriage, short-lived though it was, had made her a mother. Raising Kate had been an ongoing blessing in her life. That and her work, where she had lucked out with colleagues and challenges that had kept her mind off her mission—most of the time.
Now she was free to explore the few clues she had unearthed as she tried numerous times to find out more about the night Maggie died. It had been impossible to talk about it with her parents, but they were gone now.
Few of the people she’d known growing up still lived in Loon Lake, but she had names and contact information. Her plan was to move into her childhood home, begin the process of closing it down—and reach out to anyone who might have known her sister. It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried before, but nothing had worked.
Judith knew she was likely to fail again, but she wanted to make one more attempt. After all, she knew plenty of friends who had retired to their hometowns. If she was lucky, she might find someone from Maggie’s class or the neighborhood, and who knew? That person just might remember that awful night.
She had another reason to go back, and it was one that couldn’t happen in Evanston—she wanted to hunt.
* * *
She had been ten when her grandfather insisted she go with him to the shooting range. He had a .22 pistol and showed her how to shoot it. That summer, the two of them spent every Wednesday afternoon practicing at the shooting range.
“You’ll be able to protect yourself, and that’s important now and when you grow up,” he’d said. Judith wasn’t sure which she’d enjoyed more—becoming an excellent shot or the time she got to spend with her grandfather.
When she was twelve, he surprised her with a 12-gauge shotgun for her birthday. Bird hunting was his passion, and now he had a friend to go with him. “You’re my retriever,” he would kid her.
One of her high school friends, a boy named Tom, often tagged along with Judith and her grandfather when they hunted grouse. After her grandfather’s death and for the few years they’d stayed in touch after college, Judith and Tom would meet up in the fall for a weekend of grouse hunting.
They were pals, not lovers, though they shared a love of the Wisconsin autumns and their walks though the young aspens where the birds hung out. Her heart would lift with plain and simple happiness as
* * *
She drove into Loon Lake late that afternoon and stopped by the Loon Lake Market to stock up on basics, as she had left the refrigerator empty on her last visit. Walking out the door after making her purchases, she picked up a copy of the day’s Loon Lake Daily News.
Once in her mother’s kitchen, she put away the groceries, poured herself a glass of white wine, and sat down at the kitchen table to check out the obituaries in the newspaper, hoping none of the people she was hoping to contact had died.
This was not her first look at the obit page—she had checked the paper daily online from her office for years. She was glad to see that no one she knew had passed away. Absent-mindedly, she paged through to the final two pages where job openings were posted.
ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT NEEDED IN MCBRIDE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT read large block letters. Judith idly looked closer at the requirements: she was definitely overqualified. She was also, she figured, older than whoever they might be expecting to hire. She was also not looking for a job.
That evening, before she went to bed, she pulled the newspaper from the trash and read through the ad once more. A thought had occurred to her: she wondered if such a position would give a person access to local law enforcement records. The ad implied that applicants had to be experienced in data transfer, so, Judith surmised, that would make sense.
She certainly had not planned to go back to work, but to research anything she could find regarding her sister’s murder? Yes. That was exactly what she wanted to accomplish before leaving Loon Lake.
For fifty years she had lived with knowing, from that late-night conversation she wasn’t supposed to have heard, the details the police officer had told her parents, details that described finding a girl’s body beaten and possibly sexually assaulted. The police officer had told her parents he believed her sister, Margaret “Maggie” Hanson, had been murdered. The next morning her parents tried to keep the truth from her—but she knew. And she had lived the last fifty years determined not to die before she knew what had really happened and who was responsible. This might be a way to find out. Worth a try.
She set her clock to wake early and call for an interview with the McBride County Sheriff’s Department. The person to contact was someone named Dani Wright.
That night Judith slept easy.
Chapter Two
“Chief, we have one applicant I really like,” said Dani Wright, her voice buoyant. “It’s a woman—she’s a little older but very experienced with office stuff and IT. I emailed you her résumé. Got time to take a look?”
In her new role as the senior administrator in the McBride County Sheriff’s Department, Dani was finding herself overwhelmed.
Between the organizational challenges of helping newly elected Sheriff Lewellyn Ferris begin to manage the three towns and six townships the county included and updating the department’s IT capabilities while simultaneously handling records requests coming in from across the state of Wisconsin, Dani was floundering, and she knew the responsibilities of the job would only increase. Previously, when Lew had been the police chief of their town, she had had no trouble keeping up with her job, but this involved far more responsibility and far more work.
Dani needed help.
* * *
Lew Ferris had joined the Loon Lake Police twenty years earlier and watched the town grow as the paper mill expanded and, more exciting, the Northwoods became even more of a tourist mecca than it had been in the early 1900s. Fishing was a growing sport, as bass tournaments and muskie carnivals and a gourmet appreciation for sautéed walleye drew more and more visitors north in the summertime. Fly-fishing, a favorite sport of Lew’s since childhood, was also growing in popularity, partly because more women were now taking it up.
And with all that came crime. Cottages were ransacked during the winter months. Drinking—aka Wisconsin’s state sport—made for increasing numbers of car accidents and DUIs, especially over the summer months. Snowmobilers added a new dimension: hundred-year-old-trees do not flinch when hit by large, loud machines. The tree wins; the snowmobiler, depending on their condition, goes to the hospital or to jail.
During Lew Ferris’s years on the Loon Lake Police force, she’d learned firsthand how the steadily increasing number of visitors was putting pressure on the small-town police forces attempting to patrol the lakes and rivers and forest lands of the Northwoods. As climate change took its toll farther south, McBride County, home to the town of Loon Lake, was only going to grow more populated—and more likely to attract bad actors.
When the longtime sheriff of McBride County had decided to retire, Lew had struggled with whether or not to run for his position. She knew it would mean a heavy schedule that was sure to cut into her moments of pleasure—her escapes to the trout stream.
Then two things happened. First, a totally unqualified (in her opinion) man who’d been a police officer for only a few years decided to run for sheriff of McBride County. In his political ads on TV and in the newspaper, he bragged of having shot “a twelve-point buck”—as if that were proof he was a skilled lawman. Lew knew that such a “score” would appeal to some of his fellow hunters—male, of course—a fact that she found irritating. More irritating was his not-so-subtle suggestion that “a woman really isn’t suited to managing law enforcement.”
When Lew got wind of that remark, she began to drop her reluctance to consider the position.
The second factor that made up her mind was the realization that she wouldn’t be alone in trying to manage the challenges of law enforcement in the region. Over her years on the force, she had developed resources and relationships with others in the field. One was Bruce Peters, an excellent investigator with the Wausau Crime Lab. Another was Ray Pradt, an expert fishing guide—and tracker—who could be depended on to be deputized when a criminal investigation required exploring the impossible through the waters and woods surrounding lake country. And not least, her close friend Dr. Paul Osborne, a retired dentist with an expert knowledge of odontology—the science of using teeth and bones to identify corpses and extract DNA—was there to be deputized when she needed him.
One more person had been key to her ongoing success as the chief of the Loon Lake Police, and that was Dani Wright. Dani, once destined to run a beauty salon, had found her career path diverted when Lew stumbled onto the young woman’s natural talent: Dani was a born techie. While everyone else in the courthouse setting struggled with internet searches and data transfers, Dani came by it naturally. And discovered along the way that she liked IT better than creating nail art. Not only that—it paid better, much better. Lew knew Dani Wright’s expertise made her and the Loon Lake Police Department look good. And she could do even better if she had responsibility countywide. That was tempting.
So when Lew thought over whom she could depend on if elected, she realized that, yes, being sheriff would not be easy. Yes, it would take time away from her beloved hours in the trout stream. But she had the resources she needed: people, experience, and a love for the community she would serve.
“McBride County is not populated by twelve-point bucks,” she told the television and newspaper reporters. “McBride County is home to people, people whose lives I value.”
And with those words, Lewellyn Ferris had made her bid to be elected sheriff of McBride County.
She’d won. And today was her first day in her new job.
Chapter Three
To keep up with the increased workload, Dani and Lew had designed a new position, one with multiple responsibilities but a simple title: administrative assistant. No sooner had the position been posted than they had seven applicants. Three were young women with whom Dani had gone to school and who seemed to think that just knowing her was enough of an asset to land them the job.
