Light shining on his face woke Mars at eight-thirty the next morning. The boys were still asleep in their sleeping bags in front of the fireplace. Mars’s last conscious memory was lying on the couch, watching the fire. He was still on the couch, but the fire was long dead. As this was their last day at the lodge, and they’d need to make an early start the next morning, Mars tiptoed quietly past the sleeping bodies to avoid waking the boys. He went into the kitchen and called Harold Ivings.
Ivings met Mars on the porch of the Beck cottage shortly after noon. The boys were out on the toboggan again, and Ivings smiled in pleasure as he watched them. “You’ve been having fun, then,” he said with satisfaction.
“It’s been terrific,” Mars said. “Your suggestion about the toboggan run was right on the money. Most fun we’ve ever had.”
Ivings pulled a heavy ring of keys from his pocket. “Let me take a look at the key you used,” he said. He turned it both ways as he looked at it. “You got the old key. Not like Mr. Pogue to make that kind of mistake.” The words were complimentary, but there was something in the way Ivings said it that made it clear he didn’t much like Ted Pogue.
“Actually,” Mars said, “I got the key from Mrs. Pogue. Karen Pogue. I’ve met Ted Pogue, but it’s Karen that I know well.”
Ivings nodded. “That would explain it. Mrs. Pogue’s a real nice lady, but she gets harried from trying to do too much, I’d say.”
Mars grinned. “You’re right on both points. She is a real nice lady, and she tries to do too much.”
Ivings turned the lock with a key from his ring. He swung open the door and he and Mars stepped directly into a living room, without any of the fanfare of the lodge’s entry hall. Mars let out a low whistle. The cottage was maybe a third the size of the lodge, but what it lacked in square footage, it made up in charm. The broad plank floor was partially covered by an old hand-woven rug. The stone fireplace was a miniature version of the fireplace in the great room at the lodge. The ceilings were lower by probably ten feet and there was more leather furniture than there was at the lodge.
“What a nice place,” Mars said, almost not out loud.
“You thinking of buying the place?” Ivings asked. Mars had not explained to Ivings why Karen Pogue had given him a key to the Beck cottage. Mars turned to face Ivings. He could have just said maybe. And left it at that. But that wouldn’t have explained why Mars would need to spend a couple hours in the cottage, why he’d need to go through the contents of drawers and closets. Besides, Ivings was a decent man. Mars had no doubt that telling him the truth wouldn’t become local gossip.
“Karen suggested my son and I might enjoy a weekend up here. But I also came up because I wanted to spend some time going through this cottage. I’m a homicide investigator with the Minneapolis Police Department, and we’re looking into the circumstances of Frank Beck’s death. I’ll need to spend a couple hours here—I don’t want to hold you up. If you’re willing, you could leave me the key, and I’d drive it back to you after I finish going through the house.”
Ivings fingered the key on the ring. “What I heard was Mr. Beck committed suicide.”
Mars considered what to say next. “Definitely looked that way. But we’ve found a couple things that bear looking into.
Could be when we’re through, it’ll still be suicide. But for now, we’re not as sure as we’d like to be.”
Ivings nodded. Then he said, “Won’t be necessary for me to leave the key. I’ve got to do my first security check of the day on the other cottages, and I’m going to be doing a mechanical run-through as well. I’ll just come back when I’ve finished up. You finish here before I get back, just lock the lock in the doorknob when you leave, and I’ll lock the dead bolt when I come back. As long as you and the boys are around, I don’t think there’s any problem doing it that way.”
Mars started in the upstairs bedrooms. There were three of them and only one big bathroom. The cottage was easy to explore. Being a vacation property, and a not-much-used vacation property at that, there was none of the accumulated stuff of daily living that could take hours to go through. At the same time, it made the search disappointing. It was a sterile environment with no intriguing finds.
It wasn’t until he was back in the living room, going through the built-in bookcases, that he found something that made his throat clutch. But it clutched for emotional reasons rather than because there was something that told him why Frank Beck might have been murdered. It was a photo album, with a child’s handwriting on the spine: “The History of Dad.”
Mars remembered Karen Pogue mentioning that years earlier Joey Beck had made a family genealogy as a birthday gift for Frank Beck. It seemed unspeakably sad that after all that had happened, this testament of love should be abandoned on the bookshelf of an empty house.
He carried the album over to a leather chair by the fireplace and sat down, opening the book. The album’s cover page was a pasted color photograph of the Beck family. Mars stared at the photo. His eyes went first to Frank Beck. The image could not have been more different from the photo Mars had seen of Beck lying on an autopsy table in the Hennepin County Morgue. This Frank Beck was filled
with life and joy: his eyes shining, his color high, his arms extended over the family in front of him in a gesture of possessive pride.
Mona Beck must have been in her forties in this picture, but she could easily have been the sister of the three children who sat on the floor in front of her. Her smile was less broad than that of any of the others, but her eyes were focused, direct, happy.
The two older children strongly resembled their mother. Joey, who sat cross-legged at the bottom of the picture, looked more like his father than his mother. While he was undeniably the same Joey Mars had met, there was a difference that went beyond age. Mars looked at the picture for moments before recognizing the difference. In the picture, Joey was untouched by sadness.
The album included detailed profiles of Frank Beck’s ancestors going back to the Revolutionary War. The largest section featured a Beck relative who had been a member of the First Minnesota Volunteers at the Battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War. Joey had included extensive historical records documenting the history of the First Minnesota. Minnesota had been a state for only three years when the First Minnesota had formed the first volunteers in the nation to come forward to support the Union’s cause. It was a moving story.
Mars was so engrossed in the book that he didn’t hear Harold Ivings come in.
“You look like you belong here,” Ivings said.
Mars slapped the album shut. “’Fraid not,” Mars said.
“You find what you were looking for?”
Mars stood and stretched. “Not really. It was a long shot, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to have a look. One thing.” Mars held the album up. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take this back and give it to Joey Beck. He made it for his dad’s birthday a few years back. Seems a shame to have something like this sitting in a deserted cottage.”
Ivings took the album from Mars and paged through it. “Funny thing,” he said. “I remember Joey working on this. Couldn’t have been more than twelve, thirteen years old.
Asked me to let him work on it in one of the other cottages so his dad wouldn’t see it. We called the cottage owner, and they said no problem.” Ivings flipped through more pages, shaking his head. “They were a nice family, and Joey was a good boy. You know, your boy reminds me of him some. Just now, when I was inspecting the cottages, your boy noticed and came over. Followed me around for a while, didn’t bother at all, but asked real intelligent questions. Joey Beck used to do the same thing.”
An ache that was becoming familiar circled Mars’s heart. “I know,” he said. “I’ve thought the same thing. I have to admit that part of what motivates me in this investigation is that one way or another, Joey Beck needs to know what happened to his dad. Being told his dad was murdered isn’t going to be good news, but I think he’ll feel less guilt if that’s the outcome.”
Ivings held the album up. “I hate to ask you this, but Mr. Pogue, he’s a stickler on this sort of thing. He finds out I let someone take something out of the property, he’ll blow a gasket. You mind signing something saying you took it and will return it to the Beck boy?”
“Not at all,” Mars said. “Tell you what else I’ll do. I’ll have Karen Pogue write you a letter thanking you for what good care you took of us and for letting me return the book to the Becks.”
“No need to say thanks. Just doing my job. You ready to go?” Ivings started to the door, stopped, and pulling on gloves, said, “Tell you the truth, I’d feel better myself if you found out Frank Beck didn’t commit suicide. When I saw him up here the week before he died, I thought he seemed just fine. Felt a little guilty that I hadn’t noticed anything was wrong.”
Mars stood stock-still. “You saw him up here the week before he died?”
“He’d been coming up here pretty regular the last few months. At first I didn’t understand it. Then, after he died, I drove into Ely to pick up the Tribune. Wanted to read the obituary and all. Well, there was a big article about Beck.
First I knew about all his problems. Of course, nobody told me the Becks had sold their share in the cottage to the Pogues, so I really took exception to Mr. Pogue chewing me out on that … .”
Mars held up both hands. “Wait a minute. I’m not following this at all. Why would Ted Pogue chew you out about the Becks selling the cottage to them?”
“Not about selling the cottage. About my letting Frank Beck stay in the cottage after he’d sold the share back to the Pogues. Like I said, nobody told me the Becks had sold out. First I knew about it was when I was up here doing a security check, two, maybe three weeks before Beck died. I ran into Pogue and Frank Beck standing right out there on the porch, having a screaming match. Mr. Pogue sees me, and he starts yelling at me about Beck being there. Beck started to defend me, which just made Pogue madder.”
Mars shook his head. “How would Pogue have known Beck was up here? It’s too long a drive for him to have driven up just on the chance that Beck would be around.”
“I wondered the same thing. What I think happened is that Pogue had gotten the monthly report I put together for him on work done at the compound. Something he insisted on having, mostly because he assumes nobody—me included—can be trusted. I put on that report all the work we do for the association, including preparing the cottages and the lodge for visitors. I suppose he took a look at that and saw that somebody had been using the Beck cottage frequently on weekends. Would have drawn his attention because, as I’ve said, none of the owners here use the place much anymore. Least of all the Becks in the past couple of years.”
“Still not clear to me that he’d drive all the way up here on the chance that Beck would be coming up.”
Ivings nodded slowly, hesitating. He looked Mars in the eye. “Not my place to tell tales out of school about the tenants up here, but you being a cop and all, I’m going to say a couple things. I can trust you not to repeat this unless it becomes important in your investigation?”
“I’m not interested unless it is important to the investigation.”
“Well, truth is, I didn’t really think how Pogue happened to be up here that weekend. But one thing occurs to me that I hadn’t connected to this situation until you mentioned it just now. Pogue called here, oh, maybe a couple weeks after he would have gotten the last report. Said association members were considering a new method for assessing association maintenance fees. My understanding of the current method is they assess based on square footage of the individual units. Pogue said they were going to be looking at usage as a factor, and he wanted me to let him know by phone if someone planned on being up, how long they stayed—and to add that information to the monthly reports. What was kind of unusual about his asking was that he made a point of saying he’d reimburse me for the phone charges. Not like him at all. That’s the kind of thing he usually nickel-and-dimes me about. Says I should take that kind of expense out of my contract payment. And he was real nice about asking, which isn’t usual, either.”
“So you called him to tell him that Beck would be coming up the weekend he and Beck had the argument.”
“Well, now you’re into the business end of things, and that I’d have to check with my wife. She’s around during the day, so she takes most of the phone calls. She does the books for the association, too. After I’d talked to Pogue, I told her about Pogue wanting to be notified by phone when someone was going to be using an association property, and I told her we were to include our phone charges for those calls on the monthly statement. That kind of thing, she’d just take care of it. Never occurred to me to ask if he’d been called. I think you can assume he would have been.”
“I hate to bother you, but can you get me a copy of your phone records for any calls you made to Pogue in November?”
Ivings looked a little uncomfortable, but he said, “I can do that. Don’t even know if we’ve received those charges yet, but when we’ve got them, I’ll have my wife mail you a
copy.” Ivings looked thoughtful, then he said, “You know, when you stop to think on it—any normal person, if they found out somebody had been using something without permission, they’d say right off, wouldn’t they? I mean, Pogue would have said to me when he got the monthly statement, ‘Looks like someone’s using the Beck cottage, and that cottage belongs to me now.’ Or he just would have made a local call to Frank Beck down in the cities, and said, ‘Why are you using the cottage without my permission?’ That’s what a normal person would do, wouldn’t you say?”
“Agree with you on that. But you said Beck was up here after the weekend he and Pogue argued?”
“The weekend before he died. He stayed in the Raymonds’ cottage. George Raymond called and said he’d given permission. I wasn’t going to be available to give Beck the remote for the front gate, so I told him to stop by the house and pick it up from my wife before he went out to the compound. Told him I’d drop in and say hello when I was making my security rounds. I was glad for a chance to see him. Kind of wanted to clear the air after that scene with Pogue. Wish Beck well and all, in case I didn’t see him again.”
“And your wife would have called Pogue to say Beck would be staying in the Raymonds’ cottage?”
Ivings shook his head. “Thing is, I wasn’t really thinking about that. I don’t doubt my wife would have called Pogue and said the Raymonds would be having a guest at their cottage that weekend … .” Ivings shrugged and made a self-deprecating little face. “I’d told her about the argument at the compound. She doesn’t much care for Pogue either. And she liked all the Becks. My guess is, she just would have said the Raymonds’ cottage was going to be used on such and such a weekend. Left it at that.”
“So Pogue wouldn’t have known that Beck planned on being here the weekend before he died.”
“No,” Ivings said, his face furrowed. “But funny thing was, when I pulled into the driveway that first night Beck was going to be staying in the Raymond cottage, there was a vehicle parked across the road from the gate. Looked a little
like the vehicle Pogue would come up in, so I have to tell you my heart stopped. Thought Pogue had followed Beck up …”
“Why would he park across the road?”
“Well, when I thought it was Pogue, what I thought was he forgot about our putting a remote control on the gate. That he’d locked himself out.”
“The gate lock is new?”
“New the week after Pogue and Beck had their argument. Pogue insisted. Called me every day until I told him it was done. That and he wanted the locks changed on the Beck cottage. Which is why the key you had didn’t work.”
Mars felt like he’d had the air kicked out him. What Ivings said was suggesting a possibility that Mars should have thought of on his own. That he hadn’t made him physically ill. “But it wasn’t Pogue parked outside the gate?”
“I came up right behind the vehicle, put my spotlight on it. There was snow packed up around the plates in the back, so I couldn’t get the number. But I could tell it wasn’t Minnesota plates. Other thing, it had those tinted windows. Pogue’s vehicle doesn’t have tinted windows.
“Could you see the driver?”
“Soon as I put the spotlight on the car, I could sorta see the driver raise his hand toward me, then he pulled on out. Probably just some fella made a wrong turn on the road. Happens all the time. I was real relieved it wasn’t Pogue.”
Not sharing Iving’s relief, Mars paced. “You make multiple security checks on the property every day?”
“Part of the job. I come back twice every twenty-four hours. And I don’t do it on any pattern. Somebody gonna try getting in to the property, they’re gonna watch to see what the regular activity is. So some days I come early, then come back in a couple hours, other days I’ll come midday, then after dark, or in the middle of the night. Pity that it’s necessary. Never used to be. But with more and more people coming up here, buying vacation homes, leaving electronic equipment and all in the homes—well, it’s gotten to be a big
problem. I’m proud to say we’ve never had any losses on this property. But I’ve chased plenty people off.”
“The remote lock on the gate. Before you put on? …”
“Well, the gate was there, and it latched. But there wasn’t a lock. Not a bad idea to have the lock. I just don’t like how the decision was made.”
“So you’re sure Ted Pogue wasn’t up here that last weekend that Frank Beck was in the Raymond cottage?”
Ivings finished putting on his gloves, and gestured for them to leave the cottage. As they walked, he said, “All I can say for sure is that I didn’t see Pogue here, and the vehicle I saw didn’t have Minnesota plates or clear glass windows.”
Mars slept in fits and starts that night. Around two-thirty, he gave up trying to get back to sleep, got up and started packing. At four, he woke the boys. “C’mon, guys. Something’s come up, and I want to get back to the cities as soon as possible.”
Chris sat bolt upright and while not fully awake, immediately began to get ready. He was dressed and ready to go in a half hour, sitting on a kitchen chair, yawning and staring blankly. The surest measure of his lack of consciousness was the fact that he hadn’t asked Mars why they were going back early.
James remained in deep sleep. Mars pulled a sweatshirt over James’s pajamas, put socks on his feet and pulled boots over the socks. He stuffed James’s limp body into his parka and carried him out to the car’s backseat. As he pulled out of the driveway, he glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the toboggan run. Definitely the most fun he’d ever had.
Driving through the black night with both boys asleep gave Mars a chance to order his thinking about what Ivings had said. He couldn’t get past blaming himself for not considering that Ted Pogue might have had a role in Frank Beck’s
death. Karen had told him at Restaurant Alma that Pogue hated Beck and had been enraged over issues involving the cottage. People had been murdered over less. Mars knew from experience where any number of bodies were buried as a result of personal feuds. And Beck had poured salt on Pogue’s wounds by returning to the cottage after it had been sold back to the Pogues. If Pogue had found out that Beck had gone back to the lake after the locks had been changed, it might have pushed Pogue over the edge. Especially if Pogue had not been able to get into the compound because of the locked gate. Without having gotten into the compound himself, all Pogue would have known was that Beck had returned to the compound. He would have assumed that Beck intended to stay in his cottage and had probably enlisted Ivings’s help in getting the gate control and a new key to the cottage. Based on those assumptions, he might well have begun a plan to exact revenge on Frank Beck.
As far as that line of thinking went, it was more than enough to establish a motive for Ted Pogue to murder Frank Beck. But as Mars drove, the anxiety that such a scenario gave rise to was eased by reflection on the unanswered questions surrounding Beck’s death.
To begin, if Pogue had murdered Beck, it was likely that it was Pogue that Beck planned on meeting the afternoon he was murdered. So you’d have to ask yourself: Why would Pogue make an appointment to see Beck? Doing so would leave a clear link between himself and Beck on the day Beck died. Pogue could have, of course, given another name. But he would have had to have disguised his voice and come up with a plausible explanation for why he wanted to meet Beck. Maintaining a disguised voice for any length of time was not an easy thing to do, particularly when the person to whom one was speaking was someone who knew the speaker well. Pogue could have asked a secretary to call Beck and set up an appointment in another person’s name. But doing that just created another link between Pogue and Beck and added a witness to Pogue’s plans.
In short, Mars didn’t believe that it was Pogue that Beck
planned to meet the afternoon that he died. And if there had been no plan for Pogue to meet Beck, the window of opportunity for Pogue to murder Beck between the time Beck met with his mystery appointment after three o’clock and six o’clock when he failed to call Joey was very, very small.
Mars’s emotional tension gave way as he considered that fact. It was no less stupid of him not to have considered Ted Pogue a suspect when Karen had revealed the animosity between the two men. But the prospect of being involved in the murder investigation of a good friend’s husband—at whose house he had been staying during the investigation and about whom he had knowledge that could constitute a motive for murder—seemed less probable than it had when he had been lying sleepless at the lodge.
The two other unanswered questions in the Beck murder didn’t tie in any obvious way to Pogue’s involvement either. Play the scenario again. Pogue is enraged that Beck has once again acted in violation of Pogue’s rights by returning to the cottage. Convinced of this fact, Pogue returns to the Twin Cities and begins—what?—weaving the noose? Why such a complicated means of killing Beck, if that’s what Pogue planned to do? And there were still the numbers on the arm. Mars would have to check out any possible links between Pogue and the numbers, but the possibility that such a link existed seemed more remote to Mars than the possibility that Pogue had made an appointment to murder Beck.
The sun was rising to the left as they approached Duluth. Chris sat up, pulling at the seat belt to make himself comfortable and squinting in confusion. “Where are we?” His voice was hoarse with sleep, but the question indicated he was on his way to being fully awake.
“Just coming into Duluth. We’ll be back in Minneapolis in three hours.”
“Why’d we leave so early?”
“Remember when I told you about going up to the lake—about how I wanted to look at a cottage that belonged to a guy who may have been murdered?”
“Yeah …”
“Well, I found some things I want to check out.”
“Ummm,” Chris said, letting his head drop back against the seat. His eyes closed momentarily, then opened again. “I’m really hungry.”
“We’ll do a drive-through breakfast once we get past Duluth and are back on the freeway,” Mars said.
Finishing his egg-on-a-muffin with many expressions of distaste, Chris crumpled up the wrapper and tossed it into a bag on the car floor. Mars looked over at the bag and said, “Do me a favor. Get your food wrapper out of that bag. I’ve got a book in there and the wrapper may be greasy.”
Chris bent over, picked out the wrapper and tossed it on the floor in the backseat, below the still-deep-sleeping James. Then he reached into the bag and picked up The History of Dad. “What is it?” Chris said.
“The son of the guy whose death we’re investigating made that for his dad a few years ago. I found it in the cottage. Thought the son should have it.”
Chris started turning pages and was quickly engrossed in the personal stories. “You know what’s really good about this book, Dad?”
“I know a lot of things that are really good about that book. Just not sure if I know what you think is really good.”
“What’s really good about this book is he did it before the Internet. Now you could get all this stuff on the Internet, just like that!” Chris snapped his fingers. “But it says in the front of the book that he did this in 1993. He had to get all this stuff from the library or someplace. It would have been really hard.”
“I expect he got some of it from the State Historical Society—especially the stuff on the Civil War.” Mars paused. Right now the only thing he knew about Frank Beck that was even remotely interesting was that he had an ancestor who’d been in the Civil War. That was something Mars had learned in his years of detective work. When a piece of information surfaces more than once, you should pay attention,
no matter how unrelated it might appear to be. And this was the second time in less than a week that Beck’s Civil War ancestor had come up.
“Which reminds me,” Mars said. “We haven’t been to the new History Center building yet, and you said you wanted to go. Should we do that next weekend?” Kill two birds with one stone, is what Mars was thinking.
“That would be good,” Chris said. He looked again at the album. “Know what I could do? I have to turn in a topic for U.S. history before Christmas vacation. I’d like to read more about”—he turned pages in the album, then held the album open toward Mars. “I’d like to read more about the First Minnesota Volunteers. It says that they saved the Union at the Battle of Gettysburg. I didn’t even know that, and I’ve lived in Minnesota all my life.”
Mars nodded. “Tell you the truth, I didn’t know it either. That’d be a real interesting thing to check out. For both of us.”