The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(81)

From a distance, they could see all the police cars parked at the foot of the path leading up to the fishing cabin. The path where Phyllis Oldham had seen her husband when he shouldn’t have been there.

An ambulance was parked a bit farther on. Artie slowed and stopped when a uniformed officer approached them. “Pull behind the ambulance,” she said. “We’re waiting for the techs to give the okay to remove the bodies.”

“What’s going on?” Artie asked. He undid his seat belt and leaned farther out the window. The tips of Ilka’s fingers were cold. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer to his question. She shouldn’t even have come along, she thought. She wasn’t trained to handle dead people, and today, feeling completely defenseless, she just wasn’t up to it.

“Who’s up there with him?” Artie yelled out when the female officer walked away. Ilka’s stomach lurched.

The officer didn’t answer, but she unfastened the barrier tape so they could drive the hearse in.

“Sorry, I can’t tell you anything,” she said as they drove by.

Artie followed orders and parked behind the ambulance. Officers Thomas and Doonan were coming down the path when they got out of the hearse. The two policemen spotted them and waved them over. “Bring the stretcher,” Thomas said, his voice unusually deep. “You get to carry him down.”

Closer now, Ilka saw that Doonan’s eyes were red, and there were deep lines around his mouth, as if he had pulled a mask over his face to shield himself.

Thomas’s emotions were more open; his round cheeks quivered when he shook his head. “This is about as tragic as it gets,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. He looked so miserable that Ilka involuntarily reached out and squeezed his arm. “This is just so sad, so, so sad, and it makes no sense at all. You’d better go on up.”

“Does Shelby know?” Artie asked again.

Thomas raised a hand to his forehead, and a few seconds later he began massaging his temple, as if he hoped everything would go away if he rubbed hard enough. “Not yet. This changes everything about what’s happened. I guess I’ll have to show her the letter; otherwise, she’ll never understand.”

He turned and walked back up. They followed, though Ilka lagged behind. The two men carried the stretcher, while she bore the body bag under her arm.

Lyme grass grew on both sides of the path; tangled wild roses stood out in windblown bushes. They followed the winding path, and finally Ilka caught sight of the cabin, a wooden shack with small windows. Fish traps and nets hung from the end of the structure; the wind and foam from the lake had weathered the unvarnished boards. The cabin looked like it had been built from driftwood.

She counted eight police officers before they reached the cabin. A technician squatted, packing up a camera.

“We’ve been waiting on that tech, but now it looks like he’s finished,” Thomas said, gesturing at the man. “The dogs found them a little past eight this morning. And nothing has been moved; they’re lying just like they were when we came.”

Again Artie asked what had happened as they walked to the door, which hung crookedly on two hinges. The police stood off to the side now, speaking quietly among themselves. None of them looked at the cabin when Thomas led them in.

Ilka couldn’t stop from crying out when she saw the two men on the floor. Mike Gilbert had on the same clothes as when he’d been in the coffin. He looked like a wax figure as he lay with his head in Jesse Oldham’s lap, his hands folded across his chest. The undertaker’s son sat slumped in a corner, his hair hanging over his closed eyes, hands resting on Mike’s shoulders.

“The letter was on the floor beside them,” Thomas said, his voice breaking. He cleared his throat.

The policeman must have known the two men on the floor since they were in school, Ilka thought. His face was gray, and it was obviously difficult for him to look over there.

The cabin was otherwise completely empty; no furniture, nothing indicating it was used by some of the many sport fishermen along Lake Michigan. Jesse Oldham had placed himself and Mike so they faced the crooked door that opened to a magnificent view of the lake.

“The door was open when the dogs found them,” the policeman said. “Must have been hard for Jesse to drag Mike up here, though he was a strong guy.”

“But why?” Ilka asked, after they’d all stepped out of the cabin. The wind whipped her hair around in front of her face; all she could see was the image of the two men on the floor.

The stocky officer crossed his arms as if he were freezing, even though the sun bore down on them. He cleared his throat again and said that in the letter, Jesse Oldham admitted killing Ashley.

“But the way he tells it, it was a mistake; he didn’t mean to kill her. He was jealous, and he snuck along behind when Mike came up here to meet her. He waited outside and saw them together. Then when Mike left to go to work, Jesse knocked and went in. They argued, he got mad, got upset, and he yelled at her, told her to stay away from Mike. He wrote that Ashley made fun of him, taunted him about falling in love with Mike. She told him, ‘Do you really think he wants anything to do with a fag like you?’ And he pushed her. And she fell.”

“Oh God,” Artie said.

“He wrote that he had been in love with Mike already back in school. At first he thought Mike was interested, too, but then Mike met Ashley. Jesse was the odd man out.”