He drove too fast at first and the wheels spun, but he shifted down and only one wheel sunk into the ditch at the side of the path and the car growled back again on firm ground. The mailbox was at the end of the road. He promised himself to drive around again in the morning to determine the layout of the land. It would be silly to face the realtor without any ideas at all. The man might be honest, but even an honest man gets tempted when faced by an idiot.
When he got back Suzanne was sitting in front of the fireplace wringing her hands. Her original misery seemed to have acquired an additional twist. She seemed close to hysteria. He sat down next to her and held her hand.
'What is it, dear?'
'They all died, Jan, all of them. I must get away. They are all dead now. There's only me left, me.'
'All of them?'
She told her story in bursts, trailing off every now and then until he patiently guided her back. He asked as little as possible, waiting for the information to fit. Gradually the pattern emerged, a definite report with a beginning and an end. The end was Opdijk's death. But the event seemed to relate to other events. When, two hours later, she had calmed down and they had drunk coffee he had made himself and he had seen her safely to her room, he went to his own and made some notes. The notes had six headings and each heading was a name. He read the notes to himself and lit a fresh cigar and puffed and underlined a word here and there. Then he wrote them again, slowly and meticulously.
Six houses on one line, south shore of Cape Orca. That was the main clue of course, the connection, the thread. Only one house occupied now; the Opdijk house. The others empty and two of them burned down. Strange, wasn't it? Valuable property, left to rot, left for the storms to blow through, for vandals to desecrate and ultimately destroy, to burn. Burn, that was the limit; they wouldn't burn by themselves. Right. Now the former occupants.
Case number one. A Mr. Jones. He couldn't put a face to the man. Suzanne had hardly known Jones, but Suzanne never knew anybody except herself, her poor suffering self. The commissaris wondered if Suzanne had known her husband. The bedrooms were separate; they might have been separate from the start. Why would Opdijk have put up with Suzanne? Did he want a housekeeper and no more? But Suzanne wasn't much of a housekeeper either. The house was clean of course, and fairly luxurious but otherwise-a hellhole of bad taste. Well, never mind. Mr. Jones was dead. An old man living by himself in a small, good bungalow set at the end of the Cape, overlooking the water like the other houses. A man who kept to himself. Found dead in his own woods, shot through the head. Two years ago. During the hunting season. Bullet came from a deer rifle. Accident, pity. According to Suzanne the house wasn't sold. Nobody else moved in, and eventually it burned down.
Case number two. The death of Mary Brewer, a woman about sixty years old, also retired. Miss Brewer liked to sail and to take her eleven-foot boat out on the bay. The Coast Guard had warned her several times and she had been fined for not wearing a life jacket or taking proper precautions, but she kept on sailing for the horizon and one day she didn't come back. Her corpse turned up bashed by the waves and the rocks and partly eaten by sharks or raccoons. Raccoons, the commissaris said, and he remembered how Suzanne had pronounced the word. Clearly the animals disgusted her. The commissaris had seen raccoons in the Amsterdam zoo. Very likable, he had thought, small dainty bears with agile hands. But they ate Mary's corpse. Well, why shouldn't they? The lady was dead. Another accident. And again the house found no new occupants. It still stood there. The furniture and trimmings had been removed by the heirs, but the empty shell was left.
Case number three. The disappearance of Captain Schwartz. But there was a difference to the pattern here and more was known. Schwartz, a genuine captain of some U.S. army outfit, retired, became a Nazi, and liked to march around his grounds with a swastika band around his arm. He also wore a German-style cap. There were no other Nazis in Woodcock County, but the captain occasionally went to New York to meet friends. He also wrote articles for the party monthly in which he propagated Nazism as the solution for American crime and corruption and urged his countrymen to conquer the world and kill the Jews. An evil man, but, as far as he had been able to deduce from Suzanne's incoherent rambling, probably insane and unable to realize his preaching in any way besides writing to be read by other madmen. His neighbors would have no contact with him and the local store wouldn't serve him, but he didn't mind and did his shopping in the next county. If he wanted any conversation he talked to a portrait of Adolf Hitler, hung in the hall of his house. But his activity attracted hostility from Jameson's rowdies. Suzanne talked about a gang. She even had a name for the rebels of Jameson: the BMF gang. The commissaris didn't know what the letters stood for. A motorcycle gang if he interpreted Suzanne's information correctly. And the leader of this gang, a young man called the fox, a particularly nasty character according to Suzanne, was reputed to have visited Schwartz and possibly threatened him, for the Nazi suddenly left and was never seen again. The captain was supposed to be living in New York now. A relative had come out and perhaps sold the house, but it was still empty. Suzanne wasn't clear about the timing of Captain Schwartz's troubles and subsequent flight. Some years ago, she'd said.
Case number four. A gentleman by the name of Carl Davidson who lived by himself after his wife died of a heart attack in the hospital. Davidson liked to walk in the woods and might stay out camping for a few days. Because he lived alone and had few social contacts he wasn't missed until his frozen corpse was found by wandering locals. It had been snowing heavily and there were no tracks.
Case number five. Another old man, by the name of Paul Ranee. Unlike the others, who all originated in New York or Washington, D.C., Ranee was a local, a retired carpenter who had built his own small cabin between the bungalows of his neighbors. He had been an alcoholic but managed to stop drinking when told to do so by his doctor. Ranee was sickly and liked to stay oh his own grounds. Toward the end of his life he was running short of money. After not drinking liquor for several years, he suddenly died of alcoholic poisoning. His cabin burned down some months after his death.
Case number six. Pete Opdijk, sawing down a dead tree, slipped, fell off the cliffs, and broke his spine and head.
The commissaris reread his notes and added a few full stops and commas. Then he whistled, blew a smoke ring, put his finger through it, and made some joyful but inarticulate sounds. But then his expression changed and became a mixture of sadness and indifference. He remembered that he wasn't in Amsterdam and that the detectives of the murder brigade weren't around to be summoned to join him in a conference. This string of deaths had nothing to do with him. It might be of interest to the local authorities and the local authorities wouldn't be altogether witless. He recalled the face of the small sheriff, impassive in the sleek cruiser. A fine pair of eyes, calm and penetrating. Surely the man wouldn't just float around in his power symbol while willful death repeated itself in house after house on the shore of a peninsula well within his jurisdiction. Or would accidents really happen in such an alarming, repetitious pattern? The victims were all elderly.
He studied his cigar carefully. Elderly. Statistics proved that the elderly often want to die, so they become accident-prone or actually commit suicide. Suicide requires an act of will. It is easier to become careless. And to be careless in Woodcock County might be very dangerous. Why on earth would Pete Opdijk pick a cold day to cut down a dead tree, walk on slippery ice to get to the tree, and work on the tree while he was balancing on the edge of a precipice? And why would an old man like Carl Davidson wander about in the woods? Did he want the blizzard to sneak up on him and kiss him to death?
He put his cigar between his thin lips. No, no. Opdijk wouldn't have spent a fortune on a comfortable bungalow if he meant to have an accident. And what about the other houses? Why wouldn't anyone move into them? Why were they left until they burned down? And who was burning them down? Vandals?
He rubbed out his cigar. 'Bah.'
'Yes, Jan? Anything wrong?' He shivered, he hadn't noticed her coming in.
'No, dear, just going through my notes.'
'There aren't any complications, are there, Jan? Oh, I wish we could go tomorrow. And I wish we could go by boat. Airplanes frighten me.'
'Do you want me to take your furniture, Suzanne?'
He watched the struggle on her face but didn't interfere.
'It will be expensive, won't it, Jan?'
'Yes, it will have to be crated and we will have to get trunks to take it to a port and you will have to pay to bring it through Dutch customs. Freight, duty-it will add up.'
'I can't just leave it.'
