back was to the room, and she was talking on the telephone.
'Please, Michael,' she was saying, her voice controlled but pleading, her whole body tense with suppressed emotion. 'Please put Kari on the phone. I've got to talk to her.'
There was a momentary silence on Else's end of the line. The other women in the kitchen shifted uneasily. One of them offered Sue a cup of coffee more as a diversionary activity than out of any real interest in hospitality.
'Else's on the phone right now,' the woman explained, edging Sue toward the door. 'Wouldn't you like to wait in the living room until she's free?'
Sue seemed to take the hint, allowing herself to be herded toward and through the doorway, but something about the obvious discomfort of the women gathered in the kitchen, something about the tense set of Else Gebhardt's shoulders, kept me from following suit.
'Because I don't want to give you the message, that's why!' Else said sharply into the telephone mouthpiece. 'This is important! I want to talk to Kari myself! Put her on the phone. Now!'
There was another brief pause. 'Hello?' Else said a moment later, depressing the switch hook several times in rapid succession. 'Hello? Hello? Why, that lousy little bastard! He hung up on me!'
'Else, such language!' an elderly woman exclaimed in a voice still thick with old-country inflections.
Across the room from where I stood was a small oak kitchen table. Seated at it, with her back to the window and with a sturdy wheeled walker stationed nearby, was a rosy-faced white-haired woman. She held a clattering cup and saucer in her palsied hand. Keeping her eyes focused on Else, the woman lifted the dainty china cup to her mouth and took a sip of coffee. When she put the cup back down, it rocked and rattled dangerously, but not a single drop of coffee spilled into the saucer.
'Be quiet, Mother,' Else Gebhardt said sharply. 'I'll talk about that rotten little creep any damned way I want.'
Unperturbed, the old lady shrugged and took another sip of coffee. 'I told Gunter he shouldn't have done that,' she continued, her false teeth chattering loosely as she spoke. 'I told him no good would come of it if he threw Kari out; that it would come back on you in the end. But would he listen? I'll say not. Not at all! Gunter Gebhardt never once listened to anybody else in his whole life!'
Else stood up and leveled a chilly, blue-eyed glare at the woman seated at the table. 'I'm warning you, Mother. I don't want to hear another word about it. Kari's father is dead, and I'm going to tell my daughter about this myself if I have to drive all the way up to Bellingham and break down the door to do it.'
Another woman moved quickly to the old woman's side. 'Please, Aunt Inge,' she said soothingly. 'Let Else be. She has enough to worry about right now.'
But Else's widowed mother, Inge, wasn't so easily stifled. 'She certainly does,' Inge Didricksen sniffed. 'And she should have started worrying about it a long time ago. She always let that man rule the roost like he was the king of Prussia. Now just see where it's got them!'
'Mother!' Else exclaimed furiously. 'Drop it.'
From the way they were going at it, I figured Gunter Gebhardt must have been a bone of contention between mother and daughter since day one. Just then Else caught sight of me standing across the room. Her face flushed with embarrassment. 'I'm sorry, BoBo,' she said. 'I had no idea you were here.'
'Detective Danielson and I came to talk to you, if you have time,' I said. 'We need to gather some information about your husband. Is there some place a little more private than this? A place where we could talk?'
Behind me in the entryway, the doorbell chimed again. No doubt another group of sympathetic friends was arriving. Still holding the cup and saucer that had been thrust in her hand, Sue Danielson appeared in the doorway. Else looked from her to me and then down at her mother, who, totally unperturbed, continued to drink her coffee.
'Come on,' Else said at last. 'We'll go downstairs. No one will bother us there. Just come get me if Kari calls back, would you?'
The woman, who was evidently a cousin, nodded and said she would. Meanwhile, Else turned on her heel and led us out the back door. Just outside, between the back door and one leading into the garage, was a cement slab. Yet a third door opened off it. Else paused before the third door long enough to extract a key from her pocket.
'Gunter always kept the workshop door locked,' she explained as she worked with the key. 'He never liked having people go down there, but I can't see that it matters that much now. He didn't want people walking in on him when he was working. And, of course, I'm sure the collection itself is very valuable.'
Stepping into the darkened stairwell, Else switched on a single overhead bulb, dimly illuminating a set of heavily timbered stairs. Under the banister, on either side of the risers themselves, lay a pair of railroad ties. The rough wood had been notched to fit the steps to keep them from slipping. I saw them, but only enough to notice them, as Sue and I followed Else down the stairway and off across the darkened, dungeonlike basement.
The mistress of the house knew where she was going. We didn't. Stumbling forward in the dark, I slammed my knee into something sharp and hard. The pain of the blow was enough to make me yelp.
'What's wrong?' Sue demanded, groping for my arm. 'What happened?'
'Watch out,' I told her. 'There's stuff around here that will break your leg.' While we stood waiting for Else to switch on the lights, I rubbed my knee with one hand and reached out to touch whatever I had run into with the other.
It felt like a motor of some kind, and that wasn't too surprising. In the last few years, we've had a number of serious windstorms in the Puget Sound area. Damage to downed wires has sometimes knocked out power for as many as several days at a time. Feeling the metal object, I supposed it was one of those gas-powered generators that have become almost standard equipment in the basements of some storm-lashed neighborhoods.
A moment later, Else flipped another switch, and the room lit up. It turned out I was almost right. What I had thought to be a gas-powered generator was actually a small engine block for a diesel generator set, the kind fishing boats use to drive auxiliary generators and hydraulic pumps. For ease of moving, it was mounted on top of a raised four-wheeled dolly. I didn't find it at all surprising that Gunter Gebhardt would use his basement for off-season storage and maintenance of some of his equipment.
When the lights came on, Sue and I found ourselves standing at one end of what was apparently a single room that ran the entire length of the house. Unlike most basements I have known and owned, this one was clean and neat. The white tile floor gleamed in the glow of overhead fluorescent lighting. One end of the room was devoted to storage. There the carefully organized shelves held the kinds of tools and equipment you'd expect in the workshop of a boat-owning fisherman. And those didn't interest me very much. After all, if you've seen one bench vise, you've seen them all.
What intrigued me were the wooden display cases that lined the entire opposite wall. I started toward them, but Else stopped me.
'Don't move until I turn off the alarm,' she said. I heard several electronic beeps from a keypad as Else punched in a code to turn off what was evidently a silent home-security system.
'Okay,' she said. 'It's off now.'
By then I was already moving toward the well-lit, glass-enclosed curio cases. Metal locks had been slid in between the two separate glass panels that formed the front of each section of case. The glass shelves were lit from both above and below by a bank of fluorescent fixtures at the top and bottom of each case. And standing on the sturdy glass shelves were literally hundreds of tiny figures-toy soldiers, each standing on his own private base.
I remember having some lead soldiers of my own once back when I was a little kid. My set contained only a dozen soldiers in all-G.I.'s decked out in full combat regalia. I loved those damn soldiers, played with them every day, cried when I lost one, and begged my mother for more. But toy soldiers like that were too expensive for my single mother's limited means. Those twelve in that one set were all I ever owned.
It wasn't until I was in high school and found the last one lurking in a bottom dresser drawer that my mother told me, with no little shame, that my precious set of soldiers had come to me via a Toys for Tots drive at our church. Mother's obvious chagrin at having had to resort to charity was contagious. I threw away that last remaining soldier, although now I wish I'd kept him.
And so, those ranked figures on the well-lit shelves held a childish, almost magnetic attraction for me. Enchanted at the prospect and walking like one lost in a hypnotic trance, I moved across the glaringly clean tile of Gunter Gebhardt's basement floor. My mind was alive with anticipation, knowing that I would be delighted by the
