A Shot to Die For (13 page)

I had the sense he was telling the truth. Still, I shook my head. He might not have lied, but he had been less than candid. It was clear where his priorities lay. Then again, had I really expected anything else?

“Listen. People up here value their privacy. That’s one of the reasons they live here. They get upset when someone asks too many questions.”

“Well, the way I see it, the best way to stop questions is to answer them fully the first time.” I paused. “Assuming they have nothing to hide.”

He didn’t answer.

Chapter Nineteen

Mac left early the next morning, but I stuck around, indulging myself with a day at the spa, compliments of the Lodge. They’d heard about the incident with my outfit, and this was their way of offering an apology. After a massage, manicure, pedicure, and facial, I decided maybe the shoot wasn’t so bad after all. I packed up around three, unsure whether I was a beauty queen in training or a turkey trussed and dressed and ready to roast.

Instead of taking Route 50 to I-94, I drove through downtown Lake Geneva. It was a hot gray day, and it felt like a storm was moving in. I grabbed a frappuccino at a Starbucks and was just getting into my car when the door to the drug store across the street opened. Luke Sutton came out carrying a small plastic bag. Glancing up at the overcast sky, he went around to the back of the store and disappeared.

I sipped my drink, then got out of the car. A pay phone was just outside the coffee shop. I walked up and checked the phone book.

A few minutes later I turned into a semicircular gravel driveway off South Lake Shore Road. A procession of lakefront estates, each one larger and more luxurious than the next, flanked the street. F. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The rich are different. It’s not just their sense of entitlement, or their casual plundering of resources. I think it’s a sense of “apartness”—that they are not bound by the same rules as the rest of us. They seem to exist in a parallel universe, partaking of ours only when it suits them.

I parked in front of a stately Tudor with steeply pitched gables, a half-timbered exterior, and tall, diamond-paned windows. I walked to the front door and started to press Willetta Emerson’s doorbell. Then I reconsidered and walked back down her drive and about 100 yards down the road. Charles Sutton’s estate sat precisely in the center of a circular driveway, well recessed from the road, but plainly visible. It was a red-brick structure, with four white columns supporting a large portico. Behind the portico on top of the house sat a wide octagonal-shaped base. Above that was a white dome.

I don’t know much about architecture, but the house had a classical, familiar look. Small windows peeked out just below the dome, and I thought I saw a skylight as well. I’d seen this house before. But where? When I got it, I sucked in a breath. Charles Sutton had built a replica of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home.

I peered up the driveway. Two small statues flanked the front entrance. From a distance, I thought they were replicas of those little black jockeys in red jackets you used to see on lawns before they became unacceptable, but as I squinted, I realized I was wrong. The statue on the left was a cowboy, with a ten-gallon hat, chaps, lasso, and two six-guns. On the right was an Indian in feathered headdress, buckskin clothes, and warpaint. No pseudo-Southern gentility here. Someone had a Midwestern sense of humor.

I retraced my steps to Willetta Emerson’s home and rang the doorbell. Seconds later someone waved to me from a window, and a moment after that Willetta answered the door. Dressed in a brightly printed caftan, she made a stark contrast to the gray day.

“Hiya, cutie. You didn’t waste any time, did you?”

“It’s not a bad time, is it?”

“Of course not. I’m glad for the company. Too quiet around here since George passed on.” A trace of sadness came over her, but it resolved quickly. “Come on in.”

Like the gown she wore at the gala, the predominant color in Willetta Emerson’s home was green. The furniture, mostly white wicker, was upholstered in material splashed with green ferns and leaves. Matching wallpaper festooned the walls. The effect was more Miami Beach than Lake Geneva, which, combined with the staid Tudor architecture, made some kind of statement. I wasn’t sure what.

She led me into her kitchen, a large room with a slate floor, forest green cabinets, and a butcher block table. Motioning me to sit down, she took the kettle to the sink. “I’ll make some tea.” She turned on the faucet, then checked a clock on the wall. It was almost four. “Aw, hell, it’s five o’clock somewhere.”

She switched off the water, opened a cabinet, and pulled out a full bottle of bourbon and two shot glasses. She poured two fingers into each glass and brought them to the table. “Here.” She passed one to me.

I took a sip. The liquor burned my throat. Willetta downed hers in one gulp and smacked her lips. “So, Miss Ellie Foreman, what would you like to know?”

I leaned back. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had actually invited me to ask questions. I plunged in. “Well, for starters, I just took a look at the Sutton estate. It looks like a replica of Monticello. Was that intentional?”

Willetta laughed. “You ever been there?”

“Charlottesville? No, but I’ve seen pictures. The dome, especially.”

She nodded. “Yeah, the hallowed dome. Chuck says it was pretty unusual for the architecture of the time. When he remodeled the place, he said he couldn’t think of a better design. From the dome right down to the ice house.”

I sipped my bourbon. Talk about hero worship. Chuck Sutton could have done anything he wanted to his mansion, yet he chose to emulate Thomas Jefferson. Right down to the house he lived in.

“Where is it—the ice house?”

“In the back. You should check it out.”

“I couldn’t. I don’t want to trespass.”

She waved her hand. “You know how it is. Everyone has a ton of security, and no one turns the damn things on. You’re not planning to rip them off, are you?”

I didn’t reply.

She grinned. “Just teasing. They converted the ice house into a tool shed a long time ago, but it looks pretty much the same. Except they removed the iron grate in front. And added a new floor. It used to extend twenty feet underground.” She refilled my glass. “Like a well. The ice man would fill it up every spring.”

“Who were the ice men?”

She held up a finger, stood up, and went into the living room, where she pulled a scrapbook from a drawer. Coming back, she thumbed through it and set it down on the table. The scrapbook was open to a photo of a man wearing overalls in the driver’s seat of a wagon. A team of horses was hitched to the wagon.

“My father took this a long time ago. It’s one of the ice men. They were mostly farm and railroad workers.”

“They moonlighted?”

“Not really. Back in the old days, the Wisconsin Central was supposed to go through Walworth County clear up to Lake Superior, so a lot of Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish came over to work on it. In fact, there’s an area just out of town used to be called the Irish Woods. But the railroad fell through, and the immigrants scattered. Some farmed, some moved to the cities, some became ice men.”

“Do you have an ice house?”

“George tore it down when we bought this place. He built a swimming pool instead. Would you like to see it?”

“Sure.”

We went out to a sprawling backyard that included a rectangular pool, a cabana with a striped awning, and a bricked-in patio. At the far end of the yard was the dock, and beyond that the lake. The water was throwing off tiny bursts of light. A stand of evergreens stretched across one side of the yard, forming a natural barrier between Willetta and the Suttons, but I caught a glimpse the Suttons’ backyard.

The back of the house, the side that faced Lake Geneva, was just as imposing as the front. Columns flanked the door here as well, but instead of a portico, a sizable deck extended outward, and the octagonal base beneath the dome was more apparent. The broad, sloping lawn was heavily wooded. Flower beds had been dug at the edge of the evergreens, and a rainbow of blossoms danced in the breeze.

About thirty yards away, just under the shade of a huge oak tree, was a rounded structure made of stone and wood. It looked to be about ten feet high.

Willetta gestured. “That’s the ice house.”

“It looks like an igloo.”

“It does at that.” She smiled. “The man who used to deliver their ice became their caretaker, you know.”

“Oh?”

“But Herbert left after the—the drowning.”

I turned around. Willetta was staring at the dock. “The drowning?”

“It was horrible,” she said.

“What was?”

She sighed. “The Suttons have the two sons. Chip’s the oldest, then there’s Luke.”

“Right.”

“Well, there was a younger sister. Anne. She was a few years younger than Luke.” She paused. “She drowned when she was sixteen.”

I winced.

“She was a beautiful girl. Apple of her parents’ eye. They always wanted a girl, after the boys.”

“What happened?”

She motioned me back to the house. “Come on in. I have the newspaper articles.”

We went back into the kitchen, and Willetta paged through the scrapbook. When she found what she wanted, she spread it open and laid it on the table. I peered over. An article from the
Tribune
was taped to the page. The portion under the tape was darker than the rest of the article, which was faded and yellow and looked like it might dissolve at any moment. It wasn’t long, only a few paragraphs.

I slowly closed the scrapbook and shivered. The Sutton girl had been sixteen when she died. Rachel was fifteen.

Willetta was watching me. “The family was never the same.”

I remembered how, at the gala, Willetta said that Gloria Sutton was reclusive. Was this why? A family torn apart; a mother paralyzed with grief and guilt—guilt, because no matter what the circumstances, a tragedy like that would plague any parent. “Why didn’t anyone untangle the ropes?” “Why was she by herself?” “If only I had been there….” I shivered again. A mother withdraws from the world, leaving her sons to fend for themselves emotionally. Maybe that accounted for their behavior. Except…. “Their father seems to have moved on. He socializes. Smiles. He’s almost friendly.”

“That’s true.”

I bit my lip. I hadn’t realized I’d said it out loud.

“I wondered about that, too.” Willetta had a curious look on her face.

“What?”

She picked up the bourbon and, without looking at me, poured more for both of us. “Well, you see, part of the story never made it into that article. It came out later.”

“What part is that?”

She sat down and tossed back the bourbon. Her eyes grew wet and wide, then returned to normal. “People around here wanted to keep it quiet. For the sake of the family. And who they are.”

I waited.

“The truth is, it was pretty clear she was raped. Maybe she tried to resist—who knows—but she was overpowered. Then she was murdered. Strangled, then drowned.” Willetta twirled her glass on the table. “Her body was naked when they found her. The police never found who did it. They said it was some kind of vagrant. An intruder. You know, like the Percy girl.”

I felt a chill. Valerie Percy, one of Senator Charles Percy’s twin daughters, was brutally murdered in 1966 in their Kenilworth home. Someone allegedly broke into the house in the middle of the night and pummeled the girl to death with a ball-peen hammer. In that case, there was an intense investigation, but the murderer was never found.

I reached for the bourbon. “When did—when did Anne die?”

“The summer of seventy-four. June.”

Almost ten years after the Percy murder.

“Were there any witnesses? Any evidence?”

“No one saw anything. But it wouldn’t have been hard for someone to tie up at the dock, come on up, and do whatever it was they wanted. Especially in the summer, when there’s so many people on the water.” She motioned toward the window. “It was after that we put in all the burglar alarms and electric fences and things.”

“Willetta, the article makes it sound like an accident. How could a murder like that have been covered up? I mean, the police, the press—I would have thought—”

“It wasn’t covered up. That was just the first article. Look here.” She opened the scrapbook again to another article about a week later. The headline, from the
Tribune
, read,
SUTTON GIRL FOUND MURDERED
. And another, from the
Daily News
,
LITTLE EVIDENCE IN MURDER OF ANNE SUTTON
. And yet another from the
Sun-Times
:
MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS…THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE SUTTON TRAGEDY….

I didn’t remember the coverage. But that was the summer Nixon resigned. I was young and political and wholly consumed by Watergate, Nixon’s refusal to hand over the tapes, and the impeachment hearings.

“It was different back then,” Willetta went on. “At least around here. People weren’t so interested in cashing in on other people’s troubles. Not that there weren’t a lot of questions, mind you. In fact, just a few years ago one of those investigative reporters—isn’t that what you call them—came out from Chicago and was snooping around, asking all sorts of questions.”

I leaned back in my chair. That could explain why Luke Sutton and his brother were so quick to paint me as one of the “enemy.”

“Nobody wanted the circus that surrounded the Percy murder,” Willetta went on. “And the chief of police didn’t want to sully the town any more than it had been.”