The Bodies Left Behind

wife’s martini. She dropped olives into both drinks.
    “What was it?”
    “Remember that bear?”
    “He didn’t come up to the house.” They clinked glasses and sipped clear liquor.
    Steven said, “You seem preoccupied. What’s up, the union case?”
    Research for a corporate acquisition had revealed some possible shenanigans within the lakefront workersunion in Milwaukee. The government had become involved and the acquisition was temporarily tabled, which nobody was very happy about.
    But she said, “This’s something else. One of our clients makes car parts.”
    “Right. Kenosha Auto. See? I do listen.”
    She looked at her husband with an astonished glance. “Well, the CEO, turns out, is an absolute prick.” She explained about a wrongful death case involving components of a hybrid car engine: a freak accident, a passenger electrocuted. “The head of their R-and-D department . . . why, he demanded I return all the technical files. Imagine that.”
    Steven said, “I liked your other case better—that state representative’s last will and testament . . . the sex stuff.”
    “Shhhh,” she said, alarmed. “Remember, I never said a word about it.”
    “My lips are sealed.”
    Emma speared an olive and ate it. “And how was your day?”
    Steven laughed. “Please . . . I don’t make enough to talk about business after hours.” The Feldmans were a shining example of a blind date gone right, despite the odds. Emma, a U of W law school valedictorian, daughter of Milwaukee-Chicago money; Steven, a city college bachelor of arts grad from the Brewline, intent on helping society. Their friends gave them six months, tops; the Door County wedding, to which all those friends were invited, had occurred exactly eight months after their first date.
    Steven pulled a triangle of Brie out of a shopping bag. Found crackers and opened them.
    “Oh, okay. Just a little.”
    Snap, snap  . . .
    Her husband frowned. Emma said, “Honey, it’s freaking me a little. That was footsteps.”
    The three vacation houses here were eight or nine miles from the nearest shop or gas station and a little over a mile from the county highway, which was accessed via a strip of dirt poorly impersonating a road. Marquette State Park, the biggest in the Wisconsin system, swallowed most of the land in the area; Lake Mondac and these houses made up an enclave of private property.
    Very private.
    And very deserted.
    Steven walked into the utility room, pulled aside the limp beige curtain and gazed past a cut-back crepe myrtle into the side yard. “Nothing. I’m thinking we—”
    Emma screamed.
    “Honey, honey, honey!” her husband cried.
    A face studied them through the back window. The man’s head was covered with a stocking, though you could see crew-cut, blondish hair, a colorful tattoo on his neck. The eyes were halfway surprised to see people so close. He wore an olive drab combat jacket. He knocked on the glass with one hand. In the other he was holding a shotgun, muzzle up. He was smiling eerily.
    “Oh, God,” Emma whispered.
    Steven pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open and punched numbers, telling her, “I’ll deal with him. Go lock the front door.”
    Emma ran to the entryway, dropping her glass. The olives spun amid the dancing shards, picking up dust. Crying out, she heard the kitchen door splinter inward. She looked back and saw the intruder with the shotgun rip the phone from her husband’s hand and shove him against the wall. A print of an old sepia landscape photograph crashed to the floor.
    The front door too swung open. A second man, his head also covered with mesh, pushed inside. He had long dark hair, pressed close by the nylon. Taller and stockier than the first, he held a pistol. The black gun was small in his outsized hand. He pushed Emma into the kitchen, where the other man tossed him the cell phone. The bigger one stiffened at the pitch, but caught the phone one-handed. He seemed to grimace in irritation at the toss and dropped the phone in his pocket.
    Steven said, “Please . . . What do you . . .?” Voice quavering.
    Emma looked away quickly. The less she saw, she was thinking, the better their chances to survive.
    “Please,” Steven said. “Please. You can take whatever you want. Just leave us. Please.”
    Emma stared at the dark pistol in the taller man’s hand. He wore a black leather jacket and boots. His were like the other man’s, the kind soldiers wear.
    Both men