A Lonely Way to Die: A Utah O'Brien Mystery Novel (Minnesota Mysteries Series Book 2) (18 page)

My next call was harder. I called Carol Kramer’s phone number, the one she gave me before she drove away from the old house that morning. I had an idea about that money, and I wanted to confirm it.

When she answered I said, “Carol. It’s Utah O’Brien. I have a couple of quick questions for you. Are you in a place where you can talk?” There was no hockey game in the background, nobody shouting at moving pictures on TV.

“Yes, I can talk. I’m at a motel in Randall. I’m on my way to the city to stay with my sister for a while. I wanted to drive the whole way, but the weather was so bad.”

“How are you? You were upset this morning, and I worried about you.”

“I’m fine.” Her voice was calm, stronger than normal. Being thirty miles away from her husband was probably the reason for that.

“Carol, I have to ask you something. The sheriff found a check stub in Sonje’s purse for a large amount of money, and it was made out to you. We thought it might be a gift, but it wasn’t, was it? Did Sonje intend to buy your grandmother’s house?”

She took a few beats before answering, then said yes. “The paperwork is already signed and recorded. We did the whole thing through a real estate attorney in the city. She could have sent the money to my account, but we wanted to do it in person. It’s totally legal, you know. I’ll give the lawyer’s number to the sheriff, if he needs it.”

“Was she intending to live in that house?”

“That was the idea. It would cost a fortune to make that old place livable again, but she had the money and wanted to spend it. It’s on a five-acre lot, and she had some idea about having a big garden. I thought she was getting in over her head, but it was her choice.”

I said, “Did she say anything about getting married as soon as her divorce was final?”

There was silence for a few moments. Then, “Yes, she told me that, at the diner. She wanted it kept secret until she could tell her son, but there’s no point in keeping her secrets now, is there? She was keeping it low-key because she didn’t want the guy to end up in the gossip columns, like those women that Gavril dated this last year.”

“There’s one more thing I’d like to know for sure. It’s not about Sonje, though. It’s about Gabriel—”

I was holding a dead phone.

When I came back in the kitchen, Josie was still curled up on the couch. Sam and Gabe were looking at the wood stove, and Sam was explaining how the innards worked. Mort was sitting at the table, playing solitaire.

I reached over Josie and pulled my laptop off the bookshelf. Then I asked Sam and Gabe if they’d like to come have a lie-down in the loft. Sam grabbed Sonje’s book off the table, where it had been sitting all day, and we headed upstairs.

Sam and I were on the second step of the stairway when Gabe went back to Gavril’s coat. As Mort looked on, Gabe unfolded the coat so he could reach into one of the deep pockets. He pulled out two iPhones, looked at them for a second, and put one of them back. Then he carefully arranged the coat again so it looked the same as it did before.

He and Jocko joined me and Sam, and we went up the stairs. We crawled onto the bed and propped ourselves up against the headboard, with Gabe in the middle. I pulled the comforter over our legs.

“Comfy, Gabe?” Sam asked.

The boy nodded.

“Good. Now tell us why you swiped your dad’s phone.”

Gabe showed us the screen on his step-father’s iPhone. “This is the one he uses for recording their practice sessions. He didn’t know how to install a recording app, so I did it for him. I wanted to listen to a song Mom wrote last year. Her church choir sang it at a recital. It’s really good.”

He clicked on a square app tile on the iPhone’s home screen.

“I told him to name the songs or use the date or something, but he never does, so you just have to—” He started clicking the file icons inside the app. We heard the first few beats of three or four different gospel songs, a snare drum solo, and a few recordings with nothing but voices talking in the background.

“What are those for?” I asked. “The ones with people talking?”

“He probably hit the record button by mistake. Wait, here it is—”

It was an old bluegrass song, “You've Been a Friend To Me.” Since Sonje McCrae was a writer, I thought it would be a new song with her own lyrics. Instead, the words were traditional but the arrangement was changed, modernized. There were no banjos, and it had a warm harmony. A piano accompanied the singers, with a saxophone playing lightly during the chorus.

Gabe started it over, and we listened a second time.

Misfortune nursed me as her child

And loved me fondly, too

I would have had a broken heart

Had it not been for you.

“That was beautiful,” I said. “Was your mother singing?”

“Yeah. She did the solos. They had a mic set up at the recital, and a video camera, but I don’t think they put it on YouTube. Maybe they will, though. Everybody said the song was really good.”

“Everybody was right. I’ll call them and ask if they can make a CD for you. Would you like that?”

He nodded. “Yeah. That would be really nice.”

“It sounds a lot like your dad’s music. Did your mom write the arrangements for his band, too?”

“Sometimes. It was her idea to use the old songs. They started out writing everything from scratch, but their songs kinda sucked so they didn’t get very many gigs. And they were trying to do some retro punk rock, but it wasn’t working. Mom said Gavril’s voice was a blessing, and he was hiding it behind all that noise, so they started over with the plantation songs, but made them different, more bluesy but modern. They really took off after that.”

Sam said, “Your mother had amazing talent. She wrote books that millions of people read, she could write music, and sing. And she was obviously a very good mother.”

“She was the best,” Gabe said.

The bell over the front door of the museum tinkled, and a few minutes later we heard Emma and Josie talking down in the kitchen, in that tone of voice women use when they’re admiring a baby.

Gabe clicked on a few more files. While he listened to Gavril’s music and Sam read a few pages of Sonje’s novel, I fired up my laptop. I opened up an old file I’d built several years earlier in SketchUp. It was a 3D plan of the museum and the apartment at the back.

I clicked on the 3D Warehouse link and found a model of a lean-to greenhouse. I stuck it on the south wall of the building where it would connect with my studio, replacing the big southern window. I messed around a little with a crude design for the new wood heater, first making a long bench, like the one in the kitchen. Then I changed it so the heated cob was a raised floor in the greenhouse. Josie has wanted a greenhouse for years.

The music turned off. Gabe watched as I added a door to the new living room and put in some transom windows above the six-foot wall that separated the studio from the public area of the museum. Magically, in digital form at least, the little apartment suddenly had a real living room.

“Huh,” I said. “This wouldn’t cost much at all. We could scrounge most of the materials. Pete Hansen would have enough salvaged windows and doors, and his old lumber could be used for the greenhouse.”

I handed the laptop to Gabe. “I’m out of ideas. You want to mess with it for a while?”

“Sure.”

I was about to show him which icons to hit for various functions, but he beat me to it. “Do you use SketchUp in school?” I asked.

“No. But it’s kind of like Minecraft, only this program is really elementary. It’s sort of obvious.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. He pretended to not notice, but after a second or two, he grinned. If he was going to keep playing cards with Mort, he’d need to work on his poker face.

He found the link to files that were uploaded to the program by other users and added some furniture, mostly in a modern style. One couch was bright orange. He put a huge flat-screen TV on the wall separating the studio from the kitchen.

While Sam and Gabe discussed the technical aspects of enclosing the new living room and the best way to arrange the furniture around Sam’s flat-screen TV, I wiggled around until I was sitting more comfortably. Then I turned on the reading light and flipped through the pages of Sonje McCrae’s book, trying to find the scene where she described the General Baptist church.

Mark and Gabe both mentioned that Sonje McCrae occasionally used her stories to get even with people who wronged her, or who did something mean to a person she cared about. It was her light-hearted form of justice.

The church scene in her latest book was the only one I could remember that described a location here in West Elmer. Maybe that was one of her ‘getting even’ stories.

Nightfall in Babylon
had lots of ancient gods, at least fifteen main characters with strange names, and a dwarf or two. There were battles between various armies, and several situations where the female protagonist wanted to date a particular boy, but didn’t get to. None of that really mattered to me at the moment.

The book was controversial when it first came out because people thought it had an anti-Christian message. I thought it was pro-Christian and anti-hypocrisy, but I’m not an expert on religion. Naturally, the controversy helped Sonje McCrae sell a boatload of books.

I found the scene I was looking for near the middle of the book. I was right—the scene took place in a church that looked exactly like the General Baptist church here in West Elmer. The stained glass window was the same and the ceiling was too low. No light came through the stained glass window.

A life-sized Jesus was painted on rough plywood, and the painting was propped up at the front of the church, completely hiding the finely polished pulpit behind it.

The minister was standing behind the pulpit. Sonje described him as a tall, thin man with black hair turning white at the temples. His hair stood out from his head, charged with static electricity. He had a long face, with sad, hound-dog eyes and a nose that curved sideways, as if he’d been in a bar fight and somebody punched him in the nose. He delivered his sermon at a high decibel level to match the anger in his words.

The congregation was getting worked up and some of them were standing and waving their fists. That’s when we see a wicked-looking, misshapen beast hiding behind the painted Jesus. Now we know the preacher is a minion of one of the Ancient Ones, and not a Christian at all.

“Gotcha.”

Sam and Gabe looked at me. “What?” they said, in unison.

“Gabe, I know who killed your mother,” I said.

“She—you mean, it’s really true? Somebody killed her?”

Sam leaned his head so he could look directly at Gabe. “I thought you knew that,” he said.

“Well, I didn’t want her to die at all, but I really didn’t want her to die like they said—” He bit his lip, brushed his sleeve across his face, and closed the laptop. Sam put the laptop on the table on his side of the bed, and put his arm around Gabe’s shoulder.

“She loved you. You know that, don’t you?”

Gabe nodded. “Yeah, I always knew that.”

“Well, then. Even if she had done it herself, it wouldn’t mean she didn’t love you. It would mean her mind was sick and she couldn’t help it.” He gave the boy’s shoulder another squeeze. “But that’s not what happened. We always knew that.”

I read Sonje’s description of the preacher out loud.

Sam said, “He sounds a lot older than he was when Sonje lived here. How do you think she got the face right?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe she found him online. Does the church have a website?”

“Sure.”

I said, “I’m sure she wrote this to get even for something John Owen did to her when she still lived here. If he read this book, he’d recognize himself right away. In fact, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him myself the first time I read it—I guess I was too caught up in the story.”

I put the book on my lap while I let my mind replay our trip to the church. “I thought he was staring at his bookcase because he was upset for Mildred and he needed a place to rest his eyes. But he was afraid we would see this book. The shelves are kind of a mess, with piles of books and papers all thrown in haphazardly. I’ll bet this book was there, but we didn’t see it. And he claimed he didn’t know Gwyneth had changed her name or that he’d ever read any of Sonje’s books—but of course Mildred would have told him Gwyneth was a writer. You’re supposed to tell your pastor everything, aren’t you?”

“I think that’s just priests,” Sam said. “But sure, she would trust him to keep her secret.”

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and called Angie. She answered. “What?”

“Angie, yesterday at the diner, the pastor was at the counter when Carol Kramer was talking to Sonje. Was he still there when Sonje left?”

“No. He wandered over and helped Conrad with his crossword while the women were talking, and then he left. It was a few minutes after you were here. Why?”

“Did you see him drive or walk away?”

“No. Why?”

“Tell you later.”

After I hung up, I jumped off the bed. “That’s how he did it. He walked to the diner, had his coffee, and left. But he didn’t really go anywhere—he waited in the parking lot until she came out. Then he asked her for a ride back to the church. It wasn’t snowing yet, but it was cold. How could she say no? Come on. Let’s go talk to Mort.”