A Lonely Way to Die: A Utah O'Brien Mystery Novel (Minnesota Mysteries Series Book 2) (3 page)

THREE

The big Quonset hut that houses my natural history museum is right across Main Street from the diner’s parking lot and next door to the grain elevators. I live with Sam in a small, two-room apartment in the back. A life-sized concrete woolly mammoth stands in front of my building, and it was covered with snow. There was even wet snow clinging to the tusks and the thin top edges of the ears.

The street had been plowed but it was starting to snow again, and the breeze was picking up.

When Gabe and I ducked under the mammoth tusks and onto the front porch of the museum, I unclipped the leash from Jocko’s collar. “Go around,” I said, with a sweeping motion of my arm. The dog took off around the corner of the building. He likes that trick for some reason, and he’d wait for me at the back door.

I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket and pulled down the zipper. I took the jacket off and threw it in the corner of the porch, on a drift of snow. Then I bent down to pull off my boots.

“Gabe, try not to be shocked. I’m going to take off my jeans. I don’t want to take the skunk inside with me.”

He wasn’t in the mood to be shocked. I stood behind the mammoth’s legs so I couldn’t be seen from the street, and slipped out of my jeans. I threw them on top of the jacket. Gabe kicked off his snow-filled hightop sneakers and unzipped his own jeans, and threw them on the pile, too. I already had the front door open, and he scooted inside. I followed him.

We walked down the center aisle of the museum, passing the sculpture of a dire wolf, and then a North American horse and the huge short-faced bear.

“Whoa! What is that?”

I turned to see where Gabe was looking. The sculpture that finally caught his attention was the
Megatherium
, a giant ground sloth that was reaching for a paper mache leaf hanging from the highest point of the curved ceiling, 18 feet above our heads.

“That’s a ground sloth. This is a natural history museum. A private gallery, really, since I’m not a scientist or anything, but I call it a museum, anyway. It’s closed now, though. The animals used to live here, but now they’re all gone.”

He looked around. “They’re big.”

“Yes. They’re definitely big.”

The lights weren’t turned on. The front of the building is all glass, but with the heavy clouds covering the sun, very little light was coming in through the windows. The sculptures appeared as murky shapes and shadows.

“Where’d they come from?” he asked.

“The sculptures? Or the animals?”

“Sculptures.”

We started walking again, towards the back.

“I made them. A long time ago.” I decided to tell him the truth. “I moved back here when I was twenty-six years old, after my husband was murdered in the city. I went a little bit crazy because missing him hurt so bad. I came back home and bought this old building, and I started making these huge sculptures. It was the biggest, most unreasonable thing I could think of to do. I hoped it would give me something to think about besides how much I missed Joe.”

“Did it stop hurting?”

I looked at the boy, with his puffy, red-rimmed eyes, and sighed. “Eventually. It took a long time.”

“You didn’t forget him, though?”

“No. I still think of Joe almost every day, but it doesn’t hurt any more. You won’t forget your mom, either. And you’ll need to tell Grace stories about your mom, so she’ll know who her mother was.”

He nodded, accepting this important job he had to do. We walked past the small restrooms on the right, and the locked storeroom where I keep my paper mache masks, with dehumidifier humming inside. My studio space was on the left, separated from the main body of the museum by a short, six-foot wall. The ceiling is lower in that part of the building because the bedroom loft is above the studio area. The studio has a big window on the southern wall, but the storm clouds made the studio as dark as the rest of the building.

Gabe stopped again when he saw the new sculpture I was working on, a tableau of Clovis people—one man, two women, a baby and a six-year old kid, all life-sized and covered with pasted newspaper, still unpainted. The people were wearing animal skins, the man was carrying a spear, and the kid had a pointed stick.

When I made the big animals, I had money from Joe’s life insurance policy and I used it to pay for art supplies, including the heavy iron armatures that were made by a local welder. When I started the Clovis people I was broke, so I made them out of paper mache. They were ready to be painted, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish them.

“I thought the museum was closed,” Gabe said. “Why are you making another one?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

He looked to see if I was joking. I shrugged.

I moved towards the door of the kitchen, but Gabe didn’t follow me. He was looking in the direction of the ancient family, but he wasn’t seeing them.

“Why did somebody kill my mom? She never hurt anybody. And it was mean, leaving her all by herself. I’ll bet she was scared, and she’d be worried about me and Grace. They’re going to catch who did it, aren’t they?”

Tears were falling freely down his cheeks. I moved in for another hug, and he didn’t resist.

I couldn’t promise that the police would catch the bad guy—but I promised myself, silently, that I would do everything I could to find out what happened to this boy’s mother.

When he pulled away, I said, “Come on, let’s go into the kitchen. I have goosebumps on my legs, and we need to get you warmed up.” I opened the door to the small apartment. He went through the door, and I followed him.

The kitchen smelled like chocolate. Rita Hansen was in the kitchen, at the stove. She’s the school nurse and the daughter of Pete Hansen, the man who owns the local lumber yard. She turned when we came in. She looked at our bare legs and held her finger under her nose. “Jocko got skunked again?” she said.

I smiled and nodded. We could smell Jocko out on the back porch, even with the door and windows closed.

Josie, my mother, was sitting on the couch that was surrounded by book shelves and tucked in under the stairs to the loft. She was wearing her Earth-mother outfit, the long Kelly green wool skirt, hand-knit socks with purple, blue, and gray patterns that didn’t quite match, and her hand-crocheted sweater covered with circles in soft rose and pink. A flowered silk scarf held her curly salt-and-pepper curls away from her face.

The baby was wrapped in a shawl Josie crocheted for Angie’s Christmas present last year out of the last skeins of alpaca yarn she bought on eBay, before it went offline.

The baby was looking up at my mother, reaching for her glasses. Josie intercepted with a finger. Little Grace clutched it and drew the finger down to her mouth.

Jocko was on the back porch, barking. Chance, my old orange-striped tomcat, was twining around my legs, yelling for his second breakfast. Chance would have to wait.

“Gabe, do you have your cell phone with you?” I asked.

He pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket. I took it and plugged it into the charger on the kitchen counter. Then I pulled a pencil out of a drawer and a scrap of paper. “What’s your dad’s phone number?”

He gave it to me, and I wrote it down. I called Mort and gave him the number. He promised to pass it on to the sheriff.

Rita came up to Gabe, who looked down, embarrassed by his bare legs. She introduced herself and explained why she was there. “Josie called me to check the baby, to make sure she didn’t get frostbite. The baby’s fine. You took good care of her. May I check your hands and ears to make sure you’re OK, too? I’m a nurse. You don’t need to be embarrassed.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

While Rita inspected his skin for any signs of damage, I ran upstairs and found him a pair of gray sweatpants, some dry wool socks, and an over-sized sweatshirt from Sam’s side of the closet. It was purple, with the Vikings logo on the front. When I came back down the stairs, Rita was telling Gabe he was good to go. No frostbite.

I handed the clothes to Gabe, then looked at Rita. “Is it OK if he takes a nice hot shower to warm up?”

“You bet. It would be the best thing for you, Gabe. And when you get finished, I have hot cocoa waiting for you on the counter. I have to go now, though—I have someone coming over to the house for breakfast.” She leaned down to give the baby a kiss on the forehead, smiled at Josie, and left through the door that led out to the museum.

I pointed Gabe towards the small bathroom near the back door, and he left to take a shower.

Molly, Sam’s retired search and rescue bloodhound, was lying full-length on the couch with her head up close to the baby. She usually lies on the floor next to the heated bench at the far end of the kitchen.

Sam and a few other guys from town built the wood-burning heater in the summer, as an experiment to see if we could heat our houses with off-cuts from the hazel hedges. It’s officially called a rocket stove mass heater, and it looks like something you’d find in an adobe house in the Southwest, except for the sculpted dragon along the back—my only contribution to the project—and the ugly black barrel on one end near the stairs to the loft. The heated air travels sideways through a stovepipe in the bench before leaving the building. The bench, made with a mixture of clay and straw, stays hot a long time after the fire goes out.

Chance, the cat, loves that bench, and Molly, the old bloodhound, sneaks up on top of it when she thinks nobody’s looking. But now she was on the couch, nuzzling the baby’s toes. It tickled, and the baby giggled.

Josie held the baby up so she could see the old dog’s head, and a random movement brought a tiny fist down hard on Molly’s muzzle. I held my breath for a second, until Molly reached up and gave the baby a wet kiss. The baby thought that was really funny. I handed Josie a tissue from the box on the table, and she wiped the slobber off the baby’s cheek.

Jocko was still barking. I pulled a big pan out of a cupboard and filled it with warm water. Then I went to the closet near the bathroom where I keep the towels and pulled out an old one that I keep for the dogs.

Before I went outside, I picked up the cell phone again and called Arlene Cranston to tell her about Randy Johnson’s situation. Arlene was good at figuring out ways to help people without making it feel like charity, even though she and her husband were having money problems of their own. The couple have known the old man for years, and they’d probably start by inviting him over for dinner.

After the call, I put the cell phone on the plywood counter, added a few hazel sticks to the fire tube on the rocket stove, and then went outside to get the skunk off my dog. The hydrogen peroxide and baking soda are kept in a tin box out on the porch, just in case.

It didn’t take long to soak the fur on his chest with the solution, and it neutralized the sulfur in the skunk juice. He still smelled like wet dog, but that’s an odor I can handle. I rubbed him down real good with the old towel and we went inside. I needed to get the clothes off the front porch, too, but that could wait.

While I poured some kibbles into my complaining cat’s bowl, Jocko went over to the couch to check out the baby, but he soon wandered off to lay down next to the heated bench. It wouldn’t be long before his fur was completely dry.

I walked around the big table in the middle of the room and reached over Josie to pull a book off the shelf behind the couch.

Nightfall in Babylon
, by Sonje Neilina McCrae. I turned it over. There was a photo of a woman on the back, in her late 30s, maybe early 40s, with straight dark hair falling to her shoulders. She had a stern look on her heart-shaped face. The word ‘uncompromising’ sprang to mind. She wore a brick red shirt, open at the neck, and a short black leather jacket. Her lipstick matched her shirt. She was looking straight at the camera and standing in front of dark rusty industrial equipment.

It was definitely the woman I found out by the river, the same one I’d seen in the diner the day before.

I handed the book to Josie. “It’s Gwyneth Price. She changed her name for the books.”

Josie was startled by the name. She looked at the photo, then towards the door to the bathroom. “Gwyneth Price? That’s the boy’s mother?”

I nodded. Then I poked Molly and made her get off the couch. She slid off and flopped down in her usual place, with her back against the heated bench. Jocko had to move to make room for her.

Chance wandered over and started to jump on the couch, but I put out my hand to stop him. He padded over to the bench and jumped up, found the warmest spot, and curled up to take a nap.

I pulled the granny afghan off the back of the couch, sat, and covered my cold bare legs.

“She dyed her hair,” Josie said. “But if you ignore that, and the harsh red lipstick, she looks a lot like her sister. Emma was devastated when Gwyneth left. Losing her father, then her sister—it was too much. Mildred felt betrayed, as if Gwyneth moved to the city with her dad just to spite her mother. Mildred is usually more sensible than that. Emma was only eight or nine years old, I think.”

“Gabe says he’s never met Mildred. And he says she isn’t really his grandmother, except she ‘sort of is,’ which made no sense to me.”