January Thaw (The Murder-By-Month Mysteries) (4 page)

A father and his daughter teetered down the carpeted path from the warming house to the ice. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not very good. It’s been years.”

“If you can walk, you can skate,” Jed said, motioning me into the warming house.

The blast of heated air and the heavy scent of wet wool were impossible to resist. Within ten minutes, Jed had me suited up and hobbling toward the ice. At least fifty people were already on the lake, which reminded me of a saying in these parts:
You know who walks on water? Jesus, and every Minnesotan in the winter.

I tentatively stepped onto the ice. I was shaky at first, sticking to the edges so as not to mow over children and the elderly. As I gained confidence and grew less wobbly, I swirled in and out of people, remembering my father teaching me how to skate when I was eight. He’d brought an old kitchen chair onto the ice for me to balance with. We spent a whole afternoon on the slough behind the farmhouse, and when we were done, I was bruised but happy, not to mention a decent skater. The memory was bittersweet—more sweet than bitter, as I’d recently started to let go of resentments toward him and accept him as the whole, flawed man he’d been when he was alive.

The mental shift was hard, and I figured it would be an eternal work in progress, but it turned out to be a lot easier to love his memory than to judge it. Go figure. And once I opened up all that real estate where before I’d been holding anger and regret, I found a lot of things were simpler than I’d made them. Up until a few weeks ago, I’d been able to escape the cage of my thoughts and appreciate the moment more often. I’d even considered taking up meditation.

“Oh, sorry!” I said, narrowly missing a teenaged couple holding gloved hands as they skated. They rolled their eyes at me, but I didn’t care. Skating felt like total freedom. I could almost hear the stress of yesterday fall away. Sure, it revealed another layer of stress immediately below it, but it was a start. I didn’t even mind when I took a spill to avoid colliding with a chain of skaters playing Crack the Whip.

“Whoops!” They yelled as they flew past.

I shrugged and smiled, getting to my knees so I could hoist myself up using my hands and the toe of a skate. It was from this position that a flash drew my attention. I looked up, across the road, and toward the Prospect House. This was a perfect angle from which to see the mansion a few hundred yards away. The grounds were crawling with people dressed in red, blue, green, and patterned parkas, but what had caught my eye was higher. I followed the grain of the house to the second floor, and then to the attic. There it came again, a flash from the round window below the chimney, like a piece of jewelry had caught the glare of the sun. I squinted. Were people up there?

Then, like a jack-in-the-box, a face appeared in the window, staring directly at me.

My heart jumped. Surely I was imagining that she could see me in this crowd, but the girl in the window seemed to be gazing right into my soul. She had the round cheeks of a child, and something about her stare left me icy inside.

“Beep beep!”

My attention broken, I glanced around. The voice making the honking noise sounded familiar. Mrs. Berns?

Before I could locate her in the crowd, my attention was drawn to the roar of a giant engine firing to life. I twisted around toward the ice castle and swallowed my own tongue.

Six

Mrs. Berns was rolling
toward the skating rink on a Zamboni that lumbered as steadfastly as a dinosaur. It must have been parked behind the ice castle. She had one hand on the steering wheel and was pumping the air with the other, a grin of pure joy on her lovely lined face. She was wearing an old-fashioned aviator’s cap and goggles, and a white scarf unfurled in the wind behind her.

“Mrs. Berns!” I yelled, scrambling to stand and waving my arms at her. “Put on the brakes!”

Her eyes landed on me, and her smile grew even wider. She stood, pumping both hands in the air. The words “I’m the Zamboni queen!” drifted above the grumbling roar of the giant machine. Because she was directly on top of the beast, I could hear her, but she couldn’t hear me.

Families were gathering up their children as a mass exodus began toward the relative safety of land. A few people screamed as the Zamboni began to methodically eat up the 200 yards of ice between the castle and the rink. I skated away from the crowd, trying to lead Mrs. Berns to an unpopulated spot.

“Turn it off!” I yelled over my shoulder.

She cupped a palm to her ear in the universal gesture of, “I can’t hear you,” but at least she steered the Zamboni toward me.

“I’m just going to clear a wider rink!” she yelled back. “Get everyone off of the ice!”

I glanced toward the shore. The sensible people of Battle Lake were taking care of that just fine by themselves. When I turned back toward Mrs. Berns, the Zamboni had grown uncomfortably close.

“Turn it off!” I screamed.

She nodded and reached below the steering wheel. Then her head shot back up. Was that a look of panic in her eyes? I kept skating away, and the Zamboni kept drawing nearer. The ice was rough out here, covered in crusty snow, and I went from skating to high-stepping, trying desperately to put distance between me and her. This lasted all of four steps until the toe of my skate caught on an ice shear and I pitched to the ground like a four-legged creature who’d been putting on airs. I levered myself back to a standing position and took mad, mincing steps away from Mrs. Berns. Whichever direction I went, though, the relentless, hulking Zamboni seemed to follow. In the periphery, I spotted two men in winter overalls running across the ice toward Mrs. Berns. Would they make it here in time?

I fell again, and the Zamboni continued to rumble toward me.

“Move!” Mrs. Berns hollered. “I can’t figure out how to turn it of
f
!”

“Can you figure out how to steer it?” I hollered, crawling forward as fast as my cold knees could take me. The caution ropes surrounding Darwin’s Dunk were straight ahead. I scuttled under the rope and found myself gliding down the indent toward the center of the Dunk, where the Dunk crew must have begun the time-consuming work of cutting the hole the night before. My heart hammering, I swiveled, still on my knees, and tried to return to the safer ice, but gravity was pulling me toward the thin center.

My soft mittens and wet knees gave me less traction than a long-nailed dog. I kept my eyes on the Zamboni, hoping against hope that it would stop and that last night’s fresh ice would hold.

I slid to dead center of the Dunk and held my breath, thinking light, light thoughts.

The Zamboni growled closer.

The ice under me made a gentle cracking sound, and I spread myself as flat as I could, my eyes closing involuntarily.

I waited for the inevitable impact of the Zamboni or the icy rush of West Battle Lake in January.

And then the world grew quiet.

I opened one eye. The Zamboni was on the edge separating the thick lake ice from the prepared Dunk ice. A man in overalls was laying stomach-down across Mrs. Berns’s lap with the expression of someone who’d just swallowed a goldfish. Mrs. Berns, on the other hand, looked completely exhilarated and ready for Round Two.

I opened the other eye and breathed in the heavy, oily scent of diesel, grateful I was still around to smell. “What were you doing? You almost killed me!” I didn’t know if she’d be able to hear my shrill voice above the pounding of my heart.

Mrs. Berns rested her hands on the man on her lap. “You’re the one who kept skating into my path.”

The man on her lap raised the Zamboni keys into the air. His hand was shaking. “Got ’em,” he said weakly, sliding to the ground.

I shook my head, fear turning to anger. I gently pulled myself onto my knees, intending to very carefully hoist myself up and off the ice so I could go give Mrs. Berns a piece of my mind. I was balanced on all fours, the roar of the Zamboni still echoing in my head, when a motion under the ice caught my eye.

I glanced down and into a dead man’s eyes.

I was suspended above his frozen corpse, his blank gaze staring into mine, his open mouth and clutching hands mirroring my gesture, only a thin skin of ice separating us.

Seven

“You were just …
skating along.” Police Chief Wohnt stated. The disbelief sounded like it had less to do with the veracity of my story and more to do with the sheer variety of ways in which I had discovered bodies.

I was sitting on the bumper of his car, my head between my knees. I hadn’t stopped shivering since I’d been pulled off of the dunk hole. Jed was standing to the side, where he’d been begging me to drink hot chocolate for several minutes. Mrs. Berns was on the other side shooting me the stink eye, a cross between “don’t tell him about the Zamboni” and “really?!?
another
dead body?”

I sat up. The blood rushed to my head. The ice had blurred the corpse’s face, but not so much that I couldn’t stare right into his brown eyes, his mouth open in a silent cry. It was impossible to make a positive ID, but he looked an awful lot like Maurice, my recent library regular and the guy who’d rescued us just last night. My stomach had been greasy since, my brain on overload.

The entire lake had been cleared, the mood gone from festive to shocked, children quickly herded to cars, conversations dropped to whispers. Only twenty or so people remained, milling on the edges of the lake, a handful talking to the waiting EMTs as the police were cordoning a wider area around Darwin’s Dunk in preparation for removing the body.

“Did he drown?” I asked Gary, ignoring his question.

He glanced over my shoulder, his breath showing up big and bold in the frozen air. He was wearing a trim blue winter coat and a fur-lined cap. His face was free of sunglasses. “We’ll do an autopsy,” he said.

“But what do you
think
?” I asked. The horror of that sort of death—being trapped and suffocating under the ice with freedom so close by—was overwhelming. It didn’t help that I had liked Maurice, at least what I knew of him. My shaking grew so strong that I had to tuck my hands into my armpits to contain myself.

Gary’s jaw clenched. “I think you should go home.”

He strode off toward the lake, leaving me to wonder why he’d interviewed me in the first place. One of his deputies could have handled the duty. His absence also left me wanting Johnny, though I didn’t want to think too much about that. I didn’t like the idea of being dependent on someone. I knew I loved Johnny, though I hadn’t told him yet. Since we’d slept together, I was feeling even more vulnerable, and if I was honest with myself, we hadn’t seen each other lately as much because I’d been avoiding him. At this moment, though, I felt cold and scared and wanted him here. I dragged in a deep breath, relieved to discover that I wasn’t shivering as much.

“I can see your hard-on,” Mrs. Berns said.

“What?”

“You. Remember you’ve got the poker face of a kindergartner? Are you thinking about Johnny or the Chief?”

For a moment, I thought she meant Chief Wenonga, the 23-foot-tall fiberglass statue that resided just over the hill from our present location. He was shirtless and sculpted, and in my lower moments, I’d harbored some adult thoughts about him, but I’d thought I’d played those cards closer to my chest. A full-on blush was warming my cheeks—a relief from the horror—before I realized who she was really talking about. “Gary Wohnt?! I’d sooner eat a toe.”

She nodded sagely. “I know how confusing it can be to the lady parts when we realize an officer of the law is one of the hottest cookies in town.”

“Please,” I said. I stood and turned, just catching sight of Gary’s back before he disappeared into the ice castle with a deputy. What were they doing over there? Darwin’s Dunk was a good hundred yards away.

“Is that a request?” Mrs. Berns asked, smirking.

I shook my head. “I’m begging. I need to get out of here, take a shower, and wash the dead body juju off of me.”

“I recommend steel wool for that,” Mrs. Berns said, patting my shoulder before tipping her head toward Jed. “Since you’re in good hands, I’m going to leave you and go find out some more about that Good Samaritan who saved you from throwing yourself under a Zamboni. Like, his phone number.”

She strode off before I could reprimand her for driving the Zamboni in the first place. A shudder ran down my body as I thought of Maurice’s silent, screaming face again, and more details came to me, like his one shoeless foot.

“You sure you don’t want the hot chocolate?” Jed asked worriedly.

I realized he’d been standing next to me in the cold for nearly a half an hour, leaving his post at the warming house, and desperately wanted to do something for me. “Thank you,” I said appreciatively. I took the hot chocolate, but it was his friendship that I was grateful for.

“Do you want me to drive you home?” He was focused on me, but I could tell he wanted to check back at the warming house. There wouldn’t be any more skating today, and maybe not for a while, but he’d still need to clean and lock up. At this very moment, a gaggle of adults were milling around the door of the little hut, unreturned skates in hand. The children and most everyone else had been cleared off the lake. I could feel those who remained staring at me.

“I’m fine. Really.”

“You positive?”

I smiled reassuringly. “Positive.”

It wasn’t true.

Eight

Although I’d told Jed
I was driving directly home, I was too unsettled to be confined to my house. I’d probably make Luna and Tiger Pop crazy with all my nervous energy. I wasn’t quite ready to tell Johnny I’d skated upon a dead body, either, though I’d have to come up with a story before our date tonight. He’d always been sympathetic to my bad luck, but even someone as amazing as him must have limits. It’s not like I needed to quit smoking or snore more quietly. I had to stop finding
dead bodies
. It was honestly a surprise I had friends left. Or, I mused as I drove, maybe the safest place to be was close to me, like inside the calm eye of a hurricane.

Who was I kidding? I was Typhoid Mary, and that was almost more distressing than the memory of Maurice’s wide eyes and final frozen scream. I shuddered. It was like he had a secret he needed to tell me, something that only the person who’d killed him and the fishes who’d swum with him would ever know.

I pulled into the library parking lot out of habit, realizing that I’d assumed Maurice had been murdered. I surveyed the mental image of his body under the ice. Except for the missing shoe and the fact that he was dead, there were no signs of violence. For all I knew, he could have been out walking on the ice, fallen into the Darwin’s Dunk pre-cut hole, and been too disoriented to save himself. I liked that story a whole lot better than the alternative.

I exited my car and walked toward the library. Since I didn’t have a computer at home, this was as good a place as any for me to be. I still owed Ron an article on the Winter Wonderland and this week’s recipe column. Maybe writing would help to organize my thoughts.

I locked the library’s front door behind me and left the lights off, relying on the window-filtered light of the setting sun. How had the day gone so quickly? And horribly? Seated at my desk, though, I felt incrementally more comfortable. This was a spot where I had some control. I fired up the computer, sucking on the end of a pen as I wondered what spin I could possibly put on the Winter Wonderland article. “Plenty of Room on the Skating Rink at this Year’s Winter Festival”? “Darwin’s Dunker Sets the Bar High”?

I swallowed past the oily lump in my throat. Sarcasm was my defense against any extreme emotion, and I couldn’t move past the sensation that I’d played a part in Maurice’s death. It was guilt that I was trying to bury. What if letting me and Mrs. Berns go had turned the two thugs against him? They could have strangled him and stuck his body in the dunk hole, assuming it wouldn’t be found until spring. Or they could have forced him into the hole while he was still conscious, slammed a chunk of wood over it, and sat on the edges until his desperate cries for help and finger-scratching stopped.

I slammed my fist on the desktop. I needed to corral my slippery mind. It was sliding toward ugly worst-case scenarios. Time to focus on something else. But I knew better than that. My mind was a hungry, busy thing, and it wouldn’t rest without answers. Who was Maurice? Who were Ray and Hammer? I had little to go on. Well, that is, if “little” actually meant “nothing.”

I pulled up Firefox and typed
Ray and Maurice
into Google. I searched ten screens in and found nothing. I added the word
ogre
and found a couple bizarre baseball stories, but nothing else. Gary had given me blessedly little to go on, except for—

My fingers flew across the keyboard. I typed,
hammerhead stingray tattoo gangs
, and hit the Enter key. The first four screens were consumed with tattoo parlor links and ads, and the fifth, as were the sixth, but on the seventh, I found it—an article published the previous year:

“Sixth Suspect Arrested in Gang Activity”

CHICAGO, Ill. —Chicago police arrested a sixth suspect on suspicion of gang-related activity that includes gun and drug trafficking.

The Fugitive Task Force arrested Scott Rayman Monday morning.       

Local and federal authorities made five arrests Sunday as part of a seven-month investigation called Operation Sea Monster, named after the sea-creature tattoos the gang members are required to have. The operation included undercover officers buying drugs, as well as tips from the public.

Police still have arrest warrants for three other gang members.

Chief John Lart said the suspects are some of the high
est-
ranking leaders in the Sea Monsters, one of Chicago’s most notorious gangs.

I printed out the article and searched for anything else that fit. Dead ends, all of them. That’s when I realized I hadn’t even toured the Prospect House today, the central feature of the article I was to write. My head fell into my palm. What a waste of a day.

I felt crazy laughter burbling in my throat. I would have released it if I hadn’t just then caught sight of a neon green child’s super ball that had rolled near my chair. Somebody must have lost it during last Monday’s reading hour. I stooped to retrieve it and remembered the child I’d seen in the attic window of the Prospect House, the little girl with the plump cheeks and wide, haunting eyes. I’d glanced back at the window a couple times after I’d first seen her, and no other faces had appeared. She must have gotten separated from her tour group. Or maybe I’d imagined her. Given how little sleep and how much stress I’d had, hallucinations would not be unexpected.

Well, I’d have to work with what I had. I opened my email and shot off a brief note to Carter Stone requesting a private tour of the Prospect House at his earliest convenience. I didn’t know him personally but had heard he was a nice guy, if a little eccentric. Surely he’d understand why I hadn’t made today’s tour. Next, I conducted deeper research on the Prospect House. I should have probably done this before today’s scheduled tour, but I’d figured I already had the basics from asking around and paging through the library’s copy of
After the Battle
, a thorough softcover history book of Battle Lake.

Preliminary online research didn’t tell me any more about Barnaby Offerdahl and his mansion than what I’d already gathered from local sources. I clicked into the database I’d subscribed to after I’d decided to pursue my PI licensure in October. Once I’d discovered that a private investigator license in Minnesota required six
thousand
hours of work under a licensed PI, with a police department, or for a law firm, I almost quit the dream. But with a firm nudge from Ron at the newspaper, I’d taken my certification class last month in Willmar, near my hometown of Paynesville. I’d since lined up a handful of tiny jobs through a local law firm. Investigative work, surprisingly, was not much different than running a library. I looked stuff up online and listened to people.

My current Prospect House search was running into another dead end, which was the way the day was going in general. I discovered that Carter Stone didn’t actually own the Prospect House but had rather bought it through a nonprofit organization he’d created called Preserving History. I also found out that over half of the lots skirting the Prospect House and a big, tear-shaped tract of undeveloped land behind it belonged to Gregory Offerdahl, presumably a descendant of Barnaby’s. I didn’t see how any of those two pieces of information would flesh out my article, though. People wanted to know about the Civil War Museum hours and the cache of 1920s jewelry and flapper dresses Stone had reportedly discovered in the attic, not who owned what land parcels when.

I sighed. I wasn’t going to uncover anything more today. I decided to think about it tomorrow, which seemed like a really good attitude to take when things weren’t going as planned, which was most of my life.
I’ll worry about it tomorrow
.

Still not ready to go home and mentally exhausted, I decided to do something I knew I’d be successful at: track down a recipe for my “Battle Lake Bites” column. In the past, I’d used the search term “weird Minnesota food” when looking for recipe inspiration. You’d be unsurprised at how many hits that turned up. Since I’d started on my journey of personal growth, though, which included really seeing and appreciating Battle Lake and its people, I’d been reluctant to toss Cool Whip on top of, or cream of mushroom soup into, something that was already gross and calling it an original Battle Lake recipe. In fact, despite today’s gruesome discovery or maybe because of it, I felt like serving up something truly delicious to the town. And what could be better than Nut Goodies?

Nut Goodies have been produced in Minnesota since 1912 by Pearson’s, better known for their Salted Nut Roll. It would be generous to call the Nut Goodie a candy bar. It is more of a candy pile. Its base is a creamy maple center topped with unsalted Virginia peanuts, and the whole mass covered in milk chocolate. It’s so sweet it’ll give your future children a toothache if you eat it, but it is also heaven, particularly if consumed when frozen. Sometimes I wondered if the Nut Goodie was jealous of the Salted Nut Roll’s success, if it dreamed of finally fitting in and no longer being a Rorschach blob in a chocolate log world, if it wondered what it’d be like to play all the major vending machines. But in the end, it was the hardest-working, humblest candy I’d ever met, and I loved it for that very reason. Why not share that joy with Battle Lake?

I searched for “homemade nut goodie” recipes and received over 406,000 hits. Holy crap. I gravitated toward the ones with photos, of course, salivating as I read. In the end, I chose the simplest and most honest recipe, giving it a new name and a personal twist so I couldn’t be sued for plagiarism.

MMMM-PIES

Ingredients

Fondant:

3 cups powdered sugar

½ cup sweetened condensed milk

½ teaspoon maple extract

Topping:
1½ pounds milk chocolate broken into 1-inch squares
¾ pound Spanish peanuts (not cocktail peanuts)

Mix the fondant ingredients together until well-blended and stiff. Roll into ¾-inch balls. Place the balls 2 inches apart on a wax-paper covered cookie sheet. Flatten the balls with the palm of your hand, keeping them around
1
⁄
8
-inch thick.

Melt the chocolate in a glass bowl in the microwave in 20-
second increments, stirring between each, until the chocolate is smooth and melted. Be careful not to burn. Drop the peanuts in the melted chocolate. Stir. Pour the peanut and chocolate mixture over the fondant, allowing it to crawl lusciously just past the edges. Cool. Flip, spooning just enough of the chocolate peanut mixture onto the bottom to cover the remaining fondant. When cool, turn over and store in the freezer. Remove and ingest as needed, particularly in moments of extreme stress.

I spell-checked the recipe and emailed it to Ron, feeling good about my work. I glanced at the clock in the lower right screen of my computer, wondering if I had time to shelve books before going home to prepare for my date with Johnny.

Despite my mental and physical exhaustion, I got a warm buzzy feeling thinking about a repeat performance of our previous night together. I didn’t know if it was a result of the day I’d had, but for the first time in weeks, I was considering whether or not holding him at arm’s length was good, or even necessary. When he was around, I was happy. I desperately needed that right now.

He was honest and kind, and man, those hands of his. He’d slide them gently under the curve of my rear and pull me in for a long, deep kiss that left my knees trembling. He might be The One. Maybe it was time to let myself be vulnerable to him and to try to see in him what he saw in me.

My eyes went misty from my hot daydream, and it took me a couple seconds and a few blinks to process the time. How could it be six o’clock already? My eyes darted to the windows. It was dark outside. Johnny would be at my house in half an hour! He said he would bring the dinner and the movies, but I’d hoped to at least have the house and myself picked up before he arrived. Crap. It’d been so long since I shaved that it looked like a homeless Mediterranean had taken up residence in my underpants, and speaking of undergarments, it was laundry day tomorrow and I wasn’t exactly wearing the starting lineup. White bra with the puckered cups that was just too comfortable to throw away? Check. Dangit!

I jabbed my finger at the computer’s power button, forcing a shutdown, tugged on my coat, and hightailed it out the door, barely remembering to lock up behind me. My car had cooled down along with the night, but I didn’t have time to let her preheat. I slammed the gear stick into Reverse and tore out of my parking spot.

I hit rush-hour traffic on the way home, or at least Battle Lake’s version of it. Pickup after pickup drove painfully slowly in front of me. Even though the skating rink had been closed for the day, I imagined the Prospect House had stayed open, probably drawing even more visitors as news of the nearby tragedy spread. They were scheduled to close for the day right about now, and all the vehicles crawling in front of me suggested they were right on time.

I pounded on the steering wheel. I didn’t ask for a lot out of life, but after the last twenty-four hours I had, I was worried about my mental state if this night with Johnny crashed and burned.

My brain scrambled to make the best of my current circumstances. If I could make it home in ten minutes, and Johnny wasn’t early, that would give me exactly thirteen minutes to retrieve my machete and have a go at my legs before switching into the peach-colored, lacy push-up bra I’d bought in Alexandria last week. It made me look as though I had B cups, which was arguably a bait-and-switch if tonight went how I hoped it would, but nobody expects the real thing to drive like the display model, right?

I finally passed the clogged traffic and careened a sharp right onto the gravel. This was a shortcut in terms of miles, but since I usually drove half-speed on the back roads, it took longer. Not today. I squealed around corners, sliding across the ice and staying shy of the ditch with the help of spit and luck. As I turned into my nearly mile-long driveway, I saw I had carved two minutes off my best drive-home time. Excellent work! I might even be able to apply lip gloss and empty the bathroom garbage so as to hide that I had bodily functions.