May Day (14 page)

“Absolutely.” His smile revealed an underbite that hadn’t been apparent in his online picture, and his hands were small and soft, the hands of an academic. He was cute, but the last thing I wanted to do was date someone. Apparently that hadn’t been of concern to Gina. I told myself she must have set this up before she knew about Jeff and me, but that didn’t make me dread it any less. I abhor small talk, and the thought of mining someone for compatibility instead of responding to the natural thrust of chemistry was repellent, particularly in the wake of my most recent lover’s death. Sigh. But this wasn’t the professor’s fault, and I didn’t need to make this any harder on him.

I put up the Out to Lunch sign and pouted all the way to the Stew. When I got there, Professor Jake was waiting, his bark-brown eyes eager as a puppy’s. He was around six foot one and wore a suit, vest, and button-down-collar shirt, and his hair was close trimmed and neat.

“I hope this booth is OK.”

“It’s fine,” I said, in what I hoped was a magnanimous voice. I took the menu out of the waitress’s hand and scanned it for the quickest items. “I only have a short lunch break today. So sorry. How was your drive?”

“Fine, thank you.” He had a soft accent, maybe Mississippi. “What’s good?”

“I always get soup and a sandwich,” I lied.

“Deal.” He closed his menu and ordered for both of us. Lunch was quick and not memorable. He was pleasant and attentive, asking me about my cat and my friends and college. Actually, he was remarkably easy to talk to for a man, but I found myself spending most of forty-five minutes counting the ways he was not Jeff, and the rest of the time counting the number of times he mentioned his mother. Eleven. I wondered from a distance how odd that was. I could go whole months without mentioning my mother to another living person, and here this environmental sciences professor had mentioned his eleven times.

“I really enjoyed our lunch. Can I see you again?” he asked politely when he paid the bill.

“Sure. E-mail me.” I stepped back from what was looking like an attempted cheek kiss, scurried out the door, and cursed my weakness. I couldn’t turn him down to his face. I didn’t look behind me until I got to the library, and by then Professor Jake was gone.

My lunch date, by making me miss Jeff even more, only gave me one more reason to solve his murder in record time. Someone was going to pay for his death, and I had to find out who. The rest of the day I actually spent doing library-related duties. They say that idle hands are the devil’s minions, but for me it’s the opposite. When my hands are busy with mentally untasking duties, my mind plays. That’s what I blamed for the plan to case Lartel’s house—working and a bad date. If I had been doing anything else, I never would have come up with something so asinine.

Lartel was caught up in all this somehow. He was related to Jeff, he had been Jeff’s coach in high school, and he had been researching Jeff’s employer shortly before the murder. If nothing else, Lartel would be the easiest to eliminate as a suspect. I just needed to verify that he wasn’t in Battle Lake at the time of the murder and only pretending to be in Mexico. A quick peek into his windows would tell me that. If I couldn’t get enough proof that Lartel wasn’t involved by spying from the outside, the way I figured it, I had done a pretty good job getting into the Battle Lake Motel. How hard would a house be? Most people around here didn’t lock their doors anyhow.

As I drove under
the cover of night to Lartel’s house, I marveled at how much television had prepared me for life. A
Charlie’s Angels
fan from the word go, I had seen every episode at least twice, sometimes three times thanks to Nickelodeon reruns. I was a fan of Sabrina, of course. She had the name and the smarts and didn’t have to do all that ridiculous fawning over the men, as her hair was short and her boobs small. Sabrina used the downtime to figure things out and get the real work done. She taught a whole legion of underdeveloped and underpopular girls how to lie, spy, and detect.

And I had been a willing pupil, as evidenced by my about-to-be second break-in in three nights. Tonight I was wearing a black turtleneck and black jeans, dark hair pulled back, flashlight strapped onto a makeshift utility belt next to my spider knife. The spider knife was a purchase I’d made a few years back at Midwest Mountaineering in the Cities before a solo road trip to Colorado. I figured a woman needed protection, and it felt cool to whip open the three-inch blade with a flick of my thumb.

I had spent the first night of the road trip alone in my tent tossing the opened knife from one hand to the other just like bad guys in old cops-and-robbers movies, trying to look menacing. Apparently I was doing one thing too many because I fumbled the knife early on. It nicked the edge of my shin and started a solid bleeding bout. Since that time, I just relied on the knowledge that my secret inner superhero would know exactly how to use the knife should the need arise.

Lartel’s house was about ten miles north of Battle Lake off of County Road 78, sandwiched somewhere between Ottertail and Blanche lakes. The night was beautiful and clear, the air crisp with the sweet threat of a winter past. The stars seemed low and bright, like they always do in the spring, and the lazy off-season traffic allowed me to take a couple wrong turns before I happened upon the black mailbox with the name McManus etched onto a plain signboard swinging below.

I killed my lights (Sabrina would be proud) and rolled in stealthily. I felt the excited vibration brought on by elective fear. Lartel’s driveway was relatively short for a country home in this area—no more than three-quarters of a mile—hedged by oak trees on each side. I saw the glowing yard light as I neared the house, but I couldn’t make out the house itself until I turned the last bend in the driveway.

The outside of the residence was pretty much as I had envisioned it, except for the alabaster Doberman pinscher statues on each side of his front door. I figured he would be more of a frolicking-lawn-trolls kind of guy, but this wasn’t the first time he’d surprised me this week. The house itself was painted a pristine white, with green trim on the windows and matching green shingles—a standard country home. I guessed that the bottom floor had about three main rooms, all small, one bathroom, and limited closet space and that the upstairs had three main rooms, all with low ceilings that slanted in on the sides.

I followed the driveway to the back of the house and was pleased to find that there was a little turnaround where I could leave my car. I knew I wouldn’t be visible from the road even in front of the house, but I didn’t want to take any chances. When I got out of the car, the thick buzzing of frogs surprised me. There must have been a slough or swamp nearby. I put one hand on my knife and the other on my flashlight for reassurance and took a deep breath of the untainted air.

The sound of my feet chewing the gravel brought on a wave of reality. If Lartel was in his house, or if there was evidence of him having been in his house recently, he was either weird enough to lie about going on vacation or a murderer, and I would be dragging my clumsy fly body right into his web. Knife or no, I was just a librarian in black clothes with a big attitude. Before common sense could get the better of me, my brain flashed me a picture of my unremarkable lunch with the droning professor and then kindly supplied previews of hundreds of lame dates with faceless men lining my future. I had a strong feeling Jeff had been my one chance at happiness, and I wasn’t going to take his death lying down. My vision narrowed, and I concentrated on my mission.

I swiveled my head and counted the outbuildings. This had been a farmhouse once, but the barn and silo had long been removed, leaving two smooth cement surfaces, one rectangular and one round. Two sheds, both painted white and green to match the house, stood on each side of the cement slabs. There was no garage.

I walked toward the house on the balls of my feet, noticing that the cement path that led to the door didn’t have a single dandelion poking up through it. The grass was trimmed perfectly on each side and up to the house. I hadn’t even mowed mine yet, and here Lartel’s looked like a golf course green. I first peeked in the back windows, the play of light and shadow making it hard to see anything beyond the kitchen I was looking at. The table I could make out in the center of the room appeared spotless.

As I crept toward the side windows, I heard a twig crack in the woods a hundred or so yards behind me, and every other one of my senses melted away as I froze and tuned in to that one sound, waiting for the second snap that would indicate deliberate movement. My hair was the first thing to acknowledge fear, followed by my body and soul. My physical focus became superhuman at the cost of my mental ability. I looked at my car, closer to me than the woods, and then I peeked at the white and green house alongside me. The dwelling suddenly seemed malevolent and cocky. “Don’t run,” my brain whispered in my ear. Or maybe it was the house talking. I waited for more input, but none came. No more sound broke from the woods, and as my peripheral sense returned, I once again registered the noise of cars on the tar miles away and the melody of frogs and crickets. My breathing slowed. I walked the remaining sides of Lartel’s house and saw no sign of recent inhabitance. I had to go in.

When I returned to Lartel’s back door, I looked for the telltale faux key rock. He had one “hidden” at the library, so I figured he would have one by his house also. Sure enough, the big, exotic-looking lava rock was behind one of the two bushes guarding the rear door, a bright silver key clipped neatly into its underside. I unlocked the door and returned the key; I wanted to be primed for a quick, undetected getaway should it be necessary. My short hairs were telling me it would be, and adrenaline rushed into my fingers.

It was thrilling to enter his house, the same way it is thrilling to be kissed when you have to pee really bad. It was the same combination of excitement and restraint, and it made my breath come shallowly. It was a bright night, but I kept the flashlight on and took in the perfectly ordered kitchen. There were no just-washed glasses or plates in the dish-drying rack, and a glance into the fridge showed condiments lined up like lockstep soldiers but nothing with an expiration date. The room had the faint but reassuring smell of Lysol and sugar cookies, and I wondered if I’d prematurely judged Lartel.

Maybe he wasn’t hiding anything and really had just gone on vacation coincidentally at the same time his second cousin was coming to town, and maybe he had been looking Trillings up online for some completely unrelated reason. He could very well just be a quirky bachelor, reliving his glory days in his head while he freaked out the younger generation. Of course, that would make me the freak for breaking into his house. Better I find something incriminating.

I glanced around the shadowed kitchen with its white ruffled curtains and blue-and-white-trimmed cupboards and was relieved to see that there was no basement door. Old Minnesota farmhouses often had root cellars, but you usually had to go outside to access them. And a basement would have been just too creepy. If I stayed in the main part of the house, I could pretend I was on an adventure, secret spy chick for a night. If there was a basement, I would have to consider that I might be in a
Friday the 13th
movie.

I walked into the room off the kitchen, disregarding what looked like a pantry. I wanted to see pictures of Jeff and Lartel together, and I wanted information on what sort of terms they had parted on. If I was lucky, I could also find some dirt on Chief Gary Wohnt. I figured any guy who had a yearbook section in his library must have a decent-sized scrapbook or two in his house.

With that in mind, I cruised through the living room that went off one door of the kitchen and made only a peripheral inspection of the dining room at the front of the house. Both were immaculate and spartan, like the kitchen, the only decoration a multitude of live plants in all sizes and shapes. The lack of TV on this floor was the only thing that stood out. I admired Lartel’s housekeeping. My mom always taught me to clean my house when I went away because the only thing worse than coming home after a vacation was coming home to a dirty house after a vacation.

The stairs led off the dining room and were breakneck steep, so I had to make an effort not to bump my knees on each riser as I ascended. The creak of the third stair started my heart yammering. I really wasn’t supposed to be here, and even an empty house carries the energy of the people who’ve occupied it. It’s a scary thing to amble through, and years of media conditioning were screaming that something was going to jump out and grab me.

I slid my spider knife from my belt and held the reassuring weight in my hand. When I got to the thirteenth step, I felt a whisper at my neck. It was that essence that had turned me off of Lartel since the first day I met him, and if it was a smell or sound, it was just below my radar. Maybe it was only that I was on the second floor now, and getting away would be harder. Or maybe it was because the second floor is always the personal floor, and I finally felt like I was trespassing. Whatever the reason, I felt my nipples get hard in a bad way, and I had to fight the urge not to turn tail and run. For a moment, my breath came fast and loud enough that it echoed in the stairwell, the sound of two animals hunting each other.

When I planted my foot on the top step, I saw that I had guessed right about the layout of the house—there were three rooms up here. The one to the left looked like a bedroom, the one straight ahead looked like a den, and the one to the right had a closed door. Outside shadows from the trees played across the floors and walls, making it difficult to focus on the solid details of the house.

I forced myself into Lartel’s bedroom directly off the landing and clicked my eyes at the ruffled bed buried under dolls. My head turned farther to the right, and I saw a doorless closet full of dresses, all swimming in moonlight. I had a moment of vertigo as I tried to remember where I was. I looked behind me and saw the stairs I had just come up, the corner of the reassuringly masculine wood dining room table visible from my perch. I shuffled my feet toward the bed and touched one of the dolls. They were all alike, all of them cheap little Ben Franklin dolls decorated by the same kind of ladies who baked fruitcake and had knickknack shelves.

I willed myself to relax and move on. Obviously this wasn’t Lartel’s bedroom, so I had no reason to look further in here. He must have a niece or some other relative who visited him regularly. Maybe he had a lover who had her own room in his house. I shook off the sweet-sick feeling and headed into the next room. It was a sparse den dominated by a computer and a couch. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any bookshelves yet. A librarian without books in his home would be a strange creature.

There was one room left in the house, and I knew it was the room I had come to see. It must be Lartel’s bedroom, and I was sure that I would find the box I was looking for under his bed or in his closet, or maybe there would be a whole shelf of clues. I returned my spider knife to my belt and shined the flashlight on the doorknob, an old-fashioned glass knob with ornate clusters of flowers etched in metal around it. Protruding from the keyhole was a highly wrought skeleton key, which I grasped and turned. I took a breath and pushed, ready to use my flashlight as a weapon if need be.

I expected the door to creak like the stairs, but I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t. Everything about this house called out high maintenance and cleanliness. When I stepped in the room, I was confused by the sudden darkness around my flashlight. A black shade had been pulled over the one window, and no moon or starlight shone in. This was good, because it also meant no flashlight leaked out. I closed the door behind me and panned the room with my beam. A bile of pure horror rose in my throat as my eyes processed the spotlit vignette.

The room was a shrine to the past, but not the sort I had expected. The same dolls I had seen in the bedroom took up all available shelf and floor space, but in here they had a purpose. It was a tiny city populated by cheap, soft-bodied Shirley Temple wanna-bes. Every doll had an activity, and all were dressed for it.