May Day (21 page)

A call to Lartel’s travel agent in Minneapolis would tell me whether the man was really in Mexico. If he was, Gary Wohnt was going down, once I could figure out how to pin all this on him. My brain was full again, so I got myself ready for work and headed back to town to begin the first day of the rest of my life.

Fortunately, the travel agency
was open on Saturdays. My phone call took only a minute. I had found the number listed in the Rolodex I had borrowed off Lartel’s desk. Once I explained who I was and that a close member of Lartel’s family had died and I needed to contact him, the agent was happy to help. She confirmed that Lartel had bought the tickets to Mexico, but she did not know if he had actually gotten on the flight or checked into his hotel. She said she would look into it and get back to me. I hunkered down for an excruciating wait.

The library was busy, and my mind was energized by anticipation. Today, I would find out who had killed Jeff Wilson. I finished the article on Jeff, all but the ending, and spent the morning alternating between crabby/hyper and manic/helpful. Before I knew it, it was noon. I emptied the library and hung the Out to Lunch sign on the door. I had no intention of leaving my post lest I miss the travel agent’s call, but I did want some quiet time to eat chips and think. On my way back to my desk, the front door donged, and I realized I had forgotten to lock it.

“We’re closed,” I said, turning to see who had come in. My stomach flipped when I saw it was Professor Jake. Damn. I had forgotten about our lunch date, made via e-mail.

“Hi, Mira! Ready for lunch?” His thick-lashed black eyes sparkled, and he looked so hopeful. I hated hurting nice people’s feelings only slightly less than I hated leading on nice people.

“Um, Jake, there’s been a little misunderstanding.”

His face fell far and quick. Clearly, this wasn’t the first time he had received this speech.

He cleared his throat and stopped me from continuing. “I understand. I really do. This can be an uncomfortable thing to talk about. I assumed from your e-mail that it wouldn’t be a problem, but . . .”

He trailed off. The flutter in my throat told me this was not the conversation I had planned in my head. Professor Jake had obviously revealed something about himself in an e-mail that had never gotten past Gina, my evil matchmaker. The professor’s apologetic and depressed manner told me he thought it was a dump-worthy secret. My curiosity overrode my better judgment.

“Yeah, well, you know, things like that can be really surprising.” I figured if I played dumb, he would tell me what he thought I already knew, and it would let me off the hook. How often is it that life makes it easy to dump someone nice? This day was going well for me, and it was early.

“I understand. I thought I would gamble that you wouldn’t mind.”

“Yeah, well, you know how it is.”

“Believe me, I certainly do.”

“Yup.” This was like pulling teeth. “So what reaction do you usually get when you tell people that?”

“It really depends.”

Gawd. “So what for you is the hardest part of telling someone?”

“Their reaction.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Well, Mira, it was nice meeting you. I felt really comfortable around you, and I’m sorry this isn’t going to work out.” Jake shook my hand and turned to go. He shook hands like a girl. I looked into his eyes. He had eyes like a girl. I replayed our date. He talked about dieting like a girl. No. Way. I took a stab.

“Jake, what did your name used to be?”

“What? Oh. Jessica. But I always made people call me Jake, even when I was little. I knew I was male from day one, so the hormones and surgery just set things to rights.”

Super. A post-operative transsexual, living in the Midwest, attracted to me. I felt worse for him than I had when I had to dump him. Geez. Then I started to feel deceived on a biological level, like a dog caught humping a raccoon. I didn’t have a lot of hard and fast rules for a good date, but at least one of us had to have a factory-standard penis. This dating wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Score another point for the vibrator industry.

He started to look away. “Like I said, Mira, you’re neat. Really neat. I just thought I’d take a gamble.”

I watched him walk away, all six feet of him looking manly from behind, when it clicked for me. It clicked so loud that Jake even turned questioningly on his way out. I waved him on. I suddenly knew who killed Jeff, beyond a doubt. “Neat. Really neat.” I said it under my breath, over and over again. “Just thought I’d take a gamble. Really neat. Like Jeff’s body. Neat and clean, on the library floor.”

Jake let himself out, and I saw my hands were trembling. Lartel’s house had been really neat. Too neat. And the high-maintenance plants in his home, the kind that needed to be watered every other day, were thriving when I had snuck into his house. Really neat. Just thought I’d take a gamble. The irony was, Curtis Poling had practically handed me Jeff’s murderer on a silver filleting knife a couple days ago, and I had been too blind to see it.

The phone rang rudely in the stillness of the library. I glanced over at the caller ID on the handset and saw it was a 612 area code. The Twin Cities. I didn’t recognize the number, but it could be the travel agent. I calmed my hands as best I could, grabbing the phone a nanosecond before the machine got it.

“Mira. Lartel. I’m at the airport.”

My heart pounded in my ears like it used to when I was in track and waiting for the gun to start the hundred-yard dash. I recognized Lartel’s clipped speech, but his voice seemed a lifetime away. “What?”

“I’m in Minneapolis. I got called back early. I’ll be at the library tomorrow. You should meet me there at nine o’clock to catch me up.”

“Tomorrow? That’s Sunday?”

“Nine a.m.” Click.

I stared at the window in the phone and watched the call length counter continue to reckon the seconds. I pushed the end button to turn it off and sat down in my captain’s chair. I looked at the dappling of the sun outside the library window. Lartel was somewhere in the 612 area code, which meant he would be in Battle Lake in under three hours.

I looked at the wall clock. 12:37. I had until 3:00 for sure to get to Lartel’s house and find the proof. I turned off all the lights, changed the message on the answering machine in case someone called to see why the library wasn’t open on a Saturday afternoon, shut down the computer, grabbed my coat, and was out the door by 12:42.

I never intended to
cross the threshold of Lartel’s house again. That first visit had been enough for me. But I knew from the caller ID that Lartel wasn’t in the county, so I was out of harm’s way for at least two more hours. When I drove up to his tidy farmhouse, I felt ill. My body and mind reminded me of the drive to the hospital to hear the official story on my dad. He had only been dead for a couple hours, and the meeting was a comedy of gruesome errors as the police officers and doctors tried to figure out if his body was identifiable. They decided it wasn’t. It was scorched beyond recognition. They sent my stoic mom and my quiet self away to plan the funeral. The last time I would ever be with my dad’s whole body had been the morning before, when I said I wished my mom would divorce him so I wouldn’t have to see him and his drunk face ever again. That whole life of mine was surreal and timeless, and I watched it from well outside my body.

That familiar detachment was with me as the Toyota and I crunched into Lartel’s driveway. It didn’t look like anyone was around, but fear still punctured my skin like spears of ice, infecting my heart and filling my veins, bringing me back into my body and the moment. I couldn’t turn back now, though. I hadn’t found what I was looking for in Lartel’s office, so the answers to my questions were in that house.

Adrenaline forced my legs out of my car and to the front door of Lartel’s house. Everything appeared as I had left it two nights before, except now it was all washed in garish daylight. I retrieved the key from under the faux rock. Like a sleepwalker, I inserted it in the lock and pressed the door open.

“Hello?”

Reverberations of silence answered me. I forced myself inside and eased the door closed. The whispered warnings of the house started up immediately. “Do you really want to do this twice?” it asked me.

“You know, I really don’t,” I answered. I knew what creepiness lay here. I was actually turning to leave when I saw a manila file folder with a black tab on the kitchen table. That hadn’t been there two nights ago. I tiptoed over and touched the smooth and cool paper. My curiosity got the better of me. I let the bright light of daytime soothe me.

At first glance, it was obvious the thick file contained a lot of bank matters. I studied the papers, feeling like a recovering alcoholic at a bar—a bar that gives you a free drink in exchange for your sobriety chips. I couldn’t stop reading. It took me a couple pages before I realized I was looking at the deed to the Jorgensen land. It seemed innocuous and wasn’t what I had come for. The next document was pay dirt: Ella Jorgensen’s will. Curtis told me it had the answers, and I’m sure he had told Jeff the same thing.

The will named First National Bank executor of the Jorgensen estate, with Karl Syverson as acting representative. If there was an outstanding mortgage at the time of Mrs. Jorgensen’s death, the bank was to pay it off in installments with proceeds from her CDs. When the CDs reached their minimum investment period, the bank was to cash them in, pay off any remaining mortgage, and hand the rest over to the Department of Natural Resources. The DNR would use the money and land to construct a wildlife refuge. My head swelled like a sponge in a bathtub.

I flipped open the last item in the folder, Mrs. Jorgensen’s investment portfolio. Fortunately, it was hick-friendly and I could make enough sense of it to see that Mrs. Jorgensen’s investments had been gradually withdrawn at stiff penalties over the seven years since she had died. There were no more CDs. That would explain why both Karl and Jeff had said the property was in arrears. That left no income with which to pay the mortgage, which clarified why the property was now up for sale even though Mrs. Jorgensen had made crystal clear in the will that she wanted the land donated, not sold.

My mind flashed me a picture of the casino letter I had found among Lartel’s things at the library. Karl owed the Shooting Star Casino $59,000 in gambling debts, and I had assumed that Lartel was blackmailing Karl with this knowledge. I had been wrong. Karl had robbed the estate to pay his gambling debt. When there was no more money left, he put the land up for sale. Jeff must have demanded the will, so Karl had killed Jeff rather than ruin the life he had meticulously built in Battle Lake.

“I was going to make a clean start,” he said softly, his voice high, almost womanlike. “I was going to sell the land and pay off my debt. Then I would be done with it. I could start over.”

My intestines constricted, and my face stuck in mid-blink. I couldn’t turn around. Although I had had enough clues relating to the Jorgensen estate to point to Karl as the killer, I had been too caught up in our friendship to even consider him in that light. He was kind and welcoming to me when I first came to town and had always been a good listener and lunch buddy.

His kind front had blinded me, until my conversation with Professor Jake had triggered a convergence of clues. Jeff’s body had been spotless, its clothes changed, with a book placed precisely over his eyes. Karl, the neat freak of Battle Lake, couldn’t make a mess even when he was murdering.

“Karl?”

“Mira?” he mocked, chuckling softly.

I could feel my fight-or-flight mechanism kick in, and adrenaline bum-rushed my brain. Why didn’t it go to my arms, like it did for Popeye? “Who else knows that the land is supposed to be donated to the state instead of sold?” I asked in a thin voice.

His left hand slid onto my left shoulder, making me jump. Karl massaged me softly, delicately. “No one. At least not anymore. There was a time that Rob Winston, Mrs. Jorgensen’s lawyer, knew, but he died almost five years ago, well before the CDs could be withdrawn without penalty. Mrs. Jorgensen didn’t want it to be a big deal.” His voice deepened. His right hand connected with my right shoulder, and the massage intensified.

“She said she wanted the curse of the land to rest. Batty old lady. And she wanted to pay back the town’s debt to the Indians. But she didn’t want to stir up trouble, so she asked Winston and me to keep it quiet. No problem, I said.

“Winston said the same thing, but he was a lawyer, so he was a weasel. By the time the information chain he started got back to me, it was pure rumor. People said that the land was haunted and that that was why Mrs. Jorgensen never wanted it sold. I thought that all the truth to the rumor had died, but somehow Jeff got wind that the land was supposed to go to the state.”

I thought of Ruby calling Curtis Poling “the town’s memory.”

“I just took a little off the top at first,” he continued. “I paid the mortgage, and whatever was left over I considered my pay as executor. But then, you know.” He pulled my shoulders up, forcing me to shrug for him. “The gambling got the better of me.”

“So you killed Jeff? Because he knew the land was supposed to go to the DNR and he wasn’t going to let you sell it for your own profit?”

He abruptly took his hands off my shoulders and strode to the other side of the table. The curtain-covered sunlight shadowed his face like a mask, but his body was plain to see. He was wearing his loafers, and I could see pant legs sticking out, but above that he was clad in an ankle-length gingham dress, his nails painted pink, his receding hair covered by a platinum-blonde wig. His eyes glowed in the shadows like a wolf’s. When he stepped forward, his pink-tinted lips were pulled back in a fierce, pained smile.

“What are you staring at, Mira?” His voice switched to a falsetto southern accent. “Don’t ah look pretty? Gotta be ready for Lartel to get home. Y’all do know how he likes his house clean and his food cookin’.”

Hiccups of panic were pushing up from my diaphragm. “Who are you?” I whispered.

Karl giggled, but his voice returned to normal. “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about your boyfriend. He had a hunch about the land. A pretty good hunch. That guy always had good instincts.” Karl’s eyes were on fire, threatening to burn this horror house down around us. “Even back in high school, he always knew what to do—when to throw the ball, when to run. Back then, I looked up to two people: Jeff Wilson and Lartel McManus.

“But that was a long time ago. I’m successful now. It was actually me who contacted Trillings about the Jorgensen land months ago. Jeff was going to see what kind of person I had become. Then he called me at home on Sunday afternoon and asked how much was left on the mortgage, and I told him. He said he was thinking of some big PR stunt, some ludicrous idea for Trillings to donate money to pay off the mortgage so it could be handed over to a land conservation group. He knew Mrs. Jorgensen never wanted it sold, but he didn’t know about the investments or why the mortgage hadn’t been paid. Yet. Said he needed to see the will to make all this work.

“I told him I was interested in learning more but that I was housesitting for Lartel so he would have to meet me out here.”

Housesitting. Karl was the one who had been watering Lartel’s plants while he was on vacation, and apparently he was also a surrogate Kennie in Lartel’s twisted world. The real Kennie had warned me about the connection between those two, and damned if that woman hadn’t been dead on. I felt myself going numb, probably from my heart overexerting itself. My own fear was poisoning me. Soon, I would collapse to the floor and be unable to run. Would Karl clean my body up before he planted it somewhere? Would he dress me in my own clothes or borrow some of his play clothes?

Karl rubbed his nose absently, then pulled out waterless disinfectant and squirted a dime-sized drop into his palm. The alcohol smell hit me like a slap. “Jeff wouldn’t have given up, Mira. He didn’t when he was in high school, and he hadn’t changed.”

My hands were sweating viciously, and I tried to buy myself some time while I fought for control of my body. “I won’t tell anyone, Karl.”

Karl laughed again, but not the kind of laugh you’d want to join in on. “No, you won’t, Mira James. You’re absolutely correct right there.” He rubbed the disinfectant into his hands vigorously and popped the plastic bottle into a pocket of his dress.

Then, he tensed up like an electric bolt had zapped him. “You know, it was Kennie who messed it all up again, just like the old days.” Karl spit her name out as if it burned his tongue. “She told Jeff about the Skinvold land. He met with her on Saturday night to talk about the acreage. Sunday he met with Herbert, and then he came to me to tell me about that PR coup bullhockey for Trillings.”

I was not pleased by the distracting surge in my emotions. Jeff had met Kennie on Saturday night, not some mysterious lover, and he had only gotten together with her to look at some land. He hadn’t slept with anyone else. I struggled to get back on track. “But since Jeff didn’t know about all the debt, couldn’t you just make something up?”

Karl’s eyes became distant and unfocused. “Lartel warned me about women like you, Mira. He always talked about how manipulative you can be, women like you. Nosy, unclean, disorganized. Best avoided. I knew when I saw you snooping through his house on Thursday night that you were a sneaky one. I was a couple steps behind you that whole night, you know. You thought you were so clever, tromping through here like a bull. When you landed on your back in the living room, I almost took advantage.

“But I didn’t. I thought that doll and the fish I left later at the library would have discouraged you, but females like you don’t discourage easily. Lartel would have caught on to that right away.” Karl tilted his head back like he was trying to catch a voice in the next room, and he switched his own tone up a notch, back to his falsetto. “Yes, Mr. McManus, you’re always right. Always.”

Salty bile ate away at the back of my tongue. Clearly, Karl had spent a lot of time with Lartel, and it wasn’t happy healthy time. I didn’t want to know what sticky string connected those two. I needed out. Karl’s calm insanity had kept me frozen like a rabbit in a wolf’s stare, but my most feral instinct, the urge not to let others control me, was cracking the spell.

Karl picked up where he had left off, too caught up in his own confession to notice my change in posture. “Jeff would have figured it all out soon. All it ever would have taken to blow my whole plan was someone asking to see Mrs. Jorgensen’s will. And nobody ever would have if Jeff had just done what I brought him to town to do and not gotten so curious. All he had to do was survey the land for Trillings, sign the papers, and maybe entertain our mayor a little, bring her back East with him so Lartel had more energy to focus here at home. But that was too much to ask of Jeff, to do things right. He was always one to ruin everything.” Back to the falsetto. “Y’all were right about that, too, Mr. McManus. Yes, you were.”

His eyes refocused on me. “I could have sold the land free and clear. I could have been free.” He blinked. “So, you will keep my secret, Mira?”