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

by Jonni Good

  I don’t do a lot of jogging, but my long legs can move when they need to. Jocko and I caught up with the boy as he was going around the no-trespassing sign at the east end of the paved walk.

  Huffing, I said, “Son, what’s your name?”

  The boy looked at me, then at Jocko, without slowing. “What’s that smell?”

  “Skunk. I’m Utah O’Brien. What’s your name?”

  “Do you know what happened to my mother?”

  “Not yet. Can we stop for a second? I can tell you what I know, but I’m out of breath.”

  He stopped. I took a deep breath, and regretted it when the sting of sulfur went into my lungs. I said, “I found a woman a few minutes ago, lying in the snow down by the river. I’m really sorry. Let’s go back—”

  “But my mom doesn’t go to places like this. She doesn’t even go to the park. Maybe it’s not her. I have to see.”

  He took off again, and I followed. It wasn’t very far. We made a lot of noise, and Mort heard us coming.

  “Stop. You can’t be here.” He held out his arms, and caught the boy. “There’s nothing you can do here, and you’ll be in the way.”

  “But I had to know if it’s my mom,” the boy said, all the fight gone from his voice. He could see the woman now. All the snow was brushed off her body. The men had started to check her body temperature to see if there was any hope, but they stopped when the boy showed up. One of them moved between us and the body, blocking the view. Mort put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and turned him away.

  “You don’t want to see this, son. Go on back with Utah. She’ll take care of you. There’s nothing you can do here.”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “I think so. I’m really sorry. Go with this lady, now. She’ll do everything she can to help you, OK?”

  The boy nodded, and I took his arm, leading him away from the scene. The boy walked with me, stumbling a few times because he couldn’t see the tufts of snow-covered weeds through his tears.

  My heart was breaking for this kid. He was so young, so miserable. When we were far enough away, and a few bushes were between us and the body, I stopped and held out my arms. He came to me and held on for dear life.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, with my cheek lying on the soft black hair on the top of his head. “I’m so sorry.” Such hollow words, but what else was there?

  When he pulled away, I fished a tissue out of my coat pocket and handed it to him. He blew his nose. Jocko pressed his nose against the boy’s thigh several times to get his attention, and the boy reached down and gave my dog a pat on his head. Now all three of us smelled like skunk. I was almost getting used to it.

  “Let’s get you warmed up,” I said. “The sheriff will be here in a few minutes. He’ll know where to find us.” He hesitated. Then he gave in and came with me.

  “I still don’t know your name,” I said, when we were back on the paved walk.

  “Gabe McCrae.”

  “How old are you?” I pulled my wool hat off my head, feeling guilty for not thinking of it sooner, and handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’m twelve. Almost thirteen.” He pulled the hat down low over his reddened ears.

  “Gabe, would you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “You can if you want.” His head was bowed, his shoulders slumped. Jocko walked on the other side of him, up close, sharing his skunkiness with his new friend. To keep from tripping the boy with the leash, I handed it to him. He took it. Then he reached down and stroked my dog’s head a few times. “He’s a nice dog,” he said. “I guess it’s not his fault he stinks.”

  “Well, it’s kind of his fault. But he can’t help it now. Can you tell me why you’re here, in West Elmer?”

  Gabe picked a stick off the pavement and broke it into several pieces. He tossed them away. “Mom said we’re moving here because it’s safer. She said there was too much crime in the city and she wanted us to live someplace quieter, where we wouldn’t get hurt. So much for that idea, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Then, after a few beats, I said, “But why here, in particular? There are hundreds of little towns. Why this one?”

  “Because my mom’s mother lives here. But why does that matter? Her mom hasn’t talked to her for years. I’ve never even met her. We were supposed to go visit her this morning. She finally said she’d let my mom come.”

  “What’s your grandmother’s name?”

  He wiped his nose with his sleeve. Then he remembered the tissue I gave him, and he wiped his nose again. “I don’t know, exactly. Mom said, but I forgot.”

  A squirrel ran across the path in front of us. Jocko went on alert, but didn’t leave his post next to Gabe.

  “What’s your mom’s name? Maybe I can figure out who your grandmother is, if I know your mom’s name.”

  He thought about this for a second, with his face kind of scrunched up. Then he shook his head. “She’s been Sonje McCrae as long as I can remember, but that’s the name she made up for the books. She still gets magazines and stuff with the old name on it. She used to be Gwyneth Price.”

  He noticed that I wasn’t moving anymore. He stopped and turned back.

  “Gabe, are you saying your grandmother is Mildred Price? And your mother is the author, the one who writes the fantasy novels?”

  “She’s not really my grandmother. She is, sort of, I guess, but not really. And I’m not sure about her name. But yeah, my mom writes books.” He looked down at his feet and kicked at a clump of snow. “She did. She wrote books.”

  Jocko poked his nose into Gabe’s thigh again. My Border collie gets upset when people are unhappy. He got another head rub.

  I started walking again, but my brain was churning with this news. I see Mildred almost every day because of her job at City Hall. She’s the biggest gossip in town. She can’t keep a secret—not even other people’s secrets. How could we not know that her daughter, who moved away years ago, is now a famous author who writes books that end up on the New York Times bestsellers list?

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I said. “Where were you last night?”

  He rolled up the loose end of the leash, until there was no slack left. Then he unrolled it again as he talked. “We drove here yesterday with my mom. She took us to a little house out there …” He turned and pointed south, across the river, away from town.

  There’s nothing out there but miles of corn and soybean fields, and an occasional farm house.

  He started talking again, without taking a breath, trying to get the story told fast. “It’s a really crummy old house. There was a fire in the stove when we got there. My mom said Mrs. Kramer started it for us. Mom used to play there when she was a kid, but it isn’t very nice. The house is really old, and it looks like it’s falling apart. It was kind of fun at first. She said it was like an adventure. We had lunch, and she fed Grace and gave her a new diaper, and then Grace went to sleep and my mom said she’d be back in an hour. She was going to go talk to that lady, Mrs. Kramer. She had to give her something that was too important to mail. When she got back, she was going to tell me something. It was supposed to be a surprise. But she didn’t come back.”

  He put his hands in his armpits, trying to warm up. “I called her a million times and left a bunch of messages. And I called my dad, too, but he didn’t pick up, so I left him messages, too. I kept the fire going, and I fed Grace some formula that I heated up on an old stove, and I took her to bed with me because the bedrooms were cold, but the fire went out last night when I was sleeping and I couldn’t get it going again so it was really freezing this morning. I wanted to call 9-1-1 this morning but the battery on my phone was dead, so I fed Grace and walked to town as soon as it was light enough to see. That restaurant was open, but then the fire truck came and the ambulance, and they had that stretcher, so I left Grace with a lady—”

  He looked at me, startled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that …”

  “It’s OK
. That was my mother, Josie O’Brien. She’s really good with babies. She’s taking good care of your sister, I promise.”

  When we walked across the diner’s parking lot, I looked through the glass door to see if my mother was still there. She wasn’t. When she’s there, she always sits in the corner booth at the back because that’s where Mort always sits. It gives him a clear view of the entire restaurant, an old lawman’s habit. The diner was empty except for Angie, standing behind the counter. I gave her a wave. She waved back. Then she pointed across the street at the museum, telling me Josie and the baby were there.

  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.