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

by Jonni Good

  “We’re trying to figure out what happened, that’s all. Can you think of any reason why she’d go for a walk out on that land?”

  Both women shook their heads, bewildered.

  “Is there anyone in town who might want to do her harm?”

  “How could they?” Emma said. “Nobody knew she would be here. And I don’t think she’s talked to anyone in town since she left. Except for Carol Kramer, for a while. But they had a falling-out years ago.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. I put my hands on my knees, ready to stand up, and said, “Would you like us to bring Gwyneth’s husband over this afternoon, or perhaps in the morning?”

  Mildred said, “What for?”

  “Well—you don’t want him to take the children home without seeing them, do you?”

  Mildred raised a tissue to her eyes and wiped away a tear. “He’s not going to let me be around the baby,” she said. “Not after what Gwyneth must have told him about me.” She sniffed, then raised her tissue again, and blew her nose.

  Emma reached over and put a hand on her mother’s knee. “Mom, Grace will be coming to live here with us, now that Gwyneth is gone. Gavril Constantin isn’t her father—everyone knows that.”

  “Oh, honey, I don’t think so. You know I’m too old to be chasing a toddler around the house. Besides …”

  Mort and I glanced at each other. One of his eyebrows went up a quarter of an inch.

  “Mildred,” I said, “do you have any idea who Gabe’s biological mother is? Was it someone Gwyneth knew, by any chance?”

  Mildred shook her head. “She sent baby pictures, but I didn’t write back. I feel guilty about that now. He was cute, but he didn’t look at all like family. He had all that dark hair. Babies aren’t suppose to have hair. And that round little face with those big brown eyes. I thought she changed her name because she didn’t want to admit we were family, and then she got herself a baby who isn’t related to us, and I made it all about me. I was such a fool.”

  Emma squeezed Mildred’s shoulder and kissed her on the top of the head. “Don’t, mother. She’s the one who left. It’s not your fault.”

  Then Emma turned to us and said, “When can we come pick up the baby?”

  Mort stood up and held out his hand to help me up, too. I took his hand, stood, and waited for him to answer Emma.

  He said, “The sheriff wants the kids to stay with Josie until their father can come and get them. Wally thinks it will be easier for the kids to stay put. They’re doing well, though, and they’re safe. You know Josie—she sure does love those babies.” He made a move towards the door, and I moved quickly ahead of him to avoid being run over. There wasn’t much room between the sofa and the coffee table.

  “But I don’t understand,” Emma said. “We’re family. You’re not family. The baby should be here with us.”

  “Now, Emma, it doesn’t matter. The baby will be fine,” Mildred said. “When the husband comes, we’ll go and pay our respects. If he lets us, I mean.”

  “But, Mother, you know what they keep saying about that man in the papers. He’s in a rock band, and they’re getting a divorce.”

  I was not comfortable with the way this conversation was headed. Mort and I kept walking towards the door.

  Emma followed us. “You can see that, can’t you? You can’t hand a baby over to a man who sings in a rock band. He’s hardly ever home, and those people do drugs, you know they do.”

  Emma’s normally pretty hazel eyes were rimmed with red, although she wasn’t crying yet. I held out my arms, offering a hug, and she moved into it.

  When she pulled away, the tears were falling down her cheeks, and the house was filling up with the acrid smell of burnt chocolate chip cookies. I patted Emma’s shoulder, and we left.

  SEVEN

  Jocko followed us back to the snowmobile and jumped onto the seat. The wind was picking up and snow was starting to move into long rows and drifts. I pulled my scarf over my hat, babushka style, to get more protection for my ears.

  “Why did you say that about Wally wanting Josie to keep the baby?” I said. “I didn’t hear him say that.”

  “Well, we can’t give the baby to a suspect, can we?”

  I looked back at the house. Emma was looking at us through a gap in the curtains. When she saw me looking, she gave a little wave, and moved away from the window.

  “For the baby?” I said.

  “It happens.”

  “We need to go see Carol Kramer,” I said.

  “You call Carol, I’ll call your mother and see how things are going at home.”

  “Ask her to look up Carol’s number for me.”

  I waited, stomping my feet to make them feel warmer, while he talked to Josie. It would have been more reasonable to call Carol before we left the museum, and I was kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner. Mort ended the call and said, “She has to call someone on the library committee. The number isn’t in the phone book.”

  We waited, listening to the wind whistle in the branches overhead. When she found Carol Kramer’s number, she called Mort back and he repeated it to me. I punched it into my cell phone with cold fingers.

  Carol’s husband answered. “Who is this?”

  “Harold, this is Utah O’Brien. Is Carol home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “May I speak to her, please?”

  “What for?”

  I was too cold to play games. “Please ask your wife to come to the phone.”

  He yelled out, “Hey Carol. It’s for you. It’s that crazy broad from the museum.” Then the phone landed on something hard and bounced.

  He could have used the other B word, so I figured he was trying to be polite. A game was playing in the background, and a boy’s voice called out instructions to the players on TV. I never understood why guys did that. I checked my watch—it was a few minutes after nine, which meant they were yelling at a taped game.

  Carol picked up the phone. I told her my name, and then told her that Gwyneth was dead. She caught her breath. The phone went silent, except for the sound from the television. The noise receded as she moved away from the set, but she stayed off the phone so long I started to wonder if she dropped it, or fainted or something.

  Then a door opened and closed, and wind hit the mic on her phone. She was taking the call outside, probably on her porch.

  I asked if we could get together and talk. She agreed to meet us at the old house, where Gabe and his baby sister spent the night. Carol said she was worried about the pipes.

  The house was about half a mile out of town, where the first section road met the highway. Mort knew which one it was.

  “I’m not riding this machine all the way out there in a blizzard,” I said.

  “Of course not. That would be crazy. We’ll take your truck.”

  We rode the snowmobile back to the museum. Billy Mack was out on my parking lot with his John Deer tractor, moving snow. He uses the tractor for tilling gardens in the spring and snow control in the winter.

  Mort pulled the snowmobile in beside my truck, got off, and went to the back of the pickup to pull down the tailgate for Jocko. I vetoed that idea and sent the dog into the museum, instead. He ran straight for the kitchen door and barked. Josie opened the door and let him in.

  I looked across the street at Angie’s parking lot. Sonje’s vehicle was parked at an odd angle, with the left front tire dangerously close to squashing one of Angie’s dwarf red osier dogwood bushes.

  It was strange to see a car parked there at all. Most people parked on the other side of the diner, because it was closer to the front door of the restaurant. The north side, which had room for only five cars, was almost always empty.

  We scraped the snow and ice off the truck windows and the hood. When I pulled out onto the road, I turned right and headed south across the Little Perch river. The road had been plowed earlier that morning, but with the wind blowing and new snow coming down, the plow would need to ma
ke several more passes before the day was over. I wouldn’t normally go out in that kind of weather, and I was glad the Kramer place was only half a mile away.

  I drove about thirty miles an hour because the blowing snow made it hard to see the edge of the road. There was no traffic, but there rarely is on that highway. If you keep going south, the road would eventually bring you to Warden, about 12 miles away, and the people who live there sometimes come to West Elmer to shop at the lumberyard or the grocery store. During a blizzard, they would have enough sense to stay home.

  Even going so slowly, we got to the old house before Carol did. The clapboard siding was gray weathered wood, with a few patches of green, blue and yellow paint sticking to areas that were out of the weather. Abandoned swallow nests were attached to the siding, up below the eaves. A decorative shutter was missing a screw, and banged repetitively against the house. A rusty old Chevy Bel Air that was once black and white was parked in the side yard, covered with snow. It was missing the tires on the driver’s side.

  The front door was unlocked. We went in. The wood stove was stone cold. Wood was stacked nearby. A couple of charred sheets of paper and a few small sticks of kindling were sitting on top of big splits of wood inside the stove. Gabe was trying to get the fire going again, but didn’t know how. His family must not go camping very often.

  There was old furniture in the house that had seen better days in a previous century. Mort went down into the cellar, and I headed for the back hallway.

  There were two bedrooms. Both beds had sheets, but all the blankets were on the bed in the small room. That bed also had a dark spot on the sheets, probably marking the place where the baby spent the night with her big brother curled around her to keep her warm. The puddle was frozen.

  There was a small black carry-on bag on the floor next to the bed, with the handle retracted. It was empty. I checked the drawers in an old wooden dresser, and found a few pairs of underwear and socks, a t-shirt, and a sweatshirt. A paperback book, The Lightning Thief, was lying on the floor beside the bed. It was one of my favorites. I put the book and the clothes in the bag, and took it to the front room.

  There was a small saucepan in the sink, probably the one that Gabe used to warm up the baby’s formula on the old electric stove. I tried to imagine myself at his age. Would I have been so brave and responsible? I hoped so, but, fortunately, I wasn’t tested so young.

  Mort came back upstairs. “I turned off the water,” he said. “I couldn’t tell if any pipes were frozen or not. Maybe they’ll get lucky.”

  I went to the other bedroom. A larger travel bag was lying on the bed. I was trying to decide if I should take Sonje’s belongings back to the museum, or if I should let the husband come out and get them, when I heard Carol Kramer come through the front door.

  I went back out to the small living room. Carol’s eyes were red and her shoulders sagged. She gave me a nod, said hello to Mort, and went to an overstuffed chair. She almost fell into it. She didn’t speak for a moment, but sat there, slumped over, looking like she wasn’t sure she’d ever get up again.

  Carol is a small woman, 5’5” or so, and underweight. She wore a long gray quilted winter coat, and she didn’t take it off. It was too cold for that. Her dark eyebrows were scrunched together in the middle, accenting the deep vertical lines on her forehead. She’s blond, but it isn’t natural. She’s in her early forties, but she looks older. I didn’t know her well, just enough to say ‘hi’ when we met on the street. She’s a part-time teacher’s aid at the elementary school.

  I sat on the end of the couch near her chair, careful to feel for broken springs first. Mort flopped down on the other end and put one leg on his knee.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said, looking at the worn rag rug on the scuffed wooden floor. “She was fine when I saw her yesterday.”

  “We don’t really know yet,” I said. “Not really. I found her body out on that vacant piece of land at the end of the river walk, the Webb land, early this morning.”

  “What on earth would she be doing out there?”

  “We have no idea,” I said.

  Mort asked if she knew of any history the woman might have with that abandoned corn field. “The high school football field backs up against it, on the north side. Maybe something happened in the past that would make her think of that place?”

  Carol shook her head, confused by the question. “I don’t …” She looked at me. “And why were you out there? How did you find her?”

  “My dog found her. She was covered with last night’s snow. I recognized her from yesterday, at the the diner. I called Mort and the emergency crew. When her boy saw the fire truck, he followed the men down to the river.”

  She sat up straight. “What? The children were here? I didn’t know she was bringing the children. I talked to Mark a few days ago, and he said the family talked her out of bringing them.”

  “Gwyneth didn’t mention the children to you at all when you talked to her yesterday at the diner?”

  “No. She was in a hurry, but she didn’t say why. Lord—how did Gabriel keep the fire going?”

  I looked at Mort, and he told Gabe’s story one more time.

  Carol held her hand over her mouth and looked at the stove with fearful eyes. It was easy to imagine what she was seeing, the tragedy that could have taken two lives, or three, instead of one. When she was ready, she started to talk.

  “That stove kept my grandmother and her whole family warm for all those years, but she knew how make it work right, how to keep fire burning longer, how to get the kindling started. I came out here and lit the fire, to make sure Sonje would come into a warm house. She could have kept it going all night. But Gabriel, a city boy, here all by himself …”

  She continued, trying to focus. “Sonje got a call, right before we left the diner. The call made her angry, but she didn’t say who it was.” She brushed her hair back, away from her face, and then brushed a tear off her cheek. She seemed to be shrinking, like a balloon with a slow leak.

  “You were close.” I said.

  Her eyes darted towards me, then away. She adjusted her hips to get a more comfortable spot on the old chair. “We used to be,” she said, looking towards the window that gave a dusty, fly-specked view of the old, rusty Chevrolet. “After she left town, we kept writing to each other. She went to school, University of Iowa, because of their creative writing program, but we still kept in touch.”

  She rubbed the fabric on her coat, thinking. Then she continued, speaking quickly, as if she was trying to get the story told and over with. “We had a falling-out after her first book was published. She wrote about my little brother, who drowned when I was eleven years old. She changed the name, and the place, and added magical stuff, so it sound totally different, but I knew who it was. I told her I didn’t think it was right, that she kind of stole part of my life. She said I was being silly. We never spoke after that.”

  I let that sink in. I looked over at Mort, and shook my head, a fraction of an inch. One of his eyebrows went up, and he gave me a little nod. I turned back to the grieving woman, slumped into the beat-up old chair.

  “Carol,” I said, softly, so it wouldn’t sound quite so much like I was calling her a liar. “I’ve read every single book that Sonje McCrae ever wrote. A lot of people die in her books. They’re fantasies, and they’re written for teenagers. But no children die in them. No animals, no children. Ever. Why are you saying that?”

  She looked at me, then at Mort. She fiddled with her gloves for a minute, and then said, “She disguised it by making my brother Timmy into a dwarf. It was in the first book.”

  She looked at her hands, and the tissue, and then took a deep breath and looked out the window again. “There were lots of little stories that we made up when we were kids that ended up in her books, too. I didn’t mind that—she started most of the stories, and I didn’t have any right to say they were mine. The dwarf’s death bothered me, though.”

  She sat
up a little straighter, and looked at us. “But I didn’t really break off my friendship with her, the way I said. If she’s gone, there’s no point in lying about it now. Harold didn’t want me to be friends with her. He said my trips to the city were too expensive, and it was putting ideas in my head. I pretended to be angry at her, but I still visited her a few times a year, whenever I could find an excuse to go to the city for some other reason.”

  She looked back at us, pleading. “Don’t tell him. Please. He can’t know.”

  I could feel my face pinching up. I looked to Mort for help.

  “I remember your brother’s drowning,” he said. “I was a brand new deputy at the time. That was a bad business.” He shook his head sadly.

  I waited for Mort to fill in some details about that incident, but he moved to safer ground. “Why did Sonje come to West Elmer? She hasn’t been here in years.”

  “She called and said she wanted to make things up with her mother, with Mildred. Sonje and I always kept in touch, with letters and sometimes phone calls. We don’t do email, because Harold—”

  She looked out the window for a second. A muscle on her jaw was jumping, until she took a deep breath and forced herself to relax.

  I said, “Whose idea was it for her to stay out here? Did you offer to let her use this place?”

  “No, she asked if she could stay here. We used to ride our bikes out here to visit my grandmother when we were in grade school. This is where West Elmer used to be, you know, before they moved it to the other side of the river. Of course, that was a really long time ago. This is the only original house still standing. Sonje and I would go out into the fields and find things we called ‘artifacts’ that were turned up by the plows. It was junk, really, but it was fun. The house was much nicer then, and Sonje loved my grandmother. When she called I told her the place was a wreck, but she still wanted to stay here.”

  She looked around at the peeling wallpaper and the old furniture, and bit her lower lip. “We let this place go. Harold didn’t think it was worth fixing. He wanted to sell it right after my grandmother died, but it’s in my name, and there are a lot of memories here, so I said no. It was a mistake. A house doesn’t last long out here, if you don’t keep it up. It isn’t worth hardly anything, now.” She shrugged, and wiped her nose again.