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

by Jonni Good

  Angie said. “I can’t imagine putting up with that.”

  “Maybe she puts up with it for her two sons,” I said, but I couldn’t understand it, either.

  She said, “You don’t think Harold did it, do you? Why would he kill that author lady?”

  I hadn’t actually considered that possibility. “No, I don’t suppose. From what Pete was saying, it doesn’t sound like Harold’s style, anyway.” I turned towards Pete and said, “Do you remember when Carol Kramer got mad at Gwyneth Price?”

  “I do, actually, and I was plumb happy about it. Carol would go off to the city and come back with all these stories about what new thing Gwyneth Price had in her house, what kind of fancy restaurant Gwyneth Price took her to. She’d tell all the ladies at church, and then my Marcia would come home and want all that stuff in our house, too. When Carol stopped visiting Gwyneth, it saved me a lot of money.”

  “Did she say what caused the rift?”

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  “Did she ever tell you that Gwyneth was writing books?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Do you remember when Carol Kramer’s little brother died? Was there ever any talk around town about it being anything other than an accident?”

  He was shocked by the idea. “Of course not. Losing that little boy just about killed Carol’s mother, from the grief. And poor little Emma, she was there, too, but she was too young to know what was happening. The kids were only about three or four years old. Mildred was next door and heard the screams. She told my Marcia about the accident so often, my wife finally had to ask her to stop, because it upset her so much.”

  NINE

  Oscar was back with his laptop. He sat next to Amy and booted up the computer. Then he looked at me with his eyebrows raised, waiting for the coveted password. The Kruegers gave up their Internet subscription several months earlier.

  I turned to Angie and gave her a big smile, with lots of teeth. She looked at me suspiciously, then at the laptop. Her eyes narrowed. “Please?” I begged. “Just this once. Besides, it’s getting cut off in a few days, anyway. What can it hurt? And it’s for a good cause.”

  She glared at me for a few more seconds, on principle, and then wrote the password on a napkin and handed it to me. “Next time, they can take their laptop to your place.”

  I smiled my thanks, but groaned inwardly at the thought of more people sitting in my kitchen. I crossed to Oscar and Amy’s table and told them what I needed. “Anything you can find that might make someone mad at Sonje McCrae or her husband,” I said. “It’s a stab in the dark, but there’s always a chance you’ll find something.”

  “I thought it was a suicide,” Amy said. “I’m sure that’s what they said on the news.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe not.” I thanked them both for their help, and went back to the counter to put down a few dollars for the coffee.

  I thanked Angie and said goodbye to Pete. I walked towards the door, but I stopped when I saw the word ‘museum’ on a piece of paper next to the cash register. There was a whole stack of fliers, and they all looked alike. I picked one up.

  “Museum of Darwin’s Folly Brings God’s Wrath,” it said, in big type across the top. Below it, in smaller type, it said “Help us Get Rid of the Devil’s Work.”

  A grainy photo of my mammoth took up most of the paper below the headlines. Below the photo was a date and time, for next Saturday at ten in the morning. No location was listed for the meeting, which seemed like an important oversight. Maybe they intended to have a protest, with signs and bullhorns, out in front of the museum. It was getting a little too cold for that sort of thing, in my opinion.

  I looked up. Angie shrugged and grimaced. “I was going to throw them out. I didn’t expect you to come in so early.”

  Pete was studiously looking at the TV set above the soft serve ice cream machine. The TV wasn’t turned on.

  “Pete, you knew about this?”

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I knew. My daughter brought one over to the house a few days ago. Anybody who’s been in the museum knows it doesn’t have anything to do with evolution. Half the people in town helped you build those sculptures, for cryin’ out loud. I gave you a good deal on the lumber, myself, and my crew installed the foam insulation on that roof. I don’t remember the devil asking me to help out.”

  Angie picked up the pile and threw the papers in the trash bin below the cash register. She held out her hand for the one I was holding, but I kept it.

  “Did the pastor bring this in?”

  “No. It was John Meecham,” she said. “He had a silly grin on his face when he handed them to me. He knew he was being a jerk, and he was getting a real kick out of it.”

  John Meecham was in the same grade as me, way back when we were in school together. He was a jerk back then, too. Some people can’t help it.

  “He never showed any inclination towards religion before,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  Angie shrugged. We both looked at Pete. His neck was turning red and he kept his eyes on his coffee cup while he talked. “Meecham started coming to the church with Laura Rey, after her husband passed. Well, you can guess why. I’ve never known a man who had such a hard time remembering he’s married. My Rita saw him there a couple of times, and remarked on it. It was Laura Rey who got that fool idea about the museum, and Meecham is going along with it. She probably thinks he agrees with her, but he’s just having some fun at her expense.”

  “Why doesn’t the pastor sit Laura Rey down and explain things to her?” I said. “Isn’t that his job?”

  “Probably wouldn’t do any good. She’ll figure it out soon enough. Don’t worry about that flier. There won’t be any crowd with pitchforks outside your door next week. People got more sense than that.”

  I folded the flier into a small square and put it in my pocket. “John Owen has been the pastor for a really long time, hasn’t he? Don’t they usually move the preachers around? The Methodists have had at least five preachers that I can remember.”

  Pete shrugged. “Owen got attached, somehow. I’m not sure how he did it. The members have talked about getting a new pastor, but he always talks them out of it. I stopped going, after my Marcia died. He just keeps reading the same sermons, but Rita said he’s been adding more hellfire and brimstone lately, to spice things up. I don’t like that sort of thing, myself. They’ll have to close the church if they don’t get more members pretty soon, and a new pastor might be just what that place needs. But John Owen won’t budge.”

  “That sounds a little like you, Utah,” Angie said. “Hanging onto that old building of yours, even after the business shuts down. When are you going to move to Sam’s house, so I can invite myself over to watch a movie on his nice TV?”

  I smiled, said my goodbyes, and headed home.

  TEN

  When I walked through the front door of the museum, Sam was sitting on the old love seat next to the sculpture of the American camel, with it’s big, silly two-toed feet. I brought the loveseat into the museum after it closed so I could sit out there and have a cup of tea. It was cold now, in the big unheated space, but I sat down next to him.

  He put his arm around me, and I leaned against him. I thought, and not for the first time, how nice it was to be next to a man who was taller than me.

  “Your mother’s mad at me,” he said, while looking at the looming dark clouds through the big curved window at the top of the front wall of the museum.

  I said, “She was mad at me, too. She said Mort and I shouldn’t go around asking questions about Sonje McCrae.”

  Sam’s eyebrows scrunched together in a frown. He doesn’t frown very often. “She took me off to the side after Gabe and I got back with Molly. She said the boy already had enough excitement for the day, and he needed to rest. But the poor kid can’t sit around and mope all day. He needs to be up and doing something. Was I wrong to take him with me?”

 
I leaned on him again, and put my head on his shoulder. “I can’t see why. I don’t know what’s the matter with her.”

  “Maybe she’s feeling left out,” he said. “Remember, last year when you and Mort started looking for Larry Webb’s killer? Your mother was right in the middle of it, working her butt off to help. She even called me and asked me to write that article about the owl in Native American mythology for your blog. Of course, that was because—”

  “—it was because she was matchmaking, and you know it, you sly dog.”

  He gave me a lopsided grin and his chest vibrated with his rumbling chuckle. “I had to look up all that stuff about the owl on the Internet. It must have been a good article, though, because I got my girl.”

  “It was that green plaid Pendleton shirt you were wearing. I’m a sucker for old Pendleton wool.”

  “I’ll have to remember to wear it more often.” He pulled me closer with his big paw on my shoulder, and gave me a proper kiss.

  When we pulled apart, he said, “I got two good women out of the deal. Your mother’s a pretty special lady—but she’s not real happy today. Can you give her something more to do?”

  I thought about it for a second. “We need to go see Pastor Owen. I thought Mort and I would do it, but I’ll try to talk Josie into coming with me, instead. Did you learn anything when you went out with your hound?”

  “Not a whole lot, I’m afraid. But I got a chance to spend time with the boy, and he talked. That’s good, I think. He’s real worried that he’s going to end up in foster care. I don’t know what the rules are when a mother dies and there isn’t anybody else in the family except a soon-to-be ex step-dad. Do you?”

  “No. But if Gavril Constantin can’t take him, Emma is his nearest relation. She’s a good person, and kids love her. She’s acting a little strange today, but her sister just died. We can’t expect her to be at her best right now.”

  “But Mort said she’s only interested in the baby. He said Mildred and Emma didn’t show much concern for where Gabe will go after all this is over.”

  That was true. And Mort also considered Emma a likely suspect. I laid my cheek back down on his shoulder and we sat there, watching snow swirling around the mammoth. The dire wolf sculpture in front of us seemed to be grinning at us in the murky light.

  “Did Mort tell you about our talk with Carol Kramer?”

  He nodded. Then he said, “I remember when Carol and Gwyneth stopped speaking to each other. When the friendship ended, Carol was pretty upset about it. I don’t doubt that Harold is the kind of guy who would stop his wife from having a friend, and I can see why she’d lie to him. But I’m surprised that she thought she had to lie about it to—well, to other people.”

  He sat quietly for a moment, watching the clouds. Then he leaned down he kissed me on the forehead. “It’s cold. Let’s go inside.”

  I remembered the luggage, covered with snow in the back of the truck.

  While we walked to the front of the building, I said, “Last year, after my owl mask was stolen, Josie wanted you to do a smudging to get rid of the bad vibes in the museum. I don’t remember you doing it, though. Did she ask you?”

  He raised one shoulder, and let it fall. “I begged off. I tried to learn about the old ways to make my gran happy. It didn’t work. I’m just a town boy. I guess it’s kind of like you, not being Catholic, even though your mother was raised in the church. You probably couldn’t do an exorcism very well, either.”

  “No, I don’t think I’d be very good at that.” We both chuckled at the thought.

  He wiped a bit of dust off the nose of the American cheetah with his glove as he passed by. “You know, after my gran passed, your mother really stepped in and filled that hole. Josie means a lot to me—I hope she knows that.”

  The wind was blowing even harder when we walked back outside, and the cold stung my cheeks. We looked across the street at Sonje’s SUV.

  Sam said that according to the old bloodhound, Sonje left her car, went to the front door of the diner, and tried to get inside. Angie polishes the glass on the door every morning, but Molly definitely said that Sonje touched the door up high, as if she was knocking or banging on it.

  “The palm of the hand has a lot of sweat glands,” he said. “Molly could tell it was her.”

  Then Sonje headed south towards the river instead of back to her car. The farther she went, the more erratic her path. There were a few places where Molly stopped and snuffled over a larger area, where the woman may have fallen. The bloodhound finally stopped where I’d found the body.

  “It was a miracle that she didn’t stumble over the bank and into the river,” he said. Although, in the end, it didn’t matter very much.

  Molly found Sonje’s coat about fifteen feet from the body. There was a little silver flask in one of the big pockets.

  “The way she was stumbling around, it looked like she was drunk, or drugged. But she didn’t get drunk off the whiskey in that flask. It was still full. I put it back in the pocket and we brought the coat back here. A deputy drove by and picked it up while you and Mort were out talking to Carol. Gabe says she liked to have a sip once a day, at exactly four in the afternoon. It was a reward for finishing her day’s work. That’s the only time she ever drank, though. And he says she didn’t do drugs.”

  I gave him a look, and he quickly said Gabe volunteered that part himself. “I think the boy watches too many cop shows on TV.”

  Gabe broke down and cried when they were standing near the place where his mother died. “It was good for him to get it out,” he said. “He’s strong. He’ll get through it. He felt better when we were walking back, but it’s going to take a long time to get over this. I’m glad you and Mort are trying to find out what really happened. So is Gabe—even if you don’t find anything, at least he knows you cared enough to try.”

  We pulled the luggage out of the bed of the truck, brushed off the snow, and went back inside.

  As we walked through the unlit, unheated museum, I glanced at the dusty sculptures scattered around the old barn of a building. The giant ground sloth was still looming over the room, still reaching for the same paper mache leaf after twenty-three years. Was I really doing the same thing that Pastor Owen was doing? Hanging on, long after it was time to let go?

  Sam turned around when he noticed I wasn’t following him. I snapped out of it, and joined him. A whiff of baking nut bread came wafting out into the museum, and my stomach rumbled. I was ready for lunch, in spite of the nice breakfast Sam cooked for us, but when I looked at my watch again, it still wasn’t quite eleven o’clock.

  When we were a few steps from the kitchen door, Gabe and Jocko came out. “Mort said I should go find out what you two are jawboning about,” he said. “I think he wants to talk to Josie, and he didn’t want me to hear what he said.”

  “Sounds like Mort,” Sam said. “Always subtle.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But Mort doesn’t actually live here.” Sam looked at me, with one eyebrow raised.

  “OK, he hangs around a lot, but he doesn’t get to kick us out of our kitchen.” I moved towards the door, but Gabe wandered off to look at the unfinished sculpture standing in the middle of my studio space. I let go of the doorknob and leaned on the extended handle of his damp suitcase.

  Gabe walked around the tableau, and stopped at the young man and the six-year-old boy. He looked at the man’s face, then at Sam. “He kind of looks like you,” he said.

  “It’s my nephew, Willy. He posed for it, and Utah did a good job. I might have looked like him, a little bit, when I was a lot younger. Utah got a couple of local women to pose for the ladies in the sculpture. The one with the baby is Amy Krueger, and the older one is Angie, from the diner.”

  “They look like they’re having fun,” Gabe said. “Are they Indians?”

  “They might be ancestors of modern Native Americans. The scientists have different theories.” I said. “They’ve found a lot of their arrowheads and tools,
but they’ve only found one body with the tools, so I don’t think they can really know for sure. They’re called Clovis people, and they may have died out about the same time as the big animals. Or maybe they moved somewhere else. Or they just started making their tools a different way. It’s a mystery.”

  He turned and looked at the big window that gave us a view of the hazel hedge along the river. A cottontail bounced across the snow-covered herb garden between the museum and the hedge. The wildlife population around town exploded after the hazel hedges were put in.

  “My dad called a minute ago,” Gabe said. “He’s sitting in a restaurant in a little town. He had to pull off the highway because they closed it.”

  “I’m glad you got to talk to him,” I said. “Did it make you feel a little better?”

  He shrugged. “I guess. He said we would figure something out.”

  Gabe turned his attention to the short wall that separates the studio from the public part of the museum. He put his hands in his armpits, trying to stay warm.

  “We could make that wall go up higher,” he said. “Stick a door over there, to make this into a real room. And you could make another one of those wood stove things like you’ve got in the kitchen, and put it in here so it wouldn’t be so cold. Mort said him and Sam and a few other guys made that other one. I could help, too. And there’d be room for a couple of couches. The kitchen gets kind of crowded, and there aren’t enough soft places for everybody to sit.”

  I expected Sam to mention that we already have a living room at his house, but he was looking at the wall between the studio and the kitchen. Low cabinets run along that wall, for my art supplies, and a few masks were hanging in the wide space above the storage cabinets. A slow grin spread across his face. I was pretty sure it had something to do with his flat-screen TV.