Forgotten Spirits

by Barbara Deese

  And that little tidbit, Grace knew in her gut, was the missing piece they’d been searching for.

  When she got up to leave, she saw Robin sitting at a table near the door, pretending not to know her. Figuring she had a good reason for her behavior, Grace walked past without acknowledging her. She sensed Robin get up to follow her out.

  As soon as they were around the corner, Robin said she’d been “hanging around” between the front desk and the business office and overheard one of the staff asking her coworker if Wylie was spelled with an “ie” or an “ey” and if Stuart was with “u” or a “w.” “I was about to ask for Wylie’s room number when I picked up on the words “next of kin” and “morgue” so I hung around and one of them said, ‘Wylie Stuart. Is that the guy whose truck went off the bridge?’ Gracie, I’d bet anything that was the accident we saw.”

  Grace’s mouth fell open. “Sierra’s old boyfriend? How on earth—?”

  Robin stared back at her. “Grace, are you wearing a clerical collar?”

  * * *

  That afternoon after a short nap, Foxy stretched the definition of “family” to get her brother, her ex-husband and her two friends in for a brief visit. With very limited time to pull all their stories together, they got down to business, and as they each shared what they knew, the pieces started to form a complete picture.

  When the nurse came along twenty minutes later and kicked everyone out, she told Matt and Vinnie they looked like they needed rest. Matt, Robin saw, looked a little green around the gills, as her mother liked to say, and Vinnie, sitting in a wheelchair with his left leg extended, was ashen and holding a hand over his broken ribs.

  The nurse pulled the curtain around Foxy, shutting them out.

  After watching the two men head off to their rooms, Grace and Robin stopped in front of the uniformed officer guarding Paul’s room. Introducing herself and Robin, Grace asked if there was a chance they could talk.

  He was chunky, with a florid face. Checking his watch, he sighed. “I’m waiting for my relief to get here. I need to head back to the station and finish up some paperwork.”

  Grace nodded in understanding. “I’m hoping this doesn’t add to your paperwork. We have information about the man you’re guarding.” She nodded toward Paul’s door.

  Robin, seeing he wasn’t impressed, added, “There’s more to the story than you know.”

  He sized them up. “Tell you what. I’ll call the station. See if someone can take a statement.”

  In fifteen minutes, they were sitting in a little room off the main floor lobby with a plainclothes policeman who introduced himself as Kovacs. Robin and Grace worked like a tag team, telling what they knew and offering up more than a few speculations. Kovacs’s neutral expression, Robin thought, masked his skepticism.

  After relating what Paul’s son, Peter, told her in the cafeteria, Grace implied Paul had probably been embezzling from the synod funds to pay support for his illegitimate son, Beau. Robin took over to explain about Beau’s mother, Sierra, and her supposed suicide.

  “We think Sierra must have gotten together with Pastor Paul recently, and asked the father of her child for more money,” Grace said, suggesting a motive. “Whether she threatened to expose him, or his guilt and paranoia made him fear retaliation, he must have felt he had to silence her.”

  Since Matthew had already named Pastor Paul as the one who’d given him a near lethal dose of prescription painkillers, Robin pointed out, “Is it really so far-fetched to think he might have drugged Sierra as well? We think he either drugged her in the house and got her to get into the car, or they were sitting in the car drinking.”

  Kovacs leaned back in his chair, assessing them.

  “He’d just had a hip replacement, so he couldn’t have carried her,” Robin added. “She must’ve walked out on her own.”

  “Right. And when she passed out,” said Grace, jumping in, “all he had to do was shut the garage door and wait for the carbon monoxide to do the rest.”

  Officer Kovacs sighed. Looking at them in turn, his expression was not unkind, but he cut them off, saying, “I’d rather skip all the conjecture.”

  “Just the facts, ma’am. Is that what you mean?” Robin said, giving him a too sweet smile.

  “You might want to listen to what they have to say,” said a familiar voice behind them. They turned to see Sheriff Bill Harley walking toward them.

  “What are you doing here?” Robin asked, jumping up and throwing her arms around him.

  “I came to see Foxy.” He looked uncomfortable. “I was just in her room, but she’s asleep.”

  “But how did you—?”

  “Your friend Cate. She told me about Foxy’s accident and how you all came to her rescue.”

  Kovacs stood and introduced himself to the sheriff, who said, “These fine women helped me solve a crime a couple years back. It wouldn’t hurt to hear them out.” He pulled up a chair.

  Grace started over from the beginning. This time, the cop took more notes.

  Robin told about Pastor Paul showing up at Foxy’s apartment on some false pretext. “Maybe he was just on a fishing expedition to find out what she knew,” she suggested, adding that in any case, Cate’s mother, in her brief interaction with him, had led him right to Foxy. “Vinnie and Matt were probably just collateral damage.”

  “By the way,” Grace said, “we heard someone here talking about Wylie Stuart. What happened to him?”

  Kovacs really perked up. “What is your relationship with him?” he asked. When Robin said he was Sierra’s ex, Kovacs excused himself.

  * * *

  Opening her eyes, Foxy saw Bill Harley and thought he was just a continuation of her dream in which she was kissing Bill, who became Vinnie in that weird way people and place shifted around. She drifted back to the dream. Vinnie gave her hand a squeeze and spoke to her in Bill’s voice. “You scared me to death.”

  Rousing, she was pleased to see Bill, kind, dependable Bill, holding onto her, keeping her tethered to the present.

  Epilogue

  A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead went into a bar. They asked for a table for five and ordered a bottle of red wine called The Usual Suspect, from the Big House vineyard, and were soon joined by two more women, another brunette and a champagne-blonde. They obviously had a close relationship. These friends who called themselves the No Ordinary Women talked animatedly and then toasted to the memory of Foxy’s friend Sierra.

  Summer was just around the corner. It had been a hard winter, beginning with Sierra’s death, and they would not soon forget the Christmas blizzard in which Foxy came way too close to dying in a swirl of snow, just as she had in Cate’s dreams. But other than Wylie, everyone else had made it through the storm alive.

  Foxy had recovered completely from her partial splenectomy, although her ribs still hurt on occasion. For a month, Foxy and her ex-husband talked, both of them testing the possibilities of reuniting. But after all the arguing and crying and reminiscing, it was apparent their love belonged to another time and place, and they finally gave up and decided to put their energy into looking forward without the constant reminder of the mistakes they’d made with each other.

  Vinnie had returned to his practice in St. Louis. Foxy missed him. He could still excite her, more than she wanted to admit, but that simply wasn’t enough anymore. Her life was here in the Twin Cities, surrounded by the most amazing women she’d ever met, and even if it wasn’t what she’d imagined all those years ago when she’d first set off on her own, fresh out of high school, it was good enough. More than good enough.

  In the Ely hospital, Bill had seen what was so obvious to everyone but Foxy—she was still in love with Vinnie. He’d been a good enough friend to pull himself out of the running while she sorted things out. Maybe the “just friends” arrangement would work and
maybe not, but they were both content with that relationship, at least for now.

  Luckily, Bill had stayed in contact with all of them, the five women of the No Ordinary Women book club, even digging up the information that freed Foxy, once and for all, from her past. Foxy had wasted no time calling Vinnie and Tina, her only two surviving friends from her Las Vegas days, to let them know what he’d discovered.

  The murder they’d witnessed so long ago in Las Vegas had been solved almost a decade ago. The dead man was small-time thief who’d had the misfortune to jimmy open the trunk of a car owned by a known drug dealer and pimp. His killer, arrested later in a drug sting, had confessed to his cellmate only days before he was murdered in prison.

  Ever since finding out her past couldn’t come back and destroy this life she’d made for herself, Foxy had felt more lighthearted than she had in years, but today she was celebrating yet another release.

  Today she’d called this impromptu gathering at a coffee and wine bar in St. Paul’s Lowertown to share with her friends the above-the-fold article in that morning’s Star Tribune. There was an air of victory as Foxy held up the copy. The headline read, “Former Pastor Admits to Embezzling.”

  “Former financial administrator at the Minnesota synod . . .” Foxy began to read out loud. The story told of Paul Niemi, the now disgraced and defrocked minister who had admitted to embezzling not only from the synod but from the church he’d served immediately before that. The total figure for his embezzlement was over a quarter of a million dollars.

  A subheading partway down the page was “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul.” The paragraph detailed how months after Paul’s son, Peter, succeeded his father to the pulpit of a large church in Minneapolis, he’d noticed a discrepancy in the budget, which he’d asked his father about. The elder Pastor Niemi called it an oversight and immediately rectified the shortfall, using synod money. After some investigation, Peter was absolved of any involvement with his father’s crime, and according to the article, “Synod representatives and the younger Niemi are cooperating fully with law enforcement and ask prayers that God’s grace will extend to all involved.”

  There was a suggestion the older man’s mental health was suffering. “Only recently, Niemi pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident outside of Ely, MN, in which 51-year old Wylie Stuart was forced off the road and plummeted to his death. According to Niemi’s son, the former pastor had been despondent in the past year-and-a-half, causing grave lapses in judgment.”

  The article did not give motivation or mention that the fallen pastor had fathered a child other than Peter. However, the fifth paragraph left wide open the possibility of criminal charges linking him to Sierra’s murder. “Authorities in Rochester, MN, are conducting their own investigation into the recent death of an individual who may have had a close connection to Paul Niemi.”

  Bill, in a phone call to Foxy, told her he thought the indictments were coming down soon and hinted at the likely scenario. Having already admitted to a hit and run in Wylie’s death, Paul would be charged with vehicular homicide to which he’d likely plead guilty. His drugging of Matthew could be charged as attempted murder, but he’d probably plead to a felony drug charge.

  Sierra’s murder would have been more difficult to prove, but when presented with Sierra’s “message in a bottle,” the paternity test and Paul’s handwritten notes discovered by Cate and her mother, Niemi had talked. “I can’t tell you what he said,” Bill told Foxy, “but tell Grace and Robin their speculations were, well, just tell them they pretty much nailed it.”

  The five women talked on and on, and, just as she had again and again in the months since she’d been injured, Foxy said, “I don’t want to think what would’ve happened if you hadn’t come. If Paul hadn’t finished us off right then and there, I would’ve died from internal bleeding and Vinnie from exposure. Matt wouldn’t have made it either.”

  It was an ongoing conversation, part of the growing lore that bound them together.

  After a while, Grace said. “How about if we quit solving murders and go back to our ordinary lives.”

  Robin snorted. “Ordinary lives? I don’t even know what that means anymore.”

  “It means we go back to getting together and talking about books,” said Cate. “But I wouldn’t mind going up north and seeing where it all happened.”

  “Oh, I forgot.” Foxy clapped her hands together and said, “Matt’s pulled out of his funk now that he’s dating someone new, and wants all of us to come to his resort this summer for as long as we want. He thinks we’re a bunch of Superwomen, and says we don’t know how lucky we are to have each other.” Her eyes misted over as she looked around the table, knowing whatever circuitous path had brought her to this moment in time, it had all been worth it.

  THE END