by Jeff Shelby
“It’s an ongoing investigation,” she said. She tugged on her bolo tie, straightening it. “It’s none of your business.”
It was like someone told her what buttons of mine to push in order to irritate the hell out of me. She’d found the button and stuck her finger on it.
“I’m asking you to mind your own business and stop asking questions,” she said. “I’m the question-asker around here.”
I wanted to reach out and grab her little bolo tie and strangle her.
“We’re going to finish our dinner now, Detective,” Jake said. “If you’ll excuse us.”
She kept her eyes on me for an extra moment, then nodded. “Certainly.” She stood. “It appears my dinner date has arrived, anyway.”
Both Jake and I turned in the direction of the door. A beautiful blond woman was making her way toward us. Her hair fell nearly to her waist and she wore a tight-fitting black top and matching skirt that looked like it was painted on to her ridiculously fit body. She smiled at both Jake and me, then wrapped her arms around Detective Hanborn’s neck and planted a kiss on her cheek.
“Hey, Pris,” she whispered.
“Belinda,” Detective Hanborn said, beaming. “Go grab us a table.”
“For sure.” She nodded and sauntered off.
I stole a quick glance at Jake. His mouth was wide open and I knew it wasn’t because the woman who’d just approached our table was a knock out. He was wondering the exact same thing I was.
Detective Hanborn cleared her throat. “You’ll forgive me for not introducing my sister.”
“Your sister?” Even I could hear the blatant disbelief in my tone. “Really?”
Detective Priscilla Hanborn cinched up her belt and gave me a disgusted look. “Who did you think it was?”
TWENTY EIGHT
“Of course I thought it was her lesbian lover,” I said to Jake as we drove home. “Who else would it have been?”
He turned the wheel and pulled the SUV into the dirt lot we called a driveway. “Her sister, for one.”
“You thought the same thing,” I reminded him.
“No, I didn’t,” he said.
But he was grinning and I just shook my head. “Sisters,” I snorted, shaking my head. “Because they looked so much alike. Please.”
He chuckled. “Just can’t make assumptions these days.”
“Whatever,” I said, crossing my arms. “I don’t like her.”
He cut the engine and pulled the key from the ignition. “No. You don’t like that she told you to back down. Which, by the way, I’ve also been saying.”
“I’m aware,” I said, frowning at him. “But what exactly is she doing? I mean, she hasn’t been back to talk to us and I certainly haven’t seen her around town, talking to the people I’ve been talking to.”
He reached for my hand. “I’m sure she’s doing whatever she’s supposed to be doing. Like her or not, she’s a detective and I’d assume a competent one since the town employs her.”
I shook my head and turned to the window. All of the lights in the house were on. That was standard operating procedure when we were out at night. I was pretty sure the kids thought hitting every switch in the house would keep them safe.
I turned back to Jake. “So do you think I should knock it off?”
“I’ve already given up on that.”
“I’m asking seriously.”
He threaded his fingers into mine. “Do I think that going around and asking questions to try and find out what happened is the best use of your time?” He shook his head. “No. I don’t. But I also know it’s kind of driving you nuts and that it’s not exactly your thing to just sit back and relax.” He smiled. “And that’s why I’m not going to bang my head against a wall telling you to knock it off.”
He leaned over and kissed me and thoughts of the detective and the investigation evaporated. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close and he kissed me harder and I wondered how I’d gone twenty years without being kissed the way he kissed me.
I pulled my mouth away from his. “The kids are going to come out,” I whispered. “And scream that we are making out.”
“Let them,” he said, kissing me again. “We’ve heard it before.”
We stayed out there for a few minutes, kissing, until my phone started vibrating. Reluctantly, I pulled away from Jake and took the phone out of my purse.
It was a text from Will.
Calling the police.
Why?
Car in driveway. I can’t see who it is. Might be robbers. Or worse. When will u be home??????
We ARE home.
???
We are the car in the driveway!!!
Why r u out there? It doesn’t look like u.
Jake and I are making out.
GROSS!!! But I will call the police back and tell them not to come.
“We have to go inside,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because Will called the police.”
“What??”
I continued. “And is now calling them back to tell them not to come—because he mistook his parents making out in the driveway for robbers,” I said.
Jake leaned his head back against the seat and laughed. “At least they would’ve known the address.”
TWENTY NINE
The sun was out early the next morning and the frigid winter winds had once again subsided, which meant I could actually send the kids outside to play without fear of them dying from exposure. The winter had been especially cold, even for Minnesota, and they’d started to go stir crazy having to find ways to entertain themselves indoors. Even Will, who was almost always content camped out in front of his computer, had bemoaned the fact that winter was the only season we’d seen for months.
They foraged for their snow pants and jackets and were out the door as soon as they were done with breakfast, rummaging through the garage for shovels and sleds, intent on tricking out the bobsled track they’d built earlier in the week.
Which meant I had an empty house that I could attack.
I didn’t love housework. But I needed something to take my mind off of Olga and Helen and Elliott and the cast of characters who’d suddenly taken center stage in the my life.
I swept and mopped the kitchen. I gathered baskets full of laundry and took them down to the basement to wash, making sure I avoided looking at the newly identified coal chute. I went back upstairs and filled a bucket with soapy water and got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the stairs. And the wood floors.
The kids came inside at noon on the dot and I fed them warmed-up beef stew and bread. Nick declined the stew and ate half a loaf bread instead, his crusts piling up on his plate. I opened my mouth to comment, then stopped. He’d expand his eating horizons eventually. I hoped.
They finished their lunch by eating the last of the cookies, chattering about the improvements they’d made to the track and boasting over who’d gone the farthest. Grace lifted her bangs and showed me her forehead. There was a small red mark just above her eyebrow.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I hit the trampoline with my head,” she said. “So I went the farthest!”
I stared at her pupils for a second, trying to remember what I was supposed to look for as signs of a concussion. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary and made a mental note to tell Jake that we needed to move the trampoline further away from the house. When the snow melted, of course. Which might have to wait until August.
The kids dumped their dishes in the sink and suited back up and headed outside. I wiped the puddles of melted snow off the kitchen floor and then went back to my mental list of chores. I dusted every horizontal surface in the house and finally batted down the cobwebs decorating the bathroom ceiling. I retrieved laundry and folded it and put everything away.
I glanced at the clock mounted in the hallway just outside of the upstairs bedrooms. It was two o’clock. I’d managed to keep myself occupied with someth
ing other than the mystery of the man in my coal chute for six solid hours. I nodded, a satisfied smile on my face, but it disappeared quickly.
Because I was done cleaning…and that meant I was bound to start thinking about it. And thinking usually turned into digging.
I went downstairs and peeked out the kitchen window. The kids were still in the backyard, their coats and hats bright against the white snow. Grace was sitting on a sled and Sophie was pulling her through the yard. Will was in a tree, a rope dangling from his hands. Sophie pulled the sled in his direction and Grace waved at him, pointing to the rope and then a spot on the back of the sled. I took a deep breath and looked away.
Exploring, I told myself. That’s what they were doing. Experimenting. Learning.
I just hoped a trip to the emergency room wouldn’t be a part of today’s lesson plans.
I plopped down on the couch and picked up the laptop that was sitting on the ottoman. I opened the web browser and tried not to think about Detective Hanborn’s comments the previous night. I didn’t like that she’d told me I was getting in the way and that I needed to step back. I felt like I had the right to dig; after all, Olaf had been found in my house. And even though I had started asking questions and poking around on my own, the initial confrontations—from both Olga and Helen—had not started with me. I’d be a little more discreet with my digging, I decided. But I wasn’t going to quit.
I stared at the screen for a minute, the cursor blinking in the search box. I started typing and hit the return key. The home page for Around The Corner loaded. It was the most logical place to return to. After all, it had helped me find Stuff It and it was the one place I knew I could find information about Olaf that was from him and not filtered through anyone else.
I found Olaf’s page again and read through it carefully, sifting through everything that was on there. But, after nearly a half an hour, I realized I wasn’t seeing anything new. Everything I read were things I already knew or didn’t give me any new information to go on. I clicked around a bit, but I just kept rereading the same things over and over.
And then I thought about Helen.
If everything I’d heard from Olga and Elliott were true, she’d spent a long time trying to get his attention. When that backfired, she’d seemingly taken a different tact, trying to make him jealous. I wondered if she’d taken that further than just flirting with Elliott Cornelius.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard for a second. I bit my lip and typed her name into the search bar on the ATC web site.
And there she was.
I stared at her profile picture. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a chunky, cable-knit sweater, a matching cap perched on her head. She really was an attractive woman. Deep green eyes. Strong cheekbones. A nice smile. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she looked like a really nice person.
I scrolled through her page. Lots of photos of her looking happy and active. She described herself as a woman who had extricated herself from a toxic marriage and who was looking to see what was out there and meet some new people. As I scrolled down the page, I looked through some of the conversations that she hadn’t put behind a private wall. On Around The Corner, you could comment on anyone’s page, much like on Facebook, and that person could respond. You usually didn’t see much more than a hello or safe, benign comments. ‘I like your that picture of you with your dog,’ or ‘I like that restaurant, too’ or ‘We don’t live too far from each other.’ At least that was what I’d remembered from my brief stint on the site.
Helen’s was a bit different, though.
There were plenty of men who’d taken a moment to say hello and make a benign introductory comment.
And she’d responded to all of them.
Which in and of itself wasn’t all that weird. But it was the way she responded that made me sit up and take notice.
A man named Jason D. with a beard and a goofy smile commented that he liked the picture of her on her bike. He asked if she was a mountain biker.
“Well, I used to be,” Helen responded. “But it was something I used to do with my ex-husband and I’ve tried to make sure I stay away from anything that reminds me of him and bikes. Bike paths definitely remind me that I made a huge mistake marrying that dunderhead!”
Jason D. did not respond.
A man named Ken W. commented on a T-shirt she was wearing in one of her photos. It had Las Vegas emblazoned across the front in sparkly rhinestones.
“Not anymore,” she wrote. “My ex-husband took me there a couple of years ago and he spent the entire time ogling the cocktail waitresses while I waited for him to notice me! He never did so I dumped his rear end!”
Ken W. did not respond.
A man named Walt K. noted that she was wearing a Twins hat in one photo and asked if she went to a lot of games.
“I used to,” Helen wrote. “But my ex-husband was really the baseball fan. We’d spend hours at the stadium while he chased foul balls and ate too much food that made him too fat. So I’m not sure you’d call me a baseball fan as much as you would call me a fan of divorcing a baseball fan!”
Surprisingly, Walt K. did not respond.
All of her responses were like that, bringing up her ex-husband and denigrating him in some way. She made Olaf look like a moron in half of her comments and like an egotistical jerk in the other half. If I hadn’t met him, I would’ve thought he was the biggest jerk that had ever walked the planet.
But I had met him and I knew that wasn’t true. Or I’d been fooled by the greatest actor of our time. I didn’t think Olaf was an actor. And I didn’t think Helen had a clue as to what she was doing on Around The Corner.
If she had truly been interested in meeting someone, she’d gone about it the wrong way. She spent her time being unbelievably negative and she focusing almost exclusively on her ex-husband—two massive no-no’s for people reentering the dating pool. It wasn’t a coincidence that no one had engaged her in conversation. She came off like she was still hung up on her ex-husband and I was pretty sure that no guy wanted to fight that fight.
I wondered, though, if she’d had any luck in the private messages. Or if any of the men that commented publicly had messaged her privately. Unfortunately, the only way to access those messages would be to log into her account. And I had no way of doing that.
I tucked my legs underneath me on the couch and stared at the screen, tapping my fingers on the laptop as I thought. I pushed the cursor so it hovered over the Sign In button and clicked.
I wasn’t signing myself back in. But, after a few failed attempts at different combinations of user names and passwords, I realized I wasn’t going to be signing in as Helen, either.
I closed the laptop and set it back on the ottoman. I stretched my legs out in front of me and chewed my lip, thinking. If I’d had to guess right then and there, I would’ve bet everything I had that Helen had something to do with Olaf’s death. Everything pointed in her direction. I wasn’t sure if she’d done it on purpose or if it had been an accident or how it had happened, but she was the only one with anything negative to say about Olaf. Everyone else seemed to love him. He didn’t have an enemy in town. He’d been pleasant to everyone, including the wife he wanted to divorce.
Even as I thought this, though, the doubts rose like the floodwaters during Spring. Why would she have wanted him dead? Why would she have brought him here, to my house? How would she have gotten him in the house.
I didn’t have the answers to any of those questions and I wasn’t sure I ever would.
But there was one thing I knew for sure.
Helen hadn’t wanted that divorce.
Olaf did.
THIRTY
“I’ve gotta do some makeup, but as long as you don’t mind, I can talk, sure,” Olga said to me the next morning.
I’d tossed and turned all night, puzzled by the conflicting stories I had about Olaf. I didn’t think anyone knew him better than his sister, or at the very least, cared more a
bout him. So, after getting Emily off to school and dropping the kids at a special 4-H project meeting, I drove over to the mortuary to talk some more with Olga.
I followed her down the main hallways, but instead of going upstairs this time, we turned left and entered a large square room with two long tables in the center.
There was a body on one of them.
“Sally Gaadenstern,” Olga said. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Had a heart attack a few days ago, trying to start her snow blower. Husband was inside snoring away.” She shook her head. “He was pretty broken up about it.”
Sally Gaadenstern’s eyes were closed and her skin had a waxy look to it. A sheet was pulled up to her neck and if I hadn’t known better, I would’ve just assumed she was sleeping.
Olga opened a bag sitting on a small metal tray. She pulled out a bottle of foundation and a small makeup sponge. She unscrewed the lid and tilted the bottle.
“So,” she said. She dabbed the sponge at the woman’s face.
“Is that…make-up?” I asked.
Olga wrinkled her brow. “Duh. What else would I be using?”
“I…I don’t know. I just thought maybe you needed to use something different. You know, since she’s…not alive.”
Olga nodded. “Oh, we do. You can’t just use any old make-up on embalmed bodies. Most make-up works with the body’s heat.” She chuckled. “And she doesn’t have any, if you know what I mean.”
She rubbed the foundation in. “I like airbrush foundation myself. Much easier to get good coverage. But ours broke and Larry hasn’t gotten around to ordering a new one. Feel like I’m back in the Stone Age here.”
I assumed Larry worked at the funeral home but I decided not to ask. “Have the police been to talk to you?” I asked, trying to focus on her and not the dead body on the table.
She nodded as she brushed at Sally’s face. “Oh, you betcha. That Detective Hanborn is one tough cookie. A little rough to look at, but she’s been around a bunch, asking me all sorts of stuff.”