Snow Way Out

by Christine Husom

  “Greetings. I’m Officer Davis,” a voice called from an open window of a booth-size room to the left of where the men were sitting. I hadn’t noticed it until he’d spoken.

  Clint headed over and I followed. A man in his late twenties stood up from his swivel chair. When we got to the booth I noticed a control panel with buttons and a number of security camera monitors he had been watching.

  Clint rested his elbow in the ledge of the opening. “Good afternoon. As I mentioned, I’d like a few words with the person in charge about a couple of your former residents here.”

  “Jerrell Powers and Benjamin Arnold,” Davis said.

  “Correct.” News got around fast in the crime-fighting world.

  “I should be able to help you with any questions.”

  “Good. They were both here together during what time frame?”

  Davis sat down and typed on his computer keyboard. He had an answer a moment later. “From February to October of this year. Arnold was released a week before Powers, on October fourth. Powers was released October eleventh.” The same day he wound up in Brooks Landing.

  Clint pulled his memo pad from his breast pocket and wrote down the information. “I understand Arnold threatened Powers.”

  “It was an ongoing thing between the two of them. They started out in the same dormitory, but we had to separate them pretty soon after.”

  “They could have been twins,” one of the eavesdropping men at the table called out.

  Davis shrugged a little and lifted his hand toward the man, indicating to Clint that the halfway house resident might be a better resource for information than he was.

  Clint nodded and turned toward the men. “You don’t say. And why is that?”

  The man, with a prickly-looking short gray beard, pushed out his lips. “They had the same sort of rascally disposition. Not mean, but on the ornery side. And they took things from each other. You might expect that with the bunch of lawbreakers we got in here. But most of us try to follow some code of leaving other folks’ things alone.”

  The other man, who was clean shaven and neat in appearance, added, “Mac’s right. They could have been cut from the same cloth. They were born just one day apart. Even looked alike. Different coloring, though. Arnold was a lot heavier, but had trouble with the food here. Didn’t like it. So he lost weight, and the more he lost, the more he looked like Powers.”

  The other man jumped in. “Yeah, that was a strange thing to see. Lord above, those two fought like teenage brothers, instead of the forty-year-olds they were. And made each other mad as hell about the dumbest things.”

  “Like what?” Clint asked.

  “One of the first days they were in the same dorm together, Arnold got sick—some kind of stomach bug. He accused Powers of swishing his toothbrush in the toilet. The way I figured it is Arnold would’ve had to have done that to someone himself to come up with a crazy idea like that.”

  Yes, who would think of such a yucky thing?

  The clean-shaven man went on, “They mostly kept their fights pretty quiet so they didn’t lose privileges, but once in a while one or the other would flare up. The kicker was when Powers went into Arnold’s dorm when he wasn’t there and snooped through his things. The control officer saw him on the camera and Powers ended up losing a week of good time. But that wasn’t enough for Arnold. One of the guys overheard him say, just before he was released, that he would hunt Powers down when he got out and take care of things once and for all.”

  Clint nodded. “That sounds like a terroristic threat to me. But he wasn’t arrested?”

  “No, the guy who overheard him didn’t say anything to the officers for a couple of days. By then, Arnold was released and word had it that he’d disappeared.”

  “For now, maybe. We’ll find him.”

  The bearded man raised his hand. “Can you send him somewhere else besides here?”

  “I have a pretty strong indication the judge will do just that.”

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  We were back on the road a short time later. Clint looked at his watch. “It’s getting late and we haven’t had lunch. Want to stop?”

  The toothbrush story had quelled my appetite. “I’m really not hungry, but go ahead if you are.”

  “I got a bag of trail mix in the glove box, if you’d get it out. I’ll share.”

  I opened the box, pulled out the bag, opened it, and handed it over.

  “Thanks.” Clint set it on the center console and reached in for a handful. “Help yourself.”

  I took some, mostly to be polite. The salty nuts and sweet chocolate chips tasted surprisingly good after I’d pushed the toothbrush incident to the back of my mind.

  “I can’t call this a wasted trip, but I’d hoped to shake loose some more useful information from the parents,” Clint said between bites.

  “The guys at the halfway house seemed helpful.”

  “They were. Arnold’s definitely our prime suspect. This disappearing act he’s pulled makes him look all the more guilty. Unfortunately, your fingerprints were the only readable ones on the knife they pulled out of Jerrell Powers’s back.”

  I reddened. “I admitted that was a dumb thing to do.”

  “The question is, when you reached for it, did you put your hand on top, or under the knife?”

  Where was he going with this? “I have to think.” I closed my eyes to go back to that careless moment. “I guess my fingers were underneath, and my thumb was on top. Why?”

  “That’s the way the medical examiner said it went in. An underhanded thrust, not an overhanded one.”

  The knife was still in the victim’s back when the coroner had arrived on the scene, so there was no argument there. The way Clint described it made me realize he still considered me a potential suspect despite the fact that I had no motive whatsoever. And I had just admitted grabbing the knife in the same way the killer had pushed it into Jerrell Powers’s back. Lord help me, if the man had a charming bone in his body I’d like to know where it was.

  “Oh,” was the only word I could force out of my mouth. I contemplated whether it was feasible to hope that I would never have to set eyes on Clinton Lonsbury again after today.

  Pinky was on a tear when I got to the shop Monday morning. “Cami, a hundred people have been in looking for you already today. And I’d swear to that on just about whatever you’d want me to.”

  “Really, Pinky, one hundred people were here to see me? Before ten o’clock on a Monday morning? And they weren’t searching for unique snow globes, I have a feeling.”

  She waved her hand at me. “It was a hundred, more or less. Okay, I won’t swear to it. First it was all the early birds who stop by before work. Then there was a whole bunch of other people who I don’t remember ever seeing in here before. And they all asked for you specifically. They wanted to hear the story firsthand of what it was like finding Jerrell Powers’s body late at night in Lakeside Park.”

  The scene that I continued trying to put out of my mind popped back in full living moonlit color. “Jeepers creepers. I guess the word must have really spread like wildfire yesterday. I had to quit answering my phone last night, except when it was someone in my family. Even the local reporter, Sandy Gibbons, wants to interview me. She left two messages, which I need to return as soon as I can make myself do so.”

  “Maybe you should have one of those press conferences—you know, where you talk to everyone at once, and then you can be done with it.”

  “Pinky, I just want all this hoopla to die a natural death and be laid to rest.”

  “The trouble is, you came upon a murder victim and most people seem to have a morbid curiosity, which actually kind of surprises me. I mean, even my minister’s wife was here asking questions. They want to hear all the scary details.”

  The bell on the door dinged and three women dressed in workout clothes came in, chattering a mile a minute. One singled me out. “Ooh, you’re Camryn Bro
oks. We read the article in the Minneapolis paper yesterday about how you were the one who came upon that criminal’s body in Lakeside Park.”

  I looked at Pinky and she shrugged. Apparently she hadn’t seen the newspaper, either. Someone had obviously released my name to them.

  The woman went on, “And it was on the ten o’clock news last night.”

  Pinky and I exchanged another look of ignorance.

  “Not to mention that everyone was talking about it at the health club this morning,” the second woman said.

  “A lot of us had gone to our cabins for the weekend, so we had no clue what had happened in our sleepy little town until we got back last night,” the third one added.

  “We came in for our lattes and here we get the bonus of talking to you besides,” interrogator number two gushed.

  Number one moved close to me. “Especially since the paper said you couldn’t be reached for comment. . . .”

  Like the last time I was caught up in a major news story. I guess having a quiet life was too much to hope for, even in sleepy Brooks Landing, Minnesota. Being reached for comment was, in my opinion, highly overrated. When something big happened, I’d found out the hard way that people jumped to their own conclusions. And the truth of the matter was that those conclusions often had little to do with the real facts. As much as I disliked discussing my dreaded discovery, at least I could give this small group of women a true account.

  There was no reason to fill them in on the drama of what went on before and after the snow globe–making class between the teacher, students, and observers. Nor did I need to go over the whole burglary ordeal my dear friend had suffered at the hands of the murder victim some time before. Instead, I simply shared the fact that we’d hosted the class after work and I’d stayed later than usual. And when I remembered I’d walked instead of driven my car to work, I hiked through the park to save some time.

  When I got to the part about Jerrell Powers falling forward off the bench, they all gasped and one of them, a red-haired woman wearing a black headband, jumped up and down a few times, flapping her hands in the process. I thought she might actually lift off. “Oh, my gosh! You have to come to our Halloween party. We’ll turn the lights down low and you can tell your story. Everyone will absolutely flip. It’ll be the best party we’ve ever had for sure.”

  Her two cohorts both leaned closer and gave their two cents’ worth of agreement. I figured we were all about the same age, but I felt ten or twenty years older as they gently pleaded with me. Like kids begging their parents for something.

  It was probably the most unusual request I’d ever gotten. “I’ll have to think about that one.”

  “Of course you do. We kind of sprang the whole thing on you. How about I check back with you on Thursday? The party is on the twenty-fifth, the Friday before Halloween, starting at seven. Ooh, I am so excited.” Red jumped up and down a few more times. “I’m Tara, by the way. And this is Emily; and Heather.” The others smiled and nodded when she said their names.

  Pinky stood behind the counter watching the whole exchange with her mouth open.

  I nodded and tried to smile in an attempt to look less dumbfounded. “Okay.”

  The three women chattered about the party possibilities for a minute, thanking me a dozen times, then turned their attention to Pinky and gave her their drink orders. I slipped away to my half of the building and the relative safety of shelves full of snow globes and other finds that I could hide behind in a pinch.

  When they’d left with their beverages, Pinky found me behind my shop counter and dug her hands into her hips. “I suppose you’re going to need a booking agent.”

  It took me a second to figure out what she meant. “For the scary party circuit, you mean? ‘Come and hear Camryn Brooks relate the sordid details of her late-night discovery. You’ll never walk alone through Lakeside Park at night again.’”

  I expected Pinky to laugh, but she grew more serious instead. “Cami, I still can’t believe you walked through that dark park alone in the first place. What on earth got into you to do such a thing?”

  I shrugged. “It was a shortcut. Brooks Landing feels safe to me, especially compared to Washington, D.C.”

  “Well, duh. That’s not any kind of a comparison, and you know it.”

  “It is to me. We grew up here. How many times were we in that park after dark when we were kids and teens?”

  Pinky flapped the dish towel she was holding. “There were at least two of us together when we were there late. And the curfew whistle blew at nine o’clock back then, so we had to get off the streets before that.”

  I chuckled. “You’re right. I’d forgotten all about the nine o’clock whistle. We were back in our own yards by the time it blew, and we didn’t even question the curfew, or what would happen to us if we didn’t follow it.”

  She partially smiled at the memory, then her serious expression was back. “Cami, back to that party invitation: you’re not really thinking of going there, are you?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll have to ponder it some more. Weigh the pros and cons.”

  Pinky narrowed her eyes at me, but her door’s bell dinged so she left to take care of her customers. Monday was not normally a big business day for Curio Finds, which I had counted on, except a steady stream of customers changed that. It felt more like a Saturday. Most people who came in said they were just looking around. But it wasn’t the merchandise they were interested in. It was me. And I felt almost as uncomfortable with the attention as when I’d been accused of being involved with Peter Zimmer.

  Back then it was mostly the people in high places who gave me accusatory looks and spoke in low voices to others. Now it was the folks around Brooks Landing who studied me like I was a science fair project. Both experiences reiterated for me that I was more of a behind-the-scenes, low-profile kind of person. I remembered reading that the majority of people were more afraid of public speaking than of dying. That’d be me. If it came right down to it, I’d choose giving a speech to a large group of people over death, but my knees would be knocking, my hands would be shaking, and my face would be twitching. Being raised in the Vanelli household had helped me overcome some of my innate shyness, but not all of it.

  A little after noon, I headed to Pinky’s side to get a muffin and coffee and saw Mark Weston standing close to her. They both wore a serious expression and were talking about something seemingly important. Pinky saw me first and nudged Mark, who almost knocked Pinky’s head with his own when he turned to face me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Mark said. Clearly there was something.

  “What do you mean?” Pinky’s shoulders lifted a little.

  “You two look like you’re plotting something. Not that it’s any of my business if you’re having a private conversation.”

  “No.” Pinky used the cloth she was holding to wipe the counter.

  “Private? Is that what it looked like?” Mark’s laugh sounded forced and fake.

  Pinky looked up. “We were just talking about all the extra customers today. And hoped you were holding up okay.”

  “That’s right,” Mark agreed.

  I knew they were not telling me everything, but I was not going to keep coaxing them. “Well, thanks. It has been trying having half the people in town walk through. But I’m looking at the upside of it. If a bunch of them happened to notice any of the neat things we have for sale—in between staring at me, that is—maybe they’ll be back to actually shop sometime.”

  “You’re absolutely right. You need a cup of coffee?”

  “I do. And a muffin; maybe blueberry today.”

  “I hear you took a trip with our assistant chief of police yesterday,” Mark said.

  Pinky raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t tell me about that.”

  “I was going to, but we haven’t had any real time yet to talk today.” I turned back to Mark. “Clint’s your boss, so I’m not going to say anything a
gainst him. But I think I’m still on his suspect list.”

  Mark shook his head. “Cami, we all know you couldn’t have done it.”

  Pinky nodded. “We know that for a fact.”

  “Well, I did have the opportunity, it seems.”

  “Never mind about that. Tell us about your day with the luscious, eligible Clinton Lonsbury.” Pinky nearly drooled.

  “You can’t be serious. Do you have a crush on him?” I said.

  “I don’t really, but he is one of my favorite pieces of eye candy.” She stretched her long neck to the side.

  I put my hands over my ears. “I did not hear that.”

  “Me, either,” Mark said and made a face. “‘Eye candy’?”

  I changed the subject by filling them in on the previous day’s adventures: first the visit with the Arnolds, then the stop at the Atwood police station and the ancient officer we talked to. I ended my recitation with the halfway house experience.

  “Wow, you had quite the day, Cami. I’m feeling a little jealous. How did Clint happen to take you along in the first place?” Pinky asked.

  “I think it was to pump me for information. You know, see if I’d spill any beans on the long ride there and back again.”

  “Nooo.” Pinky drew out the denying word.

  But Mark’s silence backed up my theory.

  I shrugged. “No matter. It was good getting out of Brooks Landing for the day, and I got to see another small-town police station and a halfway house. I don’t care what our assistant chief thinks of me.”

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Erin stopped in after she had finished at school for the day. “Cami, I’m glad to see you made it through the rest of the weekend in one piece.”

  “I only had to endure Clinton Lonsbury for about six hours yesterday. But other than that, I ignored all unknown phone calls so the evening was fairly peaceful.”

  Erin grabbed her ponytail and pulled it in front of her shoulder. “You said you’d be cleaning all day. Instead you spent six hours with Clint? Do tell.”