The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1)

by Alida Winternheimer

  “You tell me, why would I bother? I’m better off dying here. Save everyone the trouble of moving these old bones to another bed in another cell.” John shook his head, as though he could not believe the stupidity of those around him. He paused and looked back at Jess. “I would like to see my son. That is my dying wish, Miss Vernon. My one and only.” He turned away from her, and the guard helped him across the room in a slow, shambling retreat.

  Jess watched until he was gone, then looked again at the windows situated high on the wall, reinforced with wire and covered with bars. For a moment, she had the impression it was the sky that had been caged.

  Jess left filling the claw-foot tub to greet Beckett with a smile and a kiss. She had called him from the road and asked him to bring Shakti to the house. She needed a soak and a glass of wine. And if one more man yelled, cried, or threatened to hit her, she was going to lose it.

  “That’s more like it,” he said and kissed her back.

  Shakti, tucked under Beckett’s arm, got stuck between them and wasn’t going to wait another moment for her proper hello. As she squirmed, her hind claws caught on Jess’s shirt and dug into the flesh underneath.

  “All right, Bear.” Jess took the puppy from Beckett and accepted a face full of kisses and a wagging tail thumping against her ribs. “I’m sorry about last night,” she told Beckett. She’d had plenty of time while driving to think about how he must have felt when she didn’t show up for dinner. Shakti got a good lick to Jess’s mouth. She set the dog down and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Want another kiss?”

  “I think I’ll wait until after your bath.”

  She led the way upstairs. A bottle of wine and two glasses already waited on the edge of the sink. Beckett poured while she undressed and slipped into the water. He handed her a glass of wine, then sat on the edge of the tub and rubbed her shoulders. Jess told Beckett about her day, from the woman at Mr. Ecklund’s house, to Johnny calling her a bitch, to the security guys expelling them, and to John saying he’d rather die in prison than go to a hospice.

  “Wow,” Beckett said when she had finished. “All I did today is trim some pots and load my kiln.”

  “What do I do now, Beckett?” Jess wiped the steam from her forehead and dropped her hand back into the water.

  “Let’s see. First, you scoot up a bit.” Beckett took up the question again once he was situated in the tub behind her. “You’ve got a man in jail who doesn’t care about clearing his name, a son who doesn’t want to know who his father is, and an old man who might hold the key to this whole mess, but has Alzheimer’s.”

  “I’m screwed.” Jess tilted her head back against Beckett’s shoulder to look up at his face.

  “Yep. Pretty much.” He kissed her brow.

  Jess sighed. “Do I just give up?”

  Before Beckett could answer, a heavy crash shook the house. Shakti ran into the bathroom, skidded across the tile floor, and wedged herself in the corner between the tub, the pipes, and the wall. Jess and Beckett scrambled to get out of the tub without tripping on each other. She grabbed her towel off its hook and wrapped it around herself as she ran out of the bathroom and across the hall.

  Jess stopped in the office doorway, her mouth agape. Beckett ran into her, almost knocking her off her feet. The Underwood lay on the floor with her desk chair on its side next to it. Jess stepped into the room and knelt beside the typewriter. The bottom of the attached case had struck first, mashing the corner. The left ribbon cover had been knocked off, and the carriage return arm was broken. There was also a dent in the floorboard where it had struck. Jess hefted it from the floor and set it back on the desk, catching the end of her towel as it slipped away. She looked back at Beckett, unable to hide her quivering lower lip.

  Beckett stood in the water dripping off his body, his hands, so capable and normally so busy, hung at his sides. He extended his arms and drew Jess into a hug. She allowed herself to cry on his shoulder while Bonnie glared at her from the corner of the room.

  The ghost appeared menacing, the marks around her neck a searing red as though freshly made. Her eyes, that had seemed so sad before, were again marred by the bursts and snakes of hemorrhaged blood vessels. Blood began seeping out from under Bonnie’s feet. Jess watched as the puddle of grew, spreading across the floor toward her and Beckett. She began to shake as Bonnie raised a hand to point at her. Jess curled her fingers against Beckett’s shoulder blades, held him desperately tight, closed her eyes, and waited to feel the thick wet of blood touch her feet, and she couldn’t help wondering if it would be warm or cold.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Her voice felt small, unable to compete with the engine noise of Beckett’s van. When he insisted they relocate to his place, Jess had been happy to grab a fresh t-shirt and head out the door. She sat with the Underwood on her lap and Shakti curled at her feet under the dashboard and picked at the frayed edges of the mashed case. She hadn’t told Beckett that Bonnie was in the room with them. “I can’t give up,” she said again.

  “What?” He looked at her, concern deepening the lines of his brow. “Can’t give up?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Obviously, giving up isn’t an option with that ghost in your house.”

  “Beckett, she was murdered on the 13th.” Jess held her typewriter like it was a wounded friend. “I think things are only going to get worse as we near the anniversary of her death.”

  “The 13th? That’s one week away.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Jess spent much of Sunday calling Johnny, leaving voicemail after voicemail. Beckett warned her he was going to take out a restraining order against her if she didn’t knock it off. Finally, he put a ball of clay in her hands. “Here,” he said. “Work it out with this.”

  “How?”

  He showed her how to wedge the clay, pushing it forward with the heels of her hands, then pulling it back over on itself. “Just like kneading bread,” she said. The physical act of wedging required she push from her shoulders and put her weight into it. She developed a rhythm of push and pull, rolling the clay against the table and under her hands. As her arms began to ache, she decided she liked the feel of clay under her hands and the way she got lost in the rhythm of movement, and for once stopped thinking about Bonnie.

  Beckett said goodbye to some customers and came to stand behind her. He put his hands over hers. She stopped moving the clay. He nuzzled her neck, his face moving against her hair until he found skin along her jaw and under her ear. “You’ve been wedging clay for an hour,” he whispered.

  Jess turned inside his arms and reached around his shoulders, keeping her hands out of the way. “I like wedging.”

  Beckett smiled. “I thought you would.” He took one of her balls of clay to the wheel and slapped it onto the center of the wheel’s head. He got it spinning, wet his hands and the clay, then leaned forward, elbows against his thighs, and cupped his hands over the mound of clay. Jess watched, studying his hands. The water spun off the clay between his fingers, running backwards over his hands, as the clay formed a more perfect ball. He squeezed it, shaping the ball into a cone, then pushed it back down. Jess wondered at the transformation of the clay, how effortless it appeared. Beckett did this several times, then stopped the wheel and stepped off.

  Jess took the seat and Beckett explained how to open a pot, showing her again with his hands over hers. Jess realized she had her lower lip pinned between her teeth, a sign she was concentrating too hard. She released her lip and pressed her thumb into the divot Beckett had made. With a little pressure, she watched in amazement as the divot deepened and expanded under her hands. Beckett then showed her how to widen the hole and raise the sides. She was making something, something she could touch and hold. Jess could not believe how good it felt, this clay spinning through her hands.

  The tourist traffic began picking up again and Beckett had to leave Jess at the wheel. She watched it slow down
and spin to a stop. Her half-pot sat there, something between a lump and vessel, while Beckett chatted with customers. Jess caught sight of his smile as he pushed his hair behind his ear and turned briefly toward her. She wondered how many more pots he sold based on his charm, and she smiled to think that she was sharing some part of his life.

  She left her clay and took Shakti outside. They meandered through the grass behind the old livery, which crinkled under foot with each step. Jess checked her phone—nothing from Johnny. There was an email from Chandra. She had been desperate to contact her best friend and then things began happening. Jess quickly typed a response, one that was almost meaningless for all it left out—there was just too much to explain. After she hit send, she dialed Johnny again, hoping to somehow convince him to meet his father.

  Voicemail again. “Dr. Ecklund, I’m sorry. I know I’m upsetting you. But don’t you care about the truth? Doesn’t the truth matter to you at all?” Jess sighed. She had said everything before. Her fingers danced at her throat. “Please.” She held the phone for a moment, waiting for the magic words. They didn’t come, and she hung up.

  The phone rang in her hand, and she jumped. It took a moment before she had collected herself and was able to answer. “Hello?”

  “Ms. Vernon? This is Sterling Devries.”

  A half hour later, Sterling walked into Beckett’s studio. It was late enough in the afternoon that the River Road traffic had slowed considerably. People would be less interested in shopping and more interested in getting home and unwinding before the workweek began. Beckett offered Sterling a beer and poured Jess a glass of wine. They slid into the booth near the windows with Beckett situated so he could watch the front door in case of straggling sales.

  “You said on the phone that you have something to tell me?” Jess said.

  “Yes.” Sterling began scratching at the edge of the Negra Modelo label with his thumbnail. “This isn’t easy for me.” He glanced up at them and Jess nodded her encouragement. “Back in 1973, I was a young man, recently out of school, working to make a place for myself in the world—especially in the world of medicine. I wanted to be a healer.” Sterling took a sip of his beer, then ran his hand around the back of his neck. Jess sensed an interjection could scare him off and waited patiently. “One of my first patients was a vet named Copeland. This guy was messed up worse than anyone I’d seen before and maybe even since. He had all his parts in tact, but his mind…” Sterling shook his head and picked at the beer label. “He told me he was dead. The walking dead. I didn’t know what to do with that, so I asked him when he died. He said, ‘Last week.’” Sterling looked up at Jess. “You understand, we weren’t trained to handle this shit. I’m not a psychiatrist. I thought he was nuts, but he wasn’t making any sense. I mean, he didn’t just come out and say it.”

  Jess looked at Beckett while Sterling gathered his thoughts. Beckett rubbed his goatee thoughtfully while watching Sterling.

  “I saw Copeland twice, which was rare. When guys came in, they saw whoever was available and it was hardly ever the same person twice. Copeland said there was a weapons cache and a gook bitch…” Sterling glanced at Jess and shrugged apologetically. “His words. Then he said he was sorry about Bonnie. Bonnie gave him coffee. Bonnie was good to him.”

  “What do you mean?” Beckett asked.

  “I couldn’t be certain, you see? Copeland was confused. He was mixing up things that happened in Vietnam and things that happened here. The Bonnie who gave him coffee wasn’t the gook bitch, and yet he talked about them like they were the same person. He said he did terrible things to her, things he deeply regretted. He broke down sobbing in the examination room. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never seen a man cry like this before. I reached out to pat his shoulder or something and he grabbed onto me. He pulled me in and clung to me, sobbing against my chest.” Sterling looked up, catching Jess’s eye. “I knew our boys saw horrible things over there, but I didn’t understand why Copeland was confused about this Vietnamese woman and this Bonnie. He went on and on about the weapons and cat’s eye. A cat’s eye?” He shook his head and took a swig of his beer. “I still don’t know what that means. I knew the soldiers came home messed up and turned to drink and drugs, but I didn’t know about PTSD. We just didn’t know about it then.” Sterling sighed and pulled another scrap of paper label off his beer bottle. “Copeland was one of the lucky ones as far medicine was concerned—he was walking around in one piece.”

  “What made you decide to tell me this?” Jess asked.

  “I’ve always been troubled by Copeland.” Sterling’s voice dropped and he pushed the scraps of wet paper on the table into a small crumpled pile of black and gold with the pad of his thumb. “He committed suicide the next day. He was reaching out for help, and I failed him.” He took a long drink of his beer before continuing. “Eventually, I figured out you can’t help everybody, but you always remember your first. It’s the first one you take personally.”

  “Did you know about the Bonnie Sykes murder?” Beckett asked.

  “No. Or if I heard about it, it didn’t really register. Maybe I didn’t want it to. But I was busy with a brand new career that was challenging me in lots of ways. To follow that kind of news…”

  “I understand,” Jess said. “If you heard about it, you blocked it out so you wouldn’t be overwhelmed.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was Copeland’s first name?”

  “Carl. Carl Copeland.”

  Jess glanced at Beckett, but of course the name meant nothing to him.

  “I did a little digging after we last met,” Sterling said. “Your neck looks much better, by the way.”

  Jess put a hand to her throat.

  “The papers said Bonnie was hung.”

  Jess nodded. “Yes. She showed me her body hanging in the smokehouse. It was the first thing she showed me, but I thought it was a hog or something.”

  Sterling shook his head. “The mark on your neck is not from hanging. It’s from strangulation, but not hanging.” He looked around the table, his hand grasping at an imaginary pen.

  “Here.” Beckett pulled a piece of scratch paper from a pile at the back end of the table. He had doodled vases and urns on one side with a soft pencil. He flipped the paper over and handed Sterling a pencil from somewhere within his papers.

  Sterling sketched a neck with a rope around it. “If the mark is level, like your mark, then the rope was drawn tight parallel to the floor, not from above. So if a killer strangles someone, it’s like this.” He held his hands out, fists together, then drew them apart as though tightening a rope. “And in hanging, the rope comes from above, so the ring around the neck slopes upward.” He drew another neck, this one with a noose around it. The rope sloped upwards toward the knot, leaving a mark like an upside-down V.

  “So,” Beckett said, turning the paper toward him and Jess, “Bonnie was strangled, not hung? The papers were wrong?”

  “But I saw a figure hanging in the smokehouse.” Jess rubbed her throat, grateful the marks were smooth. Her fingertips brushed the hairline at the back of her neck and came away damp with sweat.

  “Maybe it wasn’t her,” Sterling said. He set the pencil down with a click against the tabletop.

  “Carl Copeland killed Bonnie Sykes,” Beckett made it sound definitive.

  “But…”

  Beckett and Sterling both stared at Jess, waiting for her objection.

  “If that’s true, then Johnny Sykes believes that the man who killed his mother is his father.”

  “Oh shit,” Beckett said.

  Sterling took a long drink of his beer, finishing it in one long gulp. “And I could maybe have saved Mr. Sykes from decades in prison.” He grimaced like he’d just chewed up an aspirin. “Can I have another beer?”

  “Jess, I think you should let this go.” Beckett stood in the doorway to his bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. Jess sat on the couch with Shakti curled on her lap, chewing contentedly
on a bone that Jess held for her. Beckett’s apartment was without air conditioning. Even with all the windows open, the door propped wide, and two oscillating fans pushing air through the place, the humidity was getting to them. The moisture he’d just toweled off had already reappeared, making his skin glisten with beads of perspiration. He took the towel from his waist and dried his hair with it as he walked into his bedroom. Jess couldn’t help admiring his backside, despite being in the middle of a serious conversation. “I mean, think of Johnny,” he called from the other room.

  “You know I can’t drop it,” she said, as Beckett came out of the bedroom dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. Jess had already changed into a sundress and clipped her hair up away from her neck. It was the coolest thing she owned and already she felt sweat forming along the ridges of her shoulder blades and in the small of her back.

  The walk uphill to the Water Wheel Café seemed long with the damp heat sapping their energy. Jess’s hand bumped Beckett’s and his fingers clasped hers. They swung their hands between them while they climbed the hill. “This is August weather,” Jess said. “What happened to June?” Beckett looked at the hardware store as they passed, a proprietor’s calling. “Do you need to go in?”

  “No.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “I trust Dave, but I still can’t help looking.”

  They entered the community garden. The local business owners maintained it and had carefully chosen native plants to minimize maintenance. Bees busily buzzed from bloom to bloom; the pollen in their leg sacs glowed gold in the evening sun. Beckett pointed to one of the bees. “See that? Wait until August. There’s an apiary down County J. These guys make the best honey.”

  Jess smiled at the thought she and Beckett were a normal couple out for a stroll and a nice dinner. Denise brought them menus and water. Tonight, a tank top with a sequined skull topped a short black tutu over capris leggings. Her Buddy Holly glasses were the same, but her hair was in two thin braids pinned over her crown. Jess was glad to see she’d come back to work for Robin after Tyler’s abrupt departure. “Hi again,” Denise said.