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

by Alida Winternheimer

  “Are you all right?”

  “Huh?” Jess looked at Beckett, surprised to find him beside her on the bed.

  “You’ve been staring at that corner for two minutes. What’s going on?”

  “She’s nearby.”

  “Can you see her?” Beckett looked around the room.

  “Not yet, but the feel of the room changed, and the light. She’s with us. Can’t you feel her?”

  Beckett hesitated to answer. He looked at the ceiling and rubbed his goatee. “I’m not sure, Jess. Maybe. Or maybe I think I can because you say she’s here.”

  Jess nodded. She closed her eyes and breathed in and out slowly, moving her diaphragm the way she’d been taught to breathe in yoga classes. Focusing on the breath allowed her to clear her mind of fear and doubt and simply receive without pressure or second-guessing herself. Jess felt a melancholy sense of loss. It was not unlike when she realized she had to leave her husband. As difficult as the marriage had been, to finally acknowledge it was time to give up on them and face the unknown had caused her a period of grief before she was able to act definitively. Yes, she thought, this is the loss of everything that could have or should have been.

  Beckett touched her hand and Jess startled. She looked into his blue eyes, dim in the now dark room, and was warmed to see his concern so plainly. Jess reached out to turn on a bedside lamp. She also hit record on her phone to capture audio, then turned on her video recorder.

  “What’s going on?” Beckett kept his voice low.

  “Grief. The feeling is sadness for what she lost, but…”

  “But what?”

  Jess put her hand on Beckett’s arm to quiet him, to signal him to wait. “But it’s changing,” she said.

  The mustard hue was turning orange, gradually deepening to a fiery intensity. Jess tried to keep breathing calmly, but her chest felt like someone was sitting on it and her hair again stood on end. A flash of lightning illuminated the windows that flanked the bed, separated from the crash of thunder that followed by only half a second—the storm was as close as the river. Bonnie stood in the corner of the room as though she’d needed the jolt of lightning to power her appearance. Jess jumped back, rattling the headboard, surprised by the confluence of lightning, thunder, and ghost.

  “She’s here,” Beckett said.

  “Can you see her?”

  He shook his head. “I have a definite feeling we’re not alone.”

  Jess was gripping Beckett’s hand tightly, though she had no idea when she’d taken hold of it. She loosened her fingers. “She looks…nice, like when I first saw her, but the atmosphere, the feeling, is that she’s pissed off.”

  “Yeah. I’m getting that much,” Beckett said. “Jess? What’s our plan if things get too intense?”

  Jess looked away from Bonnie, turning her head to meet Beckett’s eyes. She wanted to tell him if things get crazy he should get them the hell out of there, but she froze, the words that were so insistent in her head somehow unable to come out as speech. She had to see this through. “As long as I’m okay, just watch the show.”

  “What if you’re not okay?”

  Before Jess could respond, a flash of lightning and the accompanying boom of thunder filled the room. Jess found herself looking right into Bonnie’s face. Bonnie spoke, but was again voiceless. Jess watched Bonnie’s ashen lips shape the same desperate plea, find him.

  “Help me,” Jess said.

  The belt flew off the end of the bed and wrapped around Jess’s wrists, propelled by some unseen force. Beckett now stood several feet away, though whether he’d leapt back or been propelled by the same force that moved the belt, Jess did not know. She felt something yank on both of her ankles, dragging her down the bed so she lay on her back in the middle of her mattress. She yelped with fright. To her right stood Bonnie, her skin now sickly in color, her eyes bloodshot, the mark of the scarf that choked her appearing, its shade turning from pink to red to purple while Jess stared at it.

  The rain at the edge of the storm arrived, pattering against the roof, heavy droplets, a tremendous relief to everyone in the area. Jess loved a good summer storm at night. She would have been sitting on the porch with a glass of port right about now, counting the seconds between flash and boom, waiting for the spectacular show to arrive, but instead she was jerked hard against the bed, her body pinned by a forceful weight that pressed into her abdomen, making her struggle for breath. She gasped, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain. When she opened her eyes, the room was smaller and painted a soft mauve. The furniture had changed. A man’s chest of drawers stood against the wall to the left. Across from the bed sat a lady’s dresser with an oval mirror above it. To the right of that was a chair and a closet door. Strewn over the chair were a number of women’s clothes, tried on and discarded. An orange sash lay on the floor beside the chair. The window at the front of the house was open. A cool breeze drifted in, stirring the floor-length ivory sheers. Jess heard crickets chirping outside.

  “Fucking gook bitch! Where are the guns?” someone shouted at Jess and a blow to her face slammed her cheek against the bed, moving her jaw with such force she wasn’t sure it would ever realign properly. The man’s knee dug into her abdomen just below the sternum, making it impossible to breathe. She tried to squirm, but her hands were now not only belted, but strapped to the bars of the old iron headboard. Panic flooded Jess’s body while one thought repeated in her mind: Don’t wake Johnny!

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Don’t wake Johnny! Don’t wake Johnny! Don’t wake Johnny! That one thought, one goal, prevented Bonnie from screaming her terror into the night. It would not have brought her a rescuer. No one lived close enough to hear a woman’s screams, not across the field of corn that separated her and her closest neighbor. While her screams might have served to release some of her fright and pain, they would have woken Johnny. And then what? Her only hope was that Carl had forgotten about Johnny.

  “You gook bitch! Answer me! Where. Are. The. Guns.”

  “Carl. Carl. You’re hurting me.” Bonnie’s wrists stung where the leather cut into her skin. Still she tugged against the bonds, trying to make her hands as small as her wrists, but she was small boned and every bracelet she’d ever owned had been taken to a jeweler to remove links, every watch had needed extra holes cut into the bands. And Carl had cinched the belt so tight.

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  She didn’t understand how it was Johnny remained quiet in his room, but he had once slept through a cocktail party that got rowdy late in the evening. As long as it wasn’t her panicked voice he heard, he might sleep the night through, perfectly unaware. When it was all over, she would crawl into his bed with him. She would surround him with her arms and as she protected him, he would comfort her, until John came home to take care of them both.

  “Please, Carl,” she begged him, keeping her voice soft, “it’s Bonnie. Remember me? Your high school sweetheart. Bonnie.”

  “You think that’s funny? You think you can just tear apart my friends?” His voice rose with agitation. “Gut them like one of those stinking pigs you got outside and leave them to rot?”

  Bonnie shook her head. “No. No. Carl, it’s not funny. It’s not.”

  He punched her in the jaw, whipping her head to the right, loosening a couple of her teeth. As her face pushed downward into the soft, smothering bedding, Bonnie bit her tongue and tasted iron. She sobbed into the bedspread, letting it muffle her sounds, keeping them, she hoped, from Johnny’s ears.

  Carl moved away, his combat boots heavy on the wooden floor. Bonnie opened her eyes to find him picking up the small hammer and nails she had left sitting out. One of her frames in which she had arranged pressed violets was on the floor, propped against the wall. As Carl turned away from the nightstand, hammer and nails in hand, the toe of his boot bumped the frame and it tipped forward, its glass breaking. He positioned himself at the foot of the bed and held up a nail. “Where are the guns, mama-san?
”

  “I…I don’t know. Carl! Carl! It’s Bonnie. It’s me.”

  He placed the tip of a nail against the bottom of Bonnie’s foot. She kicked at him and landed a blow to his head. Carl reeled away from the bed, stumbling and regaining his balance just short of crashing into the wall. He lunged at her. Bonnie thrashed her entire body, twisting against the belt, kicking both legs wildly. Carl climbed onto the bed and knelt on her, one knee pinning her thighs, the other across her shins. She writhed beneath his weight, grunting with the strain, repeating his name in her own voice, the voice of his sweetheart, but Carl focused solely on holding the nail against her foot. She felt the metal tip tracing a zigzagging line across her sole as she squirmed, and then Carl brought the hammer down. The first blow smashed the bone at the base of her big toe, but the second hit the nail’s head and drove it into her flesh.

  Bonnie thrust her face into the bedding and screamed into the comforter. She kicked against Carl’s weight, but he worked fast to take a second nail from between his teeth and hold it to her other foot. Again he drove it in, she bit her lower lip and sobbed into the bedding as the nail pierced her flesh. Carl hammered in the third nail. The pain was too much. Bonnie couldn’t breathe. A strange sensation of heat exploded like a fireworks throughout her body. When her vision cleared, Carl was above her, leering down into her face.

  “This is the last time I’m going to ask you this.” His voice was soft, almost gentle, almost patient. “Where are the guns?”

  “I…” Bonnie gulped. It took her entire will, the will of a mother protecting her child, to answer him. “I will…show…you.” She panted through the effort of holding so much pain at the distance necessary to remain conscious, able to think, to speak.

  Carl flipped the hammer over and leaned over her feet like someone working on an old board. Casually, he used the prongs to rip the nails back out of her flesh. Bonnie gulped down air, her face burning red with the intensity of each nail withdrawn, her teeth biting into her lip. He tossed the hammer and nails onto the bed and turned to look around the room, his gaze landing on the orange sash on the floor.

  He picked it up and put it around Bonnie’s neck, jerking her head up to loop it behind her, then letting her head drop again. He twisted the ends of the sash together, tightening it against her neck, and freed the belt from the headboard. Carl grabbed the sash in both hands and gave it an extra twist. Bonnie gagged as he dragged her off the bed and yanked her onto her bleeding feet. “Show me,” he insisted with a shove forward and tug backward, each movement another punch to her neck. Bonnie brought her hands to her throat, but her wrists were so tightly bound that she couldn’t get hold of the sash.

  She pointed with her hands toward the door. If she showed him something he wanted, maybe he would leave. His knuckles punched into the back of her neck as he jerked her forward. Bonnie took a step and her knees buckled. The pain of the holes in her feet was so intense she thought was going to throw up or pass out. Not allowed, Bonnie Mae Sykes, she told herself. Not allowed. She curled her toes under to try and lift some of her foot above the floor, to keep the pressure of walking off the wounds, and she hobbled into the hallway and over to the staircase.

  With her hands grasping awkwardly at the banister, Carl pushing and pulling against her throat, causing her to gag every other troubled attempt to get air, she made her way downstairs. Her thoughts, though not even formed into words, were a prayer. If the prayers of the desperate carry any more weight than the prayers of the calm, then Bonnie’s supplication weighed several tons. And if one believed in free will for all, then Carl’s will would have to be measured against Bonnie’s. The notion gave new meaning to a battle of wills, and if Bonnie had one will that was stronger than another, it was the will to protect her child.

  They made their way out past the sugar maple to the smokehouse. Bonnie’s legs kept buckling beneath her and each time she slackened and dropped toward the ground, Carl yanked upward on the sash, tightening it around her throat like a tourniquet. By the time they reached the smokehouse, Bonnie could not speak. She thrust her bound hands in the direction of the doorway and Carl reached around her to pull it open.

  The moon hung large and bright in the sky, only a day shy of the full moon, its face the only witness to Bonnie’s plight. The crickets chirred in the tall grasses at the edge of the yard where it became forest. Nearby, an owl hooted, its final note trailing off sorrowfully. Carl looked over Bonnie’s small shoulder and into the smokehouse. Leaning against the curved brick wall were a couple of rakes, a hoe, some shovels, hand tools, and her pruning shears. At the back, near the old stove, she kept a stack of extra flower pots and some bags of mulch.

  “See? Was that so hard?” Carl snarled into her ear, his breath moving her hair against her neck. “You stupid bitch. I knew you had the guns. I knew it.” He jerked hard on the sash and twisted its ends even tighter, shrinking the loop around her throat, choking her until Bonnie could not make a sound or take a breath. Carl raised his voice to a shout as her legs folded beneath her. “Stupid bitch!”

  As Bonnie lost consciousness, she heard her son’s cry from inside the house. Her one impulse was to comfort him.

  Carl let the gook drop to the ground and stepped over her body into the hut. He gathered up all of the weapons inside and then found a canvas tarp at the back under some kimchi jars and dirty sacks of rice. He laid it out and worked quickly to wrap the weapons inside. There were too many for him to carry all the way back to base, but he could hide them where the VC wouldn’t know to look, then he could come back later with some men and recover the cache. Part of him wondered at how easy it had been to torture the woman. Torture. That was the only word for it, if he was honest. What else would you call driving nails into someone’s feet? She was yellow. She was them. He was us. Not that it mattered she was yellow. In a different war she would have been a Kraut or a Ruski or something else altogether. It only mattered that she was them and he was us. That was what made him right. But right or not, the red and black was everywhere, seeping, seeping. He could hardly sleep, could hardly eat. The Kamikaze. Yeah, he was willing to do what the others weren’t. They hadn’t seen as much as he had. Not yet. The weapons clattered together heavily when he tossed them onto the tarp. There was a lot to move. It would take him at least an hour to bury them. He wondered how long he had before her friends came back. There were always more. A village was never empty for long. He kept looking over his shoulder while he worked. When the hut was cleaned out, he looked at the crumpled woman on the ground. What to do with her? She would make a nice little message to the other VC sympathizers, a reminder of who was right and who was mighty. A pole spanned the narrow hut over his head. He went outside and reached under the woman’s armpits and around her chest. He grunted as he lifted her and pulled, dragging her heavy, limp form over the threshold into the hut. He had to drop her inside and pant to recover his breath. It always amazed him how much deadweight weighed, like a body increased in density once the spirit left. And what about him? He was still alive, but his spirit had already gone. How dense was he? He grabbed her again and hefted her up, bracing the body against his chest, then with one hand threw the sash over the beam above his head. He grabbed the dangling ends, caught them in both hands, and hoisted her with a grunt. The gook moved, swaying against her tether while he tied it off. When he had the sash secured, he looked at his handiwork. She hung limply in the middle of the hut, her arms dangling, her legs buckled beneath her with the feet awkwardly behind the hips, resting on the dirt floor. Something nasty trickled down her leg. She smelled like shit, but then everything smelled like shit in Nam. Carl picked up the load of guns and headed into the jungle. At the edge of the trees, he paused to gaze back up at the moon. It was unbelievable that the same moon shone on the entire planet. Here. Wisconsin. Same goddamn moon.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Jess was dead. She had no other way to explain the sensation of being without her body. Carl picked her up off the
ground, hefting her with his arms looped around her chest. He grunted and half-swung, half-dragged her into the smokehouse. Jess wanted to tell him to take it easy on her, yet at the same time, she didn’t really care. Her body seemed a thing already discarded. Carl got the orange sash up and over the pole. He pulled it to himself, bending his knees and using his bodyweight to counter hers. The body lifted, those loose limbs dangling like a puppet’s empty form. Jess saw a trickle of something down the inside of her leg. It was curious, how invested she had been—how invested everyone was—in the nondisclosure as it were, of all things bodily and natural. Well, not all things. Brushing the teeth was all right. And manicures were actually social. But anything to do with digestion…yes, it was a curious sort of caring. Jess only felt a sort of wonder for the fact that that lump of flesh had been her vehicle for twenty-five years, for all those glorious experiences. Carl was industrious in his efforts to tie off the sash. It really was a remarkable amount of effort. Jess turned away from them, Carl and her body. She had somewhere to be. Somewhere…

  She stepped outside the smokehouse and was caught by a sound. It felt like chords binding her heart. It terrified her and she felt herself trapped somewhere dark and still and neither here nor there.

  Jess heard someone screaming. And then shouting. Shouting her name. Then she realized it was her screaming. She had never heard herself scream before. Not like this. She closed her mouth and the screaming stopped. That’s better, she thought. She felt less disoriented without the screaming. Beckett. She was inside the smokehouse. He was outside, banging on the door and shouting her name. Jess got to her feet awkwardly, grateful for the lantern over her head, and, holding the wall for support, pushed open the door to the smokehouse.