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

by Alida Winternheimer

  Rain blew in through the doorway, swept by a driving wind that carried Beckett in as well. He pulled the door shut behind him and grabbed Jess’s shoulders. “Are you all right?” he shouted over the storm. Jess was only just discerning that the sounds around her were not those of night crickets and that she was also soaking wet. “What the hell happened in here?” Beckett asked.

  “I don’t know. I think…” She looked at him, looked into those blue eyes, searching for an anchor. “I think I died. Or I was with Bonnie when she died.”

  Beckett pulled her to his chest and wrapped his arms around her. “Jessica…” He kissed the top of her head and held her tightly while thunder boomed and shook the earth. He took her by the shoulders and looked into her face. “I thought… I thought the worst.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “I have to get out of here.”

  Beckett took the lantern and grabbed the door handle. He paused to look at Jess. She nodded. He swung the door open and they rushed into the storm. It swallowed the light from the lantern and they kept their heads bent against the cool droplets pelting their faces as they ran for the house. The parched ground could not absorb this much water this fast, and mud sucked at their feet.

  They reached the front door of the house, grateful for the shelter of the porch. Jess and Beckett paused to look back at their path. It was so dark, Jess could hardly make out the smokehouse. A bolt of lightning shot down from the sky with a white flash so bright it obliterated everything. The accompanying boom shook the ground, the house, and knocked Jess off her feet. For days, whenever Jess closed her eyes, she would see the blue-tinged impression of her sugar maple and the lightning bolt that set it on fire. As flames scorched the base of the tree, Shakti tore past Jess and leapt off the porch into the storm.

  Jess glanced over her shoulder to see Beckett holding the front door open, a stunned look on his face. She scrambled to her feet. “Shakti!” she called as she ran past the burning tree.

  “Jess!” She heard her name once, then was too far away, too deep into the storm. She didn’t know if Beckett had followed or what was becoming of her tree. She only knew Shakti was out there.

  She ran to the edge of the yard and along the woods, calling Shakti’s name into the wind. Jess couldn’t see anything but dark shapes distorted by the water pouring over her face. A flash of lightning sparked the sky. She ducked and threw her arms over her head as the thunder boomed and crackled. This one was beyond her property, not by much, but the storm was moving. In the flash of light, Jess had glimpsed an opening in the woods, an overgrown trail, and she ran toward it, her heart pounding.

  “Shakti!” she called, as she ducked into the woods. There was no sign of her. She had been swallowed up, first by the storm and then by the dense forest. Jess moved forward on the trail and stumbled over a fallen branch. A few more steps and a thorny bush scraped her arm. She winced and cupped her bleeding arm in her other hand. “Shakti!”

  “Jess!”

  She spun around. A pale light bobbed toward her. She made out Beckett’s shape as he came close, the lantern in his hand finally near enough to illuminate them both.

  “I can’t find her,” she shouted over the noise of the wind and rain coming through the trees.

  Beckett handed her the lantern and she led the way forward. He followed in her footsteps, keeping close enough to see where he stepped in the shallow pool of light it cast.

  Jess picked her way over fallen logs and branches. She put her foot down on what she had glimpsed as a bed of leaf litter, like so much of the trail before. She scanned out ahead in the narrow ring of lantern light, seeking the next place to land her foot. The cushion of debris, slick with rainwater, acted like an unmoored raft, sliding easily away when Jess shifted her weight onto it. She flung her arms out for balance as her feet lost their purchase, and the lantern knocked against a slender tree trunk beside the path. It went out. Jess swore as her ass landed where her foot should have been.

  “Are you all right?” Beckett hooked his arms under hers and pulled.

  She skidded about in the mud until she got her feet back under herself. “The lantern’s gone out.”

  Beckett took it from her and whacked it with his palm. Then he opened and closed the battery compartment. The light returned. “There you go,” he said, handing it back.

  Jess wiped her hand on her shorts, trying to push some of the mud caked to her palm anywhere else. Mud had filled her shoes, sliding over the sole and in through the gaps in the webbing. She held the lantern out in front of her and Beckett bumped into her back. “Look,” she said, and lifted the lantern toward one fork in the trail and then the other. “Which way?”

  “Left,” he said.

  Left looked easier, passable even. Right looked like the trail dead-ended where the undergrowth knit itself together.

  “Right,” she said.

  “Jess…”

  She started down the right fork, trusting her gut feeling. Jess called to Shakti again. She didn’t really expect Shakti to come out, or to hear her small whimper over the tree branches shaking overhead. She only hoped that Shakti heard her and was less scared. Jess stooped low to squeeze through a tunnel-like passage in the vegetation and felt a tug on her shirt. She grabbed the hem to yank it free of whatever had snagged it. “Hey,” Beckett exclaimed. He had taken hold of it to keep them together.

  Jess pushed a branch out of the way and stepped into a small clearing. She held the branch until Beckett was safely past, then held up the lantern. The remains of a large, dead tree stood across from them. The trunk had a scar in the shape of an inverted V, it’s bark curling in toward the blackened center. Jess stared at it through the rain and wondered if she was imagining the flash of animal eyes peering back at her from inside the tree. “Shakti?” she called.

  Shakti scrambled forward, and Jess called her name again, this time in delight. She ran to meet her dog, her feet sinking in the mud, making each step an effort. Shakti got stuck beyond Jess’s reach. She cried, a high-pitched whine hat cut through the sounds of the waning storm. Jess struggled to lift her foot out of the mud. Finally, it released with a wet, slurping sound. She placed her foot down again, and as soon as she shifted her weight onto it, her leg sank in halfway up her calf. Shakti’s cries were the pitiful calls of a stranded baby. Jess looked back at Beckett. He remained at the edge of the clearing, anxiously watching her progress. She imagined sinking into the mud the way people go down in quicksand in the movies. Beckett would have to throw her a rope to get her out. One more step, and she’d be able to reach Shakti. The dog squirmed and sank in even further. Her chin touched mud, and her cries became shrill. Jess called to her again, trying to soothe her. She tugged her leg upward, surprised by the mud’s stubborn hold, and grabbed her knee with both hands to assist the leg’s effort. She yanked on her leg, while Shakti’s terrified cries pierced her ears. With a grunt, Jess lunged forward, throwing herself at the puppy.

  She grabbed Shakti and pulled. A cracking sound filled the air like a board giving under tremendous weight. Jess thought it was thunder at first, but it was too near, and Beckett was behind her, yelling an alarm. She pulled the struggling puppy to her chest and braced her there. It was then, with the dog finally secure in her arms, that Jess looked up and realized the groaning, breaking sound was coming from the tree where Shakti had been hiding. Long dead and rotten through, with the earth all around gone suddenly liquid, the tree creaked and groaned and fell onto its side. It crashed into nearby trees, shaking them, sending down a fresh shower of rainwater. Those trees protested with cracks and booms of their own while the roots of the fallen tree lifted from the earth and there was the clatter of metal on metal.

  Beckett put his arms around Jess and drew her back just as a heavy branch fell where she had been standing. Jess lay on top of Beckett with Shakti clutched to her. The frightened dog squirmed and tore at Jess’s hold, her claws scratching Jess’s chest and arms, but she held tight to Shakti’s collar and kept her
pinned. Jess felt Beckett’s chest rise and fall against her shoulders with each heaving breath. They stayed like that, propped against each other in the cool mud, while the last of the rain pattered around them and they made sense of the new state of things. Above them, the storm passed over, the clouds thinned, and the moon was bright enough to bring shapes out of the darkness and give form to a shovel raised like a signalman from the roots of the fallen tree.

  Jess wormed herself off of Beckett and handed him Shakti before getting on her feet.

  “What is it?”

  “I think we found it.” She got the lantern off the ground and wiped the mud from its lens before picking her way toward the fallen tree. Though she tried to step carefully, she twice had to stop and free a shoe from the mud.

  The shovel’s blade was rusted, its collar loose on the decaying wooden handle. Jess heard Beckett struggling with the mud behind her, but she didn’t turn around. She held the lantern closer to the tangle of uplifted roots and found cradled in their knotted limbs a number of gardening tools wrapped in a canvas tarp, now black with age and reduced to shreds. She peeled back a piece of rotting cloth and thought the lantern light had glinted off something within. She stared at the spot, slowly passing the lantern over it.

  “What have you got?”

  “The tools.”

  Certain she’d seen something, Jess kept staring into the black of mud and rotted tarp and rusting tools, willing it to show itself again.

  find him

  Her hand shook as she reached into a space between the long handles. She found something hard, the tines of a pitchfork she decided as she felt her way around it. Then her fingers brushed something small and thin. “Oh God,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  Jess jumped. “Jesus, Beckett!”

  “I thought you knew I was here.” He held Shakti by the scruff of her neck with one hand while his other hand cradled her rump.

  Jess worked around the object until she had it pinched between two fingers and began to draw her hand out. Something moved against the back of her hand. She shouted and yanked her hand out of the tarp. A centipede, carried up on Jess’s hand, flung away, its long body thrashing as its legs thrummed the air. The object Jess had retrieved twisted and slapped against her wrist. She brushed her hand and arm, shaking away the sensation of crawling things, before looking at Beckett. He stared with both eyebrows raised, his hair and face streaked with mud. “Bug,” she said.

  “Yep.” He tucked Shakti under his arm, then bent and scooped up the lantern to hold it over the thing in Jess’s hand.

  The object, an oval piece of flat metal, lay on her palm, its ball chain draping off her hand. She turned it over and used her thumb to clean its face of mud. The punched tin spelled out a soldier’s name: Carl Copeland.

  Jess took a deep breath of damp forest air and looked up through the small clearing at the dark sky. “I found him, Bonnie. I found him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The sound of birds woke Jess. Light poured in through the window at the front of the house and the world seemed right again. Shakti had insisted on spending the night wedged between her and Beckett and was curled up somewhere under the sheet. Jess found her soft lump and gave it a pat before slipping out of bed.

  The sugar maple still stood in front of her house, though decidedly worse for wear. Freshly scorched bark curled inward toward a deep triangular scar. Jess leaned closer, her brow pinching together, until her forehead bumped into the glass. She thought she saw a thin curl of smoke rising from the wound. Was it possible the storm hadn’t completely extinguished the fire? Jess ran downstairs and onto the porch.

  They’d left the garden hose out, a sloppy sprawl of rubber tubing. Their clothing laid in a muddy heap at the foot of the porch. The cold water had seemed a cruel end to the night’s adventure. She and Beckett had stripped to their underwear and took turns hosing each other off. The one under the hose also held the dog, restraining her while trying to scrub her fur clean. Jess smelled charred wood and definitely saw smoke. Jess turned the hose on and pointed it at the sugar maple. She was lucky, really. The lightning bolt could have struck her house. Or the fire could have leapt to the porch before the rain put it out.

  Beckett came onto the porch, his arrival preceded by the squeak of the storm door and followed by the jangle of Shakti’s tags as she trotted out to greet the day. “Huh,” he said as he arrived to examine the aftermath of the storm with Jess, “you have a cat-eye tree.”

  “Bonnie.”

  “What?” He rubbed his eyes and yawned.

  "The tree where the tools were buried…Bonnie wanted us to make the connection.”

  “I suppose she let Shakti out of her crate, too.”

  “Do you have a better explanation?”

  “I don’t know, but do you really think she could direct lightning?”

  Jess walked back to the house and turned off the water. “I’m not putting anything past her. I’m just glad we got through last night.”

  “Me, too.” Beckett met her at the base of the porch steps and slipped his arms around her waist.

  Jess hoped this meant they had, in fact, gotten through last night. She put her arms around his neck and rose on her toes to kiss him. It felt good.

  Somewhere inside the house, her cell phone started ringing.

  They exchanged a look that asked, what more could the day hold? as they reluctantly separated. Jess went inside and found her phone on the coffee table beside Carl Copeland’s dog tag. “Hello?”

  “Jess? It’s John Ecklund.”

  The dog tag with its rusted edges reminded her she had news for Johnny—perhaps the best and worst yet. She chewed on her lower lip, waiting for Johnny to tell her why he had called.

  “It’s about my father…”

  Jess sank onto the couch and set the phone on the coffee table. She put her face in her hands and tried to keep breathing.

  Beckett carried Shakti inside. He looked at Jess, then reached down to put the phone on speaker. “Hello?” Johnny’s voice had a hollowness to it, coming through the speaker, or maybe it just sounded that way because his father was dead. Beckett took it off speaker and put the phone to his ear. He carried it and Shakti into the kitchen. Jess heard him talking to Johnny, his voice audible, but the words indistinguishable. He came back into the living room as he hung up.

  “We’re invited to the funeral, day after tomorrow,” he said.

  Jess took her hands away from her face.

  “You aren’t crying.”

  “No. I don’t know what I am. I just couldn’t handle the news right then. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I thought we’d go to Hadley and tell John his name could finally be cleared.

  Beckett glanced at the dog tag. “Yeah. I did, too.”

  Jess wore a lavender wrap over her bare shoulders—a little color in honor of life. Beckett stood at her side in a gray suit, his hair pulled back into the knobby ponytail. He kept his hands linked behind his back and his eyes on the ground in front of his feet. Jess would have appreciated an arm around her waist or a hand on her elbow, but for some reason this funeral seemed difficult for him.

  It was difficult for Jess, too, because it was the culmination of everything that had happened since she moved to Skoghall. And then there was Johnny. He had his daughter at one side and his cousin, Pam, at his other. They held hands, their draping arms connecting them like paper dolls. His daughter, Melanie, was a lanky fourteen year old in strappy three-inch heels, the sort Jess wouldn’t dare to walk in. She topped her black miniskirt with an off-the-shoulder, cropped shirt, pushing the boundaries of what was appropriate. Freckles covered the exposed shoulder, as though someone had taken a wide brush and swept amber blush across her skin. Her light blonde hair, not quite the towhead of her father, was held back on one side with a barrette sporting a large, orange-red silk poppy.

  Pam belonged to a Catholic church and had been put in charge of finding the priest to offic
iate. Father Mike’s face sagged around its perimeter; the most prominent feature, eyebrows that looked wiry enough to scrub pots. From the looks of things, all the hair he had left was in those eyebrows. A panama hat dressed with a black band kept the sun off his head, and his robes sloped over the swell of a hearty beer-and-brat gut. Father Mike was known to love church socials and knocking back a few with friends whenever Brewers or Packers were playing. Before his knees got too bad to run, he was a legend of the Interfaith Intramural Baseball League of La Crosse, the IIBLL. Someone with a sense of humor printed an eye surrounded by heavenly rays on their t-shirts, and they became known as The Eyeballs. Within the league, jokes and puns about the eye of God were constant.

  “John Harold Sykes was a wretched soul, suffering forty years for a crime he did not commit, denied access to his only son, accused of a heinous offense against his wife, whom he loved most dearly. Even as we feel regret and sorrow for his life’s affliction, let us now feel relief and gratitude for his passing into the hands of the Lord God.

  “Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord: Lord hear my voice. Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.”

  Jess looked at Johnny and his family, at what they had been reduced to. Johnny freed one of his hands to wipe tears from his face, then returned it to the comfort of another.

  “But there is forgiveness with Thee,” Father Mike continued, “My soul waiteth on His word: my soul hopeth in the Lord.”

  When the priest finished, Johnny stepped forward to the head of the open grave. “I was deprived the opportunity to know my father. I am sure…” he clenched his jaw in an expression that denied the words he spoke, “…my grandfather did what he did with the best of intentions, but as a result, this man, John Sykes, spent forty years unable to see his only child. And I spent forty years believing my father was a dead man.

  “I am grateful I got to know him, however briefly, before he died. My father loved my mother and he loved me. He was an innocent man.” Johnny’s face clenched again and he blinked back tears. He made a choking sound as he drew in a quick breath. Father Mike put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder and patted. Johnny nodded and stepped back around the grave, resuming his place between Melanie and Pam.