by Jess Lourey
A rabbit darting from behind a rock and into a hole startled me, but otherwise, the landscape was serene and space-like in its starlit stillness. The only sounds were my shoes gathering dew, the far-off resonance of cars cruising Highway 210 a couple miles off, and cows lowing. The air smelled charged with water, and I wondered if a storm was on the way.
When I reached the top of the sumac-speckled hill that overlooked both the public access and Shangri-La Island, I crouched down and clicked the illuminating button on my watch. It was 11:37. I was early. Shangri-La was down for the night. Not even birds moved on the island.
The access, about two hundred yards away from where I was hunkered down, was a different story. I spotted a small figure wobbling through the woods. He or she looked like a child from here, but I assumed it was Nikolai. I squinted but couldn’t make out any more details except that the person looked alone.
Feeling slightly more confident, I stayed low to the ground and crept toward the access. I caught my breath behind a thick oak tree and tugged my stun gun out of the plastic-lined neck pouch I had put it and the miniature tape recorder in to keep them dry and my hands free. I strapped the Z-Force to the belt of my stealth outfit—black turtleneck, black jeans with a black belt, hair pulled back in a black ponytail holder, and black tennis shoes left over from my waitressing days. I steeled myself and walked quietly and confidently across the open expanse of the boat launch and into the edge of the woods on the other side. I counted off a hundred yards as I stepped silently into the treed border and was only mildly frightened when a hand grabbed at me.
“About time you showed up!” a voice hissed. Nikolai’s round white face glowered at me in the darkness.
“I’m early.” I studied Nikolai. In the moonlit dark, his hair was a nondescript brown, and I guessed his eyes were also. He had a large head and puffed as he talked. The top of his cranium came to my boob level, which would make him a little shy of four feet. He was dressed in all black, too, and seemed injury-free and in perfect health save for the shortness of breath. This was interesting, since the last time I had seen him, he appeared to be suffering from a fatal gunshot wound on Shangri-La Island.
“If I’ve been waiting, you’re not early. Did you bring the tape recorder?”
I patted the neck pouch. “Right here.”
He acted peeved, but he wasn’t going to let that derail his fifteen minutes of fame. Hands on hips, he glared at me while he spoke in a tremulous voice underscoring his words. “Turn it on and settle back for the tale of a lifetime. It will amaze, thrill, and chill you. It will give you anticipation, perspiration, and exultation. You will feel delighted, excited, and ignited. When I tell you the tale of the Romanov Traveling Theater troupe, you will sigh, cry, and not want to say goodbye . . .”
This is how the talk went for over a half an hour, judging by the location of the moon. Nikolai told me how he founded the theater troupe when he failed out of clown school, how he recruited other disenfranchised clowns and circus acts into his troupe, what amazing acting abilities they had cultivated, how they branched out into a carnival show to attract children, and so on.
I was just about to interrupt him when he said something that made me sit up like a dahlia in the August sun: “. . . is when I met a fellow artist like myself with really good weed. He works over at the Last Resort, and we recruited him to play bongos at the Shangri-La show.”
“Is this fellow artist tall and lanky with curly brown hair, and does he talk like Shaggy from Scooby Doo?”
“Yes, he does, though that is simply one of the many faces he wears.” Nikolai stretched and brought his voice back to a less theatrical level. “That cat has a lot of fantastic ideas. He did agree that staging my own death would be a coup de theatre.”
Jed. He was involved in this. My stomach bravely fought an onslaught of acid, and then surrendered to my stress in a pitiful gurgle. Was Jed just another man hiding a sinister side? “That was quite the performance. So you staged your death on Shangri-La Island to get attention?”
“For the craft, madam, for the craft,” he said impatiently. “And for a little extra cash. But you are missing the point. I had my audience spellbound. It was the greatest possible moment in live theater.”
“Wait. Someone paid you to stage your death? Who and why?”
Nikolai grinned like the Cheshire cat and rubbed his hands together. “Let’s just say that someone had a criminal record and wanted to draw a little heat away. A harmless goal, really, but it made for spectacular theater, and now every officer in the county is looking for yours truly. I’m sure I would have thought of the plan on my own if he hadn’t presented the idea to me.”
I was mentally racing through past conversations with Jed, trying to remember if he had ever mentioned a criminal record. He might be goofy enough to talk Nikolai into staging his own death for the heck of it, but I don’t think he was creative or motivated enough to come up with the plan. “If who hadn’t presented the idea to you?” I demanded.
Nikolai was clearly exasperated that I was focusing on what he saw as a minor detail. He drew himself up to his full four feet. “Did Houdini tell his audience how he unlocked his chains while buried alive? Does David Copperfield reveal where his disappearing tigers go?”
Jesus, for rhetorical questions. I needed to come at this a different way, because once I knew who had put Nikolai up to staging his own death, I would have a better idea if Jason was my biggest problem, if he had accomplices, or if there was someone else up to no good who I didn’t even know about. I put the Jed issue onto the back burner for the moment and concentrated on distracting Nikolai into telling me who the person with the record was. “How’d you fool the paramedics into thinking you had been shot?”
He smiled arrogantly. “A stroke of genius.”
According to Nikolai’s story, the troupe’s lizard-eyed emcee had a prescription for Guanabenz, a medication used to treat high blood pressure. Some research revealed that a little more than the prescribed dose would slow the user’s heartbeat, contract his pupils, and put him in a semi-comatose state. Nikolai took the Guanabenz and had the emcee shoot him with blanks, then squished some fake blood pellets over his heart. Once the paramedics established he was stable but in serious condition, they applied pressure to stop his blood flow and took off.
“When we got to the hospital, I jumped off the gurney in the emergency room, did my trademark tap dance to the absolute astonishment of the medical staff, and was out the door, where the ringmaster was waiting in our tour van. It was beautifully executed at every point, and people will be talking about it for decades.” Nikolai polished his fists on his shirt and beamed.
I wouldn’t call that plan genius. It sounded like a string of dumb-and-luck beads to me. “You know, it’s illegal to use emergency services as props.”
“Hence, you and I meeting at midnight and the Romanov Traveling Theater troupe quietly disbanded and out of state for an unspecified period of time.”
“Do you know anything about the little girl who is missing?”
Nikolai looked genuinely surprised and wounded. “No. I am an artist, not a criminal, and I don’t hurt children.”
“So you got me out here so I could write the story of your fabulous death and escape?” What I really wanted to know is why I was so close to so much staged death. It wasn’t very funny.
“That’s part of it. The important part.” His voice and body seemed to shrink as he stepped outside of his theater guise and became a normal man weaseling for something. “The other part is I want you to get the box with the fake diamond planted in it for me. We can split the prize money seventy-thirty.”
I snorted involuntarily. I hadn’t seen that one coming. “Buddy, if I knew where the box was, I’d have found it by now, and I wouldn’t give you any.”
“That’s why you need me. I know where the box is. The troupe and I were staying at a patron’s acreage on the north side of this lake, and I watched three people in black div
e suits slip into the creek that leads into the quiet side of the lake very early Monday morning. They had a black box tied to a rock and dragged it into the lake with them. I would have missed them except that I was up early planning my magnificent death and escape.”
“Why didn’t you have someone from your troupe get it?”
“None of us know how to dive.”
“How do you know I know how to dive?”
Nikolai grunted. “Everyone knows that, m’dear. You’re the one who got tangled up on that ‘dead’ body in front of Shangri-La.”
“Humph.” On principle, I didn’t want to help him out, but there was a nice chunk of cash at stake. “Fifty-fifty.”
“Sixty-forty.”
“Fifty-fifty.”
“Fifty-five-forty-five.”
“Fifty-fifty. And you better take it, because I know where the creek is and I can just find the box all on my own now.”
“Okay, fifty-fifty. But you can’t find the box on your own without a little bit more information. Swear to me you will not take more than half the reward money for that box.”
I held out my hand. “I swear.”
“Okay, then, and that’s on tape.” He shook my hand with his child-sized free one and pointed at the recorder clipped to my waist, its tiny wheels spinning robotically in the starlight. “The reason no one has found the box yet is the divers wrapped it in a camouflage net. Their bubbles stopped about seventy-five yards straight out from the creek, so go due south from there and look for the netting on the bottom of the lake. Underneath that is our ticket to five thousand dollars.”
A movement up the shore caught my eye. “Unless someone else finds it first.” I pointed about two hundred yards east of us, where I saw one diver dragging another into the lake.
Nikolai chuckled softly. “Right on time. This one’s on me.”
I looked at him, amazed. I had written him off as a pompous actor midway through the interview, but he still had some secrets up his sleeve. I returned my attention to the two divers, and it took me a full minute before I realized what I was seeing. Someone was planting another body in the lake, and I didn’t know if this one was real or not.
From my perch on the edge of the woods, I couldn’t make out the details of the tableau two hundred yards up the shore, except that the standing diver wore a dark dive suit with writing on the rump and had on a yellow tank. He had his facemask on and his regulator in and was breathing and splashing loudly. With the oxygen on his back and the body in his arms, he was moving with all the grace of a Land of the Lost Sleestack.
When he took his first full step, I saw he had a noticeable limp. Jed. The suited body he was hauling was tied to a rock, and I realized it had to be another bogus body or a very light one, because no normal human could drag a full-suited person and a rock while fully outfitted to dive. I had a shrieking notion that Jed may have Peyton strapped to his back, but I ignored it. I actively refused to believe Jed was evil. He was planting fake bodies, and I thought I knew why.
I was still hoping for more information from Nikolai, though he was proving to be craftier than I had given him credit for. “Who is it?” I whispered under my breath.
“You’ll have to get the combination for that safe on your own, m’dear. I’m done for the night. I’ll meet you back here tomorrow to get my half of the reward. Same time, same rules.”
Nikolai took off into the woods, but I wasn’t paying attention to him. I wasn’t thinking about who had convinced him to pretend to die. I wasn’t looking at the bubbles that now marked the ghoulish diver’s underwater mission. I wasn’t even thinking about Peyton. I was having a real, honest-to-goodness, light-bulb-sparking-over-my-head epiphany. Nikolai had said that I’d need to discover the combination for that safe on my own. It had been an offhand choice of words, but it had more meaning for me. Of course. Regina’s code numbers were the combination to a safe: 23 left, 12 right, 11 left. Cosmic duh! I just had to find out what she meant by the kissing tree, and I’d have the jewels.
Unfortunately, I still had no charges to press against Jason. I would just have to settle for finding the jewels first—and an old-fashioned nose-thumbing in Jason’s general direction. Still, I couldn’t help considering what I had been dreading: that Jason was responsible for Peyton’s disappearance. Was I just becoming paranoid, attributing all the bad things in town to him because he had attacked me a few years ago? I couldn’t cloud my objectivity with a personal vendetta even though I had seen Jason with Peyton and Leylanda only the day before. What would a man in search of jewels want with a little girl?
Maybe the person with the criminal record who convinced Nikolai to shoot himself was a stranger, and maybe he had kidnapped Peyton for some unknown reason. Jason could simply be after the jewels in an aggressive fashion—not out of character for him. I needed more information. It seemed like my best bet was to speak with Leylanda tomorrow and find out if she knew more than she thought she did.
I mulled over hurrying back to my house now and calling the police to tell them someone was planting another body in the lake, but I had a heavy feeling that Jed wouldn’t get treated well by law enforcement. I told myself I wasn’t even 100 percent positive it was Jed. There could be more than one person in Otter Tail County with a limp. Anyways, I didn’t want to pull any person power away from the search for Peyton.
And if it was Jed, I wanted to hear his side of the story before I turned him in. There would be no confronting ghost divers tonight. I quietly hiked the forty-five minutes back to my house, waved wistfully at my bed through the window, and drove to town to crash on Gina’s couch.
I slept poorly, nightmares of Peyton on a fiery roller-coaster ride pockmarking the few hours of sleep I scratched out. I woke on
Gina’s couch near dawn, tired and crabby, Tiger Pop curled up on my feet and Luna snuffling at my ear. I took patient Luna for a long walk, noticing that the town was already wallpapered with posters of the missing seven-year-old and that either the searchers were up early or they had never gone to bed. The Channel 5 News crew was in front of the bank, interviewing an employee of Woodlawn Resort. I heard her say she was one of the coordinators of the local search party and that they weren’t going to stop looking until they found our girl. The camera lights glinted off the “Find Peyton” button on her chest, and she looked straight into the camera when she spoke. Small towns have big hearts for their children.
I snuffed the guilt bubble growing in me. I shouldn’t have slept at all last night. I should have hunted for Peyton. No. I couldn’t get this involved again. My dad had taught me the dangers of getting attached to another person. Besides, what could I do that the whole town wasn’t already doing? My time was best spent getting my hands on those jewels and nailing Jason. I brought Luna back to Gina’s and returned to the library just in time to open it at ten o’clock. Mrs. Berns was waiting outside and wearing a fuchsia running suit, which was ironic, since the only exercise she got didn’t require clothes.
“You look like warm barf. You sleepin’ okay?”
I turned the key to the front door and heard the tumbler click. Peyton’s face was staring sweetly back at me from the flyer placed on the door. “Matter of fact, I’m not, Mrs. Berns. My life has been a little hectic lately.” I was thinking that in addition to my worries for Peyton, my race to find the jewels, my investigative reporting, and my full-time library job, I also had two dear animals, a large lawn, and flower and vegetable gardens that I was neglecting. My life was running away without me.
“You should let some of your responsibility go, and I can help, dear. Here’s my resumé. I’m your new part-time librarian.”
I looked at the handwritten sheet of lined notebook paper she had shoved into my hand, the confetti edges still hanging on where she had ripped it out of a spiral tablet. In the center of the page, she had scribbled, “My name is Mrs. Berns, and I’m your new assistant librarian.” Very concise.
“Mrs. Berns, I don’t know if we have the
budget for another librarian.”
She cocked her head and waggled her finger at me. “You had enough money for you and Lartel, that wacko, swishy-pant-wearin’ freak, so you got enough money for you and me. You tell me if you got someone better beggin’ for this job.”
She did have a point in that the line of people who wanted to sit in a stone building on a beautiful Minnesota summer day for minimum wage was only slightly longer than the line of Otter Tail County men who wanted to go into counseling to improve their personal relationships. “Okay, Mrs. Berns. I’ll hire you on a trial basis. If you work out, I’ll set you up for regular hours.”
She clapped her hands and then rubbed them together. “You’re a smart girl. The first thing we’re going to do is get an adult section in here. All these namby-pamby books are a good front, but we know what people really want to read. And in back, you need a smoking room to draw the bar crowd. And this carpeting—”
“No! No changes! If you’re going to work here, you have to remember that I’m the boss. This is the public library, not a pleasure palace. Now, why don’t you start by shelving those books in the drop-off bin?”
I pointed at the box by the door, and she scowled at me, arms crossed on her chest, and then backed down. I sensed that this was the calm before the storm, and she was just gathering strength for a later confrontation. Until then, I was going to enjoy the help.
Mrs. Berns turned out to be an astonishingly efficient coworker when she wasn’t reading over patrons’ shoulders or goosing the male clientele. With her help, the library was looking tidy and more organized than it had since I started in March. It was an hour before closing, and there was nothing left to do.
“Why don’t you go home, dear,” she suggested. “You can get a little sleep or whatnot. I’ll get these people out of here at closing and lock up.”