October Fest: A Murder-by-Month Mystery

by Jess Lourey

  The answer was immediate. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.” Johnny stood on the other side of the door sporting a tuxedo that hugged his broad shoulders like a lover. His beautiful hair was curling thickly around his collar, and he pushed it back impatiently and stepped to the side, making room for me to enter. When he moved, I saw that he’d lit the fireplace, along with hundreds of candles. The Jacuzzi, thankfully, was not bubbling.

  “How dare you,” I said.

  The look of embarrassed expectancy slipped off his face, replaced by confusion. “What?”

  “You think just because you reserve a room and buy some candles that I’ll sleep with you?”

  He flinched as if I’d slapped him. “Mira, that’s not it. I just wanted a quiet night with you, on neutral ground. To talk.”

  “Talk?” I jabbed a finger toward the candles behind him.

  He dropped his gaze and ran his fingers through his hair. “I should know better than to listen to Mrs. Berns,” he said under his breath. He brought his eyes back to mine, and like always, looking into those deep blues made my heart skip a beat. “Look, Mira. I didn’t do this so you’d sleep with me. I’d love that, yeah, but that’s not what tonight is about. Just give me a chance. One evening, fully-clothed, to convince you that I’m the right guy.”

  The angry, Tourette’s-dusted mice in my brain were whizzing and scratching, goading me to say something mean or inappropriately funny to push Johnny away, again and for good. Before they could get the better of me, I threw myself into the room and bulldozed Johnny out of the way so I could slam the door shut. My mood swing gave me whiplash. “Okay. I’m in. But don’t expect anything.” Damn. One mouse must have escaped.

  His grin broke open. He spread out his arms so I could take in the whole room. I couldn’t resist the impish smile on his face. I turned to follow his gaze and saw a candlelit table with a white tablecloth. On top rested a gorgeous blooming African violet alongside a frosted bottle of sparkling grape juice and two champagne glasses, a pizza from Zorbaz—cheese and green olive, if my nose was not mistaken—and enough Nut Goodie bars to kill a diabetic. Could he hear my heart breaking? Not wanting him to see the happiness on my face, I scurried toward the table.

  “This is nice,” I murmured, wondering how many slices of pizza I could eat without crossing a line.

  He strolled past me, and I felt the heat of his body skimming my back as he moved to pull out a chair. “Madam.” He indicated the seat and smiled boyishly. My lips couldn’t resist. They smiled back before welcoming a boatload of pizza and chocolate.

  I’d like to say I grew closer to Johnny that night, but it turns out I already knew him pretty well. Over the course of the meal, he filled me in on how his mom was doing and asked me about mine, told me about his plan for returning to the University of Madison next fall to begin his PhD in Horticulture, and gently probed me for more information about my past. His voice soothed the angry mice, and it wasn’t long until I’d forgotten my misgivings about the night.

  As our conversation fell into an easy give and take, I found myself desiring more than words. Without warning, my six-month dry spell had snuck up on my cowardice, slapped a chloroform rag over its mouth, and stuffed it in the closet. I became fixated on Johnny’s lips, those strong cupid’s bows, and I imagined what they would feel like on my neck, my lower back, my breasts.

  Suddenly, I noticed that his mouth had stopped moving. “What?” I shot my gaze guiltily upward.

  He smiled. “I said, are you okay? You’ve been quiet the last couple minutes. Do I have something on my teeth?”

  I blushed and wiped the drool off my chin. “I’m fine.” There’s something really hot about a guy who respects you enough to provide your favorite meal and then backs off and waits for you to come to him. Problem was, I didn’t know how to do that sober. A couple drinks in me and I’d be on him like white on rice, but without alcohol, I wasn’t sure of the protocol.

  I began by trying to shoot him mind rays suggesting he kiss me. After a few minutes, it became apparent that wasn’t the most efficient method. And I flirted about as well as a pig wore shoes, so that only left the direct route. Get to your feet and kiss the man. Just do it. Take your future into your own hands, I told myself, and choose something good for once. I slammed back the last of my sparkling grape juice and stood, all glorious woman going after her man.

  I tried, I really did, but halfway out of my seat, my nerves took over and forced me back down with an oof. I tossed some sort of half-hearted wink in the middle to try and distract from the failed attempt. Probably I looked like a twitchy ventriloquist’s dummy, or a party balloon that someone gave up on. My dorkiness made me sick to my stomach, and I became acutely aware of the heat of the fireplace smelling like a hundred lighter flames and the candles reflecting my embarrassment back to me.

  Johnny eyed me quizzically. “You sure you’re okay, Mira? You look a little green.”

  I was feeling a little green. Who corrects themselves in mid-move? The only thing more embarrassing would have been to fall on him, or to snart midstep. Why not try all three? It’d be a trifecta of humiliation. Why was my heart racing? And since when had Johnny been standing over me? I thought he was across the table. How’d he reached me so quickly? Was he making the move? Were my lips glossy? I made a seductive prepucker. I could still pull this off. I could redeem myself. But gawd was it hot in here.

  “I think you need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Huh?” If there was a list of things you don’t want to hear when you think the man of your dreams is about to kiss you, that would be at the top. Before I could protest, he was leading me toward the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of myself in the wall mirror and was dismayed to see I was the color of St. Patrick’s Day beer. Urp. That was it. The thought of beer pushed me over the edge. I leaned over the toilet, expelling a torrent of purple grape juice, red pizza, and brown chocolate.

  “Don’t worry, it’s probably just a stomach bug,” Johnny said, holding my hair back. “When I brought my mom in for her checkup, the doctor said it was going around.”

  The sweetness in his voice mortified me. I reached for the toilet handle to erase the evidence, but it was immediately replaced by more. Twenty minutes of heaving later, I was spent, having only the energy to calculate how long it would take to obtain a passport so I could fly to India to officially pursue my future as an untouchable. Johnny handed me a warm, wet towel, and I cleaned off my face. He left the bathroom, closing the door to give me some privacy, and returned a few minutes later, knocking softly before handing me a toothbrush and miniature toothpaste from the front desk. I accepted both gratefully.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, after I was as cleaned up as a person could be after involuntarily expelling olives through her nose. My throat felt like a sand truck had driven through it. I couldn’t look at him. “Is this your worst date ever?”

  He smiled, his eyes twinkling. “No, my worst date ever was the first night at the State Fair when you ran away before I could kiss you.”

  I thrust out my hand in horror.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to try and kiss you now. Just come over to the bed and lie down. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “I want to go home,” I moaned, trying to stand. A wave of dizziness pushed me back onto the closed toilet seat. “Or, maybe I’ll just lie down for a little while.”

  “Good idea,” he said, hoisting me into his arms and carrying me to the soft bed. “Tiger Pop and Luna can get out if they want to?”

  I nodded, sinking into the mattress.

  “OK. I have to leave for work at 5:00 a.m. I’ll head out early to check on them first, okay? Just sleep.” He felt my forehead and then covered me with a spare blanket before stretching out behind me, one arm draped loosely across my waist, reminding me I wasn’t alone.

  And that’s all I remembered until I heard the scream.

  My disorientation was total. The room was black. It didn�
��t smell familiar, and the digital clock was in the wrong place telling me some crap about 5:34. Where was I, and why had I been dreaming of moving to West Bengal? That’s when it came back to me in smelly waves of shame. Argh. I was pretty sure Johnny had seen me hurl last night. The humiliation was smothering.

  And then it pierced my ears again, a scream as chilling as morgue water, the noise that had woken me. I sprung out of bed and was shoved back by a Mack truck of a headache. I powered through and felt my way to the door, focusing on a sliver of grayish light glowing through the curtains. I found the doorknob and turned it, welcoming the fresh and chilly lake air. West Battle’s waves were choppy and dark, the sun an hour and a half from rising. The only brightness issued from a lonely light in the parking lot. People were beginning to stir about in their rooms, but as of yet only two doors were open, mine and the one immediately to my right. A cleaning cart was resting between our rooms. I skirted it and entered the adjacent room gingerly, certain the scream had emanated from there.

  I was paralyzed by what I saw.

  In the middle of the room lay a crumpled male figure. A cleaning woman knelt next to the man, searching for a pulse. It was then that I noticed the jellied outline of a clear plastic bag over his head and the preternatural stillness that only death can bring.

  I raced to the bedside phone to dial 911.

  “Already called,” the cleaning lady said. “Besides, there’s no hurry.”

  Her calmness unsettled me. “Were you the one who just screamed?”

  “Yeah,” she said, leaning back on her heels. “This room was supposed to be empty. I was startled, is all. But you clean hotel rooms for enough years, and nothing really scares you anymore.” She indicated the plastic bag. “Must have suffocated himself. It’s tight around his neck.”

  I didn’t want to get too close, didn’t want to see whose face it was, but I found myself tiptoeing around the body at a safe distance, just the same. And that’s how I came to stare into the dead eyes of Bob Webber, the blogger who would never again care if the world spelled his name with one or two b’s.

  “Shit. I owe Curtis ten bucks.”

  The familiar voice at the door yanked me sharply from the frozen horror on Mr. Webber’s chalk-white face. One edge of his forehead appeared darker than the rest and soft, like he’d hit the ground hard. He was still dressed in his sad, shabby coat. “Mrs. Berns?” I asked. She looked tiny in the doorway, tiny and crazy-sexy in thigh-high stockings and a black teddy under a translucent, feather-lined robe. “What are you doing here?”

  She took in my bedhead and bloodshot eyes courtesy of an evening of power hurling. “We’ll have the talk when you get a little bit older, honey. We have a more important situation on our hands. You just cost me ten cucumbers.”

  Bernard, the stuffy reporter who yesterday had been in her room at the Senior Sunset, materialized behind her, looking ridiculously bird-legged in boxer shorts and a white v-neck T-shirt.

  “Wah?” I asked.

  She crossed her arms and leaned into the door frame. “We have a Mira and Corpse pool at the Senior Sunset. Curtis Poling bet you couldn’t make it through Octoberfest weekend without finding a dead body. I figured if I steered you away from your usual haunts and kept a close eye on you, I’d win the bet. Turns out you can’t trick luck as bad as yours, sweetie pie.”

  “Wait, is that why you talked Johnny into bringing me here? To win a ten-dollar bet?” Nothing like indignation to arrest your attention.

  “Pah.” She strode over to the corpse and knelt down to stare at his face. “It’s that Leeson boy we should feel sorry for. How’d you humiliate yourself this time? And who’s the wormfood here?”

  “Bob Webber,” Bernard said from behind us.

  “One b or two?” I asked, staring at the face of the deceased and wondering why he looked so frightened. My experience with corpses is that most of them left the world with a disgusted looked on their faces, a final “Really? Is that all?” Bob Webber, on the other hand, looked like his last moments had been awfully scary.

  “Two.”

  “Well now, how do you know him?” Mrs. Berns asked, turning toward her date and sounding peeved.

  Bernard cleared his throat. “He operated The Body Politic blog. Well-known in the business of political reporting, a reputation for mendacity.”

  I didn’t like the guy’s arrogance, and I didn’t trust his aim with big words. “Mendacity or tenacity?”

  “My dear girl, he didn’t give up when he had a story. He was efficacious.” He talked slowly to give me the opportunity to dig out my thinking cap.

  I pointed at the plastic bag sealed tightly around the corpse’s neck. “Was he going through tough times?”

  “I didn’t know him personably,” Bernard answered.

  I stared from Bernard to Mrs. Berns and back again. “Where did you two meet?”

  “Gas station.” Mrs. Berns stood and grabbed Bernard’s hand. “Time to go, honey.” She shot her most threatening look to the cleaning lady, which was difficult to pull off in her Victoria’s Oldest Secret regalia. “We were never here.”

  The maid rolled her eyes and reached into her apron for a squirt of Purel, leaving me to decide if I also should never have been here. Lots of questions get asked when you’re standing near a dead body, suicide or no. Besides, my eyes and throat were scratchy and my stomach was still unsettled. I backed out of the room, pausing long enough outside to lift the room list from the maid’s cart and slide it into my jeans pocket before returning to room 20 to retrieve my car keys and purse.

  My plan was to scurry down the walkway and never look back, but once past the cart I was slowed by an agitated-looking Grace, barreling toward me. I stepped aside to let her enter room 18, her hands shaking as she slid in the electronic key card. She didn’t make eye contact with me, acted, in fact, as if she dearly hoped she were invisible. When the door glided closed behind her, I had enough time to note that both the beds were made. I returned to room 19 for a moment, peeping my head in. The maid was dragging on an Eve’s Slim in the entirely smoke-free motel, studying the body in the center as if she were considering whether to get one for her den.

  “Did you clean room 18 yet?”

  She shook her head in the negative. “This is my first room of the day. It was supposed to be empty,” she repeated.

  I thanked her and made my way to my car just as a wailing ambulance pulled into the lot, followed by a navy blue Battle Lake police cruiser with its cherries on. What I spied in the police car froze me until a basic instinct kicked in. I zipped to my left and launched between two four-door sedans. I skinned my knees in the process but it would be completely worth it if I was right and that was Gary Wohnt, former chief of the Battle Lake Police Department, persona non grata since August, behind the wheel of the cop car.

  “You okay?”

  I looked into the clear brown eyes of a man in his late fifties. He was sitting cross-legged in the space between the two cars I was now occupying. His clothes were worn but serviceable, and if not for the smell of BO and his odd location, he looked like Everyman. “Why’re you sitting between two cars in a parking lot?”

  “Why’re you?”

  He had a point. I shot a glance over my shoulder to see if the cop car was parking nearby. “I tripped.”

  “Pretty spectacular trip,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Not that you asked, but when I need to hide from the police, I find it most effective to not draw attention to myself. For example, I don’t start my hair on fire, yell ‘help,’ or leap into the air and land between two cars like a handicapped gazelle.”

  “Point taken.” I looked away from the emergency vehicles to study him for a moment. “Hey, were you one of the protestors at the debate yesterday?”

  “I am.” He held out his hand. “Randy Martineau. Pleased to meet you.”

  I shook it. “You get a chance to talk to Swydecker and Glokkmann at the debate?”

  “Swydecker, yes. Glokkmann, no
. She executed her usual escape.”

  “You at the motel to corner her?”

  “Something like that.” He nodded toward the far end of the parking lot. The Battle Lake police car and ambulance pulled around to the other side, out of sight. “I think you’re in the clear.”

  I relaxed marginally and tried to push my hair out of my eyes, but it moved as a mass, more post-hurling-restless-sleep-dreadlock than tress. “Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to shower, brush my teeth with a sander, and get to work.”

  He nodded, seeming to give my list serious consideration. “If you duck behind that yellow VW and then scurry toward the Hummer, there’s a line of bushes that should get you all the way to the back of the parking lot.”

  “Thanks,” I said. It wasn’t until I was safely behind the wheel of my car and out of town that I wondered how he knew where I’d parked. That concern sparked a realization: the vaguely familiar man I had passed on the stairwell last night on my way to the Night of Humiliation with Johnny had been Bob Webber. He hadn’t been carrying any bags, and if I replayed the brief encounter in my head, I remembered him appearing agitated, though I’d been too deep in my own problems to make more than passing note of it.

  I pulled the room list I had pinched from my pocket and scanned it while driving. It consisted of three columns: the first with room numbers, the second with last names, and the third with duration of stay. Glokkmann and Swydecker snagged my attention first. They were both staying on the same level as I had and were checking out today. I found Webber, but his room had been on the other side of the hotel, right next to the lobby door: room 4. And he was supposed to have checked out yesterday morning. What room had I seen him come from last night? And more pressing, what in the hell was Gary Wohnt doing back in town?