Missing Mark

by Julie Kramer

  But Noreen insisted, saying we’d make it a “private” suspension. By then I didn’t care anymore. A day away from the station was actually starting to sound like an overdue vacation.

  ——

  GARNETT’S PREDICTION OF things getting worse continued to play out the next morning when I opened the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and saw a picture of me being physically ousted from the comedy club in the local gossip column. The story noted that the entire video could be seen on their Web site and also reported a rumor that I’d been suspended.

  Noreen was quoted as saying Channel 3 doesn’t comment on personnel matters.

  et eternal rest be given to the departed.”

  Father Mountain was presiding over a double funeral for Mark and his mother, arranged by the Post family. Low-budget compared to the almost-wedding. A trio of tasteful floral wreaths reading MOTHER, SON, FIANCÉ decorated the closed caskets.

  Short obits. No lunch. Small turnout.

  I went to pay my respects even though I wasn’t being paid to attend in my role as suspended journalist. But I’d slept late and that was almost worth the grief over Noreen.

  For the funeral, Madeline wore a short black dress with a small black veil as if unconsciously spoofing the wedding she never had. She appeared in genuine mourning, yet also held her head high, relieved to have a reasonable explanation for why her groom pulled a no-show on the most important day of her life.

  That clarification seemed especially important to Madeline, maybe even more important than exactly how Mark ended up dead. Since I’d met her, Madeline had seemed tormented that her groom’s disappearance was a rejection of her. Spurned. Jilted. Ditched. Somehow my finding his body in a shallow grave validated that she remained undamaged goods. So while she was unlucky in love, she was not unworthy.

  “While on earth we cannot understand the evil amidst us,” Father Mountain was delivering the eulogy since no one else offered.

  Madeline’s mother and brother sat beside her, each holding one hand. I saw no sign of the bodyguard and figured his gig ended when Mark proved no menace.

  “Jean Lefevre saw beauty in the world around her and cherished flowers as a gift from the Almighty,” her priest continued.

  The best man, Gabe Murray, got there late and scooted in next to me even though the church was practically empty. He whispered did I think there was any chance the police would pay him back the money Mark owed him out of the safe-deposit cash? That nugget hadn’t been reported in the news, so I figured the local gossip grapevine to be at work. I ignored Gabe’s question and wished I’d stayed home, but I also know sometimes the killer shows up at his victim’s funeral.

  The police know this, too, and a plainclothes detective casually waited in the back of the church. We caught each other’s eye, but gave no overt sign of recognition. I first noticed him lingering near the guest book, watching who did or didn’t sign in. Upstairs in the choir loft, another cop discreetly videotaped all the observers.

  Except for Libby, the maid of honor, I didn’t recognize the other female mourners. Mostly older women, probably friends of Mrs. Lefevre.

  My comic nemeses, Jason Hill and Chad Griswold, sat in a pew in the middle of the church along with a few other performers from the comedy club. They looked uneasy, like they’d rather be joking than praying. They were probably trying to prove that brotherhood-of-comedians thing and downplay any talk of jealous rivalry.

  I was also uncomfortable, since I’d promised Miles I’d stay away from those guys. But I felt I had more of a right to be at the funeral than Chad, who claimed to barely know Mark. And if I left now, in the middle of the ceremony, people might talk.

  “Mark Lefevre saw humor in the world around him and cherished laughter as a gift from the Almighty,” Father Mountain told his flock.

  The row from the comedy club nodded in agreement and gave one another friendly punches on the shoulders in a display of comic camaraderie.

  But Father Mountain’s remark about the gift of humor also elicited a sound best resembling a snort of indignation. I glanced behind me and that’s when I saw her sitting near a stained-glass window depicting Madonna and child.

  Mark’s old girlfriend.

  When Sigourney Nelson stood for the Our Father, she looked like an extremely pregnant scarlet woman in a snug, screaming-red T-shirt with black leggings. Her belly was obvious, but at least covered, probably because we were in church.

  Father Mountain sprinkled the caskets with holy water and incense and said a prayer about an escort of angels. The funeral workers wheeled the Lefevre bodies out of the church to the sound of an uplifting tune on the organ. The best man reacted to Sigourney’s lack of waistline with widened eyes.

  But Madeline walked by Sigourney like she’d never seen her, or even a picture of her, ever before. Face blindness in action.

  I missed the graveside ceremony because I wanted to steer clear of Jason and Chad. They seemed to feel the same way and avoided eye contact with me on their way out.

  I also had another reason for skipping the interment. I wanted to chat up Sigourney. I unobtrusively clicked a full-body photo of her with my cell phone to document her pregnancy. Then a head shot. She’d stopped dying her hair black, trading her goth look for a mousy but natural brown. I walked up and introduced myself.

  “Yeah, I know you,” she said. “I’ve seen you on TV.”

  “Did you know I’ve been looking for you?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to be on TV.” Sigourney used both hands to frame her stomach. “This baby’s already added forty pounds to my girlish figure and I hear the camera adds another ten.”

  She turned and walked away, a defiant look on her face.

  “I’m trying to piece together Mark’s final hours,” I said, catching up with her outside the church. “When was the last time you two spoke?” She continued to ignore me. “Come on, Sigourney. You must still feel something for him. You came to his funeral.”

  That got her attention. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she said. “I came to say a prayer for his mother. Not him. Far as I’m concerned, no amount of prayer will keep that man out of hell.”

  I was right. She still did have feelings for him. Contempt.

  To keep her talking, I apologized for causing her to miss the burial service, but she just laughed. “Don’t you worry about that, I got plans to come back later, with my baby. Together we’re going to spit on his grave.”

  That remark didn’t leave much doubt as to who the father of her child was.

  And I was starting to have a strong suspicion who Mark’s killer was. Sigourney suddenly owned the leading motive. But if she was guilty of murder, she certainly had style.

  I stopped short of thinking he asked for it, but admired her irony in burying him near the place where he was supposed to be married to another woman. A murderess with chutzpah. Take that, you philanderer!

  I pressed her for a phone number in case I came across some new information, or in case I was actually able to build a criminal case around her, but she refused.

  “Sorry, no interest in being on TV.”

  I suspected her goal was not so much avoiding a television appearance as avoiding a prison sentence.

  As she awkwardly fit her stomach under the steering wheel of a compact car, I told her I knew about the kiss in the parking lot.

  She denied knowing what I was talking about.

  “A witness saw you kiss Mark the night he died,” I said.

  “You’re confusing me with someone else.”

  But when I confronted Sigourney about being a registered guest at the hotel during the rehearsal dinner, she admitted that she’d hoped to see her old beau that night, but had fallen asleep.

  “Wait till you’re in your first trimester,” she groused, patting her belly.

  I made a note of her license plate as she drove away. I didn’t try to follow her, because if she had already killed two people, I didn’t want to be Father Mountain’s next f
uneral.

  he next morning, my “suspension” over, I returned to the newsroom, waved at the assignment desk, but said nothing to Noreen. Half an hour later she brought me a high-end coffee drink from down the block and tried to engage me in a discussion about the fish story, but I wasn’t biting.

  A couple of hours later, I decided feuding with her wasn’t worth the effort.

  THE AIR WAS brisk so I was glad for the life jacket over my sweatshirt out on the boat that afternoon. Malik seemed comfortable in the outdoors gear he often wore when doing live shots in inclement weather.

  “The deepest point of the lake is over there.” Russ Nesbett pointed somewhere in the direction of open water. “Eighty-four feet straight down.”

  The developments in the missing-groom case, as well as the drug bust next door, had distracted me from the upcoming largemouth bass contest. Russ had insisted on taking me out for a spin in his new bass boat, sleek, shallow, and speedy. He hoped to net some publicity for the town.

  “But not all publicity is good publicity,” he explained, confiding that he wished I hadn’t done the meth-neighbor story because now viewers might think White Bear Lake has a drug problem and that could affect property values.

  “I’ll keep that in mind next time.”

  As the boat banked, a spray of water hit my face. I wiped it off, smiling politely, while telling Russ that I was feeling cold. Instead of heading back to shore, he handed me a wool blanket. Malik looked amused at my discomfort.

  “So how long could you live if you fell in this water?” I asked. I wasn’t trying to be negative. I just like knowing my odds.

  “That depends,” Russ said. “The water temperature’s probably around sixty-five degrees. If you lived long enough to die of hypothermia, that might take a few hours. But you could die in a matter of minutes if you drowned or suffered cardiac arrest or your larynx went spastic.”

  All unpleasant-sounding ways to go.

  “Holding on to something that floats, like a capsized boat,” he continued, “would help prevent the loss of body heat. You lose more heat when you swim or tread water.”

  I was glad I wore a life jacket. And I made it a point to sit low in the boat, especially on the turns.

  “Let me show you some of the basics of bass fishing.” Russ steered the boat near the shallows and pulled out a rod and reel. “Bass like hiding under sunken logs.”

  “I thought the season hadn’t opened yet.”

  I was looking for a plausible excuse for why we shouldn’t do this. Calling the sport boring wouldn’t faze him. He probably heard that from dames all the time.

  “We’re just going to practice your cast.” Russ showed me that his blue-speckled fly had no hook. “We’ll use this, though bass really like to bite on live crawfish.”

  He demonstrated how to hop the bait across the shallows into the shade, then handed the fishing rod to me.

  I recalled my husband had been especially fond of, even superstitious about, a particular red-speckled fly. He’d once landed a lunker with it. Not just a fish story, either, I’d seen photographic evidence. I smiled at how he’d employed that angler trick of holding the fish out toward the camera to make his catch look bigger. I now regretted giving away his tackle box and wished I’d kept that special lure.

  “Just a minute,” Malik called out.

  He got repositioned low on the bottom of the boat to take no chance that I’d knock his camera overboard while I was casting. To save money, Channel 3 recently dropped insurance on most of its equipment. Malik knew if he lost the camera, he wouldn’t be fired until the station worked the replacement cost out of him.

  He hoisted the camera to his shoulder. “I’m ready.”

  Then Russ reached his arms around my shoulders to demonstrate how to pull back and flick my wrist. “Gentle. Gentle.”

  I didn’t answer, but concentrated on achieving a perfect cast so I could thank him and we could head back to shore.

  “We’d make a great team,” he said. “With your media connections and my business know-how, I know we could land the Governor’s Fishing Opener next year and really put this town on the tourist map.”

  To distract him from thinking of me as his public-relations maven, I asked if we could look at some of the historic lake houses from the water on our way back. I knew many of the estates started as summer homes for St. Paul’s elite in the late nineteenth century. But Russ filled me in on vivid lake lore like how famous gangsters such as Ma Barker, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Al Capone hid out in the fashionable resort town during Prohibition. And how the lake got its name from an Indian legend that a Sioux warrior saved his beloved by killing a white bear and the animal’s spirit still lives in the area.

  I must have looked skeptical about a polar bear being this far off course, but it occurred to me that the lake’s namesake was most likely an albino black bear. By then Russ was insisting that Mark Twain even referenced the tale in Life on the Mississippi.

  “And that’s an American classic,” he added.

  That would also be easy to check, I thought, confident the volume sat on my bookshelves at home.

  We were approaching the Post family’s landmark Peninsula House. I hadn’t seen the view from the water before. Situated on a cliff, the mansion looked formidable. Russ steered the boat around the point, emphasizing the coveted shoreline location. I encouraged Malik to shoot exteriors, just in case we ever needed them.

  Next Russ pointed out the White Bear Yacht Club, and I paid close attention because Madeline and Mark’s wedding reception was supposed to have been held there. I tuned out Mr. Civic Booster’s running commentary of all the celebrities who had played golf on that course, to admire the vast wall windows in the clubhouse. As part of the lake history Russ mentioned that F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, rented rooms at the yacht club one summer in the twenties before being kicked out for disruptive parties.

  Russ’s historic gossip was starting to make me feel special, sharing the geographic shadow of noted authors. Especially when he told me that Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams” (generally considered the precursor to The Great Gatsby) was set in White Bear Lake.

  “Except he called it Black Bear Lake in his story,” Russ explained.

  I tried discussing what he thought Fitzgerald was saying about women and greed in Gatsby, but it became clear that Russ wasn’t much of a reader, just a collector of local trivia.

  That became further apparent when he echoed a hooker’s cheer, “Go, Bears!,” from the 1996 movie Fargo, and proudly explained, “That came from White Bear Lake High School.”

  I’d forgotten that scene and made a mental note to try to stump Garnett with it.

  Yet I walked on literary air when I returned home. With so many bedroom communities popping up overnight around suburban shopping centers and convenient freeway access, it felt nice to be living in a community rooted in real history. After all, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald were among America’s most influential novelists. And if White Bear Lake was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. I was even considering talking to a real estate agent once sweeps month ended.

  I flopped onto my couch and flipped through my copy of Life on the Mississippi and sure enough, Mark Twain did visit the area. I read his discourse with great interest until I got to the part where he wrote “connected with White Bear Lake is a most idiotic Indian legend.”

  Idiotic? My newly adopted hometown? I slammed the pages of his American classic, thinking, How judgmental of the old coot.

  adeline ran her hand across a shelf of books and complimented my fiction collection. She pulled out a copy of Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera and flipped through the pages. Her choice, a novel featuring an emotionally tortured adversary with a disfigured face, fascinated me, given her diagnosis of prosopagnosia.

  “Yeah, if this TV thing goes south,” I said, “I’m hoping to be a librarian.”

  She lifted her eyebrows in surprise at my answer. “
Come on, Riley not a writer?”

  “Too solitary.” I shook my head. “At least librarians get to mingle at the check-out desk and explore the stacks.”

  “I’d like to write a novel, but right now I’m working on short stories.” Madeline explained that she held degrees in both English and business. “English for me. Biz for my mother. She says we all have a duty to understand the workings of money so we can put it to good use. But I’m more drawn to words than numbers. Statistics lack soul.”

  “Madeline, that last line of yours is quite profound. I think you might have a natural flair for writing.” Better to encourage that career path than a job dealing with customers and having to remember faces.

  “Oh, what do you know about my writing?” She said it dismissively, but blushed in a pleased way.

  “You wrote a six-word novel. Remember your want ad that brought us together? ‘For Sale: Wedding Dress. Never Worn.’ Your work rivaled Hemingway’s. Even if yours was self-published.”

  She looked puzzled at the compliment and I explained that literary legend had it, Ernest Hemingway, arguably the finest American novelist of the twentieth century, wrote six words—“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”—to win a bar bet among other writers for the shortest story.

  Silently, Madeline considered my words and the very direct comparison to the wedding-dress want ad that started our odyssey.

  “Some say he considered it his best work, Madeline.”

  Then I dropped the subject because I’d made a mental vow not to discuss her deceased fiancé tonight and we were veering close to that forbidden topic. Mark might be buried, but Madeline’s emotions were still very close to the surface.

  She and I were riding together to a charity benefit in downtown St. Paul honoring the 125th anniversary of the Schubert Club, formed to salute classical music. Tonight’s event included a chamber concert featuring a world-class cellist, followed by a four-course dinner.