Dead Hot Shot (Loon Lake Fishing Mysteries) (2 page)

He-l-l-o-o,” said Osborne, raising his voice as he ambled towards the front counter. The interior of the shop had a way of reminding him of the shadows cast by ancient hemlocks: all sun was blocked out. Mildred saved on electricity, too.

Though the store appeared empty, he was well aware that the old woman was, as always when there were no customers, hunkered down in a beat-up armchair in a sitting room off to the right — one eye on a small portable television set, the other watching the shop through a half-open door. Sure enough, he heard the rustle of fabric. Then the door squeaked back and Mildred shuffled into the room, pushing her bulk into the tight space behind the counter. She wore a shapeless black shift that fell almost to the floor, skimming the top of scuffed black oxfords and exposing thick ankles encased in beige orthopedic stockings.

“Yeah, whatcha need?” Her voice was low, gruff. In all the years that Osborne had been coming by for a license or some groceries, not once had he seen Mildred smile or heard her greet him by name. Nor did she appear to change, not even with age.

Mildred Taggert’s head was remarkably large, large even for the imposing monolith of her body. Her face was doughy and puckered where dimples might have been (though Osborne found that hard to imagine). She had a nose that crumpled up and back and was too small for the width of her face. As if words were an extravagance, her lips were thin lines that barely moved when she spoke. Small, round, black lenses hid her eyes, lenses so dark he wondered how she could see anything in the dimly lit shop.

But Mildred’s hair made up for the homeliness of her face and figure. Streaked in shades of black, white and grey, it had a wondrous sheen that reminded Osborne of the silk thread used on bamboo fly rods. The old woman herself seemed pleased with that hint of beauty: she let her hair flow back from her face in waves, then twisted it into a soft bun, which she anchored with an ebony spike.

• • •

Osborne waited for Mildred to position herself behind the counter. He knew what to expect as the script rarely changed. First that growl of “Whatcha need?” His answer to which was followed by the pointing of an arthritic finger in the direction of the requested item. Next a grunted “That’s all?” And she rang up your purchase. If the request was for a license, she was just as succinct: “Name. Address. Birth date. Social Security.” If someone balked at giving their Social Security number to an old woman they didn’t know, her answer was blunt: “No Social, no license.”

“Good morning, Mildred,” said Osborne, determined to shake an extra word or two out of her today. “Gorgeous morning for a Thanksgiving, don’t you think?”

“Whatcha need?”

“Well, I appear to have lost my hunting license and was hoping you could fix me up with a duplicate.”

Before she could grunt an answer, they heard a loud crash in the far corner of the shop. “Whaddya do this time, Frances?” said Mildred, scowling as she leaned across the counter to look down the aisle.

The brown, burnished face of the young Indian girl showed itself above a stack of boxes near the refrigerator at the back of the store. Her eyes were wide and worried as she mumbled, “I just — I didn’t mean to — this box fell.”

“I know that — question is whaddya break?” Osborne didn’t like Mildred’s tone.

“Um, I’m checking — maybe salad dressing? But I’ll get it cleaned up, Ms. Taggert.”

Osborne watched as Frances scurried to pick up several jars and bottles that had rolled along the floor. She glanced up suddenly and caught him staring at her. She looked away fast as if expecting him to bark at her, too.

“Frances,” said Osborne, his voice gentle, “what do you think of our new dentist — the one who took over my practice?”

“She sees ‘im just like the state says she has to,” said Mildred.

“Thank you, Mildred, but I was talking to Frances,” said Osborne, without taking his eyes off the girl. She had grown since he’d last seen her. Her face was fuller with an angular beauty of its own: remarkable cheekbones, a square jaw and a wide, generous mouth that drooped to the left when she smiled. If she smiled. Osborne could never help thinking poor Frances, poor Josie — those poor girls — The only time he ever saw the sisters was when they were working in the shop — never outdoors, never with friends their own age. And he knew Mildred could not be easy to live with.

Before Frances could answer Osborne’s question, Mildred was demanding: “Name? Address? Birth date? Social Security? Ten bucks.” With a sigh that implied he knew she knew his name, Osborne provided the information.

“Where’s Frances going to school next year?” he said as he opened his wallet to reach for a bill. “She’ll be in college, right?”

“Ask her,” said Mildred with a dismissive jab of her thumb. But when Osborne looked back down the aisle, the girl was gone. She had vanished behind the curtained French doors that led to the living areas of the old house.

• • •

Deciding to let Mike out of the car before he left, he put the dog on a leash and guided him along the alley and past the storage barn to a vacant lot. God forbid Mike poop in Mildred’s yard. Not that it mattered — Mildred’s passion for raccoons included a live one, which she kept in a wire cage at the front of the barn. Attached to the cage was a white sign painted with yellow flowers and the name “Daisy.” The cage was elevated so the animal’s droppings littered the ground beneath it.

In Osborne’s eyes, Mildred’s affection for her pet redeemed her crabbiness: somewhere under all that black fabric and behind the dark glasses, the woman must have a heart. He just hoped that that miniscule evidence of warmth extended to the Dark Sky sisters.

But this morning, as Osborne neared the cage, he was surprised to see that the cage door was slightly ajar and Daisy nowhere in sight. He stopped, holding the leash tight. Raccoons are canny — quite capable of jimmying the kind of latch used on the cage. Canny and confrontational. The last thing he needed was for Mike to tangle with an angry raccoon.

Looking up, he checked to be sure the animal hadn’t found its way onto a branch of the old oak that hung over the fence from the house next door. He peered up at the barn, wondering if the critter might be inside. No sign of the raccoon, but the barn was interesting. Contrary to expectations, Mildred appeared to have put some money into the place: new windows gleamed in the sunlight. Casement windows in new frames no less. Expensive.

Of course, the outer walls hadn’t been touched — the mustard yellow paint still peeling and dusty with age — and the door leading into the barn was battered as always, though it sported a shiny brass padlock. But the door was closed so Osborne hoped that Daisy was either inside or long gone.

Keeping an eye out for trouble, he held Mike on the leash until they had walked past the barn and were standing on the edge of the vacant lot, a field of tall grass toasted golden brown by early frosts. A quick scan showed no movement so he unleashed the dog. Mike trotted off sniffing eagerly. He gave a quick spin and set about his business.

“Here, Mike,” called Osborne when the dog was done. But a sudden breeze enchanted the air-scenting lab, pulling him towards something hidden in the grass. Nose down, he snuffled, lingering even after Osborne called again.

“You goofball,” said Osborne, walking over to check out Mike’s prize. He was expecting a dead rabbit and hoping like hell the dog wouldn’t roll in it. It was a carcass all right, but one too fresh for rolling. A raccoon wearing a collar ringed with yellow plastic daisies lay on her side, dead. And judging from the fresh blood pooling under her body, Daisy had not been dead long. Out of curiosity, Osborne nudged at the blood-soaked fur near her left ear. She had been shot and not with a BB gun — a bullet from a .22 caliber pistol maybe?

Osborne sat back on his heels. He was certain Mildred wouldn’t have done this to her pet. So who did? What mean-spirited person would harm a little critter like Daisy?

More disturbing was that someone had fired a gun within the city limits — a highly illegal act. Out of town you can shoot as many gophers and prairie dogs as you wish — but not in midtown Loon Lake. He’d definitely mention this to Lew when he got to her house later. A dead animal wouldn’t be serious enough to ruin her Thanksgiving dinner but as the Loon Lake Chief of Police, she needed to know that someone was firing a weapon too close to homes and schools.

Getting to his feet, he wondered if he should tell Mildred. Or should he hope that she would assume that Daisy ran off — and never know the truth?

A scream shattered the sunny silence of the vacant lot. Osborne looked back towards the barn and the shop. If he had been in the woods, he would have thought it was the cry of a rabbit losing its head to an owl. But he wasn’t in the woods. That was a human scream. But of anger? Pain? Terror? Leashing Mike, he ran back towards the shop.

The shop was empty. Silent. “Mildred?” Osborne called out. No answer. “Mildred!” He raised his voice. Still no answer. Threading his way past cereal boxes and jars of condiments, he managed to get to the end of one narrow aisle without a disaster. He rapped on the French doors leading to the living room of the old house. “H-e-l-l-o-o? Mildred?”

From somewhere beyond the doors, he could hear voices rising and falling. A fevered discussion was taking place in a distant room. “You old biddy — you can’t make me!” A girl’s voice, followed by the sound of a slap. No wonder they couldn’t hear him.

He was about to rap again when he heard Mildred say, “Josie! So long as you live here you do as I say and I told you I don’t want to see that bum around here again. I’ll call the cops on the son-of-a-bitch. You hear me?”

Osborne certainly heard her. Sounded to him like Mildred had enough on her hands. Forget the raccoon. He backed away from the French doors and hurried down the aisle doing his best to make as little noise as possible. At the entrance to the shop, he held the dangling doorknob until the door had closed without slamming.

Thirty minutes later he was trudging down a gravel road that led to the logging lane he had promised Mike. The land, which belonged to the paper mill, was open to hunters and had long been Osborne’s favorite spot for hunting birds: grouse, a few pheasant that escaped from a nearby preserve, a random woodcock.

Setting out on a hunt had a way of reminding him of a time in his late teens when he had considered becoming a sculptor — until his father gave him a short course on the reality of the artist’s life vs. the financial guarantees of dentistry. He hadn’t regretted following in his father’s footsteps. Not only did he enjoy the profession and discover that he was very good at it, but dentistry held an unexpected benefit: it sharpened his eye for volume, line, color and shape. As a result, a successful hunt could yield more than an entrée for the dinner table — though he didn’t see that at first.

He was in his forties before he realized it wasn’t the game he was after so much as the hunt itself. Hunting forced him to watch for the slightest movement in the forest cover, to listen for the faintest whisper. Hunting drew him close to the heartbeat of the forest and it was that that he loved.

That and the unexpected. Walking through woods where the only paths were those made by deer, he often stumbled onto totems of past lives — animal, vegetable, even mineral — that haunted the northwoods.

He saw skeletons of ancient trees whose immense, rotted caverns seemed hushed with secrets; bones of animals delicate and detailed in the patterns left as they fell; carcasses of cars burned and abandoned by owners Osborne guessed to be mobsters from Chicago anxious to hide evidence of bootlegging. He had yet to find a corpse in one of the burned out vehicles but he wouldn’t be surprised when he did.

And the more he enjoyed a hunt — or an evening of fishing — the more he was likely to recall the badgering of his late wife: “Paul,” Mary Lee had said too many times to count, “how much longer until we’ve got enough of a nest egg that we can move to Milwaukee? You know you’ll have so many more patients there and make a lot more money — ”

Somehow that nest egg never happened — not even when Mary Lee added separate bedrooms to her pouts and punishing silences. Again, he had no regrets. He might not be worth as much as Fred Merrill, but for over thirty years he had been able to hunt within minutes of his home — and fish off his own dock. A lifestyle money can’t buy.

• • •

The dog bounded ahead, sniffing here and there, levitating in sheer bliss. Under normal circumstances, Osborne would be sharing Mike’s enthusiasm, but not today. He couldn’t get his mind off the dead raccoon, off the anger in Mildred’s voice, off that single, piercing scream.

What had the girl done that was so bad she deserved to be slapped — and slapped so hard he could hear it in the other room? Not like he hadn’t had to discipline Mallory and Erin when they were in their teens — though he had never laid a hand on them. Grounding had worked.

Osborne tried to keep his mind in the moment as he followed the lab down the rutted lane. He signaled the dog to find birds and Mike charged into a thicket of young aspen peppered with balsam. Osborne followed, running. But instead of listening for the flutter of a flushed bird, he thought again of poor dead Daisy. Maybe he should have said something? If he had, he might have been able to see for himself that the girls were okay.

A bird flushed, catching Osborne by surprise. Raising his shotgun, he pulled the trigger even as he knew he was too late. The bird was long gone. “All right now, get your act together,” he said aloud to himself. “This is one of the last fine days of autumn. Pay attention.”

The thicket gave way to a sea of black-brown cattails, their velvet cones split and ravaged by autumn winds. Mike ran along the edge of the swamp to where it bordered a hardwood forest of maple, oak and white birch. Just a few weeks earlier they had hunted here, but all was changed: the luminous reds and russets of the leaves had disappeared — vanquished by ever-hardening frosts. The trees were barren now, their black-brown branches thrust skyward as if to steel themselves against the harsh gusts of winter.

Again Mike flushed a bird and again Osborne shot too late. Mike didn’t know — he wagged his tail in anticipation of the command to retrieve.

“Sorry, fella, but I think we better give it up,” said Osborne. “I’ve got too much on my mind. I’m just not sure I did the right thing.” Mike looked longingly in the direction the bird had flown, then turned quizzical eyes on his master. He tipped his head and waited.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Osborne. “And you’re absolutely right. We need to stop by Erin’s for a second opinion.”

• • •

His daughter’s van was parked on the street in front of her house, the rear door open and only the seat of her tan corduroy slacks, the back of her black sweater and the tail of her long blond braid visible as she tugged at something inside. “Erin?” said Osborne from where he stood on the sidewalk.

“Dad!” The youngest of his two daughters backed out of the van and turned around, a smile of surprise crossed with consternation filling her face. “You’re an hour early.” She checked her watch. “The kids are still with Mark over at his folks’ place. I just came home to check on the turkey and start the potatoes.

“Here, help me with this.” She handed him a cardboard box with two pies inside, then reached back into the van for a baking dish covered with foil. With a kick of one foot, she slammed shut the door of the van. “We had brunch over there and now — ”

“I’m not here for dinner,” said Osborne, interrupting as she turned towards him. “I just. do you have a minute that I can run something by you? See if you think I did the right thing? And I’ll be back later.”

Erin paused to study his face. “You look worried, Dad. Is it serious? You didn’t. did Lew break up with you?” “Heavens, no.”

“Okay, then. Come on in and we’ll talk — but no need to leave and come back. You may as well stay now that you’re here.”

“Well, I won’t do that, sweetheart. I plan to go home and change. I am not coming to your Thanksgiving dinner in hunting gear.” He followed her up the stairs and onto the porch of the roomy, old Victorian home she shared with her husband and their three children. As Erin shoved the front door open with her shoulder, they were hit with a heavenly aroma.

“Smell that turkey, yum!” she said as they walked through the living room, past the dining room with its long table set for Thanksgiving dinner and into the kitchen where she set down the cardboard box and reached for an apron flung across the kitchen table. “So what’s up, Dad? Hey, cup of coffee? I have to make some for later anyway.”

“Sure.” As the coffee brewed, he told her what he had found in the vacant lot, how he had heard a scream, and the frightened look on the face of Frances Dark Sky when she knocked over the box in the shop. “That was Mildred’s pet raccoon,” he said. “With that little daisy collar — it had to be.”

“And you’re sure it had been shot? Not chewed by some dog or. Or maybe — you know, Dad, there’s been a bear getting into the garbage cans at McDonald’s.”

“Erin, I’m a deputy coroner, a dentist and a hunter. I may be retired from my dental practice but I sure as hell know a bullet wound from a dog bite.”

“Yeah, you’re right, you’re right — ” Erin leaned back against the kitchen counter, arms crossed as she mulled over his story. Osborne waited, hoping she would agree he’d done the right thing. “I don’t know, Dad,” she said after a long minute. “Mildred’s such an irascible old soul — you hate to give her another reason to be cross.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking. I don’t want to be responsible for one of those girls being accused of something they didn’t do.”

“Of course, you don’t know that they didn’t do it,” said Erin as she handed him a mug of hot coffee. “But whatever happened, it’s Mildred’s problem — I think it’s wise you decided to mind your own business.”

She gave him a fond look, then checked her watch again and reached to turn on the gas burner under a large pot filled with potatoes that had been peeled and cut into chunks. “How’s the rest of your day going?”

“Oh, jeez, don’t even ask,” said Osborne, rolling his eyes. “I am a desperate man, kiddo.”

“Kathleen and Fred at it again?”

Osborne nodded as he sipped his coffee. “Never ends.”

“Speaking of the Merrills, I saw Kathleen in her car last week and — I know this is unkind, Dad, so just between us — have you noticed how much that woman resembles a pug? That square, pudgy face, and her lips are this wide, tight little line — ” Erin held pinched fingers in front of her own mouth to demonstrate.

Osborne chuckled. “Poor woman.”

“Not like she couldn’t do something about it,” said Erin, bending to open the oven door and check the turkey. “Drop a few pounds for starters. She spends enough money at the beauty parlor — ” She whirled around from the stove. “Which reminds me, Dad, your ears should have been burning yesterday morning — burning.” She gave him a teasing grin.

“Oh no, what now?”

God, how he loved this girl, thought Osborne as they chatted. She was so different from both himself and his late wife. Erin had lucked out — inheriting the upbeat Irish genes from both sides of the family. Tall and slim with a complexion much fairer than his own, she juggled husband, children and pursuit of a law degree part-time — without losing her sense of humor or ever rushing a child or an adult who needed to talk.

“You’ve made quite an impression on your female houseguest, that’s for sure.”

“Really?” said Osborne with a twinge of dread.

“I had Beth and Mason in for haircuts at Jorene’s Le Cuts yesterday and Kathleen was there. She was on her back in the shampoo chair with a towel over her face getting some sort of conditioning treatment so she didn’t see us come in. And guess who happened to be the topic of conversation — ” Erin spoke with a lilt that spelled trouble to Osborne.

“You’re kidding, I hope.”

“She was going on and on about you and Fred and your hair — ”

“Our hair?” Osborne interrupted her. “Fred doesn’t have any hair.”

“Correct. Her exact words were, ‘Then there’s Dr. Osborne, same age as my husband, but he’s got all his hair. Thick, black, wavy — silver at the temples. So-o-o good-looking in a man that age.’”

“Erin — you are exaggerating.”

“Swear I’m not. And she went on. Said Fred’s let himself get fat — but not you. She told the ladies in the salon you’ve got the flattest stomach she’s ever seen in a man your age. You’re sixty-three but you’ve got the body of a fifty-year-old.” Erin grinned at him. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment, Dad.” Osborne put his head in his hands.

“And while old Fred sits around fussing with his fly rods or watching the History Channel, you’re always on the go.”

“I’m on the go, all right. Trying to keep out of the line of fire between those two.” Osborne stood up and walked over to set his coffee mug in the dishwasher. “That’s it. I have got to get those people out of my house. Tomorrow if I’m lucky. And you’re not pulling my leg? Kathleen really said all that stuff — in public?”

“D-a-a-d, she’s got a crush on you.”

He threw up his hands. “Let’s call Mallory. I know she’s not planning to visit until Christmas but maybe I can change her mind and she can catch a plane this afternoon. I’ll buy the ticket. Then I can tell the Merrills they have to move out of her room.”

“Forget that. She’s on deadline for her thesis plus she’s invited to Thanksgiving dinner with the parents of that guy she’s been seeing. And you shouldn’t have to make excuses, Dad. It’s your house. You simply say that it’s time for them to find somewhere else to stay because you have plans.”

“I do? What kind of plans?”

“Dad — ” Erin looked at him in frustration. “That’s not the point. Whatever plans you have or don’t have is none of their business.”

Just then the phone rang. Erin stepped around the corner into the den where they kept the cordless phone and answering machine. “Whoa,” she said as she reached for the phone, “we’ve got six messages! Hello?” As she listened, she walked back into the kitchen and handed the phone to Osborne. “It’s for you. Lew has been trying to reach you all morning.”