Eine Kleine Murder (3 page)

Chapter 3

Soffocato: Muffled, damped; choked (Ital.)

I tugged Gram's body up the mud bank and left it under a tree, sobbing at her bloated face and those beautiful, brilliant blue eyes, now disfigured by hungry fish. The earth shifted, tilted beneath my feet, and I plopped down beside her, losing my balance.

Reaching toward her, I shook her shoulder—was I trying to wake her? Her cold skin burned my fingertips and I jerked my hand back. Even in the darkness I could tell the skin was not alive and no longer bore the color of life.

I reached over to touch her hair. Usually soft and snowy white, the curls now escaping from the flowered pink bathing cap were dank, clotted with lake weeds. We would never again brush each other's hair. Never rub each other's feet. Never hug, kiss. Never resolve our spat. My arms ached to hold her, but this thing beside me wasn't her. She was gone. Gram was gone.

My hands went to my face, but the stench from the body that clung to my fingers stopped me before I buried my face in them.

I made it to my feet stiffly, searching in my panic for what to do next.

I had to tell someone, had to—what do they say on TV?—notify the authorities.

The only thing I could do was swim back to the eastern shore to call for help. The return trip felt twice as far. I began to fear I might not make it. My hands shook badly as I stood dripping on the beach and tried to dig my cell phone out of the pile I had left on the sand. The tympani still beat in my temples, almost blinding me.

My cell phone wasn't there. I'd lost Peter again! No, I remembered I had left it charging in the cabin. I stood for only a few seconds, still in shock, then swooped up my things. After casting one last glance across the water where Gram's body was, I realized I had to get help in a hurry.

The only thing I could think to do was run up the hill to Grace Harmon's. A tall man I took to be her husband answered my frantic pounding.

“Gram,” I blubbered. “She's… she's …”

Grace came up behind him. Warm light spilled around them into the darkness where I stood. “What is it, Cressa? What's the matter?”

“You're shivering.” The man reached a long arm around my shoulders. He guided me to their couch. Grace shook out an afghan from the back and wrapped it around me.

I took a couple of deep breaths. “I found Gram.” Tears sprang to my eyes again. “She's dead. She's drowned.”

“Drowned? Ida? Here? In the lake?” Grace's blue eyes grew huge. She threw a glance at the man.

The genial expression on his face disappeared into a frown. “What happened to her? Were you swimming together?”

“No, no. I went for a swim and she was on the other side. Underwater. Drowned.”

“Oh. My.” Grace sank, dazed, into the rocker behind her. It gave a couple of feeble rocks, then settled. The kind man sat beside me on the couch.

“Cressa, this is my husband, Al.” Grace murmured. “This is Ida's granddaughter.”

“I'm so sorry to finally meet you under these circumstances. Where is she now?” he asked, his voice somber.

“I pulled her onto the bank. On the other side of the lake. I had to leave her there. We need to get her. I need to call nine-one-one, but I left my cell phone in the cabin.” I was dizzy. The world spun off-kilter.

“I'll call.” Al got up and walked to the kitchen where I heard him dialing and speaking softly, much calmer than I could have been. After he hung up he said they were sending an ambulance.

The cup of tea Grace handed me rattled in the saucer and it warmed me up a bit. Al accompanied me down the hill, just in time to see them load her body, zipped into a dark bag, into the back. They had commandeered a boat to get her to this side of the lake. From the looks of the dripping EMT, he had done more than a little wading in the process.

My legs threatened to give way. I swayed and Al caught me.

“Where are you taking her?” I asked the technicians, barely able to talk through my chattering teeth. I wasn't cold—on the outside at least—but couldn't stop shivering.

The young female driver walked over to me as the EMTs slammed the back door of the ambulance.

“That's my grandmother,” I whispered.

“I'm so sorry. We'll take her to the funeral home here in Alpha. That's the usual procedure until she can be looked at.”

“Can I come?” I asked, not wanting to let her go with these people. It was a struggle to understand her words, to make sense of what was happening around me.

“There's really no need. There's nothing you can do tonight.” Her voice was gentle, handling me like I might break. “You can go in tomorrow to make arrangements. The coroner ought to take a look at her, but he's out of town until the day after tomorrow. We'll have the doctor in Cambridge pronounce her tonight. I'm surprised. No one has drowned out here for a few years.”

“Yes, but—” My voice caught, unable to finish my thought. It would have been a denial that she drowned, but I was looking at the evidence in that horrid bag.

The ambulance driver reached out to touch my arm, hesitated, then gave me a pat and climbed into the driver's seat.

Debussy had long ago given way to Chopin's ponderous
Funeral March,
the stark piano version. The one Gram had encouraged me to practice over and over for a recital. I watched my beloved Gram disappear with the taillights as they bounced along the gravel road, then faded to nothing.

At last I was alone in Gram's cabin. All the things I had wanted to say to her jumbled together in my mind, whirled round and round, and ceased making an iota of sense.

Al and Grace had been wonderful. They'd even offered to let me spend the night there, but I wanted to be alone in Gram's place.

My note to Gram sat where I'd left it. With more force than necessary, I grabbed it and wadded it into a tight ball.

“Oh, Grammie, I hope you know …” I couldn't finish the thought. The incomprehensible echoed in my mind:
she drowned
. The impact of those two words was simply unbearable. And how could a mere two words describe the fact I no longer had a grandmother, that she was lost to me forever?

One of the supports of my life, my Gram, was gone. A chasm was opening under me and I teetered at the edge of it.

I needed to talk to someone. Neek.

I had met the person who became my best friend only a year ago. Even though we lived in the same apartment building, and I knew her by sight, we connected in a yoga class given at a nearby high school. We were as different as a bass viol and a flute. Neek was definite about everything and always knew her place in the world, whereas I would probably always be tentative about my abilities, despite Neek's assurance that I was talented, smart, and not too bad-looking. She later said she predicted we'd be friends the first night of that class.

My cell phone wasn't in my purse. I remembered it was plugged in. Peter was charged now, but had zero connection bars. I took it out onto the glassed-in porch, built out over the hill on the back of the cabin. It held cheerful-looking white wicker furniture, a rocker, a settee, and tables, as well as a brass daybed where I knew Gram sometimes slept. I stopped. It hit me that the afghan I had crocheted for her in seventh grade was draped prominently over the foot of the daybed.

She kept it all these years.

The workmanship was nothing to brag about, but Gram had taught me to crochet and that was my first finished piece. I realized tears were racing down my face.

I fingered my afghan, then punched Neek's number into my cell phone and it leapt to life. There was only one bar, but maybe it would be enough.

She answered on the fourth ring, as I was about to give up.

My hello sounded weak to me.

“Are you okay? You sound like you have a cold. Can I send you something? I have a great new cold cure. It's a powder and you mix it with orange juice.”

I wasn't masking the thickness in my throat. I steadied my breath.

“No, I'll be all right.” I didn't really believe that. “But Neek, that big change you talked about earlier today?” My voice was still trembling.

“Was it not a good one? I was afraid it might not be.”

“Oh, Neek. She's dead. Gram's dead.”

For once Neek was speechless. I told her about swimming across the lake and finding the body, then about the Harmons, and about the ambulance taking her away. My voice became steadier as we spoke.

“She was so tough, Cressa. I didn't think she'd ever die. So where are you now?”

“I'm here, in the cabin.” I sniffed, feeling a little more human. “It really
is
cute. I like it, even without the piano. I wish I could tell her that.”

Neek was silent for a moment. “You're not going to stay there alone, are you?”

Where else would I go? “I… I think so.”

“Are you sure? Will you be okay? Should I come down?”

“I want to stay, Neek. There's no place else to go. And I have to make
arrangements
tomorrow. And I guess,” I was thinking ahead of my words, “she'll be buried here. Next to Gramps in the Alpha Cemetery. No reason for you to come. I'll probably be here for a few days.”

I pictured her name carved next to his. The only thing missing on her side of the stone was the last date. Now it could be filled in.

“But, Cressa. How did she die? Did she get caught on something under the water?”

“No, I don't think so. There's nothing in the lake but fish.”

“Do you really think she drowned? You've told me what an expert swimmer she was.”

“Yes, yes she is… was.” Neek had a point. How could Gram have drowned? “But she had to have drowned, had a cramp or something. That's the only explanation. Isn't it?”

Chapter 4

Pastorale: An instrumental piece imitating in style and
instrumentation rural and idyllic scenes (Fr.)

Neek and I talked more about the funeral and about the possibility that the blue car behind me had been Len. She was concerned he had followed me; I didn't see how he possibly could have.

This long day had started in another town, another world. I had received another nasty note slipped under the door of my apartment from Len. He couldn't quite get it through his head that he was now a stalker, under a restraining order—no longer a romantic interest.

For days I hadn't been able to concentrate on my composition, the symphony I had to finish by the end of the summer. It was the only hurdle between me and my master's degree in music. I was specializing in composition, and this was my thesis. My university teaching job required the degree. And the job was my stepping stone onto a podium.

I was going to conduct.

There was nothing I'd rather do. I'd known that since I was four. It was a hard profession to get into, but I was determined to do it.

Lately, my fear of Len had been blocking my concentration. So had the emotional distance between me and my Gram. One rift had festered for a couple of years, and I had caused that one, too. But the conflict over the cabin was more recent. This morning I had decided it was time to do something about it.

When Gram had sold her house in Moline to buy the cabin, I'd mourned. That house had been the only stable home I could remember. My musician parents had stuck me on stage as soon as I could warble a tune and bang a piano, hauling me all over the country until their deaths when I was eleven years old.

For years, I was so shy I could barely talk to people. Moving constantly, everyone seemed like a stranger. I was always the new kid in school—when I went. The only time I felt confident was when I was on stage. All stages were alike, not changeable like the people in each new place.

After they died, I went to live with Gramps and Gram, my mother's parents, in Moline, where they'd just moved to from Alpha. It was there that I finally learned to feel secure after my nomadic childhood. I still had trouble forming friendships, but I felt much safer being in one place with my grandparents.

Now I traced the fine filigree of the locket around my neck, one of my most precious possessions, to soothe myself. The jagged thought of Len ran through my mind like background music to a horror flick, but my mental foreground was filled with a keening dirge for my lost Gram.

The shimmer of moonlight on the water below the cabin shone through the tree-covered hill like the glint of brass. That damn treacherous water.

What was I going to do?

I didn't want to go back to Chicago. Could I stay here for the summer and write? I noticed that no music ran through my head at the moment, a rare thing. I couldn't see the future clearly beyond Gram's burial. It was blanked out by the abyss in my soul that kept widening.

Gram had been so pleased about buying the cabin, I shouldn't have become upset with her. I shouldn't have refused to go see it. She'd been thrilled to be going back to Alpha, where she grew up. And she told me over and over on the phone how much she loved her new place. She had never let anyone's opinion stand in her way. Including mine.

Back inside the main room, my suitcase and portable piano keyboard still lay where I had plunked them down when I first carried them in, on the wooden floor next to one of the pair of couches flanking the front door. Those couches must have been the indoor bedding for nights when the daybed on the porch was too cold; there wasn't an actual bed anywhere.

My trembling started again and my knees gave way. I sank onto the soft cushion of the other couch, unable to take another step.

The evening's grisly events, plus the presence of Gram I sensed in this place, picked that moment to overwhelm me. My returning tears stung, but not as acutely as the stab in my heart.

I pictured Gram zipped into that body bag, all alone. It was a gruesome image, but I couldn't shake it. She had been such a strong swimmer. I didn't understand how she could accidentally drown in this lake she knew so well.

My tears blurred the room. This rustic one-room cabin, with its friendly looking black Franklin stove smack in the middle of the room, was so much like her, I could picture her here.

I had been relieved to see indoor plumbing, a tiny bathroom walled out into the main room. Especially now that I was stuck here, at least until she was buried. Gram used to insist that a large house and modern conveniences were unnecessary. She had grown up with an outhouse.

I sniffed, looking through my purse for a tissue. The cabin smelled like my Gram.

A small TV sat on the countertop. I smiled to see a remote control by the couch. If I could, I'd tease her for having a remote. A tool, she always said, for lazy people. One more tear trickled down and I wished she were here to tease.

Realizing I hadn't eaten for hours, I finished unpacking and rummaged through the cabinets in the kitchenette that occupied a back corner of the cabin. Her blue metal coffee pot sat on a burner, ready for her Swedish coffee. She made it the old-fashioned way, boiled on the stove with a whole egg cracked into the pot to clarify the brew.

I stared at the peanut butter and crackers I had brought along, then at the apples I'd put into the square refrigerator tucked under the counter. I picked one up, but put it back. I couldn't eat.

I tested the lock on the door and inspected all the windows to make sure I would be safe as I slept. Turning back to the porch, built up on stilts over the sloping hill to make it level with the rest of the cabin, I opened all the louvers to let in the pleasantly cool air. The glass slats were inside sturdy screens. If someone, someone like Len, tried to get through them, the clattering would wake me up. Deflating with fatigue, I lay down on the porch's brass daybed.

I wanted to sleep on the porch because Gram had once mentioned to me it was her favorite sleeping place when the weather was fair enough.

At first I thought the trauma of the day's events would keep me wide awake, but the journey, my long swim, and emotional exhaustion soon overcame me. I carefully laid my afghan on the rocker and snuggled into the old pink and green quilt, one I recognized from Gram's house in Moline, deeply inhaling the clean, cool air, and dozed off, hoping Gram wouldn't appear in my dreams.

She didn't turn up, but I had nightmares anyway.

Visions of igloos and howling winds. Huge, hollow-eyed creatures that snarled with low, rumbling roars over a great cold abyss, a sort of hell frozen over.

I roused myself. The one thin quilt, which had been fine at nightfall, now let most of the cold air filter right on through to my freezing flesh.

An echoing boom rolled uphill to the daybed. Another boom, then another—a chorus of demonic monsters down at the lake, I thought, through my half-asleep haze. A chorus with a really scratchy percussion backbeat. I bolted upright, wide awake, when an owl hooted next to the porch, inches from my head.

I tried to call out. Fear paralyzed my throat. The croaking I made sounded like the monsters in my dream. It took a couple of minutes for my breathing to become regular. I cleared my throat—my voice was back, though still taut.

The acrid smell of brimstone from my lingering nightmare became the pleasant smoky smell left over from the wood fire I had noticed at the Harmons' earlier. The monsters, I realized, were bullfrogs croaking across the water.

Reluctant and groggy, I realized I was going to have to get up and get more blankets. My childhood afghan wouldn't keep me warm; it had more holes than thread. I vaguely remembered the location of the large armoire in a corner of the inside room. All I had to do was find my way there in the pitch black. Why hadn't I thought to put a flashlight by the daybed before I went to sleep?
Tomorrow
, I thought,
I will for sure
.

I swung my frozen legs over the side of the bed and searched with my toes for my slippers. They were in my apartment back in Chicago. All I felt was a cold wooden floor. The bushes beside the porch rustled, but I ignored them.

I felt along the painted clapboard wall to the doorway, searching the rough wooden planking inside the cabin for a light switch, but couldn't find one. I came at last to the armoire. It was so dark in the cabin I couldn't have seen a monster if one had leapt at me and grabbed my neck with its slimy claws.

I groped inside the cabinet, foolishly thinking a flashlight might be conveniently stashed there. Grabbing several thick pieces of fuzzy cloth, I made my way back to the daybed and settled in. But didn't sleep. Not yet.

The wind sighed ever so slightly through the leaves of the dense growth as the grotesque bullfrogs continued, and crickets and cicadas provided backup. Vermin and scratching noises inside the cabin? I'd think about those in the morning. The bushes rustled again. Was someone out there?