January Thaw (The Murder-By-Month Mysteries) (11 page)

Twenty-Five

Rather than speak to
Bad Brad, I acted as if he wasn’t there at all. He followed me into the library like a droopy shadow and stuck close to my side as I went about my duties. It got so I almost forgot he was there, until he chose to speak.

“Have you looked at her Facebook page?”

“Whose?” Of course I knew who he was talking about.

“My girlfriend’s.”

“Why would I look at your girlfriend’s Facebook page?”

“I thought you’d change your mind about the conflict of interest and help me out.”

“Nope.”

I turned on the front desk computer and stepped from behind the counter to switch on the public computers. When I returned to the front, I saw Brad was standing at my desktop, clicking away.

“What are you doing? You can’t be on that.”

His shoulders dropped lower, if that was possible. He pointed at the screen. “See for yourself.”

I sighed. “If I look at your girlfriend’s Facebook page, will you leave?”

“Yes.”

I dragged my feet around the counter and stood beside him. A blue-rimmed page was pulled up on the computer. It featured a headshot of a pretty blonde. A lake panorama was spread out behind her head. Her name, according to the page, was Samantha Lehmkuhl. “I don’t see anything.”

“That’s the problem.” He pointed to a white box under her photo that declared her birthday and that she was female. “Why doesn’t it say she’s in a relationship?”

I squinted at the screen. “It’s supposed to say that?”

“It can, if the person chooses to make that part of their status.”

Wow. I did not like this new world where there were so many more ways to be bonkers. My brain flitted through some possibilities. A person could break up with you on Facebook, and the whole world would know before you did. And after the break-up, you could return to your ex’s page and check out what they were up to, maybe see if they’d moved on before you had. It was enough to make a person sick. Thank goodness I had dependable, sane, loyal Johnny. The thought of him sent a delicious wave across my nerve ends. Man, that boy was good-looking. And an amazing kisser who also smelled clean, laughed at my jokes, and cleaned up after himself. Why hadn’t I immediately rescheduled our Sunday night interrupted date? I added him to my mental to-do list.

“Are you hot?” Brad asked, studying me. “Your face is all red.”

I flushed deeper. Last spring, it had taken him two weeks to notice I’d moved to Battle Lake, but here he was being all Amazing Kreskin with my arousal state. “I think I’m allergic to Facebook.”

He minimized the window. “Will you take the case? Please, Mira. For me. I love this woman.”

I had a million retorts to that, but none I could summon in the face of his obviously heartbroken state. “Fine,” I muttered.

“Thank you!” He bundled me into his arms and kissed the top of my head. “I owe you one. Whatever you need, you just tell me.”

“I need you to leave so I can get some work done.”

“Great! All these books make me nervous, anyhow. What if people see me in a library?”

“That will surely set their tongues a-wagging,” I said dryly. “Now, be off. I’ll be in touch if I find anything.”

“You’re a good person, Mira,” he said, before the door closed pneumatically behind him.

I watched him disappear around a corner. I had zero romantic feelings for him, but maybe we could be friends. His case would have to wait, though. I pulled out my Cold Case file and retrieved the letter supposedly written by Orpheus Jackson from my pocket and smoothed it on my desk.

18 January 1865

Dear Loretta:

I wish I could write with better news. In Minnesota, they do not believe the messages I bring. I do not think I can stay here. I pack my bags to return home tomorrow. Should anything happen to me, look to the tunnel of justice.

With a heart that beats only for you,
Orpheus Jackson

I had a hunch that if Maurice hadn’t been related to Orpheus, he at least believed he was. Was this somehow connected to the relatives Maurice had told Taunita he was coming to Minnesota to find? On a hunch, I strode back to the local shelf where Maurice had spent many hours the week before his death. I paged through all the references, looking for notes or dog-ears, and tipped them all sideways hoping something would fall out. Nothing.

But my Cold Case file was thin, and I sensed there was a connection—real or imagined—between Maurice and Orpheus, so I began researching Orpheus. Using the search terms
Orpheus Jackson
and
1800s
, I didn’t come up with a thing. When on a hunch I threw
Barnaby Offerdahl
into the mix, though, I was brought to a full article on the Battle of Honey Hill, a Civil War battle fought in South Carolina on November 30, 1864. O. Jackson was listed as a freeman from the north serving in the 54th Massachusetts, and B. Offerdahl as a landowner in the 1st Minnesota Artillery Battery. The battle was a failed expedition under Major General John P. Hatch. The Confederates were too well-entrenched to rout, and the Union lost 89 men, with 629 wounded and 28 missing.

The date on Orpheus’s letter suggested he was one of the Union survivors, but was this the battle that had killed Barnaby, and if so, what did that have to do with Orpheus, and why was he in Minnesota in 1865? Was he bearing a message from Barnaby? And what could this message possibly have to do with Maurice, nearly 150 years later? I had more questions than answers. To save myself the headache of carrying them spinning in my head, I wrote them down and shoved them into my Cold Case folder before moving on to Operation Offerdahl and the search for a
present-day
member of the family.

I returned to my database and set a wider search for Eric, looking for anyone who shared the surname. There were tens of thousands of Offerdahls, but when I narrowed it to Minnesota, there were far fewer. When I narrowed it even further, to criminal history, I found a Gregory and Patrice Offerdahl. A quick call to Curtis verified that had been the name of Eric’s parents. They were both mostly crime-free except for a line of bounced checks following them all the way to Phoenix, Arizona. My records showed Patrice had died four years earlier, and that Gregory still owned seven prime lakefront acres abutting or near the Prospect House, but little else. Gregory was seventy-eight and currently resided at 1923 Orangetree Lane, Phoenix, Arizona. I printed out the records and got to work running the library.

My morning passed in a blink. I finished four special orders, including tracking down and ordering a nonfiction book on abominable snowmen and another on tapping into your psychic ability. I watered the plants and dusted their leaves, wondering if I should have Kennie visit as a favor to a snake plant that was looking yellow and tragic around the edges. I showed an elderly man how to access the Internet and watched happily as he began researching his family tree. For lunch, I slammed both Danishes and promised myself I’d start working out just as soon as nature joined my team and melted the rest of the snow.

The afternoon was spent preparing the library’s February budget, helping patrons check out books, planning activities for next week’s children’s hour, answering emails requesting use of the library’s public meeting room, and updating the library website. By the time closing rolled around, I felt like I’d run a marathon. I did a last walkthrough of the stacks to make sure I’d shooed everyone out and no surprises had been left behind before running across town to pick up Mrs. Berns. I was hoping we could make it to O’Callaghan’s for the six o’clock tour.

My car idled outside her apartment building. I honked, hoping to save myself a trip into the cold air. I fumbled with the radio knob while I waited, hoping as I always did for something more than country or Journey. I settled on “Saturday in the Park.” My car was too old for a CD player, and I didn’t have the heart to carry mixed tapes with me. I took what I could get.

A flash of color caught my eye, and I glanced up and to my right. Mrs. Berns was leaving the building wearing lederhosen. She was carrying her own massive beer stein. When she slipped into the car, she smelled like face powder and dish soap.

“Lederhosen?”

She held the stein in the air, a broad smile on her face. “
Prost
!”

I smiled back. I couldn’t help it. She was lovely with her apricot-tinged white hair curling around her ears, penciled-in eyebrows, her watery blue eyes rimmed by uneven green eye shadow, her mouth a perfect heart of coral lipstick. The deep lines of her face were highlighted by the wide grin.

“I think they supply cups with their samples,” I offered, indicating her stein.

“Pah. Probably little Dixie cups. I need a woman-sized taste to know if I’ll like it or not.”

We drove in companionable silence for three or four miles. At least I thought it was companionable, until Mrs. Berns punched me in the arm.

“What was that for?”

“You didn’t ask me what’s wrong.”

“I asked you a couple days ago, and then the day after that! You nearly bit my head off.”

“That’s how you know I care.”

I tapped my signal to turn right onto County Road 23 and rubbed my arm. “Your love kinda hurts.”

“Hmph.” She crossed her arms.

“All right, I’ll bite. What’s wrong?”

“What makes you think something is wrong?”

I groaned in frustration. “Besides you asking me to ask you just now? Well, you’ve been a Crabby Appleton since you made that Al-Anon crack at Matthew’s birthday party, and it seems like you’re avoiding me.”

She didn’t respond. I tossed her a tentative sideways glance and was horrified to see fat tears rolling down the canvas of her face. I pulled over immediately and pushed the button for my emergency lights. I gathered her into my arms, amazed at how fragile she felt, like a grounded sparrow.

She pushed me away almost immediately. Almost. “I’m not a big baby. You can let me go. I just had something in my eye. An onion, I think.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s up.”

“Fine.” She pulled a handkerchief out of her chest-freezer-sized purse and blew her nose. “My husband was a drinker. He was a good man who paid the bills and never raised his hand to me or the children, but once his work was done, he’d drink whiskey until he passed out.”

Sounded familiar. I wondered why Mrs. Berns hadn’t told me any of this before. She knew all about my dad.

“When he finally died ten years ago, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I loved him, of course, but between taking care of him and raising my kids, I’d never had my own life. I started going to Al-Anon and went willingly into the nursing home because that’s what my kids wanted. Then one day, about when you came to town, I realized it isn’t what
I
wanted. I wanted to finally be my own person. So I rented an apartment and started living my life in the open. Turns out I like to dance, and sing, and kiss men half my age. Hell, I love it. I love everything about my life.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

She tried to set the beer stein on the dash, but it was too tall. “It’s my grandkids. They’re coming to visit this week.”

I had met Mrs. Berns’s five kids, most of whom lived within an hour or two drive and another who lived in Arizona, but never her grandkids. “Isn’t that good news?”

“They haven’t seen the real me. They remember me from when their grandpa was still alive, or from me visiting them. They haven’t seen me in my natural habitat.”

“But you don’t care what anyone thinks of you!”

She laid her hands in her lap. “I guess I do. It matters to me what my grandkids think. I’ve decided it’s easier to pretend I’m someone else for a couple days, but that decision isn’t sitting well.”

It took me a minute to digest this. Mrs. Berns was pure confidence, or so I’d thought. She was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. “How old are your grandkids?”

“Trevor is a year or two older than you. Michelle is twenty-seven. They live in Arizona. The last time they visited, I was in the Sunset and plenty happy to act a role for them. It’s what grandparents do, so all you kids don’t know we have better sex and take better drugs than you could ever dream of.”

Her words carried the ring of truth. “Are they brother and sister?”

“Yup. Only one of my kids had kids, which should tell you something. They’re coming because Michelle is being transferred to Fargo, and Trevor wants to help her move and visit family.”

I thought back to July, when Mrs. Berns had faux-kidnapped the adult male mascot from the Chief Wenonga Days parade. She’d had her cap guns slung low at her side and he’d been dressed like a stereotypical Indian when they’d last been spotted. A friend had been about to file a missing person’s report on the mascot’s behalf when the two of them were discovered in a very compromising position. How had she ever kept a personality like that under wraps?

I exhaled loudly and patted her arm. “They’ll love you exactly as you are, hun. In fact, I’d be pretty surprised if they didn’t know more about the real you than you think.”

She studied my face thoughtfully. A quiet moment stretched out between us. “You are a wise, dear friend, Mira. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

I felt a tear warm my eye. “Really?”

“No. That was pure horseshit. You know what I’d do without you? I’d see fewer dead bodies, that’s what. What I was doing there was a little thing called acting, and I happen to be very good at it. Now drive. I’ve done enough whining. It’s time to soldier up and accept the nevitable.”

I put the car into first gear. “You gonna show them the real Mrs. Berns?”

“I’ll let you know when I decide. And if you tell anyone about my moment of weakness, I swear to God I’ll tattoo a mustache on your face in your sleep.”

“I love you, too,” I said, smiling inside.

Twenty-Six

There were plenty of
signs pointing the way to O’Callaghan’s, all of them featuring a green shamrock and the promise of “the best beer brewed in Minnesota.” It was no coincidence that I thought that “best beer brewed in Minnesota” was about as significant as being the “tallest leprechaun,” but that might be an unfounded stereotype.

We took what was promised to be the “final turn before O’ Callaghan’s” and found ourselves in the circular driveway of a farm. The grounds consisted of a cute, slanted-roof farmhouse, a red barn and two matching outbuildings, and a tow truck with the words
Tyrannosaurus Wrecks
painted on the side.

“T Wrecks? This can’t be right,” I said. I drove up to the house intending to turn around when I noticed the man leaning on the porch rail wearing lined Carhartt coveralls. He appeared to be staring at a lone cow in a pasture about 300 yards away.

“Is he cute?” Mrs. Bern said, squinting in his direction.

“Hard to tell from here. I’m going to ask him where the brewery is.”

“I’m coming with,” she said. “It’s time to diversify my dating menu. Besides, remember that you’re on the job. You might need backup.”

I doubted it. He was maybe five-eight, a little paunchy. In his sixties, judging by the way he hunched and the bits of gray I spotted sneaking out of his John Deere cap. Mrs. Berns got jazzed about “working cases” with me when she had a chance, though, so I didn’t stop her.

“Hello?” I said as we approached the porch.

He must have heard the car pull up and the doors slam shut, and he most certainly heard my greeting. He didn’t turn.

“Sir? We’re looking for O’Callaghan’s. Are we close?”

By way of answer, he pointed at the cow. She was your standard black and white, standing in a barren snowscape broken only by a metal pole and a heated water barrel. “You see that?”

“Yes,” I said, exchanging a woo-woo look with Mrs. Berns. “The cow?”

“Not just any cow. She is my nemesis. Kicks me when I try to milk her, breaks free of the fence every day and out of the barn every night no matter how often I mend both, and moos so much I want to cut my own ears off. I want to catch her to sell her, but she’s too smart. See that metal pole? I coated it with salt. Figured she’d lick it and I’d get her good. But she won’t lick it. She just stares at it.”

Mrs. Berns walked around to the farmer’s front and flicked him on the head. “That’s about the batshit craziest plan I ever heard. Why don’t you just corral her in the barn?”

He stepped back, surprised. “I can’t. She slips away.”

“You’re getting what you deserve, then. Now where’s the brewery?”

The front door of the farmhouse slammed open and a woman dressed in head-to-toe winter camo and holding a James-Bond-spear-gun-looking weapon tromped onto the porch. “You folks lost?”

“Yep,” I said, taking an involuntary step back.

Mrs. Berns did the opposite. She leaned forward and touched the gun. “That a paintball gun?”

“Zenith Azodin,” the woman said proudly.

“What’re you hunting?”

“Hunters.”

A crafty smile crossed Mrs. Berns’s face. “Only thing legal to hunt right now is wolves.”

“Exactly,” the woman said. “I have no problem if someone wants to hunt for meat. If you’re going to hunt for sport, though, prepare to have the tables turned.” She held her weapon in the air.

“I’m in!” Mrs. Berns said.

“The more the merrier. I’ve got an extra gun inside. Name’s Vienna, by the way.”

I stared in disbelief. “You can’t hunt hunters! They’ve got real guns.”

“I wear orange,” the woman said, “and I’m in a deer blind.”

“
That is the worst idea
ever
,” I said, “and I’ve heard some pretty bad ideas.” I looked to the farmer for support, but he had returned his full attention to the cow in the field, who was in turn staring at the salty metal pole as if it were a Gordian knot.

“I took a wrong turn and ended up in Insane City, Iowa,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “And I thought Battle Lake could get weird.”

“I thought you were looking for O’Callaghan’s,” Vienna said.

“I thought so, too.”

“The turn is a hundred feet past our driveway. Their land abuts ours. You can’t miss it, once you know where to look. Hopefully when they get the new sign up yonder, people’ll stop pulling in here.”

“Are you coming, Mrs. Berns?”

“Pick me up on your way back,” she said, tugging on the orange vest the woman handed her. “I’m going to seize this moment.”

I felt the distinct stress knot between my shoulder blades expanding as I drove away. It was grappling toward my arms, head, and lower back like an octopus after prey. Deep breathing didn’t touch it. Maybe beer would. I’d gone on the wagon in October and fallen off a couple times since. I didn’t want to go down the same path as my dad and had pinballed between exactly reliving his drinking habits and being completely dry. Neither seemed to work for me, and so last month I’d decided to try drinking like a normal person. This was a hard thing to gauge in a county where consuming alcohol qualified as a winter sport, but my goal was to only imbibe socially and never have more than two at a sitting. I had no interest in ever being drunk again. I’d made too many bad choices in that state.

The second road past the T Wrecks driveway led me directly to O’Callaghan’s, a sprawling log lodge planted next to a factory building, both tucked behind a hill and so invisible from the road. A dozen or so vehicles peppered the parking lot in front of the lodge, and a large banner with white letters was strung over the door “Welcoming All to O’Callaghan’s Microbrewery!”

Just inside the door, a woman in her early twenties with a wide smile handed me a grapefruit-sized sticker in the shape of a shamrock. “Are you here for our six o’clock tour?”

“I am.” I gaped at the enormous interior. It was one big room, with tills lining the wall directly inside the door, a shopping area in the middle, a full bar in the back left, and tables in the back right. The ambience was half box store, half Irish pub.

“Wonderful! Stick the shamrock on your coat, and you can wait over by the rear door with the rest of the folks.”

I followed her finger to the other side of the lodge where I counted eight people—two couples, two kids, and two college-aged men—wearing green shamrocks and standing by a metal door marked
tour
. “That’s quite a few people for a Tuesday,” I said.

“We’ve been very popular,” she said, her smile widening.

Her name tag read
Aednat
. I pointed at it. “Is that Irish?”

“Yup. It’s pronounced ‘ey-nit.’”

“Do your parents own the brewery?”

She laughed. “I wish. We have the option of taking Irish names for our shifts.”

I thought back to the woman I’d spoken with on the phone when I initially called O’Callaghan’s. “Does everyone do it?”

“That’s up to us,” she said, “but you’ll find out all about it on the tour. It looks like they’re leaving, so you better skedaddle!”

She was right. A man in his late thirties dressed all in green and wearing a leprechaun’s hat had appeared at the rear door. He must have said something funny because the tour group started laughing. I threaded my way through the racks of O’Callaghan’s sweatshirts, mugs, bottle openers, and knick-knacks, tossed a glance at the carved-wood bar on the far side of the lodge backlit by the crackling fireplace, and tried to blend into the tour.

“Welcome!” the tour guide said. “What’s your name and where are you from?”

Judging by the expectant looks I was getting, I assumed everyone had already introduced themselves. “Mira, from Battle Lake.” That was the first time I’d uttered those words all in the same sentence. I was born and had grown up in Paynesville and spent most of my twenties in Minneapolis before relocated to Battle Lake. I was pleased it sounded comfortable rolling off my tongue.

I indicated his name tag. “And your name?”

He looked down. “Niall,” he said. “Pronounced like the river in Egypt.”

I wondered if he also went by Eric Offerdahl. The single photo I had seen had been fuzzy. Niall’s hair was brown, at least what I could see of it peeking out from under his hat, but he did not have a spike through his right eyebrow and appeared about fifteen years too old. The spike could have easily been removed, however, and if he was heavy into drugs, that could have added years to his face. I vowed to get to the front of the group at some point during the tour so I could inspect him up close.

Niall led us outside. It was already dark, but the path was lit by white twinkle lights sparkling beautifully off of the iced snow. The drifts were so perfectly formed that the grounds behind the lodge looked like the top of a lemon meringue pie. It was cold, the brief thaw over, but above zero with no wind, so the short walk to the factory was pleasant. Niall was lecturing about how the O’Callaghan family—originally from Ireland but based out of Chicago in the past eighty years—had been searching the Midwest for the perfect location for their microbrewery. They had made their money in the carpet business but wanted to build something more creative and return to their family roots. When their realtor found the 100 acres just south of Swederland a little over a year ago, they realized it would be perfect. The lakes area brought in thousands of tourists every month, taxes were low, and labor would be cheap. They bought the land, began building immediately, and had begun distributing their beers and offering tours in the past few weeks.

The company grounds, he said, were made up of the lodge we had just left and the brewery we were walking toward, plus the dorms and the O’Callaghan family home on the other side of the far hill.

“Dorms?” I said, interrupting his speech.

“Yes,” he said, smiling. “Room and board are part of our employment package. The dorms are like our own little village. Plus, we get health care and money for college.”

I narrowed my eyes. “That sounds too good to be true.”

He chuckled. “That’s what I thought too, but it is true. The O’ Callaghans figure if they are good to their employees, that we’ll stay on and work hard. And they’re right. They treat us like family.”

He fell back into his spiel. Right now, O’Callaghan’s was producing four different beers: a seasonal ale, their signature dark, and two lagers. The recipes were passed down from generation to generation. Apparently, the original O’Callaghan’s of County Galway had been whiskey distillers and brewers. Though it was too early to tell how the O’Callaghan’s beers would be received, early buzz was good, no pun intended.

Niall held open the factory door. The warm scent of yeast and something sour washed over us. I was the last to pass Niall, and I stared right into his face. I was disappointed to see no visible hole in his right eyebrow.

“Say,” I said, before slipping inside, “can you tell me what time my friend Eric Offerdahl’s shift starts? I was really hoping to run into him.”

Niall didn’t skip a beat. “Eric Offerdahl? That doesn’t sound very Irish.” He tipped his hat and moved to the front of the crowd. “This is the main factory.” He spread his arms to indicate the Wonka-esque room filled with enormous copper vats and tubes that ran to and fro and all the way to the top of the giant, open three-story room. He walked us through the malting, milling, and mashing, passing around a test tube of hops for us to inspect. Then he explained the lautering, boiling, fermenting (which accounted for the faintly sour bread smell), conditioning, filtering, and finally, packaging. The packaging area was a separate part of the factory set up exactly like I assumed Laverne and Shirley’s workplace had been arranged. The label maker was the most fascinating part to me, turning an ordinary brown bottle into a tiny, perfect, utile piece of art.

“Who designs all your labels?” I asked over the din of the operating factory.

“I do. I used to do graphic design for the carpeting company in Chicago, and now I design the labels, the marketing materials, everything.” He bowed. “And lead tours, of course. At least until we expand our line. Many of the employees here multitask.”

“Cool,” I said, accepting the sample label Niall handed to me. It was for O’Callaghan’s seasonal beer, called Ice Castle. The image on the front looked familiar. It took me a few beats to recognize that it was a cartoon version of the O’Callaghan’s-sponsored ice castle on West Battle. I wondered how the bad publicity was affecting business, but it seemed rude to ask. Niall finished up the tour, fielding questions about beer flavors (they’d add more in the summer if the current stock sold well), whether they were hiring (not at this time, but applications were always welcome), and how long it took to brew a single bottle of beer from the malting stage to the bottling (twenty-two to forty days on average, depending on what type of beer it was). When all the questions had been answered, Niall asked who was ready to try some beer. Apparently, everyone but the two children had come for exactly that reason, and the group headed toward the exits en masse. I lagged behind so I could sing “Schlemiel, schlimazel, hasenpfeffer incorporated” under my breath and snatch another label from the on-deck machine feed, this one far more interesting to me.

The colors had initially attracted me—deep blues and purples with a flash of silver—but it was the name that hitched my breath: Sutler’s Civil War Ale. I thought immediately of the Prospect House, and Orpheus Jackson. The label’s spidery font was old-fashioned, and the words were undercut by the sharp edge of a bayonet. The overall effect was a peculiar cross between edgy and quaint, but somehow it worked. On impulse, I stuffed the label into my coat pocket and caught up with the rest of the tour. I passed a door I hadn’t noticed before and tried the handle on impulse. Locked. The room must contain fragile materials, or be where they hid the garbage.

The cold outside was bracing after the steamy closeness of the brew factory. A soft winter breeze had picked up, sending tiny eddies of snowdust over the frosted drifts and making the twinkle lights glitter magically. The tour group was nearly inside the building when I caught up with them. Niall was holding the door. He tapped my shoulder lightly as I passed by him.