January Thaw (The Murder-By-Month Mysteries) (3 page)

Five

“You got anything on
Battle Lake?”

It was a week earlier, and I didn’t yet know I’d soon be meeting this man in a dark alley. I was kneeling at the bottom shelf of the “H–Ki” shelf of the fiction section, where I’d been scraping fossilized gum from the metal racks. If Stephen King’s
The Stand
was shelved, I couldn’t see the gum, but the book had been on a steady check-out for three weeks, and I was sick of looking at the liver-colored blotch.

I turned toward the voice, paused just for a nanosecond, and then answered, “The history of Battle Lake, you mean?”

I’m not proud of the pause, as short as it was, but the truth is that in this part of Minnesota, nearly everything was white: the food, the weather, and especially the people. I could count on one finger the number of people of color who’d come into the library, and I was looking at him. Early- to mid-twenties, five-foot-nine maybe -ten, skin the color of pecans, eyes a dark brown, his tight hair cropped close to his head.

“Yeah. The history.”

He said it matter-of-factly, though his stance was uncomfortable, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

“Mmm-hmm.”

It was the sound of a deliberate cough. I rose to my feet, leaving the butter knife and paper plate of bubblegum shards on the floor. I tipped so I could see around Maurice to the throat clearer.

“Yes, Jack?” He was a regular in his sixties who knew everything about the weather, trains, and guns, and loved to read pulp fiction.

“Everything okay here?” Jack asked.

I was momentarily puzzled, until he pointedly looked at Maurice, then back at me. Maurice kept his hands shoved in his pockets, his back to Jack. I guessed he’d been through this before.

“I’m fine. Just helping a patron.”

Jack stood his ground for a moment, his eyes on Maurice, then pursed his lips and stepped away.

“Sorry.” I wasn’t sure who I was apologizing for. “The local section is right over here.”

He walked behind me. The library had maybe fifteen people in it. With the exception of Jack, and maybe a stray glance or three, they all kept to what they were doing. We reached the back of the library, and I pointed at the two shelves I’d devoted to Battle Lake materials.

“Any specific time period you’re interested in?”

“Hey, it’s about Battle Lake. It’s all got to be interesting.”

It took me a beat to realize that he was joking. I smiled. “This must be your first time to the area.”

He shrugged, and the gesture was oddly endearing. “Naw. My grandma used to rent a place near here. A cabin. Stopped by and it’s nothin’ but rotten wood now, but I used to come when I was a kid, a couple weeks each summer.”

He
looked like he was going to say more but stopped himself. I stood a moment longer, giving him a chance to continue. He didn’t.

“If you need anything, I’ll be scraping gum.”

He flashed me a lopsided smile. It was quick, but brilliant. I smiled back before returning to my dirty chore.

Maurice came in four more times, always walking straight to the local shelves, sometimes with a camera, other times carrying a shabby, spiral-bound notebook and a pen, never checking anything out. A couple times he’d make light conversation with me, but mostly he worked like a man on a mission. I was used to giving people space in the library, so I never asked any questions. After last night’s altercation, I wished I had.

At least, that’s what I told myself, as I drifted in and out of uneasy sleep, curled against the wall under my bed. I’d altogether slept forty-five minutes, every muscle in my body aching from the uncomfortable position and the aftermath of the previous night’s adrenaline clench. I finally dragged myself into the murky sunlight a little before 7:30 AM, my hands, knife scar, and knees sore from the attack in the alley. Luna rushed in through the bedroom door when she heard me moving, licking my face and wagging furiously. She didn’t like that I was sleeping under the bed, whined at the edges of the mattress when I went in, and acted like it was Christmas in January when I came out.

“Hey, sweetie. How’re you?” She wagged some more and followed me around the house as I poured fresh food and water for her and Tiger Pop and prepped myself for work in a blur. The healing knife wound and my left knee needed salve and a bandage. The rest of my body would be fine after I washed down a handful of ibuprofen with yesterday’s strong coffee heated up in the microwave.

I was out the door in under thirty minutes. When the sound of the ice cracking on the lake made me jump out of my hair on my way to start my car, though, I headed back into the house and slipped my fully charged stun gun into the back seat of my car. If I didn’t have the library to go to this morning and instead had to be alone with my thoughts, I don’t know what I would have done.

The library was its own kind of church to me, and I wasn’t the only one. However, thanks to budget cuts all over the state, the library’s limited Saturday hours meant I was off at noon. I was already working at slave wages, and Mrs. Berns made even less. Of course, she didn’t do much work and shamelessly stole office supplies, but you get what you pay for.

I loved working at the library. The books were wonderful, of course, and I’d stuffed juicy, leafy green plants in all the windows and corners when I took over last May and was currently keeping up the Christmas twinkle lights past their season, but it was the people who walked through the door that made the job such a perfect fit.

They were mostly quiet, first of all. Second, they liked books, so they were guaranteed smart, though I was discovering that was a wide net. I had romance readers who reread the same book a dozen times and could remember every character’s name in a ten-book series, fans of nonfiction who regularly checked out books thick enough to press flowers and who would tell me everything I didn’t want to know about history if I stood still for too long, and literary fiction readers who always wore a secret smile. My favorite of all were the kids. I read to a regular group of them every Monday, and without fail, they were a squirming, burping, giggling pile of warm puppy love.

The library was my life raft. The only upside of our slashed hours was that it gave me more time for my second job, which I’d landed shortly after being hired by the library. I was a very part-time reporter for the
Battle Lake Recall
, an essentially one-man show known for its coverage of local church happenings, updates on city council meetings, high school sports scores, and my food column, “Battle Lake Bites.” When I’d started the column, I was feeling a tad passive-
aggressive about living my nowhere life in another small town—I’d graduated from a very similar one twelve years earlier—and I’d vowed to take editor/layout supervisor/sales director/owner Ron Sims’s suggestion that I find dishes representative of central Minnesota. Hence deer pie, Twinkie sushi, and phony abalone, among others.

In addition to that column, Ron occasionally tossed me articles, including the latest: he wanted me to follow up on a report that Gilbert Hullson’s miniature poodle had accidentally slipped into an ice-fishing hole last week while Gilbert was looking the other way. According to the rumor, Gilbert had leapt forward to save his dog, but his reflexes weren’t what they used to be, and she disappeared. Distraught, he stumbled out of his fish house just in time to see Jiffy pop up out of an uncovered hole thirty feet away like a mop head shot out a geyser. She was reportedly a little shaken but happy to be topside.

Being as it was a rare heavy news week, Ron also had me covering this weekend’s Winter Wonderland festivities, Battle Lake’s premier cold-time celebration. Day one of the two-day festival included the grand opening of the Prospect House’s Civil War Museum, Darwin’s Dunk on West Battle Lake, and ribbon cutting at the ice castle situated near the Dunk. I still couldn’t get my head around the idea of jumping into a frozen lake in nothing more than your swimsuit and a smile, but that’s Battle Lake for you.

The library was on the south end of town and the Prospect House and the section of West Battle Lake where today’s Winter Wonderland was held were on the north end. Since a mile separated the two (and since yesterday’s walk hadn’t panned out so well), I’d decided to drive from work to the event I was covering for the paper, even though it was another postcard-perfect winter day. The temperature hovered around ten degrees with a crisp lemon sun shining heatless rays off a world of snow crystals, lighting up the landscape like a pirate’s treasure. The air smelled like cold metal with the tiniest hint of green in it, and I wondered if there really was something to that talk of a January thaw.

I’d only driven half a mile before the traffic started backing up. Parking would be a bear. It seemed like this area held some sort of major festival every other month, but they were always well-
attended. I guessed it was a holdover from the agricultural days when we really were all in this together, and we had to make our own fun.

Just ahead at the corner, a white four-door pulled out and I thanked the Universe and glided the Toyota into the spot. The Prospect House was still two blocks up, but I was lucky to have parked this close. I stuffed the newspaper’s digital camera into the pocket of my puffy jacket, pulled my hat down tight over my ears, and hopped into the stream of festival-goers.

In my preliminary research, I’d discovered that the Prospect House was a Battle Lake original, an eighteen-room Georgian mansion built in 1860 by Barnaby Offerdahl, a man whose family came by money via the railroads. Barnaby, who’d never earned a blister a day in his life, lost his wife to childbirth in 1862 and decided to join the North’s fight in the Civil War, enlisting with the 1st Minnesota Light Artillery Battery and leaving behind a newborn daughter. He didn’t return, and she died under mysterious circumstances at age eight. After that, the Prospect House and its surrounding acreage passed through various hands, falling into disrepair, until recently. Carter Stone, a local historian, bought the mansion and its carriage house, minus most of the land, at auction the previous year. He and his wife, Libby, moved into the carriage house and spent countless hours restoring the magnificent estate next door. In doing so, they uncovered many of the original furnishings along with an extensive collection of Civil War artifacts. Carter had applied for nonprofit status, and today he and Libby were hosting the grand opening of the Prospect House and Civil War Museum.

I was excited to tour the mansion, which perched on a hill on the edge of town like aging royalty, hidden behind ancient hardwoods and thick, gnarled ivy branches, closed off from the public for decades and fodder for tales of hauntings and buried treasure. The official press tour wasn’t scheduled for another hour, so I made my way to the lake across County Road 78 from the Prospect House, enjoying the buzz of a large crowd, the monolithic noise occasionally punctuated by laughter or an enthusiastic greeting.

The West Battle Lake beach became the public ice rink in the winter, and its gray-blue surface was already packed with families enjoying the sunny day. The warming house door was constantly opening and closing, letting in and out smiling people who were exchanging skates for boots and vice versa. Beyond the skating rink, the Battle Lake ice castle soared toward the sky, her two gorgeous spires catching the sunlight and reflecting it back as a deep, crystalline cobalt blue. It was not much larger than a three-bedroom bungalow, but its glowing ice and delicate turrets made it enchanting, drawing skating children to it like moths to a flame, despite the yellow tape marking its perimeter.

This was the first year the town had an ice castle. The structure was sponsored by O’Callaghan’s, the microbrewery that had recently opened outside of town. They’d hired the workers who’d taken eight days to build the hollow castle replica, using plans drawn by an architect from St. Paul and enormous ice blocks cut from the center of the lake. The official lighting ceremony was tonight, and I bet the castle was a million times more magical glowing with twinkle lights. If I didn’t have a date with Johnny, I’d have been in the front row. As it was, I couldn’t wait to be in his arms. Maybe I’d finally be able to sleep.

Even farther behind the ice castle and to the left was a roped-off
area designated to be the site of tomorrow’s Darwin’s Dunk.
O’ Callaghan’s was also sponsoring this feature of the Winter Wonderland, though the Dunk was an annual tradition. It had been jokingly developed as a direct rebuttal to naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution of the species. Participants signed up for a time slot in which to jump into a hole carved in the 26-inch-thick ice of the lake, and then leapt out about as fast as I imagine Jiffy had after she’d slipped into her little ice hole. The jumpers raised money for the charity of their choice, and the Dunk motto was “Survival of the Littest.” To that end, O’Callaghan’s had installed a walk-up bar between the roped-off Dunk area and the ice castle. I’d heard it would be open up for business an hour before the lighting ceremony began, after the children had cleared off of the ice but well before tomorrow’s annual Dunk.

The closer I got to the ice rink, the stronger the smell of hot chocolate grew. I smiled, captivated by the clean, slicing sound of hundreds of skate blades against ice and the sight of people gliding along at various levels of skill.

“Mira!”

I glanced toward the warming house. Jed, a local friend, had popped his head out. Jed was a harmless stoner, the local Shaggy always in search of Scooby Doo. His parents owned the Last Resort on the edge of town, and Jed was the local handyman. He’d tried to get a glass-blowing business going in November, but that hadn’t panned out as expected. Since then, he’d gone back to working odd jobs. This must be one of them.

“You’re running the warming house?” I asked as I walked toward him.

“Just for the Wonderland.” He smiled his wide grin and nodded agreeably, the tassel on his Nordic winter cap bobbing. A riot of black curls exploded from the base of it. He seemed to be trying to grow a beard and mustache, though both were wispy with more than a little Fu Manchu to them. “Are you gonna skate?”