June Bug (10 page)

This crude destruction had paid off, because in the back of the far right corner of the closet was an opening about three feet high and two feet wide. There was probably a switch that would have tripped the dwarf door to open, but a crowbar had done this dirty work. My heart was flirting with my stomach, and they both agreed I should get my ass in on this discussion and go home to relative safety. After all, I had already been made to disappear once tonight; I’m sure there were people around who wouldn’t mind making that permanent.

However, I couldn’t fight the feeling, like fizzy bubbles in my veins, that I was about to discover some huge treasure bigger than any rhinestone I had ever hidden. Instead of returning home to safety, I shined my flashlight in the space, dropping to my knees for a better view. My light revealed a shallow but long room that went farther than I could see. The architect who had planned this place must have devised it so that the room did not take enough space to be revealed from the outside but was large enough to house a major science project.

I leaned in closer to the opening, and my flashlight reflected off a metal structure that looked vaguely familiar. It took me a few seconds to place it. I had seen a similar contraption on an episode of
The Beverly Hillbillies
in which Jethro had been making moonshine. I guess I knew now how Whiskey Lake had gotten its name. Shangri-La had been built in the twenties, at the height of Prohibition.

The still didn’t make sense, though. Regina had insisted that all the workers be fired after Shirly caught her messing in this closet, but had she been making moonshine? If she had traveled all the way from New York, it was unlikely she had the time or the means to establish an illegal liquor operation. And why would she come all the way to a remote lake in Minnesota to set it up? Surely, they could use the liquor out East.

I crouched down and squeezed myself into the hidden room. The floor had been dusty at one point, but a lot of footprints had flurried that. I ran my hands along the cool metal of the still and flashed my light up at the shelving that lined the back wall. There were hundreds of bottles stored on the shelves, and they all looked empty. Upon closer inspection, I could see that the still had been torn through as thoroughly as the closet to this room.

Immediately behind the still were two small white tanks that looked newer than everything else, along with some glass tubes like the ones we used in middle-school science class. One of the tanks had anhydrous ammonia written on the side, and the other looked like a compact gas tank for a propane grill. I knew farmers used the ammonia around here to fertilize their corn, but I had no idea why it would be stored in this room next to a tank of gas for a grill. One thing was clear, though. Jason had not found what he was looking for in this room yet, or he would be gone.

Shirly had told me other guests had also lost their jewelry that summer long ago, not just Regina with her necklace. It seemed likely that all those stolen jewels were the treasure Jason was after. Regina must have been caught stealing or hiding jewelry when Shirly walked in on her in the closet. Now I wondered if she had also stumbled across the moonshining operation and whoever had been running it.

If the help had been running the still, firing them all would have given her free rein to hide her stolen goods in the secret chamber. Or, if the Addamses were moonshining, she may have blackmailed them after she stumbled across their operation, which would explain why they had sold the place shortly after her discovery and why they weren’t mentioned in her obituary along with the Carnegies.

I knew my time was running out. Sam and Jason could come back at any minute, and I needed to find what they had missed. It looked like the two of them had gone over everything with a fine-toothed but greasy comb. Neither of them were neat people, though, and dirty people often don’t acknowledge the world below knee level. I got on all fours and ran my hand along the bottom of everything—the still, the shelves, an old typewriter. I was almost ready to give up when I snagged some material underneath the shelf farthest from the entrance.

I pulled the purple silk bag out, amazed at the fabric’s softness despite its obvious age. Inside the bag were four mothballs and a tied roll of leather about six inches long. I was pulling at the string securing it when I heard the door to the master bedroom open and then slam shut. My mouth and anus echoed the gesture.

I quickly switched off the flashlight, hoping its illumination hadn’t been seen in the main room, and I shoved the silk-wrapped leather into my purse. I considered hiding based on my memory of this now-dark room, but I discarded that as stupid. It was only a matter of time until Jason and his mystery accomplice returned to this secret space, and judging by the two feet of Sheetrock and insulation and wood I had crawled through to get in, this space was soundproof. It would be pretty easy to do away with a body in here. After all, this secret chamber had gone undisturbed for over eighty years. I was in no hurry to rot in here for another eighty.

At least if I snuck back into the bedroom I could make a mad dash to the door, and yell for help if I didn’t make it. Who knows? It might just be Sam out there, and I could take her down. I pulled out my stun gun and swore I’d name my first child after it if it got me out of here. This would all be a suspenseful bedtime story I’d tell little Z-Force some day.

I inched my way toward the opening, relieved when whoever was in the master bedroom flipped on a light. I could now make out the faint shapes of the stills and shelves. At the opening, I leaned toward the three-foot hole without peeking out and took stock of my surroundings.

“She’s the goddamn mayor of the town, Sammie. What, am I supposed to be rude to her?”

I heard Sam take a drag off her cigarette. “How about keeping your tongue out of her throat? Would that be too damn rude?”

The corner of my mouth twitched. In my head, a childish voice sang, “Kennie and Jason, sittin’ in a tree, kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee . . . ”

Jason’s voice became soft, pleading. “Baby doll, you know you’re the only one I want to kiss. Come over here to Daddy.”

I heard the bedsprings creak, followed by a deep, resigned sigh from over by the door. “I gotta pee first. Why don’t you clean up some of this damn mess? You live like a pig.”

The bathroom door opened. Seconds later, I heard what sounded like a racehorse emptying its bladder. Jason, meanwhile, began his version of cleaning. I heard the telltale zip of jeans and the sound of clothes hitting the floor. “Hurry up, baby! Little Jason ain’t got all day.”

The bathroom door opened again. “Baby, it don’t take Little Jason longer than all of three minutes, so quit your bitchin’.”

Score one for the lady. The light flicked off, and I waited until I heard the creaks of another body joining him on the bed. I slipped to my hands and knees and crawled out of the secret room and into the closet. The bed was to the right and out of sight of my spot, but I had a straight shot to the door, four feet to my left. I grimaced when the springs started squawking rhythmically, and I realized Sam wasn’t lying about Jason’s speed-racer love.

I fought the urge to stand up and run. If Jason saw me leaving the closet, he’d hunt me down to the ends of the earth. I sucked in a deep breath and forced myself out of the closet. The room was submerged in shadow, and I kept my head straight down to minimize movement and started crawling to the door. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sam riding Jason like a ten-cent pony outside the drugstore, her fingernails scraping his back. I filed it all away under “Top Secret—Don’t Open Again.”

I kept my movements slow and disciplined and was at the front door in under a minute. I snaked up the wall and slid my hand toward the doorknob. It was crystal on this side too. I had my face to the wall with my back to the room, vulnerable. Then, the heaving on the bed stopped.

I panicked, ripped open the door, and ran. I heard yelling behind me, but I was taking the stairs four at a time and burst out the front door before Jason could yank his pants on. There was still a crowd outside, but it looked like the show was winding down. My goal was to get as far away as I could, and when I saw a clear path off the island, I ran. I got about ten feet before I heard a pop like a firecracker, and a fiery blow to the center of my forehead knocked me flat.

I heard someone yell, “It’s a shooting! Somebody’s been shot!”

People started screaming and moving back, and I lay there, paralyzed, feeling my head ache like a broken tooth. I had been shot. I experienced a warm trickle bleeding into one of my eyes, and I put my hand up, terrified. Why wasn’t anyone helping me? I heard the crackle of a walkie-talkie, and then someone called 911 on a cell phone.

More than anything, I didn’t want to touch the hole in my head, but I couldn’t stop myself. I put my fingers on the spot about an inch above my eyebrows and was repulsed at the hard and wet blob protruding there. Were my brains coming out? Morbid curiosity won over prudence. I forced my hand back to the splash of flesh and gingerly lifted it off my head, tipping my eyes back so I could see it. The pain didn’t get any worse, so I tried to focus on the blob. I blinked, and then blinked again. I was holding a squashed June bug. In my haste to escape Jason, I had collided with a flying beetle with such force that I had juiced it right on my own noggin.

I sat up shakily to tell the crowd the ambulance wouldn’t be needed, that the dork who had almost drowned herself on a dead body yesterday had now just knocked herself silly on a June bug the size of a crow. That’s when I realized that the crowd wasn’t gathering around me, and the ambulance hadn’t been called for my sake. Somebody really had been shot.

Brushing bug juice off my tender forehead, I pulled myself up and pushed through the mob circled around one of the last tiki torches still burning. The raucous sounds of partying had been replaced by the buzzing hum of confusion and panic. In the middle of the circle was the performer dressed as Tweedledee, and I saw that he had indeed been an adult, and was now an adult with a pool of blood gathering under his body. Kellie Gibson was by his side, holding his hand and asking him questions. The little guy wasn’t moving.

I heard the ambulance charge up the narrow road to Shangri-La, and the crowd and I stepped back so the EMTs could access the fallen performer. While they were loading him onto the gurney, I turned to the guy next to me. “What happened?”

The man looked dazed, and he kept getting jostled by the crowd, both those trying to squeeze in for a better look and those trying to leave. “That crazy ringmaster shot him! He shot him and then disappeared into that black box! Jesus, what sort of show is this?”

I wondered the same thing. The happy island party was now a chaos of performers, police, and blood. I saw Chief Wohnt plow through the crowd and bark orders, but otherwise, the throng was a panicked blur. The paramedics cleared a path, and I realized that the carnival performers were melting into the dark. By the time the stretcher reached the ambulance, the only people left in the light of the torch were Battle Lake natives.

Why wouldn’t the performers be gathered around one of their own? Were they after the ringmaster who had disappeared in the black box? If so, I had an inside edge. I knew where the ringmaster had “disappeared” to. I pushed through the people who were now trying to leave the island like lemmings. The police were cordoning off the area, and it looked like it was going to be a long night of questioning witnesses. I skirted into the shadows and left the way I had come, along the swampy beach side. I made it unnoticed to the edge of the woods where I had been dumped, stopping to worry momentarily about poison ivy. There was a bumper crop this year. Well, if I was going to get it, I already had it.

When I reached to the drop-off spot, I realized that I was too late. Jed and his fellow zappee must have recovered and left. There was a second bongo next to the one I had been carried here in, its front open to reveal an empty hiding spot. The murderous ringmaster had escaped, and Jason was no doubt on the prowl after a mysterious intruder. I wondered how well the ringmaster and Jason Blunt knew each other. There certainly had been an unusual amount of violence, real and staged, since the two had come to town. I would sleep at Gina’s tonight, right after I reached a lighted area where I could look at what was in the purple silk I had lifted from the secret room.

The anticipation was killing me, but I wanted to get far away from Jason and Shangri-La before I examined the scroll of leather in the purple fabric. I jogged to my car, locked all the doors, and drove to Ben’s Bait in town. There, under the flickering glow of the parking-lot light, I unwrapped the cloth on the passenger seat and peeled the top layer back with all the anticipation of a lover opening a Valentine’s Day gift. This movement released the scent of mothballs and revealed the tied, cracked leather inside. I unrolled this, too, and found a yellowed document within. The paper was so thick it felt handmade, and the blue-black ink had bled through when the message had been scratched on it decades earlier. The writing on the front was still clear, however, and it read:

Jvgu lbhe onpx gb gur xvffvat gerr jnyx frira fgrcf abegujrfg xarry 76 yrsg 87 evtug 88 yrsg.

My stomach dropped. I had been hoping to find a map with a big red X over a sparkly, Richie Rich drawing of diamonds. This was a message in a foreign code with regular numbers. I slapped my steering wheel in frustration. There was nothing more I could do with this tonight. Tomorrow, I would bring it to Battle Lake’s resident wordsmith to see what he could puzzle out from it.

I woke up one hour past sunrise on Gina’s faux-leather couch with a lump the size of a crab apple dead center on my forehead and a headache of Mardi Gras proportions. I stumbled into her bathroom, showered, and felt slightly worse. I needed coffee, ibuprofen, and a talk with Ron Sims, the county crossword-puzzle champion. He took words pretty seriously, and if he couldn’t unscramble the puzzle I had found in the closet, no one could. One didn’t get to run a newspaper without loving the language.

While I was in the newspaper’s office, I needed access to the
Battle Lake Recall
’s archives to find out what the paper had to say about the diamond necklace and Mrs. Krupps back when it had all happened. A second visit to Shirly Tolverson might be in order as well. What I saw in the master bedroom the night before confirmed that he had done some judicious editing of his Shangri-La story. I hoped I could accomplish all this before I needed to open the library at ten.

I wrapped myself in a towel and stepped gingerly out of the bathroom, trying to hold my tender head completely still on my neck. Gina was sitting on the couch in the living room. “Hey, G, you have any ibuprofen?” It took me a second to realize that she shouldn’t be home at this time of day; she should be three hours into her slave shift. Another beat later, I realized that she was crying.

“He’s cheating.”

“What?”

“Leif. He’s cheating on me.”

I sat down next to her and stretched my arm as far as it would reach around her plump shoulders. Her husband had always been the noncommittal type, but I had never taken him for a cheater. “How do you know?”

Gina stared at the floor, her face red and swollen. Her over-permed blonde hair was corralled into a scrunchie, and she wore a tattered brown bathrobe with old-fashioned grandma pajamas underneath. Her voice cracked when she spoke. “He told me. He said he needed to come clean with me because our relationship is so important.”

I scowled at the weak logic of a guilty man. So he was an honest cheater? Give me a faithful liar any day. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Who’s it with?”

“He wouldn’t give me a name. Some ice-fishing hussy, I suppose. I knew I should have gone ice fishing with him when he asked. It’s just so damn boring.” She threw her head back, shaking tendrils of yellow hair loose from their tie, and sobbed like a three-year-old. I let her, even though every bellow dragged through my bug-bashed head like a rusty fishhook. When she calmed down, I asked her what she was going to do.

She sniffled on a bucket of snot and reached for the box of Kleenex. “What
can
I do, Mira? I love him. He’s my husband, and we’re together for better or worse.”

Her words ignited a sudden white anger in me. That had been my mother’s attitude during her entire tumultuous relationship with my father—he’s my husband, and I have to stay. I had no time for this way of thinking. There was a misconception that bad people walked around with knives and guns, yelling expletives, and so were easy to distinguish from good people. The truth was that bad people looked just like the rest of us, and they could bring you a flower on your birthday or call you to find out how your day went or come to your basketball game. Then, when you were fooled into relaxing, they’d get drunk or have sex with a stranger after they’d pledged their heart, body, and mind to you. I believed that when someone showed their true colors, and those colors were black and gray, you needed to act accordingly and cut them out of your life.

I looked at Gina with her stringy blonde hair, runny nose, and puffy eyes. She didn’t want to hear my theory on bad people. She wanted her husband to love her like mad. “Well, G, if you’re going to stick it out, take advantage of your current position.”

“Huh?” Another snort into her squelchy tissue.

“He’s got his tail between his legs, so you take what you need right now. Get him to agree to marriage counseling and to take you out for a nice night at a fancy restaurant, if nothing else.”

Her soggy green eyes stared into mine. “It can work, can’t it, Mira? People can move past this stuff, right?”

I grimaced. “Anything is possible. Now I need some ibuprofen before my head rolls off and under the couch.”

Gina provided the medicine, Sid and Nancy gave me a coffee and cinnamon scone on the house after they saw my green and purple forehead (“No shit. A June bug?”), and I met up with Ron Sims at the
Recall
office. It still smelled like ink and the walls were still tan, but something about the office hinted at excitement. This was a good time to own a newspaper in Battle Lake.

“Mira James! Just the person I was looking for. I’ve got two stories for you to write. Shoot, we might need a special edition!”

I could feel the ibuprofen kicking in and the caffeine stroking my serotonin levels nicely. Gina’s sadness had painted a gray spot in me, but I could do this. “Fine, Ron. First, I need help with a puzzle. What language does this look like to you?”

He glanced over the top of his bifocals at the fragile paper and yanked it out of my hand. “English.”

I pulled it back gently and tried to wipe off the glazed-donut fingerprints he had left. “In case you haven’t noticed, I am somewhat familiar with the predominant language of North America. This isn’t English.”

“It’s a cryptogram, James. Substitution cipher. Look at the numbers, syntax, and primary repetition of letters. Third-grade stuff. Now, if you want a real challenge, what you do is pull out the Sunday
New York Times
puzzle and settle back for a full, sweaty day of word wrestling. I remember—”

“Can you unjumble this?”

“Do fat men make the best lovers?”

Oh Christ! I hated trick questions. I copied the code onto his pink “While You Were Out” pad and returned the original to the silk wrap. “Just tell me what this says, okay?”

“Business before pleasure, James. Since you are the award-winning homicide writer, I want you to find out what you can about that midget who was shot last night at Shangri-La.”

“I don’t think they like to be called midgets, Ron.”

“Well, make that part of your research. I need the scoop on him—his name, where he was from, how long he had been with the traveling theater, how he’s doing—”

I wiped off my coffee mustache. “You mean he’s still alive?”

“Last I heard over the police radio. He was alive when they brought him to Lake Region, anyhow. I need that article ASAP. Also, Chief Wohnt dropped off this press release. Make sure it’s clean before we run it.”

I looked at the paper Ron shoved in my hand. It was short and typed in an austere, sans serif font with zero formatting:

“Field drinking down 43%”

Otter Tail County teenagers are gathering and imbibing in local corn and soybean fields 43% less than they were a year ago. “We have only received three complaints about teenagers drinking in the fields, down from seven this time last year,” according to Battle Lake Police Chief Gary Wohnt. “We attribute the decrease in outdoor, underage partying to the increase in random patrols, the DARE campaign, and the Olsen boys going off to college.” The Battle Lake Police Department will continue to focus on fields as a source of trouble but will expand their efforts to parked cars, abandoned silos, and public beaches after hours.

Hallelujah. I needed to fact-check an article on field drinking, rural Minnesota’s favorite youth sport, and write an article on a potentially murdered little person. Just another day at the office. “If I do this, you’ll solve the puzzle? I’ll throw in fresh hot scones from the Fortune for a full week.”

He nodded and waved without looking up at me, his head buried in the puzzle and his glasses threatening to fall off his nose. “I need another recipe, too. Make it a dessert this time. Too many main dishes lately.”

I nodded at his bald spot, pocketed the field-drinking press release, and headed to the back room. I knew the
Recall
had been around since the early 1900s, and I also knew Ron had paid big bucks to have a California-based document-scanning business convert all the microfiche archives to searchable PDF file format. This meant that I would be able to complete the background investigation I should have done on Shangri-La and its main players from the moment I had been handed the story.

I fired up the newspaper’s Mac and searched editions from the 1920s. Back then, the newspaper only came out once a month, and it was mostly filled with crop information and sensationalistic stories on the dangers of immigrants and Indians. I was surprised to see a lot of pictures and ads, mostly for radios. An October 1923 ad promised to provide “a radio that can catch the waves out of Yankton, South Dakota!”

The August 1924 issue of the
Recall
featured a full page on the building of Shangri-La, but it didn’t tell me anything new. It wasn’t until the June 1929 issue that I hit pay dirt—a full-length article on the suspicious disappearance of jewelry at the Addamses’ house. It listed these missing items: a Victorian lava cameo bracelet; two hematite intaglio rings; a coral, platinum, and diamond double-clip brooch; a black pearl sautoir; two sapphire, seven emerald, and twelve diamond rings; assorted diamond earrings; a diamond and emerald tiara; and a diamond pendant necklace. I whistled. That was quite a haul, and I didn’t even know what a sautoir was. If the thief was half the stasher I was, Shangri-La was lousy with hidden bling.

I dug in my purse for paper to copy the list on. I shut down the computer and was out the door, hollering at Ron on my way past. “You call the minute you get that solved. Fresh scones ...”

“Go! I’m not paying you to nag me!”

“Please. You couldn’t get a high school student to work the fryer at the Dairy Queen for what you pay me. Call me, okay?”

“I’ll call. If I don’t get bogged down with more work, I’ll have this solved within the hour.”

And then my treasure hunt would truly begin, bringing me that much closer to tying up the loose ends and making Jason’s life miserable.