Knee High by the 4th of July (14 page)

I squared my shoulders.
As much as I wanted to believe Johnny knew nothing about the dead guy, I was not going to let myself be played the fool again. I tried to shove pictures of Johnny out of my head, but in the sultry heat of my living room, I couldn’t escape the images of him smiling at me as he helped me landscape in June, ignoring the bruises discoloring my face, or the image of his strong hands digging into black dirt, or even the picture of his sweetly shy smile as he dropped me off after supper last night. These hot thoughts pulsed through my mind as a mosquito whined around my head. I slapped at it and missed, and it was soon joined by a second.

I checked my front door, and it was locked tight. I couldn’t find a hole in any of the screens, either. I fixed myself a cold cheese and pickle sandwich and scarfed it down. I rinsed the plate, stacked it in the sink, and made myself a glass of ice water. The glass fogged up immediately, and drips of water glided down the sides and over my fingers. By now more mosquitoes had joined the first ones, their telltale humming promising a miserable night.

I tried to outrun them by dashing into my bedroom and slamming the door. I set the sweating water glass next to my bed and flopped down, a fan pointed on my body. I wanted to think, but whenever the breeze from the oscillating fan moved from my head, the mosquitoes returned, buzzing and keening with a vengeance. It sounded like a bona fide swarm, but I couldn’t seem to kill them. When I pointed the fan so it was aimed only at my face, one of them bit my ankle and escaped scot-free.

Frustrated, I tried lying under the sheets to escape the mosquitoes, but I could still hear their vibrations. They were hovering, just waiting for me to relax and expose my soft and vulnerable skin. I tossed and turned and wondered what Gary Wohnt would do to Johnny. Throw him into the county jail in Fergus Falls, certainly, and how would they treat him there? He was too pretty to be in jail. I was bitten again, this time on the tender flesh of my wrist, and I jumped out of bed and returned to the couch. The whine of the mosquitoes was driving me crazy. I couldn’t think a clear thought and I certainly couldn’t sleep between the heavy heat and the bloodthirsty flying knives invading my home. My choices were either to stay here and go insane, or go into town and see if the Battle Lake Motel had a vacancy. I could fix whatever chink in my double-wide armor they were coming through tomorrow, in the light of day.

Before I started to fret about the money I’d be wasting, I scooped up a toothbrush, change of clothes, and a hairbrush and headed out the door. I made sure to let Tiger Pop and Luna out to spend the night in the hay-filled barn, where they would be much cooler and where they had fresh water. I could still hear the whining insects as I got in my car, so I rolled down all the windows and sped down County Road 83. Only when I finally reached the outskirts of Battle Lake did I feel bug-free.

When I pulled into the motel parking lot, I spotted Dolly’s black Honda and, a few cars down, Brando’s red Humvee. When I had questioned him at his shop after the parade Indian disappeared, Les had said Brando was staying in a cabin north of town, but I had no reason to trust him. Brando could be staying at the motel, for all I knew, or maybe he was visiting Dolly, confirming my earlier hunch. Was the motel his destination when he tailgated me a couple days earlier, on the day I had discovered the missing Chief?

A little window peeking was clearly in order, but first, I was going to stop by and visit Chief Wenonga’s post to see if there was anything I had missed when I had first found the scalp. Heat lightning flashed across the glass-flat surface of Battle Lake as I stepped out of my car, and it gave me chills. A storm in this heat would be fierce. I sniffed the air for ozone but only smelled lake and country. I reached back into my car for my flashlight and headed to Wenonga’s former home. The half-full moon offered enough illumination that I didn’t click on my light as I walked, listening to the tinkle of glasses and muted laughter floating across the lake.

The base was just as I had left it, two days and a million years ago, minus the blood. The four posts had been scrubbed clean and pointed angrily toward the night sky. They were cool to the touch, as was the four-foot-high cement stand. Clicking on my flashlight revealed nothing new on the stand, and the grass perimeter was also scrubbed clean—not even a cigarette butt marred the trampled grass. That gave me pause. Footprints were the only thing that had been around Chief Wenonga’s base on Friday when I discovered him missing, as well. If the Chief-stealer had used a wrecking ball, as Brando had said they would have had to, there would have been Chief shrapnel everywhere. Instead, the ground had been as clean as a hospital floor.

I got on my knees and ran my fingers through the stubbly grass to make sure I wasn’t missing something.

“What’re you doing?”

The gruff voice made me jump up so quickly that I lost my flashlight. I couldn’t make out anyone in the light of the half-moon. “Who said that?”

“I am the night. I am swift justice. I am—”

“Les, is that you?”

He shuffled out from behind a tree, a set of night-vision goggles perched on his head. I reached down for my flashlight, sending a crazy strip of light down the park, and shined it on Les. He was dressed head to toe in Realtree camo with black mud or grease paint smeared across his cheeks.

“What’re you doing out here late at night?”

“I could ask you the same thing, Les.”

“I’m hunting.”

“For what?”

“The truth.”

“I guess I am, too. You find any?”

“Not yet, but I just started.” The front office door to the Battle Lake Motel opened, spilling a rectangle of yellow light out into the parking lot. Les hit the ground and pulled me with him. “Get down!”

I had no choice but to hit the grass next to Les. “You wouldn’t happen to be searching for this truth at the Battle Lake Motel, would you be?”

“Perhaps.”

A thought struck me. “You know where Brando is staying?”

“I already told you. A cabin north of town.”

“So what’s his Humvee doing at the motel?”

Les broke off eye contact with me. The motel door closed and we both stood up, brushing the dirt off our knees.

“Les?”

“Could be he’s visiting someone.”

I decided to come at this from behind. “Say, Les, how would you take down the Chief Wenonga statue if you had to do it?”

He eyed me suspiciously. “I didn’t steal the statue.”

I sighed. “Look, I saw you following Dolly at the fireworks, and now you’re spying on her outside her motel room. If I tell Gary Wohnt what you’re up to, you’re going to have an uncomfortable lot of surveillance in your life. How about you cooperate with me now, and I’ll keep quiet about your illicit activities?”

He started to puff up, his bowling-ball face glistening under the blackness, and then, just as quickly, he deflated. “I’m just guessing, you understand? I didn’t take that statue, but if I did, I’d take it down with a blowtorch and a cherry picker, lickety split. No mess, and you could get it done in under forty-five minutes. That’s just a guess, mind you.”

I processed that and wondered why Brando had lied. Or maybe he really had no idea how to dismantle a fiberglass statue? “What were you talking to Brando about the other night, when he stormed out of your store?”

Les shuffled his feet in the dirt. “I knew he was coming to town. I overheard Kennie and Gary talking about it one night when I was strolling past Kennie’s house. I arranged a visit with Brando, thinking I could talk him into making a big white guy statue for the town.”

I’ll bet he was just strolling past Kennie’s house. I wonder who else’s house he strolled past regularly. “What did Brando say?”

“He didn’t think it would be a good idea. Say, you look awful pretty tonight.”

The incongruousness of his statement made it hard to process. “What?”

Another door opened in the Battle Lake Motel, but this time, it wasn’t the office door. It was door number 7—Dolly Castle’s door—and a victorious-looking Brando was emerging. Both Les and I dropped to the ground automatically, and I had to stifle a yelp when Dolly’s strawberry blonde head peeked out and kissed Brando passionately before slapping him on the rear and closing the door behind him. They did know each other.

“How do Brando and Dolly know each other?” I looked away from the rumbling Humvee. “Les?” He was gone, like a mole underground. I sighed and stood, dragging my exhausted bones back to the motel. I needed some sleep so I could mull over everything I had seen and heard today, from the dead body at the cabin to the tryst I had just witnessed.

I entered the motel office and dinged the bell at the front desk. I heard a cheerful voice warble from the back room. “I’m on my way! It’s a busy night here at the Battle Lake Motel. We have just one … oh my!”

The face of the middle-aged desk clerk went from welcoming to surprised to suspicious. I looked over my shoulder—no one there—and back at her, smiling uncertainly. “Um, were you saying you have one room left?”

“We’re a family hotel.”

“Oh, it’s just me tonight.”

“We are a family motel.” Her lips pursed into an uptight moue. “We don’t need your kind’s business.”

I looked around the front office, trying to find some indication of what my kind was versus what kind they were accepting. That’s when I caught my reflection off the glass of the 5 by 7 framed Ducks Unlimited print over the front desk. My face still wore all the makeup that Kennie had put on me earlier, and it did not look pretty, unless one was in the market for a ten-dollar whore. “Jesus.”

“It’s a little late for him, don’t you think?”

“No, I mean yes! I mean, I’m not what you think I am. I, um, let my five-year-old niece put makeup on my face earlier tonight and must have forgotten to wash it off. My name is Mira James. I run the library and work at the newspaper.”

Her lips stayed as tight as a razor cut across her face. “And why do you need a hotel room if you live in town, Ms. James?”

“I don’t live in town. I live west of town, in Sunny Waters’ double-wide?” I knew I was going a little crazy from stress because I hardly ever referred to the double-wide as Sunny’s anymore. “There’s a hole in one of the screens, but I can’t find where, and the place is swarming with mosquitoes. I needed to get a good night’s sleep. OK?”

Her lips relaxed only marginally. “I need to see some ID.”

Thankfully, my new driver’s license had arrived in the mail the week before. Heaven help me if I handed her something with a Minneapolis address. I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it over. “See? I live west of town.”

She snapped the plastic card on the counter and slid it toward me. “I hope I don’t see any male companionship entering your room tonight, Ms. James. It would be a shame if I had to call Battle Lake Police Chief Gary Wohnt out here to interrupt your, ahem, activities.”

“I’m pretty sure you don’t have to worry about me receiving any male companionship in the near future. How much is the room?”

“$55 plus tax. Because it’s still a holiday weekend.”

“Gotcha.” I handed her my cash and took my room key. Lucky number 8, right next to Dolly, who was doing just fine for male companionship, thank you very much. I bet she hadn’t gotten the hairy eyeball from the desk clerk.

I grabbed the small bundle of toiletries from my car and headed toward my room, grateful at the prospect of a night in air-conditioned comfort. There was one last hunch I needed to follow up on before I retired for the night, though.

I stopped at Dolly’s car, my flashlight in my hands, and dropped to my knees. In the moonlight, I didn’t see anything but gravel clumps, but when I ran my hands over the bumps and they didn’t come off, I shined my light and peered closer. Sure enough—there was dried red paint mixed amid the dirt. It looked like Dolly had done a little four-wheeling out at Johnny’s cabin, and recently.

I slept well
in the air-conditioned motel and woke up feeling like I could solve all this and bring Chief Wenonga home to Battle Lake. After seeing Brando leave Dolly’s room, and then finding the red paint on Dolly’s car, it was plain as the mosquito bites on my ankle that Dolly and Brando were my bad guys. I just had to figure out how and why. After I showered and got the library up and running, I would go out to Johnny’s cabin to see if I had missed anything, and then I’d enlist Gary Wohnt’s help to get Johnny off the hook. Together, we’d find out why the Chief had been taken, how it was connected to the disappearance of Bill Myers, and how that all related to the dead guy in Johnny’s cabin. I showered, brushed my teeth, and checked out of the motel.

The town of Battle Lake was beautiful and humming, the lake skirting the north edge of town sparkling in the sunlight, and it felt good to be heading back to the library where there was some order. I left my car in the motel parking lot near Dolly’s and walked the three blocks to work. It was the Monday after the Fourth of July, so the town was packed with tourists up for the week. Families in brightly colored sundresses and T-shirts walked the streets, stopping at the Apothecary for sunscreen and mosquito repellent, window shopping at the local stores that wouldn’t open for another hour. I strolled along with a little grin on my face.

I felt good enough to treat myself to iced green tea and a bagel at the Fortune Café. The coffee shop was packed. I waited my turn and was greeted by Sid’s smiling face.

“You look like the cat who got the mouse.”

“I hope to be the chick who gets the Native American. What’s the word on the street?”

Sid shook her head. “It doesn’t look so good for your love interests. First, Wenonga, and now a dead body at Johnny’s cabin. You’re not Irish, are you?”

“You know anything about that dead body at Johnny’s cabin?”

“Just that it was scalped. Not so good for business. You want some iced tea?”

“Please, green sweetened. And a bagel with olive cream cheese, to go.” I glanced around at the crowd filling her shop. “Your business seems to be doing fine.”

Sid scooped a pile of ice into a disposable cup. “Most of these people just got to town. If word spreads that it’s not safe, I don’t know what’s going to happen. The only good news is that the dead guy isn’t local.”

“That’s not good news to a tourist, I suppose.” I smiled and traded cash for food and drink. I threaded my way back through the crowd, wondering what sort of tourists Battle Lake would start drawing if this murder wasn’t solved soon. It really wouldn’t be good for business, and a lot of people I cared about were doing business in Battle Lake. That gave me one more reason to solve this murder. I sipped my tea and walked into the library with a spring in my step. The front room was just as clean as I had left it, and the air-conditioned oxygen felt refreshing against my face. I tossed my keys on the front counter, eyeballed the stack of books in the dropbox that needed shelving, and whistled as I headed to the back room to check my messages. It might have been the start of a perfect day if not for the man in my rear office, buck naked but for an Indian headdress and some war paint.