Knee High by the 4th of July (19 page)

The statue was gazing out at a far-off place where there were answers. I pulled myself up onto her base, careful not to disturb her space, and stood on my tippy-toes to look inside her cupped hands. They were full of water from the rain, but in the palms and dripping down the fingers was a red liquid, as if her hands were bleeding. And that’s when I knew how I would nail Brando. Divine inspiration, indeed.

I sped into town
with one thought on my mind: I had to find Brando’s vehicle, the embarrassingly oversized red Humvee. Brando had told me he was leaving town today, but I had a hunch that the missing Big Ole situation was going to keep him around for a little longer than he had originally planned. Our Lady of the Hills had shown me how to connect Brando to Liam Anderson’s corpse, but he had to be around for me to do it.

My Toyota was pushing seventy as I crested the divided road hill heading into Battle Lake. I was too antsy to fiddle with my radio so tried to relax by concentrating on the day. The sky was clearing and the air smelled fresh, clean, and sauna hot. The moisture on the road was starting to evaporate, leaving sluggish worms to fend for themselves. I tried to drive around as many as I could, but the highway was flush with them.

I knew my first stop should be the cabin Brando had stayed at north of town to see if he had extended his stay. I didn’t know exactly where north of town, but a little inquiring at the Fortune Café told me that he was staying at Nifty Nook Resort on Otter Tail Lake. I buzzed out there and had his cabin pointed out to me by the friendly owners, who I knew from working at the library. They said he had indeed extended his stay but didn’t think he was around at the moment.

I walked over to the cabin to be sure. Brando’s Humvee wasn’t in sight and a quick peek in the building’s windows showed me an immaculate if small interior. The kitchen was spotless, with daisy-strewn curtains cutting the sunlight. The main room had a couch, a television, a game table, and a bookshelf, and the bedroom had a bed so tightly made, the spread looked like a tourniquet. My guess was that Brando had been so successful at bed-hopping in Battle Lake that he had never used this cabin.

I listened to the water of Otter Tail Lake lapping onto the sandy beach and considered my next move. Probably, I’d go back to town and ask around to see if anyone had seen Brando. If nothing else, Gina always had her ear to the ground and might be able to tell me whose bed he had ended up in last night. I decided a quick cruise through the back streets of Battle Lake would be a good place to start before going door to door. There were really only seven avenues off of Lake Street anyhow. It was at the third street, in front of Kennie’s house, that I stumbled across the parked Humvee. That woman certainly was taking her job as mayor and official welcomer seriously.

I parked my car, scarcely able to contain my excitement, and ran over to the Hummer. It didn’t take long crouched down on my hands and knees to find exactly what I was looking for—red paint splashed onto all four wheel wells. The Virgin Mary’s stigmata had made me think of it. I hadn’t noticed the paint yesterday because of the Humvee’s matching color. So it was Brando who had originally broken the balloons when he had gone on Saturday night to drop Liam Anderson’s dead or dying body into what he assumed were empty cabins. It was Johnny’s poor luck that he had chosen his.

Dolly was surely right that Brando hired Liam Anderson to help him remove the statue, and he must have slipped or something dropped on him in the process and he was hurt. Brando, apparently not one to be too troubled by his heart or conscience, didn’t bring Anderson to the hospital. He must have been scouting out a hiding place to unload his hireling when he stumbled across Johnny’s cabin. It wasn’t teenagers who had been out there spinning shitties on Friday; it was Brando looking for a place to stash the dying man.

What he hadn’t planned for was the paint-filled balloons Johnny had secreted under the pile of leaves at the head of the driveway. I had been too fixated on Dolly as the criminal to even check Brando’s car before today. Now, I had hard evidence to bring to Gary Wohnt. I could prove that Brando had been to the cabin Saturday night, and that would be enough to launch an investigation.

“See anything you like?”

I stood so fast that I scraped my head on the wheel well. I whirled on Brando. “Not so much. Paying a house call to Kennie?”

“Something like that. What were you doing down there?”

I rubbed the tender spot on my noggin and pulled my hand away. Blood. How ironic. This man was good at separating people from parts of their head. “I dropped a bracelet.”

Brando leaned into me, oozing sexuality and charm. “I’ve never seen you wear a bracelet.” He circled my wrist with his large hand and caressed it. “You’ve got beautiful wrists.”

“Thank you. I—” Before I could make my goodbyes, Brando clamped down on my arm and twisted it around and back, forcing me to turn my back to him to keep it from snapping. The pain sent hot mercury streaks up my arm and into my brain.

“I think we need to go for a ride. You’ll like riding in the Humvee. You feel on top of the world.”

His left hand opened the driver’s side door as his right hand held me effortlessly. He gave my arm an extra twist, and I felt more than heard a pop. My knees buckled and he shoved me up and forward. My arm felt attached to my body by only one stretched sinew and to do anything but go forward would have snapped it free. I had one leg in the car when I spotted the rust-colored stains peeking out under a towel spread on the seat and carpeting.

He caught my gaze. “Time to get this reupholstered, don’t you think? That’s for tomorrow. I have a good friend who owes me a favor. For today, I think we’ll just take a little joy ride.”

Tears started spilling down my face despite myself. His grip was too tight to allow me to turn and look up and down the street, but I knew there had been no one outside when I pulled up, and it was too much to hope that Kennie would come out and save me. I couldn’t fight or yell now without losing my arm, but he’d need to let go to drive, and then I would kick, scratch, and yell like a banshee.

Brando shoved me all the way across the driver’s seat and gave a tiny yelp, which I mistook for sick glee. The pressure eased off my arm as quickly as it had come, and the lack of pain was exquisite. My arm hung limply at my side, not broken but not right, either. I turned to kick and run but was stopped short.

Brando was on his knees in an awkward genuflection, his face resting on the pavement. Mrs. Berns was behind him, crouched down, with one hand between his legs like a cocky quarterback taking the ball from her center. She winked at me. “I took a class on women’s self-defense. What you do, you make a little crook, like so, with your thumb and forefinger and come up from behind and through the legs.” She demonstrated with her free hand. “You squeeze that crook around the very top of the sac like you’re castrating a pig, pinch, and twist until you can’t twist no more. That way, you really get their attention.”

Or you could, if they were conscious, I thought to myself. And who was running the library?

It took three days
and a couple search warrants to find out I had been mostly right about Brando and Liam Anderson. Brando had hired Liam for muscle to help him remove the statue, and according to Brando, Liam had slipped and fell once the statue had been removed. He impaled his head on the post on the way down. In Minnesota, there is no law requiring someone to bring another person to the hospital, no matter how dire their straits, so the death of Liam Anderson was ruled an accident, and no charges were filed.

However, Dolly’s engineering friend found a structural flaw in Big Ole that would have resulted in him crushing some unsuspecting Lutherans with cameras in under a year if it hadn’t been fixed. Which it was. It required trimming thirteen inches of thigh off the big guy, but he looked better for it, and now, he’s as safe as Sesame Street. Finding the flaw in Ole had been enough to grant a search warrant for Fibertastic Enterprises, where the dismantled Gandhi was found stowed in a back storeroom. Apparently, Brando had been intending to resell the upper torso to a mini golf course in Branson, Missouri. There was enough left to prove that the same structural flaw that had threatened Big Ole had also sent the Gandhi statue tumbling in India, and Brando was forced to pay big to the Jains. His name and photo were on the cover of every newspaper in the Midwest, so he was humiliated as well as financially ruined.

That’s not even the best news, though. They found my man. Brando had parked his Humvee with the dead or dying Liam in it in the woods near Johnny’s cabin and driven the tractor trailer with Chief Wenonga in it all the way back to Stevens Point. There, it had been unloaded, and Brando had left instructions to have Wenonga’s body spray-painted white, his hair spray-painted blonde, his eyes blue, his leather pants replaced with a half-robe, and the tomahawk replaced with a cross. You got it. My emotionally distant hunka hunka burning love had been this close to being reincarnated as a fiberglass Jesus. Thank god for miracles.

Speaking of miracles, it was at the Return of the Chief party that Mrs. Berns explained how she miraculously came to be outside of Kennie’s house just in time to save me.

“Oh, that? Well, the library was kinda slow, and Kennie said she had a business proposition for me, so I locked ’er up and headed over.”

I wiggled the fingers sticking out of my sling. The doctor said my arm was just strained and had given me a sling and prescribed some truly worthwhile painkillers. They were even better than Nyquil. I wasn’t so medicated that I had lost all sense, however. I debated whether or not Mrs. Berns’ work ethic and/or her business venture with Kennie were topics worth pursuing. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I think the woman’s really got something this time, too. She wants to run an online business with me.”

My shoulders relaxed marginally. “Oh, that’s great! Online businesses are really taking off. You have a wider market that way.”

“It’s going to be called ‘Come Again.’ We’re going to sell previously owned and gently used marital aids. Kennie says it’s an untapped market, what with the cost of some of those things new. And you break up with someone or get divorced, you don’t want that stuff lying around to remind you what you had.”

Technically, all true. “It sure is a beautiful day to get Wenonga back.”

Brando’s brother, Peter Erikkson, was now in charge of what was left of Fibertastic and had promised to work around the clock to get a repainted Chief Wenonga back to Halvorson Park by the weekend. He was true to his word. Kennie had arranged for the Battle Lake Bulldogs marching band to be present at the reinstallation of the statue. They had originally wanted to play “Apache,” but Dolly, the town’s honorary Historical Consultant and head of the new Diversity Advisory Panel, had suggested they play something less culturally weighted, hence “Wipe Out.”

In the shortest town meeting in history, the Advisory Panel had decided that Chief Wenonga and Chief Wenonga Days were here to stay, but the celebration would from here on out be a true celebration of the First Nation people as well as the immigrants who had since arrived. That might still include turtle races, a street dance, and all-town garage sale, but it would also include historical tours through Glendalough, no more stereotypical representations of Native Americans in the parade, and introspective pieces in the
Recall
. There was even talk of changing the name of Wenonga Days to the Heritage Festival.

Change can be good, I thought, shading my eyes against the late afternoon sun that was reflecting gloriously off the ebony hair of Chief Wenonga. There were at least two hundred people in Halvorson Park doing the same, many of them tourists. Business was booming in town, thanks to the nationwide publicity Wenonga’s and Ole’s disappearances had brought. I looked around for Sid or Nancy, knowing one of them would be here. I felt a hand tap my shoulder.

“Mira?”

It was Johnny, still tanned, rippling, and smelling of vanilla and warm earth, despite his two days in the clink. Other than the tired pull around his eyes and his hesitant smile, he seemed to be my old Johnny. I smiled at him. “You look so hot.”

“What?”

“You look shot. That’s what I said. It’s something we used to say in Paynesville. You know, like ‘you look kind of tired.’ Guess that saying didn’t make it over to Wisconsin.” I giggled a tad hysterically and fought the urge to pull out my painkillers and convince him I had a prescription to be stupid.

“No, I guess it didn’t.” He rubbed his hands across the front of his jeans, glanced in my eyes and looked hastily away. “I heard you helped bring the Chief back.”

“No, that was all Dolly. You were right to check her out, you know. She had all the information. She just didn’t know who to share it with.”

“I thought she stole the Chief.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Mira?” This time he held my gaze. His eyes were a deeper blue than I had ever seen them, and I had to struggle not to look away. “I heard you helped me get out of jail.”

“Oh, that would have happened sooner or later.”

He reached for my arm, looked angrily at my sling, and pulled back. “You trusted me, and that means something to me.”

It was too much. I was going to cry or hump his leg, neither of which I wanted accompanied by “Wipe Out” and an audience of two hundred. I twisted to lose myself in the crowd, but not before he grabbed my good hand.

“Wait.” I turned back and thought I saw a kiss in his eyes before he looked away shyly. “I owe you a thank you.”

I nodded, wondering why my fight-or-flight mechanism was kicking in. Johnny wanted to thank me, and if I let it, it could be the best thank you ever, much better than a card. That’s when his cell phone vibrated against his hip.

He reluctantly reached for it and got a worried look when he saw the number. “It’s my mom. I have to take it.”

He stepped away, leaving me vibrating without the need for electricity. Was this my chance to fall for a good guy? I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying, but when he turned back to me, the concerned look was on his face for a different reason. “I’m sorry, I have to go. My mom hasn’t seen me since I got out of jail, and I need to show her I’m all right.”

My disappointment was palpable, but how upset can you be with a guy who worries about his mom? “That’s OK. I appreciate the thank you.”

He pushed a stray hair off my cheek. “I can come over tonight. Will you be around?”

Do Norwegians like white food? “I think so.”

“I’ll knock three times.” He smiled his shy grin and walked away.