The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1) (24 page)

“Beckett?”

“Mmm?”

“Would you go to prison with me?”

“What?” He lifted his head off the pillow to look at Jess, suddenly awake.

“I need to talk to John Sykes.”

“Oh.” He dropped his head and pushed his free hand over his face. “Jesus. I thought you meant…I don’t know. Something crazy.”

“This is pretty crazy. I need to go to prison to talk to my ghost’s husband and possible killer.”

Beckett chuckled, a raspy, early-morning sound from deep in his throat. “Yeah, when you put it that way, it does sound crazy.”

John Sykes had been moved from Waupun at some point—not surprising given his life sentence. He was now at the Hadley Correctional Institution, and she sent him a brief note, claiming she had information about his wife and son and asking for an invitation for her and a friend to visit. A week later, she received a fat envelope from the Hadley Correctional Institution full of the paperwork she was required to provide the Department of Corrections before she would be allowed to visit him. “It’s not the most welcoming invitation I’ve ever received,” Jess told Beckett, “but it will have to do.” They left Shakti to spend the morning with Dave at the hardware store and headed east to Hadley.

They climbed out of Jess’s car and paused to look up at the imposing structure. Built in the 1860s, it looked more like a medieval fortress than a modern prison with its stone walls and guard towers. The flags of the United States and the State of Wisconsin flanked the entrance, snapping in the wind, a crackling, irregular salute. There were other people arriving for visitors hours, people who looked like they knew what they were doing. Most of them were women and some of them had children. Beckett came around the car and took Jess’s hand. “Nervous?”

“A little.” She pushed her hair from her face, but the wind blew it right back across her eyes. She nodded her head toward a woman in a long, figure-hugging sundress. Jess had read in the regulations that short skirts and strapless tops were not allowed. This woman wore a halter-top maxi dress and flip-flops with large plastic gems atop the foot. She pulled a lightweight shrug from her oversized purse and put it on, covering her bare shoulders in order to meet the dress code. Then she opened the back door of a red Corolla that was suffering from rust and dents on every side. A girl slipped onto the tarred parking lot and adjusted a stiff plastic doll in a crocheted dress under her arm before taking her mother’s hand. As the woman and girl stepped away from their car, Jess and Beckett stepped away from theirs. When in doubt, follow someone who looks like she knows what she’s doing.

The little girl walked with a bounce and talked to her doll. Clearly she had no trepidation about being here. The idea that visiting the prison was commonplace for this child upset Jess. She couldn’t take her eyes off the girl. Her thick, straight black hair was cut in a neat pageboy style. The wind lifted it in every direction about her head, and she seemed oblivious to the violent way her hair was being stirred. Beckett squeezed Jess’s hand for courage. She turned to look at him, to let him know she was all right. The wind gusted and blew some grit into her eye. “Damn,” she said and began rubbing it.

“Careful,” he said. “They’ll think you’ve been crying.”

“At least my bruise is gone.” It was almost gone. Gone enough she’d been able to hide it with a layer of make up.

They followed the others through a gated archway, across a small courtyard, and through the main doors into the administration building. The lobby was staffed with armed guards and intake personnel who directed the visitors through a metal detector and over to tables where staff waited with more paperwork. Jess and Beckett turned in their forms, requested a meeting with inmate #00292618, and surrendered their phones and car keys to the Lobby Sergeant for holding. All of the uniformed and armed staff unnerved Jess. She kept an eye on the little girl. It was as soothing as it was sad.
If that girl can go through this,
she told herself,
then it’s not so bad
.

They were finally allowed to pass through a short hallway and into a large cafeteria-like room a with a number of round tables arranged throughout. Jess and Beckett were shown to their seats by one of the guards.

She held Beckett’s hand under the table. “Look,” she whispered. A play area with a plastic toddler slide and a bin of plush toys filled one corner of the room. The woman in the sundress and shrug sat near it with her daughter on her lap. The girl seemed reserved now in a way she hadn’t before. She held the plastic doll so it faced her, the broad bare feet planted on the girl’s thighs. She picked at the hem of the doll’s dress, a frown darkening her face. When she began to speak, Jess imagined it was to scold the doll.

Beckett nudged Jess. She looked across the room and saw a  tall, thin man with a bald head and stooped shoulders enter through a door opposite them. He walked slowly, skirting the tables, scanning the faces at each one, trying to guess who was there for him. When he looked in their direction, Jess raised a hand. He came toward them more quickly now, his gait hindered by a limp. One of the guards said, “Hurry up, Old Timer.” He ignored the remark. It didn’t seem he could go any faster than he was already. When he reached the table, he put his hands on the back of a chair, but did not pull it out.

“John Sykes?”

“I got strip searched for this. It better be worth it.”

“Please, sit down,” Jess said.

John took his seat and rested his hands on the table in front of him. They seemed unusually large, the knuckles swollen with arthritis. When he noticed Jess looking at his hands, he pulled them into his lap. “Well then?”

Jess sighed and pushed her hands through her hair. Her fingers caught unexpectedly on a snarl, a remnant of the wind’s mischief. “I’m not sure where to begin, Mr. Sykes. I’m afraid it sounds crazy.”

“Do you know the forty-year anniversary of my wife’s death is coming up this month? Do you know I have not seen my son in almost forty years?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Beckett said. “It’s about your son.”

John looked at Beckett and then at Jess. His gray eyes were piercing, despite the sallow, drooping flesh that framed them.

“I live in your old house,” Jess began, “and strange things have been happening. Things that can only be explained one way…” Jess was grateful Beckett was with her, that at least one person had heard her story and believed it. “Your wife is haunting the house.”

John pushed his chair back with a noisy scrape and rose, bracing himself against the table with those knobby hands. “That is a cruel thing to say, Miss. What are you? Some kind of thrill seeker?”

“Sit down, Sykes,” the guard who was nearest barked at him, but John turned away from the table.

“I see her,” Jess said. “She has beautiful curly red hair. She’s wearing a night gown. It’s white and sleeveless with small blue flowers and…”

John turned to face them again. Slowly, he returned his worn-out body to the seat and began coughing, a phlegmy hack that emanated from his chest. He continued to cough into a fist with his head rolled forward. The guard stepped toward him, but John held his hand up and tried to stifle his cough.

“Do you need some water?” Beckett asked.

“No.” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “It’s only the death rattle. Nothing to worry about. Besides, if I ask for water, they’ll take me back to my cell. Tell me about Bonnie.”

“Okay.” Jess hadn’t planned what she would say, which she now realized was a mistake. She could hardly tell this frail man that his wife terrified her, and probably caused a man with PTSD to tie her hands and reenact… “Oh my God.”

“What?” Beckett looked at her with concern.

“Mr. Sykes, Bonnie wants me to find him. I think she means she wants me to find her real killer so that you can be set free.” John began to shake his head, denying the possibility. “Something happened. She showed me something about that night that makes me think she was killed by a Vietnam veteran.”

“Are you a veteran?” Beckett asked.

“No, I’m not. But I don’t see how finding her killer can do anyone any good now.”

Jess and Beckett glanced at each other, their expressions mirroring the confusion the other felt. “But,” Jess began, “wouldn’t it help you? You could be free again.”

John shook his head. “I have cancer. It’s in my bones, my hip. That’s why I limp. Why I’m bald. I’ve been living with this disease and their needles and poisons for fifteen months now. Know what it’s come down to?” He leaned over the table toward Jess and Beckett, his intensity an angry incrimination of life’s injustice. “The doctors give me a few weeks to a few months. There’s talk about a compassionate release, but hell, I don’t have any use for one of those. The only person in this world I still give a damn about is Johnny. You hear me?” He lowered his head and put his face in his hands. “I haven’t seen him once since they locked me up. Not once.”

Jess reached across the table to touch his arm, to console him, but the guard stepped toward them and she withdrew her hand. “Mr. Sykes?”

“How dare you,” he spoke through his fingers.

“Excuse me?”

He lowered his hands, revealing eyes rimmed with tears and fierce with renewed anger. “My one and only comfort all this time has been the notion that Bonnie was at peace. That her soul had gone on to Heaven and she was waiting there for me, that one day we’d be together and all would be made right. Now you come here…” his voice crackled as a sob rose in his throat. “You come here and tell me she’s…she’s haunting you. Looking for vengeance, or…or…justice.” John began jabbing his finger across the table at Jess, his narrow, yellowed face twisted with pain. “I…want…her…to be…at…peace.”

He put his hands on the table again and pushed against it to help him rise from his chair. Jess hurried to speak before he could leave, before this chance was lost. “So do I. I want Bonnie to be at peace, too. Listen, John, she showed me Johnny’s room. The rocket ship bed spread. And. And there’s a cowboy. A tiny figurine about this big. Most of the paint is rubbed off. I kept trying to put it away and Bonnie kept putting it out in Johnny’s room.”

John eased back into the chair as tears fell from his eyes.

“I don’t have the answers yet,” Jess continued, “but she wants me to find him. Find him. That’s the message, John.” Jess was crying now, too, unable to hold back her tears with this man so exposed and vulnerable before her. “If we want Bonnie to be at peace, we need to find him.”

John brought the back of one of his gnarled hands to his face and wiped the tears from his cheek. “Where was the cowboy?”

“My puppy found it under the birch trees.”

John nodded. “I always liked that little stand of trees. Is the sugar maple still there?”

Jess nodded. “It’s beautiful. I hung a bird feeder from it.”

“Bonnie loved the birds. She put a feeder out back so she could watch them while she washed the dishes.”

Beckett squeezed Jess’s hand under the table.
Yes
, she thought,
now we’re getting somewhere
. “John, I don’t know how long we’ve got at this visit, but if you tell me everything you can about Bonnie and about that night, I swear I’ll do everything in my power to put her at peace.”

John looked at Jess, his eyes boring right into her. His gaze did not waver while he studied her, measuring her worth. Finally, John nodded his head, a single slow bob. “When I got home, I knew something was wrong. It felt wrong, the whole place. I went through the door and I heard the record.” He paused to collect himself and dragged the back of one of those large hands under his nose. “You know how a needle sounds at the end of a record, the way it keeps bouncing off the label? She’d been listening to
Toulouse Street
.”

Chapter Sixteen

Bonnie hoped she hadn’t missed John’s phone call already. Of course it was past Johnny’s bedtime, but if these Van Hauser salesmen were out late, she might not hear from John for a couple hours or more. She bent to lift Johnny off the seat and take him from the car. Bonnie grunted as she straightened up, bumping her head on the car’s roof. “
Oof
, you’re getting big,” she said, and kissed Johnny’s head. His teddy bear slipped from his grasp. She left the bear in the car, shut the door with her foot, and carried her son to the house.