The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1) (34 page)

Jess smoothed her napkin over her lap before looking up to study his face. “Beckett, this isn’t helping me. I need to deal with Bonnie’s problem.”

“And Johnny’s life doesn’t matter?”

“That’s not what I said.” She picked an olive off her pizza and put it in her mouth. “I need to tell him the truth. What he does with it is up to him.”

Beckett threw his napkin down beside his plate and rubbed his chin, smoothing the hairs under his hand. Jess wondered what emotions he was restraining…and why. She took a bite of her pizza and smiled to show Beckett it was good. He watched her closely, then picked up his own slice.

“You do what you have to do,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jess had been prepared to leave yet another voicemail, another apology for bothering him, and another plea to hear to her out. So when Johnny said, “Hello,” Jess dropped her phone.

“Crap!” She fumbled to catch it before it was destroyed on Beckett’s hard studio floor. She got it up to her ear, upside down, then righted it. “Sorry. You there? Hello?”

“I’m here.”

“Johnny. Dr. Ecklund. I’m sorry to be so persistent, but…”

“I know.” He dragged out the O, emphasizing the tediousness of her repeated pleas. “I’ve heard your messages. Enough of them, anyway.” He sighed into the phone, the sound loud against Jess’s ear. “I do care about the truth, Ms. Vernon. As much as I wish I didn’t, I do.”

“Good.”

“I’d like to see the house, Ms. Vernon. Can I see the house?”

Jess left Shakti at Beckett’s and drove out to the farmhouse. She was almost afraid to open the front door, but it was better to see whatever was inside before Johnny arrived.

The house was quiet, sunny, just as she had left it. Even the office looked all right. Jess rubbed the dent in the floorboard with her toe, regretting not the damage to her floor, but to her Underwood. Jess went into her bedroom and quickly made the bed then did a scan for dirty laundry or anything else that could prove awkward. She was picking the bath towels off the floor when the doorbell rang.

Jess ran down and opened the door like someone overeager to find good news on the other side. Johnny Sykes stood there rubbing his brow. He had a couple of days growth on his chin, like he hadn’t shaved since they last met. He removed his sunglasses and they stared at each other for a long moment, neither of them speaking.

“Hello,” Jess said at last. “Come in.” She stepped out of his way and led him through the vestibule, across the hallway and into the kitchen. He followed without speaking. “Would you like something? Tea? Coffee?”

“Just water, please.” He rubbed his forehead again. “Maybe some Tylenol.”

Jess set a glass of water on the table next to a bottle of Tylenol she kept in her junk drawer. She watched as Johnny popped two of the pills in his mouth and washed them down together.

“I’ve never been able to take pills like that,” she said. “I have trouble if they’re bigger than this.” She pinched her fingers together.

Johnny squinted at her. “I’m sorry. I’m not feeling chatty, Ms. Vernon.”

“Call me Jess.”

“Jess. Look, I’m sorry about Saturday. I shouldn’t have…um…”

“Attacked me?” She had been so excited to finally tell him Bonnie’s story, she had forgotten about his behavior at Oak Hill. Now she wished Beckett was with her. Maybe she could call him with a desperate message, but he’d been so adamant against telling Johnny the truth that she wasn’t sure he’d come. And here she was alone with a man she didn’t know.
Dammit, Jess,
she thought,
get smart finally, would you?

Johnny looked at her, his expression disagreeing, then softening. He dropped his head and when he lifted it, he said, “Yes. I’m not proud of my behavior Saturday. I acted like an ass.” He put his hand on the table and rubbed it back and forth thoughtfully. “This table seems familiar.”

Jess relaxed a little. “It’s big isn’t it? I think it has been here since the house was built. I think it’s too big to get through a door, so it just transfers owners when the house does.”

He looked up at Jess.

“That’s my theory anyway. I don’t really know.”

“You’re a romantic.”

“What?”

“You like the idea of having a piece of the past.”

“I guess so.” Johnny looked at her closely again, one hand on the table. Jess shifted and found her back against the edge of the sink. “I think you should see the room upstairs.”

“The room?”

“Your old bedroom.”

“Oh.” He swept his hand off the edge of the table. “Let’s go then.”

Jess led him upstairs. Johnny walked slowly, remaining several steps behind her, pausing on the landing to look out the window into the trees. “Do you remember something?” she asked.

“No.” Johnny rubbed his forehead again. “I’m sorry. This is almost too much. I’m trying to wrap my head around it.” He looked up at Jess and forced a smile. His sunglasses were propped on his head, keeping his light hair away from his face. He reached out for the banister and pulled himself forward before launching up the second half-flight of stairs and joining Jess in the hallway. It seemed an unlikely burst of energy from someone with a headache, and Jess tried not to back away or cringe when he arrived beside her.

“Here.” She led him into her office and watched as he circled the room, taking it in.

His face remained drawn by the discomfort of his headache as he peered into the corners and closet. He folded his arms over his chest and looked out the window into the leaves of the sugar maple. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not familiar. But who remembers anything from when they were two?”

Jess picked up the cowboy from the top of her desk. She had hoped Johnny would notice it himself, but his sweep of the room had avoided taking in her personal possessions. She held the figure out on her palm. “Does this look familiar?”

He took it from her and turned it over in his hands. “Where’d you get this?”

“It was buried under the birch trees by the driveway.”

Johnny nodded. He leaned over the desk to look out the window toward the birches and nodded again. “It’s mine. I have a set of these guys. They were my father’s when he was a boy. They’re all I have of him.” He drained of color and Jess worried he might fall over. She pulled her chair out from the desk and he accepted it. Johnny set the cowboy on the writing deck before him, turning the figure so they faced each other. He took his sunglasses off his head and rubbed his brow with both hands, kneading vigorously, before slipping his fingers into his shirt pocket and pulling out the photograph Marlene Wilkins had given Jess.

She gasped. “I thought I’d lost that.”

“Pops had it.” He set it down next to the cowboy. “I stayed in La Crosse Saturday, went back to visit Pops yesterday. He had this on his nightstand. I asked him who they were and he told me.” Johnny picked up the corner of the photo, tilting it to better look at the three faces within its white border. “He said that’s my Bonnie. That’s John. That’s Johnny.”

“Then what?”

“He seemed to remember who I was, or at least to question what he was thinking. He started denying everything. Telling me they were nobody and to leave him alone. He got upset again, started yelling, so I took the photograph and left him there.”

Jess had her hand over her mouth when Johnny turned to look at her. She shook her head. “I’m so sorry.” Maybe Beckett was right. Maybe sometimes it was better to not know the truth.

“I could use that cup of coffee now.”

Jess carried the coffee through to the living room. Johnny was standing next to her coffee table, staring at a corner of the room near the archway to the dining room. “I feel like I used to play here on the floor and watch
Sesame Street
.” He pointed at the corner. “But people make stuff up. Our memories can’t actually be trusted. Maybe I just want to believe that.”

“Or maybe that’s how it was.” Jess handed him his coffee cup and led the way onto the porch. She hoped they’d find a breeze outside to relieve some of the stickiness. They sat in the rockers facing the yard. The bright midday light made the yard look scorched, a paler version of itself. She had so many questions and no idea where to begin. Her eyes kept finding the smokehouse, wondering if it meant anything to Johnny.

“I’m a historian. I do research about the past. You’d think I would know my own history.”

“Some things we take for granted,” Jess said.

He snorted. “Isn’t that the truth.” He held up his left hand, displaying the absence of a ring. “I thought I knew my wife. I took it for granted that being married, she wouldn’t sleep with anyone else… It was her best friend. Her
best
friend. You know, someone we had over a lot. Someone who slept in our daughter’s bottom bunk whenever we’d drank too much for her to drive home. Someone who stayed at our house for a week after her dog died because she didn’t want to be alone.” Johnny looked across at Jess. “I’m trying to explain something to you. You see, I don’t care that my wife left me for a woman. I’m not even sure I care that she left me, to be honest. I care that she lied. She let me believe we were in love, or in love enough to keep working on our problems. We were even seeing a counselor, and that whole time she was sleeping with her best friend. We were living a lie, and she knew it and I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. It’s just, this is all going on now. You know? So to hear all of a sudden that my whole life might be a lie… It’s a lot to take in and I’m sorry about Saturday. I’m not a violent person.”

Jess looked at the orange Cooper Mini parked in her drive. The sun glinted off a dent in the hood. She nodded, accepting Johnny’s explanation and apology. “Are you ready to meet your father?” she asked.

“No. I need more time to figure this thing out.” He caught her gaze and held it. “Jess, would you help me with something?”

“I say it never hurts to hang onto things, and looky here.” Bill Ecklund’s niece, Pam, practically pranced out of the bedroom. She wore an old dress of her aunt’s, something bought for an occasion special enough that it warranted keeping it tucked in a closet until long after it had gone out of style. Jess complimented Pam, though in truth she thought the dress looked like something inspired by Nancy Reagan. It was a couple decades past even Goodwill’s use-by date. “You don’t know how many times I was ready to get rid of Aunt Vera’s things, but it just seemed wrong to toss them after Uncle Bill had hung on to them for so long, like maybe it gave him comfort knowing they were still around.” Pam had slipped on hose and a pair of old black pumps from her own closet. “I keep these things around in case of a wedding or a funeral in the family. I’m not one to wear heels normally, you know?”

Jess nodded. Sure, she knew.

Beckett had come down to La Crosse with her. He was in the dining room, tucking a webcam onto a shelf of the corner cabinet. He went back to the spare bedroom and tested the feed. Jess had warned him three times on the drive down that she hadn’t told Johnny the man who killed his mother was the man he believed was his father. She hadn’t been able to, and she was hoping there might be someone else who could tell him that piece of it. Beckett had finally snapped at her that he got it, and they spent the last twenty minutes of the drive in silence. Johnny had gone to Oak Hill to get Bill Ecklund out for a visit. They could arrive at any minute.

Pam went to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee and slice up a rhubarb pie she had made using her Aunt Vera’s recipe. She put a nice wide slice on a blue Fiestaware plate. “Uncle Bill loves rhubarb pie,” she told Jess.

“Pam, you don’t mind tricking Bill like this?”

“Well, Johnny’s got a right to know who his father is, don’t he?”

“Yes, but why now? Why not just tell him years ago?”

“Oh, well, years ago we were all sworn to secrecy. Bill and Vera thought it would ruin Johnny’s life to know what happened to his mother, and they were so heartbroken about it all nobody dared to suggest otherwise. I mean, it made sense, didn’t it? Would you want to know your father was a murderer who took your mother from you?” She went to the cupboard, the heavy beaded necklace she wore swinging against the silk top of her dress. She took down two cups and saucers for the coffee. “Anyway, everything was fine until now, wasn’t it? There was no reason to bring up the past, since Johnny has such a nice life and all.”