The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1) (37 page)

“No, but it sounds wonderful.”

“You were the sweetest little boy, Johnny.” John wheezed, exhausting himself with talking.

Johnny reached into the front pocket of his bag and pulled out the lead cowboy. He held it up for John to see.

“Well look at that. After all these years.” John took it off Johnny’s palm and brought it closer to his face. He rubbed his thumb over the cowboy’s head. “I made this.”

“You did?”

“Sure. When I was kid. Back in the 1950s, you could get these hobby kits. They came with molds and a lump of lead you could melt down and pour into the molds, then you’d paint your own figures. We didn’t know about lead poisoning then, so all the boys had them. It was loads of fun. I made dozens of these fellows. Most of them got lost, but I managed to save a few cowboys and Indians. I gave them to you. Your mother thought you were still too young, but we had fun with them, you and I.”

“I remember that,” Johnny said.

“Do you?” John’s face brightened momentarily before his fatigue returned. “That’s good. That’s good, Johnny.” He held the cowboy out for Johnny. “This poor fellow’s lost most of his paint. No surprise. You get on in life and things wear away.”

Johnny took the cowboy and patted his dad’s shoulder.

“Now I am tired, but when can I see you again?”

Johnny glanced over his shoulder at Jess, then back at his father. “How about in three hours? Can I come back in about three hours, maybe four at the outside?”

“Three hours,” he muttered. “Well, that’s supper time. If you want to watch an old man eat Jell-O, then you’re welcome to it.”

“Sure, Dad. I’d like nothing better.”

Johnny put his bag in the backseat of the Cooper Mini and he and Jess climbed in. He sat at the wheel, his hands in his lap. “I can’t leave here,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” Jess suddenly felt in the way. “I should have brought my own car. Should I call someone?”

“No, I don’t mean…” Johnny removed his glasses so he could rub the corners of his eyes. He sighed and looked up. “I asked you to come with me. I didn’t know what to expect or how I’d feel about anything. I’m grateful, Jess.”

Jess shrugged.

“I just mean that I can’t go back to St. Paul. I can’t be that far away from him. I’m going to drive you home, then I’ll find a motel here in Hadley. I have my computer. That’s all I really need. I can buy a change of clothes and toothbrush.”

“Sure,” Jess said. “That’s a great idea.”

“It is?”

He caught her eye again, and Jess saw that he wasn’t certain of anything, even that. “Yes. You said the truth matters to you, and this is your chance to talk to your father.”

“Right. I know it is.” He rubbed his palms against his jeans and finally started the car.

They’d driven a half hour before Johnny spoke again. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why you got involved in the first place. Did finding that cowboy ignite some drive to know where he came from?”

Jess looked at Johnny and slid her lip between her teeth while she deliberated. He had asked a direct question, and she had to answer him directly. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Your mother is haunting me.”

Johnny jerked hard on the wheel and the car swerved sharply onto the shoulder. He corrected, pulling them back into their lane. Jess clutched the handhold in the door beside her and managed to close her mouth after the car was back on the road. “Sorry,” he said. “That was not what I was expecting to hear.”

“I’m sorry. I should have softened it. Or prepared you.”

“Yeah.” Johnny laughed nervously. “Well, go on. Tell me.”

Jess explained how things had started out small, the cowboy kept moving to the office—Johnny’s old bedroom. She told him Bonnie appeared to her, pointed at her, typed “find him” over and over. She told him about the Underwood and the flies. She did not tell Johnny about the bloody footprints or being strangled. She wanted him to think his mother was driven, but benign.

“She told me to find him yesterday. She wants something else from me.” Jess paused to stare out the window at the passing trees. “I found your father and I found you.” She looked back at Johnny. “I just don’t know what else I’m missing.”

“Maybe she wants you to find her killer.”

“Right.” Beckett’s anger came to mind, his insistence that some things are best left unknown. She stared at Johnny while he drove, one question after another rambling through her mind, until he looked her way, his eyebrows shaping question marks. “I don’t know if that’s possible. The case is forty years old.” That was at least the truth.

“I’d like to exonerate my father.” Johnny looked out at the road. “That sounds weird. My father. Suddenly, I have a father.”

They were quiet then, and Jess was glad to keep her thoughts to herself—thoughts about fathers and killers and ghosts and secrets.

Johnny broke the silence as he turned onto Haug Drive. “Would you help me find the person who killed my mother?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jess found Beckett in the studio. He had both doors open and was running fans to try and keep the large space tolerably cool. He had put his new pieces out on the shelves by the front door, ready for new homes, while bisqued pots covered the worktable. The clay turned a  chalky, pinkish-orange color after the first firing, indicating its stage in the work flow. Beckett sat on a stool at the table, surrounded by buckets of glaze, a bowl before him on a small turntable. The glazes in their liquid state all seemed to be various shades of beige or gray. Jess wondered what colors would emerge when the bowl he was working on was fired.

Shakti strained at the leash, but Jess held tight while Beckett finished applying an even stripe of glaze to the lip of the bowl. When he set down his brush and turned to face them, Jess smiled. “Hi,” she said.

Beckett looked happier to see Shakti than her.

“Johnny met his father yesterday.” She waited, but when he didn’t respond, she continued. “It went really well. Johnny decided to stay in Hadley so he can be close to his father.” Shakti whined and gave her tail a shake. Beckett opened his arms and Jess let go of the leash. Shakti rushed to leap at him. “John is in hospice now. So I guess it will all be over soon.”

“You guess, do you?” He lifted Shakti onto his lap and held her wiggling body while she licked his chin, her paws braced on his chest, her wagging tail shaking her hips side to side with enthusiasm.

Jess felt a twinge of envy. “Yes. I mean, what else…” She couldn’t complete that sentence. She knew exactly what else and she pulled her lower lip between her teeth.

“Jess,” Beckett said, settling the puppy onto his lap, “you only chew on your lip when you’re worried or hiding something. Or when you’re worried about the thing you’re hiding.”

“That obvious?”

Beckett nodded.

“All right.” Jess looked for somewhere to sit, and Beckett moved a glaze bucket off of a stool for her. “Bonnie showed up again on Wednesday. It was awful at first. This swarm of flies came out of the smokehouse…” Beckett scrunched his face in a look of disgust. “Yeah. It was totally gross. Then she appeared in the living room and pointed at me. She looked awful, Beckett.” Jess shook her head at the memory. “She told me to find him again. But I’ve already found John and Johnny and reunited them.”

“But you just reunited them yesterday.”

“Yes, but there’s something else. Look. I decided to not be afraid of her, to just be receptive. I felt her mood. That’s the best way to describe it.”

“And?”

“And yesterday, after meeting his father, Johnny asked me to help him find his mother’s killer…Carl Copeland.”  

Beckett took a hand off Shakti to rub his goatee.

“I need your help,” Jess said. “Tomorrow is the anniversary of Bonnie’s death, and I think I know what will bring this to a close.”

“Jess…I don’t…”

“Please. Beckett, you’re the only person who knows about everything and I trust you. I can’t do this alone.”

“Jess.” The way he said her name it was half moan, a yielding despite his better judgment, despite what he wanted. “When?”

“Tomorrow night.”

The first customers of the day entered the studio and stood inside the semicircle of shelves holding Beckett’s wares. “I’ll be right with you,” Beckett called over to them.

“Beckett,” Jess lowered her voice, “I hope we’re still…dating or whatever we were doing. I hope this thing with Bonnie doesn’t ruin something between us.”

“I guess we’ll see after tomorrow night.”

Jess paused on the antique store’s porch to wipe the sweat off her forehead. Carrying the Underwood uphill from Beckett’s apartment had been more of a workout than she’d expected. Jess shifted the typewriter’s weight in her arms, freeing up a hand to open the front door. The door swung shut behind her and the tattle bells jumped, their soft tinkling replaced by the loud clanks of brass bouncing off wood as the door clattered against its frame. Lora looked up, her hands rolling a porcelain something-or-other into tissue paper, and raised an eyebrow at Jess.

“Sorry,” she mouthed. Lora had a fan behind the counter and Jess stepped toward it, hoping to catch some of the air and dry out. Just as she was about to ask Lora where she could set the typewriter, a pair of women stepped up to the counter. From the looks of them, they were mother and daughter. The younger of the two could have been sixty. She had a canvas handbag painted with large orange flowers and round bamboo handles—probably a souvenir from a cruise or vacation to Hawaii. The older woman wore a leather fanny pack with the pouch to the front over a pair of hot pink, ruffle-trimmed capris. Jess smiled at their fashion sense that was equal parts bold, whimsical, and practical. They reminded her fondly of one of her aunts who liked to profess anyone who didn’t appreciate her style was welcome to jump off a bridge. Jess used to cringe when her aunt’s eccentricities drew stares, but sometime in recent years she had learned to appreciate her aunt’s attitude, if not her fashion. The women had found a pair of kewpie dolls and set them on the counter, talking to each other about how they would look on a certain shelf at home. Lora took out more tissue paper.

“Excuse me.” Jess stepped up to the counter, claiming a narrow space beside the younger of the women. She had to turn her shoulder toward Lora to get within a reasonable speaking distance. “Can I set this down somewhere?”

Lora took it, pausing to look over the bent return arm and crushed corner before setting it on her back counter. Free of the typewriter, Jess left Lora to her customers and found her way upstairs. She went into the room with the old type and began picking through the letters, wondering from where Lora had collected them all.

Jess was looking at a large, decorative R mounted on a wood block, the sort of letter that would be used at the head of a chapter, when she heard the soft giggles of a young girl. She set the piece of type down and looked around the room. The giggles came again, this time louder but muffled. Jess exaggerated her curiosity, peering this way and that before stalking into the hallway and rounding the corner into the adjacent bedroom. The giggling increased. “Whoever has that lovely laugh? Could it be a princess?” She looked under a hat perched on a dress form in the corner. The girl squeaked as though delighted, at last having found another player for her game. Jess went to the other corner of the room and opened an old travel trunk. “Hmmm, not in here,” she announced. “Though if Lora ever sells this thing it’ll be for a pretty penny,” Jess muttered after spotting the price tag lying in one of the compartments. When she turned toward the closet full of vintage clothing, the giggling stopped abruptly as though a hand had been clamped over a mouth. Jess parted the dresses on their hangers and revealed a girl of about seven years. “Hi,” Jess said.

“Hello.” She looked at the floor. Jess followed her gaze and watched as her right foot swiveled away from the left, nervously tapping to the side three times before resting next to its counterpart. The small feet were shod in scuffed black boots with low heels that laced up the front, and the girl’s legs were covered with white stockings, despite the heat. Her linen dress fell below the knees in a blue and white wide check, cut with a dropped waist, and decorated by a sash tied in a wide bow. The three-quarter sleeves tapered below the elbow, ending in a band of crocheted lace. The girl’s blonde, shoulder-length hair had been curled and tied away from her face by a blue grosgrain ribbon.