June Bug (8 page)

“Y’all are in luck, because Monday nights are pretty open for me. What did you have in mind?” Kennie leaned forward on the counter, squishing her boobs together over a Grand Canyon of cleavage. I caught a solid waft of her signature scent: yeasty gardenias.

I considered lying, but I didn’t want to deprive her of the information she’d need to see this thing through. So I half-lied. “There’s this guy in town, Jason Blunt. He used to be my boyfriend, long, long time ago, and I was really into him. In fact, I think he might have been The One.”

Kennie hid her doubt with the professionalism of a free-clinic gynecologist. “Go on.”

“Well, I caught him cheating on me. Like I said, he’s back in town, and I—”

“And y’all want me to make his life hell tonight?”

“Yep, uh-huh. I know it’s a little bit outside the purview of your Minnesota Nice business, but I thought you could maybe turn on the Kennie charm and show him a good time.”

“And then dump him cold, like he dumped you?”

“Sure.” I was actually thinking a night fending off Kennie’s advances would be its own dose of strap oil, but whatever she needed to play this scene was fine by me. She’d buy me some time to snoop, and he’d have an evening of tuna-scented hell. “He’s got a girlfriend with him, so you’ll need to sidestep her.”

Kennie nodded sagely, making her gargantuan earrings jingle. “Where can I find him?”

So this is what it felt like to be completely satisfied. Meow. “He’s staying at Shangri-La, and I’m pretty sure he’ll be at the Romanov Traveling Theater performance tonight.”

“He won’t know what hit him, honey.”

I was banking on it.

On the way home from my long day at the library, I stopped at the Turtle Stew for some broasted chicken and jo-jos to go. The Stew was my favorite restaurant in town, because they made a mean tater-tot hotdish and had authentic Naugahyde booths. It was a great place to people-watch, too, if one was Sinclair Lewis.

When I was ordering my food, it occurred to me that I missed my friend Gina. I ordered double of everything and took it to her house.

I’d met Gina through Sunny over a decade earlier, at the annual Chief Wenonga Days street dance. Gina and Sunny had gone to high school together in Battle Lake and had both gone on to work at the Otter Tail County nursing home, one of the few jobs besides waitressing that a local girl without a college education could get by on. The two of them were tied together due to a shared history, but I loved Gina for her simple, honest company.

She was in her late twenties, built like a blonde fire hydrant, and married to her grade-school sweetheart, Leif Hokum. When I’d met him, I’d joked that it would be nice if all potential mates came clearly labeled like that. When I realized the last name of my job-free boyfriend at the time was Kidd, I wondered if maybe they do all come plainly labeled, and no woman had ever picked up on it. Maybe it was God’s way of apologizing for poor placement of the clitoris.

Gina was wearing her scrubs when I got to her one-story house in town. She had worked at the nursing home for longer than I had known her. She started as a dietary aide in high school and became a certified nursing assistant shortly after that. Last summer she had graduated from Fergus Falls Community College’s nursing program with an RN degree.

She now worked four twelve-hour shifts a week, with alternating weekends. She was so tired all the time that I hardly ever saw her. She seemed exhausted but grateful when she opened her door to me.

“Hey, chickie. Where’s Leif?”

She dug into the bag of broasted chicken. “Probably fishing.”

Gina’s husband was the typical Otter Tail County man. He was tall, dirty blonde, and sporting a burgeoning beer belly. When he wasn’t hunting with his bow and arrow, gun, or crossbow, he was ice fishing, river fishing, lake fishing, or spear fishing. All this self-reliance would be awesome if a person found himself suddenly transplanted to
Little House on the Prairie
–era Minnesota, but it sure took a bite out of relationships.

“Don’t you get sick of him being gone all the time?”

She shrugged and leaned back on the couch, rearranging the walleye-shaped pillows so she could get comfortable. “He’s there when I need him. Besides, we just had a great talk the other night where we both agreed we need to communicate and have more fun together.”

“What’re you gonna do about it?”

“Drink more.” She ripped a chunk of breast meat off the bone. “Shit, this was the longest day at work ever! We had two clients sneak out, four new clients move in, and a surprise visit from the state. I feel like all I do is go to work, come home, eat, watch some TV, and go to bed. And they pay me just enough to get up the next day and do it all over again. You gonna eat all those jo-jos?”

I passed her the greasy wax bag and took a pull on my Diet Dr. Pepper. “You do look tired.”

“No shit. That’s why nobody around here is winning any think-offs. By the end of the day, all I want to do is watch the Mary-Kate and Ashley show and go to bed.” Her eyes focused on me, and her voice changed from complaining to curious. “Say, I hear Jason Blunt is staying at Shangri-La.”

I knew Gina would get to the heart of my problems pretty quickly. She always did. “How’d you hear about that?”

“Linda Gundersen, friends with Jason’s mom, Harriet, stopped to visit her Aunt Flo. Linda said Harriet Blunt was in a snit because Jason’s girlfriend was too good to stay at their doublewide.”

I snorted. “Shoot. Trailers were made for people like those two. Yeah, he’s in town. He visited me in my bedroom the night before last. Thought I was Sunny.”

Gina nodded knowingly. “Horn call.”

“Yup. So I don’t know how good of a girlfriend this chick is if he’s already sleeping around.”

“That don’t mean anything with Blunt. He could be married to Tyra Banks and he’d still stick his bad boy in a tree if he thought he wouldn’t get caught.”

I shuddered at the reminder of his aggression. I filled her in on my interview with Shirly and the questions it raised and my subsequent diving expedition. I didn’t mention overhearing Jason talk about the jewels he was after, because I didn’t want any rumors starting before I found out more. I told her my plan for checking out the master bedroom at Shangri-La tonight.

This made me think of Kennie in her full splendor, making a little love magic for Jason.

“What’re you smiling at?” Gina smiled back, her green eyes crinkling at the corners. She had a circle of grease around her mouth that she swiped at with a napkin.

“Nothing. I gotta go, anyhow. The Shangri-La show starts in a little bit.” I waved my hand at the leftover chicken. “Give Leif the rest of the food. It’d be good for him to see that you can
buy
meat, too.”

I was halfway to my car before I had a thought. I returned to the house and poked my head in to see Gina sucking the marrow out of a leg bone. “Hey, queen of the jungle, I don’t suppose there is an off chance that Jason’s mom Harriet’s friend Linda Gundersen mentioned where Jason’s haughty girlfriend is from?”

“Niagara County. I remember because I didn’t know it was a county. I wonder if Niagara Falls is in Niagara County.”

“You’d think. Mind if I use your computer for a minute?”

“Nope. Just ignore the screen saver.”

Said screen saver was a picture of two deer watching a man and a woman graphically humping away on the forest floor, with the words “Look at those animals!” scrolling across the bottom. I dialed up the Internet and got online. If I knew more about Samantha, I would have more ammunition in my search.

Fortunately, we all leave a paper trail, and these days, most of us leave a cyber trail. It took me about forty-five minutes to locate and then search the online archives of Niagara County’s newspapers—the
Gazette
,
Sun
, and
Democrat
—until I found what I was looking for.

There was no photo accompanying the three-week-old obituary in the
Niagara Gazette
, and the information was short and sweet: “Regina Krupps, age 104, died of heart failure in her home in Niagara Falls. Her husband, noted entrepreneur Wilson Krupps, preceded Mrs. Krupps in death. Mr. and Mrs. Krupps, along with their dear friends the Andrew Carnegie family, created the Niagara County Center for the Arts in 1940. She was attended at her death by her nurse of four years and survived by her beloved bichon frisé, Berry Blossom.”

Bingo. I’ll
bet
her nurse attended her, and I had a hairy feeling that nurse was in town, rooming with Jason Blunt at Shangri-La, and that her name was not really Samantha Krupps. It was just too much of a coincidence that she and Jason would arrive in town all the way from Niagara County, New York, for a vacation at the same time everyone and his dog was looking for a lost diamond necklace owned by Regina Krupps. The elderly Mrs. Krupps had spilled some beans to her nurse, who was now in town searching for a pile of rocks. Apparently, though, Mrs. Krupps had been none too specific about their location, which bought me some time.

I printed out a copy of the obituary and walked out to find Gina snoring on the couch, the corners of her mouth still greasy from the food. I pulled her shoes off, covered her with an afghan, and was out the door.

I took the gravel back roads all the way to my house, and the sweet, dusty smell of a dirt road in June filled my car. I was in a good mood, and this only increased when I saw the package waiting on my front steps. Inside was my Z-Force, battery included. It looked a little smaller than in the picture, but it wasn’t the first time I had been disappointed by size, and I recovered quickly. The stun gun was black and fierce in my hand, and it had a good weight, like a heavy flashlight. I hooked up the nine-volt and practiced a menacing posture, zapping invisible rednecks.

My doorstep activity riled the birds, who flew from the treetops squawking, and I forced myself to calm down so I didn’t anger the Fowl Ones. I needed all the luck I could get tonight. For good measure, I filled the bird feeders with sweet thistle and sunflower seeds and even nailed up a couple oranges for the orioles. I refrained from apologizing out loud at the bird disquiet I had incited, but just barely.

There were already quite a few cars going down the driveway I shared with Shangri-La, and after a while, people began to walk down the mile and a half of road because there was no room to park on the island. When I counted more than forty people heading down there, I blended in with the crowd. I rarely carried a purse, but tonight I had dug out a hobo-sized one from the back of my closet to hide the reassuring weight of my freshly charged zapper and to stow away any long-lost jewelry I might chance across. I took advantage of the extra room in the purse to carry along a flashlight, a skeleton key that I had scored at a rummage sale, and some gum.

As I approached the resort grounds, the sun was setting on the west side of Whiskey. The light was spectacular, slicing through trees and across people to create backlit shadows. The general feel of the crowd was light, and there was joking and laughter. I heard talk of fireworks later, but much of the conversation centered on the fake body found in the lake. I fell in with a small group of people, all in their late forties or early fifties, and all of them dressed like out-of-town golfers.

The short, broad man I was directly behind spoke. “Gawd, I’d hate to be the idiot who found that stuffed dive suit. I heard whoever it was was pretty scared.”

My fingers itched to grab the zapper. Damn tourists, judging me. I bet I could bump up against this guy and drop him without taking my hand out of my purse. I walked closer to the man talking, and I kept my eyes pasted on his comb-over.

“Doesn’t take Einstein to tell a human body from a stuffed wetsuit!”

The man and his friends laughed. Two more feet and I’d be at his backside. I wondered how much of a buffer his back fat would provide him as I cradled the black plastic zapper in the security of my purse. In the dark of my hobo bag, the stun gun felt like at least seven inches.

“Let’s hope the ditz doesn’t have a driver’s license! Probably can’t tell a stop sign from a tree.”

One more step. I would zap and blend back in the crowd. It’d be a pleasant way to begin tonight’s festivities.

“I hope she buys a flashlight so she can find her ass to shit.”

Half a step. I hit the on button and heard a soft crackle of electricity. I leaned in, hypnotized by the rhythm of his large rear cheeks rolling one over the other like ships on the storm of his thighs.

Crack! The loud boom shocked me, and I dropped the stun gun in my purse, my hand falling off the button. Weak lights burned the sky, competing with the setting sun for attention, and sparkled down to earth like crashing fireflies. I smelled the sulfur and prepared myself for another round of fireworks in the twilight sky. The crowd around me stopped and oohed.

I walked past the group I had been tailing, glaring at the guy who had been knocking me. He smiled appreciatively at my ass and turned his attention back to the sky. I continued on to the mayhem of Shangri-La Island.

Children were screaming and chasing one another as a last firework shot out from the public access and over the island. Apparently, they were just meant to announce the party. All around me, people were mingling and smiling, drinks in their hands as they rode the excitement of outdoor entertainment on a warm summer evening. The theater troupe was providing preshow distractions in the only clearing on the island. A juggler danced around the tiki torches lighting the natural stage, a unicycling clown pedaled back and forth to the delighted glee of the kids watching, and a man in a tuxedo tossed candy from stilt level. Two small figures dressed as Tweedledum and Tweedledee rolled around on the ground, and I couldn’t tell from my spot if they were tiny adults or children.

There was a tropical theme blended in with the Renaissance feel of the Romanov entertainment, probably created in honor of the “island” of Shangri-La. Bongo players dressed in grass skirts and leis pounded a tribal beat on the periphery of the cleared spot, and island dancers swayed around them. The entertainment’s mingling of the tropics with Shakespeare was unsettling, like interspecies mating, and I wondered how much this spectacle cost and how the Gibsons were paying for it. There was no cover charge, and only a handful of people here were paying guests. For the second time in as many days, I considered the possibility that the Gibsons were on the black end of this whole diamond deal.