October Fest: A Murder-by-Month Mystery (3 page)

My first sleepover with
a guy didn’t transpire until I was living on my own in the Cities at the sagacious age of eighteen. I was toxic property in my hometown of Paynesville, given my dad’s shameful death. I saw no reason to complain—everyone has their knot to unravel in this life—but I’d spent my first sixteen years on this earth with an alcoholic father and an enabling mom. He put an end to half of that equation when he slithered behind the wheel with most of a liter of vodka gurgling in his belly. He took the occupants of another vehicle down with him, head on.

You can probably guess what being the daughter of a manslaughterer does to an already awkward teenaged girl, especially in Smalltown, Minnesota. I beat cheeks to Minneapolis as soon as I graduated and spent the next ten or so years sitting in on enough English classes to earn a bachelor’s degree and drinking too many vodka and diet Cokes. It was a fear of ending up like my father that had driven me to housesit for Sunny, which was ironic because it turned out that in this west-central Minnesota oasis, alcohol was as necessary to a night out as shoes.

But before that, in high school I felt lucky to have a few girlfriends, forget dating a boy. By the time I escaped the constricting environment of Paynesville and made it into the Big World, my virginity had grown heavy, a white purse that you loved until you found out everyone else thought it was dumb. Probably I should have hung onto my purse—fashion is cyclical—rather than open it for Ben, my first official boyfriend.

He was a regular at Perfume River, the Vietnamese restaurant where I waited tables, a black-haired loner who asked me out via a note on the back of his bill for imperial beef with fried rice. Turned out he was in a band, which in Minneapolis at that time was like saying he had two hands. We hung out together in various bars for a few weeks, me with a fake ID and him monologuing about the raw originality of his music, until The Night. I hope I’m not breaking the virgin’s covenant by revealing that the pleasure of the first time fell somewhere between a swimsuit wedgie and an off-trail bike ride, lasting approximately as long as the former.

Ben would never know what a gift he’d received. We broke up the next morning without ever really talking about it and proceeded in true Midwest fashion: we forgot we knew each other. I felt a little bad that he had to find a new restaurant to hang out in, but such is the price of a doomed relationship. I’d been with a handful of men since then, and though I was far from pro, I thought I’d seen enough to know when a guy asking me on a date really wanted to get to know me versus wanted to stick a toy surprise in my cereal box. That’s why I was so puzzled by Johnny’s letter.

Inside the envelope was a handwritten invitation requesting my presence at the Big Chief Motor Lodge this evening at nine p.m. in room 20. The Big Chief was the newest business in the growing town, opening its doors to the community last week. It sat on a key location one hundred feet from the shore of West Battle Lake, within eyeshot of Chief Wenonga, the glorious fiberglass statue that graced the perimeter of the town as well as my dreams. The statue was the gold standard of political incorrectness, but whenever I looked at it, I got all swoony and my heart skipped a beat. The statue was fashioned after the actual Chief Wenonga, an Ojibwe warrior. A hundred and some years ago he’d led the charge against the Dakota, another proud tribe who’d put down roots in this area.

History remembered Chief Wenonga as a gifted leader and fighter. Battle Lake, however, erected him as a stereotypical Old West Indian with full feather headdress snaking down his back, inky eyes and proud nose on a face slashed with war paint, adorned with leather pants and moccasins, an erect tomahawk in the left hand suggesting glorious things. My mind may never have gone there if the Chief statue wasn’t also shirtless, the star Chippendale Dancer of the fiberglass world. Plus, he was emotionally distant, which up until Johnny, had been the kind of guy I was attracted to.

Ah, Johnny. Open and kind, he liked to garden, had a degree in biology from the University of Minnesota, and he was taking care of his sick mother during the day and rocking out as the lead singer of a popular band at night. He was perfect, and therefore all wrong for me. So why was he making this low-class move of asking me to meet in a hotel, and why put it on a written invitation suggesting I “dress casually?” That sounded completely unlike him. But, I had a pretty good idea who it
did
sound like.

_____

The Senior Sunset is maple-lined walks with commemorative benches on the outside, institutional rooms with locked doors and paintings of pastel pastiche on the inside. From what I gathered, before Mrs. Berns had arrived, most of the clients at the Sunset spent their time watching TV or moaning for someone to brush their hair. Now, they giggled in corners as they passed black market copies of
GQ
and
Mademoiselle
, played cards for money, and hatched plans for afterhours slumber parties. Instead of following the gray road to their deaths, they pressed against the confinement of the home to squeeze bootlegged joy, the best kind, out of their final years. And it was all because of Mrs. Berns, who had followed society’s rules for eighty years before deciding it was finally time to live by her own. And society always hates a deviant when it isn’t invited to the party.

According to local gossip, she’d arrived in the area in the 1920s filling the typical Minnesota farmwife role, raising seven kids during the Depression, taking in extra sewing to make ends meet, hardworking and responsible every minute of the day. She hadn’t slowed down even after the kids moved out and her husband’s dairy farm started turning a profit, working dawn ’til sundown canning, mending, cleaning, and helping with chores. Her husband had been a solid man, no great romantic but a stable Swedish farmer who paid the bills and didn’t yell at his wife. Mrs. Berns had completely fulfilled her hausfrau duties right up until her husband’s death by heart attack a decade ago.

Legend had it, that’s when Mrs. Berns underwent The Change. Her husband’s body was barely cold when she put the farm on the market and moved to town. With a population under eight hundred in the winter and more bars than churches, you’d think Battle Lake would have welcomed its newest resident, but her sudden penchant for going braless combined with her willingness to say whatever was on her mind didn’t go over well with the more conservative members of the community. When Conrad, her oldest son, got word of his sweet mother’s out-of-character behavior, and specifically her newspaper-documented fistfight at the Rusty Nail over a man of questionable reputation (“Granny Goes Gonzo”), he promptly checked her into the Senior Sunset on threat of getting her declared mentally incompetent if she didn’t comply.

On the surface, she bowed to his command. Behind the scenes, though, Mrs. Berns got right down to the business of circumventing the rules of the nursing home, sneaking out after hours to do as she pleased. Before long, she was the don of a profitable black market operation fencing cigarettes, airplane-sized bottles of liquor, and Tom Jones posters
to those on the inside. After a near mutiny when he tried to crack the whip against these illicit antics, the director of the Senior Sunset chose to turn a blind eye to Mrs. Berns’ behavior on her word there would be no more public brawling.

Mrs. Berns likely had her fingers crossed when she made that agreement. That’s about when I met her, all fluffy-haired, bobby-socked, capgun-toting (don’t ask), four-feet-eleven inches of her. Since then she’d taught me how to dirty dance, defend myself using moves not widely practiced outside of a pig-castrating shed, and live without regret. To be honest, I was still working on that last one. But as much as I loved her, she had a mischievous streak as wide as the Mississippi, and I smelled her fingerprints all over Johnny’s invitation.

I signed in at the front desk. My lunch break was prime visiting hours and the check-in sheet was almost full. I smiled nervously at the nurse behind the desk, concealing the cloth bag I was carrying behind my back. It contained the secret to prying the truth out of Mrs. Berns: dark chocolate and a miniature bottle of red wine. I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that nursing home residents were not officially allowed liquor, which was the crime of the century as far as I was concerned. My visiting privileges would be revoked indefinitely if I got caught with it, but it was a risk I was willing to take to get the Oracle to speak.

I wasn’t sneaking toward Mrs. Berns’ room, but I did stop when I heard the whispering inside. Followed by a giggle. That’s when I noticed the cross-stitched, “Bless this Home” circle hanging off the doorknob, the signal that if this was a van, it’d be rocking so don’t bother to come knocking. Glancing at the clock on the wall, I realized I didn’t have time to wait. Buying the chocolate and wine had eaten up almost half an hour, and I needed to reopen the library at one o’clock. I knocked at the door, delicately and with more than a little fear.

The giggling stopped. “You knock like a girl.” This was followed by a rustle of fabric and light footsteps. “This better be an emergency,” she said on the other side of the door.

Her orange-shaded head popped out looking inconvenienced.

“Hi, Mrs. Berns.”

“I made him write the invitation, it’s a surprise so I can’t tell you more, and it’s not what you think.” And she slammed the door in my face.

She must have a steamy number in her room or she wouldn’t have passed up an opportunity to make me squirm, but curiosity was the one vice I consistently entertained. I knocked again, firmly.

“That’s better, but it still doesn’t get you in.”

I turned the knob and stepped inside.

“
That’ll
get you in,” she said. And next to her, on her double GoldenRest Adjustable bed, was the
Fergus Falls Register
reporter with the soup-strainer mustache who’d sneered at me in the big tent earlier today. Small world. He didn’t stand at my entrance, and Mrs. Berns didn’t introduce him.

“I need to talk to you.”

“I presume you do,” she said, employing a slight British accent to mock my serious tone.

“It’s really important.”

She dropped the accent. “It’s not about Johnny?”

“Well
…
”

“Ach.” She turned to the man lounging on her bed. “Bernard, I need to talk to Mira. Shouldn’t take more’n a minute.”

I stepped to the side so he could exit and leave us to our conversation, but he just loafed deeper into the bed, cranking the sound on the Discovery Channel, which was airing a show about the ancient mysteries of the Maya.

“I’ll take a cherry cola while you’re out,” he said. “Not the barbaric kind. Thanks.”

I wrinkled my nose at Mrs. Berns, but she shooed me out without making eye contact. In the hall, I asked, “Since when do you let someone kick you out of your own room? And what exactly is ‘barbaric’ soda?” That’s when I noticed that she was wearing creepily traditional grandmother clothes: a Branson T-shirt sent to her by one of her kids which she’d used as a dust rag until recently, elastic-waisted slacks sans her low-slung holster, and fuzzy slippers. She looked, well, old.

“He means ‘generic,’ and I needed to go to the cafeteria, anyways,” she said.

“Stop.” I grabbed her hand and rotated her toward me. “I’m sorry I haven’t been visiting regularly the last couple weeks. I’ve dropped the ball. I miss you. Now what is up with these clothes and that guy?”

The uncensored Mrs. Berns broke through the grandma garments. “You didn’t drop nuthin’, and frankly, I haven’t missed that mopey need-to-get-laid look in your eyes. I’ve got to appear professional for a little while, is all.”

“Why?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Is it because your son is around? Johnny told me.”

“He’s a girl for gossiping. And it’s none of your business.”

I knit my brows. “Since when?”

“Since you should be busy worrying about whether or not you need to shave your legs for tonight.” She cackled at the expression on my face.

I didn’t want to get off topic that easily, but there was no point in pretending I wasn’t outgunned. I sighed. “Do I?”

“When it comes to being ready for lovin’, I think the Boy Scouts got it right: always be prepared.”

“I don’t think that’s what they were referring to.”

“Nevertheless.”

I crossed my arms. “You’re not going to tell me anything more, are you?”