October Fest: A Murder-by-Month Mystery (8 page)

My feet were rooted
to the floor. Elizabeth gently led me to the side as two nurses wheeled in Mrs. Berns and positioned her bed parallel to Mrs. Skolen’s, the curtain dividing them. A third nurse followed closely with an IV and monitor on wheels. All three of them had grim, distant smiles strapped to their faces.

The nurse who appeared to be in charge, a heavyset blonde, spoke loudly to Mrs. Berns, who had a bandaged head, a face full of purple and black bruises, and her leg propped up in a cast. “We’re in your room now, honey. I know you’re awake in there, so no use pretending. You’re gonna be sore, but the sooner you’re up and around, the sooner you’ll start healing.” She pressed a white cylinder into Mrs. Berns’ hand, which looked as weak and light as a fallen bird. “If you start feeling pain, you just give this a click. It’s your morphine drip.”

My heart lightened, then soared. I knew what was happening! Mrs. Berns wasn’t nearly as destroyed as she appeared. She was playing possum until the nurses left, and then she’d morphine drip herself into Timbuktu while watching
Judge Judy
, eating lime Jell-O, and crank-calling the rehab ward. It would be her dream vacation. I kept a straight face until the nurses were done with their bustling, and then I leaned toward my old friend, quiet so Elizabeth wouldn’t hear. “You want to watch out with that drip. I’ve heard of people getting video-game thumb from pressing it too much.”

Her eyes fluttered, and then opened, looking rheumy and unfocused. For the first time, I noticed that her skin was so thin it was almost translucent. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she asked, her voice scared, “Where am I?”

And that’s when I remembered that nothing good lasts forever.

_____

Fortunately, Mrs. Berns’ skull was fully intact. Her doctor okayed her move out of ICU as soon as a regular hospital room became available. Mrs. Skolen was required to remain in ICU for at least twenty-four hours longer. Conrad and Elizabeth had rented two hotel rooms in town and returned to them after they’d seen Mrs. Berns settled in for the night. I refused to leave her side. If I was here, I could make sure she didn’t have nightmares or get thirsty. I’d locked up the library as soon as Wohnt had slapped me with the news, and it could stay locked forever as far as I was concerned.

She was in and out of consciousness for the first few hours I was alone with her, heavily doped on meds and unable to find a restful sleep. I sang to her, a quiet hum. She’d have punched me for it if she was awake, but it was enough to finally guide her into a deeper sleep. Either that or she was so annoyed by it she knocked herself out.

As much as I didn’t want to, once her breathing became deep and restful, I called Johnny to ask him to take care of Luna and Tiger Pop. He said all the right things and promised to come straight to the hospital afterward, but I’d convinced him that now wasn’t the time, that Mrs. Berns needed quiet to recover. The tears were rolling down my cheeks when I told him, but I kept my voice even on the phone. I could only deal with one crisis at a time.

I guarded Mrs. Berns’ sleep for a while, her chest rising and falling fitfully underneath the white bandages, her casted leg propped up in bed. The woman had saved my life, could spot a lie at a hundred yards, and made life more fun than it had any right to be. And with her eyes closed, she looked just like any little old lady with a few doddering years left in her. I glanced back at the phone, blurry through the tears, and considered that maybe I did need Johnny to get through tonight.
No
, I thought, resting my head on the side of her bed,
I can get through this alone
. It was the only way I knew how.

I couldn’t stand the worrying any longer so replaced it with a prayer to every god I’d ever heard of, with an added plea to fairies, leprechauns, and four-leaf clovers, just in case. There’s no coward like an agnostic who believes her best friend is knocking at death’s door.

“How is she?”

I started. I hadn’t heard the door open. “Bernard?”

He was walking funny, like his leg hurt him, and he had a glistening blue and green bruise on his left temple. “They said she was going to be fine.”

“What happened to you?”

“I fell. How’s the other woman? Freda, is that her name?”

He was anxious, repeatedly running his fingers through his hair and then shuffling them into his pockets to play with pieces of lint or whatever secrets they held. My antennae were up, alerted by his injuries and body language. Neither Conrad nor Elizabeth knew whose Dodge pickup Mrs. Berns had been driving, or where she and Freda had been going. A witness had spotted the vehicle overturned on County Road 29 going east, Mrs. Berns behind the wheel, awake but without her seatbelt on and Freda next to her, belted in and unconscious. I took a stab. “You fall into a steering wheel?”

His eyes narrowed and his hands stilled. “What?”

“You drive a pickup?” The pieces were falling into place. Mrs. Berns was wild, but she wasn’t stupid. She always used condoms, washed her hands after using the toilet, and wore her seatbelt.

His face went ashen, underscoring the ugly nature of his bruise. “I let her borrow the truck. I didn’t know she was such an abdominal driver.” He was backing toward the door.

I stood, the accumulated stress of the past twenty-four hours roaring toward my mouth. “You were driving that pickup when it got into the accident, weren’t you? You unbuckled Mrs. Berns and pulled her behind the wheel and fled, didn’t you?” My hands felt huge and meaty, itching to pound into something. I advanced, and Bernard cowered.

“Stop it.”

My ears perked, and I swiveled to the bed. “Mrs. Berns?” She’d spoken only a handful of words since her surgery, and none of them were commands. “Did you say something, Mrs. Berns?”

Her eyes fluttered open and then focused. “A dumbass says what?”

“What?” I said.

She cackled, which immediately turned into a painful cough. “Damn ribs. They’re broken you know, Bernard. Three of ’em. You get that driver’s license same place you got your journalist’s license? On the Interweb?”

He rushed to her side and grabbed her hand. I thought he was going to pour apologies, but instead he said, “Don’t tell on me. Please. I don’t want to go back to jail.”

I shoved him to the side so I could get in close to her. “How are you feeling?”

“Like the prettiest boy in prison,” she said, and then attempted another weak chortling. “No offense, Bernard.”

“You shaved ten years off my life,” I told her, relieved tears burning hot at the corners of my eyes.

“Think what it did to me.” She fumbled for the bed adjuster. “How’s Freda?”

I chose my words carefully. “She’s pretty banged up, but she’ll pull through. What were you three doing?”

Mrs. Berns’ eyes twinkled, even if the rest of her couldn’t. “Getting a marriage license.”

I glanced quickly at Bernard, but he was stone-faced. “For whom?”

“For the two of us,” he said defensively. “We’re in love and we’re going to espouse each other. On Halloween.”

I fell heavily into the chair I’d pulled next to the bed. “How long have you known each other?”

“Almost a week, and shut up,” Mrs. Berns said. “I’m tired. I need you to do something, and I don’t have any extra juice to explain myself. You my friend?”

“Of course I am.”

“Then listen. My beloved Bernard Mink and I are going to get married.” He reached for her hand but she swatted him away. “But we can’t get married if he’s in jail. So you have to find out who murdered that bobber at the motel, and you have to keep quiet about who was driving the pickup.”

“No way,” I said. “First of all, since when do
you
want to get married? You’re the one who said we’d stay single forever as a passive resistance, that if enough good women refused to get married, men would have to improve. You said the next generation could reap the rewards of our sacrifices.”

“Changed my mind.”

“For this?” I indicated the pork-bellied Mr. Mink, who had gone back to nervously running his hands through his hair and had added timid mustache twirling to the repertoire.

“Love is a capricious thing. Now shut the hell up. Are you in?” Her voice was feisty but her eyes were fading.

“Wait, how did you know the blogger was murdered?”

Mrs. Berns pointed at Bernard. “Heard it through the grapevine.”

“And how does me finding the killer help Bernard?”

“It helps all three of us, pudding head, because we were all in Dead Body City, Minnesota, at the wrong time. It especially helps Bernard, however, as he has some past issues that might make the law treat him unkindly if they learned he was sleeping next to the room where his rival was hung.”

“Rival?” I asked Bernard.

“Just a friendly opposition among newsmen,” he said. “Nothing worth mentioning.”

“Would Bob the blogger have called it friendly?”

He shrugged and then looked away to twirl his mustache like he was hoping to jumpstart an escape helicopter.

“Crap,” I said, looking back at Mrs. Berns. “This is really what you want?”

She nodded, her eyes already closed.

“Fine.” How do you refuse a woman you love in her hospital bed? And the fact of the matter was I’d been lying to myself about not caring who murdered Webber. Like an accidental vampire, I’d had my first taste of blood—or in my case, the thrill of solving a mystery—last May, and I was hooked, despite all my internal protestations to the opposite. Mrs. Berns was just giving me an excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway. “But only if you tell me why Conrad and Elizabeth were in Battle Lake.”

“Tomorrow,” she croaked, and then she drifted back into her drug haze.

Dwindling state funding had
forced me to cut the Monday through Thursday library hours from 9 to 8 to 12 to 6. The decision had made me livid. The library wasn’t a storehouse for books. It was the centerpiece of the community. Probably I should have let that anger drive my interest in government decisions. Instead, it was the discovery of a dead body and my pledge to Mrs. Berns that had me researching politics more deeply than I’d ever thought possible.

Taking advantage of the late opening of the library, I sat at one of the public computers, the guest list that I had pinched from the cleaning cart at my side. I’d dug it out of the garbage during a quick home pit stop on my way back from the hospital. I hadn’t slept or eaten in going on thirty hours. I felt as fuzzy as a dishrag, but I had a plan. I was going to research all the guests who were at the motel the night of the alleged murder. Most people can be found online, even if we’re not public figures, though I was willing to guess a fair number of the Saturday night guests had been in town for the debate, either on one of the politician’s teams or a reporter. Then, I’d generate a list of possible suspects, putting Bernard Mink at the top. I wasn’t going to break my promise to Mrs. Berns to exonerate Bernard of potential charges, but that didn’t mean I was going to be an idiot, either. Even if he wasn’t a murderer, he didn’t feel like one of the good guys, and I wasn’t letting my best friend go into anything blind.

After I’d narrowed the list, I’d suck in my pride and good sense and call Kennie to find out if she knew any more than she’d told me yesterday, or if she’d found out anything since then. Finally, I would be trying to track down the suspects, all of whom should still be in town if Deputy Wohnt had delivered to them the same message he’d given me about staying put, and see if any of them had a free moment to confess to murder.

If my scheme was a movie, it’d be more
Fools Rush In
than
A Star Is Born
, but it was all I had. So I set to work.

The room list showed that every room but two had been booked Saturday night: room 4, the room Webber had vacated on Friday, and room 19, the site of the dead body, which had “Glenn Vanderbrick” listed as occupant. Mr. Vanderbrick’s departure date column had 10/18 with an asterisk next to it and the words “pm checkout” penciled in. That explained why room 19 was empty the next morning, but why hadn’t room 4 been filled after Webber checked out? Between the debate and Octoberfest, the town had been packed for the weekend. With only two motels in town, I couldn’t imagine there’d be a Saturday night vacancy to spare.

Humoring a hunch, I held the list up to the cold October sunshine and was rewarded—the date next to Bob Webber’s name had a tiny blot on the bottom of the “8” that didn’t let in light. I placed the list on the desktop and used the edge of my fingernail to scrape the white-out off the lower left edge of the “8” on 10/18, revealing that he had originally intended to check out on the 19th. Someone had blotted the sleek bottom of the nine and replaced it with a tiny circle in pen the same color. Had his date change been so abrupt that the hotel hadn’t had time to reprint a list, or had someone tampered with the cleaning list, and if so, to what end? I didn’t suppose I could call the motel to find out what their computer system said about the dates he’d booked, but I’d sure like to know.

Tabling what I couldn’t address right now, I typed an alphabetical list of the twenty names so I didn’t have to mess up the original list with scribbled notes. Ignoring the alphabetical order, I started with Glenn Vanderbrick, the most likely suspect by virtue of location, and quickly found that he was a blogger as well as an on-call political columnist for various Midwest newspapers. Scanning his blog page, I didn’t see the thoroughness or sleek writing style of Webber’s, but he was good enough. As an off bet, I did a site search on his page for the name “Bob Webber” and came across several articles they’d cowritten. I didn’t know what that meant, that Webber had been killed in the room vacated by a coauthor, so I chose the direct route and sent Vanderbrick an e-mail explaining that I was a reporter from Battle Lake and would like to speak with him if he’d be so kind as to send me his phone number. I also included mine.

Returning to alphabetical order, I investigated Karl Bachin, whose room location between Glokkmann and Swydecker suggested he was a member of one of their campaigns. However, his two fame Googles consisted of his bowling team’s second place trophy in a Southeastern Minnesota bowling tourney and his post to a listserv regarding his preference for Brewer’s Best home beer brewing kits over True Blue Gold. A better online profile for an Octoberfest expert I could not have written. The next three names drew equal dead ends.

Glokkmann was the fifth name, and she understandably called out a whole slew of hits, the first couple pages of which I’d already read. A few deep blog postings hinted that Glokkmann was off her rocker, referring to her recent immigrant comment as well as statements she’d made about the baseless global warming scare being an anti-American conspiracy, but the only direct accusations I could find originated at the blog of Bob Webber. I perused his articles on Glokkmann more closely. In several pieces covering the alleged bribes she’d received from the oil industry, Webber cited her tax returns and her public campaign fund record as evidence of her illegal behavior, but when I cross-referenced those, I saw that while she had taken money from oil companies, she’d been up front about it. It might not be the height of ethics, but it didn’t seem out of line with what every other politician was doing. Same with her voting on a bill that could have potentially helped her husband’s business. If she thought it was a good bill for the state, she had a right to vote on it, regardless of how it benefitted her family.

When it came to her alleged drinking problem, though, Webber claimed to have several reliable sources who might in the future be willing to go on record stating that Glokkmann sometimes got so drunk during the day that she couldn’t even be wheeled into the Congressional chambers, and several key votes had been missed as a result. Unfortunately, none of those “reliable sources” were willing to go on record at this time.

The only issue Webber had really pinned her on was taking two of her daughters to New York City on the state’s dime. Glokkmann testified that she’d had to attend a conference and didn’t know she wasn’t allowed to bring her children. The issue had been scheduled to come before the House Ethics Committee last month, but Glokkmann sidestepped that by repaying the money and issuing a formal apology for her “honest mistake.” So, even in the issue that she was likely guilty of, she came out smelling like a rose. In reading the article, I was drawn to a throw-away line mentioning that she and her husband had adopted or fostered eighteen children. Wow. I was stretching myself thin with a cat and a dog.

Based on what I knew, Glokkmann should be my biggest suspect in Webber’s murder because she had the most substantial grind against him. But, the more I thought about it, the more I decided that made her the least likely killer. She’d be stupid to snuff the man who was publicly trying to take her down, and she struck me as cruel but not dumb. Back to square one, maybe one and a half. I returned to the list and in the range of the H’s to the R’s found a group at the motel for a family reunion, a couple who had just gotten married and, according to their travel blog, were hitting Midwest festivals for their honeymoon, Bernard Mink in the room right below the one where Webber had been found, and a slew of dead-ends.

I reached the S’s and observed that Swinton and Swydecker were next to each other alphabetically. Their motel rooms were adjacent as well with Swinton in 18, which was the unused room I’d seen her enter yesterday morning. Swydecker was in 17. Why hadn’t Glokkmann and Swinton gotten rooms side by side? Was that the room glitch I had seen her complaining about at the front desk the night I’d gone to meet Johnny? And had Swinton been in Glokkmann’s room Saturday night, and that’s why her room was unused? If so, had they been working on campaign strategy or on something more sinister? But Kennie had said Glokkmann and one of her staff had no alibi, so if they’d been together that night, they surely would have covered for each other.

A knock at the front door interrupted my train of thought, and I glanced up, annoyed. Couldn’t a woman uncover a murderer in peace? At the other side of the door was Bad Brad, my ex, the man who had helped set the events in motion that had brought me to Battle Lake. Right about the time I’d decided my life was crap and I was drinking too much, I’d stumbled onto the neighbor’s visiting niece playing a solo on his pink oboe. These are the crazy things you see when you spy on your boyfriend through a skylight. Choosing the passive-aggressive route, rather than confront him with the facts, I jacked his bike tires so they’d come off mid-journey and pointed west without saying goodbye. Unfortunately, Fate can find you anywhere. Brad and his band had ended up playing a gig in Battle Lake back in July and we’d accidentally reunited, him doofily and me kicking and screaming. Unfortunately, he felt right at home in Battle Lake and decided to stay. He’d talked most of his band into relocating with him.

Even though we now lived in the same tiny town, we didn’t hang in the same circles. Actually, I didn’t really hang anywhere but home and the library, which worked nifty when there are lots of people you want to avoid. I stormed over to the door, unlocked it, and yanked it open. “What?”

“Hey, babe.” The brains had never been what had attracted me to him. In retrospect, I wasn’t sure what had. “How’s it hanging?”

“I’m really busy. Whaddya need?”

He shot his eyes over my shoulder. “Um, a book?”

“Gotta wait ’til we open.” I let the door swing shut, locked it, and returned to my computer station. I worked steadily for five minutes before I realized he was still outside the door, a hangdog look on his face. I stomped back. “What?”

He pointed at the etched numbers on the door. “This says the library opened twenty-five minutes ago.”

I hate trading in my anger for embarrassment, so I didn’t bother. “Whatever,” I said, leaning over to flip on the rest of the lights. “Knock yourself out.”

I cleaned up my computer station, shuffling my meager notes so they were in order before stuffing them into my cloth purse, and I went about the business of running a library. Over the next hour people came and went, but Brad stayed. I mostly ignored him until it became grossly apparent he needed help. Then I ignored him for another ten minutes before approaching.

He glanced quickly at his feet, and the edges of his face pinked. This from the man who when we were dating used the toilet with the bathroom door open so he could watch the TV in the other room. I had to admit I was intrigued. “You don’t need to be embarrassed,” I said. “Reading is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I need to find a book that explains how to get rid of eyelash crabs.” He was talking so fast that it came out as one long word.

“Oh,” I said. “I stand corrected.”

“Don’t judge me, Mira.”

Judge him? That would have taken my focus away from laughing. Maybe all three Fates weren’t lined against me. I stepped back another five feet. “You should probably just go to the doctor.”

“I hate needles.”

I considered conjecturing about the size of the syringe the doctor would likely use to eradicate the bugs but thought better of it. Now was a good time as any to put some quarters toward the red ink of my karma. “The doctor won’t use needles.”

Either his eyes lit up or the crabs were sending me an SOS. “Really? You’ve had eyelash crabs before?”

“I don’t even know how you get
…
never mind. You just go to the doctor, they rinse off your eyelashes with a special liquid, and you’re all better. No worries.” I actually had no idea how a doctor would address this particular situation but I wanted Brad to go away.