Dangerous Habits

by Susan Hunter

  Dangerous Habits

  Leah Nash Mysteries, Book 1

  Susan Hunter

  Himmel River Press

  Copyright © 2014 by Susan Hunter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For Irene, who always believed.

  For Gary, who always loves.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

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  Also By Susan Hunter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discussion Questions

  One

  I’ve seen a lot of really ugly things happen in my 10 years as a reporter. Good people suffer, bad people thrive, and it all seems pretty random to me. A friend of mine keeps telling me I have it wrong. Life is a tapestry woven with the threads of all that is good and bad in each of us. But in this world, we’re limited to viewing it from the underside, full of knots and tangles and hanging threads that seem to have no connection or purpose. It’s only after we reach the next world that we can see how everything fits together in an amazing, beautiful picture.

  Maybe. But what I know for sure is that when I started to pull on one of those tangled threads last spring, a lot of lives unraveled, and I almost lost my own. It was pretty hard to see a Grand Design in that unholy mess.

  My name is Leah Nash. I’m a good reporter and an even better smartass who, as it turns out, isn’t all that smart. That’s why, instead of driving around sunny Miami chasing leads, I was slip-sliding down a riverbank in Himmel, Wisconsin, on a particularly nasty early April day last year. My assignment—and I had no choice but to accept it—find some wild art to fill a gaping hole in the front page layout of the Himmel Times Weekly.

  Wind and sleet riled the normally placid Himmel River into foaming whitecaps. Miles upstream the force of the current had uprooted a dead oak and carried it on a collision course with the dam supplying hydroelectric power to the town of Himmel. Now, city crews in two boats were trying to harpoon the tree with hooks and ropes before it wreaked havoc at the dam. I was hoping to get some action shots before deadline.

  When I reached the bottom of the steep incline, I saw that a massive winch had been set up to haul the tree in. As I shifted my camera bag from my shoulder, a fresh gust of wind sent an icy trickle of water down my neck.

  “I’m gonna kill Miguel.” Miguel Santos is the other staff writer at the Times and a much better photographer than me. It was his turn to follow up on the scanner chatter that had alerted us to the renegade tree photo op, but he’d begged off with a dead car battery. So, I was the one shivering and reaching for the telephoto lens.

  “Whatsa matter, Leah, Ricky Martin afraid the rain will mess up his coiffure?” Darmody asked, pronouncing it cough-your and then guffawing.

  “Quiet, would you, Darmody?” I said, though I was more distracted than annoyed. The boats were already halfway to the tree by the time I got the lenses switched. Dale Darmody, the Himmel Police Department’s oldest, but not smartest, cop was still droning on.

  “That tree must be 80 feet long. And lookee all that stuff hangin’ from the branches. Musta picked up a load of crap goin’ downriver.” His chapped red nose wiggled as he talked. Little tufts of gray hair sprang from it and from his ears. His watery blue eyes blinked in the wind.

  “Darmody! Make yourself useful and help Bailey with the winch.” The order came from Darmody’s boss, David Cooper, now striding toward us.

  “Right, LT,” said Darmody, scurrying off.

  “Hey, Coop. What good’s a promotion to lieutenant if it doesn’t keep you warm and dry behind a desk? What are you doing here?”

  “Crowd control,” he said, clapping his hands together to warm them and glancing up at the high bank above us.

  “Right.” The nasty weather meant only a fraction of the usual gawkers were on hand, and all were neatly contained behind yellow police tape. But the faithful few who kept watch were about to be rewarded.

  A sudden shout from the water signaled the tree had been hooked, and we both turned our attention to the river. As the winch roared to life, I focused the camera and started shooting pictures but soon realized I needed a better angle. I glanced around for a higher vantage point then spotted a half-dead birch jutting from the bank a few yards downstream. I sprinted behind the winch and shinnied up to a Y-juncture in the tree. It wasn’t a very sturdy perch, but I only needed it for a minute.

  I looked through the lens and zoomed in. As I did, the winch groaned against the weight of the tree and gave a banshee wail. The men in the boats pushed hard at the trunk with long poles topped by metal hooks. The tree began bobbing up and down and rolling side to side, slowly at first, then picking up speed. The pressure from the poles, the pull of the winch, the force of the current, and its own growing momentum caused the tree to rock faster and faster. It began to buck, one side dipping low in the water as the other raised higher with each rolling motion.

  “Look out! Look out! She’s going over!”

  Poles dropped and motors roared as the boats pulled away from the wake of the giant tree. With a lurch, the part of the oak that had been underwater shot upward. Branches that had been submerged lifted toward the sky. Hanging from one of them was what looked like a flapping sail. But as the tree bounced up and down more slowly, the horrifying truth became clear.

  “Somebody’s caught; someone’s on that tree!” came a shout from the onlookers.

  Tangled in the web of branches was a body bobbing up and down in awful rhythm as the winch groaned slowly on and the oak neared the shore. The crews moved back in quickly to steady the tree and free the body. By the time they pulled it into one of the boats, someone had already radioed for EMTs. The other crew and the guys on the bank continued to maneuver the tree to shore, but our eyes were on the boat speeding in with the unknown victim.

  I scrambled down from the birch and watched in silence with everyone else as two men carried the body to a grassy spot a few feet from where we stood and laid it gently on the ground.

  Rivulets of dirty river water ran down a narrow face above a once white collar now muddy and askew. Wide open eyes didn’t blink as sleet fell on their sightless stare. The veil that had once covered curly black hair was gone, and the gray color of the long robe had gone black with water and river gr
ime. For a minute, no one said anything. Then an anonymous voice broke the silence.

  “Holy shit! It’s a goddamn nun.”

  Two EMTs came up behind me with a stretcher. “Ma’am, you’ll have to get out of the way.” Nodding, I took a step backward. Stumbled. A hand under my elbow kept me from falling.

  “Leah? You OK?”

  I grabbed the arm and looked up. “Coop. I know her. She—” I stopped and looked again at the battered body, the blank eyes and slack mouth, and remembered the last time I saw her. I looked away.

  “Leah?” Coop repeated. “Who is she?”

  “Sister Mattea Riordan. She’s a nun at DeMoss Academy. How could this happen? She was fine the last time I saw her.” An irrational wave of anger rose in me. What? Like the mere fact of seeing her alive a week or so ago made it impossible she was dead now? I gave my head an impatient shake, sending droplets of water flying off my hair and into Coop’s face.

  “Sorry. I’m all right. Really. I need to grab the rescue guys before they get away.” I looked at my watch. “What will you have for me before deadline?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing official before you go to press, I’m sure. Probably not even confirmation that she’s dead.”

  I gave him an incredulous look.

  “I know, I know.” He held up his hands to ward off my scorn. “But a body pulled from cold water isn’t dead until a doctor says she’s warm and dead. Then we have to contact her order, her next of kin; there’ll be an autopsy, and, well, you know the drill.”

  “Coop, are you serious? A dead nun floats into town on a tree and the Times has nothing but ‘no comment’ from the police?”

  “Yeah. I’m serious. Nothing official. I mean it. And don’t try any ‘highly placed sources in the police department’ bull either. The last time I gave you a heads up, the chief nearly took my head off. I got nothing for you, Leah.”

  “I already know who she is. Remember? I just told you.”

  “True, but you’re not going to print the name of an accident victim before the family gets notification, are you?”

  I pounced. “So, you’re saying this is an accident?”

  “Am I talking to Leah Nash or Lois Lane?”

  “I just want to know what you think. Not officially, just as a regular person. You are still a regular person sometimes aren’t you Lieutenant Cooper?”

  He took off his HPD ball cap and ran his hand through short dark hair, a sure sign that he was irritated. I was a little irritated myself. After two months back in town, I still had a hard time accepting the ways of the local police department. Everything was on a need-to-know basis, and the chief’s point of view was that the paper never needed to know anything. I could rarely even get anything attributable to an anonymous source, because the department was so small it was easy for the chief to pinpoint a leak.

  “Off the record, right now I can’t see anything but accident, but that’s not official. We still have to investigate. Look, when I have some answers I’ll make sure you have them too. Is that good enough?”

  “I guess it’ll have to be.”

  Two

  I got what I could at the scene, then headed back to the office. The unexpected death of someone I knew and liked had left me unsettled. It wasn’t that Sister Mattea’s absence would leave a hole in my life. We barely knew each other. But her death did feel like a tear in the fabric of the universe that I vaguely believe holds us all together.

  Funny, smart, not much older than me, she was someone I’d planned to get to know when I had time. But we don’t hold time in our grasp. Time holds us and often as not lets go when we least expect it.

  The rain beat steadily as it had for days. My normal route back to the paper was blocked by flooded intersections, forcing me to go the long way round. The resulting drive was a small-scale sociological survey of Himmel that added to my depression. On Worthington Boulevard, upscale homes rested safe and secure behind high hedges and wrought iron fencing, seemingly unaffected by the weather or the changed fortunes of my hometown.

  Further on to the southeast, things were definitely different in the once well-manicured subdivisions, where middle class managers, young professionals, and factory workers with plenty of overtime bought their homes. Now, many of the houses were fronted by frayed, raggedy lawns with weather-beaten For Sale signs swinging in the wind. Driveways were empty and curtains were closed.

  A few blocks later I turned onto a street in Himmel’s poorest neighborhood. There, slapped together rentals still bowed under the burden of sagging roofs. Ancient asphalt siding still curled and peeled on the houses. Scrappy lawns were still littered with broken bicycles and rusty lawn tools. The major difference from years past was the number of vehicles crowded into the rutted gravel driveways and parked on front yards, a sign of extended families huddling together, one paycheck away from financial disaster.

  A turn north through town took me past empty storefronts that once housed the hardware store, the shoe store, Straube’s Men’s Wear. They were all going businesses when I was a kid, but our small town was living on borrowed time even then. A couple of big box stores moved in with lots of choice and low, low prices. We didn’t realize what the bargains would actually cost. Specialty stores began closing their doors, unable to compete with one-stop shopping.

  By the time the first of Himmel’s several manufacturing plants closed, the town was already in trouble. Jobs left, then families left, then one morning we woke up and Himmel was a struggling community of 15,000, not a bustling town of 20,000. The citizens who remained were frustrated and not quite sure who to blame.

  “Much like me,” I said out loud, as I pulled into the newspaper parking lot and turned off my car. But that wasn’t really true. I knew exactly why my fortunes had changed. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in my stars but in myself, that I am a stubborn smartass. But I had neither the time nor the inclination for self-reflection just then. I had photos and final edits to do if we were going to make our Thursday night deadline. I grabbed my stuff and slipped through the side door of the building.

  Max Schrieber, owner and publisher of the Times Weekly was nowhere to be found, and Miguel was still among the missing. I filed cutlines for the photos, wrote up a brief on the officially unidentified female found in the river, and went out to the front desk to check for messages. We have a lot of walk-in traffic at the Times as well as a fair number of callers who would rather leave word with a live person at the reception desk than record a voice mail. Though that can only be because they don’t know Courtnee Fensterman, our receptionist.

  Courtnee’s slightly buggy blue eyes peered out from under a feathering of light blonde bangs as she gave me a wad of pink message slips from the spike on the corner of her desk. Then she patted my hand.

  “Wow, Leah. That is so weird. It’s like you’re one of those middles. You know, getting messages from dead people.”

  “What are you talking about, Courtnee?”

  “The Sister. The dead Sister. Sister Mattea, the one in the river.”

  “How—” I cut myself off. There was no point asking how she found out about the death, let alone how she knew the identity of the body. The Himmel Times can’t compete with the Himmel grapevine.

  “My cousin Mikey was at the hospital with my Aunt Frances, she had another spell. He saw them bring Sister Mattea in, and he told my mom, and she called me. But anyway, like I said, Leah, you’re like a middle or something. Kind of.”

  “You mean a medium?” I asked, mystified but game.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s called a middle, Leah,” she said kindly. “I mean, because they’re in the middle of like two worlds, right? The living and the dead.”

  “OK, I’m a middle. But what are you talking about? Messages from the dead?”

  “Well, the Sister. She’s dead. And she gave you a message. Only wait, maybe that’s not right. She wasn’t dead when she was here, so that probably doesn’t count. Right?”

  “Sister
Mattea? When was she here? What kind of message? Where is it?”

  A blank stare from Courtnee told me my rapid-fire questions had caused a temporary interruption in brain service.

  “Well…” her light blonde eyebrows pulled together in a frown of concentration, and she bit her lower lip. Taking a deep breath, I tamped down my impatience and altered my approach. I became the Courtnee Whisperer.

  “Courtnee, Sister Mattea stopped by and left a message for me, right?” I said in a low, measured tone. I all but started stroking her withers.

  She visibly relaxed and nodded.

  “Well, she had this book she wanted to give you. But then you weren’t here so she was going to leave it. She asked me for a Post-it, so she could write you a note. Then she asked me to give it to you. But then I thought, no, I’ll put it in a manila envelope so the book and the note will stay together.”

  She paused for a lump of sugar.

  “That was a great idea, Courtnee. Now, can you think where you put the envelope?”

  “I put it on your desk, silly. What else would I do with it?”

  What indeed. “Actually, no, Courtnee, you didn’t. I didn’t have an envelope left on my desk any day this week. Do you think maybe the phone rang before you could take it to my desk, and maybe you set it down somewhere and forgot about it?”