Forgotten Spirits

by Barbara Deese

  “You know what I mean. Are we tracking down another murder?”

  Cate stopped in her tracks. “You know, I think that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

  “Goody!” her mother said.

  What a strange response to murder! Cate shook her head, and yet, to be fair, she’d never felt so alive as when she and her friends had been in pursuit of a murderer. Sure, they’d put themselves in danger, but it had all turned out okay. Hadn’t it? “Goody!” she responded. “And damn the consequences. Whoever died from reading a wine label, anyway?” After setting the box on the counter near the sink, Cate extracted a bottle and turned it in her hands. Sliding her reading glasses down from where they were perched on the top of her head, she read the fine print.

  They were still laughing when her mother reached into the box, pulled out a bottle, and said, “Oh! Oh my!” She held it up for Cate to see. It was a red wine named The Usual Suspect.

  Cate went around the counter to take the bottle from her mother. Although it appeared to be full of wine, it was light in her hands, and when she tilted it back and forth, it didn’t slosh. It was a screw-top, and she put her fingernail into the crease of the seal. It was already broken.

  “Do it! Open it,” Her mother urged.

  “I always was an obedient child,” Cate said.

  “You were not!”

  It was screwed on tightly, but Cate got the top off, and squinted inside. She turned it upside down and banged on the bottom. Then flipping on the overhead light, she held the bottle at various angles and stuck her finger into the opening.

  Wanda leaned close, trying to get a look. “There is something in there, isn’t there?”

  “It looks like rolled up paper, but it’s wider than the neck of the bottle. I can’t figure out how to get it out.”

  “Here, let me have a crack at it.” Wanda held out a hand.

  Cate passed the bottle back to her and watched as her mother raised it and brought it down with a crack on the center divider of the double sink.

  “Oh, my,” her mother said again, picking up a large chunk of broken glass from the sink. “How clever! It looks like someone swirled red paint in the bottle to make it look full.”

  Cate reached past her to snatch up the contents. She set the tube of paper on the counter and tried to unroll it. It snapped back. “Help me, Mom.”

  Together, they flattened the sheets of paper, holding the corners so they could read what was written. Cate’s mouth fell open. She stared at her mother and said, “I need to call Foxy.”

  Her hands shook as the pulled her cell phone out of her purse and pressed the numbers.

  She turned her head when she picked up a faint ringing somewhere in the apartment. Pulling the phone from her ear, she handed it to her mother and went in search of the ringing phone. It stopped. “Redial it,” she said.

  She finally found it in the pocket of Foxy’s wool jacket. It was not like Foxy to leave without her phone, but maybe she really needed to get away from it all. Flicking through Foxy’s lists of contacts, she found Bill’s number. Even though she hated to interrupt his time with Foxy, this felt too important to ignore.

  Sheriff Harley answered, sounding tired, maybe even a couple sheets to the winds. “Yes?” he said with obvious annoyance.

  “Hi, it’s me, Cate Running Wolf.”

  “Okay?” It was not a friendly response.

  When she explained Foxy had left her phone at home and that she needed to talk to her, Bill sounded confused and then aggravated. “What makes you think she’s here?”

  “I . . . I just thought . . .” she stammered.

  “I get it. She took off, and you thought she was with me. Well, welcome to the club. I thought she was with me, too.”

  She apologized and hung up. “That was awkward,” she said to her mother. “I’ve really stepped in it now.”

  On a hunch, she scrolled down and found Tina’s number.

  Waiting for Tina to answer, Cate recalled something she and Robin had talked about. They’d joked about a tontine, with each surviving investor accruing more and more money upon the death of one of them. What am I doing, calling the one person with a motive to kill Foxy? she thought, and quickly hung up.

  Next she found Matt’s number and called it. A message said the number was no longer in service. “Can you believe this?” she said to her mother as she pulled out her own phone and dialed Robin.

  * * *

  The motel said no pets allowed. They had no trouble smuggling Molly Pat in. As soon as they checked in and got the dog settled, they walked to the restaurant just across the parking lot and ordered the spaghetti with meatballs special. While they waited for their food, Foxy checked her coat pockets and then her purse. “Damn it!”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My phone. It must be in the car.”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “Well, it must be, Vinnie. I never go anywhere without my phone.”

  “Where did you last see it?”

  She faced him with a sardonic look. “Well, if I knew that, would I be digging around for it? Oh, damn!” she swore again as she remembered. Just before they’d left her apartment, she’d decided to take a warmer coat, one with down filling and a hood, leaving her wool coat at home. “I left it in my other coat pocket.”

  He chuckled in a patronizing way that annoyed her. “We’re good. If you really need to call someone, you can use my phone or make a call from the room.”

  She didn’t want to think about their room right now, with its two double-beds. “I was just going to call Cate.”

  “What for?”

  “Or Robin. Just to touch base, I guess.” How could she explain that ever since she’d gotten the call about Sierra, she’d felt like she’d taken a tumble down the rabbit hole? After her initial shock at Vinnie’s unannounced visit, his presence had been oddly comforting. But she’d barely had a moment to assimilate those two pieces of her past, Sierra and Vinnie, when she found herself fleeing to Pine Glen, where even more distant memories emerged. She’d kept her worlds separate for so long, and now they were colliding.

  Suddenly, she was homesick for the life she’d made for herself in the Twin Cities, including her friends in the book club, who supported each other in ways she couldn’t have imagined when she’d moved to Minnesota years ago, alone, mistrustful and apprehensive about her future.

  So why, she wondered, was it so hard to tell the No Ordinary Women about her life? As hard as it was to explain her complicated feelings about Bill Harley, the past was an even messier quagmire. What would they say about Vinnie Romano, when she herself didn’t know what to think of him? He was both loving and clueless, kind of a benign doofus.

  Years ago, she’d imagined what it would look like if she were to chart the years she and Vinnie had been together. It would look like the graph made by a cardiac monitor, spiking and dipping in a predictable way over several years, and then going into arrhythmia before flatlining. But was it really dead?

  When they were finished with their meal, they went back to their room. With Vinnie hovering nearby, it would be awkward talking to Bill, but she called him from the phone in the room anyway, but only after Vinnie promised not to clear his throat, cough, or make any other noises.

  Bill didn’t sound like himself, and his clipped responses didn’t encourage a lot of conversation. Foxy apologized, explaining to him she’d felt the need to get away to think, and heard an edge of sarcasm in his voice when he politely thanked her for letting him know. “I care about you, you know,” she said before they hung up, and he muttered that he cared about her too.

  Sitting in the chair next to the window, Vinnie watched her with frank interest. “Sorry if my presence is a problem,” he said.

  She felt like she was teetering on th
e edge of a high wall that separated past and present. She could choose to fall on either side, but if she did nothing, the choice would be out of her hands, and she would fall or be pushed anyway. The muscles of her shoulders were giant knots of tension, and she made a concerted effort to breathe deeply and let herself relax. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with exhaustion. All she was capable of doing was to fall into bed.

  He patted the mattress of the bed he’d claimed. “Want to sleep together?”

  Even though he’d behaved himself at her house, she felt the need to remind the benign doofus there was to be no hanky panky. She claimed the bed by the window.

  “Not even panky?”

  She laughed. “No hanky. No panky.”

  “No problem,” he said with a lazy grin, throwing back the bedspread of the other bed. “I’m exhausted.”

  Chapter 16

  Sitting in front of the television, Robin worked on the last rows of the scarf of soft, hand-dyed merino wool she was knitting for Brad. She found herself pondering what Cate and her mother had told her about the message in the bottle. It was a bit theatrical leaving personal letters and the results of a paternity test behind, Robin thought, but then Sierra had been in a theatrical business.

  It was more than that, though. She had no doubt Sierra had meant the contents of the wine bottle to be found only in the event of her death. But why? She was still young, at least too young to be contemplating her own death by natural means, unless, of course, she’d just found out she had a fatal illness. In that case, Robin might believe she’d taken her own life, but that theory didn’t take into account the fact that she’d believed someone was following her.

  If she hadn’t died at her own hand, then whoever was stalking her would be the natural suspect. Fearing someone might kill her, Sierra may have felt compelled to hide papers that would be understood only by the recipient. Since she’d made sure the box wound up in Foxy’s hands, it was safe to conclude Foxy would be able to interpret the contents of the bottle. Foxy was convinced the stalker was connected to the murder they’d all witnessed years ago, but the time lapse alone made that improbable—unless something else happened that Foxy either didn’t know about or wasn’t telling.

  Foxy had referred to Sierra as “colorful.” Was that a way of saying she took risks, had messy relationships, lived on the wrong side of the law? It was possible. Until the book club lunch, none of them had heard anything about Sierra. How important could she have been in Foxy’s life if she’d never even mentioned her? And why had Sierra reached out to Foxy?

  But now, Foxy was gone without discovering the message meant only for her. In her absence, Sierra’s message from beyond the grave had fallen into the hands of strangers. “She’s reaching out to us,” Cate had said. Well, what on earth did Sierra expect them to do about it? If she’d only needed to confess an indiscretion, a lousy choice she’d made, it would be nobody’s business but her own.

  “You worry too much about everyone else,” Brad had told her more than once, a polite way of telling her to mind her own business. “You don’t need to get involved in every little intrigue, every unsolved mystery that comes along.” Maybe in this instance Brad was right. Who was she to insert herself into the life—and death—of someone she’d never even heard about until three days ago?

  Cutting the yarn, she buried the loose end by threading it along the finished side. Holding up the deep crimson scarf, she was pleased with its look and feel. She carried it to the basement where she wrapped it in decorative tissue paper and placed it in a cabinet with the other packages wrapped and ready for Christmas morning. There was nothing more for her to do before Christmas, which was still a week away.

  In the living room, she felt a draft coming from one of the windows and when she went to close the shades, she looked across the street and down a rise to Lake Harriet. All day long the lake had been happily populated by skaters, people walking with dogs, or building snowmen and other snow sculptures, but tonight it felt desolate despite the lights lining the far shore. It was like her house—cheerless, even with all the trappings of Christmas.

  All her home needed was her family. For years, making Christmas happen had been a team effort. She and Brad and the girls and her mother had baked and decorated and had taken in a holiday-themed show. Then the girls had gone off to school, one to each coast, and although they’d carved out a little family time over the holidays, life with Mom and Dad increasingly took a lower priority. Even her mother had her own plans putting on a Christmas party at her senior apartment complex, Meadowpoint Manor.

  Maya, who typically holed up in her room writing some paper or another, would be home only for a few days of her Christmas break, and Cass, who hadn’t planned to come home at all, was now stranded in Colorado, waiting to be rescued by her father.

  She sat again in front of the TV and turned up the volume. The weather forecasts varied depending on the channel, yet all ended with the caveat that a slight deviation in the winds could change the path of the storm. With a drop of only two or three degrees, they all agreed, rain could turn to ice, snow, sleet, or some combination thereof. Watching the storm coverage, Robin remembered a favorite Dr. Seuss book, Bartholomew and the Oobleck, and imagined the climatologists all atwitter if sticky, green globs of oobleck were to fall from the sky.

  Snow and blowing snow were not daunting to most lifelong Minnesotans. After all, if they stayed home every time a flake or two fell, they’d all be hermits for six or seven months out of every year.

  She flipped off the TV and went to the bookshelf to pick a new book. Scanning the titles, she realized she wasn’t in the mood to read, a rare occurrence. Sierra’s death was still on her mind, but the one she was most concerned about was Foxy. She sorted through not so much what Cate had said, but how she’d said it. Clearly Cate had been troubled, as in her sixth-sense kind of worried. It was bad enough Foxy had left her phone at home, but now it turned out she wasn’t with Sheriff Harley after all. Last year the No Ordinary Women had read a thriller in which an ordinary man had been forced to “go dark,” cutting off all communications with family and friends in order to save someone he loved. Had Foxy gone dark on purpose?

  She grabbed her laptop from the kitchen niche where she kept it, and plopped down again in front of the television, now with the sound on the weather channel muted. As she opened her computer, she started to resurrect everything Foxy had ever said about her brother Matthew’s resort. The name of it escaped her, but she was pretty sure Foxy had talked about canoeing and kayaking there . . . and snowmobiling. Foxy once bragged about how proficient she was driving a snowmobile. Matthew’s resort, according to Foxy, was a series of log cabins not terribly far from town, which Robin presumed to be Ely. Looking over the search results, she found several resorts that fit what she was looking for.

  She was ready to give up when she remembered Foxy telling about an incident outside of one of the cabins five or six years ago. Some woman staying at the resort had been mauled by a bear, after luring the ill-fated creature up to her cabin with a bag of marshmallows. Her husband was standing on the front step, camera at the ready, when the bear charged his wife. She’d escaped with a deep gash on her arm. The bear had not been so fortunate. After documenting his own stupidity and his wife’s blind obedience, the man had showed the photos to neighbors. She—it turned out it was a female bear with two cubs—was labeled a “bad bear” that had to be dispatched. Foxy had been incensed. More like hopping mad. “They killed the wrong animal!” she’d said, ranting about the egocentric insensitivity of humans.

  Robin searched the Internet for the story, and soon came upon it in the archives of the Ely Echo. There it was, with a sidebar of other bear attacks, and quotes from people who, like Foxy, blamed the bear’s death on the foolishness of the man and his wife. The caption read, “Bear Dispatched at Twin Loons Cabins and Resort.”

  Typing in that n
ame, Robin found the simple website. The photos were not professionally done, but showed a lovely little getaway with few amenities. This little slice of nature was like the northern resorts of her childhood with running water and electricity but not much else. She pored over the photos and kicked herself for not taking Foxy up on the invitation to join her for a little break before Christmas. As a plan started to take form, Robin punched in the number given on the website, and got a message saying it was no longer in service. “Check the number and try again,” the automated voice suggested, and so she did, and with the same results.

  Once more she looked at the photos and read the accompanying text. “Leave your worries behind. Dip your toes in the clear waters of unspoiled lakes and watch the flight of herons and eagles. Sit under the stars and watch the dance of the Northern Lights. Strap on a pair of snowshoes and enjoy a brisk walk in nature.” Robin’s eyes stung as she thought of cross-country skiing through the hushed wilderness, just as she had done at her own cabin in Wisconsin. She imagined sitting with Foxy and her brother, sharing a glass of wine in front of the fireplace as they looked out the window at softly falling snow. In her memory, she smelled the pine trees that surrounded the old hunting lodge at Spirit Falls, and remembered how she and her friends had sat around in their pajamas, lighthearted and relaxed, giggling and carefree as children.

  Almost without thinking, she reached for the phone. Even as she hit speed dial, she thought about Erik’s words to Cate last year. “You have to stop letting Robin get you into messes.” Cate, ever the smart mouth, had said, “No problem. I’ll be the one to get her in trouble.” Erik had gone so far as to threaten to have her committed if she ever got into another scrape like she had last year, and the year before. Robin figured Erik and Brad had talked about how they were going to keep their wives from venturing into another debacle.

  When Cate answered, Robin told her the plan.

  Cate groaned, “I can’t leave. Family commitments. You don’t know how much I’d rather hop in the car with you, even if you’re headed for trouble.”