Death, Guns, and Sticky Buns

by Valerie S. Malmont

  Charlotte dismounted. “Let's stretch our legs a minute. I take it you two have met.”

  Professor Nakamura walked over to us and bowed low to me. I did the best I could, bowing from the saddle on top of my horse. He inclined his head just slightly when he turned to Charlotte, a sign of disrespect that she didn't seem to recognize.

  Before I dismounted, I took a look around to see if there was a wall or something nearby that I could stand on to get back on Maizie. I spotted a stone wall, about three feet high, and figured that would do.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Ken.

  “Protesting the deer hunt. Every year, the park service sends out sharpshooters to thin the deer herd. We want to stop the heartless slaughter of these innocent animals. We try to post a presence every Saturday, at least until we're chased away.”

  “And that other group?”

  “Hunters who think they, and not the park's official gunmen, should be allowed in to shoot the deer.”

  “Can we sit down, please?” Charlotte was fanning her face mask. “This thing is so damn hot. I feel like I've been sweating in a sauna.”

  She perched on a boulder near the edge of the woods and patted a spot next to her. “Come sit down, Ken. We haven't talked since Christmas.”

  He didn't move.

  As if he forgot he was holding a flag, his fingers opened, and he dropped it. “I'll get it,” I said, stepping forward and bending over. I heard a cracking sound and something rushed past my left ear with a whistle. “What the—?”

  Another crack off in the distance, caused me to turn back around. Ken Nakamura was on his knees, clutching at his chest. As I stared in disbelief, blood oozed between his fingers. He toppled sideways, and I dropped to the ground beside him.

  “Get help,” I cried. The men and women from his group rushed over to us. “Someone's shot him.” I ripped off my jacket and was using it to stanch the flow of blood from his wound.

  Even the pro-hunting group had gathered around us by now. With them there, I felt safer, for they protected us from more flying bullets.

  “I called 911,” a woman said, showing me her cell phone. “So did I,” said half a dozen other people.

  Ken was still conscious but was losing blood rapidly, and I feared for the worst. I kept pressure on the wound and hoped for a miracle. After what seemed like hours, but was in reality only a few minutes, a park ranger car pulled up, followed by an ambulance.

  The emergency medical team from the ambulance made us all move back, put an IV in Ken's arm, did their best to stabilize him, then carefully placed him on a stretcher that they then carried to the ambulance.

  “Can I go with him?” I asked. “I'm a friend of the family.” That wasn't exactly a fib; after all, I'd had dinner with his daughter-in-law only a few days ago.

  “I guess,” one of the EMTs said, and I climbed into the back of the ambulance before he could change his mind.

  I leaned out of the door. “My horse!”

  “I'll take care of Maizie,” Charlotte called. “Please call and let me know how he's doing.”

  As the emergency vehicle bounced across the field, the EMT asked me, “What happened?”

  “Somebody was shooting in our direction. I heard at least two bullets. I was right next to Professor Naka-mura, talking to him, when he was hit.”

  “Lots of boulders in Devil's Den. The shooter could have been hiding out there. I'd better call the park service and have them search the area.”

  “He's had plenty of time to get away. We were all so busy tending to Ken that we wouldn't have seen him.”

  “I wonder why this happened,” the technician said. “Was it some nut protesting the protest? Or a hunter taking advantage of the confusion to bag himself a deer?… Does Professor Nakamura have any enemies that you know of?”

  “I don't really know him all that well,” I admitted. The medic looked sharply at me. “I'm more of a friend of a relative.”

  At the hospital, I hung around outside the emergency room until Moonbeam arrived. “My ex is on the road with the high school football team, so I can't even let him know.” We hugged, then she went inside to see how Ken was doing. I promised to wait for her.

  Soon I was approached by two policemen who said they wanted to ask me some questions. One of them whipped open a notebook and asked my name.

  When I said, “Tori Miracle,” the two men exchanged glances I didn't understand. I proceeded to tell them everything I had seen and heard just prior to the shooting, which wasn't much. “I didn't even realize what was happening, until I saw Ken Nakamura bleeding from the chest.” I couldn't even tell them what direction the shots had come from.

  The man with the notebook wrote down everything I said. When I was finished, he said, “Are you Tori Miracle from Lickin Creek?”

  “Why, yes, I am. How did you know that?”

  “I have a report on my desk from the park service. There was a Tori Miracle caught acting in a suspicious manner around the exhibit cases at the visitor center yesterday. Was that you?”

  I acknowledged that it was indeed me. “But I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was only trying to see how difficult it would be to steal something.” They exchanged those glances again, and I realized that had not been a smart thing to say.

  “And you don't think that's odd behavior?”

  “I wasn't charged with anything.”

  “I know that,” the policeman said, snapping shut his notebook. “But you'd better be aware we'll be keeping a close eye on you from now on.”

  Moonbeam came out of the ER, looking terribly downhearted, and answered a few questions about why her father-in-law had been on the battlefield. “I understand you have a close relationship with Woody Woodruff,” one said.

  “I do.” Moonbeam looked defensive. I couldn't blame her.

  “He's in jail, isn't he? For another shooting?”

  “No, he isn't. I bailed him out last night.”

  After a few more questions, the police seemed satisfied that they'd gotten all there was to get from us, and left.

  As soon as we were alone, I asked, “How could you afford to post bail, Moonbeam? You said you had no money.”

  “I used my house as collateral. It's all I had. Don't look at me that way, Tori. He'll pay me back.” She appeared so dejected, I didn't tell her what I thought of her boyfriend. “You don't think they're going to blame this on him, too, do you?”

  “Just because he had the opportunity doesn't mean he had a motive. I don't think there's any reason to worry.”

  “Please don't leave me,” Moonbeam said. “I don't want to wait alone.”

  Ken was transferred to the Cardiac Care Unit, and Moonbeam was allowed to visit him for five minutes every hour. Once, while she was in there, I took a chance on going down to the lab to see if I could get my biopsy results. “Sorry,” the woman behind the desk said. “We send those reports to your doctor. You'll have to get them from him.”

  “My doctor is a she. And she's dead. Can't you please—”

  “It will be sent to his, I mean her, office, and that office will forward them to the doctor who takes over the practice. You'll probably hear something in a week or two.”

  I grumbled and snarled all the way back to the CCU, but there was absolutely nothing I could do. Moonbeam thought I was upset about Ken, and took my hand and tried to console me by saying, “He's going to be fine, Tori. I know he is.”

  Finally, a doctor came out and told us Ken was stabilized. “Why don't you go home and get some rest,” he said to Moonbeam. “We'll call you if anything changes.”

  She nodded, and we walked slowly to the door. “Can I ride with you to Lickin Creek?” she asked. “I need to feed Dad's pets, and I don't think I'm up to driving alone.”

  For either of us to get to Lickin Creek meant I had to go back to Shoestring Hill Farm to retrieve my car.

  Moonbeam drove, and Charlotte met us in the parking lot.

  “How is he?” she ask
ed. “I've been so worried.”

  “Stable,” Moonbeam told her. And she added optimistically, “He's going to be all right.”

  We transferred to my car for the trip back to Lickin Creek. Moonbeam sat quietly next to me, sniffing occasionally into a Kleenex. Once we were in the borough, she directed me to Ken's house, which was in the historic district near the college.

  She had a key to the back door. We walked through a small vestibule into the large, sunny kitchen, which was swarming with small dogs and cats. “Gloria knows what a softy Dad is,” Moonbeam said as she began to open cans of cat food. “If she rescues a small animal that nobody wants, she knows she can always count on him to take it in.”

  A small white dog with fluffy hair, black-rimmed eyes, and a curly tail put his paws on my knees and begged to be loved. I picked him up and was surprised to find he weighed a lot less than my Fred. “I saw some dogs like this at an Amish farm recently. Only not groomed. In fact they were a disgusting mess. I told Gloria about it. I hope she follows through. What is he?”

  “He's a bichon frise. I think they're distant relatives of the poodle family. Very popular and expensive, right now. The farmer's probably making a lot of money supplying pet stores with bichon puppies.”

  I reluctantly put the sweet little ball of fur down and helped Moonbeam by scooping dog food into a row of bowls along one wall of the kitchen, while she tended to the ferrets in the next room. There were birds and guinea pigs upstairs, a black-and-white gibbon in the living room, and a snake in a terrarium in the dining room.

  “Having to look at that every mealtime would be enough to make even me give up eating. Come to think of it, maybe I should get one, I might actually stick to my diet.”

  “I understand they eat snakes in China,” Moonbeam said.

  “They do. There's a place in Taipei called Snake Alley where you can pick out a live snake, and they'll skin it and cook it for you right there. I think of it every time I go to a restaurant that has live lobsters on display for customers to choose from. That makes me sick, too.”

  Finished with the feeding, we went back into the kitchen. The cats and dogs were chewing with relish. Each animal had its own dish, and I was glad to see there was no fighting.

  On the kitchen table were several scrapbooks and a notebook. “I wonder what Dad's working on,” Moonbeam said. “He didn't mention any research project to me.” She opened the top scrapbook and looked at the first few pages. “This is wonderful. I've never seen these before. It's family stuff,” she said. “Maybe he's going to write a family memoir. Just look here, these are Ken's grandparents. See how distinguished they look. I'm so glad somebody took the time to write names under the pictures, otherwise I wouldn't know who they were if…”

  “He's going to be all right,” I reassured her.

  She smiled bravely and stared for a long time at the stiff portrait of a solemn-looking young woman in a formal kimono and a distinguished gentleman in a morning suit. She turned the page, revealing a family group, mother, father, and two children. “Ken's mother and father. The baby is Ken. The older boy's name is Masao. I wonder who he was?”

  “A brother?”

  “I don't think so. Dad's never mentioned a brother.”

  “Maybe a cousin, then. Or a friend. You can ask him when he's feeling better.” Please let there be the opportunity, I prayed.

  She picked up the notebook and opened it. “It's all in Japanese. Dad said you speak the language. Can you read it?”

  “I never learned how,” I admitted. Learning to read Japanese had been on my list of things to do longer than starting a diet.

  She put the notebook down and picked up another scrapbook. The black pages were covered with the kind of black-and-white snapshots found in almost any family scrapbook, children playing on a lawn, a fishing boat at a dock with its small crew waving from the deck, school photos, backyard barbecues, unnamed adults smiling at the unseen photographer. Then she turned a page to reveal a yellowed piece of folded newspaper. She unfolded it carefully and laid it on the table. It was page 1 of a Long Beach, California, newspaper, dated December 7, 1941. The headline read JAPANESE ATTACK PEARL HARBOR.

  I turned the next page of the scrapbook and found another clipping, this one dated December 9, 1941, which reported that President Roosevelt had declared the attack on Pearl Harbor a “day of infamy.” The headline simply said WAR.

  Glued to the following pages were more articles about the early days of the war in the Pacific, all from Los Angeles area newspapers. I read through them with some interest, remembering that my grandfather had served with the navy in the Pacific during WWII. I stopped when I came to a folded piece of paper, which had been inserted between two pages but was not glued in. I carefully unfolded it, noticing that it was already torn in several places and had holes in it as if it had been thumbtacked to something. It was a poster, I realized, carrying the notice ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY, BOTH ALIEN AND NONALIEN, WILL BE EVACUATED FROM THE ABOVE DESIGNATED AREA BY 12:00 NOON. Penciled on the bottom was a date: 04/07/42. I had a funny feeling I knew what was coming. There were no more family photos, no more fishing boats, no more happy faces. There was nothing more in the album.

  “Did your father-in-law ever tell you he was interned during the war?” I asked.

  “What do you mean by interned?” Moonbeam stared blankly at the poster, uncomprehending. “I don't understand. What does this mean?”

  “It means all Japanese Americans on the West Coast were put into camps for the duration of World War II.”

  She gasped. “Dad's never said anything about it. I never heard of such a thing.”

  “It's a shameful part of American history that isn't taught in schools, Moonbeam. “It's not something the ‘land of the free’ acknowledges with pride.”

  “How come you know about it, then?”

  “I didn't go to American schools.”

  “Tell me what happened,” she begged.

  “I don't know the details, Moonbeam. You should ask your father-in-law about it. I do know that more than a hundred thousand people were imprisoned, including small children, even babies.”

  “But not if they were American citizens, right?”

  “It didn't matter if they were American citizens or not. If they had even one drop of Japanese blood, the government looked at them as security risks.”

  “I am shocked. I wish he'd talked to me about this. It's part of my daughter's heritage.”

  I patted her hand gently. “I'm sure he was going to, Moonbeam. That's probably why the books are on the table.”

  I stayed with Moonbeam until Gloria and Tamsin arrived. They were prepared to console her by holding a drumming session, so I quickly said good-bye and left.

  CHAPTER 12

  Saturday

  SATURDAY EVENING, AS I WAS WATCHING A FINE performance by Vincent Price in The Masque of the Red Death on television, Doctor God-love called to thank me for my work in looking into Mack Macmillan's death. “I'm quite satisfied with the results of the investigation. Luscious Miller told me you persuaded him to press manslaughter charges against Woody Woodruff. I'm very glad that nobody connected with the college or from Lickin Creek was associated with the unfortunate incident.”

  I sputtered a couple of times before I got my voice under control. “But I never suggested Woody was responsible. I merely reminded Luscious that the guns didn't load themselves. He assumed I meant…”

  Godlove interrupted me. “Of course, the college would like to express its appreciation for your efforts. We'll be sending a small check as a thank-you.”

  “I don't want your check. And I'm not satisfied that Woody was to blame. I'm going to keep asking questions.”

  There was a long pause. Then the college president said, “Please don't do any more investigating. That's an order.”

  I hung up and counted to ten twice to let myself cool off. He had no business giving me orders. And in my mind and in my heart I was sure Woody woul
d not have made such a terrible mistake. Not at something he took such pride in. Somehow, someone had gotten hold of the keys to that storeroom. And I was determined to find out who that someone was.

  Every TV cop show and every movie I'd seen recently had a scene set in a strip joint. I'd always thought the scenes were superfluous, added only for viewer titil-lation, and yet that's exactly where my investigation was taking me—a porno shop called the Brick Shed House, which advertised nude dancers.

  The sign over the door said OPEN 24 HOURS. There were no cars in the parking lot behind the stockade fence, only a disreputable pickup truck parked by the side door marked STAFF ONLY. That was good. There would be nobody here to recognize me. Even better, there would be nobody there for me to recognize. I knew I'd have a difficult time facing a man at a church social if I'd once come face-to-face with him in a porno shop.

  To disguise myself, I'd stopped by Garnet's house on the way out of town and borrowed some of his old clothes from Greta. In them, I looked the way I thought most Lickin Creek men looked—country macho. A pair of Garnet's khakis were rolled up at the bottom, a very large red-plaid shirt concealed my too ample bosom, and a John Deere tractor hat covered my unruly curls. I'd even padded my feet with two pairs of wool socks and I wore his oldest hunting boots. With a pair of sunglasses on, I thought I could fool almost anybody into thinking I was a man, especially if the place was dark.

  The sign on the door said CUM IN. I overcame my disgust, pulled the sleeve of my shirt down over my hand so my bare skin wouldn't come in contact with the door, and gingerly pushed it open. The interior of the Brick Shed House was lit by only one small red light bulb, hanging from the ceiling, and an EXIT sign over the side door. I blinked, and the room I was in slowly began to reveal itself. A glass counter to my right, shelves of videos straight ahead, magazine racks on my left, and a few plastic chairs were all I saw. An unfamiliar, unpleasant odor made me feel terribly unclean.