The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1)

by Alida Winternheimer

  Breathe.

  Jess drew in a hurried breath. Shakti squirmed, but Jess kept her hold on the puppy. She struggled to straighten up. It was as though Bonnie’s finger pinned her to the cushions.

  Breathe.

  “Okay,” she said. “There’s something else. Something you need me to do.”

  The specter remained, pointing at Jess.

  “Johnny knows who his father is. He knows his father is John Sykes and not Carl Copeland.”

  Something changed. Jess wasn’t certain what it was. Bonnie still stood in the corner with her arm raised toward Jess. Shakti still squirmed in her arms. It was as though a filter had dropped before her eyes, changing the hue of everything around her. Jess had studied theater in college and knew that different colored gels were put over the lights to affect different moods, sometimes so subtly the audience wouldn’t be aware of the color change, though they would feel it. Yellow-orange, she thought, and focused on the sensation of color—it was unsettling, anxiety producing. Jess looked at Bonnie and did not recoil, but tried to be receptive. “Tell me what you want.” Bonnie opened her mouth to speak, but instead of sound, a puff of frosted air escaped her lips and the room went blue. Jess shivered. Shakti jumped out of her arms and squeezed behind the couch. Jess’s own breath came from her in a cloud of frost. She tried to stay open, to not let the panic knotting her gut take over. She watched Bonnie, waiting for something more, something coherent.

  find him

  It came into her mind like type on a white page, this familiar message. Jess was about to ask a question when Bonnie vanished. The flies disappeared and the room became garishly bright as the June sunlight suddenly poured in through every window.

  Jess called to Shakti to let her know everything was all right again, but there wasn’t time to get down and coax the dog out from hiding. She picked up her phone and dialed Johnny.

  “We need to get you to your father right away.”

  While they talked, she wandered into the kitchen and poured a glass of water.

  “I’ll call the prison,” she said. “There’s all this paperwork, but I don’t think we have time for that.”

  A single fly buzzed past Jess’s head and landed on the window. Jess stared at it as it lifted two of its hair-like legs to rub them together. She bent and grabbed a flyswatter from below the sink. She straightened up and slowly raised the swatter, hovering over the fly.

  “Right. I’ll call you back as soon I talk to the prison.”

  Thwak!

  “That? Nothing. Just killing a fly.”

  John Sykes slept in a small bed in a room decorated with calming blues. If the plain and functional room had any character at all, it was soothing. A padded rocking chair sat under the curtained window. A nightstand near the bed had a pitcher of water and a large handled cup with a bendy straw next to a tub of Vaseline. The doors were typically kept open on these rooms, and as they walked down the hospice corridor Jess had noticed walls decorated with pictures taped to them and photos propped on nightstands under bouquets of flowers. John’s room was bare of personal comforts.

  Johnny approached his father’s bed. Jess noticed a chair in the corner and carried it over to the bedside. Johnny nodded a thanks and sat down near his father’s head, setting a shoulder bag on the floor next to his chair. Jess backed up so she was near the door again, ready if she was needed, but otherwise unobtrusive.

  While John slept, his breathing a slow wheeze that barely roused the sheet pulled up to his shoulders, Johnny watched this man he never had the chance to know. Even in the dim light of this room, he looked sallow. Whatever fullness of face he’d had was wasted away by the cancer. His lips looked dry and he smacked his mouth, then turned his head on his pillow. Johnny extended a trembling hand and it hovered over his father’s head. At last he touched the bald pate.

  John’s eyes flickered open. He stared at the man before him for a long time before parting his lips to speak. A hoarse croak came out. Johnny reached for the cup of water and offered it to John, who drank, then sank back into his pillow with a soft sigh.

  He reached a shaking hand up and pressed it to Johnny’s cheek. “My son,” he said. “My son.”

  Johnny nodded his head, tears flowing fast down his cheeks.

  “Don’t cry. It’s all right now.” Johnny nodded again. “When you were two, you called me Daddy.”

  “Daddy,” he said, finding his voice at last and nodding in affirmation of this stranger’s relationship to his life.

  Jess backed out of the room. She wandered into a small café painted a cheerful green with a few tables. The people here were clearly visitors or staff, not patients. She wondered, as she surveyed the room, if anyone was well enough to leave their beds by the time they came to the hospice. Large windows overlooked a zen garden with a meditation labyrinth. Jess gazed out at the labyrinth and decided again that it was for visitors and staff, a means of self-care for those encountering death. She finally approached the counter and bought two coffees, then went into the gift shop and bought a bouquet full of bright gerbera daisies.

  She made it back to John’s room without spilling, a victory of its own since she had the bouquet in a vase squeezed between the crook of her elbow and her chest, and a coffee cup in each hand. She stepped into the room and cleared her throat to announce herself. Johnny stood and relieved her of the coffee. Jess set the vase on the nightstand and primped the flowers so their faces turned toward the bed.

  “There she is,” John said and held out his hand. “The girl who brought us together.”

  Jess took his hand in hers. The withered skin clung to bones that protruded as though long deprived. She patted John’s hand gently.

  He withdrew his hand to point at his son. “He’s got his mother’s eyes. See there? See how kind they are? That’s Bonnie. She was the gentlest woman there ever was. She loved birds. Kept feeders everywhere. And any stale bread, tossed to the squirrels.” John softened against the bed, drained from even that much exertion.

  “You rest now, Dad.”

  Jess couldn’t help a sideways glance at the sound of Johnny calling him dad. He looked emotional, but he was holding it together, smiling down at his father while he patted his leg through the bedclothes.

  “Not yet,” John said. “Soon I’ll rest.”

  Jess motioned for Johnny to sit again and he did, resuming his place next to his father’s bed.

  “Is that big pine table still in the kitchen?” John asked Jess.

  “It sure is.”

  “Bonnie used to wash that real good, then she’d make bread on it. She’d knead that dough till it was smooth and round. She liked to pinch it and watch it spring back. She’d give you a ball of dough all your own,” he said to Johnny. “You remember that? You’d squish it and pat it down and roll it. Mostly it would get stuck between your fingers. Remember?”

  “No, but it sounds wonderful.”

  “You were the sweetest little boy, Johnny.” John wheezed, exhausting himself with talking.

  Johnny reached into the front pocket of his bag and pulled out the lead cowboy. He held it up for John to see.

  “Well look at that. After all these years.” John took it off Johnny’s palm and brought it closer to his face. He rubbed his thumb over the cowboy’s head. “I made this.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure. When I was kid. Back in the 1950s, you could get these hobby kits. They came with molds and a lump of lead you could melt down and pour into the molds, then you’d paint your own figures. We didn’t know about lead poisoning then, so all the boys had them. It was loads of fun. I made dozens of these fellows. Most of them got lost, but I managed to save a few cowboys and Indians. I gave them to you. Your mother thought you were still too young, but we had fun with them, you and I.”

  “I remember that,” Johnny said.

  “Do you?” John’s face brightened momentarily before his fatigue returned. “That’s good. That’s good, Johnny.” He held the cow
boy out for Johnny. “This poor fellow’s lost most of his paint. No surprise. You get on in life and things wear away.”

  Johnny took the cowboy and patted his dad’s shoulder.

  “Now I am tired, but when can I see you again?”

  Johnny glanced over his shoulder at Jess, then back at his father. “How about in three hours? Can I come back in about three hours, maybe four at the outside?”

  “Three hours,” he muttered. “Well, that’s supper time. If you want to watch an old man eat Jell-O, then you’re welcome to it.”

  “Sure, Dad. I’d like nothing better.”

  Johnny put his bag in the backseat of the Cooper Mini and he and Jess climbed in. He sat at the wheel, his hands in his lap. “I can’t leave here,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” Jess suddenly felt in the way. “I should have brought my own car. Should I call someone?”

  “No, I don’t mean…” Johnny removed his glasses so he could rub the corners of his eyes. He sighed and looked up. “I asked you to come with me. I didn’t know what to expect or how I’d feel about anything. I’m grateful, Jess.”

  Jess shrugged.

  “I just mean that I can’t go back to St. Paul. I can’t be that far away from him. I’m going to drive you home, then I’ll find a motel here in Hadley. I have my computer. That’s all I really need. I can buy a change of clothes and toothbrush.”

  “Sure,” Jess said. “That’s a great idea.”

  “It is?”

  He caught her eye again, and Jess saw that he wasn’t certain of anything, even that. “Yes. You said the truth matters to you, and this is your chance to talk to your father.”

  “Right. I know it is.” He rubbed his palms against his jeans and finally started the car.

  They’d driven a half hour before Johnny spoke again. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why you got involved in the first place. Did finding that cowboy ignite some drive to know where he came from?”

  Jess looked at Johnny and slid her lip between her teeth while she deliberated. He had asked a direct question, and she had to answer him directly. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Your mother is haunting me.”

  Johnny jerked hard on the wheel and the car swerved sharply onto the shoulder. He corrected, pulling them back into their lane. Jess clutched the handhold in the door beside her and managed to close her mouth after the car was back on the road. “Sorry,” he said. “That was not what I was expecting to hear.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have softened it. Or prepared you.”

  “Yeah.” Johnny laughed nervously. “Well, go on. Tell me.”

  Jess explained how things had started out small, the cowboy kept moving to the office—Johnny’s old bedroom. She told him Bonnie appeared to her, pointed at her, typed “find him” over and over. She told him about the Underwood and the flies. She did not tell Johnny about the bloody footprints or being strangled. She wanted him to think his mother was driven, but benign.

  “She told me to find him yesterday. She wants something else from me.” Jess paused to stare out the window at the passing trees. “I found your father and I found you.” She looked back at Johnny. “I just don’t know what else I’m missing.”

  “Maybe she wants you to find her killer.”

  “Right.” Beckett’s anger came to mind, his insistence that some things are best left unknown. She stared at Johnny while he drove, one question after another rambling through her mind, until he looked her way, his eyebrows shaping question marks. “I don’t know if that’s possible. The case is forty years old.” That was at least the truth.

  “I’d like to exonerate my father.” Johnny looked out at the road. “That sounds weird. My father. Suddenly, I have a father.”

  They were quiet then, and Jess was glad to keep her thoughts to herself—thoughts about fathers and killers and ghosts and secrets.

  Johnny broke the silence as he turned onto Haug Drive. “Would you help me find the person who killed my mother?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jess found Beckett in the studio. He had both doors open and was running fans to try and keep the large space tolerably cool. He had put his new pieces out on the shelves by the front door, ready for new homes, while bisqued pots covered the worktable. The clay turned a chalky, pinkish-orange color after the first firing, indicating its stage in the work flow. Beckett sat on a stool at the table, surrounded by buckets of glaze, a bowl before him on a small turntable. The glazes in their liquid state all seemed to be various shades of beige or gray. Jess wondered what colors would emerge when the bowl he was working on was fired.

  Shakti strained at the leash, but Jess held tight while Beckett finished applying an even stripe of glaze to the lip of the bowl. When he set down his brush and turned to face them, Jess smiled. “Hi,” she said.

  Beckett looked happier to see Shakti than her.

  “Johnny met his father yesterday.” She waited, but when he didn’t respond, she continued. “It went really well. Johnny decided to stay in Hadley so he can be close to his father.” Shakti whined and gave her tail a shake. Beckett opened his arms and Jess let go of the leash. Shakti rushed to leap at him. “John is in hospice now. So I guess it will all be over soon.”

  “You guess, do you?” He lifted Shakti onto his lap and held her wiggling body while she licked his chin, her paws braced on his chest, her wagging tail shaking her hips side to side with enthusiasm.

  Jess felt a twinge of envy. “Yes. I mean, what else…” She couldn’t complete that sentence. She knew exactly what else and she pulled her lower lip between her teeth.

  “Jess,” Beckett said, settling the puppy onto his lap, “you only chew on your lip when you’re worried or hiding something. Or when you’re worried about the thing you’re hiding.”

  “That obvious?”

  Beckett nodded.

  “All right.” Jess looked for somewhere to sit, and Beckett moved a glaze bucket off of a stool for her. “Bonnie showed up again on Wednesday. It was awful at first. This swarm of flies came out of the smokehouse…” Beckett scrunched his face in a look of disgust. “Yeah. It was totally gross. Then she appeared in the living room and pointed at me. She looked awful, Beckett.” Jess shook her head at the memory. “She told me to find him again. But I’ve already found John and Johnny and reunited them.”

  “But you just reunited them yesterday.”

  “Yes, but there’s something else. Look. I decided to not be afraid of her, to just be receptive. I felt her mood. That’s the best way to describe it.”

  “And?”

  “And yesterday, after meeting his father, Johnny asked me to help him find his mother’s killer…Carl Copeland.”

  Beckett took a hand off Shakti to rub his goatee.

  “I need your help,” Jess said. “Tomorrow is the anniversary of Bonnie’s death, and I think I know what will bring this to a close.”

  “Jess…I don’t…”

  “Please. Beckett, you’re the only person who knows about everything and I trust you. I can’t do this alone.”

  “Jess.” The way he said her name it was half moan, a yielding despite his better judgment, despite what he wanted. “When?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  The first customers of the day entered the studio and stood inside the semicircle of shelves holding Beckett’s wares. “I’ll be right with you,” Beckett called over to them.

  “Beckett,” Jess lowered her voice, “I hope we’re still…dating or whatever we were doing. I hope this thing with Bonnie doesn’t ruin something between us.”

  “I guess we’ll see after tomorrow night.”

  Jess paused on the antique store’s porch to wipe the sweat off her forehead. Carrying the Underwood uphill from Beckett’s apartment had been more of a workout than she’d expected. Jess shifted the typewriter’s weight in her arms, freeing up a hand to open the front door. The door swung shut behind her and the tattle bells jumped, their soft tinkling repla
ced by the loud clanks of brass bouncing off wood as the door clattered against its frame. Lora looked up, her hands rolling a porcelain something-or-other into tissue paper, and raised an eyebrow at Jess.

  “Sorry,” she mouthed. Lora had a fan behind the counter and Jess stepped toward it, hoping to catch some of the air and dry out. Just as she was about to ask Lora where she could set the typewriter, a pair of women stepped up to the counter. From the looks of them, they were mother and daughter. The younger of the two could have been sixty. She had a canvas handbag painted with large orange flowers and round bamboo handles—probably a souvenir from a cruise or vacation to Hawaii. The older woman wore a leather fanny pack with the pouch to the front over a pair of hot pink, ruffle-trimmed capris. Jess smiled at their fashion sense that was equal parts bold, whimsical, and practical. They reminded her fondly of one of her aunts who liked to profess anyone who didn’t appreciate her style was welcome to jump off a bridge. Jess used to cringe when her aunt’s eccentricities drew stares, but sometime in recent years she had learned to appreciate her aunt’s attitude, if not her fashion. The women had found a pair of kewpie dolls and set them on the counter, talking to each other about how they would look on a certain shelf at home. Lora took out more tissue paper.

  “Excuse me.” Jess stepped up to the counter, claiming a narrow space beside the younger of the women. She had to turn her shoulder toward Lora to get within a reasonable speaking distance. “Can I set this down somewhere?”

  Lora took it, pausing to look over the bent return arm and crushed corner before setting it on her back counter. Free of the typewriter, Jess left Lora to her customers and found her way upstairs. She went into the room with the old type and began picking through the letters, wondering from where Lora had collected them all.

  Jess was looking at a large, decorative R mounted on a wood block, the sort of letter that would be used at the head of a chapter, when she heard the soft giggles of a young girl. She set the piece of type down and looked around the room. The giggles came again, this time louder but muffled. Jess exaggerated her curiosity, peering this way and that before stalking into the hallway and rounding the corner into the adjacent bedroom. The giggling increased. “Whoever has that lovely laugh? Could it be a princess?” She looked under a hat perched on a dress form in the corner. The girl squeaked as though delighted, at last having found another player for her game. Jess went to the other corner of the room and opened an old travel trunk. “Hmmm, not in here,” she announced. “Though if Lora ever sells this thing it’ll be for a pretty penny,” Jess muttered after spotting the price tag lying in one of the compartments. When she turned toward the closet full of vintage clothing, the giggling stopped abruptly as though a hand had been clamped over a mouth. Jess parted the dresses on their hangers and revealed a girl of about seven years. “Hi,” Jess said.