The sun was still high, though already west of the river. Jess stood out in the yard, her hand on the charred bark of the sugar maple while Shakti circled its base, sticking her nose into the scar that now marred its lower trunk. Jess felt sorry for the tree. It had become a casualty of her failure to help Bonnie quickly enough. She decided to hang a bird house against its trunk, inviting new life to the branches and helping it to heal.
The sound of gravel crunching under tires signaled Beckett’s arrival. He rolled his cargo van down her driveway, bouncing over one rut after another. When Shakti saw Beckett emerge from the van, she sprinted excited laps around the yard. Jess walked over the drive to greet him and they kissed hello.
“Look.” She pointed at her house. It had a warm glow about it, just as it had when she first laid eyes on it. “Have you ever seen a more inviting home?”
“Um…”
“Doesn’t it look calm? Tranquil?” She faced Beckett. “See? No ghost.”
“Thank goodness for that.”
Jess let her hand fall against Beckett’s chest and brought her mouth close to his neck. “Did you bring it?” she whispered.
“Uh-huh.” Beckett slid away from her hold and went to the back of his van.
Jess watched him open the cargo doors, excitement mounting.
Beckett slammed the doors shut and faced Jess before swinging a long-handled sledge hammer up into the air and over his shoulder. Jess took a moment to admire him standing there, the sun glinting off the head of the hammer, her own Paul Bunyan.
With Shakti leashed to the sugar maple, Beckett handed her the sledgehammer. The head fell to the ground with a thud, heavier than she had expected. Jess grinned sheepishly at him. Beckett shook his head; the gesture said all it needed to. He fit a pair of safety goggles to her face, gently stretching the elastic around the back of her head. “We have to protect those pretty eyes.”
She lifted the sledge hammer over her shoulder. Like a baseball player, she thought as she wound up her body for the first swing. When she released, she put her shoulders and waist into it, building power with momentum. The head of the hammer snapped the board that framed the doorway, and the brick that took the brunt of her blow broke into pieces, flying like scattershot. It looked like someone had taken a bite out of the wall.
One down.
Jess smiled as she swung the sledgehammer up onto her shoulder, readying for the next blow.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my family and friends for generous support and encouragement, especially Alexia, Nico, Susan, and Wendy. Also, my gratitude goes out to Annie Ciszak Pazar, the first reader of Skoghall. Thanks to the trees and the sky for being outside my window whenever I take my eyes off the computer screen.
About the Author
Alida Winternheimer lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When she is not writing, editing, or teaching, she likes to kayak on local lakes. She also bikes, bakes, and feeds animals.
Alida and Seva, the inspiration for Shakti.
If you enjoyed The Murder in Skoghall, please check out Alida’s other novel, A Stone’s Throw, and don’t forget to leave a review online.
Look for Book Two of The Skoghall Mystery Series, Dark Corners in Skoghall, in 2015.
You can find more information about Alida and her work at www.alidawinternheimer.com/book.
Send Alida a note at [email protected].
Sample from the forthcoming
DARK CORNERS in SKOGHALL
Dave swung violently, grabbing at her hair. What was her name? She had told him in the bar. June. Or April. Or August. It was a month. It hardly mattered now, because he wanted to kill her.
The girl bent backwards, reached for something on the table to her side. A pile of 45s slid to the floor, some of the thin, black discs coming free of their paper sleeves. He lurched after her, his foot landing on the records, snapping several in half with a satisfying click click click as he shifted his weight and they yielded. That copy of “Great Balls of Fire” would never play again. What was the B side? It’s the sort of thing he would have known if he were himself.
Dave liked rock and roll and had a fully-catalogued collection of vinyl filling the shelves of his rec room. Other people collected model airplanes or trophy kills they stuffed and mounted over their console television sets. Not him. His prized possession was a 1973 Wurlitzer jukebox, model name, “The Nostalgia,” because it had been styled after the classic machines of the 1940s. For him, it brought back nostalgia all right, but not for a bygone era, for his childhood in Milwaukee. While his friends pedaled down to the comic shop and spent their allowance on Clark Kent and Double Bubble, he wasted entire afternoons in Mick’s Record Shop. Mick had one of these jukeboxes and loaded it with all the newly released singles—his version of try-before-you-buy. He also kept his favorites in the record carousel, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear Pink Floyd after Buddy Holly. Dave had rescued the Wurlitzer and restored it with his own two hands. That was the sort of thing a man could take pride in.
His own two hands. There was a lot he could do with his hands.
The girl backed herself into a corner. The shelves she pressed against, as though if she leaned into them enough they would yield her escape, were crammed with all the discarded, disused detritus of people gone or forgotten. Garage sales, foreclosure auctions, abandoned storage units had all contributed to the junk surrounding them. The man who had collected it all had a mental illness, or, at the least, a lack of self-control. June put her foot on an overturned steel pail and pushed herself up, twisting to grab at the shelves and attempting to climb to safety the way a kitten might scale a curtain. Her miniskirt rose enticingly up her thighs, up her ass, revealing the twin rounds of young buttocks—she wore a thong if she wore anything under that skirt. That, he thought, is proof. She’s a whore. She sobbed a terrified plea that never left her throat, and he felt a throbbing down low.
He could have caught her already, but Dave was enjoying this part, the…what was it called?…chase. He grinned as he reached out a hand. She got a toe on the edge of a shelf and pushed upwards. Her grasping brought a stack of yellowed pamphlets advertising a sanitarium on the shore of Lake Superior cascading to the floor, and she sobbed again. Dave slid his hand between her thighs, a laugh of mischievous glee on the verge of erupting from his lips.
April screeched at the touch and came down from the shelves, a crack emanating from her ankle when she not so much landed as crashed. She spun around, her face a mess of running mascara, mousy hair teased out of its clip, lipstick smeared onto her lower lip from their kiss. It had been the kiss that triggered something in him. March swung both arms together in a wide arc from her hips upwards toward the dark ceiling, connecting with his head. The thud of a heavy amber glass ashtray—the kind people kept out as a coffee table centerpiece, an objet d’art to collect their butts—striking his skull, fracturing the bone beneath his eyebrow, sent him reeling backwards. Dave tripped over a crate of Life Magazines and landed on something that made his tailbone sear.
April stood over him, the ashtray streaked with his blood still gripped tightly in her hands. Her top had twisted with all the activity and a breast thinly veiled by a red lace bra showed itself. His wife always insisted it was tacky, the way girls today showed off their bras.
Now he was going to kill her.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapt
er Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1) Page 31
