June Bug

by Jess Lourey

  Suddenly the forest was lit up. They must have brought a torch light. I felt big and obvious and ground my shoulder blades into the tree. I even considered closing my eyes on the time-honored principle that if you can’t see them, they can’t see you.

  “What’s the code, baby?”

  I heard the crinkle of paper. “Twenty-three left, twelve right, eleven left. Is it turning okay?”

  “Not hardly. Hand me the weasel piss.” A squirting sound like juicy hair spray was followed by the whirring noise of a lock turning. “There she is!”

  “Lemme see!”

  “Back off! Give me that light!”

  There was the groan of a door opening, yet fighting to retain inertia. Then, Sam’s scream pierced the fading light of night, and the disorienting flash of brightness followed by dark told me she had dropped the light.

  “There’s a person in there!”

  Cripes, I thought. How many fake dead bodies could one small area house in a week? Odds were, if there was really a person in there, she could pull the mask off it like it was a Scooby Doo villain to find out who the real crook was.

  “A dead body can’t hurt you. Goddammit!” The brightness from the flashlight steadied, and I heard the sound of something dry scraping against metal, followed by a grunt of a laugh. “Geez, I can’t believe he still smells. There’s even some body juice in here yet. Must be the old bag’s husband.”

  Sam retched. “Gawd, that reeks. How come he’s not just bones?”

  “I dunno, but that Mrs. Krupps was a piece of work. She has him help drag the safe out to hide her stolen jewels in, and then she buries him in it. Real nice. The crazy old coot deserved what she got.”

  “She didn’t deserve to die. She was an old lady, not hurting no one. She wasn’t going to live much longer anyhow.”

  “I made sure of that, didn’t I? And ‘harmless old lady’ my ass. She was a crook and a murderer, no better’n me. I think the two of us would have gotten along just fine.”

  “If you hadn’t killed her.”

  “Shut your pie hole. Why can’t you let anything drop? What the . . . here it is!”

  “What?”

  “Whoo-eee! Look at this pile! Would you look at it? Jesus. There must be a million dollars worth of jewels in here. It’s like a goddamn pirate’s treasure.”

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. I peered one eye around the corner of my hiding tree, hopeful that Jason would be too distracted by the jewels to notice any movement in the darkening woods. I was right. He was kneeling over a rotting cloth bag, all but drooling as he stared inside. Sam was leaning over his shoulder and shining the light in the bag, causing green, red, and white reflections to dance off both their faces. Off to the side was a dark crumple of shape. The body technically could be anyone, but given that Mrs. Krupps’s husband had disappeared about the same time she left the area, it was a safe bet that Jason was right and the corpse was indeed Mr. Krupps. The sweet, poisonous smell of rotted flesh wafted over to me.

  “Can I touch ’em, Jason?”

  “You can wear ’em, baby!” He spanked a tiara on her head, and she performed the beauty queen walk that every girl over the age of four can execute in her sleep. Jason nodded approvingly and fondled the gems in the bag. “These are just the beginning, baby. We invest these in the shit we need to get the meth lab going, and we’ll never have to work another day in our lives. Hot damn, we can probably hire people to run the lab for us!”

  The fog the finger in my head had been pointing at cleared. I saw Peyton standing behind Jason as he talked on his cell phone at the turtle races. Next to that was an image of her drawing of the math lab, only it wasn’t a math lab, it was a meth lab. Of course that term would have no meaning for a little girl, so she had reworked it into something familiar. Jason must have found out she knew about the lab and snatched her. Now that I had a lead on Peyton, my armor fell away and I realized I didn’t care about the jewels at all if I could find her. In fact, I’d trade all the money in the world to save her, but first, I needed to get out of here so I could tell the police what I knew.

  That’s when a finch flew right into the oak tree two over from where I was hiding. Those damn little birds must be the Jerry Lewises of the avian world, or else I emit some disorienting signal that only birds can hear. I pulled my head back and clamped down on my breath.

  The bird’s impact made a tiny noise, more like the pop of a knuckle cracking than the bang of a collision, but it was enough to burn the smile from Jason’s voice and get him to his feet. “If any-goddamn-body is hiding over there, they best speak up and save themselves some bones!”

  I slowly levered myself up using only my feet and the tree and prepared to run. If Jason walked in my direction, I would scream at the top of my lungs and take off like a banshee. I carefully dropped my purse off my shoulder and gently rested it on the ground to increase my aerodynamics. The zapper I kept in my right hand.

  Jason tromped over toward me, and I could hear him scratching himself. The poison oil was beginning its assault on his skin. “Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of somebody whose ass I’m gonna kick!”

  I had an inappropriate, crazy urge to pee or sing. As he came closer on my left, I wiggled around the right side of the tree, staying just out of his peripheral vision. I was a quarter of the way around when Sam shrieked. “There’s someone behind that tree!”

  I charged out from my not-so-hiding spot and beat cheeks for the road. If I could get near Shangri-La, I could attract enough attention to stop Jason. If I didn’t escape these woods, Peyton was as good as dead. There were about forty feet of forest before the clearing, and I devoured them like a fat man at a Chinese buffet.

  Unfortunately, Jason was hungrier than me and grabbed me by the hair, snapping my head back, before I covered even twenty feet. I was hopelessly deep in the woods and it was too dark to see more than dim shapes.

  Jason whipped me around until we were face to face and slapped me open-handed. The force was so strong it made everything a blank, and I was surprised to find myself crumpled on the forest floor, my stun gun lost. He kicked me in the stomach, and my diaphragm locked up, unable to pull in air for my lungs. I thought I heard Sam screaming, but it could have been me.

  “That good enough for you, Mira?” He towered over me, his voice jarringly calm. “You think I’m insane? You think I’m a crazy man? Everyone has some insanity in them. Some of ’em hide it good, like old lady Krupps, and some of ’em don’t, but we all got it. And now it’s your turn to get it.”

  He kicked some dirt in my face, blinding me, and I pulled myself away from the sound of his voice. I bumped up against a tree and tried to drag my body erect. I felt nauseated and my mouth was salty with blood, but there was surprisingly little pain. I sucked at little bits of air as my diaphragm spasmed.

  “Where you going in such a hurry? We’ve saved a little room here for you. Sam, open the front of the safe.”

  I heard the creak of the safe door and threw up, not able to swallow it back before it leaked out the corners of my mouth. I was beyond terrified. He was going to bury me alive in the safe, and no one was going to stop him. I hobbled a little away from the tree in my hunched-over position and pulled myself up. Jason slapped me again, returning me to the forest floor.

  “Fucker,” I grunted.

  “What’s that, Mira? You got something to say to me?”

  A picture of Peyton formed in my mind, smiling up at me as I read her Prince Cinders. We were both safe in the children’s section of the library, far from this madman. I concentrated on this image to remain conscious and reached deep into my reserves. My hand scrabbled around on the ground until I connected with a rock about the size of a grapefruit. My eyes had cleared enough to tell me that it was a white rock, and I hoped it wasn’t too obvious in the dark. I dug at it, peeling my forefinger and thumbnails back in my desperation to hold it. “You’re a fucker.”

  “I can’t quite hear you. You must have some last w
ords before you go to sleep forever, eh, baby?” His voice was lilting, soft and comforting.

  He kneeled beside me, and I turned my heavy head toward his voice. “Yeah, I want to say that you’re a sad, lonely bastard, and no one will ever respect you.” At least that’s what I said in my head. The reality of it was I focused all my fading consciousness on the rock in my hand. It came free and I slammed it into his face. He tumbled back in surprise. I took advantage, levering myself off the ground with a burst of adrenaline. Using both hands, I brought the rock down on his head, all the anger and loneliness that I had gathered in my lifetime joining with my fears for a little girl who was terrified and was me.

  An ultrahuman strength powered my arms, and if I had connected directly with Jason’s head, I would have split him in two like the waters of the Red Sea parted for Moses. As it was, he turned at the last millisecond, and the rock glanced the corner of his forehead with enough force to peel off a chunk of skin and knock him out. If the rock made a noise when it connected, I didn’t hear it, but I did see Jason’s eyes widen in surprise and then fog over as he passed out, face down in the dirt.

  I watched for a moment as the leaves closest to his mouth fluttered with his breath, and I convinced myself I could actually see the side of his head start to swell. The goose egg looked promising, like maybe it would grow to the size of an elephant’s testicle. I staggered back and looked wildly around for more attackers. Sam was leaning against the kissing tree. She pulled an Eve Slim out of the pocket of her polo shirt and lit it.

  “Wanna split the jewels?”

  I couldn’t recall what she was talking about, but I was sure I wasn’t in a sharing mood. “No.”

  She sighed. “Didn’t think so.”

  She brushed off her behind and strolled back the way she came. I scrabbled in the near dark for the tape recorder and then limped after her, my foot kicking on something on the forest floor. It was the stun gun, barely visible through my dirt-flecked eyes. I leaned over to grab it, the exertion shooting needles of pain through my bruised torso, and limped back to Jason. I zapped him once, just to make sure my Z-Force hadn’t been broken in the scuffle. His body spasmed and he groaned, but his breathing stayed constant. It was a crying shame.

  I hobbled out of the woods and toward Shangri-La. Jason wasn’t a clever man. He had come to town for jewels, found a secret room, and decided it would be a perfect spot for a meth lab, probably for all the same reasons the original architect thought it would make an ideal rum room. Once he found the jewels, millions of dollars worth of jewels, he still intended to start a meth lab in that room. This lack of creativity told me he was also likely using the hidden room to hide Peyton.

  Every step I took attacked my head like a piranha, and I wouldn’t have made it if a couple out walking hadn’t seen me stumble out of the woods. The woman stayed with me while the man ran to Shangri-La to call the police. He promised me he would look for Peyton in the master bedroom closet the minute he got off the phone.

  The police beat the ambulance. When I explained what had happened, particularly about the dead body back there (“No, I know. But this one really is dead.”) and my hunch about Peyton’s whereabouts, the state police were called in. Unfortunately, the press was never far behind them, so several grotesque pictures of me were snapped before the paramedics whisked me off to the hospital. I made some crack that they better not lose me like they did the dwarf, but they didn’t think it was funny.

  Luckily, the photos of me never made it into any paper. I was pushed aside for photographs of the happy reunion between Peyton and Leylanda. The man who had called the police went to the master bedroom as he had promised, and he found Peyton tied to a chair in the hidden room, her mouth gagged. He also found a TV on in front of her and a pile of candy and potato-chip wrappers underfoot. Apparently Sam had spoiled her rotten, turning on cartoons and feeding her whatever she wanted as long as she agreed not to yell. Peyton was quoted as saying, “It was the best time I ever had.”

  At the hospital, my x-rays showed a mild concussion and severe bruising, but no broken bones. Eating mostly carbohydrates really did pay off. Jason was still unconscious when he was loaded into the second ambulance and driven to the hospital. Like me, he had a mild concussion, though he needed four stitches in his head. That made me the winner. As a sweet bonus, Jason also had the worst case of poison ivy on record in the five-state area. He required prednisone shots to keep his throat from closing up and had to have his hands strapped down to keep from scratching. They actually took photographs of his oozing sores to use in some medical textbook.

  When I handed my tape recording of Jason confessing to killing Regina over to the police, he was pretty much assured of some jail time for murder, but Samantha Beladucci, aka Sam Krupps, cemented that reality. When the state police caught her about to cross into Wisconsin, she cooperated fully. She would serve some time for aiding and abetting, but Jason was going to go away for a long, long time.

  Sam’s story proved it had gone down just like I thought. Regina had stolen the jewels and then hidden them in the safe in the woods. Autopsy results showed her husband had taken a severe blow to the head, but actual cause of death was inconclusive due to the age of the remains. It was safe to assume that Regina had killed him. If she was crazy enough to do that, she was certainly crazy enough to leave a wealth of jewels hidden in the woods in rural Minnesota. This made me wonder what the stash of rhinestones I had hidden at my childhood home said about my mental health, but I saw no reason to dwell on that. Sam heard the story of the hidden jewels when she was caring for Regina and told Jason.

  For Sam and Jason, the Star Tribune contest to find the planted necklace was an unhappy coincidence. Jason found out about it when he called to set aside the master bedroom at Shangri-La. Kellie Gibson had assumed he was reserving it to get a head start on the contest and had asked him as much. He played along like that was really why he was coming, but he was fuming at the attention and number of people it brought, particularly since, according to Sam, he had just gotten out of jail in Texas for possession of methamphetamines and wasn’t supposed to leave the state.

  Kellie had inadvertently provided a distraction for Jason’s nefarious activities, since she had booked the Romanov troupe. Her third cousin’s husband, Jim Neville, aka Nikolai Romanov, ran a traveling circus in the South, and Kellie was talked into hiring them to come to Battle Lake, and specifically to Shangri-La, to put on a show people would never forget. When a scheming Jason approached Mr. Neville and played on his supersized ego, it was only too easy to convince the little guy to stage his own death. He was an actor, after all.

  Meanwhile, Jason tore apart the master bedroom closet and found the secret room right away, but he couldn’t find anything that would lead him to the jewels. He decided to make lemonade out of his lemons and began to gather what he needed to start a meth lab. He knew the resort was empty in the off-season, as the Gibsons flew down to Arizona every winter. The rum room would be perfect for manufacturing meth, which Jason figured would make him rich and supply plenty of the dangerous drug to feed his own addiction. Unfortunately, at the turtle races Peyton overheard him on the phone talking to a friend about what he’d need to start his own operation, and she kept asking him what a “math lab” was.

  Once Jason realized he could lose the jewels and the dream of his own meth lab if Peyton narced him out, he decided to silence her. Sam was queasy about harming a child, though, and convinced

  Jason to wait until the box in Whiskey Lake was found. Then, she argued, there would be a lot fewer people and photographers around, and it would be a lot easier to dispose of a body. Jason agreed.

  When Sam got a couple at Shangri-La to break the secret code that Jason had stolen from my purse, he knew exactly what “the kissing tree” was referring to, since he had spent a lot of time hunting in Sunny’s woods and even had a stand in the tree for a while.

  And the rest of it I caught on tape. Sam vehemently denied that t
hey’d planted the fake body in the lake or shot the little man. That was one mystery the police would never solve, and I saw no payoff in revealing the truth of those riddles to the law. I reminded myself to have Jed remove the second fake body, the one he had planted last night, before someone stumbled across it.

  When I got released from the hospital that same night, I reclaimed Luna and Tiger Pop from Gina’s and went straight home to sleep in my own bed for the first time in days. It was glorious. I was naked and comfortable, and Tiger Pop purred away between my feet. I was supposed to be diving for the box and splitting the reward with Nikolai that very night, but it wasn’t going to happen. I don’t know if he showed up at our designated spot, because I never heard from him again. Probably there is a theatrical dwarf somewhere cursing my name right now.

  I stopped by the library the next morning to ask Mrs. Berns if she’d mind if I took the day off. She happily agreed to hold down the fort whenever I needed it. Unfortunately, she was wearing a see-through blouse with no bra when she told me this. Her large nipples peeked at me like myopic stomach eyes. I tracked down Kennie and hired her to tell Mrs. Berns that she must wear undergarments with her transparent clothing. As an afterthought, I also asked her to “pull a Jason” on Leif, Gina’s husband. Kennie was to get him fall-down drunk and then take pictures of him and her in compromising positions. I encouraged her to enlist Mrs. Berns’s help in this endeavor.

  “Don’t actually do anything with him, Kennie. I just need the pictures for blackmail, something to keep him honest.”

  “Sure, sugar pie. I won’t actually do anything with him.” She winked as she said this, and I wondered if it was evil that I was setting Leif up for the most humiliating night of his life, one that he would only be able to remember snatches of. An image of Gina’s tear-swollen face flashed through my head, and I decided that I was just helping out the great karma machine in the sky. Once Leif sobered up, I would show him the photos of him getting jiggy with Kennie and Mrs. Berns and threaten to publish them in the Recall if I ever heard of him cheating on Gina again.