October Fest: A Murder-by-Month Mystery

by Jess Lourey

  You’d think most men would look alike from the knees on down, I thought as I studied Gary Wohnt’s shiny black shoes and polyester pants from my bean bag roost. I was careful not to move my open eye or unhinge my second, my on-the-fly theory being that if I played it cool, he might think I was simply having a seizure and leave me alone. But dang if that open eye wasn’t getting dry. I always lost the staring contests growing up. If only I’d known how handy that skill would be in later life, I might have tried harder.

  I blinked and sighed deeply. I didn’t possess the energy to launch a full-on offensive but mustered what I could. “Well, well, well, look who’s back. Miss us?” I tried standing archly but stumbled at the blood rush. Gary caught me and pushed me against the wall with one strong arm, pinning me like a bug.

  He was an olive-skinned man with dark eyes that he liked to hide behind cop sunglasses, the kind that reflected all your shortcomings right back at you. I’d had to stifle many a spontaneous confession because of those glasses. And he didn’t court small talk. “Where were you last night?”

  “Hmm, did we have a date? I don’t remember.”

  He kept staring. Or doing blinky eye-strengthening exercises. It was impossible to tell on this side of the glasses.

  I continued. “In fact, last I heard, you were totally off the market, gallivanting around the country with a, what was she, gospel singer?”

  His mouth set in a line that made clear he’d never gallivanted a day in his life and that I best shut my piehole, but anxiety kept me talking well past the point of good sense. “Or a candy striper? Hard to remember. Hey, have you had a chance to talk to Kennie since you got back? You two used to date, didn’t you?”

  He took his arm away, and I slumped a little but kept standing. The sparkles I’d seen upon shooting up too quickly slowly receded. And I still hadn’t answered his question. “So why do you want to know where I was last night?”

  For a moment, I didn’t think he was going to respond, but he finally said, “Just routine questioning related to an investigation.”

  “What’s the investigation about?” I noticed the badge on this uniform was smaller than his police chief badge, but his gun looked just as big.

  “A possible murder.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody.” I turned off my sassy box quick-like and attempted a relaxed, “How ridiculous would that be?” smile. It felt jack-o-lanternish. That’s when I realized I’d arranged my questions in the wrong order. “Who was killed?”

  “Why don’t you tell me where you were last night, and I can continue the investigation.”

  The only autonomic function I could rely on, apparently, was my liar. “I spent the night with Mrs. Berns.” Only a half-lie, really.

  The corner of his mouth twitched, either a smile being born and killed or frustration seeking an outlet. “Really. Where?”

  “Not in the same bed, if that’s what you’re asking.” For the love of Pete, had my brain gone on a cruise, leaving my mouth to fend for herself? She didn’t do so well alone.

  “At the Big Chief Motor Lodge?”

  It took all my willpower not to blanch. “I’ve heard that place is really nice. Is it open already?”

  “Because a source tells me that four people were on the scene before police arrived: a motel employee, an elderly woman wearing Frederick’s of Hollywood gear, her boy candy, and a brunette in her 30s who, I quote, ‘looked like she’d been rode hard and put away wet.’” That twitch again at his lips.

  I swelled up, indignant and about to protest before I realized I probably still looked that way. “I’ve got a house right outside of town, Ch-… Deputy Wohnt. Why in the world would I want to stay in a hotel?” Had he always been so muscular? I thought I remembered him as a little rounder in the belly.

  I saw an eyebrow appear briefly above the mirrored glass. “I wondered the same thing.”

  I pursed my lips and shook my head in agreement so it looked like I was on his wondering team. Finally, prudence had slapped a leash on my tongue.

  The radio on his shoulder squawked a code, and he responded tersely. “On my way.” He returned his attention to me. “We have more talking to do. Everyone who was at the motel last night has been asked not to leave town. I’d recommend, if you are one of them, that you also choose not to leave.”

  Where was I going to go? Besides to hell. In a hand basket. I gave him the thumbs up. “Is that all? ’Cuz I’ve got work to do.” I didn’t even know what time it was. Maybe I could go home.

  “No, I’m afraid that isn’t all.” His demeanor shifted, and for the first time, I saw a hint of human in him. “Mrs. Berns got in a car accident late this morning. She’s in the ICU at the Douglas County Hospital.”

  I was four when I entered my first hospital. My mom took me to visit a friend who’d had her appendix removed. It was exciting. People bustled down long hallways, fresh flowers were displayed everywhere, and a good percentage of the population got to lie around in their pajamas and watch TV. The antiseptic smell raised some prehistoric hackles, but that fear instinct was overridden when I spotted the free hot soup-hot tea-hot chocolate-hot coffee dispenser in the waiting room. Chicken noodle soup that came in a box was a treat reserved for when I was very sick, and here, in the middle of this busy room where no one would notice what a little girl did, was all the yellow broth I could walk away with.

  Looking back, even in a pre-litigious society, the Hot Drink Caddy was a banana peel next to pit of razor blades. On one side, it meted out your powder of choice—the dehydrated chicken broth was the color of acid sunshine, the hot cocoa powder a purplish brown, the coffee a grainy mahogany shade, and the tea a black powder with murky bits of dried lemon peel. Anyone waiting for news of their loved one and in need of some soothing hot beverage had simply to pull the Lucite handle on the front of the appropriate powder and a chute would open delivering a sandy, slinking mound into the bottom of a paper cup, available in the Dixie cup dispenser attached to the machine.

  Getting the powder was the easy part. The hangman’s noose lay on the opposite side in the form of a modified hot water dispenser, the kind that you find on an industrial coffee machine, just a simple silver tap that delivered water roughly the temperature of the center of the earth. In retrospect, the mastermind who had invented the Hot Drink Caddy must have sensed some element of danger, some dearth of common sense vaguely tied to pairing paper cups with rushing volcanic liquid. That was the only explanation for why he had made the tap lower than average, about waist height for an adult male. Unfortunately, this put it at neck height for a four-year old girl unable to resist the unorthodox attraction of sipping rehydrated chicken broth from a paper cup between meals in a hospital.

  In an era when seatbelts didn’t retract on their own and child safety seats were for dollies, it wasn’t hard to sneak away from your mom. Twist and skip, and there I was, white paper cup in hand, medicine-yellow powder sifting down the chute. I can still smell the acrid, sweaty chicken broth, all bright and rich, puffing as it hit the bottom of my cup with a soft sound, like a moth falling to earth. Cup in hand, mom busy at the information desk, I walked the Green Mile to the scalding water dispenser. I earned a friendly smile from a man waiting his turn, but that’s the only acknowledgment I received before I stood on tiptoes to lift the red rectangle on the back of the silver spigot and let flow hissing, steaming, boiling water two inches behind my cup and onto my chest. I howled but didn’t let go of the spigot, and the fiery water kept flowing. I don’t know if it was the man behind me who yanked my hand away, or my mother after she flew over the heads of people seated in the waiting room to gather me in her arms without ever touching the ground between.

  The next hour was a flurry. I remember tears, some mine, salve that smelled like banana Vaseline, and white bandages that I couldn’t take off for ten days encircling me like a mummy. And that’s forever what hospitals would be for me. Shitty places that looked like paradise until you tried to fill a paper cup with f
ake chicken broth, and then watch out. Burn, scream, and in you go.

  “I’m here for Mrs. Berns. Can I see her?” I didn’t want that desperation in my voice. If I wasn’t scared, then there wouldn’t be a reason to be scared. The hospital felt huge and cold. Nobody here would understand how much was at stake.

  The woman smiled vaguely from behind her long, speckled laminate countertop, finishing what she was typing on her computer before glancing at me. She had an innocuous face, the Minnesota-bland countenance of a woman who dreamed of a world where people understood that she didn’t gossip because she liked it, but rather because it was her duty to help others. “Are you family?”

  “I’m her granddaughter,” I lied. “I was told she was in a serious car accident, and I need to see her right away.”

  “Oh no,” the woman said, returning her eyes to her computer. “That’s no good. Let me see what I can find.” She clicked for almost forty seconds, reading so slowly that I wanted to smack her on the side of the head with the pile of manila folders lying next to her and turn the screen toward me. Her expression changed before she looked back at me, a flash of I-don’t-know-what skimming her face. “She’s in room 256. Good luck.”

  I didn’t bother with a response. I elbowed my way through the bustle of the main lobby and followed the arrows and the signs, taking a wrong turn at oncology before ending up on the edge of the ICU.

  “Can I help you?”

  I stopped before the swinging doors, startled by the woman behind the desk guarding the entrance. I realized I was breathing heavy. “I’m here to see Mrs. Berns. Room 256. I’m her granddaughter.”

  “You’ll need to sign in.”

  “Fine.” She handed me a clipboard with a lined sheet on it. I scribbled “Mira Berns” in blue ink on the line next to room 256, dropped the pen, and pushed my way through, counting the numbers on the wall outside of each room. Room 256 was across the hall from the ICU nurse’s station. I wondered if that was good or bad. The door was framed with pumpkins cut from orange construction paper, black lines bisecting toothy grins and triangle eyes.

  Her door was cracked. I stayed in the hall another moment, my head feeling white and cottony. The sterile, sick-sweet smell of surgery began to coat the lining of my nose. I pushed against her door, acutely aware of the pinkness of my hand against the brown wood. Inside, a curtain shielded the bed from my view. On my side of the curtain, a man and a woman, both near retirement age, were arguing heatedly. The man had salt-and-pepper hair tailored in a precise crew cut and slicked up with some sort of cream, the kind of pomade that would smell like your grandpa if you got too close. His nose was sharp enough to slice paper. The woman had the same nose but her hair was a chocolate brown, the deep lines around her eyes and nose declaring it a dye. I didn’t recognize either of them, though I did know the director of the nursing home, who was standing off to the side, running his fingers through his hair and looking like he’d rather be at the proctologist.

  All three of them glanced over when I walked in, but I didn’t stop to ask questions because if I stopped, I would never be able to regain the momentum to look behind the curtain. I darted around the cloth divider, and my breathing stopped. There she lay, fragile and bandaged. Every visible centimeter of her was swathed in white, some of it leaking red, some tinged with a wet-looking brownish-yellow. The only perceptible movement was a catheter bag hung off to the side, dripping slowly full, its contents cloudy. The air around the bed smelled murky.

  “Mira.” The nursing home director took my arm and pulled me back. I couldn’t remember his name. I’d interviewed him once or twice in my role as part-time reporter, but as a general rule, I avoided close contact with authority figures.

  “Is she okay?” Stupid question. I don’t know where it came from, who spoke it, even though my lips had moved.

  “It’s not …” He paused.

  “What?”

  “It’s Freda Skolen.”

  The greedy wash of relief left me woozy. I knew Freda. She and her sister Ida shared a room at the Senior Sunset, and they were sweet, smart ladies. But they weren’t my Mrs. Berns. “Where is she?”

  “They took her to surgery over an hour ago. She’s got a broken leg, three broken ribs, and a possible skull fracture. She’s in tough shape, but it looks like she and Freda will pull through.”

  I’d had enough bad news in my life that I couldn’t take his word for it. “I need to see her.”

  He shot a look at the other pair in the room and then back at me. “You’re welcome to stay. The head nurse said Mrs. Berns would be out of recovery and back in her room by dinner. Actually, if you’re willing to wait for her, I can get back. A lot of people in Battle Lake want to know how these two are doing.”

  “You’re lucky they’re alive,” hissed the man, who’d stopped in his argument with the woman to watch me like a pickpocket. He slid his eyes off of me and onto the director, his knife-edged nose cutting the air.

  His companion grabbed his arm. She wasn’t much taller than my 5’6” but had the sturdy build of a Swedish farmwife. Her strong fingers held his arm firmly. “That’s enough, Conrad. We can decide what to do once we find out how mom is.”

  Conrad Berns, Mrs. Berns’ oldest son, the one who’d committed her to the home almost ten years earlier? I held out my hand, my mind racing. “I’m Mira James. A friend of Mrs. Berns. You’re her son?”

  The director chose that moment to duck out, giving my shoulder a grateful squeeze as he passed. Conrad watched him go but didn’t stop him. “I’ve heard of you. You let my mother work for you at the library.”

  I bristled. “Mrs. Berns is an adult. She makes her own decisions. I don’t ‘let’ her do anything.” If only he knew how true that was.

  “And you took her to the State Fair?”

  Now didn’t seem to be the time to argue that in fact she had hitchhiked to the State Fair and appropriated the only bedroom in my loaner RV. I tried switching roles. “You live in Fargo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Retired?

  “Forty years in the Navy.”

  That explained the haircut. And now that you mention it, the military posture. Dang that he really did smell like my grandpa up close, though. It inclined me to warm up to him a hair, as much as I didn’t want to. “How’s Mrs., um, your mom doing?”

  He seemed to sense that he’d regained the upper hand. “We’ll see shortly. You’re welcome to stay until she returns.”

  I didn’t like feeling like I needed his permission but the truth was I did. Desperate to focus on something concrete, I turned to the woman who with that nose could only be his sister. She’d been watching our interaction quietly. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  She smiled, her eyes tired. “If you really are her friend, you knew it was only a matter of time. That woman is a wild thing.”

  Conrad snorted. “I’m getting coffee. I’ll be back.”

  Neither of us acknowledged him. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Elizabeth.” She held out her left hand. There was no wedding ring on it, but she wore a magnificent turquoise and silver bracelet. “And don’t worry about my brother. He’s all bark and no bite. He’s just worried about mom.”

  “Me too. Did you see her before she went into surgery?”

  “I’m afraid not. We arrived shortly before you. Mr. Samuelson from the nursing home was already here. He gave us the same information he gave you.”

  She pushed her hair back from her ears, and I noticed sea-blue, speckled earrings that matched her bracelet. The creative jewelry along with her crisp white shirt and expensive scarf marked her as Not from Around Here. “You live in Fargo, too?”

  She laughed, and it sounded like dry stones tumbling down a hill, the laugh of a repentant smoker. “Not for a while. I live in Sedona, in Arizona. I own an art gallery. Don’t tell my brother, but I brought some healing crystals to put near mom’s bed.”

  I shrugged. It made no difference to me. What I
needed was to distract my fear until Mrs. Berns returned. “How’d you end up in Sedona from Battle Lake?”

  That laugh again. “Our farm was actually north of Underwood. When I graduated high school in the fifties, there weren’t a lot of options for women. I didn’t want to get married, be a secretary, teacher, or nurse, so I moved to Minneapolis and took some art classes. Turns out I’m a mediocre artist but a great businesswoman.” Her eyes sparkled, and for the first time, I saw her resemblance to Mrs. Berns. “I used my connections from the art classes to gather the work of talented no-names, dug up some good investors, and launched a gallery in the Cities. When it was doing well enough, I moved it to Sedona, where they have no winter and lots of people who can afford art. Been there since the sixties. I only come home for emergencies.”

  I smiled politely, but my brain was mathing. “But Mrs. Berns got in her accident only a couple hours ago. How did you get here so quickly?”

  Her eyes arched, and her resemblance to Mrs. Berns was replaced by her resemblance to her brother. “Same person, different emergency.”

  And that’s when Mrs. Berns was wheeled into the room, flat on her back, eyes closed.

  My feet were rooted to the floor. Elizabeth gently led me to the side as two nurses wheeled in Mrs. Berns and positioned her bed parallel to Mrs. Skolen’s, the curtain dividing them. A third nurse followed closely with an IV and monitor on wheels. All three of them had grim, distant smiles strapped to their faces.

  The nurse who appeared to be in charge, a heavyset blonde, spoke loudly to Mrs. Berns, who had a bandaged head, a face full of purple and black bruises, and her leg propped up in a cast. “We’re in your room now, honey. I know you’re awake in there, so no use pretending. You’re gonna be sore, but the sooner you’re up and around, the sooner you’ll start healing.” She pressed a white cylinder into Mrs. Berns’ hand, which looked as weak and light as a fallen bird. “If you start feeling pain, you just give this a click. It’s your morphine drip.”