“Eyes and ears everywhere. Just keep it all out of your store. Could be something radioactive. Gotta be careful when you get a heap of stuff that you don’t know who had it or where it came from.”
“Radioactive? Really? You’re worse than Erica who thought there might be a dead body in it. We’ve found nothing out of the ordinary so far, and neither have the police.” There was no way she would share the discovery of the red dress with Eric Williams.
At his raised eyebrow at her mention of a dead body, she added, “Look, I have to run. Got an errand to do on my lunch break.”
“Where are you headed?”
“The Bulletin. Why?”
“Yes, why?”
“I want to know about something that happened in this area about nine years ago.”
Williams, the insurance salesman, looked thoughtful.
“Nine years…would that be the Eagle Junction girl who went missing from her prom?”
She stared at him for the second time in as many minutes.
“Small town,” he repeated.
• • •
Laura pored through the Raging Ford Bulletin archives online while her host, Charlie Kovacs, newspaperman extraordinaire, was busily building the next edition with his staff. The paper had evolved with the times, from a daily hard copy sold by kids on street corners and later delivered on bicycles, to today’s daily online and weekly hard copy with its weekend sales ads for local businesses and national online stores. Charlie hated the idea of going completely paperless with his ads online ready to print out, especially with the larger aging population in the county—the baby boomers—who expected something on paper and maybe didn’t all have printers that worked, so he continued to produce and deliver the once weekly print copy and would for a little longer.
It was easy to find the tragic story of a seventeen-year-old girl named Brittany Johanssen, lovely as a classic painting, newly elected prom queen, along with her also royal boyfriend and date, Dante Lelanley. The girl had gone missing about an hour before the prom was over; at least, those were everyone’s recounts of that evening and approximately the time when they could remember not seeing her. Police and a host of other volunteers searched everywhere that night and for three days with search dogs but found no trace of her. Amber Alerts were unsuccessful. No one saw Brittany anywhere after the last time she danced with Dante.
Certain details were carefully copied into Laura’s notebook, items she wanted to cross-check against other newspaper and online news coverage, not to mention the yearbook pictures, for, thankfully, those pictures had been taken at the prom when the couple was crowned, shortly before Brittany disappeared off the face of the earth.
It looked as if Charlie had stayed close to the facts, given the serious nature of the matter. No one wants to see a young girl vanish without a trace. He surprised Laura by walking into her alcove and directing her attention to a later article about a Raging Ford High School girl who disappeared from the prom about two years ago, as well as a few others over the years across Minnesota, northern Iowa, and Wisconsin.
She had heard of serial killers as well as serial kidnappers, such as the notorious cult kidnappings of young children in Northern California during the 1980s. But this was different, as all the girls who had vanished from their proms had just been crowned prom queens, and the incidents had all been centered within a radius of a few hundred miles.
Prom queens.
What on earth could the connection be among several missing prom queens?
Jealousy? But if so, the jealousy for one would lead to only one person, wouldn’t it? For multiple jealousies of several people across nine years, it had to include more than one person, which made it a conspiracy. Was that what this was?
Laura hated conspiracies; they were so hard to peel open and sort out, not to mention prove they even existed. She was already secretly embroiled in unraveling her own family conspiracy and caught up in witnessing first-hand how problematic and challenging it was just to work on a simple set of details.
The website with the yearbook pictures was her next stop, and Laura almost dropped her pen along with her jaw when she looked at the full-color photo of Brittany Johanssen at the prom, just after her crowning.
The girl was wearing the exact same dress as the one Erica had found in the bag of castoff clothing in Laura’s carport!
She was sure of it.
• • •
While Laura Keene was at the Raging Ford newspaper office, two people were meeting in a back office of their establishment, one puffing away on a cigarette.
“Blow it away from me so I don’t reek, please. I have an image to maintain.”
Exhaled smoke landed nearby again without regard for an image or the recipient’s wishes.
“Were you recognized?”
“No, which is a good thing, because apparently she knows one police officer rather well.”
“She’s also a consultant for the cops.”
Eyes went big.
“I didn’t know that.”
“We’ll need to watch and make sure that nothing happens to make her interested in us.”
“Oh, that we will. And nothing can be traced back to us?”
“You got that right.”
Another large puff of smoke filled the room.
Once again, arms of the non-smoker tried to wave it away.
“You have other tricks up your sleeve, don’t you?”
“You have no idea.”
nine
Justin Richard Carlson pressed his fingers to his temples as pain shot through his head once he settled in his hotel room in St. Paul.
What the heck was going on?
He had experienced stress before, especially during exam times in college, not to mention the oral exams at the very end. This felt different, more like the episodes right after high school graduation.
Edna Phelps was proving difficult to locate, and once again, Carlson thought this whole arrangement was odd and made no sense. He was not to call her or contact her in any way. He was just supposed to show up at her door and knock. She was a shut-in at this point in her life, he was told, and had a caregiver who visited her three times a week for meals, shopping, housekeeping, and laundry, plus anything else she needed done.
Before he could do all this, of course, he had to find her. And before he could act on that, he had to read the letter. The instructions from his adoptive parents were that if he had not first read the letter and spoke of its terms at her front door, she would not let him in. With no possible way around this, he pulled out the envelope and set it on the table in the corner of his room.
The next three hours were spent doing everything except read the letter. He took a shower, ran out for a quick take-out meal, bought a bottle of Scotch at the local liquor store down the block, bought a newspaper at a rare newspaper stand in the hotel lobby, and very reluctantly returned to his room.
He ate, had three quick shots of Scotch using the plastic glass in the bathroom, and opened his newspaper. Hours passed. Once he realized that he was neither reading nor digesting any of its information, nor was he interested in any of the headlines he saw regardless of how eye-catching the editors had made them, he stopped everything and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Staring at the envelope didn’t help.
He rose and strode to the table, laid his sweating hand on the envelope. Looked at his name once again, thinking once more how cold it was that someone had to type it up or print it out instead of writing it by hand. Then it struck him that in all this rigmarole, there was more than a touch of secrecy, and with it, the need for anonymity. What could be so awful that it had to be hidden until he was an adult? Was he really a Russian spy waiting to be activated? Was it something worse?
He grabbed
the envelope, opened it fully, and took out the letter.
Both hands shook.
It was a single, printed page folded into thirds. He hesitated only a few seconds more before he unfolded the top third and then the bottom third. His eyes blurred and refused to focus on the page in front of him, but at last they obeyed his brain instead of his emotions.
And he read it.
And reread it.
Poured himself another shot of Scotch.
Read it again.
It was a dream and couldn’t be real.
He had expected nothing like this, but just as he had expected, no handwriting to identify the originator…just like the envelope. It was a printed page of information, sterile and to the point, and a completely impersonal statement of facts.
What a shock.
He spent the rest of the night sipping his Scotch in front of the television, seeing nothing of what the producers, directors, and actors had gone to great pains to broadcast for his enjoyment.
Shortly before he passed out, somewhere around three or four in the morning, he felt a brief flash of the panic he had been trying to drown.
ten
Two days had passed since Laura’s conversation with Jenna about the spring sales items and Erica’s discovery of the red dress in the bags of discarded clothing.
Sales of bunny ears, cotton tails, carrot-shaped bags of jelly beans and waxy bunny teeth were going like hotcakes, not to mention Jenna’s house banners. Laura had to ask her to make a few more of each style. There were lines of people out the door and down the block. Thankfully, the weather was turning a bit warmer and less chilly. Some folks called it “cooperation,”a word waiting to be dropped once a brief cold snap returned, compliments of the tricky spring.
The big bunny in the front window sported a different sign these days. It invited everyone and anyone to come in and partake of the springtime season and fun.
The egg-decorating kits were out on sale after Laura and Jenna had spent long evening hours assembling everything. The kits went slowly at first but caught on as the middle and high school kids realized they could create a unique and decorative artwork piece that could be given as a gift and would last for years. It was lucky that Jenna found some relatively inexpensive non-toxic paints at the local hardware store that reacted well to the Dylite eggs and came in small enough tubes to fit in the kit bags, along with their egg stands. Laura had added short paint brushes to the mix with a folded sheet of instructions and suggestions. Sales began to pick up.
Sidewalks and parks were filling with tots and young children sporting bunny paraphernalia. It made Laura smile every time she was out and about in Raging Ford. Little kids were laughing and hopping about, and that’s what it was all about: Fun with a reason to spend a few dollars to help with renovations at the police station. As she had done for the St. Patrick’s Day fun items, she posted charts with donation amounts for each of the items and updated them daily. It was slow but steady progress, and Laura was determined to keep at it until there were sufficient funds for the Raging Ford police station to be able to repair and refurbish the brass handrails on either side of the broad, marble stairway. Maybe one day they could even put in a railing up the middle of the staircase to define “up and down” better.
Laura had not forgotten about the red dress in the anonymous bag of cast-offs and the girl who had disappeared without a trace nine years ago. Charlie’s newspaper had given her a whole lot of details, but she needed more information and details of the disappearance and the people involved, and she also needed to make some connections before she brought it to the attention of the police. They would want some evidence that the dress was the same one. She had to think about how anyone could prove that.
And what if this red dress was the exact same one that had belonged to Brittany Johanssen? If so, what could be the connection between that dress and the woman who had brought in all the belongings from her so-called roommate who had moved to Europe? Was the connection the woman herself or her roommate? Was the roommate Brittany Johanssen and she simply wanted to vanish from the world and life she knew?
Maybe there was no connection at all.
Or maybe there was. After all, the dress in her carport was identical to the one Brittany had worn. There were probably a number of ways she could find out if it was the dress, but she wanted to follow the rules this time.
At lunch, she texted Connor and asked his permission to look into a nine-year-old cold case. She wasn’t even sure it was in the Cold Case Deck, Card Number One of which was her parents’ double murder from eleven years before, still as yet unsolved.
He called her instead of texting back.
“Which case?”
“The one where the girl disappeared from her high school prom in Eagle Junction nine years ago.”
“I remember hearing about that, but I don’t know a lot of detail or about the other several girls who went missing from their proms in recent years. Locally, I read that we gave support, but that’s all I know because I wasn’t on the force yet. Plus, the FBI took over all of the cases after that. How did you plan to research this one?”
“Just looking up in newspapers and online for anything I can find.”
“Okay. Just don’t do more than that. If you want to do more than that, talk to me first.”
“Sure,” she responded. As an official consultant for the police in Raging Ford, she could now do these things with their permission, as well as discuss certain open cases with them. She also needed to follow their rules or she could lose that privilege.
“Are we still on for dinner tonight?”
“I might be a little late, but yes. Looking forward to it.”
• • •
Fitzpatrick knew Laura would begin her own investigation board upstairs in her apartment and put together all the information she could get, add more as she discovered it, and then move it all about, like a puzzle, until the story emerged. Then a case could be built and more investigations could take place. There was no doubt that Laura would see things that even the FBI missed; it had happened before. He expected more calls and even some requests once she got going. But she had been so helpful in other cases that he no longer minded, especially since his boss, Police Chief Arthur Mallory, had signed off on her being an occasional consultant.
He looked up the case in their database to refresh his memory. Brittany Johanssen, aged seventeen, disappeared from her Eagle Junction High School prom shortly before it ended for the evening. Connor had been a freshman at the University of Minnesota and recalled the news articles and publicity about it. He remembered thinking at the time how rich her parents must have been to offer such a big reward for her return. They must have really loved their daughter to do so, but, unfortunately, the lure of the money lead nowhere. The girl never surfaced.
Everyone with any connection to Brittany had been questioned about her disappearance, including chaperones, all the teens present at the prom, and especially her boyfriend, prom king Dante Lelanley. Teens from their class who had not gone to the prom were also questioned, as well as those who knew Brittany but were from other, neighboring high schools, including Raging Ford and Mapleton. Brittany’s close girl friends were questioned. Everyone who had any connection with the school, including Leonard Seeds, the school principal, and Mary Poos, the vice principal, as well as all of Brittany’s teachers and other school staff, were questioned. The police detectives had found nothing connecting anyone with the girl’s disappearance. The FBI took over the investigation and likewise, found no leads anywhere. It was almost as if the girl had never existed, except that she had, up to the point of disappearance. All law enforcement officials were stumped.
Connor would have to keep a watch on what Laura found online and in newspaper and school archives. And after she told him what she did find, he would need
to keep a really good watch on what she did with that information afterwards. She might get herself into real trouble if she got too close to finding out what happened. And he had no doubt whatever that she would see clues and connections that the rest of them had missed.
He wondered what delicious dinner she was cooking up for him this evening, and he knew that whatever it was, he would like it. Lucky for him, the woman could cook and it seemed as if she enjoyed it. Nothing—not even specialty coffee shops—could match her coffee.
Fitzpatrick did wish, however, that his and Laura’s lives were more intertwined and hoped with all his heart that it would happen sooner rather than later. He didn’t much like waiting.
• • •
With Connor’s permission to look into the old case of the missing girl, Laura got right to it at the end of the work day, juggling laptop with veal scaloppini, broccoli and angel hair pasta. The tomato sauce that went over the breaded, braised veal and the bubbling pasta took her full attention for a bit until it was all set to simmering.
She looked about at all the pots and checked the veal oven timer, decided everything was going properly, and turned to her laptop at the kitchen table.
A preliminary search of the online news concerning Brittany Johanssen, gave her some pieces of information that she copied and pasted into her online notebook. Next she looked up the store that Jenna told her had probably sold Brittany the dress that the girl wore to the prom. A quick phone call to Marjeanne referred her to the store manager, Diana Popovich, who was not there at this time, but Laura left a message for her to call back at her convenience. She’d have to tell Connor about this plan.
A Dress to Die For Page 5
