In a Midnight Wood

by Ellen Hart

  “Hattie and I drove up two summers ago, when Emma and her daughter had flown back from California for the dedication of that bronze plaque in honor of her mom and dad.” Cordelia searched her purse, probably looking for something to eat. “Remember? If it hadn’t been for Audrey and Leo, there wouldn’t be an art center.”

  “Did Hattie have a good time?”

  Hattie Thorn Lester was Cordelia’s thirteen-year-old niece. She’d lived with Cordelia since she was a little girl, mainly because her mother, Cordelia’s sister, was usually on the hunt somewhere in the known universe for her next husband.

  “She loved it. So many new bugs to examine and categorize. She’s moved on since then. Did I tell you she’s into Carlo Rovelli now?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A theoretical physicist. She has one of his books with her at all times. In fact—” Cordelia looked over both shoulders and then lowered her voice. “I squirreled one of them out of the house before I left.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to figure out why she finds his ideas so compelling.”

  “I’m sure she’d tell you if you asked.”

  “Oh, she reads me passages all the time. Things about gravity. Electromagnetism. The space-time continuum—things I already know everything about. No, there has to be more. Did I mention what she wants next?”

  “Let me guess. A mass spectrometer?”

  “A private math tutor. Get this: She said the entire cosmos can be understood in terms of math. Math! Nothing about theater or music or literature. It boggles the mind.”

  “She’s every bit as intense as you are, Cordelia, she just has a different approach.”

  “Yes, but this science thing gets kind of old. I mean, offer her a book on art deco and one on metallurgy and which do you think she’d pick?”

  “I see your point.”

  “To have a titan of the arts for an auntie seems like such a waste.”

  “But you adore her.”

  “Well, there’s that.”

  They were driving up on Saturday so they could both relax for a few days before the annual Castle Lake Arts Festival began. Emma had convinced Jane to offer a gourmet dinner, prepared by her, as a way to make money for the silent auction benefiting the center. Cordelia had agreed to do several meetings and speeches and a visit to the local high school.

  Emma lived in California these days, but because her marriage was in trouble, she’d come home to Castle Lake for the summer to get away and try to figure out what to do next. She’d confided to Jane that she was glad now she’d been unable to sell her parents’ house. It was a place where she felt comfortable and safe, a retreat from her chaotic life in Mountain View. She wanted Jane and Cordelia to stay with her while they were in town.

  “Does it make you feel old that you used to babysit Emma?” asked Cordelia.

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.” Emma was forty, Jane thirteen years older.

  “Take Ewing Road to the lake,” said Cordelia. “It’s faster.”

  “I know how to get to the house,” said Jane.

  “Consider me a GPS with opinions.”

  It was just after three when they pulled into the driveway next to the Granholm house. The stone-and-timber structure was the largest and grandest property on Ice Lake, having been built in the early nineteen hundreds by the son of L. R. Granholm, the patriarch of the family. According to what Jane had learned from Leo, L.R. was a dairy and wheat farmer who was responsible for the development of the Farmer’s Grange Association in Castle Lake, Clarksville, and Fergus Falls. His son, Edward, worked as a land developer. He was the one who had amassed the family fortune, such as it was. He was also one of Castle Lake’s longest-serving mayors.

  As soon as Jane eased the truck to a stop on the cobblestone drive, Cordelia was out the door. Jane spent a few minutes removing luggage from the backseat of the cab, waiting for Cordelia to return with Emma. When she did come back, she was alone.

  “Nobody’s home.”

  “Really?” said Jane. “I texted her when we’d be arriving.”

  “Well, she’s not here.”

  As they dithered about what to do, a white convertible came sailing around a curve in the Granholm’s private access road, one that connected the house to the highway.

  “Ah, our landlord,” said Cordelia.

  Emma pulled up next to them and cut the engine. Her long brown hair was tangled by the wind, held away from her face by a pair of sunglasses. She pulled the glasses down over her eyes before she spoke. “Sorry to be late.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Cordelia. “Have you been crying?”

  “I just got some bad news. It’s about my old boyfriend, Sam Romilly.”

  Emma had talked about him many times over the years, telling Jane that he’d gone missing at the beginning of their senior year. Nobody had ever seen or heard from him again.

  “What about him?” asked Jane.

  “I just talked to Dave Tamborsky, this idiot football jock I went to high school with. He’s a cop now. Still a jerk. Seems Holy Trinity was excavating a grave this morning, and a workman found Sam’s backpack underneath the coffin.”

  “His backpack?” repeated Jane.

  Emma looked from face to face. “There were bones, too. This is so unbelievable. I can’t get my head around it. After all these years, to find him like that. I mean, why on earth would someone bury him under Ida Beddemeyer?”

  Cordelia did a double take. “Who’s Ida Beddemeyer?”

  “She was the wife of our old high school principal.”

  “Heavens,” said Cordelia, waving air into her face.

  “Are they sure the remains belong to Sam?” asked Jane.

  “Dave said they’d need to send everything to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul for testing, but yeah, he was pretty sure.”

  “Let’s go inside, out of this heat,” said Cordelia, slipping her arm around Emma. “I’ll get you something cold to drink. Then we can all sit down together and talk.”

  Emma nodded, allowing herself to be guided toward the front door.

  Jane was left to schlep the luggage inside by herself.

  3

  Steiner’s Meats had been a fixture in Castle Lake since 1947, when Kurt Steiner’s grandfather had opened the doors for the first time. Kurt had learned the butchering trade from his dad. He loved the shop and enjoyed working with local farmers to find the best, the most humanely raised animals. Unlike big cities, which were only now catching on to the notion that buying local was a good idea, small town folks had known that forever.

  Kurt usually spent his afternoon break sitting on a bench outside the storefront on Main Street. He liked to get a little fresh air when he could, though today the heat and humidity didn’t offer any great pleasure. Still, he needed a breather, and this was all he’d get until the store closed at six.

  Several years ago, Kurt’s dad, Otto, had been thinking about adding a few shelves of groceries and produce, but Kurt had argued against it. Grocery stores in rural Minnesota were hard to come by and sustain. Castle Lake was lucky enough to have one that was prospering, and Kurt saw no reason to compete with it. On the other hand, he’d been aching to buy a used commercial rotisserie from a store over in St. Cloud that was going out of business. Along with rotisserie chickens, he wanted to offer a few sides. Nothing weird. Mostly, he’d chosen things he’d loved all his life, such as cornbread, baked beans, potato salad, and coleslaw. His father had eventually agreed to buy the rotisserie and slowly, their little mini-deli had begun to bring in new customers.

  At seventy-two, Kurt’s dad still worked a couple days a week. His mom pitched in most Saturdays. At the moment, they were in Florida on vacation, which meant that their only employee, a local woman, Judy Nygaard, was putting in extra hours.

  Returning to the shop, Kurt took a few seconds to check out the meat counter and the deli case from his customer’s-eye view. Everything looked good. Judy had worked from ten to
two and always left the displays looking clean and neat.

  This was the slowest part of the day. Kurt did most of the butchering in the early morning hours, when the market was closed. Today, before he left to go home, he needed to finish making one of the store’s bestsellers, a Rostbratwurst flavored with caraway and marjoram. People in town usually bought it and served it with sauerkraut and potatoes and a side of horseradish cream. As he swung around the side of the counter and headed into the workroom, he heard the bell over the front door ding.

  “Hey, Steiner,” came a male voice. “You got a sec?”

  When Kurt turned around and found Monty Mickler leaning his arms over the top of the counter, his mood instantly soured. Kurt thought of himself as a generally easygoing guy. He liked most people, but Mickler was someone he loathed. He hadn’t spoken to him in years and saw no reason to change that now.

  “What do you want?” demanded Kurt.

  Lowering his voice, Mickler said, “Got a call from Tamborsky a while ago. Seems they were exhuming a coffin this morning in the graveyard behind Holy Trinity. They found Sam’s backpack and a bunch of bones.”

  Kurt felt as if he’d been hit in the head with a baseball bat. “How—”

  “Don’t ask me anything else because that’s all I know.”

  Images came flooding back, mental snapshots he thought he’d buried long ago.

  “You okay, man?” asked Mickler. “You’ve gone totally white.”

  Kurt raced for the back door to the alley. He reached a rusted metal drum just seconds before he threw up. Wiping a hand across his mouth, he saw that Mickler had followed him outside.

  “Hey, keep it together, bro. Dave’s gonna handle it.”

  “How?”

  “He’s a cop. Everything’s cool.”

  Still leaning over the metal drum, Kurt said, “Get out of here.”

  “What?”

  Turning to face him, he yelled. “Get the hell out of here before I beat the living crap out of you.” He went at him with his fist clenched.

  “Jeez,” said Mickler, backing up. “Don’t shoot the freakin’ messenger.”

  “Leave,” screamed Kurt, feeling blood rush to his face.

  Mickler barely missed a stack of packing crates as he scrambled out of the alley.

  4

  When Dave was finally done at the graveyard, he drove over to the home of Wendell Romilly, Sam’s father. It wasn’t the same house where Sam had lived during his high school years. This one was newer, bigger, with a view of the river.

  Romilly, dressed in white slacks and a blue golf polo, ushered him into an expansive living room. Going from the outside heat into the refrigerator-like cold inside the house made him shiver. From Romilly’s annoyed demeanor, Dave assumed he hadn’t heard the news. Sam’s mother had died long ago, so at least she would be spared learning the truth about what had happened to her son.

  Dave figured that most people in town saw Wendell Romilly as a pillar of the community. He was president of one of the local banks, active at his church, served on several boards. But Dave viewed him differently. To him, Romilly was an entitled asshole, unimpressed by any authority other than his own. Police officers simply didn’t show up unannounced at his front door. This was the one part of his job Dave really liked. He enjoyed seeing people like Romilly thrown off balance.

  Romilly was a slight man in his late sixties. His skin was so dark from hours spent on the golf course that he looked like a wizened nut. Dave remembered when he hadn’t been quite so wrinkly, back when his hair was dark and his glasses were larger, hiding his owlish glare.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,” said Dave.

  “Oh?”

  “I think we should sit down.”

  Romilly lowered himself hesitantly onto a chair. Dave sat on the couch. He explained about the backpack found under Ida Beddemeyer’s grave, the billfold found inside. Through it all, Romilly remained silent and stoic. At the very least, Dave thought, he could have squeezed out a little surprise. “I’ll need to take a sample of your DNA.”

  “To prove the remains belong to my son.”

  “It’s not painful.”

  “I know that, Dave.”

  Dave’s jaw tightened. “Thank you, Wendell. ’Course, I could ask Scott if you’d prefer.” Scott was Wendell’s younger son.

  “No, I’ll do it. Just let me know where and when.”

  “Will do.” As Dave rose, Romilly did, too.

  “That’s it?” asked Romilly.

  “For now.”

  “So, you’re saying Sam was the victim of a homicide?”

  “We’re treating it as a suspicious death, but yes, I don’t think Sam buried himself under that coffin. Would you like me to give Scott the news?”

  “No, I’ll do it.” He paused. “You may think my reaction is somewhat less than it should be. All I can say is, I gave up believing I’d ever see my son again a long time ago.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Any idea who might have done it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I hope you do a better job with your investigation than your father did.”

  Dave stiffened but refused to take the bait. His dad’s investigation had been the best it could be, under the circumstances. He turned and started for the door.

  “I suppose this will stir everything up again,” continued Romilly. “People will come out of the woodwork with all their ridiculous theories. I seem to be an easy target. You know, of course, that your father cleared me of any wrongdoing.”

  “Did he?”

  “Talk to him. He’ll give you the details.”

  “I’ll do that.” Walking out on the front step, Dave touched the brim of his hat. “Thanks for your time.” Asshole.

  * * *

  Dave’s dad’s house was only a few blocks away from the public safety building, where the police station was located. He found him wearing nothing but swim trunks and a pair of old running shoes, in the alley, halfway to the end of the block. “Hey,” he shouted.

  His dad turned, looking confused.

  “Hey, Pop, I need to talk to you.”

  “Now?”

  The garden hose was lying in the grass in the backyard, belching water. Dave wondered if his father had hosed himself down to cool off in the afternoon heat and forgotten to turn it off. “Where were you going?” he asked as his dad tramped back into the yard.

  “I was … looking for something.”

  “Like what?”

  “My lost youth. What do you want?”

  Dave turned off the hose on his way to the house. “Where’s that big fan?” he asked, coming into the living room. “You told me you were going to bring it up from the basement.”

  “I forgot. Besides, we’re supposed to have a storm tonight. That should blow in cooler temperatures.”

  “But until it does, you need some air movement in here.” Dave headed into the front hall and opened the door to the basement. Once downstairs, he quickly found the fan pushed behind a bunch of clutter in the laundry room. He dug it out and returned upstairs, plugging it into an electric socket next to the TV. “There,” he said, hands on his hips. It didn’t seem right that a creep like Wendell Romilly lived in a refrigerator when his dad, who’d spent his entire life serving the community instead of making money off it, had to live inside an oven. “I got you something.”

  “What?” asked his father, stretching his hands toward the breeze.

  Dave went back out to the squad car, lifted a box out of the backseat, and carried it into the house. “I got this for you at the hardware store yesterday. The air conditioners were all marked down for an end-of-summer sale. Won’t take but a few minutes to install it in your bedroom window. At least then you can sleep tonight.”

  “I can put it in,” said his father, getting up to take a closer look at what was written on the outside of the box.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m not an invalid, although I’m not su
re I can afford it.”

  “Consider it an early Christmas present.”

  His father looked up at him. “You’re a good son.”

  “Whatever. Look, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Go get us a couple of cold ones and then I’ll be happy to talk about anything.”

  Crossing into the kitchen, Dave saw that the sink was full of dishes. His father might be spit-and-polish when it came to his uniform, back when he was still wearing one, but he’d never taken much interest in housework. When Dave opened the refrigerator, he found his dad’s billfold next to the mayonnaise. Dave had noticed other instances of his dad’s forgetfulness in the last couple of months, but wasn’t sure how much he should worry about them.

  Returning to the living room, he sat down on the couch next to his father. “Were you looking for this?” He held up the billfold.

  “Not that I remember.”

  “It was in the refrigerator.”

  “Probably wanted to cool off. Only one beer?”

  Dave handed it to him. “It’s a little early for me. Besides, I’ve got to write up a report.”

  “Too bad for you.” He twisted off the cap and tossed it into an ashtray already filled with caps.

  “Listen,” said Dave, watching his dad down half the beer, “we found Sam Romilly’s remains today.”

  “That kid in your class who went missing? Where?”

  “In Holy Trinity cemetery.”

  “My God. You’re sure?”

  “Besides the bones, which, by the way, we found under a coffin that was being exhumed, we also found his backpack and billfold.”

  “Wow,” said his dad, leaning back against the couch cushions. His gaze locked on Dave.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “It’s nothing, son. Why are you so jumpy?”

  “You handled the original investigation.”