High Crimes

by Libby Fischer Hellmann

  Jimmy didn’t have a good response, so early the next morning, she hopped on a flight to Duluth. Two hours later as she waited for a bus to the rental car area of the Duluth airport, she checked her voice mail. Three messages had come in from Vanna. All within the past hour. When Georgia replayed them, she noted how Vanna’s voice sounded more stressed and higher pitched with each call.

  Georgia, Charlie has a high fever, and it won’t go down even with Tylenol. Mom says to wait. But I can’t. What should I do?

  Then:

  Georgia, Charlie had a seizure. I’m taking him to the hospital. Please come, Georgia. I need you.

  Then:

  Georgia, it’s JoBeth. Charlie’s not doing well at all. They think it might be meningitis. Vanna needs you. I’ll leave if that’s what it takes for you to come. I know you don’t want anything to do with me.

  Georgia felt her stomach pitch, as if her guts had spilled out on the concrete of the airport. She hit redial on one of Vanna’s calls.

  “Georgia, where are you?” Her sister’s voice, squeaky and tight, was halfway to hysterical. “You’ve got to come. Charlie is really sick. He’s been vomiting, and his skin is paper white. They want to do a spinal tap. They think it might be meningitis. He’s got a high fever, and he’s had two seizures. I can’t make him stop crying. I can’t do this, Georgia. I’m sorry for everything. Please come right away.”

  Georgia’s heart cracked. Why had she picked today to fly to Minnesota? “Vanna, honey, the doctors know what they’re doing. If they say they need to do a spinal tap, let them. They’ll make it as comfortable as possible. I—I’m in Minnesota on a case.”

  “But this is an emergency,” Vanna wailed. “Please come back. Now.”

  Georgia bit her lip. By the time she flew back it would be mid-afternoon. The spinal tap would be over. She told Vanna that.

  “I haven’t given them permission yet. Mom says they’re dangerous. He could die from it.”

  “Vanna, Charlie isn’t going to die.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Where are you? What hospital?”

  “We’re at Northwest Community, but they want to transfer us downtown to Children’s. I don’t know. Should we go?”

  “Absolutely. Children’s is the best.” She tried to sound calm and composed. “Tell you what. I’ll call Jimmy. He’ll meet you there. And I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “When?”

  “Late tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll come straight from the airport. And go ahead and ask the doctors to explain everything to you in simple language. Call me back if you still don’t understand.”

  Vanna was sobbing now. “Okay. Georgia, I love you. I’m so sorry for everything. Can we—can we start over? Can I come home and live with you?”

  Georgia’s eyes welled up too. She couldn’t help it. “I love you too, Vanna. Of course you can live with me. Now, listen up, sweetie. In another hour I might be in a place where there may not be cell service. So if you can’t reach me, don’t worry. As soon as it comes back, I’ll call you.” She hesitated, wondering what else she could say that would help. “You can do this. You’re his mom. And a wonderful one at that. Keep telling him it’s going to be okay. And that you’ll be with him every second. He may not understand the words, but he’ll feel your reassurance and comfort. And your love.”

  Between her sobs Vanna said, “Pray for him, will you?”

  This was the first time Vanna had ever expressed faith of any kind. Where had that come from? “I will,” she lied.

  She disconnected. The lump in her throat threatened to choke off her breath. But so did a new thought. Why wasn’t JoBeth helping her daughter during this crisis? Why was Vanna turning to Georgia?

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  As Georgia drove through Duluth on her way to Sand Lake, the steely overcast highlighted a band of sapphire-blue ice that hugged the shores of Lake Superior. She’d never seen ice this blue. Chicago’s was dull white.

  She was puzzled by Vanna’s relationship with their mother. JoBeth and Vanna hadn’t seen each other since Vanna ran away last year, and she’d run away largely because of JoBeth, who, according to Vanna, had been drunk most of the time and a mean drunk at that. Vanna had clearly matured over the past year, but some problems couldn’t be solved by the passage of time.

  Was JoBeth drinking again? How was that affecting the way she treated Vanna and, even more important, Charlie? In retrospect, it occurred to Georgia that it might have been a blessing that Georgia hadn’t grown up with JoBeth in her life. She’d had to develop resiliency early on. Vanna hadn’t.

  After ten minutes heading south on I-35, the snow started. It wasn’t an easy snow. The wind blew up, and bands of white assaulted her windshield. A few minutes later, it accelerated into a blinding snow. Daylight acquired a uniquely dystopian cast and the windshield wipers were no help. The swirl of white overwhelmed her. She gritted her teeth and slowed to thirty.

  Her GPS went out, but she’d expected that and had printed out directions back in Chicago. She tried to make out the highway signs, but many were already covered by snow or hard to read in limited visibility. She kept the defroster on but she had to wipe her sleeve on the glass in order to see at all.

  The most unsettling part was the silence. The storm was intense, unrelenting, and dangerous, but it didn’t make a sound. The only noise was the thud of her wipers swinging back and forth. The silence added to the sense that she had crossed the border into an unfamiliar no-man’s-land. The heater was on full blast, but Georgia shivered.

  • • •

  The sign announcing she was only a few miles from Sand Lake also pointed to an exit that led to the Fond Du Lac Band Chippewa casino. Georgia noted the irony. White people like the Jarvis family were trying to find isolation off the grid on a Minnesota lake, while Native Americans were trying to encourage people to lose their money by flocking to splashy casinos.

  The snowstorm was still blustering when she reached Lakeland road twenty minutes later, but she caught glimpses of an expanse of white through the trees hugging the road. Sand Lake was still frozen. She thought she saw a couple of pickups and icehouses on the lake. Although she’d grown up in Chicago, she’d never known people camped out on the ice in winter until Matt Singer, her former lover, took her up to Wisconsin one weekend. She’d been shocked, and fascinated.

  Now she pulled up to a mailbox with the number 9415. A long driveway bisected a lawn that led to a small cabin. It took effort to turn around, and her wheels kept spinning, but eventually she parked facing the direction she’d come. She holstered the Sig under her North Face jacket, tied the hood snugly, and climbed out of the car.

  The wind whipped her face, threatening to freeze her nostrils as well. Except for the swish of her boots in the snow, the silence seemed more pronounced. As she drew closer, she studied the cabin. One story, wood logs. The chimney was brick, but no smoke drifted from the top. Shades covered two windows and were tightly drawn. It looked abandoned. Maybe that was the point.

  When she got to the door, she hesitated, recalling the last time she’d knocked on a cabin door in the middle of nowhere. Then she took a deep breath and knocked.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  No one came to the door. Georgia waited. Then waited some more. She knocked again. No one. Crestfallen, she stepped back and reassessed the cabin. Had she come all this way for nothing? She’d been so sure Kitty Jarvis was hiding out here. But now, if she was honest, apart from unearthing an address in a remote location, the principal reason she’d come was instinct. And the memory that ten years earlier, another woman in trouble had done the same thing. The fact was that Kitty Jarvis could be anywhere. Just because a family cabin existed didn’t mean she’d fled to it.

  Full of self-recrimination for faulty assumptions, Georgia trudged back to her car, keyed the engine, and blasted the heat. She checked for cell service. No bars. She couldn’t call Vanna or Jimmy, and she had no map to see if Lakeland
Road was accessible from a different route. She recalled the road did make a circle around Sand Lake, which meant she could pick one end to stake out, but there was only a fifty-fifty chance of meeting Kitty, if she was here. She could come from the opposite or an altogether different direction.

  In any case she couldn’t stake out the cabin indefinitely. It was too cold and the storm was still raging. She waited thirty minutes. And then ten more. She reflected on her life and how, despite the hard knocks, it was now full with Vanna, Charlie, and Jimmy. How she’d never imagined she would get over the heartbreak of Matt. And how, with Charlie so ill, she longed to fly back to Chicago to be with Vanna.

  She was ready to start the drive back to the Duluth airport when she stopped the car, got out, and walked around the cabin to make sure no one was there. As she made her way to the rear of the property, she realized the cabin was only about a hundred feet from the lake. She could see the vague outline of a dock. She peered into a nearby boatshed, where a skiff, probably for fishing, was stored. She turned toward the lake, frozen solid, and shaded her eyes. Through the snow, she spotted a green pickup on the ice. Next to it was a shack perched on top of the frozen lake. It looked about a football field away, and snowy tire tracks led from the lawn where she stood across the ice.

  Georgia had never walked on the surface of a frozen lake. The thought of doing it frightened the hell out of her. Then again, if the ice was thick enough to support a pickup, it must be okay for her Toyota. Still, she was loath to take the chance. A hundred yards wasn’t far to walk. She slogged through the snow to what would have been the shoreline, but there was no demarcation between land and water. She edged onto the ice tentatively. Although it was covered by fresh snow, it felt sturdy and solid. Not so different from land. She started off.

  It wasn’t difficult to walk as long as she didn’t hurry. Her boots gripped snow rather than ice, and she felt supported. The cold and wind were more challenging. Her leather gloves did little to keep her fingers from freezing, and her muscles, still sore from the beating in DC, stiffened in the frigid air. She shuffled forward painfully.

  She knew whoever was in the icehouse would see her coming, so as she approached, she waved to signal she was friendly. A few minutes later a figure emerged from the shack holding a pair of binoculars raised to eye-level.

  Georgia waved again and smiled. “Yoo-hoo . . . Is Kitty Jarvis with you?” No response. “I need to talk to her.”

  The figure, now that she was close enough to see, was a man. For an instant Georgia was surprised, then scolded herself for making another assumption. Why shouldn’t Kitty have a man in her life? If it was indeed Kitty inside the shack. A moment later a woman joined the man. He passed her the binoculars. She lifted them to her eyes, then passed them back to him with a little shrug. Georgia waved again. The woman stayed where she was, but the man went inside.

  When Georgia was just a few yards away, the woman retreated into the shack. The male reappeared outside with a shotgun. He raised it to his shoulders and aimed the barrel at Georgia.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Instinct made Georgia raise her hands. She understood. Were she in their place, she might have done the same thing if an unexpected stranger journeyed across a frozen lake to “talk” to her.

  The man called out. “Whoever you are, go away. We don’t want to talk to you.”

  “I see that. But I’m not here to hurt you, and I certainly hope you won’t hurt me.”

  “Why are you here? Who are you?”

  “My name is Georgia Davis. I’m a private investigator and I’ve been looking for Kitty Jarvis.”

  “How did you find us?”

  She let out a grateful breath. Kitty was here. “It’s my job. I’m here because something isn’t right about Scott’s death. I don’t believe he killed Dena Baldwin on his own. I think he was set up. Partly because of the yurt. I want to hear what Kitty thinks.”

  A woman suddenly poked her head out of the shack. “How do you know about the yurt?”

  “I saw it. In the basement of your building. Your super practically forced me to remove it for her.”

  The woman shot Georgia a wan smile. “Betsy can be persuasive.”

  “May I lower my hands now?”

  “Just a goddamn minute,” the man cut in. “You got a weapon?”

  “A Sig Sauer semiautomatic.” The Sig was what she’d used as a cop. As soon as she’d formally resigned from the force, she’d bought a new one. Then she’d discovered the Glock and the Sig went into the closet. Until now.

  “Slide it across the ice to me.”

  “It’s in a shoulder holster. May I reach in and get it?”

  He raised the shotgun, chambered a round, dipped his head.

  Georgia slowly reached into her jacket, drew out the Sig, and dropped it on the ice.

  “Kick it toward me.”

  She complied. It landed at Kitty’s feet. She picked it up.

  “Anything else?” he said.

  Georgia shook her head.

  Kitty nodded at him. He lowered the shotgun.

  • • •

  The shack smelled like a combination of coffee and fish. A hole in the center of the ice, about eight inches wide and a foot deep, revealed inky-dark water. A fishing rod leaned against a bench, and Georgia saw half a dozen fish in a cooler. Two portable chairs, a hot plate, a pile of blankets, and a propane heater completed the furnishings.

  The man moved his fishing rod so Georgia could sit on the bench. She was so cold she finally understood how teeth could chatter. Kitty draped a blanket over her shoulders and poured her a mug of hot tea from a thermos. Georgia sipped the tea and gazed around the shack. “I don’t understand. The heater and the hot plate . . . they don’t melt the ice?”

  Kitty laughed. When she did, her face came alive, turning warm and friendly. A heart-shaped face pointed to a prominent chin. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail. When she talked, it was with a pronounced working-class Chicago accent, with its flat As and D for Th. Georgia had grown up around it. Her father, a Chicago cop, and all his buddies spoke like that. It wasn’t until she was a teenager that she realized not everyone in Chicago spoke the same way.

  “Purdy’ll explain, won’t cha, honey?” Kitty said.

  Purdy, underneath all his outerwear, looked to be about Kitty’s height. He was slim and wore glasses, which, now that Georgia could see him at close range, covered gentle brown eyes. “First off, you have to outfit the icehouse correctly. We have a waterproof outer layer that’s made out of thermal fabric. Aluminum siding too. We have this propane heater, as well as a lantern that provides heat and light. And when you put a metal grating on top of it, you have a really good hot seat. And of course, we have LED lights and a portable generator in the pickup—”

  “That’s enough, Purdy,” Kitty said. “I’m sure Ms. Davis doesn’t care about the specs and equipment of our little shack.”

  “It’s Georgia, and I do care. I’ve never been inside an icehouse before. But I don’t have a lot of time. My nephew—just four months old—is very sick, and I need to get back to Chicago as soon as I can.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kitty said.

  “Thanks.” Georgia sipped her tea, still unconvinced about the merits of ice fishing. Why did people want to spend time outdoors when the temperature dropped to single digits?

  “And I’m sorry about Purdy before. He’s very protective.”

  “That’s not a bad thing. I suspect you may need it.”

  Kitty frowned. “Why? What do you know?”

  “Actually, it’s what you know.”

  “Me?”

  “I have a theory you may have information—maybe things you don’t know you know about your brother and what he was up to.”

  Purdy picked up the fishing rod, pulled one of the chairs up to the hole, and lowered the line into the water. “You came a long way to test a theory?”

  “I did.”

  “How did you come to hav
e this theory?” Georgia couldn’t tell if he was sincere or mocking her.

  “Like I said, I’ve been working for the family. They got an email a few weeks after Dena was killed. It was cryptic, but it implied that something or someone besides Scott was mixed up in the murder. But the email turned out to be untraceable. The Baldwins hired me to follow up on it. They want to know the truth.”

  Kitty and Purdy exchanged glances. Georgia caught it. Then Kitty said, “I don’t know anything about the woman he killed.”

  “But you knew Scott.”

  “Yes,” Kitty said. “And I’m kind of glad you’re here. I’ve been hoping to get the word out. I’ll never forgive the people who destroyed his dreams. I hope they rot in hell.”

  “Why?”

  “So . . .” She settled herself in the other chair. “When Scott was discharged, he didn’t know which end was up. He enlisted when he was eighteen. He spent nearly seven years in the army, most of it in Iraq or ’Stan. In effect, he grew up over there. Afterwards, when he came to live with me, it wasn’t easy. Like every other vet, he had PTSD. He fell into a deep depression. He was such a sweet boy when he left. When he came home, though, he was different. I hardly knew him.”

  Georgia nodded.

  “I had this job bartending at the Barracks. He would meet me there every day, and we’d talk. I wanted to help, but I felt helpless. I did talk to a therapist, who said to give it time.” She paused. “Well, time passed. Months. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to live or die. He used to say it would be easier all round if he just ate his gun.

  “It broke my heart. I tried to suggest things to him. College, for example. He wasn’t interested. Jobs, like being a mechanic. He said he didn’t have the skills. What about learning them? Nope. I told him this was a second chance at life. That he’d survived for a reason. That whether it was God or whatever, he had a new path. Nothing worked.”