In Sheep's Clothing (24 page)

“Why? You can outbid her any day. You're wealthy,” I said.

“Ah, yes. Let this be a lesson to you, Mrs. O'Shea. Power is better than dollars, any day of the week.”

“Huh?”

“Roberta has power in this town. Allegiances. Alliances. She made Brian promise her a long time ago that if he was ever going to sell his land he'd sell it to her. Now, whether or not that's in writing, I don't know,” she said. She threw her cigarette down and smashed it in the ground. “But if Brian's widow decides she needs money, the land won't go on an auction block. She'll sell it straight to Roberta Flagg. I'll never get a chance at it.”

“Oh,” I said. “How do you know this?”

“Because I've had many conversations with Brian Bloomquist. And they always ended with Brian telling me that he was never going to sell, but if he did, it would be to Roberta Flagg. So much for my lake,” she said and looked out at the water.

“You own over half of it,” I said. “That's not enough?”

“It's not acreage, Mrs. O'Shea,” she said. “It's my history. My legacy. It's the part of my identity that was kept from me.”

“Well,” I said, thinking that she was overreacting just a bit. “Thanks for being honest with me.”

She made a snorting sound. The most unlady-like thing I'd seen from her so far. “So, do you really have Anna Bloomquist's diary?”

“Yes,” I said. “You really want it?”

She nodded. “I would love to have it.”

“It's not weighed in carats,” I said.

Ignoring my remark, she flipped a card out from between her fingers. “You can mail it there. Send it registered or certified. And insure it. I'll reimburse you.”

“No, that's all right. No need to reimburse me. I'll mail it first thing tomorrow.”

The boat with the green-and-white flag won the race, and Kimberly Canton mumbled “Damn” under her breath.

Twenty-five

We all sat outside on Aunt Sissy's porch, watching Uncle Joe barbecue about thirty feet from the railing. The sun was beginning to set over the tops of the trees, but it would be daylight for another two hours at least.

Since returning home from the May Fest, Colin and Rudy had been particularly chatty, talking about the races, the gorgeous lake, the wonderful fishing, and how, except for finding a dead body and Colin being put in jail for a day and a half, the trip had been really nice. Uncle Joe was particularly quiet, especially toward me. I was assuming that was over the wolf. I noticed Aunt Sissy kept cutting her eyes around and looking at him when she thought nobody was watching. Great, I hoped I hadn't caused a marital problem between them because of the wolf. But I couldn't help the way I felt about it.

I swatted at a mosquito and cursed under my breath.

“That's Minnesota's state bird,” Aunt Sissy said.

“What? Where?”

“The mosquito.”

“Well, Missouri's almost as bad,” Rudy added.

Colin got up and went to stand by the barbecue pit with Uncle Joe. They started talking about the horses or something. Rudy stretched and yawned. Aunt Sissy stared off into the woods, lost in thought. I couldn't help but wonder if what she had said was true. That she really was dying of heart disease. I couldn't think about it without a big knot forming in my throat. I took a deep breath.

“So what did the sheriff say when you called him with the information about the lake?” I asked.

“He was pretty surprised when I told him that Roberta owned so much of the property,” Aunt Sissy said.

“Did he think she had motive enough for killing Brian Bloomquist?” I asked.

“Not sure, but I think the fact that the last thing he said was B-12 and her lot was B-12, combined with what Kimberly Canton told him, made him decide to formally investigate her. So, yeah, I think he's considering it a great possibility. The funny thing is the marina.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“Well, if Roberta did kill Brian, she won't be able to buy his property. And now that the sheriff knows about all the land she owns and the whole B-12 thing, she can't really buy the property.”

“Why not?” I asked her and took a sip of my lemonade.

“How would that look? I mean, if you were a suspect in his murder, would you go ahead and buy his land? That would look pretty bad, I think. Like, you murdered him so you could buy his land,” Aunt Sissy said.

“Which is what we all suspect anyway,” I said.

“Exactly.”

I shook my head. “Man. Little friendly competition to see who could own the most land didn't end too well.”

“No, not at all. Because Brian's dead, if Roberta killed him she'll go to jail. If she didn't, she can't buy the land, and that means that Kimberly Canton will. And our town comes that much closer to being Ms. Canton's resort town. I don't see that anybody wins.”

“Nah, me, neither.”

We were quiet a minute. Rudy got up and walked out to the field to see the llamas. They were such unusual creatures. Sort of gangly and yet graceful at the same time. They reminded me of ostriches with four legs, and they had the longest lashes I've ever seen on a creature. I took a deep breath. “I'm sorry, Aunt Sissy.”

“For what?”

“I'm sorry if there's trouble between you and Uncle Joe over the whole wolf thing. I'm sorry that you're … sick. And I'm sorry that I didn't solve your mystery.”

Her eyes glistened a little. But Aunt Sissy in all her gruffness bulled right through it, not allowing a moment for emotion. “Not your fault I'm sick. And you did solve the mystery. You found out who wrote the diary, and you found out how it ended. So far as Joe is concerned, well … yeah, that's your fault, but he'll get over it.”

“Yeah, as soon as I'm gone, he's going to go join the hunt. Isn't he?”

She looked straight at me. “You want me to answer that, or you want to have some hope?”

“Don't answer it,” I said.

I was quiet again for a few minutes, enjoying the smell of lilacs and barbecue, pine, and … horse manure. “What do you think it was like for Anna Bloomquist when the wolves were killed? I mean, what was it really like?”

“I imagine she was horrified.”

“You think her father and brother helped to kill the wolves? You know, they were farmers, too.”

“I don't know,” she said and shrugged. “That never occurred to me. I imagine they would have.”

“It would have been all the more traumatizing,” I said.

“Yeah. In some ways, Anna didn't seem like she existed in the real world. It was almost as if she was living … a fantasy.”

“Yeah, like … everything was more real for her than it was for others. She felt joy more. She felt terror more.”

Aunt Sissy nodded.

“I wish I could have solved all of it.”

“You mean, who killed Konrad and Isaac?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you said it was Isabelle Lansdowne. She had all of that motive.”

“I know, but I can't prove it. Besides, there's one thing that bothers me.”

“What's that?”

“I'm still worried about how Isabelle was able to hang her brother,” I said. “Physically, it doesn't seem like she could have managed it.”

“Maybe her husband, seeing the opportunity to get rich or richer, helped her. Who knows, maybe he's the one who actually did it. Maybe they did it together.”

“Yeah, I thought about that, too.”

The crunch of wheels on gravel sounded from the side of the house. Uncle Joe lifted up a hand and waved. I'm not sure why, but I was half expecting Sheriff Aberg to come walking around the building. Instead it was Mayor Tom Hujinak. Uncle Joe introduced him to my stepfather. Rudy was still out in the field somewhere looking at the llamas. Mayor Tom raised a hand at us on the porch.

“I took a picture in front,” he said to Aunt Sissy.

“That's fine,” she said. “You here for your tour?”

“Yup,” he said.

“Well, come on in,” she said.

We both got up and led the way for Mayor Tom. He followed us in the back door, through the screened-in part of the back porch where my quilt still sat in the frame. I think Aunt Sissy had to set maybe ten more stitches in it, and then hem it, and it would be finished. We came into the kitchen, and Tom Hujinak stopped in his tracks.

“Oh, wow, Sissy. This is totally different.”

“I expect it would be,” she said. “All new cabinets, whole new floor. The moulding is the same, though.”

She led us on a tour of the house then. Started on the first floor, then went to the second floor. It was on the second floor that Mayor Tom started to see some resemblance to the house he had once lived in. He went to the bedroom at the end of the hallway. “This was my room,” he said.

We followed him in, and he turned a complete circle in the middle of the room. “This is pretty much as I remember it, except I had baseball posters hanging on that wall instead of that beautiful dried flower arrangement you've got there.”

We laughed at that. He went to the window, lifted it, and looked down. “No roses, but you've got plenty of lilacs.”

“They surround the entire house.”

“Do you get a lot of bees because of that?”

“Yeah, but they don't bother us. Guess we're all too sour for them to sting.”

“Hope you don't mind,” he said. He walked over to the closet and indeed it sloped at a fairly steep angle. “The roof.”

“Oh,” I said.

He turned in the closet. “And the brick wall.”

“Brick wall?”

“Part of the original chimney,” he said.

“The original chimney?”

“Yeah, when the house burned, the chimney was still standing, so they just built the house up around it. I think it goes all the way to the cellar,” Aunt Sissy said. “Or it ends right above it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Thanks, Sissy, for letting me see the place again,” he said.

“Oh, you're quite welcome.”

“You guys have really turned it into a nice place,” he said. “A lot nicer than when we lived here.”

“Well, you know, umpteen kids during the Depression. Didn't leave a lot of time or money for home improvement,” Aunt Sissy said.

“You got that right,” he said.

“So, when you heard … the ghost,” I said, “what did you hear?”

“I told you. It was my sister in the next room crying over her boyfriend,” he said and pointed through the closet to the next room.

“The ghost was in your closet?” I asked.

“There was no ghost,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “Just humor me.”

“Okay, the ghost was in my closet.”

“And this chimney ends right above the cellar,” I said.

“Yeah,” Aunt Sissy said.

“I want to see the cellar,” I said with a sudden rush of adrenaline.

“Why?” Mayor Tom asked.

“I want to see if there's an opening or something down there that might help sound travel up this chimney and into your closet,” I said.

“There is no ghost!”
he said.

“I know, I know,” I said. “But I just wanna see.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I'm morbid,” I said.

“All right,” Aunt Sissy said. “Let's go to the cellar. You coming with?”

Mayor Tom turned a pasty white around his mouth. He swallowed. “All right,” he said.

We all three descended the steps, me in the lead because I just suddenly had to see what the cellar looked like, Mayor Tom reluctantly pulling up the rear, and my aunt sandwiched in the middle. Once out on the back porch, Aunt Sissy had to move some things aside and then she pulled the door up and fixed it to a hook on the wall, designed specifically for that. Then she flipped a switch on the wall. “Took us forever to realize that switch was for the light down there.”

“I'll bet,” I said.

The steps were little more than a ladder. They were actually stairs that descended almost vertically. As I went down the stairs, I had to duck my head so I wouldn't knock it on the floor of the back porch.

“There is a concrete floor down here now. I don't think there would have been one when Anna lived here.”

“No, probably not,” Tom said from behind her.

I immediately started itching when I got down in the room. It felt like things were crawling in my hair and up my arms. Psychosomatic, but it's hard to remember that when your skin is crawling. I was just glad that I was with two other people. I figured they could save me from whatever multilegged thing might attack me.

The room was small, maybe ten feet by ten feet. With a house as big as Aunt Sissy's one would expect a larger cellar. But that's not how they did it back in the old days. A cellar was mainly used to store food or to offer protection from tornadoes and dust storms. Not that Minnesota would be bothered by too many dust storms.

The ceiling was barely six feet high, and Mayor Tom sort of held himself in a semihunched position, watching the ceiling for anything that might decide to nest in his hat. I, too, watched the ceiling with keen interest. It didn't seem to be moving. Yet.

“We turn the light on down here once in a while, just to scare the spiders,” Aunt Sissy said.

I gave a nervous laugh.

“Okay, so you've seen the cellar. Let's go,” Mayor Tom said.

“Wait, where's the fireplace?”

“It would be right there,” he said and pointed to the ceiling at the end of the cellar.

I walked over and tried to get a good look, but the light cast severe shadows, and the corners of the room were dark. But a spark of light in the ceiling caught my eye. “Wait. One of you run up to the fireplace in the living room.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to stick a pen or something up through this hole and you tell me if you can see it.”