June Bug (16 page)

When I was growing up in safe, acceptably abnormal Paynesville, there were two things that really got me keyed up. One was when it was my turn to have Connie Christopherson solve my Rubik’s Cube. She was the only person in all of fifth grade who had figured it out, and she hadn’t even read the book. For a small donation of Pixy Stix, she would click-clack-click your cube until each side was a paean to monochromaticity.

It was beautiful—art and organization united—and it never lasted more than one class period. It took that long for me to convince myself that if she could do it, I could too. I only messed it a little bit at a time, starting by moving the middle square of color on all six sides. I felt confident that if I started slowly, I could find my way back. This delusion assured continuing business for Connie and kept her in Pixy Stix well into sixth grade, when the handheld Simon game and Garbage Pail Kids cards hit Paynesville via Penny Johnson’s visiting cousin from Texas and effectively erased Rubik’s Cube, Snake, and Triangle from our consciousness.

The other thing that excited me was when I was allowed computer lab time and could play Oregon Trail for a full hour. The middle school owned only four computers at the time, all Apple IIe’s, and to get access to them, you had to be part of the gifted program. The first skill we learned on the Apples was basic line programming, which involved creating a program that looked like a ball bouncing down colored stairs on the screen.

I rushed to accomplish this so I could begin playing Oregon Trail, a control-loving girl’s ticket to joy. In the game, you started out as your average pioneer about to embark on a new life in the faraway state of Oregon. The trick was, you needed to decide what to take with you to survive the journey—you only had a certain amount of space allotted in the covered wagon and a certain amount of money to buy food, bullets, and supplies with.

Your quest was played out on a map-like screen charting the wagon’s progress in relation to famous towns and landmarks such as Big Hill and the Shawnakee Trading Post. About ten real-life seconds after you hit the Trail, one of the following would happen: (1) You would run into a buffalo stampede that you could opt to hunt, and hunting stampeding buffalo is like shooting fish in a barrel. Literally. The bullets moved in aching slowness across the green screen. (2) You would spot a group of strangers and choose how to react. “Approaching” them leads to a fight, as does “circle wagons.” In either case, you needed to have your guns ready.

The game was designed to build real-life decision-making and problem-solving skills by making a kid the leader of a wagon party. Although I may never have directly applied these skills, I derived infinite pleasure out of controlling my own destiny, if even only for an hour. I particularly missed that experience as, just before midnight, I began my walk to the public access to meet a dwarf on the run from the law and pondered the whereabouts of a scared seven-year-old who may never know the pleasures of pre-teen fads and dim-witted computer games. I had spent four hours scouring the woods by her house for any trace of her, and soon, the entire town was searching. Now that it was dark, hundreds of flashlights stabbed the air in and around Battle Lake like fireflies.

Walking carefully through the dark toward my meeting, I swear I heard an audible click when I mentally separated myself from Peyton’s situation. I could feel my heart turning a little colder and my mind a little harder. If I kept worrying about her and imagining what she was enduring right now, I would go crazy. I had learned how to separate myself from emotions and circular thoughts when my dad killed himself and two others in that horrible car accident, and I would use those skills now. Plenty of others were searching for her, and there was nothing more I could do for her tonight.

I knew from Sunday’s post-fake-body trek that it would take me under forty-five minutes to hike to the south-side Whiskey Lake access, and since Nikolai demanded utter stealth, I figured walking would make me quiet as a ghost. I might even be able to sneak up on him and give myself the upper hand, if only for a couple moments.

I decided to stick to the woods and prairie, which would keep me on Sunny’s property right up until the access. That way I wouldn’t need to answer questions if someone passed me on the road at midnight. The slice of moon in the brilliant June sky didn’t provide as much light as the twinkling stars, but between the two, I was able to find my way just fine.

The mosquitoes were tolerable, and swooping bats feasted off the ones I didn’t smush. For some reason, bats didn’t bother me like birds did. Maybe it was because they were up front about their personalities. They were leathery flying mice not trying to be anything else. Plus, anything that ate mosquitoes in Minnesota had a certain sense of holiness about it.

A rabbit darting from behind a rock and into a hole startled me, but otherwise, the landscape was serene and space-like in its starlit stillness. The only sounds were my shoes gathering dew, the far-off resonance of cars cruising Highway 210 a couple miles off, and cows lowing. The air smelled charged with water, and I wondered if a storm was on the way.

When I reached the top of the sumac-speckled hill that overlooked both the public access and Shangri-La Island, I crouched down and clicked the illuminating button on my watch. It was 11:37. I was early. Shangri-La was down for the night. Not even birds moved on the island.

The access, about two hundred yards away from where I was hunkered down, was a different story. I spotted a small figure wobbling through the woods. He or she looked like a child from here, but I assumed it was Nikolai. I squinted but couldn’t make out any more details except that the person looked alone.

Feeling slightly more confident, I stayed low to the ground and crept toward the access. I caught my breath behind a thick oak tree and tugged my stun gun out of the plastic-lined neck pouch I had put it and the miniature tape recorder in to keep them dry and my hands free. I strapped the Z-Force to the belt of my stealth outfit—black turtleneck, black jeans with a black belt, hair pulled back in a black ponytail holder, and black tennis shoes left over from my waitressing days. I steeled myself and walked quietly and confidently across the open expanse of the boat launch and into the edge of the woods on the other side. I counted off a hundred yards as I stepped silently into the treed border and was only mildly frightened when a hand grabbed at me.

“About time you showed up!” a voice hissed. Nikolai’s round white face glowered at me in the darkness.

“I’m early.” I studied Nikolai. In the moonlit dark, his hair was a nondescript brown, and I guessed his eyes were also. He had a large head and puffed as he talked. The top of his cranium came to my boob level, which would make him a little shy of four feet. He was dressed in all black, too, and seemed injury-free and in perfect health save for the shortness of breath. This was interesting, since the last time I had seen him, he appeared to be suffering from a fatal gunshot wound on Shangri-La Island.

“If I’ve been waiting, you’re not early. Did you bring the tape recorder?”

I patted the neck pouch. “Right here.”

He acted peeved, but he wasn’t going to let that derail his fifteen minutes of fame. Hands on hips, he glared at me while he spoke in a tremulous voice underscoring his words. “Turn it on and settle back for the tale of a lifetime. It will amaze, thrill, and chill you. It will give you anticipation, perspiration, and exultation. You will feel delighted, excited, and ignited. When I tell you the tale of the Romanov Traveling Theater troupe, you will sigh, cry, and not want to say goodbye . . .”

This is how the talk went for over a half an hour, judging by the location of the moon. Nikolai told me how he founded the theater troupe when he failed out of clown school, how he recruited other disenfranchised clowns and circus acts into his troupe, what amazing acting abilities they had cultivated, how they branched out into a carnival show to attract children, and so on.

I was just about to interrupt him when he said something that made me sit up like a dahlia in the August sun: “. . . is when I met a fellow artist like myself with really good weed. He works over at the Last Resort, and we recruited him to play bongos at the Shangri-La show.”

“Is this fellow artist tall and lanky with curly brown hair, and does he talk like Shaggy from Scooby Doo?”

“Yes, he does, though that is simply one of the many faces he wears.” Nikolai stretched and brought his voice back to a less theatrical level. “That cat has a lot of fantastic ideas. He did agree that staging my own death would be a coup de theatre.”

Jed. He
was
involved in this. My stomach bravely fought an onslaught of acid, and then surrendered to my stress in a pitiful gurgle. Was Jed just another man hiding a sinister side? “That was quite the performance. So you staged your death on Shangri-La Island to get attention?”

“For the craft, madam, for the craft,” he said impatiently. “And for a little extra cash. But you are missing the point. I had my audience spellbound. It was the greatest possible moment in live theater.”

“Wait. Someone paid you to stage your death? Who and why?”

Nikolai grinned like the Cheshire cat and rubbed his hands together. “Let’s just say that someone had a criminal record and wanted to draw a little heat away. A harmless goal, really, but it made for spectacular theater, and now every officer in the county is looking for yours truly. I’m sure I would have thought of the plan on my own if he hadn’t presented the idea to me.”

I was mentally racing through past conversations with Jed, trying to remember if he had ever mentioned a criminal record. He might be goofy enough to talk Nikolai into staging his own death for the heck of it, but I don’t think he was creative or motivated enough to come up with the plan. “If
who
hadn’t presented the idea to you?” I demanded.

Nikolai was clearly exasperated that I was focusing on what he saw as a minor detail. He drew himself up to his full four feet. “Did Houdini tell his audience how he unlocked his chains while buried alive? Does David Copperfield reveal where his disappearing tigers go?”

Jesus, for rhetorical questions. I needed to come at this a different way, because once I knew who had put Nikolai up to staging his own death, I would have a better idea if Jason was my biggest problem, if he had accomplices, or if there was someone else up to no good who I didn’t even know about. I put the Jed issue onto the back burner for the moment and concentrated on distracting Nikolai into telling me who the person with the record was. “How’d you fool the paramedics into thinking you had been shot?”

He smiled arrogantly. “A stroke of genius.”

According to Nikolai’s story, the troupe’s lizard-eyed emcee had a prescription for Guanabenz, a medication used to treat high blood pressure. Some research revealed that a little more than the prescribed dose would slow the user’s heartbeat, contract his pupils, and put him in a semi-comatose state. Nikolai took the Guanabenz and had the emcee shoot him with blanks, then squished some fake blood pellets over his heart. Once the paramedics established he was stable but in serious condition, they applied pressure to stop his blood flow and took off.

“When we got to the hospital, I jumped off the gurney in the emergency room, did my trademark tap dance to the absolute astonishment of the medical staff, and was out the door, where the ringmaster was waiting in our tour van. It was beautifully executed at every point, and people will be talking about it for decades.” Nikolai polished his fists on his shirt and beamed.

I wouldn’t call that plan genius. It sounded like a string of dumb-and-luck beads to me. “You know, it’s illegal to use emergency services as props.”

“Hence, you and I meeting at midnight and the Romanov Traveling Theater troupe quietly disbanded and out of state for an unspecified period of time.”

“Do you know anything about the little girl who is missing?”

Nikolai looked genuinely surprised and wounded. “No. I am an artist, not a criminal, and I don’t hurt children.”

“So you got me out here so I could write the story of your fabulous death and escape?” What I really wanted to know is why I was so close to so much staged death. It wasn’t very funny.

“That’s part of it. The important part.” His voice and body seemed to shrink as he stepped outside of his theater guise and became a normal man weaseling for something. “The other part is I want you to get the box with the fake diamond planted in it for me. We can split the prize money seventy-thirty.”

I snorted involuntarily. I hadn’t seen that one coming. “Buddy, if I knew where the box was, I’d have found it by now, and I wouldn’t give you any.”