June Bug (17 page)

“That’s why you need me. I know where the box is. The troupe and I were staying at a patron’s acreage on the north side of this lake, and I watched three people in black dive suits slip into the creek that leads into the quiet side of the lake very early Monday morning. They had a black box tied to a rock and dragged it into the lake with them. I would have missed them except that I was up early planning my magnificent death and escape.”

“Why didn’t you have someone from your troupe get it?”

“None of us know how to dive.”

“How do you know I know how to dive?”

Nikolai grunted. “Everyone knows that, m’dear. You’re the one who got tangled up on that ‘dead’ body in front of Shangri-La.”

“Humph.” On principle, I didn’t want to help him out, but there was a nice chunk of cash at stake. “Fifty-fifty.”

“Sixty-forty.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Fifty-five-forty-five.”

“Fifty-fifty. And you better take it, because I know where the creek is and I can just find the box all on my own now.”

“Okay, fifty-fifty. But you can’t find the box on your own without a little bit more information. Swear to me you will not take more than half the reward money for that box.”

I held out my hand. “I swear.”

“Okay, then, and that’s on tape.” He shook my hand with his child-sized free one and pointed at the recorder clipped to my waist, its tiny wheels spinning robotically in the starlight. “The reason no one has found the box yet is the divers wrapped it in a camouflage net. Their bubbles stopped about seventy-five yards straight out from the creek, so go due south from there and look for the netting on the bottom of the lake. Underneath that is our ticket to five thousand dollars.”

A movement up the shore caught my eye. “Unless someone else finds it first.” I pointed about two hundred yards east of us, where I saw one diver dragging another into the lake.

Nikolai chuckled softly. “Right on time. This one’s on me.”

I looked at him, amazed. I had written him off as a pompous actor midway through the interview, but he still had some secrets up his sleeve. I returned my attention to the two divers, and it took me a full minute before I realized what I was seeing. Someone was planting another body in the lake, and I didn’t know if this one was real or not.

From my perch on the edge of the woods, I couldn’t make out the details of the tableau two hundred yards up the shore, except that the standing diver wore a dark dive suit with writing on the rump and had on a yellow tank. He had his facemask on and his regulator in and was breathing and splashing loudly. With the oxygen on his back and the body in his arms, he was moving with all the grace of a
Land of the Lost
Sleestack.

When he took his first full step, I saw he had a noticeable limp. Jed. The suited body he was hauling was tied to a rock, and I realized it had to be another bogus body or a very light one, because no normal human could drag a full-suited person and a rock while fully outfitted to dive. I had a shrieking notion that Jed may have Peyton strapped to his back, but I ignored it. I actively refused to believe Jed was evil. He was planting
fake
bodies, and I thought I knew why.

I was still hoping for more information from Nikolai, though he was proving to be craftier than I had given him credit for. “Who is it?” I whispered under my breath.

“You’ll have to get the combination for that safe on your own, m’dear. I’m done for the night. I’ll meet you back here tomorrow to get my half of the reward. Same time, same rules.”

Nikolai took off into the woods, but I wasn’t paying attention to him. I wasn’t thinking about who had convinced him to pretend to die. I wasn’t looking at the bubbles that now marked the ghoulish diver’s underwater mission. I wasn’t even thinking about Peyton. I was having a real, honest-to-goodness, light-bulb-sparking-over-my-head epiphany. Nikolai had said that I’d need to discover the combination for that safe on my own. It had been an offhand choice of words, but it had more meaning for me. Of course. Regina’s code numbers were the combination to a safe: 23 left, 12 right, 11 left. Cosmic duh! I just had to find out what she meant by the kissing tree, and I’d have the jewels.

Unfortunately, I still had no charges to press against Jason. I would just have to settle for finding the jewels first—and an old-fashioned nose-thumbing in Jason’s general direction. Still, I couldn’t help considering what I had been dreading: that Jason was responsible for Peyton’s disappearance. Was I just becoming paranoid, attributing all the bad things in town to him because he had attacked me a few years ago? I couldn’t cloud my objectivity with a personal vendetta even though I had seen Jason with Peyton and Leylanda only the day before. What would a man in search of jewels want with a little girl?

Maybe the person with the criminal record who convinced Nikolai to shoot himself was a stranger, and maybe he had kidnapped Peyton for some unknown reason. Jason could simply be after the jewels in an aggressive fashion—not out of character for him. I needed more information. It seemed like my best bet was to speak with Leylanda tomorrow and find out if she knew more than she thought she did.

I mulled over hurrying back to my house now and calling the police to tell them someone was planting another body in the lake, but I had a heavy feeling that Jed wouldn’t get treated well by law enforcement. I told myself I wasn’t even 100 percent positive it was Jed. There could be more than one person in Otter Tail County with a limp. Anyways, I didn’t want to pull any person power away from the search for Peyton.

And if it was Jed, I wanted to hear his side of the story before I turned him in. There would be no confronting ghost divers tonight. I quietly hiked the forty-five minutes back to my house, waved wistfully at my bed through the window, and drove to town to crash on Gina’s couch.

I slept poorly, nightmares of Peyton on a fiery roller-coaster ride pockmarking the few hours of sleep I scratched out. I woke on
Gina’s couch near dawn, tired and crabby, Tiger Pop curled up on my feet and Luna snuffling at my ear. I took patient Luna for a long walk, noticing that the town was already wallpapered with posters of the missing seven-year-old and that either the searchers were up early or they had never gone to bed. The Channel 5 News crew was in front of the bank, interviewing an employee of Woodlawn Resort. I heard her say she was one of the coordinators of the local search party and that they weren’t going to stop looking until they found our girl. The camera lights glinted off the “Find Peyton” button on her chest, and she looked straight into the camera when she spoke. Small towns have big hearts for their children.

I snuffed the guilt bubble growing in me. I shouldn’t have slept at all last night. I should have hunted for Peyton. No. I couldn’t get this involved again. My dad had taught me the dangers of getting attached to another person. Besides, what could I do that the whole town wasn’t already doing? My time was best spent getting my hands on those jewels and nailing Jason. I brought Luna back to Gina’s and returned to the library just in time to open it at ten o’clock. Mrs. Berns was waiting outside and wearing a fuchsia running suit, which was ironic, since the only exercise she got didn’t require clothes.

“You look like warm barf. You sleepin’ okay?”

I turned the key to the front door and heard the tumbler click. Peyton’s face was staring sweetly back at me from the flyer placed on the door. “Matter of fact, I’m not, Mrs. Berns. My life has been a little hectic lately.” I was thinking that in addition to my worries for Peyton, my race to find the jewels, my investigative reporting, and my full-time library job, I also had two dear animals, a large lawn, and flower and vegetable gardens that I was neglecting. My life was running away without me.

“You should let some of your responsibility go, and I can help, dear. Here’s my resumé. I’m your new part-time librarian.”

I looked at the handwritten sheet of lined notebook paper she had shoved into my hand, the confetti edges still hanging on where she had ripped it out of a spiral tablet. In the center of the page, she had scribbled, “My name is Mrs. Berns, and I’m your new assistant librarian.” Very concise.

“Mrs. Berns, I don’t know if we have the budget for another librarian.”

She cocked her head and waggled her finger at me. “You had enough money for you and Lartel, that wacko, swishy-pant-wearin’ freak, so you got enough money for you and me. You tell me if you got someone better beggin’ for this job.”

She did have a point in that the line of people who wanted to sit in a stone building on a beautiful Minnesota summer day for minimum wage was only slightly longer than the line of Otter Tail County men who wanted to go into counseling to improve their personal relationships. “Okay, Mrs. Berns. I’ll hire you on a trial basis. If you work out, I’ll set you up for regular hours.”

She clapped her hands and then rubbed them together. “You’re a smart girl. The first thing we’re going to do is get an adult section in here. All these namby-pamby books are a good front, but we know what people really want to read. And in back, you need a smoking room to draw the bar crowd. And this carpeting—”

“No! No changes! If you’re going to work here, you have to remember that I’m the boss. This is the public library, not a pleasure palace. Now, why don’t you start by shelving those books in the drop-off bin?”

I pointed at the box by the door, and she scowled at me, arms crossed on her chest, and then backed down. I sensed that this was the calm before the storm, and she was just gathering strength for a later confrontation. Until then, I was going to enjoy the help.

Mrs. Berns turned out to be an astonishingly efficient coworker when she wasn’t reading over patrons’ shoulders or goosing the male clientele. With her help, the library was looking tidy and more organized than it had since I started in March. It was an hour before closing, and there was nothing left to do.

“Why don’t you go home, dear,” she suggested. “You can get a little sleep or whatnot. I’ll get these people out of here at closing and lock up.”

The offer was tempting. Mrs. Berns had already worked alone at the library once and had not burned it down or gotten the chairs sticky in any after-hours orgy. Besides, I was itching to talk to Jed, and I also needed to walk Luna and then run home and mow my lawn before it became a wood tick sanctuary. That would give me time to talk to Leylanda tonight to see if I could make any connections between Peyton’s disappearance and the other strangeness in town.

I just didn’t know about leaving Mrs. Berns with the keys. She had a history of raucous and racy behavior. “I only have the one key, Mrs. Berns, and the city council gave me strict instructions not to lend it out when they gave me the job.”

Mrs. Berns dug around in her white plastic purse, which was lying on the counter, and came out with a rapper-sized key ring. She methodically clinked through the metal passports. “Municipal liquor store, high school, cop shop . . . here it is! The Battle Lake Public Library. Looks like we’re set.”

I was astounded. “How’d you get keys to all those places?”

Mrs. Berns winked at me. “A woman’s wiles. Plus, it’s sort of a hobby of mine.”

The realization that Mrs. Berns had probably already spent a lot of time alone in the library was oddly liberating. “It’s a deal. Close it up at the top of the hour, and I’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning at opening so we can draw up your schedule.”

“It’s a deal, homey.” Mrs. Berns grabbed my hand in some sort of gangsta handshake and headed back to the stacks. I snatched my purse from behind the counter. It contained the tape and tape recorder I had used last night, and I wanted to listen to it again to see if I had missed any clues.

A short car drive brought me to West Battle Lake and the Last Resort. I took in the rundown look of the place, noticing for the first time that one of the cabin’s roofs was sagging and that the boats tied to the dock were pretty banged up. Sal directed me to the hammock tied between two trees on the beach, where I found Jed snoozing, wearing nothing but bright aqua Bermuda shorts. He had a fresh bandage wrapped around his knee. I prodded him gently.

He snorted, stretched, and opened one eye. “Whaddya know for sure?” His wide smile was sincere.

“Not much these days, Jed. Your knee looks a little rough. How’d you say you hurt it again?”

He pushed himself to a seated position and rubbed the swollen area around the bandage. “I scraped it on a rock, diving.”

“On Sunday, you said you twisted it unloading a boat and that you hadn’t been diving in a while.”

He looked at me once, quickly, and his cheeks flushed in embarrassment. “Yeah, I musta forgot. You know, it’d be great to find that box.”

“It sure would be nice to have some extra money to fix up this place, wouldn’t it?” I asked. “Business has been kinda slow here, according to Sal.”

Jed nodded solemnly, and then his face brightened. “But it’s already getting better, Mira! What with that fake dead body in front of Shangri-La, and then the shooting, no one wants to stay there anymore. We’re full up for the first time in three summers.”

I shook my head sadly. Jed was pretty transparent. “Jed, I know you planted that body that I found in Whiskey and another one last night. I saw you.”

Jed’s eyes grew big like fried eggs, and I could see the wheels turning behind them as he struggled to find a way out of this. Unfortunately, all the pot had rusted his cogs. A big, shiny tear formed at the corner of each eye. “Mira, I feel so shitty about that. I really do, man, and I know my karma is going to be sub-groovy. But I had to help my parents. I had to! I suppose you’re gonna turn me into the Man?”

“What do you know about Jason Blunt?”

“Nothin’, except he was a supreme toker back in high school. That man would do any drug you passed him. A little bit of a temper, but otherwise fun.” Jed smiled happily at the memory.

“Is he involved in any of this?”

Jed looked puzzled. “Planting those two bodies to scare people off Whiskey Lake was my own idea, Mira. Nobody else even knows I did this.”

Except for me and Nikolai. Jed wouldn’t be earning the adjective “stealthy” anytime soon. “Why’d you tell me that Jason rented some dive suits from you?”

“It was the only name I could think of when you asked me. How’d you figure out it was me underwater surfin’ the bodies?”

“Mostly dumb luck, Jed. I’ll make a deal with you. You stop selling pot, stop planting bodies, and stop hanging out with actors and carnival folk, and I won’t tell on you.”

“Can I still smoke pot?”

“Until your head starts on fire.”

“Deal!” He shook my hand enthusiastically and was wiggling like a puppy. He had been harboring guilt about his dead-body missions, and I had absolved him.