June Bug (2 page)

When Sunny’s parents had disappeared nearly twenty years earlier, all of their property had automatically gone to their only child. It came to a little over a hundred acres of the prettiest land in Minnesota, with a sky-blue farmhouse, a barn, and three red sheds planted in the center of it. The house had burned down a year ago and been replaced by a doublewide, but that only marginally affected the charm of the place. There were still rolling hills, tillable farmland, and wild prairie freckled with thick hardwood groves. And the jewel was the lakeshore. Sunny owned the whole side of Whiskey Lake from the public-access boat landing to the little private beach a mile north.

The only gap in her empire was the jutting arm of land known as Shangri-La Island. Technically, it was a mini-peninsula and not an island, since it wasn’t completely surrounded by water. It shared the two-mile driveway that abutted Sunny’s farm and wound east and then south onto the island. A good stretch of this isthmus of a driveway was waterlocked, with Sunny’s pond on one side and Whiskey Lake on the other.

The dwellings on Shangri-La—a beautiful main lodge and four cabins for the help—were built in 1924 by Philadelphia millionaire Randolph Addams and his wife, Beatrice Carnegie, granddaughter of Andrew Carnegie. Addams had fallen in love with the area on a fishing trip and hired local workers to build the main structure out of fieldstone and cedar. Local legend had it that one summer a wealthy guest of the Addamses had gone swimming wearing a diamond necklace—a gold chain with a diamond dewdrop as big as a baby’s fist dangling from it. She emerged from the water without the necklace, and the other guests and staff searched frantically. The jewel was never found.

According to Jason, that was about to change. A national travel magazine had published an article describing and rating the resort that now occupied Shangri-La Island. The article mentioned the missing diamond. Many people read the article, and one of those people was an editor at the
Star Tribune
in Minneapolis. She had family in the Battle Lake area and thought the missing diamond necklace would be an appealing human-interest story.

The front-page headline of the Friday, June 1, Source section read, “Hope for a Diamond in Minnesota’s Gorgeous Lake Country.” The paper planned to plant a fake diamond in a weighted box in the lake on Monday the fourth, and they were offering five thousand dollars and a free week at Shangri-La to whoever found it. Apparently, they did not have complete faith in the legend of the real diamond or, if they did, had decided it was beyond recovery. But the article made good copy and was a boon for the tourist industry that drives Minnesota summers.

Unfortunately, the paper had not seen fit to warn either the local papers or the residents of Battle Lake. Here I was, Mira James, star reporter (well, reporter at least) for the
Battle Lake Recall
and living on the very shores of Whiskey Lake, and I had to get the scoop from a guy who liked ketchup and Easy Cheese on his rehydrated mashed potatoes. Technically, it was Sunday morning, which meant the contest started tomorrow.

“So how’d
you
hear about it?” I asked peevishly.

Jason took a chug off the can of Dr. Pepper he had found in the back of the fridge and burped. I noticed he had avoided looking directly at me since I had shrieked at him bedside. His jaw had been clenched since he arrived, leaving a shadow from his temple to his mouth. His brown eyes traveled around the room, annoyed or distracted. He wasn’t even close to a smile, so I couldn’t see if he still had those brace-straightened whites that made girls’ hearts flutter. Until they got to know him better, that is.

He turned to grab his shirt. He had folded it in a pile with his pants and shiny dock shoes outside my bedroom door, next to a flashlight and a six-pack of cheap beer. “Word gets around.”

“All the way to Texas?”

His shoulder blades tensed. Although he hadn’t minded talking about the diamond between shovelfuls of Potato Buds, when it came to discussing his life, he wasn’t very forthcoming. He rubbed the scratch on his back again, this time with more intensity. It looked an angry and infected red in the light, and I could see two lighter scratches running parallel to it. I wondered if he was getting cat scratch fever. The kind you get from getting scratched by a really big cat. “I left Texas a while ago. I was working up on the East Coast.”

“Doing what?” My fingers were still tracing infinity shapes. I ran my hand through my shoulder-length brown hair and forced my body to be still.

“Working.” He pulled his shirt sharply over his head, covering the scratch marks. Suddenly, he couldn’t leave fast enough.

“Mmm-hmm.” Just like that, the power in the room shifted. I blinked at him, doubtless much like a pit bull does when it senses it should probably let go of the person in its mouth but can’t remember how to unlock its jaw. “What kind of work?”

He stopped in mid-tuck and turned toward the door. “Construction.”

“House or road?”

“Jesus, Mira, back off!”

My neck twitched in response to his tone of voice. He had more than blue balls on his mind. If I was reading this situation correctly, Sunny’s house had been Jason’s first stop. If he were really in town to visit his parents, then he would have already been to see them at least once. Horny or not, he was still a born-and-bred Minnesota Lutheran boy, and he knew his mom would never stop the nagging if she heard he had come to this house first.

No, there had to be more incentive to pull him over Sunny’s way than the promise of Potato Buds and tuna surprise. The diamond was the obvious reason, but how had he found out about it? Jason didn’t have a reputation as much of a reader, so it was unlikely he had heard about the missing jewel all the way over on the East Coast by perusing the travel magazine or the online version of the
Star Tribune
. And since no one in the Battle Lake area yet knew about the diamond search—because if they had it would have gotten back to the
Recall
given the momentum theory of small-town words—it was even less likely that someone from here had contacted him. He was almost out the door, but I suddenly wanted him to stay and tell me how he had found out about the lost necklace contest and why he was so reluctant to tell me what he had been up to.

He brushed past me quickly, flashlight and beer in hand. His elbow connected with mine in a sharp crack, and I couldn’t tell if it was intentional. At the door, he turned and glanced once into my eyes, his dark brown staring down my gray. And then the screen door slapped closed and I was left alone with a crusty potato-making pan, a counter full of open condiments, and the feeling that Jason and I would be seeing each other again really soon.

I wiped my nose and began cleaning up, not relaxing until I heard the roar of his car starting and could follow his taillights as they departed down the long driveway. My hands were still shaky, and I felt displaced and edgy. I knew one thing that would calm me down for sure, but I didn’t like to give in to the bad habit.

I paced the kitchen, still thick with the smell of fake potatoes and Jason’s spicy-cheap Drakkar cologne, and listed all the reasons it would be a bad idea to rip into my old standby: although it made me feel good for the moment, coming down was always hard; empty calories at night go straight to the designated ass pockets; and I’d need to brush my teeth again.
Screw it
. I walked to the freezer and pulled out a red and green Nut Goodie package quickly, before reason or good sense took over.

Frozen Nut Goodies are the only way to go in the summer. The cool chocolate slides around on your tongue, and the maple center gets hard and chewy all at once, like iced-up honey. I peeled the wrapper and bit off the chocolate lip, letting the sweet darkness and nuts merge in my mouth. When I reached the light brown maple center, I was forced to leverage the bar in the back of my mouth between the molars to crack off a piece. I braced a chunk and sucked it slowly, letting the crystallized, nutty sugar dissolve into my veins. I felt a spreading warmth as I settled into my Nut Goodie high, the world and all its creatures right for one perfect moment.

I let Luna in before I started cleaning. She usually slept in the house, but tonight, she had wanted to be outside, probably because of the commotion down at the lake. Had Luna been in the house, she would have woken me up before Jason got to my bed.

“Hey, girl. Wild night?” I asked as I scratched behind her ears. Luna was a German Shepherd mix that Sunny had found on the side of Highway 210 when she was just a puppy. When I took over as housesitter, the dog was part of the package. She got along fine with Tiger Pop, my calico kitty and consummate coward. I hadn’t seen Tiger Pop since Jason had arrived, and my best guess was that he was sleeping in his second favorite spot in the house—the pile of clean clothes in the laundry room.

It was 3:23 Sunday morning by the time I had the kitchen cleaned, and a focused to-do list buzzed in my head: stop the presses and submit an article for Monday’s
Recall
ASAP so we didn’t look like dorks; ask around about Jason to satisfy my curiosity and get back my feeling of safety; get online and research the tale of Whiskey Lake and the real diamond necklace. Oh, and rent some diving equipment while there was still some to be had.

After the kitchen was in order, I forced myself to lie down and concentrate on the inside of my eyelids for two full hours. I considered it a major achievement that I only spent seventy-five percent of that time considering that Jason Blunt was bringing nothing but bad luck with him and that maybe I wouldn’t be lucky enough to escape this time.

I woke up around seven a.m. Sunday with enough sand inside my eyes to make a pearl necklace. Two hours of worried sleep does not a pretty gal make. I threw off the quilt and vowed not to look in a mirror for at least twenty-four hours. A loon cried, sad and long, about two hundred yards from my bedroom window, and I looked out to see a low fog kissing the lake. The lake. I had to get to town and spread the word about the diamond contest on Whiskey Lake. I forwent a shower and instead slapped on some deodorant, pulled my hair into a twisted bun at the nape of my neck, and splashed cool water on my face and mint toothpaste on my teeth. I put Luna and Tiger Pop outside along with fresh water and full dishes of food, and I headed into town.

I drove through sleepy Battle Lake, the burg quiet but for a couple cars outside the Fortune Café—probably tourists loading up on gourmet coffee—and two heavy-duty pickup trucks pulling sleek, sparkly boats. Battle Lake is in what is called west central Minnesota. This part of the state is closer to the Dakotas than Wisconsin, near the pointy-elbow shape on the left side of the state when you’re looking at a map. In the summer, the town swells with tourists who come in search of great fishing, quality beach time, comfort food at the local restaurants, and hiking at the state park right outside of the city limits. Locals grumble about the tourists, but Battle Lake would dry up without them. I had only been here since March, which put me somewhere between tourist and visiting-family-member status.

When I had first arrived in town, I got a job at the Battle Lake Public Library in addition to my newspaper job. I started out as an assistant librarian, but some freaky events in May had resulted in my being promoted to head librarian. This was good, not only for the slight pay bump but also because I didn’t have a computer at home. Now that I was the boss of the library, I had regular access to the Internet.

I pulled into the empty library parking lot and chose a spot. The library was closed on Sundays, so I would be able to write uninterrupted. Once I got inside and fired up the computer, the article on the diamond didn’t take too long to write. With a BA in English, not to mention a few graduate-level courses in the same, I was really good at plagiarizing. I simply downloaded a copy of the original
Star Tribune
article, wrote a new lead, reordered some words and replaced others, and the meat of it was complete. The problem was finding a way to make it seem like we had known about the diamond contest all along. As soon as a draft was complete, I tracked down the editor of the
Recall
, Ron Sims, at the paper’s little headquarters in town to bring him up to speed.

When I walked into the office, the fresh, metallic tang of ink washed over me. Except for that smell, this two-room rented space could pass for a waiting area in the DMV. The walls were tan, and the carpet was tan with gray specks. There were no pictures on the walls, and the only furniture in the front room was Ron’s desk, his chair, a filing cabinet, and a stack of the latest edition of the
Recall
. There was a Macintosh in the room at the rear, alongside the outdated but functioning printing press. I loved going back there. The press, with its humming, clanging parts, held so much potential, even though we just turned out small-town fare for the most part.

It took me all of thirty seconds to fill Ron in.

“Oh Christ,” he said. “When did the
Star Tribune
article come out?”

Ron was a pretty harmless guy in his late forties. He had thinning gray hair and light brown eyes and usually wore tan clothes. In fact, he was the human version of his office. He was the owner, editor-in-chief, desktop publisher, full-time reporter, photographer, and salesman at the
Recall
, which was why he was in the office early on a Sunday. The newspaper was his main claim to fame, besides the fact that he and his wife had a tendency for excessive displays of affection, forcing them to do everything short of lift their legs and spray each other in public. The two of them had gotten kicked out of a bar or two for their extreme PDA, but mostly everybody in town was just happy to see married people making out with the people they had married.

Ron had originally hired me on to write fill-in articles, though he had recently given me more work since I broke the story on Jeff Wilson’s murder last month. This included my very own recipe column, called “Battle Lake Bites.” My weekly goal was to find some gastronomic combination that, in Ron’s words, “was representative of Battle Lake.” So far, my two hits had been Phony Abalone (chicken soaked in clam juice so it tastes like fish) and Deer Pie (think Freddy Krueger meets Bambi, and add Velveeta).

Between me and Betty Orrinson, who wrote the “Tittle Tattler,” there were a total of three employees at the
Recall
. And unless Betty was holding out information, which would have been counterintuitive for her, not one of us had heard about the
Star Tribune
article until it was almost too late.

I slapped the downloaded copy of the
Star Tribune
article in front of him. “It came out June first. The contest officially starts tomorrow at dawn, but there were already boats out on Whiskey around two-thirty this morning.”

Ron leaned back in his swivel chair, crossed his legs, and hoisted them onto his desk with a grunt, lacing his fingers behind his head. I imagine he was going for a Woodward and Bernstein pose of urgent journalistic thoughtfulness, but the gap in his shirt above the top snap of his pants leaked out too much belly-button hair to permit that.

“Damn big-city newspapers. Think they don’t need to tell the little guy what’s going on. Well, this little guy has a trump card.”

I was thinking that this little guy looked like he had eaten a couple other little guys, but I didn’t want to sidetrack his train of thought.

“We have something they don’t have. We’ve got the human-interest angle. You know Shirly Tolverson, down at the Senior Sunset?”

I hadn’t been around town long enough to know all the locals by name, but I certainly knew the Senior Sunset. In fact, I was becoming a little too familiar with it. It was a nursing home in the purest sense of the phrase, and I had spent a lot of time there when I was investigating Jeff’s murder, supposedly for my article in the
Recall
, but mostly for peace of mind. Actually, most of the residents there were great when they weren’t looking for help breaking out. In fact, I had gone back just last week to help them till up and plant their little rectangle of garden, staying to play three-handed Schafkopf with some residents. I left $4.75 poorer and convinced I would spend more time there if not for the smell of the place. It was the perfume of a small-town prom gone bad—cafeteria food, cheap makeup, and Lysol. “I’m sure I could find her,” I told Ron.

“Him. His dad sold the lumber to the Addamses to build Shangri-La, and Shirly helped out when he was a kid. I used to hear him tell tales of it at the Turtle Stew. Go see him pronto and find an
angle. I’ll pull the layout and make room.” Ron hitched his pants and sat forward in his desk, a rare look of purpose in his eyes. “You e-mail me an article before midnight tonight. Damn good thing this paper comes out on a Monday, or we’d be caught with our pants down.”

I saw a forty-watt bulb switch on over Ron’s head, and I wondered if his “pants down” comment gave him an idea of something new to try with his wife. When I left, he was muttering about the “fishing contest on the back page” and “pissed-off Lutherans.” He could complain about the hassle of rearranging the layout on a paper ready to go to press, but I think he was secretly pleased to have a sense of urgency on the job. That’s why most people go into journalism: to feel like they’re breaking news and helping people. At the
Recall
, most of our reporting dealt with who was dining with whom, who had gotten arrested for what, and whose kids had gotten scholarships to where.

I stepped out into the cloudy June Sunday and looked at my watch. 10:33. Probably snack time at the Sunset, but if I hurried the four blocks, I could be there and gone before lunch was served. I wasn’t sure what a room full of geriatric diners looked like, but I was willing to bet the sound stuck with a person for a while. I’d make this quick.

I was strolling past First National Bank on a shortcut to the Sunset when a barn swallow swooped down from its nest in the bank clock and dove at my head. The deal with the bank clock is that it’s really old and ornate and beautiful, but only one side tells time correctly, and I swear the correct side alternates. Today, the side facing downtown said it was 10:34 and the side facing uptown said it was 7:20.

I was concentrating on these details to keep my mind off the fact that a bird swooping at one’s head was bad luck. I have a fear-love relationship with birds: I’m afraid of their little winged lizardness, and they love it. I try to keep my bird feeders at home full to appease the bird gods and to keep them from smelling my fear, but this little brown barn swallow diving at me was telling me something, and it wasn’t good. I wondered if it had something to do with me bringing Tiger Pop when I moved here, or if maybe the water in the bird bath outside my doublewide was stale.

“Mira? Y’all are sure up early on a Sunday. It’s my good luck, sweetie!”

Aw shit. That’s what the swallow was telling me. It was just trying to warn me that Kennie Rogers, mayor of Battle Lake, was around the corner. Maybe I’d have to rethink my view of birds. “Hi, Kennie. Actually, I’m usually up—”

“And did you get your hair cut? It’s so flattering, that field-worker look. So natural. I wish I could pull it off.” Kennie beamed at me, smoothing her frayed denim vest with her free hand. She must have greased the inside to squeeze into it, because her boobs were squished together into an enormous uni-breast with barely a crack in the top.

Her hair was coifed to frosted perfection, the curled ends crackling with Aqua Net. One errant spark and she’d go off like a rocket. Her makeup was applied with its usual putty-knife precision, her eyelids a glittery purple underneath the penciled black brow, dark lines of blush along each side of her nose to make it look thinner, her lips a bruised raspberry with a brown pencil line tracing a perfect pout well outside her mouth’s natural borders.

She was wearing rolled-up, faded Levi’s and cork-heeled pumps, a la J. Lo, but instead of looking like a trendy Latina, Kennie managed to pass for a stuffed Norwegian. “Well, don’t just stand there gapin’ at me. Aren’t y’all gonna ask me what’s in my hand?” She waved a stack of papers at me.

“What’s in your hand, Kennie?” I asked, remembering that one is supposed to pretend one’s dead when approached by a charging animal.

“Flyers for my new business! Whee!”

Kennie’s last business had been old-lady beauty contests, where there were no winners, if you know what I mean. Before that, it had been private house orgies for the aged, complete with bongs and naked rosemaling. I waved over Kennie’s shoulder at an imaginary friend and took off jogging.

Kennie chased after me, quick as a cheetah in her strappy sandals, and grabbed my arm. “You silly! Just take a look. It don’t cost nothin’ to look.” Kennie flashed me a sly smile.

I glanced around, my head twitchy, but church was in session and the streets were pretty empty. I was on my own, and I best take my medicine. “Let’s see it, Kennie.”

She smiled and nodded, eagerly handing over a brochure.

I turned over the folded paper. It looked like it had been produced with the cheap desktop publishing software that comes installed on most new computers nowadays. The paper was résumé-thickness, tri-folded to create a pamphlet. On the front were two clip-art suns, one next to the other, with the words “Minnesota Nice Inc.” curved underneath like a grinning mouth. Held at arm’s length, it looked like a New Age smiley face. I braced myself for wrinkly nudity of some sort and folded open the front flap.

“Well?” Kennie asked, balancing impatiently on one foot while she fiddled with her cheap metal ankle bracelet.

I glanced at her and then back to the first paragraph, which was actually a check-marked list:

Having trouble breaking up with that gal who doesn’t let you watch football on Sundays?