Knee High By The 4th Of July Part 7

"I need you to come to the station to answer some questions, Ms. James."

"OK, well I'm free later this afternoon, maybe around 4:00?"

"Now."

"Can't we just talk here?"

"I don't think you want that."

"Fine." I tossed my head with what I hoped was arrogant innocence, but to tell the truth, I felt a little green around the gills. Gary Wohnt and I silently walked the two blocks to the Battle Lake Police Station. The three-room brick building was stifling. The open windows allowed in the pizza-oven hot air of the late morning, and the lazy ceiling fan circulated it down into my face.

"Why don't you have a seat, Ms. James." It was not a question.

I pulled up the metal chair with a screech and sat down so I was facing Gary Wohnt across his desk. I was going to outlast him. He had nothing on me. I would stare him down, one mask of control to another. We might be here for days, but I would not talk.

"I didn't take Wenonga. I was only there on Friday morning because I noticed he was gone. I was going to tell you but I was worried you'd think I had something to do with stealing him. I wouldn't steal him. I loved him. Those were my fingerprints on the one post, but that was just an accident." Dammit.

Wohnt sighed and closed his eyes for ten long seconds, his fingers forming a teepee over the bridge of his nose. "That's not why I asked you to come here today, Ms. James. You are here because two hours ago, a dead body was found in Jonathan Leeson's cabin on Silver Lake, and you were the last confirmed person seen in Mr. Leeson's company."

s.h.i.+t. He was up to date. "Why aren't you out there now?"

"There are officers on the scene. In fact, the FBI has been called in. I would like to be able to present as much information as possible to them when they arrive. You can help me with that." He leaned back in his chair, but his posture did not give an inch. "Do you know where Mr. Leeson is right now?"

I knew where he told me he was going to be. Visiting his grandma in Stevens Point. However, I was very sure that was not where he was. "Did you ask his mom?"

"Mrs. Leeson said she believed her son was staying at the cabin for the night and does not know his current whereabouts."

"Do you know whose body it is?"

"We haven't positively identified the body. What did you and Mr. Leeson visit about at Stub's last night?"

"Ummm, gardening mostly."

"Are you dating Mr. Leeson?"

I snorted involuntarily. "No."

"I think it'd be best if you submitted a set of your fingerprints."

"Right now?"

"Yes."

"Do I have to?"

"We would look favorably upon it if you did."

"Do I have to?"

"I highly recommend it."

"Do I have to?"

"No."

I took a deep breath. "Then I think I'll go. OK?"

"Don't go far."

I was walking toward the door, worried that Wohnt was going to change his mind about letting me go but unable to stop the question leaking out my mouth. "The body you found. Was it missing part of its scalp?"

Gary Wohnt had closed his eyes again, so I couldn't tell what he was thinking, but for a second, it sounded like there was humor in his voice. "Yes. It was."

As I pushed outside into the hairy wall of heat, my head was reeling, and it didn't stop until I entered the door of the Fortune Cafe. The cool air laced with ginger and chocolate brought my anxiety down a notch. I would get to the bottom of this. The whole Battle Lake world was in a steaming latrine, and I needed to fix it. Not to save anyone else, mind you, but for my own peace of mind and so the cops would leave me alone. I'd find the Chief, and Bill Myers, and discover why Dolly and Johnny had hidden a body in his cabin for me to find. Those who had messed up would pay. I squared my shoulders and walked up to the counter and directly into the l.u.s.ty path of Brando Erikkson's gaze. He stood from his two-chair table and strode toward me.

"Mira! Two run-ins in under twenty-four hours. Fate must be bringing us together."

"It's a small town," I grumbled. "It's gravity bringing us together."

"Ha ha! Will you join me?"

I looked around the tiny cafe, dominated by a large gla.s.s display case leading to the kitchens in back. It was lunch rush, and there were no empty tables. I poked my head around the corner to the game room and library and still saw no place to sit. I considered getting some coffee to go, but reminded myself of my newfound commitment to get to the bottom of things. That included talking to Brando to find out what he knew. I might as well do it in public, in the daylight. "Sure."

I started to walk toward the counter, but Brando put his arm on mine. "I'll get it. What would you like?"

I sat down reluctantly. "An iced coffee and a cinnamon scone would be fine, thank you." I grudgingly admired his very tight rear as he walked toward the counter. Too bad he gave me the creeps. My brain stayed quiet until he returned.

"Here you go."

"Thanks."

Brando set the coffee and scone in front of me, but instead of sitting at the chair across the table, he stood, leaning into it. "You didn't come to my party last night."

I sipped the sweet, cool coffee and felt it slice through some of the fog on my brain. "I was tired. I went home."

"Too bad. It was a great time. Good music, good drinks, hot men." He winked at me, and stretched his hands over his head like a cat in a sunbeam.

"Great."

"Yes, this is a nice little town you have here. The woodchuck is going to fit in real nice."

I coughed on a piece of scone. "I was going to ask you about that. Why a woodchuck?"

Brando smirked and ran a hand sinuously up his own thigh and stroked his chest through his s.h.i.+rt. He placed one foot on his chair, giving me a full view of his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e cleavage. I was pretty sure he was about ready to ask me to cup his b.a.l.l.s when I realized what he was doing. He was flirting with himself, with me as his audience.

"Can you please sit down? It's hard to talk to you when you're standing."

Brando looked slightly taken aback, and then disappointed, but he plunked down. "You're a feisty one."

"Not so much. Bitter is probably a better word. So why the woodchuck? Why not another Chief Wenonga?"

He ran his fingers through his glossy black hair. "Indian chiefs are costly to make. It takes weeks to make any of the big men, but the Indians take even longer. We start out with a single statue mold for all of them, and from that, we create any variety of roadside art-Paul Bunyans, m.u.f.fler Men, Carolina Cowboy, Jesus Christ. For those guys, we just place different objects in the hands, like axes or crosses, but for the Indian line, we needed to build a whole new chest and arms for the mold. We don't even make them anymore. In fact, we only made three statues out of that Chief Wenonga mold."

"You're in a weird line of work."

Brando shook his head in disagreement, donning his salesman cap. "Not at all! My dad started out making boats in Wisconsin, but we needed something to do during the off-season, so we started making the big men. The work was crude at first, but now it's art. I don't sell anything that isn't absolutely perfect."

"Which is why you're giving away the woodchuck?"

"It's face melted a little. You can hardly tell when you're driving past it."

"When is Battle Lake getting the woodchuck?"

"It's on its way as we speak, from Stevens Point, Wisconsin."

Click. Last night Johnny told me he was visiting his grandma in Stevens Point. Brando's company is in Stevens Point. Too much coincidence. "You know Johnny Leeson?"

"Oh yeah, he's that albino guy in that band. The one with the brother. I like their stuff." Brando took this opportunity to slide his hand across the table and onto my arm. I grabbed my coffee and brought it to my lips, slurping the last of it and wrenching my arm out of reach.

"Not Johnny Winter. Johnny Leeson. He's from Battle Lake."

"Never heard of him."

I got the distinct impression Brando didn't pay much attention to men. "So how long does it take to dismantle a statue like Chief Wenonga?"

Brando's eyes flashed sharply, so quickly that I might have imagined it, and then went back to their half-lidded state. "I don't know. I'm an artist, not a construction worker. That was before my modeling career, you know."

If his reference to modeling was meant to impress me, it was a wasted effort. "If you make the statues, you have to have some idea of how they come apart."

He sighed and leaned back heavily in his chair, looking bored. "You only have one-note women in this town? That Kennie Rogers is about as interesting as hemorrhoid surgery, too. Sloppy kisser, by the way."

I clenched my fists. I wasn't going to sign up for Kennie's fan club anytime soon, but knocking her was my job, not his. "You can say a lot of things about Kennie, but the woman is not boring. And the only thing worse than a sloppy kisser is a man who kisses and tells. So what do you know about taking fibergla.s.s statues apart?"

He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes, still pouting. "Like I said, the statues are made from fibergla.s.s in open molds. Then we bond the seams together, and you've got a statue. We set them up; we don't take them down."

The bell on the front door twinkled, and Brittany and Heaven strolled in. Brando's eyes were on them like metal on a magnet, and I was immediately invisible.

"Never? You never take them down?"

"Huh?"

Brittany and Heaven sauntered to the front and bent over the baked goods display case, their Daisy Dukes magically covering their lower a.s.s shelf. Or maybe they didn't have lower a.s.s shelves. Suddenly angry myself, I grabbed my empty plate and gla.s.s and set them on the bus cart behind me. I flicked Brando on his head to get his attention. "You've never taken a statue down?"

He kept his gaze on the eye candy, a sneer on his well-formed lips. "No. You'd need a wrecking ball for that. There's no way to take one of those statues down without destroying it."

Ouch. Until now, I had a.s.sumed that Chief Wenonga had been statue-napped and was in a warehouse somewhere, or maybe an empty silo, whole and perhaps missing me. Brando Erikkson's careless words were crus.h.i.+ng that dream. I needed to face facts: Chief Wenonga was gone, never to return. I tried that reality on for size for thirty whole seconds, staring at the side of Brando's head as he stared at Brittany and Heaven's behinds. "You're a dumb a.s.s," I said, and whisked myself out. My made-from-scratch reality was going to win this one.

Underneath my bravado, however, I was hurting. I needed to clear my head, and that meant a whole afternoon of gardening. The fates had a different plan for me, unfortunately.

"Mira! Mira James! Just the girl we need." Kennie strolled over to me as I left the Fortune. I stared, confused, at the crowd with her. "Gary Wohnt was supposed to help me judge the pets and owners look-alike contest, but he just got called away. You can fill in for him and write a neat little article for the Recall while you're at it."

I shook my head so vehemently that something wobbled loose. "No. Absolutely not. I have plans."

"Twenty minutes, that's all we need," Kennie sang, smiling down at me from the teetering heights of her four-inch espadrilles.

"What about all these people with you?" I gestured at the hopeful-looking crowd behind her.

"Friends and family of the pet owners, and therefore not eligible to judge. Come along. Twenty minutes, I cross my heart and hope to cry. And phoo-ee, do you smell ripe. I'm gonna have to come over later and do you a favor."

That sentence was so ominous that my mouth clicked shut until Kennie dragged me to the spot where the turtle races were usually held. The crowd followed along, apparently relieved that their loved ones were going to get a chance to be judged for how much they looked like animals. Kennie shoved a pad in my hands.

"You and me need to agree on a score between one and ten, with ten being the most resemblance."

"Fine. Let's get it done and over with." There were only ten names on the pad. According to the pad, six of them were dog owners, one owned a ferret, one owned a fish, and two owned cats.

We walked past the contestants, both animals and owners drooping in the afternoon heat. Kennie cooed at how cute the pets were and I wondered whether people chose animals who looked like them, or whether we all just started looking like our pets after awhile. If so, I was hoping for some Tiger Pop highlights.

"Well, aren't you just the sweetest!" Kennie had stopped next to a fat Golden Retriever whose name on the pad was listed as "Kasey." Next to Kasey was a fat blonde man with friendly bags under his eyes. When the dog blinked, he blinked. The two even had matching jowls. Kennie and I looked at each other and both wrote down a ten.

Next was a man and his five-inch Blue Gill on a stringer. "Curtis Poling!" It was the first good news I'd had all day. Curtis Poling was a charming and slightly bawdy man who lived in the Senior Sunset, a few rooms down from Mrs. Berns. He fished off the roof, so people said he was crazy, but I knew that he was crazy like a fox and twice as cute. He had helped me crack Jeff's murder in May. "What're you doing out?"

"I wanted to see about getting my fish mounted, but somehow, I ended up over here. She's a beaut, eh?"

The fish was big for a sunny, and it was stinky. "Catch her off the roof?"

Curtis winked at me. "You know it. If you got a spot that works, you stick with it."

"You know, you don't look anything like that fish, Curtis."

"And neither do you, darling. I'd thank you to head me back toward the taxidermy shop, and I'll be on my way." His smile crinkled his ice-blue eyes, still sharp as hooks even though Curtis was pus.h.i.+ng ninety.

"You got it, Curtis. Just let me finish up." Kennie had moved on quickly when she saw the dead fish, and when I caught up with her, we agreed that Kasey the retriever and her owner Bill were the winners. For their efforts, they received a $25 gift certificate to s...o...b..'s Doo, the local pet grooming parlor. I thanked everyone for partic.i.p.ating, took Curtis by the elbow, and led him back to the Sunset, making a quick detour to the taxidermy shop on our way.

Once I knew Curtis was safe at the Sunset, I went back to Gina's house to retrieve my car and headed home, forcibly keeping negative thoughts out of my head. That left me idea-free, and it occurred to me with wicked irony that I now knew what it was like to be a Brittany. The lush hardwoods along County Road 83 looked tropical, but there were still no birds singing. The silence made the heat pregnant, and I wondered when it was going to break. I added "swim in the lake" to my mental list of cleansing activities for this afternoon.

At least my animals were happy to see me, Luna pumping happily up the driveway. Back at the house, I promised ice water and a cool dip in the lake if she'd let me get into my swimsuit and slap on some sunscreen. Tiger Pop had feigned disinterest in lapping up ice water and swimming, but he followed us as we made our way down the tree-shaded lane to our tiny little private beach on Whiskey Lake. I could hear families splas.h.i.+ng at Shangri-La, the charming resort at the end of the isthmus that was the wide spot at this end of my driveway.

I tossed my towel to the ground and kept to the gra.s.s, avoiding the pile of brown sugar sand the local 4H club had delivered this summer. The sand, I knew from painful experience, would be gla.s.s-making hot this time of day. Sunlight s.h.i.+mmered bright off the smooth surface of the lake, so bright I couldn't look straight at it. Head down, I walked into the heavenly cool water until I was knee deep and took the plunge. I was never one to acclimate myself slowly. I twisted underwater, my body heat sinking agreeably. My hands played along the silty bottom of the lake and dragged through the plant life. If I had on my diving mask, I'd be able to see silvery fish dart away from my intrusion. As I swam, the image of that dead white foot in Johnny's cabin kept sliding into my brain, and it left a cold, empty feeling inside of me. Suddenly, I didn't feel like being in this big lonely lake anymore.

I pushed myself to the surface, and Luna whined at me from the sh.o.r.e.

"Come on, you big baby!"

She barked, once, and paddled out to me. I knew she'd scratch me if she got too close, so I avoided her as I stroked back in. I found a piece of driftwood and played fetch with her in two feet of water. When she was exhausted and the cool water at my feet had leeched the red from my face, I headed back to the house, not bothering to towel off. Luna and Tiger Pop trailed behind, my sweet little farm groupies.

The part of the garden I hadn't worked over on Friday night had reached the Extreme Weeding stage. The plants were Land-of-the-Lost ma.s.sive, and the weeds had stopped seeding weeks ago. If I gave it a good going-over today and used the dead weeds as mulch, I would only have to do occasional, light weeding for the rest of the summer. Fortunately, that section was in the shade at this time of day.

I picked up where I had left off and dug my fingers into the earth, enjoying the cool feel under the surface. I started at the outer perimeter of the broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprout cans. By the time I got to the peas, my rhythm was down to a science. I didn't even stop to snack on the juicy pods. Next it was carrots, then beans, eggplant, squash, and pumpkins, and finally, more marigolds and zinnias. I knew I'd be flush with zinnias by the first blush of August. By the time I was on the final row, the weeds I'd laid flat at the first pa.s.s were turning a dried, lightening green, serving as a warning for all future trespa.s.sers. It would also keep the roots of my vegetables cooler during the scorching July days. For good measure, I raked up two piles of drying gra.s.s from my earlier lawn-mowing and scattered an extra layer of mulch over the weeds.