June Bug (19 page)

“I can’t quite hear you. You must have some last words before you go to sleep forever, eh, baby?” His voice was lilting, soft and comforting.

He kneeled beside me, and I turned my heavy head toward his voice. “Yeah, I want to say that you’re a sad, lonely bastard, and no one will ever respect you.” At least that’s what I said in my head. The reality of it was I focused all my fading consciousness on the rock in my hand. It came free and I slammed it into his face. He tumbled back in surprise. I took advantage, levering myself off the ground with a burst of adrenaline. Using both hands, I brought the rock down on his head, all the anger and loneliness that I had gathered in my lifetime joining with my fears for a little girl who was terrified and was me.

An ultrahuman strength powered my arms, and if I had connected directly with Jason’s head, I would have split him in two like the waters of the Red Sea parted for Moses. As it was, he turned at the last millisecond, and the rock glanced the corner of his forehead with enough force to peel off a chunk of skin and knock him out. If the rock made a noise when it connected, I didn’t hear it, but I did see Jason’s eyes widen in surprise and then fog over as he passed out, face down in the dirt.

I watched for a moment as the leaves closest to his mouth fluttered with his breath, and I convinced myself I could actually see the side of his head start to swell. The goose egg looked promising, like maybe it would grow to the size of an elephant’s testicle. I staggered back and looked wildly around for more attackers. Sam was leaning against the kissing tree. She pulled an Eve Slim out of the pocket of her polo shirt and lit it.

“Wanna split the jewels?”

I couldn’t recall what she was talking about, but I was sure I wasn’t in a sharing mood. “No.”

She sighed. “Didn’t think so.”

She brushed off her behind and strolled back the way she came. I scrabbled in the near dark for the tape recorder and then limped after her, my foot kicking on something on the forest floor. It was the stun gun, barely visible through my dirt-flecked eyes. I leaned over to grab it, the exertion shooting needles of pain through my bruised torso, and limped back to Jason. I zapped him once, just to make sure my Z-Force hadn’t been broken in the scuffle. His body spasmed and he groaned, but his breathing stayed constant. It was a crying shame.

I hobbled out of the woods and toward Shangri-La. Jason wasn’t a clever man. He had come to town for jewels, found a secret room, and decided it would be a perfect spot for a meth lab, probably for all the same reasons the original architect thought it would make an ideal rum room. Once he found the jewels, millions of dollars worth of jewels, he still intended to start a meth lab in that room. This lack of creativity told me he was also likely using the hidden room to hide Peyton.

Every step I took attacked my head like a piranha, and I wouldn’t have made it if a couple out walking hadn’t seen me stumble out of the woods. The woman stayed with me while the man ran to Shangri-La to call the police. He promised me he would look for Peyton in the master bedroom closet the minute he got off the phone.

The police beat the ambulance. When I explained what had happened, particularly about the dead body back there (“No, I know. But this one really
is
dead.”) and my hunch about Peyton’s whereabouts, the state police were called in. Unfortunately, the press was never far behind them, so several grotesque pictures of me were snapped before the paramedics whisked me off to the hospital. I made some crack that they better not lose me like they did the dwarf, but they didn’t think it was funny.

Luckily, the photos of me never made it into any paper. I was pushed aside for photographs of the happy reunion between Peyton and Leylanda. The man who had called the police went to the master bedroom as he had promised, and he found Peyton tied to a chair in the hidden room, her mouth gagged. He also found a TV on in front of her and a pile of candy and potato-chip wrappers underfoot. Apparently Sam had spoiled her rotten, turning on cartoons and feeding her whatever she wanted as long as she agreed not to yell. Peyton was quoted as saying, “It was the best time I ever had.”

At the hospital, my x-rays showed a mild concussion and severe bruising, but no broken bones. Eating mostly carbohydrates really did pay off. Jason was still unconscious when he was loaded into the second ambulance and driven to the hospital. Like me, he had a mild concussion, though he needed four stitches in his head. That made me the winner. As a sweet bonus, Jason also had the worst case of poison ivy on record in the five-state area. He required prednisone shots to keep his throat from closing up and had to have his hands strapped down to keep from scratching. They actually took photographs of his oozing sores to use in some medical textbook.

When I handed my tape recording of Jason confessing to killing Regina over to the police, he was pretty much assured of some jail time for murder, but Samantha Beladucci, aka Sam Krupps, cemented that reality. When the state police caught her about to cross into Wisconsin, she cooperated fully. She would serve some time for aiding and abetting, but Jason was going to go away for a long, long time.

Sam’s story proved it had gone down just like I thought. Regina had stolen the jewels and then hidden them in the safe in the woods. Autopsy results showed her husband had taken a severe blow to the head, but actual cause of death was inconclusive due to the age of the remains. It was safe to assume that Regina had killed him. If she was crazy enough to do that, she was certainly crazy enough to leave a wealth of jewels hidden in the woods in rural Minnesota. This made me wonder what the stash of rhinestones I had hidden at my childhood home said about my mental health, but I saw no reason to dwell on that. Sam heard the story of the hidden jewels when she was caring for Regina and told Jason.

For Sam and Jason, the
Star Tribune
contest to find the planted necklace was an unhappy coincidence. Jason found out about it when he called to set aside the master bedroom at Shangri-La. Kellie Gibson had assumed he was reserving it to get a head start on the contest and had asked him as much. He played along like that was really why he was coming, but he was fuming at the attention and number of people it brought, particularly since, according to Sam, he had just gotten out of jail in Texas for possession of methamphetamines and wasn’t supposed to leave the state.

Kellie had inadvertently provided a distraction for Jason’s nefarious activities, since she had booked the Romanov troupe. Her third cousin’s husband, Jim Neville, aka Nikolai Romanov, ran a traveling circus in the South, and Kellie was talked into hiring them to come to Battle Lake, and specifically to Shangri-La, to put on a show people would never forget. When a scheming Jason approached Mr. Neville and played on his supersized ego, it was only too easy to convince the little guy to stage his own death. He was an actor, after all.

Meanwhile, Jason tore apart the master bedroom closet and found the secret room right away, but he couldn’t find anything that would lead him to the jewels. He decided to make lemonade out of his lemons and began to gather what he needed to start a meth lab. He knew the resort was empty in the off-season, as the Gibsons flew down to Arizona every winter. The rum room would be perfect for manufacturing meth, which Jason figured would make him rich and supply plenty of the dangerous drug to feed his own addiction. Unfortunately, at the turtle races Peyton overheard him on the phone talking to a friend about what he’d need to start his own operation, and she kept asking him what a “math lab” was.

Once Jason realized he could lose the jewels
and
the dream of his own meth lab if Peyton narced him out, he decided to silence her. Sam was queasy about harming a child, though, and convinced
Jason to wait until the box in Whiskey Lake was found. Then, she argued, there would be a lot fewer people and photographers around, and it would be a lot easier to dispose of a body. Jason agreed.

When Sam got a couple at Shangri-La to break the secret code that Jason had stolen from my purse, he knew exactly what “the kissing tree” was referring to, since he had spent a lot of time hunting in Sunny’s woods and even had a stand in the tree for a while.

And the rest of it I caught on tape. Sam vehemently denied that they’d planted the fake body in the lake or shot the little man. That was one mystery the police would never solve, and I saw no payoff in revealing the truth of those riddles to the law. I reminded myself to have Jed remove the second fake body, the one he had planted last night, before someone stumbled across it.

When I got released from the hospital that same night, I reclaimed Luna and Tiger Pop from Gina’s and went straight home to sleep in my own bed for the first time in days. It was glorious. I was naked and comfortable, and Tiger Pop purred away between my feet. I was supposed to be diving for the box and splitting the reward with Nikolai that very night, but it wasn’t going to happen. I don’t know if he showed up at our designated spot, because I never heard from him again. Probably there is a theatrical dwarf somewhere cursing my name right now.

I stopped by the library the next morning to ask Mrs. Berns if she’d mind if I took the day off. She happily agreed to hold down the fort whenever I needed it. Unfortunately, she was wearing a see-through blouse with no bra when she told me this. Her large nipples peeked at me like myopic stomach eyes. I tracked down Kennie and hired her to tell Mrs. Berns that she must wear undergarments with her transparent clothing. As an afterthought, I also asked her to “pull a Jason” on Leif, Gina’s husband. Kennie was to get him fall-down drunk and then take pictures of him and her in compromising positions. I encouraged her to enlist Mrs. Berns’s help in this endeavor.

“Don’t actually do anything with him, Kennie. I just need the pictures for blackmail, something to keep him honest.”

“Sure, sugar pie. I won’t actually do anything with him.” She winked as she said this, and I wondered if it was evil that I was setting Leif up for the most humiliating night of his life, one that he would only be able to remember snatches of. An image of Gina’s tear-swollen face flashed through my head, and I decided that I was just helping out the great karma machine in the sky. Once Leif sobered up, I would show him the photos of him getting jiggy with Kennie and Mrs. Berns and threaten to publish them in the
Recall
if I ever heard of him cheating on Gina again.

Kennie promised to do the deeds as soon as she got done leading her As Good As Gold on the Otter Tail River Tour. Apparently, the Minnesota Nice business wasn’t doing as well as expected. People felt too guilty about hiring someone else to do their dirty work and decided to go back to the tried-and-true practices of avoidance and denial. To supplement her income, Kennie had started a gold-panning business on the Otter Tail River. There was no gold in the river, and Kennie got around that fact by trademarking the term “As Good As Gold” to refer to any of various types of river rocks. I promised to hand her brochures out at the library and go out on one more outing with her and Gary as payment for the favors she was doing for me. Apparently, I had gone over like gangbusters with Ody, and he wanted to take me fishing before he returned to Alaska. How much worse could my reputation in town get? At least I knew our time together had an expiration date.

I knew I needed more time to heal before I went diving, but by the next afternoon, the need to satisfy my curiosity outweighed the need to be pain-free. I borrowed Jed’s diving equipment and got permission from the landowners to take off from the creek on the north side of the lake. My bruises made swimming slow going, but eventually I found the camo netting about seventy-five feet straight out and twenty-one feet straight down, just like Nikolai predicted. If not for him, I would have passed right over it, since the greenish-gray cover blended perfectly with the lake bottom if you weren’t looking for it.

The box underneath the camo cover was light once I loosed it from the rope and anchor mooring it. I started swimming back before I decided I should bring the rope and netting back with me, too. No reason to litter the lake. I wasn’t able to open the box on my own, so I called the
Star Tribune
. They were grateful someone had finally found it, and the timing was perfect, what with all the publicity Peyton’s abduction and subsequent return and Regina Krupps’s stolen jewelry were getting. They ran a front-page story on the “Real Jewels of the North Country,” and the featured photo was of Peyton draped in the jewels.

I felt momentarily bad that Nikolai wasn’t getting any of the money for finding the box, and then I realized I had promised him only that I would not keep more than half. By the end of the week, a “secret donor” had arranged for all the cabins at the Last Resort to be painted, inside and out. I also arranged for a deluxe Scrabble game, complete with a lazy Susan, to be sent to the Fortune Café.

The children’s section at the library got completely revamped as well—new chairs, new stuffed animals, new equipment for watching movies and listening to books on tape, and a cavalcade of happy, colorful new books. Peyton received a colossal box of Sugar Lips Wax Chewing Gum, Strawberry Pop Rocks, Razzles Candy Gum, and chocolate cigarettes in the mail. When I spoke to her the day after she was found, she told me the kidnapping was really fun. She said the only downside was the crabby man who had to tie her up even though she would have stayed anyways. I had no reason to doubt this, and apparently Leylanda heard this too and took it to heart, because she loosened up a little on her daughter and let her keep the candy. She even let Peyton chew gum in the library.

Those donations took up a big chunk of the contest money, and I figured not spending all the money on myself was the same as not keeping it. With what was left, I paid my bills three months out, leaving just enough to hire a landscaper to do some touch-up work at my place. I called Swenson’s Nursery, and Johnny promised he would be over before the end of the week. I felt conspicuous enough requesting him specifically and after hours, so I refrained from offering extra for shirtlessness.

While I waited for him to show up on a beautiful Friday evening, I phoned my mom. When Peyton had been kidnapped, some more of my heart froze. What I hadn’t known was how much it was going to thaw when she was found. My mom and I hadn’t talked in over a year, but there’s something about worrying about kids and getting the shit beat out of you that makes you want to hear your mom’s voice.

“Mira?”

“Yeah. Sorry I haven’t called in a while, Mom.”

“How’re you doing?” She sounded so grateful that it brought tears to my eyes.

“I’ve been pretty good. How about you?”

I heard her weigh her options, and she chose to keep it light, even though she couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. I suppose she didn’t want to scare me off again. “I’m real good. We’re having a wedding shower for your cousin next weekend. We’d love to see you.”