A Lonely Way to Die: A Utah O'Brien Mystery Novel (Minnesota Mysteries Series Book 2) (21 page)

I groaned. “And Jocko didn’t tell me?” I looked down at my dog who was watching Sam pace back and forth on the porch, just outside the front windows.

Gabe sat down on the loveseat next to me and Jocko jumped up to sit on his other side, sandwiching Gabe between us. I pulled the bottom of the comforter over my robe and my feet and put my arm around Gabe’s shoulder. We watched Sam, who had moved back out to the parking lot, trudging through the snow with his head hung low. He was talking to himself and gesturing with his hands.

“How come he’s mad? He doesn’t have to do anything, if he doesn’t want to,” Gabe said, his voice shaking. “I mean, if he doesn’t want to be my dad, it’s OK.” He ran a finger under his nose.

“He’s not mad, Gabe. He’s mourning for the twelve years that he didn’t know you.”

“Thirteen years, almost.”

“Yes. Thirteen.” I gave the boy’s shoulder a big squeeze. Sam was standing on the porch now, looking at the enormous full moon above the mammoth’s tusks. He looked down and pushed some snow off the porch with his foot.

Gabe said, “So why was your mom angry at Sam? You didn’t say.”

“She wasn’t angry. She was scared for Sam. If he found out he was your real dad, and then your other dad took you away, Sam would be really unhappy. Josie loves that big guy like a son, you know. And parents don’t want their kids to get hurt.”

“My first mother didn’t care. She gave me away.”

“She cared more than you could ever know. She found a mother for you who could give you a safe place to live, and so much more love than she ever could. She mourned her lost baby for months. It wasn’t right for her to lie to Sam—but except for that, giving you away was probably the hardest thing—and maybe the best thing—that she’s ever done in her whole entire life.

“Besides, if she hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have known Sonje—your real mom. You wouldn’t have wanted that, would you?”

He shook his head. Tears were falling, unnoticed, down his cheeks. “She was the best ever. It’s not fair, though. I’m feeling really sad because she died, but I’m feeling really happy because I found my real dad. Can you feel two different things at once?”

“Sure. It happens all the time.”

“It hurts, though.” He brushed the tears off his face with the sleeve of Sam’s big sweatshirt.

Sam came back through the door. He stopped when he saw me and Gabe cuddled up together on the loveseat.

Gabe said to me, quietly, “What should I do?”

“Maybe you could give him a hug. He looks like he needs one.”

He threw the comforter aside and stood up. Jocko started to jump down, too, but I made him stay with me. Gabe walked towards Sam in his bare feet, hesitantly. Then they both started to walk more quickly, and met near the dire wolf. Sam put his arms around his son and held on, as if he was never going to let go.

I got up and went back into the kitchen, to give Sam and Gabe some time alone.

I added some sticks to the fire to warm the place up a little more, and took off my jacket. When Sam and Gabe came back into the kitchen we all sat on the heated bench under Gabe’s comforter. The bench was hard, but it was warm. Chance crawled onto my lap, but changed his mind and moved over to sit on Gabe, instead.

“So, what am I going to do now?” Gabe said. “I don’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings, but I want to live here with you.”

Sam looked at me, sending me the same question with his raised eyebrows. It was all so new to him, he hadn’t had time to think it through. He reached behind Gabe’s head to touch my shoulder. His hand was trembling slightly. I turned my head and kissed his fingers.

“I think we can work something out,” I said. “Practically half the kids in my after-school drama class have two moms or two dads, because their parents get divorced and remarried. Having two dads is almost normal.”

I picked at a loose thread in the comforter. “If you spend a lot of time in West Elmer, I guess we need to move over to Sam’s house.” I hoped I would be included in this new family unit, but we hadn’t talked about it, and I was nervous.

Sam said, “I thought we were going to fix up the studio for a living room? Gabe promised to help. We can’t start the new cob heater until the ground thaws so we can get the clay, but we can start working on the rest of it.”

“How would we heat the living room during the winter?” I said.

“We’ve got a furnace down in the cellar. We can shut off all the vents except the ones to the new living room and the new bedroom. It wouldn’t cost much. I’m spending at least that much to keep my place warm, and nobody lives there. We just shut off the water at my house and we turn off the heat. We’ll probably save money.”

He grinned, noticing that I noticed all the times he said the word ‘we’ in those sentences. I was pretty sure he did it on purpose. I grinned back at him.

“Gabe,” he said, “you won’t be able to move into the new bedroom until we get that new window in. It wouldn’t be safe.”

“I can sleep on the couch,” Gabe said. “I don’t mind.”

“We need to slow down a little,” I said. “We can’t make any plans until Gavril’s here. It wouldn’t be fair. Let’s go to bed and sleep on it, OK? I’m really tired, and we have a big crew coming over for breakfast in the morning.”

Before we went upstairs, I moved Molly’s bath rug to the top of the heated bench. Her big old head moved as she watched the maneuver, and she used her nose to investigate this new placement of what was now, officially, her rug. She looked up at Sam.

“Go ahead, Molly. You get up there as soon as we’re not looking, anyway.”

Chance thought the rug was a good idea, too, and he almost beat Molly to it. I needed to find two new rugs.

TWENTY-THREE

Jocko got me up at 4:32 a.m., as usual. I let him and Molly outside. I tried to take my shower and do my other morning chores quietly so Gabe could sleep in, but Chance had other ideas. He twined around my ankles, yowling for breakfast. Gabe woke up and popped off the couch before five o’clock, ready for the day.

The bell over the front door rang a few minutes after seven o’clock, and I went out to meet Gavril in the museum. Angie came with him, which surprised me. She usually opens the diner at six-thirty for breakfast, even on Sundays.

When she saw my raised eyebrows, she said. “I’m taking the day off. Let ‘em sue me.”

We were nearing the sculpted camel when Gavril stopped and looked around. “These sculptures. I couldn’t see them last night, it was so dark. They’re quite—primordial is perhaps the word.” He turned to me. “You made these?”

I nodded, confessing to the deed. “A lot of people helped, though.”

“Why put a camel next to a wolf?” he said. “And this thing with the mace on his tail, and the armor? This is what? An armadillo of some sort?”

“You don’t want the Latin names, do you?”

He shook his head. Then he turned around, slowly, to see more of the sculptures. He stopped when he was facing the front of the building. The mammoth standing outside was a dark silhouette against a brilliant pink sunrise. Gavril stood still, momentarily mesmerized by the sun’s gaudy show.

Angie and I glanced at each other, and smiled. Then I led them into the kitchen. Mort and Josie were coming into the kitchen through the back door at the same time.

Josie looked at me, raised one eyebrow, and then glanced surreptitiously at Sam. I nodded, and held up a thumb. She let out a long breath, smiled, and went directly to Gavril, who was starting to take off his coat. She herded him back out into the museum.

Angie was about to ask why. “We’ll tell you later,” I said.

While Josie talked to Gavril, I called Mildred’s house. Rita answered. I told her that it was safe for her and Pete to go home. Our plan was for Emma to stop by and pick up Mildred at the normal time, and take her to church.

Sam had pancake batter ready and bacon on the grill. Gabe was wearing his own clothes, the jeans and sweater that went through the washer the day before. Sam put him to work slicing a loaf of Josie’s home-made bread they found downstairs in the freezer. It was still slightly frozen, but Gabe was able to saw through it with the bread knife. A trip through the toaster, and it would be perfect. Angie set the table while Mort and I stood around, not doing anything useful at all.

Sam’s phone rang while he was turning the bacon on the grill. He listened for a few seconds, and then handed the bowl of pancake batter to Angie, and joined Josie and Gavril in the museum.

Angie put the bowl on the counter and glared at me. “Later,” I said. “Be patient.”

Before ten minutes had passed, Josie, Sam and Gavril came back into the kitchen. My mother went to Gabe and gave him a big hug. She said, “Does this make me your grandma? Sort of?”

The boy grinned. “Sure!” he said.

He looked at Mort, who smiled, looking altogether pleased with himself. “Why not?” he said. “You need somebody around who can teach you a few things.”

Angie watched all this through narrowed eyes, then gave up and poured the pancake batter onto the grill.

We hurried through breakfast. A few minutes before eight o’clock, Emma called. I put down my fork and answered the phone. When the call ended, everyone sitting at the table was looking at me. “Emma has the baby ready,” I said. “She’ll be at church a little early, as usual. She’ll stop and pick up Mildred, but she promised she won’t explain anything to her mother until after Molly’s finished with her job.”

There was a collective sigh of relief. Emma’s part in the plan was always a gamble because she was so close to John Owen. He had been her pastor for years. Now we knew she was still willing to play her part.

“Goes to show you,” Josie said. “Blood’s thicker than water.”

I never understood that old saying before, but now it made sense. Emma didn’t speak to her sister for 20-odd years, but Gwyneth was still her sister. If the pastor was the one who killed her, Emma wanted him brought to justice as much as we did.

Mort’s phone rang at 8:14 a.m. When Mort ended the call, he said, “It’s all set.”

He pushed back his chair with a scraping noise against the floor, and said. “Let’s get a move on. Constantin, we’ll go in your rig, if you don’t mind.”

We left the breakfast dishes sitting on the table. Sam, Molly and Gabe were the only ones who had any role in the morning’s events, but the rest of us wanted to watch.

When we left the museum, Mort made a point of turning the lock on the front door. Jocko didn’t get to go, and his outraged barks could be heard until we crawled into Gavril’s Ford Explorer and shut the doors.

Sam and Gabe didn’t join us in the car. They would walk the five blocks to the church with Molly.

Gabe held Molly’s leash without pulling on the bloodhound’s harness. It was his job to follow, not direct. If anyone saw them and asked, Sam would say they were taking Molly for a walk. If they asked why the dog was wearing her working harness, Gabe could say he was learning how to work with a tracking hound, which was true. Or true enough, anyway.

We arrived at the church right on time, at 8:35 a.m., five minutes after the service was scheduled to begin. Mort pointed at an unmarked car parked off Andersen Street and across from the door to the church office. Wally was in a good position to get a video of Molly as she worked.

Mort asked Gavril to park a little way down on Andersen so we could see both the front door set into the bell tower and the office door on the side. With the intersection between us and the church, it was less likely that late-comers would notice us.

We pulled up to the curb. Mort’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened for a few seconds. Then he said, “They’re a block away. I can see them now … What do you mean ‘is she any good?’ She won that big award a few years back. Of course she’s good—OK, they’re here. They’re giving the old girl another sniff of the woman’s shoe. You’ll see them in a second.”

He broke off the call and rolled down his window. A ragged rendition of Amazing Grace could be heard, barely, as the service was getting started inside the church. The Blue Malachi version we heard in the kitchen the day before was much nicer. We all turned and looked over our shoulders to see Sam and Gabe walking casually up the street.

To my untrained eye, Molly wandered almost aimlessly, the same way she did whenever she was taken out for a walk. It could be exasperating at times, because she stopped to analyze every molecule of every scent she finds along the way. She was moving no faster now. They turned the corner and started walking down the side street, getting closer to the office door.

Mort said, excitedly. “Look—she’s found the trail.”

“How can you tell?” Angie, Josie and Gavril asked, all at the same time. I couldn’t see any obvious difference in Molly’s behavior, either, except that she left the sidewalk and was now pushing her muzzle through the snow at the curb. Her tail was moving a little faster—maybe that was the sign. Sam looked up at the unmarked car across the street, and nodded. Mort was right. Molly was on the trail.

The old bloodhound turned and walked, nose to the ground, across the snow-covered parking strip, then down the sidewalk, and, finally, up the concrete walkway that leads to the office door. Many footsteps had packed the snow on the sidewalk and up to that door, but Molly still found the scent she was looking for.