The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1) (22 page)

“Obviously they broke up. She wouldn’t stand for Beckett having female friends, not a close one anyway.”

“Cathy, can you tell me about the house? Did you discover anything about the red-haired woman while you lived there?”

“The
red
-haired woman? You mean the
ghost
?” She clipped each syllable, placing excessive emphasis on the first. “The
dis
-turbance? The
app
-arition?”

Jess wondered why Cathy had bothered to call if she wasn’t going to be helpful. “Yes. The ghost. Do you know anything about how she died?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Well…to…I don’t know. To help her move on or something. Didn’t you try to get her out of the house?”

“Have you seen the bloody footprints yet?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s pissed off and things are only going to get worse. Trust me.”

“What do you mean it’s pissed off?” Beckett came to stand beside Jess and listen in, Shakti securely in his arms. Jess grabbed a pen and scrawled on her notebook, “Cathy is one bitter woman!”

“The first two years I lived there were good. There was some weird stuff from time to time, but I could ignore it or pretend I’d had a memory slip, stuff like that. I don’t know what happened to make it so…” Cathy paused and Jess heard her draw in a long breath. “…
active
, but it went nuts. It was breaking stuff, ripping pictures off the walls…. And it was crying. Choking. Sobbing. Like it was trying to cry, but couldn’t get enough air to actually do it.” Jess heard Cathy take a drink and swallow in a brief pause. “I had to get out of there.”

“Did you ever see her?”

“No, thank God.”

“When did all this start?”

Cathy considered. “2013. Maybe February. I lasted until August. Then I had to get the hell out of there, but I couldn’t afford rent on top of a mortgage, so when the house didn’t sell within a couple of months, the bank foreclosed.” There was another pause. “But you know that, since you bought the house from the bank.”

Jess stabbed at the word bitter on her notebook. “I’m sorry, Cathy. I know this is horrible, because I’m in the middle of it myself.” Jess sighed. “Her name is Bonnie Sykes.”

“What?”

“The ghost. Her name is Bonnie. I’ve found that much out. She lived there from 19…”

“I don’t care,” Cathy spit out the words and Jess jerked her phone away from her ear. “I’m trying to forget that place and what that thing did to me.” Cathy was shouting into the phone now, her voice rising to a hysterical pitch. “That place ruined my life. I’ve been foreclosed on. Do you know what that does to your credit? I can’t even buy a car now…”

“Cathy? Cathy, I’m sorry. I know. I’m sorry. Look, can you send me the painting?” Jess looked up at Beckett and whispered, “Help me.” He held his hand out for the phone, but just as Jess was laying it on his palm, the front door opened. Beckett shrugged. Instead of taking the phone, he set Shakti on the bench next to Jess and went to greet his customers. She put the phone back to her ear and tried to disengage as quickly and politely as possible. When at last she hung up, Jess dropped her phone on the table like it was contaminated. She pushed her hair away from her face and grabbed a ponytail holder from her wrist. She twisted up her hair and secured it, then lifted Shakti so they were nose to nose. “I wonder if the painting will come slashed to ribbons,” she said as she cuddled the puppy against her good cheek.

Jess looked up to watch Beckett schmooze with his customers. He stood with his hands on his hips, his blond hair tucked casually behind his ears. When he talked, he gestured with open palms. The woman he was talking to appeared charmed while her husband picked up one pot and then another, examining the bottom of each one before setting it back down with obvious disinterest.
Beckett and Lora,
she thought.
Hmmm
…

The old Carnegie library was small, but elegant with a domed atrium over the circulation desk and floor-to-ceiling windows that filled the stacks with natural light. Jess was admiring the ceiling when a librarian asked if she could help her find something.

“Yes, please. I need newspapers from the 1970s.”

“Those would be on microfiche. I’ll set you up with a machine.” The librarian came around from behind the desk. Her pleated jean skirt flowed over large hips, the kind that swung with each step. A cheery pink twin-set topped the skirt, amplifying her sturdy shoulders. The librarian talked as she led the way out of the atrium and down a stone staircase, past the main doors, and down another flight to the lower level. The temperature dropped a few degrees and the librarian snugged her cardigan closed. “It’s always colder down here, and a little damp. If you’re going to do a lot of research, bring a sweater, honey.” Jess followed her into a back room that had been modernized in the seventies or eighties with the unfortunate addition of a dropped ceiling and fluorescent lights that turned the librarian’s pink sweater a strange shade of salmon. “Here you are.” She patted a study carrel with a reader, then opened an old card catalogue drawer. “Here are the local papers. And here.” She patted some other drawer fronts. “Do you know how to use a reader?”

Jess did. She had written a master’s thesis on the early feminist movement in Minnesota, focusing on temperance, suffrage, the radical American Costume, and specifically on Julia Bullard Nelson, a widow of the Civil War who left Minnesota to teach in a Free Man’s School in Texas. She found it exciting to once again face a wall of microfiche.

Skoghall didn’t have its own paper, so Jess searched for newspapers from nearby towns. She began with the 1973 obituaries. One by one, she added boxes of rolled film to the cart until she had exhausted the entire year for both Bay City and Pepin. If Bonnie Sykes died in 1973, wouldn’t someone run an obituary in the local paper? Jess leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, then kneaded the back of her neck with her fingertips. Over three hours work and not a mention of Bonnie Sykes.

After a lunch break, Jess stood looking over the row of small, square, cardboard boxes, each one with a neatly typed label. She had been careful to put them on the cart in chronological order. She stared at the first label: Bay City Gazette 1973 Jan - Feb. What was she missing? Jess pictured the house, the lead cowboy, the red-haired woman—Bonnie, she reminded herself.

Bonnie was wearing a sleeveless nightie. “Ah-ha!” Jess moved her finger down the row of boxes she’d set out on the cart and grabbed the first one with June on the label. June was the earliest most women would go sleeveless and barefoot in this climate. She took out the coil of film and spooled it onto the rollers. The obituaries hadn’t turned up anything useful, so she began with the front page. A murder would surely make headlines.

Jess was getting hungry again and the old tubular fluorescent lights weren’t doing anything to stem a creeping feeling of lethargy. She decided to push through another half hour before she’d have to call it quits and get out of that basement. Besides, Beckett was probably sick of the dingo puppy by now.

She loaded up the next roll of film, the
Bay City Gazette
. Jess couldn’t resist reading some of the articles, despite her mission and fatigue. On June 4
^th
, Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment, prohibiting further military involvement in Vietnam without the President first getting Congressional approval. Watergate was in full swing with reports on the hearings in every issue of the paper. On June 10
^th
, NASA launched Radio Astronomy Explorer 49 into lunar orbit. The papers were full of articles about the space race and the USSR getting ahead of the USA. Russia and France were also involved in the arms race, and concern over nuclear weapons development and testing was rampant. Harrison and McCartney’s solo careers were going well. And it seemed a plane crashed somewhere in the world every week.

With so much happening, so many things to raise the nation’s anxiety, it was no wonder local news, even sensational local news, didn’t make the front page. Jess turned the nob, scrolling past the sports section to the local section. Mostly, this section was full of news about weather, crops, fishing, business openings and closings, and the occasional feature on a local person done good: Jane Smalley won the spelling bee, Ritchie Price came home with a Purple Heart, and so on. On June 14, 1973, however, the headline at the top of page L1 read, “Skoghall Woman Found Swinging in Smokehouse.” Jess’s arm shot toward the ceiling, an involuntary, celebratory fist-bump. She began, then self-consciously stifled, a “Woo-hoo!”

Her pulse quickened as she read the article. “Bonnie Sykes, wife of John Sykes, was found yesterday morning hung in the smokehouse on the family’s property. Mr. Sykes was reportedly away at the time of the incident. Law Enforcement does not believe it was a suicide and are looking for information about Mrs. Sykes at this time. Please contact the Pierce County Sheriff if you can assist the investigation. Mrs. Sykes is survived by her husband, son, and parents.” The article was surprisingly short, but included a grainy photograph of the property—of Jess’s home—with the smokehouse prominent in the foreground. A police cruiser and an AMC Matador station wagon  were parked in the long drive. The wagon had a single round can of a light over the front seats and a label on the side. Jess turned the knobs on the microfiche reader to enlarge the image. A scan of newsprint didn’t yield the best clarity, but it was good enough to make out “Pierce County Coroner.” The house looked somber, the vehicles dominated the image, their proximity to the smokehouse an incrimination of it, confirmed by the headline. Two men stood near the vehicles, one in a sheriff’s uniform, the other in a white doctor’s coat. Jess wondered if Bonnie’s body was in the coroner’s vehicle at the time the image was taken. The thought of her laid out in the back of that station wagon gave Jess the chills.

A female voice came through an intercom speaker in the ceiling, “The library is closing in fifteen minutes.”

Jess printed a copy of the first article, then hurried back to the machine to trade out the microfiche. There had to be more news, a follow-up, something… Without time to read, Jess printed off everything she could find in subsequent
Bay City Gazettes
.

The librarian appeared in the doorway of the microfiche room. “Miss, we’re closing now.”

“Just one more minute, please,” Jess said. “Last one.” She fed quarters into the printer and it hummed as the scan of the article was transferred to paper and rolled out into Jess’s eager hands.

The final headline was both sad and exciting: “Skoghall Woman’s Husband Convicted of Murder.”

Chapter Fourteen

Jess slowed her car as she pulled into her long driveway and searched the property, as though if she looked hard enough she would see the coroner’s wagon and the sheriff’s car sitting where they had  forty years ago. She stopped for a moment to stare at the small, conical structure where Bonnie had been found hanging. Jess reached a hand across the console between the two seats and laid it on Shakti’s shoulder, a protective instinct. The puppy raised her head to look at Jess, then opened her mouth in a wide yawn, uncurling her pink tongue.

“Bonnie is not your enemy. She needs your help.” This had become Jess’s affirmation since finding the articles at the library. It was meant to give her courage and had helped convince her she could do this without Beckett to hold her hand. Just now, looking out her car window at the smokehouse, she wasn’t as confident. She rolled up to the front of the house and put her Kia in park, then thought better of it. She pulled into the parking pad in front of the garage and turned the car around so it faced up the driveway, ready for a fast get-away.

Here was the house she fell in love with at first sight. The woods surrounding the property made it seem an enclave perfect for a writer. A pair of cardinals, the male’s bright red coloring a beacon of cheer, joined the sparrows and nuthatches at the feeder she had hung from the sugar maple. Jess paused to watch the birds and felt sorry for Cathy Fenton, but she also felt Cathy hadn’t wanted this badly enough. Jess wanted it. It was everything she had dreamed of one day having, and Bonnie wasn’t going to run her off.