The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1) (33 page)

Jess took the seat and Beckett explained how to open a pot, showing her again with his hands over hers. Jess realized she had her lower lip pinned between her teeth, a sign she was concentrating too hard. She released her lip and pressed her thumb into the divot Beckett had made. With a little pressure, she watched in amazement as the divot deepened and expanded under her hands. Beckett then showed her how to widen the hole and raise the sides. She was making something, something she could touch and hold. Jess could not believe how good it felt, this clay spinning through her hands.

The tourist traffic began picking up again and Beckett had to leave Jess at the wheel. She watched it slow down and spin to a stop. Her half-pot sat there, something between a lump and vessel, while Beckett chatted with customers. Jess caught sight of his smile as he pushed his hair behind his ear and turned briefly toward her. She wondered how many more pots he sold based on his charm, and she smiled to think that she was sharing some part of his life.

She left her clay and took Shakti outside. They meandered through the grass behind the old livery, which crinkled under foot with each step.  Jess checked her phone—nothing from Johnny. There was an email from Chandra. She had been desperate to contact her best friend and then things began happening. Jess quickly typed a response, one that was almost meaningless for all it left out—there was just too much to explain. After she hit send, she dialed Johnny again, hoping to somehow convince him to meet his father.

Voicemail again. “Dr. Ecklund, I’m sorry. I know I’m upsetting you. But don’t you care about the truth? Doesn’t the truth matter to you at all?” Jess sighed. She had said everything before. Her fingers danced at her throat. “Please.” She held the phone for a moment, waiting for the magic words. They didn’t come, and she hung up.

The phone rang in her hand, and she jumped. It took a moment before she had collected herself and was able to answer. “Hello?”

“Ms. Vernon? This is Sterling Devries.”

A half hour later, Sterling walked into Beckett’s studio. It was late enough in the afternoon that the River Road traffic had slowed considerably. People would be less interested in shopping and more interested in getting home and unwinding before the workweek began. Beckett offered Sterling a beer and poured Jess a glass of wine. They slid into the booth near the windows with Beckett situated so he could watch the front door in case of straggling sales.

“You said on the phone that you have something to tell me?” Jess said.

“Yes.” Sterling began scratching at the edge of the Negra Modelo label with his thumbnail. “This isn’t easy for me.” He glanced up at them and Jess nodded her encouragement. “Back in 1973, I was a young man, recently out of school, working to make a place for myself in the world—especially in the world of medicine. I wanted to be a healer.” Sterling took a sip of his beer, then ran his hand around the back of his neck. Jess sensed an interjection could scare him off and waited patiently. “One of my first patients was a vet named Copeland. This guy was messed up worse than anyone I’d seen before and maybe even since. He had all his parts in tact, but his mind…” Sterling shook his head and picked at the beer label. “He told me he was dead. The walking dead. I didn’t know what to do with that, so I asked him when he died. He said, ‘Last week.’” Sterling looked up at Jess. “You understand, we weren’t trained to handle this shit. I’m not a psychiatrist. I thought he was nuts, but he wasn’t making any sense. I mean, he didn’t just come out and say it.”

Jess looked at Beckett while Sterling gathered his thoughts. Beckett rubbed his goatee thoughtfully while watching Sterling.

“I saw Copeland twice, which was rare. When guys came in, they saw whoever was available and it was hardly ever the same person twice. Copeland said there was a weapons cache and a gook bitch…” Sterling glanced at Jess and shrugged apologetically. “His words. Then he said he was sorry about Bonnie. Bonnie gave him coffee. Bonnie was good to him.”

“What do you mean?” Beckett asked.

“I couldn’t be certain, you see? Copeland was confused. He was mixing up things that happened in Vietnam and things that happened here. The Bonnie who gave him coffee wasn’t the gook bitch, and yet he talked about them like they were the same person. He said he did terrible things to her, things he deeply regretted. He broke down sobbing in the examination room. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never seen a man cry like this before. I reached out to pat his shoulder or something and he grabbed onto me. He pulled me in and clung to me, sobbing against my chest.” Sterling looked up, catching Jess’s eye. “I knew our boys saw horrible things over there, but I didn’t understand why Copeland was confused about this Vietnamese woman and this Bonnie. He went on and on about the weapons and cat’s eye. A cat’s eye?” He shook his head and took a swig of his beer. “I still don’t know what that means. I knew the soldiers came home messed up and turned to drink and drugs, but I didn’t know about PTSD. We just didn’t know about it then.” Sterling sighed and pulled another scrap of paper label off his beer bottle. “Copeland was one of the lucky ones as far medicine was concerned—he was walking around in one piece.”

“What made you decide to tell me this?” Jess asked.

“I’ve always been troubled by Copeland.” Sterling’s voice dropped and he pushed the scraps of wet paper on the table into a small crumpled pile of black and gold with the pad of his thumb. “He committed suicide the next day. He was reaching out for help, and I failed him.” He took a long drink of his beer before continuing. “Eventually, I figured out you can’t help everybody, but you always remember your first. It’s the first one you take personally.”

“Did you know about the Bonnie Sykes murder?” Beckett asked.

“No. Or if I heard about it, it didn’t really register. Maybe I didn’t want it to. But I was busy with a brand new career that was challenging me in lots of ways. To follow that kind of news…”

“I understand,” Jess said. “If you heard about it, you blocked it out so you wouldn’t be overwhelmed.”

“Yes.”

“What was Copeland’s first name?”

“Carl. Carl Copeland.”

Jess glanced at Beckett, but of course the name meant nothing to him.

“I did a little digging after we last met,” Sterling said. “Your neck looks much better, by the way.”

Jess put a hand to her throat.

“The papers said Bonnie was hung.”

Jess nodded. “Yes. She showed me her body hanging in the smokehouse. It was the first thing she showed me, but I thought it was a hog or something.”

Sterling shook his head. “The mark on your neck is not from hanging. It’s from strangulation, but not hanging.” He looked around the table, his hand grasping at an imaginary pen.

“Here.” Beckett pulled a piece of scratch paper from a pile at the back end of the table. He had doodled vases and urns on one side with a soft pencil. He flipped the paper over and handed Sterling a pencil from somewhere within his papers.

Sterling sketched a neck with a rope around it. “If the mark is level, like your mark, then the rope was drawn tight parallel to the floor, not from above. So if a killer strangles someone, it’s like this.” He held his hands out, fists together, then drew them apart as though tightening a rope. “And in hanging, the rope comes from above, so the ring around the neck slopes upward.” He drew another neck, this one with a noose around it. The rope sloped upwards toward the knot, leaving a mark like an upside-down V.

“So,” Beckett said, turning the paper toward him and Jess, “Bonnie was strangled, not hung? The papers were wrong?”

“But I saw a figure hanging in the smokehouse.” Jess rubbed her throat, grateful the marks were smooth. Her fingertips brushed the hairline at the back of her neck and came away damp with sweat.

“Maybe it wasn’t her,” Sterling said. He set the pencil down with a click against the tabletop.

“Carl Copeland killed Bonnie Sykes,” Beckett made it sound definitive.

“But…”

Beckett and Sterling both stared at Jess, waiting for her objection.

“If that’s true, then Johnny Sykes believes that the man who killed his mother is his father.”

“Oh shit,” Beckett said.

Sterling took a long drink of his beer, finishing it in one long gulp. “And I could maybe have saved Mr. Sykes from decades in prison.” He grimaced like he’d just chewed up an aspirin. “Can I have another beer?”

“Jess, I think you should let this go.” Beckett stood in the doorway to his bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. Jess sat on the couch with Shakti curled on her lap, chewing contentedly on a bone that Jess held for her. Beckett’s apartment was without air conditioning. Even with all the windows open, the door propped wide, and two oscillating fans pushing air through the place, the humidity was getting to them. The moisture he’d just toweled off had already reappeared, making his skin glisten with beads of perspiration. He took the towel from his waist and dried his hair with it as he walked into his bedroom. Jess couldn’t help admiring his backside, despite being in the middle of a serious conversation. “I mean, think of Johnny,” he called from the other room.

“You know I can’t drop it,” she said, as Beckett came out of the bedroom dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. Jess had already changed into  a sundress and clipped her hair up away from her neck. It was the coolest thing she owned and already she felt sweat forming along the ridges of her shoulder blades and in the small of her back.

The walk uphill to the Water Wheel Café seemed long with the damp heat sapping their energy. Jess’s hand bumped Beckett’s and his fingers clasped hers. They swung their hands between them while they climbed the hill. “This is August weather,” Jess said. “What happened to June?” Beckett looked at the hardware store as they passed, a proprietor’s calling. “Do you need to go in?”

“No.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “I trust Dave, but I still can’t help looking.”

They entered the community garden. The local business owners maintained it and had carefully chosen native plants to minimize maintenance. Bees busily buzzed from bloom to bloom; the pollen in their leg sacs glowed gold in the evening sun. Beckett pointed to one of the bees. “See that? Wait until August. There’s an apiary down County J. These guys make the best honey.”

Jess smiled at the thought she and Beckett were a normal couple out for a stroll and a nice dinner. Denise brought them menus and water. Tonight, a tank top with a sequined skull topped a short black tutu over capris leggings. Her Buddy Holly glasses were the same, but her hair was in two thin braids pinned over her crown. Jess was glad to see she’d come back to work for Robin after Tyler’s abrupt departure. “Hi again,” Denise said.

“Hi again.” Jess smiled at Denise, finding her quirkily charming. “How’s Bruce today?”

Denise rolled her eyes. The gesture seemed magnified, framed as it was by her thick glasses. She shrugged next. “I’ll send him over.”

A few minutes later, a young man in skinny jeans that sat dangerously low on his hips brought them their iced teas.

“Hi Bruce,” Jess said. He looked surprised as he straightened up to catch her eye. A lanky kid with a prominent nose that hooked down toward his full and chapped lips, Bruce wore a safety pin through his ear and rimmed his dark eyes with liner. “Don’t you work at the ice cream parlor?”

“Yeah. I’m working here, too. The tips are better. And there’s no dress code. Miss Grundi thinks I’ll scare the kiddies if I dress like myself.”

Jess nodded, considering whether she had an opinion on the suitability of his wardrobe. “I’m Jess and this is Beckett,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Sure.” He nodded curtly and excused himself, apparently not one to make small talk. Small talk, Jess figured, could ruin his image.

“He’s a jerk, but he’s Denise’s jerk,” she told Beckett. He nodded as though he understood. “What were you like at that age?”

“You don’t want to know.” Beckett glanced out the window and scratched at his goatee. “Look, Jess, I think you should leave Johnny alone.”

“What?” The mention of Johnny shook Jess from her reveries about youth and young romance. “Why?”

“He hasn’t asked for any of this, has he? It’s all being forced on him out of the blue.”

“Okay. I know that, but his mother is asking for it. Actually, she’s demanding it. You were there when she threw down my typewriter.”

“I know.” Beckett sighed. “I know you’ve got this ghost on your case…”

“On my case? Beckett, it’s not like Bonnie is scolding me.” Jess put her hands to her throat. “You were there when she did this, too.”

Beckett looked at the table. “I know. I’m sorry. I know,” he said again. “But Johnny, he was just a baby when all this happened. He doesn’t remember. He grew up believing something okay about his parents. I mean, their deaths weren’t happy for him, I’m sure, but they weren’t horrific. Now you’re trying to tell this guy that everything he knows about himself has been a lie. His mother’s death, his father’s identity, his grandparents lied to him his whole life…” Beckett turned his gaze out the window. He looked…sad, something Jess had not seen before, and she wondered what was bringing this on. She waited for him to continue his speech, to explain himself, but Denise arrived with their pizza and it seemed Beckett had finished.

Jess slid a piece onto her plate and handed Beckett the serving spatula. “I’m not sure I understand,” she said. “Why the sudden concern for Johnny? I mean, I get what you’re saying, but shouldn’t he know the truth?”

“Should he? What good will the truth do him if it destroys his life?”

“That’s an assumption. What if it makes it better? What about his father? Forty years in jail and his son doesn’t even know he exists.”

“Maybe he’s better off that way. Jesus, Jess. The guy he’s identified as his father his whole life is the one who killed his mother. Now he’s got to put that together with the fact that his real father has been in jail all this time, which he knew nothing about.” Beckett was speaking in a hushed voice with an uncharacteristic intensity. “If he’d known, maybe he could have done something about his father. But he didn’t know. And why not? Because his grandparents, the people who raised him,
lied
to him his whole life. Everything he knows about his parents, his grandparents, and himself is a lie. He can’t just move on from that kind of news.”