A Winsome Murder Read online

  Terrace Books, a trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, takes its name from the Memorial Union Terrace, located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Since its inception in 1907, the Wisconsin Union has provided a venue for students, faculty, staff, and alumni to debate art, music, politics, and the issues of the day. It is a place where theater, music, drama, literature, dance, outdoor activities, and major speakers are made available to the campus and the community. To learn more about the Union, visit www.union.wisc.edu.

  A Winsome Murder

  James DeVita

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden

  London WC2E 8LU, United Kingdom

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Copyright © 2015 by James DeVita

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise— or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeVita, James, author.

  A winsome murder / James DeVita.

  pages    cm

  ISBN 978-0-299-30440-9 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-299-30443-0 (e-book)

  I. Title.

  PS3554.E928177W56      2015

  813´.6—dc23

  2014042916

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  For

  Brenda,

  Gale,

  and

  Sophia

  A Winsome Murder

  A humid night in August, after midnight. Helga Steimel was walking her dog, Fred, a tiny yelp of a poodle. The stars were out and a mild breeze was beginning to cool the evening.

  Fred, happy to be himself, barked and tugged Helga farther and farther away from town, past the Legion hall, past the church, past the high school and the cornfields behind it, and down the empty streets of the new development being carved out of the last forty acres of farmland out by the highway. There were no houses there yet. No street-lights. The asphalt roads were laid, as well as the sidewalks, chalk white and unscuffed in their newness. Mounds of lumber and roofing materials lay stacked along either side of the street, and every fifty yards or so numbered stakes sectioned off the hayfields soon to be bulldozed into residential lots.

  Fred kept yapping at the air, pulling Helga along, and she let him, gazing skyward occasionally at the clusters of brilliant stars above. On a night as dark as this she could even make out the wispy thin sheen of the Milky Way, which was exactly what she was doing when Fred suddenly stopped.

  He did not bark.

  He did not shift from his mark.

  What Helga saw first was a shadowy darkness in the tall grasses to her left, a deeper darkness than the rest of the field. Everywhere else the hay was moving, the long grasses swaying back and forth beneath the light night breeze, but not where Helga was looking. There, nothing moved. There, the grasses had all been matted down, leaving a sort of dark impression. She moved closer. Within the dusky void there seemed a thing of whiteness on the ground, a colorless form, silent and—

  Helga stopped. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She backed away, slowly, carefully, as if she’d stumbled upon some act of horrific intimacy that she knew she should not be looking at.

  A body.

  Its arms and legs bent and pointed in ways arms and legs should not be able to go.

  Melissa Becker was the first girl that Deborah Ellison ever kissed.

  She’d kissed girls before, of course, when she was little, at sleepovers, lying under blankets on living room floors or sleeping in the same bed with a playmate, but that was always practice, as they giggled it, practice to kiss the boys. But for Deborah, it wasn’t practice. She enjoyed it. She craved the tingly feeling she felt when a little friend’s hand accidentally brushed her body while whispering sixth grade secrets. There, nested into each other, so close that each could smell the other’s candied breath, Deborah felt an overwhelming desire to be the other girl, to be all of her, to dissolve within her. She didn’t know what this meant at the time, only that it felt right and true. And although some part of her, the part that was not truly her, told her that what she wanted was sinful and wrong, another part of her told her that it was right and good.

  So she knew, even then, that she was different. This difference walked before her like another person whom only she could see, leaving herself always trailing slightly behind. She wanted to catch up to her own self someday, to be the person in front of her, the person she’d been trying to pretend wasn’t there.

  And then she kissed Melissa Becker.

  Melissa was Deborah’s first love. The kind of love that marks you for life, the kind of love that can damage you. She’d felt this way about Melissa ever since middle school, but never dared to say a word. Slowly, though, as they grew up together, Deborah began to think that maybe Melissa felt the same way—something in her eyes when they said goodbye after volleyball practice, or when they ate lunch together, or when Melissa combed her hair on the bus. Deborah’s chest tickled at her touch, a flutter of hummingbird wings within her heart. She was so scared, though, so scared to say anything, to do anything. What if she were wrong? What if Melissa didn’t have the same feelings? What if she would think her disgusting and never talk to her again?

  Then Melissa got sick. The kind of sick you read about in newspapers.

  Deborah could barely breathe. She could not imagine a world without Melissa, without the person who made her look forward to waking. Just to glance her way in the hallway made day worth being day. How could this be? How could whoever does such things do such a thing?

  It happened in the high school gym.

  Deborah and Melissa were putting away volleyballs in the storage room. Melissa, in loose blue gym shorts, sitting on a rolled-up gymnastic mat, showed Deborah her leg, where the cancer was. Deborah knelt and put her hand on Melissa’s knee, hating what was beneath the skin, the unseen sickness inside, the other thing that was in the room with them now. She could feel its presence. She stroked Melissa’s leg, feeling for it, but felt only smoothness and warmth. She bent and kissed her knee. Holily. She kissed it again and again and again and again and prayed to God to make the disease go away and leave Melissa alone. When she looked up, Melissa was smiling.

  Deborah’s neck and chest blushed warm. She rose higher and kissed Melissa on the mouth. No hesitation, no awkwardness. A naked, unbound, long kiss. And Melissa kissed her back, all wanting, all willingness, all acceptance and ease, all which cannot be said, all which cannot be described in words, was in that kiss. Deborah’s body felt as if it should burst. She could not stop kissing Melissa, barely could she find time to breathe as her hands touched her every part. She wanted to travel the whole of her, every turn and curve and rise of her body, to feel it and taste it and sear it into her memory. She wanted herself and Melissa to be inside each other, to pass into one another; s
he wanted to devour her and keep her safe and whole within her own belly, safe from the cancer, safe from the world. It was all heat and breath and love and giving and generous and natural—and, god, so easy, so, so easy—so like the person that Deborah had always known she was. She had finally become the person walking before her, the one who had always been just a few steps ahead, waiting for her to catch up.

  She had arrived now, and she and her other self breathed as one.

  And she and Melissa breathed as one.

  And now this had happened.

  Tom Ellison finished up his paperwork and headed home. He pulled the squad car into his driveway and got out, noticing for a moment what a warm, listless night it was. He went into his unlocked house, placed his car keys on a table just inside the front door, and fingered through the mail.

  He walked down a short hallway lined with family photographs, oak framed and neatly arranged on the wall. He took a moment to look at them. In one, his daughter, Deborah, was wearing a white lace dress and a flowered veil, her hands, gloved in white, held before her in prayer. She was smiling. She had an amazing smile, wide mouthed and full. The picture hung slightly askew next to a silhouette profile she’d made of herself in the third grade, cut out of black construction paper. Beneath these two pictures, on an oak side table polished to a golden sheen, were three photograph albums: one for Deborah, the cover hand-colored by herself; one for her brother, Braden; and one for the family. Tom’s wife, Deanne, was an avid scrapbooker.

  If you had been standing there, in Tom Ellison’s quiet hallway, on the freshly cleaned carpet, and you had reached down and flipped open Deborah’s photo album, you would have seen a picture of her in diapers, straddling a baby walker, playing in the ankle-high water of the lake in Winsome Bay. Even as an infant, her smile is what you would have noticed first. If you looked down a little farther, on the same page, you’d have seen a photo of her at three years old, standing in the same lake, a clump of marsh weeds balanced on her head. Two plastic-covered pages farther in, Deborah wears a sparkly red dress, red leotards, and tap shoes. If you kept turning and reached the high school pages, you would have seen her at fourteen in a blue-and-white Wildcats uniform, her softball cap pulled down low on her forehead, prepared to bat and trying to look very serious, but you’d still have been able to see the grin beneath. On the next page, at fifteen, she holds a twenty-three-inch walleye, caught while vacationing with the family at Lake Sinissipi, her hair wildly fat and funny, her cheeks burnished red from the wind, smiling a smile that would have made you smile to look at it.

  At sixteen she stops smiling.

  Tom Ellison continued down the hallway into the kitchen. He flipped on the light. On his way to the fridge he saw the flashing red button on his answering machine. The ringer is always off after midnight because so many people call his house directly instead of the police station. He’s told people time and again to call the nonemergency number or 911, but having grown up in Winsome, and knowing just about everyone there, he still gets calls for everything from stray cats to drunks at the Dew Drop Inn to shot-up mailboxes. A rash of lawn globe thefts had been the big case last year.

  Tom went over to the answering machine and tapped the Play button. The message was garbled. He played it again. Jotted down the time. Deanne leaned into the kitchen doorway, shielding her eyes, and Tom apologized for waking her.

  “You coming to bed?” she asked.

  “Not just yet.”

  “Why, what now?”

  “Nothing. Go on back to sleep. It’s only Helga.” Tom headed back down the hallway for his keys. “I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I don’t know, a dead animal or something out by the highway. Be back in a bit.”

  Kevin Lachlan sat in his car and lit a cigarette. Parked in a clearly marked No Parking zone in front of the Bank Street Diner, he didn’t care if his car got booted or towed away. Actually, he hoped it would so he wouldn’t have to return to work and face the little bitch Mara Davies again, a spiky-haired witch who color-coordinated her eyeglass frames with whatever too-tight skirt she’d slithered into that morning, a woman too old for her hip hairdos and too short for the three-inch spike heels she liked to ka-lick around in every day. One stupid night, a drunken night he couldn’t even remember, and he’d been paying for it ever since.

  Lachlan cranked the AC and opened the window. He wanted two minutes of peace and quiet. The day was only going to get worse, he could feel it. Mara had set the meeting up without asking him and the last thing he wanted to do today was listen to some hack children’s book writer perform a dog and pony show she’d probably memorized out of Guerrilla Marketing for the Writer. Give me grownups, for fuck’s sake, he thought, flicking his cigarette out the window, I want to work with grownups. He shouldered open the car door and headed into the diner.

  The Bank Street was the only place in Chicago Lachlan knew of where you could still smoke. Not that it was legal there, they just didn’t care. Somebody on the payroll somewhere. He spotted the woman he’d come to meet right away. She was sitting in a booth and waving at him as if she knew him. He gave a half wave back as the owner of the diner took off his glasses and stepped from behind the register. He whispered something in Lachlan’s ear.

  Jillian McClay had allowed enough time for traffic jams, flat tires, wrong directions, road construction, lack of parking, and unforeseen acts of God—none of which she encountered—and arrived in downtown Chicago an hour before her meeting with Kevin Lachlan, editor of the American Forum magazine. The first thing she did when she got there was buy a pack of cigarettes. Whenever she traveled more than an hour from home she became a smoker again. Like tax deductions, rules were different out-of-town.

  Walking into the Bank Street Diner, she first thought that she either was in the wrong place or had wandered onto the set of a Quentin Tarantino movie. The Bank Street looked like the scene of some Slovakian mob hit waiting to happen. When she came through the door, the entire staff paused in their routines and stared. The cook, watching her, set two dishes on the countertop so slowly that neither plate made a sound. The waitresses, staring, kept doing whatever it was they were doing—serving, counting cash—only they did it slower. Even the overhead fans turned with deliberateness. Bad country music was playing, and dying aloe plants were splayed against the windows of each booth as if gut shot.

  Jillian stood by the door and waited to be seated. A man with a face like work walked toward her. Middle aged and oddly handsome in the way that ugly men can sometimes be handsome, he sipped his coffee and nodded to her. He wore black-rimmed glasses, a black suit, gray tie, and gray sweater. A charcoal man. He handed Jillian a menu heavy with plastic. “Sit, please, where you like,” he said in a soft accent that, although pleasant, somehow conveyed the sense that he was a person one was never to screw around with, like one of those quiet neighbors you read about who work in their garages late at night carving tiny wooden Santas and are later discovered to have been guilty of genocide somewhere in the Balkans.

  Jillian slid into a booth, avoiding the tangle of dead plant limbs hanging off the windowsill, and took out her cigarettes. An older man in a black suit, gray vest and tie, looking much like a twin of the charcoal man, slipped in from between the kitchen’s swinging doors. He circled the room silently, paused near the front door, looked out the windows, and then glided, shark-like, back into the kitchen. Jillian dragged over an ashtray, lit her cigarette, and scanned the room. She couldn’t write a place like this if she wanted to. The employees all looked as if they belonged to some vaguely Slavic mafia with an enforced dress code of black and gray and instructions to move more slowly than normal people. They sported runway-worthy scowls and smoked cigarettes like they were inhaling sex. Jillian envied the fact that they still smoked in restaurants in Chicago. And still had sex.

  A pretty waitress, late twenties maybe, walked past Jillian’s booth. She had dark waist-length hair and wore a gray polo and black spandex pants. She had a pot of coffee i
n each hand and drifted through the diner topping off customers’ cups. She walked over to Jillian’s booth, well aware that every man in the place was staring at her and looking like she could care less.

  “You know what you like?” she asked in a weary Euro-something accent.

  “Just coffee, please,” she said, reading Fenyana on the girl’s skinny name tag.

  The waitress filled Jillian’s cup, spilling coffee into the saucer beneath and looking completely bored. Bored and beautiful. Not Hollywood beautiful, deeply beautiful. A plain face, new and undented, and breasts that whispered, “We’re young, we’re young.” As she walked away, Jillian snuck a look down at her own breasts, adjusted her blouse, nostalgically, and sucked her belly a little farther behind the waist of her jeans.

  On her second cup of coffee she saw Kevin Lachlan walk in. Not quite fat, pudgy, a bright red face, salt-and-pepper hair. He was dressed well: suit, dark blue and double-breasted. She’d seen his picture in the magazine, but he looked older in person. Jillian caught his eye with a wave just as the man in gray walked from behind the counter and whispered something to him. Lachlan smiled at the man and then headed toward Jillian. She stubbed out her cigarette and stepped out of the booth.

  “Jillian McClay,” she said, holding out her hand.

  “Kevin Lachlan,” he said. “Thanks for driving in.”

  Lachlan took off his jacket, and they both slid into the booth. He’d already sweated through his shirt. “So,” he said, “Mara speaks highly of you.” He set his iPhone down on the table and turned up his coffee cup. “You two been friends long?”

  “We met at the book expo about fifteen years ago.”

  The waitress with the beautiful everything came over and filled Lachlan’s cup without asking. “Cream,” he said, not looking up. He was about to say something else when his iPhone spun in a half circle on the table before him. He groaned slightly. “Sorry, I have to get this.” Jillian waited as he listened to the message. Lachlan smiled, trying to fill the awkward silence, saying, “Mara really likes your books, by the way. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet.”