Season of Ice- Tales of Murder Mystery & Mayhem Read online

  Praise For Richard Prosch

  Meadows Ford is the kind of town you’d motor right past on the highway, but it’s well worth a visit—so long as Richard Prosch is your guide. It turns out the town’s as full of secrets and mysteries as the human heart, and the stories in this collection explore them with an incisiveness and humanity that’s all too rare. ~ Steve Hockensmith, author of the Holmes on the Range series.

  The way the tale is told is often as important as the tale itself, and what you have here is prose that will make you smile with admiration, even if the tone is sometimes as bleak as the Meadows Ford landscape. The imagery is precise, and the language is clear and clean. Nothing is wasted. ~ Bill Crider, author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series.

  Excitement drawn from well-written prose surges from every page. ~ David Cranmer, editor of Beat to a Pulp

  Get your FREE copy of The Target H

  Join the Wolfpack Publishing mailing list for information on new releases, updates, discount offers and your FREE eBook copy of The Target H

  Season of Ice: Tales of Murder, Mystery & Mayhem

  Richard Prosch

  Wolfpack Publishing

  6032 Wheat Penny Avenue

  Las Vegas, NV 89122

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 (as revised) Richard Prosch

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  Kindle Edition ISBN: 978-1-64734-335-4

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Season Of Ice

  Gun Guys

  Removal Service

  Fool Me Twice

  Jolly’s Boy

  Chester Dokes

  Stringtown Road

  Pretending

  Meadows Ford Blues

  Sea Of Red

  The Luck of Frankie Irish

  Lucky Stiff

  Doggy Day Care

  Girl Dogs

  Man Of His Word

  #Peacerocks

  Hidden Steel

  Book Of Slights

  I. STRANGER HOUSE: A SHORT FILM IN FIVE SCENES

  Scene I

  Scene Ii

  Scene Iii

  Scene Iv

  Scene V

  Nothing To Push Against

  The Wrong Purple Oxford Record Labels

  Blood Kin

  Pasnuta Means Arena Of Death!

  Cinderella Makes Good

  Paybak

  Conscience, Inc

  Before Blue Silence

  The Alexandria County Library Book Sale

  Lavina

  Concealed Carry

  The Dead Hand

  Art Game

  A Look At: Dan Spalding Mystery Collection: Volume 1

  THANK YOU

  Original Publications

  About the Author

  For Bill Crider

  Who first met me online

  with the open hand

  of friendship.

  Acknowledgments

  We write in rooms by ourselves, but nobody writes alone.

  Many thanks to Paul Bishop, Bill Crider, Wayne D. Dundee,

  Matt Hilton, James Reasoner, John Curley,

  Thomas Pluck, and Dean Wesley Smith.

  And especially to Gina and Wyatt.

  Season of Ice: Tales of Murder, Mystery & Mayhem

  Season Of Ice

  On a gray day, Wayne Palmer uncovered a senior high school key necklace looped around an auger shaft on the iron pile behind his barn. The chain was twisted around a cotter pin and caked with wet Nebraska sod. He tugged at it as rain dripped from the bill of his cap. Wayne was big; so were his hands. When he pulled again, the cotter pin snapped, and he staggered backwards in the mud, staring at the time-worn pendant. He was cold, in spite of his thick coveralls.

  Rubbing at the emblem’s cloudy blue and white face, he couldn’t read the year. But the colors were local. The worn-out auger had once been part of a round grain storage bin that sat a few hundred feet west of where he was working. The farm he stood on, his farm now, had belonged to the Cass family back then. He swallowed hard. The key would have belonged to Kendra.

  When he was young, Wayne and Kendra were neighbors, but they were separated in age by nearly a decade. She sat with him on Saturday nights when his dad ate supper in Meadows Ford, and she let him sit with her on the school bus during the week, in the farthest back seat with her girlfriend Jan, where they shared chewing gum and she taught him songs from the radio. Early one Saturday morning, in the spring of ‘72, Kendra died in the grain bin, pulled under while her father augured out ten tons of shell corn into a tractor trailer rig. He didn’t know she was in there. It was more than a week before someone thought to look. Wayne’s family was there when they found her.

  Eight years old, metal-rimmed glasses, long brown hair, Wayne had never seen a dead girl before. Now here was Kendra like something straight from a made-for-TV movie or Top 40 song. Wayne watched from across the rain-soaked farmyard while a Huskers game played on the radio and they pulled her out. It was humid, well over eighty degrees, and there was some smell. But he didn’t gag and he didn’t cry, because Kendra wouldn’t want him to. The paramedics fumbled around with the body as they worked to get it up and over the threshold of the grain bin’s rooftop door and down the ladder to the coroner’s truck that read Animal Rescue on the side because the county coroner also happened to be the resident veterinarian. Wayne loved Kendra with everything he had. Her eyes were a rich shade of blue that nobody who didn’t know her alive would ever know again because the camera couldn’t catch it. Her death was ruled accidental. A year later they named a softball field after her.

  Wayne flipped the key over. A deep gouge in the soft metal made it hard to read the initials engraved there, though the third letter was surely a C for Cass. It had to be Kendra’s, he thought, brought down through the fast moving corn with her, loosed by her last struggles for air. Wayne pictured old Bill Cass whistling merrily, the year’s harvest pouring from the bin while only a few feet away—separated from him by ribbed steel and 100-plus decibels of auger engine noise—his only daughter, asleep or maybe awake too late, is pulled and pinned and crushed under the ever shifting mass of a thousand million kernels of corn.

  Wayne wiped his nose on his sleeve and wrapped the key in his big navy handkerchief, storing it deep in his breast pocket before going back to work. For the next hour, he sorted through the junk pile, tossing items into an old farm truck or the bucket of his tractor-loader. The iron was cold and slick. He cut his fingers twice and, just before lunch, dropped a cedar post on his big toe. It was late autumn, a season of ice.

  She kissed him once. He was six or seven, spending an afternoon at the Cass farm while his dad was at an auction. They had climbed the ladder to the top of the grain bin. Kendra had insisted that Wayne go first so that if he fell, “I’ll be right here to catch you.” He was standing on the second rung down, working with both hands to open the angled rooftop hatchway, struggling with the rusted hinge, when she crawled up behind him and planted one on his cheek. “Hi cousin!” she said, but they weren’t cousins. “No?” she said when he reminded her. “Then let’s be kissing neighbors.” That’s as far as it went. It was a friendly, flirty joke. She probably liked him well enough. She was dead befor
e he had much chance to think about it.

  So he’d carried her with him through the decades.

  Today he ate in the house, standing over the sink. A ham sandwich and a cup of coffee. He thought about adding a shot of bourbon but decided against it. There was a message on the phone from Jill, and he thought how good that first drink would taste with her voice to go along when he called her back that night. He didn’t know where he was going with Jill. He was a confirmed bachelor farmer.

  He finished with the iron an hour before dark and fed his cows.

  His senior year, Wayne received the Kendra Cass good sportsmanship award. At the honors banquet, his homeroom teacher told the assembly that Wayne would excel at whatever he set his mind to, but Wayne wasn’t there to hear it, because that night he’d set his mind to drinking. At 7:20 he was already passed out in the back of Rebecca Weatherly’s Camaro. A week later, he saw his name engraved on a two-inch shiny rectangle in the second column of Kendra’s wooden plaque.

  At college he loafed around. He read a lot of books but never really cared to study. They gave him a degree anyway, and then his dad died. He inherited the family farm, drank hard, and sold the land on a whim. On a similar whim, he bought the Cass farm with his equity, plus a loan from the Meadows Ford Bank. He moved into the house, got a few cows, a girlfriend, and an Irish Setter named Brandy. After almost ten years of putting it off, Wayne was getting around to having a life.

  “It’s not hers, Wayne,” said Betty Cass, her eyes too big behind thick plastic glasses. “Her stuff is all put away.” The house was cold but smelled of dusty electric heat. Betty’s veined fingers tapped lightly against a mug that said Meadows Ford Farmers Exchange. Wayne sipped coffee from an identical cup.

  “Your furnace working, Betty?” Wayne said. He knew it was, had heard it wheeze on and off twice since he’d arrived, damp with the rain and starting to ache from his day with the iron, but it was something to say. Betty didn’t answer. She tapped the cup and stared out the black window.

  Wayne looked at the church calendar on the fridge and the photos of local kids stuck there with colorful magnets. “Do you still teach piano, Betty?” asked Wayne, but still she was quiet. There were two pictures of Kendra in the kitchen, a framed piece on the counter beside the sink, and a time-faded Polaroid on the fridge: Kendra with Joe Carson, her sometimes boyfriend at the time. Ten years older than Wayne, Joe never married either and still ran the local café with his dad.

  “It doesn’t belong to her,” Betty said again, like Kendra was still alive somewhere, like she could swoop in at any minute with her flowers and beads and make Wayne understand.

  “Sure, Betty. But why not just look? Hell of a drive in here.” The wind was picking up out of the North. “It’s not a nice night.”

  “You’d have come to town to see Jill anyway.”

  He shook his head. “She’s working tonight. Won’t be off ‘til late.”

  Betty nodded and stared out the window some more. Two cars crept slowly past. In the weather-spattered glass, the headlights were a tangled orange.

  “I was finally cleaning up all that junk behind the south barn,” said Wayne. “The old floor auger from the corn bin is back there.”

  “This key belonged to somebody else,” said Betty. “Yours maybe. Maybe you threw it out there when you moved into the house.” She turned and looked at him for the first time in ten minutes, her expression softening. “Maybe you just forgot,” she told him.

  “It’s not mine,” said Wayne. “It belonged to a girl. It’s smaller than the kind boys buy.”

  “Do they still?”

  “Buy them?” asked Wayne. “I don’t know.”

  “You should’ve had children, Wayne. Maybe you will one day.” Betty sipped at her coffee. “Bill always liked children on the place.”

  Then: “Her passing killed him too, you know.” It hung in the air, matter of fact.

  Betty stood up a little too fast and stumbled before walking away down the hall. When she came back, she held a square maple box. With great care, she drew back the top and nudged the container toward Wayne. He leaned forward and saw inside. Billfold portraits. A woolly patch in the shape of an intertwined M and F: her school letter. Society pins. Class ring. Class key—identical in size to the one on the table. He drew it into the light and, tipping it, read her initials on the back: KAC. Kendra Ann Cass. He returned the key to its resting place.

  “She was so proud of it all,” said Betty. “Proud of what she had accomplished.” She pulled the box across the table and hugged it tightly. “She was a good girl, Wayne. After all these years, I don’t know what you remember, and I can only guess what you’ve heard. But you believe me. She was a good girl.”

  They sat quietly for a while, and Wayne sipped the last of his coffee. Finally he said, “I better be getting on home, Betty.”

  Wayne’s pickup circled the Locust Room lounge twice before motoring back home. It took him a long time to drive the seven miles. When Wayne finally made the call to Jill, he was on his third drink.

  “If it isn’t Kendra’s, who does it belong to?” Jill Hunter pushed her breakfast plate away and settled back into the booth across from Wayne, lifting the key into the gray morning light. She was thirty and worked as a dispatcher for the sheriff’s department. They’d both grown up in the county but had only met within the year.

  Wayne pushed his own plate back, shook his head, and breathed in the sensual air around him. Marty Carson’s Maple Leaf was all about the senses: bubbling eggs and billowing pancakes, coffee steam riding a mist of fried bacon and sausage. It was the only business in Meadows Ford that hadn’t changed since Wayne was a kid, and he was there every Sunday for lunch. They sat in the first booth with mugs that weren’t allowed to go empty.

  “The necklace belonged to a girl,” said Wayne.

  “Maybe one of Kendra’s friends,” said Jill.

  “Maybe,” said Wayne. “She wasn’t very popular, no more than a couple close girlfriends. She was dating Joe Carson.”

  “It could be that she was up there with someone,” said Jill. “When the bin was emptied, the key got wrapped around the auger.”

  “No way to know who she might’ve had over,” said Wayne.

  “Ask her mom?” said Jill.

  “I should have. Right now I don’t think Betty wants any more questions.”

  Jill spun the key between her fingers. “Why would she be up there?”

  “Everyone said that’s where she smoked dope.”

  “Did she?”

  Wayne shrugged. “I was a kid. It never came up.”

  “No big deal,” said Jill.

  “But bothersome,” said Wayne.

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “There’s something that’s always bugged me about the way she died. I can’t put my finger on it. Something I’m not remembering.”

  They were quiet a while.

  “Coffee regular. Coffee decaf,” said Marty Carson as he came up behind them. Carefully the round man reached across and filled their mugs.

  “You take good care of us,” said Jill.

  “You’re family,” said Carson, talking to Jill but looking at Wayne. “Family’s all we got left in Meadows Ford.”

  “Marty’s my long lost uncle,” said Wayne.

  “You kids say that hoping I’ll leave you my fortune.”

  “Are you really related?” asked Jill.

  “Nobody new moves to town anymore,” said Carson. “Anybody left over from the old days is my family.” He laid a hand on Wayne’s shoulder. “Like I says, it’s all we got.”

  “Not so,” countered Jill. “You’ve got delicious strawberries.”

  “Fresh picked and flown in from the continent,” he told her, laughing at his joke while moving to the next booth. Jill smiled and took Wayne’s hand across the table.

  For a while they forgot about Kendra Cass. They talked about Jill’s work and nodded occasionally as someo
ne they knew went in or out.

  Joe Carson came in and walked straight to the kitchen. Wayne nodded in his direction and Jill shook her head.

  “I don’t know Joe,” said Jill. “But the department does. Had to send a couple deputies out to his trailer last month.” She looked over her shoulder. “Nothing serious. Domestic stuff.”

  As they continued to visit, Wayne found himself watching Joe Carson. The guy looked busy, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything productive. He moved a washcloth from one counter to another. He dried his hands on a towel and hung it beside the coffee pot. Then he moved the washcloth again.

  Wayne didn’t know Joe well at all. He was a loose fixture in the background of Meadows Ford, someone Wayne never thought much about. Joe dated Kendra and graduated years before Wayne entered high school, and when he worked at the café, he stuck to the kitchen. No surprise that deputies had been called out to the trailer where he lived. But neither did Wayne suspect Marty Carson’s son of being a great local criminal. Someone once said Joe had a hair trigger temper. Wayne wondered where he’d been the night Kendra crawled into the grain bin.