ONE
Jenness Crawford’s voice trembled with rage.
“My grandmother was murdered,” she said. “I just know it.”
Nina Truhler had been sitting comfortably behind the desk in her office, pleased to hear from her friend and former employee. Only now she was standing, one hand resting on the desktop for support, the other pressing her cell to her ear.
“What?” she said. “When?”
“Just over a month ago.”
“You’re just telling me this now?”
“There’s nothing you could have done. You couldn’t even have come to the funeral. There wasn’t a funeral. Just a private memorial, her ashes scattered over the lake. Then the will was read. Well, not really read because everyone knew what it said, my parents and uncle and aunts. Tess had discussed it with them when she wrote it, what she wanted done, but now they’re meeting with a developer and I don’t know what to do.”
“Wait. Jen. Go back. You said your grandmother was murdered?”
“I’m convinced of it but no one will listen to me. The police chief, the one they hired from Minneapolis, she said I was distraught. Yes, I’m distraught. Someone murdered my grandmother and now they’re trying to steal the castle.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nina, yes, I’m sure.”
“What can I do?”
“I need—I need a favor.”
“McKenzie?”
“I’m hoping he’ll help me, but I wanted to ask you first before calling him because—because of what happened the last time he did a favor for a friend. Getting shot…”
“He’s okay now.”
“Is he? Nina, I know you don’t like it when he does these things…”
“What can we do?”
You’ll notice she said we.
“Can you come down to the castle?” Jenness said. “I’ve reserved one of our cabins for you and we still observe all of the COVID protocols so there shouldn’t be any danger.”
“Yes, Jen. We’re coming. We’re coming today.”
At least that’s what Nina told her friend. What she told me later was somewhat less dramatic.
* * *
I was watching baseball, a rare Minnesota Twins–Chicago Cubs afternoon matchup, and thinking what a difference a year makes. Last September I had my choice of baseball, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, hockey, and soccer games, all of the seasons overlapping. When the coronavirus reached the U.S. earlier that year, hockey and basketball were shut down midseason and it seemed as if baseball and the WNBA would be canceled altogether. But the NHL, NBA, WNBA, and MLS were allowed to continue their seasons in protective “bubbles”—no one from the outside world was allowed in for fear of infecting the players and staff. One NBA player who snuck out to visit a strip joint—he said he went there for the chicken wings—was suspended from his team and tossed out of the bubble until he completed a ten-day quarantine to make sure he wasn’t contagious.
Meanwhile, baseball played a sixty-game schedule followed by playoffs in empty stadiums with players, coaches, and staff forced to follow strict safety protocols. Those protocols came into question when players in the Marlins and Phillies systems tested positive early in the abbreviated season. Only the rules and player discipline held and the season continued.
At its very best, sports provide an entertaining distraction from the trials and tribulations of everyday life and in those days the misery index had climbed to nearly catastrophic heights. COVID-19 was infecting millions of Americans and killing hundreds of thousands of us, the economy was in freefall with unemployment and business closings pushing toward Great Depression numbers, protests and social unrest were sweeping the nation, and a frighteningly dysfunctional government seemed incapable of doing anything that didn’t make matters worse. Was it any surprise that dentists at the time reported an alarming increase in the number of cracked and fractured teeth in stressed-out patients who ground their teeth mostly at night?
Now we were moving forward—or at least as far as the threat of COVID variants would allow. Sports had settled into their normal seasons, with an unlimited number of fans in attendance reminding everyone why they were played in the first place. There were plenty of people at the ball game I was watching and if it had been played at Target Field instead of Wrigley, I would have been with them.
I was checking to see when the Twins would return home when Nina walked into the condominium we shared in downtown Minneapolis. She dropped her bag next to the coatrack near the door, hung up her blazer, moved to the sofa where I was sitting, sat next to me, and pulled my arm around her shoulders.
“Who’s winning?” she asked.
“Top of the third, no score yet,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here, remember.”
“No, you sleep here. You live at Rickie’s.”
Rickie’s was the jazz club located on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul that Nina had named after her daughter, Erica. Like nearly all of the restaurants and clubs in Minnesota, Rickie’s had taken a life-threatening hit because of the virus. Many closed, some forever. Only Nina had a large parking lot. She built a stage inside an enormous tent that she fitted with a custom heating system. She arranged socially distanced tables for parties of two and four in front of the stage. And she turned the rest of the lot into a drive-in, people watching the musicians from the safety, if not comfort, of their vehicles while listening to a simulcast on their radios, her waitstaff providing curbside food service. On select occasions, she hosted acts in her upstairs concert hall that had been reconfigured to provide full-restaurant service to about thirty percent of the customers she usually served. Plus, she sold pay-per-view tickets to live streams of acts staged not only at Rickie’s but also clubs around the country like the Blue Note.
None of these efforts had produced anywhere near the revenue she had enjoyed before the pandemic, though. Just breaking even every week became a Herculean task; Nina was forced to lay off fifty percent of her kitchen and waitstaff. It shattered her heart to do it. Yet she had remained standing and now her business was approaching pre-COVID levels.
’Course, it didn’t hurt that she had a rich husband.
At first Nina had refused to accept my help.
“I don’t need your money,” she said.
I tried to explain that it was “our” money, only she wouldn’t listen. This precipitated the longest, loudest, and most emotional “discussion” we’d ever had. See, a couple of decades earlier, Nina had escaped an abusive marriage and, with her infant daughter in tow, had built Rickie’s from scratch. Alone. To accept help from someone, to even admit that she needed help, was painful for her.
The argument started at about ten at night. At around one in the morning I finally convinced her that “We’re in this together, remember? For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, remember?” I also reminded Nina that she was the one who had neglected her business to sit by my side for nearly three days while I was lying in a coma in a hospital bed with a bullet in my back; who had pretty much dropped everything to help me recover and rehab myself back to some semblance of normal. “I don’t recall any talk of what was yours and what was mine back then, so…”
At some point, I can’t remember exactly when, we fell into each other’s arms, mostly from exhaustion. Nina whispered, “I’m going to pay you back.”
“I can hardly wait,” I told her at the time.
Now Nina was snuggling closer against me on the sofa. I was fast losing interest in the baseball game.
“We need to get out of here,” she said.
“Get out of where?”
“Here, here; this place.”
Nina waved her hand. Our condo was located on the seventh floor with a spectacular view of the Mississippi River where it tumbled down St. Anthony Falls. Which was another thing about having a wealthy husband—Nina didn’t need to bring any money home for us to continue living in the style to which we had become accustomed; she could afford to plow all of her income into her club. We were very, very lucky and we knew it.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s a dump.”
“We need a vacation. When was the last time we went on a vacation, anyway?”
“We were going to Italy for our honeymoon.”
“Then they were pounded by COVID-19.”
“And then the U.S. got pounded.”
“Then my business went to hell. And you got shot.”
“But now your business is healing, I’m healing, and the borders are opening.”
“I still don’t feel comfortable getting on a plane.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “So, where can we go that doesn’t require using our passports or air travel?”
“I was thinking Redding.”
“Redding, California?”
“Redding, Minnesota. Specifically, Redding Castle on Lake Anpetuwi near the border with South Dakota. I was chatting with Jenness Crawford this morning. You remember Jen.”
“Sure. How is she?”
“Fine. You know after she left Rickie’s, what was it? Fifteen months ago? After she left, she took a job working for her grandmother at the castle. Her grandmother passed…”
“Oh, no. From the virus?”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, Jen runs the place now.”
“Good for her.”
“She invited us to visit,” Nina said. “I said yes. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. If I’m not mistaken, the place is supposed to be pretty spectacular.”
“Let’s find out.”
“When would you like to go? Next week?”
Nina patted my knee.
“It’ll take us what? Thirty minutes to pack?”
* * *
Three hours later the GPS in my Mustang directed us up a long and narrow road cut through a dense forest to a large rock. The words “Welcome to Redding Castle 1883” were carved into it. Beyond the rock was a clearing. In the middle of the clearing stood an enormous building that looked less like a castle than an English country house, something you’d imagine finding in the rich countryside just a few hedgerows from Jane Austen’s place. It was bathed in a golden light; the late afternoon sun was at the perfect angle to beautify its two round turrets, tall gables, huge windows and balconies, some facing the forest; others with a spectacular view of the sparkling blue water of Lake Anpetuwi.
I stopped the car along the road to gaze at it. I remember the exact words I spoke to Nina—“Geez, look at that.”
“It was built in 1883,” she said.
“Yeah, I got that from the rock.”
“I think the rock was added later.”
I glanced at Nina. Normally, she was the one who became excited by what was old and distinguished and beautiful. Instead, she looked as if there was something on her mind.
“It’s been in the Redding family all these years,” she said. “Jenness is a Redding on her mother’s side; Redding was her mother’s maiden name.”
“Okay.”
We parked among a dozen other cars in a lot on the far edge of the clearing next to a barn painted in the same earthy brown and reddish beige colors of the castle. There were eight small cabins also scattered along the perimeter of the clearing, each in a different earth tone; each built with a clear view of the castle as if there was nothing else to see. I slid out of the car and stretched. Nina remained inside for a few beats. When she finally emerged, she stared at me over the roof of the Mustang that, incidentally, she had given to me for my birthday about three years ago. Something in her expression made me stare back.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“Told me what?”
A voice called to us.
“Nina,” it said. “McKenzie.”
The voice belonged to Jenness Crawford. She was half walking, half jogging down a narrow cobblestone path that wound from the castle to the parking lot. She surprised me by wrapping her arms around my waist and hugging me, an act that would have been unthinkable a year earlier; that some people were still reluctant to engage in, vaccines be damned.
Copyright © 2022 by David Housewright
