Read Online A Lonely Way to Die: A Utah O'Brien Mystery Novel (Minnesota Mysteries Series Book 2) by Jonni Good - Free Book Online

over with. “We had a falling-out after her first book was published. She wrote about my little brother, who drowned when I was eleven years old. She changed the name, and the place, and added magical stuff, so it sound totally different, but I knew who it was. I told her I didn’t think it was right, that she kind of stole part of my life. She said I was being silly. We never spoke after that.”
    I let that sink in. I looked over at Mort, and shook my head, a fraction of an inch. One of his eyebrows went up, and he gave me a little nod. I turned back to the grieving woman, slumped into the beat-up old chair.
    “Carol,” I said, softly, so it wouldn’t sound quite so much like I was calling her a liar. “I’ve read every single book that Sonje McCrae ever wrote. A lot of people die in her books. They’re fantasies, and they’re written for teenagers. But no children die in them. No animals, no children. Ever. Why are you saying that?”
    She looked at me, then at Mort. She fiddled with her gloves for a minute, and then said, “She disguised it by making my brother Timmy into a dwarf. It was in the first book.”
    She looked at her hands, and the tissue, and then took a deep breath and looked out the window again. “There were lots of little stories that we made up when we were kids that ended up in her books, too. I didn’t mind that—she started most of the stories, and I didn’t have any right to say they were mine. The dwarf’s death bothered me, though.”
    She sat up a little straighter, and looked at us. “But I didn’t really break off my friendship with her, the way I said. If she’s gone, there’s no point in lying about it now. Harold didn’t want me to be friends with her. He said my trips to the city were too expensive, and it was putting ideas in my head. I pretended to be angry at her, but I still visited her a few times a year, whenever I could find an excuse to go to the city for some other reason.”
    She looked back at us, pleading. “Don’t tell him. Please. He can’t know.”
    I could feel my face pinching up. I looked to Mort for help.
    “I remember your brother’s drowning,” he said. “I was a brand new deputy at the time. That was a bad business.” He shook his head sadly.
    I waited for Mort to fill in some details about that incident, but he moved to safer ground. “Why did Sonje come to West Elmer? She hasn’t been here in years.”
    “She called and said she wanted to make things up with her mother, with Mildred. Sonje and I always kept in touch, with letters and sometimes phone calls. We don’t do email, because Harold—”
    She looked out the window for a second. A muscle on her jaw was jumping, until she took a deep breath and forced herself to relax.
    I said, “Whose idea was it for her to stay out here? Did you offer to let her use this place?”
    “No, she asked if she could stay here. We used to ride our bikes out here to visit my grandmother when we were in grade school. This is where West Elmer used to be, you know, before they moved it to the other side of the river. Of course, that was a really long time ago. This is the only original house still standing. Sonje and I would go out into the fields and find things we called ‘artifacts’ that were turned up by the plows. It was junk, really, but it was fun. The house was much nicer then, and Sonje loved my grandmother. When she called I told her the place was a wreck, but she still wanted to stay here.”
    She looked around at the peeling wallpaper and the old furniture, and bit her lower lip. “We let this place go. Harold didn’t think it was worth fixing. He wanted to sell it right after my grandmother died, but it’s in my name, and there are a lot of memories here, so I said no. It was a mistake. A house doesn’t last long out here, if you don’t keep it up. It isn’t worth hardly anything, now.” She shrugged, and wiped her nose again.
    “Carol,” I said, “most towns, if one of their own