Letting Go in La Crosse: Frank Dodge Mysteries, #3

By Dean Klinkenberg

The headline is explosive. The clock is ticking. Can he uncover the lies before a community self-destructs?

 

Freelance journalist Frank Dodge vowed to stay by his estranged lover's side until the bitter end. But when he's offered a plum assignment covering the economic impact of frac sand mining, he's torn between his career and reconciling with his dying ex. Believing he can do both, he's midway through the gig when a bomb goes off, taking innocent lives.

 

Discovering that corruption runs fatally deep in the clash between greedy corporates and luckless locals, Dodge chases the story into high-stakes territory. But the investigation takes him far from his former partner's deathbed when he realizes his major national scoop could take down powerful forces causing widespread environmental destruction.

 

Will Dodge's exposure of greed-driven crime cost him more than a guilt-ridden promise?

 

Letting Go in La Crosse is the third book in the gritty Frank Dodge mystery series. If you like snarky heroes, dark humor, and communities battling for survival, then you'll love Dean Klinkenberg's engaging page-turner.

 

Buy Letting Go in La Crosse to reveal the truth today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Klinkenberg
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735242811

Dean Klinkenberg

Dean Klinkenberg, the Mississippi Valley Traveler, explores the back roads and backwaters of the Mississippi River Valley, a place with an abundance of stories to tell, big characters, epic struggles, do-gooders and evil-doers. Some of those stories are in the Frank Dodge mystery series; others you’ll find in his non-fiction works and the Mississippi Valley Traveler guidebooks. He lives in St. Louis with his husband, John, and a parrot, Ra. 

Book preview

Mysteries by Dean Klinkenberg

Rock Island Lines (Frank Dodge mystery #1)

Double-Dealing in Dubuque (Frank Dodge mystery #2)

Letting Go in La Crosse (Frank Dodge mystery #3)

I occasionally offer free books or short stories to people on my mailing list. If you’d like to stay in the loop for these special offers, go here to sign up: http://DeanKlinkenberg.com/free-book/

Mississippi Valley Traveler Guides

Road Tripping the Great River Road, Volume 1:

17 Trips Along the Upper Mississippi River

Small Town Pleasures: 27 Small Mississippi River Towns for Day Trips and Long Weekends

THE CHARACTERS AND events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental, so get over it.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 2020, Dean Klinkenberg. All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

La Crosse, Wisconsin, is a special place to me. It’s not just the city where I went to college, it’s where I learned how to live. I showed up as an insecure eighteen-year-old with amorphous dreams and left as a less insecure young man with a vision for my future. Progress.

It’s also the place where I got hooked on the Mississippi River, thanks to bike rides along the river, hikes up the bluffs, and evenings spent brooding on its banks. The city is big enough to offer excellent dining and drinking options but small enough to enable a quick escape to a blufftop goat prairie or a floodplain forest. I wish I could have set the entire book in La Crosse proper, but the story required Frank Dodge to be mobile. Fortunately, the places around La Crosse are nearly as interesting.

I left La Crosse in 1988 for graduate school, but the distance in space and time did little to diminish my attachment. I have enduring friendships with several people in the area, which gives me an excuse to return regularly. It’s not quite the same place I left. It has evolved since I lived there, in a good way. Maybe they were waiting for me to leave. It’s on my short list of special places along the Mississippi. You should visit. Soon.

Every book I write is a collaboration, even if I can’t practically name every person who contributes. Letting Go in La Crosse is no exception. Still, one must try. I’d like to thank Mike Herzberg for sharing expertise earned from his years as a police detective. His comments provided a reality check. And speaking of reality checks, I’d also like to thank the FBI for talking with me. Yes! The FBI. They offer a service where they connect writers with FBI agents to discuss how to represent the work of the Bureau (more) realistically. Shelly Wilson from the Bureau’s Public Affairs Headquarters arranged a call where I got to ask several silly questions of Agent Jeff, who helped me see how ridiculous some of my initial plot devices were. Even though it was an unpleasant process to completely rewrite the story after talking with him, I’m grateful for the time Shelly and Jeff took to keep me from looking like an idiot.

The original idea for this story grew out of a casual conversation with a friend of a friend at a farmers market in Winona, another fine rivertown. I am grateful to the many people who subsequently gave up their time to talk with me and offer their perspectives on the opportunities presented by and calamities wrought by frac sand mining.    

I am also deeply grateful to Allan Edmands for his continuing role as my editor, for keeping the stories consistent and cleaning up my persistent mistakes. I also thank Peggy Nehmen for designing the cover art again.

And, as always, I am grateful that my husband, John, is not only a great partner in life but an avid reader and perceptive critic. His comments on earlier drafts were essential to creating the version of this story that you are reading now.

Dean Klinkenberg

St. Louis

1

The call came while I was sitting next to his bed in the nursing home, his hand resting limply in mine. The editor from Leave No Trace magazine had an assignment for me. She wanted me to go to Wisconsin to write about how sand mining was affecting tourism along the Mississippi River. I had pitched the idea weeks before. The lack of a response had led me to assume that she wasn’t interested. Now that she was, though, I realized that the assignment would be a good opportunity, a chance to stretch my writing skills, to show off my potential as a journalist. It would also pay well.

Still, I didn’t really want to take it. I had told myself this time that I would stay to the end.

I’d been back in St. Louis for eleven weeks. Every day I visited Greg for an hour or two and studied him closely for the latest signs of imminent death. The plastic breathing tube under his nose made that a little harder, masking subtle changes in his condition. There wasn’t much else for me to do when I was there except sit and watch. He was rarely conscious, and when he was, he was oblivious to everything around him. He had no idea where he was, who he was, who I was. That might have been the only blessing for him, a man in the last stages of a life cut short by Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t have thought he’d last as long as he had. Still, I visited faithfully to honor the years we’d spent building a life together.

I brought him fresh flowers every day. They added a floral layer to the ammonia and Lysol, which otherwise hung in the air. I’d slide a plastic chair next to the bed and watch his abdomen rise and fall, wondering how much longer the part of his brain that tells him to breathe in and out would continue to function. This time I was determined to stay to the end, until he died.

His room was maddeningly sterile. Fading brown walls flattened the dim light cast by the overhead fluorescent lights. The bed cover was white, with a barely perceptible triangle in relief in the middle of it. The sheets: white, too, of course. Every damn piece of fabric was white, so housekeeping could just throw it all in a washing machine and bleach away the unpleasant residues secreted by a man near the end of his life.

I had decorated his room this week with a few things from the house we’d shared: a blue and white comforter his grandmother had made, which I’d folded over the lower third of his bed; a blown-glass vase we’d bought in Venice, which I’d set on the coffee table; a picture of the two of us beneath the Eiffel Tower, which I’d placed on the table next to his bed.

No one paid much attention to me when I showed up, not unlike the way they ignored Greg. At that point, he was a low-maintenance patient. Someone showed up a few times a day to check his vitals, refill the fluid that got pumped into his stomach to keep him alive, and change the bags that collected his piss and shit. Occasionally, they even spritzed the room with a shot or two of air freshener—always a pine scent. They did it efficiently: in and out in a jiff, then on to the next shell of a person inhaling the last wisps of life.

Every person in this place, this memory care facility, had once walked around of their own free will, argued and made love, cheered for their favorite sports team. Many had spent a lifetime mastering a hobby such as collecting stamps or annoying their children. Everyone in this place had once lifted a fork effortlessly to feed themself, had once shit on their own. They all deserved a better end, including Greg.

There was nothing noble about my going there every day to watch over him. I knew that. I had abandoned him when he got sick. At least, that’s what most people would say, and I can’t argue the point. He’d been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s eight years earlier. We’d had a good life until then.

We lived in a modern townhouse in a hip neighborhood. We hosted regular dinner parties, the kind that everyone wanted to be invited to. Greg was a great cook—creative and fearless about trying a new dish or technique, such as hasenpfeffer (rabbit stew), mashawa soup, or blackened catfish po’ boys. I loved to eat. It was a good match.

I was working as a psychotherapist, trying to help people understand why their lives sucked. Greg was an engineer, a good one. He was fascinated by how things worked and was obsessed with making them work better. I swear he could tear apart an old transistor radio or motherboard and put it back together in his sleep. We had a collection of old electronics that he kept in working order, such as the twenty-year-old VCR he relied on to watch old VHS tapes of family movies. He felt greater satisfaction in keeping that VCR functioning than he would have from digitizing the movies and watching them on a DVD player.

When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I freaked out. Sure, I’d already noticed a few changes in his behavior: memory lapses here and there and the occasional outburst of impatience or anger. Still, the diagnosis unsettled me. Nevertheless, I felt determined to stick it out, to hang in there with him.

But we had a bad day, a really bad day, and I panicked. He got lost driving home from the grocery store, and I had to go find him. When I did, he was confused and mad. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was tapping a finger on his knee nonstop. I got him home, but his anger didn’t let up. He accused me of drugging him, of putting something in his morning coffee that had caused him to get lost. His anger turned to rage, and he punched me, knocking me on my ass. It didn’t stop there.

As he screamed more accusations and swore that he was going to get even, he kicked me. I pulled myself up, ran to the bathroom, and locked the door behind me. As he banged on the door, I called 911 for help. When the EMTs arrived, Greg got distracted just long enough for me to run out of the bathroom, push him aside and to the floor, and open the front door. They restrained him just enough to give him a shot that knocked him out cold. The hospital put him in a solo room on the psych ward, where he eventually calmed down. I think the industrial-strength Haldol helped.

When Greg returned home a few days later, he remembered feeling mad, but he didn’t remember the accusation, and he didn’t remember beating me—in spite of the black eye his fist had left behind. He refused to believe he was capable of that. Truth was, I think, that he remembered more than he let on, and it terrified him, too. Still, the hospitalization left enough of an impression on him that he turned in his retirement papers, cutting short a successful engineering career.

I was shaken, of course, and I wasn’t sure if I would be safe staying with him. Would it happen again? What if he grabbed a knife or hit me with something more lethal the next time?

Not long after that, one of my therapy clients, a young man named Joe Malone, killed himself. That flipped a switch in me. I felt helpless and impotent as a helper and a partner. I had to get out. There was still enough of the old Greg left at that time for me to recognize him, but that part wasn’t going to be around a lot longer. He was going to need 24/7 care soon, and I didn’t think I had the capacity to provide it and keep my sanity. I didn’t think I was strong enough, or good enough.

I called his sister, Emily, and told her that I had to leave. Once she was done swearing at me, we worked out a plan to move him to a center where he would have his own apartment but with plenty of oversight. We didn’t tell Greg until the day we moved him. It felt like a betrayal, but I didn’t think he’d remember if we told him earlier, and I worried that telling him might incite a major blowup. I didn’t want to risk that he’d put up a fight and make the move even more difficult.

When we got him to his new place—a large complex in south St. Louis—he was confused and insisted that he was ready to go back home. He got mad at us for suggesting he was home. He just didn’t seem to understand—or he refused to accept—the change. When I gave him a hug and looked him square in the eyes, all I saw was terror.

I stuck around a couple of weeks longer and visited him to make sure he was settled in OK. He had stopped dressing himself, so every day a nurse or a tech picked out his clothes and helped him put them on. The smell of neglect grew because he was no longer bathing himself. And when I looked in those eyes again, I no longer saw terror. All I saw was emptiness. Had the disease wiped out his soul, or had I? Or had Greg just given up?

That was enough for me. Greg was gone—at least the Greg I had known—and nothing I could do was going to change that. I packed my bags, bought an open-ended plane ticket to Panama City, and left, prepared to live up to the promise I made to Emily: to never see Greg again. Maybe that makes me a coward. Or maybe it just makes me a shitty person. I tried not to dwell on it, but I could never—have never—let it go.

So, no, visiting Greg a few years later, at the end of his life, wasn’t penance. Sitting by his bed, holding his hand, and watching him breathe wasn’t contrition. Not even close. But maybe I could get closure. I planned to stick around and restore a little bit of humanity into whatever time he had left. Maybe it would help me forgive myself and move on. I wasn’t going to leave him, ever again.

I looked at the body on the bed, then closed my eyes, letting images of the man I loved float by. I could see him in the plain, gray suit he’d worn to the AIDS Consortium fundraiser where we met. I remembered the Halloween where he’d dressed up as the bride of Frankenstein, scaring our neighbor’s kids as he jumped out from behind a bush in front of our building. I saw him sipping a piña colada at the resort in Jamaica where we’d taken our first vacation together. I felt him holding me after my father died.

Before I could lose myself in any other memories, the door swung open, and I heard a woman’s voice: What the hell are you doing here? You weren’t supposed to come back—ever.

It was Emily, Greg’s sister.

2

Y ou don’t belong here , she said. Get out. She stood in the doorway, standing straight with her arms crossed, her face flushed. "You gave up any right to see him when you walked out on him. When you gave up on him."

Well, I’m back now, I said as I stood up. And I have no intention of staying away this time. My voice trembled. I’m going to come here every day and sit by his side until the end.

"Like hell you are. I take care of him now. You signed away any claim you had to be here. You gave me power of attorney. I decide who comes and goes, and I say, ‘Get the hell out.’" She pointed toward the door, her eyes as narrow as the arrow slits in a castle wall.

The last thing I wanted to do was create trouble, but this time I was determined to be there for him, to accompany him to the end. I don’t want trouble, I said, twisting my ring back and forth. Can’t we work something out? Find a time for me to visit when you’re not around?

She didn’t budge. I don’t give a shit about you, or about working anything out with you. Don’t want trouble? Then, get out and don’t come back. You know: that thing you’re so good at.

I turned to look at Greg, gently squeezed his sagging hand, and leaned in to give him a kiss on his forehead. I’ll be back, I whispered to him. I stood up and took a few steps toward the door. I don’t want trouble. And I know there’s nothing more I can say about why I left. But I’m here now. I held up my hands. Is there nothing you could use a little help with? Something I can do?

She stepped aside as I approached the door. I don’t need a damn thing from you, she repeated as she brushed my hands aside. And no apologies will ever cut it with me. There’s no point in you being here. He doesn’t know who you are, who anyone is. You’re just here because you feel guilty. Leave, and don’t come back. She pointed at the door again. Find some other way to assuage your guilty conscience.

There was no point in arguing with her, so I left. When I got outside, I called my friend Brian Jefferson. I briefly told him what had happened, and we arranged lunch. We met at the small café downtown, Mullanphy’s, where we usually had lunch. It was near police headquarters, where Jefferson worked as a homicide detective. Silvia, our regular server, handed us menus and pointed us to a two-top in a back corner.

What the fuck did you think she’d say when she saw you? Jefferson asked as he put down the menu and pushed back from the Formica table.

I don’t know, I said, keeping my head down as I tried to decide whether meatloaf or chicken-fried steak would comfort me more. I thought maybe enough time had passed, that she might not freak out if she saw me. I looked up and forced a smile. I thought she might even be relieved that I’d come back.

So much for that plan, genius. You’re lucky she didn’t see you sooner. You’ve been back what, eleven weeks? And this was the first time she saw you?

Silvia came by and took our orders. I settled on chicken-fried steak.

I’d been so lost in my daily routine that it didn’t sink in how long I’d been home from Dubuque. I’d been going to visit Greg every day for weeks, and Emily and I hadn’t crossed paths once. Sure, I tried to go during the day when I assumed she’d be at work, but eleven weeks was a long time.

Yeah, eleven weeks, I said. Maybe she’s not going there much herself.

Jefferson rolled his eyes. Don’t go there, Frank. You don’t know what she’s been through, how much of her life she gave up to look out for him—her fucking brother—after you left. You’re not in a position to play judge.

I know. But I couldn’t be blamed for trying. We—Emily and I—barely got along before Greg got sick. She’d never liked me. I’m sure she thought Greg was dating down when he started seeing me. Greg was a brilliant engineer, but he had bad judgment when it came to men. He’d been through a few relationships where he’d been taken advantage of, and he’d had to call Emily to bail him out. She had every reason to believe that I’d be just another man who would break her brother’s heart.

I was just twenty-five when I met Greg; he was thirty-eight. He was established in his career, respected. I had just started my first job as a therapist. I was totally smitten with Greg but riddled with insecurities. When I first met his family, I tried to show off, to prove to them that I was a worthy match.

It didn’t go well. I diagnosed their mental health issues—politely, of course—and I also offered tips on how to get over this anxiety or that phobia. I was trying so hard to be helpful that it took me a while to realize that whereas his father may have been stoic, it wasn’t my place to ask him How do you feel about that? every time a new topic came up. And whereas his mother’s fear of rats may have been intense, rats weren’t a part of her daily life, so there was no need to bring in live rodents in order to systematically desensitize her to their presence.

I guess I’ll have to be more careful about choosing when I visit, I said, looking away to avoid Jefferson’s eyes. Maybe I can check with the staff and see when Emily usually visits, so I can avoid those times. I noticed my right heel tapping the floor repeatedly, but I didn’t feel capable of stopping it.

I know it’s important to you to be with him now, Frank, but be careful. His tone was soft and comforting. She can make things difficult for you. Our server came and slid plates of food in front of us.

I sat back and threw my hands in the air. What can she really do at this point?

She could file a fucking restraining order for one thing, keep you from visiting at all. Is that what you really want? He scowled, then took a big bite out of his burger.

Let’s talk about something else. I cut off a slice of steak and slid it around in the cream gravy. How’s your love life? Meet anyone new yet?

No. He wiped ketchup off his lips and looked down at his plate. I’m not dating right now.

Maybe you just need to use one of those online match services. Is there a ‘justcops.com’ for single peace officers like yourself?

You’re fucking funny, Frank. I’m not going to use one of those damn Internet dating services. Don’t feel a need to rush into anything. I learned my lesson with Lonna in Dubuque. He frowned, then bit another chunk off the burger.

It’s not like you got your heart broken. You just wanted something different than she did. I leaned toward the table and inhaled the scent of the hot fries before stuffing a couple into my mouth.

That doesn’t make it hurt any less. Jefferson sat back and slumped in his chair. I really liked her, Frank. Really liked her. He started to pout, then stopped himself and sat up straight. Anyway, I’ve moved on. I’m in no damn hurry to date again.

I’m not going to argue that point, I said. So, here’s a kicker for you. I got a call this morning for a new assignment. I took another bite of gravy-soaked fried meat and felt my mood pick up a bit. It’s a good one, a well-known regional magazine that pays well and would be a good piece to show off with.

That’s great, Frank. He looked at me and tilted his head. You’re not smiling. You’re not thinking of turning it down, are you?

I took another bite and worked it slowly before answering. "I would need to go to Wisconsin. I