Eden Redding was holding court from a lawn chair set near the General Oglesby Cabin, her husband by her side. Two other people were sitting and one was standing in a half circle around her. As I walked near, I heard a woman say, “I keep searching the sky for honeybees. I’m amazed that you would even step outside much less sit in a chair not far from where you were stung.”
“He who is not every day conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life,” Eden said.
There was a pause in the conversation as if her audience was confused by Eden’s remark.
Carly Redding was the person standing at the edge of the circle.
“Is that another one of those pretentious quotes you like to drop on us community college grads?” she asked.
“You say that like you’re embarrassed,” Alex Redding said. “You could have gone to the U like the rest of us. Or the University of Colorado like Anna.”
“Then I would have turned out like the rest of you.”
“Ralph Waldo Emerson,” I said.
They all turned to look at me.
“The quote,” I said. “Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
“McKenzie,” Eden said.
She rose from her chair and quickly bisected the circle to reach me.
“Let me guess,” Carly said. “You went to college, too.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m a Golden Gopher like your aunts and uncles.”
“McKenzie,” Eden repeated as she hugged me. “Thank you, again.”
“Are we going to do this every time we meet?”
“Probably. By the way, you were right, it was Emerson.”
Eden took my hand and pivoted back toward the others. Everyone was watching us except Carly, who found something in the woods to fix her attention on.
“This is McKenzie,” she said. “He’s the one who saved my life.”
“I didn’t actually save your life,” I said.
“You got her to where it could be saved,” Alex Redding said. “In the nick of time, the doctor told us.” He also rose from his chair and crossed to my side. He didn’t hug me, though, merely shook my hand.
The woman who was speaking when I first arrived also rose from her chair. The man sitting next to her stood as well.
“You seem to be doing a lot for the Redding family,” the woman said. “First Jenny and now Eden.”
“Actually, my wife is helping Jenness. I’m just hanging around, enjoying the castle.”
“Enjoy it while you can,” Carly said.
She continued to stare into the forest and for a moment I wondered if she was attempting to conjure a swarm of honeybees. I dismissed the idea when I realized that, when it came to the castle, she and Eden were on the same team.
The woman offered her hand and I shook it.
“I’m Jenny’s mother.” There was a tinkle of pride in her voice as if it was something she enjoyed saying. “I’m Marian Crawford. Please call me Mari. This is my husband, Edward.”
He looked me in the eye and gave me a Minnesota Nice head nod; the one that said we’re all in this together; there’s no need to talk about it.
“Ed,” he said.
“Ed,” I repeated.
“Aren’t we all just the best of friends now?” Carly said.
“Ms. Zumwalt,” I said. “We’ve never been formally introduced.”
“I know who you are.”
“I know you, too.”
The remark seemed to surprise her and not in a good way.
“What do you know?” she asked.
“Only what Maddie told me.”
“Oh, okay.” The defensiveness I had detected in her voice and body language softened as if she knew that her daughter would never speak ill of her. “When did you see Maddie?”
“This morning. We were both jogging around the castle.”
Carly nodded as if it all made perfect sense to her.
“Apparently, it’s one of her favorite things to do,” I added.
“I am sorry about taking that away from her, but we can’t have everything.”
“I’ll be sorry to see the old place go, too,” Mari said. “We’ve had many, many wonderful times here.”
“Speak for yourself,” Carly said.
“Wait,” I said. “Mari, are you voting to sell the castle, too?”
“Did Jenny tell you about the vote?”
“Yes, but she thinks you’re on her side.”
“I’m sorry.”
I noticed, though, that Mari didn’t explain exactly what she was sorry for.
“The money’s just too good to pass up.” Ed draped a strong arm around his wife’s shoulder and gave her a squeeze. “Don’t mean we don’t love Jenny. Don’t mean we don’t appreciate what she’s tryin’ t’ do. You know, McKenzie, we’re farmers.” He spoke with the same pride that Mari had for their daughter. “We have close to five hundred acres northwest of town; a little more than most. We do a little better than most, too. Netted over eighty thousand last year, a good year; mostly soybeans and corn, some beets.”
“How much of that was in government handouts?” Carly wanted to know.
Ed glared at her like she had called him a particularly dirty name.
“Wouldn’t be a problem if the government would just stay out of it, let the free market swing.” Ed returned his gaze to meet mine. “But they’re making it all political. Gotta punish China, gotta punish the EU; all those tariffs ends up punishing us. Russians invaded Afghanistan back in ’79…”
“Here we go,” Carly said.
“Jimmy Carter enacted a grain embargo in response.” Ed’s voice grew in volume and intensity. “What did the Russians do? Started getting their grain from Argentina, Brazil, Canada even; started growing it themselves in the Ukraine. Here, prices plummeted. Thousands lost their farms. Thousands. My old man, he’d tell you he was lucky t’ stay on his feet back then; one of the lucky ones. And that market, the grain market, it never went back to what it was.”
“Honey,” Mari said.
Ed gave her a slight smile and a head nod.
“What I’m sayin’…” Ed’s voice returned to his just-folks roots. “The money from the castle and them paintings…”
Jenness must have told them about her plans for the artwork, my inner voice decided.
“That’d be a nice somethin’ to hold on to in case history repeats itself.”
“Yeah, I get it,” I said.
“You know farming?”
I flashed on what H. B. Sutton had told me earlier that morning about Rickie’s.
“I know about hanging on to what you love,” I said.
Ed gave me another Minnesota Nice head nod, this one telling me that we understood each other.
“Jenness will understand, too,” Eden said. All that time, she had continued to hold my hand.
“I don’t know,” Mari said. “She’s a lot like you. She’s fierce when it comes to something that she believes in and she believes in the castle.”
“She’ll get over it,” Carly said. “Everyone will. We’ll tear it all down and forget it ever existed.”
“Why do you always have to be such a—” Alex said but didn’t finish.
“Such a what?”
“Never mind.”
“What?”
“This is where we grew up,” Mari said. “This is where our parents grew up and grandparents and all the Reddings for over one hundred and thirty-five years. How can you be so—”
Mari didn’t finish, either.
“What?”
“Such a bitch,” Eden said. “Everyone bites their tongue around you because they don’t want to make you angry, but you’re always angry. Why is that?”
“Maybe it has something to do with my childhood,” Carly said.
She turned and marched off toward the castle, got halfway there, paused, and veered off to the parking lot instead. Moments later, she climbed inside a car, started it up, and drove off.
“What a pill,” Alex said. “How is it possible she and Maddie are so different? Carly is angry at everyone and everything. But her daughter—Madison might be the most competitive person I know and that includes Big Ben and Anna…”
Everyone laughed except me.
“Yet she’s also one of the kindest people I know,” Alex added.
“It’s this place,” Mari said. “The castle. And us. Madison told me once that Carly never behaves like this at home; that she’s not like this anywhere else except here, except around us. It’s as if she reverts back to when we were kids and we didn’t have time for her, when we were always ignoring her or telling her how dumb she was.”
“That was Ben and Anna.”
“We didn’t exactly rush to her defense, though, did we?”
“That’s because they were calling us dumb, too,” Alex said.
“True.”
“Still doesn’t explain Maddie.”
“Tess,” Mari said.
They all nodded in agreement and smiled, too, as if that one word said it all.
“Tess,” Mari repeated. “I can’t say she was a great mother to Carly because I think she was exhausted from raising children by the time she came along. But she was a terrific grandmother to Maddie.”
“And Jenny,” Ed said.
Eden gave my hand a shake and released it.
“McKenzie,” she said. “Now you know that the Reddings are just as messed up as any other family you’ve ever come across. Maybe just as messed up as yours.”
“I was an only child,” I said.
“That must have been nice,” Alex said.
“Hey,” Mari said and gave him a shove.
“I wonder what John Redding would have thought about all of this,” Eden said.
“And all the Reddings that came after him,” Alex added.
“About Jenness,” I said. “It’s none of my business, I know, but you really ought to tell her your plans.”
Mari looked away while Ed stared directly at me.
“Do you have children?” he asked.
“No.”
“Uh-huh.”
His meaning was clear—if I didn’t have children myself, I certainly had no right to tell others how to raise theirs.
“It’s like I told you before,” I said. “I know about hanging on to what you love.”
Ed looked away. A moment later, his head turned and he gave me another Minnesota Nice nod, this one telling me that I had made a good point.
“Nothin’ for sure yet,” he said. “If the offer ain’t what we expect, we’ll see.”
“He’s right, though,” Mari said. “We should tell her.”
“We’ll see,” Ed repeated.
No one had much to say after that until Alex announced, “I need a beer.” His wife and in-laws decided they required refreshments as well.
“McKenzie, care to join us?” Eden asked.
“Thank you, but I have much to do,” I said.
It wasn’t true. It was just that I had had enough of the Redding family to last for a while.
I returned to the James J. Hill Cabin. There was half a bottle of Dracula wine left over from lunch and a copy of Rolling Sunset: The History of Redding Castle. I sat in the rocking chair in front of the fireplace and indulged in both. About an hour later, Nina arrived.
“I thought you’d still be in town,” she said.
“Dee and I ran out of things to say to each other. How ’bout you? I thought you’d be longer, too.”
“I was giving Jenness my recommendations for making the castle more profitable when she announced that there didn’t seem to be much point.”
“Uh-oh.”
“She had a long conversation with her parents before our meeting. Apparently, it didn’t go well.”
“They’re voting to sell the castle.”
“You knew?” Nina asked.
“I met them about an hour or so ago. They said it was just too much cash to pass up in these uncertain times. For what it’s worth, H.B. would have advised them to take the money, too.”
“I feel sorry for Jenness.”
I held up the book for Nina to see.
“John Redding wouldn’t have,” I said. “He’d have been on the side of the developers.”
“Do we have any wine left?”
I handed the bottle to her. There was a little less than a full glass remaining. She drank it straight from the bottle.
“Tell me,” she said.
“John was an entrepreneur. Or an opportunist. Depends on your point of view. Oh, by the way—General Oglesby Cabin? It was named after Richard Oglesby who became a major general in the Civil War and later governor of Illinois. He was at the battles of Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Corinth, Shiloh. His men loved him. Called him ‘Uncle Dick.’ One of his men was John Redding. Only Redding wasn’t a frontline soldier. He was Oglesby’s quartermaster. His job was to get what the soldiers needed, when they needed it and where they needed it.”
What I told Nina—John Redding grew up poor on a farm in Decatur, Illinois, the hometown of Uncle Dick. He left school to start clerking in a dry goods store at age twelve; apparently he was the only person the store’s owner trusted to measure out the whiskey, rum, and wine for his customers. He worked his way up the ladder, changing jobs frequently, eventually becoming a supervisor for a general merchandise firm with stores scattered throughout the West, including one in St. Paul, where he became friendly with the Gunderson family. That becomes important later.
Eventually, the United States went to war with itself. Redding was drafted; “conscripted” they called it back then. He immediately began looking for someone he could hire to take his place; something you could do in those days. Only Uncle Dick stepped in. Oglesby had been appointed to lead the Eighth Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment and he needed a quartermaster. He knocked on Redding’s door, so to speak, and that was that.
Meanwhile, the Dakota War of 1862 took place in Minnesota; this was only four years after it had become a state. The Dakota, also known as the Sioux, fought for all the reasons you’d expect Native Americans to rise up against the people who forced them onto reservations—the corruption of Indian agents, broken treaties, theft of Indian land, the cutting off of food and the money to buy it. When told that the Dakota were starving, one agent said, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” Of course the Dakota went to war; you would have, too.
The Dakota attacked settlers up and down the Minnesota River valley in the southwestern portion of the state, killing 358; they nearly burned New Ulm to the ground. The Minnesota Volunteer Infantry was soon formed and marched on the Dakota. After much fighting, the Volunteers captured 1,600 Dakota, including women, children, and elderly men in addition to warriors. A military tribunal sentenced 303 to be executed, except President Abraham Lincoln stepped in and commuted the sentence of 265 of them. That left thirty-eight Dakota men to be hanged in Mankato—the largest mass execution in United States history.
The majority of the Dakota were expelled from Minnesota; most fled to the northern plains of what was then the Dakota Territory or Canada’s Northwest Territories. At the same time, most of the white settlers had abandoned their homes and farms in the Minnesota River valley and fled east toward the Cities, leaving the area largely unoccupied.
When the Civil War finally ended, Colonel John Redding was left to wonder what to do with himself; somehow supervising someone else’s general stores no longer appealed to him. It was about then that he received a letter from his good friends the Gundersons, who urged him to come for a visit. While he was in St. Paul, two things occurred that changed Redding’s life. Thing one—he became reacquainted with Emily Gunderson, who had grown from a lanky child to “the most beautiful creature these war-weary eyes had ever beheld,” John wrote in a letter. They were soon married. He was thirty-six. She was seventeen.
“Of course she was,” Nina said.
Thing two—he met a fur buyer he had known before the wars. The American Fur Company had become very profitable while purchasing furs from the Dakota and white trappers around the Minnesota River valley, except the buyer told Redding that the business had all but disappeared following the uprising. If he had learned nothing during the Civil War, Redding had learned that one man’s misfortune was another man’s opportunity; H. B. Sutton had basically told me the same thing that morning.
“Let me guess,” Nina said. “He took Horace Greeley’s advice and went west to grow with the country.”
“Oh, boy did he.”
Redding took Emily to a settlement that was little more than forty people living in a half-dozen buildings at the intersection of the only two main roads in the area. He built a store. He began selling agricultural equipment to the farmers who returned to the valley. He worked with his pal James J. Hill to build a railroad to Redding from St. Paul.
“By the way, they had changed the name of the place to Redding a couple years after he arrived,” I told Nina. “Redding insisted.”
The railroad brought civilization to southwestern Minnesota. And more settlers. And more profits. The community grew larger and larger. Redding’s stores grew bigger and bigger. He began buying and hauling grain. He began buying farms and flipping them. When his neighbors became more prosperous, he started a bank. And when he convinced Hill to extend the railroad to St. Cloud and to Watertown and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.
“My point is, if John Redding were alive today, he’d be the one trying to turn the castle into a tower of condominiums,” I said.
“He became rich,” Nina said.
“One of the wealthiest men in Minnesota.”
“What happened to his money?”
“The Great Depression happened to his money. ’Course Redding had passed about fifteen years earlier and wasn’t there to see it. His kids did as well as they could, only the family’s wealth was tied too closely to many agricultural concerns and agriculture cratered. The bank failed, too. The Reddings went from the top one percent to the top ten percent, which was still pretty good but not what it was.”
“And now the castle is all that’s left of John Redding’s legacy,” Nina said. “The castle and his art collection.”
“Easy come, easy go.”
The remainder of the afternoon was spent mostly in kayaks with Nina and me enjoying the weather and each other’s company as we paddled along the shoreline past the public boat landing up to the compound owned by the Sons of Europa. The same “Heimdall” was standing guard on the same dock dressed in the same white T-shirt and blue jeans and cradling the same AR-15 lightweight semiautomatic assault rifle.
“Good afternoon,” Nina said to him as we slid past him. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
He watched her carefully—I would have, too—before shifting his eyes to me. I gave him the Minnesota wave, which means I raised my hand slightly, my index finger extended as if I was going to point at something without actually pointing at anything.
He didn’t react to either of us.
We kept paddling, moving a few hundred yards past the Tyr Haus before Nina said, “You know, I had never seen a person carrying a gun in real life until I started spending time with you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“I guess he’s a guard, but what is he guarding against?”
“The giants.”
“What giants?”
I explained about Asgard and the Gjallarhorn.
“Ragnarok,” Nina said.
“You know about Norse mythology?”
“I saw the movie. Help me, but I liked Tom Hiddleston playing Loki more than Chris Hemsworth playing Thor.”
“I noticed that you gravitate toward the bad boys.”
Nina glanced over her shoulder at me and grinned.
“I’m pretty sure, though, it won’t be the giants who destroy the world,” she said. “It’ll be the little people. They have less to lose.”
We reached the midway point along the south shore when Nina decided we should paddle across the lake to the north side and follow it back to the castle. She was anxious that we didn’t miss the sunset, yet I was sure we still had plenty of time and paddled slowly.
“It occurs to me, that after Ragnarok the world is supposed to be reborn rich and fertile,” Nina said. “Plus, it’ll be repopulated by two human survivors. Like Adam and Eve.”
“Is that what they said in the movie?”
“My point—we should practice.”
I started paddling faster.
Except practice was delayed by yet another spectacular sunset and dinner. Afterward, Nina took my hand.
“There’s something I want to do,” she said.
Instead of leading me to the James J. Hill Cabin as I had hoped, though, she took me inside the castle and guided me to the second floor. Minutes later we were standing inside the art gallery. Nina ignored the Remington, Whistler, and Nast illustrations, as well as the dozen cameos and small wall art pieces, and strode directly to the century-old Steinway grand piano. Standing above the keys, she took a deep breath, and began playing a few bars from a song I didn’t recognize.
“Listen to that,” she announced. “It’s tuned. I didn’t think it would be.”
She sat on the piano bench and began playing. I thought she might play some jazz, but she chose Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” At home when she played, I would grab a huge pillow with the logo of the Minnesota Twins, crawl under the piano, and listen. Only we were in a public space, after all, so I sat—oh so gently—on a love seat that might have been an antique. Nina went from Debussy to Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” before segueing into “Over the Rainbow” and my favorite song, “Summertime.”
I didn’t speak. I never spoke when Nina played, not even when she said things like “That doesn’t quite work, does it?” or “What if I tried this?”
She started playing “Someday My Prince Will Come,” laughed at herself, and switched to “’Round Midnight” by Thelonius Monk.
A woman stepped into the gallery and faced Nina and the piano. She was tall and thin with the stern expression of a no-nonsense high school algebra teacher and the posture of a marine sentry and I thought: she’s the one who should be guarding Asgard.
Nina spoke while she played.
“Am I disturbing you?” she asked.
“Not at all,” the woman said. “I know that some people like that kind of music.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Nina’s mouth, yet she refused to let it form.
The woman turned her attention to the Remington. She leaned in close like an art critic examining the brushstrokes. After a few moments, she spoke as if she was expecting us to cherish every word.
“I always appreciated his sculptures more than his canvases,” she said. “They’re more naturalistic and rely less on the ethnographic realism found in his paintings.”
Whatever that means, my inner voice said.
By then Nina had moved seamlessly into one of Chopin’s nocturnes. I had no idea which one; the man wrote twenty-seven. The woman straightened, closed her eyes, and tilted her head to the right as if she was remembering something. A slight smile formed on her lips, yet it quickly disappeared when she opened her eyes and saw me watching her.
“The love seat you’re sitting on is over three hundred years old,” she said.
“And still comfy,” I said.
She stared for a moment and I honestly didn’t know if she was trying hard to keep from smiling or screaming. She turned her attention to the Whistler. Once again she seemed incapable of keeping her opinions to herself.
“To his critics,” she said, “Whistler’s compositions seemed empty, his brushstrokes slapdash. I disagree, but perhaps I am unduly prejudiced, for his brushstrokes have always reminded me of my own fingerprints.”
“Oh, were you busted?” I asked.
Sometimes you just can’t help yourself, can you, McKenzie?
“Was I what?” she asked. “I will have you know, young man, that I was fingerprinted in accordance with the demands of the education department for which I was briefly employed while attaining my doctorate degree.”
“Where did you go to school? Sing Sing?”
The woman glared at me as if her fight-or-flight response was fully engaged; she didn’t know if she should tear me a new one or leave. While she was considering her options, Jenness Crawford came through the door and paused as she listened to the music.
“You play so well, Nina,” she said. “You should play professionally. Everyone says so.”
“I did when I was a kid; helped pay my way through college.”
“Why did you quit?”
“I had just too many other things to worry about.”
“Like Erica,” Jenness said. “And the club.”
Nina shrugged and continued to play.
“You should go back to it, playing professionally, I mean. Don’t you think so, Anna?”
Anna Redding. The college professor. She’s early.
The woman shrugged the same way Nina had and turned to stare at the Whistler some more.
“Have you met my friends?” Jenness asked. “This is Nina Truhler. I used to work for her. She taught me everything I know.” She pointed at me. “This is McKenzie.”
Anna nodded at us, yet did not speak.
“This is my favorite aunt, Anna Redding,” Jenness said. “Dr. Redding.”
“A pleasure,” I said.
Nina kept playing the piano.
I stood up.
“Jenny, I’m afraid I’ve been sitting on your three-hundred-year-old love seat,” I said.
“That’s what it’s for.” Jenness turned back toward her aunt. “Nina and McKenzie have been trying to help me keep the castle operating.”
“Unsuccessfully, it would seem, based on what you told me when I arrived,” Anna said.
Wow.
Nina’s response was to immediately switch from Chopin to a boogie-woogie number made famous by Meade Lux Lewis called “The Fives.”
“Must you?” Anna said.
“I’m sorry,” Nina said. “Was I being rude?”
“Like I told you, Anna,” Jenness said. “These are my friends. And Nina’s recommendations would work wonders if only the Sibs would allow me to implement them.”
Nina slid effortlessly into the very slow, very romantic “I Can’t Get Started (with You).” I always admired how she did that, moving from one song to another, one tempo to another, without ever taking her fingers off the piano keys.
“Obviously, a new strategy is required,” Anna said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Do you have one?” Jenness asked.
“Let’s just say I know my brothers and sisters and their spouses a little better than you do.”
Whatever that means, my inner voice said.
Jenness gestured at the art gallery, yet I think she meant to include all of Redding Castle.
“I can’t believe they want to give this up,” she said.
“Dear girl,” Anna said. “Dear, dear girl. We give up nothing. Come.”
Anna Redding walked out of the art gallery as if she was marching down to the Army recruiting center to sign up. Jenness glanced at us, shrugged, and followed her aunt out the door.
Nina stopped playing.
“Any requests?” she asked.
I sang the lyrics from a song recorded by the Animals in the sixties—We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.
“I don’t know that one. How ’bout…”
Nina began playing the 1920s foxtrot “Ain’t We Got Fun.”
Eventually, we made our way back to the James J. Hill Cabin, where Nina asked if I was going to tie her to the chair and make her watch The Thin Man as I promised that morning.
“I’d be happy to tie you to the chair, but we don’t need to watch the movie,” I said. “We could do other things.”
“No, I want to see it. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”
“You have not.”
“Seriously, can we get it on the computer?”
Yes, unfortunately, we could.
We laid next to each other on the love seat while we watched. My arm was around her shoulder; her head rested against my chest. It would have been perfect, except Nina had questions.
“Would the police really let Nick do all those things?”
“Shh.”
“The actress playing Dorothy, isn’t she the same one who played Jane in the Tarzan movies?”
“Shh.”
“This doesn’t make any sense. Why would Nick and Nora…?”
“Shh.”
When the film was over—“Actually, that was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Should I tell you my favorite line?”
“Please.”
“After Nick solved the murder, after he was nearly killed solving the murder, and Nora wrapped her arms around him…” Nina wrapped her arms around me. “And she said, ‘I’m so glad you’re not a detective.’”
And she kissed me.
And we made our way up the narrow staircase to the loft bedroom.
And we turned off the lamps.
And a light like the flames from a fireplace shimmered through the windows and danced against the walls.
“What is that?” Nina asked.
I quickly went down the stairs and pulled opened the cabin door.
“McKenzie?” Nina said.
“Someone erected a cross in the clearing and set it on fire.”