January Thaw (The Murder-By-Month Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF

I’d discovered that the Prospect House was a Battle Lake original, an eighteen-room Georgian mansion built in 1860 by Barnaby Offerdahl, a man whose family came by money via the railroads. Barnaby, who’d never earned a blister a day in his life, lost his wife to childbirth in 1862 and decided to join the North’s fight in the Civil War, enlisting with the 1st Minnesota Light Artillery Battery and leaving behind a newborn daughter. He didn’t return, and she died under mysterious circumstances at age eight. After that, the Prospect House and its surrounding acreage passed through various hands, falling into disrepair, until recently. Carter Stone, a local historian, bought the mansion and its carriage house, minus most of the land, at auction the previous year. He and his wife, Libby, moved into the carriage house and spent countless hours restoring the magnificent estate next door. In doing so, they uncovered many of the original furnishings along with an extensive collection of Civil War artifacts. Carter had applied for nonprofit status, and today he and Libby were hosting the grand opening of the Prospect House and Civil War Museum.
    I was excited to tour the mansion, which perched on a hill on the edge of town like aging royalty, hidden behind ancient hardwoods and thick, gnarled ivy branches, closed off from the public for decades and fodder for tales of hauntings and buried treasure. The official press tour wasn’t scheduled for another hour, so I made my way to the lake across County Road 78 from the Prospect House, enjoying the buzz of a large crowd, the monolithic noise occasionally punctuated by laughter or an enthusiastic greeting.
    The West Battle Lake beach became the public ice rink in the winter, and its gray-blue surface was already packed with families enjoying the sunny day. The warming house door was constantly opening and closing, letting in and out smiling people who were exchanging skates for boots and vice versa. Beyond the skating rink, the Battle Lake ice castle soared toward the sky, her two gorgeous spires catching the sunlight and reflecting it back as a deep, crystalline cobalt blue. It was not much larger than a three-bedroom bungalow, but its glowing ice and delicate turrets made it enchanting, drawing skating children to it like moths to a flame, despite the yellow tape marking its perimeter.
    This was the first year the town had an ice castle. The structure was sponsored by O’Callaghan’s, the microbrewery that had recently opened outside of town. They’d hired the workers who’d taken eight days to build the hollow castle replica, using plans drawn by an architect from St. Paul and enormous ice blocks cut from the center of the lake. The official lighting ceremony was tonight, and I bet the castle was a million times more magical glowing with twinkle lights. If I didn’t have a date with Johnny, I’d have been in the front row. As it was, I couldn’t wait to be in his arms. Maybe I’d finally be able to sleep.
    Even farther behind the ice castle and to the left was a roped-off area designated to be the site of tomorrow’s Darwin’s Dunk. O’ Callaghan’s was also sponsoring this feature of the Winter Wonderland, though the Dunk was an annual tradition. It had been jokingly developed as a direct rebuttal to naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution of the species. Participants signed up for a time slot in which to jump into a hole carved in the 26-inch-thick ice of the lake, and then leapt out about as fast as I imagine Jiffy had after she’d slipped into her little ice hole. The jumpers raised money for the charity of their choice, and the Dunk motto was “Survival of the Littest.” To that end, O’Callaghan’s had installed a walk-up bar between the roped-off Dunk area and the ice castle. I’d heard it would be open up for business an hour before the lighting ceremony began, after the children had cleared off of the ice but well before tomorrow’s annual