I had rarely felt so clever—I hadn’t even really lied.
“So which is it?” he asked skeptically. “You lost them in the crash, or you stopped taking them because you were worried about adverse drug reactions?”
“Why don’t you try faking a seizure?” Alan suggested into my silence.
“I guess the point I’m making,” I said finally, “is that I’m ready to go back on the meds, but I’m out, so if you could call in a prescription—”
“No,” he interrupted. “I want to see you today, Ruddy. In my office. No excuses.”
“Oh man, I have such a full day,” I responded, thinking of Amy Jo Stefonick, my collection job for Blanchard, and my date with Katie.
“I have a four thirty. It’s that or I send this e-mail.”
“Four thirty would be wonderful,” I told him with no enthusiasm. I had no idea how I was going to make it on time.
* * *
Before long I was turning up Mitchell Street, the main drag in Petoskey. The plow had shoved a wall of snow onto the sidewalks, and now the local merchants were out with their shovels, pushing it back.
There were three mailboxes attached to the outside of the small house at the address Strickland had given me. Box 1A had the name STEFONICK on it, so I opened the outer glass door to 1A and knocked on the inner wooden door. My cheeks were numbing, and thick clouds of what looked like tobacco smoke billowed out of my mouth.
I was in luck: Amy Jo herself opened the inner door. I recognized her short blond hair and freckles. Her blue eyes opened wide when she saw who it was.
“Oh God,” she said through the storm door.
“Hi, Amy Jo.”
“Oh God,” she repeated with more force. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”
“I just want—”
She shook her head wildly. “Please! Leave me alone!” She slammed the door.
“You sure have a way with the ladies,” Alan remarked.
“All right, well, that is something I might say, Alan, but you would come up with something much more pissy,” I retorted as I rapped my knuckles on the wooden door. The brass door knocker rattled as I did so, and I gave it a quick go as well. “Amy Jo?”
“I am so tired of you playing this same tune,” Alan said, sounding genuinely angry.
“Fine. Why don’t you leave, then? Take a vacation. Go to Hawaii and stay at the Walmart. Amy Jo?” I knocked harder.
“She wants you to leave her alone.”
“I repo cars, Alan. I don’t leave people alone.”
Finally she opened the inside door again. Her eyes were red, and she had a hand to her mouth. “I can’t talk to you.”
I was holding the storm door open and could feel the heat fleeing the inside of her house. “Just for a few minutes,” I replied.
Defeated, she let me in. The wooden floors creaked under my feet after I slipped off my snowy boots and padded after her into the small kitchen. “I was going to have some tea,” she told me resignedly.
“I would love some!” I responded enthusiastically. I never liked the stuff, but maybe Alan would appreciate it. We sat at a small round table, and the mug of hot liquid felt pretty nice in my hands. Amy Jo put some sugar in her tea and stirred it, looking into her cup, her eyes dead.
“Please don’t add any sugar; it’s better unadulterated,” Alan requested.
“Amy Jo.”
She glanced up at me warily.
“You’re not a medium.”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head no.
“So what…?”
She glanced around her small kitchen. “The first time I saw you going into a medium’s tent, it was at the Venetian Festival in Charlevoix,” she said.
The Venetian Festival is sort of the polar opposite of Smeltania. It takes place in the warm end of July and is a huge art fair and street carnival. At night there are fireworks and a parade of yachts in the harbor, rich people standing on the bows of their enormous boats, holding cocktails in their hands and staring at all the tourists sitting on the grass in the park, who stare back. I had ducked in to see if the mediums, or maybe the media, could connect me with Alan. I’d had no luck.
“I guess I’m not understanding,” I confessed.
“Then I saw you last year at Shantytown, and I thought maybe you were trying to, you know, reach her. Lisa Marie Walker.” She took a sip of her tea, and I did likewise.
“She was pretending to be a medium as a ruse to talk to you,” Alan advised me, as if I couldn’t have figured that part out.
“You don’t like the tea?” she said, smiling at my reaction.
“It’s very different,” I replied carefully.
“It’s green tea,” she and Alan said together.
“Haven’t you heard of green tea?” she asked.
“Yes, I just had no idea people actually drank it.” It was pretty bad stuff. I reached for the sugar bowl and, over Alan’s loud complaints, heaped in a couple tablespoons. Now it tasted like sweetened bad stuff, which was something of an improvement.
“Don’t drink any more,” Alan begged. I took another sip.
“So you knew I was going to mediums. And you decided to pretend to me that you’re one, too. So that you could tell me something. What do you want to tell me, Amy Jo?” I asked her.
She looked away, then down. I let her struggle with it. “I saw something,” she finally whispered.
“Saw what?”
She raised her eyes to mine, and I noted something new in them: regret. “That night. I mean, I didn’t know what it meant at first, not until I was older, and you had already gone to jail.”
It was prison, but I didn’t want to interrupt her with a correction. I sat in silence—sometimes, when I’m trying to get people to tell me where they’ve hidden their cars, I’ll just sit and they’ll eventually fill the void with more information.
“I was on my bike. I saw you, and I knew who you were. Everybody knew who you were.”
“Where did you see me?”
“At the 7-Eleven. You parked your car. I saw you get out and go into the store. And I sat and watched. I kind of had a crush on you then.” She blinked at me a little shyly.
“So then what happened?”
“Then the back door of your car opened, and this girl got out.”
I turned absolutely still.
“She went over by another car and threw up. I mean, she was pretty drunk; she could barely walk.”
“Did she get back into my car?”
Amy Jo shook her head. “No, that’s what I’m saying. A man came up and helped her.”
“My God,” Alan breathed.
“Helped her?” I probed.
“He put his arm around her while she was sick. And then he led her down the street, and they got into a car. Or at least I think they did. I was actually watching you, because you had gone to the counter with some beer and you were showing your ID.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. I felt a little dizzy. “Why didn’t you tell the police any of this?” I asked faintly.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t even know about the accident until later, and then it was when I was in high school, doing a research paper on the history of the area. The night you crashed was the day after my birthday—a really important birthday. See, I got that bike for my birthday, and I rode it all day and all the next day, and then someone stole it right out of our garage. The night you crashed into the water, that was the night someone took it. I woke up the next morning and went out, and it was gone. So I’d never forget that night, the last night on my new bicycle.”
“You still could have said something. You still could have told the police,” I replied, my voice rising.
Her freckled face turned deathly pale. I had more than a hundred pounds on her, and we were alone in her small flat.
“Ruddy,” Alan soothed cautiously.
“I am so sorry,” she told me, gulping back upset tears. “I didn’t think anyon
e would believe me. I thought they would think I was just making it up to be famous. I was in high school when I figured out what I really saw. When you’re in high school, there’s a lot you don’t understand about the world.”
I took a breath. “Okay. Right. You didn’t know. I get it. It’s okay. Just … this man who helped Lisa Marie, can you tell me anything about him?”
She shook her head, a tiny motion. “I wasn’t really looking at him. I was looking at you.”
“Okay, but you did see him, even if just a little,” I responded, forcing my voice to be gentle. “What do you remember?”
She swallowed. “He wasn’t as tall as you are. He was sort of, you know, slender. I saw his hair. It was brown, but in the center it was missing, you know?”
“A bald spot?”
“Yes!” Momentary pleasure showed in her eyes—she was happy to have gotten this detail out—but then it faded. “That’s really honestly all I can remember.”
“Ask her how she knows it was Lisa Marie Walker,” Alan suggested.
Well, that was stupid—who else could it be? “Do you remember anything else? Anything at all would be helpful,” I prodded.
She shook her head. Some relief was showing in her expression—the secret she had bottled up inside her for so long was out in the open, finally, and I hadn’t yelled at her. Not much, anyway.
“If she is only guessing it was Lisa Marie, then her testimony won’t be enough to reopen the case,” Alan lectured me. “You have to ask her how she knows.”
Okay. “How did you know who the girl was?”
“Oh. Well, I didn’t. I mean, not that night. But I did see her face. When she got out, she sort of stared up at the streetlight for a moment. That’s how this whole thing started—I was reading about the accident, and I connected when it must have happened, after my birthday, but I didn’t think much of it until I scrolled down to her picture and realized, oh my God, that’s her.”
Amy Jo apologized to me again as I was putting my boots on. I told her it was okay, though there were so many ways it wasn’t, and got her to agree that if it came to it, she would be willing to tell the prosecutor what she had just told me. It wasn’t the prosecutor she had been afraid of; it had been me, Ruddy McCann, repo man.
“I guess I didn’t realize just how important this conversation was going to be. I mean, I thought, you know, a medium. I don’t really believe in any of that stuff,” Alan murmured apologetically and, in my opinion, ironically, as I got into the tow truck. The person who claimed to be dead and talking to me didn’t believe that there were people who could talk to dead people?
“How do you feel, Ruddy?”
“Feel?” I started the truck and steered back south. Time to see if I could collect some of Blanchard’s money. “I don’t even know. What am I supposed to feel? My whole life was ruined because of a lie. A lie even I believed. Should I be happy? Angry? I just feel hollowed out. My God. All I did wrong was drive her to Charlevoix. So I bear some responsibility, but not the way I thought. Maybe I failed to protect her, but I never killed anybody.”
“Somebody did, though. Somebody killed Lisa Marie Walker and threw her into the water.”
“Yeah. The guy who ‘helped’ her.”
“We have to find who did that, Ruddy. She was murdered. We have to find the man who did it.”
12
Back in Jail
Herbert Yancy seemed like the best person from Blanchard’s list to start with, because he owed the most money—more than fifteen grand—and would therefore garner me the biggest fee. Collecting him would get me almost to where I could afford the Wolfingers’ tickets. Yancy lived on a bluff overlooking Torch Lake—a beautiful, shockingly clear body of water right off Highway 31 between Traverse City and Charlevoix. Yancy’s driveway was so long, it could have supported at least one cherry stand, maybe a rest area and a traveler’s bureau. He had a separate garage with five doors, the one in the middle oversized so he could park his sailboat or maybe an armored car full of gold bullion. The house itself looked to have more bedrooms than the average hotel, and a grand wooden staircase built of redwood between the garage and the house descended through the trees down to the beach below. Or at least I assumed it was beach—this time of year the lake and the shore were both frozen solid and coated with white.
I got sidetracked on the way to the front door. A ladder was leaning up against the house, and I could hear someone up there, moving around on the back side—the lake side—of the roof. I put my hands on the rungs.
“We shouldn’t climb up there,” Alan fretted, so naturally I climbed up there. For all his nervousness, there wasn’t really any reason to worry—the foot of snow provided surer footing up top than I would have had in the summer. At the peak of the roof I paused to take in the view: It’s a nineteen-mile-long lake, and from up there I could see practically the whole thing, the stark black trees in the white snow along the shore, the evergreens, and one lone ice shanty, trying to kick-start the next Smeltania.
There was, indeed, a person on the roof. A guy was sitting, his back to me, down toward the lakeside lip of the roof, messing with some wires. In the winter, as the snow melts, water trickles to the gutters, where it hits the air and refreezes, the ice backing up like a miniature glacier, which wreaks havoc on the shingles. To prevent this, homeowners like Yancy had heating wires zigzagging along the edge of their roofs to keep the water liquid and moving along. Homeowners like me climb up on their roofs with a shovel. The guy had earbuds in, which was why he hadn’t heard me come down his driveway. I picked up some snow, made a loose snowball, and tossed it in his direction. I didn’t mean to hit him, but it caught him in the back of the head.
He overreacted, leaping to his feet and spinning around. I guessed maybe I understood how startling it would be for this to happen: You’re fooling with wiring, listening to rich people music on your iPod, and some repo man pelts you with a snowball. Not exactly how you thought your day would go when you first woke up this morning.
“Yancy?” I asked as he yanked the buds out of his ears.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Are you Herbert Yancy?” I repeated in a cold voice.
“Yeah?”
“William Blanchard sent me to talk to you.”
I expected some sort of reaction but not what I got. Yancy’s face paled in fear, his mouth dropping open. “Oh God.”
“Do you have to sound so hostile?” Alan demanded.
“Look,” I managed to say—and then the guy turned and ran. On the roof! Where the hell did he think he was going? “Wait!” I yelled at him. I gingerly gave pursuit. We were running along the spine of the house and the fall on the lake side was a hell of a lot scarier than the driveway side, but I didn’t particularly want to trip in either direction. “Would you just wait a minute?” I shouted angrily.
Though it was a pretty big house, it didn’t go on forever. He was running out of roof, and the truth of this seemed to occur to him. He skidded to a halt, throwing a wild look back at me.
“What did Blanchard tell these guys you were going to do to them?” Alan wondered. “He’s scared to death.”
“We need to talk, Herbert,” I declared sternly.
Yancy took a few steps in my direction, but he wasn’t looking at me—he was staring at the twenty-foot gap between the house and the roof of the detached garage, backing up to make the leap.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.
“Don’t let him jump!” Alan shrieked at me.
Okay, how was I supposed to stop him? “Wait! Don’t!” I shouted.
Yancy took off running, his stride lengthening, and when he leaped, it was graceful and athletic and he nearly made it, hitting the gutters of the garage roof hard before falling back and crashing onto the wooden stairs, bouncing and tumbling down them and finally coming to a stop in a heap at the bottom, sprawling on the frozen beach.
He wasn’t moving.
Just great.
* * *
It took me a few minutes to get down to where Yancy had come to rest. “Why did you have to do that? I told you not to climb up here! He could be dead!” Alan babbled shrilly—that’s right, I don’t care what he says: The man babbles.
Yancy was conscious, but not in the mood to talk. I could see by the way his leg was bent behind him that the bone had snapped, and his wheezing suggested he might have broken a rib or two as well. I pulled out my phone and called 911, giving them the address.
I checked my watch. I needed to wrap this up quickly so I could make it to see Schaumburg by four thirty, but I couldn’t very well leave Yancy by himself.
“Why did you run away?” I asked him disgustedly. “I just wanted to talk to you. Did you think I was going to throw you off the roof, so you jumped off instead?”
His eyes were squeezed shut so that he could concentrate on his pain, and he didn’t answer me.
“I can’t see how your sarcasm is helping anything here,” Alan chided.
“Whereas your complaining is oh so helpful,” I snapped back. I didn’t care if Yancy heard me arguing with myself or not. I kept glancing at my watch, tracking the time as it ticked away.
Eventually the sound of sirens built in the distance. I went up the stairs to wave at the ambulance when it came down the long driveway, looking uneasily at my timepiece as the attendants pulled out a stretcher. To get to Schaumburg’s on time, I needed to leave now.
Which I did, getting an odd look from the driver of the ambulance when I gave him a thumbs-up and slipped behind the wheel of my new tow truck. He clearly thought I should stick around to explain why Yancy had decided to descend the stairs from the roof of his house, but I figured once the patient stopped feeling sorry for himself, he could tell them just as easily as I could.
“Won’t you get in trouble for leaving?” Alan asked worriedly.
“Nah,” I told him. “I’m the Good Samaritan here. If I hadn’t shown up to dial 911, Yancy could have frozen to death down there.”
“If you hadn’t shown up, he wouldn’t have fallen,” Alan argued.
“We don’t know that for certain.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”