“That’s good.” Actually, it was great. “Uh, I’d appreciate it if you let me handle Deputy Dumbbell. Otherwise, you know.”
“It makes you feel less manly,” she guessed.
“Of course not. I’m way too manly to feel less.”
She laughed again. “Of course you are.”
“If you need a demonstration,” I said suggestively.
“In that case, I know just who to call,” she agreed primly.
So she was not only not angry that I’d canceled our date because I’d spent the night in jail, she agreed that I should never have been arrested for something that wasn’t my fault. Deputy Dumbbell’s department had lost points, and she felt bad for me and agreed we should go out for dinner the next night instead. Plus, we both agreed I was manly. I scored it a solid win for Ruddy McCann.
I took the repo to Blanchard’s bank. His lot had one of those wooden gates that rises when you put in your ID badge. I phoned the bank, and William Blanchard himself came out to card me in. He grinned and gave me a thumbs-up when he saw me dragging the Ford, turning his hand into a finger pistol that he fired and then raised to his lips to blow the smoke out of the barrel. “I get it: You’re the gunslinger, I’m the gun,” I muttered as I dropped the Ford next to Zoppi’s Jeep. His ex-Jeep.
Blanchard invited me into his office and shut the door behind me. “I got a little something for you, boy,” he told me, a sly expression on his face. He fished around in a drawer and tossed me a paper bag. I peeked inside and saw a thick wad of cash. “You like?”
“So Mr. Yancy paid?” I deduced.
“Yancy? Hell, boy, they all paid. There’s five thousand dollars in that bag. You sure put the fear of God into the fellows on the boat. And by ‘God,’ I mean, of course, me.”
Any affection I might have felt for him over the bag of money was waning in the face of his use of the word boy. I slipped the cash into my coat pocket. “For the record,” I said, “Yancy fell.”
“Yeah, well, some fall. You broke his leg and his collarbone.”
“He fell,” I repeated stonily.
Blanchard just grinned at me. Part of me wanted to take his bag of money and pitch it at his face, but it was a very small part.
Katie had texted me some emoticons while I was in with Blanchard: a heart, a glass of wine, and a piece of chocolate cake. When I returned to the repo truck, I sent her back a llama and a snowman. This is how people communicated before there was written language.
Alan woke up as I was pulling into the library parking lot. “What happened with the repo?” he wanted to know.
“There was a live grizzly bear in the backseat. I wrestled him into submission and dropped him off for Kermit to babysit along with my dog.” Not so much as a chuckle out of Alan. A lot of imaginary people are grumpy when they first wake up. I shut off the engine. “Okay, Alan, we’re headed into a library. That means if I look around and there are other people there, we have to be quiet. I can’t talk to you if everyone can hear me. So you should be quiet, too.”
“Can I ask you something before we go in?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“Did you ever take the antipsychotic medications? At first, I mean.”
“Nope.”
“Then how do you know you won’t like the side effects?”
“That’s not why I don’t take them.”
I could feel him in there, mulling it over. I’ve always heard that humans only use 10 percent of their brains—was it really so crazy to suppose that the part of me that was Alan could tap into some of the other 90 percent for his own calculations? “And you went to see psychics.”
“Mediums. Not psychics.”
“For me, though. Trying to get in contact with me. That’s why you don’t want to take the pills; you’re afraid they will snuff me out, as if I’m some sort of psychosis and not a real person.”
“We done?”
“Why? Why did you want me back?”
“I honestly can’t think of a single reason.”
“Ruddy.”
I blew out a breath. “I don’t know. I don’t think there is a reason, meaning, something I thought through, analyzed. It just felt wrong, somehow, when I couldn’t talk to you. It helps to have you around, like when you stopped me from breaking Deputy Dumbbell down into his component parts, or when you told me I needed to give more thought to my texts with Katie. Or even talking to you about Lisa Marie Walker. You drive me crazy most of the time, but without you there, it gets too goddamn quiet.” I fell silent, thinking of the irony of telling a voice in my head it was driving me crazy—if you hear a voice in your head, you’ve probably already been driven.
“That’s pretty much the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Well, don’t pick out your prom dress just yet, Alan. I’m only saying, when you’re not around, I miss you. And when you are around, I want you to go away.”
* * *
My Internet connection at home forces me to sip data through a straw, so if I want to get anything done, I use the free PCs in the library. I settled into a chair and demonstrated my technical expertise by logging into my e-mail.
“What’s Viagra?” Alan wanted to know.
I, of course, couldn’t answer him, because there were others at some of the computers to either side of the long table where I was sitting. The sheer unworkability of the arrangement—me silent, him babbling away—quickly became apparent when I used the search phrase “dead girl washes up onshore boyne city mi” because the first hit had nothing to do with Lisa Marie.
“Wait,” Alan commanded. “This could be important.”
Sighing impatiently, I read through the article. “Slow down,” he ordered.
A woman named Nina Otis fell off a car ferry and drowned. She didn’t wash up in Boyne City—she was from Boyne City—but the distinction seemed lost on Alan.
“So she’s on the car ferry, the Emerald Isle, going from Charlevoix and Beaver Island,” Alan mused, like he was Sherlock Holmes and this was a clue and he was waiting for Dr. Watson to catch up.
There was nothing to catch up to. Beaver Island is about fifty-six square miles of typical Michigan landscape—inland lakes, trails, beaches. It’s a beautiful place—some of my favorite repossessions have been on Beaver Island. According to Nina’s sister, Audrey, Nina was on her way for a surprise visit when she slipped unnoticed over the railing. It had nothing to do with Lisa Marie Walker.
About halfway through the trip, the captain of the Emerald Isle paged Nina. Her sister filed a missing person’s report, but not much happened until five days later, when Nina was found washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan, just north of Charlevoix.
So, two women under entirely different circumstances drown, and their bodies are recovered in two entirely different places. The only thing they had in common was that it took five days for them to be found.
“Hey, I wasn’t finished!” Alan protested when I changed back to the results page and pulled up stories on Lisa Marie.
It was depressing, reading the articles I’d skipped while it was all happening. The news accounts mostly got it wrong. I was identified as Lisa Marie’s boyfriend. The stoners in the van were there for “late-night fishing.” I was traveling at “excessive speed.” That made it sound as if I had been going a hundred—I’d made a wrong turn that a lot of other folks had made. I was just the first one to go into the water.
Depressingly, there was nothing new at all to be learned from anything we read online. At Alan’s insistence, I also searched for “missing women” in our area, and looked at other drownings.
Interestingly, at least to Alan, was the fact that a woman fell off the public docks in Charlevoix a few years ago, in November—the same time of year that I crashed into the lake. She, too, was found washed up in Boyne City after five days. The surface current must move corpses in that direction.
The article about Lisa Marie had a photograph, which I decided I needed in case I ra
n into anyone who might have seen something. I made the mistake of printing it out, because that got Alan all excited and he insisted on printing pictures of six other women who had vanished from the area who seemed to fit what he was calling the “victim profile,” which was under the age of forty and female—hardly an exclusive group. Only three of the women—Nina Otis, who went over the rails of the Emerald Isle on the way to Beaver Island; the one who fell off the docks in Charlevoix; and another who vanished during the night from a sailboat anchored offshore in Boyne City—were pulled from the water. The other three were simply missing. I tried to signal my impatience with Alan’s new hobby by clicking the mouse with extra force, but it was a fairly ineffective tool for expressing displeasure.
And I really disliked Alan’s self-satisfied, approving “mmhmm” noises when I returned to the article about the woman who fell off the car ferry. There were a couple of things that were nagging me about the story.
Back in the repo truck, I fired up the engine and then sat in the parking lot, waiting for the heater to kick in.
“I’m amazed no one has ever seen the connection!” Alan enthused.
“And I’m amazed that after I told you to be quiet in the library, you talked the whole time,” I replied.
“Hey, don’t just shove the printouts into the glove box; they’ll get all creased.”
To shut him up, I pulled out an unused repo folder and placed everything inside. “We shouldn’t be wasting our time on these other women,” I groused. “I get that it’s fun to play forensic detective, but we’re trying to find out what happened to Lisa Marie Walker.”
“Then why did you go back to the story about Nina Otis?”
I didn’t want to tell him.
“Ruddy? Why did you reread the story?”
I didn’t answer.
“Ruddy?”
You don’t know the meaning of the word pester until you’ve had a voice in your head, insisting you talk to it. I put the truck in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. A light snow started to fall, batting at my windshield and lighting up in my headlights. “Well, I thought it was odd that the sister said Nina was going to Beaver Island for a surprise visit. How did she know that?”
“What do you mean?”
“The word surprise sort of implies you’re not supposed to know about it. Yet when Nina Otis doesn’t show up, the sister calls the police.”
“Nina’s husband could have told her,” Alan pointed out. “As in, Hey, my wife is coming out for a surprise visit; don’t tell her I told you.”
“Sure,” I said dubiously.
“What else? There’s something else.”
I sighed again. “The captain of the Emerald Isle paged her. Why would he do that? I’ve been on that boat dozens of times, and the only page I’ve ever heard is when some parents are trying to track down their kids. The crew doesn’t keep a roster; they take tickets like a movie theater, completely anonymously. So someone must have told the captain that Nina Otis was missing. Who did that?”
“Oh my God, you’re right. You think it was whoever pushed her off? Wait, that wouldn’t make sense.”
“That wouldn’t make sense,” I agreed. “It wasn’t someone who might have seen her go into the water, either. You don’t page someone who just fell off the boat.”
“Someone knows something about the day Nina Otis died. The same way Amy Jo Stefonick knew something about Lisa Maria Walker.”
I didn’t reply. I just watched the snow bend up into my headlights and then fly over the top of the truck.
“Whoever it is, we have to find him, Ruddy. It could be our killer.”
14
We Don’t Know She Was Murdered
When I got home, I debated calling Katie, but Alan advised against it, so I did. I kept it silly and light. “You’re more beautiful than a repo in the light of a midnight moon,” I told her at one point.
“You’re as romantic as a picture of a llama,” she countered. We voted that hers was funnier.
Katie and I talked for an hour before we went to sleep in our separate houses, and we texted each other the moment I awoke. I felt pretty sure I was winning the battle to get her back. I emoticonned her a rocket and a piece of toast.
I took Jake with me on a quick repo assignment because it was just down the highway. He tried to ride with his nose out and his huge ears flapping in the wind, but after about five minutes the wind chill got to him and he pulled his head in with a disgusted look. I found the unit—a Mazda on blocks in the customer’s front yard, hood yawning open, engine gone, seats gone, customer gone. I took pictures with my phone and sent them to the bank in Kansas that financed it. They would most likely just abandon the thing. Under Milt’s regime, I would have received nothing for my efforts, but with Kermit in charge, I had a hundred bucks coming.
I still harbored a lot of affection for Milt, still missed him, but I didn’t like the way he had treated me. If he ever decided to join the dead-guys-in-my-head club, we’d have a few words about that.
The last assignment Milt had given me before he died was a guy named Mark Stevens, whose file had now worked its way to the top of the stack. I had repossessed a lot of his family members over the years and didn’t expect them to tell me much of anything on how to find their cousin, but his best buddy in life was a guy named Kenny MacDonell, so I figured if I found Kenny, I would be able to locate Mark.
I dropped Jake off at Kermit’s office before I headed out of town and tried to ignore how eager my dog was to leave the repo truck. “You know you belong to me,” I reminded him. He gave my hand an affectionate, reassuring lick. I think we both knew I was being condescended to by a basset hound. He curled up in his chair and sighed in contentment. Kermit was on the phone, so I didn’t stick around.
It took me most of the day, asking around, to track down Kenny’s mom, who lived by herself in a house trailer outside of Bellaire. Her driveway was plowed out and her walk shoveled, which Alan noted. “Kenny probably lives here,” he concluded shrewdly.
“Or maybe his mother drives a snowplow. You think of that, detective?” I knocked on the front door, little pieces of ice dropping from my mitten with the impact. The sky had completely bled out of blue and was a milky white, and the temperature was scraping the teens. While I waited, I had a fantasy that Kenny’s mother would invite me in and give me a cup of coffee. I could taste the coffee, feel it warming my hands and my insides.
A woman opened the door as far as a chain would allow, her blue eye regarding me balefully through the crack. Even with that little of her face showing, I knew she was the woman who had gifted Kenny MacDonell to the world—same orange freckles and pale complexion, hair a dark red. I had met Kenny and his buddy Mark when the two of them barged in with shotguns and tried to hold up the Black Bear a few years back. I probably wouldn’t mention that to his mom. “Mrs. MacDonell?” I asked.
“Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of Kenny’s.”
“He ain’t here.”
I hugged myself a little to indicate how much warmer our conversation would be at her table, with her coffee. “Do you know what time he’ll be back?”
“Who says he lives here?” she responded with hostility.
“She’s not going to tell you anything,” Alan predicted.
“Oh!” I gave her a surprised look, one of the chief psychological weapons we repo men deploy to extract information. “He moved? When was that?”
“I never said he lived here. I ain’t seen Kenny in a long, long time.” She made to shut the door.
“Oh my God! That’s terrible!”
She hesitated, frowning suspiciously. The door was now open barely an inch.
“You must be worried sick! How long has he been missing?” I implored.
“I didn’t say he was—”
“Have you called the police?” I interrupted anxiously. “I know how a mother feels when one of her children vanishes. Can I help you in any way, Mrs. MacDonell?” br />
“No, I’m sure he’s fine.”
“This is terrible weather to be homeless!” I squinted at the soulless sky.
“He’s not homeless. He just hasn’t been around in a while.”
“He could be in trouble!”
She shut the door, slid off the chain, and opened it up wider, still blocking access with her body. “There’s no trouble. He gave me two hunnert dollars a couple days ago.”
I put a hand on my heart. “Oh, thank God. Thank God. So you know where he is, then.”
“No. I don’t know where—”
“I was so worried you were telling me something horrible had happened to my friend Kenny,” I continued blithely. “He still doing construction at the East Jordan Iron Works?”
“No, he’s remodeling a place on the lake south of Petoskey.”
“That’s good. He and Mark?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. One of those big places on the highway?”
“No, a small home off Townline Road.”
Alan groaned, as if he had wanted her to keep it a secret or something. “Well, that is so good to hear. I know he’s been down on his luck lately. Hey, if you see him, would you tell him his good friend Ruddy from the Black Bear stopped by?”
“What do you want with him, anyway?”
“Oh.” I shrugged. “I just want to show his friend Mark my new truck.”
* * *
“I can’t believe that worked,” Alan muttered.
“The power of repo persuasion.”
“So when are we going to Beaver Island to talk to Nina Otis’s sister?”
“We’re not. I can’t see any reason why that will help us find out what happened to Lisa Marie.”
“But what about the possibility that all of the women we found on the computer were killed by the same man, a serial killer, like in all those books you make me read? We talked about this!”
“No, you talked about it. I don’t see the connection at all. Three of the women are just gone; they didn’t even wash up onshore.”
“People don’t just vanish.”
“Alan, I make my living off of people who just vanish. It’s what people do.”