I sighed. “Remember the morning she was heading off to work from my place, first day as a licensed real estate agent?”
“Ruddy … I can’t promise you I will be asleep when I need to be. And you can’t ask me … She’s my daughter.”
I didn’t think it was time to tell him about my newfound ability to push him away when I needed to. We would just get into a huge argument, him insisting he was a real person and me pointing out that if I could force him to leave, it meant I was making him up.
“Let’s just handle that when I need to. I promise I won’t make you be part of anything,” I vowed.
He was silent, though I could sense him worrying about it. And after a while, I found something of my own to worry about.
Could I make him leave if I wasn’t on the medication?
* * *
Becky wasn’t at the Black Bear, so I parked the tow truck at the repo lot and walked the few blocks to the house she and Kermit shared. I knocked and entered, calling, “Hello?” over the unmistakable sound of a circular saw biting wood.
“In the garage!” Becky yelled back. I made my way to the door just off the kitchen, noting that some of the cabinets had been taken down from the wall.
Becky’s garage had been turned into a workshop. She smiled at me, raising her safety glasses. “Hi, Ruddy! What’s in the box?”
“It’s just a gift for the baby. A Michigan State blanket.” I waved the box at her. Alan made an approving noise because the gift had been his idea. Becky opened the box and held up the square of green-and-white cloth, grinning.
“Thanks!”
“So, what are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m building a pantry for the kitchen before I lay down the new floor.”
“No, I mean what are you doing? You’re pregnant. You can’t be sawing wood. You need to be resting.”
“Oh, stop. I’m fine.”
“Women can work pretty much right up until they’re due, if they’re careful and healthy,” Alan informed me. He had been married to a woman who gave birth a single time, so that made him some sort of expert.
“Won’t the wood fumes be bad for little Ruddy Junior?” I asked.
“Wood fumes,” Becky repeated, laughing along with Alan. “And what if it is a girl?”
“I don’t know.… Ruddette?”
“You kill me.”
“I just came by to see if it is okay if I leave Jake with you tonight.”
“Oh?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Date. Katie.” I was grinning.
“You just came by to tell your sister you have a date with my daughter and are presuming you’ll spend the night with her,” Alan translated moodily.
“That’s really good, Ruddy.” She walked up to me and gazed into my eyes. “How are things with her?”
“She came back from downstate with a change of heart. She said she talked to her mother, who said such terrible things about me, Katie figured I must be a nice guy after all.”
“And you were going to tell me this when?” Alan demanded angrily. “Katie spoke to Marget?”
“I knew she’d come around,” Becky said encouragingly.
“I don’t want to blow it with her.”
“You won’t. Just be the man she fell in love with the first time.”
I liked that one. “Thanks, Becky.”
She looked around her workshop. “Well, I’d ask you to help, but I don’t want to have to do everything all over again.”
“Very funny.” We were both grinning, though.
* * *
Alan jumped on me the moment I left my sister’s house. “So sorry I didn’t mention Katie talked to Marget,” I apologized. “I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
“So she’s forgiven her mother for what was done to me?” Alan asked, anguished.
“I don’t know that. But, Alan, would that really be so bad? Marget is her mom. She raised Katie. Don’t people eventually have to forgive? Move on?”
“Like you moved on from Lisa Marie Walker?” Alan retorted.
I felt my face flash hot despite the cold air. “I get that you can’t take a swing at me from in there, but if you’re trying to get to me, that one didn’t even make any sense. I did move on, got on with my life, and now I’m back in it because I’m looking for the truth. Because as much as I owe it to myself, I owe it to her; because I may not have driven her into the lake, but I did drive her to the 7-Eleven. Because I care that someone murdered her. Which you know damn well. Try going back to insulting my trousers; you had better luck with that.”
“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said after a pause. “You’re right: I’m angry, but I shouldn’t be upset with you. It just feels like Katie’s choosing sides. Picking her, Marget, instead of me.”
“Your daughter isn’t very easy to figure out, I’ll grant you that. But the one thing I can tell you is that she’ll make up her mind without help from anybody else.”
Back at the repo lot, I told Kermit he and Becky would be taking care of my dog for the night. “But you’ll be here for the Wolfingers’ send-off party, though, right?” he asked me.
“Oh yeah, that’s tomorrow night? I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Becky is launching a luau.”
“I will be there for the countdown and takeoff.”
I bent down to tell Jake he would be sleeping at my sister’s place, but that I would be back and he needn’t worry that I was abandoning him. It worked: He seemed pretty unworried.
“I know what was going on with your sister,” Alan advised as I walked home.
“Becky? Do tell.”
“You know there is no such thing as wood fumes, and that she’s not going to hurt herself when she’s not even showing yet. You’re acting dumb and protective to let her know you care about her and you’re going to love her baby. Instead of just coming out and telling her.”
“No such thing as wood fumes?” I demanded with exaggerated incredulity.
Alan sighed. “Are you ever going to get a haircut?” he replied irrelevantly.
I ran a hand through my hair. “Just getting more handsome every day,” I proclaimed.
At home I changed into my one nice pair of pants and a sweater I’d been wearing to social occasions since the late nineties. When I sniffed it to make sure it was still fresh smelling, Alan nearly had a seizure. I threw a few clothes into an overnight bag and made sure I took my heaviest boots and gloves—it would be cold out there tomorrow, on the ice of Shantytown. If Kenny and Mark didn’t show up, I’d be forced to knock on a few doors.
The Black Bear showed up on caller ID just as I was heading out to the truck. It was Jimmy. We exchanged how-ya-doin’s as I cranked up the engine. “Hey, could you do me a favor?” he asked me.
“Shoot.”
“I lost my cell phone. Would you call it for me? Maybe I can hear it ring if it’s around here.”
Alan snickered.
“Jimmy … couldn’t you just call it from the phone you’re using now?”
“Uh, well, I thought that the sound of it in my ear might make it so I can’t hear my cell.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you could hold it away from your ear if you wanted.”
“Hey, yeah, that would work!” he agreed cheerfully.
“Say, Jimmy, you got a minute?”
“Pretty dead here,” he grunted agreeably.
I told him where I was with Katie. “I think it sounds good,” he told me when I was finished. “Like she’s working things out in her life, and she sees you as part of that.”
“You think I should talk about the wedding?”
“Only if she brings it up,” Jimmy advised.
“Got it.”
“I cannot believe you’re getting advice about dating my daughter from this moron,” Alan sniffed.
We rang off. I set the cell phone in a cupholder and started down the road. “Alan,” I said after a moment, “you may not ever, ever, call Jimmy a moron. You got that? He’s like a brothe
r to me. You do that again, and I will never speak to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“All your questions will go unanswered. I’ll stop discussing Lisa Marie, Nina Otis, and everyone else with you. You’ll be alone in the world.” Or maybe I’ll just make you go away forever, I thought to myself.
“I get it. I said I was sorry. She’s my daughter, Ruddy. I don’t like you discussing strategy about her, like she’s a hill the squad needs to take in a war.”
“You’d rather have her with someone who doesn’t care enough to try to figure her out? To give her what she wants? Because I know Deputy Dumbbell is awfully convenient. That’s who her mother, Marget, with her overbearing influence, wants her to marry.”
That shut him up, leaving me to ponder: Since when did Alan ever use a military analogy?
Strickland phoned me as I was pulling up in front of Katie’s house. “Going to be sub-zero all week,” he informed me.
“Great, I’m going to Shantytown tomorrow. Wait, do you know which hut belongs to the mayor?”
“Hell no. The mayor? He’s not a mayor; the whole thing is idiotic. Just a bunch of guys sitting in small boxes, drinking themselves into a stupor everyday.”
“It sounds pretty fun, the way you put it. Do you know the mayor’s name?”
“Phil somebody.”
“Okay, thanks. Good to know.”
“Well, the reason I called.”
“Yes?”
“I ran your list past a buddy, and we got a hit on one.”
“A hit? They found her? Was she drowned?”
“Yeah, they found her. Rachel Rodriguez. But she’s not drowned. She ran off and got married to someone her family didn’t approve of. She lives in San Diego now.”
“Lucky her.”
“Yeah. It was in the high seventies there. Dry, though; they could use some rain.”
“Any action on anybody else?”
“No, that one just came up right away. The case was old, you know, almost four years ago when she vanished.”
I thanked him and hung up. “So we can cross that one off the list,” I reasoned to Alan.
“Right, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about the others.”
“I’m not saying you are wrong, Alan. Aren’t I going to Shantytown tomorrow to try to track down Phil, last name unknown by everybody, your prime suspect in the Nina Otis murder?”
“So you agree it was murder.”
“I don’t know that.”
“You said murder.”
“Jesus, Alan! I’m just trying to figure stuff out. You say Nina Otis was killed and maybe by the same person who did away with Lisa Marie Walker. We’ve got nothing on Lisa, but maybe the mayor can tell us who was buying Nina drinks before the ferry left, if she was in the Ferry Bar. It’s the most tenuous lead I’ve ever heard, but it’s the only one we’ve got so far.”
“Okay.”
I looked at Katie’s tiny rental house. The light was on inside, glowing yellow through the curtains. Her driveway and walk had fresh snow from the other day on it, tracked with evidence of her arrivals and departures. I would grab the shovel from the back of the truck and scrape it away for her.
“What are we waiting for?” Alan asked.
Okay, this was it. I couldn’t possibly have a date with Katie with her father there, yammering at me, so I went into my mind. I thought of Alan, searched for him. I wasn’t on antipsychotics, but I could still feel him, like cotton stuffed into my head. I mentally went to that Alan presence, and, when I got there, I pushed.
24
Why Would Anybody Lie About That?
When I woke up the next morning, the sun was bouncing off the snow, and there were neither clouds nor heat—a blindingly bright, painfully cold day. I could tell we were pushing the thermometer down into record-low territory and reflexively thought of calling Strickland for a weather report.
“I don’t want to go out there,” Katie moaned next to me.
“Then don’t. Let’s stay in bed and keep each other alive with our body heat.” I demonstrated just how much I could raise our temperatures for a moment, and then she pushed me away with a laugh. “I have to go to work,” she chided gently.
I went out and started Katie’s car for her and scraped the ice off her windows, then ran back into the house so I didn’t lose any extremities. When I walked her out and she saw her car, she turned and gave me a look that caused my internal organs to flutter.
As she drove away, she blew me a kiss, and then I got into my own vehicle and invited Alan back—just sort of reopened my mind. “Morning, Alan. You might want to turn up the heat in there today. It’s not going to make it to zero.”
He grunted.
“So, where did you go last night?” I asked, curious about how it felt from his end when I shut him out of my mind.
“Go? What do you mean? I fell asleep. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Sure.”
We drove to Boyne City and pulled up in front of the coffee shop where I told Mark and Kenny I’d meet them. When they arrived, I saw that they had dented the roof of their truck back up from the inside, maybe by using a chunk of the same battering ram we used in the assault on the air conditioner. It looked like an elk had tried to kick its way out of the cab.
Plus there was no windshield.
They were both wearing full woolen face masks, white chunks of ice clinging to the front where their mouths were. They slid into the booth across from me and pulled off their masks, looking shell-shocked as they gazed at me almost without recognition. Their lips were blue, their faces drained of color.
Kenny said something to me, but his mouth was so numb, I couldn’t understand it. I told him to be careful with the coffee—it was hot, and I didn’t want him burning himself.
“I sort of thought you boys might stop at the junkyard and get yourselves a new windshield,” I drawled.
Mark was staring at his coffee as if his brain had disconnected from the rest of him. Kenny was shivering. “We’re kind of short on funds, and we don’t got any more credit there,” Mark slurred.
“Yeah, but you can’t drive around with no window on a day like today. You’ll die.”
“We tried driving in reverse but the other cars got mad at us,” Kenny replied. “So then we took turns for five minutes each, one person driving, the other person ducked down under the dashboard to stay out of the wind.”
I thought about it. “Here,” I said. I pulled out my wallet and laid five twenties on the table.
Mark stirred, showing life for the first time. He mumbled something like, “Huh?” only not as articulate.
“That’s what I get for collecting payments instead of pulling in a repo, that fee I told you about,” I explained. “My contribution toward the windshield. You guys want breakfast?”
Kenny’s eyes were shining like a kid’s on Christmas morning. Mark raised his coffee to his lips and slurped. “Thanks, man,” Mark said. “My cousin owns a body shop in Petoskey. With this we got enough to buy the glass and he’ll carry us on the labor.”
I nodded. I knew both Mark’s cousin and the body shop—I’d affected a repossession on the former from the latter. “After we go out and talk to Phil what’s-his-name, I’ll tow your truck to Petoskey for you,” I offered.
“You’re the nicest repo man in world,” Alan noted sardonically. I wondered if it was his forced ejections from my brain that were making him so cranky.
We got so toasty warm in the café that stepping back outside caused us to gasp in shock. Eyes watering, we trooped in single file out toward the shanties. The wind had blown away loose snow, and some brave or stupid soul had driven a plow all around the area so that we were walking on white ice that felt like concrete underfoot.
There were several huts that were nice: prefabricated jobs on runners. More often, though, they were tiny little shelters built of weathered wood and plastic sheeting. Some had stovepipes. Many of them looked ready to fall over.
/> I was glad to have my guides. There were no people visible and, judging by the lack of smoke from the metal chimney pipes, there was virtually no one inside the things, this sub-zero day. Kenny and Mark led me straight to my destination.
Phil the mayor’s place was larger than many, but not all, of the places, a solid but old-looking shelter that felt randomly positioned off to one side, not at all in the center of the “town.”
Kenny pounded on the door, using a gloved hand, then surprised me when, after no one responded, he reached up and opened the door. I followed him inside, though.
The place was, I was sorry to note, unheated. A portable toilet at one end had a curtain for a modicum of privacy, and at the other end there was a bunk bed built at head height. In between these two places was a hole the size of a basketball hoop, a black circle in white ice. There was a trapdoor in the floor to cover this hole, but the trap was open.
“You pretty good friends with this guy?” I speculated.
Kenny shook his head. “Not really. He just lets people come in if they want. See, he’s got the emergency equipment.” Kenny opened some cupboards. I saw medical supplies, a flare gun, and other miscellaneous safety stuff.
I reached out and picked up a red metal can, a stout sixteen-ouncer with a cone top. “I haven’t seen this in a while,” I marveled. “Didn’t know they still made it.”
“What’s starter fluid?” Alan asked, reading the label on the red can.
“This stuff is for the old clunkers people drive out here, the ones that have carburetors. It’s ether, really volatile. You pour the ether down the throat of the carburetor, and it gives your engine an extra kick.”
Mark and Kenny nodded, unimpressed. “Stove’s not going,” Mark observed.
“Yeah. And look, the fishin’ hole’s froze over. I think Phil hasn’t been here for a couple of days,” Kenny added.
“He hasn’t been at the Ferry Bar recently, either,” Alan observed unnecessarily. But I knew what he was thinking: Had we identified our murderer?
“Let’s go get some kerosene,” Mark suggested.
We trudged fifty yards to a flimsy hut with canvas for a door. Inside was a guy who sold kerosene. Incredibly, and in complete violation of the law, he stored the stuff in clear, one-gallon glass jugs. He had two walls of his place lined with the containers, all on shelves. He told us he would let us take a couple back, and put it on the mayor’s account.