I gave her two twenties and a ten. I mean, why the hell not?
3
Not from a Him
Madame Revard didn’t say anything for a few moments. She had an array of small polished stones in front of her, and she picked a few of these up, holding them in her hands for a moment before setting them down again. It was the first time I’d seen a medium do that. One of them was a Petoskey stone, a spotted rock, unique to the area, cherished by collectors and by locals who liked to find rocks and sell them to people from out of town.
“A man is here,” Madame Revard murmured. She glanced up at me, then looked away.
I sat silently, my arms crossed. It was not a good sign that she had scanned my face for a reaction, but I wasn’t ready to give up on her yet.
“He is a very big man,” she continued. “Your father?”
Well, I’m a very big man, so chances are my dad had been too.
“He says he used to play football with you in the yard,” she elaborated.
That could be a guess, but something told me there was more to it than that. I didn’t know where Madame Revard was from, but it probably was around here—not that many Hollywood celebrities had flown in for the Smeltania festival. When my dad died, it got a mention in the local press because I was still considered big news—the hometown jock who had thrown it all away when Lisa Marie Walker drowned. Almost the exact same story ran when my mom passed away.
Madame Revard closed her eyes. Her lids were painted a metallic-silver color, like a hubcap, contrasting strongly with her deep-red lips and the black points brushed into her skin at the outside corners of her eyes. I wondered if she got her makeup advice from dead people.
“He has something he wants to tell you. He’s sorry for how judgmental he was? Something happened, and he was very stern with you. He says he was too harsh.” She opened her eyes and gazed at me levelly.
I swallowed. Maybe this lady was a charlatan, maybe not, but her words still got to me. What kid doesn’t want to hear his father say something like that? Lisa Marie had been under a blanket in the backseat of my car, sleeping off too much alcohol. To Dad, her utter helplessness made what I did that much worse. He never came to visit me in Jackson, though my mom showed up a few times. The day he died, a guard and a minister came to my cell to tell me. My petition for compassionate leave was denied. I closed my eyes briefly to suppress a flood of regret.
“Is there anyone else there? Another man, maybe?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.
The woman paused for a moment. Then she reached out and picked up a smooth stone. “Let me see,” she murmured. “Someone you were close to?”
As if anyone would visit a medium to contact perfect strangers. I gave her a small nod when she met my eyes.
“You lived with him,” she stated.
Alan had lived with me, actually.
“Yes, someone is coming forward now. He says he has been watching you, and that he is learning lessons from you he wished he had learned while he was alive. That you’re his role model in life now, his guide, and he is glad you are teaching him.”
Well, that was a lot of crap. If Alan had something to say, it would almost certainly be to complain about me being engaged to his daughter.
Madame Revard saw something in my expression. She set down the stone. “He has left,” she murmured.
“The guy who was here last year was better at this,” I said.
Her face hardened. “What do you mean?”
“The medium. He came up with some stuff that no one could know but my mother. Not just feelings, but actual facts from the past. It’s why I keep trying—I’ve never been able to reach Alan, but sometimes I’m impressed. Persuaded there’s maybe something to this.”
“They can sense when you’re skeptical. When you’re not receptive. And they stay away.”
“I’m very receptive.”
“No, you’re hostile.” Her eyes flashed at me angrily.
I stood up. “I’m not hostile; I’m just built to look like it.”
“Thank you for the session. Go in peace,” she said dismissively.
I stepped outside the tent, and the cold air rushed up to freeze my face. “Well, Alan, struck out again,” I said softly.
I sometimes talk to Alan as if he were still there. That doesn’t mean I need antipsychotic medication.
The locals had been drinking long enough to set up a broom ball game on the ice rink. I stood and watched it for a minute: about a dozen people whacking each other with brooms that had the bristles wrapped in duct tape. They were supposed to be playing a sort of hockey, without skates and using a soccer ball as a puck, but mostly they were knocking each other over, falling to the ice and laughing uproariously.
As far as I know, only our species does this sort of thing.
I sensed someone standing near me, and turned. A young woman was looking up at me with an oddly intense expression. From the lights strung overhead, I could see she had pretty blue eyes and blond hair worn short, her bangs peeping out from her hat, which matched her scarf. Her bulky coat hid whatever curves she might have, but she was on the thin side. “Hi,” she said. Her freckled cheeks were red from the cold.
“Hi,” I responded with more interest than was appropriate for a man who was affianced. In my defense, she was really focused on me, her stare intent, and it made me feel attractive. I had been at the festival for a couple hours and had just about decided to leave, but if pretty women were going to chat me up, maybe I’d stick around awhile.
“I saw you come out of the medium’s,” she said. She glanced over at Madame Revard’s tent.
“Yeah. She said Abraham Lincoln is proud of me.”
Admittedly, not the most witty remark, but she was still staring at me and reacted not at all to this.
“I saw you last year, too. There were two mediums here, and you talked to both of them.”
“You saw me last year?” I replied, puzzled. Why would anyone notice or even care?
“I’m kind of a medium too,” she continued, as if answering my question.
“Oh?”
“You’re Ruddy McCann. That football guy.”
“Well, okay, but that’s sort of known.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not channeling anyone for that. I mean, I recognized you.”
“Okay.” I slipped off my mitten and held out my hand. “Nice to meet you…” I put a questioning look on my face and left a blank at the end of my sentence for her to fill in.
“Amy Jo,” she said with some reluctance. She kept her glove on as she shook my hand.
“So, every year you come to experience the thrill of Smeltania?”
She wasn’t interested in light banter. “I have a message for you. From, you know, beyond?”
This was the strangest conversation I’d ever had with a medium, and believe me, those people can get pretty strange. I regarded the young woman warily. None of this felt right, exactly, but she was clearly intent on telling me something. Could Alan be reaching out to me through her? It seemed pretty implausible, but if I wasn’t at least a little open to the idea, why had I driven all the way to Boyne City?
“Okay, what does he say?” I finally asked. I thought about my wallet, which had a lone twenty and a few ones stuck inside. If Amy Jo were going to quote a price, it would be now.
But she was shaking her head. “Not him.”
“Sorry?”
“Not from a him. It’s from a girl.”
“A girl,” I repeated slowly.
“Yeah, um … it’s important.”
“Okay.” I was completely baffled.
Amy Jo worked her lips a few times, looking as if she regretted ever approaching me. Then she leaned in closer, sharing a confidence. “It’s from Lisa Walker,” she said in a near whisper.
I went very still. The woman gazing at me so intently did not have the look of a prankster, nor a con artist, but I could not think of any reason why anyone would bring up that particular name to me. “That
’s enough,” I said coldly, interrupting Amy Jo as she was getting ready to say more. “Who are you?”
“I told you,” she replied. Her face held the anguish of a liar caught in an obvious fib.
“You’re not a medium.”
“Listen to me!”
“This isn’t funny.”
“She says she wasn’t in the car!” Amy Jo blurted.
I stared at her, my anger rising. “What kind of person…,” I started to ask, but I stopped when she shook her head wildly, tears in her eyes.
Why would she be crying?
“No, it’s true. Please. I know you think you killed her. I know about the accident. But you have to believe me. She wasn’t in the car.”
I realized my heart was pounding. Did she realize what she was saying? For a moment I allowed myself to contemplate it, and I nearly staggered with the implications.
“I have to go,” she said, taking a step back.
“Wait. No!” I seized her by the shoulders, and her eyes widened in alarm. “Listen to me. You have to tell me everything. What do you think you know?”
“Lisa wasn’t in the car when it sank. Okay? Please let go of me!”
I realized just how tightly I had been gripping her. I let go. “Not in the car? My car? How do you know?”
She backed a step away from me. “I said.”
“You’re not a medium! What is this?”
“Ruddy?” a woman called.
I turned, and there was my fiancée, Katie, her hands in her pockets, a stunned expression on her face. From her perspective, the conversation I’d been having must have seemed shockingly intimate.
I turned back, but Amy Jo was fleeing, tufts of packed snow flying from her boots. She was headed for the parking lot.
“Ruddy? Who was that?” Katie demanded, bewildered.
I turned away from the shock in her eyes and tracked Amy Jo as she slid behind the wheel of an old RAV. Her brake lights fired, but she had to back up to get out of her spot, and I caught a clear glimpse of her license plate. As a repo man, I’d developed a knack for memorizing plate numbers.
“Ruddy?”
I turned back to my fiancée. Her blue eyes were pained. A lock of her curly reddish-brown hair had come loose from her wool hat, and she brushed it away impatiently. “How … how did you find me?” I asked her, which had to be the worst question for me to ask. Could I sound more like a cheating man?
“You told Jimmy you were coming here. You told me you were on a repo. Who was that woman?”
“She said she was a medium.”
“That’s not what I mean, Ruddy!” Katie exclaimed. “You were holding her, having a fight!”
“No. No, no, no,” I protested. “It wasn’t like that. I just met her.”
“You did not just meet her,” Katie remonstrated, shaking her head. “You are lying to me.”
“I swear, it’s true.”
“So you just met her? You were holding her.”
“Yeah, but not … It wasn’t like a hug.”
“I could see it wasn’t a hug! Ruddy, what’s going on here? Can you imagine how it felt to see the two of you together?”
“Okay. Okay. I see how this could look. But you have to trust me.”
“Trust you?” she repeated. “You said you would be working a repo. You lied to me, but you say to trust you?”
“I know.”
Her shoulders slumped in defeat, and that alarmed me more than anything else she could have done. “I’ve been trying so hard to make things work lately, and now this—,” she began mournfully.
“But there is no ‘this’!” I interrupted. “I was just reacting to what she told me. That’s all. I swear that’s all you were seeing.”
“What? What did she tell you?” Katie pleaded. “I want to believe you, but you’re not telling me anything.”
I took a deep breath. “She said Lisa Marie Walker wasn’t in the car the night I crashed into the lake. When it sank, she wasn’t in the car.”
Katie blinked, caught off guard. “What?”
“That’s what she said.”
“How…?”
“She told me she was a medium, but I don’t believe her. I mean, she didn’t act like any medium I’ve ever spoken to.”
Katie frowned at me, confused. “You’ve spoken to mediums?” she asked after a pause.
I sighed. “Yeah, it’s why I came here tonight.” I gestured at Madame Revard’s tent down the street, and Katie looked over at it without comprehension.
“To talk to a medium,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Why would you do that?”
I was not going to tell her why. I could just imagine her reaction if I told her I was trying to reach her dead father. “The medium, Madame Revard, told me my father was sorry he was so stern with me, so judgmental. I think she means after what I did to Lisa Marie Walker. He was very … He felt I had really let him down, let the family down. The town, even. The only thing he approved of after the crash was when I pleaded guilty.”
“Oh, Ruddy.” Katie’s expression softened. “I didn’t know you were so … You never talk about that.”
“I didn’t want to tell you what I was doing tonight, so I said I was on a repo.” That much was certainly true.
“But can’t you see? That’s the kind of thing I’ve been talking about. I wish you would tell me. I wish you would let me in, to trust me. You used to trust me!”
“Okay. You’re right. Anyway, then this woman, her name is Amy Jo, came up out of the blue and said she saw me go into the medium’s tent and that she had a message from beyond for me. From Lisa Marie. That Lisa Marie says she wasn’t in my car.”
Katie processed this. Of all the people in the world, only she knew the full story. How I’d met Lisa at a party. She’d been drinking and wanted to go for a ride. I was the college football jock, and she was a high school senior. After she drowned, everyone assumed I’d taken her out for sex, but actually, that never came up. I had just met her and was flattered by her attentions. Soon after we got into the car, she felt ill and crawled under a blanket in the backseat. I stopped for beer in Charlevoix because that had been the original destination, but she never moved when I parked the car, and didn’t answer when I asked her if she wanted anything. Driving back home, I made a fatal wrong turn, mistaking the steep drive down to the ferry launch for a bend in the highway. I didn’t even see the ramp, and hit it going probably fifty miles an hour. That’s what the sheriff estimated, anyway.
I got out of the car with the help of some people who had been sitting in a van, smoking marijuana. Lisa Marie didn’t. Her body washed up right here in Boyne City five days later, blood full of alcohol, lungs full of water.
I wasn’t lying to Schaumburg. There were many days when I would gladly change places with her.
Could she have gotten out at the 7-Eleven? I tried to remember if I had seen her when I got back in the car, if she had said anything, made a noise. It certainly felt as if she were still there.
And if she wasn’t in the car, why did two searchers find her body floating in the cold gray waters of Lake Charlevoix?
“You’ve never seen her before? This Amy Jo?” Katie asked.
“I swear it.”
“Why would she say that? About Lisa Marie Walker?”
“I don’t know, but she seemed to believe it.”
“Is there … Is it possible?”
“I don’t know. But if it is, Katie, it means that my whole life went off course, that I lost everything I had, all for a lie.”
We stared at each other. Light snow was falling, landing in the fur hood around her face and sticking there. Under any other circumstances, I would have been unable to resist pulling her to me and kissing her, but I just stood there. “What is it? Why did you come looking for me?” I asked finally.
“Oh.” Her face fell. “Ruddy, I am so sorry. I have news.”
She stood there and tried to control her emotions, and I
stood there, waiting for whatever bad thing she was going to tell me, my heart thudding. “It’s about Milt,” she was able to say before she came into my arms, pressing her face to my shoulder. The rest of her words were muffled by my coat, but I still heard her.
“He’s dead, Ruddy. Milt killed himself.”
4
Aloha Means Everything
Tom actually came out from behind the counter at the pharmacy, something I’d never seen him do. If someone had asked me, I would have speculated that after closing hours he slept in a box in the back. But he wanted to tell me how sorry he was about Milt, and he shook my hand with grim formality.
Tom’s mustache is as bristly as a whisk broom and actually makes a scraping sound when he rubs it. It’s a sandy color, like his hair—blond but with a lot of what could almost be dirt in it. “So, do they know what happened?” he asked me.
I shook my head. We sat down in chairs in the small waiting area. “It looks like he closed his garage door, started his engine, and then just sat there and drank vodka until the fumes got to him.” Thinking of him dying like that always gave me a stabbing sensation in my gut, and this time was no different.
“Did anybody…” He struggled with how to put his question and then gave up. “This is such a shock.”
“No one had a clue this might be brewing, as far as I know. I can’t think of any reason for him to do this, though I guess there’s no such thing as a good reason. But business has been good, we’re getting more skip tracing work, he was healthy.…” I trailed off as a shadow passed through Tom’s eyes. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. I could tell. If Milt was sick, Tom might know—but of course he couldn’t tell me. “How’s his wife? How’s Trisha?” he inquired after a moment.
I shrugged. “I haven’t spoken to her, but I guess not well. It’s just awful.”
We both sat there quietly for a moment.
“What does this mean for you, then?” he asked finally.
“Besides losing my friend, you mean? I don’t know. Milt was the business; it was always just him in that office. I’ve got some repo assignments I guess I’ll follow up on and maybe get paid, maybe not. Either way, I feel like I owe it to him, that I’d be dishonoring him somehow if I just gave up. But yeah, I might be out of a job.”