Abe nodded.
“Family out there? Close friends?”
Liz shook her head.
“We took her to the Polka Fest in Cedar when she was younger. We camped once in a while, but no, nothing that sticks out.”
Liza gazed at the hand-drawn map. A road ran along the side, M-22, with two additional roads leading away from it. She read Misty Lane and Sapphire Lane.
“Those sounds like the cobbled streets of Disney World,” she murmured.
“If you’re heading to the haunted mansion, maybe,” Abe muttered, almost too low for Liz to hear.
“Explain the map,” Liz insisted.
Her companions didn’t speak and Liz slapped her hand on the table.
“Abe!”
Abe lifted his coffee drank and drank it down.
“Ben Stoops? That name ring any bells?”
Again, Liz shook her head.
“I saw him at the park where Orla’s bike was found,” Abe explained. “He’s got a look. ‘The guy police love to hate,’ my dad would call him. He’s unkempt, withdrawn, and he drives the truck that boy saw in the park the day Orla’s bike disappeared.”
Liz blinked at him.
“That’s gotta be him, then. Right?” A rush of exhilaration made her want to fling Abe’s papers in the air. “You’ve got his name? And an address?”
Abe sighed. “It’s more complicated than that. This guy, Stoops, lives on the same piece of property as Spencer Crow. They live in the same stretch of woods.” Abe pointed to the map he and Hazel had been looking at.
Liz glanced down at the map. She had spent little time on the Peninsula and wasn’t familiar with Sapphire or Misty Lane.
“What does that mean?”
“It could mean they’re working together. It could mean it’s one of them, or it’s neither of them.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t know what it means.”
Hazel
“Should we have told Liz?” Hazel asked, settling into Abe’s passenger seat. “About the sightings?”
He seemed to consider her question for a long time, maneuvering his car away from the bustle of Traverse City to the shrouded forests of the Leelanau Peninsula.
When he spoke, he sounded weary and uncertain.
“Not yet. Since I met Liz, she’s had one desire - to bring Susan home. She knows Susan is dead. If I tell her about sightings, she might start to hope again.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
He glanced at her.
“I don’t know, Hazel. But yeah, I think hope could derail her. She told me about the first year after Susan vanished. She couldn’t get out of bed for days, and she lost twenty pounds - stopped eating. Jerry had to call a doctor to the house. I’m sure it was worse than she ever let on. Searching for the truth, she has a purpose again. These sightings are… a complication, in a way.”
“A complication?” Hazel protested. “Susan is trying to tell us what happened to her. Don’t you see?”
“I need to concentrate,” he snapped. “Can we just drop this for now?”
Hazel didn’t add more, and Abe regretted bringing her. He’d allowed her to ride along mostly because he knew his own disbelief might cause him to miss something. He preferred to work alone. The more minds, the more theories, the more sleepless nights.
They didn’t speak until they pulled into a driveway to pick up Ricky, the young man who’d spotted Susie on that dark stretch of road.
Ricky climbed in the backseat.
Hazel twisted around and stuck out her hand.
“I’m Hazel,” she said.
“Ricky,” he told her. “Sorry about the dirt.”
She shook his hand anyway, seemingly unfazed by his dirty hands. They’d picked him up from his job site. Dark sweat stains circled beneath his armpits. A layer of dirt coated his arm and face, giving him a bronzed look.
As they drove up the peninsula, Ricky leaned forward between the seats.
“Slow down as you come up on this curve,” he said.
They’d just passed Sapphire Lane.
“Just up here.”
Abe slowed the car to a crawl. In summer, the forest road was dense with trees, especially in this area. At various points along the road, they glimpsed spacious views of climbing hills, an occasional hint of Lake Michigan sparkling in the sun, but in this area, the trees were so thick the eye couldn’t penetrate their leafy branches.
Abe pulled off on the shoulder, and all three stepped from the car.
Ricky walked toward the trees, turned and walked back a few paces.
“Right around here,” he said. “It was night, so I can’t give you an exact location.”
Hazel stood in the spot, closed her eyes. She squatted down and rested a hand in the dirt.
Abe watched her and felt mildly foolish.
“It happened at night,” Ricky started. “I mean, my girlfriend thinks she only appears at night.”
Abe sighed. What he had expected? Susie’s ghost to step from the trees and lead them to her killer?
A car came around the curve, and Abe hustled them all back.
The orange sports car flew by, hugging the curves and spitting dust in Abe’s face. He watched the car disappear around the next curve.
“We better go,” he blurted, sensing another car rolling their way. As they piled into Abe’s car and drove down M-22, they passed a green pickup truck driving the other way. Ben Stoops was behind the wheel.
Abe
Abe scrolled through microfiche, reading all the obituaries during the week of October 1951. Hector Crow’s death notice included a brief snippet about his being a well-respected dentist, survived by his wife Virginia, his son Spencer, and his brother Byron.
It took some digging, but Abe tracked down the police officer who’d responded to a call of death at 311 Sapphire. The man had retired three years earlier, but Abe found his phone number and an address in Suttons Bay, Michigan. Abe called the man, and the retired deputy agreed to meet with him.
The retired officer lived in a small Cape Cod at the end of a dirt road. A wrought-iron fence contained an overweight, yellow Labrador retriever asleep next to a pile of chew toys.
When Abe stepped from his car, the man emerged through the front door.
“Officer Brewer?” he asked.
“Come on up,” the man called. “Clementine won’t hurt a fly.”
Clementine barely batted an eye when Abe passed. He stepped onto the porch, where the man sat in one of two plastic lawn chairs. He waved his hand that Abe should sit.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet with me, Officer Brewer,” Abe told him, shaking the man’s soft, age-spotted hand.
“You’re digging into some awfully old history for such a young man,” Officer Brewer told him. “My name’s Dan. I haven’t been an officer for three years, and I rather enjoy going by simple old Dan now.”
“Okay, Dan. I have a few questions about Hector Crow, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“What hair?” Dan laughed and patted his bald head.
Abe smiled.
“You responded to the call of a death at 311 Sapphire Lane on October 5th, 1949?”
“Sure did. It was a pretty straightforward call. A man had died in his sleep.”
“But the man was only twenty-nine years old?”
Dan shrugged. “Heart attack, brain aneurysm. People die in their sleep, son.”
“What did the coroner say?”
“Couldn’t find a cause of death. He labelled it natural causes. His wife buried him three days later. Uneventful, the whole thing.”