“I’m sorry, Taylor, I have to leave. I’m showing some property in about twenty minutes. Guy from Chicago is thinking of buying five lots on the flowage. It’s something I can’t get out of. I’d like it if you stayed, though. Will you, please? Will you stay here at least until I get back? You could use the rest.”
I could at that.
“Thank you,” I said.
She smiled and cleared her coffee cup to the sink.
“Where’s Dean?” I asked.
“Up at the garden.”
I nodded. Dean Bernelle had studied horticulture at the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, then inexplicably took a job in the accounting department of 3M. He retired the year I married his daughter with a pension I wished I could look forward to, moved to his Wisconsin lake home, and now has the most ostentatious garden in the state—an entire acre’s worth. But while he is quite content digging in the dirt, his wife is not. So Phyllis, who had never worked outside the home while Dean was working, earned a realtor’s license and now makes more money than he ever did, selling lakeshore property. Which was perfectly fine with Dean. “The more she makes, the more I get to spend,” he liked to say.
“How are things, Phyll?” I ventured.
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“I’ve been better.”
Phyllis Bernelle had a way of asking questions without uttering a sound. She would stare at you with clear green eyes, and you would fall all over yourself confessing to various misdeeds. “The trick,” Laura once told me, “is not to look at her.” But I was looking at her, and I couldn’t resist.
“I was worked over by the Kreel County sheriff yesterday.”
“Why?”
“I think I upset him,” I told her. “Something to do with his girlfriend.”
She stared at me some more.
“I’ve been looking for a woman who was supposed to be dead but apparently isn’t. I found her, and then she was shot.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out,” I vowed. And please, don’t let me be an accomplice, I prayed.
Now she was nodding.
“You always had such interesting stories to tell,” she told me. “I’ve missed them. I’ve missed you. I wish we could have seen more of you since Laura was killed.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
My mother-in-law closed her briefcase and pulled it off the table. “I have to go.”
“I appreciate your taking me in.”
“Will you wait until I get back?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me what happened in Kreel County?”
“In grisly detail.”
“Don’t let Dean put you to work.”
“I’ll try not to.”
“Listen,” she said, “if you’re in trouble, I know a good lawyer.”
“Thank you,” I answered. “But lawyers are a dime a dozen. It’s friends that are hard to come by.”
“Where the fuck are you?” Hunter Truman wanted to know.
“Minong.”
“Where is fucking Minong?”
“Wisconsin.”
“Where in fucking Wisconsin? Goddammit, you were supposed to call me yesterday. I’ve been waiting by the fucking phone since—shit—since noon. What’s going on? Didn’t you find her?”
“I found her.”
“And?”
“Hang on to yourself, Hunter,” I told him. “I found Alison, and two minutes later someone shot her. She’s badly hurt.” The pause was so long, I was compelled to ask, “Are you still there?”
“How bad?” he asked. “Will she live?”
I told him I didn’t know and why.
“The sheriff assaulted you?!” Truman was clearly outraged. “The bastard assaulted you?!”
“Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Fuck, yeah,” he said. A moment later, he added, “Shit, Taylor, what’s going on?”
I told him my only theory. “It wasn’t Alison who was shot—”
“Not Alison?”
“What I mean is, I think whoever shot her was shooting at Michael Bettich, the person she’s pretending to be.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but it might be connected to a small resort she’s building across the highway from a proposed Indian gambling casino.”
“She’s building a resort?”
Truman was asking too many questions; my head started to throb violently.
“I’ll tell you more after I have a chance to get back up there and poke around,” I told him, hoping to end the conversation. “Assuming I can avoid the county cops.”
“Fuck ’em!” Truman said so loudly it hurt my ear. “You get your ass back up there; I’m officially authorizing you to do that. You find out what you can about Alison, and if the cops get in the way, we’ll sue the shit outta the whole fucking lot of ’em.”
“Whatever.”
I was pleased that Truman was still paying, but even if he had pulled the plug, I would have gone back.
“When are you leaving?” he asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?! Why not today?”
I told him I had to go and quickly hung up the phone. My head couldn’t take any more.
“Hi, Desirée. Cynthia Grey, please,” I told her office manager-cum-Doberman about an hour later. I hadn’t been able to reach Cynthia at home, so I tried the office.
“Whom may I say is calling?”
“Holland Taylor.” As if she didn’t know.
“Miss Grey is in meetings all day. However, I will inform her that you called.”
“Please don’t do this, Desirée; I need her.” I wondered if my voice sounded as pathetic to her as it did to me. Probably, because she put me through.
“Holland?” Cynthia asked. “Are you okay? Desirée says you sound funny.”
“If you really want a laugh, you should see how I look,” I told her.
“What’s going on?”
I gave her the short version, lingering on my injuries only long enough to solicit her sympathy. When I had finished, she told me, “Come home. You did your job. You found her. Now come home.”
“I can’t,” I told her. “I have to know—”
“If you’re responsible?” she finished my sentence. “Don’t give me any of that male-pride bullshit,” Cynthia added earnestly. “And I don’t want to hear how a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You come home. Right now. You come home to me before you get hurt again.”
“Will you take care of Ogilvy for me?” I asked. “Make sure he has plenty of alfalfa and water?”
Cynthia hesitated before saying, “Of course.” Then she added, “I hope he eats your Nolan Ryan autographed baseball.”
That hurt.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I promised.
“Please do.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.”
“It’s personal now,” I told her. “Maybe it always was.”
“I know.”
I hung up the phone and stared out the window. Every muscle and bone in my body hurt. Even thinking hurt. “Run it off,” my coach used to say. That had been his cure for everything. “Run it off, sweat it out.” During those few brief years when I had the audacity to consider myself an athlete, I would follow his advice like it had come down from Mount Sinai. I wondered what had become of him as I crawled back into bed and pulled the blankets to my chin.
Dean Bernelle can’t cook. He was one of those older-generation gentlemen who bought into the theory that cooking, that anything to do with the kitchen, was women’s work. But he made a valiant effort nonetheless, whipping up fried eggs, toast, and canned chili for a late lunch. I thanked him profusely even though the toast was burned and the yolks of the eggs were rubbery.
The death of his daughter, Laura, and his granddaughter, Jennifer, had hit him especially hard. Yet he never discussed it. At least not that I was aware of. But it was always there, just below the surface.
“I’m putting in a wall of blueberry bushes near the shed,” he told me. “I remember Jenny used to love picking blueberries. She’d eat a berry for every one she dropped in the bucket, then come home with her mouth and fingers all purple. Laurie would get so angry at us.”