Other than the thumpers-small-time greaseballs who lurked in the parking lot, sunning themselves against the abandoned cars like snakes, even on gray days-the only outsiders who came to the health center in the daytime, besides me, were a couple dozen retired tool men and machine operators, veterans of the factories that used to hum in Rivertown. They came to work limber into aching joints and to trade jokes. It was safe enough, so long as everybody got out before dusk, when the dealers nosed their shiny-wheeled cars into the rutted lot, to peddle powders to high schoolers from the affluent, more western suburbs.
I left the locker attendant to his disintegrating cigar and wet floor and went up. As on every afternoon, Dusty and Nick were roosting on the rusted exercise machines. Nick had a new joke that he was brimming to tell, but he forgot it halfway through. I could have finished it for him, since he told it every couple of weeks, but that might have hurt his feelings. So I waited until he remembered enough to finish it with a flourish. In an uncertain world, where any tomorrow can bring tragedy, the opportunity of knowing anything of the future, even if it’s only the punch line to an old joke, is always to be cherished.
I began walking laps but kicked up to a run when I started imagining the kind of fear Carolina Dare must have felt, hunkering in that cold, isolated cottage, starting at the sound of every little noise from the fields outside, jerking out of an uneasy sleep every time the wind rattled a loose window sash. I wondered if that kind of living wasn’t its own kind of death.
I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. Then I headed down to the locker room, grabbed my street clothes-no point in slushing through moisture to shower at the health center that day-and went out, wet from sweat and Carolina’s fear, into the gray of the early March afternoon.
“You did what?” Amanda leaned back in the booth at Gino’s East, just off Michigan Avenue in Chicago, struggling with the beginnings of a smile. I’d picked her up outside the Art Institute at seven that evening, and now we were drinking sangria, waiting for a cornbread crust pizza.
“I fired off some Honestly Dearest letters to her editor.” I shrugged as though it had been acceptable behavior.
“You should have told him, Dek.” Her lips twitched, just once. “He was…he was…her boss. And you…you…” She lost it then and started laughing. “You as an advice columnist, you…” She lost it again.
I took a sip of sangria, felt a little piece of fruit bump my lip. “You don’t know how wise I can be.” I tried to smile like a sage. It was the first time I’d felt like smiling all day.
She shook her head, still laughing. “I guess not.”
We sipped more wine, but the smiles felt wrong.
“He didn’t give a damn about her,” I said.
“Still, you should have told him.”
“I did, actually, in a snotty letter obviously mimicking Carolina’s voice.”
“Nice.”
“I know. I know,” I said to the disapproving schoolmarm look she was aiming at me. “I did go to retrieve it, though. I was just too late. And I did call Charles, intending to apologize for what he is going to receive, and to give him the sordid details of Carolina’s death.”
“Intending?” The marm mouth grew even more dour.
“He’s such a priss, Amanda.”
She gave it up and asked, “What exactly are the sordid details of Carolina’s death?”
“I don’t know them yet.”
“Yet?” She reached across the table to squeeze my hand.
“It’s not just curiosity. It’s not even that she set aside what might have been her last seven hundred to hire me. It’s that she died without rippling the pond. When her newspapers run a notice, it will sadden her readers, I’m sure. Then they’ll forget her, like the cops have forgotten her. Her attorney is only interested in getting the estate closed. The blueberry cop, Reynolds, wants to try, but he doesn’t have the time, and her landlady just wants her place back. Nobody cares.”
“Except you.”
“She was so paranoid she had her checks cashed in Florida and the money forwarded up to Michigan.”
“Dek.”
“She wanted me to find her killer.”
“How?”
“I have no clue.”
“You could spend the rest of your life searching for that lockbox.”
“Yes, and I don’t think I’d get any closer to finding it, if the key even belongs to a lockbox.”
“What, then?”
“I’m bothered that there was no coat in the house, which means she must have been wearing it when she was killed. Yet she was inside, supposedly, typing.”
“You wear a coat inside the turret.”
“She had central heat.”
“Maybe the landlady took the coat with the canned peas, or whatever,” Amanda said.
“There was an ashtray full of cigarette butts spilled on the floor, yet there were no packs inside the house. Ever know a cigarette smoker who doesn’t have a backup pack or two stashed?”
“Not those who don’t live in the city, close to an all-night store. Why is that important?”
“Assuming the nimble-fingered landlady didn’t take the smokes, the missing cigarettes could have been taken as part of an extremely careful search.” I told her about the deep finger gouges in the jar of cold cream in Carolina’s bathroom.
“Looking for something small, like that key?”
“Sure. Someone could have come in, bagged all the small stuff, and taken it out to search through later.”
“What do you do now?”
“I left a message for Reynolds this afternoon, asking him to get me the name of the person at the county who’s been assigned the case. I’ll tell the cop about the guy who tried to get at Carolina’s mail in Woodton. If Reynolds and I both push, I figure the cops will talk to the postmaster, get a description. Maybe they’ll do an artist’s sketch.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she said.
“And they’ll send the sketch out to get tacked up on police bulletin boards alongside the other half-accurate sketches, and the death of Carolina, known as Louise, will be forgotten.”
“Then you’ll drive up to West Haven, hand over the house and car keys to the lawyer, find someplace to donate the car, and be done?” Amanda didn’t buy it; she knew where my mind was going. “Because you still won’t know exactly what Carolina wanted from you.”
“There is that, yes,” I said.
Our pizza came. She ate modestly, I ate the rest. Afterward, we braved the cold to stroll up Michigan Avenue and think of better things. We stopped at the gallery where we’d first met, two years before. We didn’t go in; we looked through the window, trying to see ourselves through our reflections as we’d been that first night. She squeezed my arm and we walked back to the Jeep. Later, much later, after I left her place and drove south to catch the expressway back to Rivertown, I would have said, if asked, that the world was at last righting itself, that Amanda and I were doing it right this time, carefully, deliberately, spending lots of time on building a solid foundation.
That was before I heard from Carolina herself.
Twelve
The next morning, I drew bigger circles on Fizzy’s map of Michigan, then used the Internet to hunt towns even farther out from Rambling, where Carolina might have rented a lockbox. As I’d done before, I sent out e-mails inquiring about a Louise Thomas, but this time I slid in the nugget that Louise might have used the name Carolina Dare. I was hoping that the bankers would check for that name as well. It didn’t go well, sliding or otherwise. Nobody got back to me.