A week later, Leo grabbed my arm outside the door after school. “You’ve got to meet Maris.”
“Indeed,” I said, trying not to grin at my perfect one-word sarcasm.
She came out a couple of minutes later. She wore an open green coat, a starched white blouse-a novelty at RHS-and pale gray jeans. Her blond hair hung straight down to her shoulders, framing a face that at first glance might have been unremarkable.
She smiled. Leo was right. It transformed everything.
Leo stood up and shrugged out of his traffic-stopper orange parka, warm at last. He held his hand out for my cup. “We’re under control,” he said. “We can have another.”
When he came back, he handed me my mug, then snapped off the plaster lamp. The outlines of Maris’s old typewriter blurred just enough to give us some distance. I squeezed the coffee mug with both hands for warmth.
Leo sat down. “So now you know who your client is,” he said again, for perhaps the fifteenth time. All fifteen times, it hadn’t been a question, it had been a prompt.
My head was a muddle of too many images, old and new, mixed together, of a blond girl and a burned cottage, of the smell of spring and the stench of fire, of blue eyes and red blood spots. Each of them flew by, too quickly to seize. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. So I offered up what I’d said the previous fourteen times. “It changes everything.”
I stared for a while at the space heater, because there was no place else left to look. I didn’t want to look anymore at Maris’s typewriter, and I didn’t want to look at Leo, because it would just prompt him again.
“What will you do?” he said anyway.
“What will you do?” Maris asked. We were two blocks from school by then, marching three abreast on the sidewalk. Or rather, they were marching on the sidewalk. I was trying to keep up beside them, hobbling over the small mounds of snow on the fringe between the sidewalk and the street like a man new to wooden legs.
“Go to college, I suppose,” I stammered. It wasn’t her beauty that was making me stutter, though she had that, in aces. It was her directness, the unblinking way she asked me the question, and then waited, as though what I was going to say might change her life.
“Where?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Surely you must know. You’re going to graduate in five months. Surely you must know what you’re doing after high school.”
On the other side of her, Leo arched his eyebrows in a pantomime of Groucho Marx. He knew that in the places I lived, college was never discussed. The only future I had was to be shoveled out, like ash from a fireplace, as soon as I graduated. Nonetheless, he was enjoying the discomfort that was knotting my tongue. He was my best friend.
“I don’t know,” I stammered again.
“Maris.” Leo laughed, rescuing me. “Don’t get bogged down in what Dek doesn’t know. It will stop your life.“
She laughed then, too, and they marched, and I hobbled, on.
“All this time, I believed…” I stopped, sipped coffee and Jack, and tried again. “All this time, I believed she was…”
“Dead,” Leo finished for me.
“Disappeared forever.” I couldn’t say “dead,” not for Maris. Even during the worst months, in the dark times between two and four in the morning, I’d never said that. “I just figured if she were OK, she would have found a way to let me know.”
“Everybody thought she’d been abducted.”
I looked at the low, partially shadowed thing on the card table. “I know.”
“It’s good; she had a life.”
I turned to stare at him.
He looked away. “Sorry,” he said, “I just meant at least she wasn’t abducted and killed back then, like the cops thought.”
“I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Her disappearing?”
“Sure, that. And the rest.” I was angry at her now. I wanted to throw her old Underwood onto the snow. “But that charade, that Louise Thomas business about a will.” I set the cup down on the floor, hard, spilling. “That was cheap.”
I’m sure-
I cut him off. “Crap. She could have called.”
“Back then?”
“Damned right; but now, too. If she needed help, why the hell didn’t she call, ever? I wasn’t just some fucking jamoke.”
Leo got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with the bottle and a paper towel. He blotted up the coffee and Jack. “Mr. Daniels and I are going home,” he said, reaching for his parka.
We walked down the stairs.
“I would have gone to her,” I said.
“Of course.”
I opened the door. “Then, or now.”
He stepped out, then turned around. “I couldn’t help it. I had to have that old typewriter examined.”
Ludicrously, a fragment of an old, better moment came to me. I smiled, remembering the word.
“Indeed,” I said.
Twenty
“You’re rousting me at home because you just realized you know your lady columnist?” Patterson said quietly into the phone.
I’d started calling the Cedar Ridge Police Department at five thirty that morning. At seven, when I’d called for the fourth time, they finally told me Patterson wouldn’t be in for another hour. I said it was an emergency. Patterson called five minutes later, from his home.
“And because her home got torched. I think she’s being tortured for what she knows about that bank money,” I said.
“Not after a month. She’s running or she’s dead.”
“You’ve got to find her.”
“Why the sudden panic, Elstrom?”
After Leo left, I stayed up the rest of the night, pushing back at the arms of the past so I could think of something to do in the present. I came up with nothing except to jump-start Patterson. Too many of the wrong words, though, would make Maris the target of a police manhunt, if she were running. Too few wouldn’t get Patterson started.
“She’s an old client,” I said, because that’s what I’d decided upon somewhere around five in the morning.
“An old client you just remembered?” He exhaled disbelief into the phone. “Look, there’s no way of telling whether those letters sent to Honestly Dearest were written by Lucia Helm. Her school has nothing of hers anymore, her family is dead, and none of her old friends have anything they can be sure she touched. We’re at a dead end on that.”
“Assume Lucia wrote the handwritten letters. What about the typed ones?”
“Common stationery, common computer printer, and not a fingerprint on them. You want to guess Severs sent them?”
“Yes.”
“Be my guest. Dead man, dead end.”
“That leaves us with the Kovacs brothers. Did you send out bulletins saying they might have been involved in Severs’s murder?”
“Because a guy named Elstrom thinks he may have known a woman who wrote an advice column, who may have received stolen money from a girl who’s now dead, who found it hidden, perhaps, by a cop who’s now dead, who may have gotten the money from two brothers who may have stolen it, but whose only provable deed is that they left town around the time the cop died?”
“What have you got that’s better?”
“Circulate Carolina Dare’s driver’s license photo. It’s coming in this morning.”
“And then what?”
“We wait for a response.”
“Can’t you take the lead on anything?”