Until after the last day of school. We were walking down Thompson Avenue when she stopped suddenly, grabbed my arm, and told me to stop being a damned fool. Most of the weights came off my chest then, and we did resume our explorations, although never again did I let myself get close to what I’d done the day of Lillian’s funeral. Even now, in August, I was still ashamed of my lust that afternoon, ashamed of that boy I watched on her bed. She wasn’t a virgin, and it was my fault.
“I know,” I said.
She looked at me, and I saw that she was trying to smile, but it touched only her mouth. Her eyes and her forehead were frozen with something-shame, too, I thought, though it had not been her fault.
“No.” She shifted closer so that her body rested against mine. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
I turned to look at her, surprise and relief muddling in my mind. “What, then?”
She was looking past me, through the bramble, at the Willahock. The river was running strong that afternoon, and for a minute we watched a small Styrofoam ice chest work its way west. Then she stood up and tugged at my arms. “Buy me a Coke,” she said.
We followed the path along the river, past the limestone enormity of the city hall, and when the path disappeared into brush, we cut through the junkyard, the used auto lot, and behind the convenience store where the chief convenience was that it sold pocket-sized bottles of wine. We ran under the railroad overpass and down to Kutz’s.
It was lunchtime, and there was a line of businessmen in suits, construction workers in dusty dungarees, and rig drivers in white T-shirts and ball caps. I started toward the end of the line, but Maris held out her hand and led me around to the back. All of the wood-planked tables were filled by people eating, and dozens more stood around the clearing, balancing paper soft drink cups, and hamburgers and hot dogs wrapped in thin paper.
She squeezed my hand, keeping me tight beside her, until she stopped up close to the back of the clapboard-slatted trailer. For a minute, we looked at the carvings of initials inside hearts, some deep, some tentative. It was an old tradition, going back to World War II, when Kutz’s old man ran the stand. My father’s initials, whoever he might have been, could have been cut into that wood, maybe with my mother’s, maybe with someone else’s. All I knew of him was he was a Norwegian named Elstrom. When I was small, I used to sneak down to the back of Kutz’s and hunt for my mother’s initials, but I never found any that matched. She’d left no trace. Still, it was an old habit, and even that day, with Maris, I looked.
Maris gave my hand a hard last squeeze and let it go. She reached into her jeans and came out with a bone-handled penknife. Stepping back, with a grin as wide as Montana on her face, she studied the wall like a sculptor planning a first cut. Then, still smiling, she began to trace our initials with the point of the knife, MM+VE, in a small blank space and surrounded them with a tight heart. She worked silently, concentrating, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly past her lips, oblivious to the people at the tables and, I thought, only faintly aware of me. Over and over, she cut into the lines of our initials and their protecting heart, until it was the deepest carving on the side of the trailer. Finally, she stood back. Satisfied, she wiped the blade of her little knife clean of old white paint and specks of wood, folded it, and slipped it back into her jeans.
“There,” she said. “Forever.”
Neither of us came from a place that believed in forever, but that day I came as close as I thought I ever would. “It must be forever, Maris,” I managed, “if it’s on Kutz’s trailer.”
She reached up to kiss me. Somewhere behind us, at one of the tables, somebody clapped, and in a second, everybody in the clearing was applauding. We turned, and Maris, ever Maris, curtsied to the crowd.
She vanished a week later.
“The way she disappeared back then matters now because…?” Leo stood and walked to the kitchen window. It had begun to snow, a light, halfhearted snow that wouldn’t amount to anything.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“But you do know. You think what’s happened now has to do with that August?”
“I don’t know.”
Leo turned from the window. “Tell me again that she’s alive.”
“She had money enough to fake her disappearance from Rambling. She could have found somebody to torch the cottage, if she didn’t come back to do it, to eliminate the last traces of herself.”
“You’re thinking of telling the cops in Iowa her real name?”
“I can’t risk that.”
“She was never a suspect in her father’s murder, Dek.”
“Because they never found motive.” I got up and put my cup in the sink.
“Then why does any of that old stuff matter now?”
I looked at his eyes, maybe the only pair of eyes that had trusted me in that long-ago August, when I said I’d had nothing to do with Maris’s disappearance.
“I don’t know” was all I could say.
We walked out of the kitchen, through the living room, to the front door.
“She had no motive, that August.” He opened the door for me.
I drove to the Burlington station and caught the twelve twenty into Chicago.
Twenty-eight
I called Patterson when I got off the train at Union Station. “I’ve got a lead for you to do nothing with,” I said.
“Lovely to hear from you, Mr. Elstrom.”
“That blueberry cop I was working with up in Rambling?”
“Security guard for a growers’ association.”
“He’s not.”
“Not what?”
“Not a security guard.”
“Who is he?”
“I think he’s a Kovacs, and that he followed Carolina down to Florida. From there he, or they, tracked her to Rambling. You need to send out photos of those two brothers.”
“To whom?”
“To the cops on Windward Island. Ask them to show the photos to Dina at the Copper Scupper and the woman who runs the Gulf Watcher newspaper.” I thought for another minute, then added, “And have them send a set of photos to a Lieutenant Dillard at the sheriff’s office in West Haven, Michigan. He doesn’t see a crime yet, but he will if you do your job.”
“And a set for you?”
“Of course. I can identify which one of them is passing as Reynolds, at least.”
He said he would.
At least.
The Harold Washington Library in Chicago is modern and huge. Outside, it is home to enormous green owls at its roofline. Inside, it is home to microfilms of most Chicago newspapers, some going back to the 1850s. My shoes made loud clacking sounds as I went up the empty broad staircase to the second floor.
I started with the Chicago Tribune. Once I threaded the correct microfilm spool into a reader, it took only a few seconds to fast-forward to the right page. I knew the date better than my own birthday.
The headline for August 12 was in big type: MACHINIST MYSTERIOUSLY MURDERED. The one-column story underneath, slugged at the top with “Daughter, 16, Feared Abducted,” began with a vivid summary of the gore: At noon on August 11, Herman Mays had been found slumped onto his kitchen table, facedown in a puddle of blood. The back of his skull was caved in. His daughter, Maris, was missing. Police feared she’d been kidnapped by the murderer or murderers.
Herman Mays had been discovered by a coworker sent around after Herman had failed to punch in. A factory representative said Mays had been a top-form die and mold maker, and his work was considered vital to fulfilling a government contract the company was under great pressure to complete. After ringing the outside bell, the coworker noticed that the sidewalk door, though closed, was unlocked. He went in and found that the upstairs apartment door was also unlocked. After knocking several times, he went in and discovered Herman facedown on the kitchen table, dead.