“Want me to pick you up or are you driving?”
“Why don’t you come get me? We got something else to do first.”
“You mean Ariadne Wilcox. You still want to go out there?”
There was a long pause. “Don’t have to.”
“Why? I thought . . .”
“Just got word. They brought her to the hospital in Kalkaska about an hour ago.”
“What?”
“He beat her up pretty bad.”
“Crap. Hope the creep’s in jail.”
Another long pause.
“Dead,” she said. “Ariadne shot him straight through the head.”
TWENTY-NINE
Raining again, dark clouds moving like thick blood clots overhead. Sheets of rain, the color of red sand, poured down across the windshield, wipers barely keeping up. I took this as an omen, since I lived my life by signs—though they usually stood for nothing—and didn’t want to get to the hospital. All of this business with Ariadne felt not just tragic but personal. As if I had something to do with bringing the woman, with her children gone, to a hospital bed and probably to a prison.
Dolly got a town girl in to watch Jane. I waited while she told the girl what she had to do and couldn’t do and shouldn’t do and better not be caught doing. She told her what was in the motel fridge she could help herself to and how to heat Jane’s bottles and when to give her cereal. She pointed out a pile of clean diapers and clean clothes and mentioned that the TV only got three channels. After all of that, we left.
We had nothing to say the whole way down to Kalkaska except for the one time Dolly said she’d heard from that woman Antigone Jones.
“Guess Eugenia told her to call me. Said she took Cate to church a time or two but that was all.”
Another dead end.
For myself, I just wanted to merge with the beat of the driving rain and the occasional clink of Sorrow’s name and vaccination tags—I’d brought him to town with me because I was tired of apologizing every time I came home late and he’d tried to be good but there was another puddle just inside the door.
There were few cars in the hospital’s main parking lot. Bad weather kept people at home. I knew I didn’t want to be there dragging a long shadow of guilt behind me. I’d made fun of the woman. I’d blamed her. God only knew what was waiting up in a sterile hospital room to haunt me.
I walked Sorrow around the car a few times then locked him inside with a window cracked.
We stopped at the desk and were told to go on up. The room was on the second floor. I knocked at the closed door only to have it opened by a man in a white coat who said he was almost finished with Ms. Wilcox and would be right out.
Dolly shuffled around looking at the pictures on the walls of the hall while I shuffled around looking down at my sneakers.
Dolly came to stand beside me. When she spoke, her voice was muffled and troubled. “You know I didn’t mean for her to really shoot him,” she said.
I made a face in her direction.
“Well, maybe she took me seriously. I’m feeling . . . well . . .”
“Yeah,” I half whispered back. “And I made fun of her.”
The tech, with his vials of blood, came out, and told us to go on in. He held the door wide.
I didn’t recognize the person in the bed. I hoped it was the wrong room. This woman’s face was mottled red with blue bruises, and swollen to twice the size of a normal face. The eyes were slits with something dark behind the lids, something going back and forth from me to Dolly. The thin lips were puffed and cracked and shiny with ointment. Ariadne Wilcox was bandaged around her head, down across her ears, and under her chin. Her right arm, lying on top of her light coverlet, was swathed in bandage. I didn’t want to know about the rest of her body. Ariadne licked at her lips with the tip of a swollen tongue. Her head didn’t turn toward us. Only those dark irises under the gapped lids followed me and Dolly as we came in close, to stand over her.
She focused on Dolly.
“Is he dead?” she asked in a voice that sounded like something trapped in a box.
Dolly nodded.
Ariadne tried a smile but winced. She settled for an almost imperceptible nod then added a few words that weren’t clear. She tried again, licking out at her lips and holding her breath.
“Good,” was what finally came out.
Dolly leaned down closer to her. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry . . . I didn’t mean for you to . . .”
Ariadne half lifted the bandaged arm from the blanket.
“Don’t . . . sorry,” she said. “No kids . . . No life . . .”
Dolly and I both nodded, catching on; knowing now what her life had been like back at that plain little house.
We’d blamed her for letting her kids be taken.
How cheap blame was.
Ariadne took a couple of deep breaths. “His gun. Beat me with it. Grabbed . . . it. Fell down.” She took more deep breaths though she winced and groaned before going on. “Turned around. His face right . . . down by me. I just . . . shot.”
“That’s self-defense,” Dolly whispered. “I sure wish you’d said something that day. Told us to get you outta there.”
I took Ariadne’s movement to be a shrug. “Nobody . . . believe me. My . . . own mama . . . Me. Somethin’ wrong with me.”
“I’ll be there to testify,” Dolly said. “I saw that bastard in action a couple of times.”
I added “me, too” because I had to say something supportive to clear my conscience. I’d seen the remnants of that black eye the day we were out there but went on to believe what was easiest to believe about her.
“Was he the one who ran into my car?” Dolly asked. “Was he trying to kill my baby?”
Ariadne shook her head very slowly. She tried to clear her throat but it hurt too much. She remained still without speaking.
“Did he kill my grandmother? Maybe ’cause he was still mad that I got your two little girls away from him?”
She shook her head again. A single tear leaked out from the ruined eyes. “Wish . . . almost . . . be over for you, too.”
Dolly put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing just a little to let her know she understood, maybe felt the same way.
After a while, Ariadne licked hard at her lips. “My . . . kids? You think . . . someday?”
“You take care of yourself first,” Dolly said, barely containing herself. “Get better. Me and Emily, here, we’ll get you help. You’ve got to get your GED, get a job, make a home for the girls to come back to. That’s what you’ve got to think about right now. And . . . and . . .”
Maybe there was a smile. So hard to tell smiles when a face doesn’t look like a face. “No death . . . penalty . . . in . . . Michigan.”
“You’ve already been to hell and back. Nothing more’s going to happen. Me and Emily . . . we’ll . . . see to it.”
Outside, I ran through the steady downpour to the car then put Sorrow on his leash and walked him around the drenched parking lot until he found just the right place to lift his leg. Dolly waited in the passenger’s seat.
There wasn’t much to say after what we’d just seen. I didn’t want to think about anything Dolly’d committed us to. I had no money for lawyers. She sure wasn’t rolling in cash.
Still, some tragedies simply take your breath away. Some tragedies stand outside ordinary worries. I was with Dolly. And Ariadne. Whatever it took.
THIRTY
Because neither one of us wanted to do any real work that afternoon, we drove toward Norwood to take a look at the house where the woman made those phone calls.
For myself, I was glad to leave my usual places behind. In my head the usual had become contaminated by a woman’s dark and terrible life. I needed to be away from town, away from home, away from the work I should be doing. Here I was driving along black and shining roads with the misery of a dank rain all around me, and happy for it.
We had a lot to talk about but words were small, compared to what we’d witnessed back in the Kalkaska hospital.
Dolly called her sitter, then, satisfied all was well, settled way down in her seat, pushing her gun around to her right side. “Lets him out,” she said.
“Lets who out?”
“Lets Jerome Ordway out. She wouldn’t have lied to me. He didn’t do it. Guess I’ve got to rethink some of those others who’ve got it in for me. You know, like that Roman Valderez, the wife beater, except usually wife beaters are drunks and cowards and I don’t think the guy even knows how to write let alone copy out one of the Ten Commandments.”
“What about Claudine Worfman? How about her? She could be the one making the phone calls. Just to add to your misery.”
Dolly shook her head. “I don’t see Claudine going all the way out to Norwood to break into a house and use the phone.”
“Okay. There’s still that bulging garage at the Throes brothers house.”
“So what? We found the SUV. What else do we care about?”
I shrugged. “Could be stolen goods. Could be they’re afraid you’ll find out what they’re doing.”
Dolly gave me a disgusted grunt.
“You going there to have a look?” I pushed.
She stuck her bottom lip out and shook her head. “Who cares if they’re growing a little pot?” She burrowed farther down into my front seat while putting a hand up to push Sorrow’s head, sticking through between the seats, away from hers.
“Let ’em do what they want. No skin off my nose,” she said with un-Dolly-like resignation.
At US 31, I turned north. Norwood was beyond Elk Rapids, about halfway to Charlevoix. A picturesque little village I’d been to many times. It sat on the shores of Lake Michigan, off by itself, away from the main highway and far from other towns. Old houses, new McMansions, horse farms, and tiny shoe boxes—all old money and new money. Quiet places with screened porches and expansive lawns. And little huddled houses where fishermen and hunters used to make a subsistence living before selling off to people from down below, in southern Michigan, to use as their getaway cabins on the big lake.
I turned at the sign to Norwood. A narrow, two-lane road curved through woods and fields and up and down hills. The rain let up a little but the sky was still odd, the threat huge, even mystical overhead.
“You think she’ll go to jail?” I asked when I made a left turn at a white church, as Dolly indicated.
“Ariadne? Not if there’s justice anywhere in this world. And just to be sure, you mean what you said back at the hospital? That you’ll testify for her?”
“Of course. I saw her black eye when we went out there. And I saw his rage—that we’d dare question him.”
“But he wasn’t the one who ran into my car. And he wasn’t the one who killed Cate. Would have been good if he had been. I’d have liked to send him back to prison. Men up at Marquette don’t like child molesters.”
“He’s dead anyway,” was all I could answer.
Along either side of the road, heading down toward the lake, were thick woods or old barren fields where someone once tried to farm. The road, the trees, the fields—everything glistened darkly with the still dripping rain.
“Ominous,” I said, shivering.
“Yeah, you see the lake?” She pointed through a stand of weedy trees. “Mad as hell.”
I saw roiling water and waves breaking on a rocky shore. I saw whitecaps rolling from as far off as I could see.
“How does something so beautiful get so ugly?” she asked, an unusual question for Dolly. “Seems wrong. You know? If a thing’s beautiful why does it have to have this other side?”
I had no answer to a philosophical question from my pragmatic friend.
“Where’s the house?” I asked to deflect the anger she was working up to.
“Straight,” she nodded ahead.
I drove until she pointed to a white farmhouse set back from the road under tall maple trees. Far behind the house, across a wide, fallow field, stood an old barn, large corrugated roof partially fallen in, red walls gaping. The sturdiest thing about that building was a solid white stone foundation. Evidently the property hadn’t been farmed in a long time.
There were no cars in the drive beside the house. The state police had come and gone.
“Nobody around,” I pointed out the obvious.
“I’ll call the post, see if there’s a way to get inside.”
I got out, Sorrow on his leash, and left her to her phone call while Sorrow sniffed out the perfect tree to lift his leg.
I got him back in the car and went up the steps to cup my hands at the front door glass, looking in at a still-life room: a curved-arm sofa with big, fringed pillows and rocking chairs set in front of a well-used stone fireplace.
“Said there’s a key over the door,” Dolly called up the steps to me, slamming the car door behind her. “They put cardboard in the window where she broke in.”
She found the key and, with the help of a pushing shoulder, got us into a living room colder and damper than outside, though I heard a faraway furnace snap on, probably set very low back before winter. The place smelled of must and an earthen cellar. Not a place I wanted to hang out in, unless we were going to build a fire and stay to see if the phone lady returned.
On the far side of the living room, in front of a wall of bookcases, a log staircase climbed to the second floor. Dolly headed there and I followed.
Upstairs, there were two bedrooms. Each had an old canopied bed with dusty curtains hanging over the canopies. There were very similar old dressers in each room. No closets, but tall chifforobes stood along a side wall—one empty and one with a pile of what looked like old jeans, a chenille bathrobe, and a worn, wool plaid jacket. Typical summer visitor gear.
There was a bathroom but nothing looked as if it had been touched in quite a while except that the toilet was running. All I could think of was the electric bill the owner was going to get as her water pump ran on for months. I jiggled the handle until the ball inside caught and the water stopped.
“Hope the state police got some prints off that handle before you messed it up.” Dolly stood behind me, in the bathroom doorway
“Think of the bill.”
“Yeah, well, think about catching her.”
Properly chastened, I followed back downstairs to check out the kitchen. A painted wood table with six high-backed chairs stood at the center of the large room. An expensive industrial-type range and a double-door refrigerator took up one wall. Cabinets and a double sink took up another. Under one counter there was a built-in dishwasher. All the appliances were new and more what I expected in a doctor’s house.
A tall window on the back wall had been closed with cardboard taped over broken glass.
Dolly nodded to it. “That’s how she got in,” she said. “State boys fixed it as best they could.”
When I opened one of the cupboards I found a stash of can goods and a can of coffee.
The woman had helped herself. An empty chili can stood in the sink, along with an opener, a dried-on pot, a dirty dish, and a glass.
“She was here for a while,” Dolly said, pointing to the mess in the sink.
“Not today.” I examined the dried-on chili.
“So, maybe she hasn’t been back since she made those phone calls. Look for a car key. The doctor said she kept a car up here and that the key was in a cupboard. It was the only thing she could think anybody might want to steal. I didn’t see a car out there anywhere. Did you?”
“Could be in that barn.”
“We’ll look when we finish here,” she said and opened the refrigerator to find it empty.
I searched everywhere for the key but found nothing. No key hung on the little pegboard by the door. No key in any of the cupboards.
We finished the kitchen and went through the living room, checking bookshelves and even shoving our hands down between the cushions of the sofa and chairs. Nothing anywhere but a little dust.
We looked over the place a last time then went out the front, locking the door behind us.
The rain had turned to mist. I let Sorrow out to run, nose to the ground, snuffling ahead of us around the side of the house, where he stopped to sniff at the double-wooden doors to a Michigan basement sticking out from the stone foundation.
Dolly hurried up behind him to check the padlock on the doors. “Nobody been down there,” she said.
“Such a big place.” I pointed to the empty fields surrounding the house, then back to where the derelict barn stood. “Think it was a dairy farm at one time?”
“Who knows? People come up here with crazy ideas about going back to the land. Soil is nothing but sand. Still—cows. Suppose that could be.” She shrugged.
“Man over by Mancelona grows potatoes. He’s got a great business.”
“Potatoes have to be easier than cows.”
When we got to the barn, we stood in one of the door-less openings. The old tin roof hung halfway to the floor in places. The cavernous building was empty except for piles of timber and the rusted skeleton of an old plow. Rain dripped from jagged roof edges. Nothing looked safe: not the gapped walls, not the roof, not the hanging hayloft.
“Nobody here,” Dolly declared and we gladly headed back as I whistled Sorrow out of the field. “And no car.”
“And no key to a car inside the house.”
“I better get that license number out to all departments across the state.”
“I’ll call Bill. Maybe he can get the make, model, and license number into my story. It would help to have a lot more eyes looking.”
Back at the car, Dolly bounced the house key in her hand as I started my engine. “I’m keeping this key,” she said. “In case the woman comes back. She’ll have to break in again if she wants to hide out here.”
The ride back to Leetsville was a little better than the ride to Norwood. As Dolly called Lucky with the information on the Volkswagen, the sky cleared, rays of late day sunlight shot down like spotlights, then a broad halo, and then the sun broke through and the woods and rolling hills shimmered.
When we were almost back to town, Dolly sighed, sat up, and twiddled her fingers on the dashboard. “You know what’s driving me crazy right now?”
“Everything?”
“Yeah, well, especially two things. That ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ business, like I’ve got some crazy preacher after me. And those damned jellybeans. You know, maybe Audrey isn’t the only one who loves black jellybeans . . .”
I didn’t look over at her. I had my own ideas but didn’t feel I had the right to say a word to Dolly.
“And you know what else? It’s Omar. He’s serious about wanting to be in Baby Jane’s life. Don’t expect I can stop him. I been thinking maybe I’ll call him tonight, invite him to my motel. Let him play with Jane awhile. I guess what you said is right: ‘It’s only fair.’ He’s her father after all. And sometimes I can be a little bit hardheaded.”
On that monument to understatement, I dropped her off at the motel and headed home. Now it was just Sorrow and me.
Happily, Sorrow couldn’t talk.