TWELVE
“You gotta come get me,” Dolly said over the phone. “Lucky just got word they found the car. The black SUV. He’s out there now, in Elk Rapids. So that means you gotta take me. No car.”
I was in my little studio behind my house thinking happy thoughts about eventual solvency and starting a new book, which would surely carry me to the heights of literary stardom. I wasn’t thinking about Dolly, which was a kind of “shame on me” since Dolly’s problem was bigger than my sorry economics any day.
“You at home?” I was already out of my chair and leaning over the phone.
“Where else would I be?”
“I’ll get right into town.”
“Bring your camera. Or your telephone. Whatever you use. You’ll want pictures for the paper. And, Emily, it was reported stolen last Saturday night, right there in Elk Rapids, the chief says. You’re never gonna believe what else Lucky told me.”
“What?”
“They found it parked right back on main street where it disappeared from. If it weren’t for the busted-up front, Lucky says you’d never think it was moved at all.”
“Left on the street?”
“Right there downtown.”
“Nobody saw who parked it there?”
“Nope. Had to be sometime during the night. Elk Rapids doesn’t exactly swing at two, three o’clock in the morning.”
“So, as if it was returned to the owner?”
“Yeah. Like, whoever did this only borrowed the car.”
“As if they didn’t steal it.”
“Seems like that. Strange.”
We both thought a long time, until Dolly said, “Anyway, bring your camera. The front’s all banged in. You’ll want a picture of that. We’re gonna talk to everybody in town, if we have to. That car was noticeable.”
“What about Jane?”
“I gotta call Gloria. She said she’d come over anytime and watch her. Cate’s still acting scared of . . . I don’t get it but I can’t budge her and I don’t want to force anybody to watch my baby.” I heard a catch in her throat. “Geez, Emily. What was I thinking? Getting pregnant like that.”
What do you say to somebody this miserable just because she got what she always wanted? I said nothing but, “I’ll drive right in. And look, if we have to, we’ll take Jane along. I can watch her while you see about the car.”
The phone went dead.
This time I didn’t bother to lock Sorrow out on the porch since it didn’t do any good. He’d been showing me he was a grown-up dog, at least some of the time. I figured he could be trusted not to tear sofa cushions to bits or pee on my oriental carpet that I’d brought with much difficulty from Ann Arbor and treasured—by me as the one good remnant of my marriage, and by Sorrow as a handy bathroom, which he was getting over, except for that occasional happy drizzle.
As I drove I wished I’d read that child-care book I’d picked up at the library instead of working on the new novel.
At Dolly’s house Cate was wringing her hands and in tears about being too afraid to watch little Baby Jane, who swung in a baby swing at the center of the living room, smiling, and not looking like a thing to be feared at all.
Dolly kept shushing Cate, telling her it was all right, she understood. “No problem.” She stuck Jane’s feet into a pair of hand-knit bootees and her arms in a hand-knit sweater over pink pajamas with
I love Mommy
on the front, which I had bought as a new-baby present.
“We’ll drop her off with Eugenia until Gloria gets back into town,” Dolly said.
Cate, in obvious distress, said again, “I just can’t do it. The baby’s got a problem. That hairline fracture. I’m so afraid . . .” Her dark eyes, lost in a mass of tiny wrinkles, were huge. “Later. Later. When she’s better. Then I won’t worry . . .”
Dolly grabbed Jane out of her swing to dandle on her hip. I grabbed the car seat on the way out the door, and we were off.
At EATS, Dolly set the car seat, with Jane in it, on top of a counter. Immediately Leetsvillians gathered around her, cooing and laughing and enjoying every smile Jane gave them.
Eugenia hung over the car seat, mugging at Jane, her tower of tight curls nodding overhead like a puff of dangerous meringue.
Lucky kept calling, telling Dolly to get there as soon as possible. They had the place cordoned off, she told me. “Techs on the way. Lot of damage to the front of the car. Whoever did this was lucky they could drive off like that.” She gave me an excited look. “I’ll bet anything we’ll get ’im now.”
Eugenia grabbed my arm as I headed toward the door. “Tell Harry I’ll do it for eight dollars a head. Okay? You tell him and not a penny less than that. Just got to give me a date and how many.”
“You know they’re not sending out invitations with RSVPs.”
She shrugged. “Then I’ll start a sign-up sheet in here. That’ll take care of it.”
I said I’d pass the word to Harry. “He wants to have it at my house,” I added and couldn’t help making a face.
Eugenia shrugged. “I don’t care where I cook hot dogs. We’ll get you chairs and tables from one of the churches. I’ll do the rest. Tell ’im potato salad and macaroni salad, cucumbers in sour cream, chips and dip, beans and franks, and two sheet cakes. One chocolate and one white. No drinks. He’s got to supply those.”
Sounded fine to me.
The drive over to Elk Rapids, almost on Lake Michigan, took half an hour. Dolly spent most of her time on the phone with Lucky, but in between phone calls I told her my good news.
“I got a call from my agent. She sold my book.”
Dolly frowned over at me. “Just one book?”
“Sold my manuscript to a publisher.”
She thought awhile and then her face broke into the first real smile I’d seen since long before the accident. “Wow! That’s great news. You gonna be rich?”
I shook my head. “Just a way to get in. Take a lot more books before I even get noticed. Got to get good reviews. Got to sell ’em.”
“You can do it,” she said and nodded hard. “I’m really happy for you, Emily.”
After a thoughtful few minutes, Dolly said, “You know what, Emily? Now that I think about it, this lets the Throes boys off the hook. You know, finding the car like this. I was ready to get out there and make ’em open up that garage. I was almost sure it was them, after all. But that pair would never give the car back. Not the Throes boys I know. They don’t fool me with that flower patch of theirs. Still planting marijuana out there somewhere.”
We drove down the main street of the little resort town. I pulled in and parked in front of a tiny restaurant, between an insurance agency and a gift shop. The stolen car and some of the sidewalk was ringed with yellow police tape. A small crowd of locals and early tourists were gathered behind the tape, watching the techs in white suits and gloves check out the inside and outside of the vehicle. Police cars from four different jurisdictions were parked down the center of the closed-off main street.
Before climbing out of the Jeep, Dolly leaned across to remind me, “You don’t put me in any of those books of yours, right? We talked about that already.”
I didn’t say anything back. I was too happy and pleased that I had a friend who actually got it, how happy I was. I didn’t want to mess up the moment with an argument.
Jack, from Jack’s Towing, waited on the other side of the street, leaning back on his white truck. He would take the car to Grayling, where the forensic techs would go over it. I joined him to wait for Dolly.
She walked back to where Jack and I stood. She leaned in close. “Just what I said before, the car’s in exactly the same place where it was stolen. That driver took a big chance bringing it here. Like I said, we’ll be talking to everybody in town. Anybody who was around during the night. Anybody who thinks they saw the damaged car in the area.”
Her tone said she was speaking on the record so I grabbed my reporter’s notebook from my purse and caught up with her.
“Check out the license plate.” She pointed to the back of the car. I made out the first part: seven KXU. “That’s the car all right.”
“Did they find anything in it?”
“They’re still collecting fingerprints. Some blood on one of those broken headlights, like the driver got out and ran a finger over the glass. Dumb. Still, it gives us something.”
When I had everything she could give me I pulled out my iPhone and got photos of the front and all the damage: headlights smashed in, grille almost nonexistent, and hood bent at an odd angle. I talked to Lucky and got a little more background: the Elk Rapids police coming on the car at 3:10 a.m. and calling him at home.
“At first none of us believed it was the same vehicle,” he said then shook his head. “Who brings a car back where they stole it?”
“I was thinking . . . you know . . . about that ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ note,” I said.
He gave me a funny look.
First he leaned back on his heels. Then he gave me another look and nodded. “Could be. This is truly weird, what’s going on. Brings back the car—but it’s a mess. Is that what this guy sees as returning a borrowed vehicle?”
I shrugged then went to sit in my car and wait, in case I needed to take Dolly back to town. A couple of cops I didn’t know walked over and asked what I was doing there, but when I said “reporter” they seemed satisfied, though I decided to drive on down the street, to the park near the shore of Lake Michigan.
The lake had the kind of calm I wasn’t feeling inside me, but welcomed. Bits of sunlight bounced off the edges of soft breaking waves. Nobody was around. I had the lake to myself and toed my sneaker into the sand. I thought about reappearing black cars and babies with injured heads and wondered what rent in the universe occurred that let this insanity rain down.
I took my shoes off and walked into the lake. This early in the year, the water was still cold, my toes wrinkling against it. I bent to stick a finger in the water. More cold. And powerful: all that blue water as far as I could see. This thing with Dolly and Jane made life seem so fragile suddenly, as if I only kidded myself that I had a lot to do with my years on earth and eating yogurt instead of ice cream was going to keep me around forever.
I went back to my car and called Bill Corcoran to bring him up to date on what was happening.
“Give me what you’ve got, Emily,” he said. “I’ll fill in the backstory. You have photos for me?”
“I’ll send them right over.” I hung up, emailed my photos from my iPhone, and drove back toward the site where the police cars stood, though the car was gone, along with the white van. I spotted Dolly talking to an officer I didn’t know so I parked and waited, hoping this would be the end of it for her, that whatever evidence the car held would tell who’d hurt her baby or was getting even with her for something.
She opened the door and climbed in as I was about to take a nap.
“Belongs to a Stephen Wentworth,” she said. “Lives over on Elk Lake. Reported stolen Saturday night.” She settled her gun off to the side where it wouldn’t dig into her hip. She clunked her muddy boots down on my recently cleaned floor mat. “I don’t know why in hell me and Lucky didn’t get a bulletin before now.”
“Fingerprints?” I asked.
She nodded. “Could be anybody’s. Won’t know until the techs process what they found.”
She sat thinking while I waited for more.
“You mind?” she said.
“Mind what?”
“Going over to see this guy? The owner of the car?”
I shrugged. “’Course not.”
“How about that ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ thing now?” She made a noise. “What do you think of that? Go figure, eh? A stolen car.”
“I think it’s nuts,” I said without a lot of thought. “Find anything in the vehicle? I mean, anything to tell you who did it?”
“Jellybeans.” Disgust dripped with the words.
“Jellybeans! That’s all?”
“Three bags. Black jellybeans. Like some little kid was driving.”
So, an angry guy popping black jellybeans was out to settle a score with a dedicated cop.
I backed around the last of the police cars, made an illegal U-turn, and took off toward Elk Lake.
THIRTEEN
“Wentworth lives on the lake.” Dolly looked over at me. “Told Lucky he went to town to talk to some people at the coffee shop and never thought a thing about leaving the keys in the car. Nobody steals a car in Elk Rapids. Trust me. Nobody locks their houses, let alone their cars. Just not done. Never heard of. Why the heck did this person take that car to come after me, like it was a spur-of-the-moment thing? Something smells bad about all of this.”
She settled back and rubbed at her eyes. “You know, Emily, usually we get incidents like a hit-and-run and a neighbor calls before I’m back to the station. Somebody saw something, somebody suspects the kid down the block. But here we’ve got nothing. Where’d this person come from, anyway? How much do they hate me that they’d steal a car in Elk Rapids to come after me? And why wait until I was out at a cemetery to hit me—when I wasn’t even in the car?” She leaned her head against the back of the seat and sighed. “You get it?”
I said nothing.
“Okay, so Lucky called this Mr. Wentworth and told him I’m coming out in an unmarked car—just so he knows I’m official.”
“I’d say that uniform . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, we’ll talk to him and then I got another idea. Something I’ve been thinking over.”
I turned south and then east, along the lake.
Stephen Wentworth had a very nice house. The two-story log home faced Elk Lake at the end of a long strip of neatly kept lawn with garden beds filled with spring flowers. He came to the door, an affable gray-haired man in his sixties. He pushed the screen door open and invited us in.
“Terrible thing. Never would have expected it to happen in Elk Rapids. All I did was go in for a cup of coffee and to talk a little bit. So many of the folks who winter in Florida are back now. We like to get together, see how the world’s been faring. My keys were in the car. Down in Boca I’d never think of being so lax, but Elk Rapids! For God’s sakes, what’s this world coming to, is what I’d like to know?”
I got introduced and he winced when he heard “reporter.”
“I’m helping out in this where I can,” I explained, hoping it was enough to let me squeak under his radar.
He nodded.
“So the keys were in the car,” Dolly said.
He nodded again.
“And what time of day was this, would you say?”
He thought a minute, pulling his bottom lip in thought. “Must’ve been about five. I was meeting a friend at six thirty for dinner but I thought I’d go in early. As I said, to sit and talk awhile.”
The two of them got the time narrowed down while I looked around, marveling at how the other half lived. Or, in my case, how the other two-thirds lived. Windows sweeping across a wide wall looked out on to manicured grounds and then a swath of blue lake water with painted on waves—all the same height. A long half circle of white sofa stretched in front of the window. Daffodils stood in crystal vases on almost every table in the room. But no Mrs. Wentworth in sight. A beautifully feminine room and Stephen Wentworth was a decidedly not-feminine man. More an auto executive type. The “at ease” clothes he wore probably cost as much as my yearly allowance for jeans and T-shirts, with all my new underwear thrown into the calculation.
“I see you’re a big fan of jellybeans,” Dolly said, giving a light laugh.
Wentworth looked perplexed. “Jellybeans? Why, no, I don’t think I can remember the last time I ate a jellybean.”
Dolly kept her eyes on her notebook, writing down every word.
“Then you didn’t have bags of black jellybeans in your car?”
“What?”
“We found three bags of black jellybeans in the back of the car.”
“Well, there you have it. Kids. I don’t care where you live or how careful you are—if wild kids want to cause trouble . . .”
Dolly shook her head. “This wasn’t a kid,” she said. “We have reason to believe it was someone with a definite purpose in mind for your car. An adult.”
“Care to say what that purpose was?”
Dolly shook her head. “Not right now. Our investigation is too preliminary. Nothing’s sure at this point. Sorry you got mixed up in any of it. Just the way things are.”
We were back at his front door. I complimented him on his yard, thinking I’d hear about his gardening service.
“Gardening’s what keeps me sane,” Stephen Wentworth said and seemed embarrassed. “Something about digging in the dirt . . .”
“Me, too,” I said. “And the flowers. Especially after winter.”
He looked at me as if noticing me for the first time. He nodded. “Life,” he repeated. “When I lost my wife . . . this whole place was her doing. I couldn’t let it go.”
He cleared his throat and held the door wide.
His last question to Dolly was about getting his car back so the insurance adjuster could get a look at it. He said nothing more to me but took my hand and held it a minute, as if dirt and worms and yellow flowers had made us automatic friends.
“Where next?” I backed down the long driveway to the road.
“Lucky said he told you about Ariadne Wilcox?”
“Spider lady.”
“Yeah, whatever. I’ve been thinking and thinking. No way can I say for sure it was a man rammed into my car like that. I couldn’t see him. Or no, maybe I saw something but it was just the shape of a person’s head behind the wheel. By the time I got from Grace Humbert’s tombstone out to the road, the car was squealing away, almost out to 131. So, who says it was a man? Huh? You tell me that.”
“I think everybody just assumed . . .”
“See what I mean? Assuming isn’t proof of anything. Big car. Powerful engine. Man. Woman. Kid. All they had to do was turn it on and come at me at a pretty fast clip.”
“This woman hate you that much?”
“Who knows? Barely said a word at the trial. But she wouldn’t testify against her boyfriend. Women like that, just as bad as the guy they let hurt their kid. Maybe worse because they’re supposed to take care of their babies.”
I thought awhile. “This one kind of makes more sense, when you think about it,” I said finally.
“Nothing makes sense, you ask me. Who’d want to hurt Jane to get even with me?”
“Maybe a woman who lost her babies,” I said and took off around the bottom of Torch Lake, through Alden, over to 131, north up to Alba, then east again.
We were heading for a place close to Gaylord, and a conversation with a spider woman who thought mothering stopped at the delivery room door.