FOURTEEN
This part of northwestern Michigan rolled gently and opened wide with fields turning from brown to green. We drove through Mancelona, passing potato farms with rainbows hovering over automated sprinklers rolling and shooting mists of water across acres of growing plants.
I wasn’t looking forward to meeting the spider lady and seeing Dolly embroiled in combat with a woman who’d had her babies taken away from her.
Beside me in the Jeep, Dolly was quiet, slouched down so her gun pushed up almost into her lap, hands draped over her knees, face blank, eyes staring out the front windshield.
We turned at Alba, a small, crossroads kind of town, then headed toward Gaylord, down a side road, and another left at a hand-painted sign reading:
PRIVATE
KEEP OUT
The house was small, set in the middle of a white pine forest, as if a Christmas tree farm had gotten away from whoever owned the place. I pulled in a dirt drive that wandered off beyond the house, ending in a sea of rusted-out cars and abandoned engines.
A young woman in jeans and a shirt that stopped just below her sagging boobs was hanging clothes on a line that ran from one corner of the house out to a skeletal tree, big dead limbs threatening to tumble. The woman stopped, hands reaching up to hang a gray undershirt on the line, mouth filled with clothespins, as I parked the car.
“That her?” I asked.
Dolly nodded. “Her all right.”
The woman, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-three (from the look of her a rough, mean twenty-three years), bent slowly to take up her wash basket and pull a clothespin from her mouth. She crossed her arms, canted her hips to one side, and stood where she was, with no intention of coming to us as we got out and stood, side by side, in her yard.
Dolly slowly pulled a pad of paper and a pen from one of her buttoned-down shirt pockets, buttoned the pocket back up, flipped the pad open, studied an empty page for a long minute, then looked over at me. “Might as well go talk to her,” she said, but reluctantly, as if she had misgivings of her own about facing this Ariadne Wilcox again.
We’d only taken one or two steps toward the back when the front door burst open and a man in his late twenties came out, yelling before the door closed behind him.
“What the hell you want?” the man demanded, hands closing over the crooked railing around the tiny porch. “Get the hell away from here. You got no right . . .”
Dolly was taken off guard for only a minute, stepping back, hand going to the snap that held her gun in place. She left her hand where it was and looked up at the angry man with long sideburns, wearing only a sleeveless undershirt and khaki shorts that hung to below his knees. He was barefoot and spitting mad.
“Thought you were still in jail, Jerome,” was all Dolly called out, one hand up, shading her eyes from the bright sun.
“Been out three weeks. Don’t owe you a damned thing. Don’t need to explain nothing. Why don’t you get back in that car and leave me and Ari alone?”
“She let you back in the house, eh? After what you did to Carol Anne? Should have been castrated . . .”
Dolly walked toward the man, not away. As she approached him, he grew more anxious, his discomfort turning into rage. The white-knuckled hand released the porch rail and hung in the air. He nervously lifted his left shoulder again and again, then stretched his neck one way and the other, took swipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, but stood where he was, eyeing Dolly as she approached him.
“Mind yer mouth,” he said, his voice lowering.
“I’ll mind my mouth when you stop hurting babies and stop moving in with dumb women who don’t know how to take care of their own little girls.”
“You trumped up those charges. I never did nothing . . .”
Ariadne Wilcox approached slowly from around the back of the house. Her almost colorless hair was held back at the front by a plastic headband and at the back by a rubber band pulling her hair into an uncombed tail. She had the face of a poor young woman—no makeup, probably never could afford it, and the pasty look of bad nutrition. Her blue eyes were already lost in wrinkles as she squinted over at us, head skewed to one side. As she watched, I noticed the yellow of a passing black eye along the right side of her face.
“Ari’s got no other kids for you to take away,” Jerome spit out. “So, what you want this time? Come for me? I kinda thought you was thinking about you and me . . .”
“You let this . . .” Dolly turned to the silent woman and pointed at the man on the porch. “This
thing
back in your house?”
Ariadne said nothing, only stared at Dolly with dead eyes.
“He burned Carol Anne. Put her little hands on top of a stove burner to teach her not to grab food off the table.” Dolly was pushing hard.
Ariadne looked at her feet, shuffling one dirty tennis shoe in the dirt. She said nothing.
“Clumsy kid. That’s what I told you before. I never touched her,” Jerome, leaning back against the screened door, yelled.
“You been out three weeks?” Dolly asked him.
“Yup. But I wasn’t out running into that patrol car of yours, if that’s what yer asking. I saw the newspapers.”
“That is exactly what I’m asking. Found the car you stole. Looks just like something you’d think to do, Jerome. Something truly stupid.”
He shrugged. “Think what you wanna think. I don’t wanna go back to jail. Not even to teach you a good lesson. Yer not worth it.”
Ariadne stepped from the shadow of the house overhang. “I heard you got a baby of yer own, Dolly.” There was an attempt at friendliness in her voice. “A girl, right? Just like my Carol Anne. You know where Carol Anne and Susie Q got to? I’d like to see ’em . . .”
Dolly put up a hand, ignoring the woman and tightening her focus on Jerome. “You’d like a big car, wouldn’t you, Jerome? Maybe an SUV? Maybe over in Elk Rapids? Be surprised they even let your kind in Elk Rapids. I heard they got some kind of crud detector there at the light on 31.”
He curled his lip and smiled. “I had a car like that you think I’d waste it running into any piece of crap you drive?”
“I think you’d be dumb enough to think you were getting even. Just your kind of thing.”
Dolly turned to Ariadne, as if the woman had just entered her radar. “You and that creep up there have anything to do with what happened out at the cemetery in Leetsville? You think jail was bad last time? You wait and see what the courts will do to you for this kind of thing. And not just eighteen months this time. I’ll see to that myself. I can come up with a lot of charges . . .”
Ariadne had a hand over her mouth. She shook her head. “I would never hurt . . .”
Dolly said nothing back to her. I’d seen that tight little body before and wouldn’t want her coming after me right then. I took a step toward my car and reached out to touch Dolly’s arm. She shook me off. She was in killing mode. Her hand was on her gun. He shoulders were up, almost touching her earlobes.
I whispered, “Dolly, let’s go.”
She stood still a few long seconds then shook herself.
“I hope you two were the ones who ran that car into me,” she yelled toward both people. “I can’t tell you how much I want to come back here and arrest you and save the pictures the newspaper will run to show to your little girls someday. Show ’em the kind of trash they got away from. You know what I’m going to say to your little girls, Ariadne? I’m gonna say they are two lucky girls, Carol Anne and Susie Q. I’m gonna say this is the woman who pushed you out into the world, but was never your real mother.”
Ariadne said nothing. One hand went to her mouth and stayed there.
“I’m gonna tell Carol Anne and Susie Q that real mothers don’t let dumb jerks touch their little girls. And they don’t let dumb jerks move back in after they go to jail for touching and hurting their little girl. Real mothers don’t leave their kids. A real mother would put a gun to this lowlife’s head and blow his brains out before she let him back in her life. So, you see, Ariadne, you got nothing to complain about. You never was a real mother to the girls, and I’m gonna be around to remind them of that. And remind them I was the one who put the two of you in jail for a long time, if it was you who tried to hurt my baby.”
Ariadne shifted the laundry basket to her other hip. Her eyes didn’t change. Not a muscle moved in her face. It was a face long beyond dead.
We walked to the car, but Dolly kept stopping to turn around and yell at Jerome Ordway, who screamed for us to get off his property.
We got in the Jeep. I turned the car and went out the rutted driveway. In my rearview mirror I saw the two of them standing where they’d been. Neither had moved nor turned to look at each other. Somehow, deep in my brain, I was hoping that just a little bit of what Dolly said was sinking into Ariadne Wilcox’s head. Not a spider woman after all, I was thinking, more like a woman caught in somebody else’s web. I’d seen these backwoods girls many times. Dropped babies because they had no other way to live. Moved in with any guy who would put a roof over their head. Sad women, growing old and more beaten down by the year until they came into the Save-A-Lot on Fridays when their welfare check came, a line of snot-nosed kids behind them, and filled their basket with on-sale sweet cereals and beer and hot dogs and swatted any kid who dared to ask for one of the cheap toys at checkout.
• • •
On the way back into Leetsville, I asked Dolly what she thought of Jerome Ordway and Ariadne Wilcox as suspects.
She shrugged. “Not her. She’s like twice-ground cornmeal. Nothing to her. But him, he hates so many people I bet you I’m not even near the top of the list. We’ll see what turns up on the SUV. Jerome’s fingerprints anywhere on it and he’s a dead man.”
“But the ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal.’ That could fit. I mean, he’s the kind of man who’d want to get even for taking his prey away from him.”
“Yeah, but he wouldn’t know how to write something biblical like that. His note would’ve been more like ‘You piece of. . .’ Well . . . I think you get it.” She gave me a rueful look, saving my tender ears from the ravishes of a string of curses.
FIFTEEN
Back at EATS, Jane sat happily in her car seat atop a back table where Omar Winston sat, Jane’s fingers wrapped around his pudgy pinky.
Dolly’s greeting wasn’t warm but Omar ignored it and simply said he needed to talk to her in private. Dolly called over to Flora Coy, who came to flutter at Jane with a napkin, then wipe spit from her chin, while Dolly went outside with Omar. I settled in a back booth, away from everyone, and ordered a cheese omelet and toast because I liked eating breakfast whenever I felt like it.
There’d been something about Omar’s set face that didn’t bode well for Dolly. I was hoping it was a break in the case, though why it should come from a Gaylord officer I couldn’t figure. Maybe a suggestion, something Omar thought of that the rest of us hadn’t. It was always good to have a fresh eye take a look at facts but I doubted a new idea was going to come at us from Officer Omar Winston.
Dolly came back in alone. No Omar in sight. Without a word she grabbed up Jane’s car seat, with Jane in it, turned, and stomped back out the door without a word.
I followed because as far as I knew I was Dolly’s only means of transportation. She went to my car and strapped Jane in the back.
“Where to?” was all I asked.
“My house,” Dolly mumbled. “Gotta clear my head. I’ve got to think. That guy is driving me nuts.”
I didn’t say a word, figuring whatever was going on would spill out after just a block or two anyway. It didn’t take that far. Dolly sputtered, then she swore, then she looked over at me with her teeth clenched.
“You know what he wants? He wants to take Jane home with him. Says his mother can take care of her until this is all cleared up.”
I didn’t say a word. I thought plenty. Like how that wasn’t a bad idea.
“Next thing he’ll want to share custody. You watch. That’s what’s coming. I guarantee it.”
“He’s her father. He’s worried.”
She glared at me. “Yeah, well . . . He’s not getting his paws on her.”
“You might have to think about that someday.”
“As if I’m gonna trust him to take her all the way to Gaylord where I can’t be with her all the time. No sir.”
“But . . .”
“That’s enough, Emily. I got other things on my mind right now.”
We left it at that. I went into the house with her to go over some items for my next story. She called Lucky, but there was nothing new beyond the jellybeans. Prints on the note turned up nothing. And the blood from that broken headlight wasn’t typed yet. No DNA test unless it was deemed necessary for a prosecution. The tests were costly, and took a long time.
Cate was happy enough to take Jane from Dolly’s arms and lay her on the sofa to change her diaper, which made me look off into a corner of the room so I didn’t have to watch. Something about a diaper full of baby poop made my stomach turn. The one thing I couldn’t avoid was the smell. All the baby powder in the world couldn’t cover that smell, so I made my way out into the kitchen and sat down at the wooden table Cate had recently painted white, one of her many improvements to this spare and stripped-down house Dolly thought just fine the way it was.
Dolly followed me out to rummage through bottles in the refrigerator door, coming up with a Mountain Dew she offered to share with me. I shook my head, figuring I didn’t need any more sugar in my system than I’d already put there with a candy bar I’d found at the bottom of my purse as dessert, after the cheese omelet and whole wheat toast.
Cate brought the sweet-smelling Jane out and pushed her at me. I put up a hand. “Gotta go,” I said and started to get up.
“Take her.” Cate scowled at me. “I’ve got something I want to show Dolly. Gotta go get it in my bedroom.”
So I took the baby while Cate went back to her room. I got her settled on my lap as she looked at my face, seeming to worry about who I could be and what was expected of her now. I smiled down into that concerned little face and got a deep, Dolly-like frown in return.
Cate was back with something in her hand.
“Just wanted you to see this, Dolly. I’ve been looking for it. Knew I put it somewhere and this morning I opened up an old book and there it was.” She handed a photograph to Dolly, who took it, stared down at it, then looked up expectantly.
“Who’s this?”
“That’s Audrey. My sweet little doll baby. That was a couple of years before she had you. Thought you’d like to have it.”
Dolly held the photo out toward Cate. “No, thanks.”
“Now Dolly. That’s Jane’s grandma. And that’s something you gotta care about.”
“I’m not doing this again.” Dolly stood, snapped the photo into the air toward her grandmother, and stomped out of the kitchen. “Told you before.” Her voice was deep ice. “I don’t want anything to do with that woman. Hate her!”
Cate bent slowly to pick up the picture from the floor and look at it again before tucking it into her skirt pocket.
“If only Dolly would listen,” she sighed. “Audrey Delores was always such a fragile girl. You know, Emily, everybody’s got faults. Why, look at me. What kind of mother must I have been to my own sweet little dolly that she turned away from me so bad?”
I didn’t say anything. I held Baby Jane tighter, feeling baby warmth against my arms. It was almost hard to let go when Cate took her but I wanted to be someplace else right then, where people didn’t hurt each other, and babies didn’t come along to make a sorry life even worse, and “hate” wasn’t a word that leapt so easily to mind.