Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (23 page)

I told him to find a town in Wisconsin or Minnesota, near the Mississippi River, that had a statue of an Indian chief. “Womack, or someone like that.”

“I'll do it, right now. Just please, please, stay on the line. I need someone to talk to.”

I couldn't hear him tapping on his keyboard, for the pounding of the bass, but he was back on the line in two minutes. “Chief Winnemac. Hadlow, Minnesota. Just west of the Mississippi River.”

He begged me to stay on the line, but there was no time.

CHAPTER 38.

Things went smoothly, for much of the rest of the day.

My one-way flight to Minneapolis got in at seven fifteen, right on time. I rented a tiny, squared-off Chevrolet, cheap, from Swifty's Rent-a-Car, just off the airport grounds. I'd never heard of Swifty's, and the car looked like a delivery van left too long in a dryer, but the price was right, thirty a day. For most of the forty miles southeast to Hadlow, things were fine.

Then, at dusk, I came up on a man driving a pickup truck with its headlights off. He was pulling a stake trailer, also unlit, filled with pigs.

The man and the pigs seemed content to move along at fifteen miles an hour. I was not. I was in a hurry to find a place to stay in Hadlow, have dinner, and be set to start prowling what I hoped was Sweetie Fairbairn's hometown first thing the next morning.

I put on my turn signal and pulled out on the left, to pass.

The farmer, without signaling, chose that exact moment to turn left.

As did his trailer. As did his pigs.

I T-boned the moron, slammed right into the side of his truck. The impact sent me off the road, upright, down into a ditch.

His truck also managed to stay upright, down in the ditch, ahead of me. Not so his trailer. Not so his pigs.

The trailer had twisted over, onto its side, splintering its stubby wood fence. Amid great squeals of terror, or perhaps enthusiasm, the pigs exited and took off across the field.

“Son of a bitch,” the livestock owner shouted and started to run after his pigs.

“Son of a bitch,” I echoed, thoroughly caught up in the drama of the moment.

After two hundred yards, the man realized the futility of chasing his bacon across the field, and he came back. Furious.

“Didn't you see I was turning?” he demanded.

“Didn't you see I was already in the other lane, with my lights on, about to pass you?”

So it went for another minute or two, until we both got on our cell phones. He called a friend of his who had a brother. They each had tow trucks. I called Swifty's Rent-a-Car.

“You waived our insurance,” the unruffled female voice said around the gum she was chewing. “It's your responsibility to have our vehicle towed to our nearest service center. They'll provide an estimate of repairs.”

“Where are your service centers?”

“There's only the one, at the airport in Minneapolis where you rented the car.”

I told her getting towed there would cost a fortune.

“You should have thought of that before you declined our insurance.” I heard her type on her computer. “Meanwhile,” she said, “we've placed a ten-thousand-dollar charge on your credit card. That will be reversed once the car has been repaired, at your, or your insurance company's, expense. Thank you for using Swifty's Rent-a-Car.”

I was about to wish her good luck, because my credit card has a five-hundred-dollar limit, when I remembered I'd given the Swifty's agent Koros's plastic to use for a security imprint.

It didn't matter. The gum-chewing Swifty girl had already hung up on me.

The two tow trucks came. The driver of the one that pulled my Chevy up from the ditch asked me where I was headed.

“Hadlow,” I said.

“Good enough. Ralph's got a service station there. He can look at your car.”

“It's a rental,” I said, without knowing why.

“Even better. Rental companies take care of everything. They'll get you a new car delivered pronto.”

“I used Swifty's Rent-a-Car.”

“Never heard of them.”

“They're cheap,” I said, finding no comfort in that at all.

We clattered southeast along two-lane blacktop in almost total darkness for forty-five minutes. Then, topping a hill, I saw a round yellow light, disembodied and hovering, high in the distance.

“Do you see that?” I asked, leaning closer to the windshield.

He laughed. “UFO?”

“What is it?”

“Chief Winnemac,” he said, “or at least his big cement head. The rest of him is obscured by the tree line.”

“How tall is the statue?”

“Fifty-some feet, but being high on the bluffs over the Mississippi River, he appears much taller. He looks over everything for miles around.”

“Including Hadlow?” I asked, mostly to make conversation.

“Especially Hadlow, because of the way the river bends.”

Ten minutes later, our headlamps picked up a scalloped beige sign announcing that the chamber of commerce wanted to welcome us to Hadlow, Minnesota. For good measure, they'd cut a profile of Winnemac at the top of the sign, implying his delight as well.

As we drove through town, I imagined the chamber of commerce would delight in welcoming anyone. The description Kathy had given Linda Coombs had been accurate. Hadlow was just another tiny, fading town: two blocks of storefronts, some twitching, some long dead; a grain elevator, missing clapboards, peeling paint, but seemingly still operating; four taverns shining small neon beer signs at the darkness; and one gas station.

It looked like it had been a fine place to leave for decades.

Ralph's service station, by its fading red and yellow colors, appeared to have once been a Shell franchise. Now it sprouted no name or logo at all.

“End of the line,” the tow driver said. Once he pocketed two hundred of George Koros's dollars, he dropped the Chevy. By now, I'd run through more than half of the ATM cash.

A man in overalls came out of one of the service bays as the tow truck pulled away, and eyed the unhealthy way the Chevy's front wheel was canted out. “Animal or metal?” he asked.

“A bit of both. A man and his pigs turned in front of me.”

“Won't be able to look at it until morning.”

“Is there a place to stay in town?”

“Five miles south. Place used to be an Econo Lodge before the economy tanked.”

“Have you got a car I can rent?”

He started to shake his head no, then stopped as though lightning had charged his skull. He wet his lips and pointed to a flatbed truck, parked next to a tow truck at the side of the station. It had been red and yellow once, too. Now it was mostly gray, where the paint had weathered off, exposing the primer.

“That's what I got to rent. Fifty bucks a day.”

I told myself that, should I lose my mind, I could buy pigs, and use the truck to take them for picnics in the countryside. I also told myself that the truck was all that was available.

In the sky, in the distance, the yellow-headed Winnemac appeared to grin. I peeled off another hundred of my rapidly dwindling dollars.

The truck cab had an authentic working smell to it, a mixed bouquet of gasoline, grease, and sweat. I rolled the windows down to draw in the night air as I drove the five miles to the motel.

As Ralph had said, the place had recently been an Econo Lodge. The outdoor signs were gone, but the name was still stenciled on a canvas laundry hamper left outside a service door. I hoped that meant the place still sported beige walls, safe and free of depictions of creatures wanting to bite in the night.

My room was blessedly bland, beige and more beige. I took a long shower, had a few Ho Hos for dinner, and slipped into bed. As I lay in the darkness, drapes pulled tight against the bright concrete eyes of Winnemac, my mind stabbed me with the thought that this trip was a waste of time. Sweetie would not have come back to a place like Hadlow. It was too small in which to hide.

I pushed the thought away. Anyone could hide anywhere.

Except perhaps Winnemac.

CHAPTER 39.

The next morning, the desk clerk at the used-to-be Econo Lodge told me, with some pride, that the high school served a dozen local communities. His pride was justified. The high school was big. Because it was summer, only a few cars were parked in the lot.

“You say you're looking for a woman who may have attended this school over forty years ago?” the stern-faced woman in the administration office asked.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You don't know her real name, or a maiden name?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Yet you think you would recognize her in a yearbook photo?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And you think she'd look the same, after forty years?”

“Close enough, I hope, ma'am.”

My side of the dialogue had been defensive right from the start. Being in a high school brought back memories of my own encounters with stern-faced administrators, and that triggered old instincts to provide short, nonincriminating answers.

“This is an insurance issue?” she asked. I'd given her one of my cards.

“A routine matter of an estate not being closed out. The company wants to make the payout but can't locate all the beneficiaries. We're hoping one or two might still be in this area.”

She wrote something on a small piece of paper and handed it to me. “Our librarian is in today, preparing for the new year. She'll show you to the yearbooks.”

“Thank you.”

“Young man?”

I stopped at the door. “Ma'am?”

“See that you move quietly through the halls.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

As I walked down the hall, I looked at the slip of paper she'd given me. It was a hall pass. I wanted to laugh, loudly—school was out for the summer—but I was too old.

*   *   *

The librarian wore faded jeans and a blue chambray shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Obviously, she'd come to school that day to sort and lift, and was not pleased with my intrusion. She put me in a small room, came back with the books I'd asked for, and told me she was very busy.

Looking for her family, I'd requested the six yearbooks around the year I estimated Sweetie would have graduated, if she'd been truthful about being fifty-eight. I began with the oldest book, going through the pictures of the graduating seniors because those photos were the largest. None resembled Sweetie Fairbairn.

I was almost through the senior photos in the next book when one stopped me. It wasn't Sweetie; it was a blond girl with a sunny smile who'd been active, for her first three years in high school, on the girls' cross-country team, the debate society, and the Future Farmers of America.

I stared at the picture, but I didn't need to. I knew that blond girl. I'd gotten a glimpse of her when she was much, much older, after her skin had gone leathery from too much exposure to the sun. I'd seen her coming out of George Koros's building.

She'd been why Koros hadn't let me into his private office. She'd been hiding in there while Koros and I talked in his anteroom.

She wasn't Sweetie Fairbairn, not quite—but she was very close.

The yearbook said her name was Darlene Taylor.

I flipped back to the book's index. There was another Taylor listed. Rosemary. I turned to her homeroom photo.

Sweetie Fairbairn looked back at me from forty-two years before. She was a pretty girl, with happy eyes and a good smile. The girls—Darlene, a senior; Rosemary, a junior—were sisters.

I thumbed backward through the senior photo pages again, idling, not ready yet to think about what her sister Darlene's presence in Chicago might mean about Sweetie's disappearance.

This time my eye was stopped by another senior photograph, a boy's. I'd not been looking at boys, but this one, in Darlene's senior class, caught my eye because he had slicked-back hair that reminded me of Elvis Derbil's. The boy's name was Korozakis. There was no mistaking the wide Greek face. I knew that face.

George Koros.

Darlene Taylor, her sister Rosemary, and George Koros. All together in Hadlow, Minnesota.

I leaned back, shut my eyes.

Sweetie Fairbairn and George Koros had been lying to me since the beginning.

I wondered how I could find out why.

CHAPTER 40.

The librarian made me photocopies of the yearbook pages. The stern-faced administrator pursed her lips at my foolishness when I came back to show them to her. “Going back four decades? None of us is that old, Mr. Elstrom. Myself, I've only been here ten years.”

“Would you mind taking a look anyhow? Then I'll be on my way.”

It was incentive enough. She took the three photocopies I was holding out and glanced at the one on top.

“Never seen him,” she said.

“There are two more pictures.”

She looked at the second copy. “No, never…” She stopped, moved the picture a few inches farther from her eyes. “I'll be darned. Darlene.”

“Darlene Taylor,” I said.

“Darlene Taylor, of course. I had no idea she'd been such a pretty thing.”

“How about the last photo?”

She studied the third sheet. “Obviously Darlene's sister, almost close enough to be her twin, but I've never heard of her.”

“You know Darlene?”

“She works here. Janitorial.”

“Here? Like right now?”

“Not summers. Darlene is part of the night crew that works during the school year.”

“Can you tell me where she lives?”

“Against policy.”

“Can you think of anyone who would have known Rosemary?”

“This is an insurance matter?”

“A small family policy. We need to locate both sisters.”

“There's Miss Mason. She used to teach English, all four grades. Last I heard, she's at the assisted living facility. It's not more than ten miles from here.”