Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (24 page)

Actually, it was fourteen miles, but I resisted the urge to call the administrator and correct her with a strong “No, ma'am.” It was enough to know she was wrong. Besides, I was afraid of being summoned back; I'd snuck away without turning in my hall pass.

The assisted living facility was sided with cedar, old and grayed out. Miss Mason was old, too, but not grayed out. Her hair was dyed a vibrant brown, and her lipstick was bright. She did not live there, she said pointedly; she was the facility's activities director. We sat in one corner of a large visiting room, filled with comfortable-looking sofas and chairs. The furniture looked unused.

“I taught them all, Mr. Elstrom—Darlene and Rosemary, even Georgie, though he wasn't there the whole year, of course.” She handed back the photocopies. “I expect lots of folks remember them, at least those of us of a certain age.”

“I'm not following, Miss Mason.”

“The incident, the filling station?”

I shook my head.

“Forgive me, Mr. Elstrom. I thought you were here about that old case. Exactly why have you come?”

“I'm trying to locate Rosemary Taylor.”

“About what?”

“An insurance matter.”

“I would have thought those folks, the Taylors, were too poor for any kind of insurance.” She sighed. “I can't help you. Rosemary left Hadlow right after her junior year. Caused a lot of talk, because it was just a couple of months after the incident.”

“The incident?” She'd said it twice now.

“The service station out by the river was robbed that April. A young attendant was shot several times, gut shot, and died of his wounds. There were no eyewitnesses, but several people reported seeing Darlene and Rosemary riding with Georgie in his convertible, out in that direction that afternoon.”

“They were suspected?”

“Certainly not by right-thinking people. Georgie was always driving Darlene around in that flashy car. That day, they brought Rosemary along and were out by the river, was all.” She thought for a moment, then said, “That convertible didn't help.”

“What do you mean?”

“Georgie was new to town. Greek. His father was sent here to close down the paper mill, lay off the people, sell off the equipment. Took a long damned time for that mill to die, longer still for its guts to be pulled out and sold. Meanwhile, there was Georgie, a real smoothie—I expect he got his way with Darlene, that spring—breezing about in his father's flashy convertible. It struck people wrong, driving a car like that when folks were losing their jobs. Anyway, a lot of people didn't much mind when Georgie was sent away.”

“After the incident?”

“Just days afterward, if memory serves. His parents said they wanted him to finish up at some fancy college prep school, to better his chances of getting into a good university, but there was talk that he was sent away because of the incident.”

I pointed to Koros's yearbook photo, lying on the coffee table. “That shows him as graduating from here.”

“He never finished. Yearbooks get printed weeks before the end of the school year.”

“Rosemary left at the end of that same school year?”

She nodded. “First Georgie, then Rosemary.”

“Why did Rosemary leave?”

“No reason to stay, I expect. She was a moony girl.”

“Moony?”

“A delightful child, but a dreamer. Her head was filled with fanciful thoughts of elegant lives in elegant cities. There was nothing like that in Hadlow.”

“What about Darlene?”

“She was the dutiful one. She kept on at the family place, after the mother died, and after Rosemary took off. Of course, Alta was still alive then.”

“Alta?”

“The third girl; Darlene and Rosemary's younger sister.”

“I didn't think to look in the yearbooks for a third sister,” I said.

“Oh, no; Alta wouldn't be in any of the yearbooks. She quit going to school in seventh or eighth grade, around the time the father took off. Hard luck all around, in that family.” She leaned forward. “Insurance money would sure help Darlene. She stayed on after Alta died, though I'll never understand why. She should have left. She was a pretty, bright girl. She could have fashioned a better life for herself, somewhere else.”

“Alta died?”

“I told you: hard luck all around in that family, especially that year.”

“When did Alta die?”

“September, three months after Rosemary took off.” She pursed her lips, thinking back. “Their mother died the winter before. There was talk about sending the girls—remember there were three of them, with Alta being disabled in some fashion—to state care, but Darlene, being the oldest, fought that. She said she could manage the family.” She reached for the yearbook copies and held one up. “Yes, see here? Darlene was an active girl during her first three years of high school, but senior year, she did nothing. She dropped out of everything to keep that family going.”

“By then the father was gone.”

“Long gone, the bastard. Hand it to Darlene, she was tenacious. After the mother passed, she and Rosemary alternated the days they went to school, so that one was always home with Alta. But the impact was hardest on Darlene. She was the oldest.”

“Alta was disabled?”

“Mental or physical, no one quite knew what she suffered from. She contracted something and after that was never seen. Folks supposed Martha Taylor, the mother, thought it inappropriate to put her youngest child on display. Things were like that, then.”

“What did Alta die of?”

“A virus, I think. Anyway, folks expected that would be the last straw for Darlene, but she stayed on, cleaning at the school, and farming some. It must be difficult, being out there all alone. Of course, she doesn't really farm, just tends a plot for her own needs. She has a man stop by, now and again, I hear, to help with the heavier chores.”

“Does Rosemary ever come back?”

“Oh, how I wish she would. She was charming, utterly charming. She had such—” She stopped, hunting for the right word. “Hope,” she said finally. “Rosemary had such hope. It came through so strong in her stories.”

“Stories?”

“She was always writing stories, and not just for my English class, either. They were romantic, and tragic, but underlying, there was always hope. She wrote a whole novel, her junior year. It was about a man who entertained kids, I think. Got a mention in the local paper for that, and the school mimeographed a bunch of copies, thinking it would inspire other students to take up writing. It's not that the writing was particularly good; it was her tenacity that made the impression, her willingness to write such a long thing. Then, as now, young people were not known for their powers of concentration.”

Something faint nagged at the back of my gut. “A story about a man who entertained kids?” I asked, hoping I sounded merely conversational.

“I think he got killed, toward the end of the story. Romance, tragedy, and hope. Young Miss Rosemary's heroine rose above the tragedy, and went on to work with ill children.”

“How did he entertain the kids?”

“Well, I don't quite remember—”

“With balloons? Did the man entertain children with balloons?”

“It's been years since I looked at it—”

“You have a copy?”

Her eyes narrowed, seeing through the lies I had told. “What are you after, Mr. Elstrom?”

“Do you still have the story?”

“Somewhere, I suppose.”

“I need to see it.”

“Why on earth would you want to?”

I couldn't lie anymore. “Something more than idle curiosity.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “Best you ask Darlene about these things—and that insurance you say you're here about.”

She gave me directions to the Taylor place, and I walked out into the sunshine. It took some time to put the key in the ignition, because I had to sit for a while, in that truck cab that smelled of grease and gasoline and sweat, and think about the death of a gas station attendant, and the death of a clown … and wonder what might have been set in motion over forty years before.

CHAPTER 41.

I followed a road that had once been gravel but was now worn to rutted brown clay, flecked only faintly with the gray of a last few embedded stones. I passed no houses. It was empty country.

The Taylor place was four miles outside of Hadlow, a leaning cottage stuck on more hard brown ground, surrounded by once-cleared fields that were now thick with thin, spindly trees. Whatever Darlene Taylor had grown in the small plots had curled up and died, giving way to weeds.

Weeds, and perhaps a twisted idea of how words of romance and murder and a clown, written by a high school girl long before, could be used for blackmail.

The house appeared deserted. A piece of cardboard had been taped inside to cover a shattered front window. The screen door was canted outward, about to fall off its hinges. The place looked as it should, if Darlene Taylor had abandoned it to come to Chicago.

Except for the weeds in the front. Someone had trampled them recently, walking up to the house. They were only now beginning to spring back up.

I left the truck on the road and came up on foot. I knocked on the door, waited, knocked again. No one answered.

I tried the handle. The front door was locked tight, and all the windows looked to be latched. All but the one covered by cardboard.

I walked around to the back. An old water pump stuck up out of the ground, five yards from the house. An outhouse stood fifty feet past that, near a sparse copse of trees. It leaned in the same direction as the cottage.

The rear door was locked, too.

I rubbed a window made filthy by blown dirt and pressed my face against it. I was looking across a kitchen sink, at a plate of beans, half eaten, set on a porcelain-topped table. The beans looked fresh, not dried or discolored. A smear of gravy beneath them glistened in the sunlight coming in diffused through the window.

I watched the beans. Things moved across them, like they'd moved across the corpse of Andrew Fill.

Flies.

I went back to the truck and drove away.

I'd come back after dark, to see if Darlene Taylor had come home.

*   *   *

The little rental Chevrolet sat in front of Ralph's service station, its driver's side front wheel bent at exactly the same angle as the night before. Hearing the familiar sounds of his truck clattering up to its rightful home, Ralph came out of the bowels of his station, wiping his hands, and struck a pose in front of the wounded Chevrolet like he was studying sculpture.

“I've been thinking on this all morning,” he said. “I'm not sure if I can make it drivable.”

I squeezed the last of Koros's cash in my pocket, sensing Ralph was about to squeeze me. “What will make you sure?”

“I'll have to start pulling off parts. It'll take days, and big money.”

“We'd better tow it, then.”

“Where to?”

“The rental place in Minneapolis.”

His voice brightened. “That's a long, long ways.”

I gripped the cash in my pocket tighter. “How much?”

“I'd have to think on that.”

I knew what he had to think about. He had to guess how much I was clutching in my pocket, and what he could rationalize that into, in per-mile towing charges.

“Let me know, Ralph,” I said, hoping he couldn't hear the defeat in my voice. I went back to the smells of grease and gas and sweat percolating in the cab of his truck.

*   *   *

I had the afternoon and early evening to kill. I decided to begin by stabbing at it with a plastic knife and fork. I pulled into the parking lot of a fast food place at the edge of town called the Would You? and ordered the chicken basket.

It was after lunchtime. There were no teenagers loitering in front. There had been, though—years and years of them, judging by the carvings on the wood planks of the picnic tables. Love had been memorialized there, in initials filled with chicken and burger grease sure to protect it from the harsh Minnesota winters, likely to last longer than the love itself.

I would have bet most towns had such hieroglyphs. My town, Rivertown, certainly did, though instead of being carved into tables, ours were cut into the sides of Kutz's Wienie Wagon, a wood-slatted trailer that had been pulled beneath one of the overpasses when FDR was president and left to sink on deflating tires. My own initials were there, paired with a girl's, inside a heart. Years later, she'd come back to cut another heart, larger, to surround the first one. It had taken me too long to learn about that second heart.

My chicken—a leg, a thigh, and a breast—came with a biscuit and french fries, enough goodness to clog even the most elastic of arteries. As I ate, I studied the carvings on the table, wondering if Rosemary Taylor's initials had been carved at the Would You? Or whether the tables from her high school days had been discarded, their initials lost, and the whole process begun all over again.

The chicken, biscuit, and fries were excellent. When I turned in my tray, I was tempted to tell the young lady behind the Would You?'s grease-smeared glass that I would again, if allowed. I didn't, because I worried she'd misinterpret my play on the name of the place and call the police.

I walked to the truck, leaned against its fender. It wasn't hard to see Georgie Korozakis, cocky and young, breezing along that Main Street in his father's convertible, with Darlene Taylor nestled beside him, her blond hair blowing back, both of them laughing at the wind and the notion of ever growing old.

I called Amanda. Her secretary told me she was out at a luncheon and wasn't expected back until much, much later. I didn't want to wonder if that was true.

Leo didn't answer his cell phone. He was probably in a meeting somewhere.