Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Six

The sun was two feet off the horizon when I got back to Louise’s cottage. That meant maybe an hour and a half before it got dark, enough time to finish up.

As I carried out the three bags of crumpled newspaper pages to leave by the garage, I thought of Louise’s nimble-fingered landlady. The Honestly Dearest columns were the only traces I’d found of any contact Louise Thomas had sought with her world. Maybe those columns were all that had touched her heart. I turned around on the drive and put the bags into the back of the Jeep. Tossing them in the Dumpster behind the motel would be a minor gesture, but one that would guarantee they’d never be touched by Mrs. Sturrow.

I went back inside. With her sheets of newspaper gone and her sensible clothes in a bag on the porch, Louise’s tiny house had the stale air of a place closing in on itself. That was my imagination working, of course. Perhaps she’d never really occupied that house; perhaps she’d merely drifted between its three rooms for a time, careful to leave nothing of herself behind. I walked through the mess in the kitchen to look a last time for anything left of Louise Thomas.

In the tiny bathroom, there was a bar of Ivory soap in the fiberglass shower enclosure, another on the corner sink. One white bath towel hung on a hook; a second had been thrown to the floor. A jar of cold cream also lay on the linoleum floor, upside down, a foot from a tube of toothpaste, rolled carefully up from its bottom, and a scuffed-down purple toothbrush. There was no aspirin, no cough syrup, no thermometer. Whatever pain or fever she’d known, she’d managed it without help.

I picked up the jar of cold cream. Deep finger gouges raked the inside, as though someone had been searching for something buried in it. The cold cream smelled of roses. My fingers began to cramp; I’d begun squeezing the jar too hard. I’d known a girl once who’d smelled of roses and of Ivory soap. Lots of girls, lots of women smell of roses and Ivory soap. There was nothing in the bathroom. Nothing at all.

The sunlight was fading quickly in the living room now, the light behind the plastic sheets deepening into gray. I took another look around the room. There’d been nothing personal there, no photo albums or whiskey, no old records or CDs. If Louise Thomas had owned a television or a radio, they’d been taken by the intruder or by Mrs. Sturrow. Something, though, perhaps just an overworked fancy in a darkening cottage, made me allow the possibility that Louise Thomas had lived without television or radio or books. I wondered what kind of woman could manage the nights, in such a desolate place, with only the wind to keep her company.

The bedroom, too, demanded little more than a fast, final glance. I went to the empty closet, this time thinking to feel along the top shelf. My fingers touched a small box in the farthest corner. It was a new black typewriter ribbon, marked for Underwood models like the Number Five on the oak table. I put it in my coat pocket.

I had to pass the oak table on my way out of the room. From habit, I started to reach for the typewriter.

We bent to look at what she’d just cut into the paint on the underside, M.M.’S FUTURE MACHINE, she’d scratched, with the fork. She smiled, pleased by our scrutiny. “I’m going to write my way out of this town,” she said.

I pulled my hand back. It was just an old reflex. I didn’t need to turn over the machine. I’d already checked. There was nothing there.

I felt in my pockets for Louise’s keys. It was almost dark.

Something glinted faintly as I reached to close the living room door. I stepped back inside. It was the brass knob on a closet door, caught just right by the last of the daylight. I’d never noticed that closet; it had always been hidden by the opened living room door. I turned the knob.

Two wire hangers dangled empty on a metal pipe rod. There was no jacket, no coat, no hats to protect from the cold or the sun. On the floor was a woman’s pair of gray running shoes, size eight. I grabbed the clothes bag from the porch, dropped in the shoes, locked both doors, and left.

Jeep Wranglers have no trunks, and the shelf of a backseat is comfortable only for people with removable legs. Since the car was already crammed with three bags of newspaper sheets, it was tempting to leave the clothes behind.

But they might fetch a few bucks for Mrs. Sturrow at a resale shop.

“Let her eat fruit,” I said to the bag of clothes. Smug with pettiness, I jammed it in the back of the Jeep. I’d find a Salvation Army bin in West Haven.

I got behind the wheel, twisted the key in the ignition-and then I sat, stalled by a hazy mix of old memories and new questions. The engine seemed to grow louder and louder, as if impatient with my indecision. Finally, I could not stand it. I shut it off, ran to the dark house, and unlocked the doors. By now, the living room was almost black, the bedroom barely lighter. Even in the cold, I was sure there was a scent of roses and Ivory soap.

I grabbed the Underwood. The heavy old black steel was frigid under my grip as I relocked the doors and hurried to set it on my passenger’s seat. I fired the engine and drove away.

The road to West Haven was deserted, the snow on the fields a pale blue blanket lit softly by a rising quarter moon. Past the broad turn a couple of miles west of Louise’s place, something flashed red a few hundred yards behind me. It could have been the quick tap of brake lights of a car following without headlights, or it, too, could have been my imagination.

…

Setting down the bags of newspaper sheets to unlock my motel room door, I made a bargain to shut up the little bean adder that crabs around inside my head: I’d spend only the seven hundred Louise had earmarked for me to be her executor, and not one dime more. Whatever questions remained when the seven hundred ran out would have to stay unanswered.

The little bean adder snorted in disbelief: You don’t have any other money, he said. Ah, but I have a credit card, I almost said, but I didn’t. It isn’t seemly to argue with oneself aloud, even when one is within earshot of only twin Dumpsters.

Inside, I called Reynolds’s cell phone and left a message asking him to call. Then I dumped the bags of crumpled Honestly Dearest columns onto the bed and began sorting them by date. It would have been boring work, but I’d switched on Grand Rapids television. Its Starsky and Hutch retrospective was still going strong, and though the plot of each episode was identical, the names of the distressed damsels and the colors of the villains’ cars varied enough to keep me enthralled. Time almost flew.

The Honestly Dearest columns went back over a year. As I’d noticed at lunch, the oldest were from the Gulf Watcher, a shopping tabloid from Windward Island in Florida. More recent were a couple of sheets from Georgia and Ohio papers. The newest, and the largest batch by far, came from the Southwest Michigan Intelligencer, beginning the previous May.

As Starsky and Hutch traded witticisms about women and cars, and cars and women, I nibbled at my salad from lunch and what was left of the Oreos and read Honestly, Dearest columns. To victims of faithless marriages, teenage insecurities, bad-smelling coworkers, a peeping pizza delivery man, and a college lad who objected to his roommate having sex with a girlfriend while he was trying to study not five feet away-all of them ordinary people, sadly at their most ordinary-she offered up respect and common sense.

However, none of the letters appeared to have been written by a frightened, lonely woman living in an isolated cottage. And none had been spotted with blood. The newspapers had been scattered by the intruder, after he killed her.

No blood, no trail to Louise. I didn’t know what that meant.

I’d fallen asleep rereading some of the newer columns, notwithstanding Starsky and Hutch being mirthful in the background, when Reynolds called. It was eleven twenty.

“Who’s got Louise Thomas’s purse?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I’d like to notify next of kin. She might have had wallet pictures, letters, something else that can help me trace them down.” It sounded better than trying to justify a growing obsession.

“Most likely, the intruder took the purse for the cash and the credit cards.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“All I know for sure is I got a message on my cell phone saying there’d been a home invasion and a death on Twelve, and to keep an eye peeled for vandals.”

“Who left the message?”

“Some woman with the county. I didn’t write down her name.”

“So you wouldn’t know where they took her?”

“Whichever funeral home they use as county morgue?”

“I want to find out where her purse is, and if she was wearing a coat.”

“A coat?”

“There was no coat in her house. Maybe the landlady swiped it, but maybe Louise was wearing a coat when she was killed-it was cold in that house-and the sheriff has it.”

“How is that important?”

“You’re going to love this.”

“Tell me.”

“I want to know if she had cigarettes in her coat pocket, or in her purse.”

“Now you’re really confusing me. Cigarettes?”

“I think she smoked. Too much fresh air was blowing in through the plastic to smell it, but I found a broken ashtray with three Salem butts spilled out of it. There were no other cigarettes in the place.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Ever know a cigarette smoker who didn’t have a backup pack in a drawer? Especially somebody who lived way out in the tulies, miles from a gas station or a convenience store?”

Reynolds exhaled slowly into the phone. “Look, my job is to watch warehouses and fruit fields. In the winter, that might not seem like much, but in the summer, it’s plenty. There’s a population then, some stealing from each other, some stealing from the growers. And that’s when I’m on the phone with the sheriff’s office, all the time. I’ve got to be careful with that relationship. I can’t bother them with some bright idea about a missing pack of cigarettes.”

“So nobody investigates.”

“Not true. I’m sure the county is keeping the file open. And I’m doing what I can.”

“That old Dodge in the garage has a Florida license plate. Do you know anybody who can trace it backward, get me her previous addresses? Maybe I can find a relative that way.”

“I had a buddy run that Florida plate. The guy who purchased that Dodge new sold it to some young woman some years ago.” He paused, then said, “She never retitled the car in her own name.”

“She left it in the previous owner’s name for all those years?”

“Apparently.”

“How did she get a license plate?”

“She learned ways of circumventing the law,” he said.

I saw her then, in my mind: huddled in a long coat, a wool beret pulled down low, a scarf and dark glasses hiding her face, coming out of the narrow little cottage.

“She owned nothing but a few things that could be packed quickly.” I spoke fast, anxious to get the words out so I could understand. “She drove up here in a car she never titled in her own name, paid a year’s rent up front, with cash. She arranged to have her mail diverted, kept nothing in that cottage she couldn’t walk away from.”

“Indeed,” he said. He already had it figured.

She hurried the few steps from the back door to the garage, clutching her coat to her thin body, against the wind, against the world.

“The back bumper, where the license attached, was clean,” I went on, “because she kept the plate under the front seat, screwed it on only when she went out, so she wouldn’t get pulled over by a cop. Otherwise, the plate was off the car.”

She knelt at the back of the Dodge, attaching the plate.

“So no one creeping around the cottage could trace her from the license, find out where she was from,” I said.

“Paranoid to the extreme,” he added.

Louise straightened, moved to the driver’s door.

“Or extremely careful,” I said.

She started the car.

“Every minute, she was running scared,” I continued. “Not just in Rambling, but down in Florida, too, because she never retitled the car. For years, she was running scared.”

“What does this mean?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

Louise backed out along the rutted drive. As she passed, in the center of my mind, I could not see her face.

I awoke in the dark. The red letters on the alarm clock read 3:45. I lay still for a few minutes, trying to pretend nothing had nagged me awake. But I knew.

I gave it up. I got out of bed, slipped on Nikes, jeans, and my pea coat, and padded down the outside stairs to the Jeep, to lug the frozen old metal back up to the room. I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I made sure. Again.

I balanced the typewriter upside down on the bathroom sink, because that’s where the light was brightest. The metal undercarriage shone back, black and smooth. Nothing had been cut into the bottom of the front rail.

To be certain, I looked at it from different angles, front to back, side to side. It was then that my eye caught the small piece, high up in the undercarriage, that was blacker and shinier than the rest. I felt for it with my fingers, touched a rounded surface with a hole cut into the center of one end.

I turned the typewriter over and began working the odd shape with my fingers. It didn’t move. When I withdrew my hand, bits of black paint came back stuck to my finger. Old factory paint didn’t come loose that easily.

I hustled down again to the Jeep for the little rolled pouch of small tools, prudence for driving a heap as old as mine. Upstairs, I worked the blade of a small screwdriver under the piece of curved metal. After a minute, it began to move. Then it clattered loose and fell into the sink.

A flat key, stamped with the number 81.