Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Seven

The key I’d discovered probably weighed an ounce, but it dragged like a thousand pounds. She’d painted it to make it blend in, then epoxied it too high and too tight inside the typewriter to be gotten at easily. Whatever the key unlocked, she hadn’t planned on accessing it for some time.

Or maybe forever.

I didn’t figure the key worked anything in West Haven. It was too close to Rambling for such a secretive woman. Besides, I had already checked out the banks and the post office. They’d had nothing for Louise Thomas.

So I started across the street from my motel, for fortification for a road trip. At seven thirty, the Wal-Mart parking lot was already half-filled, no doubt by people there to buy Oreos for breakfast. Not me. I strutted right past the end display of the dark, round dunkers-sugar and flour, fat and sin-and exited clutching only a huge foam cup of coffee and a lone doughnut, this one barely dusted with green sprinkles, and even those were the precise color of broccoli. It’s always best to begin a challenging day with a sense of moral superiority.

I’d drawn two concentric circles on Fizzy’s map, to correspond to Aggert’s list of towns a thirty-minute, and then a full hour’s, drive from Rambling. I was guessing the numbered key would fit something in one of the four post offices or eight banks in the closest circle. I didn’t figure a woman afraid of leaving a license plate on her automobile for fear of being discovered would want to be on the road for very long.

Santha, Michigan, population 3,012, was thirteen miles of tree orchards north of West Haven. Wood signs stuck in the frozen dirt said the lifeless trees I was seeing produced peaches and apples, and if I happened to be around in late summer, I could pick them myself. It seemed a world apart from chasing the trail of a key hidden by a dead woman.

The flat key didn’t fit box 81 at the Santha post office, and the man at the window said there were no mail holds for a Louise Thomas. Oddly, for such a small town, Santha had two banks on the two blocks of its main street. Both were branches of banks, one in Detroit, one in Lansing. Louise was not a customer of either one.

Grand Plain was straight east through seventeen more miles of fruit trees. It appeared never to have had a post office, though it did have a gas station with two pumps. Grand Plain had recently had a branch of a bank, too, though a new-looking sign in the window said it was closed and referred customers to the main location in Kalamazoo. I wondered if intense competition from the two-bank metropolis of Santha, population 3,012, had been responsible.

Woodton was fourteen miles southeast of Grand Plain. A bank and the post office filled one side of the block-long main street. I walked into the post office lobby at twelve fifteen. Though it was lunchtime, I was the only customer, and my running shoes made loud squeegee noises as I crossed the polished marble floor to the small wall of brass postal boxes. Their numbers stopped at 75, six short of my number 81. I went over to show Louise’s will to the young girl in the service window.

“Do you have any mail holds for this woman, Louise Thomas?”

“No, we sure don’t,” she said right off. Then she stopped, pursed her lips, and turned to open a small wooden box. A second later, she produced a three-by-five index card. “Leastways, we’re not getting any mail addressed to Louise Thomas. But a person of that name did fill out a hold request last year. We do that for people who are gone a lot.” She smiled a good, white-toothed smile of youth, told me she’d be right back, and disappeared through a door at the back of the mail sorting room.

Five minutes later, the interior door to the lobby opened and a thin, sour-looking fellow emerged. His narrow face was pinched and wrinkled, as though from spending his entire life squinting at poor penmanship. He was carrying a plastic tub, stenciled with U.S. MAIL on its side, as though it were half-filled with bricks instead of thick tan envelopes. He dropped the tub at my feet, sending a loud thud echoing through the marble foyer.

“Perhaps you can get in here more frequently,” he groaned, wiping his brow in anticipation of any perspiration that might bead there.

The right thing would have been to remind him that mail piling up would no longer be a problem, since his clerk must have told him I’d showed her Louise’s will. Instead, I put on a happy smile and bent down to pick up the box, one-handed. It was heavy, but not like bricks. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“I’ve heard that before,” he said.

Already the tub was tugging my hand. “When was she in last?”

“The woman? Not for a while. I meant the fellow before you. He said he’d make sure it didn’t pile up.” He shook his head. “He hadn’t even bothered to bring authorization, just asked for the mail. Like I’d hand it over to a stranger?”

I tried to give him what I hoped was a sympathetic smile-clearly the man’s life was a soap opera of unwarranted indignities-but the tub was beginning to tear the ligaments out of my shoulder, and I was afraid my face was showing the pain. I shifted the tub to my other hand, in what I hoped was an unobtrusive manner. “This fellow-when was he in?”

“Two weeks ago. No, maybe the week before that.”

“He wanted her mail?”

“Can you believe?”

I could believe, if he’d murdered Louise Thomas and hadn’t found what he was looking for in her cottage.

“What did he look like?”

The postmaster gave a dismissive shrug. “Ordinary, very ordinary, like you. Your height, but older. He was slimmer, though.”

“Hair color?”

He shook his head. “He wore a knit hat, pulled low, for the cold.”

“Eyes?”

“Our conversation was very brief.”

“What about Ms. Thomas? What did she look like?”

“Like the star of a trashy Dracula movie.” He laughed, trilling against the marble on the floor and the walls. “I mean, every time she came in for her mail, she had on a hooded dark coat and dark glasses. Summer, winter, it didn’t matter; she was always shrouded.”

“She’s dead.”

“So my clerk told me.”

I shifted the tub back to my right hand. My entire body, from the shoulders on down, was throbbing. “I’ll have her mail forwarded to me, so you won’t have to bother with it anymore.”

He walked me quickly back to the counter and produced a forwarding authorization form. I set down the tub, as grateful as I’d ever been for anything, and reached for the counter pen with a trembling hand.

“Mind you return it,” he said.

“What?” Confused, I turned to look at him.

“The container.” He gestured at the tub on the floor. I nodded, gave him his form back, and picked up the tub, again one-handed. As soon as I was outside, I put both hands to it so it wouldn’t fall from my trembling arms.

There was a white stucco diner across the street with a sign in the window advertising the day’s special of chicken-fried steak for $4.99. Chicken for lunch is a requirement of good health. I went in and set the tub beside me on the seat of a red vinyl booth by the window. It was one ten, and like the post office, the diner was empty. I was too hungry to care why nobody was lingering there after lunch.

A matronly waitress in a pink uniform came over. I waved away her offer of a menu, told her I’d have the special. “But only put half the gravy on it,” I said. I’d begun the day by skipping Oreos; now I was cutting back on gravy. Soon my ribs would emerge.

She peered over her reading glasses. “We could hold the gravy altogether if you’re dieting.”

“Half the gravy should do it, thanks,” I said, smiling up.

“We could hold the potatoes. You could have fruit.”

“Fruit’s got a lot of sugar,” I said.

“We could hold the fruit.”

“Just as I ordered it, please,” I said. “Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, half the gravy. And coffee, black.”

“You know the chicken fried steak isn’t really steak?” She wasn’t going to yield.

“Is it chicken?”

“Some of it comes from a chicken.”

“Will I be able to tell what’s under the breading?”

“Probably not,” she said, conceding the point, “but to make double sure, we cover the meat and the breading with lots of thick gravy.” She tore my order from her little pad and walked to the grill window.

I pulled one of the large envelopes from the tub. It was addressed simply to H. D. and had been mailed two weeks before, from a Smith’s Secretarial on Windward Island, in Florida.

It was the same island where the oldest of Louise’s newspaper columns had come from.

My waitress came back with the coffee, a basket of rolls, and a dish of little butter tubs the size of sliced doughnut holes. She made a show of turning to walk away, but she was moving slow, hanging back, daring me to butter a bun. I managed a smile for her and went back to the envelope.

By now my fingers were tingling. I ripped open the envelope. Inside was a loose bunch of smaller envelopes along with some photocopies. I turned the big tan envelope to slide everything out onto the table.

Most of the smaller envelopes were white and business-sized, but a few were square, in neon green, yellow, and pink, the kind for greeting cards. I spread them out across the surface of the table. All had been mailed to Honestly Dearest, care of the Bayonne, New Jersey, Register. None had been opened.

The photocopies looked to be mock-ups of Honestly Dearest newspaper columns, set in newspaper type.

Reader letters and copies of future advice columns, forwarded up from Florida to an H.D. in Woodton, Michigan.

My mind did loops around the impossibility of it, as I saw again the clutter of newspaper sheets strewn all around inside the tiny, frozen cottage in Rambling, and the old, black typewriter in the bedroom.

I fumbled at opening one of the regular white envelopes. “Dear Honestly Dearest,” it began, “I’m a middle-aged housewife, trite I know, who’s been having romantic fantasies about the man…”

I dropped it back onto the pile and tore open another of the thick tan envelopes forwarded up from Florida. More small envelopes addressed to Honestly Dearest were inside, along with another mock-up of a future column. Something new, too: a white envelope that had been addressed with merely a name, handwritten in large, cursive letters: Carolina.

I slit it with my fingernail. “Carolina!” the same large scrawl had been written on a sheet of white typing paper. “We’re about out of backlog! Have you succumbed to the beach in sunny Ef El A?!! RUSH MORE!!!!! Charles.”

“Ef. El. A.” I mouthed it under my breath. F-L-A. Florida.

“She’s sick, you know.”

I jerked around, looked up. I hadn’t heard the waitress coming. She was balancing a large plate with her fingertips and nodding at the photocopies of the Honestly Dearest columns I’d spread on the table.

She set my plate down a fraction of a second after I got the clippings out of the way. It was mounded with a thick white gravy, the consistency of oatmeal.

“Sick?” I asked, my mind still in the envelopes.

“Honestly Dearest,” she said. The gravy started to work its way over the edge of the plate but hung suspended at the lip, too thick to drop.

“How do you know that?”

“More coffee?”

“How do you know she’s just sick?”

She left and came back with the glass coffee carafe and a thin newspaper that had been folded twice. She set the newspaper on the table and filled my cup. “Right there at the top,” she said.

I looked at the newsprint, HONESTLY DEAREST was printed out in bold letters, followed by “is ill,” in italics.

“You read the column a lot?”

“In the Intelligencer. Except she’s been sick, like I told you, the last couple weeks.” She started to turn, to walk away, but then stopped. “You don’t look like the type to be reading those columns.”

Then she said something else, but her words dissolved into muffled buzzing, crowded out by the flash fire of thoughts raging inside my head. She stood, waiting.

“Nothing else, thanks,” I thought to say.

I’d guessed right. She smiled. “I’ll leave you to your columns, then,” she said.

I looked down at the shape of the chicken fried steak submerged in the puddinglike gravy, a pale porpoise drowning in thick lava. “Thanks for all the gravy,” I called out.

“Only way to eat chicken fried steak,” she said, not bothering to look around.

I stuffed the loose envelopes and photocopies back into the two tan ones and dropped those back into the mail tub, where, I hoped, I could ignore them for a few minutes.

I cut loose a cube of the chicken fried substance and managed to raise it, quivering as it was beneath its half inch of molten gravy, to my mouth without spilling it, but the traffic in my head was still too busy. My appetite was gone. I needed to get away, find someplace quiet to paw through the mail tub.

I left a ten on the table, hauled the tub out to the Jeep, and gunned down the empty road to West Haven. There were no more answers in the cottage in Rambling, nothing to be learned working out of a room across the street from a Wal-Mart. I needed to get back to the turret.

I left the tub in the Jeep and ran in to grab the Honestly Dearest columns, my duffel, and Louise’s old steel typewriter. The desk clerk, a sallow, pimply kid who looked resigned to a life behind a registration counter, stiffened as he told me I’d have to pay for the upcoming night, since it was long past checkout time. I surprised him by not arguing, and he bobbed his head instantly when I asked him to drop Louise’s clothes at the local homeless shelter.

H. D. Honestly Dearest. No matter how many times I ran it through my brain, it was unreal. Louise Thomas was Honestly Dearest, the advice columnist. Except she wasn’t Louise Thomas; that was a made-up name.

Her name was Carolina.

I had to get back to the turret, to my records, to find a Carolina.

To find out why she’d had to lie to me, by using a false name.