Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Sixteen

Driving back east across Iowa, as the sun eased into the horizon behind me, I let my mind play over the good certainty that Carolina Dare was alive.

She’d known the town from the zip code. After the box of money had arrived on Windward Island, the letters from the girl had stopped, and the threatening letters had begun, Carolina would have called out to a local paper or the police department in Cedar Ridge. She would have found out about the death of a girl in a trailer fire. More chillingly, she would have learned the girl’s stepfather was a cop, someone with resources good enough to find anybody.

Scared, she fled Florida. She found her way north, to Rambling, Michigan, a place cheap enough to get by on her column income, a place desolate enough to hide from a cop. She arranged to have her checks cashed and sent with her mail to a post office half an hour away. She locked the girl’s money in a bank box, because it was her only insurance, should the cop somehow find his way to her.

As safe as she could make herself, she stayed vigilant. She kept track of Severs, because by now she knew his name. She must have called the Cedar Ridge Police Department every day or two, from a pay phone, asking if the officer was in. “No, ma’am,” she would have been told, “can we have him call you?” “No need.” She’d laugh, relieved that he was still in Iowa, as she fired up another Salem.

Then one day she called and learned Randall Severs would no longer be in. He’d died in a car fire.

I could almost feel the way her lungs must have filled, deep, perhaps for the first time in over a year. She wouldn’t have let herself feel safe, not at first. Too many months of running and hiding couldn’t be erased like chalk off slate, and she must have suspected that somebody involved in the bank job had killed Severs. Still, Severs’s death must have muddied the trail to her.

She stayed put, kept writing her columns, trailing out to Woodton for her mail. She stayed edgy, too, running to the window every time a car drove by or a branch snapped at the side of the house. After a time, she must have seen her life unraveling like that, living scared in a sagging, drafty cottage on a desolate piece of dirt. It was then that she must have seen-really seen-that lockbox with one million, two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars in it.

Money that nobody knew she had.

She considered all the angles, chose something simple: Leave the white cotton panties, the sensible JCPenney bras, the twenty-year-old Dodge, and the damned generic cans of food that, by then, all tasted the same. Hunt up someone to name as executor, someone she’d met at a job long ago, someone who wouldn’t remember her and make it personal, trying to find out what happened to her. Find a lawyer, some lethargic fellow working above a junk store, drop off a will. Then visit the lockbox, fill the bag or the backpack, spend a little of it on a used car, privately advertised in the Intelligencer. Then, after dark, daub a little blood, smash a few windows, slip on the coat, tuck the smokes into the pocket. Stop in West Haven, slip the keys though the lawyer’s mail slot. Then, after a few hundred miles make a couple of last calls from a pay phone someplace, talking low through a wad of Kleenex, to tell the answering devices of the lawyer and the blueberry cop that Louise Thomas was dead. Be gone.

I’d been had, by a terrified, hunted woman. It felt good. I was done.

I thumbed Reynolds’s number on my cell phone, got him on the second ring. “You should be a real cop, Reynolds. You’ve got a good nose.”

“I called you twice.”

“I’ve been to Iowa.” I told him about Carolina’s connection to Lucia Helm, the bank robbery, the two brothers who took off, and the late incinerated stepfather cop, Randall Severs. “All that gives the Iowa cops a fresh angle. That might get the Feds interested in the Kovacs brothers.”

“Think they’ll find her?”

“I hope not. She’s running with enough money to become invisible.”

“You’re that sure she’s running?”

“It’s been weeks, and no body has surfaced. She might be free as a bird, forever.”

“That stepfather…”

“Severs.”

“Yeah, Severs. How does he fit with the bank?”

“For now, only through his stepdaughter’s letters to Carolina about the money. He might have been involved in the robbery planning, or maybe he just stumbled onto the money during the investigation. We’ll never know. The only thing that’s for sure is he was torched in his police car.”

“By those brothers?”

“That’s the supposition.”

“You’d better be careful,” he said.

“The Kovacs brothers don’t know I exist,” I said, “and I gave the letters to Patterson. I’ve got nothing they need.”

“You’ve got that lockbox key.”

“The money’s gone. That box, wherever it is, has already been emptied.”

“You’re probably right.” His voice was barely audible.

“I’ll still come to Michigan tomorrow, to give the house and car keys to Aggert. Afterward, I’ll swing out to Rambling, take a last look around the cottage, and grab that blood sample to send to Patterson, but it won’t do him any good without a known relative.”

“We’re done?”

“She’s on a beach, watching sunsets.”

I let myself fantasize for a few miles, then, about corn, and it wasn’t until I was almost to the Illinois line that I thought to check my cell phone for messages. There were five: the two from Reynolds he’d said he left; two from Aggert, both asking if I’d returned to Michigan; and one from Amanda.

I called Amanda.

“I was thinking we ought to have dinner tonight,” she began.

“That is good thinking, though this incessant violating of our one-week rule might lead to us becoming overcome with passion and trigger chaos.”

“How soon can you get downtown?”

“Where downtown? A restaurant, or that huge bed you have overlooking Lake Michigan? I can get to your bed hours quicker.”

“Restaurant.” She laughed. “We need nourishment for what I’ve got in mind.”

“Your sense of urgency is encouraging.”

“Where are you now?”

“Suspended above the middle of the Mississippi River, on a bridge.”

“You sound like that’s making you chipper.”

“My burden has been lifted. I believe Carolina is alive, with enough money to hide well and long. We will celebrate tonight.”

“Our trattoria, at eight?”

“I’ll fly.”

“I’m sure,” she said.

The last of the orange had gone out of the sky, and it was now appropriately dark enough to call Aggert. He’d left a phone number different from his office.

“Are you back up here?” he asked, right off.

“I’ve found another reason why I’m done being an executor,” I said.

“You found the lockbox?” There was traffic noise behind him; he was on a cell phone.

“Even better. I’m pretty sure your Louise is very much alive. I’ve just been to Iowa, talking to the police in Cedar Ridge. Your client received some money stolen from a bank near there. She was afraid the robbers would track her to Rambling, so she took off, but I think she’s safe.”

“You didn’t find the lockbox?”

“It was a ruse. She would have taken the money with her. Wherever the lockbox is, it’s empty now.”

“For the purpose of the court-”

“Tell the court there’s no corpse.” Traffic was slowing now that I was getting closer to Chicago. I’d need both hands for the steering wheel and the gear shift. “I’ll be up in Rambling tomorrow, for one last look around. I’ll drop off the keys.”

“All the keys?”

“The Iowa police might want that numbered one.” I said it to be a jerk-and maybe to give Carolina just a little more cover.

“What time will you be here?”

“Probably after lunch,” I said, recognizing the reality that a foot of onions served on a stick just across the street would inhibit any attempt I might make to go directly to Aggert’s office.

Traffic congealed almost solid just west of Chicago, so I drove straight downtown. Amanda was already at the restaurant. She’d ordered a bottle of wine.

“Truly, we are celebrating,” I said, sliding into the booth across from her.

“I think so, yes.” She poured me wine. “To survival.” She raised her glass.

I took a sip and set down the glass. “Anybody’s survival in particular?”

“Ours.”

“You’re referring to the fact that, in a scant two years, we’ve gone from being whirlwind lovers to newlyweds to divorcés to recoverers to occasional daters to lovers again?”

“Still a whirlwind.” A smile played on her lips.

“I don’t understand, but I’ve been in Iowa.”

“I’m wondering if we should turn up the centrifuge, start spinning things a bit faster.”

“You mean start seeing each other even more frequently than we have been?” I reached to pour us more wine. I would certainly drink to that.

“More than that.”

I looked at her across the table. What I thought had been a smile was actually a suppressed tremble. Her eyes were shiny. She was about to cry.

“Hey,” I said. “We’re celebrating. We’re survivors.”

“Are we healing?”

“Stronger every day, especially since I took my vow of poverty.”

She didn’t laugh, and I knew why.

“You’re worried,” I said, “because since we met, I’ve gotten poorer, and you’re still…?” I stopped, because it was a topic she liked to ignore.

The unfinished question hung in the air for a minute, until she said, “Rich?”

“Art rich,” I corrected, “which is quite unimpressive, except to snoots. Rubes like me don’t recognize the stuff on your walls as being worth millions. To us, it looks like the paintings they sell at warehouse events.”

“You rubes.”

“Ah, but in our eyes, you are redeemed by your beater Toyota and your cheesy starting-out furniture.”

“I don’t have cash. What I make at the Art Institute goes for condo dues, taxes, and the security system.”

I pounced. “So you see, it wasn’t the money that did us in. As the counselors might say, we had a different, unresolved issue: me. I got duped in a high-profile court case, and the newspapers trashed me. My clients flew away like birds. I sulked, like a child. Also like a child, I took it out on you. You were handy, you came from rich-the daughter of a major executive and political player-and I came from Rivertown. The money difference was never the problem, it was the weapon I used against you. That’s what made us go away.”

“We came back together,” she said, managing a small smile.

“You conveniently forget that I had to help blow up your house to get you to pay attention to me.”

She laughed, and for a moment, it touched her eyes. Then her face turned serious. “Will we ever know if we’re surviving surviving?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. Though, of course, I did.

“We can’t just survive; we have to move on.”

She’d just said the words I’d been living to hear for over a year. But I was wiser now.

“I need to get my livelihood back in order,” I said, “establish thick links to bedrock. Rivertown isn’t coming around like the lizards had planned, which makes selling the turret a ways away. And most of my former clients remember the stories in the Tribune; they’re still reluctant to use me to trace documents or photograph accident scenes. Still, things are picking up-at glacial speed, perhaps, but they’re picking up. I’m wobbling, but I’m upright, and I’m aimed down the right road.”

She smiled and took a sip of wine. She was still unsure.

“It’s you that I want,” I said. “It’s only you that I want.”

She smiled bigger and reached for my hand under the table.

There wasn’t time, then, to tell her about my plan to ring the turret with cornstalks and make soufflés.