Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty

“You’re rousting me at home because you just realized you know your lady columnist?” Patterson said quietly into the phone.

I’d started calling the Cedar Ridge Police Department at five thirty that morning. At seven, when I’d called for the fourth time, they finally told me Patterson wouldn’t be in for another hour. I said it was an emergency. Patterson called five minutes later, from his home.

“And because her home got torched. I think she’s being tortured for what she knows about that bank money,” I said.

“Not after a month. She’s running or she’s dead.”

“You’ve got to find her.”

“Why the sudden panic, Elstrom?”

After Leo left, I stayed up the rest of the night, pushing back at the arms of the past so I could think of something to do in the present. I came up with nothing except to jump-start Patterson. Too many of the wrong words, though, would make Maris the target of a police manhunt, if she were running. Too few wouldn’t get Patterson started.

“She’s an old client,” I said, because that’s what I’d decided upon somewhere around five in the morning.

“An old client you just remembered?” He exhaled disbelief into the phone. “Look, there’s no way of telling whether those letters sent to Honestly Dearest were written by Lucia Helm. Her school has nothing of hers anymore, her family is dead, and none of her old friends have anything they can be sure she touched. We’re at a dead end on that.”

“Assume Lucia wrote the handwritten letters. What about the typed ones?”

“Common stationery, common computer printer, and not a fingerprint on them. You want to guess Severs sent them?”

“Yes.”

“Be my guest. Dead man, dead end.”

“That leaves us with the Kovacs brothers. Did you send out bulletins saying they might have been involved in Severs’s murder?”

“Because a guy named Elstrom thinks he may have known a woman who wrote an advice column, who may have received stolen money from a girl who’s now dead, who found it hidden, perhaps, by a cop who’s now dead, who may have gotten the money from two brothers who may have stolen it, but whose only provable deed is that they left town around the time the cop died?”

“What have you got that’s better?”

“Circulate Carolina Dare’s driver’s license photo. It’s coming in this morning.”

“And then what?”

“We wait for a response.”

“Can’t you take the lead on anything?”

“You mean like calling her editor in New Jersey?”

“I already did that. He doesn’t know anything. He’s never even spoken to her.”

“Then tell me who to call, Elstrom. And after you’ve done that, give me the link between Carolina Dare and any crime. I can’t rustle too deeply into her background without reason. For now, all we can assume is that the lady just left-picked up and headed for a new life.”

“You’ll e-mail me her driver’s license photo?”

“What aren’t you telling me, Elstrom?”

I looked at the old black Underwood on the card table and hung up.

“I’ll come along,” Leo said simply, when I called to tell him I was driving back to Rambling. He didn’t ask why I was going, didn’t remind me that I’d already said there was nothing left up there. He didn’t waste words expressing outrage when I told him that Patterson had effectively back-burnered the case, nor did he suggest we wait a day, because snow was coming down heavy, and the roads were slick enough to make even Hummers do pirouettes. He didn’t tell me that he had a right to be involved, either. I knew he wouldn’t say any of that, but that’s not why I’d phoned him. I called because I didn’t want to go to Rambling alone.

Now, I was parked at his curb, and he was talking at me through my unzipped side window. “I don’t know why I shouldn’t drive,” he was saying. “I’ve got shock absorbers, an adequate heater, treads on my tires, and”-he paused to gesture at the Discount Den radio dangling underneath the dash-”a CD player for when you bore me.”

He was trying for light. We both knew the drive up to Rambling would be grim business, like two men going to the funeral of the woman who’d deserted them both.

“A hundred-thousand-dollar Porsche will make people too distrustful of us rich city folks to answer questions.”

“Whereas a clapped-out Jeep will get us invited in for generic beer and pork rinds?” Leo grinned, but not much.

“You’ll see lots of cars like mine-”

“Up on blocks, rusting.”

“Get in and zip the window.”

He got in, closed the zipper around the scratched plastic, and smoothed back a flap of duct tape that was dissolving in the moisture. “You ever hear from that security guy in Rambling?”

“No.”

Leo turned to look at me. “He doesn’t know about the fire?”

“You mean the fire that occurred right after I told him I’d be coming up for the blood evidence?”

“Ah,” he said.

“Reynolds knows about lots of things. That’s why he won’t call back. And that’s why we’re going to Rambling.”

I concentrated on moving us through the thickening snow, out of the side streets, onto Thompson Avenue, and up the ramp to the toll-way It had been plowed, but not recently. Cars and trucks were crawling, strung out like a convoy carrying nuclear waste. I supposed Leo was as grateful as I was for the snow; having to squint into the white ahead for the sudden flash of brake lights gave us an excuse not to look at each other. Or to talk.

It wasn’t until an hour later, after I pulled away from the second tollbooth, that he said to the windshield, “I dreamed about her last night, how she was in high school.”

“Not me,” I said.

I felt him turn to look at me.

“I didn’t sleep at all,” I said.

He nodded a bit and went back to looking out the windshield. And we moved on, the three of us, with Maris Mays right in the middle. Just like old times.

January gave way to the beginning of February, and Maris and Leo, brought together by words, became Maris, Leo, and Dek, brought together by Leo. Leo knew everything that went on at school, because he talked to everybody, and walking home-Leo hugging the inside of the sidewalk, outrageous in mismatched neon garb; Maris quiet and beautiful in the middle; and me wobbling on the rough terrain by the curb-we laughed as Leo pantomimed a self-important jock’s lips struggling with the words on a science exam, or mimicked the soft wonder in the homecoming queen’s voice as she bragged that so many of her male teachers offered to tutor her on weekends. The details, though, were only half of it. It was Leo’s sense of the absurd, the way his thick eyebrows danced in disbelief, the way his lips stretched into the most wicked of grins, that made us laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe.

Leo had been cracking me up like that for years, but I had the sense, sneaking looks at Maris, that laughing hard was new to her, that she’d never had much occasion to see anything that was funny in her life. I think Leo saw that, too. His walking-home monologues seemed to acquire a bit of polish as February moved along, and I had the thought that he might have been practicing his delivery at night, at his house.

I would have, if I could have been that funny. I would have, if I could have made Maris laugh like that.

“She lived here?” Leo poked the toe of his boot at the black end of a charred board poking through the snow.

“It’s where I found the typewriter.”

It had stopped snowing, but the sky was dark with another approaching storm. It wasn’t yet noon.

“Nobody should live here.” He looked down the rutted road at spindly, stunted trees, black against the charcoal sky. “Too desolate.”

I kicked at a charred board. “That was the attraction.”

He shook his head as we walked back to the pile that was the garage, covered now in clumps of fresh snow. “Her car?” He pointed at a corner of the blistered trunk, exposed under the pile of boards where the snow had slid off.

“Just like the inside of the house, she was careful to leave no clues of her identity in the car,” I said.

He turned to look at me. “She bought that car years ago and managed to never title it in her own name?”

“That’s what Reynolds said.”

“Which name might that have been?”

“You mean, was Maris using the name Carolina Dare before she’d ever heard from the girl in Iowa?” I knew where he was going. “I think yes. She changed from Carolina to Louise when she got up here. And I think she had other names before that.”

“She wasn’t just running from bank robbers.”

“No.”

His eyes searched my face. “So she could have spilled a few drops of blood, then run, like-”

“Like last time, Leo?”

“Like when we were kids.” He turned to look at the ruined remains of the cottage, covered now by a blanket of clumped snow. “There was no fire then.”

“She didn’t set this. No way she risked coming back to torch the place.”

“She’s got to be running,” he said.

I tried to find the words for Leo, a grown man in an orange parka and a purple-pommed hat, very much the boy he used to be. A boy looking for hope.

“I can’t tell you she’s still alive,” I said.

He turned to walk back down the drive, not wanting to hear any more.