Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty-one

We traversed the roads within a two-mile radius of the burned cottage, looking to find someone who had ever noticed anything happening at the cottage, or who had seen the fire. There were fourteen homes in that two-mile square. Nine of them had enough broken windows to indicate their owners were long gone. Five appeared to be occupied, but at two, no one answered my knock. At the three houses where somebody came to the door, no one had ever seen a commotion at the cottage, until the night of the fire.

“Roaring inferno,” the unshaven man in the flannel shirt at the second house said, making a careful whoosh with a can of Bud Light. “Even from this far, I could see the flames had burned way down by the time the fire department got there. No saving that place.”

“I don’t suppose you knew the woman who lived in that house?”

“No time for chitchat, then or now,” he said, closing the door.

It went the same way at the other two cottages.

“What now?” Leo asked at four o’clock.

“Local phone book.”

We drove to West Haven and parked in front of Fizzy’s discount store. Aggert’s windows above were dark. We walked across the street to the restaurant.

“Beer?” he asked.

“No sleep, no beer. Just coffee and a cheeseburger.” I pointed him toward the hostess smoking by the door and started for the directory hanging by the pay phone in back.

There was a listing for a Southwest Michigan Growers Association in Rambling. I called and got a machine message saying they were closed, but it included an after-hours emergency number. That number had an answering device, too. I said I was looking for a John Reynolds and was in the area only for the evening. I left my cell number.

I got back to the table at the same time as a waitress with a tray. Leo had spotted the specialty of the house, because she was setting down two poles of onion rings, two double-thick cheeseburgers, and an extra plate.

“I figured you should cut down on fat.” He cut one of the burgers and put the small half on the extra plate for me.

I nodded at the wisdom of that but quickly slid one of the poles of onion rings out of his reach, before he developed wisdom about those as well. The truth was, though, that I wasn’t so much hungry as starved for banter.

“I came up here one last time, expecting nothing, and nothing is what I’m getting,” I said.

“Is this a dead end?” Leo asked.

“Maybe it’s supposed to be,” I said. “Maybe it’s nothing more than Maris, if it is Maris, sending me a signal that I’m misinterpreting.”

He brightened. “Like what?”

“Like this.” I pulled out my key ring and held up the flat numbered key. “She knew I’d recognize that typewriter, knew, too, that I’d find the key she’d glued up inside. She named me her executor because that would give me access to her mail at the post office box, and from that I’d learn about the bank job in Iowa. Maybe all she wanted was for me to tip the cops about the real cause of Lucia Helm’s death and let them take it from there.”

“Kind of a roundabout way of doing things, isn’t it: faking an abduction, leaving a will? What’s wrong with a simple telephone call to the cops in Iowa?”

“She couldn’t be sure they’d catch all the people involved in the bank job before the robbers caught up with her.”

“And it spared her from having to get in front of the cops and explain why she’s been changing her name, and why, a long time ago-”

My cell phone rang.

“Wilbur Watson over at the Fruit Growers,” a man’s voice said. “You’re looking for John Reynolds?”

“I’ve been working with him on the disappearance of the woman who lived in that cottage that just burned on County Road 12.”

“You want to swing by my office in an hour?”

I started to ask him why we couldn’t talk on the phone, but he cut me off, gave me directions, and hung up.

“Man of few words?” Leo asked.

“Must come from talking mostly to blueberry bushes.”

Leo nodded, but his mind was wandering someplace else. “She could have left you a note, with instructions, instead of running you all over the place.”

“It’s been a long time, Leo. People change.”

A grin grew on his lips. “Not me,” he said, tapping the orange parka draped on the chair next to him.

I laughed then, a real laugh, and as we ate, we talked about the old pictures on the wall, of sailing ships, and men cutting huge logs, and my theory about beckoning women plying the shores of Indiana in the good old days. I made him laugh, and that made me laugh some more.

On the drive back to Rambling, he asked, “You really think she took all that money and ran?”

“Why not? She’d been running for years, since she was a kid. Why couldn’t she get fed up with it all and grab something for herself?”

“But do you really believe it?”

“I need to hope it, Leo.”

The fruit warehouse was a big corrugated-metal structure, two stories tall. A shiny blue pickup truck was parked on the gravel in front, in a circle of light cast by a fixture above a large overhead door. We got out and tried the small door at the side of the building. It was unlocked. We went in.

A single string of fluorescent fixtures, high up, barely lit the rows of empty gray metal storage racks. A yellow forklift truck with its forks dropped was parked at the edge of the light, next to three stacks of wood pallets. The warehouse smelled of fruit and diesel fuel.

“Elstrom?” A man’s voice came from an open door to a small, metal prefab office.

We walked over to stop in the doorway. “And Leo Brumsky,” I said.

Watson looked up at us from his chair. He was about sixty and looked to be tall and beefy enough to eat Leo for lunch. There were no other chairs in the cramped office.

He didn’t get up to extend his hand. “What’s this about John Reynolds and some woman that lived in that cottage that just burned down?”

“I ran into him at that cottage. He told me he works security for some of the growers around here.”

“Which growers?”

“I didn’t think it mattered.”

“And you?”

“The missing woman’s lawyer called me, said she’d died and I’d been named executor of her will. What do you know about Reynolds?”

“Your John Reynolds showed up here just before Christmas. Said he was looking for security work. I told him we weren’t hiring.”

“Do you know where he works?”

“That’s why I asked you to stop by. I wanted to see your face. After we talked on the phone, I called some of the smaller growers, to make sure. Nobody hired your John Reynolds to work security.” Watson’s lips worked at a small smile. “Nobody hires security in the winter.” His smile grew larger. “If you look around, Elstrom, you’ll see there’s nothing worth taking, unless you fancy chipping a frozen blueberry bush out of the ground.”

Watson stood up.

“You’re not interested in the woman who might have disappeared from that cottage out on 12?” I asked.

Watson paused before reaching to snap off the light to his office. “Don’t much care about anything, other than somebody passing himself off as working for us,” he said.

Outside, not even the cold winter air could cut through the sudden heavyweight of fatigue. I handed Leo the car keys and went to the passenger’s door. “You drive,” I said.

“Reynolds?”

“I’d like to think he was an insurance investigator, looking for a line on the robbery money, but insurance investigators don’t torch crime scenes on their way out of town.”

“Someone involved in the bank job?”

I shut my eyes. “It’s exhausting, being played for a chump.”