Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty-two

I called Leo from Midway Airport at seven o’clock the next morning. It had only been a few hours since we’d pulled up in front of his bungalow. In a calmer world, he would have been still sleeping. As would I.

But the world had changed, again.

He answered on the first ring. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

“Are you in your office?”

“Yes, trying to get my mind off-”

“Switch on your e-mail.”

I pressed the cell phone tighter to my ear and listened to him tapping keys. “E-mail forwarded from you to me,” he said, reading off the screen. Then, “E-mail to you from your cop Patterson in Cedar Ridge: ‘Carolina Dare’s driver’s license photo received from Florida secretary of state. Who is she, Elstrom?’” Leo paused, and I could easily imagine the relief growing on his face as he studied the photo on the screen. “Hell, Dek,” he said after a minute, “I’m with the cop: Who is the woman in the photograph? That can’t be Maris.” He sounded almost giddy.

I looked at the copy I’d printed for myself. “Look at the photo again, Leo.”

“I can see,” he said, not ruffled. “She’s got dark bangs down to her eyebrows, hair framing the sides of her face. Lots of makeup, sloppily applied. Especially the lipstick; too much lipstick, blurring the contours of her lips. Thick, black-rimmed glasses; puffed-up, fat cheeks, like she’d stuffed them with cotton balls…jeez, it’s like…”

“Like she deliberately tried to conceal her facial features?”

“It can’t be Maris,” he said.

“That license was issued three years ago.”

“You’re surprised she was hiding out three years ago, long before she’d ever heard of Lucia Helm? You always figured she ran from Rivertown.”

A boarding announcement for another flight came over the loudspeaker above my head.

“Where are you, Dek?”

“I’m going to Florida.”

“You’re at the airport already?”

“I’ve got to be sure it was Maris down in Florida, and up in Rambling. That driver’s license photo gives me nothing.”

“What about your blueberry cop?”

“When I get back, I’ll pass on what I know to Dillard in Michigan and Patterson in Iowa. First, I’ve got to be sure about Maris.”

“I’ll come along,” he said.

“You want to help? Keep an eye on the turret. If you’ve got time, get somebody to put another lock on the door.”

“What?” Surprise, mixed with anger, came through the phone.

I told him about the two times I’d come home to an unlocked door. “I’d feel better with another lock.”

“You’re dusting me off.”

“I’d put the lock on myself if I had the time.”

“Dek.”

“And I want you to call Aggert, get his e-mail address, and forward that photo to him. See if that’s the woman who came to see him.”

“Crap, Dek. You’re giving me crap to do.”

“I have to go to Florida alone,” I said.

“Because?”

“I have to be sure it was Maris down there.”

Leo let it go because we’d been friends since seventh grade, but the anger was still in his voice when I hung up.

I bought coffee and a Chicago Tribune, and for a half hour I tried to be like everybody else waiting at the gate, staring at a paper, lulling time into a stupor, but I couldn’t focus the blur of the letters in the headline. I kept seeing Maris’s face, on a rare bright afternoon, early in February.

Leo raised his palms to the sky, a rural preacher begging divine guidance.

“Help me understand!” he shouted, done telling us about Elvis Derbil, delinquent senior, who’d taken to sneaking up on students passing in the halls and twisting the backs of their shirts and blouses into crumpled knots. “The principal having to tell you he was going to make your mother come to school to iron clothes for the kids you’d been grabbing?”

I started to laugh, but stopped as Leo’s face suddenly froze in pain. He was looking at Maris.

“Oops,” Leo said.

Maris touched Leo’s shoulder. Then she turned to me, smiling. “Leo is oversensitive about my situation.”

On the other side of her, Leo kept his eyes far ahead on the sidewalk, his face a red mask.

“After my mother died,” Maris went on, “my father started complaining about all the things he’d lost with her death: He had to make his own coffee, push his own vacuum cleaner, and press his own shirts. Exactly the sort of grief an eight-year-old girl who’s just lost her mother needs to hear.” She sighed. “My father still whines about his loss, every night when he’s on his way out to the bars, but what he doesn’t say is that, by the time I was nine, I was making the coffee, running the vacuum, and pressing his shirts.“

“His slave,” Leo muttered.

“Lt’s not so bad,” Maris said.

She stopped, and we stopped. “Do you really work in a laundry?” she asked, feigning horror as she looked at my own rumpled shirt. Then her face lit up the world with a huge smile. “Do you even know what ironing is?”

Leo laughed in relief.

“I’m affecting a weary intellectual look,” I said, my face warming from her attention. “This young man is too busy tending a huge brain to be bothered by trivia like appearance.“

Maris laughed, and we started up again, she and Leo and I, and I was sure I would remember that laugh for the rest of my life.

I called Amanda when my flight to St. Petersburg was five minutes from boarding.

“Why is it when I finally agree that we should start seeing each other more frequently, you quit calling?” She asked it laughingly, but the tone behind it was worried.

“I’m off to sunny Florida,” I said, trying for sun-shined Vitamin C in my voice.

“What’s in Florida?”

“Oranges, alligators, and a lead on this case I’m working.”

“Your seven-hundred-dollar-fee case?”

“I tend to get involved” was all I said, to my shame.

She started to ask something, but I was saved, as I’d planned, by the boarding announcement, and I clicked off in too much of a hurry to tell her I loved her.

Leo and Amanda. I’d just shut them both out. It’s not every morning a man gets the chance to trash the emotions of the only two people on the planet who care about him.

The St. Petersburg airport still used roll-up staircases to deplane passengers, and for a second, as I stepped out into the blinding white heat at the top of the platform, I felt like I was in one of those old Hawaii travel ads, where disembarking tourists were greeted by hula girls with leis, waiting at the bottom of the stairs. I scanned the tarmac below, adjusting my expectations now for girls with baskets of Florida oranges, holding alligators on leashes. Such was travel to a vacation destination in the new millennium: Only one person waited below, an overweight ramper with a three-day beard, sweating in blue coveralls.

I rented the cheapest car they had at the Alamo counter-a micro-compact with a name I’d never heard of, put together in an Asian country I’d never heard of, and then, I supposed, just affixed with postage and mailed over-and headed south on 275 to 75 to Bradenton. The car was right for my wallet but wrong for my six feet four inches. I drove with the windows down and my knees up, gripping the steering wheel as if I were aiming a go-kart.

Never having been to Florida, I had some expectation of roadsides lined with grass-topped huts selling seashells and coconuts. Apparently I’d arrived decades too late. There were no such huts, but there was a huge Wal-Mart, the biggest Wal-Building I’d ever seen. Its sign said it contained a food store and an auto repair center. It was big enough to also house a hospital, though the sign didn’t mention any such thing. That was just as well, because the idea of continuous price rollbacks on bypass surgery was not comforting. I swung in, depleted their supply of Doomsday Oreos by one bag, and was out of there in five minutes, prepared now for anything.

Windward Island was south and west of Bradenton, across two bridges, one of wood, one of steel. It was not so much an island as it was a sandbar, bisected by a two-lane road. The Gulf of Mexico was a shell’s throw to the west, and an inlet waterway was a shell’s throw to the east.

Smith’s Secretarial, the service that forwarded Carolina’s Honestly Dearest mail north to Michigan, was in an aluminum-sided building on the northernmost part of the island. It was on the second floor, above a beauty supply shop. The woman inside, smoking a cigarette at a desk behind a computer, looked not to have bought anything from the store below.

I introduced myself, said I was there representing Carolina Dare.

“We don’t give out the names of our clients,” she said.

“I’m a court-nominated executor,” I added, trying the same bluff I’d used on the landlady in Rambling.

This woman was sharper. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She crushed out the stub of her cigarette and pulled another Marlboro from the pack on the desk.

“Nothing,” I said.

“She dead?”

“I hope not.”

She lit the Marlboro. “If you’d like to leave her a note,” she said from behind the smoke, “I’ll be happy to pass it on if she ever comes in.”

“I know you’re cashing her checks and forwarding her mail to Woodton, Michigan.”

“Then you can mail your note up there,” she said.

“I’ve been reading her mail.”

“Then you can read your own note when it arrives up there.”

“I don’t know how to get in touch with her.”

“I can’t help you.”

The dim bulb that occasionally lights my attic flickered. “Maybe I can help you.”

“How’s that?”

“Are her bills with you paid?”

“We bill quarterly, in advance, fifty bucks a month.” The woman wasn’t going to give anything away.

“I imagine she sent in her payment in December. That would cover her through the end of this month?”

She said nothing, and I realized my mistake. Maris hadn’t needed to send in any payments. Smith’s would just take their fee from the New Jersey checks and forward the balance up to Woodton.

“I would imagine there are laws preventing you from making any deduction if Carolina wasn’t around to authorize it,” I said.

That got her attention. She crushed out the new Marlboro, half-smoked. “Go on.”

“How about I make you a deal?” I pulled out my checkbook. “I’ll pay her account six months in advance, for April through September. If she contacts you, authorizes you to make further deductions from the checks that you cash, you return my three hundred.”

“Fair enough.” She set a pen down at the edge of the desk.

I didn’t pick it up. Instead, I pulled out the copy of the driver’s license photo Patterson had sent to my computer. “Is this her?”

She studied the photo through the smoke, then looked up. “Mister, that isn’t anybody.”

I wrote the check for three hundred and handed it to her. “One more thing, which shouldn’t violate your confidentiality restrictions: Ever hear of a woman named Carolina Dare?”

“Sure.” She grinned, sliding open her desk drawer and dropping in my check. “She used to waitress at the Copper Scupper, north point of the island.”

“Used to?”

“Worked there for years, then took off sudden, a year ago. Nobody’s heard from her since.”

“Nobody?”

“I would have heard. This is a small island.”

I started for the door but stopped and asked the question I’d wanted to blurt at the beginning.

“What did she look like?”

“I thought you said you were her executor,” the woman said, reaching for another Marlboro.

“Court-appointed.”

“Of course.” She laughed up a bit of phlegm. “Court-appointed people come down here all the time, looking to settle the estates of women who made the big bucks waitressing at beach bars.”

I reached for the doorknob. “What did she look like?” I asked again.

“About your age, slim, medium height, blond, blue eyes. Ordinary looking,” she said.

I started to turn the knob.

“Ordinary looking,” the woman said behind me, “but damn, when she smiled, it changed her into the most beautiful woman in the world.”

I walked down the stairs.