Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty-seven

The sky looked like it was about to throw down serious snow when I drove over to Leo’s at ten thirty the next morning. The radio weatherman, undoubtedly medicated, was chirping that it was going to be a fine day nonetheless when the quick release terminals gave way and the radio clattered to the floor of the Jeep, silencing the fool. I took that as a good omen and whistled the rest of the way.

Now, below the hem of the red terrycloth robe, behind the storm door, I could see pajama legs that had World War I biplanes on them.

“I’m here to complain that you didn’t put a lock on my door.” I smiled, striving for the same cheer as the medicated weatherman.

“I worked until four in the morning.” Leo rubbed his eyes. “You’re supposed to be in Florida.”

The glass on the door was starting to cloud up from the heat inside, and the biplanes were disappearing into the mist.

“I need coffee and remembrances,” I said.

He pushed the door open. “Jeez,” he said, yawning.

I followed him through the living room. Several folding chairs and little tray tables holding almost empty bowls of pretzels, nuts, and bridge mix were grouped to face the big-screen television.

He turned to put his finger to his lips. “Ma’s still sleeping.”

“Porn again?” I mouthed, gesturing at the semicircle of chairs.

He nodded. “All the ladies have premium cable,” he whispered as we passed his mother’s bedroom door. “Each is supposed to take a turn hosting, but Ma’s got the biggest screen, and with their eyes, at their ages…”

“They’re all widows, right?” I asked in the kitchen.

“All except Mrs. Roshiska. Her husband’s still kicking, but he’s almost ninety. God help that poor bastard when she comes home after watching television here. I have nightmares of her charging him in her walker.” He reached into a cabinet for a can of generic coffee and set it on the counter. “Make java,” he said, heading for the hall.

I measured out four scoops of coffee, added ten cups of water, and switched on the machine.

Ten minutes later, as the coffeemaker belched a last puff, Leo reappeared, this time in jeans and a purple Sesame Street sweatshirt. Both Bert and Ernie, embroidered on the sweatshirt, were wearing tuxedos. There was a message there, but I was too tired to figure it out.

I poured coffee into two of Ma’s scratched porcelain mugs, and we sat at the kitchen table, its top dulled almost opaque from Ma’s relentless scrubbings with wire pads and kitchen cleanser. It had been colorless even back in the day when Leo and I had built model airplanes at that table.

“What did you find out in Florida?” Leo took a sip of the coffee and grimaced. I make weak coffee, especially for the morning, but compensate by drinking too much of it.

“Maris was a shadow down there. She lived in an attic apartment, acquired nothing but a car and a passing friendship with her boss at the restaurant where she waitressed. She moved from her apartment to the restaurant and back to her apartment.”

“Completely safe. Completely anonymous.”

“Somebody followed her down there, somebody who looked like Reynolds. He traced her to the restaurant where she worked. The hostess there thinks it’s why she took off.”

Leo pushed his one hundred and forty pounds out of his chair as if he weighed ten times that and went to the counter. He dumped the pot of coffee I’d just made into the sink.

“You’re sure it was her?” he asked without turning around.

“There were marks on the kitchen table. I made a tracing, checked them against the little rubber feet on the Underwood. They match.”

“Shit.”

“Yes. Did you call Aggert?”

He shook out the grounds basket, put in a new filter, added many scoops, and filled the water reservoir. “He gave me his e-mail address, asked me whether I knew if you found her lockbox. I told him you’d call, and I forwarded the driver’s license photo up to him.”

Leo turned to look out the window, the coffee forgotten.

“OK.”

“Did you call Iowa?” he asked, still looking out the window. There was nothing out there except a wall of bricks. And maybe Maris.

“Today. I’ll tell Patterson I think Reynolds is one of the Kovacs brothers and that he followed Maris down to Florida. He’ll send me photos of the Kovacs brothers. I’ll I.D. the one posing as Reynolds.”

“Progress.”

“Absolutely.”

He flicked on the coffeemaker and came back to sit at the table. For a few minutes he told me about the ancient urns he was authenticating for Sotheby’s. Neither of us was listening, but it passed the time until the new pot of coffee was done.

“What do you remember about… about that August after we graduated?” I asked, after he reached for the pot and filled our cups. Even after all the years, I couldn’t use the right words.

Leo took a sip, studying me over the rim of the mug. “You mean about Maris’s disappearance?”

I nodded.

“Her first disappearance?” he amended.

“Her first disappearance.” I didn’t want to ever say she was dead, either.

“Jeez, Dek, you were there, closer to everything than me.”

“Nobody talked to me. They asked questions, made accusations. Nobody talked to me.”

Leo set down his mug. “There was fear, mostly: ‘Killer Stalks Rivertown.’ I remember my parents talking low, hush-hush, when they thought I couldn’t hear. Rivertown was rough then, sure-hookers, gambling, like now-but there were no murders. Obviously that changed when Maris’s father was killed and she was thought abducted and presumed killed. Ma made me quit McDonald’s the moment she heard, no notice, no nothing. She hustled me downstate to a motel near the college two whole weeks before freshman orientation.”

“And forbade you to talk to me,” I said.

“There was a lot of whispering, Dek. You were seen arguing with Maris the day before she vanished.”

Remembering that still wanted to suck the air out of my lungs. People I didn’t even know suddenly gave me a wide berth on the sidewalks. Even my two aunts wouldn’t look at me directly.

“Besides,” Leo went on, a sly smile lighting his face, “I called you plenty from that motel pay phone. Used up my Playboy money, as I remember.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“That I used up ray Playboy money to talk to you? Me neither.” He put on a frown, still trying for light.

I looked at him across the scuffed old table. “That she never called to tell me she was all right.”

“You’re pissed now, along with being worried.” Since we were kids, there’d been no fooling Leo about much of anything.

I shrugged, the best I could offer up.

“Maybe she really was abducted, Dek, like everybody thought. She could have been kept as a slave or something, and only broke away later. That kind of fear would make anybody want to hide for the rest of their lives.”

I shook my head. “She ran scared from Rivertown, too.”

“I’m not a virgin, Vlodek,” Maris said.

We were sitting on the bank of the Willahock River, in front of my grandfather’s turret. We went there a lot, because it was choked with weeds and thorny bushes and nobody else went there.

Although almost three months had passed, that was the first time she’d spoken of the afternoon in May. Certainly, I’d never brought it up. In the days immediately afterward, I’d come to dread the last bell of the school day. Walking home, I couldn’t even reach for her hand and had begun inventing lies about having to be at the laundry an hour early. I’d been a beast.

Until after the last day of school. We were walking down Thompson Avenue when she stopped suddenly, grabbed my arm, and told me to stop being a damned fool. Most of the weights came off my chest then, and we did resume our explorations, although never again did I let myself get close to what I’d done the day of Lillian’s funeral. Even now, in August, I was still ashamed of my lust that afternoon, ashamed of that boy I watched on her bed. She wasn’t a virgin, and it was my fault.

“I know,” I said.

She looked at me, and I saw that she was trying to smile, but it touched only her mouth. Her eyes and her forehead were frozen with something-shame, too, I thought, though it had not been her fault.

“No.” She shifted closer so that her body rested against mine. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

I turned to look at her, surprise and relief muddling in my mind. “What, then?”

She was looking past me, through the bramble, at the Willahock. The river was running strong that afternoon, and for a minute we watched a small Styrofoam ice chest work its way west. Then she stood up and tugged at my arms. “Buy me a Coke,” she said.

We followed the path along the river, past the limestone enormity of the city hall, and when the path disappeared into brush, we cut through the junkyard, the used auto lot, and behind the convenience store where the chief convenience was that it sold pocket-sized bottles of wine. We ran under the railroad overpass and down to Kutz’s.

It was lunchtime, and there was a line of businessmen in suits, construction workers in dusty dungarees, and rig drivers in white T-shirts and ball caps. I started toward the end of the line, but Maris held out her hand and led me around to the back. All of the wood-planked tables were filled by people eating, and dozens more stood around the clearing, balancing paper soft drink cups, and hamburgers and hot dogs wrapped in thin paper.

She squeezed my hand, keeping me tight beside her, until she stopped up close to the back of the clapboard-slatted trailer. For a minute, we looked at the carvings of initials inside hearts, some deep, some tentative. It was an old tradition, going back to World War II, when Kutz’s old man ran the stand. My father’s initials, whoever he might have been, could have been cut into that wood, maybe with my mother’s, maybe with someone else’s. All I knew of him was he was a Norwegian named Elstrom. When I was small, I used to sneak down to the back of Kutz’s and hunt for my mother’s initials, but I never found any that matched. She’d left no trace. Still, it was an old habit, and even that day, with Maris, I looked.

Maris gave my hand a hard last squeeze and let it go. She reached into her jeans and came out with a bone-handled penknife. Stepping back, with a grin as wide as Montana on her face, she studied the wall like a sculptor planning a first cut. Then, still smiling, she began to trace our initials with the point of the knife, MM+VE, in a small blank space and surrounded them with a tight heart. She worked silently, concentrating, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly past her lips, oblivious to the people at the tables and, I thought, only faintly aware of me. Over and over, she cut into the lines of our initials and their protecting heart, until it was the deepest carving on the side of the trailer. Finally, she stood back. Satisfied, she wiped the blade of her little knife clean of old white paint and specks of wood, folded it, and slipped it back into her jeans.

“There,” she said. “Forever.”

Neither of us came from a place that believed in forever, but that day I came as close as I thought I ever would. “It must be forever, Maris,” I managed, “if it’s on Kutz’s trailer.”

She reached up to kiss me. Somewhere behind us, at one of the tables, somebody clapped, and in a second, everybody in the clearing was applauding. We turned, and Maris, ever Maris, curtsied to the crowd.

She vanished a week later.

“The way she disappeared back then matters now because…?” Leo stood and walked to the kitchen window. It had begun to snow, a light, halfhearted snow that wouldn’t amount to anything.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But you do know. You think what’s happened now has to do with that August?”

“I don’t know.”

Leo turned from the window. “Tell me again that she’s alive.”

“She had money enough to fake her disappearance from Rambling. She could have found somebody to torch the cottage, if she didn’t come back to do it, to eliminate the last traces of herself.”

“You’re thinking of telling the cops in Iowa her real name?”

“I can’t risk that.”

“She was never a suspect in her father’s murder, Dek.”

“Because they never found motive.” I got up and put my cup in the sink.

“Then why does any of that old stuff matter now?”

I looked at his eyes, maybe the only pair of eyes that had trusted me in that long-ago August, when I said I’d had nothing to do with Maris’s disappearance.

“I don’t know” was all I could say.

We walked out of the kitchen, through the living room, to the front door.

“She had no motive, that August.” He opened the door for me.

I drove to the Burlington station and caught the twelve twenty into Chicago.