Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Thirty-two

“No motive, no weapon,” I said, for the fifth time.

The expression on Dillard’s face didn’t change. “A few years after Maris Mays disappears from Rivertown, a woman named Carolina Dare comes forth, full grown and apparently bereft of any childhood, including a record of her birth. Maris Mays is Carolina Dare is Louise Thomas.”

“Find her. Ask her.”

“She changed her identity because she killed her father,” Dillard said again. He’d been saying it over and over for the last ten minutes. Throughout, Patterson had been so silent I wondered if he was even still on the phone.

“No motive,” I said of that long-ago August. “And no weapon.”

Dillard scowled. “You never wondered why the papers dropped the story of your girlfriend’s disappearance so soon? Your Rivertown cops tipped them that young Maris might have caved in her old man’s head. Back in those days, papers were real careful about printing stuff like that.”

“Nobody found a motive, nor a weapon.”

“Herman Mays was a whining, self-pitying, whoring son of a bitch, but there’s plenty of men like that. The problem was, no one knew the family, father and daughter, well enough to say they weren’t enjoying a cordial relationship.” Dillard paused, then said, “Except you.”

“Maris and I didn’t talk about her father.”

“Sure you didn’t.”

“What’s your point?” I had a headache now, a real pounder from the blueberry fumes-and Dillard’s mouth.

“Maris Mays killed before now,” Dillard said.

“No motive, no-”

“She could have killed again.”

“Like riding a bicycle, is it, Dillard? Kill once, it’s easy to kill again?” I stood up, to see if he’d move to stop me. It would make sense for him to dummy up something to hold me as a material witness.

“We need to talk to her,” he said from his chair.

I moved for the door. “She didn’t have to kill to run with that bank money. We’ve come full circle.”

“Lieutenant Dillard is right. We need to talk about Maris Mays,” Patterson said, speaking at last. He must have heard my voice move away from the phone.

“You need to identify your burned men,” I said, not turning around.

“You mean man,” Dillard said. “There’s only one.”

“There are two. Patterson will explain.”

I turned the knob on the door and walked out.

At three fifty-five in the afternoon of Thursday, August 10, I stopped to wait outside the florist’s where Maris worked, like I’d done every working day that summer. She got off work at four, and if we walked quickly, we could have thirty-eight minutes alone in her apartment before I had to run for the evening shift at the laundry.

That day, four o’clock came and went. At four fifteen, I went inside.

The lady who owned the shop smiled as she shut the glass door on a refrigerated cabinet filled with pink and yellow flowers. “Maris is off sick today, Dek. She called this morning to say she wasn’t feeling well.” I walked over to Thompson Avenue. At her street door, I was agonizing over whether to push the bell button or just try to call up through her open bedroom window, to see if she was all right, when I spotted her coming down the sidewalk from the other direction.

She stopped, still fifty feet away, when she saw me. Her face was strange, frozen looking. For a moment. I had the prickling sensation that she didn’t know me, that she thought I was some nobody she’d caught staring at her. Then she smiled, a faint, worked-up smile, and hurried toward me.

“Dek.” She reached to hug me. “Dek,” she said again, into the fabric of my shirt.

She started sobbing.

I knew better than to leave town. My little showboat stunt of walking out on Dillard had bought me a little time, nothing more. That’s what I needed, though-just a little time, to put some space between their questions and what I knew about Maris.

I drove to the motel, shut off the engine, and sat for a few minutes in the Jeep, watching the traffic roll by, up on the interstate. Being too cautious with Dillard and Patterson could cloud up everything around Maris and might start a manhunt for her. Being too straight about that August, when we were kids, could do the same thing. Either way could harm her.

More minutes passed. Nothing came clearer. All I could think to do was walk across the highway to the Wal-Mart.

I looked at knit shirts and electric razors, spray guns and screwdrivers and bug sprays. I studied labels for contents and uses, concentrating on anything but memories. After an hour, I was no smarter than I’d been when I entered the store, but I was considerably calmer. I bought Oreos and started back across the highway to the motel.

A blue SUV with a gold shield on its door was in the parking lot. Its engine was running.

“Care to go for a ride?” Dillard asked out the open window, as if he were giving me a choice.

“That would be peachy,” I said, getting in. I offered him an Oreo, but he shook his head, probably rightfully; the chocolate and double cream filling would not marry well with the residue of blueberry that was sure to be sticking to everything inside his mouth.

He surprised me. Instead of heading north to the sheriff’s department for more questions, he turned right, drove west, and then turned south.

“Did you have fun shopping at Wal-Mart?” he asked, after a couple of miles.

“Regrettably, they have everything I need,” I said, clutching my Oreos and looking out the window at the white fields.

He nodded at the finality of that, and for another fifteen minutes, we said nothing. Then I began to recognize some landmarks I’d seen earlier.

“Woodton?” I asked.

“We’re going to show the postmaster some pictures,” he said, then said nothing more for the rest of the drive.

A clerk led us through the sorting room to a small office in back. The postmaster gave me the barest of nods, no doubt still weak from toting that tub of Carolina’s mail, but he did reach up to shake Dillard’s hand. Dillard and I sat down, across the nicked government-gray metal desk.

“We’re seeking the identity of a body we found,” Dillard said. “We think he tried to get at Carolina Dare’s mail.” He opened the envelope he’d brought, pulled out two pictures, and set them in front of the postmaster.

“Not him,” the postmaster said, of Eddie Kovacs. “Not him, either,” he said of the brother, Lance. He handed the pictures back across the desk.

Dillard pulled out another picture. The postmaster took it, held it up with its white back facing me, and stared at it for a long minute, frowning. At last he nodded. “That’s your man,” he said.

“He didn’t give you a name?” Dillard asked.

The postmaster shook his head.

“It would have been an alias,” Dillard said, taking the picture and sliding it back into his envelope. “No matter. We’ve identified him from dental records.”

“Dead, you say?” the postmaster asked.

“Shot and burned,” Dillard said.

I started to reach for the envelope in Dillard’s hand. He shifted in his chair, moving it away from my reach.

Dillard tapped the envelope. “This man was in here in January, trying to get Carolina Dare’s mail?”

The postmaster wiped a weary hand across his brow. “He was so insistent. I kept telling him he had to produce authorization. He kept saying, over and over, he was authorized, like that was enough.” A small smile played at the edges of the postmaster’s lips. Justice had been served. The man who’d tried to subvert the U.S. Postal Service was dead. Shot and burned.

We all stood up. Dillard and the postmaster shook hands again, and we left. In the car, Dillard put the envelope between us on the front seat and started the engine. As he pulled onto the street, I picked up the envelope and slid out the pictures. The familiar face was on top.

“Just like you figured,” he said.

“John Reynolds,” I said, but he knew that I knew better.

“Officer Randall Severs,” Dillard said, “late of the Cedar Ridge, Iowa, police department.”