Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Two

I set off for Michigan at ten the next morning. The sky was low, and a light snow was falling, but it was not enough to slow the Illinois Tollway. By February, toll road pilots are a brazen lot. With months of winter driving behind them, they blow through whiteouts and icy patches, balancing coffees, croissants, and cell phones, with barely a twitch of a thumb on their steering wheels. I breezed to the state line.

Things slowed, though, in Indiana. Winter grows potholes along its northernmost interstate the way summer grows weeds in its fields. My Jeep is nine years old, its shock absorbers and springs long retired, and I had to back off on my speed to keep my teeth in the places I was accustomed to finding them.

Slowing things, too, were the billboards picturing surgically perfected women with come-hither pouts, who danced naked at gentlemen’s clubs. So many of them smiled under banners proclaiming that truckers were especially welcome that I began to wonder how long it took long-haul drivers to pass through that part of Indiana. If a gentleman trucker stopped at even a third of the clubs where he was sure to be welcomed, it might take months. I left Indiana understanding why over-the-road shipping had become so expensive.

…

West Haven was right on Lake Michigan, two miles due west of a Wal-Mart. It was an old resort town of ice cream parlors, beachwear shops, and sandal stores, set on a main street that sloped down to a shore lined with curled ice cliffs of waves that looked flash frozen, as if by an instant’s touch of an ice goddess’s wand. Everything was white and shiny-the sky, the lake, the beach-except for a small red lighthouse at the end of a pier that stood like a crimson exclamation point against the vanished horizon.

I parked the Jeep in an angled space and walked along the sidewalk. Most of the shops were closed, their bright awnings rolled up tight against the gray of February. Attorney Aggert’s name was lettered in gold leaf on a second-floor window in the next block, above a lit-up discount store named Fizzy’s. The discounter’s window featured a display of black hydraulic automobile jacks nestled on a scattering of fluffed striped beach towels-everything one would need for a festive day of tire changing at the beach, SHOP EARLY, the banner exclaimed. I accepted the universality of that, even though I had never thought to combine beach time with auto repair, for never had I seen a banner proclaiming SHOP LATE.

I had an hour before my appointment with Aggert, so I opted for lunch in an exposed-brick-and-fern place across the street. I enjoy opting for lunch, though it’s not something I can afford to do often. But today was a special day. I was about to come into seven hundred dollars for very little work.

The hostess smoking a cigarette at the little table by the door appeared to have undergone the same flash freezing that had trapped the waves along the shore, right down to the curl of smoke that hung suspended in the air above her head. I made a polite cough and she looked up, crushed out her cigarette in a black Bakelite ashtray, and told me I could sit anywhere I wanted. She lit another cigarette as I headed to a booth against the wall.

There was only one other diner in the place, a blond fellow frowning at the stock market pages of the Wall Street Journal like a man reading his own obituary. He was about my age, too young to be wearing a red-checked shirt with a blue necktie and blue suspenders.

I was hungry but ordered responsibly-only a Diet Coke and vegetables consisting of a Cobb salad and the house specialty, a foot of fried onion rings, stacked on a pole. While I waited, I sipped the Coke and studied the old photographs on the wall. They were from the days when ships carrying commerce used to float over from Chicago. In the century that had passed, shipping had gone high speed, but I wondered if goods from Chicago might have arrived faster in those old days, given the proliferation of gentlemen’s clubs slowing trucks in Indiana. Still, I allowed there might have been ladies in high-button shoes, feather hats, and little else back in those old days, too, dancing along the shore in Indiana, pouting at the ship captains. Indiana might always have been that kind of place.

The salad was excellent. So, too, were the onion rings, served twelve inches high as advertised. At five to one, I paid the bill and tiptoed away, careful not to disturb the hostess nodding by the smoldering ashtray at the front door.

I popped Tic Tacs, climbing the stairs next to the discount store, so I’d arrive smelling like a candy cane. The frosted glass door at the top opened right into Aggert’s office, and there sat the man in the red-checked shirt and blue suspenders I’d seen in the restaurant, still reading his Wall Street Journal. He set down his newspaper and stood up, and we shook hands across his desk. He was chewing breath mints, as well-Altoids-from a little red and white tin centered on his desk. He motioned for me to sit in one of the visitor’s chairs.

He ground up a last fragment of Altoid and handed me a tan envelope. “Ms. Thomas’s will, and her keys. The estate doesn’t appear to be very large. It shouldn’t require much of your time.”

I opened the envelope. Inside was a folded single sheet of paper and a key ring. I unfolded the sheet of paper. “LAST WILL,” it read, in slightly uneven manual-typewriter letters. “I, KNOWN AS LOUISE THOMAS, BEING OF SOUND MIND, HEREBY LEAVE ALL MY ACCOUNTS, POSSESSIONS, 1983 DODGE, CONTENTS IN THE HOUSE ON COUNTY ROAD 12, RAMBLING, MICHIGAN, AND ANY OTHER ITEMS AS MAY BE OF VALUE TO MY EXECUTOR, VLODEK ELSTROM, OF RIVERTOWN, ILLINOIS, TO DISPERSE AS HE SEES FIT IN THE RESOLUTION OF ANY MATTERS RESULTING FROM MY DEATH.” Her signature was at the bottom. Aggert and somebody else had signed on the two witness lines.

I looked across the desk at the lawyer. “Odd sort of will, counselor.”

He shifted in his chair. “I didn’t draft it. She brought it in the morning of New Year’s Eve. All she wanted was for me to witness it.”

“Just witness?”

“That, and hold it for her. After I signed, we walked downstairs to get one of the clerks at Fizzy’s to be the other witness.”

“She didn’t ask you to look it over or offer advice?”

“She didn’t even want a photocopy. It was very strange.”

I looked at the document again. “The wording seems odd: ‘I, Known as Louise Thomas.’”

“Sounded to me like she was just trying to lawyer it up. People do that sometimes, to make it sound more legal.”

“Known as? Sounds like she’s admitting it’s a fake name.”

He shrugged.

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Surely you must-”

He held up a palm to stop me. “She came in with her coat collar up, a wool beret pulled down low on her forehead, a scarf around her mouth. I wondered if she was sick, because she never took off the hat or the scarf. It was bitterly cold that week, lots of wind.”

“Could you at least tell if she was young or old?”

“She was only in here a few minutes, and she wore those glasses that get darker in the light-”

“Twenty or sixty?”

He shook his head. “Somewhere in between.”

I picked up the little ring of keys. “And these?” There were two Chrysler-logo keys and a standard house key.

“For the car and the house, I imagine.”

“Did she give you a list of assets as part of the will?”

“No, and that’s what’s needed. It’s called an inventory, and I have to file it with her will in the probate court. As executor, it’s your responsibility to provide me with an accounting of everything she had that’s worth something.”

“Lockbox?”

“Again, your responsibility.” He shrugged. “I have no authority to contact the local banks. I’m hoping that, if she had a box, you’ll find a key among her effects.”

“When did she die?”

He looked away, as if he were trying to read the fine print on one of the degrees framed on the opposite wall.

“There’s some dispute about that,” he said after a minute.

Something greasy worked its way down my throat, but it could have been the last inches of the foot of onion rings. I cleared my throat, prompting.

He turned to face me. “You sure you didn’t know Louise Thomas?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair. He smelled of mint and spring.

“Not by that name.”

“Think, Mr. Elstrom.”

“I knew a lot of people through my business.”

He gestured at the laptop computer on the credenza behind him. “You got quite a lot of notoriety through that business as well.”

He’d done an Internet search on me. He might have been a resort-town lawyer, but he knew how to do homework.

“I was cleared,” I said.

Aggert nodded, accepting, and eased back in his chair. “It took some time to discover her body,” he said, coming around to my question.

The onion rings started to dance. “No neighbors noticed she wasn’t around, or the mail piling up? Nobody at work thought to report her missing?”

“I don’t know where she worked.”

“And people aren’t neighborly in Rambling?”

“It’s a blueberry town. Not many people. Just blueberry bushes, picked mechanically or by seasonal workers. Nobody much is left except for some back-to-the-earth nuts, folks who need to live out where they can’t see other house lights at night.”

“How did the cops know to contact you?”

“They must have found my card in her house. I didn’t think to ask.”

“Did you tell the cops she’d just been in to give you her will?”

He opened his little tin of Altoids, slipped one in his mouth. “That has to be coincidence.”

“Coincidence?” Suddenly, I didn’t like William Aggert very much. He was a man who asked too few questions.

“It happens,” he said, scenting the air with the fresh Altoid. “Somebody gets the urge to write a will and dies right afterward.”

I jangled the keys. “What am I supposed to do? Go out to Rambling, inventory her stuff, and then give it away?”

“And call around to the banks, see if there’s a lockbox. I don’t imagine there’ll be much to inventory. Nobody who has anything lives in Rambling.” He opened the center drawer of his desk and pulled out his check for seven hundred dollars, made out to me.

I stood up.

“You’ll get on this right away?” he said.

“I’ll drive out there now.”

“As her attorney, I need to be kept informed, every day.”

His phone hadn’t rung since I’d been there, his desktop was empty, except for the Altoids, and he didn’t have a secretary. He was looking for something to do.

“I’ll do what I can. I have other obligations,” I said with a straight face. I started to turn for the door.

“One more thing,” he said. He handed me a scrap of paper with a name and phone number on it. “Miss Thomas’s landlady, a Mrs. Sturrow. She wants to know when the house will be available to rent out.”

“How far in advance did Louise pay up?”

“Mrs. Sturrow said until the end of May,” he said.

“Tell her the executor says the end of May,” I said and walked out.

Downstairs, in Fizzy’s, a smiling man was pulling a watch from a case marked $5.95 to show to a woman wearing a mended fleece coat.

“Are you sure it’ll keep good time?” the woman asked, squinting at the watch. She could have been sixty or she could have been forty; her face was weathered and deeply lined. I guessed she was from a surrounding farm town and had cut those lines working days in the sun and sweating nights about rain and crop prices and interest rates. Skin gets furrowed just like dirt in farm towns.

“Fine quartz movement,” the man said, smiling at the watch in the woman’s hand.

The woman rubbed the shiny silver on the watchband, testing to see if it would come off under her thumb. “I’ll think on it, Mr. Fizzeldorf,” she said, handing it back. And then she walked out.

Fizzy Fizzeldorf glanced over at me, then quickly put the watch back in the display case. I took no offense that he suspected I was not to be trusted around a six dollar watch.

“Got maps of Michigan?” I asked.

His smile reappeared. He rootled under the counter and came up with a folded map that had been stained with a coffee cup ring. “You’re in luck,” he said. “This is the last one left.” The map had an out-of-business oil company logo beneath faded red letters announcing that it was ALL NEW FOR 1984.

“That’ll be two dollars,” he said.

A stained old map for two bucks seemed like a wrong value, considering that four dollars more could get me a whole chrome watch, but I didn’t make the point. “I’ll buy it if it’s got Rambling on it,” I said.

He smiled, unfolded the map, and laid a thick forefinger on a spot an inch northeast of West Haven. “Thar she blows,” he said.

I gave him the two bucks.

The asphalt crumbling on the road to Rambling was the same bleached gray as the sky, and one slight shade darker than the snow lying wind-rutted on the fields. Only the branches of the blueberry bushes, blood red and gnarled, as though contorting to wrench themselves out of the ground, gave any color to the landscape at all. I made the eighteen miles to Rambling in twenty minutes because there were no other cars on the road to slow me down.

Aggert had been right: Rambling in winter was indeed a blueberry town, populated only by bushes. There’d been a drugstore with an icecream-cone-shaped sign, a café, and a resale shop. They were vacant, offering nothing now but sun-faded FOR RENT signs propped in their dirty windows. A fourth building that had once been a food store was no longer anything. It had burned, and snow covered what remained of its roof, lying on the ground inside its walls. Rambling looked to be a ghost town, abandoned even by its ghosts.

I followed Fizzy’s map and continued east. County Road 12 was a mile past the frenzy of downtown Rambling, a whispery road, more dirt than gravel. I stopped at the intersection, looked both ways. There were no houses visible in either direction. I turned right and drove south through more acres of twisted red blueberry bushes. The first sign of life was two miles down, a cluster of three cottages set close to the road. HAPPY FARMS, a wood sign read. The occupants must have been away, being happy elsewhere, because the snow on the single drive heading up to the houses was unmarked by tire tracks, and there was moss showing on the roofs where the snow had melted off. I kept driving south until I came to the town limits of the next metropolis, a place named Tadesville. It looked to be no more affluent than Rambling. I swung around and headed back the way I’d come.

I crossed the West Haven road, this time heading north. A mile up, I came to an asbestos-shingled faded green cottage, set in a clearing surrounded by spindly trees. It was a skinny place, no bigger than a house trailer, with a glassed-in front porch. I bounced onto the ruts of the driveway and cut the engine.

Ripped plastic sheeting billowed in and out from the two large side windows facing the drive, catching the wind like sails on a sloop. Dark splotches of moss and mildew spotted the siding where the wind had torn off the green shingling. The cottage looked like it had been abandoned for years, except for the tire tracks in the snow on the drive. There were plenty of those-and they were new since the last snowfall.

I got out and went up the two front steps to knock on the front porch glass. I waited a minute, knocked again, then stepped down. Nobody would live in such a house, not with torn sheeting slapping against broken windows, fanning in the cold.

I started toward the back of the house. Beneath the plastic-sheeted windows, my shoes crunched on bits of broken glass. They lay everywhere across the driveway, sparkling like strewn diamonds, even though the day was overcast.

At the rear, more plastic sheeting had been duct-taped to the back door window.

A carriage-sized garage leaned at the end of the drive. Its swing-out doors were bowed, sunk in the middle, but arcs had been swept in the snow in front of them. They’d been opened recently. With a lift and a tug, the left door opened easily.

An old metallic-blue Dodge Aries sedan was parked inside. Big, irregular spots of rust marred the roof, hood, and trunk, as though acid had been spilled on the car and eaten the paint. There was no license plate on the rear bumper.

The driver’s door was unlocked. I pulled out the ring of Louise Thomas’s keys and slid in. Even in the cold, the interior smelled of damp and must. The first auto key slipped easily into the ignition. I gave it a turn. The engine fired instantly. I looked at the gauges; the gas tank was full, the battery was charging. I shut off the engine.

The fit of the car key confirmed it: I’d found Château Louise Thomas.

The dome light showed a car interior that was immaculate. There was no clutter on the upholstery or floor. The glove box was empty. I felt under the front seat, touched metal and a thin plastic. I pulled out a supermarket bag containing a screwdriver, a license plate-white and green and orange, from Florida-and two shiny screws. The plate had a renewal sticker that would not expire until October.

I got out and walked around to the back of the car. The paint on the vinyl bumper where the license attached was clean. Louise Thomas had recently removed the plate I’d found under the front seat. I used the other car key to open the trunk, but there was nothing in there except a well-worn spare tire. I closed the trunk, locked and shut the driver’s door, and walked back up the drive, crunching glass as if I were walking on granola.

The third key turned the porch door lock easily. I opened the door, stepped inside.

I saw blood.