Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 41.

I followed a road that had once been gravel but was now worn to rutted brown clay, flecked only faintly with the gray of a last few embedded stones. I passed no houses. It was empty country.

The Taylor place was four miles outside of Hadlow, a leaning cottage stuck on more hard brown ground, surrounded by once-cleared fields that were now thick with thin, spindly trees. Whatever Darlene Taylor had grown in the small plots had curled up and died, giving way to weeds.

Weeds, and perhaps a twisted idea of how words of romance and murder and a clown, written by a high school girl long before, could be used for blackmail.

The house appeared deserted. A piece of cardboard had been taped inside to cover a shattered front window. The screen door was canted outward, about to fall off its hinges. The place looked as it should, if Darlene Taylor had abandoned it to come to Chicago.

Except for the weeds in the front. Someone had trampled them recently, walking up to the house. They were only now beginning to spring back up.

I left the truck on the road and came up on foot. I knocked on the door, waited, knocked again. No one answered.

I tried the handle. The front door was locked tight, and all the windows looked to be latched. All but the one covered by cardboard.

I walked around to the back. An old water pump stuck up out of the ground, five yards from the house. An outhouse stood fifty feet past that, near a sparse copse of trees. It leaned in the same direction as the cottage.

The rear door was locked, too.

I rubbed a window made filthy by blown dirt and pressed my face against it. I was looking across a kitchen sink, at a plate of beans, half eaten, set on a porcelain-topped table. The beans looked fresh, not dried or discolored. A smear of gravy beneath them glistened in the sunlight coming in diffused through the window.

I watched the beans. Things moved across them, like they’d moved across the corpse of Andrew Fill.

Flies.

I went back to the truck and drove away.

I’d come back after dark, to see if Darlene Taylor had come home.

The little rental Chevrolet sat in front of Ralph’s service station, its driver’s side front wheel bent at exactly the same angle as the night before. Hearing the familiar sounds of his truck clattering up to its rightful home, Ralph came out of the bowels of his station, wiping his hands, and struck a pose in front of the wounded Chevrolet like he was studying sculpture.

“I’ve been thinking on this all morning,” he said. “I’m not sure if I can make it drivable.”

I squeezed the last of Koros’s cash in my pocket, sensing Ralph was about to squeeze me. “What will make you sure?”

“I’ll have to start pulling off parts. It’ll take days, and big money.”

“We’d better tow it, then.”

“Where to?”

“The rental place in Minneapolis.”

His voice brightened. “That’s a long, long ways.”

I gripped the cash in my pocket tighter. “How much?”

“I’d have to think on that.”

I knew what he had to think about. He had to guess how much I was clutching in my pocket, and what he could rationalize that into, in per-mile towing charges.

“Let me know, Ralph,” I said, hoping he couldn’t hear the defeat in my voice. I went back to the smells of grease and gas and sweat percolating in the cab of his truck.

I had the afternoon and early evening to kill. I decided to begin by stabbing at it with a plastic knife and fork. I pulled into the parking lot of a fast food place at the edge of town called the Would You? and ordered the chicken basket.

It was after lunchtime. There were no teenagers loitering in front. There had been, though-years and years of them, judging by the carvings on the wood planks of the picnic tables. Love had been memorialized there, in initials filled with chicken and burger grease sure to protect it from the harsh Minnesota winters, likely to last longer than the love itself.

I would have bet most towns had such hieroglyphs. My town, Rivertown, certainly did, though instead of being carved into tables, ours were cut into the sides of Kutz’s Wienie Wagon, a wood-slatted trailer that had been pulled beneath one of the overpasses when FDR was president and left to sink on deflating tires. My own initials were there, paired with a girl’s, inside a heart. Years later, she’d come back to cut another heart, larger, to surround the first one. It had taken me too long to learn about that second heart.

My chicken-a leg, a thigh, and a breast-came with a biscuit and french fries, enough goodness to clog even the most elastic of arteries. As I ate, I studied the carvings on the table, wondering if Rosemary Taylor’s initials had been carved at the Would You? Or whether the tables from her high school days had been discarded, their initials lost, and the whole process begun all over again.

The chicken, biscuit, and fries were excellent. When I turned in my tray, I was tempted to tell the young lady behind the Would You?’s grease-smeared glass that I would again, if allowed. I didn’t, because I worried she’d misinterpret my play on the name of the place and call the police.

I walked to the truck, leaned against its fender. It wasn’t hard to see Georgie Korozakis, cocky and young, breezing along that Main Street in his father’s convertible, with Darlene Taylor nestled beside him, her blond hair blowing back, both of them laughing at the wind and the notion of ever growing old.

I called Amanda. Her secretary told me she was out at a luncheon and wasn’t expected back until much, much later. I didn’t want to wonder if that was true.

Leo didn’t answer his cell phone. He was probably in a meeting somewhere.

I called Jennifer Gale. She sounded glad to hear from me.

“Want to have dinner after the news tonight?” she asked. “I can tell you how I’ve struck out, trying to trace Sweetie Fairbairn’s background.”

“I’m in Hadlow, Minnesota. I got into an altercation with a truckload of pigs.”

“Are you all right?”

“I am. The farmer who caused the accident is angry, as will be George Koros when he finds out his credit card is being charged ten grand against car repairs. The pigs, though, appeared to be ecstatic. They took off across a field and might now be in Mexico.”

“Why are you in Hadlow?”

“I got a lead into Sweetie Fairbairn’s background.”

“I thought you were going to keep me current on all this.”

“That’s what I’m doing. Things have happened so fast there wasn’t time.”

“Did she come from Hadlow?”

“You’re not going to broadcast this yet, right?”

“Right.”

“Sweetie came from here. So did her sister, a woman who I saw at George Koros’s building. So did George Koros.”

“All three of them?” She inhaled sharply. “Big news, Dek Elstrom.”

“Indeed.”

“When can I use this stuff?”

“When I’m sure none of it incriminates the missing Ms. Fairbairn.”

I told her I’d check in with her when I learned something new.

I didn’t say that hearing her voice made me feel not so alone.