The Dead Caller from Chicago

Ten

“She ain’t been home for two, three days,” Theodea Wilson’s nearest neighbor told me the next morning. “School’s probably out for Easter break. She might be gone to her summer place.”

I was holding my shopping bag of clothes like I was trying to make a delivery. “Man, they must have gotten things screwed up down at the store.”

“What store?”

“Hardware,” I said vaguely. I didn’t know any of the nearby stores.

“It’s mighty cold for that right now.”

“Hardware?”

“Eustace,” she said loudly.

“Eustace?”

“Eustace!” she yelled, like I was hard of hearing. “This time, she screwed up. She didn’t stop her mail. I been pushing it through the slot and watching out for packages. I can take your bag.” She held out a hand.

“It’s OK,” I said. “I’ll have the boss call her in a few days.”

“I suppose you could try that,” she said and closed the door.

I had a Michigan map in the glove box but could find no town named Eustace. I drove to the BP station on the highway, filled up, and asked how I could get to Eustace.

“Not very easily,” the sour-faced woman behind the counter said.

“It’s not nearby?”

“It’s close enough, less than thirty miles, but it’s not a town. It’s an island off Mackinaw City, like Mackinac Island. But Eustace is not open to sightseers.”

“Why not?”

“No sights.”

“I know a woman who lives there.”

She cocked her head, seeing a lie. “How’d she tell you to get there, then?”

“She didn’t.”

She nodded, her suspicions about me, and perhaps all of mankind, confirmed. “Best you try to call first, if you can.”

“Cell phone reception up there is spotty?”

“Only on good days.” She frowned at another customer walking in and told me to take the highway straight north until the land ended.

I passed much deeper snow than was in Chicago, and more white birches. Big pines were everywhere, including one growing up through the shattered windshield of the burned-out shell of a car. Roadside places sold firewood, stained glass, and deer food. Twenty-five Harleys were parked outside a barbecue restaurant, though I didn’t know Harleys well enough to tell whether any belonged to the tattooed, bifurcated ladies from the night before.

There were billboards, too, for gun dealers and places to stay on Mackinac Island. Two touted the Grand Hotel, a place that promised the longest porch I’d ever seen.

The road ended in Mackinaw City. I’d heard of it, of course, like I’d heard of the big island, Mackinac, out on the water. Expensive sailboats raced there from Chicago every summer-manned, I imagined, by taut tanned fellows in pink knit gator shirts and waterproof moccasins, for whom Cheerios meant not just good health but a whole way of life.

Mackinaw City was no city, but rather several blocks of gift stores, resort clothing shops, and trendy bars lining both sides of a wide center ribbon of mostly empty parking spaces. I drove up and down the long main street, checking out the few cars. None were familiar.

I checked out the parking lot for the ferry operation that serviced Mackinac Island, then cruised the side streets. Pa Brumsky’s brown LTD was parked beside a peeling tan-painted house four blocks in. I knocked at the front door. A teenaged boy wearing a tousled T-shirt and rumpled jeans answered.

“I’ve been looking for a big old Ford like yours,” I said. “Is it for sale?”

The kid shook his head. “We just rent parking for people going to Mackinac.”

“But do you know if it’s for sale?” I said, to keep him talking.

“You could leave a note on the windshield, with your name and phone number.” He started to close the door.

“Did the owner say when he’d be back?”

A pouty blond girl came into partial view, running her fingers through her own hair because the young man’s was too far away. She wore a tousled T-shirt and rumpled jeans, too.

“Leave a note,” the kid said, shutting the door.

I envied him. There are points in every life when tousling and rumpling must proceed without distraction. I felt ancient, as though it had been centuries since I’d last been properly tousled and rumpled.

I drove back to the ferry service. Past a row of outdoor restrooms and a gift shop, small whitecaps crashed against a white-fenced dock ramp. Farther out, a ferry was churning the rough water, heading in. Beyond that were two bumps, one large, one small, faint against the gray. Mackinac and Eustace.

No one was around except a man in a white wood ticket booth. “Does that go to Eustace Island?” I asked, pointing at the approaching ferry.

“Nothing goes direct to Eustace. Got to go to the big island, then catch a ride to Eustace.”

“I need to go straight to Eustace.”

“What the hell for? Nothing there but one old hotel, thirty rooms, built by some moron thinking to compete with the Grand on Mackinac. He went bust in short time. Other fools came along, thinking to compete, too. Busto, every one of them. Only seasonals use it now, green cards mostly, and most of them won’t be here for another month.”

“A woman I know has a cottage there.”

“There are those,” he allowed, “a few places that rent to idiots with little money and fewer brains. It’s a dismal rock, Eustace.”

“Will your ferry take me if I pay extra?”

“Ferry’s too big. Docks on Eustace are rickety things, only good for small craft.” He pointed to the whitecaps. “Won’t be anybody going to Eustace today except the first crew working at the Grand. Best I can say, if you’re hell-bent, take our ferry to Mackinac, ask who’ll run to Eustace tomorrow, and huddle up at a bed-and-breakfast if you can find one open this early.”

The approaching ferry pivoted in a tight arc, reversed its engines, and backed up alongside the ramp. A hardy-looking couple, tanned even in March, wheeled bicycles down the ramp and rode off. Cheerios people.

“When’s it leave?” I asked the ticket seller.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Even if I’m the only passenger?”

“It’s in the contract. We run on schedule, rain, snow, or empty.”

I boarded and went up to the open top deck. The day had darkened even further, smudging the horizon into the waterline. Mackinac Island and its tiny sister, Eustace, were lost in the gloom.

The diesel engines rumbled louder below decks, and the ferry pulled away from the dock. No one else had gotten on board.

I looked back at the shore.

A bulky figure was standing alongside the ticket shack. His hands were jammed in the pockets of his black trench coat, against the cold. He looked square and dark and evil. He was looking right at me.

I turned a little, pretending to look up the shore. I could still see the ticket shack out of the corner of my eye.

The bulky man passed something to the ticket taker. It might have been money for the next ferry, but it could have been money to talk. “Why, Eustace,” the ticket seller could be saying. “The damned fool wants to go to Eustace, though there’s nothing there this time of year but a few seasonals, and lots of rocks.”

Impossible, I said to the thought. I’d lost the bronze Malibu back in Illinois.

It started to rain, a little. I went belowdecks, where I’d be dry and less cold.

Where I wouldn’t be seen by the bulky man’s eyes.