Wrong Side of the Paw

Chapter 3

For the first time in I couldn’t think when, Rafe and Kristen and I had planned to get together for dinner.

Back when I’d first moved to Chilson, the three of us visited every restaurant in Tonedagana County, most of the eateries in Antrim, Charlevoix, Cheboygan, and Emmet Counties, and a few down in Grand Traverse County.

It had started as a casual resolve not to eat in the same place twice, quickly morphed into a Thursday night event, and had solidified Kristen’s resolve to open a restaurant of her own. Since then, however, the three of us, who’d become friends on a beach before we were teenagers, had become so busy with our own lives that coordinating our schedules took a monumental effort.

When Kristen’s restaurant opened, the two of us established a Sunday evening habit of me arriving after the dinner rush for dessert in her office. Often we ate crème brûlé, but sometimes it was a new recipe she wanted to try out.

Rafe and I, because his house so was close to Uncle Chip’s Marina, saw each other frequently. I’d stopped last week to check out his progress on the downstairs bathroom and caught him crouching on the floor and frowning at the beadboard he’d put in the previous week. The tallish and lanky Rafe stood, brushed sawdust out of his straight black hair, and asked what I, as an impartial observer, thought of the knots showing through the paint primer, and had appeared annoyed when I’d said I couldn’t see any knots, even when he was pointing directly at them.

To distract him from an unnecessary scrutiny of his work, I’d suggested the three of us go out to dinner, just like in the old days.

“What’s the matter?” he’d said. “Did my man Ash finally figure out that you were never going to learn the infield fly rule and he couldn’t take it any longer?” He’d grinned. “Or have you finally realized that you’re deeply in love with me and are only waiting for the right time to break it off with him and fall into my arms.” He spread his arms wide and made loud kissy noises.

I rolled my eyes. “Eww. No, they’re down a couple of deputies and he pulled night shift this month.” My boyfriend was also taking classes at the local community college; it was a minor miracle our paths ever crossed. Still, I saw him more than I’d seen my previous boyfriend, an emergency room doctor. If Ash’s shift hadn’t been too exhausting, we got together to run or bike a few mornings a week, but mornings were growing darker and darker and I wasn’t sure how much longer that would last.

I tried to remember the last time Ash and I had done even a semiromantic thing together. Dinner? Movie? Snuggling in front of his fireplace? It had been weeks, but I couldn’t pin it down. Why wasn’t I making sure those things happened?

Suddenly, I realized that Rafe was staring at me with an odd expression. I felt my face turn warm and quickly said, “Kristen’s flying solo now that Scruffy is back in New York, but we could add a fourth. Who are you seeing these days? Invite her along.”

Rafe’s love life was a complicated thing. As far as Kristen and I could figure, three months was the maximum he’d dated anyone. We figured that’s how long it took a woman to realize that she was never going to change him. Of course, his versions of the multitude of breakups varied from “Too clingy” to “Couldn’t stand how she laughed” to “Didn’t like beer,” but Kristen and I knew too many of the women to believe any of his explanations.

“Right now I’m footloose and fancy free.” He’d dropped to his hands and knees to peer at the woodwork, but looked up at me, flashing his smile, a bright white against the permanently tanned skin he’d inherited from his distant Native American ancestors. “Want to hear what happened with Stacey?”

“No.” I had no idea who Stacey was, but I was already on her side. “Do you want to do dinner or not?”

In the end, it turned out he did. For the next two days we had a three-person round of texting about dinner details and it was seven o’clock when Rafe parked his battered Jeep Cherokee at the Weathervane in Charlevoix. Originally a grist mill, its riverside location next to a drawbridge was a big attraction in summer, when the number of boats passing through from Lake Charlevoix to Lake Michigan seemed to rival the number of cars driving over the bridge itself.

Since the weather was still mild, we sat on the deck. Kristen and I ordered wine, and our designated driver sighed and ordered a beer. “Don’t give me any more,” he told our waitress. “No matter how much I beg.” He gave her a huge grin.

When she smiled back, Kristen and I exchanged glances. Rafe’s long-standing habit was to flirt outrageously with female waitstaff, and more often than not, at the end of the meal he’d have a new number in his cell phone and a smirk on his face.

“Plan number one,” I said to Kristen.

“On it.” She gave a thumbs-up.

Rafe looked from one of us to the other. “There isn’t a snowball’s chance that either one of you is going to tell me what’s going on, so I won’t waste my precious time in asking.”

“Should have figured that out years ago,” Kristen said.

I nodded. “Think of the things you could have accomplished with the energy you’ve expended so uselessly.”

“Moved mountains.” Kristen made a shoving motion.

“Learned two new languages,” I said.

“Invented a cure for the common cold.”

“Perfected cold fusion.”

Rafe opened his mouth to make a smart remark, but instead turned to smile at our approaching waitress. “Thanks,” he said as she handed around the drinks. “I don’t suppose you have a table where I can sit and eat without being insulted.”

“Pay no attention to my husband.” Kristen hopped her chair close and slung her long arm around his shoulders. “We’re still working out the best medications for him to take.”

“It’s that weird-shaped pill that’s giving him the trouble,” I told the waitress in a confidential tone, leaning over to tuck my hand under Rafe’s elbow. “You know, the blue one?” I winked at her.

“Oh,” she said, suddenly catching on that we were talking about an erectile dysfunction medication. “Oh. Well, I hope it works out for . . . um, for all of you. I’ll be back in a few minutes for your order.”

When she was back inside, Kristen and I spluttered with laughter.

“Aren’t you the funny ones,” Rafe said sourly, but he said it with a smile.

“We are, aren’t we?” Kristen held up her glass. “To the reinvigoration of the Thursday Night Restaurant Review Crew.”

As we tinked glasses, Rafe pointed out the obvious. “It’s not Thursday.”

“Which makes us even funnier,” Kristen said. “Drink up, my dear boy. It’s the only one you’re getting until we’re home, no matter how many times you bat those long lashes at our waitress.”

He looked across the table and fluttered his eyes violently.

“Not a chance,” I said, tucking my wineglass close to my body.

“Don’t even.” Kristen took a sip of her burgundy. “This stuff is too good for you.” She glanced at me. “For you, too, but I have high hopes.”

It was a fond hope of Kristen’s that I’d turn into a wine connoisseur so we could have long esoteric conversations about vintage and growing conditions and the best way to harvest grapes. I doubted she would ever succeed since my wine preferences were based on two things, price and the cuteness of the label, but who was I to tell her to give up a dream?

“Speaking of you,” Kristen said, “I’ve heard ten different stories about what happened yesterday with you and the bookmobile and Leese Lacombe and how her dad died. What’s the real deal? Unless you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Not really,” I said. “Not right now anyway.”

As a relative newcomer to Chilson, I often had to rely on natives to give me the historical details that were so often necessary to understanding relationships and motivations. The town wasn’t tiny, not by Up North standards, but it wasn’t uncommon to realize, halfway through a conversation, that you were talking to someone about their cousin. Years ago, I’d learned to get a background check on everyone I met from Kristen, or Rafe, or my aunt Frances, or Donna at the library, or sometimes all four.

“Did Leese go to Chilson?” I asked. Rafe had graduated from high school two years ahead of Kristen and me.

“She was in the elementary school,” Rafe said, “but then her mom got a job in Petoskey and they moved.”

“I remember,” Kristen said, snapping her fingers. “Number eight on Petoskey’s softball team. She was a power hitter. Whenever she came to the plate, our outfield moved way back.”

All very interesting, but I wanted to get back to what Rafe had said. “You said her mom got a job in Petoskey. What about her dad?”

As I asked the question, I focused hard on the sailboat coming up the channel, trying to guess exactly when the bells on the drawbridge would start dinging, when the traffic lights would turn red, stopping traffic back all through downtown Charlevoix, trying hard to watch what was going on in front of me so I didn’t have to remember what I’d seen.

“Leese’s parents split up a long time ago,” Kristen said.

“Dale and Bev got divorced when Leese was little,” Rafe said. “I remember Leese being the first kid I knew whose dad didn’t live with them.”

The bells went off and the traffic lights switched to red. As the bridge’s deck started to rise, bells ringing, I said, “Them? Does Leese have siblings?”

“Only child,” Kristen said. “At least directly. When her dad showed up to games, sometimes he had two little kids in tow. Stepbrother and stepsister from his second wife.”

“Brad and Mia.” Rafe tapped his glass. “Brad’s a brew master at that new craft brewery on the north side of Petoskey. Not sure what Mia does.”

“Figures he’d know the guy who makes beer,” Kristen said to me. “But I’m surprised he doesn’t know about Mia. She was a cute little bug of a kid, and she grew up pretty. I lost track of her after she got out of high school.”

Rafe pulled out his cell. “Of course, now that you mention it, I think she’s a Facebook friend. Hang on.” He tapped at his phone’s screen a few times, tapped again, then said, “Sure, here she is.” He handed his phone over to Kristen.

“No kidding,” she said. “Mia’s in charge of Information Technology for what’s-their-face, that company in Charlevoix. You know, that one that makes something for cars.”

A girl computer geek? I’d have to tell Josh. I squinted at the screen, which was hard to see in the glare of the setting sun. “Does it say anything about her liking the White Sox?” Because if she did, there was no point in introducing her to Josh, who was a die-hard Detroit Tigers fan.

“No, but she did grow up to be gorgeous.” Kristen gave me the phone and I studied Mia’s picture.

“Wow, she is hot.” I passed the cell back to its owner. “And you haven’t dated her?”

Rafe shrugged. “Not my type.”

Laughter erupted on the female side of the table. “I didn’t know you had a type,” Kristen said, “other than that she has to be breathing and younger than your mom.”

Rafe looked at Mia’s Facebook photo. “Pretty enough,” he said, “but she doesn’t talk much. She’s a friend of a friend. We run into each other at parties, is about it.”

“Her mom’s sooo not like that,” Kristen said. “Carmen. I remember at softball games, Carmen would be there with Dale. He’d be yelling at the umpire like the jerk he was—not to speak ill of the dead, but the truth is the truth—and she’d be right there with him, both of them in the guy’s face.”

“You remember that stuff?” I looked at Rafe. “Do you remember the parents of your opponents?”

He tapped the side of his head. “Like a steel trap.”

“It’s a small-town thing,” Kristen said. “If a kid is athletic, they’ll play every sport they can. I did soccer, basketball, and softball.” She shrugged. “A lot of girls did those same sports, so you see the same kids over and over. You get to know them and the people who show up to watch them.”

In Dearborn, where I’d grown up, the student body was roughly a zillion times bigger than the size of Chilson’s high school. If I’d wanted to play a varsity sport, which I never had, the odds of me actually making a team were about the same as Eddie never shedding any of his variegated black and white hairs. Up here, if you wanted to play, about all you had to do was keep a decent grade point average.

“What did Leese’s dad do for a living?” I asked.

“Builder,” Rafe said. “I worked for him one summer. Sort of. Not my favorite job and he was a horrible boss.” Rafe twisted in his chair and glanced around. “You two ready to order? Our waitress is right over there.” He flashed her another smile and made a come-along gesture.

“The magic is gone,” I said, watching. “Look, she barely smiled back.”

“Poor Rafe.” Kristen sighed. “This could be the start of a long dry spell for him.”

“In spite of the lies you already told her, five bucks says I’ll get her number before we leave.” Rafe reached for his wallet.

“That’s five each.” I drew the appropriate bill out of my pocket and Kristen did the same. If we spent any time with Rafe, a five-dollar bet was almost a guarantee, so we’d come prepared.

“Not fair,” he grumbled, but slapped down two fives onto the center of the table to match the ones we’d laid out. “But you can’t interfere.”

The waitress approached. “So what can I get for you three?” she asked.

“Ladies first,” Rafe said, nodding in Kristen’s direction.

I smiled to myself and settled in for an entertaining evening. My concern for Leese and the events of the previous day faded to the back of my mind.

Almost.

• • •

The next day was a bookmobile day, and our formerly perky trio of two people and a cat was decidedly unperked. Our shared dour mood could have been due to the weather, which though still warm, now included a layer of clouds so thick it was hard to believe the sun had come up and so low that if it dropped a few more feet it would be fog.

It was an indication of things to come. Thanks to the long periods of constant cloud cover in this part of the state, fall and winter were times when seasonal affective disorder roared through Tonedagana County at an epidemic level. Snow, with its reflective brightness, helped abate the worst of the symptoms, but I knew more and more people who were purchasing light therapy lamps. The results, I was told, could be impressive and I was thinking of getting one for my office.

But today, I was pretty sure it wasn’t the weather that was dampening our collective spirits. No, I would have bet the five dollars I’d won from Rafe that it was the memory of what had happened the last time we’d been out—finding Dale Lacombe’s dead body.

As we drove, time and again I tried to think of a conversation to start, and every time I came up with something that seemed too stupid to bother with. We didn’t need to talk about the weather; it was right there in front of us. Same thing with the changing colors on the trees. You can only point and say “Pretty!” so many times without feeling like a toddler overusing the one word in your vocabulary.

I could feel Julia glancing over at me every so often, and I knew she was also wrestling with what to say. Neither one of us wanted to talk about it, and neither one of us wanted to remember it, but the discovery of Dale Lacombe’s body was all we could think about.

Then, just a few miles before our first stop, I knew what I had to do. It was going to be ugly and I risked ridicule, but Julia and I had long ago made a pact that what happened on the bookmobile stayed on the bookmobile. I took a deep breath and started singing.

Julia’s head snapped to the left so fast I was worried about whiplash. “Seriously?” she asked.

I nodded and launched into the second line of the theme song to Gilligan’s Island. It was one of the few songs I knew from start to finish. My brother and I had been huge fans of the sitcom. Somewhere along the line, I’d also developed hand gestures to go with the words, but I couldn’t do those while driving.

Shaking her head and smiling, Julia started singing along and we pulled into the parking lot of the Village of Dooley’s fire station just as we finished the closing line. Timing is everything.

“Mrr.”

“Was that a criticism?” Julia asked, unbuckling her seat belt and leaning forward to unlatch the door of Eddie’s carrier. “Or were you asking for an encore? When you don’t enunciate your consonants, it’s hard to tell the difference.”

“Mrr!”

“Saying the same thing only louder doesn’t help me translate,” she said, watching as he leaped from floor to console to dashboard. “And don’t I wish I could move like that.”

“He’s young,” I reminded her. “When you were three and a half, you could probably—” I stopped and studied her. Though tall, lanky, and graceful, Julia had never struck me as the athletic type. “Sure is a nice day, isn’t it?”

She hooted with laughter. “You are one of a kind, Minnie Hamilton.”

“Mrr,” said our new dashboard ornament.

“You, too, of course.” Julia stood and patted him on the head, making his face bounce a little. After two pats, he ducked away, jumped down, and trotted to the rear of the bookmobile, where he sat down and stared at the back door.

“Does he think we’re going to keep it open again today?” Julia sounded amused.

“Please don’t ask me what a cat thinks,” I said. “Especially that one. His head may be big, but I’m not sure he’s always using the brains he has up there.”

Just then the bookmobile’s door opened.

Julia laughed. “Here you are, assuming he’s scamming for a chance to get outside when all the time he was serving as a watchcat, warning us of approaching patrons. And here’s our first of the . . . oh.” Her voice gave an unusual squeak. “Good morning, Leese. It’s . . . nice to see you.”

“And you.” Leese’s face, which two days earlier had been a cheerful and rosy-cheeked tan, now looked worn and pale. She heaved herself up the last two steps, leaned down to give Eddie a pat, then stood tall, squared her shoulders, and looked at me.

“I know this isn’t where I usually meet the bookmobile, but I found the route schedule on your website and drove out here. I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes, if you have time.” She nodded at Julia. “Both of you.”

The door opened again and small feet clambered up the stairs. “Is the bookmobile kitty here?” a high-pitched voice asked.

“I want to pet Eddie!” called a different child’s voice.

“Say good morning to the bookmobile ladies first,” said a man.

“Good morning, bookmobile ladies,” kid number one said.

“Morning,” said kid number two. “Can I pet Eddie now?”

Julia glanced at Leese and me. “Talk away. I’ll take care of them,” she said, and moved off to do so.

“Shall we adjourn to my office?” I asked, and we walked to the front. I unlocked the driver’s seat and rotated it to face the back.

Leese sat on the carpeted step and looked up at me. “I owe you some explanations,” she said.

But I was already shaking my head. “You don’t owe me a thing, so please don’t say anything you’re not comfortable telling.”

She half smiled. “And that’s why I owe you; because you don’t feel I owe you anything.”

“That almost makes sense,” I said, “but not quite. Either way, feel free to not explain.”

She looked at the floor, then up at me. “How about if I want to?”

“Different story altogether. If you need a friend, if you need to talk, then talk away.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “My local friends are old ones, but they’ve built lives that don’t have room for me right now. And though I’m making new friends, that takes time.”

“I know.” And I did. I’d had the luck to fall back into instant friendship with Kristen and Rafe when I’d made the permanent move to Chilson, but it had taken months and years to develop new relationships. Small towns meant small tight circles of friends, and if you didn’t have children in school or a workplace to meet people, finding friends could take a lot of work.

She waited a beat, then nodded. “First I have to thank you for calling and checking up on me. I should have called you back right away, but . . .” She sighed. “I wasn’t up to it and I’m sorry.”

I remembered the message I’d left for her to call. I’d worried a little about the silence, but had decided to wait another day or two before trying again. “No need to apologize,” I said.

“Okay, then. First off, no matter what you hear, they didn’t arrest me. I was held for twenty-four hours in the county jail for cause, and was released after the medical examiner’s preliminary findings came out. My father had been dead longer than they’d thought. With so much time having passed between the murder and finding him in the truck, the window of opportunity expanded exponentially.”

I’d followed her words, but got lost in the syllables toward the end. “So what you’re saying is anyone could have done it?”

“At this point they’re not even saying if it was murder.”

“Um . . .”

She rolled her eyes. “I know; why else would his body end up in the truck if it hadn’t been murder? The sheriff is just being cautious, I suppose.”

“Cautious” wasn’t a word I would have used to describe the almost frighteningly capable Sheriff Kit Richardson, whose toughness was legendary. Some of the stories about the fifty-something sheriff had to be apocryphal, but with my own eyes I’d seen her take down a man a hundred pounds heavier and a foot taller with little more than a fierce glance. And she was an Eddie fan, so all in all I found her to be a role model of the highest order.

“They’d like to arrest me, though,” Leese said conversationally.

My eyebrows went up. “You sound pretty calm about it.”

“Only on the outside. My guilt would be an easy resolution for them. Father and daughter get into an argument, daughter kills him—either accidentally or not—and she hides the body in his truck until she can find a way to get rid of it.” She made a tossing gesture. “The Mitchell River Valley is only a couple of miles from that church where you stopped the other day.”

I didn’t need a map to see what she meant. Planning the bookmobile route had carved Tonedagana County’s features deep into my brain cells. “They think the state forest is a good place for . . .”

“For disposing a body?” She shrugged. “It’s a big place. Winter’s coming on. With a little work you could bury a body and have it hidden until spring, if not longer.”

I shied away from thinking about the logistics and zeroed in on something else. “That truck was your dad’s?”

She made a noise that wasn’t quite a snort but wasn’t exactly a laugh, either. “For the first time in years, I asked my dad for a favor, and that’s the piece of crap I got. It needed more work than my SUV did.”

My eyebrows wanted to go up, but I kept them firmly in place. “You and your dad didn’t get along?”

“Let me think how to answer that.” She stretched her legs out straight, her heels thumping the floor. “And the answer is no, not since I was three years old. That’s when he took off for greener pastures. If I was lucky, I saw him every other weekend. If I was unlucky”—she grimaced—“I saw him more often.”

“Rafe Niswander and Kristen Jurek are friends of mine,” I said. “Kristen said you’re a great softball player.”

“That, from the blond bomber?” This time Leese’s smile looked real. “I’d love to see her again. And Rafe, too. Is he still as cute as ever?”

I blinked. Somehow I’d never thought much about Rafe’s looks. Of course, now that I was thinking about it, he did have a lot going for him. White teeth, high cheekbones, easy smile, thick black hair, and a flat stomach that didn’t reveal how much beer he seemed to consume. “He’s mostly annoying.”

“Same old Rafe, then.” She laughed softly.

“They said your dad came to a lot of your softball games.”

“Only until it became obvious I wasn’t good enough to get a college scholarship. After that, my stepmother was the one who brought my step-sibs to the home games.”

That hadn’t been how I remembered Kristen telling it, but no doubt Leese had a better memory for those events. “What was with your SUV?”

She made a face. “The transmission went out a week ago. My car guy said if I didn’t mind waiting, he could get me a rebuilt one cheap, but I’d have to wait until the summer people were gone.”

Wincing, I said, “Even a rebuilt is expensive, isn’t it?”

“Which is why I sucked it up and asked my dad for a loaner. My law practice is going to take a while to be profitable and I don’t want to spend more of my savings than I have to.”

“He had an extra truck?”

She nodded. “He’s one of those guys who always looks like he’s having a party, there’s so many vehicles in the driveway. But when I asked to borrow one for a couple of months, he tried giving me this long sob story about how he needed all the trucks for his crew. I got tired of it halfway through, opened my wallet, pulled out some bills, and held them out. The look on his face was priceless. I was so proud of myself for shutting him up that I almost laughed.”

Her gaze drifted away. “I got a friend to drop me off at his house later that day, and when I drove off in his truck, he didn’t even come out, just stood in the doorway watching me with his arms crossed. It was the last time I saw him until . . . until two days ago.”

I came around and sat down next to her, putting my arms around her as she started to sob. Because even if her father hadn’t been much of a dad, he was the only one she would ever have.

And now he was gone.