Yes, for forty-four years.
Are you forty-four?
I am. I’m as old as the dirt in your backyard.
LOL. You’re actually a year younger than my dad, although older than my aunts and uncles.
I wrote—Who are your aunts and uncles?—and hit send. I knew immediately that it was a mistake. I was pushing too hard too fast. Probably Elliot thought so as well. It took a few long moments before he replied.
When I decided to take the DNA test my father told me to be careful what I revealed about myself to strangers.
That’s very good advice. I probably would have told you the same thing myself.
Do you have children?
I flashed on Erica, Victoria, and Katie yet typed No just the same.
I was an only child. My mother died when I was twelve and my father, the man I thought was my father, passed about ten years ago. I didn’t have any other family that I knew of. When I did the DNA test, I thought I would only find sixth or seventh cousins. Imagine my surprise.
I waited a few more long moments before Elliot replied.
I can’t imagine. I have no idea what you must be going through.
I admit I’ve had my ups and downs at first. Now I just want information.
Would you like to meet?
Yes, but you should check with your father first. I’m sure he’d have a few words to say about meeting strangers.
Yes, he would. You should have heard the lecture he and Mom gave me before I went to college freshman year. I didn’t know they had such a low opinion of men.
I’m confused. You’re not a man?
LOL. I get that a lot because of my name. My friends mostly call me Ellie.
Well, Ellie, I would very much like to meet you. But I want you to feel safe; I want you to feel comfortable. You pick the location and bring as many friends and relatives as you want.
Now you really do sound like my dad.
Which is what brought me to Northfield, about a forty-five-minute drive south of Minneapolis if you obeyed the prevailing traffic laws.
MONDAY, MAY 18 (LATE AFTERNOON)
I ate a pretty good burrito in Kahlo Restaurante Mexicano while I waited for Elliot, although that’s not where we had arranged to meet. Instead, she asked me to find her at CakeWalk, where we could get a decent cup of coffee along with custom cakes and desserts, located directly across Division Street from where I was sitting. I was watching the front door because I wanted to see Elliot when she arrived; I wanted to see who her friends were. Mostly, though, I wanted to see if she drove there from Carleton College, where she was majoring in English with a minor in creative writing. A license plate number could be very helpful, I told myself.
Elliot appeared a good ten minutes before I was scheduled to arrive, which I thought was intentional. She did not drive. Instead, she had walked the half mile from the dorms at Carleton. She had four friends with her, three guys and one woman. I identified her by the way she seemed to be giving instructions to the others. The three guys were big enough that they could give me a hard time if they knew how to handle themselves, which I doubted. The woman was petite, with bright blond hair cut short. Elliot had long auburn hair that she wore in a ponytail.
All five of them went inside the CakeWalk. I took my time finishing the burrito and a bottle of Mexican Coca-Cola, which was sweetened with cane sugar instead of that high-fructose corn syrup crap you get in the United States, policed my table, and stepped across the street. I arrived at CakeWalk two minutes before the appointed hour. One of the guys and the woman I had assumed was Elliot were sitting together on a black leather sofa in front of a coffee table. The other two guys were sharing a small table against the wall. The petite blonde was sitting between them at an undersized pink picnic table beneath a sign that read I NEVER MET A PROBLEM A CUPCAKE COULDN’T FIX.
It was the blonde who stood when I entered.
“Mr. McKenzie?” she asked.
“Ms. Elliot?” I said.
She stepped toward me as I approached. She seemed to be debating whether she should hug me or not. I solved the dilemma by offering my hand.
“Thank you for seeing me, Elliot,” I said.
“You’re welcome, cousin. Should I call you cousin?”
“McKenzie is fine.”
We sat at the table and stared at each other for a few beats. She had one of those round faces that made it easy to imagine what she had looked like as a baby—dimples, big bright eyes, easy smile. She was cute. She’d be cute when she was sixty.
I gestured toward the glass cases at the far end of the café loaded with desserts. Two employees were standing guard behind them.
“May I buy you coffee?” I asked. “A cupcake?”
“Thank you,” Elliot said. She gave me her order and I stood. “What about your friends?” My wave carried over the three men and the second woman. “What can I get you guys? Know what—just order what you want. I got this.”
They glanced at one another as if they were surprised while I made my way to the glass cases. I bought a café mocha and a cupcake called a Sassy Cass with a raspberry on top for Elliot—kids, I thought—and a black coffee for myself. I left my credit card with the waitress and motioned at the others. They were already lining up to order. The young woman with the ponytail said, “Thank you. You’re very kind.”
“Not at all.”
“How did you know we were together?”
“Experience.”
“You’re an interesting man.”
Did she think you were interesting in the way that you might think someone you just met at a party was interesting, my inner voice asked, or did she Google you? Take my word—search for McKenzie Minneapolis and you’ll find all kinds of weird stuff.
While the CakeWalk staff made the mocha, I took the cupcake and black coffee back to the pink picnic table and set them down. Elliot smiled at me.
“I hope you don’t mind that I brought my friends,” she said.
“Truthfully, it would have broken my heart to learn that a woman who was related to me would be dumb enough to meet a stranger alone.”
Elliot scooped the raspberry out of the frosting of her cupcake with her index finger. “Cousins,” she said, and ate the raspberry.
We chatted mostly about Carleton College. Elliot liked it there. It was a good school, she said, and small. “Intimate, you know?” It was far enough from her home in St. Paul that she could get away from her nosy family, yet close enough that she could reach out whenever she needed help.
While we chatted, two of the guys returned to their stations. The third said, “Ellie.”
She didn’t move.
“Elliot,” he barked.
Elliot’s head came up as if she was surprised to hear her name spoken aloud.
“Your café mocha.” The man gave her a white cardboard coffee cup with a brown cardboard sleeve.
“Thank you,” she said.
Meanwhile, the other young woman had settled back into the leather sofa. She was behind me, yet I was aware that she was leaning toward the picnic table, trying to hear every word we spoke while pretending not to. I nearly asked her to join us but decided against it. Why ruin her fun?
“About your family,” I said.
“I’m not sure what to tell you,” Elliot said. “I texted my father after we chatted online, but I couldn’t get ahold of him.”
“Instead of texting, did you think to actually call him?”
Elliot had a quizzical expression on her face, as if I had suddenly switched from English to a foreign language.
“I’d be happy to speak to your father,” I said. “I’ll give you my number. You can have him call me. It might be better that way. Secrets have been kept from me for forty-four years. No doubt they have been kept from much of your family for the same length of time. You don’t necessarily want to be the one to reveal them. It’s liable to cause a lot of tension. I know I’m tense.”
Elliot tilted her head just eno
ugh to look past me without seeming like it. I realized that she was taking cues from the young woman behind me.
“Your profile on the website—Dee Dee?” she asked.
“Name of a girl I used to date when I was about your age.”
“Why Dee Dee? Why not use your real name?”
“I guess I wanted to find out who I was related to before they found out they were related to me.”
“Is that because you’re a millionaire?”
“That and other reasons. I didn’t know I was going to learn what I learned.”
“You found Jelly’s gold. You saved that super rich woman’s life—Riley Muehlenhaus.”
I shrugged at the references.
“You did your homework,” I said. “Good for you.”
“You help people.”
“When I can.”
Elliot glanced around me again.
“You could be helpful to us,” she said.
“In what way?”
“Things in my family are going kerflooey.”
“‘Kerflooey’?”
“It’s a real word. An adjective. It means awry or kaput. It dates back to 1918.”
“You really are an English major. That doesn’t answer my question, though.”
I heard a voice behind me. “McKenzie.” I turned to face the young woman sitting there. “What’s your blood type?”
I didn’t know Dave Deese’s blood type. Why would I? So I gave her mine without hesitating so she’d know I was telling the truth.
“A-negative,” I said. “Why?”
She didn’t answer, but her eyes grew wide with surprise.
“That’s rare,” she said. “Only one in sixteen people have A-neg blood.”
“So I’ve been told. Why?”
“Just … thinking. I don’t know how DNA works.”
“I’m not sure it has anything to do with blood type.” I spun back to the woman who called herself Elliot. “What’s your blood type?”
“O-positive. Does that mean we’re not compatible?”
“Like I said, I don’t think blood type enters into it—DNA, I mean.”
Elliot glanced around me again.
“I need to get back to campus,” she said.
She stood up.
I stood up.
The three guys and the young woman stood up, too.
“I need to speak to my father,” Elliot said. “I hope you understand.”
“I do understand.” I fished a business card from my pocket printed with only my name and cell number and gave it to her. “I’d appreciate it if you gave him this.”
“I will.”
“Don’t believe everything you read about me online, either. Most of the stories have been greatly exaggerated.”
Elliot smiled brightly.
“Thank you for coming down here to see me,” she said.
“It was my great pleasure. I hope to see you again.”
All five of the students made their way to the exit. I called to them as they were passing through the door.
“Elliot.”
Only instead of the petite blonde, it was the young woman with the auburn ponytail who turned her head.
“I like clever girls,” I told her.
* * *
My notes didn’t end there, of course. Only Shipman was getting a little antsy hanging around my place alone. She transferred my notes to a thumb drive and turned off the computer. Give her props—when she finished the beer, she at least had the courtesy to rinse out the bottle and drop it in the recyclable bin. Either that or she was hiding the evidence.
She left the condominium and took the elevator to the ground floor. Smith and Jones were waiting for her at the security desk. They told Shipman that they had been granted permission by their employers to share their security camera footage without demanding subpoenas and such. They motioned her behind the desk and gave her a chair in front of one of their computer screens.
“By the way,” Smith said. Or was it Jones? “I remembered the woman’s name. We didn’t write it down because, like I said, we didn’t check her in. I remember asking—here.”
He manipulated the computer keyboard and an image of a woman appeared. She entered the building and approached the desk, an envelope in her hand. She extended her hand and Jones took the envelope. She turned and made to leave, but paused. When she paused Smith or Jones tapped a key and image on the computer screen froze.
“I asked her what her name was,” he said. “There was no name on the envelope so I asked her what name I should give McKenzie. And she paused. You can see her pausing as if she didn’t know if she should answer or not and then she did.”
Smith or Jones started the video again and Shipman could see the woman pause, utter a word, and walk away.
He halted the video again.
“Elliot. I asked her who I should say delivered the envelope and she said ‘Elliot.’”
Shipman felt a thrill of excitement run through her body, yet beat it down. She was convinced that Smith and Jones had just solved her case for her, only she didn’t want them to know it. As it was, Shipman stared at the image of the woman, once again frozen on the screen. She saw blond hair and a round face. She didn’t see bright eyes, an easy smile, or dimples. She didn’t see cute, either. The more she stared the more she saw a face that seemed beaten down. ’Course, that could have been caused by the quality of the video, she told herself. Or not.
Shipman leaned back in her chair.
“It’s never this easy,” she said.
SEVEN
Bobby Dunston and Mason Gafford knew two things almost immediately when they arrived on the scene. The first was that it wasn’t an armed robbery, after all. The second was that it was sure to become a “fucktard” story, one that cops would tell for years to come whenever the topic of how completely nuts people can be came up in conversation, which was frequently. Bobby didn’t care much for the term itself; he thought it was derogatory. ’Course, cop slang often was. It referred to someone who was not mentally challenged, yet acted as if they were. Case in point—actually, there were a couple of people to point fingers at.
Start with the young woman who had yet to go to bed and sleep off the hard partying she had engaged in the evening before. She had gone to the fast-food joint while still wearing her short, sequin dress and demanded a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich with decaf coffee and a hash brown patty on the side. If her dress hadn’t been enough to demand the attention of the administrative coordinator working out of the St. Paul school district, her high-pitched voice was. He admired her from a distance because she was both stacked and old enough not to be a student—apparently the school district had rules.
Unfortunately, the kid working behind the counter said he was unable to serve the young woman a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich with decaf coffee and a hash brown patty on the side because the restaurant stopped serving its breakfast menu at ten thirty A.M. sharp and it was now ten thirty-seven. The woman didn’t care. She wanted a goddamned sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich with decaf coffee and a hash brown patty on the side and she wanted it now. She told the kid to stop being “anal-retentive,” was the word she used. After all, it was only seven minutes past the deadline and she was wearing a short, sequin dress that showed off her chest, so c’mon.
The kid didn’t comment on the short, sequin dress or her chest, but did say that he was sorry; the ten thirty shut-off time could not be ignored, the instructions coming down from corporate itself. Could he interest her in a burger or a crispy chicken sandwich, instead? The woman would accept no substitutes, however. To prove it, she pulled a small handgun from her bag, waved it at the kid, and said she would have a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich with decaf coffee and a hash brown patty on the side “by any means necessary.”
The administrative coordinator had been watching the exchange between the counter kid and the young woman from his booth with increasing amusement. He had made up his mind to intervene on t
he woman’s behalf; it would give him the opportunity to get to know her better, so to speak. When she pulled her gun, though, he pulled his, a Kimber Micro 9 Stainless Raptor—the man had a Permit to Carry a Pistol issued by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department. He testified later that he had been waiting for a moment like this for years. He shot at the woman; emptied his gun, in fact; six rounds in the mag and one in the throat. He missed her completely, although he did graze the shoulder of the kid behind the counter and blast apart a lot of the equipment, including a coffee machine that began leaking everywhere.
The woman took exception to being used for target practice and turned on the coordinator.
“What is wrong with you?” she wanted to know.
“You have a gun,” he reminded her.
She pointed it at him and squeezed the trigger.
A steady stream of water hit him right between the eyes.
She laughed.
He whacked her in the face as hard as he could with the butt of the handgun, knocking her down.
That’s when the police officer arrived.
He saw the woman writhing on the floor, blood pouring from her nose and upper lip.
He saw the kid holding his arm, blood seeping between his fingers.
He saw the smashed and leaking coffee machine behind the kid.
He saw the man waving his Kimber nine-millimeter handgun and screaming, “It’s all her fault!”
The officer drew his Taser and hit him with 50,000 volts.
By the time Bobby and Gafford had arrived, the counter kid was being treated by an EMT for what the kid clearly thought was a life-threatening wound but the EMT diagnosed as superficial.
“If it were up to me, I would have given her a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich with decaf coffee and a hash brown patty on the side,” the kid said. “But corporate … They’re going to be so upset.”
Both the man and woman had been taken into custody and were being held in the backs of separate patrol cars. During questioning, they were both adamant that they had done nothing wrong, the man in particular. He kept insisting that he had “acted within my God-given Second Amendment rights” and that “the St. Paul Police Department would pay for its racist behavior” because the officer who tased him looked like he had Hispanic origins. As for the woman, apparently her twenty-three years on the planet had prepared her for days like this.
What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel Page 9