Early Morning Riser

by Katherine Heiny

  Dr. Haven shook his head. “I saw him there Monday afternoon. My wife and I were driving to her brother’s house, and I saw Jimmy and that friend of his, right on Main Street.”

  “I’ll ask him about it,” Jane said doubtfully.

  “I think it’s best if he stays here in town unless you or Duncan is with him.” Dr. Haven picked up his medical bag. “Here in town everyone looks out for him, everyone knows him and can help him if he needs it. I don’t like to think of Jimmy out dealing with strangers. Oh, and one more thing. You might want to have Olivia Ness’s and Sydney Swan’s mothers give me a little call. Looks to me like they both have the beginnings of conjunctivitis.”

  * * *

  —

  The mayor was unable to come to school because he was having his wisdom teeth removed, so he sent the assistant health inspector, a man named Kelvin Dunn. Jane already knew Kelvin because he ran a roofing business on the side and had replaced the gutters on her house three years earlier.

  Kelvin entered the classroom dragging three enormous cellophane bags. He asked Jane and Mr. Robicheaux to wheel in the television from the AV room so he could show a short film, and while they did that, Kelvin gave each child a straw boater with a red-white-and-blue hatband, a patriotic plastic pinwheel, a flowered plastic lei, and a bright red woven-nylon shopping bag. He’d obviously stepped into City Hall’s storeroom and helped himself to leftover Fourth of July bounty. Jane was pleased, even though the classroom now sounded like a grove of palm trees in a strong wind, due to all the rustling plastic. The boaters were too big and slipped down on the children’s foreheads, and they peered out from under the brims, beady-eyed.

  Kelvin gave a short talk about the importance of health inspections, and then Joshua Curry, apparently still thinking Kelvin was the mayor, asked how many people would have to die in the line of succession before Kelvin became president.

  “Oh, gosh, I don’t know,” Kelvin said. “Most of civilization, I guess.”

  Still, it all went very well until they lowered the lights and started the videotape, which was called FDA Standards: What You Should Know. Jane saw the title and felt a flicker of unease. The film didn’t start out that badly—it was mainly short clips of peanut-butter factories and tuna canneries and an unseen male narrator talking about food-preparation guidelines. But then the television screen filled with a close-up of a glass bowl full of brown powder, and the narrator proclaimed solemnly, “For every fifty grams of cinnamon, the FDA allows up to ten rodent hairs and four hundred insect fragments,” and a girl from Mr. Robicheaux’s class named Jasmine Bigelow cried out, “I had cinnamon toast for breakfast!” and burst into traumatized tears.

  Kelvin stopped the film, and Jane turned on the lights, but Jasmine couldn’t calm down. Mr. Robicheaux had to escort her to the nurse’s office, and they could all hear Jasmine’s cries as she went down the hall, her voice nearly breaking on the second word. “Cinnamon toast! Cinnamon toast! Cinnamon toast!”

  Jane shut the door to the hallway.

  “I sure am sorry about that, Jane,” Kelvin said.

  “Oh, now, I’m certain Jasmine will be just fine,” she said, although she was pretty sure Jasmine would never eat cinnamon toast again. She might never eat breakfast again, period.

  “Can we watch the rest of the movie?” Nicholas King asked, and the other children squinted at her from under their boater brims.

  “No,” Jane said. “It’s almost time for recess.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Christopher Goodman. “Recess is at ten fifteen. It says so on the schedule.” (Those early readers could be problematic.)

  “This is a special recess,” Jane told him. “So special it’s not even on the schedule.”

  “Oh,” Christopher said. Jane regretted having used that excuse so early in the year. It generally only worked once.

  “Everyone, please thank Mr. Dunn for coming,” she said. “And then you may all put on your coats.”

  The children clapped, and Joshua asked to shake Kelvin’s hand on the off chance that he did become president someday, and then they all ran over to the line of coat hooks against the outer walls of both classrooms.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” Jane said to Kelvin. “The Fourth of July stuff was a big hit.”

  “Oh, that was no problem.” Kelvin was shrugging into his own bright blue windbreaker. “But I wanted to ask you: Who’s that fella living with Jimmy?”

  “That’s Willard Williams,” Jane said. “But he doesn’t live at Jimmy’s. He lives in the Schroders’ granny flat.”

  “Nobody’s living in the Schroders’ granny flat except their granny.”

  Jane frowned. “I thought she died.”

  “Nope, that was Mark’s mother-in-law over in Kalkaska.” Kelvin zipped up his windbreaker. “Mark’s mother still lives there. I know because I was over there on Sunday, cleaning their ground-level traps, and Mark was outside talking to me when Aggie Polnichik comes driving up and says, ‘Mark, I have the perfect tenant for your garage apartment,’ and Mark sort of hollers up at the granny flat, ‘Ma, how would you like a roommate?’ You know how he likes to joke around—”

  “Willard’s probably still at the City Motel in that case,” Jane said.

  Kelvin shook his head. “Oh, no, I saw him going into Jimmy’s with two big suitcases. And Marie Henderson at Glen’s told me that Jimmy bought family packs of cereal and potato chips and told her he was eating for two, and she figured that was Jimmy’s way of saying he had a roommate.”

  Yes, it probably was. Jane was fluent in Jimmy’s language, too.

  * * *

  —

  Jane used her key to let herself into Jimmy’s house.

  “Willard?” she called. “Willard?” But that was just a formality. She knew from the dry, dusty silence of the house that no one was home. Jimmy would be at work, and Willard must be off somewhere. She closed the door behind her and went upstairs.

  Mrs. Jellico’s bedroom was so dim and depressing that it wouldn’t have surprised Jane to find Mrs. Jellico’s body still lying in state there. The room was crowded with bulky furniture laminated in a tortoiseshell finish, and yellowed lace doilies covered the tabletops. The bedspread was fringed pink chenille, and the bedside lamp bases were white porcelain festooned with large pink porcelain roses. Jane could hardly believe Willard had chosen to sleep here, even when faced with the City Motel, but he clearly had: a suitcase lay open on the floor, its contents untidily stirred, and a men’s leather toiletry case rested on top of the dresser.

  Jane paused for a moment, her hand resting nervously on her throat, where she could feel her pulse beating. She glanced over her shoulder even though she knew the hall behind her was empty. Then she crossed the room and knelt by Willard’s suitcase. She lifted the clothes carefully with one hand while she ran the other along the bottom of the suitcase. Her fingers felt only the soft suitcase lining—no papers or envelopes or boxes or whatever she was looking for. She wasn’t even sure. She looked at the clothes themselves. She recognized several of the big, loose button-down shirts Willard favored, and the shabby corduroys and khakis. The usual jumble of boxers and pajamas and undershirts, all faded and worn. Only one item of clothing looked new, and Jane pulled it out carefully and shook it open. A long-sleeved black shirt with boyne mountain staff embroidered on the left breast pocket. She refolded it and tucked it back into the suitcase.

  Jane went downstairs and stood for a moment in the front hall, her hand on the door handle, her feet in the pie wedges of afternoon sunshine that shone through the fanlight above the front door. She turned and hurried into the kitchen. She took down the Humpty Dumpty cookie jar and removed the worn envelope from inside. She had put forty dollars in there just three days ago. She opened the envelope flap and ran her thumb across the greenish-white edges of the bills inside. Then she pulled the bills out s
lightly so she could see the denominations. Seven twenties. One hundred and forty dollars.

  “Thought I should chip in now that I’m living here,” Willard said from behind her, and Jane’s hands clenched so violently, she nearly tore the money in half.

  “Goodness! You scared me to death,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  Willard didn’t reply.

  “I was just seeing if Jimmy needed any more money for groceries this week.” Jane’s voice sounded false and tinny, even to her.

  “I think we’re okay,” Willard said.

  “Of course you are.” Jane swallowed. “Of course.”

  She returned the envelope to the cookie jar with trembling fingers while Willard watched in silence. She said good-bye and hurried out to her car, shame puddling at her heels like a shadow.

  * * *

  —

  They decided to cancel Taco Tuesday that week because Gary had chipped an incisor opening a bottle of hot sauce with his teeth and Freida had strained her voice by trying to reach top C during choir practice. Jane was relieved—she didn’t want to see Willard again so soon.

  Besides, she liked to have nights alone with Duncan. She picked up Chinese food for their dinner on her way home from school. Her neighbor, Clifford Graves, was out in his yard blowing leaves when she got home. He was a ranger at Young State Park, and he looked like an overgrown Boy Scout in his khaki uniform. He was an angular blond man in his late twenties, and though Jane found him somewhat hyper and excitable—watching him use a leaf blower right now was like watching a man fend off an attack of invisible bees—she liked him a lot.

  “Hiya, Jane!” Clifford turned off the leaf blower and hailed her with it when she got out of her car. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right,” she called back. The wind undid her ponytail and her hair rippled in the breeze. “How are you?”

  “I’m good!” he called. “You ought to bring your class out to the nature center. We got a new tarantula for the terrarium, and we let people hold her. She hasn’t bitten anyone yet, so we don’t think she’s going to.”

  The thought of Clifford handling a tarantula was so alarming that Jane missed the next thing he said. “What?” she called.

  “I said, did Jimmy find his friend?” Clifford shouted.

  Jane went to the bottom of her driveway so she could hear him better. “What friend?”

  “That friend who lives with him,” Clifford said. “Willard. I saw Jimmy in the hardware store, and he was asking the cashier if she’s seen him.”

  Jane looked at him, frowning. “Why would Jimmy be looking for Willard in the hardware store?”

  “That’s what the cashier said,” Clifford answered. “She said, ‘How would I know? This here is the hardware store, not missing persons.’ And Jimmy said—”

  A car drove down the street then, and both Jane and Clifford backed up. By the time the car had passed, Clifford had started up his leaf blower again and conversation was impossible. Jane could feel the cartons of Chinese food cooling in her hands, so she waved good-bye and hurried into the house.

  * * *

  —

  When the principal’s secretary, Ms. Lowry, interrupted Literacy Workshop the next day to tell Jane that the sheriff was waiting to speak to her in the main office, Jane’s first thought was that she’d forgotten to put the sheriff on the guest-speaker calendar. That’s how caught up in the Community Unit she was.

  But Ms. Lowry’s face was tense and watchful. “You go ahead, Jane,” she said. “I’ll take over class.”

  Jane had never known Ms. Lowry to do this. She looked at the children worriedly. It was a bad day for substitutions, a bad day for disruption—the wind had been blowing hard since morning, making the dead leaves whip around the schoolyard like a thousand scampering chipmunks. Windy days were hard teaching days; it made the children glittery-eyed and impulsive. Maybe it was the low barometric pressure, or maybe it was something more instinctual, more primitive.

  “Okay,” Jane said slowly. “We were just doing fill-in-the-blank worksheets for sight words.” She handed Ms. Lowry her own paper. “If you read aloud, they can follow along.”

  She left the classroom and walked down the hall to the office, her pulse beating in her temples. A car accident, she thought. It must be a car accident. The other half of whatever terrible event she had put in motion on the night Jimmy’s mother was killed.

  The sheriff, his brown uniform with gold braid vivid against the drab surroundings, was standing next to Ms. Lowry’s empty desk with his arms crossed, talking to the principal, Mr. Hawthorn. Jane knew the sheriff slightly—his wife ran a catering company, and Jane had booked them for her wedding reception, for the wedding to Luke that hadn’t happened.

  “Here she is now,” Mr. Hawthorn said. “Jane, please feel free to use my office.”

  Another first. Entrance to Mr. Hawthorn’s office was normally more restricted than the first-class lounge at an airport.

  “Hello, Sheriff,” Jane said. “Has there been an accident?”

  “No, no.” The sheriff shook his head. “Everyone’s okay. Let’s go in here, shall we?” He held the door of Mr. Hawthorn’s office for her. He creaked when he moved, the leather of his duty belt rubbing against his handgun holster, radio pouch, and baton holder. It was a harsh, rasping sound.

  “Now,” the sheriff said as soon as he had shut the door. “First off, I want you to know that Duncan is with Jimmy, and they are both perfectly fine.”

  “Duncan?” Jane asked.

  The sheriff took her arm gently and led her to the small green sofa near the window. She sat down and he sat next to her, leather squeaking again.

  The sheriff’s voice was calm, unhurried—the voice of someone who is used to relaying information to people who might not be listening carefully. “Now, what happened is that Jimmy didn’t show up for work today, and when he wasn’t there by midmorning, Duncan called him,” he said. “Jimmy takes his job very seriously. Duncan said he’d never missed work before without calling.”

  “No, he would never do that,” Jane said worriedly. “Has anyone checked his house? Maybe he’s ill.”

  “When Jimmy didn’t answer the phone, Duncan went over to the house and rang the doorbell,” the sheriff continued. “After ten minutes of knocking and hollering and looking through the windows, he gave up and began looking for Jimmy around town, at Glen’s and the library and places like that. And eventually he found him, more or less by coincidence, over on Ray Street. Apparently, Jimmy had been up since daybreak, going house to house on foot, asking if anyone had seen his friend Willard.”

  Jane rubbed her forehead. “Yes, someone told me he was asking around.”

  “Jimmy was very worked up, almost hysterical,” the sheriff said. His voice was still deliberate. “Duncan got him to get in the van and calmed him down a little. You know how good Duncan is with Jimmy, Jane. Anyway, they went back to Jimmy’s house—Duncan thought Jimmy probably hadn’t eaten in hours and had the idea that breakfast might calm him down. But Jimmy was too upset to eat and couldn’t stop saying they needed to find his friend. Finally, Duncan said if it would make Jimmy feel better, he’d call the police and see if there’d been an accident, and Jimmy said, ‘No, no, you can’t call the police because they’ll ask me for the money.’ ”

  “Money?” Jane asked. “This is about money?”

  “Yes, these things usually are,” the sheriff said bitterly. “Duncan got the whole story out of Jimmy, eventually, but it was fairly garbled, and it took Duncan a while to make sense of it. Apparently, Jimmy’s friend, this Willard Williams, convinced Jimmy to take out a personal loan from a bank in Grayling, using Jimmy’s house as collateral. Duncan said Willard had evidently been pressuring Jimmy for weeks, promising that he would double the money on the stock market, and Jimmy believed him bec
ause—”

  “Because Jimmy believes everything,” Jane finished softly.

  “Yes, it seems that he does,” the sheriff said. He shifted creakily. “At any rate, the bank approved the loan, and Willard had them deposit the money in an account in both his and Jimmy’s names. Now, if they’d tried to do that at a bank here in town, the bank manager would’ve called you, or even me. Tim Kelly at Citizen State or Frank Bradley at Huntington, both of them good men, friends of mine…” The sheriff shrugged sadly. “Well, I guess Willard knew better than to try it here. Anyway, this was ten days ago, and since then Willard has been driving all over the state, draining the account by writing different cashier’s checks to himself. He would do this while Jimmy was at work and then be home in the evening, so Jimmy didn’t suspect anything. And then two days ago, he up and disappeared.”

  Jane swallowed. “How much was the loan?”

  The sheriff grimaced. “Eighty thousand dollars.”

  Jane felt dizzy. It seemed as though eighty thousand moths had swarmed in front of her, blocking her vision. She blinked rapidly. “A bank lent Jimmy eighty thousand dollars?”

  “Well, you know what the economy’s like,” the sheriff said. “Banks are practically begging people to borrow.”

  Good for the economy, Jane thought. Good for the banks. But what about Jimmy?

  “Now, I’ve got people out looking for Willard,” the sheriff said. “But that’s not his real name, and Boyne Mountain doesn’t have anyone fitting his description on their books.”

  But he had a Boyne Mountain staff shirt, Jane thought, and then winced at her own naïveté. It would be so easy to steal a shirt like that. They even sold them at the thrift store sometimes—no one knew that better than Jane.

  The sheriff was still talking. “That Buick Willard was driving was unregistered, bought just six weeks ago. It looks like he was planning this for a long time, and I’m sure it’s not the first time he’s done it, but I’m hoping he let something slip while he was here, some personal detail that can help us find him. Jimmy’s not in good enough shape to remember much at all, and Duncan says Willard was pretty tight-lipped about his past. Can you remember anything about him? Anything he might have said about his personal life or background that would help us?”