Widow

by Martha Miller

  The year they’d gone down to Shawnee camping in her new Jeep, they’d gotten up at five and started driving south. Down one hundred miles on the Interstate, they’d woven their way around a constant stream of big trucks. Doree had slept in the tiny backseat, and Toni slept in the passenger seat with her head back and her mouth open. They’d argued that morning, but Bertha couldn’t remember what it was about then or now. As she’d driven, she realized that a relationship like theirs was made up of an infinite number of negotiations. Bertha took the exit to a two-lane state route south of St. Louis. It ran through small towns and flat farmland. She’d been alone with her thoughts in the morning mist, much like the mist that hung over the frontage road and grassy area now. She’d had such a sense of peace that morning, such a strong sense that life was good.

  Bertha wondered if memories would always be this way to some degree. She thought about Toni every day and doubtless would until she had nothing left to think with. Some things couldn’t be undone, and losing Toni was one of them. From the start she’d been so busy reacting that she hadn’t had time to consider what she could make of her life without Toni. Often, like now, she ran the old tapes, the big events in their lives, just so she didn’t forget.

  Below she heard a door slam and watched someone walk across the parking lot and, with a key, unlock a truck door. It must have been an old truck because no one used keys anymore. The remote was on the key ring; even some starters were on remote. Bertha leaned forward to get a better look. Something was familiar. As the headlights came on and the truck started to move, Bertha heard Norman Bates crying. He’d wake Doree if he kept it up. She stood, went inside, and saw that Doree was in the bathroom. The toilet flushed, water in the sink ran, and then Doree stood in the doorway, the light from the bathroom behind her.

  “Where you been?”

  “Just outside,” Bertha said. “I wanted to make a phone call.”

  Doree rubbed her eyes with her fist. “This early?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Norman Bates woke me.”

  They both looked at the cat. Bertha said, “You think if I took him outside, he’d know what to do?”

  Doree shrugged. “How should I know? Frankly, his options are limited.”

  Bertha scooped the big cat up in her arms.

  “What if he makes a break for it?”

  “Put your coat on and come with me. We stand a better chance together.”

  Outside, the eastern sky was a wispy salmon with thick clouds of gray and orange. As Bertha carried the big cat down, she heard Doree on the stairs behind her. As soon as she was on ground level, the cat leapt from her arms and ran around the building and out of sight. Doree ran past her and disappeared behind him.

  Bertha stood still for a moment. The truck that had left, maybe five minutes earlier, was parked in the same spot again. She recognized it. She’d seen it the day she’d visited Scottie in intensive care and ran into Billie Little. The old truck was hers. What the hell was she doing here? She last saw Billie the night after the explosion. Had the police found her or was she still a missing person?

  The cold morning tightened around Bertha, as she turned toward the row of doors. Only one had the lights on—number 127—the room directly beneath hers. The other rooms were either empty or the guests were asleep.

  “Bertha?”

  Thinking it was Doree, she turned.

  Billie Little stood next to the ice machine and said, “I thought that was you come in last night. What you doing here?”

  “I could say the same to you.”

  Billie ran her fingers through her straight hair, pushing it back out of her eyes. Her face looked like a crumpled lunch bag. “I been making myself scarce.”

  “The police are looking for you. The morning after you visited me in the hospital, two detectives told me you’d disappeared. I started wondering if I’d dreamed the whole thing.”

  “It’s them I’ve been avoiding.”

  “Why? What the hell’s going on?”

  Billie stepped closer to Bertha and lowered her voice. “I think someone’s trying to kill me. I think it could be the police. The night your car blew up, I saw them. They came over and knocked, but I’d locked the door. I hid behind the bar until it was safe to leave.”

  Bertha was damned if she was going to let an opportunity to learn more go by. “You were avoiding them? I don’t understand?”

  Billie held up her hand flat like a traffic cop. “Just hold on a minute. Someone died in that mess. I think it was an informant.”

  One of the things about informants was that other people weren’t supposed to know who they were. Bertha wasn’t surprised that Billie knew. Less and less surprised her these days. “Whose informant?”

  Billie tapped a cigarette from a pack and lit it, drew on it, then expelled cigarette smoke from both nostrils, smoke that quickly dissolved in the cold air. After the soot in her hair from her house fire, Bertha easily ignored it. She noticed Billie looking past her and turned to see Doree standing at the corner of the building, holding the orange cat and calmly scratching his ears.

  Billie asked, “This Toni’s little girl?”

  “Doree, this is Billie Little, an old friend.”

  “Hello,” Doree said, and started up the stairs.

  “She’s a beauty. Looks a lot like her mother. How’s she doing with all of this?”

  Bertha shrugged. “Stellar, considering her whole world has been blown to bits. Her mother’s dead, her boyfriend dumped her, and the only home she’s known for the last ten years was set on fire.”

  “Poor kid.” Billie raked her fingers through her hair again. “Say, Toni was keeping something for me. You haven’t run across a box that doesn’t belong to anybody, have you?”

  “No. But if I do I’ll call you.”

  “Cold out here, ain’t it?” Billie flipped the remainder of her cigarette toward the parking lot. “I need to get inside. Y’all take care. Let me know if I can help.”

  Bertha headed up the stairs without looking back.

  Once the three of them were inside, Doree said, “If you’re going to stay here for a while, you need to get this guy some food and a litter box. Especially a litter box. After today, I’ll be in Indiana and you’ll be on your own with him.”

  “There’s a Walmart up the street. I’ll run up there later this morning.”

  Doree put Norman Bates on the floor. “Am I going to the courthouse with you?”

  Bertha shook her head. “I’m not working today. I’ve called your aunt and asked her to pick you up here. I’ll stay with you until she comes.”

  Doree sat on her bed and the cat jumped up next to her. “I’m sorry if I was a lot of trouble. I want to help. But…” a tear rolled down her cheek.

  Bertha passed a tissue to her. “Don’t apologize. I should be taking care of you, and I can’t even manage a damn cat.”

  “I miss my mom so much.”

  Bertha draped an arm around Doree’s shoulders and kissed her forehead “I miss her too, but we’ll get through this.” Bertha pulled a tissue from the box and blew her nose. The white tissue came away from her face with streaks of soot.

  “How do you know that woman?”

  “Billie? She’s a bartender at the Crones Nest, a gay bar downtown.”

  “I’ve seen her before. Mom didn’t like her.”

  Bertha wrinkled her brows. “What do you mean?”

  Doree shrugged. “We ran into her one night when we were picking up pizza for dinner. She spoke and Mom kind of snubbed her. Later I asked who the woman was, and Mom called her trouble-making ‘white trash.’ That’s pretty extreme. She never referenced anyone’s race—white, black, red, or yellow. But that woman, Mom said she had a ‘white-trash heart.’”

  “How long ago was this?” Bertha asked.

  “I don’t know. Is it important?”

  Bertha blew her nose and sneezed. “Thing is I can’t figure out what’s important an
d what isn’t.” The vibration of her cell phone in her back pocket startled her. She jumped, and Norman Bates leapt from the bed and skidded into the bathroom. She started laughing and soon Doree had joined her.

  Bertha answered the phone and Pop Wilson was on the line. “Three of us, counting me, can meet today. Just tell me where and what time?”

  Bertha stood and turned her back to Doree. She sniffed and said, “Can you handle IHOP again?”

  “Sure,” Pop said. “I’m a masochist. And I got a couple of friends who can’t wait to tilt at windmills with us.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The IHOP on Tuesday afternoon was nearly empty. In the back of the dining room, Bertha found Pop with two old white guys at a four-top table.

  Pop said, “This is Mel and Francis. We call him Stumpy.”

  She reached across the table to shake hands. “Bertha Brannon.”

  Mel said, “We know who you are, Your Honor.”

  “Please, call me Bertha.” Suddenly anxious, she sat across from the two men and next to Pop. A gum-popping heavy-set black girl, with orange-tipped dreadlocks, appeared on her right and asked what she was drinking. The retired cops had iced tea in front of them. Bertha ordered coffee.

  “Cream?”

  “No thanks.”

  After a short silence, Mel said, “Pop’s told us about your problems.” Bertha thought it strange hearing this old guy call him Pop, as he was probably older than all of them. Mel was thin, with a large mustache, a shock of gray hair, a long thin face, and a good-sized Adam’s apple that moved beneath his red and wrinkled throat as he talked.

  Stumpy leaned forward. His bald head was shiny, and he had a large flesh-colored hearing aid in his right ear. Bertha thought about her own hearing and the possibility of needing an aid herself. She hoped they had mocha colored for her but doubted it. The old guy said, “Course we already knew a bunch of it. Reading the paper and listening to scuttlebutt.”

  The waitress set a cup and a coffee carafe with a half dozen little packages of cream on the table. Her nametag that read Rosa was pinned to her uniform over a pink lace hanky. Grandma had taught Bertha that trick. You wanted customers to look at something fresh and pretty, especially at the end of a shift when you weren’t so fresh and pretty yourself. Rosa looked at the wall behind them and asked, “Y’all ready to order?”

  When Bertha asked for pancakes, the others followed her lead.

  Alone again, Pop said, “What can we do to help?”

  Bertha sighed. “I don’t know. At first I felt overwhelmed with all this crap, but to be honest, right now it’s infuriating. I don’t know where to start.” She took a deep breath, then went on. “You would think Toni’s death would be enough. But I told myself it really was a DV call gone bad—like they said. It happens. The phone calls were scary and annoying, but my family was with me, and I was too overwhelmed with grief to deal with them. Scotty’s death might not have been connected to this mess, but today I’m sure it is, although I don’t know how. My Jeep blew up and then last night someone started a fire—”

  Pop said, “Think I should remind you that it’s not your job to figure all this out. You need to talk to the police.”

  “Not the police. If I keep waiting for them to do something, I’ll end up dead. By God, this is the place where Rambo picks up his gun.” When Pop and the others looked around the room, Bertha realized she’d shouted. She took a deep breath.

  Pop put a finger to his lips to quiet her, then whispered, “You got a gun?”

  “Three. They were Toni’s. A small revolver, a 38 Sig-Sauer, and some kind of rifle.”

  Stumpy leaned across the table toward her again and asked, “Can you shoot with any accuracy?”

  “No.”

  Stumpy nodded. “We can help you with that.”

  Pop smiled, deepening the wrinkles around his eyes. “Maybe not as good as Rambo.”

  “Question is,” Stumpy said, “who do you aim at?”

  “I keep wondering what I have or what I’ve done that someone would bother me? I’m a fifty-five-year-old judge in county court. The cases I get aren’t enough for anyone to bother me. Up until a couple of months ago, I led a fairly unremarkable life.”

  Pop said, “So it’s not your position on the bench?”

  “Can’t be.”

  “Toni’s job? Was she working on something sticky? Something dangerous?”

  “I don’t think so. Although DVs can be dangerous in themselves, she hated those calls.”

  “We all hate those calls,” Pop said.

  Just then their food arrived. Pop sent his bacon back to be cooked longer, and they all started eating. Finally, over coffee, they decided to meet early the next morning out on Stumpy’ s farm for target practice. She’d have to go to the house and get the guns while it was still daylight.

  Later, as Pop walked her to her car, Bertha asked, “Why do they call that guy Stumpy?”

  “Watch him walk.”

  “No, I mean what happened to him?”

  “Polio. There weren’t immunizations when we were coming up. Lots of kids got it. Some it killed and some it crippled.”

  “Doesn’t the name bother him?”

  “Naw. He tells others that he was wounded in the line of duty—some kind of big shootout. Story has changed over the years, the latest is a hostage situation where four kids and their mother were about to get killed. But truth is, he never got put on the street. Rode a desk for thirty years. This is his big chance to carry a gun and hunt down the bad guys.”

  “He’s going to teach me how to shoot?”

  Pop held the door for her as she slid beneath the steering wheel and then leaned down. “He was one of the best marksmen on the force. I think he can teach you a thing or two.”

  After Pop closed the car door and turned toward his own truck where Mel, the quiet one, was waiting, Bertha stared straight ahead. Norman Bates was in a new carrier on the passenger seat. She’d sent Doree on her way back to Indiana more than an hour ago. When Anne had arrived, she’d fussed at her and Doree burst into tears, saying she wanted to go home and sleep in her own room. Anne softened then. Before Doree left the room, she threw her arms around Bertha’s neck and clung to her as if she were drowning, whispering in her ear, “Please don’t let anything happen to you. You’re all I got.”

  Bertha answered, “We’re all we’ve got. This is going to end soon, and we’ll go home and get on with our lives.”

  Then Anne opened the motel room door and Doree followed her out.

  Now in front of the I-Hop, Bertha started the car. She was on the way to the house to pick up the weapons and then, after six, to Alvin’s to drop off Norman Bates.

  *

  Bertha parked in the alley behind the house and left the cat from hell in the car, thinking she wouldn’t be long because she knew right where Toni had kept the guns. When she pressed the garage door opener, nothing happened. The power was off. So she used her key to open the back door to the garage. The sunlight from the open door fell across the smooth concrete floor; the garage remained a cold, dark cavern. She sensed something in front of her but couldn’t see it. Fumbling with her key ring, she located the penlight. It gave off a glow like a votive candle. She moved forward slowly, kicked something solid, and heard it scrape the floor. She held the light down near the floor and saw Toni’s drill and, beyond that, a socket wrench. A dark shape in front of her turned out to be the locked metal cabinet that had stood next to the workbench; it was turned on its side, the lock broken. Someone had been there after the fire department left.

  The door to the kitchen, where the fire had started, was closed, but a strip of light shone beneath it. Bertha sidestepped the cabinet and made her way across the rest of the garage. The stench from the fire hung in the air like a gauzy curtain that she couldn’t push her way through.

  When Bertha touched the kitchen door, it swung inward; with the light from the kitchen windows, more of the garage was illuminated. It had
been ransacked.

  Inside the house was cold. The night after the fire, the French doors in the family room had been boarded up, but now they were open, the plywood lying on the patio outside. Bertha thought whoever started the fire might have come back. She turned to face the open kitchen area. The countertop to the island was sooty and scraped, and the cabinet doors stood open. Mud and grime was tracked everywhere. Most of the Sheetrock was lying in a broken heap next to the refrigerator. She stepped around the soggy mess to the pantry. Inside, canned goods were on the floor. This area had been ransacked too. They must have been waiting for her to leave the night before because she and Doree hadn’t been away very long. Of course there could have been more than one of them. Whoever it was must have started the fire after they’d gone through the house. Surely they wouldn’t set a fire and hang around to search the place.

  Bertha pulled a hidden ladder to the attic down and ascended it. The air up there was warmer and drier. Beneath a folded tent was a bag for tent poles; inside were three guns and enough ammo to hold off Santa Anna. She couldn’t see well enough to tell if the intruder had been up there. Though they’d lived here all this time, the attic didn’t hold much: some of Doree’s toys, a dresser, dressing table, several dusty boxes, and a cedar chest that Toni had called her hope chest, which contained yearbooks, photo albums, a wedding-ring quilt passed down from Toni’s grandmother, and Doree’s baby clothes. Bertha noticed a compartment along the side, which contained pictures of a much-younger Toni and a black police officer: Doree’s father.

  Bertha hadn’t thought of Leon in years. He’d died before she’d met Toni. His family didn’t maintain a relationship with Toni or their granddaughter. Toni had been pregnant when a fifteen-year-old gangbanger shot Leon. Maybe his folks didn’t even know about the pregnancy. Bertha lifted the quilt out of the box and sorted through a handful of books, more picture albums, and a baby book. She glanced inside the top one, but her penlight was flickering. She wanted to get this stuff out of here. Everything, even in the attic, had the putrid smell of the fire. These things belonged to Doree now. She might put them in Grandma’s storage unit if she could get some help getting them down.