Liz blinked at him.
“That’s gotta be him, then. Right?” A rush of exhilaration made her want to fling Abe’s papers in the air. “You’ve got his name? And an address?”
Abe sighed. “It’s more complicated than that. This guy, Stoops, lives on the same piece of property as Spencer Crow. They live in the same stretch of woods.” Abe pointed to the map he and Hazel had been looking at.
Liz glanced down at the map. She had spent little time on the Peninsula and wasn’t familiar with Sapphire or Misty Lane.
“What does that mean?”
“It could mean they’re working together. It could mean it’s one of them, or it’s neither of them.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t know what it means.”
* * *
Hazel
“Should we have told Liz?” Hazel asked, settling into Abe’s passenger seat. “About the sightings?”
He seemed to consider her question for a long time, maneuvering his car away from the bustle of Traverse City to the shrouded forests of the Leelanau Peninsula.
When he spoke, he sounded weary and uncertain.
“Not yet. Since I met Liz, she’s had one desire - to bring Susan home. She knows Susan is dead. If I tell her about sightings, she might start to hope again.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
He glanced at her.
“I don’t know, Hazel. But yeah, I think hope could derail her. She told me about the first year after Susan vanished. She couldn’t get out of bed for days, and she lost twenty pounds - stopped eating. Jerry had to call a doctor to the house. I’m sure it was worse than she ever let on. Searching for the truth, she has a purpose again. These sightings are… a complication, in a way.”
“A complication?” Hazel protested. “Susan is trying to tell us what happened to her. Don’t you see?”
“I need to concentrate,” he snapped. “Can we just drop this for now?”
Hazel didn’t add more, and Abe regretted bringing her. He’d allowed her to ride along mostly because he knew his own disbelief might cause him to miss something. He preferred to work alone. The more minds, the more theories, the more sleepless nights.
They didn’t speak until they pulled into a driveway to pick up Ricky, the young man who’d spotted Susie on that dark stretch of road.
Ricky climbed in the backseat.
Hazel twisted around and stuck out her hand.
“I’m Hazel,” she said.
“Ricky,” he told her. “Sorry about the dirt.”
She shook his hand anyway, seemingly unfazed by his dirty hands. They’d picked him up from his job site. Dark sweat stains circled beneath his armpits. A layer of dirt coated his arm and face, giving him a bronzed look.
As they drove up the peninsula, Ricky leaned forward between the seats.
“Slow down as you come up on this curve,” he said.
They’d just passed Sapphire Lane.
“Just up here.”
Abe slowed the car to a crawl. In summer, the forest road was dense with trees, especially in this area. At various points along the road, they glimpsed spacious views of climbing hills, an occasional hint of Lake Michigan sparkling in the sun, but in this area, the trees were so thick the eye couldn’t penetrate their leafy branches.
Abe pulled off on the shoulder, and all three stepped from the car.
Ricky walked toward the trees, turned and walked back a few paces.
“Right around here,” he said. “It was night, so I can’t give you an exact location.”
Hazel stood in the spot, closed her eyes. She squatted down and rested a hand in the dirt.
Abe watched her and felt mildly foolish.
“It happened at night,” Ricky started. “I mean, my girlfriend thinks she only appears at night.”
Abe sighed. What had he expected? Susie’s ghost to step from the trees and lead them to her killer?
A car came around the curve, and Abe hustled them all back.
The orange sports car flew by, hugging the curves and spitting dust in Abe’s face. He watched the car disappear around the next curve.
“We better go,” he blurted, sensing another car rolling their way. As they piled into Abe’s car and drove down M-22, they passed a green pickup truck driving the other way. Ben Stoops was behind the wheel.
* * *
Abe
Abe scrolled through microfiche, reading all the obituaries during the week of October 1951. Hector Crow’s death notice included a brief snippet about his being a well-respected dentist, survived by his wife Virginia, his son Spencer, and his brother Byron.
It took some digging, but Abe tracked down the police officer who’d responded to a call of death at 311 Sapphire. The man had retired three years earlier, but Abe found his phone number and an address in Suttons Bay, Michigan. Abe called the man, and the retired deputy agreed to meet with him.
The retired officer lived in a small Cape Cod at the end of a dirt road. A wrought-iron fence contained an overweight, yellow Labrador retriever asleep next to a pile of chew toys.
When Abe stepped from his car, the man emerged through the front door.
“Officer Brewer?” he asked.
“Come on up,” the man called. “Clementine won’t hurt a fly.”
Clementine barely batted an eye when Abe passed. He stepped onto the porch, where the man sat in one of two plastic lawn chairs. He waved his hand that Abe should sit.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet with me, Officer Brewer,” Abe told him, shaking the man’s soft, age-spotted hand.
“You’re digging into some awfully old history for such a young man,” Officer Brewer told him. “My name’s Dan. I haven’t been an officer for three years, and I rather enjoy going by simple old Dan now.”
“Okay, Dan. I have a few questions about Hector Crow, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“What hair?” Dan laughed and patted his bald head.
Abe smiled.
“You responded to the call of a death at 311 Sapphire Lane on October 5th, 1949?”
“Sure did. It was a pretty straightforward call. A man had died in his sleep.”
“But the man was only twenty-nine years old?”
Dan shrugged. “Heart attack, brain aneurysm. People die in their sleep, son.”
“What did the coroner say?”
“Couldn’t find a cause of death. He labelled it natural causes. His wife buried him three days later. Uneventful, the whole thing.”
“What was Hector’s wife like? Virginia Crow?”
“Real cool,” the man told Abe. “She stood there and watched as we loaded him on the stretcher and carried him off. For all she reacted, she could’a been watching us carry a slab of meat from the freezer out of her house. Dry-eyed and not a sniffle out of her.”
“Did you see her son, Spencer Crow? He would have been little, not even two years old.”
Dan nodded.
“Caught a glimpse of him sitting in the kitchen when we carried out the boy’s daddy. He didn’t make a sound, just sat in a chair staring at the table. A quiet little guy. I remember feeling real bad for him and his mama, though she was a card, I’m sure.”
“The mother didn’t console him?”
“Not in front of us,” Dan said. “One thing I remember bein’ a little strange.”
“What was that?”
“I saw that woman about six months later, walking down to her mailbox. Belly out to here.” Dan held his hand two feet out from his stomach.
“She was pregnant?”
“Sure looked it, though she never mentioned it when the husband died. I ran into her a few years later at a store in town, asked about her children. She told me she had one child, and he was fine. Then she turned and walked away as if I’d insulted her. Strange woman, indeed.”
“You have no idea what happened to the second child?”
He shook his head.
“None of my business. Might’a lost it, maybe gave it up because
her husband was dead. Impossible to say.”
“Not impossible,” Abe said.
37
Abe
Abe sat at his desk at Up North News.
He had missing girls’ tips to follow up on, he still hadn’t called his mom, and he’d told his dad he’d stop by again for dinner. Instead, he’d spent hours calling hospitals, inquiring about records for Mrs. Virginia Crow. He scoured birth records but found nothing. He’d left messages with a handful of connections. Finally, he got a hit.
“I’m looking through midwife records from 1963,” the woman who worked for Leelanau County Health said. “A birth that happened at 311 Sapphire. A midwife assisted.”
“So, she had the baby. A boy or a girl?”
“A boy.”
“Got a name?”
“No name on record.”
“How about a name for the midwife?” Abe asked.
“Rosie Hyde.”
Abe’s editor stopped at his desk.
“I was hoping for a follow-up story, Abe. Some leads, at least. Not to mention you promised me a work-up on each girl. Instead, I’m looking at a blank basket in my office with your name on it.”
Abe held up a finger, finished scribbling the address for Rosie Hyde, and stood.
“I’m on it, Barney.”
“You’re on what? I need a pitch. Wait, where are you going?”
Abe grabbed his keys, walked backwards toward the door.
“You’re not a detective, Abe. You’re supposed to write the story. You…”
But Abe had already pushed open the door and was running down the hallway.
* * *
Hazel
Hazel turned onto Sapphire Lane, driving at a creep while studying mailboxes. Many of the houses stood far off the road, invisible behind the wall of trees and foliage. The few Hazel observed were grand estates surrounded by sprawling yards with gardens, flowering shrubs, and several elaborate fountains displaying kissing children or chiseled saints.
She slowed at the mailbox marked three-eleven, staring into the thick forest. The stone driveway disappeared into the woods, concealing the house and its inhabitants.
She pulled onto the shoulder, gazing in her rearview mirror at the mailbox for 311 Sapphire Lane.
What would it hurt to get out and look around?
“If he’s a murderer, it could hurt a lot,” she grumbled, opening her door.
Bird song and crickets greeted her. It was peaceful. She loved her house in town, but sometimes the traffic and neighbors made her garden feel as if she lived in Chicago instead of northern Michigan. She enjoyed the sounds of nature and the quiet, the deep penetrating quiet, beneath them. Except as she slipped into the woods, the quiet grew unnerving. Her feet crunched over twigs and leaves so loud, she paused every few feet to listen. Had someone heard her?
An acorn fell from a tree overhead, and she sprang back when it landed in the leaves in front of her.
“Where are you going?” a woman’s sharp voice sliced through the stillness, and Hazel froze, caught.
And then another voice, a man’s voice, answered the woman’s question.
“Out,” the man said.
“Out where?” The woman’s shrill tone made Hazel’s ears ring.
She crept forward until she spied them through the trees. A man and a woman, facing off in the stone driveway of 311 Sapphire.
“What’s the problem, Mother?”
The woman stomped her foot and stabbed the air with a finger.
“The problem?” she shrilled. “It’s not safe.”
The man didn’t respond. He’d turned and started away, but the woman lunged forward, stopping just behind the man. He shrugged her off.
“Spencer!” the woman wailed, but the man got into his gold sports car and pulled down the driveway.
Hazel turned and sprinted back to her car. She waited until Spencer turned on Sapphire Lane, and then she jumped behind the wheel and followed him.
When she reached M-22, the car had disappeared.
“Damn,” she cursed.
She turned south, hoping the man in the gold car was heading for Traverse City, but she’d lost him.
“It’s not safe,” she said out loud. What had the woman meant?
* * *
Abe
“Hi, are you Rosie Hyde?”
The woman had frizzy red hair pulled into a white scarf. She sat on a huge tire half-buried in the sand. Kids ran around the yard, screaming, blowing bubbles, crawling over an iron jungle gym.
“That’s the name my father gave me,” she said with a big, joyful smile. She beamed at the kids as if they were all her own.
Abe jumped to the side as two little boys raced by with squirt guns, shrieking and spraying water in long, sparkling streams.
“Michael and Andy, watch where you’re aiming those things,” Rosie called.
Abe stopped near Rosie and held out his hand.
“I’m Abraham Levett. I called about the Crow baby.”
Rosie frowned and leaned sideways, grabbing his hand and giving it a little shake. She looked soft and warm, like a grandmother who baked cookies and sampled every batch.
“Such a sordid tale for a sunny day as this,” Rosie told him. “But I’ve suspected ever since that dark day in that big, drafty mansion that someone would come calling.”
Abe climbed onto a matching tire, propping his feet in the grooves to keep from falling off.
“Why did you believe someone would come calling?”
Rosie slid from the tire, her large, soft bottom swishing as she walked to a bucket and pulled out a big wand. She blew a stream of bubbles into the air. The kids screamed with delight and set about chasing the bubbles through the grass.
“Children are the light of the world,” she said, returning with a smile and moving deftly back onto the tire. “I became a midwife because I love children, and I love mothers. I have four children myself, grown and scattered now like seedlings from a cottonwood tree.”
Rosie lifted a locket from her large bosom and opened it toward Abe.
“Amanda and Matthew,” she said, revealing two tiny, smiling faces. “My first grandbabies. There will be more to come out of my first three children, but the fourth one is a wild child who will never settle down.”
Abe smiled, thinking of his own mother’s insistent questions about grandchildren. Neither he nor his sister had produced grandchildren, much to his mother’s dismay, but his sister, Lisa, had just gotten engaged and hoped to start a family after medical school.
“They’re sweet,” he said.
She smiled, proud.
“Sweet as strawberry pie. The little boy on Sapphire was a different sort of child. He might have been sweet, given another mother, another life.”
“Spencer?”
“Yes. I remember him well. Empty dark eyes, skin the color of rotten turnips. Poor, sad child.”
“Was he ill?” Abe tried to reconcile the handsome man in the gold car with this memory of a sick child.
“Unwell, yes, but from a disease or from abuse, I can’t say.”
“Abuse?”
Rosie nodded, touched her locket again.
“Midwives have a responsibility to the children, but to the mothers as well. We’re chosen because we do not adhere to the laws of man. We are ruled by women.” Her mouth grew pinched as she spoke, and the lines of her age deepened in her face. “In the end, I spoke with a friend in Social Services. They visited the house and reported a doting mother, an ill toddler, and a healthy newborn baby. I tried to visit Virginia three more times to provide after-care for her and the new baby, but found the gate locked. She didn’t return my calls or respond to my letters. I never saw her or the children again.”
“Today, she only has one son,” Abe told her. “Spencer. I’m curious, though, you said dark eyes. Do you mean brown eyes?”
“The sickly child had brown eyes, almost black.”
Abe frowned.
“Sp
encer has blue eyes. Could illness have made his eyes look a different color?”
Rosie lifted an eyebrow.
“Never heard of a disease that changes eye color,” she murmured, “but I’ll tell you this. That second baby had the brightest blue eyes you’ve ever seen. Blue as the name of his street, Sapphire.”
Abe remembered Spencer’s glittering blue eyes. They were an uncanny blue, icy.
“What did she name the baby?”
“She didn’t. She refused to name him, insisted she wanted to wait, though as far as I knew, the baby’s daddy was dead. Though…”
“What?”
“Another man was there. The children’s uncle. A strange man, with eyes like the new baby.”
“But don’t most babies have blue eyes?”
“Yes, they do, but I’ve seen enough babies to know whose eyes will change and whose eyes will stay blue. That baby’s eyes were unique. I’d bet they look the same today.”
Abe watched the children and tried to make sense of the woman’s story.
“Did she mention putting the second baby up for adoption?”
Rosie shook her head.
“She looked at that baby like… like he was a rare jewel. Not the way of most mothers, overflowing with love, but her own kind of curiosity and desire. A greedy look in her eyes. I helped that baby out of her body, and then she clutched him like he might disappear from her arms. I didn’t hold him again. I tried to weigh him, and she snarled at me like a rabid possum.”
“How old was the sick child?”
“No more than two. He barely walked, sort of lurched around. He didn’t speak.”
“Spencer is twenty-five, according to his driver’s license,” Abe thought out loud.
“Well, the second baby was born twenty-three years ago, so that’s the right age for the older child. But that child did not have blue eyes.”
Ashes Beneath Her: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 18