Unaccounted For

by Nan Willard Cappo

  The Barbie in Jenny’s hand paused in its waltz down the coffee table. His sister’s eyes studied him with speculation. “Daddy’s in heaven,” she told him.

  Milo brazened it out. “They have TV in heaven. I was getting his attention so he wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Oh.” Jenny accepted this, especially since Milo picked her up and tickled her until she screamed with laughter.

  He went to his room. From behind the Pinewood Derby trophy on the closet shelf, he took out a half-empty bottle of Old Spice. He’d removed it from his parents’ bathroom the night the police brought the news. Now he breathed in the scent and let grief tear at him. Maybe they did have TV in heaven. Maybe his father could see him trying.

  Milo replaced the bottle on the closet shelf, next to the accounting books he’d salvaged. He ran his hand over their spines. In the quiet winter twilight his resolution to seek answers came back, as strong as the night he’d made it. It was time to ask someone—besides God, who as usual was being cagey—what was up with those.

  “Ten-minute miles,” Zaffer gasped. “That stinks! Gotta get that down.”

  Milo spit in the grass. “Still. Four miles. That’s something.”

  Zaffer consulted his new wristwatch/GPS/pedometer, a black rubber wonder with the complexity of a space shuttle cockpit. “Four miles and one-sixteenth.”

  Milo collapsed onto the cold ground at Valeene City Park. Cross country season was over, but Zaffer was determined to maintain military fitness levels and weekends were the only time Milo could join him. There’d been frost again that morning. It might be mid-March, but spring in Michigan was still a tantalizing rumor.

  Zaffer’s dog licked his face. Titan was a two-year-old German shepherd, and her “why are we stopping so soon?” whimper said she’d rather be running with the wolves in the Upper Peninsula.

  “Did I show you how this tracks your running history? Check this out!” Zaffer thrust his arm under Milo’s nose. “We’re getting slower.”

  “I don’t care. Hey. Let’s go for a drive.”

  “Okay.” Zaffer was easygoing, Milo had to admit. As moody as Milo had been in recent weeks, his friend never took offense. “Where to?”

  “The quarry.”

  They took Zaffer’s beat-up truck, with Titan sniffing them from her perch behind the front seat. After a few miles, with the town behind them and nothing but farmland and telephone poles surrounding them, Milo turned off the radio.

  “I like that song,” Zaffer objected.

  “I need to tell you something.” Milo stared unseeing at the fields along his side of the road, winter brown and patchy with clumps of old snow. “My dad used to gamble.”

  Zaffer made a clucking sound. “Did he lose a lot?”

  “Yeah. But he got most of it paid off.”

  Milo remembered the night it all came out the way older people recalled when the twin towers got hit. He’d been in the kitchen doing homework—some freshman science report on earthquakes. Jenny and Joey were down for the night. Suddenly his mother appeared in the door between the kitchen and the living room.

  She was holding the Visa statement. This in itself was unusual; Tim, the accountant, handled the bills. “The check for Milo’s swim camp bounced,” she said. “What is ‘Online Entertainment Services,’ and why do they think we owe them $7,400?”

  On the couch his father lowered the want ads. Without knowing why, Milo braced himself.

  “It’s a poker site. I’ve had a run of bad luck, babe,” Tim said.

  “How much bad luck?”

  “Well—$51,400, all told.” He’d known the exact amount, of course. “But don’t you worry. The odds don’t know how much you’ve lost. I’ll win it back.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing all this time? Gambling?”

  Milo was just as horrified. Gambling! He couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d caught his father robbing the Help for Unwed Mothers box at church.

  “What about the job hunting?” Gloria asked.

  A charade, it emerged. For weeks, since the tool-and-die shop where he’d worked for eighteen years had closed, Tim had crafted one résumé after another. He would read them the latest versions, ones where he was a financial analyst or an investment counselor, depending on what the ad wanted. Milo would say, “Sounds good, Dad, go for it,” and admire how well his father was handling what most people considered a very stressful period.

  All those interviews, those journeys in the car dressed up in a suit—trips to casinos. His mother’s face grew paler and paler. Oh, his father was in a mountain of trouble, but Milo had no fellow feeling for him. He could only stare.

  Gloria called her sister. Aunt Grace and Uncle Paulie came over at once. Tim did not protest, and Milo saw that his father had lost the right. The relatives exclaimed in shock…and suggested a plan. They would lend the Shoemakers enough to cover the gambling debts and living expenses. Uncle Paulie was a shift foreman at Wolverine Motors, and Aunt Grace’s day-care business was thriving. Tim must swear on the Bible to stop all gambling, and to attend Gamblers Anonymous meetings. Paulie volunteered to go with him. Milo, too engrossed to go to bed even if anyone had thought to suggest it, offered the same.

  And Tim must actually look for a job.

  “My uncle talked the bank into refinancing. He even cosigned the mortgage. So we hung onto the house.” Milo reached back and kneaded Titan’s ruff of fur.

  “Jesus, Shoe. I had no idea.” Zaffer exhaled noisily. “So that’s why you’re so cheap!”

  “I’m thrifty, you clown. There’s a difference.”

  Zaffer smirked at having made Milo laugh. “But your dad got the Wolverine job.”

  “Yeah.” That had been a good day, all right. “Uncle Paulie talked him into going in. Dad was waiting in Human Resources when he ran into Alf Farnon in the hallway. Mr. Farnon liked his tie, they got to talking, and bam. He was hired.”

  “Must have been some tie,” Zaffer said, pleased the gambling tale had taken an upbeat turn. Forgetting, Milo saw, that this story did not have a happy ending.

  “It was his Mustang tie. Farnon likes Fords.”

  The Shoemakers had rejoiced. The relatives came over with champagne and Aunt Grace’s whiskey brownies. The next day Milo babysat while his parents shopped for a new suit for Tim.

  And no one asked the question weighing on Milo’s mind. Had his father told Alf Farnon about being a recovering gambler? Milo decided nobody asked for the same reason he didn’t ask it himself. They knew the answer. Of course Tim hadn’t told Farnon. He might be a gambler, but he wasn’t suicidal. Then.

  “The day of the funeral, someone robbed our house,” he continued.

  “You never told me that!” Zaffer’s stare was accusing. Titan nosed Milo in reproach. “I told you when Sammy got arrested.”

  “I couldn’t tell anyone. My mom—she went a little nuts.”

  “You know, I heard crooks rob houses during funerals.” That fast, Milo was forgiven. Just as he’d brightened at the part where Tim found a job, Zaffer grew animated at this new criminal development. “My brother says they read the obituaries to find out when the family will be gone.” One of Zaffer’s many brothers—not Sammy—was a policeman up in Pontiac. “Did the cops get anything back?”

  “We never called them.” Milo described the casino matchbook, and how his mother worried the insurance company might find out about the gambling.

  “Shit,” Zaffer kept saying. “Holy shit.” He rubbed his head with both hands, leaving his tight dark curls looking exactly the same. “So why are we going to the quarry?”

  “To reconstruct the accident. After the robbery—hell, maybe he did kill himself.”

  “Shit,” Zaffer said again. “From money troubles?”

  Milo liked that; it covered a lot of territory. “Yeah. If he’d gotten into debt again, and didn’t want to tell us…you know.”

  “Don’t rule out murder.”

  “Murder!” Milo was startled
into laughter. “By who?”

  “Whoever he owed money to. Isn’t it just as likely that whoever he owed killed him, as that he killed himself? Come on, Shoe. He had a lot to live for. ” Zaffer shook his head in world-weary wisdom at Milo’s naïveté. “Moscow rules, buddy.”

  “What?”

  Zaffer ticked them off on his fingers. “Assume nothing. Keep your options open. Don’t look back—you’re never completely alone. Only the best spies made it out of Moscow.”

  “I don’t think my dad knew Moscow rules.”

  Zaffer pointed a finger at him. “Exactly.”

  Of all the scenarios Milo had imagined taking place the night his father died, murder wasn’t one. Tim Shoemaker didn’t have any enemies. His family was still eating their way through the freezer of casseroles and pies that had descended on them in a blizzard of sympathy. And Valeene wasn’t Detroit. Murders in Valeene were about as common as Ferraris.

  And yet…murder would absolve his father of all kinds of sins. Sloppy driving, poor judgment, forgetfulness. Cowardice.

  Murder would give Milo someone to blame. His spirits rose.

  They passed the farm with the two grain silos that said “Jesus” on one and “Saves” on the other. Zaffer pulled the pickup to the side of the road just down from the quarry entrance. The limestone quarry hadn’t been worked in Milo’s memory. He supposed most people would rather it be a source of jobs, but he preferred its present-day role: the steep cut sides framing a huge, rectangular lake of slate-gray water, converted years ago to a mostly safe swimming hole. Titan whined as though in agreement, and Zaffer let her out.

  “Let’s go, James Bond.” Milo stepped onto the shoulder of the road, where the cold wind cut through his nylon jacket. Fields bordered this narrow two-lane stretch until just before the quarry itself, when woods began on the north side.

  “First we recreate the scene,” Zaffer was saying. “It’s pitch-dark and really foggy. Your dad’s driving west on this road—”

  “We don’t know what direction he was coming from.”

  “Oh. I was thinking he’d be headed toward your house, that time of night.”

  “We don’t know what time it was.” The car had been in the water for five days—if his dad had died the same night he disappeared—and even the best forensic experts couldn’t have pinpointed time of death. Milo doubted Valeene’s medical examiner was the best.

  Zaffer took this setback in stride. He looked up the road, then back the way they’d come. “If he was heading west he was already on the quarry side of the road. A lot easier to take a wrong turn if you’re looking for a right turn along here anyway. Whereas if he was heading east, there’s no place to turn off for two miles. And he wouldn’t cross the road and drive into the quarry without a reason.” Zaffer shaded his eyes with his hand. “Nope. If he was driving east, then I’d say—however he died, it wasn’t an accident.”

  Milo was impressed. Standing here on the scene, listening to Zaffer run through the possibilities—years of crime shows had not been wasted on his friend—turned his father’s death into a puzzle to be solved. It gave Tim’s death more significance, somehow.

  “Okay, he’s heading west and he’s looking for the right-hand turn onto Tecumseh Highway.” Milo walked to where the dirt shoulder yielded to the gravel track into the quarry. It was his father; he should take a more active role. “He sees what looks like a road. He turns right. How does he get through the gates?”

  He gestured toward the metal swing gates, padlocked with a bright new lock. On each side of the drive, the gate was securely attached to a metal pole set in concrete.

  “They were open?”

  “That’s what the cops think.”

  He told Zaffer what the detective at the Valeene police station had said back in January. A young detective who’d run cross country himself a few years before, he probably shouldn’t have shared the police file with Milo, but he had. “They’d be invisible in heavy fog. They only dragged the quarry because that woman called up. She saw the gates open when she was walking her dog, and thought it was unsafe.”

  “Just one set of tire tracks?”

  “They don’t know. It was six days before they got here, and everything was a mess.” Milo paced down the drive and right to the cliff’s edge, where a shiny, new-looking barricade had been installed.

  March wasn’t much better than January for quarry gazing. July was the best. His family had been here last July, and Milo pulled the day up from his memory as though playing a video.

  The water had been a deep, inviting green. On the opposite side of the water from this cliff, a grassy bank sloped to woods, and a path led from a small wooden dock up through trees to the hidden parking lot. He and his dad had carried the cooler and towels down to the water.

  Milo heard again the shrieks of the twins in their water wings as the grown-ups towed them around the shallows. The hot sun burning his face. After they swam they’d grilled sausages, and his father let Milo build the fire. Tim told Jenny and Joey, “Watch Milo T., he’s got the knack of it.” Milo T. was his nickname from kindergarten, when there’d been another Milo and the teacher used their middle initials to keep them straight. Of course Jenny and Joey had begged to build fires, too, and Milo let them hold burning sticks, one twin at a time.

  He could taste the crisp skin of those sausages. Well. No matter what he did later, you had to admit there were times when Tim Shoemaker had done everything right.

  Zaffer came up. They peered down at the water, not green today but a cold, gunmetal gray.

  “He did have a lot to live for,” Milo said.

  Zaffer glanced at him. If someone had a lot to live for, they lived—if they could. “Can you talk to his old gambling pals?”

  “I tried. I called Gamblers Anonymous but his mentor moved away last summer. The guy on the phone was real sorry to hear about my dad, but he didn’t know anything.”

  “Damn. Gambling’s the best clue we’ve got.”

  Milo knew there was another clue—the new accounting books inside old, false covers. But loyalty to his father reared up. Tim’s gambling was fact, known history. Corporate fraud? Only suspected. Like his mother said, the books proved nothing by themselves. He kept silent.

  They called for Titan and got in the truck. “You know what you could do?” Zaffer said on the way back to town. “If you want to know whether he owed someone money? Go to Wolverine Motors. Ask his coworkers.”

  Zaffer wasn’t the only one who watched crime shows. Hadn’t Milo already visited the local bars, acting the PI? Hadn’t he questioned the police? Yet he squirmed at this suggestion. The bartenders and waitresses and local cops, they were strangers. Showing up where his father had worked, asking questions of people who’d known Tim—that would be…awkward.

  Because they might really know something, a voice in his head whispered.

  He heard himself say, “I could ask Alf Farnon.”

  Zaffer whistled. Alf Farnon was the president of Wolverine Motors.

  Farnon had gone out of his way to tell Tim’s widow about the insurance. If nothing else, Milo could thank him for that. “Yeah. I’ll start with him.”

  ***

  Chapter 3

  Most people who lived in Valeene did so because they’d been born there. But that didn’t mean they didn’t appreciate it. Valeene was real small-town Michigan, vastly different from, and Valeeners would say superior to, Detroit’s urban blight or Ann Arbor’s self-importance. On Sundays the churches were full, with occasional prayers for the high school teams. The industries were farming and autos. Valeene might hold itself above Detroit but no one could deny their fortunes were linked. There was a Ford plant just outside town to the east, a GM plant ten miles to the west, and Chrysler had a proving ground not too far away. You didn’t see many Volvos or Subarus; it was Big Three country.

  Of course, that was when they were the Big Three. By the year Milo started high school, auto jobs vanished by the hundreds with e
ach headline. Two families left the state for every one that moved in; more would have fled if their houses would sell. They led the nation in unemployment. All across the region, people wondered if it was true what the rest of the world thought—only losers were left in Michigan. And what that said about them.

  When his father was laid off, Milo wondered that himself. Shouldn’t they pick up and move? Go to a different state? Even Canada? After the gambling business surfaced he thought it again. A fresh start, or the support of relatives who had to help you? But then his father got hired at Wolverine Motors, and Milo breathed easier. Wolverine workers weren’t losers.

  On this Friday morning in late March, at an hour when he’d normally be trying to stay awake in Comparative Government, Milo sat on a buttery-soft leather couch outside the office of Alfred C. Farnon, president. He surveyed his luxury surroundings as complacently as if he’d chosen the decor. Mr. Farnon himself had gotten on the phone when Milo called, to say of course he’d make time for Tim Shoemaker’s boy. Milo knew his father had been one of several payroll supervisors—not exactly executive status. But the president of the company had bothered to make a seventeen-year-old boy feel important; Milo appreciated that.

  The gray-haired secretary saw his smile and returned it, asking if he was sure he didn’t want a soda? Or coffee? Mr. Farnon would be with him shortly. Milo refused politely. So she wouldn’t ask again, he stood up to examine the articles and plaques that lined the walls.

  The framed article from Time was the same one hanging over his father’s desk at home: “Michigan’s Little Engine That Could.”

  Milo read it with fresh attention. How Wolverine Motors had been founded by Andrew Farnon as an engine and parts supplier for the Big Three. How in its heyday it employed more than 1300 workers over three shifts. Then the industry contracted and Wolverine went to two shifts, then one, then into talk of bankruptcy. Andrew Farnon died and his son Alf took over.

  Alf Farnon declared a new focus. Wolverine Motors would now build…fire trucks. “This is a time to take risks. A time to bet on ourselves,” the article quoted him. They’d photographed him in front of the main doors downstairs. In a worn leather bomber jacket, with the sun shining on his blond hair, he looked as though he’d just returned from a dangerous mission. The tilt of his chin, the way his arm rested confidently on the new corporate sign, inspired Milo. Who wouldn’t bet on this man?