Unidentified Woman #15

by David Housewright

  “No,” she said. “They’re not going to let me alone; they’re not going to let me go. Sooner or later, they’re going to take me and it’ll be the same damn thing all over again.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The men who tried to kill me the first time.”

  “Who are they?” I repeated.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Fifteen, what you need to know, Nina and I are on your side. Especially Nina, so don’t worry about me being friends with Bobby Dunston, okay? If there’s a choice to be made, I’ll go along with her every time. Besides, I’m not a cop anymore. I’m not in the business of arresting people for their past crimes.” I emphasized the word past. “If there’s anything you want to tell me, it won’t go further than this room. I promise.”

  Fifteen nodded, yet I don’t think she believed me.

  “Who are these men?” I asked. “Why are they trying to kill you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “According to the twelve-step programs, there are two days you should never worry about. One of them is yesterday. Yesterday is gone.”

  “What’s the other day? Tomorrow?”

  “That’s what they say, except I worry about tomorrow all the time.”

  “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…”

  “Exactly right. If you want to take care of tomorrow, fix today. I will help you if you let me.”

  “Why? Why would you help me?”

  “I believe in the promise of spring.”

  Fifteen drifted to the huge windows and looked out at the frozen world beyond.

  “I guess we all do,” she said. “We wouldn’t live here if we didn’t.”

  We both stopped talking after that until the silence became too loud.

  “Feel like going down to the gym and working out?” I asked.

  “My knee is aching again.” Fifteen grabbed her knee and massaged it to emphasize her point. “You go, though. I’ll be all right. I need to think.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  I went into the master bedroom and changed my clothes. Fifteen was still staring out the window when I returned.

  “Be back in about forty minutes,” I said.

  “Take your time.”

  “Fifteen? If it helps, what you said the other day, about the soul? I think you’re on to something.”

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, Smith ran into the gymnasium. He was woefully out of shape for a security guard and spoke between labored breaths.

  “The girl,” he said. “She left the building. Went out the door. Carrying a backpack. We tried to call. You didn’t have a phone. Saw you on camera…”

  My first thought was to chase after Fifteen, but in shorts and a T-shirt, I wouldn’t last ten minutes on the streets of Minneapolis in March.

  “Where did she go?” I asked.

  Smith shook his head.

  “Jones is following her,” he said.

  “Good man.”

  I had just gotten the words out when Jones spoke to Smith over the radio that was attached to the lapel of his jacket.

  “I lost her,” Jones said.

  “What do you mean you lost her?” I said.

  Smith repeated my question into his mic.

  “Target was headed to the train station. I thought she was going to get on the Green Line to St. Paul. She didn’t. She—she disappeared. Just now. I looked. She’s gone.”

  “Dammit,” I said.

  I guess she didn’t believe you after all, my inner voice said.

  Smith asked a question then that impressed me for the simple reason that I hadn’t thought of it myself.

  “The man in the white Toyota—Howard. Did he see her leave?”

  “I don’t know,” Jones said. “The car is gone.”

  “Is that a good sign or bad?” Smith asked me.

  “Hell if I know.”

  * * *

  I searched the condo when I returned to determine what Fifteen might have taken with her in the backpack. Afterward, I made three phone calls. The Minneapolis Police Department was the first to respond.

  I was filling out a theft report with an officer when Nina burst into the room, leaving our door open behind her.

  “What did you do?” she wanted to know.

  “Sit. I’ll explain in a minute.”

  Only Nina didn’t sit. She stood there glowering while I finished with the officer. The officer told me where and when I could get a copy of the report online and left the condo. He had to step around Bobby Dunston to get out.

  “What did you do?” Bobby wanted to know.

  “I screwed up. Twice. The first time was when Fifteen arrived. I let her see me going into the man cave.”

  The bookcase door was still open, and I led Bobby and Nina inside.

  “What good is a secret room if you don’t keep it secret?” Bobby asked.

  “None at all.”

  “What did she take?”

  “Four guns—a .25 Colt semiautomatic, .38 Smith & Wesson wheel gun, nine-millimeter Beretta, and my Walther PPK. They’re all registered. I gave the numbers to the Minneapolis cops.”

  “Why did you do that?” Nina wanted to know. “They’ll arrest her. Is that what you want?”

  “It’s the only excuse we have to search for her,” Bobby said. “Except for the guns, Fifteen has committed no crimes that we’re aware of.”

  “I don’t want her arrested.”

  “I’ll withdraw the complaint after we find her,” I said. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll hire my own lawyer to defend her; G. K. can discredit me on the witness stand.”

  Nina’s expression suggested that she’d pay real money to see that. Yet having an excuse to search for Fifteen was only part of the reason I called the police, and Bobby knew it. The other part—I needed to protect myself in case the guns started showing up at crime scenes.

  “Why did she leave?” Nina asked. “McKenzie? She was safe with us. I told her that. Didn’t you tell her that?”

  “She didn’t believe us. When she heard me use Doug Howard’s name, she didn’t believe us at all.”

  “Who’s Doug Howard?”

  “Is that what made her run?” Bobby asked.

  I told them about my morning.

  “Ahh, McKenzie,” Bobby said.

  “You thought she was lying about having amnesia. Now we know for sure.”

  “How did Howard know Fifteen was here?” Nina asked.

  “Probably followed her when she left the hospital.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Bobby ignored the question and asked, “What else did she take?”

  “Five thousand dollars in cash,” I said. “I didn’t tell the MPD about the money, though.”

  Bobby nodded his head as if he understood perfectly.

  “What are we going to do?” Nina repeated. “Fifteen is all alone. She’s all alone and she’s scared. She’s probably trying to hide.”

  “What do you know about Howard?” Bobby asked.

  “Only what I told you.”

  “I don’t even have a legitimate reason to pull his jacket.”

  “Maybe not, but you’re going to do it anyway.”

  “We need to find her,” Nina said. “Should we offer a reward?”

  “What would the notice say?” Bobby asked. “Wanted—a pretty, young, blue-eyed blonde with pale skin? In Minnesota, that shouldn’t generate more than ten thousand phone calls. I’m sorry, Nina. I don’t mean to be rude, only it would be like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. We don’t even have a name.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” I said.

  Nina looked at me with high expectations. Bobby’s expression suggested annoyance.

  “Have you been holding out on us, McKenzie?” he asked.

  “She let it slip the other day. Her name is El.”

  “Elle? As in Elle Macpherson, the model? Or short for Ellen, Eloise, Elea
nor?”

  “Or just the letter L,” Nina said. “Linda, Laurel, Loraine…”

  “Something else,” I said. “Yesterday morning on the balcony, she said that there wasn’t a single building over two stories in Deer River.”

  Bobby tried to contain himself and nearly succeeded. Yet for the briefest of moments an expression flicked across his face that I had seen before, albeit not very often. It was the one that said, “You’re smarter than you look.”

  FIVE

  I started at the Holiday Stationstore off U.S. Highway 2 just inside the city limits.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I have a place, a cabin, about fifty miles north of here. I must have driven through Deer River a thousand times to get there, and this is the only place I’ve ever stopped. I ran into a couple of kids in the Cities, though, especially this pretty young thing called herself El, and they said I should give DR a try. Do you know El?”

  I spoke the name loud enough for everyone to hear. The woman working the cash register didn’t know it. Neither did anyone else by the way the other customers acted.

  I tried the same gag over a mug of tap beer at the joint next door and received a head shake from the bartender for my trouble. The folks at the Outpost Bar and Grill, Otte Drug Store, and the U-Save Food Store also claimed they had never heard of a blue-eyed blonde named El. I found it very discouraging. Small towns don’t have much of a transient population. Everyone who was there was usually there to stay, and I figured the thousand or so people who lived in Deer River would know everyone else. I was starting to think I had figured wrong.

  Next, I pulled into the parking lot of the Deer River High School, home of the Warriors. The school was housed in an aging flat brown building, and if it had any athletic fields, they were buried under three and a half feet of snow. It must have been doing something right, though, because the plaque just inside the front entrance proclaimed that U.S. News & World Report had awarded Deer River a bronze medal, designating it as one of the best high schools in the country.

  The secretary was old enough that she could have turned over the first shovel of dirt when the school was built. She looked up expectantly when I approached. I asked if there were copies of the yearbook dating back the past five years that I could look at. She asked why. I told her that I wanted to look up a young lady I met in the Cities—a girl called El. She asked why. I asked if she knew El. She responded by picking up a phone and making a call. I told her that wasn’t necessary. She told me to wait. I did.

  Less than a minute later, another woman approached. She extended her hand and told me her name. “Ms. Bosland.” She was surprisingly young and pretty and I thought, as I shook her hand, that if I were still in school I might have tried to date her. I told her what I wanted.

  “Mr. McKenzie.” She spoke my name slowly like she was trying to memorize it. “We are not in the habit of revealing personal information about our students to strangers.”

  “Let me speak to the principal.”

  “I am the principal.”

  Wow, school has changed, my inner voice told me.

  “Finally, someone I can talk to,” I said aloud. I shook her hand a second time and repeated my request, this time making it sound like I wanted dinner and a movie with drinks at my place afterward. She still refused.

  “What about prospective employers who only want to know if she graduated?” I asked.

  “You can’t even tell me her full name, so I doubt she sent you a résumé or filled out a job application. But I’ll bite—are you a prospective employer? What company?”

  “I just want to look up El’s picture in the yearbook.” Even as I said it, I knew I sounded creepy.

  Both women folded their arms in unison, their movements so similar that I wondered if they were family, if the principal was the secretary’s great-granddaughter. It was apparent that neither of them was going to budge unless I told them a story, and the only one that came to mind was the truth. I couldn’t tell them that, so I excused myself. Their cold stares followed me out the door and across the parking lot to my Jeep Cherokee.

  I thought about calling Bobby Dunston. Perhaps he could contact the principal from his office and ask her to cooperate with me. It sounded a lot like admitting defeat, though, and I wasn’t ready for that.

  I had purchased the Cherokee when cars were cars and not floating personal computers. It had none of the gadgets—including a seat warmer—of my late, lamented Audi, which I had every intention of replacing in June or when the snow melted, whichever came first. So I dug the smartphone out of my pocket, pleased that I had bars. Experience had taught me that coverage Up North was iffy at best. I piggybacked the high school’s Wi-Fi connection and googled the Deer River, Minnesota, public library, figuring that it would probably have yearbooks. There wasn’t one.

  “Well, dammit.”

  * * *

  Night had fallen, along with the temperature. The snow under my boots crunched like gravel as I walked across the parking lot toward the entrance of the small roadhouse just off Minnesota Highway 6, north of town.

  O’Malley’s was an oasis of light in a world of sorrowful blackness. Except for the distant stars shimmering above, there was nothing else to comfort a traveler as far as the eye could see. Along with light, there was warmth. I felt it radiate from the building as I approached; heard it in laughter and Golden Oldies as I opened the door.

  The mornin’ sun is shinin’ like a red rubber ball, the Cyrkle sang from the jukebox.

  Hang a left and there was the restaurant, filled to capacity, a trio of smiling waitresses scurrying from kitchen to tables and booths, taking and filling orders. To the right was a bar, also full of customers, a regulation-size pool table making it more crammed than it needed to be, a young man circling the table and twirling his cue like a samurai sword and someone shouting “just shoot the frickin’ ball” in a way that made others laugh.

  It was only 6:00 P.M. on a Thursday by my watch, yet the place was rocking like Saturday night in downtown Minneapolis. I thought that was probably because Deer River was two hundred miles from downtown Minneapolis and there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do on a cold winter’s night. It was a condescending attitude to take, I admit, but you should hear sometimes what small-town folk have to say about us city slickers.

  The only empty stool was at the far end of the stick beneath the head of a twelve-point buck that had seen better days. I managed to get there without inconveniencing the pool player. There were amusing signs on the wall about credit, as well as jokes involving Ole, Sven, and Lena. Conversations seemed to include everyone within earshot. The bartender could have been the girl who grew up down the street. She looked to be about twenty with sandy hair, hazel eyes, and a figure the old man would have labeled “pleasingly plump.” The thing was, though, it seemed as if all the light in the place came from her smile.

  She set two menus in front of me before I was comfortably seated, one listing the daily specials. She left, served a few patrons, and returned. The Everly Brothers were on the jukebox now, telling Little Susie to wake the hell up.

  “Whad’llya have?” she asked.

  I requested a Summit EPA, a craft-beer brewed in St. Paul, my hometown, that she didn’t serve, then switched my order to Schell’s Pilsner, which she didn’t have either. She stared at me, an expression of infinite patience on her face.

  “Grain Belt?” she suggested.

  “On tap?” I said.

  “Comin’ right up.”

  The bartender returned a moment later with a twelve-ounce mug. She pointed at the menus and asked, “Do you want to order something to eat?”

  “In a minute.”

  She started to move down the stick and I said, “I must have driven past here a thousand times on the way to my lake cabin, yet I’ve never stopped.”

  “What makes us so lucky this time?”

  “A young lady I met in the Cities told me to give it a try. Girl named El.”

 
“El? You know Ella Elbers?”

  He shoots, he scores, my inner voice announced.

  I pulled out my smartphone and tried to keep my hands from trembling as I called up Fifteen’s pic, the one of her dancing in a dress made of strawberry lace. I zoomed in and showed the photo to the bartender, who took the phone from my hand.

  “Oh my God, she cut her hair. So cute.”

  “You’re friends?”

  “Of course we are. We grew up together. Went to school together. Didn’t she say?”

  “No. She just said to stop in O’Malley’s the next time I was up here.”

  “The bitch. Didn’t even tell you to say hi? That’s cold.”

  I spread my hands wide as if to announce, “That’s El.”

  The bartender returned my smartphone.

  “I haven’t heard from El in God, three months,” she said. “Oh, hey, in case she didn’t tell you.” The bartender extended her hand and I shook it. “I’m Cynthia Desler. Cyndy. With two Y’s. Some people call me M.”

  “What does M stand for?”

  “Nothing. It used to stand for Marie. When I got divorced, I switched from my ex’s name back to mine, but the court clerk screwed up. He left the Marie part out. Now it’s just M. You believe that? I lost my middle name. My friends call me M now whenever they want to tease me. What a world. How do you know El? Oh, wait…”

  Cyndy moved down the bar and began assisting patrons with drink and food orders. How she knew they wanted help I couldn’t say. It wasn’t like they were waving—at least I didn’t see them wave. Yet a competent bartender has a sense for such things, and she was clearly good at her job. A few minutes later, she returned with a fresh Grain Belt.

  “This one’s on the house. Any friend of El’s is a friend of mine.”

  “El and M.”

  “Yep. BFFs going all the way back to kindergarten.”

  That’s how long you’ve known Bobby Dunston, my inner voice reminded me.

  I lifted the beer mug in a toast.

  “You’re very kind,” I told the girl.

  The smile, which never seemed to leave her face, cranked a few watts brighter as if it was a compliment she heard before yet never tired of.

  “How long have you been tending bar?” I asked. “You don’t look nearly old enough.”