“You don’t go now,” Claude said dismissively. “You wait until you’re sick of winter.”
“I am sick of winter!” Wilma responded.
“No, you’re not!” Claude snapped, glaring at her. “You get sick of winter in March, when it starts to sleet and the slush freezes at night.”
I thought they both had good points.
Wilma shook her head, agitating her huge bejeweled earrings. “No. Stop trying to tell me how to think! I like March. The sun comes out. Sometimes.”
“Jesus! I’m telling ya, you don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve lived here my whole life, and March is the worst month!” Claude crashed his fist onto the table.
“I want to go now! You’re not the only person who gets to vote!”
“Goddamn it, Wilma, do you see? You see? It’s like you don’t even have a brain. Everyone knows you don’t go to Hawaii now; you go when I say!” Claude bellowed at her.
Wilma had perhaps a quarter of an inch of beer in her mug, which she tossed into Claude’s face with the kind of accuracy that comes from years of practice. I wondered how many more times I was going to see that in my life.
“You can go now if you want, but I’m taking my trip in March,” Claude told her as he wiped off his face.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
I stood up and reached for her empty mug. “You know what you should do? You should let Kermit help you with this.”
They gaped at me, momentarily distracted. “Huh?”
“He’s good at this. It’s how he used to run his fiscals. Give me the card, Claude.”
Claude handed over the plastic case with the one-in-five card in it. “Don’t lose that,” he fretted.
I went toward the back of the kitchen, where Becky and Kermit were working on installing a surveillance camera so that we could see that there was never anyone in the alley. I made a couple of photocopies of the card, telling Kermit I was ready to do the deal—buy the Wolfingers their tickets. I asked him to call the one-in-five phone room and make sure they would have their “vacation,” their hotel room in the flophouse.
“When do they want to go?” he asked me.
“I’d say get them the hell out of here as fast as you can.” I told him to let me know how much—I had the cash.
“You want us to split it with you?” Becky asked.
I shook my head, touched. “No, thanks. But I appreciate the offer.”
The two of them glanced at each other, passing a married-couple message between them. “There’s something else, Ruddy,” Becky advised. They were both grinning as if they had another new repo truck waiting outside.
“Yes?”
“You’re going to be an uncle!” Becky’s eyes positively glowed.
“What? Wait, what? No kidding! That’s amazing. I’m … amazed.” And I was amazed. Just a few years ago Becky’s options in the male department were limited to the drunken passes feebly launched at her at last call by swaying, slurring idiots who didn’t see me glowering behind them. Now she was married and starting a family—everything had changed.
“We’ve been trying to be patrimonious for months,” Kermit told me.
I had a vision then: Becky’s children playing with my kids under Bob the Bear; me, not just Uncle Ruddy but Daddy, married to Katie, innocent of all crimes, a pillar in the community, with a responsible job. Well, I’d still repo cars, but more for the sport than for the money.
I gave Becky a hug and shook Kermit’s hand and thought afterward I probably should have hugged him, too.
Becky told me they were keeping the news under wraps until she was further along, and I promised their secret was safe with me. I went back to the bar, floating on the good news. Jimmy hadn’t moved. I put a fresh mug under the tap for Wilma. “Hey Jimmy,” I hailed him cheerfully, “date with Katie went pretty well last night. I mean, really well. We didn’t sleep together, but I think she wanted to.”
“Okay,” he said, still watching the TV.
“I mean, it seemed to go a little south at the very end, but almost because we didn’t go to bed, if that makes sense.”
“Sure.”
“So, I thought maybe I should call her in a little while? Apologize a couple dozen times?”
He shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t.”
“Why not? I thought you always say women like it when you call them after a date.”
“Not when you’re on a break. Not when it didn’t end good. You need to wait a few days.”
I looked up at the screen to see what was so damn fascinating. Two men were putting up drywall. “Isn’t there a book I can read or something? None of this makes any sense to me,” I complained.
Jimmy just shrugged. “It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s relationships.”
I grabbed a mug for Claude. “How’s Alice?” I asked idly as I pulled on the tap.
Jimmy finally tore his eyes away from the riveting drywall demonstration. “Oh,” he said.
That didn’t sound good. “I’ll be right back.”
I gave the Wolfingers their refills. They were looking at Hawaii photos on Wilma’s phone, compliments of Becky’s free Wi-Fi.
The cell phone waylaid me on my way back to find out what had gone wrong with Alice and Jimmy. It was Katie’s number on my caller ID, and I answered with real pleasure—maybe I shouldn’t call her, but I certainly should answer if she called me!
Her voice was rushed. “Ruddy! I have to go to Grand Rapids. It’s my aunt Kjersti. My mom’s older sister. She’s in the hospital.”
“I’ll drive you.”
She paused. “That’s really nice, Ruddy. I need my car, though. I don’t know how long I’ll need to be there. They say she just collapsed.”
“If you need me, I’ll come down. Or I could drive you down now and tow your car behind us.”
She laughed at this. “That’s sweet. But I think I’ll be okay. I’m going to go now, but I’ll call you,” she promised.
“Please do. And please drive carefully.”
“I will.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“Me, too. Ruddy? I need to get on the road.”
“Text me when you get there.”
“I’ll send a soccer ball and a kangaroo,” she vowed.
We hung up, laughing. I wondered if the cone of silence on Becky’s pregnancy extended to Katie—I would have to ask.
“You know,” I said to Jimmy when I returned to the bar, “my sister’s in the back. You could put on the basketball game.”
“No, it’s okay. I want to see what’s going to happen.”
“What’s going to happen is that they’re going to finish putting up drywall,” I predicted.
He gave me a blank look.
“So, what’s going on? You and Alice. Something’s bothering you, I can tell.”
“I’m just … You’re going to be mad.”
“Oh?” I raised my eyebrows at him, truly surprised. I didn’t really get angry at Jimmy, not with any heat.
“Yeah, it’s about Alice. She’s going to ask her husband for a divorce.”
“Huh.”
“You’re not angry?”
“No,” I replied. “Of course not, Jimmy. I’ve got no right to be angry. It’s your life.”
I wondered, though, how William Blanchard would react to this.
* * *
Alan woke up while I was at the Bear, but was uncharacteristically silent. I walked home, wondering why the sky was clear when it had been so cloudy all day. Jake was already back in the bedroom, his head on my pillow. His tail thumped when I stroked his ears.
I looked around my house—my very clean house. Either Jake had tidied up, or someone else had been at work.
I pulled out my tequila bottle and gave myself a generous pour. My Pavlovian response to the smell of the strong liquor was normally to go to my chair and pick up my Lee Child novel, but I resisted the urge. Instead I went to my small table, opened t
he folder, and pointedly pulled out the new Nina Otis article.
“Look—,” Alan began defensively.
“No, you look, Alan,” I interrupted angrily. “What is the one thing you must never, never do? I don’t care if my kitchen is dirty or my house is on fire—when I’m sleeping, you may not take control of my body. Ever.”
“I just had an idea—”
“I don’t care!”
“Please listen,” he begged. “I found out some things that are really important.”
“How did you do this, anyway?”
“I went to the Black Bear and used Becky’s laptop. She leaves it there behind the bar most the time. Can I just tell you—”
“That’s breaking and entering,” I thundered. “And using my sister’s equipment? Do you know how furious I am at you?”
“I didn’t break. I used your key, and just listen. There’s more to all this. You know the woman who fell off the docks in Charlevoix? The news accounts got it wrong. Nobody saw her fall. A witness said he saw her headed in the direction of the docks, and that she was carrying what looked like a bottle of whisky in a paper bag.”
“So?”
“So don’t you see? Lisa Marie gets out of your car, she’s drunk, a man ‘helps’ her, and five days later they find her floating in the water. This woman is drinking heavily, she’s got a bottle with her, she vanishes. And her body also doesn’t show up for five days—pretty coincidental, don’t you think? And what about the woman on the sailboat? Her husband said they were drinking a lot that night. He passed out belowdecks. Everyone thinks she went topside and fell off. But the water was calm, there was a full moon—wouldn’t she yell? Wouldn’t her husband hear the splash? They were anchored just twenty yards out—on a still night, wouldn’t people onshore hear something? And her body washes up in Boyne City. Guess how many days after she disappeared.”
“You’re going to say five days.”
“Yes! Well, four. Four days. But when her husband called it in, volunteers turned out in force—it was summertime, plenty of boaters to help out. They looked all over, starting, of course, right there in the lake at Boyne City. So where was she all that time?”
“She probably sank,” I reasoned. “And then her gasses caused her to rise.”
“Or, what if someone saw her on the boat? Somebody who has a thing for intoxicated women. Someone who could row out from shore, or something. He grabs her and, even if there’s a struggle, her husband is zonked and doesn’t hear it.”
“Someone who likes to drown drunk girls,” I summed up skeptically.
“Don’t forget the autopsy on Lisa Marie. There’s something else he likes.”
“That doesn’t explain Nina Otis,” I pointed out after a few moments. “Even if she were drunk, there was no time to do anything on the boat except push her off.”
“It’s a two-hour trip,” Alan advised.
“There’s no place to do what you’re suggesting. I’ve been on the boat.”
“Oh yeah? Every inch of it? Every compartment? And it’s a car ferry—what if our helpful friend has a panel van?”
I swallowed a slug of tequila.
“God, that stuff is vile,” he grumbled.
I ignored this. “Every single thing you say might be true, but they’re all dead ends. Lisa Marie vanished, and the one witness has told us all she knows. A woman might or might not have fallen off the docks. Someone might have grabbed a drunk lady off a boat, but no one saw anything, or the cops would have been all over it. Maybe Nina Otis was pushed, but if someone saw that, they would have reported it.”
“They’re not all dead ends,” Alan insisted. “You got the sister on Beaver Island. The surprise visit. Somebody paging Nina Otis—what if that was our man, luring her up to the bridge?”
“She never responded to the page.”
“So she was ambushed on the way!”
Jake had come out to see what all the yelling was about. He yawned pointedly at me—shouldn’t we be sleeping? Wasn’t that what night was for? And day, too, for that matter?
“Why is it so important to you to prove there’s any connection? We’re spending all this energy on something that might not have anything to do with Lisa Marie,” I criticized.
“But I think they are all connected. I think we’re on to something. I think when the guy who took Lisa Marie read about your accident, it gave him an idea on how to dispose of bodies.”
I was grimly silent, thinking that if Alan was right, my accident had provided the inspiration for several murders.
“I think we should go to Beaver Island and speak to Nina’s sister, ask her about the surprise visit.”
“And what I think is that you’re ignoring the point of this conversation, which is your unlawful appropriation of the body McCann.”
“I’m sorry, but the place was turning into a pigsty. I couldn’t help it.”
“That’s ridiculous. You could, too, help it.”
“The cutlery was all in a jumble. There was no organization. Some of your water glasses were ends up and some ends down. It was driving me crazy.”
“There’s a reason why Alan is an anagram for anal.”
“I just did what anyone would do.”
“No, you did what you would do. And you will never do it again.”
“Fine. Can we go?”
“What could the sister possibly know?”
“We can’t answer that until we talk to her! Ruddy, it’s the only next step we have. What else can we do?”
Jake went to his blanket on the floor and collapsed with a groan. I pulled down the rest of my tequila. Alan waited anxiously, like a teenager who has asked to use the family car and is waiting for Dad to make up his mind. It wasn’t so much that I thought Alan’s idea made sense. It was just that if I didn’t do this, I wouldn’t be doing anything at all. “Okay,” I decided. “I’ll go.”
16
Then You Die
In the winter you can get to Beaver Island on a snowmobile if you don’t mind the idea that you might hit open water and die. You can also drive your car across—the ice is thick enough except for where it isn’t, and then you die. Or you can fly in a little two-engine airplane for a hundred bucks round trip. I picked the airplane.
Alan, as it turns out, equates plane ride with plane crash. As soon as he saw the tiny two-engine aircraft, he pretty much wanted to back out of the whole deal, but one of the consequences of being a voice in my head is you go where I go.
Around five hundred people live on the island in the summer, fewer in the winter. I was met by a guy in an ancient Jeep who I always call when I’m out on the island, looking for a repo. He was pretty surprised to hear from me because I’ve never once gone out there in the winter—you steal a car in the winter, the only way to get it to the mainland is to drive it on the ice, and then you die. His last name was also McCann, which was how I found out I had distant relatives who had once lived on the island. There was even a McCann House, which was both older and nicer than the McCann house in Kalkaska. He and I called each other by our last names. He was shorter and older and thinner than I, probably forty, and looked as if he had decided personal grooming wasn’t worth the bother, his long reddish hair curling down and sort of blending into his ratty beard.
“Hey, McCann,” he greeted me, holding out a gloved hand to shake. I got in the rattling old Jeep and told him I needed to see Audrey Strang—did he know her? He gave me a look—it wasn’t as if anyone could have somehow escaped his attention on such a small island.
As was true of every trip on Beaver Island, it didn’t take long to reach our destination: four neat little cabins in a row next to a main house, all of them well maintained log homes. A fancy sign proclaimed that we had arrived at AUDREY’S B&B. I told McCann I’d text him when I needed him to pick me up, waving at him as he backed down the driveway. There was far less snow out on the island than I’d expected—the little strip of land was too small to have lake effect. Still, snowmobile tr
acks in and out of the driveway told me that Audrey, who McCann said was a divorced lady, didn’t use a car in the winter. A woman in a front window watched me trudge to the front door and I waved at her, too.
“That’s got to be Audrey Strang,” Alan sang, positively giddy to be alive after the bumpy plane ride.
She opened the door as I was walking up the wooden steps and stomping the snow off my toes. “You don’t have a reservation. Are you here for a cabin?” she asked, letting me in. She was an attractive woman, probably fifty, with short sandy hair and hazel eyes. Her home was nice and warm, and she wore a sweatshirt with a moose on it that matched her eyes. The sweatshirt, not the moose.
“No, ma’am. I’m here to…” Well, I should have rehearsed this part. I fumbled with the papers I had shoved in my pocket. “I am wondering if I could talk to you about your sister. Nina Otis.”
She blinked, cocking her head. “All right,” she said slowly.
“Don’t just show her the picture. Talk to her first, get her comfortable,” Alan instructed me, as if I didn’t make a living talking to people about their relatives.
She invited me to take off my coat and told me she was just making some coffee, which sounded really good to me. While she ground some beans and put water in the coffee maker, she asked me if I was a cop. I said no, my interest was personal. “All right,” she said again.
When she heard my last name, we walked through the tenuous relationship I had to the McCanns still on the island. We chatted a bit about her bed-and-breakfast business, and she revealed that she was going to leave in a week to go to Florida. It was the kind of drawn-out conversation that icebound people indulge in.
“I’m glad I came out when I did, then. I would have hated to miss you,” I told her.
“We could have called ahead,” Alan observed, and not for the first time. I’m a repo man, so it sort of goes against my nature to phone people and tell them I’m coming.
I detailed for her what bothered me about the newspaper story—the “surprise” visit. She nodded warily. “Tell me again why you’re asking?”
Here we go. I explained that I was looking into the drowning deaths of some local women, because I was blamed for one of those deaths, but now had reason to believe I wasn’t involved. She asked me a lot of questions about that, and I answered truthfully, revealing everything except the fact that I had a dead Realtor in my head, who was making impatient noises over how long this was taking. Most of the information I’ve gotten from people has come from sitting and talking about something else until they felt comfortable enough to tell me where Uncle Bob was hiding his Chevrolet.
Repo Madness Page 15