She Stopped for Death

by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

  “I know.” Zoe sighed. “She’s a problem. But I don’t think I can help you. She leaves me notes and money. I leave the groceries on her porch. That’s as close as I get to her.”

  Detective Minty stared down at his hands. He wrote something, then snapped his notebook shut and stood.

  “One more thing.” He turned to put a finger in the air. “Ed Warner told me this girl, this Alex Shipley, who’s staying with the Westons, was caught nosing around the Sutton house, and Emily called him. The girl was trespassing. You know anything about that?”

  “She was looking for her uncle, Detective.”

  “She find him?”

  Zoe shook her head too slowly. His eyebrows went up. “You’d better ask her,” Zoe said.

  “I will. Is she at the Westons’ now?”

  “She’s goes to school at U of M. She went back there.”

  “I’ll get in touch with her. Is there anything you all know that you’re not telling me? Seems there’s a lot of silence from over here all of a sudden.”

  Zoe didn’t answer. She would respect the promise she shared with Dora, Jenny, and Alex until she couldn’t anymore.

  Detective Minty was headed to the Westons’. She walked over with him. A fine drizzle was falling. Zoe wished she could talk to the others first. Something really bothered her. This hospital stuff. Lorna gone. She kept telling herself that they shouldn’t be pretending everything was fine. Alex didn’t find her uncle. Nobody knew the truth about the mother’s death—except their small group. The cousin was horribly murdered. Nothing was really fine. Every important fact they had came from Emily. They needed to look into the hospital story for themselves. They needed to search for Lorna. She felt as if a huge lie were growing inside her and beginning to hurt. She was going to choke on it. She had to talk to the others.

  The lights were on in the Westons’ kitchen because the day was getting dark fast. Clouds from over the lake were threatening another fall storm. Thunder rumbled way off.

  Feeling formal and not deserving of a warm welcome since she was dragging a Trojan horse in behind her, Zoe knocked and waited.

  When Dora opened the door, she smiled, then looked surprised that Zoe was knocking. She frowned when she caught sight of the man behind her, but asked them both in, talking about the rain and what the weatherman was saying on the TV.

  Jenny, at the table, nodded to Minty.

  “Expected you yesterday.” She pointed to a chair, inviting him to sit.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  Dora stood at the oven, waiting for the timer to go off so she could grab two sheets of chocolate chip cookies before they burned. She made a face behind Minty’s back.

  The timer rang. She pulled the cookies from the oven, slid them onto a waiting rack, then onto a dish she handed around the table.

  “I found that book you were asking about.” Dora smiled happily at Zoe.

  Before Zoe could ask which book, having no clue what she was talking about, Dora urged more cookies on everyone.

  Zoe said only “Thanks” and pretended to be happy about whatever it was Dora had found for her.

  Minty asked Dora and Jenny the same questions he’d asked her. As they answered him the same way Zoe had, there was another knock at the door. Tony Ralenti walked in, nodding to everyone and looking hard at Minty until he was introduced before going over to Jenny and, in front of everyone, kissing her on the forehead.

  Jenny’s face colored but she pretended everything was normal. Soon Minty rose slowly, excused himself, and was gone.

  There was silence around the table because of Tony. He wasn’t in on the secrets Emily had told them.

  “Does he have any idea yet who killed Althea?” Tony asked.

  “He didn’t tell me anything, only wanted to know about Alex and the fire. Then asked the same questions he asked you.” Zoe looked from Dora to Jenny, both of whom looked stuffed with things they wanted to say but couldn’t because Tony was there.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Dora shook her head, sounding close to tears.

  “We’ll talk later, Mom.” Jenny reached over to squeeze her mother’s hand. “Let’s eat your cookies and be happy.”

  Tony’s dark eyes slowly went from one of the women to the other. He glanced down at his hands, then back at each of them. “Not one of you can keep a secret, you know. What’s going on here?”

  They looked at each other and then each grabbed a cookie, taking bites in unison.

  “Hey, I was a cop, remember? If you think that detective didn’t catch on, you’re crazy. He’ll be back until one of you tells him what it is. Might as well tell me. Maybe I can help you figure what to do.”

  The women looked at each other.

  “You told me,” Dora said. “Might as well tell Tony.”

  Tony didn’t say a word, only listened.

  * * *

  “So the sister killed their mother? That’s what she said?” He thought a while. “This sister. This Lorna. Emily said she ran off with Alex’s uncle. Why doesn’t that story ring true, I wonder?”

  “But that’s Lorna’s pattern. She takes away everything Emily loves,” Dora said.

  Tony nodded a couple of times. “Murders everyone, sounds more like it.”

  “Not Walter Shipley.”

  He shrugged. “And nobody knows where she is? That’s really strange. People like that—killers—they like to stay close to home. You’ve got to call Minty and tell him this whole thing—the hospital, all of it. Maybe he can track Lorna Sutton down.”

  Dora got up and went into the living room. She came back with a book in her hands.

  “This is what I was trying to tell you about, Zoe. When I said I had the book you were looking for.”

  She set it in the middle of the table so everyone could see and pointed to the title: An Annotated History of the Traverse City State Hospital.

  They gathered around the book as Zoe told them what Myrtle had been saying—that she was in the hospital with Lorna.

  They looked down at the cover photo of a huge stone Victorian building with strange cupolas sticking from the top. Small, blurred people were gathered on the grounds in front of the building.

  “Looks like a prison,” Zoe said under her breath as she took in the wall, the narrow windows, some with close-set bars over them. The building was stark and unlandscaped. It overpowered the photo—like too much sky.

  “Traverse City State Hospital,” Dora repeated. “That’s where Myrtle’s brothers sent her. We heard about it when Jim and I first moved to town. One of those whispered things: that the boys wanted the restaurant. And that’s where Lorna went after she set the fire. I’ll bet Emily blames herself for her mother’s death. After all, that’s what she came back to Bear Falls to prevent.”

  “So Lorna went back to that house when the hospital closed? That’s thirty-seven years ago.” Zoe shuddered at the thought. “And lived together all those years. Until Lorna left.”

  They turned page after page—photos of women in simple, identical dresses. Children—a lot of children.

  Zoe pulled the folded picture from her pocket and smoothed it out on the table.

  “Myrtle said Emily didn’t like her sister much. Never came to see her.”

  Tony got up slowly, hands on the table. “I’ll be back in the morning. I think what you’ve all got to do is decide if you’re going to cover for Emily Sutton or call Detective Minty. You ask me, it’s time to start looking for Lorna Sutton. She killed once, according to your poet. Who said she hasn’t come back and is killing again?”

  Chapter 20

  With little left to say, Zoe made for the path between their houses. She was glad it was still raining. The weather fit her mood. More than anything, she wanted to shut her door behind her and hug Fida. She wanted to ask Fida how the devil she’d been dumb enough to get involved in this mess in the first place.

  In the kitchen, Zoe pulled a juice drink from the bottom shelf of her refrigerator, wh
ere she kept most things she needed often. She got a glass from a cupboard, using a stool, and then sat at the table, pouring her drink slowly, thinking, then inviting Fida to sit with her, pushing a doggy treat across the table.

  “Fida. I feel so bad for Emily. I’ve been horrible to her. I’ve been awful. Mainly because I don’t think she likes me. I feel kind of bad about that. She’s had a hard life.”

  She looked Fida straight in her good eye. “I’ll bet you’ve run into circumstances like that, people who don’t like small dogs. Who wouldn’t take it personally? But I don’t get her, and she doesn’t get me. Anyway, I’ve decided to be nicer. And I’ll help Abigail the best I can with Emily’s big day. I will be a better human being.”

  Fida sneezed. As if bored, she looked at the floor, jumped down, and wandered off to her bed in the corner.

  Zoe scowled at her faithful companion, thinking that with all the things she’d done for that dog, she should be able to expect a little of her time.

  She checked her watch. Four thirty. Maybe a couple of hours to write. Alone, by herself, no talk of mad events or implosions by deluded writers. That’s what she was herself, after all—a writer. Not a deluded one—yet. Not a famous one—yet. Not a mad one—at least, no more than all writers were mad, thinking what they slaved away at was as important to anyone as it was to them.

  She left the kitchen, setting her glass on the counter and looking down at her snoring dog. Zoe thought maybe she would choose to come back in her next life as a West Highland White Terrier in a home with a single lady who doted on her. Not a bad life. One thing she knew—she would earn her keep by listening and not letting her eyes droop closed as her mistress talked. She would come when she was called, never pee on a rug, never poop when she got nervous. She would be the perfect companion. Unlike Fida, who snored at her now.

  With a dismissive nod of her head, she left Fida to herself and went into her office to work on the Two Emilys book, beginning with the first of the Master letters to someone who sounded like a lover but probably was only directed to the whole of love—love as Dickinson imagined it might be.

  There was something more than different about Emily Dickinson. Like no other earthbound poet she’d read, there was true imagination in that head. Lines constructed on paper that you could almost hold in your hand, lift the lines to look at the ideas this way and then that way, and always find yourself reflected somewhere.

  Zoe leaned back to wonder if she would have liked Emily Dickinson as a person. Probably not, Zoe decided. Dickinson would annoy her—all that running from visitors and sitting at the top of the stairs to talk to company. Would Emily Dickinson know how to take a joke? Did she ever think a single swearword in her life? Zoe bet she had, if for nothing more than to try them out for sound and color.

  It was after seven when she stopped writing, hating to pull herself away even then. She liked wandering, inside her head, through the Dickinson house in Amherst. Climbing the stairs to Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, sitting at her desk and looking out her window, out over the Pelham hills.

  But she was hungry and Fida was at her feet again, trying her best to look apologetic for whatever she’d done before so Zoe would feed her.

  All she could find in her cupboard was a can of dog food for Fida and a box of crackers for herself. With a piece of gouda cheese from her refrigerator, she and Fida had a fine dinner and thought only happy thoughts—like dreams for Jenny and Tony. Whatever had gone wrong between them sure seemed taken care of. The kiss he’d planted on Jenny’s forehead in front of everyone had been like a signal. And their eyes when they looked at each other. Something happened. It looked a lot like love to Zoe.

  It was already getting late when she went to her office again and turned on her computer. She Googled “state hospital Traverse City.” A list of websites popped up. Then new color photos of old Victorian buildings—imposing and institutional, with flat, creamy stone walls. Small windows. Pretty hallways with vaulted ceilings. Shop after shop. Restaurants. Displays of wine, jewelry, clothes. The gentrification of the asylum was ongoing.

  Then came photos of the buildings as they used to be. She recognized some of the pictures from Dora’s book. Vacant-eyed patients on the lawn, leaning away from each other, not touching. Photos of the hospital after it was closed, buildings fallen into ruin. One building, with a squat turret at the top, was especially sad.

  There wasn’t much on the patients who’d lived at the hospital in the early 1900s. A few names—mostly from relatives who didn’t want them forgotten. One site mentioned patient lists, but the writer complained that he couldn’t get his hands on them unless he was a relative of a patient. And there again was Myrtle’s photo. Zoe looked close. She thought she recognized Myrtle again—this much younger Myrtle. The other woman was too blurred. It had to be Lorna, unless something was confused in Myrtle’s mind. Maybe because of the big event coming up and people in town talking of nothing but Emily. The height and shape was Emily’s height and shape, or, again, what could be the height and shape of a million other women.

  Zoe turned off the computer and sat back in her chair, drawing her robe around her.

  Closed in 1989.

  Lorna came back home. She was still there when Walter Shipley arrived. Now gone for three years. No word from either of them since the day they left together.

  Nothing of what she looked at or read felt right to Zoe.

  That night, in bed, a word whispered back into her head. Something from her garden, where she was always happiest. A word from Lilliana. Not one of the special words they shared at times like this, when life got overwhelming and she wanted to be a chipmunk—to pull back into a hole and hide. Sometimes words were all she had for beauty. The best word of all was tomorrow. Always tomorrow, when everything could change.

  Psst—the word whistled right through her head, though she tried to catch it. It still sounded like pride. But that made no sense at all.

  She woke up the next morning with a few things worked out.

  First, there was that shed behind Emily’s house where Alex saw a car. Somebody had to take a look and settle whose it was once and for all.

  Second, for her own information, she wanted to get down to that hospital, walk around the grounds, imagine Lorna staying there and then coming home to the sister who had put her there.

  Third, Walter and Lorna left together. They had to be somewhere. She’d call Detective Minty to see if he’d found out anything.

  But before any of that, she would make a call to Christopher Morley. He was sending her a ticket to come to New York, and she wanted to thank him again. Maybe make him laugh. Maybe have it perk up her whole day before she went over to Emily’s to get another of her interminable lists that seemed more about vanity now than food.

  * * *

  In the morning, Zoe went over to the Westons’, but there was no one home. She went inside and called their names. No one answered. She called Jenny’s cell from their kitchen to find that they were up in Charlevoix with Tony, taking photos of houses.

  Zoe went home and worked. Even at five o’clock, there was no car in Dora’s drive. She’d been thinking all day of how to sneak around the back of Emily’s outbuildings and get a look in that garage. The idea seemed like a good one, but she didn’t want to go alone.

  She and Fida sat in the living room and listened to a Leonard Cohen CD. She sang “Hallelujah” over and over, until she was sick of her own voice and remembered she was supposed to have gone to Emily’s for the latest list. Cursing herself for forgetting, probably on purpose, she dialed Emily’s house to apologize. Emily, of course, didn’t answer.

  Nothing she could do about it now. She was hungry. She had nobody to talk to and had already screwed up badly enough for one day. What she wanted was to get out of the house, eat, and make herself feel better.

  Demeter, Delaware’s mother, was on duty at Myrtle’s diner. She brought Zoe’s meatloaf even faster than Delaware had. The chunk of meat, covered with
canned beef gravy, and a side dish of peas and carrots, were like manna to Zoe. She dug into the mashed potatoes—real potatoes, whipped with plenty of butter. That was a good thing and Zoe wanted only to concentrate on good things at that moment.

  The bread pudding was dry. Demeter shrugged and spread her hands when Zoe complained. Taller than her daughter, with dyed black hair puffed into a helmet around her head, she laughed at Zoe. “You been coming here for over a year. You think things are going to change?” She pulled the dish from under Zoe’s spoon and took it to the kitchen.

  “You want your bill,” Demeter asked when she was back, “or you just going to sit and take root?”

  “Is Myrtle back there?” Zoe motioned toward the kitchen.

  “You ever know her not to be when the front door’s open for business?” Demeter shook her head, dislodging the pencil stuck up there.

  “Could I talk to her?”

  Demeter laughed. “You want your nose bit off? Especially after I told her you said the bread pudding was too hard. I asked her if I could take it off your bill, and she said for me to charge you twice. Maybe now’s not the best time to go back there.”

  Zoe sat awhile longer, hoping the restaurant would clear out and Myrtle would at least want to bawl her out about the bread pudding.

  People left, but other people came in, some just for coffee. Zoe turned her water glass between her hands and waited.

  Fifteen minutes passed.

  Finally, Zoe got up when Demeter’s back was turned. She toddled fast across the floor and through the swinging doors.

  Myrtle turned from the deep sink with a butcher knife in her hand. “Get out of here, Zoe Zola,” she hissed, setting the knife on end against the sink.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” Zoe stood her ground. “It’s about that hospital.”

  “What about it?” Myrtle turned to the sink, running hot water over a stack of stuck-on pans. When she turned back, she looked hard at Zoe. “You think I made up everything I told you. Right? Think I’ve got nothing better to do, working back here every day of my life except Christmas, than to make up stories.”