“Woman. I’m not a girl. I’m a woman.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I think my problems are behind me, but you can never be sure. I’d appreciate it if you hung around for, say, eleven days.”
For a moment I felt like I had on Saturday night when I moved my last chips into the center of the table, betting my ace-high against Bobby Dunston’s full house.
“Sure,” I said.
* * *
I went home as I had promised Nina, had a bite to eat, sat in front of my TV, and crashed. My aching shoulder wouldn’t allow me to get comfortable, though, so fifteen minutes later I sat down in front of my computer. I Googled “Erin Peterson” and found doctors, teachers, financial advisers, communications directors, scientists, productivity experts, and one woman who was a victim of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007. I had no idea that it was such a common name. As far as I knew, I was the only Rushmore McKenzie in the world. I didn’t find Salsa Girl until the fourth page, and that was only because she was mentioned in a couple of magazine articles that I had already read.
What exactly are you looking for, anyway? my inner voice asked.
The answer was I didn’t know. I was intrigued by the idea that Erin had such a “tiny footprint,” according to Schroeder, and that she has revealed so little of herself to Marilyn Bignell-Sax. And me.
I Googled “Erin Peterson University of Wisconsin” and was surprised again by the number of women that popped up—twenty-seven in all. I clicked on IMAGES and went down the list again, this time checking out the blondes one by one. I found a financial officer, music director, teacher, health support worker, nursing student, senior epidemiologist, lab assistant, materials planning specialist, and events planner, yet no one who made salsa. One woman that intrigued me was a horticulturalist who took a summer internship at the Boerner Botanical Gardens near Milwaukee thirteen years ago. They liked her so much that they offered her a job when her internship expired. She left the University of Wisconsin shortly after starting her junior year, like Salsa Girl had, to accept it, although she took night courses at Wisconsin-Milwaukee to finish her degree years later.
Her story forced me to ask two questions that I realized I didn’t have answers for. One—when did Erin leave Wisconsin to start Salsa Girl out of her mother’s kitchen? Two—how old was she? Marilyn said Salsa Girl was a full decade older than Randy. Randy was at least thirty, which would make Erin forty. Except then the dates didn’t match up, I reminded myself. Let’s say Erin was twenty when she left Wisconsin and that she spent two or three years working the farmer’s markets before she met Randy. That would make her thirty-three-ish.
By then Nina had returned home.
“How old do you think Salsa Girl is?” I asked.
“About our age. Maybe a little younger. Say forty.”
“Not thirtyish?”
“Please. I mean, she looks great: perfect petite figure, not a ripple of fat. You could bounce quarters off her backside. I’m not saying she had work done, either. But thirty? No. Men might believe it. But women—I think we have a better sense of age. Why? Does Erin say she’s thirty?”
“I’ve never heard her mention how old she is. I’ve never heard her mention a birthday.”
“Why is that a thing?”
“Let’s say that Salsa Girl is forty years old. That means she met Randy when she was thirty years old. She was developing Salsa Girl Salsa for three years before that. She left school in her junior year when she was twenty or twenty-one. When you do the math, that leaves a seven-year hole in her story.”
“So?”
“So what did she do during those seven years?”
“Maybe she married a man who abused her and she doesn’t want anyone to know because she’s embarrassed and ashamed even after all this time.”
Like Jason Truhler had abused Nina, my inner voice said so I didn’t have to.
“Maybe she finally freed herself of the bastard and found the strength to not only rebuild her life but to build a thriving business as well,” she added.
Again like Nina.
“In that case, she would be a remarkable woman,” I said. “And I would love her with all my heart.”
To prove it, I left my place behind the desk and went to where Nina was standing. I slipped my damaged arm out of the sling, wrapped both of my arms around her, and pulled her tight against me. She sighed into my collarbone. I kept holding her.
“This can’t be doing your shoulder any good,” Nina said.
“It’s not. In about thirty seconds I’m going to start whimpering because it hurts so much.”
“Let me go.”
“Never.”
“Boy oh boy.”
Nina wrestled out of my grip and pushed me away. She watched as I winced while slipping my arm back into the sling, stepped forward, and gently cupped my face with both of her hands. She kissed me.
“Boy oh boy,” she said again.
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
“Should I tell you what I think? I think Erin did what she did when she was young and then went back to school and started Salsa Girl Salsa. Her origin story remains intact—it’s just that we all assume she started college when she was eighteen like most of us did, and she never bothered to correct the assumption. Why would she?”
“That still leaves those seven years.”
“Why are they important?”
“Someone has been sabotaging her business, blew up one of her trucks. We all assume that it’s connected with her attempt to sell Salsa Girl to Central Valley International. But what if it isn’t? What if it’s all about revenge? A vengeful ex-boyfriend like you once suggested. How ’bout a vengeful ex-husband?”
“Like mine?”
“Like yours.”
“You asked her about it once before and she said no, remember?”
“Yes, but I didn’t believe her.”
“So now what?”
“Keep looking, I guess.”
I did, too, and discovered exactly what Marilyn Bignell-Sax and Greg Schroeder had discovered—nothing. I thought about giving it up and decided that would be injudicious.
Injudicious? my inner voice asked. How would Salsa Girl, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, know what a professor at DePaul University in Chicago tells his inattentive students?
I Googled the DePaul yearbooks and discovered that the Minerval served as a journal and chronicle of life at the university until it was replaced by the DePaulian yearbook in 1924. Unfortunately, it ceased publication in 1997. The entire yearbook was posted online, though, and I went through it page by page looking for an image of Erin Peterson. I found several women who could have been her, but her name wasn’t listed anywhere.
I decided to stop wasting my time and go to the source. I picked up my landline and dialed the number that I found on the DePaul website. I told the woman who answered that I was checking on a resume I had received from a job applicant who claimed she had attended DePaul University.
“What year did she graduate?” I was asked.
“You tell me.”
The woman sighed as if I were being overly dramatic and put me on hold. I was bounced from one phone to another until a man with a young but earnest-sounding voice told me that Erin Peterson graduated from DePaul with a degree in business administration in June 1988. Unfortunately, that would have made her over fifty unless she was some kind of prodigy, which I wouldn’t have put entirely past her.
“I don’t believe that could be my job applicant,” I said. “Too old.”
“Just a moment, sir.”
The young man returned to the phone five minutes later. He said, “The only other Erin Peterson to graduate from DePaul did so in 1966.”
“Yeah, not her, either. Could you tell me if there was an Erin Peterson who attended classes at DePaul but who did not graduate?”
“No.”
“No you can’t or no there wasn’t?”
“No, there were no other women n
amed Erin Peterson who attended DePaul.”
That surprised me. Not because there was no record of Salsa Girl attending the school, but because there were only two Erin Petersons altogether. Wisconsin had a boatload.
“Is there anything else, sir?”
“If it’s not too much trouble, could you check on the name Christine Olson?”
“Just a moment.”
As it turned out, three women by that name had attended DePaul, only none of them fit my timeline. I thanked the young man and went back to my computer. I Googled the name. Wow, there were a lot of Christine Olsons in the world, and Salsa Girl had been right: At least half of them had a Scandinavian appearance.
I clicked on some of the names at random, including a Christine Elizabeth Olson who was last seen in Chicago fifteen years ago. Her physical description was close enough to Salsa Girl: RACE white, GENDER female, HGT 5′ 6″, WGT 115, HAIR blond, EYES blue. But the three separate photographs of her posted on the Illinois State Police missing persons web page bore no resemblance to Erin Peterson at all.
After four hours I came away with exactly what I had started with—an aching shoulder.
NINE
I returned to Salsa Girl Salsa early the next morning. Alice Pfeifer was behind her desk, speaking softly into a microphone attached to a headset with one earpiece as she worked her computer. The two women I had seen earlier but not met were each in their own small office and wearing identical headphones. They also were speaking softly while they typed on the keyboards of their computers. I hung around the foyer waiting for someone to take a moment. Only none of them did, each moving from one call to another justlikethat.
Erin entered, using the door that led to her production plant. She was dressed in a lab coat and a hairnet.
God, my inner voice said, she even makes that look good.
“What are you doing here?” Erin asked.
“I know Fridays are important to your company. This is when your saboteur first struck, remember?”
“I remember.”
“I thought I’d hang around to see if I can be of some help.”
“I appreciate your concern, but I’m going to be awfully busy for a few hours, and I‘m afraid you might get in the way.”
“I can watch the entire operation on your office computer.”
“Be my guest, although I don’t know what you think you’ll see.”
“I’m looking for anything out of the ordinary.”
“What’s out of the ordinary in a plant that makes salsa? Do you even know?”
“I’ll take note of what I think is suspicious activity and ask you about it later.”
“There’s not going to be much to see anyway. Most of my staff has Fridays off. The rest of us load the reefers and unload the Texas truck. After that we’re pretty much done for the day, although the office staff will be taking orders for the coming week until three P.M. We increase or decrease production based on demand. The NBA playoffs begin next week, so that will give us a nice uptick in sales. ’Course, it won’t be as big as March Madness. Or the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is the second-highest food-consumption day in the United States, behind only Thanksgiving. People will eat something like eight tons of tortilla chips, not to mention 41 million dollars’ worth of salsa. But okay, All right. I’m happy to see you, McKenzie. I appreciate that you’re looking out for me. There’s coffee and donuts in the break room. Help yourself. I’ll see you later.”
Throughout the entire conversation, Alice kept working the phones and her computer.
* * *
Erin had bought assorted treats from Bignell Bakeries for her employees, and I wondered if it was a daily thing or just Fridays. I grabbed a couple of custard-filled Long Johns and a cup of coffee and retreated to her office. I called up her external cameras first and then her internal cameras. I flicked through them one at a time with one hand while holding my tender arm in its sling against my chest. Salsa Girl had been right; all I could see was people going about their business. They could have been building a nuclear bomb and I doubt I would have known.
By midmorning the reefers appeared. One by one, the refrigerated trucks were loaded with pallets stacked with plastic-wrapped salsa. One by one, they drove off without incident until the finished-goods cooler room was empty except for the salsa that would go out Monday morning on the local trucks. Everyone seemed relaxed, including Salsa Girl. ’Course, she always appeared that way, even when I knew she was agitated beyond words.
Eventually the truck that Erin had sent to Texas on Monday morning returned. I could hear the beep-beep-beep it made as it backed up to the loading dock. Its huge door was opened and Hector Lozano and Tony Cremer began moving boxes of fruit and vegetables from the trailer into the prep room. I remembered the driver’s name was Jerry. I figured there must have been union rules forbidding him from lending a hand, because Hector and Tony didn’t seem to mind at all that he just stood there and watched.
When they were halfway through, Hector stopped unloading and began rummaging through the boxes inside the prep room. His back was to the camera, so I couldn’t see what he was doing—and then he shifted his position and I could: loading various fruits and vegetables into a single carton. When he finished, he put the box on the shelf nearest the door. It looked exactly like the box I had reached for when he slapped my hand earlier in the week.
Tony came in, moving his load to where the other boxes were stacked.
“S’okay?” he asked.
“Somos buenos,” Hector said.
We’re good? my inner voice asked. What does that mean?
Afterward, Hector rejoined Tony, and the two of them finished unloading. Jerry pulled away from the dock and parked the truck near where its bombed-out sister was sitting, still surrounded by yellow tape—POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.
Back on the loading dock he asked Tony and Hector, “What the hell happened?” Hector explained. His English was a helluva lot better than my Spanish.
“That’s fucked up,” Jerry said. “I don’t wanna work no place where I could get blown up.”
Tony and Hector thought that was funny. Tony slapped Jerry’s shoulder.
“Who’s gonna waste a bomb blowing up a guy who sits on his fat ass all day?” he said.
“Better sittin’ than standin’ all day, amigo. Get to see some of the world, too. What do you see all day?”
“La Señorita. Now she has a nice ass.”
“Es perfecto,” Hector said.
The boys joked around some more. Instead of Erin, though, they seemed more impressed with the attributes of Maria Serra, the production manager. Apparently Erin was too skinny for their tastes.
Salsa Girl appeared a few minutes later.
“Gentlemen,” she said. “Are you still here? Go home.”
“Señorita,” Hector said, “Jerry is worried about the bomb.”
“All the more reason for you to get out of here. Listen, I don’t understand what is happening or why any more than you do, but I’ll talk to the police and by Monday maybe I can tell you something more, okay?”
Her employees agreed with Erin’s plan and they all wished each other a pleasant weekend. The three men left. I watched Erin cross from one box on her computer screen to another as she made her way back to her office. Eventually she appeared in the doorway.
“Well, that’s done,” she said. “See or hear anything interesting?”
I flashed on Tony’s and Hector’s opinion of her backside, but kept it to myself.
“Nothing, I’m sorry to say,” I said.
“Sorry to say?”
“I was looking for clues.”
“Get out of my chair.”
I did, sliding past her as she made her way behind her desk. She sat in her chair, clicked the camera boxes off her screen, and pulled up something with a lot of numbers. I sat in the chair in front of the desk.
“I’d offer you a drink,” Erin said, “except as soon as I’m done here, I’m going home
to take a nap. I’m just exhausted. I have a date tonight, too.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Ian’s taking me to the Twins game.”
“Ian never takes me to the ballpark.”
“I can’t imagine why not.”
Alice appeared at the door. “Ma’am,” she said.
“Alice, you can’t still be mad at me.”
“I have to go.”
“What?”
“I need to leave. I’m sorry.”
“Alice?”
Alice wasn’t listening. She was down the corridor and gathering up her bag and jacket before Erin could leave her office.
“Alice, what’s wrong?” Erin asked.
By then Alice was out the door and jogging to her car. She drove off in a hurry.
“Family emergency?” I said.
“Her family lives in South Dakota.”
Families in South Dakota have emergencies, my inner voice said.
Only I didn’t believe it.
Erin stepped around Alice’s desk and donned the headset.
“No rest for the wicked,” she said. Into the headset she said, “Salsa Girl Salsa, how may I help you?”
* * *
I drove back to the condo using both hands. My shoulder still ached, but not nearly as much as it had. Besides, you can’t baby yourself. Well, you can, but if you do your hockey-playing pals will make fun of you. I’d rather take the pain.
It was pushing two o’clock. I had just enough time to pop the cap off a bottle of Summit Ale and wonder what I was going to make for lunch when my cell phone rang.
“McKenzie,” Alice Pfeifer said, “I need help.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“Tell anyone what?”
“Can you come to my apartment?”
“Where are you?”
She told me.
“I’m on my way,” I said. Before leaving, I went to the secret room for my SIG Sauer. Time and experience had taught me that when a pretty girl calls out of the blue asking for assistance, you’d best be prepared for anything.
* * *
I wasn’t prepared for this, though. I stepped inside Alice’s apartment after she opened the door and discovered Randy Bignell-Sax sitting on the sofa. The left side of his face was swollen, and he had a gel ice pack not unlike the one I used pressed against it. He was wearing a black sweater over a dark blue shirt; the collar of his shirt and the shoulder of the sweater seemed wet from the condensation off the ice pack.
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