A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  “Neither are we, but you have a good face.”

  “An honest face?”

  She shook her head and laughed. “No. More like it’s too confused to be dishonest.”

  I smiled with her at that, then drove away.

  A half mile up into the hills, I pulled over and slipped the rubber band off the mail. A letter-sized white envelope, computer addressed to Nadine Reynolds, was in the middle of the packet. The address was printed in the same font as the summer’s two extortion letters, and it had been postmarked from the same Chicago zip code, the day after the money was left in the Dumpster behind Ann Sather’s restaurant.

  If my cell phone worked, I would have called Till.

  Nineteen

  As the crow flies, Lucy Vesuvius’s place was no more than two or three miles from the store in Clarinda. But if the crow used Betsy’s paper-bag map, following the same twisting, rutted dirt and stone roads that I did, it might still be hopping on its tiny, clawed feet. The squiggly lines Betsy had drawn on the map were accurate enough, but she’d used no street names, because there weren’t any. Instead, she’d noted landmarks at intersections, like “Red Barn, Part of Roof Missing,” or “Fallen, Rotted Tree.” It must have been years since she’d been back up in those hills. The red barn had collapsed; I drove past the rubble twice before I thought to get out of the car to check the heap of boards for flecks of red paint. The fallen, rotted tree was gone, too—dinner, most likely, for a previous generation of termites.

  The little cottage was so densely nestled in the woods that I drove past it three times before I spotted the painted plaque nailed to a tree. It had a picture of a volcano erupting, with READINGS lettered underneath a mountain. Vesuvius. Cute.

  I parked as far as I could get off the narrow, one-lane dirt road and walked through the trees. The tiny house wasn’t much more than a shack. It had been painted lavender, with darker purple and red trim, but now most of the paint was off, and black mildew covered much of the exposed gray wood. Spindly trees grew right up to the cracked cinder-block foundation. The front door had moss on it and looked to be swelled shut from moisture. I knocked anyway, several times, but there was no answer.

  I walked around to the back. There was a small, sunlit clearing behind the house, planted with irregular rows of a hodgepodge of different plants and bushes. I recognized tomatoes, a row of something low to the ground that could have been strawberries, and, in the center of the plot, several tall pointy plants that might have been destined to be smoked rather than eaten. At the opposite end of the clearing, a woman in a faded pink sundress and a tattered straw hat, unraveling at the brim, was bent down, tending a row.

  “Hello,” I called.

  She looked up. Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear her. I walked closer.

  “Hello,” I said again.

  The freckled face under the unraveling hat was in its late fifties or early sixties, wrinkled and worn by the sun, but she had a child’s smile, wide-eyed and full of innocent delight.

  “Lucy Vesuvius?”

  “That’s me,” she said, straightening up. She stuck out a dirty hand. I shook it. It was calloused and rough. “Forgive me, I forgot I had an appointment.”

  “We haven’t. I just took the chance you’d be home.”

  “You from the welfare?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Her eyes got narrower. “I didn’t figure you were. It’s been years since I applied. What brings you here, then?”

  “I brought your mail,” I said, handing her the small bundle with the letter to Nadine Reynolds on top. I watched her face.

  “I don’t know why Betsy down at the store bothers,” she said, holding out the packet far enough to see without reading glasses. “All I ever get is catalogs for stuff I don’t—”

  She stopped suddenly, and her fingers tightened on the white envelope with the Chicago postmark. She slipped it out of the packet, slit it open with a grimy fingernail, and pulled out a sheet of folded white typing paper. A twenty-dollar bill fluttered to the ground, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was too intent on the white sheet of paper. She held it up against the sun and turned it over, looking for writing. The paper was blank. I had the feeling she no longer knew I was there.

  I bent down to pick up the twenty-dollar bill and held it out to her. “I wonder if you can help me.”

  Slowly, she lowered the blank piece of paper. Her eyes were unfocused, like her mind was a million miles away. Then she smiled and took the twenty. “I get so little mail. Come inside and we’ll have peppermint tea. It’s the least I can do for you driving up my mail.”

  I followed her to the back step of her fading lavender cottage. “Please remove your shoes,” she said, pausing to kick off her sandals. “Keeps the karma in balance.” She dropped the blank sheet of paper and the envelope into a plastic tub filled with old catalogs and opened the back door.

  Lucy’s tiny kitchen was a war zone of clutter. Pots, pans, and metal utensils, some rusted, lay nestled on the shallow counter beneath sagging chipped-enamel cabinets.

  She moved to an indoor hand pump set into the counter, next to the sink. “Just take a minute,” she said, working the pump until water came out. She filled a dented copper teapot and set it on a narrow two-burner propane stove that could have been scavenged from an old house trailer. She scratched a wood match against the underside of the counter, held it to the burner until a flame caught, and set the kettle on to boil.

  “Take a seat,” she said, waving the match. She came over to the two scratched white-painted wood chairs by the stained oak table and pushed aside a few red clay pots so we’d have room for our tea. We sat down.

  “You didn’t tell me what brings you all the way up here.” She smiled at me across the corner of the tiny table, smoothing the wrinkles on the lap of her sundress.

  “Nadine Reynolds.”

  Her mouth held the shape of the smile, but the life went out of it. It was like a switch had been closed, shutting off the animation to her face. She looked at me with frozen eyes.

  “Obviously, you know Nadine Reynolds.” I gestured toward the backyard. “That was her mail you opened out there.”

  The teakettle started to whistle. She didn’t move; she continued to sit, paralyzed, oblivious to the shrieking steam for several more seconds until, at last, the sound got through. She pushed herself up from the chair like she had arthritis and shuffled the three steps to the stove. Slowly, she filled two silver tea balls with dried leaves from a mason jar, dropped them into white china mugs, and added boiling water from the kettle. She brought them back to the table and sat down with a sigh.

  “I grow my own tea,” she said in a faraway voice. “Peppermint’s my favorite.”

  “Nadine Reynolds?”

  She looked down and pulled at the little chain holding the tea ball in her cup. “You from the police?” she asked without looking up.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You’d have to tell me if you were law enforcement, right?” she said. Her eyes were still down.

  “I suppose I would, but I’m not.”

  She raised her head then and looked at me. “Nadine Reynolds has not been here for a long, long time.”

  “She still gets mail here. Money.”

  “Nadine Reynolds was a confused young woman, a girl really, filled with love and uncertainties about her fellow man. Nadine could not live as she had.”

  She stopped.

  I waited.

  “Drink your tea,” Lucy Vesuvius said after another minute. She took a small sip. Some of the life was coming back into her face. “Peppermint’s at its most exhilarating when it’s hot.”

  I took a sip. She was right; it was exhilarating. Of course, after one slice of dry wheat toast and two granola hotcakes topped with an orphaned organic raspberry, beef broth could have sent me to the stars in ecstasy.

  “Nadine Reynolds,” I said again.

  “What do you want with her after all these years?”r />
  “I’m not looking for her. I’m looking for someone she knew. Michael Jaynes.”

  “Michael?” All the dullness was gone from her voice now. “Has he sent you?”

  “Do you know where Michael is?”

  “Have you seen Michael?” She leaned forward in her chair.

  I shook my head. “I’m trying to find him.”

  “Why?”

  “Something about insurance on an electrical contracting job he worked on a long time ago. Do you know where he is?”

  She looked down as her fingers strayed to her dress pocket to touch the twenty-dollar bill. Then her eyes moved up to my face.

  “A long, long time ago,” she said, “when things were very confused, there was a war that no one wanted. It was a time of upheaval, a time of fear. Our own police, supposedly sworn to protect, had turned on us. Some people left the country, to Canada, to Europe. Some put their heads down and endured, praying the horror would pass. And some, like Nadine Reynolds, protested peacefully. Nadine had grown up privileged, in Ohio. She came out here to college, to Berkeley. There she met a group of peace-seeking people, and she lent her presence to those who were trying to convince the politicians that what they were doing in Vietnam was wrong. But some of those gentle people had lost their way, too. They did things they shouldn’t have done, things they couldn’t see were just as wrong as what they were protesting against.”

  Lucy Vesuvius got up, went to the stove, and held up the dented kettle. I shook my head. She poured more hot water into her cup, brought it back to the table, and watched the steam rise for a minute before continuing. “One night, the little group that Nadine had joined set off a small disturbance, a little explosion in the middle of the night, when no one was supposed to be around. Underneath a police car, just an empty police car, behind a police station.” She shook her head, still looking down at her tea. “There was a girl, come to see a rookie cop on his break. She was out in back, waiting in the parking lot. She got hit by a tiny part from the car. Just a bit of the outside mirror, the paper said, but it was enough to blind her.” Lucy raised her head. Her eyes were wet. “Don’t you suppose everyone knows that wasn’t supposed to happen?”

  “I’m not here about that.”

  She pulled a piece of paper towel from a roll on the table and dabbed at her eyes.

  “It was Michael who built the bomb?”

  She shook her head, hard. “No. Like Nadine, he had no idea the others were planning a bomb. It scared him. It made him angry. He was just home from Vietnam. He’d seen the horror, the wrongness of violence. All he wanted was for others to see that, too. But in the end, the people who’d built that bomb were no better than the people they were protesting against. That’s what war does, Michael said: It infects everybody.”

  “And after the police car blew up?”

  “The ones who’d set the explosive took off, shocked and scared by what they’d become. Nadine dropped out of school, came up here.”

  “What about Michael?”

  “He’d learned electrical in the Army and went down to L.A. to work construction. It was no different down there. The craziness was everywhere, and it wore at him like an infection. He told Nadine he was going to check out the heartland, the Midwest, to see if things were less agitated there.” She blew her nose with the paper towel. “They were going to get married, you know, Michael and Nadine. But too much had happened. They were both changed people. He took off, and she stayed up here, out of touch with it all, hoping Michael would come back and they could rebuild what they’d had. He never did come back.”

  “But he calls.”

  She shook her head. “He never did come back.”

  “Betsy down at the store said he calls every few months.”

  Lucy shook her head again.

  “And he sends her money.”

  She dropped her eyes, and her hand moved again to the pocket of her sundress.

  “That twenty was from Michael, wasn’t it?”

  She raised her head. “No telling. There’s never a letter.”

  “Why doesn’t he write?”

  She twisted the piece of paper towel she had in her hand. “What’s there to say?”

  None of it was making sense. “Is he running? Are the police looking for him for that car bombing?”

  “I told you, Michael wasn’t involved. When he went down to L.A., he kept on using his right name. If they’d been looking for him, they would have found him easy enough.”

  “Then why doesn’t he write? Why send money with no letter?”

  She managed a small smile. “He’s been doing that since he left. The message doesn’t have to be in words.”

  “In 1970, his employer sent his paycheck here, after he quit working for them.”

  She closed her eyes and smiled, thinking back. “For sure, that was strange. The check came with a note saying Michael had listed her name as somebody to contact. Nadine cashed the check and put the money in a cigar box. The money is still here.” She dabbed again at the corners of her eyes with the piece of paper towel. “Can you believe, still here after all this time, waiting for him?”

  “You have no idea where he is?”

  She forced a tight smile and looked right into my eyes. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  I stood up. “Thank you for the tea.”

  “Thank you for the mail.”

  I walked around the table and let myself out the back door. I sat on the stoop to put on my shoes. After a glance backward to make sure she wasn’t watching out the window, I fished the blank piece of paper and the envelope out of the plastic tub and stuffed them in my pocket.

  I drove back south through Clarinda. The V.W. bus and the faded Reliant were gone from the Inn, their people fortified for another day. After a few miles, I pulled off at an observation point, got out my duffel, and wrapped the envelope and the sheet of paper inside a clean shirt. It was a long shot, but all there had been was long shots. Maybe A.T.F. could find a fingerprint on the sheet of paper.

  I watched the waves pound the big rocks down below and thought about Lucy Vesuvius. I’d believed her when she told me that Michael Jaynes, service-trained demolitions expert, disillusioned war protester, skilled electrician, and authentic angry man, had taken off for the Midwest long ago. I’d believed her when she said he never wrote, just sent the occasional ten- or twenty-dollar bill wrapped in blank paper. I’d believed her when she said she’d never tell where he was, whether she knew or not.

  And I believed she hadn’t seen him, at least not recently. From the way she tore at the envelope I’d brought, she was too hungry for news of him.

  It was that envelope that nagged the most. I couldn’t figure the twenty-dollar bill she’d just received. It was such small change, enough only for a few groceries. A ten or a twenty might have been all he’d been able to spare in the years past, but now he had half a million, enough to stuff an envelope full of hundreds. But the envelope I’d brought her, postmarked after the money pickup, had contained only another twenty.

  Till’s people would have to get on it. I picked up the cell phone to call him. The display still read NO SERVICE. I set it down on the seat, started the Sebring, and drove on.

  My phone started chirping with message alerts two miles south of Bodega Bay. I was on the inland stretch then and pulled off on a gravel road next to a horse farm. I punched in my voice mail code. There were seven messages from Leo and four from Stanley.

  I got Leo on his cell phone.

  “Where the hell have you been, Dek?”

  “Surfing, beach parties, hot tubs with implanted California girls—”

  “Anton Chernek was arrested by the F.B.I. yesterday afternoon.”

  I stared at the corral across the road. The horses had stopped moving.

  “Dek?”

  “I heard you. F.B.I., not A.T.F.?”

  “F.B.I., Financial Crimes. One of Chernek’s clients accused him of stealing from her account. What’s interes
ting is that the story is on page three of today’s Tribune, which means the reporters have been tipped there’s more than what’s in the ink. Embezzlement cases usually are reported in the metro or business sections. So there’s more news to come.”

  “Any mention of the problem I’m working on?”

  “None yet.”

  I stared at the horses.

  “Maybe you were right, Dek. Needing money bad enough to embezzle from clients might have made the Bohemian desperate enough to extort money from Gateville.”

  Twenty

  Stanley had been frantic when I called him from California, insisting I return immediately. “Santa Rosa, Michael Jaynes, give all that to Agent Till,” he’d said, breathing hard into the phone. “I need you here.”

  I caught the next flight back to Chicago and landed at nine fifty that night.

  Even without his pale blue uniform, Stanley was easy to spot in the crowded terminal. He was pacing back and forth by the entrance to the parking garage, his lips moving silently. He looked like a man trying to talk himself into a heart attack.

  “Thank God you’re back.” He moved to take my duffel. We tugged; I won, and hung on to it as we moved up the walkway to the garage.

  “Boy, was I glad when you called,” he was saying. “I didn’t want to keep leaving you messages, but the Board is expecting me to handle it all.” He spoke in a rush, like there were a thousand words in his mouth, each fighting to get out first.

  He led me down one of the aisles to the blue full-size Chevy van with the wheelchair lift that he’d driven to Ann Sather’s restaurant. We climbed in, and he started the engine.

  “I told Mr. Ballsard we’ve got to stay on our guard, but he’s not listening. He thinks it’s over.”

  “He thinks it’s Chernek?”

  Stanley nodded. He threw the van into reverse, took his foot off the brake, and gave it too much gas. The van lurched backward, cutting off an S.U.V. creeping toward us, looking for a space. The driver hit the brakes, honked, and shot his fist out the window, a finger in the air. Stanley, oblivious, jerked the shifter into drive and punched the van forward.