Dead Floating Lovers (15 page)

Nothing like a mood-killing angry face waiting on my side porch to bring me back to earth with a ground-shaking thud.

All morning Jackson and I had been the way we used to be: touching each other, laughing together, no old animosity or manipulation. Just a man and a woman. A couple who looked, to outsiders, as if they were very much in love. I liked the feeling. I liked daring to draw in a deep breath and not hurting inside. I welcomed touching his cheek over coffee, making love a last time before leaving, taking one of his well-manicured hands in my rather rough hand and bringing it to my lips, looking up at him, seeing him contented and pleased with me.

Driving home I thought about what it could be like if we married again. I’d have to leave my house on Willow Lake. The real estate market wasn’t very good in Michigan; maybe I would hang on to it for a while. Why not? I asked myself. We could come up here to write. Nothing stopping us from having a second home. I wouldn’t have to give up my place entirely, just be ready to share a little. Lots of couples did exactly that. Or they had time apart at their summer home. Maybe I couldn’t keep the garden, but then I could hire Crazy Harry to weed for me, maybe spray on deer repellant. There was no reason to go on in such turmoil, not with a perfectly good marriage as an alternative.

I drove down my drive, happy with myself, but guilty that I’d left Sorrow on the porch alone all night. I thought, with a thud, I might have to get rid of Sorrow. Really no place for him back in Ann Arbor. He was too big, too clumsy, too unmanageable. And he was used to freedom. I could see him leaping on a leash, tied to a post outside of Zingerman’s, straining to get away. No, I would just have to harden my heart and find him a good home. Maybe Dolly would take him. She didn’t have much in the way of entertainment. A dog would be good for her.

Or Crazy Harry. He could add Sorrow to his kennel of dogs. I even told myself Sorrow would like that, having his own kind for company.

The Leetsville patrol car sat in my drive. Sorrow, who had escaped, leaped in place beside my squat, angry friend, standing with her fists jammed at her waist, watching me pull down the hill. Eleven thirty. We’d said early, but I’d forgotten.

I parked beside Dolly’s car, got out, and waved, happily calling out, “Hi! Beautiful morning.”

“Where the hell you been?” Dolly growled.

Sorrow leapt in wild circles around me. He had learned not to throw his body at a human being, but had not learned how to stay on the ground. I grabbed a couple of fistfuls of his thick hair and forced him to calm down. He lapped at me, his long pink tongue reaching for a bare arm, a leg, anything he could get to. I patted his head and bent close, whispering an apology.

“We were supposed to get going early. Remember what you said yesterday?”

I murmured something and nodded.

“You stay in town?”

I grabbed my purse, salad bowl, and tongs out of the car and started toward the house with Sorrow leaning his big black-and-white body into mine.

“Looks like it,” I answered Dolly over my shoulder, opening the door, and nudging Sorrow to sit.

The two of them followed me inside. I hurried to feed Sorrow, still feeling guilty that he’d probably been out all night, and hadn’t been fed. Water he could get down at the lake.

“You sleep with Jackson?” she demanded.

I turned an astonished, and innocent, face to her.

“None of your business,” I said, and slipped off my shoes. I needed a shower, my hair washed, a change of clothes. Maybe an hour. Dolly had been there almost two hours already. I probably wouldn’t have time for a shower. No time to wash my hair. But I was at least going to change out of the silk shirt and pants into something more suitable for hunting down missing women.

“Are you nuts?” She took a seat at the kitchen island, wiggling around so her gun found a place for itself over the side of the chair. “You know what that guy’s like. He’ll use you again. You’re already typing up his stuff, sending it to the publisher for him. Now he’ll have all the sex he wants, too. Sounds like some damned geisha to me. Never thought you’d be that kind of woman.”

I gave a disgusted snort and headed back to my bedroom to change. When I came out, dressed more for the day ahead in jeans and yellow cotton sweater, she was still talking.

“You think you’ll marry him again? Start all that over—finding underwear in the glove box of his car?”

I decided I’d told Dolly too much and was sorry. I had needed a place to go with my misery when I first knew her, but I should have kept it to myself.

I shrugged. “Might. Things aren’t working that well up here.”

“You mean your crappy books?”

“Well, yes,” I sat on a stool and changed into tennis shoes. “My crappy books. No decent jobs. Being alone too much. Talking to a dog like some old lady.”

“What about the
Dead Dancing Women
thing? The one about us?”

“No takers.”

“Thought you were sure about that one. Didn’t like it myself—made me look kind of like an odd person—but I thought, ’cause it was based on those murders here last year, well, that it should sell. If that happens you should be OK.”

I nodded. “If that happens,” I echoed.

“Doesn’t take a lot to live up here.”

“Takes some.”

“You said you still got money from your dad.”

“But it’s running out. Probably by next year …”

“Geez.” She looked away, disgusted. “Anything can happen between then and now. If I was you I’d get my real estate license, just in case. You could make enough off that.”

I nodded. An idea I’d been kicking around. A week of schooling. Have to pass a test. Find an office that would take me …

Thinking about Jackson and Ann Arbor was easier.

“I thought you loved it up here.” She sniffed and picked at the skin on her left hand.

“I do,” I said. “But …” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Sorrow had to be put on the porch, though I promised him a long walk when I got back.

A woman has to be practical, I told myself as we headed out to my car. Maybe it was time to move on. Still, as I turned to lock my door, I felt the solid brass knob in my hand, put a palm against the warm and firm wood, and turned away from the house I loved with a frisson of sadness.

“OK, so here’s the deal.” Dolly sat on a bench at the Trout Town Grill making notes in her small notebook. “Let’s go see these Robbins families.”

Trout Town Grill, in Kalkaska, had good food, especially their Cobb salad. The restaurant was crowded but we got a booth at the back in five minutes. I ordered my salad and Dolly went for the fried chicken. She dug her notebook out again and laid it on the table.

She frowned over her notes. “Then we’ll head out to Elk Rapids. That Tanya Lincoln, sister of the missing girl from Mancelona. She’s out there.”

I nodded and dug into my salad as soon as it got there. If Dolly decided we’d better hurry, there would be no time to finish my food. She could bolt down a plateful of anything in nothing flat.

“Then we’ll make a stop in Traverse City. See this Fern Valient. Then out to Peshawbestown and Lena Smith. That’s going to be the hard one. We’ll have to go door to door.”

“Or to the casino. Somebody there might know her.”

Dolly nodded and bit into a piece of chicken as a man in his mid-thirties with shoulder-length brown hair, dirty jeans, and a clean checkered sport shirt walked over and stood beside our table.

“Heard you was looking into that bone thing, from out to Sandy Lake,” he said, smiling and nodding at me then turning his attention to Dolly.

She leaned back and frowned up at him. “Billy Kramer?”

He nodded.

“When you get out?”

“Long time ago. I was a kid, Dolly. I’m married now. Me and Cassandra got us a little boy.”

She smiled. “I’m really happy to hear that. I never thought you was bad.”

“Thanks,” he said, and lowered his head shyly.

“Why are you asking about Sandy Lake? Just curious?”

He shook his head and looked at people in the other booths. “Heard it might be Chet, your husband.”

Dolly nodded, scrunched up her face, and waited.

Billy leaned close to Dolly’s ear and told her something I couldn’t hear. She looked up and demanded, “You sure?”

Billy nodded, waited a minute, then walked back to a table near the far wall where a young girl sat holding a baby dressed in a blue onesy. He kicked his feet and made happy noises. She looked over at us and nodded her head.

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“Said he’d seen Chet with a woman once. He said it was an Indian girl, and he knew she had a brother because he knew the brother. Maybe another girl in the family, too. Said they lived somewhere around Leetsville back awhile. The brother’s name is Alfred. Had a little run-in with Alfred when Billy was about twenty. Didn’t know the last name but he heard the brother works at one of the casinos; maybe is high up in the business end of things.”

“Should have asked for a description.”

She shrugged. “What good is that going to do? Billy’s got to be thirty-six now. So, thirteen years ago?”

“He say what the run-in was about?”

“You mean with Alfred?” She shook her head then thought awhile. “Billy was a mean guy when he was young. Had something to do with his dad. He got some awful beatings out there on Crawford Lake. Got into a lot of scrapes with people he saw as different. His dad was maybe a Klan member, something like that. Wouldn’t be surprised if Billy called this Alfred names. Insulted him. You know what boys do.”

“Some guy,” I muttered and glanced back at what looked like a nice young couple, and at the baby the woman dandled on her lap.

“Don’t glare, Emily. Billy’s a different man since marrying Cassandra. Up here, we keep tabs on the bad guys. Happy when they get turned around. I think Billy’s one of the turnarounds. And his dad died. That was a big help.”

She finished her chicken while I was only halfway through my salad. I could see she was getting fidgety, so I had the waitress box up what was left. We headed out to Third Street, to call on the first of the Robbins.

The house was small, white, and set back on a lot between two huge Victorians.

A woman came to the door wiping her hands on a dish towel and frowning through the screen at us. “Yes?” she said, looking over Dolly’s blue summer uniform, then me. I didn’t think we looked like a menacing duo. Had to be Dolly with that gold badge pinned way up over her left breast.

“Ma’am,” Dolly said hesitantly. “I’m Deputy Wakowski with the Leetsville Police. This is Emily Kincaid, with the
Northern Statesman
. We’re getting information on disappearances from a ways back. Can you tell us if you’re related to Tricia Robbins?”

She frowned harder. “She’s my daughter.” One of her hands went up to hold on to the door. “Oh my God—she’s not …”

“No, Ma’am,” Dolly hurriedly pulled the screen door open and reached in to grab the woman’s shoulder, supporting her. “It’s nothing like that.”

The woman backed into her living room and sat down on a brown checked sofa.

“Did your daughter ever come home?” I asked.

She nodded, but looked disgusted. “Back when my husband reported her missing she’d already run off maybe three times. That last one seemed longer than the others.”

“She come back or did you just get a phone call or something?” Dolly said.

She made a motion with her hand. “She came back, then ran off again in a few months. Next thing she was gone, and we finally heard she was living with some man down in Grand Rapids. Pregnant. After we heard that, well Tim and I decided we didn’t want anything to do with her.” She gave a decisive shake of her head. Her lips pulled in tight, forming a halo of tiny wrinkles around her mouth. This was a woman still angry with the child she’d borne, yet something in her eyes said different.

“You got scared when you thought she might be dead …” Dolly always stepped in where angels knew better than to tread. “Seems you love her.”

The woman made a noise and got up from the sofa. “Natural enough. I’d feel bad about any Christian soul coming to a bad end.”

Dolly was about to say something else—I thought it had to do with that “Christian soul” stuff—and I grabbed on to her arm. It didn’t do to get into religious arguments and our time was limited. We could mark Tricia Robbins off our list and go on to the next, though even I was hoping Tricia’d found a happier home down in Grand Rapids.

___

Tanya Lincoln, of Elk Rapids, lived in a second-floor condo looking out on Lake Michigan. We pushed the doorbell but no one answered. We tried the next-door condo and the elderly man who answered said Tanya worked at the insurance agency right downtown.

That was our next stop. The overly made-up receptionist in the small lobby of the vine-covered brick building smiled a lot and went to get Tanya Lincoln from the lunch room. The receptionist came back with a short and wide woman who smiled as much as the receptionist and stuck out her hand as she walked purposefully forward.

Dolly introduced us, and asked if we could talk in her office.

We sat in two blue and chrome chairs across from her desk in what was a very spare office. Tanya folded her hands on the desktop, showing us she had all the time in the world to listen to our insurance needs.

“It’s about your sister,” Dolly began.

Tanya frowned.

“What about her?”

“I’m talking about Bambi.”

“Yes?”

“You reported her missing thirteen years ago.”

The woman looked surprised at first. She finally smiled, her broad face widening, her deep brown eyes looking amused.

“And what do you want to know about her?”

“Did she ever come back?”

Tanya laughed. “She sure did. Married a man from Mancelona. They’ve got four kids and she helps out here in the agency. You want to meet her?”

Before we could say that wasn’t necessary, she got up and motioned us back to the lobby.

“Bambi,” she called to the smiling receptionist, who sat leafing through an
Elle
magazine. “These two are here to find out if you ever returned when you ran away.”

Bambi’s chin dropped. She stared up at her sister. “You are kidding me.”

“No,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed but not knowing why. “We’re checking on all girls who came up missing about thirteen years ago.”

“And you’re with the newspaper?” she asked, looking at me. She’d overheard the introductions. “I hope this won’t be in the paper again. That was a long time ago.”

I shook my head. “I’m working with Deputy Wakowski, here. Something to do with a current case she’s on. Just covering it for the paper.”

“Probably that Sandy Lake thing,” Tanya said toward Bambi, and leaned back on her heels. “I read about it. Awful.”

“Well, you can take my name off your list,” Bambi said. “And I sure don’t want to see my name in the paper connected to anything like that. First place, I don’t want my kids to know I ran away like that. Trouble enough, with four boys.”

I put my hands up as if surrendering. “No need to bring you into anything.”

Bambi’s smile was gone. Those bright red lips were pursed tight. “That is so right. And I’ll be watching the paper. If I see my name you’ll be talking to Tanya’s lawyer …”

Tanya rolled her eyes. Dolly and I backed toward the door.

We thanked them and left the office. Behind us, I heard the women arguing.