Dead Floating Lovers (16 page)

Traverse City, on this bright May afternoon, resembled Disneyland waiting to open. The clean streets and bright blue bay looked ready for happy characters to come bouncing down the sidewalks, zip by on motor boats, glide overhead in balloons, and wave stiff hands in the many parades to come. There is something about a waking resort town. The locals walked Front Street smiling, nodding to each other, and calling out as if about to break into song.

Washington Street was in the downtown area. A block over from Front. Between two of the houses we passed stood an old signal tree, severely bent out of shape by Indians making their way from winter to summer hunting grounds. Once they had tied young saplings at an angle to mark their trail through this place of the grand traverse.

Fern Valient’s house, one of the smaller homes, was nestled in between larger homes with wraparound porches and tall trees. A black SUV was parked at the curb in front of the Valient house. We knocked and waited. No answer. Dolly walked to the backyard to see if Mrs. Valient might be out working in her garden.

“Nobody back there,” she said, coming around front.

“We’ll call later,” I suggested and started down the front steps.

“Guess we’ll have to.” Dolly headed out the front walk to where my yellow Jeep was parked at the curb. “Too bad. Could have all these loose ends tied up.”

I figured it didn’t matter. My money was on the Naquma girl. I did wonder, though, why she hadn’t lived on the reservation at Peshawbestown. Maybe that wasn’t so unusual now, but thirteen years ago the Odawa weren’t doing quite so well. Would this one family have had the money or the self-confidence to live away from the tribe? Maybe leaving the reservation was more common than I thought. I guessed I didn’t know a lot about the Odawa.

The bay, awake after a long winter of ice and snow, reflected a brilliant blue and cloudless sky. A few fishing boats worked the middle of the bay. One sailboat and many speed boats dotted the water’s surface. Memorial Day would be the official kickoff. The marinas we passed already teemed with boats coming out of storage.

Along the way toward Sutton’s Bay, a flock of returning swans circled and chased, making spring fools of themselves near shore. Dolly sat with her elbow resting on the window ledge and her fist jammed into her chin.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked after too long a time of quiet.

She turned and gave me a wan smile. “Oh, just Chet and that girl. I wonder if there was another boyfriend in the picture. You know, somebody really jealous. Soon as we know who she was for sure, let’s start asking about boyfriends.”

“This Lena Smith might know.”

Dolly shook her head. “Didn’t seem she knew a whole lot. Paper said they were only friends at the beauty school. She didn’t even know where Mary Naquma lived.”

“What about the school? Shouldn’t we go there and see if anybody remembers her?”

“Out of business. Already tried to call.”

It didn’t take long to get to Peshawbestown, still an Indian Reservation, but now one sprawling along M22 and back into the forest. A casino, hotel, and conference area were the town centers. I remembered coming up here quite awhile ago, before I married Jackson, and driving through on my way to Northport. The houses were mostly trailers then. Run-down, rusty places. Unemployment among the Indians had been high. Alcoholism destroyed lives. Now the houses were neat, many of the homes new. They’d created their own jobs, and all shared the money made from gambling. There were no ego-swollen Donald Trumps among the Odawa. The money they made gave every member of the tribe a better life. Their children got college educations, and the tribe was building its own colleges. Everybody got a piece of the pie, like the true meaning of democracy—not simply consumerism.

Dolly tapped me on the arm and pointed to one of the houses set back in the woods. The place was very small, but neat, with a perfectly square, newly tilled, and planted garden off to one side.

“One of the Smiths you found,” Dolly whispered as if anyone could hear. She pointed to a mailbox.

I turned in, pulled between garden and house, and parked. I looked with longing at the perfect rows of the garden, hilled, and, I’d heard, probably planted with fish heads and other parts for fertilizer. I thought longingly of spending spring and summer days in my garden until my skin was brown and my garden luxuriant. Maybe taking on a Native American life was what I was after. Complete peace and nature. No TV. Maybe no electricity at all. I could live in a teepee and keep a wood fire going at the center all winter. I’d heard of a woman in Traverse City who’d lived like that, close to the park along M72. The thought of baking my skin over a fire all winter, and maybe freezing to death anyway, cooled my rustic dreams.

We knocked at the many-times-painted white front door. No answer. Again. No answer. Dolly stepped off the small square of cement and looked up at the house. I was making my way to the car when a woman came from the woods. As she got closer, she put a hand in the air, hailing us with a “Yoo-hoo, there. Can I help you?”

The woman was too young to be Lena Smith. In her early twenties, with straight black hair cut in bangs and left to hang around her face, she was slim and pretty, with a timid smile.

“Are you looking for Tobias?” she asked when she got up to us.

“Looking for Lena Smith. She one of the Smiths who live here?”

“No. Tobias Smith,” the young woman said. “Why do you want to talk to Lena?”

The way she said it made me suspect this woman knew Lena.

“Actually,” Dolly said, “We’re looking for a Mary Naquma. Do you know her?”

The woman’s face changed from open and halfway friendly to dark. Her eyes went cold. She took a few steps from us, backing off the way she’d come. She shook her head.

“How about a man named Alfred?” I stepped in, trying to close the gap between us.

She glanced over her shoulder at the woods, as if she was going to bolt at any minute.

“Lena Smith reported Mary missing back a few years and we’re doing a follow-up,” Dolly went on. You couldn’t miss the instant reluctance we were getting. There might even have been a big dose of fear.

“Can I have your name?” Dolly moved up beside me.

“You got a card?” The woman ignored Dolly’s question.

Dolly felt in her pockets, took out the punch card they’d given her at Trout City, and a pen. She scribbled her name, address, and number then handed it to the woman. The woman looked down at the card and then at us.

“You both from Leetsville?” she asked.

We nodded. “I’m with the
Northern Statesman
,” I said. “We’re following a series of disappearances that happened awhile ago.”

“What about this ‘Alfred’?” Dolly asked. “Probably Alfred Naquma.”

“Never heard of him.” She snapped her mouth shut.

“If you hear where this Lena Smith lives now, will you have her call me?”

The woman barely nodded.

“And if anybody out here admits to knowing ‘Alfred,’ give me a call on that one too, OK?”

“Yeah. Sure.” She nodded, turned, and hurried off through the woods the way she’d come.

Dolly and I exchanged glances. “What do you make of that?” she asked, climbing back into my car and slamming the door.

“No idea. But obviously those names meant something to her. Guess we wait.”

“Casino?”

“There are other Smiths out here we could look up first.”

She shook her head, lifted her hat, and repositioned it on her sweating hair. “Give you ten to one we hear pretty soon.”

I backed out the drive to M22 and drove south. “OK, but let’s ask for ‘Alfred’ at the casino. See what happens.”

For a late afternoon, the parking lot of the casino was surprisingly full. The bells and clanking began as soon as we opened the door. I had this thing about gambling. I knew I had an addictive personality, and those sounds made my blood bubble and my brain stop working. I immediately began calculating how much money I had in my purse.

“No gambling,” Dolly leaned in close and whispered.

“Maybe just a Triple Diamond machine.”

She shook her head and scowled at me. “We’re on duty, Emily. You don’t drink and you don’t gamble on duty.”

“I’m not a cop.” I pouted and blamed her for losing me the fortune that was waiting here, among the flashing lights and loud voices and old people dragging oxygen machines through the cigarette smoke, from machine to machine.

“You’re with one,” she said, and headed off to the line for the customer service area where I could have gotten a personalized casino card that would have paid big dividends. If it weren’t for Dolly Wakowski.

When we got to the counter Dolly asked where the main offices were. We were sent back out of the casino and down the next road to the hotel/conference center and tribal offices.

A pleasant Odawa woman sat behind a modern oak desk in the lobby of the tribal offices. Dolly didn’t ask directly for this “Alfred” guy but instead asked for a member of the council. The girl went through a set of double doors behind her desk and came back with a tall man who looked like any other white man. So many Odawa were of mixed blood. The names could be American. The faces American. And yet they could be close to full-blooded, the white genes winning out in the big lottery.

“May I help you?” the man stepped over. His manner was stiff, business like, and guardedly friendly.

Dolly introduced us. “We’re looking for a Lena Smith. Does she still live around here?”

He thought awhile. “Many Smiths. I don’t recall a Lena.”

His head dipped, as if bowing.

“What about Mary Naquma?”

There was a small intake of breath. I knew what to look for now. That name brought response. Not the one we were looking for, but still a response.

He shook his head slowly.

“Are you sure? She disappeared about thirteen years ago.”

“Not from here,” he said with conviction.

“No, not from here. But she was an Odawa.”

“Many Odawa.”

Dolly put out a hand to me. “You got some notepaper?”

“You’ve got your own notebook,” I hissed back.

“Forgot.” She patted her pant’s pocket and pulled out her notebook.

After writing down her name and number again, she tore the paper off and handed it to the man. He took it, folded it neatly, and put it in his shirt pocket.

“And your name is …” Dolly put out her hand to shake his.

“Nicholas Adajawa. I’m manager of the casino.”

Dolly nodded. “If you hear anything about Lena Smith, or about Mary Naquma, you’ll give me a call, OK?”

He said nothing. He put his hands deep into his pockets and stood there waiting for us to leave.

Outside Dolly was spitting mad. “They know something.”

I nodded, as frustrated as Dolly.

“Let’s go back to the casino.”

I gulped. I’d made it out intact once. I didn’t know if I could go back in there and not fall from grace.

“I got a couple of bucks,” she said. “We’ll play your nickel machine. I just want to see who hangs around us now that the word’s out. I’ve got a feeling something’s going to happen.”

It wasn’t at the nickel machine that something was going to happen. After losing the ten dollars I’d confidently fed into the machine, an almost physical sadness set in. The few times I hit were only tiny blips in the constant gobbling of my nickels. At first I played the full shot—seventy-five cents a pull. Soon I was down to twenty-five cents a pull. Then a dime. Then I fed it one nickel at a time, meaning one line. Of course, that time the machine hit big on a line that wasn’t covered so I had my sense of stupidity to deal with at the same time as my deep regret at losing. One thing I learned about myself I didn’t know—I was cheap, as well as poor.

Dolly did better. She made small wins and kept playing even though she missed a lot of the plays due to looking around the huge room where we sat against the wall.

When my ten dollars was gone, I waited for her to finish, turning my chair back and forth, scanning the room, the people, the workers.

Just as Dolly hit triple diamonds on a line she’d covered and the machine went into its deep rumbling and flashing, I saw him standing inside the archway to the restaurant. He was talking to another man with long dark hair. They spoke in urgent conversation. It was the man from Sandy Lake.