Dead Floating Lovers (19 page)

Dolly marched ahead of me through the deep, yellow sand. The morning sky, reflected on the still surface of Sandy Lake, was streaked blood red and mauve. One of those “sailor take warning” skies, which always seemed to prove true. Probably rain by evening. I looked up at the clouds, their overhead direction and speed. Maybe a woods-cleaning, spring storm out of the west coming. The kind that brought old trees crashing down and wiped out my electricity for days. Everything part of that gigantic cycle, I had learned. Ebbs and flows. Nothing personal in the storm that took out my electricity. Just the old cosmic swing; events working toward a bigger goal than I would ever understand.

Dolly muttered over her shoulder at me, complaining that I was too slow. “Stop all that thinking and move,” she ordered. “Got to get around to the other side. We’ll comb the woods up the slope. Look hard at the shore. If anybody lived out here there’s gotta be something left of ’em.”

“Probably had the wrong lake. Nobody knew where this Mary really lived.”

“Yeah, well, all signs point to this one. Otherwise why sink ’em here?” She stopped, turned back, and let me get within ten feet of her before taking off again, throwing little bursts of sand back at me as the heels of her boots lifted and fell.

“What about a boyfriend of Mary’s?” I called after her. “If we’re looking for someone mad at both of them, makes sense it would be a jealous man.”

“Sounded like Chet was her one true love, from what Lena said.” Dolly shook her head as she went around the first cove, then moved beyond where we’d found the skeletons, toward an area of deep woods.

I trudged along at a slower pace. If she wanted help searching the woods on the other side of the lake, she’d have to let me go at my own speed. The one thing Dolly Wakowski would have to learn is not to push the unpaid help too far. Still, the distance between us grew as she marched on, head down, arms swinging, shoulders bent forward. She looked like a blue-backed gnome on a mission. I glanced at my own feet, in sandals, and wondered what the heck I was doing out here. Maybe I’d get a story—if we found anything. More than likely it was another of Dolly’s wild goose chases—like that abortive trip to Detroit.

The air cooled fast. My sandals filled with damp sand. I had to stop every so often to take them off, bang them together, slip back into them, and be off again.

It took half an hour to reach the wilder side of the lake where hummocks of grasses grew, and the thick trees blocked the uphill slope. I looked at the lake, a deeper mauve and purple mix of storm warning.

I caught up with Dolly where the trees grew thickest. The forest must have stretched for miles, out from the sand’s edge to I had no idea where. This was typical of land the oil companies owned up here. Hundreds of miles of forest crisscrossed by two tracks. Every once in a while there would be a pumping station or shed filled with equipment. At times men manned the various stations. Most were self-operated, the thick arm of a pump going up and down, throbbing, sucking oil and sending it along pipelines to the next station.

Dolly scanned the ground, walking slower. Her hands were caught together behind her back as she took small steps up into the woods, then down, leaving no area unsearched. I moved ahead of her, into the thick woods, and assumed her stance: hands at my back, head bent forward, feet shuffling through weeds and broken tree limbs.

In an open space among the trees, I came on what looked to be a cement pad for a garage or a shed. The grasses growing around it and through the large, crooked cracks were dull, almost blue in color. Everything looked much drier and sandier here. Beyond the cement pad, milkweed grew, and here and there a browned trillium. I thought about collecting the young milkweed pods and sticking them into my jacket pocket. I ran my fingers over one of the small, silky feeling pods and decided: no, I wasn’t a backwoods girl after all. I bent and more closely surveyed the ground around me.

“Hey, over here!” Dolly called from up the rise, a little ahead of where I stood. “Found something.”

“Me, too,” I yelled back. “A cement pad. Like maybe it was a garage …”

“Saw that.” Her voice, coming from among the trees, bounced off tree trunks, and got lost in the slight soughing of the pine boughs. “Got something up here.”

She stood next to a long row of vine-covered cinder blocks half buried in the ground. I could follow the line to where it turned a corner, then disappeared underground. We walked the course of blocks, turning with it, following where they disappeared, possibly covered over with sand years before.

“There,” Dolly pointed to a place farther into the trees. It was difficult to make out anything beyond a pile of charred timbers covered with dead vegetation, all dropped into what had once been a rough hole in the ground. I reached in among the burned beams and drew out the rusted remains of a lawn chair. Dolly tugged at what looked like a badly rusted pot. There were other things among the ruins, but nothing truly identifiable.

“This has got to be it. You bring your camera?” Dolly nudged me.

I pulled my digital Nikon out of my jacket pocket and snapped pictures from all angles, though I figured I’d have to come back to get good shots. The sky had already darkened so there was little contrast between trees and ground. And no shadow to differentiate the walls of the foundation from the burned wood. I pushed at a growth of fiddleheads and crouched as low as I could, to get perspective on the ruin. One darkened beam, sticking up from among the others, gave form to what had once been a house. But what did it mean that the place had been destroyed?

Dolly said she’d go to Gaylord and talk to Detective Brent. I handed over my answering machine tape for her to give him. “How about you go to a pumping station and see if you can find anyone who remembers this place, and who lived here?” she said.

I agreed to do that, but not until the morning. There was a storm on the way and I had Jackson coming for dinner. Maybe Dolly didn’t believe in having a life outside her police work, but I did.

How could I mess things up so badly? I wanted everything perfect when Jackson came to dinner. A wild, atavistic urge to feed a man came over me. Must’ve been straight down from a grandmother I’d never met; from back in the times when a woman caught herself a productive male or perished. My dinner would be spectacular. A mating dance to end all mating dances. Intimate, with candles and wildflowers and wine. It would fill him, satiate him, make him mellow and tranquil and putty in my hands. I’d decided this was the evening I would mention moving back to Ann Arbor.

The storm, when it hit, was wild, but brief, the air crystalline clear afterward. The evening promised to be one of those May times when the world smells like every flower in the whole spectrum of flowers, and when the late golden sun is thick enough to roll in. There wasn’t a cloud left in the sky by dinnertime; a great evening for eating on the deck. But I was conflicted—eat inside or out? Inside would be cozier. Outside restful—but with too much demanding our attention: the lake, the birds, the beaver out there mocking me.

So … inside. I spread a yellow striped cloth on the little table in my kitchen nook. Blue tapers in crystal holders … well … maybe not real crystal. Blue cloth napkins beside my burgundy plates. Colorful. Lovely. I planned to serve tomatoes with mozzarella I’d picked up at Cherry Street Market; fresh basil and olive oil on top of the luscious little beauties. I prepared bruschetta with bits of garlic and roasted red pepper. There would be a risotto with freshly grated pecorino cheese, peas, and morels. And tiny lamb chops with a salad of arugula, ceci beans, and blue cheese. I felt like Martha Stewart on steroids, dashing about in my kitchen, gathering my wares, weaving my web. I could feel the bluebirds sitting on my shoulders, singing. There are days when you know nothing could possibly go wrong—until it does.

The tomatoes and basil were fine. The bruschetta burned in the oven. But what could that matter, with the pleasures yet to come? The risotto didn’t absorb the chicken broth—it remained a kind of soup. I let it rest until Jackson got there, thinking it was sure to set up. It only needed time to be perfect.

Jackson arrived with his arms filled with more of his manuscript—pages and pages of handwritten notes. I put Sorrow out on the screened porch with a mammoth stack of dog bones, hoping he would eat and go to sleep.

My hair was done—as well as I ever do it: left long and wild and thick. I had swiped color on my cheeks, pink lipstick over my mouth, and added a smudge of gray to my eyelids. I had dressed in a deep pink silk shirt and slinky black pants. I even wore low backless heels. At my neck I draped silver chains, and stuck silver hoops in my ears. If I said so myself, I looked more Ann Arbor than northern Michigan.

In the doorway Jackson bent to peck at both my cheeks. I hugged him awkwardly—all that paper between us.

“Something’s burning,” he said after dumping his paper on the living room desk and turning to stick his nose in the air.

I assured him it was only the bread and that I had a wonderful dinner planned for us.

“I’m assuming you’ve got my work done? What I gave you before?”

I nodded and pointed to a stack of sheets on the counter, with a freshly burned disk sitting on top.

“Good.” He fingered the sheets of his manuscript then lifted the first page and began to read to me.

Since I’d already read it once, I only half listened as I stirred my risotto and put the lamb chops into a pan to sear along with garlic, olive oil, and pepper. Jackson settled into a living room chair as I poured the white wine—not Santa Margherita—and brought a glass to him. He waved for me to set the glass on the table and continued to read, stopping only to give a cluck of admiration from time to time.

The manuscript came with him as he followed me around in the kitchen. He read on until I took the stack of papers from his hands and set it on the counter. For that I got a pained look, his dark eyes accusing me of ingratitude.

“Dinner,” I said, and led him to the table, where I’d put him next to me, not across.

The tomatoes were wonderful.

“Any bread?” he asked and I had to shake my head, not bringing up the bruschetta I’d burned.

“Remember that time you forgot to pick up the roast beef at the butcher’s when we were having all those people over?” He snickered and shook a finger at me. “God, but that was funny. How you scrounged up a vegetarian dinner only to discover most of that Indian delegation weren’t meat eaters anyway. Very, very lucky.”

I nodded.

“And the time when you cooked your first turkey and forgot to take the giblets bag out?” He took another tomato from the pretty Chinese plate I’d set them on. “But you came around—eventually. We had some wonderful meals. I like to think I had something to do with your education.” His lips smacked together.

I smiled and took a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking about our life in Ann Arbor.”

“It wasn’t all bad, was it?” He smiled indulgently and patted my hand. “Now be honest. We made a good couple.”

“Yes, well …” A little irritation settled deep in my brain.

I poured the rice out onto his plate. It spread and then it spread some more. It reached the edge of his dish and kept going as he tried to catch it with his fingers. Fortunately, he laughed.

We ate the rice with spoons. The salad was flat. Lamp chops were inedible—tough and cooked all the way through. I had no dessert.

I suggested we take our wine out to the deck after the meal. He looked longingly over at his manuscript and then at me, but my scowl stopped him.

We set our deck chairs to face the lake. There was no breeze. It was the quiet time of evening when the birds settled into their nests with a last weak riffle of sound. The sun made long horns of gold across the surface of the water.

“I brought my things,” Jackson said quietly and turned his head slowly to give me an anticipatory look.

I smiled, then launched into the subject sitting like a lump between us.

“You know, Jackson, I’ve been thinking about moving back to Ann Arbor,” I said.

He shrugged and said nothing.

“I mean,” I went on, “I’ve been up here for over three years now. I think I miss working at the newspaper. All of that urgency every day.”

“I can see where you’d miss it. Still, it is beautiful here. Quiet. Perfect for a writing getaway. I think I’ve envied you this.”

“Yeah, well, I was thinking I could keep this place. A weekend retreat. Or if one of us has to write …”

“Nice of you to include me.”

“What I was suggesting …”

“Could I have more wine?” He held his glass in the air. I hesitated then went in and brought the bottle out with me.

I didn’t know why I was tongue-tied. Maybe because I felt I was doing too much of the work and he just wasn’t getting it.

“This would be a great place for me to come work on my next book,” he said, glass turning in his hands. “I’d pay you rent, of course.”

“No, what I meant …”

“Give you a little income. You’d need an apartment. Maybe a condo. Could you swing it without selling this place?”

I shook my head hard. “I don’t …”

“But of course you could rent in AA.”

I stopped trying. He wasn’t getting it or he didn’t want to understand. Maybe I was pushing too hard; scaring him. Jackson could be a timid and frightened man when cornered. He needed time to adjust to the changes between us. I looked over at his slightly worn profile and felt a rush of love.

When I got up to bend and kiss him, he put his arms out and held me. It didn’t take long to find our way back to my bedroom and spend the rest of the night without talking.

After we’d made love, I slept as I hadn’t slept in days. Some old admonition from dead family women made me feel safer, having a man in the house; a knight in shining armor, who would leap up and fight off all intruders with his trusty lance.