Dead Floating Lovers (2 page)

That small hole turned the skull from a thing of creepy interest into a chilling relic of violence.

This was no place for something so grim. Not out here at this peaceful lake. We squatted next to each other there in the damp sand, looking with morbid curiosity at the small skull. Light yellow stains colored the base. At the back, like a bull’s-eye, was that round hole the size of a nickel. Dolly moved so she could see the front of the skull and pointed to another neat round hole, an almost perfect bull’s-eye between the empty sockets. Awful thing. The skull looked pierced, as if for hanging. Somebody’s idea of a weird trophy.

I couldn’t help thinking that if it hadn’t been turned up the way it was, maybe by an animal; if it had been face down in the sand, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought: just an unimportant glacial rock uncovered by receding waters. All the Great Lakes suffered from lowering levels. Some said St. Clair River dredging was leaching our water out through the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean. Some said it was the water bottlers, stealing our groundwater. Some said relax—it’s the big wheel turning. Part of a natural cycle. We’ll have our water back one day and complain then of flooding.

Sandy Lake was down from what I remembered. The shore was much wider. Up fifteen feet in back of us, the old shoreline cut a deep ridge into the sand.

Water lapped gently at my feet, turning my sandals from brown to black. I stepped in farther to get a look as Dolly pointed beyond the skull, out to where the water got darker, murkier, deeper, out to where yellow pollens floated gracefully over more bones: humped rib bones, maybe an arm bone, other scattered bones. And nearby, next to the deeper bones, submerged planks—some kid’s attempt at a raft a long time ago.

“Poor thing,” I said, feeling protective of the bare bones. “Somebody must’ve drowned when the water was high. You should have called the state police right away.” I kept my voice respectfully low despite, or because of, the wind-slurred silence around us.

Dolly shot me a sideways, disgusted look. “You don’t see that hole?”

“Hmm,” I said and winced.

Dolly’s big shoes dug deeper into the sand. She shifted her gun around to her back and put a hand out to steady herself, fingers digging a deep hold beside her. She lowered her head and looked down as if to talk to the skull. She had that kind of face on, mouth a little open, eyes filled with sadness.

“I was supposed to call the state police. I couldn’t call anybody.” Her voice broke as she stood up. “I think I know who she was.”

“Dolly …,” I whispered. There was something deep and ominous around us. We had walked a long way to where the bones lay, off where people who knew the lake never came. There were a few rows of fresh footprints. Two of the rows must’ve been the mushroomers approaching and leaving fast. The others were Dolly’s—when she came out to investigate then ran to get me. Then ours. Like footprints over a hill in the middle of the desert, even these prints seemed out of place here, where everything else was undisturbed.

Three huge crows passed overhead. A shudder moved across Dolly’s wide back as echoes of their cawing died away. She pulled her hat off and rested it against her leg as her lips moved and her eyes closed. Dolly was praying.

“Dolly,” I said after a few uncomfortable minutes.

Another high-flying crow cawed a reverberating caw. A red-winged blackbird flew slowly overhead, watching what we did. Along the shore around us were the toed footprints of many birds. I recognized the signature print of a raccoon. Nothing bigger. No bears here pawing at the bones. No murderer’s footsteps loping away. But there wouldn’t be. Too many years … something happened out here I didn’t want to think about.

Sandy Lake wasn’t a place many people knew about, and I’d been told it was best to stay away. Before I’d gotten strange feelings out here, I came to watch a mother swan and her cygnets. That was my first spring in northern Michigan. I was lonely then, before I learned to live alone. I didn’t yet know my neighbors—Crazy Harry Mockerman; Simon, my helpful mailman. I hadn’t yet made friends with people in town like Eugenia Fuller of Fuller’s EATS, a genealogy-crazed woman with a proud heritage of ancestral outlaws.

I didn’t string at the newspaper in Traverse City where I now knew and respected the editor, Bill Corcoran. And, of course, that was before I knew Deputy Dolly Wakowski, who was bent on making a reporter out of me, or at least a writer of something useful, if it killed her. I had thought this place healing—the silence, the deep, unmoving sand. Maybe, I’d thought then, it was my “road less taken.” A place where my muse resided, like visiting the Oracle in Greece. I imagined this a healing spot where ideas for new novels would spring directly from the waters into my brain. Still, even back three years ago I’d felt too exposed, too breathless, too afraid of emptiness out here.

I stopped coming.

Now human bones lay at my feet and the small lake was changed again. Fear. Death. A pile of bones. Dolly’s painful voice:
I think I know who she was.

“She?”

Dolly nodded.

“There’s no telling from …” I gave a half wave toward the skeleton.

“Mushroom hunters thought it was some kind of Indian burial they’d come on,” Dolly said finally, voice low though there was no one but the three of us, or rather the two of us, and whoever the bones had been, to hear. “I think they called the tribe.”

“They’re probably right,” I said. Picked-clean bones like these could have been anyone.

I wrapped my arms around my body, holding myself tight, as much to be reminded I was alive and had nothing to do with a bare skull, as for warmth.

“Nope,” she said. “Don’t think so. I only saw her the once but … I know what that is.”

She pointed one pudgy finger toward the water, beyond where the skull lay.

I hunched forward and followed to where the finger pointed. Something out there. A small mound of corroded metal with a red bit sticking out.

“What is it?” I asked her, still whispering.

Dolly took a long, deep breath, reached into the water, and, with one finger, dug out a chain with metal dangling from it. And something red. She turned to me, eyes lost in the shadow of the brimmed hat she’d settled back on her head. “I think … it might be my wedding present.” She looked me straight in the eye. She let the metal chain play between her hands, running it lovingly across her fingers.

That last part didn’t sink in at first. I was too upset at what she was doing.

“You know better … No evidence tampering. I’m not going to be a party to …” I thought a minute. “What the heck do you mean, ‘my wedding present’?”

She settled the chain with oblong tags gently into her open hand. All I knew about Dolly’s husband was that he’d left her a long time ago.
Just gone,
she’d said and shrugged. I never thought any more about it.

“Chet gave me his dog tags when we got married. All he had. See this?” She prodded the rusty chain, exposing a small red charm that looked like a beer stein. “He was in the army. Motor pool in Germany before we met. Got this charm over there and was proud of serving his country. Talked a lot about being in Germany. About the girls. But …” She stopped, reading my eyes. “I’d better get you home. No sense you being in on … well … I just wanted you to see I didn’t do anything else. I’m not covering up for anybody. Not Chet. I wouldn’t do that.”

“You mean, you think the bones belong to your ex … or whatever he still is … husband?”

“No. Not his,” she said, vehemently shaking her head. “Last time I saw these dog tags they was on a real young woman. She was with Chet at The Skunk Saloon in town. I went in there one afternoon, just looking around to make sure nothing was going on. Saw her with these. My wedding present, can you imagine? I hardly looked at the woman, just kept staring at the dog tags around her neck. Walked out of there and Chet came running, trying to tell me she was nobody and why didn’t I ever believe him. But he didn’t follow me home. Next thing he was gone, and so was she—I guess.”

“This is the woman?”

Dolly shrugged and threaded the dog tags into her breast pocket. “If it is, Chet could be in big trouble. If the bones turn out to be male then I’ll tell what I know. It would have to be him. If they’re hers … well … I’ve gotta find him, talk to him before I say anything to anybody. Not that I’d let ’im get away but … I guess I owe my family that much. Benefit of the doubt.”

“What the hell’s going on, Dolly? Unless you’ve gone completely out of your mind, I can’t protect you. Not after what you just did. Put those dog tags back. You’re interfering with an investigation. My God, Dolly, you’re hiding evidence. That’s everything you would never do. And you know you don’t have any fam—”

She shook her head, stopping me as she stood and brushed sand from her trousers. “I’ll take you home, call the Gaylord post on the way. Then you’re out of it. The mushroomers are staying at the cabins on US131, too upset, they said, to hang around. Nobody but you knows anything so far.” She set off ahead of me up the beach.

I wanted to protest. I didn’t know what I had witnessed, and didn’t feel right about any of it. Dolly had pulled me into something I didn’t want to be a part of. I felt a chill like the chills that come just before the weather turns; the kind of feeling you get when you know you’re in for it but there’s no place to run.

I followed along with my head down until Dolly stopped dead beside me. She stood still, not even a breath. Her eyes turned up toward the tree line. The expression on her face, as her eyes stayed fixed on a place among the trees, told me something more was going on.

A dark figure stood there, just before the darkness of the woods. A man watched us from up among the quaking aspen, the new spring leaves making shivering shadows over him as they danced on a strange breeze that didn’t reach us. The man was tall, with long, straight black hair blowing around his head and face. He was broad shouldered. I couldn’t see his face, only the outline of him as he stood motionless, watching.

“One of the Indians,” Dolly whispered. “Mushroomers called ’em after all.”

“He saw you,” I whispered, not taking my eyes off the man. “He must’ve been watching when you took those dog tags.”

“Naw,” she said, but shuffled her feet and squinted hard at the ground.

The man didn’t move. I wanted to wave or call out. Anything to break the silence. But even as we watched, he disappeared. As if he’d only been a shadow, he was gone.

“See,” Dolly said, but with a catch in her voice. “He didn’t see a thing.”

“Oh, Dolly,” I moaned. I wanted to go home. I wanted to stick my head under a pillow and come out when whatever was going to happen was over.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” I said.

“You going to call it in to the paper?” Dolly asked as she pulled down my drive with gravel-hurling speed. She skidded to a dusty stop amid a chorus of pinging against the undercarriage of her patrol car.

“Of course.” I held on to the door handle for dear life. Dolly’s driving could rattle your bones and your brain unless you prepared yourself for mercurial starts and dead-on stops. “That’s my job.”

“What’re you going to tell ’em?” She watched me with a look falling someplace between rapt interest and challenge.

“That a skeleton was found at Sandy Lake. Maybe something about low lake levels revealing old secrets.”

“Nothing about me.” Those round blue eyes were pale marbles turned on me. That one lazy eye of hers moved slightly to the left.

“I can’t believe what I saw you do,” I said. “You, of all people, breaking the law.”

Dolly opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. “Sometimes you just have to,” she muttered. “I love the law. I believe in it.” She hesitated, taking a swipe at her nose with her shirt sleeve. She turned her wet eyes on me. “But there’s something even greater, you know.”

“Like what?” This little woman exasperated me. She made me sad and she made me mad. I was more than a little pissed. I’d been lectured on the sanctity of speed limits more than once as Dolly stood next to my car window, writing me yet another ticket. And this wasn’t about speeding. This was all about evidence tampering. But maybe about a broken heart, too.

“Like what you owe a member of your own family.”

I gave up. Dolly Flynn Wakowski was one of those maddening, strait-laced people who live unnuanced lives. There were times I even envied her single view of morality. She spouted the code according to law enforcement classes. Rules were rules. Everything was black or white, right or wrong. Kind of an easy way to look at things—not a whole lot of rethinking involved. But now she spouted this family business. She had moved to a book with two commandments and the highest order had to do with a ceremony she and Chet shared so long ago.

“That man saw. Don’t kid yourself.” I hissed at her and looked around as if the man might step from my woods.

I got out of the car.

“If the bones are Indian …” I looked back at her.

“They’re not. At least not ancient bones.”

“You might be in trouble with the state police. And from the looks of it, with the Odawa Tribe, too. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when that Indian comes after you. You could lose your job, Dolly. If that guy tells Chief Barnard what he saw …”

She looked out her window toward my garden, not seeing the beds of nodding daffodils, not smelling the deep pink and blue hyacinths I’d planted near the door. Beyond my garden beds, the woods were filled with glowing trilliums and Johnny-jump-ups. Dolly only looked inside herself, not at the soft spring landscape. She sucked at her bottom lip. “So you’re not saying anything about my wedding present?”

“Was it really?” I couldn’t help making a face. I wanted to laugh and felt crummy about it. “I mean, is that what he really gave you?”

She glanced down at her watch. “Got to get going. Detective Brent will be out there and expect to find me.”

“So.” I was like Sorrow—couldn’t let it go. “This Chet took his dog tags back and gave them to another woman?”

“Looks that way. Got to wait and make sure the bones are female. I don’t know what … I don’t want to think about …”

“They could be Chet’s,” I said, not to be mean but only direct.

She shook her head fast. “Said I don’t want to think about it.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll call you later. There’s something else …”

“Oh God. No.”

“I don’t know how to find him. I need help.”

“Check the DMV. Check if he’s got a record.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see.” She nodded, sniffed, and then took another swipe at her nose. “How about dinner later? OK? We gotta talk.”

“EATS? The whole town’ll be in on it.”

“Nah.” She shook her head. “Nobody knows yet.”

“You think so?” From experience I knew Leetsvillians had an uncanny sense of occasion. Like giant insects, their feelers spread out. Be it danger, somebody needing help, or bad weather coming, Leetsvillians knew long before things happened and brought the news to Eugenia Fuller’s restaurant on 131 to chew over with other town citizens. They would have answers before the storm hit, before a person’s burned-out house stopped smoldering, before a woman’s dead husband turned cold, or before Dolly could tuck her patrol car between buildings and hope to trap somebody speeding along at 40 in a 35.

Dolly said they all had police scanners and that accounted for their rapid knowledge. I wasn’t too sure it was that easy.

“Make it seven,” she said, and was gone in a choking cloud of dust.

___

Sorrow had pushed the porch door open and had been having his way with my house. One pile of poop under a captain’s chair—still steaming. A lake of pee in front of the sink. And Sorrow leaping to be loved. After that morning’s events, a little poop and pee meant nothing to me. Mere messy gnats to strain at. I scooped and sopped and patted my loving dog’s head. I knew, as Portia knew, that mercy was not strained … or was that something else? I didn’t care right then. I knew what I was getting at. I needed love, and Sorrow gave it with unfettered abandon.

Bill Corcoran was in his office at the
Northern Statesman
when I called, as he was most days—all seven of them—writing, editing, assigning. I could picture him among the usual mess of newspapers, copy to be edited, notes for an upcoming editorial. Nothing neat in his office, but nothing where he couldn’t find it. A bear of a man, gruff but caring, Bill was everything a medium town newspaper editor should be: intelligent, aware of his readership, but true to his calling. And always with that odd middle finger he used to push his heavy-rimmed glasses back up his nose. I still didn’t know for certain if he meant it as a comment, a suggestion, a criticism, or if it was merely a bad, handy habit.

“OK,” he greeted me with his usual bruskness. “So, Emily. What’s happening out there at the edge of the world?”

“Bones,” I said, meaning to be titillating.

“Human? Animal? Ancient? New?”

“Kind of old. I mean, it takes awhile for bones to become bare bones. Definitely human.”

“You mean Indian old?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So? What’s the story?”

“They surfaced out at Sandy Lake, with the receding water. Skull. Other bones. There’s a bullet hole straight through the skull.”

“Hmm. You calling Gaylord? They’ll handle it. Brent won’t want your buddy, Deputy Dolly, anywhere near it. Or the Tribe. Wouldn’t fool with them. Got a thing about their ancestors. They’ll be called in case they’re old bones.”

“Police are … eh … still out there, I think. The Odawa might know already.”

“Got a photo?”

Sticky subject. Maybe I’d go back. But the investigators would chase me away.

“No.”

“You see ’em yourself or just hear?”

“Saw ’em.”

“But no photo, eh?”

“Un-uh.”

“OK. Get me the story. Could be front page. Oh, and by the way, your ex called. Dinner at his house soon. Suggested I bring a date.”

“He would.”

“Might take him up on it.”

“Your life.” I was immediately sorry I’d introduced Bill Corcoran to Jackson in a weak moment. Something about Jackson that he zeroed in on anybody I might be remotely interested in. Not that I was—interested. It was just that there weren’t many available males up here in the woods, which made Bill a possibility.

“So, e-mail the story.”

Yeah sure … depression crawled into my head. I hung up. Not smart enough to take my camera. No instincts for journalism. Books didn’t sell. Jackson moving in on one of my few friends. Money low. No prospects. What else did I have going for me? Hmm … no use selling my body. Wouldn’t bring a dollar and a half.

I let Sorrow out while I grabbed a tuna sandwich then went out to stand in the middle of one of my garden paths, needing to get my head out of Dolly’s world and back into my own. I stuck a Detroit Tigers cap over my thick hair and looked around at what I’d created from a patch of pure glacial sand. Neat beds of flowers. Stone paths with creeping thyme planted between them. Spring flowers—no tulips since the deer saw them as cause for celebration and brought their buddies to the banquet. But a wave of daffodils in varying shades. Hyacinths: blue and pink. It was perfect. Spring was always perfect, no slugs, no moles, no leaf rot.

Sorrow snuffled at the base of a birch tree, then hurried to the other side, then back. Doggie business required deep concentration.

I got the pointed hoe from the garden shed and dug around the flowers. At this time of year the cultivating had to be done carefully. In my second spring up here I’d been overzealous, digging and coming up with lily bulbs with tiny sprouts, and damaging late-emerging peonies. I dug carefully then got on my hands and knees and poked around with my fingers, pulling the earth away from rose bush roots and checking around the iris to see if they’d survived the voles. After a while I sat back on my heels and let a few of the thoughts I’d been avoiding come into my head.

How did I begin to process “wedding present” and a set of blank dog tags with a little red beer stein attached? How did I put together a philandering husband who’d fled the marriage thirteen years ago, with Dolly’s tearful “he’s my only family”? Geez! What she believed came from a place above, below, aside from everything my middle-class upbringing prepared me for. I wanted to laugh at her “wedding present” and her “family,” but there was something so painful trapped in those words. Dolly asked for so little. Who was I to judge her need? Me? Family-less Emily with only my own philandering ex to claim.

I yanked hard at last year’s Japanese iris foliage, then got the pruning shears and cut it back.

I wanted to call Jackson Rinaldi and tell him what had happened. He would laugh with me. I’d get my head back on straight, and feel better. He would find it ridiculous, as he’d found Dolly earlier. “The simple, you know,” he said once about Dolly, “they will inherit the earth and welcome to it.”

“It’s the meek, Jackson.”

“Whatever,” he had shrugged, but the idea got across to me. This was not my place. This was not my circle of Ann Arbor friends. This was not a dinner out with professors, a hot discussion of the latest book, the current political fandango; not even a snide assessment of a new reporter come to the
Ann Arbor Times.
This was the empty woods and lakes I’d chosen. Dolly and Crazy Harry and Eugenia. This was Native Americans and their counterculture. This was bones and history.

I whistled to Sorrow who was reluctant to leave the hole he was digging. I put away my tools, wiped my hands along the sides of my jeans, and went out to my small writing studio under tall maples with newly unfurling leaves. Sun shone on my little peaked roof through a mass of knobby, fuzzy spring shadows. It was so unlike winter, when the shadow lines were straight pencil strokes of spare shapes and the only sound the thump of bare tree trunk against bare tree trunk.

The size of a small garage, my writing studio was plain and undecorated, a single open room with windows looking out on a small meadow where I watched deer chase each other, and once I saw a coyote passing through, and once a mother fox with her kits. It was a good place to work and a good place to do nothing but stand at the window and look out—a thing I did a lot of, calling it “mental writing.”

Elbows on the window sill was a terrific position, I’d found, for musing. My best stuff came from watching the meadow, and sometimes observing a spider weave a laddered web in a corner of a pane of glass, and sometimes lying on my back on my tattered futon, watching the ceiling, hoping inspiration would droppeth like “the gentle rain from heaven.”

I pushed the door open and Sorrow clambered in with a scramble of toenails on the wood floor. He sank down to the rug with a thud and a deep sigh. He was in for a long session of tedium, ending only when the computer said “Good-bye.” Then he would leap and pant and be absurdly happy that I’d finished my boring sitting job for the day.

I put an ani difranco CD on the stereo, bowed slightly to my painting of Flannery O’Connor, nodded to the Georgia O’Keeffe photo with Stieglitz, and snapped my fingers at the drawing of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst home. Mothers all to me. Women, like my favorite poet, Erica Weick, who held on despite what the world threw at them, their confined lives, their subversive art.