Repo Madness (6 page)

“Ruddy!” Claude bellowed when he saw me. “We're going to Hawaii! All expenses paid!”

“That's great, Claude,” I said as sincerely as I could.

“Drinks are on me!” he cried overenthusiastically. Everyone yelled, “Yay!” again.

“Actually, the first two are on the house,” I corrected him.

“Even better!” he enthused. “This is the best day of our lives!”

I decided not to explain that the free drinks were due to Milt's passing. I turned and tracked Jimmy eyeing me and remembered he was in some sort of trouble. We nodded at each other, but things were too busy to chat.

Whether Milt would have enjoyed the conversable conviviality or not, the free drinks and the single round I let Claude put on his tab propelled the bar into a full-out celebration.

“In Hawaii, they don't have consonants, just vowels,” Claude lectured a bleary-eyed group of revelers. “And aloha means everything: hello, good-bye, love, peace, eat, drink, lawn mower, doesn't matter: You just say aloha.”

A lot of people frowned as they considered this, but no one challenged him.

“Honey, let me dance the hula for you,” Wilma cooed at her husband. They were being amazingly noncombative with each other—I guess winning a trip to Hawaii can really smooth out the rough spots in a relationship.

Wilma put Claude in a chair in the center of the room and spooled up “Hotel California” on the jukebox, which I guess was as close as we could come to Hawaiian music. Everyone was laughing and cheering, but we all fell silent when Wilma started to move in a smooth, flowing, and frankly erotic fashion, her hips swaying, her hands carving the air like elegant birds. What the hell? No one had ever seen her do such a thing, or suspected she was capable of it. She was graceful and beautiful, and we were all entranced.

The dance ended with Wilma climbing on the chair and crashing with her husband to the ground. Then they made out on the floor until Claude needed to breathe. “Last call!” I shouted.

I checked my phone. No response from my fiancée.

By the time we'd broomed everyone out the door, it was just Jimmy and me. I locked the place and poured us a couple of short beers, and we sat underneath the bear—a taxidermied black bear that stood in the corner, its lips in a snarl, arms raised, looking fierce and ready to attack. I had nicknamed the bear Bob and thought he was kind of cute. He was the reason my father gave the bar its name. Legend had it Dad had shot the thing, but Becky claimed she was with him when he bought it at a garage sale.

As I get older, I learn more and more that memory is a tricky thing and that Becky's is wrong.

“Okay, so?” I prodded.

Jimmy swept his black hair out of his eyes and looked at his hands as if he were holding cards in them. “Yeah. I have a problem. With Alice.”

“Alice. Alice Blanchard?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she asking for child support? Because if she is, you know you need to pay it.”

“No, she still won't take any money for Vicki.”

Jimmy had recently found out he had a daughter, Vicki, now ten years old, by a woman he hadn't known was pregnant when they'd stopped dating. Alice Blanchard was married to a big shot banker in Traverse City now and had a nice life and was altogether hostile to Jimmy, but she allowed my friend to see his biological daughter.

“So she won't take money.… Wait, is Alice threatening to cut off your visitation? Because that's not right either.”

Jimmy shook his head. “No, that's not it.”

I was impatient with the guessing game. “I know she hates you, Jimmy. What's she doing now?”

Jimmy looked pained. “It's like this, Ruddy. I sort of started having sex with her again.”

I stared at him. “I did not see that one coming,” I confessed.

“We didn't mean to. We just couldn't help it.”

“Sure, that makes sense.”

“So I need your help.”

“You need my help? How can I help? With what?”

“Alice thinks her husband suspects something.”

“Wow, Jimmy.” I shook my head. “This is a big mess.”

“Tell me about it,” he responded moodily. “And it gets worse. He told her one time that if she ever cheated on him, he would kill her.”

“Right, well, a lot of people say things like that.”

“No, Alice says he means it.” Jimmy gave me a soulful look. “She's really, really scared.”

 

5

Why Would You Believe Something Like That?

My dog, Jake, stirred in his bed when I walked in the front door, giving me a mournful look with his basset eyes. His mottled body—brown and black and white—was coiled and ready for inaction, his flabby stomach as pink as a baby's butt.

“You know, for a lot of dogs, when their master comes home, that's a really big deal. They jump around, bark, lick. Or, you know, move a single muscle.”

He sighed with disgust at the behavior of those other dogs. I went over to him and knelt to stroke his soft ears. “Hey, Jake. You get a lot done today?” He leaned into my massage. “Did Katie take you out?”

He shot me a coldly disapproving look at the word
out
.

“Okay, you and me, outside, leg up, in five minutes. Prepare yourself mentally.”

I walked down the short hall and stood in the bedroom doorway. Katie was sitting up in bed, reading
Radiant Angel
by Nelson DeMille. She wore a gray flannel nightgown that looked like it had been issued by the Russian army. I was learning to read the signals: White clingy T-shirt meant she could be coaxed into feeling amorous. Lacy black meant I'd better be ready to perform. This one suggested I'd have better luck invading Poland.

I gazed at her, feeling the distance between us. Some random seed of discontent had taken root in our relationship and flowered despite any nurturing by either of us. “It was a nice funeral,” I said by way of a greeting.

She set her book down and gave me a sad smile. “He was a good man. Are you okay?”

I shrugged. “Doesn't seem real yet.”

“I know. And then when it does sink in, you sometimes wish you could go back to being in denial.” I wondered if she was thinking of her father. “So, did you see my mother?” She glanced away, as if she didn't want to hear the answer.

“Yes.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“Yes. She said the usual things. ‘I'm no good for you, I'm a loser' … like that.”

She pressed her hands to her head in an odd headache gesture. “My whole life…,” she started to say, and then she was crying.

I crossed over to her, concerned. “Honey? Katie? What is it?” I put my arms around her.

She didn't reply for a moment. Her tears flowed silently, and she reached for a tissue to wipe her eyes. Jake's collar rattled as he came into the room, sensing something. He leaped onto the bed, probing Katie's face with a wet nose and then a pink tongue. She hugged him to her. “Oh, Jake,” she said mournfully.

“Is it Milt?” I asked.

She shook her head, then shrugged. “Oh, a little, I guess. It's more that I couldn't go to the funeral because of my mom. Which is just one more way she's running my life, you know? And when I went to work, answering the phones at Dad's old office, I thought I was finally making my own decisions, but the only reason Dad worked there in the first place was because she got him the job. Even now that I've taken the real estate exam, it still all flows from her, you know?” She caught my noncomprehension and laughed sadly. “I guess this doesn't make any sense.”

“You're saying you feel controlled by your mother.”

“I'm saying I don't know who I am anymore.”

Something told me I was heading into a conversation I might not like, but that didn't stop me. “What does that mean?”

“I mean, I have these roles, like I'm your fiancée, my mother's daughter, and if I passed the test, I guess I'm a real estate agent, but who am I? Who is Katie Lottner?”

Jake and I glanced at each other. She appeared to be in real pain, a pain neither dog nor man seemed able to understand.

“I thought about going to the bar as usual,” she continued. “And there's laughing and drinking, and then Wilma Wolfinger throws a beer in Claude's face. Like nothing happened, like Milt never died. And I realized, this is how every day goes now.”

“Actually Wilma did sort of a Hawaiian lap dance for Claude.”

She gave me a wan smile. “This topic is a little too emotional for you, isn't it?”

“No, no,” I protested, though inside I was practically screaming,
Yes, yes
. I just couldn't escape the feeling there was something worse going on here than I perceived. “I just want to make sure … Are you still pissed off about that Amy Jo woman, at the Shantytown festival?”

“No. I told you I accepted your explanation.”

I wondered if I should probe the difference between
accepted your explanation
and
I believe you
. I decided to leave it alone. I regarded my fiancée. Even with her face scrubbed of makeup and her hair pulled back in a scrunchie, she was still breathtakingly beautiful.

“It's just that we spend practically every night at the bar.” She sighed.

“Because I work there. I'm a bouncer. It's not like they'd hire me to do that at the church.”

“You work there. You get
paid
to work there?”

Was that what this was all about? I remembered reading somewhere that married couples mostly fought about money and sex. I couldn't imagine what there was about sex to fight about, but money made sense. “Becky doesn't pay me in winter. The Bear really doesn't make a profit until the snow melts.”

“That's not my point. It's not that you're not making any money; it's that you go there even though there's no reason. I just would like to spend an evening somewhere
else
for a change.”

“Okay. We'll do that. It's a good idea. Let's go someplace nice.” I mentally reviewed my financial status, which was broke and out of a job. Well, maybe not
that
good of an idea.

“No, I'm sorry. That's not what I even meant to tell you. Forget I said that.” She gave me a serious look, and I felt my blood chill. There would be bad news now. “I think I found a place. In East Jordan. Like we talked about. Closer to work.”

“No,” I protested. “We said we would discuss it.”

“No,” she responded in disconsolate tones. “Please don't say that. We've discussed it a lot. The commute, our relationship, how things have been lately.”

“You say ‘our relationship' like it's this thing we keep in a closet somewhere. It's not a thing; it's us,” I argued. I could feel the heat rising in my face, though I knew I needed to be calm and reasonable.

“It's really late, can we not fight about this now? I won't know about the place until tomorrow. I just really need to chill out and go to sleep; I don't want to go through this all again.”

Well, I did. I wanted to go over this ridiculous idea that we were going to put a pause in our lives. We were betrothed; you don't suspend that for some sort of engagement vacation. But instead I came up with the most difficult word for me to utter in the moment. “Sure.”

Katie sighed in relief and picked up her book in a way that suggested the conversation was over. I thought about asking her if she wanted to fight about sex, but instead went to drag my dog out into the cold. He really had to lift his leg, but his expression indicated he resented me anyway.

*   *   *

Katie slipped out before I awoke, and, of course, Jake didn't stir. I had a vague notion of my front door easing closed while it was still dark, and then what seemed like just seconds later my house was filled with daylight.

The morning was so nice, it hurt. We don't see much of the sun in late January, but on this day the air was full of dancing sparkles as the trees shook off their snow under a dazzling blue sky. I shielded my eyes as I stumbled to the repo truck, which barely started despite the dual batteries. The sun was doing nothing to cut the cold, which had driven temperatures below zero.

“Why on earth would the Wolfingers want to go to Hawaii?” I asked myself.

I drove to Boyne City for the second time in twenty-four hours. My route took me through the little town of East Jordan, where Katie worked, then through acres and acres of hardwood, the trees casting dark shadows in the brilliant sun, until finally I arrived at the shore of Lake Charlevoix and turned right. My heater had apparently decided to give up—even after an hour in the truck, I could still see my breath.

When I arrived in Boyne City, the shanties clustered out on the frozen lake looked like big animals huddled against the cold. I pictured the men sitting inside them, not moving, holding fishing rods, icicles hanging from their faces. Well, okay, the shanties probably had to be heated.

I kept driving north, and eventually the woods thickened up, blocking my view of the ice, until I turned off the road and into a neatly plowed driveway near a mailbox that read
STRICKLAND
.

Barry Strickland had been the sheriff until recently, when he resigned amid the scandal of an extramarital affair with a councilman's wife. It didn't seem to bother the townspeople all that much when the story came out, but Strickland immediately apologized and quit the office. He explained that he'd brought dishonor to the position. That was the sort of man I knew him to be—he had the strength and integrity of a steel beam.

The councilman's wife went back to her husband, and Strickland, long a widower, went to his cottage on the shore and now, ironically, did a little work for Milt, helping us find people who had disappeared with debts owed to banks and credit unions. He still had a lot of friends in law enforcement after thirty-five years working as a cop all over the state, and was dogged and patient as an investigator.