Chapter 11

 

Since meeting Cora Baker in May, I’d been spending some time with her each week, usually on Tuesdays. Cora lives in the southwest corner of the county at the end of Brown Trout Lane. Although her house is a cozy cabin on the Pottawatomi River, the most intriguing thing about Cora’s place is that she is privately assembling a Forest County museum in a pole barn on her property. When I met her she had already been working hard to inventory the entire collection in a computer database, but it was way too big a job for one person. I like Cora a lot, and I’d been helping with the project ever since we figured out who murdered Cliff Sorensen, by using information from her newspaper archive. I hoped to find out a lot more about Angelica Leonard from Cora.

So, on Tuesday morning Paddy and I pulled into Cora’s yard just as she was stepping out of her kitchen door. She wore clean but faded overalls over a crisp blouse, her signature style. Today the blouse was green, and she had her gray braids pinned around her head, which indicated a get-down-to-business mood. I’d called to warn her that I was bringing the dog. She thought it would be all right for him to stay in the office with us, and in fact, Paddy lay down placidly beside the computer desk when I positioned myself at the keyboard. So far, so good.

We were still working on taking inventory of the boxes we’d brought down from the upstairs storage area over a month before. It took a long time to enter all the information about each item, decide if it would be displayed or stored and then actually take care of it. Cora pulled open the flaps on a cardboard box and lifted a stack of delicate white baby clothes trimmed with handmade lace onto the table beside the computer. As always, there was also a page of lined paper in the box covered with Cora’s cramped handwriting. She made careful notes about every item at the time it was collected.

“How’s it going with your red friend?” she asked, nodding at Paddy.

“He’s certainly brought more activity to my life. He needs to have a decent walk several times a day or he can’t lie still.”

“I guess that means we won’t get much done today,” Cora said, but she chuckled, so I knew she wasn’t upset.

“We’ll see how it goes. But I want to talk to you about something, anyway.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve gotten my first assignment with Family Friends, and they sent me to meet Corliss Leonard and his granddaughters.”

“I think I know where this is going.”

“Corliss... Len... told me about Angelica’s disappearance, and I thought I should at least read the news articles about it. It looks like I’ll be spending some time with Star and Sunny. I’d like to understand as much as I can about what happened.”

“You’re welcome to read the papers, of course, but they won’t enlighten you much more than what you probably heard from Len. The whole thing came to a dead end really quickly. There wasn’t much of an investigation, to tell you the truth.”

“You remember when it happened, then?”

“Sure. The Sheriff questioned that boyfriend of hers...”

“DuWayne.”

“Yes, I’d forgotten his name. But, anyway, his whole day was accounted for, and most everyone believed that she just hitched a ride and got away from him.”

“Len seemed to think they got along really well.” I didn’t mention talking with Paula.

“I guess DuWayne was OK. I talked with him a few times in town and he was polite—not arrogant or disrespectful, but he ran around with some pretty rough friends. Mostly, he spent time with Marko Louama’s boy, Larry. Larry’s been in trouble with the law since he was in junior high. There were a couple of others in that group, too. Some girl from Emily City and another young tough whose name I don’t know. But the girl was Mexican, I think. I saw them a lot because I lived in town then.” Cora hesitated.

“I know you used to be married to Jerry Caulfield,” I admitted.

“Hmmm, I suppose that nosy Adele told you.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d already learned that Cora’s relationship with Jerry, the owner and editor of the Cherry Hill Herald, was a very sore topic.

Cora continued, “Well, we lived right there, two blocks from Main Street, behind the newspaper office. I couldn’t help but see them. There’s an empty lot beside the office, and the building next to that was vacant then, too. That whole group of kids—I guess most of them were done with high school, but they were kids to me—thought that was an out-of-the-way place to hang out. They’d laugh and smoke and push each other around. Sometimes other kids came by.”

“Why were they in Cherry Hill if DuWayne and Angelica lived in Hammer Bridge Town, and the other girl was from Emily City?”

“That’s a good question, isn’t it?” Cora said sarcastically. “I think they were all dealing drugs. There was a lot of reaching into pockets and passing things back and forth while trying to stay in the shadows.”

“How could Angelica spend time there? She had two little girls.”

“I have to be honest and say that after the younger one was born Angelica hardly ever came around with the gang. Before that, though, she’d just leave the other girl with her parents. They were clueless as to what their daughter was up to.”

“Did you ever see DuWayne hit Angelica?”

“One night he slapped her pretty hard, but she slapped him right back. That Larry Louama was the one I didn’t trust, though. He had a mean streak a mile wide. Assaulted John Aho at the gas station when he was only sixteen, because the pop machine was out of order. Went after him with a tire iron, but no one was seriously hurt and John didn’t press charges. A foolish decision, if you ask me.”

“Wow, this doesn’t sound like the Angelica I’ve heard about.”

“Parents are always a little blind, don’t you think? I’ll see if I can remember anything else, but maybe we could work on these baby clothes now.” She picked up the sheet of notes from the stack of small garments, and I turned to the database and pulled up a screen for a new item.

Cora and I concentrated on inventory for a couple of hours, after which we walked Paddy the length of Brown Trout Lane. I had remembered to bring some training treats, and we each practiced his new commands with him. The only other fact I learned about Angelica’s friends was that Larry Louama had finally been sent to prison for assault about four years previously.

I left Cora’s mid-afternoon, and spent the evening raking my yard and admiring my “new” house from all sides. Robert had managed to match the old clapboards with some salvaged siding from a demolition. As soon as it was all painted, the house would almost look as if it had always had two stories throughout. I liked it a lot. Between raking, hauling tubs of debris, and bending to pick up Paddy’s tennis ball after each retrieval, I knew I was going to be sore the next day. But Paddy was catching on that he had to drop the ball when I told him “give,” if he wanted it to be thrown again.

There was supposed to be a meeting of the Family Friends committee on Thursday. I was looking forward to that, not only so I could report on my progress with the Leonards, but also because John Aho was a committee member. I wanted to hear more about Larry Louama. However, on Wednesday evening Adele called and cancelled the whole thing, saying she had a sore throat. She’d contacted the literacy tutor, and Corliss Leonard would begin meeting with her at the library.

My new upstairs was a mess with plaster dust hanging in the air, but by the end of the week the taping and sanding were done, and Gorlowski’s crew was moving on to some other job. I tried to clear the chalky residue from enough surfaces to make a clean work space and to clear my mind from prejudicial thoughts about Angelica’s friends.