The Cutlass started with a grunt of surprise; its motor hadn’t turned over at that hour of the morning in years. Yawning, I gave the steering wheel a sympathetic pat and pulled out of the garage onto asphalt pocked with holes and dark with dew. Drops sparkled on the grass. It would be an hour or more before it dried enough to wake up the sprinklers. Traffic was light in town, made up mostly of American-made cars driven by the red-eye shift at Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler with their lamps on.
The first place on my list—because it was the farthest and the day was fresh—was in Warren, a stone’s throw from the GM Tech Center. That was a going concern around the clock. Test drivers shoved their shiny new plastic toys at top speed around the track and the city-size parking lot was packed fender-to-fender while the eggheads were climbing into their lab coats inside the huge dome-shaped research building.
I passed a mile or so of chain link fence and left the pavement for a stretch of gravel bisecting what had obviously been a large dairy farm. The large whitewashed two-story farmhouse had a new metal roof and two silos flanked a barn the size and shape of an airplane hangar. A sign on a concrete slab showed a stylized sailboat floating on a wiggly blue line toward a mound with a palm tree sticking up from it. Under the picture:
PEACEABLE SHORE
A Haven for the Renewed
Twenty-some people were hoeing rows of green plants in an acre of plowed ground, with two more manhandling panels of galvanized iron on the roof of the barn. The web site Barry had found advertised the place as a recovery center of some kind.
A gravel turnaround looped in front of a long front porch supporting a row of unoccupied bentwood rockers and a butter churn with geraniums sprouting from the top. Someone had taped a square of cardboard over the doorbell, asking visitors in block Sharpie letters to knock. Pigtails of red, yellow, and green wires spilled beyond the sign’s edges ending in wire nuts. I rapped on a screen door, releasing tiny helicopters of peeled paint from the wooden frame and a sifting of rust from the iron mesh. Darkness behind, broken up by geometric patterns of sunlight spilling in through windows on the other side of the house.
A distant door opened, releasing just enough illumination to describe the boundaries of a long narrow hall dividing the ground floor into two halves. The rectangle of light framed a substantial body in a bell-shaped dress. Another door with a glass insert opened halfway along the hall, letting in more light and the same body, larger now in appearance. By the time it reached the screen door, it seemed to fill the passage from wall to wall. A bare arm the size of a leg of lamb reached up, tinkled a hook loose, pushed open the door against the grinding complaint of a spring, and I was face-to-face with the largest woman I’d ever seen. She balanced three hundred pounds on a six-foot-four-inch frame, with another hundred pounds of strawberry-blond hair falling to her waist on both sides of her print blouse. Her face was an assembly of ovals bunched around a pug nose and a tiny mouth painted fireplug red. Patches of rouge stained the ovals of her cheeks and her eyes glistened like pennies in a wishing well. A gust of the kind of perfume they stirred up in steel drums came out with the suction of the door opening.
She said nothing, waiting.
I fished out a card and held it level with the pennies. “We’re conducting a missing-person investigation, and the name Peaceable Shore came up. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”
The other leg of lamb rose and a stunted-looking hand took the card. That hand was a disappointment, sprouting like a child’s pinwheel at the end of that arm. At that it was twice the size of mine. The tiny lips writhed over the printed words. “Who’s ‘we’?” The pennies wandered past my shoulder to the empty Cutlass.
I smiled. “We’s me. The plural sounds more official. Actually I’ve got all the authority of a Cub Scout. I’d consider it a personal favor if you could spare me a few minutes so I can move on from here.”
Her neck accordioned while she consulted a tiny octagonal gold watch sunk into the suet of her wrist like a microchip. “Five minutes. I’ve got a referral on the way and one stranger’s enough in their condition.” She stepped aside, still holding the screen door.
The place smelled like Grandma’s, cheap furniture oil mixed with apple-nut bread baking somewhere. Behind me she closed and rehooked the door and I flattened against the wall to let her take the lead. I followed her between shoulder-high wainscoting, watching her tea-colored muslin skirt swing from side to side like a bell without a clapper, a pair of muscular calves ending in black walking shoes, no ankles in between, the floor planks shifting under her weight. Her hair in back also reached her waist, or where a waist belonged. I figured her for a retired Olympics shot-putter, if not a transsexual slaughterhouse employee.
I put all that aside when we passed through a door marked PRIVATE at the end of the hall and she sidled around a gray steel desk with a composition top and sat with her back to a framed diploma on the wall. Someone named Lois Champion had graduated from a Neuropathy program in Minneapolis with a degree in mental and physical therapy.
“Dr. Champion?” I asked, sitting in a vinyl-upholstered kitchen chair opposite her.
“Mrs.” She settled into the space between the arms of her chair; I thought of a bear relapsing into its rings of tallow. She picked up my card from the desk where she’d put it, without looking at it this time. “I doubt I can help you, Mr. Walker. All our people are present and accounted for. We take the roll in the morning and do a bed check at night.”
“Rehab?”
“No. They come here from drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinics to prepare for returning to the outside world.”
“Halfway house?”
The ovals bunched in displeasure; I thought. Considering the amount of spatial and weight displacement, she might have been stroking out or suppressing a burp. “I never use the term. We had difficulty obtaining a permit to use this property because the neighbors thought they’d be living next door to ex-convicts. Many of our guests have violated no laws except those that apply to controlled substances. The more severe cases stole from relatives to support their habit.”
“I don’t get it. Rehab places are supposed to prepare them to return to society. How many hoops do they have to jump through before they can apply for a driver’s license?”
“You don’t know the statistics. Alcohol and drug abuse is the twenty-first-century’s answer to the Black Plague. The clinics have their hands full detoxing the residents, and only so many beds to restrain them during the process. They can’t spare any to piece together their shattered souls once they’ve gotten the poison out of their system. Without places like Peaceable Shore, their chances of remaining straight are next to nothing.”
“Okay.” I changed positions on the uncomfortable seat. I wanted to smoke, but I supposed she’d consider that abuse of a controlled substance. “Why do you think the name of your establishment came up while I was looking for Emil Haas?”
The ovals shifted again. “I know that name.”
“He and his partner are investors. They’ve been buying up delinquent properties in Detroit for renting and resale. The partner hired me to find Haas after he vanished. Carl Fannon’s the partner’s name.” I watched her, but all that flesh was an almost impenetrable insulation between me and what was going on behind it.
She returned my card to the desk, squaring the corners in its exact center.
“The murder, yes; if that’s what it was. I was right, I’m no help. I know nothing more of either man than what I’ve heard and seen on the news. The only offers I’ve received on this property are from an auto dealership looking to expand and a developer who wants to glut what little is left of open country with McMansions, basketball hoops, and speed bumps. I turned them down—despite the profit I would make. I didn’t spend four years studying the bundle of nerves that is the human corpus in order to drink Cosmopolitans in Myrtle Beach.”
“You’re the owner?”
She flattened her palms on top of her desk, her face reddening until it blended with the blush on her cheeks, and rose. “That’s as much time as I can give you, Mr. Walker. I’m sorry.”
“No need. You’d be surprised how many places call themselves Peaceable Shore. This one’s just another bead on the abacus. Mind if I look around outside, just so I can say I did?”
“I thought your client was dead.”
“He was. Still is, I suppose, but his check cleared before he died.”
“I can’t honor your request. I was serious about how many strange faces my guests can tolerate at this point in their passage. I’m not running a petting zoo. I employ people to maintain the safety of the people I’m responsible for.” She peeled the card off her desk and held it out.
“That’s all right, Mrs. Champion. I found out it costs just as much to print five hundred as to print one, and they wear out so fast, the way people keep picking them up and laying them down.”
I used the succession of doors. It was like passing through the various chambers leading from a plant room. As I put distance between us I felt the pressure relieving, like the change of temperatures from one climate-controlled enclosure to another, but I hadn’t heard the door to her office close and was sure she was watching me in case I doubled back or ducked down one of the halls to right and left. When the screen clapped shut behind me I breathed in the smells of cut grass and sunshine, but I knew I’d be smelling baked apples and lemon Pledge the rest of the day.