As Leo walked outside, I saw that the red flag on the mailbox was down. The mailman had come early and had taken the envelope full of nonsense I’d meant to retrieve. I’d have to call Charles now, tell him Carolina was dead, and concoct some story about why that was funny enough to send him an envelope full of sophomoric advice column responses.
The telephone receptionist in Bayonne, New Jersey, didn’t even bother to cover her mouthpiece: “Charles, line three,” she yelled.
A moment later, a precise voice came on. “Charles Braithwaite,” he said, enunciating each of the three syllables carefully.
“I’m calling about Carolina—”
“Carolina!” he said, sucking in enough air to fill a balloon. “You tell her I will not be treated in such a fashion! You tell her that she isn’t the only columnist in the world! You tell her—”
I cut him off so he could suck in more air. “You don’t understand—”
“No!” he shouted. “She doesn’t understand. I need columns; I need them now, and I will not listen to anything that premenopausal—”
I held the phone away from my ear, let the words float away. I’d heard enough to make up my mind. When the noise died down, I brought the phone back to my head. “She hasn’t been well. She wanted me to call and tell you that. Also, she didn’t receive your last payment.”
“Hold on,” he said, much more calmly. Papers rustled in the background. “She’s wrong. Her last quarterly check was sent out in mid-December. I’m looking at it right now. It got cashed, in Florida, same as always.”
“On Windward Island?”
“Of course. As usual, cashed by her service.”
“Smith’s Secretarial?”
“Of course.”
The same outfit that forwarded her mail to Michigan was also cashing her checks. “Could you check the spelling of her last name on the check?”
“Why would you ask that?” Suspicion had crept into his voice.
“Double-checking the details, is all. You know Carolina.”
“D-A-R-E, care of Smith’s Secretarial. The check was cashed, but maybe they didn’t deposit the money into her account, or whatever.”
“Probably Carolina just forgot.”
“Well, you tell her I haven’t forgotten, not about our contract. I’ve been covering her ass for weeks now, saying she’s been sick. I don’t care how ill she is, you tell her to send in some columns—”
“When did you last speak with her?”
Too long a silence came from the other end.
“Come on, Charles. How long?”
“You know damned well I’ve never spoken with her,” he said in a small voice.
“Never?”
“Who are you?”
“A friend, helping her. And trying to help you.”
“This is what comes from her being a real recluse.”
“Not to worry, Chuck,” I said. The simpering twit hadn’t once asked how sick Carolina was. “She said to tell you she just mailed in a new batch of columns.”
“It’s Charles,” he corrected, “and it’s about—”
“Chuck, she specifically wanted me to tell you to pay particular attention to the last letter in the bunch. It’s kind of about you and her.”
“It’s Charles,” he screamed.
I keep a gym bag in the Jeep for those odd moments when the need to drop the extra pounds I’m carrying overwhelms me. That need doesn’t arise often. The gym bag’s also there for those moments when I’m angry. That does occur frequently, and since the turret’s walls are limestone, tough on the knuckles when punched, I try to hustle my anger over to the Rivertown Health Center, where I can run and talk to myself. The other people there, especially the winos who live upstairs, don’t mind; they talk to themselves, some of them, all day long.
I went out, jiggled the lock on the turret door to make sure it had latched tight, and started toward the Jeep and calmer moments. But the day wasn’t done with me yet. Across the lawn, Elvis Derbil, in a snap-brim cap worn backward, metal studs glinting off his black leather motorcycle jacket, was scuttling across the lawn toward city hall.
Elvis Derbil, author of the hundred-dollar use-no-plywood citation.
“Elvis!” I yelled across the lawn. Lizards can hear, even if only as vibrations through their membranes. Elvis, though, didn’t turn his head. He just hurried through the parking lot door.
I hustled across the frozen snow, over what had once been my grandfather’s land, to the city hall built with my grandfather’s limestone. Down the stairs, along the dark corridor, through the door marked BUILDING DEPARTMENT, I chased the trail of coconut-scented hair spray. The look on my face sent the department clerk—a dimwitted niece—pattering away; she’d witnessed our confrontations before. Stopped at the counter, I yelled Elvis’s name through the doorway to his office. I couldn’t see much of him except for one scuffed sole of a pointy-toed red and black cowboy boot, dripping snow slush onto the surface of his desk.
“Get the hell out here, Elvis,” I yelled.
“Come to pay your fine?” his voice asked from behind the wall. The dripping boot didn’t move.
“Come to protest, Elvis,” I said, still yelling.
“I told you: That structure’s a historical; no materials not in keeping with the period.”
“That plywood is only a temporary cover for a broken window.”
His chair creaked, and the boot slid off his desk. A second later, he appeared in his doorway. His forehead, bald halfway back, glistened beneath the overhead fluorescents like Crisco under a stove light. He leaned against his doorjamb and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his striped cardigan sweater. “You telling me they used plywood in the Middle Ages?”
“You telling me they used window glass in the Middle Ages?”
The tight-lipped smirk on his face opened around yellow teeth. “A ‘course they used window glass,” he said. “Otherwise, why did they put in windows?”
“High archers,” I said, lowering my voice.
The smirk disappeared as if someone had turned off a switch, and worry lines appeared. He was thinking. “What the hell do foot problems have to do with windows?” he ventured, after mulling it over for a minute.
“Not high arches; archers: bow and arrow guys, high up.”
He nodded vaguely, the most motion he could summon while his brain was frying. “I told you you’d get ticketed for not using authentic material.”
“It’s temporary, until I can get glass cut.”
“Tell you what: I’ll cut the fine in half if you get glass in it by two weeks.”
“That’s still fifty bucks.”
“Better than a hunnert.”
From habit, I opened my mouth to yell back, but then I shut it. My war with city hall was not winnable through individual battles. I had to wear them down, inch by grinding inch irritate them enough to make them anxious to change my zoning to residential and be rid of me.
And I had reduced the fine by fifty bucks.
I left.
The attendant, a wily fellow who lived upstairs, was pushing shallow eddies of cloudy water toward the floor drain in the basement locker room of the Rivertown Health Center. Normally, the only thing he ever hefted was bolt cutters, and then only when some fool new to the place and thinking a padlock would safeguard a watch and a wallet had just gone up to work out.
“What prompted this?” I asked.
“Toilets,” he grunted past the sagging stub of the cigar that had drowned on his lips.
Toilets spit back often enough at the health center. In the past, though, the attendant had left things to air dry rather than lift a mop himself. I could only guess that his new energy was prompted by city hall. The lizards were becoming increasingly desperate to revive the decaying old tank town, to make it worthy of demolition and new construction by upscale developers, for the kickbacks that would bring.
It was slow going. Rivertown was a hard town to make a show of cleaning up. The hookers strutting Thompson Avenue, and their older sisters behind the bowling alley, could outrun police strobes quicker than cockroaches fleeing sudden light. The tonks, too, were untouchable. Most of them were owned by the lizards themselves. As were the vacant factories with their shattered windows, and the boarded-up retail stores dotted along Thompson Avenue like missing teeth.
That left visible eyesores like the Rivertown Health Center. A stained yellow-brick pile, tiger-striped by rust running off its metal roof, it had been defrocked years earlier from being a Y.M.C.A. Its upstairs population of winos and semiretired sex offenders—slowed by age, rather than by any loss of inclination—was a ripe target for a very public cleanup campaign, but even that had limited prospects for success. The grizzled folks who slept, stupored, on the upper floors were rarely seen, staggering down into the daylight only on the first day of the month, and then only to snatch their disability checks from the mail slots at the front desk. The rest of the time, their prowlings were as nocturnal and as furtive as raccoons: fast forays to the liquor store across the street for fresh half-pints, and occasional stumblings down to the Willahock, to admire the stars while urinating in the river. Toppling the health center would send the residents, very publicly and very permanently, into the streets.
Other than the thumpers—small-time greaseballs who lurked in the parking lot, sunning themselves against the abandoned cars like snakes, even on gray days—the only outsiders who came to the health center in the daytime, besides me, were a couple dozen retired tool men and machine operators, veterans of the factories that used to hum in Rivertown. They came to work limber into aching joints and to trade jokes. It was safe enough, so long as everybody got out before dusk, when the dealers nosed their shiny-wheeled cars into the rutted lot, to peddle powders to high schoolers from the affluent, more western suburbs.
I left the locker attendant to his disintegrating cigar and wet floor and went up. As on every afternoon, Dusty and Nick were roosting on the rusted exercise machines. Nick had a new joke that he was brimming to tell, but he forgot it halfway through. I could have finished it for him, since he told it every couple of weeks, but that might have hurt his feelings. So I waited until he remembered enough to finish it with a flourish. In an uncertain world, where any tomorrow can bring tragedy, the opportunity of knowing anything of the future, even if it’s only the punch line to an old joke, is always to be cherished.
I began walking laps but kicked up to a run when I started imagining the kind of fear Carolina Dare must have felt, hunkering in that cold, isolated cottage, starting at the sound of every little noise from the fields outside, jerking out of an uneasy sleep every time the wind rattled a loose window sash. I wondered if that kind of living wasn’t its own kind of death.
I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. Then I headed down to the locker room, grabbed my street clothes—no point in slushing through moisture to shower at the health center that day—and went out, wet from sweat and Carolina’s fear, into the gray of the early March afternoon.
“You did what?” Amanda leaned back in the booth at Gino’s East, just off Michigan Avenue in Chicago, struggling with the beginnings of a smile. I’d picked her up outside the Art Institute at seven that evening, and now we were drinking sangria, waiting for a cornbread crust pizza.
“I fired off some Honestly Dearest letters to her editor.” I shrugged as though it had been acceptable behavior.
“You should have told him, Dek.” Her lips twitched, just once. “He was…he was…her boss. And you…you…” She lost it then and started laughing. “You as an advice columnist, you…” She lost it again.
I took a sip of sangria, felt a little piece of fruit bump my lip. “You don’t know how wise I can be.” I tried to smile like a sage. It was the first time I’d felt like smiling all day.
She shook her head, still laughing. “I guess not.”
We sipped more wine, but the smiles felt wrong.
“He didn’t give a damn about her,” I said.
“Still, you should have told him.”
“I did, actually, in a snotty letter obviously mimicking Carolina’s voice.”
“Nice.”
“I know. I know,” I said to the disapproving schoolmarm look she was aiming at me. “I did go to retrieve it, though. I was just too late. And I did call Charles, intending to apologize for what he is going to receive, and to give him the sordid details of Carolina’s death.”
“Intending?” The marm mouth grew even more dour.
“He’s such a priss, Amanda.”
She gave it up and asked, “What exactly are the sordid details of Carolina’s death?”
“I don’t know them yet.”
“Yet?” She reached across the table to squeeze my hand.
“It’s not just curiosity. It’s not even that she set aside what might have been her last seven hundred to hire me. It’s that she died without rippling the pond. When her newspapers run a notice, it will sadden her readers, I’m sure. Then they’ll forget her, like the cops have forgotten her. Her attorney is only interested in getting the estate closed. The blueberry cop, Reynolds, wants to try, but he doesn’t have the time, and her landlady just wants her place back. Nobody cares.”
“Except you.”
“She was so paranoid she had her checks cashed in Florida and the money forwarded up to Michigan.”
“She wanted me to find her killer.”
“How?”
“I have no clue.”
“You could spend the rest of your life searching for that lockbox.”
“Yes, and I don’t think I’d get any closer to finding it, if the key even belongs to a lockbox.”
“What, then?”
“I’m bothered that there was no coat in the house, which means she must have been wearing it when she was killed. Yet she was inside, supposedly, typing.”
“You wear a coat inside the turret.”
“She had central heat.”
“Maybe the landlady took the coat with the canned peas, or whatever,” Amanda said.
“There was an ashtray full of cigarette butts spilled on the floor, yet there were no packs inside the house. Ever know a cigarette smoker who doesn’t have a backup pack or two stashed?”
“Not those who don’t live in the city, close to an all-night store. Why is that important?”
“Assuming the nimble-fingered landlady didn’t take the smokes, the missing cigarettes could have been taken as part of an extremely careful search.” I told her about the deep finger gouges in the jar of cold cream in Carolina’s bathroom.
“Looking for something small, like that key?”
“Sure. Someone could have come in, bagged all the small stuff, and taken it out to search through later.”
“What do you do now?”
“I left a message for Reynolds this afternoon, asking him to get me the name of the person at the county who’s been assigned the case. I’ll tell the cop about the guy who tried to get at Carolina’s mail in Woodton. If Reynolds and I both push, I figure the cops will talk to the postmaster, get a description. Maybe they’ll do an artist’s sketch.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she said.
“And they’ll send the sketch out to get tacked up on police bulletin boards alongside the other half-accurate sketches, and the death of Carolina, known as Louise, will be forgotten.”
“Then you’ll drive up to West Haven, hand over the house and car keys to the lawyer, find someplace to donate the car, and be done?” Amanda didn’t buy it; she knew where my mind was going. “Because you still won’t know exactly what Carolina wanted from you.”
“There is that, yes,” I said.
Our pizza came. She ate modestly, I ate the rest. Afterward, we braved the cold to stroll up Michigan Avenue and think of better things. We stopped at the gallery where we’d first met, two years before. We didn’t go in; we looked through the window, trying to see ourselves through our reflections as we’d been that first night. She squeezed my arm and we walked back to the Jeep. Later, much later, after I left her place and drove south to catch the expressway back to Rivertown, I would have said, if asked, that the world was at last righting itself, that Amanda and I were doing it right this time, carefully, deliberately, spending lots of time on building a solid foundation.
That was before I heard from Carolina herself.