I stared at Kane. There was an odd reflection on his glasses from the overhead light, so that I couldn’t precisely see his eyes, but the rest of him was rigid and hostile. As for me, I was shocked silent—even Alan had stopped talking. I cleared my throat. “What are you talking about?” I asked faintly.
“You know goddamn well what I am talking about.” He shook his head, and the reflection flashed across his glasses. “I don’t know what you think you were going to accomplish here today, but you made an appointment under false pretenses, and I want you to leave.”
“Dr. Kane … I honestly don’t know what you are talking about.”
I’ve seen the look he gave me then—like I was the lowest life form on the planet. Usually I get it from people who are disgusted I am there to reinforce their obligation to pay back their loans, and I can often cheer myself up by driving away in their cars. Since that wasn’t an option here, I felt myself growing frustrated and angry.
“Just leave.” He made to move past me but stopped when I took a step, putting myself between him and the door. He peered up at me, a flicker of concern in his glassed-in eyes.
“We’re not finished here. You said I know something. Tell me what you think I know, Dr. Kane.”
His lips twisted into a disdainful sneer. “I never told the family the truth. I wanted to spare them the pain, Mr. McCann. But apparently your lack of humanity knows no bounds.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“You had intercourse with her that night. I recovered semen. Can you imagine? Bad enough that their little girl drowned in your car—first you got her drunk, and you … you…” He shook his head, unwilling to speak it.
“Is this true, Ruddy?” Alan whispered, shocked.
My heart was pounding. “Did you keep the semen?”
“What? Of course not! I would have had to put it into my report, then.” He glared at me. “Satisfied? Now, are we done here?”
“Yeah. We’re done.” I pointed a finger at his face—a single finger, when what I wanted to do was feel his teeth on my knuckles. “Just one more thing, Dr. Kane. You think that proves she was in the car? It doesn’t. It proves the opposite. The exact goddamn opposite.”
* * *
Alan’s questions followed me as I stormed out to the repo truck. “What are you saying, Ruddy?”
I got in and slammed the driver’s side door. “Goddammit!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.
“What? Tell me!”
“If that pompous ass had just put that in his report, you know what a difference it would have made?”
“No, what? How?”
“It means, I would have known something was wrong. Because I might have forgotten a few things about that night, but I promise you, I never had sex with Lisa Marie. You don’t forget something like that. I never so much as kissed her! I never would have pleaded guilty if I had known she had somebody’s semen inside her. Maybe we would have hired a private investigator to look into what really happened that night. Or the guy’s DNA might be on file with the cops. Maybe we would have found Amy Jo and gotten her story. Maybe somebody else saw something that night! My whole life would be different!” I started the truck and drove out of the parking lot, forcing myself not to let my anger express itself in a stomp on the accelerator. Alan’s silence was somehow pensive as he experienced me controlling myself. “What?” I snapped at him. “What’s your problem now?”
“You keep saying that,” he replied quietly.
“Saying what?”
“That your whole life would be different.”
“Well, it would!”
“I don’t disagree. But isn’t that sort of beside the point now? You can’t go back.”
“Are you saying I should just let this whole thing drop?” I demanded, furious.
“No! Of course not. I think something much worse happened to Lisa Marie than what anyone knows. There was semen inside her. She got out of the car before you drove into the lake, but she drowned anyway. We owe it to her to try to find out who did that to her. But it won’t change anything. You can’t get the years back. You’ll still be who you are.”
“You are wrong, Alan. It will change everything. You have no idea what it is like for me now. I used to go to the Dairy Queen or the bowling alley or the movies, and everyone was glad I was there. Men shook my hand, little boys looked at me like I was a superhero. Now people are embarrassed when they see me. The kids stare at me like I’m a suspect being interrogated behind a one-way mirror. All because of a fiction.”
Alan was silent. The old repo truck always shuddered its way down the highway, so much road noise that I couldn’t have heard the radio even if it had worked. This one was quiet, the only sound a faint buzz from the knobby tires finding their grip on the pavement. I listened to the buzz for a while. “You don’t understand,” I finally muttered.
More miles buzzed by. “Kane gave us something we haven’t had up until now,” Alan mused.
“How’s that?”
“Motive. Before, it didn’t make any sense. Lisa Marie wasn’t in the car. But she shows up in the water anyway. A man ‘helped’ her, but she still died. Why? It was a complete puzzle. Until you find out that she had semen inside her.”
“So she could have known the guy,” I suggested, nodding.
“Or he’s a predator who came across a drunk teenage girl and saw an opportunity.”
“Jesus.”
“We need to find out everything we can about Lisa Marie Walker,” Alan said decisively.
My phone rang. I picked it up and looked at the screen.
Time to talk to Dr. Schaumburg.
* * *
Schaumburg confessed that his conversation with Kermit left him slightly confused. “The man said you were reincarnated in jail.”
“Well … reincarcerated, maybe.” I gave a not-my-fault accounting of Herbert Yancy’s swan dive off his roof. “So obviously, I couldn’t make it to our appointment.”
“It does seem as though every time we set up a time, something extraordinary happens to prevent you from making it.”
“What, are you saying I wanted to roll the repo truck? To get arrested for some rich idiot falling off his own roof?”
“You didn’t push him,” Schaumburg observed neutrally.
“No, of course not. I was just there to collect an account for the bank.” The ice I was skating on had grown thin under the truth, but it was still holding my weight.
“Could Alan have pushed him off?” Schaumburg asked quietly.
“What? Alan would have been afraid to even climb the ladder.” I snorted.
“I wasn’t afraid,” Alan tsk-tsked.
“Have you spoken to Alan lately?”
“Alan was just a voice, Dr. Schaumburg, something my brain made up.” And that, too, was the truth. A version of it, anyway. Though from the continued noises Alan was making, I could tell he did not agree.
Schaumburg grunted. “All right, let’s set a time for you to come in.”
We agreed that we would love to reunite Tuesday morning.
I finally got a chance to repo a vehicle that was parallel parked on the street, right in downtown Traverse City. I pulled a Ford Edge from between an old Toyota and a new Audi and was out of there in five minutes. The whole experience improved my mood. Alan fell asleep while I was jockeying the Edge away from the curb. How anyone could fall asleep during such a glorious repo was beyond my comprehension.
Katie was having a busy day, but eventually was able to return my call for a quick five minutes. “They arrested you?” she responded incredulously when I told her why I couldn’t make our date. “When the guy ran on a roof, and fell?”
“It was more like a jump, at least at first. The fall sort of came later.”
“Was Dwight there?” she practically hissed.
I delighted in being able to tell her yes, of course, he was the one who put the cuffs on me. Too tight, by the way.
“So that’s what this is all about?” she fumed. “Okay, I’ll talk to him.”
“What? No, don’t do that,” I urged.
“Why not? This is all some sort of juvenile power play. He calls you my bouncer friend. Like, ‘Heard anything from your bar bouncer friend?’ It sickens me.”
“Do you tell him I’m actually your repo friend?”
She laughed. “I tell him you’re my boyfriend.”
“That’s good.” Actually, it was great. “Uh, I’d appreciate it if you let me handle Deputy Dumbbell. Otherwise, you know.”
“It makes you feel less manly,” she guessed.
“Of course not. I’m way too manly to feel less.”
She laughed again. “Of course you are.”
“If you need a demonstration,” I said suggestively.
“In that case, I know just who to call,” she agreed primly.
So she was not only not angry that I’d canceled our date because I’d spent the night in jail, she agreed that I should never have been arrested for something that wasn’t my fault. Deputy Dumbbell’s department had lost points, and she felt bad for me and agreed we should go out for dinner the next night instead. Plus, we both agreed I was manly. I scored it a solid win for Ruddy McCann.
I took the repo to Blanchard’s bank. His lot had one of those wooden gates that rises when you put in your ID badge. I phoned the bank, and William Blanchard himself came out to card me in. He grinned and gave me a thumbs-up when he saw me dragging the Ford, turning his hand into a finger pistol that he fired and then raised to his lips to blow the smoke out of the barrel. “I get it: You’re the gunslinger, I’m the gun,” I muttered as I dropped the Ford next to Zoppi’s Jeep. His ex-Jeep.
Blanchard invited me into his office and shut the door behind me. “I got a little something for you, boy,” he told me, a sly expression on his face. He fished around in a drawer and tossed me a paper bag. I peeked inside and saw a thick wad of cash. “You like?”
“So Mr. Yancy paid?” I deduced.
“Yancy? Hell, boy, they all paid. There’s five thousand dollars in that bag. You sure put the fear of God into the fellows on the boat. And by ‘God,’ I mean, of course, me.”
Any affection I might have felt for him over the bag of money was waning in the face of his use of the word boy. I slipped the cash into my coat pocket. “For the record,” I said, “Yancy fell.”
“Yeah, well, some fall. You broke his leg and his collarbone.”
“He fell,” I repeated stonily.
Blanchard just grinned at me. Part of me wanted to take his bag of money and pitch it at his face, but it was a very small part.
Katie had texted me some emoticons while I was in with Blanchard: a heart, a glass of wine, and a piece of chocolate cake. When I returned to the repo truck, I sent her back a llama and a snowman. This is how people communicated before there was written language.
Alan woke up as I was pulling into the library parking lot. “What happened with the repo?” he wanted to know.
“There was a live grizzly bear in the backseat. I wrestled him into submission and dropped him off for Kermit to babysit along with my dog.” Not so much as a chuckle out of Alan. A lot of imaginary people are grumpy when they first wake up. I shut off the engine. “Okay, Alan, we’re headed into a library. That means if I look around and there are other people there, we have to be quiet. I can’t talk to you if everyone can hear me. So you should be quiet, too.”
“Can I ask you something before we go in?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“Did you ever take the antipsychotic medications? At first, I mean.”
“Nope.”
“Then how do you know you won’t like the side effects?”
“That’s not why I don’t take them.”
I could feel him in there, mulling it over. I’ve always heard that humans only use 10 percent of their brains—was it really so crazy to suppose that the part of me that was Alan could tap into some of the other 90 percent for his own calculations? “And you went to see psychics.”
“Mediums. Not psychics.”
“For me, though. Trying to get in contact with me. That’s why you don’t want to take the pills; you’re afraid they will snuff me out, as if I’m some sort of psychosis and not a real person.”
“We done?”
“Why? Why did you want me back?”
“I honestly can’t think of a single reason.”
“Ruddy.”
I blew out a breath. “I don’t know. I don’t think there is a reason, meaning, something I thought through, analyzed. It just felt wrong, somehow, when I couldn’t talk to you. It helps to have you around, like when you stopped me from breaking Deputy Dumbbell down into his component parts, or when you told me I needed to give more thought to my texts with Katie. Or even talking to you about Lisa Marie Walker. You drive me crazy most of the time, but without you there, it gets too goddamn quiet.” I fell silent, thinking of the irony of telling a voice in my head it was driving me crazy—if you hear a voice in your head, you’ve probably already been driven.
“That’s pretty much the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Well, don’t pick out your prom dress just yet, Alan. I’m only saying, when you’re not around, I miss you. And when you are around, I want you to go away.”
* * *
My Internet connection at home forces me to sip data through a straw, so if I want to get anything done, I use the free PCs in the library. I settled into a chair and demonstrated my technical expertise by logging into my e-mail.
“What’s Viagra?” Alan wanted to know.
I, of course, couldn’t answer him, because there were others at some of the computers to either side of the long table where I was sitting. The sheer unworkability of the arrangement—me silent, him babbling away—quickly became apparent when I used the search phrase “dead girl washes up onshore boyne city mi” because the first hit had nothing to do with Lisa Marie.
“Wait,” Alan commanded. “This could be important.”
Sighing impatiently, I read through the article. “Slow down,” he ordered.
A woman named Nina Otis fell off a car ferry and drowned. She didn’t wash up in Boyne City—she was from Boyne City—but the distinction seemed lost on Alan.
“So she’s on the car ferry, the Emerald Isle, going from Charlevoix and Beaver Island,” Alan mused, like he was Sherlock Holmes and this was a clue and he was waiting for Dr. Watson to catch up.
There was nothing to catch up to. Beaver Island is about fifty-six square miles of typical Michigan landscape—inland lakes, trails, beaches. It’s a beautiful place—some of my favorite repossessions have been on Beaver Island. According to Nina’s sister, Audrey, Nina was on her way for a surprise visit when she slipped unnoticed over the railing. It had nothing to do with Lisa Marie Walker.
About halfway through the trip, the captain of the Emerald Isle paged Nina. Her sister filed a missing person’s report, but not much happened until five days later, when Nina was found washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan, just north of Charlevoix.
So, two women under entirely different circumstances drown, and their bodies are recovered in two entirely different places. The only thing they had in common was that it took five days for them to be found.
“Hey, I wasn’t finished!” Alan protested when I changed back to the results page and pulled up stories on Lisa Marie.
It was depressing, reading the articles I’d skipped while it was all happening. The news accounts mostly got it wrong. I was identified as Lisa Marie’s boyfriend. The stoners in the van were there for “late-night fishing.” I was traveling at “excessive speed.” That made it sound as if I had been going a hundred—I’d made a wrong turn that a lot of other folks had made. I was just the first one to go into the water.
Depressingly, there was nothing new at all to be learned from anything we read online. At Alan’s insistence, I also searched for “missing women” in our area, and looked at other drownings.
Interestingly, at least to Alan, was the fact that a woman fell off the public docks in Charlevoix a few years ago, in November—the same time of year that I crashed into the lake. She, too, was found washed up in Boyne City after five days. The surface current must move corpses in that direction.
The article about Lisa Marie had a photograph, which I decided I needed in case I ran into anyone who might have seen something. I made the mistake of printing it out, because that got Alan all excited and he insisted on printing pictures of six other women who had vanished from the area who seemed to fit what he was calling the “victim profile,” which was under the age of forty and female—hardly an exclusive group. Only three of the women—Nina Otis, who went over the rails of the Emerald Isle on the way to Beaver Island; the one who fell off the docks in Charlevoix; and another who vanished during the night from a sailboat anchored offshore in Boyne City—were pulled from the water. The other three were simply missing. I tried to signal my impatience with Alan’s new hobby by clicking the mouse with extra force, but it was a fairly ineffective tool for expressing displeasure.
And I really disliked Alan’s self-satisfied, approving “mmhmm” noises when I returned to the article about the woman who fell off the car ferry. There were a couple of things that were nagging me about the story.
Back in the repo truck, I fired up the engine and then sat in the parking lot, waiting for the heater to kick in.
“I’m amazed no one has ever seen the connection!” Alan enthused.
“And I’m amazed that after I told you to be quiet in the library, you talked the whole time,” I replied.
“Hey, don’t just shove the printouts into the glove box; they’ll get all creased.”
To shut him up, I pulled out an unused repo folder and placed everything inside. “We shouldn’t be wasting our time on these other women,” I groused. “I get that it’s fun to play forensic detective, but we’re trying to find out what happened to Lisa Marie Walker.”
“Then why did you go back to the story about Nina Otis?”
I didn’t want to tell him.
“Ruddy? Why did you reread the story?”
I didn’t answer.
“Ruddy?”
You don’t know the meaning of the word pester until you’ve had a voice in your head, insisting you talk to it. I put the truck in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. A light snow started to fall, batting at my windshield and lighting up in my headlights. “Well, I thought it was odd that the sister said Nina was going to Beaver Island for a surprise visit. How did she know that?”
“What do you mean?”
“The word surprise sort of implies you’re not supposed to know about it. Yet when Nina Otis doesn’t show up, the sister calls the police.”
“Nina’s husband could have told her,” Alan pointed out. “As in, Hey, my wife is coming out for a surprise visit; don’t tell her I told you.”
“Sure,” I said dubiously.
“What else? There’s something else.”
I sighed again. “The captain of the Emerald Isle paged her. Why would he do that? I’ve been on that boat dozens of times, and the only page I’ve ever heard is when some parents are trying to track down their kids. The crew doesn’t keep a roster; they take tickets like a movie theater, completely anonymously. So someone must have told the captain that Nina Otis was missing. Who did that?”
“Oh my God, you’re right. You think it was whoever pushed her off? Wait, that wouldn’t make sense.”
“That wouldn’t make sense,” I agreed. “It wasn’t someone who might have seen her go into the water, either. You don’t page someone who just fell off the boat.”
“Someone knows something about the day Nina Otis died. The same way Amy Jo Stefonick knew something about Lisa Maria Walker.”
I didn’t reply. I just watched the snow bend up into my headlights and then fly over the top of the truck.
“Whoever it is, we have to find him, Ruddy. It could be our killer.”