Dead Little Dolly (15 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

The rain stopped on my way into Traverse City the next morning. Puffs of warming moisture played across M72. The sun came out from behind dark clouds as I drove past the casino then turned at US 31, toward town. I still didn’t know what I was going to say to Bill about the job.

No woman living on the edge of financial disaster has any right to turn down an offer like the one Bill made: full-time work in my old profession, regular pay, benefits—so I could actually afford to get sick once in a while.

And, after all, lots of writers worked full-time jobs and still found time to write.

So. I shouldn’t kid myself. The book I’d sold might be the last. I passed Burger King and resort after resort. Lake Michigan was so far down its marshy shore stretched out farther than I’d ever seen before.

At the newspaper office, Bill stumbled to his feet to greet me. He took my hand in both of his and immediately asked how things were going. “If she needs somebody to watch her baby. Like a safe house. We’ve got people here in town who’ll be glad to step in.”

I shrugged and promised to pass on the information while assuring him she had an army of people back in Leetsville helping already.

Sitting there, in his office, I thought how nice it would be to come into this place every day, be part of the turmoil of a newsroom again. He added to my problem by taking me out to introduce me to Cathy, the City Editor, a beautiful woman with a smile that lighted her whole face. She wished me luck with this thing going on in Leetsville and offered any help she could give. “I’ll back you out there, if you need me,” she offered as Bill moved me around the room.

“Giving you a flavor of our operation,” he leaned in close to murmur after introducing me to Anne, one of the reporters, who got up to hug me and say everybody was pulling for me and the deputy.

“You want me out there with you,” Anne offered, “Bill says this is our top story until the guy’s caught. Tell Dolly we’re all so sorry about her grandmother.”

I met women in Advertising, and an older woman in Circulation before Bill led me back to his office, where I cleared files from a chair.

“So, what’s going on out there?” He leaned back, hands behind his head, then shot out that middle finger to push his slipping glasses up his nose. The only time this gesture bothered me was when he left the finger there to think. A person could take that gesture personally after a while.

“We cleaned out Cate’s room. Found letters from a cousin down in Washington, Michigan. Back from the 1980s. Dolly’s following up on that. Nothing to help us find Audrey Delores Thomas in France or much of anything else. I don’t see how a woman could live for more than seventy years and leave so little behind her.”

He made a note of Audrey’s name again. “You know for sure she went to France?”

“Right after Dolly was born. That’s what she understood.”

“So? What year?”

“Seventy-nine.”

“Lucky will probably come up with something soon. Nobody just drops off the face of the planet,” he said.

“Some do,” I said. “We all do eventually.”

He smirked at me. “I’ve got that friend in Paris. Gave him what I had. One of them will get us information.”

“Dolly would sure appreciate it,” I said.

“Now, about the job?” He leaned back. “I’m going to need to know pretty quick.”

“Just a couple of days, all right? I’ve got to talk to my agent and my editor.” Then I approached an idea I’d come up with on the drive in. “Would there be the possibility of more stringer work?”

Bill bit at his lip. He shook his head. “You know what’s going on with newspapers. I’m actually going to cut down on outside writers and lay more on my staff. I could keep on with what I’ve been giving you. You’re over there: Kalkaska, Leetsville, and Mancelona. That’s a long way for my people to go.”

He considered. “Maybe a few more stories. You like covering teacup collections? That’s about all I’ve got.”

“Love teacup collections,” I assured him.

“Let me know soon.”

My phone rang. I bent to burrow in my shoulder bag.

The first thing I heard was a baby crying and Dolly’s voice talking baby talk.

“Hello? Hello? This you?” were her first coherent words.

I assured her it was.

“Think Jane’s getting sick and tired of being on the go all the time, like we’re homeless or something.”

“You could go back to your house.” I wagged a finger in the air toward Bill and went out into the hall.

“Not safe.”

“How about my house?”

“Hard to get babysitters to go out there.”

“Bill said he knew people here in Traverse City who would be happy to keep Jane until this is over.”

“Not letting her out of my sight. But that’s not why I called. Got a couple of things. I went to the post office. Only thing in the box is an ad for hearing aids. But Lucky came up with a phone number for that Mable Todd. I called her.”

“What’d she say?”

“I’ll tell you, but you don’t write up anything unless I say it’s okay.”

“Fine. What’s going on?”

“She sounds kind of old. Probably like Cate. Anyway, she said she hadn’t been in touch with Cate for a long time and was sorry to hear she was dead. Then I told her Cate was murdered and the woman could barely speak after that. She said something funny.”

“What?”

“All she said was, ‘Does Audrey know?’”

“That’s understandable. Audrey’s her daughter.”

“So then I said that I’m Cate’s granddaughter and she acted flummoxed. I told her I’m an officer with the Leetsville Police Department and that Cate had been living with me. The woman said: ‘Granddaughter?’ Like she never heard of such a thing. So, I said, ‘I’m Dolly,’ and she said what a surprise it was to hear from me and she went on to say something about thinking I was ‘out of the picture.’ Whatever that means.”

“Maybe because you went into foster care.”

“Yeah, could be that.”

“So, what else?”

“Well, then she said, ‘You must be doing all right after all. Glad to hear it.’”

“What?”

“Yeah. Hung up on me. Sounded nervous, like she wanted nothing to do with a murder. Maybe that was it. People get funny. Scared. But I’d told her I’m her cousin, too. You’d have thought . . .”

Jane cried and Dolly took time to rearrange her, probably to her other shoulder.

“What’d you do then?” I asked.

“What’d you think I did? Called her back. She answered and I said this was official business and I was calling for information on Cate. She took a long time to say anything and then her voice got stiff, kind of, and she said something like, ‘I don’t mean to be harsh, Dolly. But, well, with your history—I don’t think it’s a good idea to go on talking about this.’”

“What history?”

“No clue. She hung up again. I’ve got to get down there, to Washington. Somewhere in the thumb, I think. You want to come with me? I could use the help with Jane.”

Of course I was taking a road trip with Dolly and her baby. Nothing like a little time away to think over a job offer that could ruin my life.

TWENTY-SIX

Even with so much to talk about, Dolly and I were silent for the first few hours of the trip, keeping inside our own heads, with our own thoughts.

I’d already learned that the baby’s room had been full of fingerprints—attributable to no one but Dolly and Cate and one other set that couldn’t be found in any of the databases. There was blood on the knife that killed Cate. Cate’s, of course, but blood belonging to someone else, too. This time DNA testing was ordered on both the blood from the broken headlight and the blood on the knife.

But that could be weeks away—knowing for sure the blood came from the same person. Neither Dolly nor I believed we had weeks to wait. And that single jellybean was beginning to feel like a hook left to draw us in a direction we didn’t want to go, an over-the-cliff direction into crazy-land with no real markers to follow.

That jellybean seemed at first childish, and then diabolic. Someone with a motive buried in his own head. Someone who didn’t know Dolly or Cate but had latched on to them as targets. This route could lead to a man living in a shack back in the woods with nothing to focus his hatred on beyond a woman he’d spotted at the supermarket, or a car he saw parked at a cemetery. Which would mean my newspaper stories led him straight to Dolly and Cate.

That wasn’t a thing I wanted to think about, so instead I thought long and hard about mental illness and crime and how if we, as a society, would only put some of the money spent on prisons and prison personnel and law enforcement into curing all forms of mental illness we would, in the end, be one step closer to a perfect world.

Another thing to be thankful for: that I wasn’t born with a glitch in my brain. At least not one that threatened anybody but me.

Then, since Dolly still wasn’t talking and she was driving, I decided I had more immediate things to think about—like summer taxes coming up and whether I wanted to take a full-time job so I could pay them . . . or not. And—way in the back of my head—was Bill showing an interest in taking our friendship a step further? Or was it just me again, imagining things that weren’t there due to an excess of imagination.

Jane slept until we were down to Bay City, where we stopped for her to take a bottle and get her diaper changed and her bottom creamed because she was getting red from sitting. We grabbed a drive-thru hamburger and were back on the road in fifteen minutes.

“I’ve been thinking,” Dolly finally said. “Isn’t it kind of funny how I get one new family member at a time? I mean—my mother, and then she’s gone before I even know her. My grandmother—now she’s gone. Now a cousin—God help her.”

“You’ve got Jane. You’ll always have her.”

“Yeah?” She turned worried eyes on me. “That’s what’s scaring me.”

I said nothing because I didn’t have easy words for the fear she felt.

After a while, she launched into a different problem. “I got a call from an attorney last night. Omar hired him to get visitation rights.”

“Are you going to fight him?’

She sighed deeply. “I don’t know. I don’t see why he should have any rights at all.”

“He’s Jane’s father.”

She rolled her eyes at me.

“So? A father has rights, Dolly.”

“My father didn’t have any. I never saw him. Not one story about him. Not one word from him—my whole life long.”

“You want that for Jane?”

We fell silent again.

Another stop—this time at a rest area, where Jane smiled and cooed at everyone she saw, even flat on her back, legs in the air, with a new diaper slipping into place.

Down around Flint, Dolly said she was going to call Mable Todd, to make sure she was home and would stay there. I thought the arrangements had been made before we left Leetsville but didn’t say anything. I hoped the woman was home and this whole thing wasn’t a wild-goose chase.

I listened as Dolly identified herself and said she would like to see her this afternoon, sometime around three. Evidently there was pushback from the other end and Dolly stuttered a couple of times before agreeing to have Lucky call the Washington police and confirm the appointment.

She hung up and called Lucky.

“Won’t meet with me unless you call the police department there in Washington and have them call her. She said she’s got no idea who I am and won’t let me in her house unless the local police say it’s okay.”

She hung up and looked over at me. “She doesn’t trust me. Thinks I’m a murderer coming after her. Lucky’ll take care of it.”

“Is Lucky going to mention that the cop coming to call will have a baby strapped to her chest?”

“What do you mean? Why’d you think I brought you along? You carry Baby Jane. What would it look like for a cop to go on an interview with a baby?”

“What will it look like for a reporter to show up on an interview with a baby?”

“Hey. I’m the one in charge here.”

We both stewed awhile and then made a deal. I’d carry Jane in her holder as long as I could go in with Dolly. We’d make no mention of the baby and hoped Mable Todd wouldn’t notice.

The house, on West Road, in Washington, a tiny village I’d once visited in apple season because of the orchards dotting the main road, was a spare, white farmhouse now lost in a line of newer bungalows. We climbed the steps to the wide front porch and rang the bell. Jane felt warm against my chest. I looked down into her open and considering eyes and smiled at her. She smiled back and wiggled in her Snuggie as the door opened and a woman, who looked like Cate Thomas, frowned at us, taking in the uniformed Dolly and me with a kid strapped to my chest, a shoulder bag tossed around to my back, a reporter’s notebook in one hand, a pen in the other, and a silly smile on my face.

“You’re Dolly?” the woman said and motioned us into the house. When Dolly introduced me as a reporter from a Traverse City newspaper she looked long and hard, then muttered, “Don’t go putting my name in any newspaper. I’ve got nothing to do with what happened to my cousin. Hope that’s clear right up front.”

I assured her it was clear and moved Jane a little to the right so my boob wasn’t flattened.

The living room was one of those comfortable places where people kicked back in La-Z-Boy chairs in front of a redbrick fireplace and glass-framed photos of angels ranged around the walls. Mabel Todd, herself, was dressed like a peasant woman straight out of a Rumanian wheat field: blue headscarf covering her hair, narrow face without makeup, red cheeks. Her eyes were Cate’s eyes—far spaced and deep set, with tiny lines radiating from their corners.

“So?” she demanded after indicating we should sit on a brown micro-suede sofa with a multicolored afghan thrown over one arm. “You’re here about Cate.”

She shook her head slowly. “Don’t know why you made the trip down from . . . where’d you say? Leetsville? I haven’t seen or heard from Cate Thomas since the . . . oh . . . let me see.” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Maybe late eighties. I had no idea she’d moved up north. She ever marry again?” She went on without waiting for Dolly to answer. “That husband of hers. One day there. Next day out for cigarettes and never came back. That was your problem, I always thought. No father. Grew up like a weed, you did.”

Dolly, confused, made a face. “I think you’ve got me mixed up with somebody else.”

“You said Cate was your grandmother . . . Oh . . .” The woman put a plump hand to her cheek. “For heaven’s sake. You said ‘grandmother.’ Here all along I thought you meant Cate was your mother. So, that means you’re not Audrey. You’re Audrey’s baby. Well, what do you know. I thought you were lost and gone right from the git-go.”

“Lost and gone?” Dolly’s confusion deepened.

“You know what I mean. Cate was having so much trouble with Audrey and then you were born and your father took right off. Cate found out all this later, you see. And then, well . . . your mother wasn’t exactly the dependable type.”

“She signed me over to the state.”

“That’s what I figured though Cate never came out and said. Just a lotta trouble, is what she told me in her letters. I kind of thought . . . well now . . . I thought your mother ended up in a hospital or something.”

Dolly shook her head. “She’s with a religious group in France.”

“Well, what do you know. You don’t say. Know a lot of people saved by religion. I’m glad to hear it. Better that than where she was headed.”

Dolly pulled one of the photos from the album out of her shirt pocket and passed it to Mable Todd. “Is this Audrey Delores?”

The woman took the picture, thought over it a while, then shook her head. “I really wouldn’t know. Even though we were writing letters, me and Cate weren’t close. I don’t remember the last time I saw her. You know how it is with families.”

Dolly gave her a tepid smile. “In the album I took that picture out of, somebody wrote in ‘Dolly at the cottage.’”

“Well.” She looked down at the photo again. “Could be your mother, I suppose. Cate called her Dolly. Guess that’s what confused me when you called. You know, the name and all. And being my cousin.”

“What about the cottage?”

She shrugged. “Can’t help you there. Probably some friend’s place.”

“And this.” Dolly pulled a small envelope from her pants pocket. She emptied it into her palm and held it out to Mable Todd. It was the key we’d found in Cate’s Bible. “Would you know anything about this?”

The woman took the key into her hand and looked it over, both sides. She shook her head. “What is it?” she asked.

“Something we found among Cate’s effects. Just wondering if it was old. Maybe a key to some house where Cate used to live.”

“Doesn’t look like a house key to me. Look, there’s numbers on it. You ask me, I’d try a bank. I got a key looks something like that, to my safe-deposit box here in town.”

The woman warmed as we got up to leave, believing us—that we were no threat to her. She patted my shoulder and remarked what a beautiful baby I had. There was no use correcting her at that point so I puffed up and thanked her and said she looked more like her father than me and got a menacing look from Dolly.

At the door, the woman hugged Dolly. “So we’re related. What do you know? I guess you’re my second cousin. Isn’t that how it works? You keep in touch now. Imagine, they called you Dolly, too. Guess Audrey named you for herself. That’s kind of nice, you think about it. Nice to meet you. Me and Cate were the last of the family, far as I knew. There was Audrey—but with her troubles, well, who knows where she got to? So you say she’s in France?” The woman looked away, thinking, then back to Dolly.

“I don’t suppose you know much about your father,” she said.

Dolly shook her head, agreeing.

“Well, no harm in telling you now. You see, when Audrey went into labor her husband or whatever he was—never sure about that marriage—his name was Harold Flynn, dropped her off at the hospital and was never seen again. Cate told me all this in a letter. She just needed to tell somebody, is what I suspected. Later, she didn’t say much about Audrey, just that there was this baby. Gone, is what she said. Nothing else. That’s the same thing Cate’s husband did to her. Be your grandfather, Dolly. Up and left. My own husband was a good man. But he died at fifty-two. Guess women in our family don’t have a lot of luck picking men that last.”

I watched as Dolly absorbed this news then gathered herself to leave.