Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) (30 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

“You ready?” I asked.

Lyle and I shared a last look of uneasy solidarity, the farmhouse quavering to a silent wind, like it could topple and consume us at any moment.

Seeing his despondence I patted his leg. “It’ll be fine.”

“Wonder if the spooks will remember us,” he said. “Cause Momma don’t want no misery.”

Even as he made fun of the resident spirits, his apprehension was apparent. I could see and sense them too, in the peeling gunmetal paint, the rotting planks, the intransigent weeds. “Come on.” I pulled my luggage from the trunk.

We approached through the rear entryway, the kitchen door the only functioning portal in or out, as far as I could remember, unless one shimmied down the drainpipe, and even then . . . Some might never get out; a flicker of approval for Carly.

Cigarette haze hung in the air, two empty Keystone bottles chaperoned an ashtray brimming with spent Lucky Strikes. Absurdly balanced, like a discontinued museum diorama, the mounted creatures and wax figures already stored away, or destroyed. The room hadn’t changed, the sickly pale green cabinets and brown scuffed floral linoleum familiarly dangerous and vaguely welcoming. I had just walked out of that room,
hadn’t I?

Momma straggled into the room carrying a third bottle. “I see you made it. Go put your stuff away.” She zigzagged over to Lyle and left a wet kiss on his cheek, which he quickly but surreptitiously wiped away when she finally acknowledged me. “Easy trip?”

“Forty hours, Momma,” Lyle answered wearily before I could speak.

“Well maybe Eunis can rustle up some dinner for us. I’ll bet you’re hungry.”

I seethed. I determined that my first project would be to purify the outside, scraping and repainting the house, anything to stay outside.

***

When I settled onto my old bed for the first time, pressure clamped my whole head. I started to address the room, then stopped. “No,” I said.

I pulled the journal out of my luggage, and finding a comfortable angle between pillow and wall, I wrote:

“Harold,

“I’m back in the cellar —my old room. Only mustier. More cobwebs. Like Momma always knew I’d return. William Schroeder waiting for me on the wall. What did he have, really? Eighteen days before the strokes and becoming vegetative? What we can do now!

“Anyway, my room: it’s even smaller than I remember, though I haven’t been gone that long. Maybe I’ve gotten bigger. Ha! Maybe.

“Otherwise, no changes. Not even Momma. There’s nothing wrong with her that wasn’t wrong with her when I left six months ago that I can see.

“But there was one surprise: I opened a kitchen cupboard and noticed my stepfather’s favorite plate at the bottom of a stack. Sounds silly, a favorite plate. But he’d worked for the railroad his entire life before the accident, and that handmade plate, a large uneven brown plate with the railroad’s insignia emblazoned in dark brown and orange in the center, was all he’d eat off of.

“At least once a week, he’d tell me about the plate and the railroad, like he’d never told me before. The rest of them didn’t listen. Sometimes Carly would carry on another conversation with Momma, as if Papa Karlyle wasn’t even talking. He paid it no mind because he loved telling me about the railroad.

“Anyhow, the plate reminded me of him, and how kind he was to everyone. Even me. He’s probably the only family I ever had before you.

“By the way, was my temper that bad? I don’t remember being violent. I need clues. You didn’t leave many.”

***

After renting a pressure washer, ordering paint, and grabbing some basic tools in town, I deduced that a phone call to Muriel and Rhoald, Harold’s parents, was a poor investigative approach since they would almost certainly tell me to go to hell, or at least Rhoald would. Muriel would be more demure, not that either of them would know what that word meant.

So I gave them no warning and knocked on their door. I glanced nervously around the compulsively clean and organized yard. Already beyond the ravages of winter and early spring, the yard bloomed ground plum and an edge of marsh marigold. In the first week of April!

I turned to the door. Was there a radio playing? I knocked again.
Please
,
make it Muriel
. The solid black door opened.

“God,” he said, “it’s you.” Rhoald slammed the door in my face.

I closed my eyes, took a breath, knocked again.

The door sprung instantly open. Rhoald’s eyes were fevered, his small beet-red face and pate of remaining hair bristled. “Zombie, don’t you get the message? You’re not welcome. Not ever.”

“I need to talk to you about Harold.”

“Mean the son you killed? Our
only
son.”

“I didn’t kill him.” But there was so much I couldn’t explain. Guilt and the nagging feeling of anger I had for Harold.

“The cops weren’t so sure of that, but I guess your good looks got you off.” He sneered. “Anyway, we have nothin’ to discuss.”

You’re a scientist, a detective.
“Don’t you want to know why he killed himself?”

“
My
son wouldn’t kill himself.”

“Well, who would?”

“If it wasn’t by you directly, it was by you indirectly. And he’s dead. There’s nothin’ to talk about.”

“Rhoald, who’s at the door?” Muriel’s voice came from inside the house.

“And don’t upset her. You’ve already done enough.” He slammed the door a second time.

***

Sarah Pooley’s oxidized sedan sat in the farmhouse driveway, burgundy going on gray, and Sarah herself met me as I entered the kitchen. “Your mother’s lookin’ for you.”

“Hello to you too, Sarah.”

She curled and tightened her lips —especially her upper lip— so that rigid lines carved away from her ashen mouth. Aging like uncovered guacamole. “Welcome,” she said stiffly. “Your mother needs you.”

“She seems fine to me. Most of my work’s going to be outside.”

“She’s gettin’ older. You can’t see all the trouble.”

“Momma’s what, fifty-seven now? That’s not old.”

“I’m not gonna argue with you.” Sarah pulled on her light jacket. “It’s your responsibility and you’ve got enough strikes against you that I’d think you’d just take care of the one person who took care of you when nobody else gave a shit. Good bye.” She pushed past me and out of the farmhouse.

“Hey.” Lyle headed sheepishly for the old Frigidaire as if he’d heard nothing.

“She doesn’t look sick to me,” I said. “Why’d you get me up here?”

“Told you,” Lyle talked into the fridge, grabbing white bread and mayo and some luncheon meat. “Momma said she needed you.”

“And the doctor?”

He shrugged.

“That’s the same answer you gave me the last time, except now here I am.”

He started building his sandwich, licking the knife of mayo as he went along, then putting it back in the jar.

“That’s disgusting.”

“No big deal.” He launched into the sandwich as cover.

“When you’re done stuffing your face you’re going to drive down to town, and you’re going to find your friend and that weird woman, the one who was friends with Harold. And you’re going to set up a meeting or get her name and an address.”

“My friend? She’s probably long gone.”

“I’ll be long gone if you don’t help me. You can deal with Momma.” But I knew better, even as I said it.

He turned pale. “You’d desert her?”

“I took your word that she needed me.”

“She does.”

“Yeah, as a housekeeper, delivery service and general punching bag. Until I see or hear proof that she’s actually sick, I’m setting my own rules. I’ve got my own agenda. You understand?”

“Don’t be that way.”

“Find me a clue.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

“What’re ya doin’?” asked Momma, “Them’s mine.”

“Momma,” I took hold of a half-finished pint of gin, “you’re so sick this alcohol can’t be good for you.”

“Put those bottles down,” she said with a vengeance.

“Let me check with your doctor. What’s his name?”

“None of your damn business.”

“I’m here to help. You said you needed me up here, right? Or was that something Lyle made up?”

“Lyle’s a good boy.”

“He’s a man, and the good part can be argued. Did you tell him I had to come up?”

“Sorta. Now put down those damn bottles. At my age I gotta right to enjoy myself.”

“Seems like that age started around the time I was four.”

“You ain’t got no idea what it’s like bringing up a baby alone.”

“You had Karl.”

“Only after I made myself available to him . . . for yer sake.”

“Papa Karl was a good man.”

“Karlyle was a simpleton. A dreamer and a simpleton.”

“What’s your doctor’s name?”

“Not till you put down my bottles.” Momma stuck out her chin.

“I got places on this farm you’ll never find them. Especially with all my tools and tarps spread across the yard and by the barn. I can wait.” I kept gathering additional bottles of schnapps and Yukon Jack from the cupboard.

“Ungrateful little shit!”

“Doctor’s name.”

“Hall.”

“First name?”

“Doctor.”

“There must be twenty doctor Halls in the area. And not one of them will give me any information unless I call him with some assurance.”

“Don’t know his first name. Give me my fuckin’ bottles.” Momma charged me.

I stood my ground. “Maybe I’ll just drop them here, let you clean them up.”

She stopped, shook with anger, looked for something to throw at me. “After all I’ve done.”

It was a familiar anger; I recognized it . . . in myself. “You’ve taught me well.”

She reached for the skillet on the stove. “Gimme my bottles!”

I could look like her. I could rage. I was ashamed. “Or you’ll what? You’ll throw me out?” And then I even understood the frustration on her face.

My cell phone rang.
Damn it!
Hands useless. I
had
to put the bottles down. “You’re off the hook for now,” I said changing my tone to sweetness, “but I want to make sure you’re as healthy as you can be.”

I laid the armful of bottles onto the counter and Momma started grabbing them back.

“Yes?” I said to the cell, and listened. “That’s good enough, Lyle. Thanks.”

***

The Drink ‘n’ Dive, not surprisingly, sat in the only part of Bemidji that hadn’t been restored, an anachronism, or worse: an indelible stain. Going back at least fifty years it had been the purlieu for drunks, drugs, hookers, trouble. The stories Momma told. Even the cops avoided it.

I headed there to question Lyle’s connection, Sparky. On the way, I imagined her.
She might be the woman whose hair was stashed in Harold’s Edgar Allan Poe book
. Its unsavory qualities still with me.

When I arrived, Sparky’s gray junker van, “Lightning Electric,” was parked outside.

As I stepped into the bar’s gloom I almost crashed into Geraldine Mae Scotts, the notorious eighty-something-year-old grand diva who’d been singing bawdy sea shanties at the bar for more than half a century.

“Sparky?” I asked as she moved determinedly past me, a brown muskrat wig sliding off her head. She pointed to the back and headed to the other side of the large room where, to my amazement, Gordon Mingle waited at a small table. He waved at the two of us. I’m sure Gordon was as shocked to see me in such a disreputable place as I was to see him there. But neither of us showed signs of it. I turned to find Sparky.

A sparse Hendrix-like guitar swelled across the room, its waves breaking briefly for a deep-chambered voice, “spellbound,” as the bar slowly filled with desperate clientele: a man missing most of his teeth, another dragging an oxygen canister, a chinless woman with more skull than hair. I sighed. It was too early for such a gathering.

Three topless mermaids floated languorously behind the huge bar. Their breasts fell back upon their chests as they rose in rotation to the surface for a breath of air. Their scaled lower bodies and fins fluttered with a variety of marine greens.

The music drifted:

“We were swimming through a daydream
And the sea released our feet
Then the sun laughed on the water
And hid what lay beneath . . . ”

I stood alone, unnoticed, at the center of the wooden bar, mermaids flowing above me in the massive tank —two white, one Asian— drawing ravening male attention, as the nymphs beckoned and suggested, and the men nodded in acquiescence. Everyone at the bar and in the large glass aquarium above them would likely be scarred and shredded if the tank were to shatter.

“You must be Eunis,” came a sandpaper, high-pitched voice from behind.

I spun around.

“Ow,” said the woman when she fully took me in.

“Yes,” I said without offering a handshake, which would have been both out of place and hygienically a mistake. “Is there a place we can talk? Back there?”

I walked behind her, not sure what
I’d
just seen. When we slid into the booth, back by the restrooms, the sharp smell of bleach and the broad smell of urine forced me to abandon breathing. Not for long.

“So?” Sparky said. She was very thin; piercings almost completely masked her face. Her eyes were set deep in shadow between sharp objects that threatened to blind. She could’ve been Asian, she could’ve been Native American, she could’ve been white. And almost any age. A well-worn beret pulled low on her shaved head, the stubble insufficient to hide the filth accumulating on her scalp, and no way to ascertain if it was her hair stashed in
The Tell-Tale Heart
. The ridge of her nose —though impaled so savagely I had to look at her sideways not to take on pain— was the only feature that suggested flesh and blood.

“Sparky?”

She rolled up the sleeve of her work shirt and itched at her arm, which surprisingly lacked tattoos of any kind. “I don’t have all day, and I’m just doing this ‘cause your brother is a fucking saint.”

I would’ve loved to inquire regarding his sainthood, but there were more pressing matters. “Lyle said you knew a woman who knew Harold Cloonis.”

“Your husband,” she said matter-of-factly.

“You knew him?”

“You mean did I have intercourse with him?”

“No, that’s not at all—”

“I never met him, but he must have been some strange dude.”

“You found him strange?”

“Not me, lady. I told you, I never met him.”

“But?”

“But there was this —not sure what to call her— I guess, friend.” She waggled her head. “Acquaintance. Anyway, she dated him. Well, they fucked like bunnies.”

“Harold fucked like bunnies?” I’d assumed I was the first, though I’d never asked. But then he had never offered. Anger, again.

“
She
said. Never watched them. Nothing wrong with that.”

“When was this?”

“. . . We were spellbound
Yes spellbound. . .”

Sparky paused as one of the mermaids, a full-figured woman with long red hair flowing like kelp, waved at her. She waved back. “Three, four years ago.”

Before
me. I relaxed.

Sparky returned to me.

“That her, the one in the tank with the big bosombas?” I asked.

“Sherry? Hell, no. Pammy, Pamela, was tall, thin, short hair. She should have worn her hair longer, more feminine. Whatever she could do.”

“Lyle said you thought she was weird.”

“I never said that.” Sparky’s body twitched in obvious discomfort. “She was different, that’s all.”

“Where is she now? Her last name? How do I find her?”

“Don’t know, don’t know. Good luck.” Sparky began to slide out of the booth.

“Something,
anything,
you remember of what she told you about her time with Harold?”

“You wouldn’t hurt her?”

“Me?! Of course not. It’s about Harold.” Unraveling Harold.

“Well, the Woodland Cabins, down by Kabekona. She mentioned he took her there.”

The same place he’d taken me. I was adrift again.

“. . .Who knew we were just creatures

Shipwrecked on a beach

With nothing but each other

And the truth just out of reach

We were spellbound

Spellbound

Yes spellbound”