Dead Dancing Women (15 page)

“Miz Henry and Flora Coy and Mary Margaret were her own kind.” Dolly scowled and let her small voice get even smaller, and tighter.

“I don't mean anything against the ladies, but you know my mother came from cultured people …”

“Your grandfather was a dirt farmer out by Camden Road,” Dolly said from between clenched teeth. “Your mother never could sell the farm because it was such poor ground, and that's the same property where they're bringing in oil and gas now.”

“That's what you get for listening to gossip, Dolly Wakowski.” She flounced around to face me. “Don't you put a word of what she said in the paper. We came from refined people, despite what the deputy here wants to think.”

“Not a word,” I assured her.

I wished her luck and got out of there as fast as possible, dragging a sputtering Dolly behind me down the narrow, leaf-littered stairs.

TWENTY-TWO

While Dolly went over
to talk to Flora Coy about getting someone to stay with her, I went back home, my sense of hospitality overcoming my antipathy to the visiting duo.

Sorrow didn't greet me when I got out of the car. I missed being bowled over, and suddenly longed to reach down to touch his eager little head. Something about a dog that could make the rest of the world a better place, just by their joy at being a part of it. I figured he was either banned to the screened porch, or sound asleep inside.

I walked under the arbor and stopped to pick a last climbing Blaze rose. I tucked an errant branch back through the lattice and patted it in place, then pulled a big thorn from my palm and reminded myself not to get soppy about a rose bush. If no one had been inside, waiting for me, I would have walked through the garden, snipping heads from browning asters, clearing away the pulpy nasturtiums. It was almost an ache in me, needing to touch the plants. We'd already had a killing frost. Anytime now, I could finish mounding those rose bushes. They were so ugly, gnarled and black, with not a sign of a rose. Amazing to me, what nature can do. The going to sleep, then spring resurrection. Thoreau said the ring of the woodsman's axe was buried in the acorn. And in us—life swirling in the genes, all possibility, all trembling verges. No one, ever, had the right to put an early end to a life. No one had the right to disturb the ordained cycle. I looked at my drowsing garden and thought of the two women, their shock at someone wanting to kill them. What was in their eyes? What was written on their faces? What did it feel like to die because someone else wanted you dead? I hoped I'd never know.

I looked out at the yard behind the house where another arbor led to the brick garden walk I'd installed myself. A patchwork of leaves covered the ground. In the ragged lilac bush, a cardinal sat, singing at me. His mate clung to a branch above him, nervously cocking her head at him, then at me. They would stay with me all winter. I would look out one January day, when the snow was over three feet deep and I was at my most depressed, and I'd see a flash of red and know color and life were coming back. It was all a matter of holding on and believing, for me, and for the birds. Winter, up here, was no joke. Animals starved. People went crazy.

Taking a deep breath of the cooling air, I went into the house.

Sorrow ran to meet me, his nails scrambling on the wooden floor, his white and black head thumping against the hip I thrust out at him. He danced in circles around me, until Jennifer clucked at him and he slunk away, giving me a reproachful look over his shoulder.

Jennifer had recovered from her near disastrous headlong run down the drive with Sorrow. He hadn't. I noticed Sorrow kept his distance from her, still suffering, no doubt, from the string of profanity aimed at him. I had the proud feeling that Sorrow was an extremely sensitive and keenly intelligent dog.

They'd had no dinner, they said, not wanting to raid my refrigerator, though I'd explicitly told them to help themselves. I didn't have much in the house anyway, so I took them to Buster's Bar for a burger, which tickled Jackson because he could wear the cowboy hat and boots he'd brought with him, confusing northern Michigan with Texas.

The little bar, a low, wood building set halfway back in the woods, was smoky. A country western song whined from the jukebox. Two old guys sat at one end of the high bar, backs hunched, fingers around their cans of Bud Light. They stared at us when we walk
ed in, pausing to take in Jackson's shiny new boots and cowboy hat. I got a nod, then they went back to their conversation about the electric company coming through and trimming somebody's trees, which made that somebody so mad he went into his house and got a gun, which landed him in jail overnight. Both agreed a man ought to have a chance to defend his own trees, then they went quickly on to “that Dave Rombart's going around bragging some big magazine's doing a spread on 'im. Fool. Who'd want to give him publicity? Writer must be pretty hard up for something to write about.”

I ignored the remarks and led Jackson and Jennifer to a table at the far side of the room, right under an overhead TV where a wrestling match happened in silence.

At the next table, a man and woman were deep in conversation. He had his hands behind his head as he leaned back, chair tipped up. She frowned at him. I thought maybe it was a juicy affair going wrong. Maybe she was an angry wife, ready to walk out. Which points out a problem with writers—an excess of imagination—since she was saying, “Well, I'm going to New York whether you like it or not. There's that new production of Brecht …”

My usual miscalculation. Up here you never knew who was who. There was the guy who'd finally come to take my phone wire out of the tree where it had been wrapped for six months, and hook me to a telephone pole. Sometimes things take awhile up here. The guy looked at the beginnings of my garden and stayed an hour, walking slowly around and around my beds, offering plant advice, fertilizer information, and critter control. He'd been a horticulturist in Midland, wanted to live in northern Michigan, he said, and paid the price that meant in no jobs. I thought I'd learned my lesson, about pigeon-holing people, still I kept being surprised. They might all look the same, but people, up in the woods, had different skills and different reasons for being there. Maybe a lot like me.

Jackson asked Sally, our pretty waitress with long, brown hair caught up in an amazing ponytail, for the wine list after he'd settled his boots on the chair rungs and put his big hat carefully on the table beside him.

“I'll give you the list, mister,” Sally said, then rolled her eyes at me. “We got red. And we got white. Which will you have?”

Jackson looked appalled, then asked to see the bottle of red, which she brought over.

“Boone's Farm,” she read off, holding it out to him. “August.”

Jackson waved it away and ordered a Sam Adams. Jennifer wanted spring water and got a glass of water Sally said was, “Right out of a spring. And for free, too.”

Hamburgers and frozen pizza were on the menu so they ordered hamburgers and let it go at that. There weren't going to be embellishments like lettuce, or tomatoes. Just hamburgers. But thick, and good.

Back at home, after our dining adventure, our thrilling threesome shared a glass of the Cabernet Sauvignon Jackson'd brought with him. We remained magnificently interested in each other throughout the rest of the evening, even though Jackson did absorb a larger portion of all available air, space, and time. I yawned hard at nine thirty, then again at nine forty-five, and we were off to bed by ten.

Somehow they managed to get the bedroom door open all the way, pushing the dresser back far enough to expose my shamefully defaced drywall, which occasioned expressions of surprise from them and chagrin from me. They went in and closed the door hard behind them.

I woke sometime during the night to Sorrow growling. I sat up in fear of attack, at least something terrible being thrown at my house. It took awhile to fix the locale of the thumping noise. Grateful that it was nothing but Jackson's energetic lovemaking in the next room, I fell back to sleep with only the minutest pang of jealousy nibbling at my brain.

Sunday morning Jennifer went off for a long run around the lake while Jackson and I put on warm sweaters and took our coffee cups out to the front deck to sit in the warm, morning sunshine. A flock of migrating geese honked their hearts out on Willow Lake. A pair of frantic black squirrels dashed from oak to aspen, chasing each other as if spring-maddened instead of facing months of claustrophobia down in tiny holes. Chickadees sat on a maple branch hanging just above the deck and peeped insistently until I got up and filled the feeder by the steps.

“You seem quite content,” Jackson said as he stretched his legs and leaned his already overly tanned face back to the sun. A late hummingbird hovered just above his head. Jackson swatted at it as he would a fly.

“I am,” I said, and settled down in an Adirondack chair beside him.

“And the books you were going to write, what happened to those?”

“Never fear, Jackson. I'm writing them.”

“Anything about to come out?” He raised his eyebrows into question marks.

I only smiled and sat forward in my chair, certain I'd heard a car at the top of the drive, and glad of it.

Dolly. I was never quite so happy to see her.

“Good morning,” I called cheerfully across the railing, grateful for her chunky body and flat head, as she walked around from the drive. No police uniform today. I'd never seen Dolly in street clothes before and had to admit that Deputy Dolly, off duty, didn't look bad at all. She had on a blue fleece jacket, navy pants, and a yellow, scooped-neck sweater. A big brown shoulder bag hung over her arm. Her hair was fixed so it curled a little around her small, round face. I could even detect a hint of pink lipstick, and was that … no! … blush?

I figured her curiosity about Jackson got to be too much for her. She bent forward when I introduced them, told him she was our local law enforcement and gave him a brisk handshake. She pulled a metal chair from around the umbrella table and sat, legs spread too far apart, fixing one of her steady looks on Jackson. I went in to get her a cup of tea and when I came back she was pulling a stack of flyers from her purse, handing them to him, and explaining they were rentals.

“Just trying to help out,” she said, frowning up at me as if about to be accused of interfering. She took the teacup and set it on the wooden table beside her.

“Any one of these probably just what you're looking for,” she said to Jackson, then turned back to me. “I was telling your friend about some of the places around here for rent. Stopped at a couple of the real estates in town. Thought that might help you both out.”

I nodded.

“Hmm.” Jackson looked at one flyer after another, then turned to blink hard at me. “Not quite what I had in mind.”

He handed back the brochures, smiled, and leaned over to pat Dolly's hand. “Thanks for the thought, dear, but I'm looking for something private. Closer to Traverse City. For the library, of course. And I will need some diversion. Restaurants. Theater.”

“Thought I heard you brought a girlfriend,” Dolly said, gathering her brochures together and wiping the back of her hand on her jacket. “Should be ‘diversion' enough.”

“Hmm,” was all Jackson said again. He excused himself, got up, and went into the house.

“What in hell do you think you're doing?” I hissed when I could. “You're being rude.”

“What do you care?” she hissed back. “You want him and his buddy hanging around forever? I'm telling you, Emily, I know people like this. That guy'll move in and write his book at your expense if you don't put your foot down.”

“I'll handle it. Just get off …”

Jackson was back, looking tall and lean and only slightly dissolute, with his morning tousled hair and his thick, Irish sweater. A photograph album was tucked under his arm. “Thought you both might like to see photos of my trip to England.” He smiled at me, then at Dolly. He sat down between us and set the album on his lap.

I'd known Jackson a long time. He didn't have a whole lot of moves. This was his “charm the masses” ploy. For whatever reason, he wanted Dolly to like him. He opened his album and quickly drew her in close, pointing out places in England he'd been, recounting funny little stories, putting an arm around her back when he had something he especially wanted to share with her. Once, he even stooped so low as to whisper in her ear, some
bon mot
that made her blush. Poor Dolly. I watched with amusement as she received the full Jackson treatment.

When Jennifer got back from her run, she acknowledged Dolly with a dismissive half-smile and stood stretching and arching in front of us. “I simply have to get out to look around,” she said, mewing at Jackson. “Let's take a ride, Jack. Please! It's such an absolutely beautiful day. Let's not waste it just sitting around …” She looked from me to Dolly, and back. “Here,” she added.

Dolly and I begged off the drive though Dolly looked unsure for a few seconds.

“We've got things to discuss,” Dolly finally told Jackson, her face deadly serious and self-important. “A case we're working on together.”

Jackson's eyebrows shot up. “A case? Really Emily, I didn't know you went in for police work.”

“There have been two murders,” Dolly said. She sniffed and gave him a smile I'd never seen on her face before. If I didn't think it impossible, I would have sworn she was flirting.

“Emily writes for the newspaper in Traverse and since I'm with the police department out here, well, we're kind of hoping to solve this before anything more happens. Nobody knows the people back in these woods the way we do and …”

I interrupted before she got stuck in the whole speech about our superior qualifications, and gave Jackson and Jennifer a shortened version of the story. They sat round eyed, asking questions and giving little shivers. But soon they were off on their Sunday afternoon diversion, while Dolly and I sat for the next hour mapping out what we knew, and where there were holes to plug. We made lists of the people we'd learned something about, and what we still had to discover. At a little after one, Bill Corcoran, from the paper, showed up and Dolly was wowed again, this time almost speechless.

Bill was a great-looking guy, big and rugged, with a head of thick blond hair. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, which endearingly slid down his nose as he spoke in a deep, halting voice. The glasses kept having to be hoisted with, unfortunately, his middle finger. Bill was one of the hunched-over, hands-clasped-in-earnest kind of guys who radiate sincerity, intelligence, and loyalty. Just the kind of man most women overlook in favor of the charmers like Jackson—to our eternal discredit.