Dead Dogs and Englishmen (3 page)

“Wha … the hell?” Dolly said. Her expression caught the revulsion I was feeling. My stomach gave a single heave and then another.

The dog's body was pretty much intact expect for what looked like scrapes and a few open wounds, the worst being a black bullet hole into the brain at the back of his head. A small cloud of flies, disturbed by the buzzards, hung in the air just above the dead animal.

“Jesus …” Dolly's voice was strange. When I looked at her I saw the palest face I'd ever seen. Well—pale edging toward green. She bent forward, one arm across her stomach.

I hurried to where she stood, the turkey buzzards scrambling awkwardly away.

I put my arm across her back though she waved a hand at me. She turned and vomited into a clump of weeds behind her.

“Geez, Dolly, it's bad. I know that. But you've seen a lot worse …”

She raised her hand to quiet me. Her eyes, when she looked up, were wet with tears. Her face turned a bright shade of red. It didn't seem she could stand straight so I tried again to help her. Again she shook me off, keeping her shoulder between us. If I'd ever seen misery written across someone's whole body, this was it.

“Maybe you need a doctor or …”

She shook her head violently and pulled a tissue from her pants pocket, wiping it across her mouth.

“I'm gonna go get Chief Barnard …” I started to say.

She shook her head again. “I don't need nobody.”

“It's a dog, Dolly. Sad, yes. But … there's a woman back in that house in a lot worse shape than this animal.”

“Dog's just as dead,” she said, avoiding my eyes as she blew her nose.

“I don't get it …”

“You don't have to. Just mind your own damn business and don't say a word to nobody.”

“Are you sick? Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? I'd like to help.”

Her head snapped up, eyes wet and angry. The weak eye wandered off as if looking for a way out. “Where you headed from here?” she demanded.

“Traverse City, I guess. I want to get the story in.”

“Okay. Never mind. It wasn't nothing anyway.”

“Why don't you come on out to my house later? We could talk …”

“Yeah, sure.” She nodded but it didn't sound likely. “Maybe later. Or maybe not. Just something I got in my head …”

I knew better than to push her. If she was in some kind of trouble, if she hated living with her grandmother and wanted help getting her out of the house, if she had a disease—I'd have to wait until she was ready. Dolly was as stubborn as a bulldog and moved at about the same pace.

I put my hands in the air and stomped off, yelling over my shoulder,

“Fine. Just … well … I thought we were kind of … you know … like friends.”

“Yeah, sure.” She pulled in a couple of deep breaths and steamed past me. “Like you'd ever be my real friend. Think you're so smart, all that college …”

Dolly, grousing along ahead of me, still avoided the drag path. I watched her back going up and down, big boots tripping in the grasses. Something different about her sloping shoulders, about that oddly shaped rear, and that head under her official hat. Something gone from Dolly. A certain sharp edge that had always been her protection. She was snappish—as usual—but the snap was blunted, turned half on herself. I'd never seen anyone who
needed help more than Dolly at that moment. I knew that if
Leetsville people, like Eugenia at EATS and all her customers, caught on to this Dolly problem they'd be forming support groups and rescue groups and driving Dolly crazy. At that moment, watching the tight little blue-shirted back ahead of me, I wished them well.

First came a late
lunch and a kind of reconnoitering on the Dolly problem. That meant EATS, Leetsville's finest restaurant. I had a few questions for Eugenia Fuller, the large, blond, contentious owner, or Gloria, her sweet little waitress. If anyone knew anything going on in Leetsville, it was that pair. They were the unofficial presidents of every civic association and every social service—psychologists to the masses. Before anyone officially knew that Doctor Henley, at the small clinic between Leetsville and Mancelona, had delivered bad news to a patient, word went around EATS. Planning how best to help began; figuring what could be done for a woman fighting breast cancer, how her kids could be taken care, meals planned, deliveries set up, and a caravan of rides to Munson Medical Center in Traverse City put down on paper. Every municipal government in the United States could learn logistics from the women at EATS. It was simple, cost little, and came from giving hearts.

If Eugenia didn't know what was going on, I would get over to Dolly's house and call on her grandmother, Cate, who'd been living with her for a couple of months. The old woman had to have noticed something if everyone in town was already talking.

EATS was clearing out when I got there. I nodded to the people I saw going in. I seemed to know them all. A few years ago, when I first walked into the foggy restaurant filled with smokers, complete silence had fallen. Curious eyes turned my way. Puzzled glances were exchanged. Lips hovered over the stained edges of coffee mugs a little too long. I'd looked around then, nodded if I caught someone staring, and settled into one of Eugenia's red plastic booths with a sigh—me and the red plastic.

Little by little I'd been accepted. Dolly paved the way, bringing me into her investigations because she'd figured she had a better chance of holding on to a case, not having it go over to Gaylord, if she had help. The chief of police, Lucky Barnard, had his hands full of the day-to-day police work in a small town: those pesky marijuana growers, a kid with a new BB gun shooting out car windows, mailbox destruction, wife beatings, runaway kids. Plenty to keep him busy. Dolly sold me on helping her by telling me I had a better chance of a fulltime job on the newspaper if Bill saw what a good crime reporter I was. Maybe things didn't actually work that way in the journalism business anymore, but I'd figured it wouldn't hurt.

Eugenia, as always, stood behind her glass counter near the door. She glanced up, frowned, and stuck a pencil into her huge mop of blond hair that covered her ears, most of her forehead, and cascaded down her neck.

“Haven't been around much, Emily. Seems like ages.” Her frown didn't go away. I got the feeling not being around was a kind of sin in Leetsville—or cause for major alarm.

“Ya know,” she went on. “People who live alone back in the woods should see to it they call somebody or come in to have a talk from time to time. Otherwise, we get to thinking maybe you're dead out there.”

I shook my head. “Eugenia. Don't you think Harry would, just maybe, call somebody if he found me dead?”

She bit at her bottom lip, punched a button on her cash register, then surveyed the contents before closing the drawer and giving me a dead-on look. “Emily. I know you're new up here …”

There went the last five years down the drain.

“… and maybe you're not onto the ways of the woods, yet.” She hesitated, nodding to Jake Anderson of the Skunk Saloon as the tall man came in and took a booth by the front windows. “But if you want to keep us from worrying you gotta check in from time to time. That way we don't waste time thinkin' about you. You see?” She raised her plucked and drawn-in eyebrows at me, and gave one of those tight smiles people give when they're mad as hell but not willing to own up to it. “I got a little story for you.”

She rested her forearms against the counter, above a handwritten sign that clearly said:
Please do not lean on glass.

“Old Selma Tompkins from down south of Kalkaska. Take her for instance. Lived alone well into her eighties. Tough old bird. Never wanted any help, not even somebody looking in on her once a day or so. Always had this woodstove to keep her warm in winter. Lugged the wood in herself, she did. One winter—and it was a bad one—she went out to get her load of logs, and the shed door closed and locked behind her. There she was—sitting alone until they brought her out feet first, stiffer than a board. Came from that shed bent like a chair. Now, if she'd just not been so stubborn and let folks help her a little bit, maybe drop by once a day, she coulda been found and got out of there before she turned into a popsicle.”

Instructive story. Chastened, I nodded. “Sorry. Been busy.”

“Still trying to write them books?”

I nodded.

“No luck?”

“Some. I'm waiting to hear.”

She stood back, her face lighting up. “Be great if you sold something. I'll tell you what. You ever want to have a party to announce your book selling, or when it comes out, or whatever you writers celebrate—why, you can have it right here, at EATS.”

I thanked her for the offer. She was too many steps ahead of me. First came acceptance by the agent, then word of an offer from a publisher, then making changes and getting the book turned in on time—so many steps to having a published book in my hands and actually celebrating. But EATS was a fine place to start dreaming.

Most of the booths were empty so I took one off in a corner by myself. Gloria came over, her tennis shoes sticking to the brown linoleum with a sucking sound, and took my order for a BLT and diet Coke. I tried to catch Eugenia's eye, to beckon her to join me, but she was busy talking to a group of women from the Leetsville Library.

My sandwich came in record time so I settled into eating. I really had to get to Traverse, to the
Northern Statesman
. I'd write my story there at the paper, turn in the film I'd taken of the house and the body being brought out. Most of all, I needed to talk to Bill. I had two small stories to do, but I could use more. I'd figured my August bills ahead of time and had a slight shortfall that could be taken care of by a couple more human interest pieces. Maybe I'd call Jan Romanoff at
Northern Pines Magazine
. She paid better, but most of the work there was done by staff.

This waiting to hear if I had a chance with my manuscript was driving me crazy. What I should have been doing was beginning a new book. That's what writers were always told. I was thinking maybe not another mystery. Maybe the great American novel instead. Something that would knock Jackson Rinaldi's Chaucer book right out of the literary waters.

Not that I was competitive or anything.

But I had an idea to write a book about a bunch of homeless women living in a small wood down in Detroit. There was a time, back when I was in Ann Arbor, that I volunteered at a homeless shelter and sat with women who always had a new dream to tell me about, the biggest dream being a home of their own. Maybe I could get a good novel out of that. I had notes. I had characters. I had my place. All I needed was the time, and the actual belief that I could ever compete with my ex in the literary world.

What I seriously had to do, beyond a competition that lay only inside my head, was get busy finding a job that paid enough money to keep me there in Northern Michigan, although soon I'd have a few jars of fish—since Harry was willing to teach me how to can the stuff. With such bounty I'd surely live to gripe another year. And dream another dream of publishing a novel that would turn Jackson Rinaldi green with envy.

“You know, Emily …” Eugenia shook me right out of my writing reverie as she sat across from me with a heavy plunk against the plastic seat.

“Heard you and Dolly found a dead woman over on Old Farm Road,” she said.

I didn't even bother to wonder how the news had gotten back to town so fast. Something in the water, I was beginning to think. Or a kind of specialized Leetsville radar—picking news from the air.

“Know who she was yet?”

I shook my head.

“If you describe her maybe I can help.”

I read her my notes. She shook her head. “I'll start asking,” she said. “But you know how these workers come and go. If she was a wife or a girlfriend … well …” She shrugged. “And, hey, I heard there was a dead dog out there, too. Now that's a really sad thing.”

I nodded, used to Leetsvillians's take on news, and launched into what was foremost on my mind. “Harry said something that's got me worried. You know, just what you were talking about—how we have to watch out for each other.”

She nodded. “You mean the deputy, don'tcha.”

I nodded. “He said people are saying she's different.”

“Meaner, I'd say. Well … not exactly.” She thought awhile. “Short with everybody, is what I hear. Don't come in here hardly at all. She's got that grandmother with her. Maybe Cate's doing some cooking. Don't even see Cate much any more.”

“You said ‘not exactly meaner.' So what is it exactly?”

She thumped her hands on the table top. “Something dif-
ferent. We all seen this kind of thing before and that's why we're worried. Not in Dolly, mind you. But the gettin' mad stuff. Something's going on that's got her in a twist. We're just hoping it's not bad. You know, like cancer.” She leaned closer. “Seen enough of it and we don't want Dolly goin' through anything. And not all by herself. She's so damned hardheaded. Never opens up to anybody about anything.”

“Comes from her background,” I said, not having to remind Eugenia that Dolly's childhood had been a series of bad foster homes until she turned eighteen and was sent out on her own. Then a marriage to Chet Wakowski that lasted six months and the guy was gone. No family. Until the grandmother showed up—thanks to Eugenia's constant delving into genealogy and producing relatives—wanted and unwanted—for Leetsvillians.

“Yeah, well. It's time to get over all of that. You know something, Emily? If you let people come into your life, and you let 'em care about you, a responsibility is owed. That kind of caring doesn't get turned on and turned off. Dolly's been one of us since I can't remember when. She's been there for a lot of people. Mostly she's not easy, but she takes care of the innocent ones and hunts down the others. Think she owes us just a little bit more of herself—like sittin' down and tellin' us things are okay, or letting us help her if they're not.”

“She wanted to talk to me but then told me to forget it. I don't know how to help her. She's impossible …”

“Yeah, well … maybe you should just sit her down somewheres and make her tell you what's going on.”

I had to laugh at that one.

“You got any other ideas?” She frowned.

“You really think it's medical?” I asked.

She nodded. “That's what we're thinkin'. She's got her job—so it ain't financial. Got her grandmother with her—so she's finally got some family. What the hell else could it be?”

My turn to shrug. “Anybody talk to Cate?”

“Seemed too much like intruding.”

“I'll stop by there. I haven't seen her in a while.”

“Be okay, I suppose.” She set her hand on mine as I pushed my cleaned plate away. “Would you just let us know? One way or the other—whatever it is. We'd like to stop worrying. If she don't want help, that's fine. But just don't leave us hanging like this.”

I agreed, left money on the table to cover my bill, and my usual tip, and made my way out of the restaurant.

I drove over to Dolly's place, a straight up-and-down, no-
nonsense white house with cement steps that sat right on the sidewalk. No front yard to speak of. A two-track dirt drive with no car. She had an ochre plastic pot with one tired-looking geranium sitting on a top step and her last year's Christmas wreath—plastic greenery with a couple of shiny pine cones—still hanging in a front window. I was going to stop but got cold feet at the last minute. If Dolly suspected I was asking questions about her, I would never hear the end of it. I drove on past the house. Another time, I told myself.