Repo Madness (14 page)

“Like what?”

“Well, I don't know, Alan,” I replied irritably. “But I got the medical examiner's name. He's no longer the M.E., but he is still listed as a practicing physician. I'm going to go talk to him.”

“What good would that do?”

“You know, if you read a few murder mysteries instead of
Good Housekeeping,
you'd realize that in today's world, forensics solves everything. Maybe the M.E. remembers something that nobody cared about because I had already pleaded to the crime.”

“Well, obviously I'm reading the same book as you. I don't have much of a choice, do I? I'd prefer biographies, but you've decided we need to reread the Lee Child one.”

“Pretty good, don't you think? I see myself as a lot like the Jack Reacher character.”

“Except that he folds his clothes and keeps his kitchen clean.”

“I don't know where you get that.”

“He's ex-military. Organized, neat, disciplined. Simply could not be less like you.”

“You know what, Alan? I would appreciate it if not every conversation we have ends up with you complaining about some aspect of Ruddy McCann. Think you could manage that? You're a guest in my house and my body. Show some respect.”

I must have raised my voice, because when I looked over at the counter, all three women were standing behind it, staring at me soberly. I waved in an everybody-talks-to-themselves fashion and left the library.

I really didn't want to speak to Schaumburg, but I was just reaching for my phone to call him when it rang. Caller ID told me it was Barry Strickland. We chatted about the weather for a few moments before he got down to it.

“I ran that plate,” he told me. “Belongs to an Amy Jo Stefonick, twenty-three years old. You got a pencil?”

 

11

Ask Her How She Knows

I headed straight to Ms. Stefonick's address in Petoskey, a lakefront city of about six thousand souls, most of whom would be inside on a day like this—frigid but partly sunny, the golden beams of sunshine slanting down through breaks in the heavy dark clouds every once in a while like stairways to heaven. I was pretty pleased with this analogy when I mentioned it to Alan, but he just said,
“Oh please.”

“So sorry that I am trying to find something pleasant to talk about,” I replied.

“It's not even original
.
And I can't stand that you're using your cupholders to store trash.”

“It's not trash; those are my receipts. The cupholder is my filing system.”

“Stuffing wadded-up scraps of paper into a hole in your dashboard is not a
system,
”
he sniffed.

“You going to tell me why you're even more irritating than usual today?”

“You're supposed to be giving Katie time to think things through, and then you're taking her out to dinner tonight. How is that giving her time?”

“Okay. Let's say you're real, that I'm not just imagining you to keep myself company.”

“You can't seriously be back to that.”

“If you are real,”
I continued stubbornly, “then you are her father, so you're hardly the person I would go to for advice on dating her. And not her father
now
; in your mind she's still a little girl. I mean, you missed the teenage years, when she discovered boys and went to prom. You missed when she moved to Detroit for nearly a year. She's a full-grown woman now, Alan. You want her to wind up with Deputy Dumbbell?”

He was quiet. I fidgeted. I had a great follow-up speech on the topic of what it meant if he were just a delusion, but his silence was robbing me of any pleasure in the argument. “Alan?”

His voice was raw with pain.
“How do you think it feels to know that, Ruddy? To know that I couldn't be there for her, to protect her from her worst mistakes, to give her advice. How can you be so callous to me?”

Ugh. I was pondering how to apologize when my phone rang. It was, unfortunately, Dr. Robert Schaumburg.

“Ruddy, this is Dr. Schaumburg,” he said curtly. “Your druggist keeps asking for some authorization form but hasn't bothered to fax it to me to fill out and sign.”

Yes! Good old Tom.

“I want you to know I am sending a letter to the court today,” he continued, “informing them you are in violation of the terms of your probation and, in my opinion, are a danger to yourself and others and should be picked up immediately.”

Oops.

“I told you this would happen, Ruddy, that if you ignored me, it would be at your peril.”

“I was in the hospital.”

He paused. “Say again?”

“You can call over there and verify, or call the sheriff's office. I was in an accident during the ice storm and had to go to the hospital for a while.”

I could hear him turning it over in his mind. “Why didn't you have the attending physician call me?”

“Doc, I got hit in the head. I was all bruised up. I was on pain medication. Which,” I continued with more enthusiasm as something occurred to me, “I figured you would not want me taking in combination with the meds Sheryl prescribed, so I haven't been taking them since the crash. In fact, the medications don't seem to be in my house, and I promise you that if they were in the glove box when I rolled the truck, I'll need a new prescription.”

I had rarely felt so clever—I hadn't even really lied.

“So which is it?” he asked skeptically. “You lost them in the crash, or you stopped taking them because you were worried about adverse drug reactions?”

“Why don't you try faking a seizure?”
Alan suggested into my silence.

“I guess the point I'm making,” I said finally, “is that I'm ready to go back on the meds, but I'm out, so if you could call in a prescription—”

“No,” he interrupted. “I want to see you today, Ruddy. In my office. No excuses.”

“Oh man, I have such a full day,” I responded, thinking of Amy Jo Stefonick, my collection job for Blanchard, and my date with Katie.

“I have a four thirty. It's that or I send this e-mail.”

“Four thirty would be wonderful,” I told him with no enthusiasm. I had no idea how I was going to make it on time.

*   *   *

Before long I was turning up Mitchell Street, the main drag in Petoskey. The plow had shoved a wall of snow onto the sidewalks, and now the local merchants were out with their shovels, pushing it back.

There were three mailboxes attached to the outside of the small house at the address Strickland had given me. Box 1A had the name
STEFONICK
on it, so I opened the outer glass door to 1A and knocked on the inner wooden door. My cheeks were numbing, and thick clouds of what looked like tobacco smoke billowed out of my mouth.

I was in luck: Amy Jo herself opened the inner door. I recognized her short blond hair and freckles. Her blue eyes opened wide when she saw who it was.

“Oh God,” she said through the storm door.

“Hi, Amy Jo.”

“Oh God,” she repeated with more force. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“I just want—”

She shook her head wildly. “Please! Leave me alone!” She slammed the door.

“You sure have a way with the ladies,”
Alan remarked.

“All right, well, that is something I might say, Alan, but you would come up with something much more pissy,” I retorted as I rapped my knuckles on the wooden door. The brass door knocker rattled as I did so, and I gave it a quick go as well. “Amy Jo?”

“I am so tired of you playing this same tune,”
Alan said, sounding genuinely angry.

“Fine. Why don't you leave, then? Take a vacation. Go to Hawaii and stay at the Walmart. Amy Jo?” I knocked harder.

“She wants you to leave her alone.”

“I repo cars, Alan. I don't leave people alone.”

Finally she opened the inside door again. Her eyes were red, and she had a hand to her mouth. “I can't talk to you.”

I was holding the storm door open and could feel the heat fleeing the inside of her house. “Just for a few minutes,” I replied.

Defeated, she let me in. The wooden floors creaked under my feet after I slipped off my snowy boots and padded after her into the small kitchen. “I was going to have some tea,” she told me resignedly.

“I would love some!” I responded enthusiastically. I never liked the stuff, but maybe Alan would appreciate it. We sat at a small round table, and the mug of hot liquid felt pretty nice in my hands. Amy Jo put some sugar in her tea and stirred it, looking into her cup, her eyes dead.

“Please don't add any sugar; it's better unadulterated,”
Alan requested.

“Amy Jo.”

She glanced up at me warily.

“You're not a medium.”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head no.

“So what…?”

She glanced around her small kitchen. “The first time I saw you going into a medium's tent, it was at the Venetian Festival in Charlevoix,” she said.

The Venetian Festival is sort of the polar opposite of Smeltania. It takes place in the warm end of July and is a huge art fair and street carnival. At night there are fireworks and a parade of yachts in the harbor, rich people standing on the bows of their enormous boats, holding cocktails in their hands and staring at all the tourists sitting on the grass in the park, who stare back. I had ducked in to see if the mediums, or maybe the media, could connect me with Alan. I'd had no luck.

“I guess I'm not understanding,” I confessed.

“Then I saw you last year at Shantytown, and I thought maybe you were trying to, you know, reach her. Lisa Marie Walker.” She took a sip of her tea, and I did likewise.

“She was pretending to be a medium as a ruse to talk to you,”
Alan advised me, as if I couldn't have figured that part out.

“You don't like the tea?” she said, smiling at my reaction.

“It's very different,” I replied carefully.

“It's green tea,” she and Alan said together.

“Haven't you heard of green tea?” she asked.

“Yes, I just had no idea people actually drank it.” It was pretty bad stuff. I reached for the sugar bowl and, over Alan's loud complaints, heaped in a couple tablespoons. Now it tasted like sweetened bad stuff, which was something of an improvement.

“Don't drink any more,”
Alan begged. I took another sip.

“So you knew I was going to mediums. And you decided to pretend to me that you're one, too. So that you could tell me something. What do you want to tell me, Amy Jo?” I asked her.

She looked away, then down. I let her struggle with it. “I saw something,” she finally whispered.

“Saw what?”

She raised her eyes to mine, and I noted something new in them: regret. “That night. I mean, I didn't know what it meant at first, not until I was older, and you had already gone to jail.”

It was prison, but I didn't want to interrupt her with a correction. I sat in silence—sometimes, when I'm trying to get people to tell me where they've hidden their cars, I'll just sit and they'll eventually fill the void with more information.

“I was on my bike. I saw you, and I knew who you were. Everybody knew who you were.”

“Where did you see me?”

“At the 7-Eleven. You parked your car. I saw you get out and go into the store. And I sat and watched. I kind of had a crush on you then.” She blinked at me a little shyly.

“So then what happened?”

“Then the back door of your car opened, and this girl got out.”

I turned absolutely still.

“She went over by another car and threw up. I mean, she was pretty drunk; she could barely walk.”

“Did she get back into my car?”

Amy Jo shook her head. “No, that's what I'm saying. A man came up and helped her.”

“My God,”
Alan breathed.

“Helped her?” I probed.

“He put his arm around her while she was sick. And then he led her down the street, and they got into a car. Or at least I think they did. I was actually watching you, because you had gone to the counter with some beer and you were showing your ID.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. I felt a little dizzy. “Why didn't you tell the police any of this?” I asked faintly.

“I'm sorry, but I didn't even know about the accident until later, and then it was when I was in high school, doing a research paper on the history of the area. The night you crashed was the day after my birthday—a really
important
birthday. See, I got that bike for my birthday, and I rode it all day and all the next day, and then someone stole it right out of our garage. The night you crashed into the water, that was the night someone took it. I woke up the next morning and went out, and it was gone. So I'd never forget that night, the last night on my new bicycle.”

“You still could have said something. You still could have told the police,” I replied, my voice rising.

Her freckled face turned deathly pale. I had more than a hundred pounds on her, and we were alone in her small flat.

“Ruddy,”
Alan soothed cautiously.

“I am so sorry,” she told me, gulping back upset tears. “I didn't think anyone would believe me. I thought they would think I was just making it up to be famous. I was in high school when I figured out what I really saw. When you're in high school, there's a lot you don't understand about the world.”

I took a breath. “Okay. Right. You didn't know. I get it. It's okay. Just … this man who helped Lisa Marie, can you tell me anything about him?”