Unidentified Woman #15 (9 page)

“What do you know about Howard?” Bobby asked.

“Only what I told you.”

“I don’t even have a legitimate reason to pull his jacket.”

“Maybe not, but you’re going to do it anyway.”

“We need to find her,” Nina said. “Should we offer a reward?”

“What would the notice say?” Bobby asked. “Wanted—a pretty, young, blue-eyed blonde with pale skin? In Minnesota, that shouldn’t generate more than ten thousand phone calls. I’m sorry, Nina. I don’t mean to be rude, only it would be like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. We don’t even have a name.”

“That’s not entirely true,” I said.

Nina looked at me with high expectations. Bobby’s expression suggested annoyance.

“Have you been holding out on us, McKenzie?” he asked.

“She let it slip the other day. Her name is El.”

“Elle? As in Elle Macpherson, the model? Or short for Ellen, Eloise, Eleanor?”

“Or just the letter
L,
” Nina said. “Linda, Laurel, Loraine…”

“Something else,” I said. “Yesterday morning on the balcony, she said that there wasn’t a single building over two stories in Deer River.”

Bobby tried to contain himself and nearly succeeded. Yet for the briefest of moments an expression flicked across his face that I had seen before, albeit not very often. It was the one that said, “You’re smarter than you look.”

FIVE

I started at the Holiday Stationstore off U.S. Highway 2 just inside the city limits.

“Yeah,” I said. “I have a place, a cabin, about fifty miles north of here. I must have driven through Deer River a thousand times to get there, and this is the only place I’ve ever stopped. I ran into a couple of kids in the Cities, though, especially this pretty young thing called herself El, and they said I should give DR a try. Do you know El?”

I spoke the name loud enough for everyone to hear. The woman working the cash register didn’t know it. Neither did anyone else by the way the other customers acted.

I tried the same gag over a mug of tap beer at the joint next door and received a head shake from the bartender for my trouble. The folks at the Outpost Bar and Grill, Otte Drug Store, and the U-Save Food Store also claimed they had never heard of a blue-eyed blonde named El. I found it very discouraging. Small towns don’t have much of a transient population. Everyone who was there was usually there to stay, and I figured the thousand or so people who lived in Deer River would know everyone else. I was starting to think I had figured wrong.

Next, I pulled into the parking lot of the Deer River High School, home of the Warriors. The school was housed in an aging flat brown building, and if it had any athletic fields, they were buried under three and a half feet of snow. It must have been doing something right, though, because the plaque just inside the front entrance proclaimed that
U.S. News & World Report
had awarded Deer River a bronze medal, designating it as one of the best high schools in the country.

The secretary was old enough that she could have turned over the first shovel of dirt when the school was built. She looked up expectantly when I approached. I asked if there were copies of the yearbook dating back the past five years that I could look at. She asked why. I told her that I wanted to look up a young lady I met in the Cities—a girl called El. She asked why. I asked if she knew El. She responded by picking up a phone and making a call. I told her that wasn’t necessary. She told me to wait. I did.

Less than a minute later, another woman approached. She extended her hand and told me her name. “Ms. Bosland.” She was surprisingly young and pretty and I thought, as I shook her hand, that if I were still in school I might have tried to date her. I told her what I wanted.

“Mr. McKenzie.” She spoke my name slowly like she was trying to memorize it. “We are not in the habit of revealing personal information about our students to strangers.”

“Let me speak to the principal.”

“I am the principal.”

Wow, school has changed,
my inner voice told me.

“Finally, someone I can talk to,” I said aloud. I shook her hand a second time and repeated my request, this time making it sound like I wanted dinner and a movie with drinks at my place afterward. She still refused.

“What about prospective employers who only want to know if she graduated?” I asked.

“You can’t even tell me her full name, so I doubt she sent you a r
é
sum
é
or filled out a job application. But I’ll bite—are you a prospective employer? What company?”

“I just want to look up El’s picture in the yearbook.” Even as I said it, I knew I sounded creepy.

Both women folded their arms in unison, their movements so similar that I wondered if they were family, if the principal was the secretary’s great-granddaughter. It was apparent that neither of them was going to budge unless I told them a story, and the only one that came to mind was the truth. I couldn’t tell them that, so I excused myself. Their cold stares followed me out the door and across the parking lot to my Jeep Cherokee.

I thought about calling Bobby Dunston. Perhaps he could contact the principal from his office and ask her to cooperate with me. It sounded a lot like admitting defeat, though, and I wasn’t ready for that.

I had purchased the Cherokee when cars were cars and not floating personal computers. It had none of the gadgets—including a seat warmer—of my late, lamented Audi, which I had every intention of replacing in June or when the snow melted, whichever came first. So I dug the smartphone out of my pocket, pleased that I had bars. Experience had taught me that coverage Up North was iffy at best. I piggybacked the high school’s Wi-Fi connection and googled the Deer River, Minnesota, public library, figuring that it would probably have yearbooks. There wasn’t one.

“Well, dammit.”

*   *   *

Night had fallen, along with the temperature. The snow under my boots crunched like gravel as I walked across the parking lot toward the entrance of the small roadhouse just off Minnesota Highway 6, north of town.

O’Malley’s was an oasis of light in a world of sorrowful blackness. Except for the distant stars shimmering above, there was nothing else to comfort a traveler as far as the eye could see. Along with light, there was warmth. I felt it radiate from the building as I approached; heard it in laughter and Golden Oldies as I opened the door.

The mornin’ sun is shinin’ like a red rubber ball,
the Cyrkle sang from the jukebox.

Hang a left and there was the restaurant, filled to capacity, a trio of smiling waitresses scurrying from kitchen to tables and booths, taking and filling orders. To the right was a bar, also full of customers, a regulation-size pool table making it more crammed than it needed to be, a young man circling the table and twirling his cue like a samurai sword and someone shouting “just shoot the frickin’ ball” in a way that made others laugh.

It was only 6:00
P.M.
on a Thursday by my watch, yet the place was rocking like Saturday night in downtown Minneapolis. I thought that was probably because Deer River was two hundred miles from downtown Minneapolis and there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do on a cold winter’s night. It was a condescending attitude to take, I admit, but you should hear sometimes what small-town folk have to say about us city slickers.

The only empty stool was at the far end of the stick beneath the head of a twelve-point buck that had seen better days. I managed to get there without inconveniencing the pool player. There were amusing signs on the wall about credit, as well as jokes involving Ole, Sven, and Lena. Conversations seemed to include everyone within earshot. The bartender could have been the girl who grew up down the street. She looked to be about twenty with sandy hair, hazel eyes, and a figure the old man would have labeled “pleasingly plump.” The thing was, though, it seemed as if all the light in the place came from her smile.

She set two menus in front of me before I was comfortably seated, one listing the daily specials. She left, served a few patrons, and returned. The Everly Brothers were on the jukebox now, telling Little Susie to wake the hell up.

“Whad’llya have?” she asked.

I requested a Summit EPA, a craft-beer brewed in St. Paul, my hometown, that she didn’t serve, then switched my order to Schell’s Pilsner, which she didn’t have either. She stared at me, an expression of infinite patience on her face.

“Grain Belt?” she suggested.

“On tap?” I said.

“Comin’ right up.”

The bartender returned a moment later with a twelve-ounce mug. She pointed at the menus and asked, “Do you want to order something to eat?”

“In a minute.”

She started to move down the stick and I said, “I must have driven past here a thousand times on the way to my lake cabin, yet I’ve never stopped.”

“What makes us so lucky this time?”

“A young lady I met in the Cities told me to give it a try. Girl named El.”

“El? You know Ella Elbers?”

He shoots, he scores,
my inner voice announced.

I pulled out my smartphone and tried to keep my hands from trembling as I called up Fifteen’s pic, the one of her dancing in a dress made of strawberry lace. I zoomed in and showed the photo to the bartender, who took the phone from my hand.

“Oh my God, she cut her hair. So cute.”

“You’re friends?”

“Of course we are. We grew up together. Went to school together. Didn’t she say?”

“No. She just said to stop in O’Malley’s the next time I was up here.”

“The bitch. Didn’t even tell you to say hi? That’s cold.”

I spread my hands wide as if to announce, “That’s El.”

The bartender returned my smartphone.

“I haven’t heard from El in God, three months,” she said. “Oh, hey, in case she didn’t tell you.” The bartender extended her hand and I shook it. “I’m Cynthia Desler. Cyndy. With two
Y
’s. Some people call me M.”

“What does M stand for?”

“Nothing. It used to stand for Marie. When I got divorced, I switched from my ex’s name back to mine, but the court clerk screwed up. He left the Marie part out. Now it’s just M. You believe that? I lost my middle name. My friends call me M now whenever they want to tease me. What a world. How do you know El? Oh, wait…”

Cyndy moved down the bar and began assisting patrons with drink and food orders. How she knew they wanted help I couldn’t say. It wasn’t like they were waving—at least I didn’t see them wave. Yet a competent bartender has a sense for such things, and she was clearly good at her job. A few minutes later, she returned with a fresh Grain Belt.

“This one’s on the house. Any friend of El’s is a friend of mine.”

“El and M.”

“Yep. BFFs going all the way back to kindergarten.”

That’s how long you’ve known Bobby Dunston,
my inner voice reminded me.

I lifted the beer mug in a toast.

“You’re very kind,” I told the girl.

The smile, which never seemed to leave her face, cranked a few watts brighter as if it was a compliment she heard before yet never tired of.

“How long have you been tending bar?” I asked. “You don’t look nearly old enough.”

“Better than that, I’m the manager. Didn’t El—no, of course, she didn’t say. I’m going to kill that girl.”

“Still, you’re pretty young for the job.”

“What can I tell you? Ingvar hired me part-time to wait tables when I was in high school, made it a full-time job when I graduated. I proved I was smarter than everyone else, so when I turned twenty-one he put me in charge. That was last year.”

“Ingvar?”

“Ingvar Ragnvaldsson.”

“Lord almighty.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why he called the place O’Malley’s. Smartest business decision he ever made, besides hiring me, that is. If he had used his own name—I can pronounce it because I’ve had a lot of practice. Everyone else trying to get it out, they’d tell themselves, ‘You know what? I’ve already had too much to drink.’ Oh, oh…”

She cocked her head to listen. I heard it, too. The opening
ba—ba, ba—ba
to an old Partridge Family song. She moved away until her backside was resting against the mirrored shelf behind her, the most serene smile on her face. And David Cassidy sang “I Think I Love You” from the jukebox. Nearly everyone in the bar joined in, all of them directing the lyrics toward Cyndy M. Inexplicably, I found myself singing along—
Though it worries me to say, I never felt this way
—which made her laugh out loud.

The song ended, people applauded, Cyndy shouted, “Enough now, enough,” and took care of her customers. It was a good fifteen minutes before she returned. She pointed at the beer mug.

“Freshen that up?”

“Sure,” I said.

I also asked for a Philly cheese sandwich. She took care of both orders.

“You get that a lot?” I asked. “Your customers serenading you?”

“Couple times a week. Same song. Do I look like Susan Dey, the actress who played Laurie Partridge in the TV show?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah, well, when I was younger and thinner…”

“Younger? Thinner?”

“I have a child, a daughter. That’ll age you. And believe me when I tell you childbirth goes right to your hips. That’s why I didn’t move to Minneapolis with El. A bunch of us planned to go after we graduated. Seven of us. Three girls and four guys. There was nothing sexual about it, though. No one was partnering up. We were like brothers and sisters. Growing up in DR, we took every single class together from preschool through senior year, you know? Anyway, the seven of us were going to try our luck in the Cities, rent a house together, get jobs, maybe go to community college and then try to get into the U. It was going to be fun. Then I got pregnant with Lizzie. Then I did what they say you’re supposed to do. I married her father, who I loved at the time, but who turned out to be a jerk who stole my middle name. And here I am.”

Cyndy spoke the words with the melancholy tone of what might have been. Yet she did not linger long, choosing instead to change the topic of conversation. I liked her for that.