Dead Dancing Women (2 page)

I looked down Willow Lake Road in one direction, then the other. Nobody was going to come and save me from working on the book, or on the article I'd agreed to write for a local magazine, about a group of Survivalists living back in the woods down the road from me. I had to make phone calls. An interview to arrange. I wasn't exactly looking forward to doing either.

The trees along the road waved and bent in the wind. Clouds scudded by in brightly lighted puffs. Crows leaped about or hunkered down along the telephone wires, their thick plumage poking straight up in the damp wind.

I gave an involuntary shiver as I made a move for the garbage can. Willy, the garbage guy, had uncharacteristically put the lid back on instead of leading me on my usual treasure hunt to retrieve it. I wrapped my arms around the can and lifted. The can had an odd, off-balanced feel to it. Something left inside. I tipped it one way, then the other, causing whatever was in there to roll like a basketball from side to side. Odd, I thought. I didn't remember a cabbage, or anything round, that I'd thrown away.

“Better be careful,” I yelled at the crows creeping toward me, though they gave only cheeky stares in return. “You hang around and Harry's going to make crow stew out of you.”

I laughed as I set the can down to see what choice tidbit had so unsettled the crows. I pulled off the lid with a wide, round gesture.

I laughed again, as I looked down to see what discarded morsel had caused the morning's greedy uproar.

I was laughing still, as I stared into the wide blank eyes of an old woman's severed head.

TWO

I did an amazing
dance. A leap in the air, a twirl, all the while holding the lid in my hand, and yelping words I didn't know I knew. I must have kicked the garbage can at one point in my dance because it fell over and away from me, causing the head to roll out onto the pavement, wild gray hair moving in a clotted clump. The head came to rest with the dead face turned toward me, on its side, eyes looking directly into mine.

I took a lot of deep breaths and moved closer to the slightly rocking head. It wasn't pretty. The smell I'd been ignoring got to me now, making my stomach do things I didn't want it to do. I hadn't paid attention to the smell but the crows sure had, and were going crazy around me. Crows in the air, wings flapping. Crows leaping up and down in the road. Crows. Crows. Crows. Rain falling. Trees going crazy …

A rocking head …

I took a lot of deep gulps of air, hoping to hold my breakfast down. This wasn't a thing to be alone with. I stepped back a lot of quick steps, away from the … thing, looking straight at me. I had to think. The police, of course. I'd go back down to my studio and call Police Chief Lucky Barnard in Leetsville. And Bill Corcoran. I had to call Bill, editor at the paper I did freelance work for, and let him know what happened out here. Geez—how many dead heads turned up in garbage cans?

Still, I couldn't leave the head in the road. Alone. There was something beyond pathetic about it—the poor woman. Dead. Unreal. But … not alone. A car might come by. Or those damn birds might make off with it. I wasn't about to touch her … er … “it,” so I carefully retrieved my garbage can and set it upside down over the head, figuring no one would drive into the poor thing that way.

I ran down the drive to my studio. I fooled around with the temperamental lock, ran in, grabbed up my phone. I got the number and called the police chief in Leetsville.

At first, Lucky Barnard didn't believe me.

“Having a little joke on me, Ms. Kincaid?” he asked when I said there was a dead head lying on Willow Lake Road, at the top of my drive, under my garbage can. “Something for one of your books?”

I sighed and looked around my writing space for solace. “No, Mr. Barnard … er … Chief. I mean, I've got a dead head under my garbage can. I think you'd better get out here.”

I took in the smiling photo of Georgia O'Keeffe hanging beside my desk. She was flirting with Stieglitz, her husband, this woman who lived by her own standards, everything going into her work, her amazing photographs. My saving places: O'Keeffe; the Jim Harrison poem, framed and hung beside her; my Erica Weick poem; my lithograph of Emily Dickinson's house; my painting of Flannery O'Connor. All part of my coterie of artists who sustained me.

“Hmm,” Lucky said.

I threw in a little more detail, hoping to interest him, desperate to be taken seriously. “Very dead, chief. An old woman's head …”

“Hmm,” he said again. I heard him turn from the phone and ask someone a question.

“OK, Ms. Kincaid. My deputy is somewhere out there right now. I'll have her stop by.”

Relieved at first, because I'd gotten to the point where I was thinking I'd have to bury the head and forget it, I then remembered who he was talking about: Deputy Dolly Wakowski, scourge of the backwoods roads, a squat little woman with the thin but strident voice of a marionette. Deputy Dolly wore her police uniform like a suit that didn't quite fit. She'd stand beside your car, staring you down, shrugging her way around in her ill-fitting blue shirt, shifting her drooping gun belt back and forth, and then give you a ticket and a lecture because the back, two-lane roads up here were dangerous, but also empty most of the time, easy to speed on, and Deputy Dolly was determined to keep us all alive.

Deputy Dolly, a lot like Barney Fife, only not as pretty. I'd heard she was condemned to work the back roads forever since she smashed one of the two Leetsville police cars while chasing a teenaged candy-store bandit. She was a little gnat of a woman who had already given me three speeding tickets, leading the people down at Buster's Bar, where I sometimes went for the fish fry on Friday nights, to let me in on the flash-your-headlights warning if Dolly was spotted in the area.

Sure thing—I would be thrilled as thrilled could be to show her my dead head. Still, at that point, even Deputy Dolly looked good to me. Anybody. Just so I didn't have to go back up there and be alone with … that … poor woman.

“I'll be right on out, too, and I'll put a call in to Doc Stevenson, Kalkaska County Coroner. You go back to the road, OK? Watch that garbage can, and wait for the deputy.”

When I got back to the top of my drive, there was a white and gold police car parked across the road, red lights flashing. The crows were gone. Deputy Dolly was bent over, the rear of her, with gun belt dangling, turned my way. She was gingerly lifting one side of the garbage can and peeking underneath.

“It's there all right,” I called out.

She gave a whoop and dumped the can over, exposing the head as she jumped back with one hand on her chest and one hand flying to her gun.

“You scared the hell out of me!” Dolly chirped, dancing in my direction, frowning and angry.

I hunkered down in my denim jacket, hands clenched in my pockets, ponytail dripping down my back. I kept my eyes on her. It was a lot colder now. Light rain still falling. I looked over at the poor head in the road and had the urge to take my jacket off and cover it.

“You're Emily Kincaid,” Deputy Dolly said. She came closer, slowing dow
n, frowning hard at me. “I remember you.”

I choked out something about being happy to see her, which was asinine under the circumstances, and would have been asinine anyway, since I would never be happy to see her.

Dolly whipped out a small notebook, felt in her shirt pocket for a pen, then in her pants pocket, came up with one, and frowned at me again. This, I was thinking, is a formidable woman.

She asked questions and wrote down my answers. A car approached. Dolly ran into the road and furiously waved the car back, motioning for the old man behind the wheel to turn around, to get out of there.

“Have to get this road blocked off as soon as the chief gets here,” she called out as she gave what passed for a thin smile. She was walking toward me when I noticed a flash of movement across the road, somewhere down Harry Mockerman's drive. A flash of black, like the shadow of an animal, or just a wave of leaves in the growing wind. I took a step into the road and raised my arm to hail Harry, but there was no one there. Nerves, I told myself. Between the head in the road and this deputy, no wonder I was seeing things.

A blue sedan came sedately around the far curve. No flashers. No sirens. Nothing to denote any eagerness or urgency. The car pulled to the side of the road across from where we waited, not talking to each other. Chief Lucky Barnard, a big, sturdy man in a trim blue and white uniform, got out. “Where is it?” he called, coming toward us slowly.

Dolly pointed to the place in the road where the head lay. He walked over, bent down, and looked the poor thing squarely in the face. He straightened fast and came to where we waited.

“Recognize who it is?” the chief said to Dolly.

She nodded.

He nodded, too.

“Who?” I asked, tired of their silent cop routine.

“Might as well know, I suppose. Everybody's going to, soon as word gets out. Old Mrs. Poet. Ruby Poet. Disappeared, oh, back a few weeks. Had a big search for her. Did everything we could. Always thought she got lost in the woods. Old, ya know. Probably got disoriented. But, how the hell did her head end up in your garbage can?” He shook his own head again. “I just don't see …”

“Probably some animal found it,” Dolly said. The two stood looking over at the dead Mrs. Poet. They toed the ground awhile, chewing things over, ruminating.

“Some animal?” I said, just a little incredulous. “Found it and put it in my garbage?”

“Well, I guess not,” the chief said. “But, then there's got to be an explanation.”

“Yup,” I said.

“We'll just wait for Doc Stevenson,” the chief said. “He'll be able to give us a better idea of what happened to the poor old soul.” He reared back on his heels and chewed awhile at his bottom lip.

The chief was a big man. Once a Marine, I'd heard. He fixed me with a long, suspicious look now. “How're the mysteries coming? I read a lot of mysteries. Haven't read one of yours, have I?”

I shrugged and shook my head, leaving it at that, though my face was burning. He knew damned well none of my books had been published. Everybody up here knew everything about everybody. Well, almost everything. I'd always imagined there were a lot of secrets buried in the blank-windowed, backwoods houses, and behind the facades of the ginger-breaded, Victorian houses in town.

“This wouldn't be something from a book you're writing, would it?”

“I don't dig up dead people just to see what'll happen,” I said, being as inane as he was.

A long blue Oldsmobile came up the road and parked behind the chief's car. An elderly man in a windbreaker over a rumpled blue suit got out.

“That's Doc Stevenson,” the chief said. “We'll have him take a look and tell us what he thinks. Why don't you go on back down to your house now, Ms. Kincaid? Use the day to rest and come on into town in the morning, tell us what happened out here. Help a lot if you'd do that. Dolly would be glad to give you a ride, if you need one. Wouldn't you Dolly?”

She made a face at him.

Rather than see an argument break out over me, I assured Chief Barnard I could get into town on my own. We agreed on ten o'clock and I started down my drive, happy to get out of the rain that was falling harder now, and hoping, somehow, to get the vision of that poor woman's dead head out of my mind.

“Oh, Miss Kincaid … er … Emily,” the chief yelled after me. “We'll be taking your garbage can along with us. Hope you got another one.”

I nodded. “Take it,” I called back. It wasn't a trophy I'd planned on keeping.

Time to buy that black bear a new can to kick around.

THREE

I shuddered as I
stepped into my tiny, overcrowded living room. It was depressing to think of that poor woman, Mrs. Poet. I didn't know her, but the name was familiar, probably from that search a few weeks back. For a few days, local TV reporters followed police into the woods before being shooed away, left standing with camera rolling, microphone in hand, explaining why they couldn't go into the woods, trying to make a story where there was none. I hadn't paid much attention at the time, since I didn't report on it, but the name was an odd one.

I ran water into a flowered cup at my sink. Now that everything was out of my hands, I found I was shaking. Tea was what I needed. A good and strong Earl Grey.

I set the cup into my microwave, made my tea when the microwave dinged, and went over to my living room desk to call Bill Corcoran at the
Northern Statesman
.

When he answered, Bill sounded hurried. There was the usual noise of telephones and reporters' voices behind him. Traverse City was a growing resort town and his paper one of the biggest dailies in the North Country, right behind the
Record Eagle
. He was always pressed for time, slightly out of breath, on a perpetual deadline. I wondered if he figured on all of this when he'd moved up here from Detroit to run the paper.

“Something happened out here this morning, Bill,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

“Yeah, Emily? What's going on?”

“I found a human head in my garbage can.”

“A human what?”

“Head.”

“Well, eh, how'd you know?”

“Know what?”

“Er … nothing. I guess you'd know a human head if you saw one.” He sounded like I was feeling.

“The police from Leetsville came out and took it away.”

“Wow! I mean … that's something. Where'd they take it?”

“Coroner.”

“So … they know who it belongs to?”

“‘Belonged,'” I corrected. “I think so. That Mrs. Poet they were looking for. Remember they searched the woods out here for almost a week? She never turned up.”

He was quiet a minute. “Yeah, I remember.”

“That's it.”

“So, you follow the story for us?”

“Sure. I guess I'm kind of at the middle of it.”

“Talk to the police …”

“They want me there in the morning—to make a statement.”

“Yeah, that's Leetsville. Morning's soon enough. I'll get something in tomorrow's paper, whatever you've got. I'll need details for Wednesday. See who takes jurisdiction, probably be the state boys, but I'll bet Lucky Barnard keeps his hand in. That's his town. He protects his turf. See what you can find on the woman and her family; what people in town think—things like that.”

“Sure.”

“And, Emily. Must've been a shock. You OK?”

“Well, it wasn't pleasant. But I'm OK.”

“So … make sure I get something in time for tomorrow. TV people will be all over you, I suppose.”

“I'll handle it.”

“Good. Eh, Emily, you sure you're all right?”

I said I'd be just fine. Veteran reporter—all that stuff. I hung up and felt better. He'd sounded almost like a friend. I was assigned the story. I could follow up, find out who Mrs. Poet was, what happened to her.

I sipped my tea and stared at the wall. I needed to talk to somebody. Any friendly voice to knock out the memory of what I'd found up there at the road. There was Jackson, of course. In a way we were still friends. If you didn't have to be married to him, Jackson wasn't a bad guy. Funny. Bright. Good looking. The kind of friend you have fun with but not the kind you end up marrying. Unless you suffer a severe lapse in judgment during a weekend trip with him in New York City—which you shouldn't have gone on in the first place.

No, not Jackson. I'd called him when I got mad at the beaver for scaring me with those tail slaps and it was really funny when I slapped the water right back at him … well, I thought it was funny. Jackson was (as they say of the queen) “not amused.”

So, maybe not a dead head story either.

I put on a James Taylor CD to soothe me. There was something I'd been avoiding here. A thought I didn't want to think. Someone put Mrs. Poet where I found her. Certainly it was no accident. No storm washed her up and plunked her into place. No wild animal, as Chief Barnard suggested, unless coyotes and bears were getting smarter than I wanted to know about. And then there was the thought I'd
really
been avoiding: someone disliked me enough to put that poor woman's head in my garbage can.

When the phone rang I decided I no longer was in a hurry to talk to anyone. I let the machine get it. A TV reporter wanted to know what happened out here, and if I would pose for pictures with my garbage can, up at the road where I'd found the dead woman's head. I answered and told the woman to call the Leetsville Police, that I had nothing to pose with since Lucky Barnard took my can with him.

I hung up and sat down at the living room desk. I leaned over the teacup, taking in the fumes, restoring my soul. The best thing I could do, I told myself, was get to work. That meant the story waiting out in my studio, or the article on Survivalists Jan Romanoff, at
Northern Pines
Magazine,
had asked for.

“Don't piss 'em off,” she'd warned me. “Just follow 'em around for a day. You know, through the woods. They say they live off the land, but I know the guy's at least got a listed phone number. Do a kind of ‘back to nature' piece. Get some recipes for raccoon or bear. You know. A little bit tongue in cheek. A little bit serious. No political stuff. He said they weren't into antigovernment crap, just living through the coming end of the world.” She laughed, then laughed harder when I thanked her for the assignment.

“I know you came up here to get away from it all, Emily,” she said when she stopped laughing. “Figured you'd be the one to pick up grinding your own corn and jerking your own beef—or whatever it is they do to it.”

I agreed that I was certainly the one for the story.

Better than nothing.

I dialed the number Jan had given me.

“Yah,” a deep-voiced man grunted.

“Ah …” I squinted at my handwriting in my notebook. “Dave Rombart?”

“Yes, ma'am, that's me.”

I told him who I was and that Jan Romanoff asked me to call and set up an appointment to come out and meet him, talk about his “lifestyle.”

“Well now.” He wasn't sounding as enthused as I'd expected. “I kinda thought she'd send a man. You know, because there's a lot of trekking through the woods involved. And shooting. And stuff.”

I assured him I could trek, and shoot—if I had to. “Just want to follow you. How many of you are there?”

“'Bout eleven. Give or take a couple. Me and the wife, mostly. We got ourselves a nice place out here.” He told me where to find them, a few miles down the road from me. A place I'd always wondered about, with a huge, metal gate, and big KEEP OUT signs.

“And we got to talkin' the other night that maybe others should know how to take care a theirselves out in the woods. For when the big one drops. Can't be too ready. And it seemed kind of … well … selfish not to share what we learned. Could mean the difference between surviving and being melted.”

On that happy note, I assured him he was doing the world a favor, and set up a time to meet on Thursday, out by the gate. He said he'd be waiting and he knew Sharon, “the wife,” would just love to give me her recipe for venison stew with corn bread muffins.

Since it was now past lunchtime, I made myself a tuna sandwich and opened a cold Diet Coke. I arranged some apple slices around my sandwich, feeling the need for feminine frills right then, and took the whole thing down to the lake.

Willow Lake could have been called a pond, I suppose. It was small, elliptical, with a sandy bottom where bass laid their eggs in swirling circles every early summer. Nice beach, sky blue water out to the place the water darkened and deepened at the drop-off. I liked the thought of it as a whole lake. My lake. Me, and a couple of loons, and those noisy ducks, and that damned beaver, who stayed busy knocking over trees with his two front teeth.

Actually willow trees did ring the lake, unusual for this far north. They hung long branches of yellowing leaves into the water. Trees and sky doubled on the lake's calm surface, so the whole place was a painting, repeated and repeated.

I sat in a lawn chair on my wobbly dock, ate my sandwich, drank my Coke, and lounged in what had become a half sunny, half overcast, day. With watery sun on my back, and the soft lapping of water at my feet, I began to feel cleaner, braver, almost as if that morning hadn't happened.

This was what I'd come to the North Country for: peace, mindless nature, and not many people. I was here to heal and find a new way to live. Kind of like the Survivalists.

I looked back at the sand path leading to my north-facing house. I'd already had the privilege of learning survival up close and personal. My first summer here a storm out of the west gobbled up the sky, moved black and thick across the lake, obliterated everything: water, sky, woods. I remembered how the walls of my house shook. The windows shook. Geraniums, in clay pots I'd set along the front deck, went flying off banister posts, and off the steps. I went flying too, into the bathroom. I closed the door and climbed into the tub, where I'd cowered with a pineapple-printed shower curtain wrapped around me, and a bath mat on my head, until the house stopped shaking and quivering like something out of
The Wizard of Oz
.

It was at that moment living alone in the woods lost all sense of romance and bravado. This was real life I discovered in those long minutes in my bathroom, not a Disney movie with birdies flitting on my shoulders as I sang a pretty song.

During that storm, I learned to live alone. Bears shaking my garbage can at night didn't bother me. Trees falling on my house didn't bother me. Snow so deep I had to shovel out my windows didn't bother me. Quiet bothered me. Sometimes loneliness bothered me.

But finding part of a poor old woman in my garbage can …
well … there were some things in life you could never be prepared for.

I set the diet soda at my feet. I must've moved too fast. I surprised the beaver swimming out from the dock, coming from his growing twig house back in the reeds. He slapped the water hard with his tail, sending a huge spray of lake water over me. I leaped out of my chair.

He really got me, my summer's nemesis. I was still unnerved by the morning's events and he'd caught me off-guard. We were in a knock-down battle—him taking down the soft woods around the lake, and me hoping to scare him away.

I wasn't in the mood for the game right then. I grabbed my dish and soda can and headed back to the house, muttering that I was going to talk to old Harry about getting rid of the beaver, save my lake, free the world from one more nuisance. Let the creature end up as a beaver stew. Maybe the Survivalists had it right.