Dead Dancing Women (4 page)

“And as we find out things, you're not giving any of it to the paper until we've got it wrapped up. Is that a deal?”

I thought awhile. “I'll have to turn in stories as I go along.”

She nodded. “That's fine with me. Just nothing we're working on.”

“Dolly,” I warned, “I've got a job to do.”

Her face turned red. “Me too,” she said and then stared down into her tea.

“So, OK,” I said.

She nodded, looked up, and stuck her hand across the tabletop at me. “Guess we're partners.”

I took the short-fingered hand and shook it one quick time. “Guess so,” I said. “We'll start with old Harry. Should go over and warn him anyway, that there'll be men in the woods tomorrow, searching for the rest of Mrs. Poet. He doesn't like strangers in his woods. We don't want him siccing those dogs of his on the police.”

“Then there's your other neighbor. Over to Ruffle Pond. Joslyn Henry. We could go talk to her, too.”

“Joslyn helped me with my garden my first year up here. She lives with her son, doesn't she? Isn't that Ernie Henry, from the small-
engine
repair shop?”

“Yup. So, guess we'd better talk to Ernie, too. He can be an odd one. You know, still living at home. In his late thirties. Maybe he didn't like his mother messing with this nature worship stuff. You never know up here. People get to brooding when the winter goes on too long. End up doing things they'd never do otherwise. You'd be surprised at the effects of a bad winter. Seen 'em go stark staring mad from too much snow.”

“But this happened in the fall. Or maybe she was killed in the summer.”

Dolly shrugged off this brush with logic. “Still, with some it takes a long time to work up the nerve to do what they've been stewing over for months.”

“OK.” I stretched back and yawned. “I'd like to see Mrs. Henry. When I lost most of my lilies to something I thought were worms I called the local extension agent, down in Kalkaska, and he suggested I drop over and visit Mrs. Henry. ‘Retired librarian and gardener par excellence,' he told me. Said she'd help out about the skunks digging in my compost heap and deer eating my roses. I went over there and got a severe case of flower envy when I saw her garden.”

“Been there. Beautiful. She's done it for years. Was the president of our local garden club at one time.”

“Told me to give those worms—that were really slugs—a mixture of yeast and beer. Told me better yet was to pick 'em off, one by one, and drop them into a can of kosher salt. That's what I've been doing ever since. She told me to plant nasturtiums and foxglove and spiky things the deer don't bother. And she said to use cayenne pepper that would make them sneeze, or buy some fine netting to drape over the flower buds. And she said for me to give up on growing tulips. Deer eat them. She said to try crocuses and daffodils. Nobody eats daffodils. And she told me how to build a wooden fence around my compost.”

I'd followed Joslyn Henry's advice and the next year my spring garden fairly glowed with daffodils and crocuses. I didn't go back to see Mrs. Henry after that. I had the feeling she didn't welcome visitors too often and I didn't want to impose. Our only conversations took place when she stopped to talk while I was collecting my mail, or out for a walk. She'd ask about my garden. I'd ask about hers. That was it, though I invited her to drop down any day she wanted. She never had, as far as I knew.

“As I said, she's a friend of Ruby Poet,” Dolly was saying. “One of the woods ladies. If she hasn't heard about Ruby Poet yet, well, it will be a favor to break it to her. And just maybe she can tell us more about what was going on in Ruby's life when she disappeared.”

I nodded. So, right under my nose: nature worship, firebrand preaching, town taking sides for and against Mrs. Poet. I'd thought I was more a part of Leetsville and life out in the woods than I was. I knew nothing about anything. I wasn't sure how much help I was going to be to Deputy Dolly, but it felt right to be working on a story, and it felt good to stay away from my house until all those bad spirits swirling around out there settled down.

“Let me call in my story,” I said, picking up the check for the drinks. “I'll meet you by Harry's driveway in what—half an hour?”

I paid the bill and got a wave and a curious look from Eugenia. There was going to be wild speculation about what was going on after Dolly and I left.

Outside the restaurant, Dolly stuck her hand out to take mine again. I guessed we were sealing our deal though I was already feeling a little uncomfortable.

She waited, hand in the air. I had no choice. I took the hand sticking out too far from the frayed jacket cuff, and shook it solemnly.

“Should we exchange blood?” I asked, though I figured she was too straight arrow to get it.

Dolly frowned, I guess to impress me with the seriousness of our joint undertaking. “Let's hope nobody's going to be losing any more blood. I'll protect you the best I can.”

I smiled gratefully. Now I felt safe and secure. Deputy Dolly—my protector. Odd that small chills ran up and down my back, and that the hair along my arms stood on end as she pulled open the sprung door of her police car, got in and drove off, back toward our secret meeting place, a couple of clanks and a cloud of exhaust marking where she'd been.

SIX

Old Harry's drive was
little more than a wide dirt path through a double row of dead and dying elms; an overgrown lane lined with lethal raspberry bushes, arching branches reaching out to grab at our jackets and tug at our hair. Harry didn't use the driveway for more than walking out to the road, as far as I knew. He owned a vehicle—of sorts. A kind of half-breed he'd put together himself from spare parts, with a black pickup cab for a front, and a flatbed he'd built on the back. He drove over to my place in it when he came to take out a fallen tree, or get a wasp's nest from under my eaves; but always avoiding main roads, taking the old logging roads so Dolly couldn't catch him. On the flatbed of his unique vehicle, Harry kept chain saws and oilcans and rags and even a beekeeper's veiled hat. He was a man equipped at all times to take on any disaster I came up with.

“I've seen Harry's car,” Dolly said, as we walked along through a new layer of fallen leaves. “Always gets away before I can check to see if he's got a license on it. Can't be coming in and out this way though. Take a look at this drive.”

I was taking a look. Close up, bent halfway over, eyeing the thorns on the branches, burrs on the bushes.

I didn't answer Dolly because I was sure Harry didn't fool with licenses for anything he owned. Not his dogs. Not his hunting. And certainly not that old, slapped-together car. But I wasn't going to help Deputy Dolly look into it. Our partnership stretched only so far. “Lots of last-century logging roads back in the woods for him to get in and out on,” I said. “And Shell Oil put in roads to get to the rigs and the pumps they've got going back in these woods. Some of the roads must run behind his property.”

“Didn't find oil on your property, did they?” Dolly grinned over her shoulder at me. “You'd be a millionaire if they did. Making millionaires out of some of the damnedest people.”

“Don't own the mineral rights,” I said. “I think Shell does.”

“Yeah, most don't own 'em. Old mining company bought 'em up years ago. Sold 'em to Shell. But you'd be amazed what some of the scrub and sand land is bringing folks who didn't sell out.”

While we walked, cussing a few times when the brambles got us, the weather turned again, with the sun going behind the clouds, leaving fumes of cold to scuttle along the ground like tiny goblins. More shadows than I cared to think about slipped in and out around us. I shivered in my denim jacket and told myself it was time for warmer clothes. Sooner than I cared to think about, it would be time to trot out the down jacket, knee-high boots, and the wool cap I pulled over my ears on below-zero mornings when my breath froze into cartoon balloons in front of me.

I'd never been to Harry Mockerman's house. I always left notes in his mailbox, asking him to come repair a screen or a window; come cut a fallen tree. There was something about Harry that didn't invite cozy friendliness. Maybe it was that dead-looking black suit and yellowed shirt he wore day in and day out, season after season. Harry in that funeral suit—with his long gray hair and grizzled face, with almost opaque eyes—could be intimidating. He was old, and skinny as a razor's edge. Never looked at me when he spoke, only down at the ground, always hunting earnestly for something. He'd stand dead still a minute then walk away to examine a thing he'd spotted. When he wandered back, he'd have a leaf in his hand, or a stone, or a piece of some unidentifiable item I didn't want to put a name to. He'd look up at me with his sad, faded blue eyes that were almost lost in his face, folded back in among fossilized wrinkles, and he'd give me a look that was pure question. As in:
Who are you? How'd you get here? Where are we?

Harry's stubbled chin would start to work then. He chewed thoughts over in his head, and in his mouth. His furry eyebrows would knit together. After a long time maybe I'd get a drawn-out, “
Wellllllll now …
”

He looked as if he'd been carved from a single piece of wood, not made of flesh and bone. There was something fixed about him, as if he'd always looked just this way, and there'd never been a different Harry Mockerman. Never a young Harry Mockerman. No past. No future. Just an old man living deep in the woods.

He had, he once told me in a long, drawn-out story that took him the better part of an hour to get out, worked for the Leetsville Logging Company back in the '20s, when he was just a boy. Which would make him close to ninety, I figured. He'd been a log skidder, he'd told me, and went on to tell me things about the lumber camps, with Indians camping on one side, loggers on the other, big stories that took him a long time to get out. A couple of the stories stretched over a two-day job, when he was fixing my dock.

Maybe his stories were true. Maybe he was lying, taking pleasure in fooling the city girl, as so many did up here. I'd heard some fantastic tales—ghosts and witches and murder. Through all of them I'd stood in proper appreciation and wonderment, wide-eyed, playing the role I'd been handed.

Harry's dogs, penned up somewhere beyond the house, began to bark wildly when Dolly and I broke out of the bushes and into the clearing where the house stood. Dolly cursed under her breath and pulled brown pickers from her uniform pants. I figured I'd do mine later, when I wouldn't have to be bent over, exposing my vulnerable backside to an empty clearing with dogs barking beyond.

Harry's house was small, tarpapered, and leaning. The front door and sill didn't quite meet. The screen door hung halfway open. Behind the house—what I could see from where I stood—was a group of buildings, each in worse shape than the other. I spotted his hybrid vehicle parked back there beside one of the sheds.

“Think he's home?” Dolly straightened and looked at me. She scrunched her face, then tapped at one of her ears, meaning the barking was too loud.

I shrugged. “Who knows? If he doesn't want to see us, he's long gone by now.”

Dolly reached up and slapped, flat-handed, on Harry's screen door. Her knock formed a kind of vacuum with the closed inner door, muting her knocks, making the screen bounce.

“Harry?” I leaned around and called through the screen door with dozens of small tears in it, useless at keeping out our no-see-ums, our mosquitoes, and our killer flies.

“Harry?” I called again. “It's me. Your neighbor, Emily Kincaid. From across the road. Could you come out here a minute? There's been some trouble over at my place and I have a deputy with me. She wants to ask you a few questions. See if you noticed anything or anyone out on the road yester …”

The inner door had opened soundlessly and Harry stood there, framed behind the screen. I stepped back, choking on the words I'd been about to say.

“Geez, Harry,” I said, recovering, forcing a smile. “This is Deputy Dolly, with the Leetsville Police. She wants to ask you a few questions. I came along because …”

He pushed the screen door open. Not a word out of Harry. He stood with his head down, examining the cracked linoleum at his feet.

Harry wore his usual shiny black suit, but now he'd wrapped a big white towel around his middle, protecting the suit from something. The strange thing about Harry and that suit of his was that the suit didn't smell. If there'd ever been an odor to Harry it was always a kind of smoked smell, woodsy, like someone who lived year-round with a blazing fire.

Harry held the crooked door wider. Dolly stepped through first, with me behind her. He led the way, without speaking, back through a cluttered but not unclean living room, into the room beyond, a tiny alcove of a kitchen where a simmering enameled pot on a
white gas stove sat with its lid bouncing, letting out little vents of good-smelling steam. It was a tiny room. Cluttered, like the living room, but not dirty. Everything in it was old and well used, with either a crack or a yellow patina of age. There was an old-fashioned icebox, with a pan underneath it catching slow drips from melting ice; a white metal table with two ladder-backed chairs; and a single open cupboard made of bare boards and metal uprights. The cupboard held a few dishes, a couple of cups, two pots, and a dozen or more Mason jars.

Harry motioned for us to sit down while he went to the back door, stuck his head out, and yelled “Shut up” at his dogs, who quieted immediately with only an occasional complaining bark or two.

Dolly nervously adjusted her gun belt back and forth, trying to get comfortable on the wooden chair with a cracked seat. “Miz Kincaid here found something pretty awful in her garbage can yesterday morning, Mr. Mockerman.” She launched into our reason for coming.

Harry nodded a time or two without looking at her. He picked up a big spoon, went to the stove, and stirred whatever was cooking there. The smell in the room was good. Onions and herbs. He didn't turn around, just stirred, keeping his back hunched over as he minded his pot. We waited.

I knew Harry to be a quiet man, but not this quiet. There seemed something too still about the bent back he kept turned. Harry was afraid. That was obvious. Maybe of us or maybe any woman who dared come into his home. There'd been a professor at U of M like that, a friend of Jackson's. Totally afraid of women, unless he met them out of doors, where he could run. God knows how he managed his classes. Poetry, for heaven's sakes. Of course—because he was good-looking—the class was filled to overflowing with dewy-eyed sprites clutching their spit-worn Emily Dickinsons to fluttering bosoms.

I'm a kind of spit-worn Emily Dickinson, all by myself, since I was named for her, which pretty well sealed my fate, though I married and never wrote poetry and left my father's house when I was eighteen to go away to college. Still—I'd decided early in life that there was something tragic about me, too. I just couldn't quite put my finger on what that tragic thing was since I always seemed so disgustingly ordinary.

Harry stirred. We sat. Dolly sniffed from time to time.

I figured, finally, that it was Dolly and the uniform that were getting to Harry.

“I found a head, Harry,” I said as gently as I could. “Somebody put it in my garbage can.”

“Don't say.” Harry pulled his shoulders up tight to his ears. From time to time, he changed the spoon, one hand to the other, then wiped his free hand on the towel wrapped around his middle.

Dolly cleared her throat. “You see anything up at the road yesterday?”

Harry made a noise and stirred faster, spirals of steam rising around him, spots of liquid flying from the pot, hitting the surface of the stove with soft sizzles, hitting the towel that covered the prized suit.

That stew did smell good. I was willing to bet he'd put some wild leeks in there, and maybe a little wild parsley. If you couldn't say much else for Harry, you had to admit he was a good cook. My mouth was watering.

“Anyway,” she said, not admitting defeat. “You know Miz Poet from town? Ruby Poet? Sure you know her, Mr. Mockerman. You grew up around here. You must know just about everybody.”

Harry shook his head then. “Nope. Don't know her,” he said.

“Come on, Mr. Mockerman.” Dolly gave a little, insincere laugh. “After living your whole life here, on this piece of property, in this particular house not five miles out of Leetsville? Why, that's hard to believe.”

He shook his head again. Harder this time.

“Harry, you had to know her,” I said, keeping my voice very soft. “She disappeared a few weeks ago. It was in the papers and on TV.”

“Don't get the paper. Don't got no TV.” His voice was gruff, sulky.

“Well, anyway, you knew Ruby Poet.” Dolly was exasperated. She got up and stretched as tall as she could get. I got up, too, because it was hard to sit and be as nervous as I was feeling. “Everybody knew her. It was her head, though she had no business turning up in Emily's garbage can.”

“Oh,” was all she managed to get out of him.

“You see anybody around Emily's garbage can yesterday after the truck went by? You up by the road at all?”

A very slow, thoughtful shake of Harry's head.

“Strange cars around? Somebody out walking?”

Harry appeared to think hard again, as if he was really trying to help, then shook his head. “Seen nothing. Weren't up to the road all day yesterday. Nope. Nowhere near the road. Not all day. I was busy here, in my house.”

“Garbage day,” I said.

“Forgot to take my bag out,” he said.

“I thought I saw you, or somebody, in your drive …”

Harry whipped his head around to give me a long, hard look. I supposed I was breaking some kind of code of the woods, saying anything, bringing trouble to his door. I stopped and added feebly, “I'm probably wrong. A bird or something …”

“Lots a crows,” he agreed as he moved away from the stove to the open shelf and took down a quart Mason jar. He got himself a big metal ladle, went back to the stove, and began dipping the soup or stew or whatever into the jar in his hand. When the jar was full, he found a metal screw top and lid and set those in place. He screwed the jar shut as Dolly and I waited, at a loss for words, while he pulled a dishtowel from the table and carefully wiped the jar dry.

“What are you making?” I motioned toward the pot, sensing we'd better prepare to leave or end up standing there all day staring at Harry's silent back.

“Possum stew,” he said, turning and holding the jar out to me. “I would a brought it over later.”

I took it, reluctantly. “You get a possum this morning?”

Harry nodded and gave a fleeting, crooked smile. “Yup.”

“So, you been out hunting?” Dolly drew herself up to full height.

“Nope. Don't hunt outta season. It came to the door. They sometimes do that.” Harry shook his head emphatically but he still didn't look either one of us in the eye. “Sometimes walk right up here and drop dead.”