Dead Floating Lovers (24 page)

There were no lights on in the tribal police building as I drove by, and nothing but dark around me. Lake Michigan on my right. Trees to my left. I’d planned to stop and see Ray Shankwa and raise as many kinds of hell as I could. Now I had nowhere to go with my anger and frustration. It was like looking for ghosts. I knew they existed, the two men, but they were nowhere. They found me easily enough, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. As if a cloak of invisibility had been drawn around the men, no one knew them, no one recognized the names, no one offered help. I got the feeling I was being shut out of a northern club I knew nothing about. Didn’t anyone care that two people had been murdered and left to molder at the bottom of a lake?

The thing about murder, to me, was the hideous arrogance of taking lives no one had the right to take. Most murderers were the worst kind of egoists: if I can’t have them; if they won’t listen to me; if I can gain something … why, I’ll just do away with them and then I’ll be happy. There always seemed to be that at the very bottom of the urge to kill: then I’ll be happy.

Who was happier after killing Mary and Chet? I asked myself as I drove back down through Sutton’s Bay. I curved with the road, past the Bay Theatre, Bahle’s Department Store, and all the galleries, toward Traverse City.

Why would Alfred Naquma kill his sister? I wondered. Maybe because Chet was a white man. There were plenty of Indians who held grudges. Would Alfred be happier knowing he had stopped his sister from making a terrible marriage? If I understood human beings better, maybe I could fathom that one, but the human psyche, much like that of animals, was, at heart, unknowable.

Was it because Chet was a married man? I wondered. That would do it for a lot of fathers and brothers.

Could be something else. Something illegal going on out at Sandy Lake Alfred couldn’t let Chet find out about. Especially with Chet’s soon-to-be aggrieved wife on the local police force.

But where was Orly Naquma? And Christine, the other sister?

Why would Alfred wipe out his whole family, and why would the tribe protect him?

None of it made sense.

Thirteen years was a long time to have kept this secret. It was like peeling an old onion layer by layer; the onion was rotten but the skin didn’t want to give up its core.

I couldn’t go home. Not back to that silent house. Too much on my mind and I’d failed to find Sorrow. I was tired and out of ideas. In the morning I was supposed to pick out Chet’s casket with Dolly. I didn’t want to. Didn’t want to see Leetsville for a while and didn’t want some melancholy job ahead of me. I wanted to be someplace where I was an Emily Kincaid I recognized. For just a few hours.

I headed out toward Spider Lake and Jackson.

___

Stripped down to his boxer shorts, a tee shirt, and bare feet, Jackson wasn’t expecting company when he came to the door.

“Anything wrong?” he asked as he unlocked the screen to let me in, maybe a little reluctantly. His good-looking face was lined with worry and irritation. I ignored the pallid greeting and walked in, slapping my purse on the kitchen counter and leaning over it, resting my hands to either side. Exhaustion hit me hard. I was tired from the night before, from not sleeping, and from the emotional stress of not finding Sorrow. Maybe even from making an ass of myself at the casino.

“What happened?” Jackson’s hands were on either of my arms. He turned me to him and held me. I think I might have cried—I was that frustrated.

I stepped away from Jackson, giving him points for kindness.

“Somebody stole Sorrow,” I said.

“That’s terrible,” Jackson frowned and drew me close again, patting me awkwardly on the back.

I let out a puff of air. Enough of that. I told him I just couldn’t go home, that I was miserable, and needed a bed for the night. He looked at me oddly, then sensed I wasn’t in the mood for sex. He said he would clear his papers from the spare room.

Nobody answered at the Leetsville Police Station when I called. I let it ring and ring. Finally, after about ten rings, when anyone needing help would have given up, a machine came on and I left the message for Dolly that I wouldn’t be able to go with her in the morning. I said I was sure she could pick out a casket by herself and that something unsettling had come up. I said I would tell her all about it when I got back home.

I got the number for the tribal police and left a message there, too. I asked Ray Shankwa to call me and gave him Jackson’s number. Maybe it wasn’t smart to admit to being thrown out of the casino but that’s what I said in the message, and told him why, and that I was looking for the men and that they’d kidnapped my dog and I was going to go after them, beginning in the morning when I would call the police in Sutton’s Bay, in Traverse City, in Gaylord—and soon nobody would be hiding and somebody would pay for everything that was going on … The answering machine at the other end beeped, stopping me.

I called Bill’s office next and left a message on his machine about the chicken bones. I promised a new story the next day.

Jackson, lying on the couch behind me, listening, put his arms up behind his head.

“Quite a night, Emily,” he said, and smiled a superior smile. “Did you really get kicked out of the casino?”

I nodded. “I want my dog back. One of those men is a murderer. If I keep quiet, who’s to say they won’t harm Sorrow, or even do something to me? They want the murders out at Sandy Lake hushed up and everybody in the tribe is covering for them.”

“Everyone?” He lifted an eyebrow at me.

“Well, it seems to me …”

“Maybe you’ve gotten a little hysterical …”

Christ! The old “now calm down little lady” routine. I’d forgotten that part of Jackson’s character. It made me wince. Too tired and angry to get mad at Jackson too, I made him move over and lay down beside him on the couch.

I never got to the spare bedroom. Never even got out of my clothes. We fell asleep like that, in each other’s arms. It wasn’t until near morning that I moved to a deep chair and curled up with a blanket pulled to my chin.

Jackson made pancakes with real maple syrup for breakfast. I was hungry. Anger can do that, bring on the need for quantities of food to tap down all those roiling feelings.

I don’t know if he expected me to leave after breakfast, but I didn’t. While he went up to his office/bedroom to work on
The Mosaic of Humanity in the Canterbury Tales
, I took a full pot of tea to his deck and wrote out a new story for Bill. Two kayakers paddled silently past, and the voices of swimming children came from down around the cove. I felt safe there, with Jackson writing upstairs, with people doing things they should be doing up north. Nobody wanted to hurt me. Maybe I was hiding, but it felt good and freeing. Soon enough I’d get it together and go home. Since I had no clothes, no toothbrush, and nothing else other than the lipstick and hair brush in my purse, I imagined I would, like Shaw’s houseguests, begin to stink like dead fish—sooner rather than later.

Jackson didn’t seem to mind. I stayed on through lunch and then he invited me out to Hannah’s Bistro for dinner and a movie. On our way through town later, I dropped the story off at the paper without seeing anyone.

How normal. A regular life. I enjoyed the salmon at the bistro and loved the movie, though I slept through most of it. On the way home we talked about our life before divorce, back when we’d been happy.

“You were a good foil for all the academic businesses,” he said, turning to smile as I reclined in his Jaguar, feeling rich and important, a woman with real things to do and intelligent topics to talk about.

“You introduced me to that world I would have been shut out of otherwise,” I said. “All those professors. That was fun—the discussions, even the arguments.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “We made a good pair.”

“Except for your need to look elsewhere,” I said, unable to let him off the hook, though it was a halfhearted attempt.

He shook his head. “Mea culpa. Remnants of my teen years, I’m afraid. It is possible to be a child and an adult at the same time.”

“Sounds like an excuse a lot of men use.”

“An atavistic giving into impulses, I’ve come to think. Really, those women had nothing to do with how I felt about you.”

“Oh, Jackson.” I was tired. Too tired to plow old ground and sane enough to realize it had all been plowed too many times before.

We didn’t talk for a while as we drove back to his house on Spider Lake.

“I’ve been thinking hard about selling and going back to Ann Arbor,” I said, almost wistfully.

“I know,” he said. “Though I have to say, I’ve never seen you quite as happy as you’ve been up here. I have thought, more than once, how lucky you are to live in the North Country. For writing, it couldn’t be a better place. Tough, I suppose, to make a living. But then, that’s not a worry of yours. Not with the money from our divorce, and then there is the money your father left you.”

There was nothing to say. If I told him my money problems, he might think the only reason I wanted to remarry him was to get a steady meal ticket. And—being honest with myself—that could be the truth. I didn’t like women like that, but now I understood, just a little, how a woman might find herself frantic, needy, and vulnerable.

“Still,” Jackson drove carelessly, a wrist draped through the steering wheel, “since your books don’t sell and you’re only working as a journalist part-time, I can see where you might want to get back into real life.”

I bit my lip—hard. When I could speak, I said, “I was thinking, perhaps we might try again.”

He hesitated. “You mean marriage? Us?” The laugh he gave wasn’t flattering.

“We seem to be in a different place now,” I pressed on.

“Yes, that’s true … but are you certain? I mean, I know I’d be a much better husband than I was.” He went into deep thought as we turned on Hobbs Highway. “In truth, I’ve missed you. It takes a wife to plan the kinds of parties we used to give. And they were good parties. At least never dull.”

I nodded.

“And, with the married professors—their wives held the divorce against me. For God knows what reason. We’d be back in the married set again. That wouldn’t hurt me at the university. I mean, we all reach a point where we are one thing or another: young and on the prowl, or married and settled. I suppose we could, eventually, fall back into the exact circle of friends we used to have.”

I nodded, though cringing at the clinical analysis of our chances for success. And at the heavily weighted practical pros and cons.

He turned to me as we pulled in the drive under the tall pines. “We’re getting on so well now. I like our being … close, the way we are. So very … comfortable.”

We slept together that night. Almost a joyous occasion, as if a decision had been reached. It looked as though my little golden house could go on the market or be rented out. That idea began to hurt a lot. I forced it behind me.

Sunday morning I lazed around for a few hours, cooked breakfast for us, and then, stretching, suggested I’d better be getting home.

Jackson nodded. “I’ve got a lot of work to accomplish today. Probably best for both of us if you leave.”

A little too enthusiastic for my ego, but it was true. I had to get back and face the funeral in the morning, had to track down those two men, had to get that cemetery story finished and into
Northern Pines Magazine
, had to find Sorrow—a lot of things I hadn’t been thinking about.

Jackson said he would call in a few days and bring over more manuscript sheets. I took his face between both my hands for just a minute. I needed to look into his eyes. There was impatience there. There was a kind of satiation. There was a cautious kindness. I didn’t know about love. Maybe at our age love wasn’t so apparent. Maybe we’d both learned to guard our feelings. Maybe I needed to stop looking for overt signs and settle for what was said.

We kissed good-bye and I was out of there—no bags to pack. No long leave taking.

At the bottom of my drive, when I got home, the first thing I saw was two people meandering through my garden. Dolly and Crazy Harry. Together, but apart—one up one garden path, the other standing in the new vegetable bed with a hose in his hand, watering seedlings emerging from the hills. I would have beans and corn and pumpkins and squash by fall. Harry was bent almost double, poking with one finger into a hill while water went on the next hill. Dolly, when she heard my car, stood with her hands at her waist, glaring into the sun.

“Where the hell you been?” was her greeting.

“Out,” I said. “You get the casket chosen OK?”

She nodded. “That’s not what’s important here. You disappeared. Never said where you were going. You with Jackson?”

I nodded as I slammed the car door and fumbled with my house key.

“Get Sorrow back?” she demanded.

I shook my head.

“Then what the hell were you doing over there?”

“I went to the casino. Caused a lot of trouble, demanding to see Lewis George and Alfred Naquma. They kicked me out.”

“Dumb. Why didn’t you call?”

“So we could both get kicked out?”

“So we could do things the smart way.”

“You hear from Ray Shankwa?”

She nodded. “He said he got a message from you but couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Told me the men haven’t been seen around in about a week. He called their homes, visited the casino, and even went to the tribal offices. Alfred works there, at the offices. He might even be in charge or pretty high up. Lewis George is a tribal chief. They call him ‘gimoa.’ Ray said it isn’t like them to be gone, and he’s spread the word for them to come in as soon as they get back.”

“Back from where? They’ve got Sorrow. Jesus …”

“We gave it a good go, Emily, but the word is out that I’ve turned the whole thing over to Gaylord. When they took your dog it just got way beyond what we could do. Brent’s going to work with the state police out of Traverse City.”

I was happy to hear we weren’t on our own anymore. “You tell them the men kidnapped Sorrow?”

“Of course.”

Harry, behind us, hadn’t said a word. I waved halfheartedly as he shut off the hose. The next thing he was gone. I guessed, now that I was home, his job was finished.

Dolly toed the bark path. “So, you stayed with him,” she said.

I shrugged, depressed and not up to being quizzed on my love life. “I had enough of everything and everybody. A weekend away from all of this wasn’t too much to ask.”

“Not if that’s all it was.”

OK. That was the end point. The place beyond which I wouldn’t let her go. Dolly wanted only the best for me, I understood that. It was her methods I couldn’t tolerate.

“If Jackson and I get back together, I’m very sorry, but it has nothing to do with you, Dolly. I will run my life as I want to. Even if I end up leaving here and going back to Ann Arbor—that’s my own business.”

She opened her mouth again, snapped it shut, and averted her eyes.

“I don’t mean to be rude or anything …,” I began, feeling sorry for her.

She nodded, still looking down at the ground. “I just don’t want to see you …”

“I understand that. But what I do isn’t up for discussion.”

She sniffed. “You’re right. None of my damn business. Can I say one thing though?”

“One thing.”

“I never had a friend like you before. I mean, not somebody as smart. You know, it’s like you’re from a different world. Guess, what I’m saying is I’m a very selfish person. Look what we’re doing with these murders we come up against. Maybe not this one, so much. I know it’s cost you your dog and you’re probably mad as hell. Still, I …”

I put a hand on her arm and stopped her.

“OK,” I said. “We needed to clear the air. Now you know where I stand and I know why you were coming on too strong. So, let’s just forget it and see if there’s anything more we can do to get those men and get my dog.”

She nodded.

“Let’s go in my house. I’ll make some tea and we’ll talk about tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow” was the funeral. She wanted to change the topic as much as I did and funerals required a lot of discussion. Over cups of Earl Grey we talked. She seemed overwhelmed.

“Never planned anything like this by myself before,” she said, sipping at her tea as she sat at the kitchen counter and I stood across from her. “The casket was bad enough. Who knows what Chet would have wanted? I mean, we never talked about stuff like that. Too young to even think about it. I got him a nice one. Sullivan said I didn’t even need a whole casket ’cause it was just the bones. He thought I should go for cremation and an urn but that’s not what I want.”

“How much did you spend?”

“Twenty-five hundred.”

I took a deep breath. “You talk to his sister?”

She nodded.

“Did you tell her how much this whole thing is going to cost? I mean, there’s the luncheon at EATS afterward, the funeral home fees, grave site.”

Dolly shook her head. “It’s enough for them to come all the way up here. His mother’s driving from Bloomington, Indiana, you know. We’ll talk about it after. They’ll probably stay with me a few days. Got the house pretty clean and changed the bed in my spare room.”

“When are they arriving? Shouldn’t you be home?”

“No. Won’t see them until tomorrow morning.”

“Before eleven?”

“I told them the time. Said they could make it.”

“So, you’ll talk to them about the cost …”

She gave me a long look. “Maybe you should stay out of this. Just like I’m staying out of whatever happens between you and the jerk. This is my place.”

I sputtered. “I don’t want to see you get stuck …”

“Yeah. Well, that goes two ways. So let me handle my husband’s funeral, OK?”

Nothing more to say. She was right.

At the door of her patrol car, we got back to what Dolly and I shared in common.

“Are we really out of it, Dolly? I don’t feel right … “

Dolly shook her head and made a face. “Naw, Brent’s just our cover.”

Relieved, I leaned in the window. “Then what about that sister of Alfred? Christine. Think we can find anything more on her?”

“Good idea. I’ll call Lena Smith. The chief pulled her number from when she called the station. Let’s see if Lena knows anything about Christine’s whereabouts. Then I guess I’ll start checking driver’s licenses. Find if there’s a Christine Naquma in Michigan or not. Go through the usual channels.”

“Should we get back to the casino? Or to the tribal offices? Or even house to house out there? That’s what got us a response on Lena Smith.”

“Don’t think you’ll be welcomed at the casino for a while. The others I’d better do myself.”

Dolly put the car in gear and held one finger in the air. “See you in the morning. About ten at Sullivan’s?”

I nodded. I’d be there.

___

No Sorrow. No resolution. Dolly had depressed me, and there were other things. When I picked up the mail, driving in from Jackson’s, there were two envelopes with my address in my own handwriting. That meant two more rejections on
Dead Dancing Women
. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been so sure of that book. Dolly and I had exposed people out to kill gentle women of the woods for their own gain. It had everything: plot, characters, place. Somebody would buy it. But, I told myself, not just yet. Being a writer meant extreme patience and a firm belief in my own work. Time, I told myself. I just needed to give it more time. Which was what I was running out of.

I went to my studio and tried to write for a while. The Indian cemetery story was due and I still had research to do. Nobody would be around on Sunday, and who knew if I could get anyone with the Odawa Education Center to talk to me—now that I was persona non grata with the tribe.

What I did, when I saw the northern sky begin to darken, was to get on my bathing suit and do a cannonball from my dock into Willow Lake. A sound decision.

The water was still winter cold, with eddies of warmth. I found the eddies and floated along them, above the muck of leaves and weeds below. The water was opaque, still fogged with winter density. I lay on my back, doing only enough of a stroke to keep myself afloat so I could watch the sky, admire the speed of the dark, rolling clouds, and feel the thrill of danger. Soon lightning thrashed across the northern sky, sidewise. Then came the roll of thunder. I felt it move through the water as it shivered the air.

Time to get out, before I fried in my own lake. The storm brought in much cooler air. I shivered, wrapped a towel around myself, and hurried up my path between growing stands of thick bracken.

Once at the house, I don’t know what made me look up. Maybe it was a noise. The air felt different, and not from the temperature dropping. It was more a sense of something happening by the big maple beside the door. A disturbance. I stood beneath the tree as it blew back and forth in the wind. I peered up. A dark shape huddled high on a branch. An animal, clinging near the top of the tree. I couldn’t make out what it was in the growing dark. Certainly not a dog. I walked backward up the drive to where I could see better. A small brown bear clung tight to the main trunk of the maple with both front paws, his back paws on a thick branch beneath him.

I took one more look, to make sure what I saw, and ran in the house. I would call the DNR. They would come out and tranquilize him, get him out of my tree, and take him off to a place where he wouldn’t bother home owners. The bear would be safer that way, I assured myself as I hurried to the phone. I couldn’t simply leave him up my tree. It was too dangerous. The storm would make him nervous. Maybe he would attack me or someone coming up my drive. Thank God, I told myself without thinking, that Sorrow wasn’t there to bark and make things worse. I thought again of the animal up the tree, holding on for dear life. Maybe he was like Sorrow, terribly trapped where he didn’t belong.

One call flashed at me from my answering machine. I punched the button hurriedly. At first there was nothing. Then I heard barking. I held tight to the phone and listened until the line went dead. My hand shook when I reached down to call the DNR. I punched one number for Information and then hung up. I didn’t need to get that bear out of my tree. He didn’t need the DNR shooting tranquilizers into him. I wanted no more animals hurt or displaced because of me. The storm would let up soon. The bear would climb down. In the morning he’d be gone and I could feel all right about myself.