Dead Little Dolly (13 page)

“I’d say better not have it come directly from your department. More an anonymous donor, seeking justice for the baby. Something like that. Or”—he looked over at me—“you could say you’re putting up the money, Emily.”

“Me! You’re kidding, right? My creditors see I’ve got a couple thousand dollars and I’d have everybody after me.”

“A couple thousand!” Dolly leaned back and shook her head. “I was thinking a hundred or two. I don’t have a couple of thousand to throw away. Got doctor bills from having Jane. Still paying. No health insurance. Now I got the three of us to see to.”

She shook her head again.

Bill had a hard time keeping his face straight. “Why don’t we just say ‘reward’? Say it’s for information leading to the arrest of the person who stole the SUV in Elk Rapids.”

Dolly agreed that would work and Bill shifted back to me. “You’re getting a story turned in this afternoon, right? Put the reward info in.”

I agreed and we were out of there, off to stop at Wal-Mart’s for diapers and formula and a couple of Onesies, then back on the road to Leetsville without Dolly mentioning lunch at McDonald’s or any other stops. I was left with the rest of the day to myself and thought I’d go home, make a sandwich and a cup of tea, and take myself out to my studio and that new book I was outlining for my agent to look at before sending it on to Faith Cardoni.

Back at her house, I helped Dolly get the car seat and diaper bag out of the car, along with the Wal-Mart bags, while she carried Baby Jane.

“Cate, we’re back,” Dolly called as she stowed the bags on the sofa and laid Jane down to change her.

“Cate?” she called again when the diaper was changed. She held Jane, wobbly as a scarecrow, in her lap and mugged at her.

Nothing. Not a sound in the house.

“Guess she’s not home.” Dolly held Jane out to me and went to check the kitchen and then around to Cate’s room before coming back to where I sat dandling Jane in my lap. “Not here,” she said. “You might as well go on home.”

“Want a ride to the station?” I offered, knowing she’d be antsy about getting in to work.

“I’ll call Lucky. He’ll come get me. Probably’s got a car waiting for me by now.”

“You taking Jane along?”

She said nothing though her face crinkled. “Guess I have to. I’m looking into a regular sitter. A couple of girls in town called me last night, offered to sit and not charge an arm and a leg.”

“Sometime you’ve got to have a long talk with Cate. I can kind of see her point. But it sounds to me like she heard from Audrey and she’s using Jane to maybe get you to change toward your mother.”

Dolly took the formula into the kitchen and I heard a cupboard door slam. She came back for the diapers and headed back to Jane’s room while I hung out with Jane.

Sometimes you can sense something in the air before it happens. This was one of those times. Like a missed heartbeat. Maybe it was a footstep that didn’t happen. Maybe an intake of air that changed everything.

I knew before Dolly screamed.

I was up and running down the hall.

She was in Jane’s nursery. I took everything in at once. I understood nothing. Dolly knelt in the middle of the ruined room with her hands clutched at her cheeks. She was down on one knee beside Cate, who lay on the bare floor in a pool of blood.

In what had been a pink and white room with white curtains and framed photos of puppies and kittens on the walls, Dolly bent over Cate Thomas, feeling for a pulse at the back of her neck, holding her breath, then looking up at me.

Terrible, terrible, was all I could think as I touched Dolly’s back, my other hand on the cell phone in my pocket. What we needed, I told myself through my shock, was an ambulance. EMTs saved lots of people with their defibrillators. They knew how to get a heart started again—if that’s what this was.

Dolly pulled carefully at her grandmother’s shoulder, rolling her toward us. The woman, so obviously dead, came over slowly. Her eyes were open, face almost serene, but blood pooled under her chest, and neck, and soaked the floorboards beneath her.

I held my breath and turned away. The room had been destroyed. Clothes were thrown everywhere. The crib was torn apart, pieces of it laying in corners. The mattress had been gutted as if stabbed again and again. The changing table was overturned and broken. Someone had smashed the legs into crumpled sticks.

This isn’t real,
was all I could think. Nothing could look this terrible—ruined pink and white and ruffles and teddy bears and . . .

On the wall between the front windows someone had scrawled a message. Hard to read words done in what looked like red crayon. Bloody words.

“Thou Shalt Not Steal
.
”

TWENTY-ONE

Everything, after those long, agonizing minutes we waited for Lucky to get there, was a whirl. Jane cried out in the living room. Dolly knelt beside Cate’s body. I knelt beside her, my hand on her shoulder until she shrugged me away as if her pain was too personal. I left her alone and went to the front room to get Baby Jane and bounce her until she stopped crying, then stepped out to the porch to listen for Lucky’s approaching siren, alerting Leetsville that there’d been another tragedy.

When Lucky pulled up and jumped out of the patrol car, I led him into the house without a word, then set a strangely quiet Baby Jane in her swing. I took him back to the nursery.

Lucky looked to where Dolly knelt beside the dead woman and then to me.

“Can you get her out of here?” he asked brusquely. “I’ve got officers coming, and techs. I called an ambulance but . . .” Here he shrugged toward where Cate lay. “I can see it won’t do any good.” He leaned in close and tapped his friend’s bent shoulder. “Dolly, I need you to leave now. I’m . . . this looks really bad. Why don’t you go outside and let me get to work? That okay?”

Dolly, head down, stayed where she was on her knees beside Cate. But it was only a few minutes before she nodded, grabbed Lucky’s offered hand, and got slowly to her feet.

She took a last look at where Cate lay, her long gray hair tainted with blood, eyes wide but empty, before she turned and left the room.

Lucky, after bending over Cate, making a cursory inspection, looked back at me. “Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?” His dark eyes were angry. “This was about Cate to begin with. Something followed her up here. That’d be my first guess. Nothing to do with Dolly or Baby Jane which, in a way, is a comfort. Hope Dolly will focus on that when she can think straight.”

I nodded, but thought Grace Humbert thoughts again.
Clarity. Clarity.
“Or this could be another terrible way to get even with Dolly,” I said, putting things together in my head and coming up with a straight path, no forks to mislead us.

The house filled with techs in their white suits and white booties, like a group of fairies from
Peter Pan
. The horror of murder was set aside in favor of order and jobs to be done. I stayed on the front porch at first, taking care of Jane when she needed a bottle or a clean diaper. A surprisingly easy job.

Dolly was the hard part—her face so set, her eyes filled with something like death, or maybe the promise of death to someone, whoever did this to Cate. She didn’t talk. She said nothing about where she and Jane would go—not being able to stay in this house now. There wasn’t even speculation as to who could have done it. None of the usual Dolly attention to detail or motive or innuendo was there. She was silent, sitting in a wicker porch chair then walking to the railing and back.

Dolly ignored the crowd gathered along the sidewalk and didn’t answer when people shouted out their sympathy. Dolly was a zombie. Her head turned at a noise. She nodded or shook her head when Lucky came out to speak to her. She looked straight ahead and through people most of the time. I was ready to suggest a trip to the hospital—maybe to be treated for shock, but then I figured I’d just leave her alone, let her handle this in her own way. Dolly would be back, eventually. And when she did come back I pitied whomever had done this to her family.

Within the hour, Bill was there. I moved Dolly and Jane to the front seat of my car when Cate was carried out to the waiting ambulance. She would be autopsied in Grayling.

Dolly didn’t turn to watch. She stared out the front window at nothing and only came back to where we were when Jane let out a tired little cry.

Bill caught sight of us huddled in the Jeep. He raised a finger in the air and made his way over slowly, head down, deep in thought.

“Dolly.” Bill nodded to her through the open door. “God, I’m sorry. Awful stuff going on.”

Dolly looked at him but didn’t seem to understand.

Bill looked to me. “Anything yet?”

I shook my head. “Nobody’s saying a word. Lucky told me to hang around. He needs a statement. But I didn’t see anything. I didn’t know anything was wrong until Dolly screamed.”

Bill nodded, blinked, then pushed his heavy glasses back up his nose. “Everybody at the paper sends their condolences,” he said to Dolly, a hand on her bent back. Baby Jane, in her mother’s arms, reached out and grabbed his finger, giving it a shake.

Dolly’s eyes were bloody red; her nose was swollen. When she looked at me, she blinked hard. “We’re gonna get ’im, Emily.”

I nodded.

Bill stood within the crook of the door saying nothing. He motioned to me and I got out to join him at the back, near the trunk.

“Maybe you don’t want to write this but I’ve gotta get something in tomorrow’s paper . . .”

“Don’t worry. You know that sliver of ice that the writer Graham Greene talked about at a writer’s heart? I’ve got an iceberg in me. I’m not just mad. What he did to Dolly . . . let alone that Cate got involved. If I ever wanted to get somebody . . .”

“I’m sure Dolly feels the same way. She’s got the law. You’ve got the newspaper. I’ll stand behind you. I want a feature every day: what’s happening, anyone questioned. Information. Keep it in the reader’s face. Let’s stay on top of this, Emily.”

I nodded, not needing to be told what I had to do. “I’ll send what I can. I’ve got a photo of Cate on my iPhone. I might as well be doing something. When’s the latest I can get it to you?”

“No more than a couple of hours. I’m heading back to town now. I’ll save room on the front page. You okay with that? Give a recap, cover speculation, every fact you’ve got . . . Lucky said something was written on the wall . . .”

“‘Thou Shalt Not Steal.’”
I shuddered.

“Can you get in there to get a photo?”

I shuddered again but settled down into my big-girl pants. I nodded.

“You have any idea what’s going on? Was it about Cate all along, the way Lucky told me on the phone?”

“Who knows? It just . . . seems . . . like there’s no real reason to it. Go after Dolly and Baby Jane to get at Cate? Or is Cate’s death to get at Dolly?”

I fell quiet, thinking about Dolly’s family. Abandoned by her mother. A grandmother who’d let her be carted off to one uncaring home after another. Then the hit-and-run. Now a murder. There was so much to look at. None of it made sense.

Bill touched my arm because I’d drifted off, thinking how unfair life could be to some people and wondering how those innocent people got chosen and telling myself I didn’t believe any of the good church folks who said we had to grit our teeth and bear it because that was God’s will, reducing God to some kind of Nazi general sending one to one line and the next to another.

“You okay?” Bill asked, obviously knowing I was anything but okay.

“Look, if you need me for anything. Even if you think Dolly should stay at my house for a while. I mean, somebody’s after her about something . . . Stick with Lucky, look into Cate’s background. Use the other reporters. Everybody wants to help any way they can.”

“I don’t know where to begin. Guess we should go through Cate’s things.”

“Lucky’s got resources you don’t have, at least on the forensics end.”

“Cate didn’t talk much about her life before coming here. Southern Michigan, I think. I heard her mention Dexter once. And Ypsilanti. She said she’d lived there.” I tried to clear my head. “Now I’m wondering why it was so easy to talk her into coming to Leetsville, and then moving in with a granddaughter she didn’t know and who didn’t know her. There could be any number of enemies or old troubles buried in her past. Or in any of the towns she mentioned.”

I thought awhile longer. “Maybe Lucky’s right and the murderer is somebody from Cate’s past. Still, the cemetery thing . . . how was that a threat to Cate?”

Bill shrugged. “Maybe go for her loved ones first. Some vindictive payback. Who knows?”

“We’ve got to find out before he comes back for Dolly, or for Jane.”

“Imagine the mission she’ll be on,” Bill said. “And Emily, that ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’
business. Think that’s some kind of cover-up, a distraction?”

I shook my head. Who knew anything in this upside-down,
Alice in Wonderland
world we’d been drawn into?

As he was leaving, Bill leaned over to kiss my cheek in a not-so-brotherly way I almost didn’t notice.

When, three hours later, Lucky asked Dolly and me to come over to the station while techs finished up at the house, Dolly put her head down and gave a single deep sigh. She was giving Jane a bottle, leaning protectively over her baby, looking down into the perplexed brown eyes looking back hard at her. She nodded.

I started to lay out plans for after we talked to Lucky. I was telling her that there would be no going back into that tall, plain house—maybe ever.

“Anything we need for Jane we can pick up on the way out to my house,” I said, and was about to add that I needed a few groceries and hoped it would be all right . . . when one of the techs came to the door of the house and called Lucky back to him.

We watched as Lucky cut across the grass, then up the steep front steps, broad back hunched. The tech walked out to the porch to meet him, handing him something that looked like a small plastic bag. The two of them talked for a couple of minutes. Lucky nodded, hurried back down the steps, and over to the car. Whatever he held in his hand, he’d palmed so only the clear plastic edges of the bag showed around his fingers.

“Found something, Dolly.” He leaned in. “I don’t know . . . Think you gotta take a look.”

He held out his hand. Whatever was in the bag wasn’t large. It lay under his thumb so it was difficult to see.

Dolly took the bag, holding it up toward the sun. She squinted to make out what was at the bottom.

She shook her head slowly, beyond comprehending anything. “What is it?” she asked Lucky.

“Look again,” he said, as if reluctant to name what she was seeing.

I leaned in, peering over her shoulder.

Dolly shook her head. “I don’t get . . .”

“A black jellybean, Dolly,” Lucky almost whispered. “They found it on the floor of the nursery. Just that one black jellybean.”