Dead Little Dolly (19 page)

THIRTY-THREE

Martie Sinclair lived down River Road, back in the middle of a forest on the banks of the Manistee, a winding river so slow shadows of wild celery waved against the rippled sand bottom. Minnows darted, silver in the sun. A deer came out to drink at the other side of the river and looked hard at me before deciding I was harmless.

I could have hung out there, outside Martie Sinclair’s house, and watched the water flowing around the banks and between floating islands of vegetation, and not moved all day.

Up the bank from where I stood, Dolly talked to Martie, an older woman with a puff of snow-white hair, while I watched a stick float by the toes of my shoes.

Dolly scribbled notes while I took off my sneaker and stuck my foot in the water. Cold. Very cold. And I had nothing to wipe my foot on so I wedged it back into the sneaker wet. I squished up the bank to where the two women stood.

Dolly thanked Martie and took my elbow, leading me back to her car and shaking me from my river trance.

“You asleep or something?” she demanded, starting the borrowed squad car, then lurching back up the drive to River Road.

“Tired, I guess. What I really want to do is go home and sit down in my studio and work on a book. I don’t want to be here, Dolly. I want to be in a world I make for myself where I’m in charge and people listen to me and I know what’s going to happen, to whom, and who the killer is. I’m not liking it in this real world. We’ve got some woman who thinks it’s all right to make creepy phone calls for kicks. We’ve got some jellybean-eating killer. We’ve got me creeping around on my knees at night because I’m scared. And you . . .”

“Yeah?” She waited. “What about me?”

“Just . . .” I was sorry I’d started the whole thing. “All the hurt thrown at you. Baby Jane. Cate. Now Audrey Thomas—nowhere.”

“So? What do you expect me to do? Curl up and die?”

At the main road she checked for traffic and made a right.

“I’ll tell you this, Emily,” she started again. “Sure, I’d rather be someplace else. Maybe Hawaii or Alaska. And maybe I don’t want a sixteen-year-old watching my baby. And sure I want to find out who killed my grandmother and I want to take ’em by the neck and throw ’em, hard. Maybe ten miles.” She turned to look over at me.

“And maybe I’ll get a chance to do all of that,” she went on. “Maybe even a chance to sit in a corner and cry my eyes out. But, if I’ve learned one thing about living, it’s that you don’t give into bad stuff. You fight it and you keep fighting it until maybe—someday when I’m long gone—people will stop doin’ terrible things to each other.”

I didn’t answer. Chastened, I sat up, pulled over the notebook Dolly laid between us, and read that we were headed to Bellaire, a town northwest of Mancelona. To Rodgers Road. To see a Ginny Schwartz.

“Does she know we’re coming?” I asked sheepishly, tapping a finger on Dolly’s notation.

“Martie called her.”

“So she took Cate places?”

“She picked up Martie for garden club and met Cate there.”

“Anything else?”

She shook her head. “Martie said Ginny would tell us all they used to do. Places she took Cate.”

We were there in half an hour. Me, with a new resolve to concentrate, to keep my mind on finding this murderer, and put my life, my future, my choices behind me until this was over.

One thing I vowed: I was going to be a better friend.

Ginny Schwartz’s house sprawled across a green knoll. Neat flowerbeds edged the walls. All shades of spring flowers nodded in a freshening breeze coming over the hills from the big lake.

Ginny Schwartz expected us, inviting us into a kitchen with tall, many-paned windows of sparkling glass. We sat at a table with a teapot in the center, kept warm by a knitted blue cozy. Three cups and saucers, sprinkled with blue forget-me-nots, were set on the table. Lace-edged napkins were folded, laid with shining spoons, and arranged beside the saucers. There was a silver pot of cream and one of sugar, and a plate of oatmeal cookies so warm steam rose above them.

Ginny, a woman in her sixties at least, indicated our places at the table and poured the tea. She passed the cookies. I took one—just being polite. Dolly took three then tucked one in her pocket, which, she explained, would be for later.

Ginny, a sweet-face woman, seemed flattered and didn’t mind.

“Now, you want to know about me and Cate,” she said, then smiled at Dolly. “Your grandmother.”

Dolly nodded.

“She was a lot of fun to be with. Certainly she’d seen more of the world than I could ever imagine. Not that she bragged about it or anything. Just that she had . . . I guess you could say she had more knowledge than I.”

She put her cup carefully back into its saucer and wiped at her lips with her ironed napkin. “We enjoyed each other’s company. I was so sorry to hear . . . what happened to Cate.” She shook her head sympathetically.

The woman went on. “I’m surprised she never said anything to you. Why me and Cate would take off every couple of weeks. We called them our adventures.” She hesitated. “But mostly we just went to Alden. Such a lovely little town. We’d have tea at a restaurant there. Walk through the shops. End up out on the dock, sitting and watching the lake, and enjoying the day.

“Oh, and, of course, our visits to the candy shop. Cate went to Alden especially to visit Spencer’s. Always for the jellybeans. They sell the individual colors, you know. And Cate only liked the black ones. Heaven knows why. She did say once they weren’t for her. She said they were for a friend, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was something of a secret pleasure, since she never opened a bag and passed it to me. But, as we all know, folks have habits of being. Cate’s was to hoard those black jellybeans to her. Which, don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly understood. I have little things I keep to myself, too. Don’t we all?”

She laughed lightly and poured more tea.

I looked at Dolly, who kept her face blank, her eyes fixed on the woman.

When Dolly spoke, her voice was steady. “I never knew Cate to eat jellybeans,” she said. “Or any other candy. Never kept it in the house. So, she ever say who this friend was?”

Ginny shook her head. “Never said. I figured it was somebody from her past. You know, somebody I wouldn’t know, if there really was an old friend.”

“Anything else?” Dolly asked. “I mean, any other place the two of you got to?”

She thought awhile. “Just the bank. Brought her to the Northern Community Bank here in Bellaire. Cate said she didn’t like banking closer to home. Didn’t want neighbors knowing her business.”

Dolly and I stiffened at the same time.

“Which bank was that again?” Dolly smiled that odd, Cheshire cat smile of hers that said more about what was going on inside her head than that she was feeling friendly.

“Only one. Northern Community, right down in town. Can’t miss it.”

THIRTY-FOUR

The Northern Community Bank was downtown where Ginny Schwartz said it was. I’d never noticed it in all the times I’d driven through Bellaire, stopped at the Brewery, or went to Lulu’s Restaurant when Jackson came to town and I talked him into going there because he could pay for the Sangiovese,
and the Santa Margarita Pinot Grigio I couldn’t afford to buy, and he could pay for the wonderful cheese platter of salamis and cheeses from all over the world, with nuts and slices of crisp baguette . . .

Painful to think about and, if I was ever honest with myself, one of the main reasons I let Jackson continue to visit.

Paraphrasing Dr. Seuss, I quoted to myself, “Oh, the places I will go. The places I will go
.
”

Back to earth and Dolly pulling into the parking lot beside a plain redbrick building with a Northern Community Bank sign across the front.

“Did you bring the key?” I asked.

She held it up for me to see.

“You have a death certificate?”

She patted her breast pocket.

“Think this is it?”

“You mean, maybe I’ll find out something truthful about Cate’s life for once? Doubt it.”

She gave me a skeptical shrug, opened the door, and jumped out.

A woman in a blue suit looked at the key and examined the death certificate Dolly handed her. She marked Dolly’s badge number down on the form she had in front of her, slapped her hands on the paper, then pushed a button that zapped open the gate beside us. She led us back into a vault, walls lined with narrow, locked boxes. The woman used Dolly’s key to open one lock and a key she took from her pocket on another. She pulled out the box to set on a table at the center of the room, then turned and left.

The top on the metal box slid back, exposing nothing but stacks of envelopes. Dolly picked one up, looked at it, set it on the table, and picked up another one.

“Mail,” she said, looking perplexed.

“Mail? What do you mean ‘mail’? Letters from people?”

She shook her head and took another envelope to look at closely. “This pile’s from some hospital.”

“Why don’t we take them back to your place? She must have had a reason for hiding them. We’ve got to look at everything.”

“Good, then I won’t need Janie to stay with Jane. Her mother swore up and down she’s reliable and she probably is. But
sixteen
! When I was sixteen I was sneaking out to drink beer with my buddies.”

“No wonder you never lasted in a foster home.”

“What do you think forced me into drinking beer?”

We got a bag from the lady who’d let us into the safe-deposit vault, filled it with tightly packed envelopes, some held together with red rubber bands, and headed back to town and the Rolling River Motel.

I drove the babysitter, Janie, to her house in town, dropped her off, then headed back out to the motel. Dolly had the letters lined in rows on the bed by the time I returned.

She was on the phone and motioned for me to take a look at what she had there.

“Yeah, well,” she was saying, turning her back to me. “Let me think about it. Might be something coming up. I’ll let you know.”

She hung up, turned to me, and made a face. “Omar. Offering his mother up as babysitter again.”

“I thought you said something close to ‘no way in hell’ last time he asked?”

“Not like that, I didn’t. But take a look at what we’ve got and you tell me if we don’t have another trip downstate ahead of us.

“They’re all in order,” she went on, pointing to the array on the bed. “All from the same place. Same address. A hospital in Kalamazoo. Different signatures on some. One signature on the earliest—goes back to the 1980s. Different on the middle letters. Different one on the latest. They’re reports.” She looked hard at me. “I think they answer a lot of things.”

I skimmed over the envelopes, making note of the hospital’s name and address.

“Oakwood Psychiatric Hospital,” I read aloud from one of the envelopes. “Have you gone through them?” I asked.

“Some. They’re all the same—just about.”

“So?”

“Each one is a letter from the director of the hospital and a copy of a doctor’s notes.”

“Huh? Was Cate confined there? Is that the big secret about her?”

She shook her head and frowned hard at me.

“Come on, Dolly. This could be important.”

“The reports cover the years from 1979 to 2012. The woman they’re talking about was in that hospital all those years, with something called ‘schizoaffective disorder.’”

“What? Thirty-three years? I didn’t think they kept people that long anymore . . .”

She shrugged. “What I read so far, she didn’t get any better. In a few of those later letters they said she had that ‘schizoaffective disorder’ along with something called ‘comorbid anxiety disorder.’ None of it sounds good. The doctor’s reports I looked at had her always about the same. Recently, they used something called paliperidone on her, then something called lithium. But I guess the lithium made her confused so they changed that. You can read them all, if you want. But nothing’s different until early this year . . .

“God almighty.” Dolly took a deep breath and dropped her head into her hands.

“Oh, geez, she died,” I said. It seemed the logical conclusion. “Some relative of Cate’s?”

Dolly shook her head. “No, didn’t die. Changed. From what I understand they put her on a new drug—something called . . .” She looked down at the letter she’d just picked up and sounded out the word, “Aripi-pra-zole.”

“Hope it helped, whoever she is. What a life of hell.”

“Yeah.” Dolly looked hard at me.

“Yeah,” she said again.

“What’s her name? Are you related to her, too?”

Dolly nodded, then nodded again. “I think so.”

I made a face. “Not exactly the kind of family you wanted to find.”

“That’s for sure.”

“So? You ever hear of her?”

She nodded. “I think we just found my mother.”

THIRTY-FIVE

What was there to say? I could have been watching a puzzle fly apart in front of me. Dolly’s mouth sagged. Her eyes stared off, the one lazy eye moving slowly left, as if there was something to see on the blank motel wall. All I could do was wait. I pulled out the desk chair, sat down, and watched Dolly for a cue—what I should do or say to help her. I prayed she could hold herself together one more time.

Baby Jane fussed in her swing, set up in a corner of the room, a few tentative baby protests. For a minute Dolly looked over at her baby as if she didn’t quite understand what had made the noise. Slowly, as I held my breath, she stirred and got up from where she’d collapsed on the bed. She took Jane from her swing and held her tightly to her chest.

When Dolly turned to me, her baby’s face pressed to her pale cheek, she said only, “I could have visited her. All these years. I could have known her.”

It was as though some of Dolly’s life force had leaked away. She was distracted rather than sad; thinking hard but thinking about things that didn’t matter. She looked toward the refrigerator, then the TV, then the bed. As if she needed to inventory her world, make sure it was intact, she turned slowly around.

“So?” I prompted finally.

“Guess we gotta get down there. To that hospital. Looks like it’s time I met the real Audrey Delores. If this is even her and not somebody Cate dreamed up to be my mother.”

She made the phone call to the Kalamazoo hospital and was connected to the director after a few minutes. I listened as she explained she was an officer with the Leetsville Police Department, investigating the death of someone who might be related to a patient there. She said she needed to come down and speak to him, and maybe see the patient.

I watched her face as she gave the man her mother’s name and then listened quietly to whatever he was saying. Something was quickly agreed on. Dolly said she could be there by ten the next morning, hung up, and turned to me.

“He wants a court order,” she said. “Patient privacy. Lucky’ll get it for me.”

She hesitated, but only for a minute. “I’m calling Omar. No more sixteen-year-olds watching Jane. We’re going to his mother’s house.”

While Dolly called Lucky, who said he’d have that order by evening, I called Bill and told him what was happening. I helped Dolly gather up the swing, the diaper bag, plenty of bottles and clothes, and a portable bed.

“Omar’s meeting us there,” she said as we stuffed Jane and all her gear into the backseat of my car. “I’ve gotta leave her overnight. We need to get an early start tomorrow.”

We headed toward Gaylord and the first meeting between Dolly Wakowski and Omar’s mother.

• • •

The house wasn’t easy to find, hidden behind tall bushes at the back of a long lot near the center of town. When I pulled in I caught sight of the back end of a blue state police car pulled off to one side. So Omar was there to ease the meeting.

I wanted to help Dolly with Jane’s stuff, but instead Dolly pushed Jane into my arms. Of course, the first thing Baby Jane did was smile one of her lopsided dopey smiles at me and bobble her head against my shoulder so I was butter melting along the path to the house. I held on tight, watching where I walked across flagstones set down into deep turf. She felt like an enormous weight against my chest. Responsibility. Her need for protection. There was no spring to her warm, little body. No self-reliance. She laid her head against me and made noises I took for approval, and maybe surprise, that I hadn’t dropped her yet.

Omar was at the door, smiling, holding the door wide then quickly reaching out to help Dolly with the swing and the diaper bag.

“Emily,” he acknowledged me with a nod. “Good to see you. I’m really looking forward to this.”

He nodded again and again. “My mother’s out in the kitchen. She’s all excited about meeting her granddaughter for the first time.”

I caught a kind of bravado in his voice as he talked over his shoulder at us, leading the way through a house so clean it looked like shrink wrapping had just been pulled off for this special occasion. I followed Omar, baby still in my arms, taking in the number of religious icons hanging on the walls, candles in religious holders, candles wound in ribbons and sitting at the center of a lace doily on the polished dining room table.

“Myra’s actually my stepmother,” Omar murmured.

“Religious, huh?” Dolly said, noticing what I was noticing—a kind of excessive presence of God stuff.

He nodded and gave Dolly a tight smile. “A very good person.”

“Long as she’s older than sixteen,” Dolly muttered back.

“I’ll be leaving her overnight,” she raised her voice. “Picking her up tomorrow, when we get back.”

“Where’re you going?” Omar asked,

“Kalamazoo.”

“About your grandmother’s murder?”

“Sort of. Following up on some things. Things I didn’t know about Cate’s past. Have to check out every angle.”

“Yeah, that’s what I imagined it was about. If there’s anything . . .”

“Your dispatcher’s got the license number of somebody who stole a car out in Norwood. She broke into a house and made phone calls from there, then took the car. The phone calls were to Emily here.” She indicated me with a flip of her thumb. “And Emily’s boss at the
Northern Statesman
. We’re thinking some whack job going after me, but who knows?”

In the kitchen, an older woman, with short, steel gray hair pulled back behind her ears, got up heavily from the table to greet us.

Another immaculate room, as if no one ever cooked a thing in there. No smell of fresh bread baking or soup simmering in this house. The watchword here was: Clean.

The woman came over to look closely at Baby Jane, getting within inches of the baby’s face, narrowing her eyes, then shaking her head.

“Don’t look like you,” she said over her shoulder in Omar’s direction.

He laughed nervously. “Don’t worry, Ma. She’s mine all right.”

She glanced at me, taking in my hair, my shirt and jeans, my ratty shoulder bag, and even looking at my left hand—maybe searching for a ring, I thought.

“Women should be more careful,” she said sourly in my direction. “It’s the woman’s fault. Babies are going to come when a girl doesn’t respect her body.”

Dolly, beside me, sputtered a time or two. Her eyes grew huge and round. I watched her face move from distracted to animated, then right on to mad as hell.

“Eh . . . Mrs. Winston . . . I’m Dolly. You’re telling off the wrong woman there.”

Mrs. Winston stepped back. “You?”

She spun around to face Omar. “This is the woman you had sex with? She looks like a man.”

Dolly sputtered.

Omar frowned. “This is my baby, Ma. And Dolly’s my baby’s mother.”

She made a noise and threw a hand in the air. “I raised you better than this.”

I stood still, holding on to Baby Jane for dear life. It was a standoff at the O.K. Corral, or Eastwood making somebody’s day. All I could do was watch Dolly’s back hunch up, her neck disappear, and her head dip forward.

“Maybe we should leave,” I whispered in the hope of staving off World War III.

Dolly looked at Omar for a minute, then back to me, mouth open. She shook her head.

Omar, in the doorway, put his arms out. “Please, Dolly. She doesn’t mean things the way they sound. Mother’s had a hard life. You’ve got to cut her some slack here. All this is a surprise. I only told her about Jane a few days ago.”

Dolly took Jane out of my arms, turned, then stopped on her way out of the room. Her little square body was hunched down tight. “You know what, Omar?” she said, a small smile running across her lips. “Lots of women have hard lives. They’re still decent human beings. I’m not leaving my baby here. Not now. Not ever.”

She was gone.

He ran after her, out to the car. The swing was still in his arms, diaper bag still canted off his shoulder. As we re-stowed Jane’s gear, he begged Dolly to reconsider. “I’ll call in sick, stay here all day and take care of her myself.”

Dolly looked around at him. I heard her say, softly, “Omar. You’ve got problems of your own here. Jane’s not going to fix anything. Get your own place. ’Til then, you’re welcome to come over and visit but I won’t let Jane spend a single minute in a house with a woman who’s got a mouth like that on ’er.”

He backed off from the car.

The next words Dolly uttered as we drove out were, “Damn. Who can I get to watch her?”

We headed back toward Leetsville while Dolly called Gloria at EATS and explained. I could hear Gloria begging off but not the reason why. Dolly hung up and said, “She’s got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. Can’t take Jane.”

She thought hard while I took a couple of long gulps and offered to stay behind. “I’ll watch her, Dolly. I’ll be happy to.”

She turned me down, saying, “Naw, you’ve got to be there. This’ll be your story for the day.”

I was about to argue when her phone rang. All I heard was “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Be right there.”

She looked relieved. “Eugenia’s keeping her at the restaurant until three o’clock, then she’ll take her home with her. Tomorrow she’ll take her to the restaurant or maybe take the day off. If she needs help she’s got a dozen women already offered to chip in.”

That settled, she said, “You know I can’t go on like this, taking Jane from pillar to post. I’ve got to settle on one babysitter.”

I agreed. “And you need a stable place to live, not a motel.”

“That, too.”

I thought awhile. “I can understand you wanting company for this trip down to the hospital, but, Dolly, this isn’t something I can put in any story about Cate’s murder. I’d say this is personal business. Your personal business.”

She looked over at me. “Yeah, maybe it could’ve been like that. Except for one thing. That director told me something that’s got my head spinning. We’re not going down there to talk to my mother. She’s not there. That new medication they put her on changed everything. She improved, the man said. A few months ago she petitioned the courts to be released.”

There was more.

“About a month ago, they released her,” Dolly said. “She’s been out of there ever since. Cate must’ve known and never said a word.”

Back in town, we picked up the court order Lucky’d brought back from a judge in Kalkaska, and dropped off Jane.