The Dead Caller from Chicago (6 page)

Dark haired, slim everywhere except a bit north of her waist, she was every bit as beautiful as I remembered.

“Leo lives there?” she asked, seemingly surprised. With Jenny, things were often seemingly; usually she knew way more than she let on. Then, “You're going out again?”

“Again?” I asked, dumb as a brick.

“You didn't turn on any lights when you got home, and you're wearing your blazer and your peacoat. So, are you going out again?”

“You've never been to my turret in the cold months. In winter, I wear two coats indoors, especially in March.”

“You never got heat?”

“There's a small space heater, but bigger things are in store. I'm embracing my future.”

She laughed, perhaps at the ice that was breaking. “Lester Lance Leamington? He advertises on Channel 8.” It had been her station, until she moved out to San Francisco several months before.

Thinking, as I'd been, at glacial speed, I suddenly became aware we were still in my open doorway. “Let's go out for dinner. We'll ask each other inconvenient questions.”

“Where?”

“Someplace with heat,” I said smoothly.

She drove us in her Prius, because as she put it, she'd already been in my Jeep. She'd also been upstairs, in the turret. We'd used the fireplace on the second floor, after an especially chilling day in the heat of summer. I think we both thought we might go higher, to the third floor, where there was another fireplace. And a bed. Instead she'd left for San Francisco.

She drove to a barbecue joint just inside the Chicago line. It had black walls and a skull-and-bones painted on its door. Proper gourmet dining was at last coming to the city.

“This place is dark and looks to have many small rooms,” I observed aloud, as we stepped into the foyer. Jennifer Gale, former features reporter for Channel 8, attracted attention wherever she went.

“I like it because it's dark and has many small rooms.” She smiled. We were definitely thawing.

The waitress parked us in a booth at the back of a particularly dark room. We ordered Cokes and pulled pork from a waitress who didn't give Jenny a second glance.

“So, what brings you back to Rivertown, other than the chance to bump into me?” I asked.

“I've been back for two weeks.”

Trying to hide surprise, curiosity, and more than a little disappointment, I said, “That explains why I haven't called.”

“Huh?” she said, and we both laughed.

“Are you permanently back?”

“I'm not sure.” She turned to look away, across the room. I recognized the gesture. It wasn't that she and I had lied to each other in the past. It was more that sometimes we'd worked too hard at avoiding truths.

“Why are you staking out that new house that's going up?”

“Interesting, such a house in such a town.”

“Enough to return from San Francisco to check out?”

She smiled, said nothing. She wasn't going to tell me a thing.

“Who's building it?” I asked.

“I've been seeing your Jeep on that block quite a bit lately.”

“Around one particular house, and yet you didn't think to find out who lives there?”

She laughed. “Maybe I did find out it was Leo's, though it doesn't appear that he's around.”

“He's away. I'm looking after things,” I said.

“Doing a most thorough job of it, too. Tonight, you stopped outside his bungalow, turned off your lights, and just sat, looking after things.”

“You could have come up and said hello.”

“That's what I'm doing now.” She smiled. It was a wonderful smile, articulated by slight lines around her mouth that were hidden by makeup for television. She reached across the table to touch my wrist. It was like fire. “Just like old times?”

“Comfortable, for sure.” Except it wasn't. Leo Brumsky was missing from the same block that had drawn Jenny back to Rivertown, and until I knew what he was up to, and she was up to, I couldn't say much at all.

Our pulled pork sandwiches came. “Saved by pork,” she said.

“I've always wondered what ‘pulled' means,” I said, playing along. “I keep envisioning a frantic tug-of-war between a butcher and a screaming pig, with the butcher always winning. Then the image gets too gruesome to think about further, and I let it go.”

“Same old Dek,” she said.

She talked a careful little about San Francisco and the vagaries of network news reporting. We agreed they were like the vagaries that seemed to afflict everything, except the opinions of addle-headed experts. Nobody honest knew anything about the future, not anymore.

The waitress took away our plates, and Jenny asked, “Why didn't you call after you got back from Indiana?”

“Actually, I did,” I said. “I just clicked off before sending the call through.”

“I wouldn't have pressed,” she said.

We'd both been hunting the same woman. She could have been talking about that. Or she might have been referring to my relationship with Amanda, my ex-wife.

“The papers said you pushed to get transferred,” I said, not ready to press, either.

“It seemed an opportune move. Fewer features, more investigative reporting.” She said it with a smile, but there might have been a bit of hurt behind her eyes. My not calling wasn't the major reason she went to San Francisco, but it still made me an ass.

“Remember the night we lit my fireplace?”

“We took a warming romantic possibility and invited in our ghosts to cool things down.”

“Your husband, my ex-wife, and us. It was crowded.”

“We weren't ready.”

“I've needed the months since last fall to understand that.”

“Now you're embracing your future?” Her face had relaxed to its loveliest.

“One that's looking considerably warmer. I've got a new client, two assignments so far. Soon there might be central heat.”

“What a shame. You have such fine fireplaces.”

I let that thought hang in the air for a long moment, then asked, “Your ghost?” Her husband, a newsman, had been killed in Iraq.

“He's not coming back.” Her eyes were clear and unblinking. “And yours?”

“I've not spoken to Amanda in weeks.” Even now, the finality of the words about my ex-wife startled me. I headed for safer ground. “Speaking of ghosts,” I said, “the stories you were chasing in Rivertown about Elvis's salad oil scheme and the lizard relatives collecting unearned expenses and travel reimbursements? Channel 8 has reported nothing since you left.”

“I kept my notes. How's Leo?” She'd met Leo the previous summer. Like everyone, she'd been charmed in an instant.

“You mean in general?”

“Why does his house need watching by a man sitting in the dark?”

“As I said, he's away.”

She laughed. I laughed. At least we were being honest with each other, about not being totally honest with each other.

We left and drove back to the turret in silence. I wondered if she, like me, was going over things we could have said at dinner, or even before that.

She pulled to a stop in front of the turret. “Well, we've established you should have come charging back from Indiana, intent on seeing me.” She smiled, hugely. “I forgive you, and so you can see me again, and soon.”

For that, and for everything else I wanted to fix with her, I reached over and kissed her, quickly, before I got out of her car and went up to the turret.

 

Eight

I switched on my computer first thing the next morning. Endora's boss had e-mailed at 3:17
A.M.
, probably about the time I finally found sleep:

Dek, It's too damned late, or too damned early, to be sending e-mails. I'm still in my office. For the last hour, I've done nothing but sit. And think. And now, at last, I've summoned a vague conclusion that begs for another conclusion, which will be up to you to provide.

I combed every newspaper, television, and law-enforcement Internet archive available to us here at the Newberry. As you can imagine, I found numerous citations for men named Evans—under almost every given name you can think of. There were thousands!

And now, I think I found him in a regional summary of tiny newspaper clips from central Illinois. Attached is the death notice from the
Center Bridge Bugle
. It reports that Edwin G. “Snark” Evans, of that town, died many years ago.

Center Bridge is two hundred miles southwest of Chicago. It has fallen on hard times since the John Deere assembly plant, fifteen miles away, closed. The local funeral home and a number of Center Bridge's businesses have also folded, along with the
Center Bridge Bugle
, presumably, since I can find no other references to it. I would imagine many of the town's inhabitants have moved away, though someone might remain who remembers your Mr. Evans.

Now, as to that conclusion that begs for another conclusion: Though the death notice appears to be straightforward, something about it feels wrong. And that's what's kept me up until this late (or early) hour.

First, who would use the nickname “Snark” in a death notice? Certainly, nicknames appear in news reports and in obits, but they're more of the garden variety—a “Bud” or a “Bob” or a “Skip.” To me, something about the nickname “Snark” seems, well … a little “snarky,” if you'll allow my joke. The nickname seems pejorative, a little distasteful.

I consulted an online dictionary and found the term was coined by Lewis Carrol in 1874, to refer to an imaginary animal. Certainly, there's nothing distasteful about that. Still, the nickname bothers me.

Then there's that lack of detail in the obit. Contrary to custom, the death notice does not report how he died, only that he was survived by a sister, whose whereabouts are not mentioned. Nor is there any mention of a wake, service, or funeral, or where he was buried. Again, I got my information from a summary, so perhaps that's their practice. Still, it feels bothersome.

Finally, there's the
Center Bridge Bugle
itself. As I've written, I could find no other mention of that newspaper itself. It's not listed in any of the reference sites for defunct Illinois newspapers. That's more than odd, and it's triggered an outrageous thought: Was Snark Evans's the only death they ever reported?

I told you: It's late (or early) and I'm probably making no sense at all.

If it weren't for worry about Endora's safety (and of course Leo's, and his mother's), I would have enjoyed my little sleuthing assignment. One enjoys a challenge away from Chaucer, my current project. Sorry I didn't find out more.

I stared at the screen. He'd uncovered almost nothing … and perhaps so much more.

Fifteen minutes later, I was pointed downstate. The sky was dark, the wind was strong, and the Internet weatherman offered the likelihood that more snow was headed right across my path. Still, I figured the first hundred of the miles to Center Bridge would be an easy cruise, since it was an interstate.

I figured wrong. The wind advancing ahead of the snow was too riled. A hard wind can test patience in any car, but in a Jeep, it can summon frothing lunacy. Jeeps present a stubborn, flat wall to the road; there's nothing aerodynamic to part the wind around them. Add a semitattered vinyl top that's been poorly patched with silver tape, and a Jeep becomes a bucking, flapping mess, akin to a sailing ship in a hurricane the moment the sheets give way. The noise was deafening; the cold coming in, freezing; and the wind resistance so strong that I couldn't get above forty-five miles an hour. I endured it only by tucking in behind several semitrailer rigs as they came up to pass me. I was relieved when I finally got off the interstate south of Champaign.

I figured wrong on that, too. The second leg was two lanes of bad asphalt, cratered by potholes and sheeted in the smooth spots by invisible black ice. The storm had found full strength by then, raining down fine bits of semisleet and hail the size of tiny marbles. Even in four-wheel drive, I was Barishnikov at the ballet, gliding and occasionally pirouetting toward the west.

Single pairs of headlamps popped up behind me now and again, but they quickly disappeared. No one had need, that day, to go to Center Bridge. Nor did any lights at all come toward me. I wondered if that meant that those who'd intended to leave had done so, years before.

That seemed all the more likely when I finally arrived, at three fifteen, a full five hours after I'd left Rivertown.

The business district, both blocks, had been vaporized by hard times. One car and four pickups were angle-parked along its main street. A tavern and, strangely, a Salvation Army resale shop were the only places showing light. The rest of the storefronts were dark, or boarded up.

I went into the tavern. The bartender and his two patrons looked up.

I ordered a Diet Coke and asked, “Any of you know Snark Evans?”

“He's dead,” the bartender said.

“Good riddance,” one of the patrons on the stools said.

“Never finished high school,” the other patron said. “Took off freshman, sophomore year. Folks were surprised he even bothered to start.”

“What do you want to know for, anyway?” the bartender asked.

I handed him one of my cards. “A minor insurance policy was taken out a long time ago. One of their managers heard I'd be driving past Center Bridge and asked me to stop in to update his records.”

“How big is the policy?”

“That's not my department. Any of Snark's relatives around?”

All six of their shoulders shrugged. “None of that damned family is left,” said the second patron.

“They was all bad apples,” the bartender said. “The father got killed in a bar fight in Champaign, early on. The daughter was trashy, strutting herself while she was still in grammar school. The mother, she just plain wore out and died.”