Cruelest Month (9 page)

April is the cruelest month,
he said out loud, repeating each word again as he wrote it, two lines high in his careful cursive. He put in a long slash mark after
month
and wrote,
And it’s not even April yet.

Ray thought about the line and the poem.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
 
Memory and desire, stirring
 
Dull roots with spring rain
. Then he penned,
Memory and Desire
, also using two lines. He sensed a melancholy in the phrase.

He remembered the class where he first studied the poem, an undergraduate course in 20
^th
century British and American poetry. He started filling lines, then several pages in the journal about the class and the teacher, Alice Bingley, a fragile-looking woman who was quite brilliant, but routinely brutalized her students because they were not.

He remembered how the class of 20-some had shrunk to four by the end of the semester: a beautiful and distant girl who often talked to the professor in French and Italian; a tall, thin black woman who articulated most of the best answers to the professor’s probing questions and then Ray and his friend, Zeigler.

The first day of class in early January, Zeigler showed up late and seemed to immediately earn the instructor’s enmity. He was wearing athletic department sweats and a stocking cap. Ray recorded the dialogue as he remembered it.

“Are you a football player, Mr. Zeigler?”

“Yes ma’m.”

“And what position do you play, Mr. Zeigler?”

“Defensive tackle, mostly, ma’m.”

“And why are you taking this class?”

A long silence followed as Zeigler considered his answer. “My advisor, Professor Foster, recommended the class, and you.”

“Really, I must have a word with Milton.”

Ray then recorded how he and Ernie Zeigler became friends and study partners. Ray reflected that he had come to college from an exceedingly modest home, but Zeigler had come from real poverty. His mother had died in his infancy, and his father—alcoholic and mostly unemployed—did his best to palm off young Ernie for weeks, sometimes months at a time, to family members, sympathetic neighbors, and girlfriends.

Fortunately, by junior high his size and athleticism had drawn the attention of the coaches, and other teachers found that the huge kid in tatters was enormously likeable and exceptionally bright. Ray based this part of his commentary on things Zeigler told him during their many rambling conversations. Ernie came to college with the clothes on his back, nothing more, not even a suitcase. He didn’t have an athletic scholarship, and he wasn’t a starter. But the equipment manager and some of coaches found him clothes, shoes, even a place to live. Fortunately, it was also a time when the citizens of Michigan were still funding their universities at a level where students of limited means could cover their tuition costs with part-time and summer jobs.

One of Professor Bingley’s first assignments of the semester was the close study of T. S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland.” Ray recorded how lost he was the first time he tried to read the poem. He couldn’t begin to decipher the meaning of the text. He and Zeigler spent hours in the library pouring over scholarly guides, and they both struggled to answer Bingley’s classroom interrogations, which seemed designed more to inflict pain than to elucidate the text.

From that point forward in the semester, Zeigler would say, “Hey, Elkins, April is the Cruelest Month. That’s when she’s going to flunk our sorry asses.” There seemed some truth to that possibility. They both got C minus on their midterms. Ray had three minuses on his bluebook after the C, and Ernie had four. They laughed about the minuses over a pitcher of beer. But in the end they’d both managed to survive Bingley. Ray remembered how startled he was to find a B, no minuses, when he opened his grade report.

Months later, in the fall, he ran into Zeigler crossing campus. “You won’t effing believe this!” Zeigler blurted out loudly from 20 or 30 yards. “She gave me a B.”

The memories had managed to brighten Ray’s mood.
And maybe in England, April is the cruelest month,
he thought,
the beginning of spring. In Michigan that would be late May or June. March is the cruelest month here because spring doesn’t seem possible.

14

Mackenzie woke with a start
. There was a sound, a new noise that she hadn’t heard before. She lay for several minutes listening, trying to determine the source. Finally she decided that it had to be rain hitting the skylight or perhaps dripping off the long overhangs onto the deck.

She was uncomfortable in the bedroom. It was far too large for her tastes. The king-size bed looked minuscule on the expanse of white carpeting. The six-drawer dresser—three sets of two drawers, a long low modern piece—did little to absorb the available space. And the vaulted ceiling added to her feeling of unease. The room was just too big, too open. Her decision to take the master suite was based on the convenience of having the adjoining bathroom. She now considered switching to one of the other guest bedrooms.

Lifting her left arm above her head, she gazed at the luminescent face of the military style watch, 4:47. Rolling over on her side, she tried to find a comfortable position, pulling one pillow under her head, pushing another between her knees. She couldn’t remember a time in her adult life when she had been so filled with misgivings.

This project was different from anything she had ever encountered. And it was heavily loaded with memories and emotions. Mackenzie was better at dealing with data; feelings were not her strong suit.

Years before, Mackenzie had traced her mother, not that she ever desired to have any contact with her. Sally Hallen’s trail had been easy to follow, littered as it was with numerous arrests for petty crimes, the occasional incarceration, and ending in a late-night motorcycle accident where she and her companion were killed in a high-speed collision with a pickup truck.

She had also used her considerable technical skills to see if anyone could find anything on herself and her twin sisters, all three who had left Sandville decades ago in the company of two elderly relatives. There was nothing. She wondered if it would still be possible today for three children from an impoverished background to completely disappear without a paper or digital trace. She doubted it. But she had long believed that her mother was relieved that the children were gone. How many times had her mother had told her and her sisters that they were
only a burden
.

Giving up on the possibility of falling back to sleep, Mackenzie crawled out of bed and pulled on some fleece sweats. After switching on the coffee maker, she settled on the couch with her iPad and did a quick check of her e-mail.

Next she opened the planning document and flipped to the
Threats
page. The first item on the page was labeled
Possible Identification.
She clicked on the link and another page appeared. On the left was a picture that she had taken the day before. On the right was a photo she’d carried with her for years, the last class picture from Consolidated High. She had scanned it into a jpeg while still in California. She held the iPad up to look closely at the grainy black-and-white image of a young teen whose eyes looked almost too large for her narrow face. The girl had short hair—a jagged cut, inexpertly done with kitchen scissors by her mother or grandmother. The thin smile displayed buckteeth beneath an asymmetrical nose, the result of a fall from a tree a year or two before. There was never money for a visit to a doctor. Her grandmother had straightened it as best she could and packed it with cotton until it stopped bleeding.

Mackenzie looked at the face on the other side of the screen, 20 years older, perfect teeth, and a
retroussé
nose—her first substantial investment after she entered the world of work. Her hair was luxuriant and carefully styled, and her once soft blue eyes were now green. The little girl voice had disappeared years ago; intense voice training starting in high school had enhanced her rich contralto. And there would be no recognizing her diction, now educated, cosmopolitan.

For this project, she’d thought it essential to hide her identity. Even before the physical transformation, she’d been fortunate on that issue: she’d been given a new identity long ago, when her great aunt rescued her and her sisters from her alcoholic and feckless mother. As she passed back and forth between the before and after photos, Mackenzie concluded that it would be difficult for anyone to make a visual tie between her and that delicate little girl of 20-some years ago.

The second link on the page was
Be Invisible
. She clicked on it and looked at her notes. Mackenzie was well aware of the impossibility of anonymity in a small town. Small towns are not like New York or San Francisco or other major cities where it is so easy to be just one of the crowd. Other than the realtor who sold her the house, Mackenzie had done her best to avoid local businesses. She did all of her shopping in Traverse City. She’d bought the most commonly seen vehicle on the road, a two-year-old Subaru. Her red Beamer convertible, an attention grabber, was safely tucked away in the garage of her condo in California.

Local Law Enforcement
was the third entry on the list. She scanned the few lines of notes. Cedar Bay village had one policeman who worked a nine to five, 40-hour week; Mackenzie’s home was just beyond the village limits. The Cedar County Sheriff’s Department provided most of the police protection for the region. In her survey of newspaper articles, she had determined that the department was, along with the other units of local and state government, underfunded and understaffed. Ray Elkins was listed as the sheriff. She typed his name into Google. There were dozens of entries, most from the local paper, and most from stories concerning local police matters. She read through the entries on the first and second page and looked at a couple of pictures of Elkins.
Just another middle-aged cop
, she thought.

Finally, she thought about Richard Sabotny, the biggest threat, and the reason she was here. She had been searching for him for years, wasn’t even sure he was alive. And then suddenly he was back in Cedar County, a decorated veteran and reputed soldier of fortune living very publicly in a trophy house on the bay, his driveway running off a major highway.

Putting down the iPad, she leaned her head against the couch. The black early morning was fading to gray. She could just begin to see the white caps rolling toward the far shore. She was filled with angst, not knowing where to start, but feeling an overwhelming need for action.

15

Ray was in his office before 8 a.m
., first attending to routine paperwork and then perusing
Al Capone’s Michigan: The Secret Lost Treasure,
as he sipped from a large insulated mug of espresso and hot milk. He thought he had followed Hannah’s instructions on how to use the espresso machine exactly, but found with the first few attempts he wasn’t getting the crema to form on the top. He poured all of the failures into his travel mug, topping them with four successful shots and a large quantity of hot milk from his feeble attempt at making micro foam. He added four spoons of raw sugar that had come in the box with the espresso machine.

Vincent Fox’s book was a fast read. The opening chapter dealt with his growing up in Chicago. He described his neighborhood and Catholic grade school education—including a few detailed accounts of run-ins with the nuns, yardstick-wielding Sisters of Holy Mercy charged with civilizing and Americanizing the children of immigrants. Ray noted that most of Fox’s text was vague and generic, containing experiences common to the lives of most people living in America’s industrial cities early in the century.

In the second section of the book, Fox explained he was a kid of the streets when Capone first spotted him. He began by running errands for Big Al, and soon, while still in his teens, he became one of Capone’s personal drivers.

Ray googled “Capone” to check the dates. As his daughter had already mentioned, Fox was far too young. But it was engaging fiction. Fox was a skilled storyteller.

In the final section of the book, Fox described how Capone came under increased scrutiny after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. With the coming of Elliot Ness and the Untouchables, Capone began to worry about the possible destruction of his empire. In an effort to protect his immense wealth, he started to collect gold coins, not trusting paper money. And not trusting banks—which were, of course, subject to thievery from both bank robbers from the outside and employees and managers on the inside. He devised a plan to bury his fortune in a number of locations along the shoreline of upper Michigan, from Frankfort to Petoskey, including the offshore islands. Fox went on to claim that most of the gold was buried north of Frankfort and south of Leland, as well as on the Manitou Islands. He provided a blurred vision of 11 treasure sites where he had participated in burying bags of gold coins, explaining that they had always worked at night, usually coming ashore from boats.

Each of the 11 sites was given several pages, but Ray quickly noticed that the first one was a template for the next ten. They were all variations on a theme, a word processing file worked and reworked in a less than convincing fashion. The descriptions, as Fox’s daughter had suggested, were indistinct. Almost any piece of coastline could fit: sand, trees, dunes, small streams. The place to start digging would be more from the imagination of Fox’s readers than anything he provided in
Al Capone’s Michigan: The Secret Lost Treasure.

Ray was still pondering the possible effects Fox’s fiction might have on readers when Sue Lawrence arrived, thunking her travel mug on the conference table and dropping Simone into the one upholstered chair in the office. Simone immediately jumped out of the chair and ran to Ray, demanding to be picked up.

“I thought you were coming in late,” Ray said, looking at his watch.

“Simone doesn’t like sleeping in. She’s used to getting up at 6 o’clock, having her breakfast, and going for a walk. I tried to pull her back into bed, but she’d have none of it. Plus, there was something going on outside, a deer or some other animal, so she was clawing at the venetian blinds and barking. Thus our day just started like usual, only we took a longer walk. Simone was doing more hunting than attending to business.”

“I got here early as well. My motor was running.”

“When are you meeting with Fox’s daughter to I.D. the body?”

“Late this morning.”

Sue pulled off her coat, threw it on the chair, and sat heavily. “So what did you do last night, get out in your boat?”

“Yes.” He ran his thumb over the pages of Fox’s book. “The plan was to go home, cook pasta, kick back, listen to music, and read.”

Sue jumped up to retrieve her coffee. “What changed your mind?”

“Hannah Jeffers was waiting for me. She already had my kayak secured to the roof of her car.”

“So someone new has a key to your house?”

“I forgot to lock the garage,” he said. “She’d texted me earlier in the day about going out. I’d completely forgotten.”

“Texted?” Sue laughed out loud. “I didn’t think you did that kind of thing.”

Ray ignored her. “We paddled to the Hollingsford Estate. I wanted to have a look around.”

“And?”

“I found the private family cemetery, just like Ma French told us. Of course, in the last few days with all the rain, the snow is gone.”

“Find anything?”

“ Nothing that shouldn’t have been there. Just sand and old headstones. I would have liked to look around the estate, but I was concerned about having enough light to get back to our put-in point. That, and a front seemed to be coming in faster than NOAA’d predicted.”

“But you and the Doc obviously made it without too much difficulty.”

Ray reflected on her tone a few moments before answering. “It was getting choppy. Hannah doesn’t seem to be bothered by weather, she likes to paddle in conditions. But something interesting did happen.” He told Sue about the Jet Ski.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I’m still wondering. We didn’t hear or see anyone on the water on the way out. It was so rough on the way back; I only became aware of the Jet Ski when it was too damn close. That said, the operator must have been aware of us. He’d probably had his boat beached along the stream that empties from Lost Lake. And when he circled, he had a better view of us then we did of him. We were right down there in the wash—he was three feet or so above us. Anyway, I don’t think we looked like anything he was expecting.”

“Did you get his registration number?”

“It was dark. If it was there, I didn’t see it. When we get the Fox investigation under control, I want to go back and see if we can figure out what’s going on.”

Sue nodded and stood, picking up her coat and folding it over her arm. “I’ll get all the material organized. But as you know, there are no obvious leads.”

“So what do we know?” asked Ray, pulling down a whiteboard from the ceiling. He wrote
motive
in the first column on the left.

“There’s only one that we’ve identified,” said Sue.
“Money.”
She paused as Ray added the word with a blue marker. “What about the family? Possible inheritance…?”

“I don’t see it. No. It’s all about the pot of gold Fox put out there in his book or the cash he won at the casino.” Ray walked back to his desk and sipped at his coffee, thinking. “Last night I had trouble sleeping. I even got up at one point and tried to conjure a list of our known bad guys. No one fits.”

“I agree. I can’t put a face to this crime with anyone we know from the region.”

“How about the Watonda sisters?” asked Ray. “They were willing to do most anything for dope or money.”

“Or love,” said Sue, “Last I heard Darcy was in a slammer somewhere in the south, maybe Tennessee. She was caught bringing dope to her boyfriend on a jail visit.”

“I sort of remember that. How about her lovely twin, Marcy?

“Rumor has it she’s becoming a big porn star in Eastern Europe. Her newest flick,
All the way with the NBA,
is getting a lot of critical attention. Probably will be an award winner at Telluride and Sundance, maybe even TC.”

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“You need to go to yoga with me, or at least to the bar after. When one of the local gals or guys makes good, it’s something to talk about. And, according to my sources, the Watonda girls have been providing great gossip since they were in eighth grade.”

“Okay, getting back on task, can you think of any of the usual suspects that we should check out?”

“No, not a one. We’ve got our share of lowlifes, but I can’t paste this on any of them,” Sue answered. “But we’re living in such hard times. Maybe someone went over the edge. Maybe it’s someone new to the area.”

“We have to go back to the bookstore and library, see if Phillip or the librarian remember anything. I’d like to do that as soon as I get back from meeting with Fox’s daughter at the Medical Center. Anything else I should know about?”

Sue put her coat back on the chair. Simone immediately jumped up and scratched out a bed. Sue sighed. “Well, we’ve had another theft of produce from one of the CSAs.”

“What this time?” Ray got out a notebook.

“Potatoes and carrots from one of their storage units. Last week 500 pounds of potatoes went missing from Gourmet Boutique Farms. The Cedar County Gleaners has also reported some losses.”

“Remind me when this started exactly.”

“The first one was a few weeks before Halloween. A farmer near Inland Corners thought that he had some pumpkins stolen. I met with him and took a report. Let me get his name.” She slid into Ray’s desk chair. He waited as she keyed in a search command.

“John Dirker, an old guy, late 80s. I didn’t think much about it at the time. There were hundreds of pumpkins in fields, near the barn, and loaded in two trucks. He was a little fuzzy on how many were missing, but insisted that it was the small ones, the pie pumpkins and the Wee-Be-Little, that disappeared. Nice old man. I learned a lot about different pumpkin varieties.

“I asked him if he had an inventory system, or a count, some way he could determine numbers and estimate the value. Dirker couldn’t do it. Said he’d planted the Wee-Bees mostly for his great-grandkids and their friends, but he had a couple of commercial customers who’d also ordered several hundred, and he couldn’t fill the order because most had gone missing. He couldn’t tell me precisely when they disappeared. Could have been any one of several nights.”

“And that was the end of it?” asked Ray.

“I listened to him, wrote up a theft report, had him sign it. Yep, that was the end of the pumpkin caper. So that was October. Since then we’ve had several more reports of missing produce, primarily root vegetables, many that I’ve never heard of—things like celeriac, Swedes, and kohlrabi. The interesting thing is that the quantities are small, usually only a few hundred pounds. The thefts are either from unlocked buildings or open storage areas. I’ve been having Brett follow up on most of these: it’s more a show of concern about their loss. They know there’s little chance we’re going to recover a couple of gunny sacks full of carrots.”

“And it’s always produce, yes? There have been no reports of livestock being…?

“None. No pigs or steers, not even a chicken or a duck. There’s some poaching going on. That’s usual. And the road kill, the deer, disappear before they cool off.” She looked at Ray and rattled her empty coffee mug. “So what are you thinking?”

“I don’t think it is just hungry people helping themselves. And even if it were…. There seems to be a pattern. We just have to figure out who’s involved.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get down to the Medical Center. Can we pick this up again in the late afternoon?

“Absolutely.”

“Here’s some reading for you, Fox’s book. Won’t take you long. And you’ll like the section on where Capone’s gold is stashed.”

“There’s one more thing we need to talk about, Ray. The 911 phantom has struck again. We’ve had three more incidents in the last week. Same MO. Weekend nights, usually after midnight, always in the central sector. The location is out in some field where the responder has to leave their car and walk around with a flashlight.”

“Teenagers,” said Ray, “sitting at a safe distance, watching the spectacle, sharing a joint, a few beers, or both. I’m sure it’s a good laugh.”

“Ray, a lot of downstate departments have stopped responding to these. Should we consider that?”

He pondered the question before answering. “Not yet. I keep worrying about a real emergency situation where we don’t respond and should have. Let’s look at this on a month-to-month basis. When the summer people come back and we’re stretched to our limits, maybe then we will have to stop responding. The kids will have to find another source of amusement.”

“How about digging for buried treasure by moonlight?”

“Or maybe we can teach them about snipe hunts.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll explain when we have some time.”