Dead Dogs and Englishmen (11 page)

“We'll be Jack and Jill.” I tossed my ponytail. “Joined at the hip—that's what we are. If Jack goes down the hill can Jill be far behind?” I laughed a truly phony laugh.

She clucked at me. “Surely you can come up with something a little … well, shall we say … a little more creative? But you have plenty of time, Emily. And remember, if there are friends you would like to bring … well, all you have to do is whistle.” She turned to Jackson and slowly puckered her lips at him. “You do know how to whistle, don't you, Jack?”

Her voice was low and sultry, a true Lauren Bacall imitation. “All you have to do is put your lips together, and blow.”

I wanted out of there. I wanted to get home where I could take a bath or get in the lake and listen to the woodpeckers pound at my poor, bare trees. I wanted to forget how crazy human beings could get and how bills and life necessities were trapping me when all I'd come to Northern Michigan for was to be free.

I pulled the wide door open, hurrying, and ran into a dark man standing on the threshold.

“Excuse me …” I started.

The man, dressed in work clothes—blue shirt, baggy blue pants, and heavy boots—looked down at me and nodded. He had to be over six feet. Maybe two hundred pounds. Black hair. Black eyebrows. Cold eyes. His face was lined, but good looking in an early, cruel Clint Eastwood kind of way. His broad shoulders and thick, muscular body gave off the mixed message of strength and menace. He stood back to let us pass, looking off, away, not bothering to see us. He said nothing.

As we hurried down the front steps, I heard Lila, back in the open doorway, hissing at him. “What are you doing at the front door? Listen here, to me. Don't you ever enter my house this way. I don't …”

“It's not your house,” the man answered in a deep, accented voice riddled with insolence.

“I'll have a talk with …” Lila sputtered, turned around, and slammed the door in his face.

I looked over my shoulder to see the man squeeze the door handle and push his way in. I turned to Jackson. “What the hell did you get me into this time?”

I shook his hand from my arm and stormed ahead of him to the car.

I handed my check
reluctantly to the smiling teller at my bank in Kalkaska.

I went on to Leetsville where I drove by the police station. Dolly's car wasn't there. There were lots of other places I should have gone—like home to Sorrow. I could use the rest of the day to write, begin the new mystery about dead skeletons Dolly and I found out in Sandy Lake. I liked what happened in that investigation. I liked that we could bring a family together. I liked the way I came out looking. Still, I didn't know if I had a whole book there or not. What I needed to do was get started, make notes, fill out an outline as best I could, start gathering details, maybe even dare to ask Dolly how she remembered things—but probably not. She was still mad that I'd included her in my first book. I'd fight that battle when I got there. And if she was mad at me about the books, she was going to get a lot madder when I did what I'd decided to do—about her and her ‘problem.'

I drove around the block a few times, asking myself: Did I really want to do this? And the answer kept coming back:
Somebody's got to
. I angle-parked in front of the police station and went in. Big, burly, Chief Lucky Barnard was at the front desk, completing a phone call. He made some notes, then turned his worn face up to me. In the few years I'd known him, Lucky had been through some bad health problems with his eight-year-old son. Charley's cancer had just about killed Lucky. The kid was better now, seemed to be cancer free though Lucky and his wife kept their fingers crossed from checkup to checkup. When I'd first met Lucky, about four years before, he'd looked younger than his forty-four years. Now he looked much older. His eyes were pouched, the corners of his mouth drooped; his chin sagged. He'd put on weight so that his stomach bulged over his thick, leather belt when he stood to shake my hand. He was a man who seemed to have the whole world on his shoulders. And here was Emily Kincaid, come to add a little more to his load.

“Hey, Emily. How're ya doin'. Haven't seen you around here since that cult thing. Good job you and Dolly did on that one.”

“We had help.”

“Yeah, well you stuck with it. That's what counts. Too bad about the reverend. He wasn't a fraud, ya know.”

“I know,” I said, shaking my head. “Just a man on a mission of his own.”

“So, what brings you here today? Dolly's out. She said the two of you were working on this migrant murder. She really admires you, you know. Says you're one of the only people she knows she can trust.”

I choked slightly at that one.

“Lucky,” I started in then stopped to think again. No, I told myself. There was no way around it. If I was about to cut my own throat, then that's how it was going to be. Soon there'd be clouds of steam rising over Leetsville, but I didn't know what else to do. “Did Dolly tell you she's pregnant?”

He took in a swift, deep breath, then let it out. His red face got redder. His jowls and cheeks settled slowly into a blank look. He opened his mouth then snapped it closed. “You don't say.”

I nodded. “She hasn't told anyone but me. She's having some problems, hasn't been to a doctor, and who knows how she expects to get all the way through without telling you.”

He made a face and took in another deep and sorrowful breath. His voice dropped a note to two. “She'll probably take to wearing big sweaters and saying she's getting fat. You know Dolly. Her way or no way.” He thought a while. “Don't know what I'll do without her. Got this migrant case. Got some bad checks passed at the IGA. Got stolen gas down at the Shell Station. Kid brought his dad's hunting knife to school. Got a suspected marijuana patch out on state land.” He thought a while. “I could go on …”

“I wanted to tell you because she's got to look out for herself and she's not doing it. I figured you have every right to be in on this. You're here on the front lines.”

“She'll be mad. I mean, that you told me.” He thought a minute. “When's the baby due?”

I shrugged.

“So, who's the father?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Never seen her with anybody since she was married to Chet. He's dead. You think she went to one of those clinics? Like that octo-mom?”

I shook my head.

The chief leaned back then sat down and crossed his arms over his chest. He was a man coming through a fog. Soon, he gave a short, amazed laugh. “Never saw Dolly as a mother. Always so, well, you know what I mean, kind of tough. Don't get me wrong. Good person and all. One of the best—Dolly Wakowski.”

I agreed. I made a comment on how I'd seen many women changed by motherhood and hoped the miracle would hit Dolly too.

He laughed again. “Take a miracle, or she'll be hooking the kid to her gun belt and dragging it along with her.”

I left feeling guilty and mad at Dolly for never handling things the way they should be handled. Her, and that holding everything tight to her chest, like she couldn't trust a single person in the world. So I'd jumped into her business. Probably get my ass kicked—figuratively, I hoped. Too late to worry about it now.

As my dad used to say—
in for a penny, in for a pound
. I drove over to Dolly's house. Her car wasn't there either but I thought I saw her grandmother inside. I was going to intrude in Dolly's business again. This took two more trips around the block and five minutes sitting at the curb before I got up my nerve to go to the door.

Dolly's potted geranium on the top step, planted in a red clay pot, was doing all right. At least it was still alive, which was a hopeful sign. Dolly didn't bother with flowers until she met me, saw my garden, and got the idea to dress up her house a little. This was the result. Purple geranium in a distinctly red pot. You could shudder when you looked at it, but at least Dolly had added color to what was a basic white saltbox, without the usual charm of a saltbox, with white trim, sitting on a small, bare lot, close to the street; this three-step, white-painted cement porch leading up to the front door, and pitted aluminum storm windows—open because, like me, she didn't have air conditioning. I knocked at the white door embellished with four fan lights and a dusty Christmas wreath, and listened, hearing footsteps cross the bare wood floor.

Catherine Thomas, Dolly's grandmother, stood there frowning at me. Catherine was an amazing woman, so completely who she was—a true original, or as meaner people might say, an oddity. She dressed the same no matter the season, no matter the occasion. Like come-down royalty. Like a bag lady who lived behind a Broadway theatre with access to their dumpster. Like a poor woman without a mirror.

Today she wore a black cotton skirt that fell to the tops of her truly broken-in Gucci shoes. Her white-lace, see-through blouse hung over a black, old-lady, sturdy brassiere. In her piled-high white hair a golden star bobbled back and forth, held up by nature, wiry hair, a stick drilled into her skull, or simply by Catherine's force of will.

“Emily,” she moved her overly painted lips up and down, crinkling her eyes so that her false eyelashes had to bat a few times to get themselves untangled. “It's good to see you, but Dolly's not here.”

I put a foot up into the house the way a salesman does, to stop the door from slamming. “I came to talk to you.”

She made a coy face and waved me on inside. “Sounds ominous. Do you want to know where I buy my clothes? No? A more sinister reason for coming? Perhaps like somebody we both know and love getting herself stupidly pregnant because she thinks a child will make her life perfect instead …”

She closed the door and motioned me into the living room, then to a chair. “… of a living hell because no child guarantees happiness for the mother. It's the other way around, you know. A mother should guarantee happiness for the child, except it so rarely happens that way.”

She sat on the plaid sofa across from me. “I mean, look at me, with my daughter over there in France with a terrible religious cult that's held her hostage for years, turning her against her mother and her own child, for heaven's sakes! What kind of thing is that? Well, I'm telling you, I'm giving Audrey one last chance. She's going to be a grandmother now and if she's ever going to live up to what she's done to Dolly and make things right, this is the time.” She drew a breath but went right on talking. “I'm too old to go through all of this again. I just can't deal with another child that could be lost.”

I interrupted when she took a breath. “Will Dolly's baby be lost?” I asked.

“Who knows what will happen?” She threw her hands in the air. “She is her mother's daughter after all, and a baby is not a doll. There's no changing your mind after you have it. Twenty years. That's what it takes. Twenty years, at least, of devotion. Well, I'm telling you, I just can't go through it. Not more shame and sadness.”

“Would Dolly cause you shame and sadness?” I couldn't help myself.

She thought a while. “Maybe not Dolly. To tell the truth, she's not a bit like Audrey. The opposite I'd say. And nothing like her father. But I'm not up to looking after a child. Not at my age. Though, you know, I didn't exactly look after Dolly when she was a baby. I mean, not with Audrey never telling me what she did with the girl. All along I thought the baby was with Audrey, there in France. But no, my very own daughter deceived me and signed over all rights to Dolly to the State of Michigan. I never in my life heard of such a thing. Mother like that. Well, I'll tell you one thing, she didn't learn it at my knee. Maybe I never had much, with my husband, Ricardo leaving me when Audrey was born—dirty scumbag—flying off to Rio with a Spanish dancer named Florita, who he'd sworn was his sister when he first brought her home. Can you just imagine? I took that woman into my house …”

She stopped as if someone had hit her on the back of her head. She blinked a few times, bringing herself back to Leetsville, Michigan, back to Dolly's house, and back to this living room, and me. “But you didn't come to hear my long tale of woe, did you?”

“No,” I said, clearing my throat because I'd forgotten for a minute that I could speak. “I mean, I came because Dolly told me she was pregnant and I wanted to talk to somebody because Dolly's impossible. She told me she's spotting a little, told me she has no doctor.”

The woman clasped her hands together and thumped them up and down in her lap. “Were you going to suggest an abortion? You know Dolly would never be a party to …”

I shook my head. “No. I respect her choice. If she wants the baby … It's just that somehow I don't think she knows how to take care of herself, let alone a baby.”

Catherine Thomas nodded. “Women. Women. Women.” She sighed. “What a sorry bunch we are. That damned pull toward motherhood. If only women had a chance to get beyond it. I don't mean to speak against having children but, for heaven's sakes, at the right time, in the right circumstances, for the right reasons.”

“There'd never be any kids if that was the way it worked,” I said.

She shook her head at me. “It's just that nature doesn't respect a woman's right to a life of her own. Don't you think, Emily, that so much is stacked against us? I had so many friends with big dreams. My friend, Alice Trotter, for instance, wanted so badly to play the flute in a symphony orchestra but she got knocked up in high school and married Billy Comfort, who turned out to be the opposite of his name. Last time I talked to her, she said Billy never could stand to hear the flute and broke it into a million pieces. Well, now he's dead, but too late to do Alice any good. And then there was …”

I had to break in or I'd never get away. Cate Thomas, I could see, was spending way too much time alone in this house. “I don't know what I want Dolly to do. Not my call. I just wish she'd take care of herself.”

Cate thought a minute then blew out a long, sorrowing breath. “Wish I could help out. Wish she'd listen to somebody. Last thing I want to see is Dolly losing that baby. I don't think anybody knows what a hurt soul she is. Baby'd be good for her. But still, I'm going, be gone from here in a week or so. Back to France one last time to see if I can find Audrey.”

I frowned at that. Something stuck me as not right. Seemed, as Dolly said, too much a pattern in the Thomas family—leaving their kids when they needed them the most.

“I can see you're judging me.” Cate shook a crooked finger near my nose. “I'm an old woman. I would have taken Dolly out of those awful foster care homes where they put her. I never even knew she was still in the States.” She gave a mighty shrug. “I would have raised her but … well … now I just can't take on a job like that.”

I said nothing but my gut was churning. If I opened my mouth I'd say something even worse than the stuff I'd already said.

“So, were you thinking she should put the baby up for adoption?” Cate said, then sat back and smiled.