Dead Little Dolly (14 page)

TWENTY-TWO

It would have been one of my favorite May days if it weren’t for Cate’s funeral.

When I awoke my bedroom was dim. I could hear rain softly hitting the windows. A perfect day to sit at my desk and write and drink tea. And maybe entertain myself with thoughts of other writers in their garrets all around the world, plugging away at their hard and thankless tasks—suffering for our art, the lot of us.

All I had were a couple of hours to kill before picking up Dolly and Jane at their motel in town, where they’d moved after one night with me.

Not nearly enough time to develop a good case of rainy day self-pity.

I put on a crinkly old yellow slicker and whistled for Sorrow, who never minded the weather or let much of anything interfere with his boundless happiness. He pounded past me, out the door and into the drive, then stopped to look both ways. He chose the lake, beating an ear-flopping lope down the sand path to the reeds, where he sniffed and searched for loons or geese—interlopers in his world—while I stood watching the dimpled lake and listening to the dripping trees behind me. Spring, and all that new life. I smelled the wet earth smell of stirring worms and wondered about living and nonliving until it was time to give up thinking dark thoughts and get into town for Cate’s funeral.

• • •

The rain kept up all morning. The service graveside was short, people separated by nodding umbrellas. Dolly and I stayed on after the others, though we were soaked through and our shoes were shiny black from the damp grass. She wanted to stop and talk to Grace a minute.

“I’m here anyway. Might as well say hi,” Dolly said as we tramped over to Grace’s grave and bowed our heads, both dumping our woes on the poor soul who probably only wanted to rest in peace.

I asked Grace to straighten this whole thing out so we knew which path to take. She had a way of cutting crap, the way she’d probably done in life—with her red whiskers and shaped mustache. Like Dolly, I could think clearer after having a short heart-to-heart with Grace. Things were falling slowly into place, facts lining up like guests at a wedding: groom’s side; bride’s side. Jellybeans and blood on a headlight and a wrecked SUV returned as if borrowed for only a moment.

Things were just beginning to gel when Dolly turned, head bent, and headed back toward my car. I scrambled after her, waving to Grace over my shoulder.

“We’ve got to go back in there,” Dolly announced on the way over to EATS for the funeral luncheon.

“In where?”

“My house. Got to face it. Eugenia said everything’s cleaned up in the nursery. Jake Anderson and some guys from the Skunk painted the walls. They left Cate’s room alone. We’ve got to take a look. There’s got to be something.”

I said I’d help and she gave me a grateful look. “But I don’t know if I can live there anymore. And I’ll never put Jane back in that room.”

I understood. Who knew what anyone would feel about the house where their grandmother had been murdered?

I wasn’t ready for what came next.

“I asked Lucky to see if he could find Audrey Delores in France,” she said. “She needs to know her mother’s dead.”

There was nothing to say. I could only imagine the long nights of misery this decision brought Dolly.

Eating began when Dolly and I walked through the front door. Baby Jane, who’d gone ahead with Gloria, gurgled in her seat at the middle of a long table filled with bowls of chicken salad and extra-large homemade rolls, and lettuce and tomatoes and home-canned pickles, and chips with dips and berry pies townswomen had baked. Lots of conversation. Lots of laughter. Lots of offers of help to Dolly:

“You need me to watch Baby Jane for you, all you gotta do is ask,” one woman with four children of her own offered.

“I’m home every afternoon—if you want to drop the baby off,” another said.

“Dolly, whatever you need. You go after whoever’s doing this to you. Get ’im.”

“Dolly, you ever need a man over there to help you with anything at all, why, you just give me a call,” Jake Anderson, a kind man with troubled eyes, said.

And one that made Dolly angry. Deputy Omar Winston came in shaking rain off his plastic-covered hat and from his black slicker. He found Dolly in the crowd and stiffly came to express his condolences. His offer of help had to do with Baby Jane.

“I already told you, I’ll take her any time,” he said within earshot of everybody. “You know, I’m gonna have to see a lawyer if you won’t give me visiting privileges. Hate to bring it up, but I’m figuring she could come stay with me and my mom until this thing going on with you is over. I mean, until you catch the guy. My only concern is the baby’s safety. That’s all I care about . . .”

“She’s fine,” Dolly, beside me at a center table, growled and turned her back. He put a hand on her arm.

He cleared his throat. “All I’m thinking about is Jane. Her safety. She got hurt once in all of this. I don’t want it to happen again.”

Dolly reared back to fix him with an angry glare. “You think I do?”

“I think you’re a stubborn person.”

Dolly opened her mouth then snapped it shut. She gave him a long, thoughtful look, swallowed hard a time or two, turned, and got up to go back to the ladies’ room.

TWENTY-THREE

Next surprise through the restaurant door was Bill Corcoran, apologizing for missing the funeral. “Tried to get here on time but a couple of things at the paper held me up. Had a reporter quit. No explanation. Just packed his stuff and left this morning.”

He greeted Dolly, even hugged her, and wished her good luck finding the person doing these things. He asked a few questions about the investigation, grabbed a dish of chicken salad, then took a chair at our table, across from where Baby Jane held court with a yawn, a sleepy smile, and a nod of her head.

When we finished eating Bill asked me to come outside to his car a minute.

“Got some things we should talk about,” he said, getting up slowly, shoulders hunched.

I told Dolly I’d be back and followed him out while Dolly watched, turning around to comment to Eugenia, who looked after me and smiled.

I climbed in Bill’s pickup and slammed the door behind me. The nice soft day had gotten colder and damper. Bill turned the motor and then the heater on when I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself.

“So?” I asked, aware people inside the restaurant were discussing us by now.

“Couple of things. First: can you handle this or do you want some help on it?”

“You mean Cate’s murder?”

“That and the hit-and-run at the cemetery.”

“Of course they’re connected,” I said. “I don’t care who this is aimed at, Cate or Dolly. It’s all part of the same thing. Not two separate incidents.”

“No response on Dolly’s reward,” he said. “A couple of psychics from down below. One UFO nut. That’s all. I’m beginning to think whoever’s responsible isn’t from around here. If he was local, somebody would know what’s going on.”

I agreed. Another vote for somebody from Cate’s past.

“Dolly’s started hunting for her mother in France. Finally. She wants to tell her about Cate and, I guess, see if she’s got any idea who would do this to her. She just doesn’t know what part of France she’s in.”

“French government will know. Even if she’s a resident alien, they’ll have records. Can’t go there and just disappear. Unless you really want to. I mean, on purpose. I could help, if you need me. Got a good friend over there. A journalist. He’d find her.”

“Lucky already started searching. Before she even asked him to. Told me he contacted la Sûreté. French form of the FBI. Doesn’t expect a problem, locating the woman. He was anxious, though, about going ahead and searching behind Dolly’s back. He figured it would be hard on her, with the history she has with her mother,” I said. “Or lack thereof. But now it’s okay.”

I hesitated only a minute before bringing up something else Lucky had confided to me. “Another thing is, Lucky thinks this is getting to be too much for Dolly. What with the baby and now her dead grandmother. He’s wondering if he shouldn’t turn the whole thing over to the state police and keep her out of it.”

“Good luck with that,” Bill said, knowing Dolly well by now.

“That’s what I told him. He couldn’t keep her away if he tried. Would you expect Dolly to sit out a hunt for somebody after her family?”

“Still, maybe the state police should take over.”

“She’d be at the center of things anyway. And driving them crazy.”

He thought awhile. “You know what defense lawyers can make of overzealous police.”

Bill hesitated a few minutes, looking off toward the rain-dotted windshield. “There’s this thing with the reporter who left today. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“About what?”

“The job. I know you’ve got a book deal but that won’t bring you any money for over a year.”

“I get an advance.”

He shrugged. “Well, the offer’s there if you want it. I mean, the job is yours.”

I drew in a long breath. “I have rewrites on the manuscript. I’m starting a new book. The editor talked about a contract on a second . . .”

He shook his head a time or two. “It’s up to you. Let me know in a couple of days, all right? I’ve got to fill the position.”

I agreed and got out of his car, running back into the restaurant through the rain and muddy tire tracks, thinking about taking that “road” just offered—safety of a full-time job, benefits, security.

Or go on as I was. Writing mysteries that still might not sell. Fooling myself that everything would be okay and ending with nothing.

TWENTY-FOUR

We were back at Dolly’s by three o’clock. The house felt abandoned. Chilly and damp. The chemical smell of paint layered the air. The stink of incipient mold floated up from the basement. Any spirit of welcome this old house used to give was gone.

Dolly laid Baby Jane on the couch to finish her nap. We went back together to see what the men and women had accomplished in Jane’s room. I could only imagine Dolly’s stomach must’ve been turning fast. Mine was.

If you didn’t know what had happened in there, the room looked new and untouched. It had been scrubbed and polished; the air was thick with fresh paint. All traces of blood were gone from the floor. Pictures on the walls were straightened. The broken crib had been removed. Bedding gone. Order restored and almost nothing left behind. Even that terrible scrawled message had been painted over—the spot turned into a large rectangle of blue with a painting of the Au Sable River done by Mardi, a local landscape artist, hanging at the center.

Dolly said nothing. She closed the door behind us then went into Cate’s room. More a sense of dread here, in the simply covered single bed, in a lamp draped with a yellow scarf, in a closet half filled with sad clothes, like leftovers from a Gypsy troupe, or remnants of a woman with very limited means. Some were almost rag-like: long skirts and peasant blouses and jackets that were much too large and hung from their hangers like the dejected backs of prisoners.

“I’ll do this.” Dolly pulled a large old trunk from the closet. “You take the dresser.”

“Am I looking for anything in particular?”

Dolly shook her head. “You’ll know. Something from her past. Names. Letters. Things like that. Something from Audrey Delores Thomas, I guess. Or anybody else Cate kept in contact with. You got a question, we’ll talk about it.”

I settled into searching a dead woman’s dresser drawers and found the pathetic collection of useless things not only sad and poignant, but instructive. Here was a life traced in Lily of the Valley bath powder, in old underwear and rolled-up nylon stockings, in a drawer filled with nightgowns washed so thin the patterns were gone. I opened the bottom drawer and found an ancient Bible held together with a large blue rubber band. Beneath the Bible there were three letters in the original envelopes, the return address to a Mable Todd in Washington, Michigan, and postmarked June, 1981; January, 1985; and September, 1989. In one drawer I found a pile of yellowed newspaper clippings held together with a paper clip. These were tucked under a stack of bras stained at the underarms. I riffled through the clippings but they were only recipes and stories about old movie stars.

Tucked inside a book of poems by Christina Rossetti were fifteen twenty-dollar bills. I counted the bills then read the poem they’d marked: “When I am Dead, My Dearest,” but didn’t read it to Dolly because it was so sad.

I handed the money to her. She took it without a word and stuck it in her uniform shirt pocket.

I pulled the drawers from the chest, one by one, and turned them over, checking for anything stuck underneath. Nothing.

“Got this,” Dolly said and pulled a red, plush-covered photo album from the trunk. She set in on the floor beside her. “Guess we’ll take a look later.”

I was done with the chest and had nothing to show for it but three old letters, a decrepit Bible, and a book of poems.

Dolly leaned back on her legs and leafed through a stack of papers. “Paid bills,” she said. “Stubs and receipts. Nothing going back before last year, far as I can see.”

When we finished going through everything in Cate’s room, even turning the bed to see if she’d stuck something between the mattress and box springs, we had a sum total of a pile of old clothes, three letters, a Bible, and a photo album.

“And this.” Dolly pulled a last thing from the trunk.

She handed me a pincushion stuck full of pins and one needle. It looked like something made by a child: raveling raw edges of the overlapping chintz material sticking out around the sides. I turned it over and found, written in small stitches on the bottom:
Love from your little Dolly
.

“You give her this?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I didn’t even know her when I was a kid. Or that’s what she said. Who knows? Never got any real truth out of the woman.”

“You have a relative named Dolly?”

She shook her head. “Got no relatives, remember? Probably just a coincidence. Somebody’s kid she used to know.”

Dolly crossed her legs and drew the photo album to her. I settled beside her, watching the faces of long-ago people drift by as she turned the pages.

“There’s your Dolly,” she said and jabbed a finger at one of the old photographs. She pushed the album toward me.

In the picture a girl stood at the end of a dock. A teenager with long blond hair. Skinny. Squinting back at the photographer behind a hand up to shield her eyes. She wore a bathing suit from the 1960s or 1970s. Maybe sixteen years old. She wasn’t laughing, more annoyed at the person taking her photo. Beneath the picture the words “Dolly at the cottage” had been hand-lettered.

“Not me,” Dolly said.

“Could she be your mother?”

Dolly made a face. “No clue. All the women in these pictures look alike.”

“And isn’t your mother’s name Audrey?”

Dolly nodded. “Far as I know.”

“Then why ‘Dolly’?”

“Her middle name’s Delores. Guess that’s what it is. When Cate talked about her sometimes she’d call her ‘My sweet little Dolly.’ I always thought she was just using a pet name. You know, like Baby Doll, or Sweetie, or something like that.”

“Your mother named you after what her mother called her? Sort of like naming you for herself.”

“Doubt it. That’s somebody else there.” She jabbed at the fading photograph of the young girl on the dock. “Nobody to me.”

Dolly flipped more pages, bending to squint over photo after photo. I sat back and watched the old photos go by.

“Lots of that girl in there,” I said. “Pretty.”

“Pretty is as pretty does. One of my foster mothers used to say that to me.” There was a bitter laugh. “All she meant was that I wasn’t pretty and didn’t act pretty.”

There wasn’t going to be anything soft coming out of Dolly that afternoon. I could sense her mood darkening. Hatred for her mother ran too deep, for too long a time, with too much blame attached to be healed by a single photograph of a young girl about to leap into a lake somewhere in time—if that really was her mother.

I pulled out the three letters and opened them, oldest to youngest.

Nothing much beyond the usual “It was really good to hear from you again. We were wondering what happened to you after all that fuss you went through. We’re still hoping things will get better one of these days. John says hello and hopes you are feeling okay. He went through a bout with the flu last winter and still has a leftover cough that gets to him every so often.” All the nothing stuff people used to write to each other and now tweet or email by way of reaching out and holding on to friends and family. The letter was signed, Your Cousin, Mable Todd. The next letter was almost the same except this time Mable wrote they were going on vacation to Florida and were looking forward to that. She asked Cate if she was doing okay and if there was any news of Audrey, then added she prayed for both of them every night.

The last letter only said she was sorry things weren’t going any better with Audrey and she wished there was better news.

I handed the letters to Dolly, who examined the envelopes and the return address first, then read through the letters quickly. “This all there is?” She looked up at me. “Cousin. What do you know? Must be my cousin, too.”

“But the last letter is postmarked 1989. Guess they lost touch after that.”

“Still, who knows? Maybe I can find her. Sounds like she knows about Audrey going to France. And things about Cate, too. Might be all I need.”

“There’s a return address.” I tapped the envelope.

“I’ll write her. Or better yet, I’ll see if she’s listed and give her a call.”

I carefully pulled the rubber band from the old Bible and opened the book. The name inscribed on the first page had faded beyond reading. I turned to the list of family members, a page of fading scrawled ink notations, ink faded to brown leading down to small, handwritten listings: A Catherine Linden was listed. Born March 5, 1938.

“Is this Cate?” I pointed to the listing.

“She told me she was sixty-six.”

“Then maybe it’s not her.”

“Naw. She probably was seventy-four. Crotchety as anything sometimes. Probably lied to me.”

“A family trait,” I said under my breath. “That ‘crotchety’ business.”

Dolly ignored me. “Here, look at this one.”

Audrey Delores Thomas. Born July 18, 1959.

“And here’s me.” She pointed to a listing for Delores Flynn, born in 1979.

Dolly pulled the Bible from my lap and rested her hands on the open pages. “Guess I should put a death date in for Cate.”

She ran a hand across the page. “This is all I’ve got.” She rifled through the pages then, turned to places marked with death notices and rotting newspaper articles and funeral cards with long-gone people’s faces and small prayers, but nothing more about who they were.

As she turned the fragile pages the book fell open to a place where a small brown envelope lay. She pulled the envelope from where it had indented a space for itself and held it up to the light.

“What the heck?” Dolly said, opened the envelope, and slid a medium-sized key out into her hand.

“Got numbers on it: 2341. Nothing else. Not even the name of the maker.”

“House key?” I asked.

“House key’s in her purse, on a ring with what looks like a post office box key. Had a wallet with a few dollars, and her last Social Security check stub.”

“Didn’t she have direct deposit? Most seniors do it that way.”

“Never asked.” Dolly stuck the key into the pocket where she’d stuffed the twenty-dollar bills. “First thing I’d better do is get over to the post office. Check that box.”

Out in the living room, Jane awoke and began to cry. Dolly pushed the dresser drawers closed. She closed the strapped trunk and toed it back into the closet.

We picked up our meager finds and left the room, closing the door firmly behind us.