Dead Little Dolly (2 page)

ONE

I missed the call from Lucky Barnard, Leetsville’s sheriff and Deputy Dolly Wakowski’s boss, because I was out in the woods taking in spring and not thinking about Mother’s Day. My mother, Joan Kincaid, had died of a brain tumor when I was twelve. I could barely remember her voice or touch and that filled me with the kind of misery I didn’t want to go near on a sunny Sunday in May.

All I thought about was how great it felt to walk free in the bright northern woods after picking my way carefully—for months—over ice and through deep snow. I chased my clumsy dog, Sorrow, up an old logging road, and sensed him laughing just the way I was laughing as I stopped to pick another yellow violet, then a bloated lady’s slipper, and then knelt in last year’s damp leaves only to find myself at the center of a fairy ring of morel mushrooms.

I wondered if you could make a wish at the center of a ring of mushrooms, then decided to make one anyway, and wished for my mystery novel to sell, now that I had an agent. And I wished for money so I wouldn’t be scared when bills came in. And I wished my ex-husband, Jackson Rinaldi, wasn’t coming up to see me. “Soon, Emily,” he’d promised. “With wonderful fresh pastas and a flat of pansies for your garden.” Which almost made me want to see him—but not really.

There was no need to wish for loons because I heard them out on Willow Lake, singing those wonderfully odd songs they sang, songs that echoed through the trees and over the beaver dam and all the way up to Willow Lake Road.

Wishing for something I knew I’d already gotten was a sure way of making my other wishes come true. Or, at least, in my magical, mystical, sometimes miserable way of figuring out what life was all about, this was the way I got everything I hoped for.

And not a damned bug anywhere. That could have been a wish, too. No bites on my neck while digging in my garden. No vampire mosquitoes. No stinging horse flies. No nits, gnats, or no-see-ums. Not yet.

Spring was a gentle time of the year in northern Michigan, unless a sweeping-clean storm came through and toppled huge trees, broke weak branches overhead and gave last year’s leaves one more chance to blow around searching for that peaceful place where the wind stopped and everything came to rest.

I picked the mushrooms and put them into the mesh bag I carried (so the spores could drop and produce next year’s crop). I would stuff the delicate mushrooms for dinner, and find some leeks and even a few tiny milkweed pods to boil in three waters and fry in butter.

After six years up in northwestern lower Michigan, at a place between the third and baby finger of Michigan’s mitten, in a small, golden house on tiny Willow Lake, I was finally over the Snow White dream I’d brought up with me. The dream where bluebirds sat, singing, on my shoulder. The dream where the flowers in my garden bloomed freely in the Kalkaskian sands and where I would live a simple life without dear Jackson Rinaldi, a University of Michigan professor of English who copulated with every willing coed he could urge into his bed or the front seat of his Porsche, and who once claimed the frilly panties I found in his glove compartment were only rags he used to wipe off his headlights, and who pretended the crying girl who called to tell me what a bastard I was married to was a psycho he’d kicked out of a seminar on “The Wife of Bath.”

“With good reason, Emily. Good reason.” He’d sighed and batted his dark pretty eyes at me.

I’d dropped his name, Rinaldi, and went back to Kincaid, but I couldn’t seem to drop him. Jackson kept showing up. And since I’d once been in love with him and he was still a part of my history and, from time to time—when he became the man I’d married: funny and charming, and courting me the way he once had courted me—well, this new kind of loneliness made me a sucker for his wheedling:
“I’ve got to see you, Emily.”

As I walked, I thought up another wish. To support myself by selling the mystery novels I wrote. Nothing had happened yet but I had an agent and a book out to editors and, as always, hope was springing eternal, though my money was running very low and the jobs I got, writing for a Traverse City newspaper and northern magazines and a few editing jobs, didn’t pay a whole lot.

I hooked my bag of mushrooms to the belt of my raveling jeans and kept on my Johnny Appleseed way through the woods. Sorrow ran ahead, stopping to sniff at a chipmunk hole and then at a larger hole even I knew had to be a skunk’s den. I yelled him away from that one since I wasn’t ready to start spring with a tomato juice bath.

Even with all the sunshine, I walked through tendrils of cold. Cold that made me shiver in my red cotton sweater. Cold that could be present even on the warmest days. A kind of warning to trust nothing—not completely. Winter could come back at any minute. One year we had snow on Memorial Day.

I wished I’d brought a hat out with me. I’d had my blond-streaked hair cut very short at the newly rebuilt Gertie’s Shoppe de Beauty in Leetsville and my head was cold. I told myself I looked just the way I wanted to look: a woman free of makeup and bad-hair days and worries over clothes or putting on a few pounds or any expectations of who I was and how I looked—beyond my own.

I shivered. Despite the sun and color, there could be strange things in the woods. Even on a May afternoon. Things you could feel but not really know. It was the spring version of an uneasy fear that swept the woods before hunting season. Or in summer—tension when a thunderstorm rumbled overhead.

Sorrow, ahead of me on the road, stopped racing in circles to snuffle and paw at the earth. He tore at something, pulled it free, and carried it back to me as fast as he could fly. He dropped his prize at my feet. The ravaged pelt of a dead raccoon. Killed by winter or a predator. It took a while to get him to forget that particular prize.

We headed into a thicket of thorns. Beyond was Willow Lake Road and easier walking but I got hung up in the bushes while Sorrow bounded up the slope. I pulled at my sweater and yelled at Sorrow to wait for me. The clunk-head couldn’t remember about cars and being careful on streets. Damn, I whispered to myself. Everything came with a catch. You couldn’t just be stupidly happy. Always one of life’s rotten picker bushes around to horn in and ruin things.

I yelled at him again as I pulled strings of red cotton yarn from my sweater. I groused and climbed the hill to the road where Sorrow waited dutifully, giving me a judgmental eye roll as he lifted his leg and peed on the mailbox post—communicating something about me to neighboring dogs. When he finished, he looked at the box and barked, then turned to see if I was smart enough to get it.

Something in the box.

I pulled the mailbox door open the rest of the way to find a yellowed piece of paper, folded, with EMILY written on the front fold in big block letters. A note from my neighbor, Harry Mockerman, handyman and woodsman, and once even a log skidder during the last of the northern logging operations. Harry lived across Willow Lake Road from me, down a burr-infested driveway, in a tiny crooked house surrounded by trees. The first time I saw Harry’s house I couldn’t help but think of forest homes in fairy tales. Places where bear families and little men who worked in diamond mines lived.

EMILY KINCAID GOT TO SEE YOU RIGHT AWAY DON’T SAY NOTHING TO NOBODY ABOUT THIS JUST COME ON OVER SOON AS YOU CAN

I sighed—there went my perfect day.

I set off across Willow Lake Road and up Harry’s overgrown driveway.

Harry’s watchdogs, in a chain-link-encircled kennel back near the house, barked and howled before I got halfway up the drive. Sorrow heard, sat, and gave me an eye roll, his way of letting me know he was too particular to spend time among a pack of howling spaniels and shepherds he’d heard baying through the woods when Harry went out hunting. I guessed he’d be waiting there when I came back down the drive. He always was.

Harry’s crooked little house was the very house he’d been born in seventy-two years before. He’d lived in the woods his whole life, roaming free, unrestricted by things like hunting licenses and fishing licenses and car licenses. When his freezer was empty he filled it with deer meat and raccoon meat and meat he found out on the road after a bad night of speeding pickups left carnage behind them. If the coho were running he was out in the water, and he was known to pull the biggest fish from the fastest-flowing rivers and disappear the quickest when the game warden stuck his head out from among the trees.

The back end of the slapped-together vehicle standing in front of the house, half pickup and half old black Chevy, was totally license-free. My friend Deputy Dolly swore she’d catch Harry driving one day and get him off the road for good. But what Harry knew, and Dolly Wakowski didn’t, or ignored, was the vast network of logging roads still running through the woods behind his house. Roads that got Harry anywhere he needed to go—even into Leetsville, where he could park among the trees and walk to Eugenia Fuller’s EATS restaurant for a Sunday breakfast with old friends, or to Chet’s Garage, or to the hardware store, the Save-A-Lot, to Jake Anderson’s Skunk Saloon, or even over to the feed store for dog food.

“Come on in, Emily. I got something to talk about here,” Harry greeted me, his grizzled chin working, thick eyebrows going up and down, bony body bent forward as he pushed the crooked screen door open.

He’d set two coffee mugs on the white metal table in the kitchen, where he motioned for me to sit. He brought the coffeepot over from the stove and pushed a milk carton toward me.

On the old porcelain stove, a pot of stew simmered, the loosely balanced cover bouncing with steam. The smell was of slow-cooking meat and potatoes and morels—and maybe some boiled purslane thrown in at the end for good measure. A good smell. I liked getting a jar of Harry’s soup or stew, sometimes left beneath my mailbox with my name on it and other times set on my side porch. The taste of Harry’s cooking was pungent. At first it seemed a little too wild for me but I was used to it by this time, and not as particular as I once was. I even looked forward now to the next Ball jar tucked just inside my screen door when I got back from doing an interview for Bill Corcoran’s newspaper, the
Northern Statesman
, or was out hunting for a place to hide a body in my next book. Anything beats cooking for myself.

Harry’s house was always neat—in the way a man keeps a house neat. Nothing much to get in his way. Everything practical and useful and easy to live with: no little rugs on the floor; no pretty dish towels hanging from the oven handle. Only a few plain white dishes, two more mugs, and two shapely Coca-Cola glasses set up on an open wooden shelf. The bare wood walls were painted white over old wallpaper, the seams running floor to ceiling every few feet under the paint.

Harry stirred his stew then came back to the table. He cleared his throat and chewed his bottom lip. Finally, he sat down across from me and cleared his throat again. “You know me and Delia Swanson always planned on marrying one day,” he said, stating a fact everyone in the North country had known for years.

I nodded.

He nodded back at me. “And you know we just been waiting for her mother to . . . well . . . pass on. Ever since she took unkindly to me back when I was a kid . . .”

I nodded again. “And was mad a few years ago when you wanted Delia to run away with you.”

“There’s that,” he agreed.

“And when you stole Delia off to come live here for that week, bringing on her mother’s first heart attack at the thought of Delia being . . . well . . . deflowered.”

“Delia was eighty. Now, let me talk, will you?” He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “So, you heard the old lady finally died last week.”

“I was at the funeral, Harry.”

“One hundred and one. Thought she’d outlive us all. Think that was her plan. Providence fooled her.” He nodded fast now. “We’re planning on gettin’ married just as soon as we can.”

“Have you asked Delia? I mean officially?”

“I will. That’s where you come in . . .”

“I’m not asking Delia Swanson to marry you.”

He sniffed and frowned. “What I want you to do is help me plan this weddin’. Want to do it up brown for my future wife. A big celebration with food. Maybe even a honeymoon except I’m not goin’ no farther than up to the bridge. Mackinaw City. That’s as far as I’m goin’ and even that means I gotta find somebody to take us ’cause I can’t take that car of mine out on the I-75. Then, too, I need somebody to feed my dogs and watch the house.”

“For what?”

He frowned. “What’d you mean: ‘for what’?”

“I mean, watch your house for what? Who’s coming near it with your dogs barking and jumping at the fence the way they do?”

“Still . . .”

“Maybe I could feed the dogs,” I offered. “But only if I can throw the food at them. I’m not going in there.”

Harry nodded. “Work that part out. Got something else I need your help with. What I was thinking was you could maybe do the ceremony. You got a college education.”

“If you mean marry you, I’m not a licensed minister.”

“That don’t matter. Jake, in town, told me you can get your license on that Internet. You get that, we can have the ceremony right here.”

“Where? Here? In this house?”

“That’s what I was thinkin’. Have it here, in the house. Have some tables set up outside for the celebration afterward.”

“How many are you planning to invite?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. Leetsville—I suppose. Most of those folks.”