Dead Little Dolly (6 page)

EIGHT

Ralph was planting seeds along a furrow at the far side of the spaded garden. The man looked a lot older than forty, but often these backwoods men aged early. Too much hard work. Too much disappointment. Sometimes it was just too much drinking and smoking and thinking.

Ralph put a hand up to cover his eyes against the sun then picked up a hoe from the ground beside him and leaned on it, waiting to see what this yellow Jeep was bringing into his property.

Dolly got out and gave Ralph a perfunctory wave. “It’s me, Ralph. Deputy Dolly. Just want to talk to you.”

As Ralph set his hoe down and walked along the garden row toward us, the trailer door opened and the younger brother, Donald, leaned out, keeping one hand on the door handle and one hand on the doorframe, dumbstruck at the sight of company.

When both men took in who’d come to see then the response was swift and surprising.

Ralph picked up speed as Donald swung off their small porch. Both headed straight for Dolly.

Ralph got over to her first. He put his arms out wide and folded them around a stiffened Dolly, hugging her close to his skinny chest. “Heard about what happened.” He looked down sadly into Dolly’s startled face. “Me and Donald here said right away, what kind of scum-sucking jerk would do that to a baby? Geez, Dolly, no matter how drunk me and Donald get from time to time, we’d never do something like that to your baby.”

Donald, younger by about five years but otherwise almost a carbon copy of Ralph, was right behind his brother. “Heard and we jist wanted to tell ya we’re happy she’s gonna be okay. Why, I seen Baby Jane over there to EATS that one time and told Ralph here I never seen a prettier baby. That’s what everybody for miles around here’s been saying. No baby prettier, Dolly. Sure hope you get the guy who did that to your car.”

Ralph put his hand out to shake mine. “Know you, too. Yer Emily Kincaid, that writer. Heard you was trying to sell some book you wrote. Should get it up there on that Internet. Heard books on there sellin’ like hotcakes. Me and Donald was talking jist the other day about writing one about our life and seeing to getting it put up on there.”

I kept my mouth shut as Dolly toed the ground then kicked a rusted beer can a good fifteen feet. “That’s kind of why I’m out here, boys,” she said. “Not about a book. I heard you were saying something about getting even with me for putting you both in jail.”

Ralph’s eyebrows shot up. Donald’s mouth dropped open.

“Us? Geez, Dolly, we’d never do anything to hurt yer baby,” Ralph said.

Dolly toed the ground again, keeping her head down so she didn’t have to look at the stricken faces. “That’s not what somebody heard you saying.”

“You mean that ‘We’re gonna fix Deputy Dolly’ stuff Donald was spouting at EATS a few weeks back?” Ralph waved a hand as if wiping it all away. “He didn’t mean anything at all, did you, Donald?”

Donald snapped his mouth shut and shook his head vehemently. “Listen, Dolly, there were guys in there laughing at us ’cause we just got outta jail and so I said that to shut ’em up. Like if I can take care of you I can take care of them easy enough.”

He shook his head hard. His eyes got red around the edges. I thought the man might be about to cry. “You know that stuff don’t mean anything. Let’s go in the house. I’d like to make you a cup of coffee and talk this out. Man to man, so to speak.”

Dolly took more than one deep breath. She seemed about to get mad at Donald then changed her mind and nodded. To my surprise we followed the boys into their trailer for what I imagined was some kind of peace talk.

I wasn’t eager to sit down with the Throes boys in that trailer. I’d been in many backwoods places where people just didn’t notice how they lived until they had no room to sleep anymore and either sealed up the place and moved away or put up a tent in the yard until winter came and forced them to pull at least some of their stash out to leave for the coming winter’s snow to squash flat.

This trailer wasn’t like that. I’d never seen a neater place. If you stacked my haphazard housecleaning up against the Throes, I’d come out the loser.

The place was small but immaculate. The little living room had a pullout sofa covered with a crocheted throw. Magazines were neatly stacked in a wooden bin. A coffee table held a collection of carved wooden figures I had to ask about.

“Mine,” Donald said proudly. “Learned to carve like that when I was a kid. After our mom and dad took off and left us the way they did, I didn’t say a word for about three years. Just carved my animals. Ralph thought it took too much time, but look at what I’ve got to show for it now.”

The air inside this home was sweet. A Mason jar crammed full of daffodils sat on a kitchen counter free of dishes or anything much beyond an old cracked set of yellow canisters.

Dolly and I looked at each other as we took seats on the sofa, careful not to disturb the precisely draped orange throw.

“Donald makes a great cup of coffee.” Ralph smiled a kind of painful smile. “If you like coffee, that is.”

Obviously these men weren’t used to company. Especially not the company of women. I figured they wanted to talk to Dolly more than me and I wanted to take a look at that shed. While Dolly waited for the old metal coffeepot to perk, I made an excuse—had to make a phone call—and went back outside.

I stood in the cluttered yard, so different from their home, and thought long and hard about people not being what I expected. There were no stereotypes in the north. Every time I told myself I had them all pegged, I’d be proven wrong again.

A slight wind came up out of the south, warming the air around me. Might be hot enough to swim in Willow Lake by Memorial Day. I cheered myself with the thought of my lake and the loons, then depressed myself with the thought that I was more alone than Ralph and Donald, and not as neat.

I looked off at the bulging shed and figured I’d better take a look, though if these two guys were the ones who went after Dolly’s car they were better actors than Tom Hanks and Anthony Hopkins put together.

It was a slow amble over to the rickety shed with shingles torn off the roof, exposing gaping holes, which I imagined skunks and raccoons and other assorted animals made good use of. I checked the sky again—pretending I had nothing special on my mind. Then turned to make sure the door to the trailer stayed shut.

The boards were crossed and nailed over the shed doors but not doing too good a job as the doors bulged outward. I put my eye to the gap, leaning hard with a hand to either side of me. There was some light, coming from the holes in the roof. I half expected the eye of something or other to look back at me. Instead there seemed to be a mattress pushing from the other side. And not much else to see.

There could be a black SUV hidden in there, behind the mattress, or just a lot of other old junk the boys had accumulated over the years. Maybe Ralph was the hoarder, while Donald kept things neat—even to boarding up Ralph’s collections.

I pushed my eye harder—squinting one way and then the other, seeing if the slumping mattress inside gave a view of something else beyond it.

“Lookin’ for something?” Donald’s voice behind me made me almost jump out of my Nikes.

I stumbled back. I knew my face was red, along with my eyes—pushed up against the shed the way they’d been.

“Why . . . eh . . . I was just seeing what you had in there that the doors had to be boarded up the way they are.”

He shook his head. “Ralph.” He snickered. “Got more stuff than one person ought to have. Says he’s keeping it but I say you can’t live in a mess like that. I boarded the shed shut and he’s still threatening to take the boards off except he knows that junk of his’ll come flying out and about kill him.”

He sniffed and eyed me closely. “You interested in antiques? Got quite a selection in there, if you are. I could pull the boards off. Take a while. Need help. And we’d have to run when I get it down to the last nails . . .”

I assured him I had no interest in “antiques.”

“Lots of good stuff. Old Coca-Cola signs. Seen those. A pinball machine. Got an old Ford truck. Think he’s even got the trunks our great-grandparents brought with them from England. I’m tellin’ you, Ralph saves everything. Me, I’m a thrower. I don’t like mess, that’s why I clean up after Ralph and hide it all away.”

He stopped to point to the other two old barns. “See those barns?” he asked.

I nodded, still embarrassed at having been caught snooping.

“All full. Just didn’t have to nail them shut like this one. Don’t know where we’ll go with it all from here on in. Maybe just make a bonfire. Let it go at that.”

Ralph and Dolly came out of the trailer, talking as they stepped down from the cinder-block porch.

Dolly waved. “You missed coffee,” she said. “We got a lot of places to get to, Emily. Better get going, if you’re through talking to Donald there.”

The Throes told us to come calling whenever we were in the neighborhood and we were out of there and back on the road.

Dolly slumped in the front seat, the stack of file folders back on her lap.

“You think I should have asked him to take the boards off that shed?” I said after a while. “That SUV could’ve been in there. That’s what I went out to check on.”

She nodded. “Doubt it,” she said. “Most they probably got in there is a new stash of marijuana. I don’t want to be arresting them again over that stuff.”

“You busted Ralph three times already.”

“Yeah, I know, and I’ve been thinking. Those are real nice men. They care a lot about Baby Jane. I could tell.”

She glanced over at me. Her scowl went deep. “I heard the story about their parents taking off on them when I first came to Leetsville. But I never heard Donald didn’t talk for three years after that. All I ever knew was they got a note saying their mom and dad would be in touch and to take care of things around the house ’til they got back. Only they never came back. Not a word. You ask me, those boys are still waiting. Keeping the place up the way they were told to. Sad to think about it. I sure wish I hadn’t sent them both to jail like that.”

“Doing your job.”

“I know. I know. Still, sometimes people should come first. I mean, if you understand what they’ve been through. I mean, if you’ve been through the same kind of thing . . . well . . . seems there’s got to be a way to fix things better.”

NINE

Cate called my cell phone, which was a good thing because Dolly was driving and getting madder by the minute over that “Thou Shalt Not Steal” business rolling around in her head. She’d been repeating the phrase again and again as if there might be something hidden in the words—if she could just get them in the right order.

“Can’t call
her
,” Cate said to me, her voice clipped and angry. “She won’t listen. I don’t want to take care of this baby by myself. Poor child needs her mother. You gotta tell Dolly to get home here, or take Baby Jane someplace else. With that hairline thing on her head, I just don’t want to be responsible. Wouldn’t you think . . . ?”

“Calm down, Cate,” I said, which made Dolly lean over and grab first my arm and then the phone, right out of my hand.

“Jane all right?” Dolly demanded and then listened, sputtering as Cate talked on. As she got madder, she slowed. “Okay. Okay. Stop talking. I’ll call Eugenia, see if she can send one of the girls over to get her. Or maybe stay awhile and help . . .

“Yeah, sure,” she continued, looking more and more unhappy. “I don’t see what you’re so worried . . .

“I said I’d call right now. Be just a few minutes.”

She punched the end call button fast, then rolled her eyes.

“I don’t get her. She didn’t have this problem at first. Said she loved watching Baby Jane. Now, all of a sudden . . .”

I shrugged. “Baby’s just out of the hospital, Dolly. I’d be scared to watch her myself—with that hairline fracture. I mean, if you don’t know kids that well . . .”

She dialed another number. One eye on the road—which made me nervous, though we were still on the two-track and hadn’t passed a car going in or out. I watched her fumble with the phone and couldn’t help thinking about my Jeep getting wrapped around one of the gnarled old trees along the roadside.

She talked to Eugenia at EATS, seeing to it someone would go over and help Cate or bring Baby Jane to the restaurant, where everybody in the place would be making over her, making her laugh, and just showing what good people thought of babies in general.

“Eugenia’s going herself,” she said when she was off the phone. “I told her how Cate’s acting and she’s gonna talk to her; see if she can find out what’s wrong all of a sudden.”

She stopped before turning out on to 131. “Where are we going next?”

“I’ve got to get this follow-up into the paper soon. If we’re going to Traverse City I’d like to get the story turned in.”

“While I wait in the car? With all I’ve got to do? You said you wanted to ride along, not the other way around.” She put the car in park. “Give me those files. I was thinking of one . . .”

“Tommy Worfman,” she said, pulling a folder from the bottom of the pile. “Ran a meth lab way back in the woods. Started a fire back there. Surprised as hell when I followed the fire truck out and walked right in and got him. But I think he’s still up in prison—Marquette.”

“So? What about friends of his? Somebody getting revenge for his buddy?”

She nodded. “Could be. Gotta think about that. How bad they want to get me. And his mother, Claudine Worfman, hates me like a plague of grasshoppers. Be kind of good to get her stirred up. If she thinks I’m blaming any of this on Tommy or his trashy friends, she’ll get the word out to finish the job.”

“Wow, well connected, huh?”

“She should be the one in jail. I don’t think Tommy even knew what he was cooking out there in that lab she set up for him. Some mothers, you know, they got acid in that amniotic fluid stuff.”

“Seems a long shot. Couldn’t be him if he’s in jail.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t know police business much, do you?”

I bit my tongue and went back to the “who, what, where, when, and how” of the story I wrote as she drove off.

“Claudine lives over by Rapid City,” Dolly said after a while. “That’s where we’re going. After that I want to see Ramon Valderez. Mean s.o.b. Beats his wife. He told me once he was going to get me when I didn’t expect it. He’s not in prison right now. Wouldn’t put anything past him. When they’re mean, they’re just mean.”

“And then around to Traverse so I can turn this in to Bill.” I waved my reporter’s notebook in the air.

“I said I’m not sitting, waiting for you. I got too much to do.”

“Make phone calls while I’m in with Bill. Don’t you have to check in with Lucky? See if they found the car yet? And maybe what he found out at the Harpys’, or from Will Friendship.” I hesitated, thinking. “And by the way, lady. This happens to be my car. It goes where I go.”

“That’s not our deal. Told you I’d share the gas. Lucky’ll reimburse us. And about calling him, if he had anything, he’d call me. Still, I guess I’d better check in. But I’m not going to Traverse. You drop me off at the station first. Or wherever Jane is.”

“All that extra driving,” I complained but got nothing more. “I won’t be long at the paper.”

I was ignored. Dolly was thinking.

“Can’t always leave Jane at the restaurant. Who knows what kind of germs she could pick up there?”

She stomped on the gas. I wondered if she was missing her siren, which Dolly used like a calling card, announcing her arrival wherever she went.

“After Claudine,” she said later. “You drive. I’ll call Lucky. Said he was going to call body shops, too, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen—that the car turns up at one of those. So many guys back in the woods’ll do body work a lot cheaper than the regular places. And keep it quiet.”

The house was little, almost lost under towering old oaks and behind thick sumac bushes. The open fields surrounding the house had been cut back long ago to a far ring of woods. Now the fields were covered with the low green fuzz of spring growth. No farming going on anymore. One of many hardscrabble farms started by people who kept coming to northern Michigan to plant corn and rows of soybean in sand and finally gave up when the soil and the farmer were exhausted and broke.

Claudine Worfman sat on the front porch of her house. She rocked as she watched us pull in and park in her drive that was nothing more than a bare earth track over humps of dead tree roots.

I saw the woman and poked Dolly.

“That’s her,” Dolly said and smiled a wicked smile. “I’m not going to be making her day, I’d say.”

She got out. I followed, staying behind her. I wanted to watch and listen to Dolly handle this big woman in a ruffled sundress, hair permed to within an inch of its life and held back by a green headband. Kind of a Medusa look to Claudine Worfman.

“Miz Worfman,” Dolly said, approaching the bottom of the steps.

“Deputy.” Claudine kept rocking.

“Could I speak to you a minute?”

“What if I say ‘Hell no’?”

“Then I’ll ask my questions anyway.”

“What if I go in the house and get a big broom to sweep you outta here?”

Dolly thought a minute, took off her hat and scratched at the back of her head. “Then I’m gonna have to take that big broom away from you and arrest you for assault.”

“On my own front porch?” The woman twisted back and forth in her chair but kept right on rocking. “You mean I can’t defend my property from troublemakers?”

“I’m not here to make any trouble, Miz Worfman. Just got a couple of questions for you.”

She rocked hard. And waited.

“Somebody ran into my car yesterday. It was parked. Done deliberately. I mean, they left the road to smash into it.”

“You want to take a look at my car? It’s in the garage, over there.” She pointed around to a one-car garage back beyond the house. “1988 Buick. Got a few dents but not what you’re looking for.”

Dolly shook her head. “No, I didn’t think it was you . . .”

“Not that I wouldn’t like to see that happen.” The woman smiled a wicked smile.

“My baby was in it.”

Claudine nodded, her face expressionless. She said nothing.

“She’s okay. Thanks for asking,” Dolly added facetiously.

“Why would I care about your baby? You care about mine? Sitting up there at Marquette?”

“Mine wasn’t cooking meth and almost blowing up a neighborhood.”

“That was a little fire. Nobody in danger.”

“Well,” Dolly went on as I stood there, not introduced and having no desire to be. “The reason I’m here is to ask you about Tommy’s friends. I remember some of them, after the trial, bragging they were going to get even for him . . .”

“I don’t know nothing about that. Seems more your problem than mine.”

Dolly turned slowly, as if to walk away. “Sometimes my problems get to be other people’s problems, too. Like now. If I heard you were the one egged those boys on to do something . . .”

“Well.” Claudine Worfman stood and stretched her wide and tall body. She flipped a slipping ruffled sleeve back up her arm. “You ever hear such a thing, you come right back here and we’ll talk about it. Until then, if you don’t mind, I got a cake with a file in it to bake for my poor child.”