Dead Sleeping Shaman (10 page)

Still 13 days of sunrises and sunsets

Fuller’s EATS, with its
upside-down neon arrow pointing toward the door, was already crowded, the parking lot filled with pickups, rusty Chevys, and new Toyotas. People had their supper early in Leetsville. I parked and went in, pausing in Eugenia Fuller’s vestibule to take a quick glance at the latest genealogy sheets she’d pulled from the Internet and hung around the walls, some with big golden stars denoting special people. Since she considered herself an expert in tracing family trees, she’d hung a sign above the doorway into the restaurant: EUGENIA’S GENEALOGY SERVICE: Let Me Find The Lost Sheep For You.

Eugenia used to concentrate on her own relatives, especially those who’d been hanged, until she claimed Billy the Kid and Annie Oakley—people like that. Some of us caught on they weren’t really her family, which took the fun out of it for Eugenia. Soon she was researching other people’s kinfolk. So far she hadn’t zeroed in on me, but there were quite a few in town getting mad at her when they walked in for a quiet meatloaf dinner and came face to face with old Aunt Tilly, who murdered her husband back in 1888, and who the family had been pretending never existed for more than a hundred years. EATS was a lot more interesting since a few of the local families stormed in to register their complaints with Eugenia’s “damn fat nose stickin’ into business you got no business sticking it into” or “don’t you go hangin’ no more damn lies about the Abbots, ya hear?”

Angry families boycotted Eugenia’s place for a week or two but then, one by one, came back because staying away from EATS meant knowing nothing of what was going on in town. If EATS was the center of the universe for the meatloaf special, it was also the center of Leetsville’s gossip patrol and helping hands—if anybody got burned out and needed clothes, if a wife was getting beat up out at a house back in the woods and needed to hide, or if a teenager wanted somebody calm to talk to after getting in trouble with Lucky Barnard or Dolly Wakowski, EATS was the place to spread the word. People in Leetsville never turned their backs on each other. There was something so real about the people, I was still fascinated by how the village worked—taking care of their own, chastising their own. Committing a crime meant instant shame. Being a lush meant people trying to help find a cure—all kinds of suggestions from rehab to a copper bracelet. Problems belonged to everybody. A child going wrong wasn’t cause for gossip as much as cause for help. Leetsville was a place where troubles were talked about openly. “Things” weren’t hidden since those “things” were a part of everybody’s life. So many middle-class myths found no place in Leetsville. Life was as it was. Some ran to religion, some to alcohol, some to drugs, some to anger, but most accepted life the way it came. They enjoyed the good days and shared the bad.

Every table in the restaurant was filled. The air was thick with smoke though Eugenia had installed something called a smoke zapper that added to the din with sudden ZAPs and sounds more like flies dying than smoke being eaten. I stood in the open doorway checking out the filled tables until I spotted Dolly and Crystalline in a corner booth. They sat with Eugenia of the big high blond hair and double chins that trembled as she talked earnestly to Dolly. Making my way across the room, threading through chairs stuck out in the aisles, people stopped me a couple of times. Word had spread I’d found a body out at Deward and I’d taken on a kind of macabre sheen of celebrity. Since it was a matter of pride to me that Leetsvillians now allowed me in, a stranger from a strange land—Ann Arbor—I stopped to talk, giving out as much information as I could.

I greeted the women in the corner booth—Dolly and Crystalline on one side, Eugenia on the other. They were deep into something that was making Dolly and Eugenia mad, their chins stuck out toward each other, heads waggling, lips thin. I’d sat through many of these quarrels and figured it might take a minute or two.

Eugenia was in the middle of a sentence, hand curled around the edge of the table, bottom slightly lifted from the seat, preparing to get up and let me sit down though she had things yet to say. I waited patiently, knowing Eugenia could hold her retreating pose for a good long time. She went on with whatever it was she was angry at until Dolly stopped her midway with a pithy thing she’d thought of.

I waited, shifting from one foot to the other, hoping Eugenia would soon get over her current snit and leave. When the door to the restaurant opened, I turned to see who it might be. An old woman I’d never seen before stepped tentatively into the room. I figured she had to be with the cult but she was alone, not in a group of three and four as the others were. And she certainly wasn’t bald. Nor wearing a sexless robe. If anything, she looked more like Crystalline, or Marjory—kind of blowsy, kind of overdressed, kind of odd.

I watched as the woman came around between chairs and tables, hesitating, searching for someone or something. She looked hard at Eugenia, who was too deep into her argument with Dolly to notice.

The woman, sixty or seventy, wore a long black skirt. Her bright blue sweater was of, what looked like, cashmere. Probably not. Not from the rest of what she wore: a jumble of bright green scarves wrapped around her wrinkled neck; black string-gloves on her blunt, old hands; and worn but still stylish Gucci shoes on pudgy feet in black lisle socks with a hole above one ankle. She had applied almost clown-like makeup around her eyes, mascara seeping through wrinkles down to her cheeks, and lipstick that merged into feathered lines around her mouth. I had no idea what look she was going for, but what she’d achieved wasn’t particularly attractive.

The woman stopped and put her hand on a chair back for support. She looked at Eugenia again, frowning. She patted nervously at the white hair piled on her head, caught with a rhinestone-studded comb that threatened to fall off to one side. She took a deep breath, as if for strength. After a few hesitant seconds, she turned to me, her almost opaque blue eyes giving me the once-over and leaving me with the odd feeling I should know her. She stared at my University of Michigan sweatshirt and worked her way down to my paint-stained jeans. With a sniff, and a firm set of her chin in the air, she brushed past me, pulling her calf-length skirt to one side as she made her way to a four-top Gloria, the waitress, was washing off while spraying crumbs into the air behind her.

Another one of Eugenia’s indigent souls, I thought as she settled at the table and lost herself in Eugenia’s sticky menu.

Eugenia looked up at me, her cheeks a high red with whatever anger was taking her at the moment. “You going out there tonight, to that revival thing, Emily?” she demanded, blowing out a sound of derision. “Woulda thought you were smarter than that. The old man’s a crook, you know.” She slapped one large hand on the tabletop and lifted her behind up an inch more. “You ask me, he’s trying to get everything those folks own. Scarin’ them for a reason, I’ll bet. I always say, you look where people are putting fear into other people and you’ll find a crook.”

I shrugged, not wanting to give away too much information. When it came time to have news spread around the town, that’s when Eugenia would be useful. Right now no one needed to know why we were going to the meeting that night.

“According to the Reverend Fritch, you’ll be caught deader than a doornail if you don’t get out there and listen,” Dolly, leaning across the table, warned.

Crystalline leaned back and rolled her eyes at me.

Eugenia’s ringlets bobbed and the loose flesh under her chin flapped as she laughed. “Yeah. Like dying scares me. You, me, everybody—we’ve all been dying since the day we was born. You realize that? The guy out there—that Reverend Fritch—he doesn’t know any better than me when I’m going to die. And I sure don’t have to sign over all my worldly goods to buy me a place to the left of a fiery furnace.”

“You don’t know anything, Eugenia,” Dolly said, a couple of red spots blooming on her cheeks. “And I wouldn’t go around slandering anybody until you’ve got something to go on.”

“Heard plenty already. His people come in here bragging about how they gave away all their money and wanting me to feed them for free. Like it’s a contest and the biggest fool wins. But that big fool isn’t going to be me. Have to be blind not to see what’s going on out there. He’s doing nothing but breaking the law.”

“No proof of anything wrong.” Dolly balled her fists and thudded them on the table. One thing she didn’t like was people telling her what was and what wasn’t against the law.

Eugenia waved an angry hand and stood, turning to give me half the wattage of her usual greeting.

“Who’s your new customer?” I nodded to the table the old woman had commandeered, spreading her wide skirt around her and plunking her elbows in the middle of the red Formica.

Eugenia, who’d been too busy talking to notice the woman, looked over at her then back to me. Her mouth opened a little. Her drawn-on eyebrows elevated. I could see she was thinking hard. Finally she shrugged. “Striking woman. Looks like she could use a hot meal, don’t it?” She put her shoulders back, straightened the shoulder pads in her white blouse, and made straight for the somewhat familiar-looking woman’s table.

Crystalline greeted me when I finally got to sit down across from her. Her face, free of makeup, was drawn and sober; her eyes puffed and tear-washed. The red hair that had seemed so alive before lay flat against her head, the pouf deflated, as if a force had been withdrawn.

I leaned forward to whisper, “That woman over by the wall, at the table by herself, is she part of your group?”

Crystalline squinted, found the woman, and shook her head. “Sure as hell looks like we do, I guess. Could be one of us. But she isn’t. Never seen her before.”

We studied the menu. I was hoping for shrimp scampi or maybe a tuna steak but realistically considered the salad bar with cheese ball and crackers, or the meatloaf.

“Eugenia puts on quite a feed,” Dolly said toward Crystalline.

When Gloria came over, green order pad in hand, Crystalline ordered vegetable beef soup, which sounded good to me so I changed my order. Crystalline had to go to the bathroom then and stood, drawing her long red, silver-edged skirt around her. I watched her walk off, drawing every eye in the restaurant after her.

I leaned toward Dolly, whispering to keep our conversation from the antenna ears beamed our way. “There wasn’t a thing about Marjory’s mother in the newspaper morgue. I went in this morning. Nothing. Nothing on a Paul Otis either. Old high school stuff on Arnold—debate captain. That’s all. Anything new on Marjory?”

Dolly looked around the room, daring people to go on staring at us. “Strangled all right.”

I shook my head. “I saw the rope …”

“Compression of the trachea, pathologist said. Died of asphyxia. Rope. Ordinary rope.”

“Does that mean no blood?”

“It was there. Very little. Because her chin was down and that hat was over her face, you didn’t see it. Mark of the rope wasn’t deep, but well defined—bled in places. You missed the cyanosis in the face. Guess you weren’t looking for a dead lady with a red face.”

“No question then.”

Dolly nodded.

“How’d anybody get her out there? Crystalline said she hated Deward, was even afraid of it. Any drugs in her system?”

Dolly shook her head. “Don’t know yet. Too soon for toxicology to be back.”

“God, this is frustrating,” I said. “When will those women from Toledo get here?”

“By morning. We’ll go to the revival tonight—see the reverend if we can, then interview her friends. Somebody’s gotta know something.”

When Crystalline came back, I told her I hadn’t found anything about Marjory Otis’ mother in the old newspapers. No mention of a missing woman, no death notice. Nothing that might help us.

“I thought—because they were from an old family connected to Deward—that there would be something,” I added.

Crystalline shrugged and sniffed back more tears. The food came. We were quiet as we ate. Something about what was ahead stilled any interest in talking. We soon got up to leave, heading to the front counter where Eugenia stood, hand out, ready to take our money.

“Your real name is Delores Flynn, right?” Eugenia asked Dolly after she’d paid and left a dollar on the counter for Gloria.

Dolly narrowed her eyes and took a step away. “I’m not paying for any of this family search stuff you’re doin’. Don’t have money for crap like that. I had Chet. He was my family. And don’t think you can show off by doing it behind my back. Won’t get a cent outta me. Not one red cent.”