Dead Sleeping Shaman (17 page)

It was only five-thirty
when I got back to Leetsville. I was meeting Crystalline and the others at six. They wanted to help, but I wasn’t coming up with anything for them to do. All the paths to an answer were so tortuous—one thing in one direction, something else in another. It wasn’t as if there were easy pieces here, all fitting together. I wished it would be more like writing a novel—things falling right into place, no hesitations, no gaping holes you could fly an airplane through.

I sat in my Jeep in front of EATS, grousing at life in general, at Dolly Wakowski, and at my own stupidity for letting her talk me into an involvement I didn’t want or need. I noticed the old lady, the string-gloved one, looking out one of the front, fly-specked windows. She didn’t notice me but sat looking north, delicately lifting a white coffee cup to her lips, one stiff pinky finger shot into the air.

I watched the overly made-up old woman and wondered again about her. She didn’t seem to be with the End Timers, nor anybody else. And why was Eugenia putting up with her in the restaurant day after day?

With her black lace, no-finger gloves, a hat with cherries on it sitting on top of her mass of unruly gray hair, and the round spots of rouge on her withered cheeks, she reminded me of an over-the-hill Mary Poppins. I watched the hand and coffee cup come up to her mouth. She took a sip, then put the cup down. Arm went up, then down. What the heck was she doing in Leetsville? None of my business, but since when did that stop me from asking questions?

As I sat there waiting, my imagination worked overtime. I gave the woman a checkered past, a history that crossed continents, a tragic life. I figured you didn’t end up in Leetsville unless you really wanted to. But then again, that was true of any place in the world. I finally got out of the car, ready to take on Crystalline and her friends, yet still wondering why I was doing this if Deputy Dolly was no longer interested.

My stomach went into spasms when I saw the sheet of paper flapping over the cigarette machine in EATS’ lobby. I might not be psychic, and sure had no shamanic powers, but I knew what this was about and knew that World War III was about to begin. At a time when I doubted everything about Deputy Dolly, I knew this was still going to send her over whatever fine edge she teetered along.

FLYNN FAMILY TREE, the paper said in a very large font. The drawing beneath the heading was crude. It had to be a tree, but one with lopsided branches stuck on a skinny stick-figure of a tree with a couple of roots shooting straight into the earth. Dolly’s family tree was really a short bush that looked as if it had grown against a wall, in deep shade.

Evidently, Eugenia hadn’t loaded up on genealogy stock yet. Or she was in such a big hurry to drum up business for her new venture she didn’t mind putting up kindergarten drawings.

I stood on tiptoe to see what Eugenia had found. The only names filled in were on the mother’s side, explaining the lopsided look. There was a grandmother and a grandfather: Catherine and Ricardo Thomas. I’d seen the rest a while ago, when Eugenia had displayed Dolly’s birth certificate.

Mother: Audrey Alice Thomas, 17 years old in 1974

Father: Harold Flynn. 31 years old in 1974

Sired: Delores Flynn, October 17, 1974. Women’s Hospital,
Detroit.

October 17! That was today. Dolly’s birthday. I’d never thought to ask. She seemed so … birthdayless, like somebody hatched from an egg.

I went in, lifting my nose, hoping for fresh baked bread, and took a seat near Eugenia’s front counter, where she busily polished the glass, blew at it, and then polished it again. The old bag lady sat at her usual window table, a plate of meatloaf untouched in front of her. I nodded. She nodded stiffly back. A few of the other tables were occupied by families of pilgrims. At others, Leetsvillians sat together whispering, their heads nodding. A lot going on in town for people who were used to solitude.

Eugenia glanced up as I ordered hot tea from Gloria. She grinned.

“So? Whadda ya think?” she called over.

“About that?” I nodded toward the vestibule.

“ ’Course. Told her I’d find something.”

I shook my head. “She’s going to be pissed off at you.”

Eugenia waved a hand. “Eh, she’ll get over it. Did you notice? Today’s her birthday.”

“I saw,” I said.

“Should we throw a party?”

“I’d wait until she sees what you’ve got up. Maybe fireworks enough right there.”

“Phooey. Dolly’s too sensitive. She’s always moaning about having no relatives and now I found her some. If she don’t like that I’m hanging her tree for everybody to see, that’s too bad. I got my career in genealogy to think of. I’m doing hers for nothing. Won’t be that way with other folks.”

I had a few other things to add but the door opened and Crystalline, along with her friends, walked in. Obviously the women didn’t mind the spotlight. Every head turned to watch them make their way to where I sat. Every pair of eyes in the place turned to the person next to them and rolled. Sonia looked particularly Goth with black eye makeup and a black headscarf drawn around her forehead. Felicia was done up with flowers and bows. Crystalline was her bigger-than-life self with red hair puffed and bunched into a cascading waterfall.

“We spent the day over at Seven Bridges on Valley Road,” Felicia said, leaning in close to me after ordering a diet Coke.

“It’s the water,” Sonia added. “Marjory always told us—when you’re upset, go stand by running water. That’s the thing that will make everything clear.”

“We all felt it,” Crystalline said. “There is the deepest reverence in rushing waters. Always cleansing, you know? That’s why this north country’s got the forces it’s got.”

“‘You can never step in the same river twice,’
” I misquoted, wanting to be in the loop on our mystical, magical country.

“Anyway,” Crystalline sighed and went on. “Standing there, on those bridges, and watching that water run beneath our feet. I can’t tell you …”

Felicia broke in, excited, “I sensed something special is going to happen. And pretty soon now. Like truth being discovered.”

“Me too,” Sonia, not to be left out, said. “But what I felt …
well … there will be death.”

Crystalline nodded, hair flopping into her eyes and having to be pulled back into place then pinned with a huge green barrette.

“This whole area is in store for something,” Crystalline went on. “Don’t know if it’s death or change, but you can feel it in the air. Maybe Marjory set all this in motion.”

“Reverend Fritch says the world’s going to end,” I reminded them, feeling chilled. “That’s pretty big.”

“Bull shit.” Sonia rapped the table with her knuckles, making her silver bell earrings give a small tinkle.

“Let’s not get carried away,” Crystalline clucked, then turned to me. Across from us, Sonia and Felicia argued in whispers. “If you ask me, Emily, I think we’d better get out to that campground soon and meet this Reverend Fritch. I’ll be able to tell you right away if the man is genuine or not. I know these things. And maybe we can figure out what Marjory meant by having to take care of something with him.”

“Those were her words? That she had to ‘take care of something with him’?”

Crystalline frowned, thinking. “Something like that. She was talking about him. I know that much because she had his website up. Seems she said …” Crystalline frowned hard as she thought, giving me a glimpse of a younger, more innocent woman. “What I remember was ‘somebody is going to have to do something about the whole thing.’”

“So, Emily,” Sonia leaned over and put her hand on mine. “I want to see this guy. I was thinking, maybe we should have a séance. You know, contact Marjory.”

Crystalline shook her head. “We don’t do parlor tricks, Sonia. You know what Marjory always said. What we do is honorable. We help and heal. Help and heal. No foot tapping and taking money for contacting passed love ones.”

“There’s a service tomorrow morning,” I said. “How about after that? Maybe in the early afternoon? I need to talk to him too.”

“Are we sayin’ the truth, about why we’re out there?” Sonia asked. “Or should we come up with a story … ?”

“Truth, Sonia,” Crystalline said. “We’ve got nothing to hide. Let’s go see what the man’s about, pick up on the scam and how he’s working it—if there is one—and find out if he knew Marjory.”

I agreed. We ordered meatloaf, ate, and made our plans. We said good-bye out front, agreeing to meet about noon to go to the campground. I stood, waving, as they drove off, then turned to find the old lady’s eyes on me through the window. She sat where she’d been sitting for hours. She lifted her coffee cup to her lips in a quick, pinky-pointing movement. I waved at her. I thought her eyes were on me but she didn’t wave back. The delicate, lace-covered hand took the cup to her lips, then down. Up, then down.

I was free to go home and write my next garden column, about the garden in winter, which would make it a short column since my garden would be under five feet of snow by January. But I was nothing if not resourceful. I’d come up with something—maybe a vole’s eye view of wintering tulip bulbs. But I didn’t have any tulip bulbs. The deer had already done away with them. Crocus, then. Or a worm’s eye view of rose bush roots. I drove home trying not to think about mysterious old ladies, or weird women who picked up their information from the air, or people who could be mean to little girls like Marjory and Dolly, or voles eyeing tulip bulbs, or mice drooling over the few rose bushes I had left.

I got home, found a quarter bottle of Pinot Grigio in the fridge, and went to bed with the bottle and P. D. James.

Sunday, October 18

9 days to go

All I wanted to
do Sunday morning was stay home, nurse my wine headache, and read the funnies to Sorrow, who lay on his back beside me on the bed, all four feet stuck up in the air.

When I’d gotten home the night before there’d been a call from Jackson, very apologetic about Bill’s party and telling me that Regina had explained to him how it was intrusive of him to ask to call an agent who was considering my work. At that point he gave a nervous laugh. “She also said I should never have invited her to the party without checking with Bill. She said I am a rude person but, of course, she doesn’t know me very well, yet.” There was a pause. “She reminds me of you, Emily. I rather like that particular kind of feistiness. Perhaps I’ve been missing it in my life. Would you say you were the rudder I needed to keep me on a straight course?” He made a thinking, kind of clucking, sound. “Wouldn’t that be something? I mean, if now I learn that what we had together was what I needed all along?”

My stomach was too tender for that much sugared pap so early in the day. I would not call him back. I would not call Dolly either. Let her call me. I was going to make a list of everything I’d learned about Marjory Otis so far and another list of what we still needed to know. I sat with my first cup of tea of the day—making it a chai, which warmed my soul. I started my lists. When I’d finished I found I knew a lot about the woman, and just as much I didn’t know:

Who had she come to Leetsville to help?

How was the Reverend Fritch involved?

Who had she taken out to Deward with her?

What did Arnold know about their mother?

Where was the other brother—Paul?

And the biggest questions of all: What was Marjory doing at Deward to begin with? What would make her go there, to a place she’d said she feared? And why did she fear it?

I made a list of people I needed to talk to, beginning with the Reverend Fritch, Arnold Otis, and Aunt Cecily. Most of all I had to sit down with Dolly and find out what was going on. Maybe I even needed to talk to Lucky, see what he was picking up from her. And, God help me, that Officer Winston from the Gaylord state police office, I had to get in touch with him. He was expecting results from me and Dolly. I didn’t know how he would feel about a reporter doing what a police officer should have been doing.

Bill called a little after nine to see if I wanted him to go with me to the next of the ghost towns on my list. I had this tug at my conscience. What I really wanted to do was go out to a ghost town with Bill, walk in the woods, enjoy what was promising to be a fine fall day, and get really happy. I wanted to be free of my obligation to a group of women I barely knew, going with them to a place where I’d been uncomfortable, and talking to people I thought were truly nuts.

“Can’t, Bill,” I said, letting my voice show the deep disappointment I felt. “I promised to go out to see the Reverend Fritch. It’s about Marjory Otis’ murder.”

He hung up reluctantly. Probably didn’t trust me not to turn up a dead body every story I went out on. I could see that, after a while, an editor might get suspicious. And—after a while—a thing like that might make any reporter nervous.

Sorrow and I took a long walk to clear our heads and check out the chipmunk population. I wanted to go up to Willow Lake Road and over to Harry’s to see how the courtship was going, but I didn’t like to take Sorrow there with me. Harry’s dogs went crazy at the sight of another animal. Anyway, with Harry, I never knew where the fine line between busybodyness and concern lay. He could get testy if I asked too many questions. What I would have to do was wait until he came to me, maybe with his new bride on his arm. Or mad as hell, and swearing off women for the rest of his life.

At my studio, I tried to work on the new book, Dead something or other, but it grew elusive, wouldn’t fall into a nice straight line I could follow from beginning to end. I figured I’d just name all my books starting with Dead. That way they’d be in a straight line—if they ever got published—in bookstores and libraries.

There was something there—to this new story I was writing. Dolly and I had lived it but I couldn’t get it to sit still on the computer. A young Indian woman kept jumping in and out of my vision. Lovely. Young. But scarred. I brought her forward in my head but she didn’t want to be trapped in words. Not yet. I would have to coax her, work with her, let her get to know me before I asked that she put her life in my hands. I made a few notes—on my part and on Dolly’s part in the story. Nothing more happened. I sat staring at the screen, let my finger rest on J, and watched a funny line of dancing j’s run across the screen. Time to get out of there.

I walked around Willow Lake, tip-toeing through wet places where the tag-alder and lake met. At one of the beaver’s slides, Sorrow ran in circles, nose to the ground, sniffing the six-inch lengths of wood the beaver had readied for transport down to his den where he would live off the cellulose all winter. The beaver, swimming around his conical house, wasn’t happy when he caught us at his slide. He paddled back and forth, slapping his tail on the water, trying to get a big enough wave going to scare us away. Sorrow watched him, trying to decide if it was worth the swim out to visit or not. Being the smartest dog on earth, Sorrow said the heck with a cold swim and the chillier welcome, and came bounding back to me. We moved on, making a bouquet of perfect red and gold and multi-colored leaves to take home with us, to put in my garage sale crystal vase and set where the sun would hit them, in front of the big front windows.

That was the good part of the day.

I stopped at the Green Trees Motel just after noon, figuring we didn’t need to take two cars out to the campsite. The women were ready, chattering among themselves, and coming up with questions to ask the reverend. All three were deeply into discovering what had happened to Marjory in that terrible place she had been afraid to go.

As we drove back through Leetsville, Crystalline wondered if she could see any of the photographs the police took of Marjory, there at Deward. Dead under the tree.

“Not that I want to see her … like that.” She made a face. “I mean, I can imagine how awful it was …”

I shook my head. “Not awful at all. She looked as if she was asleep. That’s what I thought …”

“What we were talking about was that maybe, by how she was sitting or something around her, we could figure out what happened.” Felicia leaned over the seat to join the conversation.

“I pick up things by holding a picture in my hand,” Sonia, her voice whispery for a change, offered from the other side of the back seat.

“I took photographs,” I said, only then remembering. “I’ll put them on my computer when I get home tonight and run off the best for you.”

“Could you run off all of what you have?” Crystalline asked, turning tear-filled eyes my way. “If there’s any chance … We want to help.”

I agreed, kicking myself for not remembering I had my own photos of the scene. If Dolly had been doing her job and realized what I’d done she would have asked for them before now or shown Crystalline the photos she’d taken. It was her fault I wasn’t doing the best work I could be doing. This was her department, damn it. I was only supposed to write the stories, not be at their center. I should have been Boswell to Dr. Johnson. Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes. Not this damned girl detective without a clue to her name.

By the time we pulled into the two-track leading to the campsite and the End Timers, I was fuming at Dolly all over again and deciding she could take over her own investigation or give it back to Gaylord. Officer Winston seemed like the kind of guy who would be glad to get us out of the way and hog glory to himself.

Well … not glory so much as aggravation and fear and feeling stupid and abandoned.

Damn Dolly. After this visit to the Reverend Fritch, I was going to hunt her down, make her tell me what was going on, or give her a knock on the head to bring her back to her senses.

Then I would wish her a happy birthday.