Dead Sleeping Shaman (20 page)

Still only 8 days to go

Now I had an
answer to one part of the puzzle: what had brought Marjory to Leetsville. Not what had taken her out to Deward; I didn’t know that piece yet. But at least we knew for certain it had something to do with her brother, Arnold Otis, and with the End Time cult. I had to talk to Mr. Otis. So many questions—about Marjory, about their mother and what had really happened to her. And about the reason she had to meet him in Leetsville, the thing that had put him in so much danger. Then, what I needed most to know was, why hadn’t he been here? If he was afraid for his own life, didn’t he care that his sister had put herself in danger?

All I wanted was to get home. I’d had more than enough of people and problems for one day. I took the note with me, tucked into my jacket pocket. I would turn it over to Lucky and Officer Winston on Wednesday. Maybe they’d know what it meant or at least could force the wannabe senator to come to Leetsville, sit down, and fill in the empty places in Marjory’s story.

My stomach growled as I turned onto Willow Lake Road, then down my driveway, stopping only to get the newspaper from the box beside the road. I was already visualizing a Swiss cheese omelet with a slice of thick peasant bread from the freezer. Maybe I had half a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I thought so. And it would be cold. And, if I could work up the ambition, I’d throw together a bread pudding. I’d learned to make one pretty close to Emeril’s while covering Mardi Gras in New Orleans one year, but I nixed the bread pudding pretty quick. Not the kind of thing you fussed over for yourself. Then I nixed the nixing. I was worth a little bread pudding.

Like visions of sugar plums exploding into bright pieces in my head, my omelet, my glass of wine, and my bread pudding went off like firecrackers lost in an endless sky. Harry waited on the side porch. Sorrow, getting his ears scratched, sat upright beside Harry’s poky old knees.

He stood slowly when I got to my door and pushed a joyous Sorrow down. I invited Harry in. He usually preferred outdoors for talks but this time he followed and took a seat on the sofa while I made us both a cup of Earl Grey tea, though after one attempt to get his bent finger through the delicate cup handle he gave up and ignored the tea.

“Ya see, Emily,” he started, skinny legs together. “What I’m here to ask you is to go down to Delia’s house with me. We’re having trouble. Delia’s agreed to marry me but her mother’s acting up something awful.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like the thought of living alone after all these years.”

He shook his head. “Got a son down in Atlanta, Georgia, she could go live with. Or I could move into their house there down the road. But she says that’s never going to happen.”

“Could it be your dogs, do you think?”

He gave me an odd look, as if a thing like that had never entered his head.

“So, what I thought you might do,” he went on, ignoring me, “if yer willin’, that is, is to go down there with me, tell Bertha I’m a good provider and how I’m so handy you couldn’t live here without me.”

“You mean now?” There was no hiding my reluctance.

“Yes, now. We can’t just sit around waiting for the old woman to change her mind. I’ve got to do something …” This was as excited as I’d ever seen Harry get. “If that reverend’s right, well, I’m not gonna spend these last days living all alone.”

I sighed and agreed. We drove over to Delia’s in my car because I wouldn’t go in his.

The Swanson house was like all the others along the road, set back in the woods, an old farm house with a steep pitched roof so the snow would slide off, two stories—all the bedrooms upstairs—and a small porch that had obviously been put on years after the house was built. All the houses up here had been built for utility. Maybe the Swansons had actually tried farming in what locals called our Kalkaska sands. Maybe that was the way everybody built their houses back sixty years or so ago. People up here didn’t look for frills.

Delia was expecting us and led us to what she called “the back parlor.” I sat uncomfortably on an upright chair while Harry took a chair across from me. Delia excused herself, bowing her curly gray head and going off to get her mother, Bertha, who was taking a nap. The rousing of Bertha and getting her down the stairs took at least fifteen minutes, during which time Harry sat rolling his eyes at me. An unhappy Bertha came in from the hall with Delia holding her elbow and directing her to the nearest chair. Bertha sat and frowned at Harry and then at me.

“You’re that woman from down the road,” she said. “The one who’s trying to write stories or something.”

I nodded that the description fit me so I must be that woman.

“Nice of you to call.” The old lady dripped sarcasm. “Finally.”

She eyed Harry and said nothing to him. Harry’s face reddened. He looked hard at the floor.

“You come with a reason in mind?” she went on. “Or just being neighborly?”

Delia cut in, before her mother got too testy. “Miz Kincaid came over to put in a good word for Harry. We know you’ve got yourself set firmly against us getting married …”

“Bah,” the old woman spit out. “Married! At your age? You’ve gone straight out of your mind. And Harry Mockerman, of all people. Couldn’t you find yourself a man so you could marry up in the world instead of down?”

The woman made a face and looked toward the door she’d come in, as if planning her escape.

“Harry’s a fine man …” Delia said, defending him as he sat on the edge of his chair with his hands working at each other in his lap.

“Harry’s a good friend of mine,” I said. “He’s a wonderful cook and if I ever need anything done around my house, why, I wouldn’t call anybody else. He’s honest …”

“Phooey, you say. He’s a handyman. To think I’d live to see the day my daughter goes off with a handyman … well …”

The thought was beyond words for Bertha.

“Don’t you think your daughter’s old enough to make her own choices?” I asked, not meaning to set off a civil war. But I did.

Bertha narrowed her eyes. “Get that person out of my house. I want her outta here!”

She coughed, then put a hand to her chest and thumped a few times. She fell back in her chair, mouth open, eyes rolling. Something very serious was going on. I hoped I hadn’t brought on a heart attack—the woman was in her nineties, after all.

Delia went to her mother, then turned to Harry and me. “Maybe you’d better go. She gets like this from time to time.”

I got up as fast as Harry did. At the front door I turned to try to say I was sorry but Delia, bending over her mother and whispering quietly to her, looked up and nodded. She mouthed “thanks” at me. We were out of there as fast as Harry’s old legs could pump their way to my car.

I stopped to let him out at the head of his drive, trying to say I was sorry if I’d brought on a heart attack. Harry only waved a hand in the air and grunted something that sounded like “That one don’t have a heart to begin with” before he was off and hidden among the overgrown trees.

The omelet tasted flat. I’d already had eggs that day, two more seemed to cement the fact I was alone and had nobody to cook for but myself. I decided it was definitely a night calling for Emeril’s bread pudding and put everything into the bowl—the hard bread cut into squares, more eggs—everything. I got out the cinnamon can and tapped it over the bowl. Nothing. No cinnamon. What was bread pudding without cinnamon? I couldn’t waste the other ingredients so I tried more sugar and some nutmeg, but after it was baked it tasted bad. Just bad. I scraped the pudding onto a paper plate to put out for the birds and decided to get my mind off murders and sisters and brothers and everything I’d been thinking about—like Dolly Wakowski having lost her mind.

I went on the Internet and looked up ghost towns in Kalkaska, Antrim, and Grand Traverse counties. There were plenty. I chose two to do the next day: Rugg and South Boardman. I stumbled on a site that listed all the ghosts in Kalkaska County, and decided to broaden my article. Not just ghost towns, but actual ghosts. Now I was having fun. This was something I might enjoy, without too much running around, or going to places such as Deward.

I dug my notebook out of my purse, wrote down directions and what I might find at Rugg Pond and South Boardman, then went out to my car for the camera I’d left on the back seat.

When I was doing stories, features like this one, I always made sure I had spare batteries in the camera case. Being out in the woods with the light dying and the batteries gone was an event I didn’t want to have happen to me again.

And an extra film disk. I slid the disk door open and removed the disk I had in there. It could be full. Better to delete the photos I didn’t need …

It hit me. What I had on the cartridge were photos from Deward. Not just the pictures I took for my story, but pictures I took of Marjory, laid out under the tree. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference—nothing in the pictures the cops didn’t already have—but I wanted to see for myself. Maybe give the photos to Crystalline.

At my desk, I slipped the disk into the printer and turned everything on. It took a while, as it always does, but eventually the computer recognized the printer and they agreed to bring up my photos. I couldn’t tell much from the small snapshot size of the photos, so I made them full screen and set it to a slide show.

One by one, all the pictures I’d taken that day—of the river, of the foundations of houses, of the trees, the railroad grade—everything moved past me at ten-second intervals.

Then Marjory. Just as serene. Just as colorful. Hands in her lap. I felt that she wasn’t a stranger now that I knew what her life had been. She lay with her hat off to the side, eyes staring out. The jack pine cast shadows even at noon, so some of the photos were dark. Others were crisp and clear. The images went by and the show came to an end. I pushed the button, starting at the beginning again. There’d been something …

I ran the slide show three more times before I chose the photos I wanted to copy.

Something near Marjory’s body that I hadn’t noticed when I was out there. It was caught in the way the sun had moved overhead, or in the shadow of the tree. Something about the ground—a shape. I had to show this to Lucky. I’d show this to Officer Winston. Maybe I was crazy, looking for answers where there was nothing. Or maybe I was so frustrated with how slow this murder investigation was going that I was seeing things. Or, even if what I saw was there, maybe it meant nothing.

Tuesday, October 20

7 days ’til the end

It wasn’t simply because
of the story I was working on that I went to Rugg Pond. Nor just because I was worried about Dolly, though I was certainly worried. Rugg Pond was a place to go, like Seven Bridges, when you need to get in touch with nature. You could stand at the dam, water rushing hard, falling to a riverbed below, or you could stop on the other side where the pond was tranquil, flat, and quiet until it slowly seeped over a catch basin that fed the water to the dam.

I stood for a while looking down as the noisy water cascaded over rocks, swirled in worn places, then fell again, then again, the sound deafening, mist rising as the water moved, hit the bubbling Rapid River, and coursed faster downstream. A root-exposed maple leaned out, colorful leaves rattling in the clouds of mist for the last season—the brightest fall of a tree’s life, just before it died. By winter, the lower branches would be encased in ice, frozen in place, roots pulled from the ground, and next spring the tree would be dead.

Too much about death in my head, as if it was the most important part of living. It wasn’t. I leaned my elbows on the metal railing and watched the water do what water was meant to do.
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances …

A cliché, even in Shakespeare’s time, but like most clichés, worthy of a revisit.

Exits and entrances. In between a story is told. I wondered about Marjory’s story, the scenes that led her back to Deward. Was it about her mother, Winnie Otis? Winnie Otis, in her madness, had always returned to Deward when she needed to be alone. There was a family history that drew her there—back into pioneering times. Then that same history drew Marjory. Buried within families there were often secrets. In mine it was my grandfather who went crazy and tried to murder my grandmother one January night. My father told me once he thought it was that shameful secret that killed my mother. She’d carried the knowledge deep but had to be nice to my grandfather. Mother never said a word to me, burying first her mother—with her father leaning in to kiss his dead wife’s cheek as if he’d been the finest, most loving man, all through their lives together—and then burying her father, in a cheap pine box going into an unmarked grave.

That was anger.

And Marjory? What brought her back to Deward? A letter from a brother—we knew that now. But what part did the ghost town play in the thing that happened to her? She wouldn’t have come back to a place when she was afraid of it. She must have trusted the person she was with. So, trusting … who is it that women most trust? Friends? Relatives? Strangers?

Anyone?

I shook my head and went to stand on the tranquil side of the dam. A few late swans cruised the far shore. Starlings, in groups, swooped and soared across the water’s surface, chattering and carrying on before flocking to fly off south. There were a few geese up on the grass. Every year, as the geese got into formation, honked orders, and flew away, I thought of rats leaving a sinking ship. But in the spring, when I heard their honking overhead, I’d get tears in my eyes. They were back and I’d made it through another winter—by myself, with only a few nice guys to help me, like Harry Mockerman and my snowplow man.

I took photographs to go with my story, but there wasn’t much left of the town that had, at one time, been called Mossback. In 1902 fire wiped out the buildings. In 1916, while a Waldo Yoemans was helping to search for Fred Hill, presumed drowned while fishing in the Rapid River, Yoemans’ store, too, burned to the ground. Nothing of the stores or post office or people left. They’d had their time on stage. That act was finished. I couldn’t even see the railroad grade that brought the train to town back then. I’d have to make the past live through words.

There was one stately home I wanted to photograph. The beginnings of the place went back to the Civil War and Rolando F. Rugg, once the sheriff of Kalkaska County. He enlisted with Company D, Fiftieth New York Engineers, served until July 1865, then learned carpentry after the war and came to Michigan. Mr. Rugg, one day, rode his horse into town to cash a $12 check, his pension for being in the war, and dropped dead in the store.

Odd to think of people who thought it a good idea, like me, to make a life where winters went on forever, where the ground was like quicksand—hard to farm, the distances between towns wide. It seemed that the biggest connection between people, over all of time, was their need to be away from crowds and better their lot in life. Made me wonder, was that what I was doing? And how was I better off? Certainly no crowds. Certainly a lot of new and interesting and individual friends. Certainly a life that wasn’t counted off in clock ticks with me salivating to get moving, like one of Pavlov’s dogs answering a bell. Starvation could loom. Maybe I would be found one spring—like an old couple at a nearby place still called Starvation Lake—stiff and cold and very skinny.

I went back to my notes, trying to get a handle on my inability to concentrate for very long.

I tucked my notebook into my jacket pocket and pulled out the envelope with the photographs I’d run off the night before. One by one, as I stood there far from Deward, I looked at them and let myself go back to that morning, and the woman laid out beneath the jack pine. I looked closely at her chin, dipping down into her chest. There was nothing to see. I couldn’t have known.

There were photos of the tree behind her. I’d taken a picture while turned toward the path leading in from the approach road. I’d taken pictures while squatting on my haunches, down at her level, close to the ground. There were two of these, dead-on photos with her eyes looking past me, over my shoulder, as if someone knelt back there.

And the last two, the ones I couldn’t get out of my head. Something there. I wished I could ring my head like a gong, make everything I knew settle into place. What I needed was Dolly’s pragmatic brain. I needed her telling me to “get real” or “try to make some sense, ok?” I needed her bringing me down to earth.

I told myself I didn’t want to find anything. It was probably the way the sun fell—an odd shadow because it had been close to noon when the sun is directly overhead and the light is flat; not a good time to take photos. I would have to go back there and prove to myself that what I saw outlined on my photo didn’t exist. Shadows in a photo were only shadows—they might take forms and hint at more, but they were only shadows.

Why didn’t I believe it? I looked closer at those two photos then put them away. Something there. It meant going back to Deward.

I put off driving to South Boardman, because I’d heard there wasn’t much left of the old town which once stood along US131. There were other towns to find—near Grawn, Keystone Pond. Maybe Old Mission. I wanted to talk to Jim at the country store out there. And then I would fill in with ghosts I’d found: a ghostly plumber mailing a letter at the Kalkaska Post Office; a Civil War soldier reading while sitting on the shore of Log Lake; a headless woman in Advent Swamp; a child in an upstairs room of a building that had once been the local funeral parlor.

I drove back to my house because I needed Sorrow. If I was going to Deward alone, at least my happy-go-lucky dog could go with me. Now that I was deeply into ghosts and hauntings and places with histories, I’d spooked myself to the point where if Sorrow didn’t go, neither did I.

At Deward Sorrow took off running, ears laid back, as soon as I parked to the side of the sandy two-track and let him out of the car. The day was overcast, chilly; the trees had either dropped all of their leaves or the leaves were that bloody end-of-season color that wasn’t pretty any longer, only burned looking.

Because I’d gotten myself so involved with ghosts, I was convinced Marjory would be there again. She would tip her head up this time, greet me, smile, and wish me a good day. As I walked around the last bend before Deward, I stopped a minute, confusing Sorrow into a sliding halt in the sand. He came bounding back to see what I’d found that he’d missed, sniffing around my feet, forgetting himself and jumping up against me. Content that I was still me, and ok, he ran off, down the path toward the town.

Huge questions bothered me.
If a brother wanted her help, what did it have to do with Deward? And which brother was it? Arnold, the brother running for state senator, a very visible figure, probably powerful? Paul—who might not even be alive?

There was nothing under the tree, just scuffed dirt and disturbed grasses where Marjory had lain and the police had walked. I stopped on the trail. The tree was absent of crows now. I knelt in the exact place where I’d shot the photos of Marjory and the ground around her—before the police got there, before anything was disturbed. What I’d seen in the photo was a faint depression in the ground, a large rectangle filled with gnarled weeds and disturbed earth, but sunken—like the foundations of the houses. I walked around the depression, bending to brush leaves away as I moved. About the size of a grave. But not mounded. Or, if once mounded, not now.

I looked at the picture. The photo showed the dimensions of the rectangle better than I could make out in front of me. There was something there, not far from where Marjory had lain. I sat at the head of the rectangle, putting my hand down on the sunken earth. I closed my eyes as I sat there, trying to see what Marjory could see; maybe visualize what Crystalline or Felicia or even Sonia might see. I got nothing. I moved to the other end of the rectangle, carefully brushing away dead leaves. Both my hands were within the rectangle; my head was bowed. I closed my eyes and wrapped my fingers around sticks lying on top of the dirt. I held on to the sticks, feeling them, seeing them as parts of the jack pine, or maybe bits of underbrush. I lifted one, hoping there was something in it that could help me. Wishing I could find answers to questions I couldn’t form.

Something stuck into my thumb. I threw the stick down and looked at my hand where blood pulsed out in a slow ooze around a thorn—a curved, triangular thorn lodged firmly in my flesh.