Dead Sleeping Shaman (5 page)

Still 15 days

A neat pile of
doggie turds waited on the kitchen floor, narrow wafts of steam rising. There was a puddle of water next to Sorrow’s bowl. I assumed the water was truly water, dripped from one of Sorrow’s long, extensive drinks, and not dog pee. I cleaned up the very neatly coiled pile of shit, wrapped it in a newspaper, and set it out on the side porch to go to the garbage can.

There was another pile to deal with here, a message from Jackson, who was staying in a cabin over on Spider Lake, outside of Traverse City, for what seemed to be an interminable sabbatical year of writing an opus on the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims. He was into his second year up here. I wondered if he would ever go back to teaching at the University of Michigan.

“I won’t take no for an answer,” he was saying. “I haven’t seen you in weeks so I’m picking up pasta at Gio’s, in Kalkaska, and coming over tomorrow evening. Now, don’t bother making faces and thinking up ways to rid yourself of my company, Emily. I’m going to be there. If you are still mad at me for that last … well, indiscretion, which meant nothing, and shouldn’t matter anyway since we are no longer married, as you should, by now, have noticed. You will simply have to get over it. See you about six. Oh, and tie that damn dog up. I will be wearing new, and very expensive, slacks and a cashmere sweater. I’d like not to have doggie prints on at least one outfit.”

Yuck.
I punched the button, erasing Jackson. No use calling him back and pleading the Black Plague. Nothing stopped him when he was on a tear. Like the men and women of the United States Post Office, neither wind nor rain nor sleet nor dark of night deterred Jackson when he wanted something.

I called Bill Corcoran, at the paper. At least I could pretend to be a reporter.

“You found her?” he asked.

“I went out there to do the ghost town thing.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I’ve got photos.”

“Of Deward?”

“Yes. And of the body.”

“Hmm, I don’t think so. Not the body. We’re not that kind of newspaper. Tell you what, I’ll run with whatever you email me. Save the photos. Keep checking with Lieutenant Brent. Find out who the woman was and what happened to her.”

His voice trailed off as he leaned away from the phone. I could visualize him in his cluttered office, large head with longish straight brown hair bent over the phone, his big-framed glasses slowly riding down his wide nose, and his middle finger going up, pushing the glasses, holding them in place.

“Looks like strangulation,” I said.

“Um, murder. I’ll want you to stay right on it.”

“Dolly might know who she is. They got a missing persons report this morning. Dolly thinks the description is close.”

“Get back to me when you get the ID, and anything else you’ve got.” He hesitated. “You working with her on this one?”

“You know Dolly. If there’s a way she can get herself, and me, involved, she’ll do it.”

“Hasn’t worked out too badly for you,” he said, obviously not wanting misery from me. “Got a book from that last one, didn’t you? What about that business you two got into with the Indians? You writing that one?”

“Yeah, well, haven’t sold the first one yet.”

“You will. It’s a good book.”

“I did hear from an agent, a woman who’s interested. I’m hoping …”

“Great!” At last, a friend who wished me well. “Keep me in the loop. Sure hope this works for you. Still looking for more freelan-cing?”

“Of course. Even if this agent takes me on, there’s no money until she sells it. And even then, the advance will be small. I’m not known …”

“I’d like to talk to you when you come to town. There may be a slot here for you … nothing full time.”

“Not obits again. That didn’t work too well.”

“A column.”

I thought fast.

“What kind?”

“We could talk about it.”

“When? Tomorrow morning Brent wants me in Gaylord to give a formal statement. I could come after that …” Thoughts of calling Jackson with my excuse for not being home when he brought his dinner ran through my head.

“No hurry.”

“But …”

“Whatever … oh, and I’d like to have both you guys over for dinner, pay back you and Jackson for your past hospitality. Maybe Friday? Seven o’clock? And Emily, sorry it took me so long. I guess, with Jackson and Ramona—well you know what happened. I’ve been holding off.”

“Sure. That would be great.” It had been one dinner at Jackson’s, with me a reluctant hostess and Bill bringing a friend, Ramona Sheffield, a small redhead who worked at the Dennos Museum. Ramona and Jackson ended up as … well, not friends so much as … I caught Jackson and Ramona … shall we say
in flagrante delicto
?
Translation: while the crime is flaming hot.
Water under the bridge. I even thought of Ramona fondly now. She’d saved me from making a huge mistake where Jackson was concerned.

“I’ll call Jackson,” he said.

“About the column …”

“Whenever.” He hung up, dashing any hope I had of telling Jackson I would be away on important journalism business all day tomorrow.

So, no Traverse City. No nailing down more newspaper work, which I needed desperately since the winter gas bills and plowing bills and roof shoveling bills would soon be coming in. There was money left from the divorce and from my dad’s life insurance, but it had to last. There wasn’t a single penny for anything but the barest of necessities.

No putting Jackson off. I supposed I should vacuum the dog hair off the rug, or at least get that interesting cobweb up near the ceiling. What I did was tell myself I would think about all of that tomorrow—like Scarlett. Thinking was making my brain throb.

It was dusk, but still better to be out at the lake with Sorrow. Though I didn’t have as long a history with him as I had with Jackson Rinaldi, it sure was happier. I called my dog, kissed his eager black-and-white head, looked into bright happy eyes, and figured maybe he was the best, and least complicated, friend I had in the world. We headed down to Willow Lake to frustrate the ducks and anger the beaver.

I picked up the sandy, slobbery stick from where Sorrow had dropped it on the wobbly old dock. I gave the stick a long, hard toss, as far as I could get it, out into the evening-still lake. Before the stick hit the water with a mighty splash, Sorrow launched his big black-and-white body off into space, shaking the dock and me. He hit the water, wallowed around for a minute, then struck out for the place where the stick floated, his paws cutting the water, chin up, head focused on nothing but that magnificent prize. Over near the beaver’s den, there was a splash as the angry rodent slapped the water with his tail and retreated to his house.

Sorrow had to be part retriever no matter what else our vet, Doc Crimson, claimed for him. Maybe part some kind of English sheepdog, too. Part mastodon. Parts of a lot of things I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, name. His mother must have been quite the slut, one of a long line of sluts, to have spawned a dog of so many flavors.

I watched him swim full-heartedly after that stick and couldn’t remember ever not having him with me. Sorrow might be ugly and ungainly—an animal that did nothing but annoy me most of the time—but when I needed him to come lay his head in my lap, roll his eyes up so that the red rims showed, and give me total and complete love, my heart felt as if it could burst out of my body. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t remember ever being affected by Jackson that deeply.

If I could only find a man like Sorrow …

Christ! I thought, standing there on the dock in long shadows, watching my dog and hugging my sweater close, the last thing I needed was a new man in my life. The very thought of picking up someone’s dirty underwear and smelly socks, or having to put meals on the table—how quickly experience punctures romance.

A tired sun sprang from behind a bank of surly clouds for just a minute, then it was gone. The air was so crisp you could take a bite out of it. Willow Lake lay quiet in the dying light. The water circles Sorrow made with his arcing leaps from the dock moved off in widening silver rings, catching the lighted clouds in sparkles. Around the lake, the willows had turned a soft yellow, branches hanging into the water. Red maples, golden oaks, tarnished beech and birch—they blended into a hazy, moving, mirrored image of autumn.

Sorrow crawled from the water, dropped his stick, and squatted to pee—like a girl dog. Something was delayed in Sorrow. He should have been lifting his leg by now. It was one of my many worries—that he would never develop fully because all he had was me: no guy to show him how to do it right.

When he finished, he retrieved his stick, parted the reeds along the shore, and bounced down the dock to drop the stick next to my foot. He shook. Water flew everywhere. I was drenched, yelling, and cursing a string of fine blue words.

“Emily Kincaid?” a voice behind me called over my manic swearing.

Back up the beach, Crazy Harry Mockerman, my neighbor from across Willow Lake Road, stood giving me a quizzical and distinctly disturbed look.

“You ok, Emily?” Harry asked.

The skinny man in the shiny black funeral suit he wore every day of his life stood tall, surprised by my choice of epithets. He held a bouquet of golden oak leaves in his left hand. His right arm hung rigidly at his side, fist clenched.

My friend, Harry, was once a log skidder with one of the last companies to pull down the virgin pines. That was back in the fifties, way after all the fires had swept across the northern part of the state leaving few tall trees standing. Harry lived alone in a crooked little house, down a thorny, overgrown path across Willow Lake Road from me. He did odd jobs. Some truly odd, like saving me from his own pack of hunting dogs when I’d suspected him of driving his homemade half-car/half-truck into the back of Dolly’s patrol car, forcing us into Arnold’s Swamp with a bunch of caged birds and a worried old lady somebody was trying to kill.

“Why you mad at the dog?” he asked, frowning. As the proud owner of a pack of nameless and, I imagined, vicious dogs, Harry was an animal lover; except for those he trapped, shot, or picked up from Willow Lake Road—all smashed and very dead. Harry lived off the land. I didn’t resent his killing, somehow. It wasn’t like the lighted buck poles small towns put up every November. Not like the horror of coming on one of those prize poles at night, when the shadows of the dead animals stretched long and the bodies hung stiff; all the beauty gone.

“He got me all wet.” I swiped at my jeans with my hands.

“What’d you expect? See that lake out there,” he asked, a smug smile stretching his thin lips. “All water. Case you didn’t know.”

I counted to a silent twenty.

“Can I do anything for you, Harry?” I asked finally, walking toward him along the dock.

“Sure can.” He backed off as I jumped to shore, over the mucky place where Sorrow had to stomp and throw a little mud to add to my damp jeans.

Harry lifted his right hand and slowly opened his fist. A round black button lay there, at the center of the pink and wrinkled palm. I stepped closer, bent over his hand, looked at the button and then up at Harry’s grizzled face, into blue eyes so faded they were hardly any color at all.

“Came off my jacket. Can you sew it back on?”

“Well … guess I can try. I’m not much at sewing.”

“Me neither. And all’s I’ve got is white thread. That’d look funny, wouldn’t it?”

He pointed to the place where a few threads stuck out on his jacket, the place where a button should have been.

I stood back and looked him over. His hair was slicked away from his face with some kind of pomade, maybe lard. A black tie was tied around his yellowed white shirt collar. His old shoes had been given a spit and polish. Harry was definitely more tricked out than I’d ever seen him, except once, at a funeral.

“What are you dressed up for?” I asked, not recalling another funeral I’d heard about.

“None of your business,” he nodded along with his words. “Got a place I’ve got to get to and I don’t want to go down there looking less than my best.”

I smiled, ready to tease the old man as he sometimes teased me—the city girl.

“Come on, Harry. Where are you going? You want that button sewed on? You’d better tell me.”