Dead Sleeping Shaman (7 page)

14 days to go

“Murder all right,” Lieutenant
Brent welcomed us in the long hall of the police post.

“Sorry for your loss, Ma’am,” he said, noticing Crystalline. He bowed slightly. “We’ll need your help.”

This time Crystalline didn’t cave. If anything, her back locked in straighter. She was on a mission, ready to tell whatever she knew. I squared my shoulders and followed along behind Brent and Dolly and Crystalline, down the hall to his office. Brent stopped me at the door, a large hand in front of my nose.

“Officer Winston needs to talk to you, Emily. Back there.” Brent leaned into the hall and pointed down a ways. “You’ve been a big help, but I’ll speak to you later.”

“I need information …” I protested, receiving a paternal pat on my back. He nodded that large, bald head and gave me a sympathetic look.

“Realize that. But not now.”

“How’d she die? Can you tell me that much?”

“Strangled. Three-cord, white cotton rope. She’ll be going down to Grayling, to forensics. They’ll fill in the rest.”

“Why can’t I hear Crystalline’s story?”

“Police business. Officer Wakowski will help you later—the best she can.”

I stepped back as he shut the dark oak door in my face.

I went to the room he’d indicated where I sat for fifteen minutes, waiting for this Officer Winston to come ask me the same questions I’d answered the day before. By the time the SpongeBob SquarePants man came in, held his square hand out to shake, and took the chair across the table from me, I was livid.

“Officer Winston,” he introduced himself, then looked at papers he’d spread out on the desk. “And you are Emily Kincaid?” He glanced up to see if I’d get the answer right.

I nodded.

“With the Traverse City
Northern Statesman
?”

I nodded again.

Officer Winston pulled a pad of paper close, then turned on a tape deck. He settled back in his chair, head upright, his body trying to be military but missing by a chin or two. Everything about the man annoyed me, from his too-well-pressed uniform down to the smirk on his round face. His head was buzz cut so there was only a faint hint of dark hair up there. He looked like a cartoon cop who, like Pinocchio, was trying to be real.

“Sorry if I took too long.” He gave me a stretched lip smile. “Had to get an intoxicated individual over to the county jail.”

I grunted something.

“What do you write?”

I thought awhile, feeling evil. “Investigative stuff. Stories about police brutality. Official malfeasance—you know what the word means? Things like that.”

He shook that almost bald head of his and looked down at the form in front of him. “You won’t find any of that in this department,” he said with pride.

I pushed myself lower in my chair. “Let’s get this over with. I’ve got a job to do.”

“Uh-huh.” He made a note in his notebook. “Got the statement you gave to Lieutenant Brent. Gave me a good idea of what happened. Just thought I’d kind of fill in the corners you skirted.”

“I don’t skirt,” I groused, feeling entirely uncooperative and wondering what Crystalline was telling the other two.

“If you would just start at the beginning …” He raised his pen and waited.

I told my story fast. Nothing about mood or why I was out there; and I left out the throwing-up part as none of his business. I didn’t mention that damned soup tureen. I liked the sound of what I was saying and thought I came out of it looking pretty good.

“You thought she was sleeping?”

I nodded and noticed the guy’s left eye jerked rhythmically. He had a tic. I made him nervous.

“You will have to speak up. The tape doesn’t record head motions,” he ordered.

“Yes. She looked as if she was sleeping.”

He fixed his little round eyes on me, left eye still ticcing away.

“On the cold ground?”

“Yes.”

“No car anywhere around?”

“I wasn’t looking for one.”

“And the woman never moved …”

“I didn’t stand over her and watch.”

Because I was mad and sounded it, the questions came in staccato fashion, without comment.

After a while he nodded and turned off the tape deck. He folded his hands in front of him on the table, and stared hard at me, turning pencil-line eyebrows into doodles.

“Can I go?”

“Think that’s all we need. I might be calling you if …”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” I had no idea why I’d taken such a dislike to this automaton.

“Sorry, but I have a job to do.”

“So do I. I’ll talk to Lieutenant Brent.”

He slipped his pad of paper over to me and asked me to read and sign. I did, then got up to leave. He put out his hand to shake mine. I pretended not to notice and walked from the room.

Dolly, Crystalline, and I hurried down the high steps of the police post. Dolly leaned close. “It’s ours, Emily. Wait ’til you hear her story. All about Leetsville. We get to find the creep who killed her.”

“Good luck,” I grumbled, bristling over being separated from the others and interrogated by the little blob of a man. “All I need is a story for the paper. That’s it. Everything else is your department.”

Dolly looked me in the face. “What if that damn book of yours sells? You think of that? You’ll need more. You’ll need me. And maybe I won’t want to be bothered with you hanging around by then. Two can play that game, Emily.”

I could have grabbed her by the scraggly hair and tossed her down the steps, but Crystalline had stopped, turned, and watched us with consternation written in her blinking eyes.

“I appreciate it, Emily,” Crystalline said, taking a deep breath and pulling her shoulders back. “I’ll tell you everything I know. And on that you’ll have to trust me. Knowledge comes through different channels. Maybe even Marjory will come back to help us. Whatever it takes—of this world or of a world beyond —we’ll find the person who did this to her.”

She talked all the way back to my house.

Though it was dark by the time I got home to Willow Lake, Jackson’s white Jaguar, parked in my driveway, was unmistakable.

All Dolly said when she saw it was “Un-uh. There stands trouble.”

Jackson, long and lanky in his dress-to-impress outfit, leaned against the back of his car with arms crossed, a white restaurant bag dangling from his left wrist. He straightened with a slow, languorous unfolding—sure to wow any woman within one hundred feet. You had to give him a certain grace; an older male model perfection in his black turtleneck under a white cashmere cardigan and his knife-creased slacks. Ah Jackson, I thought, ever the pipe and elbow-patch writer. Crystalline gave an “Umm” of admiration. I muttered something about him being my ex.

He waved at Dolly, and bent forward to see who the redhead, beside her in the car, was, then waved and smiled at her, too. What a charmer. With meanness bubbling straight up from my soul as I crawled out of the car, I thought the charm was wearing a little thin. With bigger meanness, I added, in my head, that the wearing down could be from all those chipper coeds he’d gotten into his bed. “Past sins will out,” I mumbled to nobody in particular.

“I called you,” I yelled toward him, slowly making my way toward the house as Dolly left. “I told you I wouldn’t be here.”

Jackson shrugged and opened his arms wide as if I’d go flying to him. The bag from Gio’s restaurant swung back and forth from his wrist. “Figured you had to come home sometime. Where on earth is your spare key?” he demanded, walking toward me. “I searched everywhere. There’s not a person on this earth who doesn’t hide a key under the welcome mat.”

I got around him, through the bare rose arbor, to the house, ignoring the arms held out. I felt in my pocket for a key. There was one under the flowerpot near the arbor, but I didn’t want him to see where I’d hidden it. “Obviates the hiding, doesn’t it?” I said over my shoulder. “To put a key where people expect to find it?”

I pushed my way through the door then turned and smiled up at him. He bent to kiss my cheek and hug me, moving the bag so it slapped hard against my back.

“I needed to see you,” he said.

That should have been nice to hear:
I needed to see you …

“I’m sure my pasta has shriveled by this time,” he complained.

“Come on in, Jackson. And bring your shriveled pasta with you.” I grinned back at him. I felt an old urge to reach up and touch his face where the five o’clock shadow outlined his rugged chin. “I’ll make a shriveled salad to go with it.”

I didn’t add,
and never once think it a metaphor for our shriveled marriage.
I didn’t say it, not out loud, but I sure thought it, and then thought what a clever girl I was.

It was so ordinary,
sitting at the table, sharing dinner as Jackson talked on and on about Chaucer and how he hadn’t finished his book and how his leave of absence had to be extended beyond the time he’d allotted, all the way into next year.

His voice became a familiar buzz working in and around my thoughts. From time to time, I put my hand down to rest on Sorrow’s attentive head. Touching my dog gave me a kind of grounding that brought me back to where I was and what lay ahead. When Jackson stopped for a breath, one time, I slipped in the events of my day.

“I found a dead woman out in Deward,” I said between two snide observations on the Canterbury pilgrims. Jackson didn’t like Chaucer’s people all that much, or maybe he didn’t like Chaucer, with his raucous sense of humor. But then why the choice to spend a year, and more, writing about him? Ah, the ways of men—ever beyond me.

Jackson’s eyebrows shot up. “And where is Deward?”

“Over toward Gaylord.”

He nodded, as if picturing the place in his head.

“Another of these quaint small towns?”

“Actually, there’s no town anymore.”

“Then, what on earth were you doing over there?”

“A story, for Bill. October stuff—ghost towns.”

“Ah,” he nodded again, then again, as if getting the whole picture. “One of your little …”

“Haven’t you missed the point?”

Jackson laid his fork neatly on his plate then crossed it with his knife as if he were in a fine restaurant signaling the server to take his mess away. Sorrow sat up, recognizing a moment when he might get a leftover. “Point?”

“The dead woman.”

“My goodness. Actually dead?” He ignored Sorrow, who lay back down under the table across my feet, keeping them warm.

I nodded.

“Unfortunate. Poor soul.” He patted at his lips with the paper napkin I’d given him. “So … I’ve got a few pages I thought I might read to you tonight …”

“And, I almost forgot, an agent asked to see the mystery.”

His eyes shifted. He thought a moment, came up with a way to deal with my news, and said, “You don’t say. How exciting for you—at last a little interest.”

He reached across the table and patted my hand, which I moved to my lap.

I had to grit my teeth. “If she takes it and sells it, I probably will make good money.”

His smile was paternal. “Do you realize how unlikely a scenario that is? You must know the odds against publication by a novice
… well … an unknown.” He clucked a sympathetic cluck that turned my blood into molten lava. Of all the nerve—him and his dry, academic meanderings.

“Better chance than most,” I said through tight lips. “People actually look forward to reading what I write …”

He raised his eyebrows. “But mine is scholarship, Emily. You can’t mean to equate what you do with what I accomplish …”

I got up to clear the table and cut the leftover linguini into bits for a grateful Sorrow.

Later, I paid for what Jackson had taken as an insult to his work by sitting, curled in a chair, for two hours as he read. His thesis had to do with the pilgrims’ lack of piety and their true motives for making the trip. After the first hour I yawned and attempted to get up, only to be waved back to my chair and given an “only a little more” promise. A half an hour later, I fell asleep.