Shelf Ice (8 page)

“I’ll have what you’re having, even if it kills me. Role model and all that stuff.”

“I was thinking about the case last night,” said Ray, sliding into a chair at the table and setting Simone back on the floor.

“So was I,” she responded. “It looks like we both need to get a life. I took a laptop home with photos from the crime scene. I was going to review everything, and then let it perk during the night, see if anything new popped up. But I got home, took a long, hot bath—I needed to get the stink of the fire off me, especially my hair. Then I just crashed. I could barely make it from the tub to the bed. If I hadn’t set two alarms I’d still be out.”

Sue set two bowls of oatmeal on the table, then brought coffee mugs and the pot. “What do you want on the oatmeal?”

“What does your grandmother do?”

“Lots of butter and maple syrup.”

“I’m starting to understand your genetic pool,” said Ray. “I’ll take some maple syrup. That and the butter are in the fridge.”

After Sue settled across the table from him, Ray asked, “What about the prunes?”

“That was a joke. I was trying to totally gross you out. You’ve got some bananas that are almost too ripe. Want one of those?”

“Sure,” Ray. “I was thinking about”…

“Why don’t we see if we can have a meal together without talking about work?” Sue interrupted.

“What would we talk about?” Ray asked.

“What do people talk about when they can’t think about anything to talk about? How about the weather?”

“That’s going to be a long conversation,” said Ray. “Snow today, snow tomorrow. The sun will appear again in April. Next topic.” He watched as Sue pushed slices of butter in her oatmeal and then cover the surface with syrup.

“Did you make amends with your girlfriend for missing a date?” Sue questioned playfully.

Ray explained Sarah’s sudden job change and her impending move to Chicago. His telling someone else about Sarah suddenly leaving made it more real. They ate in silence for several minutes.

Finally Ray said, “So we’ll start with Molly, and then we’ll be able to spend time reviewing where we are and planning on what to do next.”

“The morning, Ray, only the morning. Then I’m bringing you back here and you’re taking the rest of the weekend off. You’re to relax and take it easy.”

12.

Ray looked at Molly closely as she slid into a chair across from him in his office. This was his third contact with her. He had met her briefly during the hiring process, and he and Sue had questioned her the morning after the assault on Brenda Manton. Now he looked at Molly again with fresh eyes, and while it had been only three days since their first extended conversation, he noticed things he hadn’t seen on their first encounter. He wondered if he had been less than fully cognizant of everything that happened after the jarring collision with the plow. Perhaps he had been able to concentrate on the main events without being sensitive to the nuances.

He carefully observed Molly as she poured a mug of coffee and added milk and sugar. She had the worn look of someone just coming off a night shift—her blouse less than crisp, her makeup in need of touching up. There was also a hint of stale cigarette smoke. Since the entire county complex became a smoke-free zone, the smokers had regressed to high-school like behaviors—smoking in their cars or in a wooded area at the far corner of the main parking area and so far no one had pressed for rigid enforcement of the ban.

“You’re in contact with Brenda Manton’s family?”

“Yes. I drove down to Grand Rapids on Thursday, and I’m going back today as soon as I get a couple of hours of sleep. I had a long conversation with one of her brothers last evening.” Her eyes flooded, and she wiped them with her hands. “You know what’s happening?” she asked.

“Just reports on her condition, reports that were less than optimistic. Do you want to fill me in?”

Molly pulled several tissues from a box on the table, blotting tears again and blowing her nose. “They’re going to pull her off the machines in a day or two. I guess they’ve been making whatever type of arrangement you have to do for that kind of stuff. Her brother Jeff, he’s the oldest, explained all that to me last night.”

“You told me that both brothers were physicians?” Ray asked, checking on his memory of his first conversation with Molly.

“Yes, Jeff is a surgeon and Robert is an internist. Jeff is also a medical ethicist; he did some kind of special degree or program after his residency. He explained the situation to me last night, all the medical stuff and all the other considerations. It was logical and made sense, and the thing about how other people will be able to have better lives because of the organs they’re able to harvest. That’s the term he used, harvest. Weird.”

Molly sipped some coffee. Ray sensed that she was struggling to keep her grief in control. “It all makes sense. Brenda’s no longer there. Just turn off the fucking machine….” Molly collapsed in tears.

Sue, who had been sitting silently at the table up to this point asked, “Molly, can I get you anything, water?”

“I just need a few minutes.” More tears followed until Molly was able to regain control. “This wasn’t real in the beginning.” She paused, “Brenda was going to get better. Come home. Everything was going to be fine. That’s what I had convinced myself of. Now none of that is going to happen. She’s gone, her house is gone, the person that I’ve been closest to over lots of years, gone.”

“Wednesday night,” started Ray, trying to move the interview forward, “why were you texting? Why weren’t you having a conversation? I can’t imagine much was going on in dispatch at that time of morning.”

“You’re right. Nothing was going on. Brenda had no landline. You probably know that. It was just the cell, and the coverage down in her area is lousy, the way it’s tucked back in those little hills. If Brenda walked halfway down her road to the highway, she could have a conversation, but in her house the cell phone didn’t work too well, some days not at all, like the weather or clouds did something. But texting always seemed to work. So we’d stay in contact that way.”

“Molly, we’ve talked about this briefly, but tell me again. Why was Brenda up at that time of the morning? What was going on?”

“She was working feverishly. I remember her saying,
 
‘I’m on a roll.’ She had a major show coming up in the late spring at one of the universities down state, and she was working feverishly to get things done. Brenda said her art was going in a whole new direction.

“Sheriff, what you have to understand is that Brenda was a workaholic. When she was working on something, nights and days didn’t matter. She’d work. When she was tired, she’d sleep. When she was hungry, she’d eat. But the focus was always on the work. And when a project was done, she’d take time off and life would go back to normal for a while. After a few weeks or months she’d start getting antsy. She needed to focus, she needed to be productive, she needed to do art.”

“You’ve talked about your friendship. Did you spend time together when she was in one of these intensive work phases?” asked Sue.

“We talked every day.
 
I’d visit three or four times a week, usually bringing whatever groceries she needed. When she had completed a project, we’d spend more time together. She described her life as having two phases,
in cave
and
out of cave
. When she was working, she was
in cave
. She was absolutely driven when she was working on a project. She didn’t socialize or do anything else until she was done.”

“So you were a close friend of Brenda’s. Who were her other close friends?” asked Sue.

“We were more than just close friends,” said Molly. “We have been best friends since ninth grade. I think we were more like sisters.”

“I understand,” said Sue. “But Brenda did have other friends, perhaps not as close as the two of you.”

“I told you about Tristan Laird.”

“Yes. Have you been in touch with him in the last few days?”

“He doesn’t have a phone or anything. I did go looking for him yesterday. The road into his trailer is blocked with snow, and I didn’t have the energy to try to hike in.”

“So you haven’t talked to him?”

“No.”

“Do you think he knows what’s happened to Brenda?”

“Hard to say. He doesn’t have any electronic stuff, not even a radio. Like I think I told you, he’s in his own universe. But he does have a sense of things.”

“If Tristan found Brenda’s house destroyed, what would he do?” Ray questioned.

“Think about what a normal person would do, and that won’t be it. My guess is that he would just disappear for a while. He’s really paranoid. Eventually he’d get his fear under control and try to figure out what happened.”

“We need your help in finding him so we can talk to him,” said Sue.

“You don’t suspect?…”

“We don’t suspect anything. We need to talk to everyone who knew Brenda. We’re at an early stage in this investigation. We’re just beginning to collect information. We’re gathering pieces of a puzzle that we hope will lead us to Brenda’s assailant,” Ray said, speaking slowly, stressing the message of each sentence. “We need you to take a map and pinpoint places where we might find Tristan.”

“What I’m telling you is that it won’t be easy,” Molly responded. “Like I said, he’s got this trailer he uses, but I didn’t see any signs that he was there. And if he’s spooked, there’s no telling where he might be. Sometimes he sleeps in a canoe that he ties up in a remote spot on one of the streams like the Betsie or the Platte. And this time of year he likes to spend time out on the shelf ice. If the lake is calm, he will paddle out in a kayak and find an ice cave to sleep in. He says he can hear voices in the wind and waves.”

Ray was moving his head from side to side. “That would be so dangerous, given how fast the weather changes.”

“He’s had some close calls, Tristan has. He laughs about them.” Molly paused briefly, “And, yes, I will mark out a map for you, but I’m not sure how much help it will be. I don’t know many of his secret places.”

“Tell us about other friends,” pressed Sue.

“Brenda had lots of friends, but we were the close friends, Tristan and me. Work came first, socializing came later. That said, she was very active in the arts community here and across the state.”

“Let’s talk about people around here, anyone she might be in contact with on a regular basis?”

Molly took a few moments to reflect on the question before responding. “Well, probably Elise Lovell. That’s the woman she’s been buying most of her yarn from recently. There was a lot of back and forth between them, you know. Brenda was always looking for special colors and textures, and Elise was willing to experiment and produce lots of samples until Brenda found just the right thing.”

“How often would they have had contact?”

“Just guessing, I don’t know for sure, but probably once a week or something like that.”

“Are there other people in the community that Brenda had contact with?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Molly, we’re looking for motive. Why was she attacked? What was going on in her life that prompted this violence? People often share things with those they come in contact with. They might talk to a hairdresser, or physician, minister, perhaps someone they do yoga with. See where I’m going? We’re looking for the bits and pieces, so we can begin to connect the dots.”

“She got her hair cut by the guys at the Third Wave, but not often. And she did a lot of yoga classes, but that was years ago. Recently she’s just been using DVDs. As far as religion, she didn’t go to church.”

“Love relationships?” asked Sue.

“Not now, not recently.”

“How about a bad breakup in the past?”

“No.”

“She owe anyone money, or was anyone in her debt?”

“No. She was self-sustaining, and I don’t think anyone owed her.”

“Family problems?”

“No. I wouldn’t say she was close to her family, but they all seem to like and respect each other.”

“How about Richard Kinver?”

“Kinver, the creep. Brenda told me he’d come sniffing around like he was wanting to offer some kind of trade-out in exchange for plowing service.”

“What are you suggesting?” asked Ray.

“You know what I’m suggesting,” Molly replied. “But I think he finally got the message.”

“Did she ever feel threatened by Kinver?”

“No, just irritated,” She paused briefly, “Sheriff, I’m exhausted. I need some sleep. Then I have to get on the road. Can I go now?”

“Yes. You know what we’re looking for?”

“Yes.”

• • •

“What do you think?” asked Ray, turning to Sue as the door closed.

“Just like our first conversation, she’s not giving much. We need to find out why.”
“What’s next?”

“I’m going to drop you home. And then I’m going to run down to Grand Rapids, too. See if I can learn anything more from her family. And don’t even ask. You’re not going.”