“You going to call it in to the paper?” Dolly asked as she pulled down my drive with gravel-hurling speed. She skidded to a dusty stop amid a chorus of pinging against the undercarriage of her patrol car.
“Of course.” I held on to the door handle for dear life. Dolly’s driving could rattle your bones and your brain unless you prepared yourself for mercurial starts and dead-on stops. “That’s my job.”
“What’re you going to tell ’em?” She watched me with a look falling someplace between rapt interest and challenge.
“That a skeleton was found at Sandy Lake. Maybe something about low lake levels revealing old secrets.”
“Nothing about me.” Those round blue eyes were pale marbles turned on me. That one lazy eye of hers moved slightly to the left.
“I can’t believe what I saw you do,” I said. “You, of all people, breaking the law.”
Dolly opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. “Sometimes you just have to,” she muttered. “I love the law. I believe in it.” She hesitated, taking a swipe at her nose with her shirt sleeve. She turned her wet eyes on me. “But there’s something even greater, you know.”
“Like what?” This little woman exasperated me. She made me sad and she made me mad. I was more than a little pissed. I’d been lectured on the sanctity of speed limits more than once as Dolly stood next to my car window, writing me yet another ticket. And this wasn’t about speeding. This was all about evidence tampering. But maybe about a broken heart, too.
“Like what you owe a member of your own family.”
I gave up. Dolly Flynn Wakowski was one of those maddening, strait-laced people who live unnuanced lives. There were times I even envied her single view of morality. She spouted the code according to law enforcement classes. Rules were rules. Everything was black or white, right or wrong. Kind of an easy way to look at things—not a whole lot of rethinking involved. But now she spouted this family business. She had moved to a book with two commandments and the highest order had to do with a ceremony she and Chet shared so long ago.
“That man saw. Don’t kid yourself.” I hissed at her and looked around as if the man might step from my woods.
I got out of the car.
“If the bones are Indian …” I looked back at her.
“They’re not. At least not ancient bones.”
“You might be in trouble with the state police. And from the looks of it, with the Odawa Tribe, too. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when that Indian comes after you. You could lose your job, Dolly. If that guy tells Chief Barnard what he saw …”
She looked out her window toward my garden, not seeing the beds of nodding daffodils, not smelling the deep pink and blue hyacinths I’d planted near the door. Beyond my garden beds, the woods were filled with glowing trilliums and Johnny-jump-ups. Dolly only looked inside herself, not at the soft spring landscape. She sucked at her bottom lip. “So you’re not saying anything about my wedding present?”
“Was it really?” I couldn’t help making a face. I wanted to laugh and felt crummy about it. “I mean, is that what he really gave you?”
She glanced down at her watch. “Got to get going. Detective Brent will be out there and expect to find me.”
“So.” I was like Sorrow—couldn’t let it go. “This Chet took his dog tags back and gave them to another woman?”
“Looks that way. Got to wait and make sure the bones are female. I don’t know what … I don’t want to think about …”
“They could be Chet’s,” I said, not to be mean but only direct.
She shook her head fast. “Said I don’t want to think about it.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll call you later. There’s something else …”
“Oh God. No.”
“I don’t know how to find him. I need help.”
“Check the DMV. Check if he’s got a record.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see.” She nodded, sniffed, and then took another swipe at her nose. “How about dinner later? OK? We gotta talk.”
“EATS? The whole town’ll be in on it.”
“Nah.” She shook her head. “Nobody knows yet.”
“You think so?” From experience I knew Leetsvillians had an uncanny sense of occasion. Like giant insects, their feelers spread out. Be it danger, somebody needing help, or bad weather coming, Leetsvillians knew long before things happened and brought the news to Eugenia Fuller’s restaurant on 131 to chew over with other town citizens. They would have answers before the storm hit, before a person’s burned-out house stopped smoldering, before a woman’s dead husband turned cold, or before Dolly could tuck her patrol car between buildings and hope to trap somebody speeding along at 40 in a 35.
Dolly said they all had police scanners and that accounted for their rapid knowledge. I wasn’t too sure it was that easy.
“Make it seven,” she said, and was gone in a choking cloud of dust.
___
Sorrow had pushed the porch door open and had been having his way with my house. One pile of poop under a captain’s chair—still steaming. A lake of pee in front of the sink. And Sorrow leaping to be loved. After that morning’s events, a little poop and pee meant nothing to me. Mere messy gnats to strain at. I scooped and sopped and patted my loving dog’s head. I knew, as Portia knew, that mercy was not strained … or was that something else? I didn’t care right then. I knew what I was getting at. I needed love, and Sorrow gave it with unfettered abandon.
Bill Corcoran was in his office at the Northern Statesman when I called, as he was most days—all seven of them—writing, editing, assigning. I could picture him among the usual mess of newspapers, copy to be edited, notes for an upcoming editorial. Nothing neat in his office, but nothing where he couldn’t find it. A bear of a man, gruff but caring, Bill was everything a medium town newspaper editor should be: intelligent, aware of his readership, but true to his calling. And always with that odd middle finger he used to push his heavy-rimmed glasses back up his nose. I still didn’t know for certain if he meant it as a comment, a suggestion, a criticism, or if it was merely a bad, handy habit.
“OK,” he greeted me with his usual bruskness. “So, Emily. What’s happening out there at the edge of the world?”
“Bones,” I said, meaning to be titillating.
“Human? Animal? Ancient? New?”
“Kind of old. I mean, it takes awhile for bones to become bare bones. Definitely human.”
“You mean Indian old?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So? What’s the story?”
“They surfaced out at Sandy Lake, with the receding water. Skull. Other bones. There’s a bullet hole straight through the skull.”
“Hmm. You calling Gaylord? They’ll handle it. Brent won’t want your buddy, Deputy Dolly, anywhere near it. Or the Tribe. Wouldn’t fool with them. Got a thing about their ancestors. They’ll be called in case they’re old bones.”
“Police are … eh … still out there, I think. The Odawa might know already.”
“Got a photo?”
Sticky subject. Maybe I’d go back. But the investigators would chase me away.
“No.”
“You see ’em yourself or just hear?”
“Saw ’em.”
“But no photo, eh?”
“Un-uh.”
“OK. Get me the story. Could be front page. Oh, and by the way, your ex called. Dinner at his house soon. Suggested I bring a date.”
“He would.”
“Might take him up on it.”
“Your life.” I was immediately sorry I’d introduced Bill Corcoran to Jackson in a weak moment. Something about Jackson that he zeroed in on anybody I might be remotely interested in. Not that I was—interested. It was just that there weren’t many available males up here in the woods, which made Bill a possibility.
“So, e-mail the story.”
Yeah sure … depression crawled into my head. I hung up. Not smart enough to take my camera. No instincts for journalism. Books didn’t sell. Jackson moving in on one of my few friends. Money low. No prospects. What else did I have going for me? Hmm … no use selling my body. Wouldn’t bring a dollar and a half.
I let Sorrow out while I grabbed a tuna sandwich then went out to stand in the middle of one of my garden paths, needing to get my head out of Dolly’s world and back into my own. I stuck a Detroit Tigers cap over my thick hair and looked around at what I’d created from a patch of pure glacial sand. Neat beds of flowers. Stone paths with creeping thyme planted between them. Spring flowers—no tulips since the deer saw them as cause for celebration and brought their buddies to the banquet. But a wave of daffodils in varying shades. Hyacinths: blue and pink. It was perfect. Spring was always perfect, no slugs, no moles, no leaf rot.
Sorrow snuffled at the base of a birch tree, then hurried to the other side, then back. Doggie business required deep concentration.
I got the pointed hoe from the garden shed and dug around the flowers. At this time of year the cultivating had to be done carefully. In my second spring up here I’d been overzealous, digging and coming up with lily bulbs with tiny sprouts, and damaging late-emerging peonies. I dug carefully then got on my hands and knees and poked around with my fingers, pulling the earth away from rose bush roots and checking around the iris to see if they’d survived the voles. After a while I sat back on my heels and let a few of the thoughts I’d been avoiding come into my head.
How did I begin to process “wedding present” and a set of blank dog tags with a little red beer stein attached? How did I put together a philandering husband who’d fled the marriage thirteen years ago, with Dolly’s tearful “he’s my only family”? Geez! What she believed came from a place above, below, aside from everything my middle-class upbringing prepared me for. I wanted to laugh at her “wedding present” and her “family,” but there was something so painful trapped in those words. Dolly asked for so little. Who was I to judge her need? Me? Family-less Emily with only my own philandering ex to claim.
I yanked hard at last year’s Japanese iris foliage, then got the pruning shears and cut it back.
I wanted to call Jackson Rinaldi and tell him what had happened. He would laugh with me. I’d get my head back on straight, and feel better. He would find it ridiculous, as he’d found Dolly earlier. “The simple, you know,” he said once about Dolly, “they will inherit the earth and welcome to it.”
“It’s the meek, Jackson.”
“Whatever,” he had shrugged, but the idea got across to me. This was not my place. This was not my circle of Ann Arbor friends. This was not a dinner out with professors, a hot discussion of the latest book, the current political fandango; not even a snide assessment of a new reporter come to the Ann Arbor Times. This was the empty woods and lakes I’d chosen. Dolly and Crazy Harry and Eugenia. This was Native Americans and their counterculture. This was bones and history.
I whistled to Sorrow who was reluctant to leave the hole he was digging. I put away my tools, wiped my hands along the sides of my jeans, and went out to my small writing studio under tall maples with newly unfurling leaves. Sun shone on my little peaked roof through a mass of knobby, fuzzy spring shadows. It was so unlike winter, when the shadow lines were straight pencil strokes of spare shapes and the only sound the thump of bare tree trunk against bare tree trunk.
The size of a small garage, my writing studio was plain and undecorated, a single open room with windows looking out on a small meadow where I watched deer chase each other, and once I saw a coyote passing through, and once a mother fox with her kits. It was a good place to work and a good place to do nothing but stand at the window and look out—a thing I did a lot of, calling it “mental writing.”
Elbows on the window sill was a terrific position, I’d found, for musing. My best stuff came from watching the meadow, and sometimes observing a spider weave a laddered web in a corner of a pane of glass, and sometimes lying on my back on my tattered futon, watching the ceiling, hoping inspiration would droppeth like “the gentle rain from heaven.”
I pushed the door open and Sorrow clambered in with a scramble of toenails on the wood floor. He sank down to the rug with a thud and a deep sigh. He was in for a long session of tedium, ending only when the computer said “Good-bye.” Then he would leap and pant and be absurdly happy that I’d finished my boring sitting job for the day.
I put an ani difranco CD on the stereo, bowed slightly to my painting of Flannery O’Connor, nodded to the Georgia O’Keeffe photo with Stieglitz, and snapped my fingers at the drawing of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst home. Mothers all to me. Women, like my favorite poet, Erica Weick, who held on despite what the world threw at them, their confined lives, their subversive art.
I needed my mind focused on things other than Dolly Wakowski and old bones. I thought about the novel I wanted to write. I pictured it in my head: the scenes, the characters, the setting. My main character would be a man. Contrary to what some misguided writing books preached, I was drawn to see the world through the eyes of men. This man would be an attorney. Elderly. Just out of the hospital after his first heart attack. I could see his grimaces of pain. I could feel his chest grumbling. I could smell his cigar smoke, a brandy stink, and the mothball aroma of his worn wool jacket. I could hear the soft sigh his leather office chair made under the weight of him.
I turned on the computer, lived through the pop-up reminders of downloads waiting, of virus scans expiring, and files I had yet to process. Irritating, especially in my current mood. I wanted immediate access. I wanted a fresh page. I wanted the ceremony of putting truly new words to paper …
Randall Jarvis pushed his private nurse’s hand away from his wrist and fixed her with a look that could make guilty defendants squirm and intractable juries melt …
In the middle of this—my creative throes—the phone I should have taken off the hook buzzed at me. I felt the usual tug of war between curiosity and blatant indignation. How dare anyone interrupt what is certainly the next great American novel? How insensitive. How crass. How …
Jackson. My day was complete. He had followed me to northern Michigan, on sabbatical, writing his important tome on Chaucer’s pilgrims. Or maybe he’d come just to drive me crazy. I wasn’t sure. He was in a cottage—bigger than mine—over near Spider Lake, outside Traverse City. The sad thing was he couldn’t find anyone to transcribe his work for him. Since he took great pride in writing in long hand, as the greatest writers wrote, he saw no reason to change his winning ways now. I was the secretarial service, as I had been when we were married. Some old habits just don’t go away. I would type his work into the computer, copy the files on disk, and deliver hard copy for his astute editorial eye. For all of this I’d been presented with a tee shirt. A U of M tee shirt. A shirt high above others. With all the work I’d done for Jackson, even at ten dollars an hour, I figured it had to be worth about a thousand dollars.
“I must see you, Emily.” It was the usual demanding, deep voice not meaning to be demanding. In fact, he would be hurt to think I ever thought such a thing of him … ever.
“Busy working right now, Jackson. What’s it about?”
“I need a sounding board. Some of this chapter doesn’t ring true to the ear. You know I’m trying to capture Chaucer’s insouciance.”
“You mean over the phone? You want to read to me now?”
“No, no. I thought I’d bring dinner in an hour or so. I’ve got more work for you to put into the computer. Maybe you could run off a copy or two. You do such beautiful work …”
“Can’t tonight. I’ve got plans.”
“Plans?” Snide laughter that could make my skin ripple up into crocodile hide lay just beneath the word.
“Dinner plans. Sorry.”
He huffed a moment. I said nothing more. “Then tomorrow. I’ll bring what I have and read you this bit …”
“Tomorrow,” I agreed.
“Lunch?”
“Great.”
“Do you have things in the house? I could pick up a loaf of bread …”
A sigh and lunch was settled. I put down the phone and pictured poisoned mushrooms. An omelet. A soup … ah yes … who would suspect an ex-wife trapped into endlessly typing her prior husband’s manuscript, a Sisyphean task never to be completed? Who would even imagine she might hold a grudge … ?
I liked the idea of mushroom soup but decided I’d go with morels I’d buy from Crazy Harry. He was an expert in the woods. So maybe one or two weren’t quite right … false morels weren’t easy to spot. Who could blame me? A form of Russian roulette.
I couldn’t get back to my gentleman of the bar. He retreated behind a woodpile in my brain while I stewed over being cornered, yet again, by Jackson, the man I’d sworn to love forever and ever and ever. That love lasted less than five years, unless you counted the motherly fondness I still felt for him from time to time. Who knew why? Old habits, I guessed.
I turned off the computer and endured Sorrow’s joy. Dolly was what I planned to think about for the next few hours, until I met her at EATS. Dolly was less complicated. Dolly and her wedding present and her “family” were easier to deal with than Jackson and everything I’d left behind in Ann Arbor. Right then, if it had come to a struggle between my graduate degree, my knowledge of cheap wines, my drunken discussions of the meaning of “circumference” in Emily Dickinson, why, I’d pick Dolly and simplicity every time and feel good about myself in the process.