Wednesday, October 14

13 days to go

I woke up close to three a.m. and found a note saying he’d see me at Bill’s party on Friday. I’d forgotten. Something to look forward to. I liked Bill, one of those ardent newsmen who were beginning to seem like dinosaurs. And I looked forward to seeing him later, at the newspaper. I was going into Traverse City to divine what kind of a column he wanted me to write. I was grateful for any job that brought in money. Beggars can’t be choosers—unless he wanted a column on geriatrics, or sex. For the one, I wasn’t there yet. For the other, my memory was dim.

I went to bed and slept soundly until seven-thirty. I got up as Sorrow did his dance of the new day around me. I had my cereal and tea and walked from front windows to side door and back, uneasy. I’d had enough of Jackson and memories of what should have been. Enough of sad people and inhumane violence. Time to treat Sorrow, who had been neglected and showed it with rolling eyes and big sighs, to a walk.

It was different out in the woods. Sorrow and I were free. No sound, except the rattle of dying trees when the wind blew, and Sorrow’s scrambling paws as he dashed off, racing toward whatever he imagined had to be waiting for him.

I watched my dog with pride—his graceful lope, ears back, shining coat of many lengths. Last night I had come home to a pristine house, not a single poop or pee anywhere. Sorrow was growing up. There’d been almost sadness about having nothing to clean. He didn’t need me.

One of the reasons for a long walk was Marjory’s story, or as much as Crystalline knew of her story. It wasn’t a particularly original tale, nor even truly bad, as women’s lives went. Still, there was processing to do. If I was going to work on this with Dolly, I had to have all we knew sorted in my mind.

Marjory Otis came from an old family that settled around Leetsville sometime in the late 1800s. Marjory told Crystalline that the Otis family was proud of the great-grandparents who’d worked in the lumbering business, living in the woods all winter, back at a boarding house in Leetsville all summer. By the time her father, Charlie, was grown, the lumbering business was long gone. After high school, Charlie got a job at a manufacturing plant near Mancelona and met Marjory’s mom, Winnie Frank; they married and rented a house in Leetsville. Marjory was only a little girl, Crystalline said, when he died, killed in a motorcycle wreck up near Vanderbilt. Later, her mother, Winnie, had what they called “a crisis” and was taken off to the mental hospital in Traverse City for almost a year. When she came back, Marjory said her mother was never the same again. They lived in a run-down little house her Uncle Ralph rented to them, off toward Deward. When her mother disappeared for a day or two, that was where they usually found her—in Deward, camping alone by the side of the river, surprised when they came looking for her.

“I kind of think that was why Marjory hated the place,” Crystalline had said. “Maybe because of the way her mother loved it. I don’t know. It wasn’t that she hated her mother. I don’t mean that. It’s the memories … I guess going over there to find her mother living in a makeshift tent and seeming happy not to be with her kids, well, the pictures she kept in her head of that place weren’t good ones.

“One day Marjory’s mother ran off with a guy selling tractors,” Crystalline went on to tell us. “She left a note that gave her three kids, Marjory, Arnold, and the youngest boy, Paul, to their Uncle Ralph and Aunt Cecily, their father’s brother and sister-in-law, to care for, though they didn’t much want children around. All Marjory ever hoped to do after that was get away from Leetsville. She married a soldier who stopped at the Shell station in town and gave her a ride down toward Detroit, which was kind of like what her mother, Winnie, had done. Marjory and the soldier stayed together for four years, until he stopped at another gas station, met a sixteen-year-old girl, and took off again.

“No need for Marjory to come back to Leetsville,” Crystalline said. “When I first knew her, just saying the name of the place could make her sad. Bad days for her, when her mother ran off. Marjory always said her mother would never have walked out on her kids, no matter how sick she got, but nobody ever looked for her. Her aunt wanted to think the worst and only said Winnie was getting what she had coming to her. She could still be alive, you know that? Marjory was fifty-two. Her mother could be in her seventies. I wish I could find that old lady. I’d grab her skinny neck and …”

Dolly put up a hand. Crystalline’s face twisted into a slit-eyed hate mask. I had gotten an idea what Crystalline was like before Marjory came into her life. She took a couple of deep breaths, closed and opened her eyes, gathered herself back together, then smiled sweetly, and went on.

“Never was easy for Marjory to talk about her past. Then the next thing we know—she’s gone. Called from that motel where I’m staying now and said she was up here and would come back when she’d settled things that had to be settled. There was something about having to help somebody, but she never said who.”

I’d asked her then if there was anything else she could remember about Marjory’s life in Leetsville. She thought awhile. “Only other thing I knew,” she said, “was that she, and her brothers, Arnold and Paul, lived with her Aunt Cecily and Uncle Ralph for her teen years ’cause there was nobody else. Otises they were. Brother to Marjory’s father. Aunt Cecily, who didn’t have any kids of her own, didn’t want anybody else’s kids, and took care of them only until they turned eighteen when she kicked them out of the house. She might have liked the oldest, Arnold, a little more than the others. It wasn’t long after he left the house Marjory heard he was in a junior college down in Flint. You probably heard of Arnold. He’s running for state senator here in Michigan. Big deal—Arnold. He almost never contacted Marjory. She said he didn’t want people knowing his sister was a shaman. It could hurt him in the upcoming election.”

Crystalline pursed her lips, took a deep breath, and poked one red-tipped finger into her pile of hair.

“She told you she was coming to help somebody? Did she say who? Or what kind of help she could give?” Dolly asked. “Maybe it had something to do with healing, or something with this Shamanism stuff.”

Crystalline frowned. “She didn’t tell me who it was. I got the idea it had to do with her brother. I know one thing, it had nothing at all to do with our beliefs. She would have said. I mean, that’s what we all do, we share stories, so we’re always learning. You know, able to help people better.”

“Even when she called to say where she’d gotten to she didn’t mention this person she came to help?” Dolly pressed.

Crystalline shook her head. “I asked her but she said she’d tell me everything when she got back to Toledo. She was interested in a Reverend Esau Fritch. You heard of him? I don’t know why but she was looking him up online and reading about some kind of stuff. I remember her sitting there in this little office the four of us rent for healings and readings and classes. I remember she was shaking her head and saying somebody was going to have to do something about the whole thing but she didn’t say which ‘thing.’ That’s what she said—do something about ‘the whole thing.’ I hear the guy’s here, saying the world’s about to end. Maybe that’s what she came for.”

“Could be one of them’s got something to do with her murder. Could be that preacher. Could be her brother. Maybe both,” Dolly said, and settled her small, round head—hatless for once—down into her shoulders. She got very quiet.

Crystalline looked sad. “Marjory’s was a history of being left and leaving—people and places. But all she ever said to me about Leetsville was that she hoped never to come back here again—until she did. I know one thing, that ghost town gave her the creeps—like all the family trouble started there and the relatives weren’t smart enough to know it wasn’t pride they should be showing—about being early settlers—but fear.”

Before I’d gotten out of the car, the three of us agreed to go hear the Reverend Fritch’s evening revival. I wanted a story on the end of the world, the preacher, and his followers. Dolly said not to forget we were investigating a murder and his name had been brought into the investigation. Crystalline wanted to come along, see if she remembered anything else Marjory had said about the man. We planned to meet at EATS at five-thirty and get out to the campground by seven, when the meeting would begin.

That gave me some of the morning to take a walk and work on the manuscript for the agent and then time for a trip to Traverse City to start talking columns with Bill.

I poked under the dying leaves with a stick, looking for wild leeks. They were almost too strong to use at this time of year, but I could throw one into a stew.

Sorrow bounced back and forth through the trees, dancing circles around me, then taking off, black ears flying, pink tongue lolling.

I started back toward Willow Lake. I knew Dolly would have a list of people to talk to when we got together, along with questions. I was going to come up with my own—if I felt like thinking about it. Dolly acted as if she knew everything about investigating a murder now that she was taking crime scene classes online. I was already tired of her preaching forensics and procedure to me. I’d been a journalist in Ann Arbor for eight years. I’d worked on murder cases before. Even one serial murderer. I always felt Dolly’s perspective—being from a small town, rarely going south of Saginaw—might be limited. I wanted to think things over, when I got the time. See if I could connect dots Dolly would never think to bring together and find out what happened to Marjory Otis, and why.