“Why did she give it up?”
“I don’t think it was important enough to her. We often spoke about acting, fantasizing about our careers. She told me she was going to change her name to Rosalind Colletti; it was going to be her stage name. But acting is an extremely punishing profession, and I don’t think she was willing to take the rejection, the hammering we often get from agents, from casting directors, from critics. You know what her goal was? It wasn’t the Oscar or the Tony. It was independence. She wanted to take only those parts that genuinely interested her and nothing else. Show me an actor with that attitude who gets work. Jack Nicholson, maybe, but first he had to pay his dues like everyone else. Ever see Hell’s Angels On Wheels?”
“So she gave it up,” I volunteered.
“We went to a few auditions together, then fewer and fewer until she stopped going altogether. It’s too bad. I’m doing The Merchant of Venice for The Acting Company; Alison would have made a great Jessica. Would you like a couple of tickets? On the house?”
“That would be very nice, thank you,” I answered without hesitation. I used to glom onto freebies when I was a cop, too.
“Thursday night? I already gave away my weekend tickets.”
“That’d be great,” I said as she made a note to herself on a small pad.
“I write everything down,” she told me.
“So do I,” I replied, making a notation on my own pad. “When did Alison begin working for the health-care organization?” I asked.
“About a year after she earned her master’s. First, though, she took a job with an advertising agency that had a public relations department. She was a junior account executive—or something like that—and the health-care company was her primary client. A year later she left the agency and began working full time for the health-care place. It upset a lot of people, too.”
“How so?”
“First thing she did was fire the ad agency and hire someone else.”
“Burning bridges,” I suggested.
“She was like that.”
“How did your relationship hold up?”
“Fine,” Marie answered, shrugging. “We started to drift apart; she was doing her thing and I was doing mine. We stayed in touch, though; met a couple times a month for lunch.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“About a month before she disappeared.”
“What did you talk about?”
“I can’t even remember, it was so unimportant. She certainly didn’t confide in me about what was happening in her life if that’s what you’re asking,” Marie shook her head sadly. “I was supposed to be her friend—one of her best friends—yet she didn’t confide in me. Now I wonder if we were friends at all. Sometimes it seems to me that we were only two people who knew each other for a long time.”
I appreciated Marie’s confusion. I am continually impressed by how little we truly know about each other, by how much we conceal. We often remain strangers even to those we’re the most intimate with. I’ve known widows who learn more about their dearly departed husbands in the first week after they’re dead than in forty years of married life. It makes one yearn for that lost age of formal introductions, that time in our society’s evolution when our character was well known and even guaranteed by mutual friends, accepted customs, and shared institutions. Of course, there wasn’t much call for private investigators back then.
“How did she meet Stephen Emerton?” I asked, nudging Marie slowly toward the question I most wanted to ask.
“I introduced them,” she replied. “Stephen and I were seeing each other. Nothing serious, though. One day I introduced them over lunch. A week later Alison called and said Stephen had asked her out, did I mind? I said no.”
“You didn’t mind that your best friend was stealing away your boyfriend?”
Marie smiled. “Stealing him away? More like I was giving him away. And good riddance. Stephen’s a good-looking guy, I admit. But I’ve seen kiddie pools with more depth. ‘An idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’” she added, quoting Macbeth.
“Did you tell that to Alison?”
“‘Friendship is constant in all other things, save in the office and affairs of love; therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues; let every heart negotiate for itself,’” she replied. I couldn’t place the line.
“I recognized Macbeth,” I told the actress. “The last quote?”
“That was Shakespeare, too. Much Ado About Nothing. Sorry. I know I can be annoying, quoting playwrights. Sometimes I can’t help showing off.”
“Forget it,” I told the actress. “I’ve been known to show off on occasion myself.” Then I asked, “Was Alison working for the health-care organization when she and Stephen met?”
“Yes.”
“Did Alison see anyone else while she worked there?”
“Before Stephen? Probably. Alison was pretty enough; she could have had all the male companionship she wanted.”
“Any names?”
“No,” Marie answered. “None that I can remember.”
“How about after she married Stephen?”
There it was—the high, hard one. Marie swatted it like it was a beach ball.
“I doubt it,” she said. “I think you can tell if a woman cheats, and Alison just wasn’t the type.”
Alison wasn’t the type: I was happy to hear Marie say it. Happy and relieved. So much for not getting emotionally involved in a case, so much for keeping an open mind. Alison wasn’t the type. I wrote it down in my notebook.
“Although if she was cheating on Stephen, I would have been the last person she’d tell,” Marie added. “Alison was very big on appearances. If she thought someone would disapprove of something she did, she’d have kept it to herself. I guess I know that much about her.”
“Would you have disapproved?”
“Absolutely. You want to sleep around when you’re single, go ahead, who cares—although these days I figure you’re taking your life in your hands. But not when you’re married. You have to be honest when you’re married. Otherwise, why bother?”
“If Alison was cheating on Stephen and didn’t confide in you, would she have confided in Gretchen Rovick?”
“The cop?”
“The sheriff’s deputy,” I corrected her.
“Maybe. She and Gretchen grew up together, went to the same high school. I met Gretchen only once, the weekend Alison was married. She was maid of honor, I was a bridesmaid. We were the only two standing up for Alison.”
ten
Deer Lake. Wisconsin was A GOOD NATURED TOWN. It said so on the hand-lettered sign that marked the city limits. The sign listed the community’s population at 1,557. It seemed larger than that. The parking lots of two supermarkets located across the blacktop from each other were packed with cars, and a considerable amount of traffic was moving in and out of King Boats, which I later discovered not only sold recreational boats but built them, too. Along the main drag a visitor could find a drugstore, bank, real-estate office, hardware store, several gift shops, two restaurants, a service station, a clothing store, a movie rental shop, an appliance dealer, a store that specialized in personal computers, and six—count ’em, six—taverns.
Gretchen Rovick was a Kreel County deputy sheriff, and apparently her beat included Deer Lake. She agreed to meet me at the Deer Lake Cafe after she finished her shift. I was an hour early, and it had been thirsty work driving three hours northeast from the Twin Cities—although I was familiar with the terrain since my wife’s parents lived about forty miles south—so I stopped for a taste, parking in front of The Last Chance Saloon. The Last Chance Saloon was next door to The Next to Last Chance Saloon. It turned out to be the same bar with two entrances; a hokey gag, but I liked it.