Jack Fredrickson
Honestly Dearest, You're Dead
The second book in the Dek Ekstrom Mystery series, 2008
For Jack and for Lori
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once again, Missy Lyda, Eric Frisch, Mary Anne Bigane, and Joseph Bigane III worked at more than the words.
Once again, Kate Scherler worked at more than direction.
Once again, Patrick Riley worked at more than the Web site.
Once again, Marcia Markland and Diana Szu worked at more than keeping everything moving forward, and once again India Cooper smoothed over everything I missed, and some of the things I should have.
And once again, as she has for forever, Susan…
Lucky me.
Prologue
She wouldn’t have heard the back door glass being punched out, not in those winds. Later, the blueberry cop would say the Gazette reported they gusted up to fifty miles an hour, and that was in Kalamazoo, safer inland. Where she was, close to Lake Michigan, they would have raged louder. Hawking across the ice cliffs at the shore, building their furies as they screamed across the frozen fields, sucking the red branches of the lifeless blueberry bushes into grotesque tendrils, like twists of frozen blood, the winds could have hit her narrow little cottage at sixty, seventy miles an hour. Shingles clattering, windows banging, her place must have sounded like a cheap pine coffin being beat on by a hundred angry hands. She wouldn’t have heard the glass break.
Nor would she have felt the sudden chill. Her thermostat was set down to a frugal sixty degrees, and there were gaps in the siding a fat man could stick his thumb through. There was no knowing what the inside temperature was that night-if it even was night-because nobody came by for days. By then the frigid air blowing through the three broken windows-the one on the kitchen door, broken carefully inward; the other two, larger, smashed out in panic, spraying bloody glass all over the snow-packed drive-had chilled the house to freezing.
She’d fought. In her frenzy and her fear, she’d thrown herself at those two big windows. Each time, she’d been grabbed and dragged back, dripping bloody shards onto the frayed living room rug. I tried to step around them, but they were everywhere, crunching under my feet like bits of old bones.
There was blood in the bedroom, too, frozen little droplets on the faded floral wallpaper, the oak table, the bare plank floor. On the knurled wheel that turned the rubber platen of the ancient black Underwood typewriter.
I stopped, took a breath, like always when I saw one of those old Underwoods. A long time ago, I’d known a girl who owned a typewriter like that, a blond girl with a boy’s name. I was with her when she bought it, helped carry it home, watched as she turned it upside down to scratch her initials on it to make it her own.
Outside, in the dimming light, the wind rustled, restless, waiting. I eased the old typewriter over and bent to look for marks made long ago. My eyes stung, wet. From the cold of the cottage, I told myself. From the horror of the butchery that had happened there.
It had nothing to do with the past.
One
Three days earlier, I was up on a ladder.
February is the wrong month to be outside on a ladder in Rivertown. It’s especially wrong when it is twenty degrees outside, the wind blowing up the Willahock River is strong, and the ladder, bought too well used from the widow of a housepainter who’d died in a fall, swayed like Katharine Hepburn sashaying through an old movie. But I had no choice. A pigeon, apparently still distraught from being evicted from the stone turret he’d spent a lifetime marking with excrement, the place I now called home, had killed himself smashing in the glass on one of my second-floor slit windows. That in turn sent what little heat I’d managed to trap blowing out that shattered window like smoke up a flue, and me up a ladder on a day when I should have been inside, bemoaning the fact that I didn’t have central heating.
I’d just gotten to the top of the ladder with a piece of plywood and was hugging the top rung like life itself, waiting for the swaying to stop, when my cell phone rang down below.
“Mr. Elstrom’s office,” Leo Brumsky said, on the ground. He’d insisted on coming over to hold the ladder. He’s a highly regarded provenance specialist, makes upwards of four hundred thousand dollars a year authenticating items for the major auction houses in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and has been my friend since grammar school. As a counterweight to my swaying ladder, though, his five feet six inches and one hundred and forty pounds was worthless. Carefully, so as not to excite the ladder, I looked down at the world shifting beneath me.
“Who may I say is calling?” In the frigid air, Leo’s words made white puffs under the chartreuse knitted acrylic hat, topped with a purple pom, that he told me he’d bought for fifty-nine cents. He’d also told me the hat was new, but I didn’t believe it. The way the acrylic drooped below the fur of Leo’s black eyebrows suggested there’d been a previous owner, somebody with an enormous head. Either that or that the hat had been stretched, for years, over a basketball.
“I’ll try to catch him as he’s coming down.” Tilting his head back to grin, preening with his wit, he covered the mouthpiece between two mittened hands, chartreuse to match, and waved the cell phone high, like Muhammad Ali back in the day, after a victory.
“Is this necessary?” I called down.
“How many business calls do you get?”
He had a point: I hadn’t gotten a client call in five weeks. I undulated down to the frozen snow, set the plywood against the ladder, and took the phone.
“Dek Elstrom,” I said.
“Vlodek Elstrom, of Rivertown, Illinois?” a man’s voice asked.
“How may I help?” Unless the guy was offering unbreakable windows, installed free, I wasn’t interested. I was cold.
“My name is William Aggert. I’m an attorney in West Haven, Michigan. A client of mine, Louise Thomas, has passed away.”
He paused so I could mumble the appropriate regrets.
“Never heard of her,” I said.
“Never heard of Louise Thomas?” I learned long ago that lawyers like to repeat themselves. It doubles their billable hours.
“Never,” I said, switching phone hands and jamming the cold one in the pocket of my surplus store pea coat. One doesn’t risk gloves when clinging to life aboard a moving ladder.
“Never heard-”
It was too damned cold. “Are you going to try to bill me for this?” “Miss Thomas named you executor of her estate,” he said.
“If I don’t know Miss Thomas, how can I be her executor?”
“You’ve never heard of Louise-?”
I stomped my feet, switched hands again, thought this time of plunging the cold one under Leo’s hat. There was plenty of room between his bald head and the acrylic.
“Happens all the time,” he said.
“Misidentifying an executor?”
He gave a lawyerly laugh, dry and uncomprehending. “Executors being named by people they don’t know.”
Leo pulled the basketball warmer down to his chin and started to dance around, stomping his feet to keep warm. In the orange traffic officer’s jacket he’d gotten at the same place he’d bought the hat, he looked like a fire hydrant with rhythm.
“My obligation is to inform you of her passing, and to provide you with the necessary instruments for you to fulfill your responsibilities,” Aggert said.
“To be executor.”
“Exactly.”
“How much would that cost me?”
Aggert made a clicking sound. It could have been a loose tooth, or it could have been a breath mint. “Ms. Thomas gave me money to be escrowed for your fee.”
“How much?” I asked, perked up like a falcon sighting a field mouse.