I went back inside. With her sheets of newspaper gone and her sensible clothes in a bag on the porch, Louise’s tiny house had the stale air of a place closing in on itself. That was my imagination working, of course. Perhaps she’d never really occupied that house; perhaps she’d merely drifted between its three rooms for a time, careful to leave nothing of herself behind. I walked through the mess in the kitchen to look a last time for anything left of Louise Thomas.
In the tiny bathroom, there was a bar of Ivory soap in the fiberglass shower enclosure, another on the corner sink. One white bath towel hung on a hook; a second had been thrown to the floor. A jar of cold cream also lay on the linoleum floor, upside down, a foot from a tube of toothpaste, rolled carefully up from its bottom, and a scuffed-down purple toothbrush. There was no aspirin, no cough syrup, no thermometer. Whatever pain or fever she’d known, she’d managed it without help.
I picked up the jar of cold cream. Deep finger gouges raked the inside, as though someone had been searching for something buried in it. The cold cream smelled of roses. My fingers began to cramp; I’d begun squeezing the jar too hard. I’d known a girl once who’d smelled of roses and of Ivory soap. Lots of girls, lots of women smell of roses and Ivory soap. There was nothing in the bathroom. Nothing at all.
The sunlight was fading quickly in the living room now, the light behind the plastic sheets deepening into gray. I took another look around the room. There’d been nothing personal there, no photo albums or whiskey, no old records or CDs. If Louise Thomas had owned a television or a radio, they’d been taken by the intruder or by Mrs. Sturrow. Something, though, perhaps just an overworked fancy in a darkening cottage, made me allow the possibility that Louise Thomas had lived without television or radio or books. I wondered what kind of woman could manage the nights, in such a desolate place, with only the wind to keep her company.
The bedroom, too, demanded little more than a fast, final glance. I went to the empty closet, this time thinking to feel along the top shelf. My fingers touched a small box in the farthest corner. It was a new black typewriter ribbon, marked for Underwood models like the Number Five on the oak table. I put it in my coat pocket.
I had to pass the oak table on my way out of the room. From habit, I started to reach for the typewriter.
We bent to look at what she’d just cut into the paint on the underside, M.M.’S FUTURE MACHINE, she’d scratched, with the fork. She smiled, pleased by our scrutiny. “I’m going to write my way out of this town,” she said.
I pulled my hand back. It was just an old reflex. I didn’t need to turn over the machine. I’d already checked. There was nothing there.
I felt in my pockets for Louise’s keys. It was almost dark.
Something glinted faintly as I reached to close the living room door. I stepped back inside. It was the brass knob on a closet door, caught just right by the last of the daylight. I’d never noticed that closet; it had always been hidden by the opened living room door. I turned the knob.
Two wire hangers dangled empty on a metal pipe rod. There was no jacket, no coat, no hats to protect from the cold or the sun. On the floor was a woman’s pair of gray running shoes, size eight. I grabbed the clothes bag from the porch, dropped in the shoes, locked both doors, and left.
Jeep Wranglers have no trunks, and the shelf of a backseat is comfortable only for people with removable legs. Since the car was already crammed with three bags of newspaper sheets, it was tempting to leave the clothes behind.
But they might fetch a few bucks for Mrs. Sturrow at a resale shop.
“Let her eat fruit,” I said to the bag of clothes. Smug with pettiness, I jammed it in the back of the Jeep. I’d find a Salvation Army bin in West Haven.
I got behind the wheel, twisted the key in the ignition-and then I sat, stalled by a hazy mix of old memories and new questions. The engine seemed to grow louder and louder, as if impatient with my indecision. Finally, I could not stand it. I shut it off, ran to the dark house, and unlocked the doors. By now, the living room was almost black, the bedroom barely lighter. Even in the cold, I was sure there was a scent of roses and Ivory soap.
I grabbed the Underwood. The heavy old black steel was frigid under my grip as I relocked the doors and hurried to set it on my passenger’s seat. I fired the engine and drove away.
The road to West Haven was deserted, the snow on the fields a pale blue blanket lit softly by a rising quarter moon. Past the broad turn a couple of miles west of Louise’s place, something flashed red a few hundred yards behind me. It could have been the quick tap of brake lights of a car following without headlights, or it, too, could have been my imagination.
…
Setting down the bags of newspaper sheets to unlock my motel room door, I made a bargain to shut up the little bean adder that crabs around inside my head: I’d spend only the seven hundred Louise had earmarked for me to be her executor, and not one dime more. Whatever questions remained when the seven hundred ran out would have to stay unanswered.
The little bean adder snorted in disbelief: You don’t have any other money, he said. Ah, but I have a credit card, I almost said, but I didn’t. It isn’t seemly to argue with oneself aloud, even when one is within earshot of only twin Dumpsters.
Inside, I called Reynolds’s cell phone and left a message asking him to call. Then I dumped the bags of crumpled Honestly Dearest columns onto the bed and began sorting them by date. It would have been boring work, but I’d switched on Grand Rapids television. Its Starsky and Hutch retrospective was still going strong, and though the plot of each episode was identical, the names of the distressed damsels and the colors of the villains’ cars varied enough to keep me enthralled. Time almost flew.
The Honestly Dearest columns went back over a year. As I’d noticed at lunch, the oldest were from the Gulf Watcher, a shopping tabloid from Windward Island in Florida. More recent were a couple of sheets from Georgia and Ohio papers. The newest, and the largest batch by far, came from the Southwest Michigan Intelligencer, beginning the previous May.
As Starsky and Hutch traded witticisms about women and cars, and cars and women, I nibbled at my salad from lunch and what was left of the Oreos and read Honestly, Dearest columns. To victims of faithless marriages, teenage insecurities, bad-smelling coworkers, a peeping pizza delivery man, and a college lad who objected to his roommate having sex with a girlfriend while he was trying to study not five feet away-all of them ordinary people, sadly at their most ordinary-she offered up respect and common sense.
However, none of the letters appeared to have been written by a frightened, lonely woman living in an isolated cottage. And none had been spotted with blood. The newspapers had been scattered by the intruder, after he killed her.
No blood, no trail to Louise. I didn’t know what that meant.
I’d fallen asleep rereading some of the newer columns, notwithstanding Starsky and Hutch being mirthful in the background, when Reynolds called. It was eleven twenty.
“Who’s got Louise Thomas’s purse?” I asked.
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I’d like to notify next of kin. She might have had wallet pictures, letters, something else that can help me trace them down.” It sounded better than trying to justify a growing obsession.
“Most likely, the intruder took the purse for the cash and the credit cards.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“All I know for sure is I got a message on my cell phone saying there’d been a home invasion and a death on Twelve, and to keep an eye peeled for vandals.”