“Who left the message?”
“Some woman with the county. I didn’t write down her name.”
“So you wouldn’t know where they took her?”
“Whichever funeral home they use as county morgue?”
“I want to find out where her purse is, and if she was wearing a coat.”
“A coat?”
“There was no coat in her house. Maybe the landlady swiped it, but maybe Louise was wearing a coat when she was killed-it was cold in that house-and the sheriff has it.”
“How is that important?”
“You’re going to love this.”
“Tell me.”
“I want to know if she had cigarettes in her coat pocket, or in her purse.”
“Now you’re really confusing me. Cigarettes?”
“I think she smoked. Too much fresh air was blowing in through the plastic to smell it, but I found a broken ashtray with three Salem butts spilled out of it. There were no other cigarettes in the place.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Ever know a cigarette smoker who didn’t have a backup pack in a drawer? Especially somebody who lived way out in the tulies, miles from a gas station or a convenience store?”
Reynolds exhaled slowly into the phone. “Look, my job is to watch warehouses and fruit fields. In the winter, that might not seem like much, but in the summer, it’s plenty. There’s a population then, some stealing from each other, some stealing from the growers. And that’s when I’m on the phone with the sheriff’s office, all the time. I’ve got to be careful with that relationship. I can’t bother them with some bright idea about a missing pack of cigarettes.”
“So nobody investigates.”
“Not true. I’m sure the county is keeping the file open. And I’m doing what I can.”
“That old Dodge in the garage has a Florida license plate. Do you know anybody who can trace it backward, get me her previous addresses? Maybe I can find a relative that way.”
“I had a buddy run that Florida plate. The guy who purchased that Dodge new sold it to some young woman some years ago.” He paused, then said, “She never retitled the car in her own name.”
“She left it in the previous owner’s name for all those years?”
“Apparently.”
“How did she get a license plate?”
“She learned ways of circumventing the law,” he said.
I saw her then, in my mind: huddled in a long coat, a wool beret pulled down low, a scarf and dark glasses hiding her face, coming out of the narrow little cottage.
“She owned nothing but a few things that could be packed quickly.” I spoke fast, anxious to get the words out so I could understand. “She drove up here in a car she never titled in her own name, paid a year’s rent up front, with cash. She arranged to have her mail diverted, kept nothing in that cottage she couldn’t walk away from.”
“Indeed,” he said. He already had it figured.
She hurried the few steps from the back door to the garage, clutching her coat to her thin body, against the wind, against the world.
“The back bumper, where the license attached, was clean,” I went on, “because she kept the plate under the front seat, screwed it on only when she went out, so she wouldn’t get pulled over by a cop. Otherwise, the plate was off the car.”
She knelt at the back of the Dodge, attaching the plate.
“So no one creeping around the cottage could trace her from the license, find out where she was from,” I said.
“Paranoid to the extreme,” he added.
Louise straightened, moved to the driver’s door.
“Or extremely careful,” I said.
She started the car.
“Every minute, she was running scared,” I continued. “Not just in Rambling, but down in Florida, too, because she never retitled the car. For years, she was running scared.”
“What does this mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Louise backed out along the rutted drive. As she passed, in the center of my mind, I could not see her face.
I awoke in the dark. The red letters on the alarm clock read 3:45. I lay still for a few minutes, trying to pretend nothing had nagged me awake. But I knew.
I gave it up. I got out of bed, slipped on Nikes, jeans, and my pea coat, and padded down the outside stairs to the Jeep, to lug the frozen old metal back up to the room. I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I made sure. Again.
I balanced the typewriter upside down on the bathroom sink, because that’s where the light was brightest. The metal undercarriage shone back, black and smooth. Nothing had been cut into the bottom of the front rail.
To be certain, I looked at it from different angles, front to back, side to side. It was then that my eye caught the small piece, high up in the undercarriage, that was blacker and shinier than the rest. I felt for it with my fingers, touched a rounded surface with a hole cut into the center of one end.
I turned the typewriter over and began working the odd shape with my fingers. It didn’t move. When I withdrew my hand, bits of black paint came back stuck to my finger. Old factory paint didn’t come loose that easily.
I hustled down again to the Jeep for the little rolled pouch of small tools, prudence for driving a heap as old as mine. Upstairs, I worked the blade of a small screwdriver under the piece of curved metal. After a minute, it began to move. Then it clattered loose and fell into the sink.
A flat key, stamped with the number 81.
Seven
The key I’d discovered probably weighed an ounce, but it dragged like a thousand pounds. She’d painted it to make it blend in, then epoxied it too high and too tight inside the typewriter to be gotten at easily. Whatever the key unlocked, she hadn’t planned on accessing it for some time.
Or maybe forever.
I didn’t figure the key worked anything in West Haven. It was too close to Rambling for such a secretive woman. Besides, I had already checked out the banks and the post office. They’d had nothing for Louise Thomas.
So I started across the street from my motel, for fortification for a road trip. At seven thirty, the Wal-Mart parking lot was already half-filled, no doubt by people there to buy Oreos for breakfast. Not me. I strutted right past the end display of the dark, round dunkers-sugar and flour, fat and sin-and exited clutching only a huge foam cup of coffee and a lone doughnut, this one barely dusted with green sprinkles, and even those were the precise color of broccoli. It’s always best to begin a challenging day with a sense of moral superiority.
I’d drawn two concentric circles on Fizzy’s map, to correspond to Aggert’s list of towns a thirty-minute, and then a full hour’s, drive from Rambling. I was guessing the numbered key would fit something in one of the four post offices or eight banks in the closest circle. I didn’t figure a woman afraid of leaving a license plate on her automobile for fear of being discovered would want to be on the road for very long.
Santha, Michigan, population 3,012, was thirteen miles of tree orchards north of West Haven. Wood signs stuck in the frozen dirt said the lifeless trees I was seeing produced peaches and apples, and if I happened to be around in late summer, I could pick them myself. It seemed a world apart from chasing the trail of a key hidden by a dead woman.
The flat key didn’t fit box 81 at the Santha post office, and the man at the window said there were no mail holds for a Louise Thomas. Oddly, for such a small town, Santha had two banks on the two blocks of its main street. Both were branches of banks, one in Detroit, one in Lansing. Louise was not a customer of either one.
Grand Plain was straight east through seventeen more miles of fruit trees. It appeared never to have had a post office, though it did have a gas station with two pumps. Grand Plain had recently had a branch of a bank, too, though a new-looking sign in the window said it was closed and referred customers to the main location in Kalamazoo. I wondered if intense competition from the two-bank metropolis of Santha, population 3,012, had been responsible.