“Ef. El. A.” I mouthed it under my breath. F-L-A. Florida.
“She’s sick, you know.”
I jerked around, looked up. I hadn’t heard the waitress coming. She was balancing a large plate with her fingertips and nodding at the photocopies of the Honestly Dearest columns I’d spread on the table.
She set my plate down a fraction of a second after I got the clippings out of the way. It was mounded with a thick white gravy, the consistency of oatmeal.
“Sick?” I asked, my mind still in the envelopes.
“Honestly Dearest,” she said. The gravy started to work its way over the edge of the plate but hung suspended at the lip, too thick to drop.
“How do you know that?”
“More coffee?”
“How do you know she’s just sick?”
She left and came back with the glass coffee carafe and a thin newspaper that had been folded twice. She set the newspaper on the table and filled my cup. “Right there at the top,” she said.
I looked at the newsprint, HONESTLY DEAREST was printed out in bold letters, followed by “is ill,” in italics.
“You read the column a lot?”
“In the Intelligencer. Except she’s been sick, like I told you, the last couple weeks.” She started to turn, to walk away, but then stopped. “You don’t look like the type to be reading those columns.”
Then she said something else, but her words dissolved into muffled buzzing, crowded out by the flash fire of thoughts raging inside my head. She stood, waiting.
“Nothing else, thanks,” I thought to say.
I’d guessed right. She smiled. “I’ll leave you to your columns, then,” she said.
I looked down at the shape of the chicken fried steak submerged in the puddinglike gravy, a pale porpoise drowning in thick lava. “Thanks for all the gravy,” I called out.
“Only way to eat chicken fried steak,” she said, not bothering to look around.
I stuffed the loose envelopes and photocopies back into the two tan ones and dropped those back into the mail tub, where, I hoped, I could ignore them for a few minutes.
I cut loose a cube of the chicken fried substance and managed to raise it, quivering as it was beneath its half inch of molten gravy, to my mouth without spilling it, but the traffic in my head was still too busy. My appetite was gone. I needed to get away, find someplace quiet to paw through the mail tub.
I left a ten on the table, hauled the tub out to the Jeep, and gunned down the empty road to West Haven. There were no more answers in the cottage in Rambling, nothing to be learned working out of a room across the street from a Wal-Mart. I needed to get back to the turret.
I left the tub in the Jeep and ran in to grab the Honestly Dearest columns, my duffel, and Louise’s old steel typewriter. The desk clerk, a sallow, pimply kid who looked resigned to a life behind a registration counter, stiffened as he told me I’d have to pay for the upcoming night, since it was long past checkout time. I surprised him by not arguing, and he bobbed his head instantly when I asked him to drop Louise’s clothes at the local homeless shelter.
H. D. Honestly Dearest. No matter how many times I ran it through my brain, it was unreal. Louise Thomas was Honestly Dearest, the advice columnist. Except she wasn’t Louise Thomas; that was a made-up name.
Her name was Carolina.
I had to get back to the turret, to my records, to find a Carolina.
To find out why she’d had to lie to me, by using a false name.
Eight
A cell phone rang far away.
“Dek,” Amanda’s voice said from the sliver of light under my pillow.
“I love you,” I said as the phone rang again.
“Your cell phone,” her distant voice said, above the ringing.
“I love that, too.” I pulled down the pillow to close the little gap.
“Dek Elstrom’s phone,” she said, much fainter now, outside the darkness.
Several seconds of soothing, dark silence followed. Then, without warning, the pillow was torn away, a thousand daggers of white sunlight stabbed into my eyes, and the rude, cold plastic of a cell phone attacked my cheek.
“Dek Elstrom,” I said into the obnoxious intruder, because I had no choice.
“Top of the morning, Mr. Elstrom; Bill Aggert here.” I could almost smell the damned mints above his chirping words. “I just called your motel and was shocked to learn you checked out yesterday.”
I opened my eyes to squint at Amanda’s bedside clock radio. It was seven fifteen. We’d only slept for four hours.
“It’s seven fifteen,” I said.
“Eight fifteen in West Haven,” he said. “You can be back up here before noon.”
Amanda stood by the full-length window, looking out at Lake Michigan in the east. The view of the lake from her fortieth-floor condominium was roughly the same as I’d seen in Michigan-waves frozen in midcurl, chunks of ice floating far out-but the view from West Haven didn’t include Amanda in a sheer white wrap, made transparent by the sun as it, and part of me, rose.
I propped myself up on one elbow to get a better view. “I found a little key,” I said, tossing a morsel to make him go away.
“P.O. box or bank?”
“Louise had her mail held in Woodton. No box.”
“Anything in it that affects probate?”
“I haven’t gone through it all yet.”
“Bring it up today,” he boomed, “and I’ll go through it while you take that key to the rest of the banks and post offices. Bills and assets have to be included in the inventory.”
“You have a deadline to file something concerning her death?”
“The probate court likes timely filings.”
Amanda turned from the window to smile. The new view was just as breathtaking.
“I’ll call you,” I said, not caring much if Aggert heard before I clicked him away and dropped the phone.
I’d called Amanda at nine thirty the previous night, ten seconds after I’d thrown the last of my old business files across my office. There’d been no Carolina.
“I’ve been in Michigan, in the cold, but I saved myself for you,” I said.
“I’m sure I’m not worthy.”
“Nonetheless, I’d like to come over.”
“What about our one-week rule?”
“I know we must take things slow this time,” I said, “but Sunday’s horn concert wasn’t a date; it was work.”
“What about what we did afterward? Was that work?”
“That we must continue to practice. It’s why I’m calling.”
“No it isn’t. There’s something else.”
“I’m cold.”
“I’ll call down to the desk.”
Now, the next morning, an hour after Aggert called, Amanda and I were sipping coffee in her living room. Like the rest of the apartment, the walls were the palest of whites. She had almost no furniture in the two-bedroom condominium: a simple laminate table and four chairs in the kitchen; nothing in the dining room except boxes of art books; a dresser and an enormous bed, bookended by two nightstands, in the master bedroom; a computer workstation in the spare room.
In the living room, where we were now, there was but one glass coffee table and one soft white sofa, both facing two million dollars of miscellaneous artwork surrounding an eleven-million-dollar Monet. After her house in a gated community had been destroyed the previous year, she’d told me proudly that she’d furnished her new, high-security condo on Lake Shore Drive for less than four thousand dollars.
“Are you teaching today?” I asked.
“Got to pay the bills.”
She’d inherited the Monet and the other art from a grandfather, but she needed the teaching money to pay for the taxes, dues, and security system at the condominium. For a woman who owned millions in art, she was just getting by.
She set her coffee cup on the glass table, snuggled closer. “How are you?”