The day was looming fruitless. “I wanted to find Carolina in my files, a previous client from a job. She wasn’t there.”
“She could have been in the background: a secretary, a clerk.”
“That would have been a long time ago. Reynolds told me she bought her car some while ago and never titled it in her own name. She’s been running for years, and that’s what nags.”
She squeezed my arm. “You must have made an indelible impression, for her to remember you from so long ago.”
“You should have seen her place, a tiny cottage with missing shingles, set in the middle of nowhere. She was so alone.”
“Dek…”
“If she’d called, maybe I could have helped.”
Amanda straightened up so she could look at my eyes. “She didn’t know you well enough for that, Dek. You’ve got to accept that. People have all sorts of casual relationships. You have to stop making more of this than it is.”
“A casual acquaintance, fearing for her life, doesn’t worry about an executor, especially not for an estate that has no value. She goes to the cops. A friend, or at least someone who knew me better, would have called me, told me she was in trouble, and asked for help. Unless…” I looked past Amanda, at the frozen lake.
“Unless?” She reached out and touched my arm.
“Unless…she didn’t think I would help.”
“Have you ever refused to help anybody?” Her brown eyes caught the brightness from the windows; a smile, coaxing, played on her lips.
I didn’t answer.
Her grip on my arm got stronger. “She was someone you knew briefly a long time ago, someone who went on to write advice columns. Someone who liked to live in seclusion. That’s all.”
“Or she was someone who knew she was going to die.”
Amanda sighed, reaching for her coffee. “What can you do?”
“I’ll finish going through all her mail, see if there’s some hint in there as to why an advice columnist hides out in Rambling. I’ll contact the banks I didn’t visit, see if anyone’s got a lockbox for a Louise Thomas.” Outside her window, everything was white and frozen, easy to see. “But if she rented the box using the Carolina name, I’ll strike out. I’ve only got authorization to act for a Louise Thomas.”
“Are you going to call that editor, Charles?”
“If I can rule out that she wasn’t running from him. He still thinks she’s living in Florida.”
She looked out where I was looking. “Such respect for a dead lady,” she said.
“I want to know why she chose me.”
“What happens when you run through the seven-hundred-dollar fee?”
I shrugged.
“You didn’t know her, Dek.”
“I want to believe that.”
Amanda set down her coffee and turned to touch my shoulder again. “Her house was cold?”
“Her house was dead.”
I got back to Rivertown at nine thirty. By then, the jukeboxes that pulsed the tonks had long gone silent. The street drunks with a few bucks had shuffled off to the health center, the ones without to the warm spots beneath the viaducts. The girls who hadn’t been girls for decades had made their last slow parade down Thompson Avenue, to ease back to their rooms and drop away their fake furs and peel off the mesh stockings that hid more than they revealed.
Midmorning, when the town is quiet and the sky is clear, helps me make my peace with Rivertown. Midmorning, when the sun hangs behind the dead smokestacks of the abandoned factories and makes them cast long shadows, giving them a sort of new life; midmorning, when the still soft light blurs the accordion fences fronting the pawnshops and the liquor stores just enough to shroud the despair that, come noon, will be sold in those places again. Midmorning, there can be hope in Rivertown.
The little red flag on my rural-style mailbox was up, announcing to the world that I’d received correspondence. Since my business had tanked, it was a rare enough occurrence. I dropped the curved door and found an envelope with a drawing of my turret on its lower left corner. It was from the City of Rivertown. I wanted to wad it up and throw it toward city hall, but reason prevailed. I brought it inside, pinched between my forefinger and thumb, as one would carry an expired rodent.
I went upstairs, nuked cold coffee, and walked across the space that would one day be a hall. My office was warm, fifty-some degrees. In my haste to get away from the files I’d thrown all over the floor the previous night, I’d left without shutting down the space heater. I took off my pea coat, took a sip of coffee, and confronted the envelope.
There was no letter, just a violation notice. The crime, scribbled almost illegibly, as though by a child in a hurry, was “Use of Unhistorical Material in Historical Structure.” The fine was one hundred dollars.
It was signed by one E. Derbil, and the bastard had ticketed me for temporarily covering a shattered window with plywood.
Elvis Derbil and I had disliked each other since grammar school. He detested my smart mouth. I detested the way he squealed with laughter every time he did something cruel to a classmate or a small animal. I tried to forget Elvis, like I tried to forget everything about Rivertown, when I fled to Chicago for college and then a career. For years it worked. Then my reputation got ruined, my business collapsed, and Amanda tired of nurturing a whining, self-pitying drunk. I came back to Rivertown and moved into the crumbling turret that had been my grandfather’s dream because I’d run out of dreams of my own.
That put me squarely under Elvis Derbil’s thumb.
My grandfather had been a small-time bootlegger. According to the mutterings I’d overheard from my mother’s three sisters, he’d been broke most of his life. There’d been a time, though, at the beginning of the Great Depression, when his larger competitors had stopped brewing and set instead to killing each other off. In the ensuing shortage, demand for my grandfather’s brew soared. Too small to be much noticed before, he now enjoyed great prosperity. But unfortunately, his hinges had not been fully attached. Instead of investing his new wealth in land or equities or even more vats, he bought truckloads of limestone blocks, to build a castle on the Willahock River.
Just after my grandfather began construction, his competitors came to their senses. They stopped shooting and went back to brewing beer, and that disintegrated my grandfather’s good fortune. Restored to being broke, he died of a stroke soon after, leaving behind only a lone turret and a small mountain of limestone blocks.
The turret and the limestone sat abandoned until the end of World War II, when the lizards who ran Rivertown sniffed new shakedown opportunities from the coming postwar factory expansions. They’d need a temple from which to dispense building permits and accept gratuities. So they declared the small mountain a public eyesore, seized it and the land on which it sat, and built a magnificent hall of stone terraces and darkened corridors, expansive offices and closet-sized public rooms. They’d had no use for the turret, however, and left that with my grandfather’s daughters, accruing unpaid taxes, deserted except for wide-strafing pigeons.
I scoffed when I inherited it from an aunt who’d refused to inflict it upon her own children. It lacked electricity and hot water; its roof leaked, and it was littered with rat carcasses. Then my life unraveled. I got hauled back to Rivertown in a stupor and dropped at the health center like a sack of broken bones, to spend the night in a Lysol-soaked room just vacated by a fellow who’d died in his own vomit. I awoke the next morning looking up, because there was nothing left beneath me. And I quit scoffing. I dragged my clothes to the turret, telling myself that my grandfather’s dream could be rehabbed and sold for a grubstake to a new life.
First I needed an occupancy permit.
The person I had to see at city hall, across the lawn, was my old school antagonist Elvis, nephew of the lizard mayor of Rivertown. He looked older now, of course. His hair had receded halfway back on his head and was sprayed straight up, like the comb on a rooster if set perpendicular to its beak. It smelled of coconuts. He still had his squeal, though, amazingly not softened even a fraction of an octave by age.