He’d been waiting. He’d followed the newspaper reports of the corruption trial I’d gotten caught up in, no doubt exhausting his lips as he savored the words reporting my downfall. When I showed up at city hall, he made much of his power, and my lack of it. “Only temporary,” he’d said, waving a dirty fingernail over a blank permit application, “and only to fix up the inside. No modifications to the outside.” “Why’s that?” I’d asked, long removed from the ways of Rivertown. He grinned and turned the form around so I could see. That was the first time I saw the new symbol of the village-my turret-printed right at the top. “It’s a historical,” he said, the beginnings of a squeal forming in his throat. The turret, though now owned by me, had been zoned a municipal structure in a greasy deal with its former owner, my aunt. The lizards hadn’t wanted to own the turret, they just wanted to use it, as the symbol of what they were calling the Rivertown Renaissance, and they’d plastered its image on the town’s stationery, the police cars, and the portable outhouses in the town’s one park. It was a sleight of hand that could have occurred in no other town on the planet.
I had no choice. I took the occupancy permit, restricted though it was. In the fifteen months since, I’d plodded-renovating the interior as money allowed-and plotted, planning for the day when I could afford a lawyer to sue to get the zoning changed. All the while, Elvis and I fought over each repair. We argued about the color of the new roof, the sheen of the varnish on the timbered door, the hue of the caulk that would stop the winds from coming in around the windows. Everything was a cause for battle. So it was now, concerning the plywood I’d used to temporarily cover a broken window.
I sat at my card table desk, pushed Elvis’s citation to the farthest corner, and switched on my computer. Internet directories got me e-mail addresses for the rest of the banks on Aggert’s list, and I sent them all letters inquiring whether Louise Thomas had done business with them. It only took a couple of hours, but I was pretty sure it was two hours wasted. Carolina had been a secretive woman, and if she’d used her real name, or any name except Louise Thomas when renting a lockbox, I was stopped.
I sent the last inquiry at two o’clock. My office still seemed hot, but worse, it smelled of futility. I walked into the kitchen, in search of better air.
There was a jar of pickles inside my refrigerator and a third of a bag of Oreos. Between them was a plastic package of ham slices. The ham slices were sweating inside the plastic, in spite of the refrigerated air. I closed the door before the ham started to cry.
Things weren’t much better next door. Two generic Lean Cuisine knockoffs rested side by side in the freezer, and otherwise alone. I have a theory that a Lean Cuisine, ingested before Oreos, coats the stomach with a kind of chemical firewall that prevents the absorption of black and white calories. My belt indicates the theory has little promise, but I am still investigating.
I nuked the knockoff that had a picture of a fish dinner on it, but when I removed the plastic cover, I realized I’d been hoaxed. The fish had swum away, and its place had been taken by something that looked and smelled like a puddle of adhesive. I threw the tray in the garbage, poured coffee, and dunked Oreos.
Fifteen minutes later, I called Reynolds, thinking I’d get his voice mail, but he surprised me by answering.
“I’ve got news,” I said. “Louise Thomas’s real name was Carolina something. She wrote an advice column syndicated in shopping newspapers.”
“A gossip columnist?” He didn’t sound excited.
“More like a Dear Abby.”
“How’d you find this out?”
“I drove around your neck of the woods, checking to see if a numbered key I found fit a postal or bank box.”
“You didn’t say you had a key,” he said.
“I might never find where it fits. I did learn she was picking up her mail in Woodton.”
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “All the way over in Woodton.”
“There was a lot of mail there.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Advice column stuff. Reader letters, copies of her newspaper columns, and a note from her editor.”
“Anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Jesus, Elstrom, a clue to her murderer.”
“I’m going to read it all this afternoon. Listen, there’s something else: The Woodton postmaster told me a guy came in, wanting to get at her mail. The guy didn’t have any authorization, so the postmaster blew him off.”
“Did he tell the police?”
“I don’t think so. You might want to keep a special eye on that cottage.”
“You want me to run that key around, check the banks you didn’t get to?”
“You don’t have the authorization. Besides, I’ve sent them faxes,” I said. “How are you coming at your end?”
“You mean, did I find out if she was wearing a coat when she was killed?”
“With a pack of Salems in the pocket,” I added.
He didn’t laugh. “We’re having some vandalism, petty stuff from the local delinquents. Maybe I should run your key to the sheriff. He can contact every bank in the state.”
“You haven’t even had the time to find out who’s investigating.”
This time he laughed. “Get your butt up here with that key. And bring that mail. We can pass that on to the sheriff as well.”
I told him I’d be up when I learned something. “If ever,” I added.
We both laughed at that.
Nine
The contents of the rest of the large envelopes were the same as of the two I’d opened at the Woodton diner: reader letters, mailed to Honestly Dearest at the Bayonne Register in New Jersey, then bundled and sent down to Windward Island, Florida, to be forwarded again, up to Woodton. A third of the large envelopes also contained a photocopy of an Honestly Dearest column, set in type for distribution to the syndicate’s newspapers.
By the postmarks, I guessed that Carolina had picked up her last batch of mail at the very end of the year, about the time she’d made out her will.
I read the letters twice through. At the end, I felt like I’d just crammed for a final exam on the continuum of human misery. All the players from the earlier columns had again been present-the cheating husbands, cheating wives, thieving children, unappreciative brides, abusive parents, touchy aunts, and touching uncles-a thousand variations of the species human, reporting up close and personal, in their own woeful words. Such was the pathos of it all that I wanted to raise my coffee with a trembling hand and toast the miracle that the controlling forces of the universe hadn’t said the hell with it and dialed up the spinning of the world until it was fast enough to throw us all off.
There were also two more notes from her editor, just as short and whining as the one I’d read in Woodton: “Carolina! YOU MUST STOP DIDDLING! Send more at once. Otherwise will void your contract immediately. Now, Carolina. Charles.” And finally: “You are canceled in one week if you don’t respond. C.”
The editor, Charles, had written truer words than he knew. Around the time he’d scratched out his last note, Carolina’s whole life had been canceled.
I stood up and kicked at the listing red vinyl chair. My head was banging from coffee jits and human angst. I’d learned nothing. For days, I’d been chasing a ghost named Louise or Carolina, and I’d discovered only that she wrote columns for throwaway papers and might have smelled of roses and Ivory soap and maybe Salem cigarettes. I put on my pea coat, gloves, and knit hat and went out. A walk in the cold might tamp the failure smoldering in my head.