I switched on the coffee and walked across the would-be hall. I knew what had silenced him so abruptly.
He was standing back from the card table desk, the bags of hot dogs and drinks in his hands forgotten. His always pale face was two shades whiter than I’d ever seen it. He was staring at Carolina’s typewriter as if he were looking at the dead.
“Just like…” He let the sentence die away.
“I know.”
He roused his thoughts enough to put the bags on the card table, but his right hand lingered close to the old Underwood.
“There’s nothing scratched on the bottom, Leo.”
In a kind of exaggerated slow motion, he turned to look at me.
“I checked,” I said. “Several times.”
He dropped his hand and stepped backward.
“Old times,” he said.
“Old times.”
His eyes surveyed the mess of wadded-up paper on the floor, hunting, I thought, for a place-any place-to look rather than at the typewriter. “You writing a book?”
“Indulging a fury.”
He nodded, without questioning, and pointed at the thick tan envelopes and newspaper sheets stacked beneath the card table. “Louise Thomas’s?”
“Carolina’s. Her real name.”
His eyes had strayed back to the old typewriter. “You knew her?”
“I don’t remember a Carolina, either.”
He shrugged out of his orange parka. Underneath, he wore a red rag knit sweater, two sizes too long, that on him resembled a sock knitted for a dinosaur. He bent down to peer more closely at the piles of newspaper sheets. “Advice columns?”
“I think she wrote them in Florida and in Rambling. I’ve read them all. She answered each with compassion, respect, and a good bit of humor. I think she’d known pain herself.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “Dek Elstrom, ever the romantic.” He straightened up, about to open the bag of hot dogs, when he must have spotted the white envelopes with Carolina’s name written on them. He raised an eyebrow. I nodded. He picked one up and slid out the sheet inside. “Her editor wants to know why she’s stopped sending in material.”
“She quit submitting around the end of last year.”
“Because she was killed.”
I waved a hand at the litter of wadded-up sheets. “I was up late, trying to find the best way of communicating that to her editor.”
He set the small drink and one hot dog on the table for me and took the other five dogs, with the cheese fries and the Big Swallow, to the plastic chair. He would eat all that and still weigh a hundred and forty pounds. It is an injustice. I wear every Oreo I’ve ever eaten.
I sat in my red swivel chair, unwrapped my hot dog, and took a bite. It tasted as good as ever, though who knew what the absence of lead paint dust would do to the ancient flavors in the boiling water, long term.
“She was nationally syndicated, but she wrote with that old-” He stopped, not wanting to even refer to the old machine. The typewriter had spooked him, the way it had me at first.
“No computer word processor for her.”
Leo bit into a hot dog, chewing slower than usual. Always, he ingested Kutz’s tube steaks at warp speed. Not today. He’d been slowed by the past.
“It’s not hers, Leo,” I said.
He looked at me from across the small room. “You’re sure?” He was bald, with the shadow of a man’s heavy beard on his pale skin, but it was a boy asking the question, the boy he’d been the summer we graduated high school.
I tapped the typewriter next to me. “Nothing under this baby except smooth black paint.”
He grinned then, after a fashion, and shook his head as if he were clearing it. “Saudade,” he said.
“Saudade?”
“Brazilian word, somewhat untranslatable into English, but it can mean a kind of yearning, a grateful nostalgia, for a love past.”
I raised my Diet Coke and toasted the typewriter. “Saudade,” I said, being bilingual, too.
Leo took a bigger bite of his hot dog. “You said this Rambling, Michigan, place is dirt poor?”
“Everything on its main street is vacant or burned. Half the houses outside of town appear to be abandoned.”
He unwrapped another hot dog. “She made a few bucks writing advice columns for shopping rags, lived in a rented shack, drove a clapped-out old car, owned few clothes and almost no other personal possessions?” He was chewing faster, and thinking faster.
“Yes.”
“Except for that?” He pointed at the typewriter with the last inch of his second hot dog.
“Except for that.”
“If she had nothing, why name any executor? Why name you?”
“I work cheaper than anybody.”
It didn’t fetch a laugh. “You knew her,” he said.
For a moment, neither of us spoke as we pondered the riddle of that.
“I’m guessing Carolina worked at a client’s, years ago, before she started writing her columns,” I finally offered up. There was nothing else to think.
Leo slid the wrapper of a fourth hot dog away. I hadn’t seen him eat the third.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s get back to the second biggest question. Why was she living in Rambling?”
“Because nobody would know she was there. She had her mail-her readers’ mail, notes from her editor-sent down to Florida, then forwarded again, up to the Woodton post office box, which was a half hour’s drive from her home. She had no possessions, no personal stuff except a few clothes, a car not even titled in her own name, and a typewriter. She could pack up and be gone in fifteen minutes.”
“What about that key you found?”
“That’s where she kept what valuables she had. In a bank box.”
“Near Rambling?”
“No. The way she cemented the key into that typewriter tells me she wasn’t planning on using it for some time. I’m guessing that key works in some bank in Florida, or maybe on the route she took coming north.”
I looked at the typewriter, then back to Leo. “But somebody did.”
“Did what?” He dropped a limp cheese fry back into the sodden tray.
“Somebody did know she was in Rambling.” I told him about the man in the pull-down hat who tried to finesse his way into her mail at the Woodton post office.
“You didn’t find any money in her cottage?”
“I don’t think she had a bank account. I’m guessing that guy grabbed whatever cash she had in the house.”
“It wasn’t a random home invasion?” He unwrapped the last of his five hot dogs, bit into it, and waited.
“A home invader doesn’t track her mail to Woodton.”
“What, then?”
“She’d been hiding from the man who finally found and killed her,” I said. “For years.”
“That explains why she left Florida, and her secretive life in Rambling. And that brings us back to the number one question: Why name you executor of a valueless estate?”
“She didn’t name me. She hired me.”
“To do what?” He watched my eyes as he slid the last of the hot dog into his mouth.
There was only one answer.
“She wanted me to find her killer,” I said.
Eleven
As Leo walked outside, I saw that the red flag on the mailbox was down. The mailman had come early and had taken the envelope full of nonsense I’d meant to retrieve. I’d have to call Charles now, tell him Carolina was dead, and concoct some story about why that was funny enough to send him an envelope full of sophomoric advice column responses.
The telephone receptionist in Bayonne, New Jersey, didn’t even bother to cover her mouthpiece: “Charles, line three,” she yelled.
A moment later, a precise voice came on. “Charles Braithwaite,” he said, enunciating each of the three syllables carefully.