“Could you at least tell if she was young or old?”
“She was only in here a few minutes, and she wore those glasses that get darker in the light-”
“Twenty or sixty?”
He shook his head. “Somewhere in between.”
I picked up the little ring of keys. “And these?” There were two Chrysler-logo keys and a standard house key.
“For the car and the house, I imagine.”
“Did she give you a list of assets as part of the will?”
“No, and that’s what’s needed. It’s called an inventory, and I have to file it with her will in the probate court. As executor, it’s your responsibility to provide me with an accounting of everything she had that’s worth something.”
“Lockbox?”
“Again, your responsibility.” He shrugged. “I have no authority to contact the local banks. I’m hoping that, if she had a box, you’ll find a key among her effects.”
“When did she die?”
He looked away, as if he were trying to read the fine print on one of the degrees framed on the opposite wall.
“There’s some dispute about that,” he said after a minute.
Something greasy worked its way down my throat, but it could have been the last inches of the foot of onion rings. I cleared my throat, prompting.
He turned to face me. “You sure you didn’t know Louise Thomas?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair. He smelled of mint and spring.
“Not by that name.”
“Think, Mr. Elstrom.”
“I knew a lot of people through my business.”
He gestured at the laptop computer on the credenza behind him. “You got quite a lot of notoriety through that business as well.”
He’d done an Internet search on me. He might have been a resort-town lawyer, but he knew how to do homework.
“I was cleared,” I said.
Aggert nodded, accepting, and eased back in his chair. “It took some time to discover her body,” he said, coming around to my question.
The onion rings started to dance. “No neighbors noticed she wasn’t around, or the mail piling up? Nobody at work thought to report her missing?”
“I don’t know where she worked.”
“And people aren’t neighborly in Rambling?”
“It’s a blueberry town. Not many people. Just blueberry bushes, picked mechanically or by seasonal workers. Nobody much is left except for some back-to-the-earth nuts, folks who need to live out where they can’t see other house lights at night.”
“How did the cops know to contact you?”
“They must have found my card in her house. I didn’t think to ask.”
“Did you tell the cops she’d just been in to give you her will?”
He opened his little tin of Altoids, slipped one in his mouth. “That has to be coincidence.”
“Coincidence?” Suddenly, I didn’t like William Aggert very much. He was a man who asked too few questions.
“It happens,” he said, scenting the air with the fresh Altoid. “Somebody gets the urge to write a will and dies right afterward.”
I jangled the keys. “What am I supposed to do? Go out to Rambling, inventory her stuff, and then give it away?”
“And call around to the banks, see if there’s a lockbox. I don’t imagine there’ll be much to inventory. Nobody who has anything lives in Rambling.” He opened the center drawer of his desk and pulled out his check for seven hundred dollars, made out to me.
I stood up.
“You’ll get on this right away?” he said.
“I’ll drive out there now.”
“As her attorney, I need to be kept informed, every day.”
His phone hadn’t rung since I’d been there, his desktop was empty, except for the Altoids, and he didn’t have a secretary. He was looking for something to do.
“I’ll do what I can. I have other obligations,” I said with a straight face. I started to turn for the door.
“One more thing,” he said. He handed me a scrap of paper with a name and phone number on it. “Miss Thomas’s landlady, a Mrs. Sturrow. She wants to know when the house will be available to rent out.”
“How far in advance did Louise pay up?”
“Mrs. Sturrow said until the end of May,” he said.
“Tell her the executor says the end of May,” I said and walked out.
Downstairs, in Fizzy’s, a smiling man was pulling a watch from a case marked $5.95 to show to a woman wearing a mended fleece coat.
“Are you sure it’ll keep good time?” the woman asked, squinting at the watch. She could have been sixty or she could have been forty; her face was weathered and deeply lined. I guessed she was from a surrounding farm town and had cut those lines working days in the sun and sweating nights about rain and crop prices and interest rates. Skin gets furrowed just like dirt in farm towns.
“Fine quartz movement,” the man said, smiling at the watch in the woman’s hand.
The woman rubbed the shiny silver on the watchband, testing to see if it would come off under her thumb. “I’ll think on it, Mr. Fizzeldorf,” she said, handing it back. And then she walked out.
Fizzy Fizzeldorf glanced over at me, then quickly put the watch back in the display case. I took no offense that he suspected I was not to be trusted around a six dollar watch.
“Got maps of Michigan?” I asked.
His smile reappeared. He rootled under the counter and came up with a folded map that had been stained with a coffee cup ring. “You’re in luck,” he said. “This is the last one left.” The map had an out-of-business oil company logo beneath faded red letters announcing that it was ALL NEW FOR 1984.
“That’ll be two dollars,” he said.
A stained old map for two bucks seemed like a wrong value, considering that four dollars more could get me a whole chrome watch, but I didn’t make the point. “I’ll buy it if it’s got Rambling on it,” I said.
He smiled, unfolded the map, and laid a thick forefinger on a spot an inch northeast of West Haven. “Thar she blows,” he said.
I gave him the two bucks.
The asphalt crumbling on the road to Rambling was the same bleached gray as the sky, and one slight shade darker than the snow lying wind-rutted on the fields. Only the branches of the blueberry bushes, blood red and gnarled, as though contorting to wrench themselves out of the ground, gave any color to the landscape at all. I made the eighteen miles to Rambling in twenty minutes because there were no other cars on the road to slow me down.
Aggert had been right: Rambling in winter was indeed a blueberry town, populated only by bushes. There’d been a drugstore with an icecream-cone-shaped sign, a café, and a resale shop. They were vacant, offering nothing now but sun-faded FOR RENT signs propped in their dirty windows. A fourth building that had once been a food store was no longer anything. It had burned, and snow covered what remained of its roof, lying on the ground inside its walls. Rambling looked to be a ghost town, abandoned even by its ghosts.
I followed Fizzy’s map and continued east. County Road 12 was a mile past the frenzy of downtown Rambling, a whispery road, more dirt than gravel. I stopped at the intersection, looked both ways. There were no houses visible in either direction. I turned right and drove south through more acres of twisted red blueberry bushes. The first sign of life was two miles down, a cluster of three cottages set close to the road. HAPPY FARMS, a wood sign read. The occupants must have been away, being happy elsewhere, because the snow on the single drive heading up to the houses was unmarked by tire tracks, and there was moss showing on the roofs where the snow had melted off. I kept driving south until I came to the town limits of the next metropolis, a place named Tadesville. It looked to be no more affluent than Rambling. I swung around and headed back the way I’d come.
I crossed the West Haven road, this time heading north. A mile up, I came to an asbestos-shingled faded green cottage, set in a clearing surrounded by spindly trees. It was a skinny place, no bigger than a house trailer, with a glassed-in front porch. I bounced onto the ruts of the driveway and cut the engine.