Fortified, I drove across the street to a blue and turquoise cinder-block motel with an empty parking lot and a lit-up sign saying they had cable television. The desk clerk, a lad of about seventeen, told me a room would be thirty dollars, including color television. “But no cable,” he said.
“The sign says you have cable.”
“We drop our subscription in the winter. We get one regular channel, though, out of Grand Rapids.”
“It’ll do,” I said and gave him my credit card.
My room had a nice view of two perfectly matched Dumpsters, and if that got boring, there was indeed the color television set that the desk clerk had promised. There was also a Bible with its cover torn off and a phone book for the whole area, including Rambling. I looked under the government section at the front of the directory, but there was no listing for a Rambling police station.
I walked back across the highway to the Wal-Mart and sat in a molded brown plastic booth. I had the nacho platter for dinner. It, too, looked to have been molded, though in a different color. Afterward, I passed the rest of the night in my motel room, watching a Starsky and Hutch retrospective on Grand Rapids television and eating Oreos. At midnight, I set the bedside alarm for six thirty and turned out the light. It was too early for the Oreos; they wanted to stay up for a while and play with the nachos, so I lay in the dark and listened to the trucks rumbling by on the interstate, wondering what kind of woman would want to live on a humanity-forsaken, dry bit of ground in Rambling. It didn’t seem like anybody I’d ever known.
Sometime around two in the morning, I said, “Who are you, Louise?” for the hundredth time to the darkness and fell asleep.
Four
Without caffeine, my brain is mush. Since my thirty-dollar room didn’t come with a coffeemaker, nor even brownish powder that could be added to tap water, I hurried through my shower and shave and had my hand on the doorknob in a fast twelve minutes, telling what was left of the Oreos they had until that evening to survive.
I sped across the road to the Wal-Mart and got a large coffee and a Wal-Doughnut with yellow sprinkles on it. As I drove northeast to Rambling, I wondered if I was obsessing too much about Wal-Marts, but it was impossible not to marvel at their efficiency. I’d heard that eighty percent of Wal-Mart’s goods came from eight thousand factories in China. Yet even getting their goods from that far away, they still managed to deliver their coffee hot and their doughnuts moist. It was no wonder that the merchants on Main Street U.S.A. were getting creamed.
I was savoring the last of the yellow sprinkles stuck between my teeth when Aggert called.
“When are you stopping by?” he asked.
“It’s only seven thirty; I didn’t figure you to be at work yet. I’m on my way to Rambling to bag up Louise’s stuff.”
“If you’re sure there’s nothing there, let the landlady clean it up. Better you should start on the banks and post offices.”
“Maybe the cops will want to examine her stuff again for clues.”
“The cops are done. Come by my office, pick up that list of banks and post offices.”
“I’m going to bag her stuff; she’s owed that.” I told him I’d stop by later.
A huge dark blue SUV, the kind of monster that squeezes a mile, maybe two, out of a gallon of gasoline, was parked at the end of Louise’s drive. The garage doors were open, and inside, a man was leaning into the open driver’s door of the Dodge. I’d meant to lock the car the previous day but must have forgotten.
When he heard me bounce up the ruts, he straightened up and came out. He wore jeans and a quilted black parka and moved easily, with his shoulders square, arms loose and ready at his sides. Gray-haired, he was older than me, maybe fifty, but he was physically fit, probably a weight lifter, not the type to be crunching nachos at Wal-Mart. He looked like a cop.
“How you doing?” he asked. He spoke softly, but there was an underlying tone of insistence in his voice, as if he were used to people doing what he said. Right away.
“That depends,” I said. “I’m here because I have legal authority. You look like you’re trespassing, maybe even breaking into a vehicle over which I have control.” It was a lot of strong words, but I’d been energized by the yellow sugar sprinkles on the doughnut.
“Fair enough.” Grinning, he reached into his pocket and handed me a business card with a logo and a cluster of blueberries on it. “I’m John Reynolds. I do security for some of the growers.” He smiled wider, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “And you are?”
“Watching empty fields and picking machines extends to this cottage?”
The smile went away. “I could tell you that’s part of it, watching the neighborhood. And I could tell you that watching those empty fields and frozen picking machines occasionally gets boring.” He shook his head. “The real reason is that I think someone should try to find out what exactly happened here.”
“Dek Elstrom,” I said. “Louise Thomas’s executor.”
“Got anything to back that up?”
I handed him my driver’s license and Louise Thomas’s will.
“You knew her?” he asked, studying my driver’s license photo. I had to crouch when they took the picture, and it made my face look like it had more chins than federal buildings have steps.
“I don’t know. I may have met her through my records research business, perhaps years ago.”
He nodded. “How may I help?” he asked, handing back my license and the will.
I got out of the Jeep. “Tell me what happened.”
“I’ll give you the guesswork tour.”
We started up the drive, but he surprised me by stopping almost right away, at the back door. He pointed at the ground beneath the square of plastic that had been taped over the broken glass. “See anything?”
I looked at the ground, then up at him. “No.”
He nodded and motioned for me to follow him. Halfway up the drive, he again stopped, this time right under the two large windows at the side of the house. The ripped plastic sheets billowed softly in the morning air.
He pointed to the ground. “See anything?”
The thousand bits of glass I’d seen the day before glinted in the snow. “The window on the back door was broken inward; no glass left outside on the ground. But these,” I said, pointing up at the two large plastic-sheeted windows, “were shattered from the inside out. And with great impact.”
He grinned. “My guess, too. Now the tour continues inside.” He started to reach to pull himself through a rip in the plastic.
I jangled the ring of keys. “We can use the door, like invited guests,” I said.
He followed me to the front, waited as I unlocked the two doors, then stepped ahead to go in first. Pulling a small flashlight from his jacket pocket, he switched it on and pointed the beam at the floor beneath the two shattered windows. Glass crystals winked back from the carpet.
“Some glass was dragged back in,” I said.
“Hell of a struggle.” He raised the beam toward the back of the room. “You’ve seen the kitchen?”
“Yesterday.”
“It’s been cold enough inside here for the food on the floor not to have spoiled, so I don’t imagine they can pinpoint a time of death.” He started walking through the living room to the back.
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“State police, or the county.”
“What are they telling you?”
“Nothing. They left a message, telling me of the death and saying I should keep an eye on the place for vandals when I’m passing by.”
“Nothing else?”
“Mr. Elstrom, they don’t have the resources to work full-time on a home invasion gone bad. The way it works is that sometime in the future, some small-time greaseball will offer up something he heard in exchange for leniency on his own case.”