“You don’t have any hidden money,” Mary said. “You’re still having delusions from the meningitis.”
“Spoil sport,” Grandma said under her breath. “Let’s go look at the waves.” She headed for a boardwalk.
The wind had picked up. Whitecaps the size of freighters formed in the open water, rolled toward us, then broke and slammed against the fine white sand of the beach. My hair blew this way and that, covering my eyes until I held it away with one hand on my forehead. Grandma shuffled through the sand, then stopped. She cast a complaint my way, but the wind picked it up and carried it off in another direction.
A man and woman sat with their backs to us, wrapped in a blanket. Several other people walked along the beach. A dog loped near the water with no owner in sight.
My eyes latched on two women with rolled-up jeans, wading out in the lake. One of them kicked her bare feet through the waves with angry thrusts.
April’s air temperature, in spite of the wind, was fairly comfortable because of the sun’s warmth. But stepping into Lake Michigan at this time of year had to be as cold as treading over ice cubes.
The great lake’s water never quite warmed up enough for an enjoyable swim. I’ve been in it when the water was so cold my ankles ached from wading for only a few seconds. And that was in July!
I pulled the binoculars out of my fishing vest and focused in. The tall one had hair almost to her waist. The sun caught it just right, giving her head a halo effect. She said something before they turned around and headed for shore. She must have stepped in a little too deep because her jeans were wet. The other turned and I recognized her.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to Grandma. “I have to say hello to someone.”
Angie Gates didn’t see me approaching until I was almost beside her. When she did notice me, her eyes opened wide in surprise and she backed up into the waves.
The credit union teller’s face was blotchy, her eyes red from crying. Her hair whirled as the wind picked up, creating an effect which was the exact opposite of the halo I’d imagined moments before – more like something out of a horror flick.
I could see her mind working over the situation.
She took off running down the shoreline, pulling the other woman along, shouting at her to hurry. I knew better than to chase Angie. She was years younger and stronger than me, and whatever was happening to her to make her run away had given her added forward momentum.
The tall woman was beautiful, the kind that made me wish for one more go around in her body instead of mine. I never looked like that, even in my best year.
I glanced down at the waves near my feet.
Anyone who lives near the Great Lakes would know simple physics. Most things tossed into the waves wash back up on shore. Unless the object filled with water and disappeared under the lake’s sand carpet. Angie must have thought they would sink.
One did. I saw a flash of color before it vanished under the weight of water and sand. The other rolled toward me. With each new wave, it tumbled closer.
I kicked off my shoes, braced myself for the shock of cold water, waded in, and picked it up.
I held an orange sneaker in my hand.
Chapter 12
THERE’S A GANG UNDER THE bridge,” Kitty said from the front porch of her dilapidated house. Kitty’s yard still looked like a junkyard, even after official town warning number three. But since she wanted to be a lawyer, I wasn’t about to interfere. “They call themselves the Orange Gang.”
Cora Mae guffawed. She had bobby pins stuck in her mouth while she wrapped Kitty’s wet head in pin curls. One of them flew out when she laughed. “The Orange Gang, what a name,” she said, talking out of the side of her mouth.
I sat down beside Kitty. It was the safest place to hide from the view up her house dress. I thought about the bridge Kitty had referred to, the Mackinac Bridge that connected the lower and upper peninsulas. “Tell me more.”
“All we got from Dickey was a name,” she said. “The dead guy behind your truck was Bob Goodyear.”
“Goodyear? Spelled like the Goodyear blimp?” I scribbled in a notebook, listing names and drawing arrows between possible connections. All the lines looped and crossed until my effort looked like toddler scribbling.
Kitty nodded.
“Quite moving your head,” Cora Mae complained. “Now I have to start that one over.”
“I got most of my information from an Internet search,” Kitty said. “In the 1920s, the Purples ran the rackets in lower Michigan. They were tough. Tough enough to stand up to Capone and Scarface. Goodyear’s gang comes from Grand Rapids and they’re trying to emulate the Purples-graffiti, symbols, tough talk, and a color all their own. Orange.”
“They probably picked orange because purple is its complementary color,” Cora Mae said.
“Blue is,” Kitty corrected her.
“Close enough,” Cora Mae said, smashing a strand of curled hair against Kitty’s head and anchoring it with two bobby pins.
“A gang,” I said, in awe. In the U.P. we know about gangs. As in “let’s take a picture of the whole gang in front of that wood pile.” Or “Let’s invite the whole gang over and polish off a case of Bud.”
One time, a motorcycle gang stopped at Ruthie’s on their way through Stonely. That scared a lot of residents that day, before moving on. Otis from the train is another gang member, the railroad gang.
But this was different. This was the real, mean, and ugly, inside and out.
“Why did Bob Goodyear extirpate Kent Miller in the first place?” I wondered out loud, getting a kick out of my word for the day. “They both wore orange shoes, so they were on the same team.”
Kitty shrugged, earning her a gentle slap on the top of the head from Cora Mae, the beautician.
I waited breathlessly for Kitty to use her word for the day again. I longed to watch her mouth form higgledy-piggledy.
“Just because they’re in the same gang,” she said, “doesn’t necessarily mean they were best buddies. After all, they came from a lumpen society, which is probably rife with internal problems.
Lumpen? Rife? Where was higgledy-piggledy?
I didn’t know what to say. Lumpen wasn’t on my radar.
“They’re riff-raff for sure,” Cora Mae said through the bobby pins.
“Besides,” Kitty said, “Dickey talked to Kent Miller’s mother. His whole family lives in the Soo. The mother said he’d just started going down to Grand Rapids recently. She didn’t know anything about orange shoes.”
“That’s a mother for you,” Cora Mae said. She glanced at me. “What have you been up to?”
“Chasing my family across the county,” I replied, giving them a short overview of my quest for the escapees. They laughed until tears ran down their faces. I guess you had to be there to appreciate the seriousness of the matter.
Then I got to the meat of the story. “Angie from the credit union was walking the Gladstone beach. When she saw us, she ran away.”
“If Grandma Johnson was anywhere nearby, I can see why,” Kitty said. “Don’t take it personally.”
“An orange sneaker washed up on shore,” I said.
“I’ll be dang,” Cora Mae said, while chewing a wad of gum. Her favorite exclamation is cripes, but recently she’s added dang to her developing vocabulary. “Where’s the shoe?”
“In my truck.”
“We have to tell Dickey,” Kitty said. I could hear the reluctance in her voice. Including the law in our operation was a last resort.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” I agreed, my feelings about involving the acting sheriff running along the same vein as Kitty’s. “I’m going to heat up pea soup for the family, since we didn’t have lunch. Unless you count the ice cream that I didn’t get any of, thanks to Blaze. Then the three of us should go find Dickey and tell him about Angie.”