As I’d told Jenny, Amanda and I hadn’t spoken in months, and those last conversations had taken on the sounds of last gasps. She’d given up the last vestige of her former life, teaching at the Art Institute, to head her father’s philanthropy. I saw her mostly in the society pages of the Chicago papers now, a glittering brown-eyed vixen, usually on the arm of one particularly distinguished-looking silver-haired bastard. Looking happy to have gotten past the sort of fumbler who would live in a turret.
Leo had helped me through all of that.
I pulled into the parking lot of a Home Depot, went in, and watched from behind the door glass. The bronze car, an older Chevy Malibu, had pulled in to park between two panel vans, three rows from where I’d left the Jeep. I bought a box of finish nails to have something to carry out, got into the Jeep, and turned north.
A mile up, there was a huge shopping center that must have been designed by an angry architect. It had a particularly vexing layout, consisting of six octagonal clusters of stores separated by green spaces with small trees. And speed bumps. The crazy quilt of interconnected parking lots had tons of speed bumps.
Amanda and I had gone there several times during our marriage. It was a place of high-end chain stores and old ladies, driving slowly because speed bumps can loosen old teeth or new dentures. They approached the asphalt mounds as though they were scaling Everest in a blinding blow, slowly, evaluating every twitch of the steering wheel. Traffic coagulated.
Narrow little unloading alleys had been cut through to the centers of the clusters, for trucks to access the receiving docks behind the stores. The alleys were difficult to see. More important for me, it was easy to presume that the trucks exited the same way they went in. They did not. The trucks went out the opposite side of the cluster, onto an unseen side street.
The bronze Malibu followed me toward one of the store clusters. I darted into one of the parking lots and drove down, as though looking for an empty space. He turned into the lot, too, though two rows back.
I came back up the adjacent aisle, as though I were still looking for a parking place. Then I left the lot and butted into the line of cars in front of the stores. The Malibu had no choice but to do the same, though by now he was well behind me.
It came my turn to take a shallow turn to the left, toward a new store cluster, and I became unseen to anyone more than five cars back. I swung sharply into a loading alley, drove all the way through, and came out onto the access road. Twenty minutes later, I was eastbound on the Illinois Tollway, headed toward Indiana.
I scanned the rearview now and again, but no bronze Malibu could have followed me. Still, to be doubly safe, I got off at Route 12 and followed that beneath the curve of Lake Michigan until I got into Michigan and could pick up the interstate again. For two hours, I passed increasingly bigger pines and smaller towns until I ran out of daylight and interstate and had to cut over to side roads where I could see not much of anything at all.
Downtown Blenton, a forlorn, block-long strip that looked only marginally more prosperous than Center Bridge, appeared an hour later. Theodea Wilson lived in a cottage set well away from the other three houses on her street. Her place was dark.
It was too late to bang on doors in the neighborhood, so I headed back to a Super 8 motel I’d passed a mile earlier. It sat next to a restaurant that had a stuffed deer’s head encased in glass and lit up on its roof, as though to keep an eye out for the hunter who’d dispatched it to an afterlife of riding a roof without legs and a torso. The 8 had two pickups in its parking lot. One was rusty and red; the other was rusty and green. Combined with the vigilant Rudolph high across the lot, the compound had a sort of perverted-Christmas air.
I checked into the 8 and walked over to the restaurant. Three Harley-Davidson motorcycles were parked by the door. The knotty-pine interior was decorated with broken Detroit Red Wings hockey sticks, a large electric Jack Daniel’s sign, lit up, and three ample blond women in tight, low-riding jeans sitting on stools at the bar. All three swiveled in unison as I walked in, making me feel like two hundred pounds of fresh meat being wheeled to a buffet. I took a table by a window so I could be the first to see if any more motorcycle women showed up.
When the waitress brought a menu, I couldn’t help but glance past her at the three women at the bar. Their tight low-riding jeans had ridden even lower, displaying three identical Harley tattoos above the beginnings of three identically deep great divides. I should have taken that view as added incentive for continuing to forsake Twinkies and Ho Hos for aged Cheerios, but I was tired. I ordered a burger, fries, and, after the briefest of hesitations, the house specialty, maple apple pie. I promised myself to rectify it all by eating twice as many Cheerios the next day.
The burger was good, the fries were crisp, but it was the maple-flavored apples encased so lovingly in crusted lard that set my mind to reminiscing. I’d had instances where good pie had accompanied revelations. There’d been an exceptional key lime in Bodega Bay that foreshadowed my tracking down a woman who had a fondness for bombs. More recently, a fine apple, topped with Velveeta, had come along with the discovery of a satisfactory-enough development in the case of a missing woman. I liked harbingers, especially if they were pies, and there was no reason to think that a maple apple pie, up in piney country, would not lead to finding my best friend alive and well.
I bid a silent adios to the tattooed backsides at the bar and tumbled off to my room at the 8, sure to sleep well and safe.
Clever me.
Ten
“She ain’t been home for two, three days,” Theodea Wilson’s nearest neighbor told me the next morning. “School’s probably out for Easter break. She might be gone to her summer place.”
I was holding my shopping bag of clothes like I was trying to make a delivery. “Man, they must have gotten things screwed up down at the store.”
“What store?”
“Hardware,” I said vaguely. I didn’t know any of the nearby stores.
“It’s mighty cold for that right now.”
“Hardware?”
“Eustace,” she said loudly.
“Eustace?”
“Eustace!” she yelled, like I was hard of hearing. “This time, she screwed up. She didn’t stop her mail. I been pushing it through the slot and watching out for packages. I can take your bag.” She held out a hand.
“It’s OK,” I said. “I’ll have the boss call her in a few days.”
“I suppose you could try that,” she said and closed the door.
I had a Michigan map in the glove box but could find no town named Eustace. I drove to the BP station on the highway, filled up, and asked how I could get to Eustace.
“Not very easily,” the sour-faced woman behind the counter said.
“It’s not nearby?”
“It’s close enough, less than thirty miles, but it’s not a town. It’s an island off Mackinaw City, like Mackinac Island. But Eustace is not open to sightseers.”
“Why not?”
“No sights.”
“I know a woman who lives there.”
She cocked her head, seeing a lie. “How’d she tell you to get there, then?”
“She didn’t.”
She nodded, her suspicions about me, and perhaps all of mankind, confirmed. “Best you try to call first, if you can.”
“Cell phone reception up there is spotty?”
“Only on good days.” She frowned at another customer walking in and told me to take the highway straight north until the land ended.