Dearly Departed

by David Housewright

  The two friends didn’t drift apart until the age of nineteen. Alison was at the University of Minnesota, completing work on her master’s. Gretchen had enrolled in the Law Enforcement program at Minnesota State University in Mankato. After graduation, Gretchen moved to Deer Lake and took a job with the Kreel County Sheriff’s Department. Still, the two women spoke at least three times a week by telephone. Inexplicably, Alison’s last call, according to her phone records, was placed one whole month before she disappeared. About the same time Marie Audette had lost track of her.

  “We spoke every other day,” Gretchen said. “Our phone bills were outrageous. Then one day she stopped calling me, and when I called her, all I got was her machine.”

  I told her about the harassing phone calls and suggested that that was the reason Alison refused to answer the telephone.

  “Doesn’t explain why she quit calling me,” Gretchen said. She turned away, and I was afraid she might start to cry. I hate it when women cry. There’s never anything I can think to do about it except watch. Only she didn’t cry. Instead she asked, “Is there anything else?” obviously anxious to end the conversation.

  “Stephen Emerton claims Alison was having an affair with someone while she was working for the health-care company, possibly a doctor.”

  “Stephen is a jerk,” Gretchen insisted.

  “That’s already been firmly established,” I replied. “But is he also a liar?”

  Gretchen breathed wearily. “The woman in me says Stephen is full of it. Alison would not have had an affair; she just wasn’t like that.”

  “That’s what Marie Audette said,” I offered hopefully.

  Gretchen nodded, then added, “The cop in me says it’s a possibility, although Alison certainly never mentioned a doctor to me.”

  We had just finished our meal when the commotion started. A woman dressed in a wide flaring skirt and tight cotton sweater that was far too young for her was wobbling along the bar, a martini in her hand. She looked like the kind of woman who only drank with men. And there were plenty about, most of them competing to see who would be first to refill her glass or drag a chair over to her, all of them ogling her with a thirst that was both comical and frightening. One of the men pushed a second, who pushed a third, who pushed the first, and so on, while the woman laughed gleefully.

  “Stay here,” Gretchen commanded firmly in case I was contemplating a reprise of my performance at The Last Chance.

  The deputy moved to the center of the group. Two men left immediately, leaving three and the woman. I couldn’t hear what Gretchen said, but her words were effective. The woman responded with a high-pitched laugh, but the men all grabbed some bench except for the largest of the three. He grabbed Gretchen by the wrist. She did not pull away. She merely looked at his hand, then at him, and spoke a few, slow words. The man hung in there with as much tenacity as a professional ballplayer in the first year of a guaranteed multimillion dollar contract, which is to say he backed off quickly, sitting with the others, pulling the woman down into a chair next to him. After a few more words, Gretchen returned to our table. The four people watched her, huddled close together, and then left the restaurant.

  “Are you married?” Gretchen asked me as she regained her chair.

  “No,” I said, without going into details.

  “She is.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Eleanor Koehn. She’s a slush.”

  “A slush?”

  “A lush who drinks and then becomes a slut.”

  “I take it her husband was not among Eleanor’s admirers.”

  “Her husband is King Koehn. He owns King Boats.”

  “King Koehn?”

  “That’s what he calls himself, what he insists his employees call him. About half the people in Deer Lake work for him one way or another.”

  “And he doesn’t have time for a wife,” I guessed.

  “Sure, he does. Just not his own.”

  “Compliments of the management,” Ingrid announced, interrupting us with a bottle of Beringer white zinfandel and two wine glasses.

  “This isn’t necessary,” Gretchen told her.

  “Are you on duty?” Ingrid asked.

  “No.”

  “Compliments of the management,” she repeated, pouring a generous amount of the liquid into each glass. We both thanked her.

  “You did that well,” I told Gretchen after our hostess left.

  “Breaking up the brawl?”

  “No. Scamming the freebie,” I said, and Gretchen laughed.

  “Don’t tell Bobby Orman,” she said. “He’s the sheriff. He takes a real dim view of deputies accepting gratuities.”

  “You did handle yourself well, though,” I told her again. “Both here and at The Last Chance. You’re a good cop.”

  “I don’t know. I might be catching on. Finally. When I first started, I was in everyone’s face. Always mouthing off, always threatening people until physical force became a necessity. I was the best baton twirler in Kreel County, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “I guess I was trying to overcompensate for being a woman, trying to prove I was just as tough as the male deputies. There was a lot of hostility and suspicion when I first started; the guys stood back to see if I could handle myself. Some of them didn’t want to work with me. Others, when I called for backup, they’d take their own sweet time responding, stopping along the way to bag a speeder, stuff like that. So I was always asserting my authority, I was always playing it hard. And I never understood why no one complained. Oh, they’d scream a blue streak about some of the things I said but nothing when I beat them up.

  “Then one day I started thinking, This is silly. It’s silly for a deputy—man or woman—to start duking it out with some guy in a bar. What does it prove? That you’re stupid, that’s what it proves. I guess I’ve mellowed. I don’t get in their faces anymore. I don’t try to belittle them. Or challenge their manhood. I talk softly but firmly and directly, and people respond. They call me ma’am. They kiss my hand and they say, ‘Can I tell you my side of the story first, ma’am?’ Most people who give cops BS do it for effect, they do it for the crowd. But look at me: five foot six, one hundred twenty-five pounds. People who give me BS look stupid, and no one wants to look stupid in front of their friends. They’d rather go to jail. Besides, I bust someone, he figures he’ll get treated right. He knows he won’t have an accident on the stairs; you know, trip and bump his head eight or nine times.”

  “You’re a peace officer,” I volunteered.

  “That’s it exactly. A peace officer. I like the sound of that.”

  We finished the wine and listened to Lonnie Cavander’s first set, and when it seemed the right time, I squeezed Gretchen’s soft, warm hand and told her it had been a pleasure meeting her. She told me she had enjoyed herself, too, and I should call her the next time I was in Deer Lake. Neither of us spoke of Alison again.

  eleven

  The Donnerbauers lived in a house in an old-fashioned St. Paul neighborhood that harkened back to the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald and bootleg booze. But the house itself wasn’t old-fashioned, merely old, with a spotty lawn and crumbling sidewalk. Mrs. Donnerbauer greeted me at the door, waving frantically. “Come in, come in,” she urged, as if she were afraid the neighbors might see me.

  I had called the Donnerbauers from a pay phone before leaving Deer Lake and asked if I could visit. They agreed. But it was well after ten when I arrived, and no visible lights burned in the house as I stood on the porch and stared at the front door, deciding whether I should knock or not. I figured they must have gone to bed until Mrs. Donnerbauer opened the door just as I was about to leave.

  I stepped across the threshold into virtual darkness. An ancient floor lamp burned in the far corner of the living room, but the dim light it cast was supressed by a burnt-orange lampshade and didn’t reach the door. The only other light in the room came from a seventeen-inch television mounted on a metal TV t
ray, also in the far corner; its flickering shadows gave the plastic-covered furniture an eerie sense of movement. A man that I assumed was Alison’s father sat under the floor lamp in a chair facing the TV screen, his bifocals balanced on his nose. He was either watching the Entertainment channel or reading the People magazine that was opened across his knee. Mrs. Donnerbauer introduced me, saying, “The detective person is here.” Mr. Donnerbauer didn’t reply. Maybe, in fact, he was sleeping.

  Alison’s mother led me to the kitchen in the back of the house, where a single bare lightbulb burned overhead. She offered me a chair after first removing a large cardboard box from the seat. The box was at least fifteen inches square and filled with the small rubber bands that the delivery kids wrap around your newspaper. She set the box on the counter next to an impressive stack of wrinkled aluminum foil. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked. When I said I did, she filled a tall juice glass and handed it to me.

  “Would you like some fish sticks?”

  “Fish sticks?” I replied.

  “We have plenty,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said, confessing that she worked as a food demonstrator, enticing supermarket shoppers with free samples as they pushed their carts up and down the aisles. She always brought the leftovers home to feed her family, which now consisted only of herself and her silent husband.

  I declined the fish sticks.

  “That woman in the paper, are they going to make her pay for hurting my little girl?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked abruptly.

  “I don’t know. There’s not much physical evidence,” I answered.

  “It ain’t fair,” she insisted.

  I agreed with her.

  Mrs. Donnerbauer was a small woman on the downside of fifty, an age she hadn’t reached without hard struggle. Any resemblance to the young woman in my photographs had been eroded by time. Without prodding, Mrs. Donnerbauer began speaking of her Alison—only not with the hallowed devotion you would expect from a grieving mother. Rather, she spoke of Alison as if she were the wayward daughter of an unpopular neighbor.

  “Very peculiar child,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said.

  “How so?”

  “Well, she wasn’t like the other children.”

  “How so?” I repeated.

  “For one thing, she was always reading,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said as if she had caught her daughter drinking three-two beer behind the garage. “Reading at the dinner table. Reading in the car. Reading in front of the TV. Reading at night under the covers with a flashlight.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” I suggested. “I did much the same thing when I was a kid.”

  “War and Peace?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked. “The Selected Plays of Eugene O’Neill? Canterbury Tales? In old English! Once I caught her reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She was eight years old. Imagine.”

  Imagine, indeed.

  “And she would never answer when I spoke to her,” the woman added from across the kitchen table. “I would chant her name: Alison, Alison, Alison. Nothing. At first I thought she was deaf or something. Then I thought it was because Alison hadn’t been named until after she was three months old because of a family disagreement.… His mother,” she mouthed silently, gesturing toward the living room. “I thought maybe she didn’t realize that Alison was her name. Of course, I now know that she was just ignoring me, like her father. Isn’t that right, dear?” she asked the man in the living room. When he didn’t reply, she shook her head. “See?”

  “Maybe he didn’t hear you.”

  “Oh, he heard me fine; he just doesn’t want to say anything.” Mrs. Donnerbauer sighed dramatically. “It’s the cross I bear.”

  I didn’t say anything, either. After a moment, Mrs. Donnerbauer sighed again. I took that as a cue.

  “It must have been difficult raising a girl who was so intelligent,” I said.

  “Very difficult. And a little bit”—Mrs. Donnerbauer searched for a word, settled on—“frightening. Imagine trying to raise a child who’s smarter than you. It was bad enough when she merely thought she was smarter. But then the teachers at the school told us Alison should be in special classes because she was a genius. They tested her—they never asked me if they could, but I guess they test everybody. Anyway, they tested her, and the tests results said Alison was a genius. A genius,” she repeated as if the word made her nauseous. “It gave Alison a reason to ignore me. Suddenly I wasn’t smart enough to tell her when to go to bed or to eat her vegetables or what clothes to wear. I wasn’t smart enough to be her mother. ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone.’ Everyday it was the same thing until finally I just threw up my hands and did leave her alone.”

  Mrs. Donnerbauer took time out to stare at something way above my left shoulder. I sipped coffee from the juice glass. At last she said, “I guess Alison found out what happens when you think you’re so much smarter than everyone else.”

  I was amazed by the statement and flashed again on the photograph in my car. In the end, Alison couldn’t even depend on her mother.

  “She used to say she was blessed,” Mrs. Donnerbauer continued. “Well, I didn’t see it. Where’s the blessing in being so different from everyone else? You tell me. I remember when she was graduated from high school—graduated three weeks before her sixteenth birthday. I was so embarrassed.…”

  “Really? I would have thought you would’ve been proud.”

  Mrs. Donnerbauer shook her head. “You don’t know what it’s like, having people look at you, stare at you. Having people ask you questions because your daughter is so … different. People asking how she was around the house, like if she ate strange food or something. People asking if I—if I—took vitamins or something when I was carrying her; if I listened to Mozart of something in the delivery room. Imagine! People. Sometimes I don’t know what to think.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know what to think, either,” I agreed.

  “And of course, she didn’t have any time for boys,” Mrs. Donnerbauer continued. “She was too busy doing genius things.”

  “What about Stephen Emerton?”

  “That was the one time I put my foot down,” she answered proudly. “Stephen was such a good-looking boy and smart, too. But the way Alison treated him … Well, I practically forced her down the aisle.”

  “Alison didn’t want to get married?”

  “Oh, of course not. That’s what normal people did. But I knew marriage was the best thing for her. And so …”

  “Was she happy do you think?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Was she happily married?”

  Mrs. Donnerbauer stared at me as if she had never heard the expression before.

  “I heard that she might have been seeing someone else,” I added.

  “Committing adultery!” Mrs. Donnerbauer was genuinely shocked.

  “I heard—”

  “No daughter of mine ever committed adultery. I don’t know where you got your information, young man, but you better go back and get some more, yes sir. We are Catholics in this house. Roman Catholics. We don’t break commandments.”

  I was actually relieved to hear her denial. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Offend me? Why should I be offended because a man comes into my home and calls my little girl a trollop!”

  “Mrs. Donnerbauer, I deeply apologize, I truly do,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “But you have to understand that when we hear rumors like this, no matter how ridiculous, we have to look into them. It’s the courts that make us do it.”

  “The courts,” she repeated and looked around, like she was searching for a place to spit. No one likes the courts. That’s why it’s easy to blame them when you get into a jam.

  I tried again. “This rumor says that Alison was involved with a doctor while she worked—”

  “No. No. No. My daughter would never get involved with … A doctor, you say? No. I don’t want to hear any more. I think it’s time you left.”

  I rose from my
chair.

  “My daughter is no adulteress.”

  I was happy to believe her.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Donnerbauer.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “My child never cheated on her husband, I don’t care what that … that brute Raymond Fleck told the newspapers,” she added slowly and carefully in case I was leaving with the wrong impression.

  “I never thought she did,” I agreed.

  Mrs. Donnerbauer apparently had to think about that. And in the silence that ensued, Mr. Donnerbauer said one word very clearly from his chair in the darkened living room: “Holyfield.”

  The word hung in the air like an unpleasant odor.

  “No,” Mrs. Donnerbauer muttered.

  “What was that, Mr. Donnerbauer?” I stepped toward the arch that separated the two rooms.

  “Dr. Robert Holyfield,” he said, without taking his eyes from the TV screen.

  “What? What? What are you saying?” Mrs. Donnerbauer pushed past me, practically running to her husband’s chair. “What are you saying? Do you know what you’re saying?”

  Mr. Donnerbauer refused to look at her. “She was a woman like all other women,” he answered coldly.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Mrs. Donnerbauer demanded.

  Mr. Donnerbauer turned his head maybe ten degrees and tilted it just enough so that he could see his wife’s face. His upper lip curled into an ugly snarl. “You know exactly what I mean, woman.” Then he just as deliberately resumed watching TV.

  “You bastard!” Mrs. Donnerbauer spat at him.

  Mrs. Donnerbauer’s high-pitched whine was gaining in volume behind me as I walked rapidly from the room, out the door, and into the night. I didn’t look back until my car door was open and I was sliding in.

  twelve

  M innesotans. Like most Americans, are summer people. Perhaps more so than most Americans because we spend such a large part of the year without its warmth, yearning for it, planning for it. True, few people have as much fun in the snow as we do. Yet, when we recall the joys of childhood, we always think of summer.