The Dead Caller from Chicago

by Jack Fredrickson

  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.

  I passed much deeper snow than was in Chicago, and more white birches. Big pines were everywhere, including one growing up through the shattered windshield of the burned-out shell of a car. Roadside places sold firewood, stained glass, and deer food. Twenty-five Harleys were parked outside a barbecue restaurant, though I didn’t know Harleys well enough to tell whether any belonged to the tattooed, bifurcated ladies from the night before.

  There were billboards, too, for gun dealers and places to stay on Mackinac Island. Two touted the Grand Hotel, a place that promised the longest porch I’d ever seen.

  The road ended in Mackinaw City. I’d heard of it, of course, like I’d heard of the big island, Mackinac, out on the water. Expensive sailboats raced there from Chicago every summer—manned, I imagined, by taut tanned fellows in pink knit gator shirts and waterproof moccasins, for whom Cheerios meant not just good health but a whole way of life.

  Mackinaw City was no city, but rather several blocks of gift stores, resort clothing shops, and trendy bars lining both sides of a wide center ribbon of mostly empty parking spaces. I drove up and down the long main street, checking out the few cars. None were familiar.

  I checked out the parking lot for the ferry operation that serviced Mackinac Island, then cruised the side streets. Pa Brumsky’s brown LTD was parked beside a peeling tan-painted house four blocks in. I knocked at the front door. A teenaged boy wearing a tousled T-shirt and rumpled jeans answered.

  “I’ve been looking for a big old Ford like yours,” I said. “Is it for sale?”

  The kid shook his head. “W
e just rent parking for people going to Mackinac.”

  “But do you know if it’s for sale?” I said, to keep him talking.

  “You could leave a note on the windshield, with your name and phone number.” He started to close the door.

  “Did the owner say when he’d be back?”

  A pouty blond girl came into partial view, running her fingers through her own hair because the young man’s was too far away. She wore a tousled T-shirt and rumpled jeans, too.

  “Leave a note,” the kid said, shutting the door.

  I envied him. There are points in every life when tousling and rumpling must proceed without distraction. I felt ancient, as though it had been centuries since I’d last been properly tousled and rumpled.

  I drove back to the ferry service. Past a row of outdoor restrooms and a gift shop, small whitecaps crashed against a white-fenced dock ramp. Farther out, a ferry was churning the rough water, heading in. Beyond that were two bumps, one large, one small, faint against the gray. Mackinac and Eustace.

  No one was around except a man in a white wood ticket booth. “Does that go to Eustace Island?” I asked, pointing at the approaching ferry.

  “Nothing goes direct to Eustace. Got to go to the big island, then catch a ride to Eustace.”

  “I need to go straight to Eustace.”

  “What the hell for? Nothing there but one old hotel, thirty rooms, built by some moron thinking to compete with the Grand on Mackinac. He went bust in short time. Other fools came along, thinking to compete, too. Busto, every one of them. Only seasonals use it now, green cards mostly, and most of them won’t be here for another month.”

  “A woman I know has a cottage there.”

  “There are those,” he allowed, “a few places that rent to idiots with little money and fewer brains. It’s a dismal rock, Eustace.”

  “Will your ferry take me if I pay extra?”

  “Ferry’s too big. Docks on Eustace are rickety things, only good for small craft.” He pointed to the whitecaps. “Won’t be anybody going to Eustace today except the first crew working at the Grand. Best I can say, if you’re hell-bent, take our ferry to Mackinac, ask who’ll run to Eustace tomorrow, and huddle up at a bed-and-breakfast if you can find one open this early.”

  The approaching ferry pivoted in a tight arc, reversed its engines, and backed up alongside the ramp. A hardy-looking couple, tanned even in March, wheeled bicycles down the ramp and rode off. Cheerios people.

  “When’s it leave?” I asked the ticket seller.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Even if I’m the only passenger?”

  “It’s in the contract. We run on schedule, rain, snow, or empty.”

  I boarded and went up to the open top deck. The day had darkened even further, smudging the horizon into the waterline. Mackinac Island and its tiny sister, Eustace, were lost in the gloom.

  The diesel engines rumbled louder below decks, and the ferry pulled away from the dock. No one else had gotten on board.

  I looked back at the shore.

  A bulky figure was standing alongside the ticket shack. His hands were jammed in the pockets of his black trench coat, against the cold. He looked square and dark and evil. He was looking right at me.

  I turned a little, pretending to look up the shore. I could still see the ticket shack out of the corner of my eye.

  The bulky man passed something to the ticket taker. It might have been money for the next ferry, but it could have been money to talk. “Why, Eustace,” the ticket seller could be saying. “The damned fool wants to go to Eustace, though there’s nothing there this time of year but a few seasonals, and lots of rocks.”

  Impossible, I said to the thought. I’d lost the bronze Malibu back in Illinois.

  It started to rain, a little. I went belowdecks, where I’d be dry and less cold.

  Where I wouldn’t be seen by the bulky man’s eyes.

  Eleven

  A hundred yards out from the shore, the water began kicking harder, making whitecaps two feet high. The ferry was big, but the roil in the water was stronger. The ferry bobbed like a small boat.

  I went up to the wheelhouse. The captain was talking casually to the deckhand. They both turned, smiling. They were used to angry water.

  “Got work on Mackinac?” the captain asked.

  “I’ve got a friend on Eustace Island.”

  He winced. “Hell to pay, if that’s your destination.”

  “Can you take me? I’ll pay large.”

  He shook his head. “We’d crash on the rocks.”

  “How do I get there, then?”

  “Arnie Pine,” the deckhand said. “Keeps his boat on the next dock over from ours. The Rabbit. He’s adept.”

  “Even in this kind of weather?”

  “Depends on his lunch,” the deckhand said. They both laughed at the inside joke.

  We docked on Mackinac Island fifteen queasy minutes later. I stepped onto the wide plank pier, and for a second I just stood in the soft rain, sucking air and enjoying the unyielding steadiness of the wood below my feet.

  As promised, the Rabbit bobbed at the next dock. It was a swaybacked thing and seemed to groan under the weight of a weathered white cabin that looked too long and tall for its narrow deck. There were deep gashes, some grayed, some fresh, cut into its green hull. No one was on board.

  Farther down, a man knelt on the pier, ready to pull a small motor out of a rowboat heaving in the chop. The water rose and he lunged, grabbed the motor, and set it down with a thud onto the pier. “Bad damned water today,” he called across, standing up.

  “Is Arnie Pine around?”

  “He’ll be back just before his four o’clock run to Eustace.”

  I looked down at the water crashing into the pilings next to him. “Isn’t it too rough?”

  “For everyone else, maybe, but Arnie takes his little ferrying income serious. And,” he added, “he’ll have had lunch.”

  “Lunch?” The ferryboat captain and his deckhand had mentioned Pine’s lunch, too.

  He wiped the mist of rain from his forehead. “Arnie takes his lunch serious,” he said. “Especially in rough weather.” He lifted his motor and started down the pier.

  I had three hours to kill. I walked up the incline to what must have been the main trap for tourists. A few blocks of businesses sat on a gently curving street. Every third or fourth one appeared to be selling fudge. Or would shortly, when the vacationers started coming. For now, everything appeared to be closed.

  The Grand Hotel loomed enormous and white above the winding street, easily visible through the leafless trees. Amanda and I had talked once about spending a weekend there. We’d talked about doing all sorts of things like that in the beginning, before my life short-circuited ours.

  I wondered, then, if Jenny and I could ever talk of such things, and whether new beginnings were possible at all. It was a gloomy day all around.

  I walked up the hill. A cast-metal sign announced that gentlemen were expected to wear coats and ties on the hotel grounds after 6:00 P.M.

  A man in a yellow paisley scarf and long wool coat approached me. “We’re not yet open for the season.”

  “I’m just looking around, you know, like for the future,” I said.

  “Indeed.” He glanced pointedly at the inch of blazer that drooped below the hem of my peacoat. His nose was rather pointed, too, and long.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “They start at a little over four hundred,” he said, raising the prominent nose as though he knew I’d come north in a duct-taped Jeep, with my duds in a paper bag.

  “For a week?” I asked, snooting right back at him.

  “Per night, of course. Good day, sir.” He touched the brim of an imaginary top hat in salute and walked away.

  Though thick snow covered its sunken terraces and broad expanses of lawn, I could imagine the hotel in full bloom. In a month, maybe two, a hundred white rocking chairs would be set out for the sor
ts of semiembalmed butts that would be only too happy to shell out four hundred a night to enjoy the view. I was inspired, then, as to how I might amuse myself in such a place. I’d park myself at one end of the long porch, instruct a white-coated waiter to bring me a mint julep, then proceed to work my way slowly down the long expanse, taking the tiniest sip as I tried each available rocker. The objective would be to see how many rockers I could traverse before either the julep ran out or I got ejected, accused of lunacy.

  Certainly such a stunt seemed no crazier than spending four hundred bucks just to sleep in such a place for only one night.

  Two dozen young men came out from behind the hotel and began walking down the hill toward the tiny fudge town. I checked my watch. It was 3:45. I fell in behind them as they made the turn toward the piers. By now, the whitecaps had swelled higher and were sloshing onto the tops of the piers. One by one, they walked through the puddles and climbed down into the oversized wood cabin of the bobbing Rabbit.

  Nothing happened for another fifteen minutes, and then a man came down the incline. He had white hair and white stubble on his chin, and he wore an ancient ski jacket and a black watch cap and one glove. There was a decided roll to his gait that had nothing to do with the downward slope of the ground.

  “Arnie Pine?” I inquired, when he stepped onto the dock.

  He stopped and stared at me for a moment with rheumy, shifting eyes. No doubt, he was seeing me blurred. Arnie Pine had had his lunch.

  “I need a ride to Eustace Island,” I said.

  “The lake’s a tad ripply,” he said through the booze sloshing in his gullet, of the water sloshing on the dock.

  I pointed to the workers sitting on the benches in the boat. “They’re going.”

  He nodded, sensing truth, and squinted at me. “Fifty, for the two of you.”

  I gave him two twenties and a ten and followed him on board. Several of the workers looked at me, disbelieving, when I went to stand at the open space at the back of the boat. My paranoia had returned, remembering the bulky man at the ticket shack back in Mackinaw City. I wanted to keep an eye on the water, for other boats.