Starting again, he wrote about Vincent Fox, the man in the worn buckskin jacket with the fringes, the old guy with the long gray hair in pigtails he had seen occasionally shopping in the market. The character walking along the side of the road with a weathered, leather backpack. He thought he also remembered seeing Fox on his old bicycle, maybe a Schwinn.
Real and false memories occupied his thinking for several minutes.
Did he actually remember seeing Vincent Fox on a bicycle or was that just an invented memory, an imaginary connection his brain made seeing the bike or hearing Fox’s daughter talk about her father?
The scene with Fox’s body flashed across Ray’s memory. He reflected on the hardest part of police work, crimes against the most vulnerable members of the community, usually the young and the old. Ray wrote about controlling his rage as he viewed Fox’s body in the water and his revulsion as Dr. Dyskin pointed out the charred area on Fox’s foot. Then he recorded his conversation with Sue about the aluminum bats, adding a few lines about a colleague from his first year of police work, an avid tennis player, who had a steel racket he repeatedly slammed into a large canvas beanbag chair as a way of unwinding after a particularly rough shift.
April is the cruelest month, he said out loud, repeating each word again as he wrote it, two lines high in his careful cursive. He put in a long slash mark after month and wrote, And it’s not even April yet.
Ray thought about the line and the poem. April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Then he penned, Memory and Desire, also using two lines. He sensed a melancholy in the phrase.
He remembered the class where he first studied the poem, an undergraduate course in 20th century British and American poetry. He started filling lines, then several pages in the journal about the class and the teacher, Alice Bingley, a fragile-looking woman who was quite brilliant, but routinely brutalized her students because they were not.
He remembered how the class of 20-some had shrunk to four by the end of the semester: a beautiful and distant girl who often talked to the professor in French and Italian; a tall, thin black woman who articulated most of the best answers to the professor’s probing questions and then Ray and his friend, Zeigler.
The first day of class in early January, Zeigler showed up late and seemed to immediately earn the instructor’s enmity. He was wearing athletic department sweats and a stocking cap. Ray recorded the dialogue as he remembered it.
“Are you a football player, Mr. Zeigler?”
“Yes ma’m.”
“And what position do you play, Mr. Zeigler?”
“Defensive tackle, mostly, ma’m.”
“And why are you taking this class?”
A long silence followed as Zeigler considered his answer. “My advisor, Professor Foster, recommended the class, and you.”
“Really, I must have a word with Milton.”
Ray then recorded how he and Ernie Zeigler became friends and study partners. Ray reflected that he had come to college from an exceedingly modest home, but Zeigler had come from real poverty. His mother had died in his infancy, and his father—alcoholic and mostly unemployed—did his best to palm off young Ernie for weeks, sometimes months at a time, to family members, sympathetic neighbors, and girlfriends.
Fortunately, by junior high his size and athleticism had drawn the attention of the coaches, and other teachers found that the huge kid in tatters was enormously likeable and exceptionally bright. Ray based this part of his commentary on things Zeigler told him during their many rambling conversations. Ernie came to college with the clothes on his back, nothing more, not even a suitcase. He didn’t have an athletic scholarship, and he wasn’t a starter. But the equipment manager and some of coaches found him clothes, shoes, even a place to live. Fortunately, it was also a time when the citizens of Michigan were still funding their universities at a level where students of limited means could cover their tuition costs with part-time and summer jobs.
One of Professor Bingley’s first assignments of the semester was the close study of T. S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland.” Ray recorded how lost he was the first time he tried to read the poem. He couldn’t begin to decipher the meaning of the text. He and Zeigler spent hours in the library pouring over scholarly guides, and they both struggled to answer Bingley’s classroom interrogations, which seemed designed more to inflict pain than to elucidate the text.
From that point forward in the semester, Zeigler would say, “Hey, Elkins, April is the Cruelest Month. That’s when she’s going to flunk our sorry asses.” There seemed some truth to that possibility. They both got C minus on their midterms. Ray had three minuses on his bluebook after the C, and Ernie had four. They laughed about the minuses over a pitcher of beer. But in the end they’d both managed to survive Bingley. Ray remembered how startled he was to find a B, no minuses, when he opened his grade report.
Months later, in the fall, he ran into Zeigler crossing campus. “You won’t effing believe this!” Zeigler blurted out loudly from 20 or 30 yards. “She gave me a B.”
The memories had managed to brighten Ray’s mood. And maybe in England, April is the cruelest month, he thought, the beginning of spring. In Michigan that would be late May or June. March is the cruelest month here because spring doesn’t seem possible.
14
Mackenzie woke with a start. There was a sound, a new noise that she hadn’t heard before. She lay for several minutes listening, trying to determine the source. Finally she decided that it had to be rain hitting the skylight or perhaps dripping off the long overhangs onto the deck.
She was uncomfortable in the bedroom. It was far too large for her tastes. The king-size bed looked minuscule on the expanse of white carpeting. The six-drawer dresser—three sets of two drawers, a long low modern piece—did little to absorb the available space. And the vaulted ceiling added to her feeling of unease. The room was just too big, too open. Her decision to take the master suite was based on the convenience of having the adjoining bathroom. She now considered switching to one of the other guest bedrooms.
Lifting her left arm above her head, she gazed at the luminescent face of the military style watch, 4:47. Rolling over on her side, she tried to find a comfortable position, pulling one pillow under her head, pushing another between her knees. She couldn’t remember a time in her adult life when she had been so filled with misgivings.
This project was different from anything she had ever encountered. And it was heavily loaded with memories and emotions. Mackenzie was better at dealing with data; feelings were not her strong suit.
Years before, Mackenzie had traced her mother, not that she ever desired to have any contact with her. Sally Hallen’s trail had been easy to follow, littered as it was with numerous arrests for petty crimes, the occasional incarceration, and ending in a late-night motorcycle accident where she and her companion were killed in a high-speed collision with a pickup truck.
She had also used her considerable technical skills to see if anyone could find anything on herself and her twin sisters, all three who had left Sandville decades ago in the company of two elderly relatives. There was nothing. She wondered if it would still be possible today for three children from an impoverished background to completely disappear without a paper or digital trace. She doubted it. But she had long believed that her mother was relieved that the children were gone. How many times had her mother had told her and her sisters that they were only a burden.
Giving up on the possibility of falling back to sleep, Mackenzie crawled out of bed and pulled on some fleece sweats. After switching on the coffee maker, she settled on the couch with her iPad and did a quick check of her e-mail.
Next she opened the planning document and flipped to the Threats page. The first item on the page was labeled Possible Identification. She clicked on the link and another page appeared. On the left was a picture that she had taken the day before. On the right was a photo
she’d carried with her for years, the last class picture from Consolidated High. She had scanned it into a jpeg while still in California. She held the iPad up to look closely at the grainy black-and-white image of a young teen whose eyes looked almost too large for her narrow face. The girl had short hair—a jagged cut, inexpertly done with kitchen scissors by her mother or grandmother. The thin smile displayed buckteeth beneath an asymmetrical nose, the result of a fall from a tree a year or two before. There was never money for a visit to a doctor. Her grandmother had straightened it as best she could and packed it with cotton until it stopped bleeding.
Mackenzie looked at the face on the other side of the screen, 20 years older, perfect teeth, and a retroussé nose—her first substantial investment after she entered the world of work. Her hair was luxuriant and carefully styled, and her once soft blue eyes were now green. The little girl voice had disappeared years ago; intense voice training starting in high school had enhanced her rich contralto. And there would be no recognizing her diction, now educated, cosmopolitan.
For this project, she’d thought it essential to hide her identity. Even before the physical transformation, she’d been fortunate on that issue: she’d been given a new identity long ago, when her great aunt rescued her and her sisters from her alcoholic and feckless mother. As she passed back and forth between the before and after photos, Mackenzie concluded that it would be difficult for anyone to make a visual tie between her and that delicate little girl of 20-some years ago.
The second link on the page was Be Invisible. She clicked on it and looked at her notes. Mackenzie was well aware of the impossibility of anonymity in a small town. Small towns are not like New York or San Francisco or other major cities where it is so easy to be just one of the crowd. Other than the realtor who sold her the house, Mackenzie had done her best to avoid local businesses. She did all of her shopping in Traverse City. She’d bought the most commonly seen vehicle on the road, a two-year-old Subaru. Her red Beamer convertible, an attention grabber, was safely tucked away in the garage of her condo in California.
Local Law Enforcement was the third entry on the list. She scanned the few lines of notes. Cedar Bay village had one policeman who worked a nine to five, 40-hour week; Mackenzie’s home was just beyond the village limits. The Cedar County Sheriff’s Department provided most of the police protection for the region. In her survey of newspaper articles, she had determined that the department was, along with the other units of local and state government, underfunded and understaffed. Ray Elkins was listed as the sheriff. She typed his name into Google. There were dozens of entries, most from the local paper, and most from stories concerning local police matters. She read through the entries on the first and second page and looked at a couple of pictures of Elkins. Just another middle-aged cop, she thought.
Finally, she thought about Richard Sabotny, the biggest threat, and the reason she was here. She had been searching for him for years, wasn’t even sure he was alive. And then suddenly he was back in Cedar County, a decorated veteran and reputed soldier of fortune living very publicly in a trophy house on the bay, his driveway running off a major highway.
Putting down the iPad, she leaned her head against the couch. The black early morning was fading to gray. She could just begin to see the white caps rolling toward the far shore. She was filled with angst, not knowing where to start, but feeling an overwhelming need for action.
15
Ray was in his office before 8 a.m., first attending to routine paperwork and then perusing Al Capone’s Michigan: The Secret Lost Treasure, as he sipped from a large insulated mug of espresso and hot milk. He thought he had followed Hannah’s instructions on how to use the espresso machine exactly, but found with the first few attempts he wasn’t getting the crema to form on the top. He poured all of the failures into his travel mug, topping them with four successful shots and a large quantity of hot milk from his feeble attempt at making micro foam. He added four spoons of raw sugar that had come in the box with the espresso machine.
Vincent Fox’s book was a fast read. The opening chapter dealt with his growing up in Chicago. He described his neighborhood and Catholic grade school education—including a few detailed accounts of run-ins with the nuns, yardstick-wielding Sisters of Holy Mercy charged with civilizing and Americanizing the children of immigrants. Ray noted that most of Fox’s text was vague and generic, containing experiences common to the lives of most people living in America’s industrial cities early in the century.
In the second section of the book, Fox explained he was a kid of the streets when Capone first spotted him. He began by running errands for Big Al, and soon, while still in his teens, he became one of Capone’s personal drivers.
Ray googled “Capone” to check the dates. As his daughter had already mentioned, Fox was far too young. But it was engaging fiction. Fox was a skilled storyteller.
In the final section of the book, Fox described how Capone came under increased scrutiny after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. With the coming of Elliot Ness and the Untouchables, Capone began to worry about the possible destruction of his empire. In an effort to protect his immense wealth, he started to collect gold coins, not trusting paper money. And not trusting banks—which were, of course, subject to thievery from both bank robbers from the outside and employees and managers on the inside. He devised a plan to bury his fortune in a number of locations along the shoreline of upper Michigan, from Frankfort to Petoskey, including the offshore islands. Fox went on to claim that most of the gold was buried north of Frankfort and south of Leland, as well as on the Manitou Islands. He provided a blurred vision of 11 treasure sites where he had participated in burying bags of gold coins, explaining that they had always worked at night, usually coming ashore from boats.
Each of the 11 sites was given several pages, but Ray quickly noticed that the first one was a template for the next ten. They were all variations on a theme, a word processing file worked and reworked in a less than convincing fashion. The descriptions, as Fox’s daughter had suggested, were indistinct. Almost any piece of coastline could fit: sand, trees, dunes, small streams. The place to start digging would be more from the imagination of Fox’s readers than anything he provided in Al Capone’s Michigan: The Secret Lost Treasure.
Ray was still pondering the possible effects Fox’s fiction might have on readers when Sue Lawrence arrived, thunking her travel mug on the conference table and dropping Simone into the one upholstered chair in the office. Simone immediately jumped out of the chair and ran to Ray, demanding to be picked up.
“I thought you were coming in late,” Ray said, looking at his watch.
“Simone doesn’t like sleeping in. She’s used to getting up at 6 o’clock, having her breakfast, and going for a walk. I tried to pull her back into bed, but she’d have none of it. Plus, there was something going on outside, a deer or some other animal, so she was clawing at the venetian blinds and barking. Thus our day just started like usual, only we took a longer walk. Simone was doing more hunting than attending to business.”
“I got here early as well. My motor was running.”
“When are you meeting with Fox’s daughter to I.D. the body?”
“Late this morning.”
Sue pulled off her coat, threw it on the chair, and sat heavily. “So what did you do last night, get out in your boat?”
“Yes.” He ran his thumb over the pages of Fox’s book. “The plan was to go home, cook pasta, kick back, listen to music, and read.”
Sue jumped up to retrieve her coffee. “What changed your mind?”
“Hannah Jeffers was waiting for me. She already had my kayak secured to the roof of her car.”
“So someone new has a key to your house?”
“I forgot to lock the garage,” he said. “She’d texted me earlier in the day about going out. I’d completely forgotten.”
“Texted?” Sue laughed out loud. “I didn’t think you did that kind of thing.”
Ray
ignored her. “We paddled to the Hollingsford Estate. I wanted to have a look around.”
“And?”
“I found the private family cemetery, just like Ma French told us. Of course, in the last few days with all the rain, the snow is gone.”
“Find anything?”
“ Nothing that shouldn’t have been there. Just sand and old headstones. I would have liked to look around the estate, but I was concerned about having enough light to get back to our put-in point. That, and a front seemed to be coming in faster than NOAA’d predicted.”
“But you and the Doc obviously made it without too much difficulty.”
Ray reflected on her tone a few moments before answering. “It was getting choppy. Hannah doesn’t seem to be bothered by weather, she likes to paddle in conditions. But something interesting did happen.” He told Sue about the Jet Ski.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I’m still wondering. We didn’t hear or see anyone on the water on the way out. It was so rough on the way back; I only became aware of the Jet Ski when it was too damn close. That said, the operator must have been aware of us. He’d probably had his boat beached along the stream that empties from Lost Lake. And when he circled, he had a better view of us then we did of him. We were right down there in the wash—he was three feet or so above us. Anyway, I don’t think we looked like anything he was expecting.”
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