The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “The Chickermans were so friendly that you never noticed,” Lilly said. “Roger told me he’d see Gus come out of Whirling Creek, way above our place, carrying his fishing gear. He was upstream where Daddy told us never to go. Once Roger and Bill Roquette set up for poachers.” Roquette had been the local game warden when we were kids. “It was in the fall and after dark and they saw a light and waited. It was Gus. They scared the hell out of him and he swore at them in a language neither of them recognized. Then he said they should keep this quiet because Ruby didn’t like him to be out in the river. Roger thought it was funny.”

  “I used to watch you and Roger,” I told Lilly. “In his car.”

  She began to laugh. “I was a hot one,” she said. “I miss being hot with Roger.”

  12

  There was still no word from Yetter by early March and I was still living with Lilly and her kids. She was in pain but trying to hide it. She and the kids went off to see friends or had company in on a regular basis and I was pretty sure she was avoiding being alone.

  I saw an AP piece in the Detroit News saying that UPI was having another bout of its periodic fiscal problems and that there were rumors and indications from “reliable sources” that we were up for sale. UPI’s reputation for satisfying the public hunger for news was equaled by its peripatetic financial history. It irritated me that Yetter hadn’t called, and whenever I called him he was “in a meeting.” I called my bank to see if my February check had been deposited and it was there, easing my anxiety slightly.

  Lilly came home from the grocery store with unexpected news.

  “Raina’s parents are dead.” She seemed numb.

  “What?”

  “It’s on the radio. They were killed in a fire at their store this morning.”

  I called down to the sheriff’s department and asked for details.

  “We don’t give out that sort of information over the phone,” a woman said brusquely. Bureaucratic indifference was endemic.

  I drove down to Pinkville to check it out. A fire truck was still at the scene. A deputy stopped me up the road and I showed him my press card.

  He was overweight, his face bluish red from exertion in the cold. “That ain’t from here,” he said.

  “I’m Bowie Rhodes. My sister was married to Roger Ranger.”

  “No shit?” he said. “We were all sorry about Roger.”

  “The Chickermans are old friends.”

  “More like were,” he said. “Sorry.” He waved me on.

  Some of the building still stood. Water was frozen in strange shapes on the ruins. The ground was thickly iced and slippery. Steam hissed. Water from high-pressure hoses hung in the air, an icy mist. It looked like an insane sculptor had been at work.

  There was a state police panel truck parked near the ruins. It had mobile lab painted in blue on the sides.

  “Press,” I told a fireman as I flashed my UPI ID. “What happened?”

  “You’ll have to talk to the chief,” he said. His face was black with soot and there were icicles on his black helmet. His lips were blue.

  The fire chief was Vince Vilardo, the brother of one of my father’s friends. “Vince?” He stared at me through bloodshot eyes. “I’m Bowie Rhodes.”

  Vilardo nodded wearily.

  “What happened?”

  “The hell it looks like,” the chief mumbled. “Goddamn fire. It was going like a sonuvabitch when we got here, but my boys did good. We almost strangled her, but the wind popped up and off she went and that was that. Ten, twenty minutes more and we’d-a had her flat on her back.”

  The ruins were still warm, the sun sinking. The mist darkened. ­Artificial spotlights were turned on. Only a few firemen remained and they wore black, shadows casting shadows in the eerie light. Cold crept into my legs. The Chickermans had always treated me well. I had seen a lot of ­carnage in my life and had learned how to turn off my emotions, but this was personal. My parents were gone, then Roger Ranger, now the ­Chickermans and their place. Piece by piece my past was being erased. I wondered how Raina would learn of this and knew I should call her, but all I knew was that she was in the “city.” I felt guilty that I had let her slip so far away.

  I asked Vilardo and some others about Raina, but nobody knew how to contact her. Vince told me that a Traverse City lawyer had called even before the news of the fire broke, saying he’d contact the survivor.

  “What was his name?”

  “Eubanks, I think.”

  “You know him?”

  “Nope, and I never heard of him. You might want to call Maria Idly in T.C. She’s my second cousin and works for the county prosecutor. If there’s anything to be known about a local mouthpiece, she’d be the one to know it. She’s in the book.”

  I drove up to Traverse City that evening, checked a phone book, and placed a call to Maria Idly from a pay phone. I apologized for calling outside business hours, told her I had talked to Vince and explained who I was and what I wanted. I asked her about Eubanks. She uttered a few noncommittal uh-huhs and asked me to meet her at ten the next morning at a Big Boy on the south edge of town. I got a room at a sleep-cheap, called Lilly, and arrived at the restaurant the next morning.

  Maria Idly was short and a little on the hefty side, dressed in a dark suit and high heels. We both ordered coffee.

  “I called my cousin last night,” she said. “Vince described you pretty well.”

  “Did you think I was up to something?”

  She laughed. “Hell, in my business I think everybody’s up to something. Besides, I deal with reporters all the time. It never hurts to verify who you’re talking to. In my line we trust nothing.”

  “You work for the prosecutor?”

  She nodded. “His name’s Carvelly and I’m his chief deputy, at least in title. If he ever retires, I’ll try for his job, but people here may not be ready for a female prosecutor.” She rolled her eyes. “Besides, Carvelly won’t give me the nod unless I give him an incentive. We girls are just so soft.”

  I laughed. She didn’t strike me as soft. “I’ve heard of Carvelly.”

  “You have?”

  I said, “Karla Capo.”

  Idly looked surprised. “Karla? Hell of a gal. How do you know her?”

  “I live in Grand Marais part of the time.”

  “I guess she finally got Roman to let go of her kids.”

  “Just.”

  “Old Quick Shot was really frosted. Damn shame—a man with all those natural attributes and none of it amounting to anything. He’s good at making money and that’s about it.”

  “Karla told me.” This earned me a raised eyebrow and a sly smile.

  “I won’t bore you with tales of Michigan’s Peyton Place. Most of it’s meaningless,” she said. “What do you want to know about Eubanks?”

  “Who he is, what sort of practice he has. I grew up with the Chickermans’ daughter, and Vince told me Eubanks called before the fire was public knowledge and said he’d notify their daughter. I guess that means he’s the family’s lawyer.”

  Maria Idly cocked her head. “If so, they’d be his first clients. Eubanks is a member of the state bar, but he doesn’t belong to any local groups and I’ve never heard of him appearing in court.”

  “What’re you trying to say?”

  She raised her hands. “I’m not really sure. I just find it a tad curious that a lawyer who doesn’t practice suddenly has a rural grocer for a client.”

  “Do you know Eubanks?”

  “Only of him. Carvelly claims he’s met him, but Carvelly was pretty closemouthed when I pushed him for details early this morning.”

  “Does anybody else around town know him?”

  “Could be, but nobody I know. He has an office,” she added. She took out a notepad and read me the number.

  Here I go
again, I thought.

  I used the pay phone at the Big Boy to call Eubanks, but there was no answer. I checked the phone book, but there was no residential listing.

  “Nobody there,” I said, when I returned to the table. “And no home phone listing.”

  “This guy has a smell to him,” she said.

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know. Intuition, I guess, a nagging feeling that he isn’t entirely what he seems to be. Carvelly doesn’t much want to talk about him, which usually indicates the other person has clout and Carvelly thinks he’s cultivating power. Usually he gossips about everyone. What will you do now?”

  “Call him later today.”

  “If that doesn’t work?”

  “I’ll visit his office.”

  “I like determination,” she said. “If you need help, call. And say hi to Karla for me. That woman is a barrel of laughs.”

  I promised I would.

  I went back to my room at the motel along the lakeshore and tried Eubanks again. No answer. Raina’s folks were gone. I was going to make sure she knew what happened and find out what the hell she had been doing in the U.P. I was tired of her now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t routine. I napped briefly, but awoke with an idea.

  After another fruitless call to Eubanks, I called Father Buzz.

  “What can I do you for?” he answered brightly.

  “It’s Bowie. You remember that woman who was alone in the cabin west of town? I was with you delivering groceries. She wasn’t friendly.”

  “Bowie? Where are you?”

  “BTB,” I said. Yooperese for Below the Bridge. “Do you remember her?”

  “Not really.”

  “You have to. It was a log house. The woman had a shotgun. Dark hair.”

  “Shotguns. I remember,” he said.

  “I need to know who she is.”

  Silence. “Are you on a toot?”

  I wished I was. “This is important, Buzz.”

  “I never knew her name.”

  “You said she was renting.”

  “You have a helluva memory.”

  “Who owns the place? Who did they rent it to?”

  “This will take a while,” the priest said.

  “I’ll call you back in the morning. Eight?”

  “Make it noon,” he said. “I think the people who own the place live downstate. The assessor will have the owner’s name.”

  “I need this, Buzz. It’s important.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I thought then she was somebody I knew. A girl I grew up with. Her parents just passed away and nobody seems to know where she is. It’s important that I find her now. I know it’s a long shot.”

  “Long shots are a priest’s specialty,” he said. “Be patient, my son.”

  I tried several more calls to Eubanks, had baked walleye at a place called the Cream Log and Five Eatery, and turned in for the night.

  Buzz called the next morning at eight.

  “Get it?”

  “God seems to be smiling on us.”

  “Well?”

  “The house is owned by an Ovid Merchant of Southfield, but he’s never seen it. He bought it as an investment. He owns a lot of properties in the U.P., but he’s an absentee landlord. A management company in Marquette handles the rentals, maintenance, the whole shebang. They’re the people I talked to.”

  “I don’t need a history of shipbuilding to recognize a white whale.”

  Buzz chuckled. “Melville did tend to run off at the mouth. The company says the place was rented to somebody named M. J. Key.”

  I stared at the phone. “What did you say?”

  “M. J. Key. K-E-Y.”

  “I heard. Male or female?”

  “Just M. J. The records don’t show.”

  “Address?”

  “None. Paid ahead, in cash. Are you in trouble?”

  A shrink might have an opinion on that, I thought. M. J. Key? I couldn’t believe it. Buzz thought God was smiling. It seemed more like a Bronx cheer to me. “I’m fine.” Raina had used the name M. J. Key, or somebody by that name had rented the place for her. And someone named M. J. Key had bought Key’s manuscript from Lockwood Bolt. Everything about Key was like a huge whirlpool.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “You sound distinctly perturbed.”

  “Supremely confused is more to the point.”

  “The eternal human condition,” Buzz said. “God will show you the way.”

  To a rubber room, I thought. “Can you have the company in Marquette mail a copy of the rental agreement to me?”

  “At your sister’s place?”

  “Please.” I gave him the address.

  “Anything else?”

  “That’ll take care of it.”

  “Count on me,” the priest said. “How’s your sister?”

  “She’s doing as well as can be expected.”

  “Mourning and grief take time. Any word from UPI on your job?”

  “They’ve gone mute.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said.

  “I know, God will provide.”

  “Not for journalists,” he said with a malicious chuckle. “I don’t think he likes what scribes did to the Bible. Journalists are on their own. Frankly,” he admitted, “we all are.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “I’ll tell everyone you called.”

  I called Eubanks after I talked to Buzz and got through. I told him I was a close friend of Raina’s and wanted to talk to her.

  “She’s been informed,” the lawyer said. He had a sandpaper voice and paused between words. He also had a faint accent but I couldn’t place the nationality.

  “Could I get her number? We’re old friends. I’d like to help if I can.”

  “Everything has been taken care of,” Eubanks said. “If, as you say, you are a friend, you would already have her number, wouldn’t you? Good day, sir.”

  “How about you pass along my number and she can call me?”

  My answer was a dial tone.

  The Chickermans’ obituary was in the Traverse City Record-Eagle. The obit traced their lives only from the time they arrived in the area. Just Raina was listed as kin. No address was given for her. There would be no services, no flowers or donations, end of write-up. I wasn’t about to give up.

  The lawyer had an office above a T-shirt shop with a special on shirts that read cherry festival. I went up unannounced. It was a small, musty suite with high ceilings and distressed furniture. There was a decrepit receptionist with hair the color of tin. It was stacked in a beehive. A couple of curls had worked themselves loose.

  “I need to see Eubanks.”

  She wore half glasses and stared over them. “For that, you’ll need an appointment.”

  I walked past her into his office and stopped, my mouth agape. There was fly-fishing regalia everywhere. One wall held dozens of split-bamboo rods with sumac handpieces that shone. There were several sizes of willow creels in various shapes. Shadow boxes filled with flies. A wall of books. On a table there was a bullet-shaped glass minnow trap with c. f. orvis maker etched into the side. Everywhere I looked there were treasures, and the more I looked, the more I saw, until my eyes came to rest on a rectangular frame covered with glass. Inside it were three rows of three huge flies each, all white, each different, all of them pristine. The box looked very much like the one I had found and lost in the Natural Sciences Collection Room many years before. I wanted desperately to look at the back of the frame.

  “Chase the trout?” a voice asked.

  Eubanks was an old man with a bent back and a face spattered with liver spots.

  “Now and then,” I said.

  “You would be Rhodes.”

  I
did not apologize for barging in. “I want to talk to Raina Chickerman.”

  Eubanks studied me with a tight squint. “The thing about trout,” he said, “is that some just aren’t meant to be caught and chasing won’t make it different. There are some people just like that as well.”

  “I need to talk to her.”

  He joined his hands in front of him. “Need’s granite. Want’s sand. Need stays put, centered and insistent. Want blows in and out, drifts between your toes. It takes a whole life to understand the difference. Most never do,” he added. “You’d best leave Raina Chickerman alone, Mister Rhodes. Infatuation is a long road from commitment and granite’s not sand.”

  “I saw her a while back in the U.P. near Grand Marais. She rented a house under the name of M. J. Key. Is that name familiar?”

  “The trout writer.”

  “Why would she use that name?”

  He said, “Don’t chase what can’t be caught, son.”

  I turned to the white fly displays and stared at them. “It’s a fine room,” I said.

  Eubanks nodded.

  “Are those snowflies?”

  The old lawyer looked at the case for a long time before he spoke. “If you’re meant to know, you’ll know. Good day, Mister Rhodes. Please don’t intrude again.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “I would never make a threat,” he said, turning his back on me.

  “I understand you called the fire department about handling the Chickermans’ affairs before the fire was in the news. How could that happen?”

  “Get out,” he said, not bothering to look back at me.

  Eubanks was a hard old man, raised in a generation that put great value on hard jaws and duty, and I knew there could be no argument, no wedge of logic that would move him off his course. I had been dismissed many times before and would be many times again, but Eubanks had cut me loose with the sure-handedness of a bomb maker. I mumbled an apology to the receptionist on my way out and walked numbly down to the street. I had but one image in my mind, the snowfly.

  When I got outside, I lit a cigarette and tried to think. M. J. Key bought M. J. Key’s manuscript from Bolt. Raina rented a house under the name of M. J. Key. Eubanks knew who the writer Key was and had a shadow box of snowflies. There was not enough to figure it all out, but it was all connected and eventually, I was going to put it all together.