The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  Or something, was right. Key was disappearing from library references and I had a hunch the government was behind it. Danny had found Key’s works here before, and now references to them were gone. Was this widespread, and if so, why? I didn’t know how many of Key’s books had been in print, but there was no way they could all be collected physically. Not even Uncle Sam could do that. Not that they had to physically remove the books. All they had to do was remove card-catalog entries and cross-references. Not a small job, but doable if this was what they were up to. The old fellow at Michigan Tech had similarly come up empty. At the time I thought it was his incompetence; now I had to wonder. And somebody had removed Key’s books’ index cards from York Gentry’s collection. Was all of this connected? I had no way of knowing unless I kept pushing ahead. The more barriers that got thrown in my way, the more determined I was to break them down or find a way around them.

  The CIA had debriefed Valoretev and me in Sweden. And the government was threatening UPI if they employed me again. I thought about this and all I could come up with was M. J. Key. I had wanted to interview Brezhnev and this had cost a man his life. My dogged pursuit of the rubber-bullet story in England had cost Jen Chia Yi Yi her life as well. My refusal to back off had left blood on my hands, and it was clear now that the Key manuscript was anything but a simple fishing book. On the other hand, the Russians had let it go back to the West. Did they know what they had, or had it been bought for the Kremlin strictly as a collector’s item, as Valoretev had said? What the hell was in the manuscript that was making my own government so determined to make all mention of it disappear?

  I called Ingrid but got no answer. She was probably still on patrol. You could never find a cop when you needed one. And she was conscientious. She would never quit early.

  Neither would I.

  I went over to Grand Central Station that evening, stopped at a newsstand, and looked at a New York State atlas. The next morning I took the New York Central an hour and a half north.

  The village of Rhinecliff was built on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River; it was spring, newly bloomed forsythia blazed yellow, and there were buds on the trees. The station was several hundred yards north of the village square and I enjoyed the walk in soft air. I noticed that all the houses had mailboxes. Not a good sign for what I sought.

  The village square was triangular. There was a stone monument to the war dead in the center of a patch of old grass. The post office was between a hotel and a bar.

  There weren’t all that many brass boxes in the post office. Each had four knobs to rotate to a combination number. I found Box Forty-Five and peeked in. It was empty.

  I went to the service counter and tapped the hand bell on the counter. A man in a green eyeshade appeared. I told him I was thinking about moving to the area. Did residents have a choice of boxes or delivery?

  “Everything’s delivered,” he said.

  “Then why the boxes?”

  “Seasonal people,” he said with disdain.

  “Do you know Raina Chickerman or M. J. Key?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not the answer man.”

  “Is there a newspaper in town?”

  “There’s the weekly Gazette up in Rhinebeck.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Four, five miles.”

  “Is there cab service?”

  “From the train station,” he said.

  “I was there and didn’t see any.”

  The man shrugged.

  “How about a pay phone?”

  “Outside the Sugar Cone.” Before I could ask what this was and where, he pointed. “The ice cream shop is back up the hill and to the right. You can’t miss it.”

  The telephone was inside. I got a directory from the girl working the ice cream counter and called the Gazette.

  The editor’s name was VanDenBerg. I told him I was a reporter from Michigan and asked to use his morgue. When I got back to the train station there was a cab. The driver wore a baby blue porkpie hat.

  “You from L.A.?” the cabbie asked.

  “Michigan,” I told him.

  “Tigers,” he said. “They’re okay. I guess I can take ya. Friggin’ creeps from L.A. can walk.” Another clan encountered.

  Milt VanDenBerg (he told me he was named for Milton Eisenhower, not Milton Berle) gave me a cup of coffee and took me to his microfilm file.

  “Looking for something in particular?” he asked.

  “Two people. M. J. Key and Raina Chickerman.”

  “Never heard of ’em. You try the City Directory?”

  I drew a blank. “What’s that?”

  “Lists everybody. Got one in every town in America.”

  “You’ve got one?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I looked, but there was neither Chickerman nor Key. I did, however, find an R. Smith, which was the name Raina had used in Grand Marais. The address was Box 45, Rhinecliff. My heart raced.

  I told VanDenBerg I had found a name, but only a box number.

  “That would be a city person,” he said. “We get a lot of ’em. Probably comes up weekends and summers. City people got their own ways.” The values were obviously not shared.

  “Do they use a box if they don’t want their mail delivered?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me any,” the editor said. “Could be they sublet a different place every summer. City people like to jump around. Real grasshoppers.”

  “Is there a listing of sublets?”

  “Only if a Realtor handled them, but we’ve got so much demand up here that people don’t need to throw money away. It’s cheaper to run an ad with me. I’ve got subscribers all over the place.”

  “Are your subscriber lists public?”

  “Nope, that is a matter of privacy. And you could be the agent of a competitor.”

  “I’m not. Could you take a look for me?”

  “Not sure I could do that.”

  “I can pay.”

  “That would be unethical.”

  “For your time and effort, not the names. Call it professional courtesy.”

  “I can do that.” He waited until I gave him a twenty and wrote the names for him.

  When he came back, he was smiling. “No Raina Chickerman, no M. J. Key, no R. Smith.”

  Which amounted to another wall, hit nose-first.

  “Sold an ad to another Chickerman, though,” he added after a long pause.

  “Who?”

  “Time’s money.”

  “Gus Chickerman,” I said and I saw by Milt VanDenBerg’s face that I had guessed it.

  The editor gave me an address and I knew Raina wouldn’t be there but I had to look. I took a cab to the house, had the driver wait, and walked the grounds. The place was small, more cottage than house, and it was empty. All the shades were up. A mildewed for sale sign was stuck in the front yard beside a hedge gone wild.

  I wrote down the name of the realty company and paid a visit. Another twenty bucks got me the name of the person who wanted the house sold: Eubanks!

  It remained a wall, but now I knew she had been here and that Raina’s movements had not been the mystery her late parents had led me to believe. And Eubanks was involved.

  I caught a cab back to Rhinecliff and took the train north to Albany. It was easier to get a flight from there than to go back into New York City.

  On the flight from Albany to Detroit I sat beside a woman with pale blue hair who silently read a Bible, moving her lips and tracing each word with her forefinger. She stopped reading when we hit some air pockets. She closed her eyes tight and began to lose her color.

  “It’ll settle down,” I told her.

  She did not look at me.

  When the air grew smoother, she immediately went back to reading.

  After a mome
nt, she snapped the book shut with a pop and looked at me. “Are you a Believer, sir?”

  When I didn’t answer, she said, “Do you put your life in the hands of the Big Fisherman?”

  “M. J. Key?”

  She said, “Blasphemer.”

  •••

  I had always loved reading detective stories and I had known my share of cops and security types; stories found neat resolution, tightly engineered by their authors, but real investigators, cops or reporters, rarely found easy or quick answers. Less than two-thirds of murders in cities were ever solved. Reality was eternally messy.

  I claimed my car in Detroit and pointed myself north. I could not wait to see Ingrid. By Alma it was snowing. By Mount Pleasant the snowstorm had intensified, making it impossible to see, but blind as I was to the outer world, I had a crystal-clear view of my inner world and it was a startling sight. I had missed Ingrid as I had never missed anyone in my life.

  I also thought about something else. My old man had always said, “What goes around, comes around.” I had been butting up against M. J. Key since college and I had no doubt that this wouldn’t be the last time. Raina Chickerman was the key to Key. I didn’t know how or why, but I knew it was true.

  It was nearly sunrise when I got to Dog River and headed west. I drove toward Ingrid’s, but the snow had drifted high and a half mile away was as close as I could get. I walked the rest of the way leaning into a howling wind and when I climbed onto the drifted-over porch I pounded on the door.

  “You’re freeezing,” she said when she opened the door.

  Snow was melting on my face. “I love you,” I said.

  She looked at me for a long time.

  I asked, “Now, like this?”

  Ingrid held out her arms and smiled. “Exactly the way I imagined it.”

  21

  Spring in northern Michigan comes only after a long, painful labor, and like any difficult delivery its arrival is greeted with a combination of joy and exhaustion, followed by postpartum blues. Ingrid and I had settled in and, by the time the first robins showed, we were both ready to fish. The day after I first told Ingrid I loved her, I called Fred Ciz, gave him my new address, and told him I’d be up to visit sometime that summer.

  I took Ingrid to meet my sister, Lilly, and after that they were on the phone at least once a week. Lilly and her children came down to visit at Easter. Ingrid’s big house on the upper Dog River was overrun with little bodies in sleeping bags. We cooked hamburgers over charcoal and I was at peace.

  “There’s more to a relationship than this,” Lilly said, softly scolding.

  “I’m discovering life.”

  Lilly said, “You look happy.” I could tell she meant it.

  A week after Easter Fred called.

  “Amp’s dead,” he said. The deputy, who had been in Vietnam, had gone down with a heart attack trying to referee a domestic dispute and died on the spot. I hadn’t known Amp that well, but he had always seemed competent, an integral part of the fabric of Grand Marais. Amp enforced the law with common sense and care and I admired him.

  “When’s the funeral?”

  “Next Tuesday.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  “We?” he asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  Ingrid went with me. We had the wake at Staley’s, which was packed with cops and DNR people in uniform and Amp’s friends and relatives from fifty miles around. CO Service was there and we talked and decided that we would try to get together sometime other than at funerals. As it happened, I would know Grady Service for a long time.

  It became clear at the funeral that Amp had been a hero. He had won the Distinguished Service Medal, two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star with a V for valor, three Purple Hearts, and never said a word about his military service. The Army had wanted to send a ceremonial burial detail up from Detroit, but Buzz and Fred refused and said they would take care of it, which they did. Some vets from the Newberry VFW post handled the detail. “Taps” was played, rifles fired, the flag folded into a smooth triangle and presented to Amp’s mother. Wet eyes everywhere.

  The wake was rowdy. Karla, Buzz, and Fred were all over Ingrid. Janey circled cautiously around her but seemed to warm to her by the end of the evening. At one point I saw Karla pigeonhole Ingrid. There was an animated discussion punctuated by bursts of laughter and it unnerved me.

  In the bedroom at Fred’s that night, I wanted to know what Karla had told her, but couldn’t bring myself to ask. Ingrid had been able to read me from the first moment.

  “It’s none of your business. Woman talk.”

  In the morning we had slight hangovers and a visitor. Luce County sheriff Donal Hammill had a red face, a mashed-in nose, and small ears that stuck out like buds. Fred served up breakfast and Hammill drank six cups of coffee and ate six fried eggs and six pieces of buttered white bread, toasted dark. He must have had the metabolism of a shark because he couldn’t have weighed more than 160, firearm included.

  “Most important meal of the day,” he said when he was done.

  “Breakfast?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said with an impish grin. “The one you’re eating at the moment.”

  It was easy to see why Amp had been hired. His boss had the same direct and easy manner. Eating done, he turned his attention to Ingrid.

  “Rumor has it you pack a badge.”

  “Rumor is fact,” she said. “Which is rare.”

  “I might as well get to the point,” Sheriff Hammill said. “I’ve got an opening. Pay’s crap, and so’s the work. You interested?”

  “Maybe I’m not qualified.”

  Hammill grinned. “I talked to your chief last night. I talked to people in Detroit too.”

  “You’ve been busy,” Ingrid said.

  “Are you interested or not?” Hammill asked.

  Ingrid looked at me. “It’s your decision,” I said.

  “I’m interested,” she told the sheriff.

  “Good. Come see me tomorrow afternoon and we’ll talk.”

  “What about your house?” I asked her when we were alone.

  “I don’t let things define me, Bowie. The house will keep. You love it up here and I’ve got a feeling I will, too. What’s to think about? You think your friend Karla can find us a place to live?”

  Which is how we came home to Grand Marais and thoughts of Raina Chickerman and the snowfly slowly faded. I had love, friends, and money in the bank. In time, I knew the snowfly would be behind me.

  •••

  By the middle of July the blackfly infestation had subsided. Ingrid worked a regular day patrol in the northern county, but anytime anything happened up our way, she got the call. It was High-T season, meaning a long ton of tourists in camper trucks doing stupid things.

  We rented a small log cabin a block from Staley’s and though we were happy, we never talked about marriage.

  The phone rang on a Wednesday night as we were making love in the kitchen. This wasn’t unusual. Ingrid was spontaneous and passionate. Her work often butted in.

  “Damn,” she said when she hung up the phone.

  “Gotta go?”

  She nodded. “I hate those words.”

  Ingrid did not talk a lot about her work and only occasionally felt the need to vent.

  “Got a body,” she said. “More like a skeleton, I imagine. Been there a while, they say. Could be a hunter from last fall.”

  “Somebody known to be missing?”

  “That would be too easy,” she said.

  She returned about four a.m., woke me, took my hand, led me into the kitchen, and started undressing. “Now,” she said, “where were we?”

  •••

  A week later I was using a dry Royal Coachman on the West Branch of the Fox River. Ingrid, Buzz, and I were only f
ive or so miles north of Seney, whose infamy had peaked before the turn of the century, when white pine was king, loggers terminally thirsty, and the town boasted fifty bars strung out along two miles of nasty dirt road. Now the road was paved, there were only three taverns, some Mennonites looking to homestead, and a few remaining loggers jobbing pulp for a couple of local mills. Pulping was beer money to add to the dole.

  Ingrid had waded upstream ahead of me. She believed in covering as much water as she could, while I preferred to go slowly and study the river and let its secrets unfold at a more leisurely pace. There were plenty of brookies and a few browns in this part of the Fox, each with its own niche. Of course, it didn’t escape me that Ernest Hemingway had been up here long ago, maybe stood at the same bend, freshly returned from his stint with the ambulance service in Italy, where he had been wounded, gotten hepatitis, and come back to the States to lick his wounds and bask in self-­proclaimed glory. He came up to Seney by train and camped along the river with a couple of pals and caught fish and brooded and maybe dreamed of greatness or killing himself. Unless you believed Carl Collister, and I wasn’t buying his fantasy one bit.

  From what I had read about Hemingway, there were two things always on his mind, be great or die, or be great and die, the line of demarcation never too clear to me. I had seen soldiers with the same dementia in Vietnam. The only soldiers I knew who conjured greatness out loud usually ended up dead soon thereafter. But Hemingway wasn’t a soldier, then or later. He was more like a USO doughnut dolly or a Red Cross hireling and later he was a war correspondent, the same as me, which was definitely not a soldier. Reporters watched and soldiers did, a much greater divide than mere words can convey.

  Of course Hemingway had killed himself; suicide ran in his family the way six toes, tiny peckers shaped like plantains, or a propensity for contracting upper respiratory infections afflicted others.

  “I thought we were fishing?”

  Ingrid’s voice snapped me back to reality. She had returned silently and eased down beside me on a sturdy cedar sweeper.