by Deb Davies
“Of course it wasn’t Dannie’s fault,” Charles said.
“Yeah. Hell, we all feel guilty. I should have been making everyone stay in the house.”
“That would have eliminated my inspired turkey sketches.”
“Crimes around here are usually pretty simple, unless guys get into a fist fight that turns lethal in a bar. I can’t anticipate what this perp is doing next. Claire should put in cameras. I can do that for her. She’s not going to object after Jen was hurt. Seems like whoever hates her, or wants to hurt her and her friends, is getting more desperate.”
“Oscar and the salmon were in her living room.”
“Yeah. But whoever was there was in and out of her house in—what would you guess? Five minutes? Leaving that threatening note takes less than that. How long would it have taken to spook Zoe’s horse? Whoever set this trap up left that trailing scarf. Now that I think about it, that person took a risk of being seen.”
“Could you ask Elaine or Bertram Allarbee to go through every single book, hold them upside down, fan out pages, and see what falls out?”
“Good idea. And while I call a security company, you could do something. Check out the basement again. Pearl’s driving me nuts with his weird little gifts. Check the attic; make sure squirrels haven’t chewed a hole in the roof.”
“There’s no way Pearl can get in and out of the attic.”
“Check the back of closets again. Make sure none of the ceiling panels open.”
Charles said, “I’ll do anything I can.”
CLAIRE AND LAUREL sat on a hard, plastic-coated couch in the hospital lounge. The seating wasn’t that comfortable, but a cart provided bottled water, coffee, tea, sweet rolls, rock-hard melon, and blueberry yogurt. Donations were requested. A pop machine bore a sign reading, “Out of order. Check cafeteria hall.” The room smelled of disinfectant and floral spray scent.
An elderly volunteer who looked like a raddled strawberry muffin went down to the hospital’s cafeteria and got eggs and toast on a tray for a diabetic father whose daughter was in surgery for a broken sternum.
“Thanks,” he said. “But I left my wallet in my jacket in the truck. I can’t pay you.”
“They didn’t charge me for it,” the woman said. “Any of you want cold water, there’s a drinking fountain in the hall.”
Laurel leaned against Claire’s ample shoulder. She’d cried herself out after the woman surgeon had told her, “We’re guardedly optimistic. I’d hug you, but then I’d have to prep again.”
Claire was still drizzling. She leaned her head away from Laurel, so her tears made a damp splotch on her own shoulder. Thank heavens the toast and egg man had agreed with them, and the television news—which could not be turned off—at least had the sound turned down. The room was quiet. Fluorescent lights, with their mosquito-in-the-ear keening, had been turned off. Instead, three lamps with identical blue, Chinese urn-shaped bases lit the room, throwing splotches of light on the ceiling. The clock on the wall had a face and hands and ticked. The room felt a bit homelike—better than an airport lounge until an ambulance’s wailing siren hit a crescendo outside and then abruptly cut off.
Laurel sat up straight. “You crying, Claire?” she asked.
“No.” Claire’s nose was running, so the word sounded more like Doh. She groped for a box of tissues on a table next to the couch.
“Did you get Arnie?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.” Claire scrubbed at her nose.
“Was Charles there?” Laurel asked.
They were talking quietly, trying to not disturb the man, who, now that he had eaten, had walked over to the window and was staring out over the parking lot. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his back was to them.
“Mm-hmm,” Claire answered.
“How’d they sound?” Laurel asked.
“Really glad to hear from us. Charles asked about, you know, fluid in the lungs.”
“And Arnie took his head off, I bet,” Laurel said. She put her head in her hands.
“No. No, he didn’t,” Claire said. “They—they sounded OK. Worried, you know, but not about to turn on each other.”
“Oh,” Laurel said. “That’s good. That’s really good. Because, I’m not going to be able to type up notes for a while. I’m going to just help Jen. We don’t need them arguing—” She gave Claire a stricken look.
Claire stared back at her. “You slept with Arnie,” she said. “You said he was a hairy, bullnecked cretin, and then you slept with him.”
“He’s not,” Laurel said. “He does have hair on his back. But he’s not a cretin.”
“Arnie’s married,” Claire said.
“So I heard. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Laurel. Why would I think you’d need to know?” Claire asked. “Why did he do it? He’s Chinese Food and Movies. Not Mr. I Need Sex.”
“I asked him to.” Laurel looked woebegone. “I’ve never—never approached anyone. I don’t think it will happen again.”
Claire’s expression softened. “We were both wrong,” she said. “Our intentions and predictions. Remember, we talked about them at the motel?”
“I forgot,” Laurel said. “What did I predict?”
“No empathy.”
“I don’t think I’m good at that. Even reading, for long-term learning, we need empathy.”
“Only you, Laurel, would relate sex to reading.”
That’s not true, Laurel thought. Arnie did.
“And I said I wouldn’t get involved until I figure out who I’m turning into. But Charles seems to like me for who I am, right now. It’s confusing.”
“I wish I could see Jen.”
“I wish I’d brought a flask,” Claire said.
Jen continued to make progress in the days that followed. Once she was moved from intensive care into a private room, Laurel was given a strange, uncomfortable reclining chair in the room with Jen.
“I think this chair was designed for a tall man,” Laurel said.
But if she lined the chair with pillows, she could sleep in it comfortably, and if she cramped up, she put the hospital pillows on the floor and slept next to Jen’s bed. Sometimes, one of Jen’s hands would dangle off the narrow mattress, and Laurel could reach up and touch her daughter’s fingers. When Jen slept on her back, her hands drifted to the position they’d found when she was a little girl—her right hand near her face, her left above her head, clutching strands of her own dark hair. Laurel found herself thinking that the right hand could help guide a breast or bottle into an infant’s mouth; the other hand, with its tendrils of hair, could fend off the instinctive fear of falling, of being dropped. Laurel felt as though she had dropped her child. Like an atheist in a foxhole, she did a lot of praying, along the lines of, “Take me, God. Goddess.” She often ended with, “Shit. I suck at this.”
Jen, still taking opiates, lagged at conversations and slept a great deal, but was glad to have Laurel there. Jen’s doctor came in after five days, cut back on her pain medication, and told her she could start, with her physical therapist’s supervision, some gentle leg lifts while lying in bed. “If that doesn’t hurt or slow healing,” he said, “we’ll start getting you up and around.”
Claire had gone back to her house, under Arnie’s duress. The two of them stopped by Everything Michigan, both to stock up on food and so Arnie could talk to Ann.
“George’s family.” Ann paused in thought. “Salt of the earth people. Grandparents, I was told, were farmers who rented land to other farmers. Not rich, but stable. His parents—you know they lived near us—had a printing business in Grayling and owned but didn’t manage a small restaurant where the farmer’s market is now. They probably had a couple bad years when local printing went south, but George always had better clothes than the rest of us did. He had a blazer that he wore to church, and we girls all thought it was the epitome of cool. He wanted to be, and he was, someone special. He held his head up and his shoulders back. When he went
to away to college, his parents sold property. Zoe Weathers bought one of the parcels, the one that’s next to your house now,” Ann said.
Claire bought everything she could think of to buy, except salmon. Koeze peanut butter. Bread. Smoked ham, which she hadn’t bought once since meeting the Marshes’ pigs. Apples, dried apricots, nut-studded brownies, a pear pie complete with cream and rum. Comfort food.
People helped themselves to food when they were hungry. Laurel simply ignored the security cameras. She slept in George’s white V-neck T-shirts, which seemed to keep getting longer on her. Either they were stretching or she was losing weight. Or both.
When she came out to the kitchen, Arnie said, “That’s a new look. Don’t wear it to the office.”
“We were going to give these to Tansy. She said some residents could use them.”
“As Patsy says,” Arnie quoted, “And yet…”
Claire was more self-conscious with the security cameras. She wore her own nightgowns and caftans, but the shoulder she’d hurt falling down the stairs made it hard to brush her hair. It fell, full of tangles, down her back. She had stopped drinking, as she had when George was dying.
“I think at some point,” she said to Laurel, “my dopamine receptors decide ‘rewards’ are bullshit. When enough goes wrong, I don’t get anything out of alcohol, or candy, or even ice cream, and it’s been decades since I tried drugs. If I’m not getting anything out of my bad habits, why suck down extra calories?”
Instead, she cleaned kitchen cupboards as a penance for Jen’s suffering. It was possible there were important papers hidden in a pie safe or in between chipped Blue Onion plates someone had pushed to the back. When she looked into the cupboards, she saw someone had left her tall stems of chicory, and in another one, she found half a black walnut with little stick feet glued on so it looked like an owl.
She held the trinket in her hands, the way a child holds an insect, and trekked down to the basement, opening her hands and showing it to Charles. “Of course you wouldn’t know anything about this.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Looks bafflingly like a token from an admirer. Haven’t a clue.”
“I love it,” she said. “But it confuses me, too, because from the first minute I saw it, it has reminded me of Laurel, but Laurel isn’t dark-skinned, wrinkly, or twice as wide as she is tall.”
Charles’s smile widened, and the expression reached his eyes, which in turn, made Claire smile.
“Now that you mention it, Laurel reminds me of a saw-whet owl. Saw-whets are small and like solitude, and even when they’re adult, their heads look big for their bodies, which makes them undeniably cute. When the temperature is freezing, a saw-whet stores extra food in trees and then comes back when it’s hungry to sit on the cache and thaw out its dinner, looking as though it’s sitting on a clutch of eggs.”
“Laurel never does that with food. At least, I hope not.”
“She caches what she reads, though. She tucks things away in her brain, and when she’s bored, she incubates, devours, and digests.”
“Um. Yeah. How did you happen to think of Laurel as an owl?”
“I don’t know. Watching her read, I guess, as she takes off her glasses and gazes into the distance for a minute before going back to a computer or her book. You spend enough time in the woods, and you start getting intuitions. Something is moving toward you. Or something—familiar, not familiar—is pacing along by your side. E.O. Wilson, an extraordinary bug guy, calls it ‘the naturalist’s trance.’ There was a naturalist over by Ludington who kept feeling she was being watched; she was thinking bobcat, maybe, and it took her a while to realize there was a young cougar moving silently along with her, keeping just uphill from her. Not stalking her, she thought, just curious. We’ve still got the instincts that tell us when someone is watching us.”
Claire fidgeted, remembering the first night Laurel had spent at her house.
“Everyone has multiple aspects,” Charles muttered. “I’ve been thinking there was a marten near here. Martens are small, gold-brown weasels that weigh about two pounds, generate massive rage when threatened, and can take down bigger prey. I thought I might be getting impressions of Arnie. Martens almost always den away from their mate and kits. Arnie doesn’t live with his family, which could produce tension. He used to feel like a big ball of frustration, unfocused anger, and defensiveness. But now Arnie’s—well, focused on problems here. He reminds me of a goshawk. They zigzag through dense forest on the wing or even run after lizards or small mammals on foot. Ferocious defending a nest site. Squawking, dive bombing attacks.”
Claire thought privately that Arnie, descending squawking from above, would rout the most determined predator. “What about you?”
“I’ve decided I’m a snipe. Shy, secretive. Eyes in the back of my head. However, I make daring, dazzling, headfirst dive courtship displays in spring. That had a lot of D words, didn’t it? Which reminds me,” he continued, “I know David’s bird type. The dickcissel looks like a bit like a meadowlark. Its call is its own name, trilled, and it’s polygynous, mating with up to eight females every spring, which means it does not help females when they’re nesting or brooding.”
“David Dickcissel? Jen wouldn’t like that.”
“I wouldn’t say it to Jen. Though you could say it to Laurel. I picture him striding down corridors, seeing a likely female and trilling, ‘Dickcissel, dickcissel, dickcissel!’”
“Did you see the way Arnie lit into him?” Claire asked.
“I didn’t see it, but that somehow doesn’t surprise me.”
THERE WERE MOMENTS for socializing, but time stretched like runny taffy. Like Claire, people chose odd tasks.
Elaine Santana collected all the framed pictures and mirrors she could find and took them out of old-fashioned frames, checking for messages between cardboard and photographs. Not discovering anything, she laboriously reassembled the lot, using Windex on the glass and dusting the picture frames. She ran her hands over wallpaper in the upstairs bedrooms, trying to see if there were telltale bulges to explore, and unscrewed the light switch plates to make sure nothing hid behind their blank, snub-nosed faces and that no one had tampered with the wiring.
When Charles wasn’t with Jen or pottering in the basement, he washed dishes at the sink that was too low for him, so he stood stooped, like an Ichabod Crane caricature. He wiped his wet hands on khaki pants and peered through spattered glasses, muttering about dirty teacups and custard hardened onto Pyrex, but he shooed away anyone else who tried to take over the task.
Twice, Pearl brought him voles he’d carried up from the basement, but he never presented them to him when he could be seen entering the house.
“He’s onto me,” he told Arnie.
“Work harder,” Arnie said.
It looks like beer,” Claire said. “I had to show it to you.”
The water pouring over the small dam in the river had the faint gold hint of tannin, and it splashed and burbled down to the base of the rocks with so much force, bubbles rose to the surface.
Laurel raised her half of the sub she was eating and then frowned. “Don’t say ‘It don’t get no better than this.’”
“I don’t even like Old Milwaukee,” Claire reassured her. “That was the most annoying commercial ever made.”
“I’m glad you talked me into meeting for lunch.” Laurel chewed and swallowed bread, cheese, lettuce, and salami. “Why are school and hospital walls beige?”
“Sometimes mint green, but mostly beige,” Claire agreed. “That’s where someone with decorating smarts could knock the ball out of the ballpark. How’s my decorator doing?”
“Jen confounds the doctors. She’s young, so she’s healing fast. They’re keeping new skin from forming over the punctures so the wounds heal from the inside out. Her doctor says the cold water might have slowed bacterial growth, which was his first concern, so she’s full of antibiotics, but her stomach does better with them than mine. It was grea
t of Zoe to insist on staying with her. She didn’t take any guff from me when I said I should be there. She reminded me that she’s a doctor, even if she is retired, and pushed me out of the door.”
They were both dressed to visit Jen at the hospital later—Laurel in a straight, knee-length gold dress and sandals, Claire wearing white slacks, a navy tank top, and white tennis shoes.
“Isn’t this the park where Zoe rescued those puppies?” Laurel asked.
“Sure is,” Claire responded. “Right across the road is the starting place for the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon, but this is the site where Zoe Weathers chastised the man who wanted to drown what he thought were his puppies, only to find they belonged to Zoe. I bet he had one of those bumper stickers: ‘My dog, my wife, my gun. You can take my wife.’”
Laurel grimaced. She was thinking of Jen, held underwater by the trap and fighting for air.
“If Zoe ever needs anything—”
“Doubtful,” Claire responded.
“Tell me.”
The day was cool, but the sun was bright. Arnie dozed in the shade near them. A couple of high school students wandered through the park holding hands. On the other side of the river, a mother with her toddler on a leash was doing yoga exercises. A white-haired woman with her glasses down on her nose sat on a bench, reading an issue of Smithsonian magazine.
“Is Arnie asleep?” Claire whispered.
“I think so,” Laurel said. “Do you know what this bit of the river reminds me of? The time I went camping with your family. I had a crush on Doyle, but your brothers ditched us so fast, you’d think we had leprosy.”
“I didn’t know you liked Doyle! Ugh. He’s fine now, but they were all obnoxious then.”
“We were packed into your parents’ station wagon like sardines in a tin. I thought his sweat smelled sexy.”
