Sam and I went dancing at the Rooster most Friday nights. Our song was “Brown-Eyed Girl” because I am one. No one can sing it like Van Morrison, but we didn’t care. Sam would swing me back and forth. I gave him the lead. Oh, Sam.
I chop at the hole. Ma is on the deck. She has a coat draped over her shoulders.
“You have a call,” she tells me.
“Thanks. Just take a message, Ma. I want to get this done.”
She goes back inside.
So, what have I been doing for the past four months besides feeling pissed and a little sorry for myself? I helped Ma with her house and the stuff she’s accumulated for seventy years. She doesn’t want to sell the house, so she’s renting it to a granddaughter, my brother’s kid, who is married. It took weeks to clean or give away a lot of it. What she couldn’t part with is stored in her house’s attic or cellar. Course, we took some with us, so she’d feel at home. I gave her the downstairs bedroom, which is next to a bathroom. It’s been good to have Ma here. Not many people would say that about their ninety-two-year-old mother, but I can.
Seeing how things can add up, I cleaned out my house, save for Sam’s tools in the basement. I started reading books again. Then there are my kids, Matt, Alex, and Ruth, who live close enough, so I can see them whenever I want, and that granddaughter, Sophie, Ruth’s girl. It feels good to hold someone that small in my arms again.
I’ve been back to the Rooster a few times, but not on a Friday night. I have a beer or two, talk with people about what’s happening in town and around here, and about sports, everybody’s favorite topic at the Rooster, especially Boston sports. Woe to the Yankees fan who admits it, or as I like to say, the only thing worse than the Yankees is a Yankees fan.
But with two weeks to go on unemployment, I’ve got to think about a job. Since I can’t leave my mother alone too much, the pickings are slim if I want to work close to home.
I drop the shovel. The hole is deep enough. I use the edges of the towel the cat is lying on to lift and lay her gently inside. I fold its edges over her before I shovel the dirt, first a sprinkle then larger scoops, until her body is covered with a nice mound. I top the grave with the stones I picked from the hole. I’ll find more later.
I stay there for a moment and thank the cat for being the loving animal she was, especially for Sam. If I could have figured it out, I would have buried her at the town cemetery with him. It would only have been fitting.
The snow is sticking. I grab the tools to put in the shed. My job is done.
Kale Soup
The kitchen smells like kale soup. Ma’s been busy. Long before kale became the foodie thing to eat, we Portagees ate the green. No kale salads for us. No kale smoothies. We cook the kale to death in soup with white beans, potatoes, chorizo pork sausage, and cubed beef. That’s the way my mother makes Caldo Verde, and we eat it three days in a row. The soup only gets better, well, as long as it’s refrigerated. Being one of those natural food nuts who prefers not to eat red meat, I skip the chunks of beef when I make the soup, and if I have to use sausage, then it’s turkey or chicken instead of pork, which horrifies my meat-loving mother. I figure if it makes my ninety-two-year-old mother happy, I can eat a soup with pork sausage and beef cooked in it.
“Smells great, Ma,” I tell her as I slip off my boots at the door.
Behind me the snow is coming down hard for October. I have yet to see the strobe of a highway department truck moving down the hill in front of our house. But I will if the temps drop.
I check the phone message. My assistant editor called. I suppose he got shit-canned, too, and wants a reference. Maybe he needs advice. I’ll call him later.
Ma is watching an old movie. I had a dish installed on the roof, so she could have all the shows she got on cable back home. I also turn the heat on instead of just running the woodstove. I want her to feel at home. I still get the paper delivered, so she can do the crossword puzzle and Sudoku, which I can never figure out. She plays solitaire, too, but on a tablet. They help keep her mind sharp.
“Do you always get snow this early?” she asks without taking her eyes off the TV’s screen. “It’s not even Halloween.”
“Sometimes one sneaks in,” I tell her. “It’ll probably all melt tomorrow. The kids will be able to go trick or treating and have their party at Town Hall like they always do. Actually, one year we had a snowstorm on Halloween. It was a mess.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. Hey, I’m gonna wash up before dinner. I’ll make a fire later.”
There are two bedrooms upstairs. Sam and I had the one on the right. I use the one on the left for an office and a guest room, for whenever we have overnight visitors. I have a crib in here for Sophie when I watch her, which is twice a week when her mom needs to go to the office. The rest of the time Ruth works at home.
I wash first. My face in the mirror is still red from the cold. I don’t know if I would call myself beautiful. Interesting-looking is more honest, with smooth skin I’m proud of, damn high cheekbones, and brown eyes on the big size. I used to have dark brown hair, but now it’s mostly silver after I decided to stop dyeing it. I’m taller than my mother by several inches and thin for someone who worked at a desk job so long. I also don’t look like Ma. I definitely take after my father’s family, especially when I see old photos of his sisters.
I check my email and Facebook. There’s nothing to respond to, but I hit “like” on a couple of friends’ posts. I mean what can I say about a person who writes nonstop about her dogs, all eight of them? I see one friend was foolish enough to pick a fight over national politics. I have a couple of friend requests. Uh, later. I tap the manila folders beside my laptop. These are the ones I stole from the newsroom on my last day there. They do contain clippings, from when I was the hilltown reporter, notes and police records.
I flip open the top folder. The headline on the first story says: “Conwell woman missing.” It has a photo of Adela Collins, not a very good one, but it’s what her family gave the cops. Here is my lead:
“Police are investigating the disappearance of Adela Snow Collins, 38, a Conwell native, who was reported missing Tuesday, Sept. 15 by her family when she failed to show up for work at the town’s only store.”
It was my first front-page story. My coverage won me an award in the ongoing series category, a second, but, hey, still an award. It happened twenty-eight years ago, when I was still kind of green. I was surprised the then-editor let me handle it on my own, but by then I already had proved to them the locals would likely talk with me more than some city reporter.
The police never found Adela Collins or why she disappeared. Their mistake, I believed from the start, was to treat her as a missing person and not consider that something criminal could’ve happened to her. Women don’t just disappear in a town of a thousand people. Neither do men. It still bothers me. That’s why I copped the folder. I found it the other day in the box I brought home from the newsroom and left in a closet. Like I said, I was busy moving my mother. I was happy to make the discovery.
I’m going to sit down and read everything. Maybe there’s something I missed. Certainly, the cops did.
Everyone in Conwell knew Adela Collins. Her parents owned the Conwell General Store forever, well, until ten years after her disappearance, when their son took it over. Adela ran the cash register five days a week. What did she look like? She was one of those soft-bodied women. Middle height. Longish, brownish hair. I can’t recall if her eyes were green or blue but definitely not brown.
We weren’t friends, but we always found something to talk about when I went to the cash register, or I saw her at a town event. She was nice to my kids, which counts a lot. I knew, but didn’t include in the story, Adela had a teenage marriage, and then a second marriage to a mean drunk that produced one child, a boy, before they got divorced. Dale was ten when Adela went missing. I see him now and then. He lives in his mother’s house, which used to be her grandmother’s, within walkin
g distance of the store. That’s why it was odd she didn’t make it to work that day. All she had to do was go a few hundred yards or so. And when her father went to see her, thinking she was too sick to answer the phone, he found her car was missing, too.
The dog was inside the house. Her pocketbook, with her wallet, was on the kitchen counter.
The family took it hard. Adela was gone and nothing more. Things just fell apart for the Snows.
Sam and I weren’t friends with the Snows, but in a town this small you know everyone, even the part-timers, who live most of the time in New York or Connecticut, and the nut cakes, who hide out on the way-back roads. We know what they look like and drive. We give a wave or a friendly toot of the horn.
Yup, we hilltowners are nosy, and I am probably nosier than most. I inherited that from my mother, who’d drive to a fire scene in our hometown if it was close or look up someone’s address in the town’s directory when the paper reported they were caught doing something they shouldn’t have. I liked to tell my reporters I inherited the curiosity gene, how I turned being nosy into a profession, that and always being last minute, that working close to deadline I mentioned before.
I hear my mother calling. She’s at the bottom of the stairs. She likes to eat early. I don’t mind.
I shut the folder and give it a pat.
“Coming, Ma,” I tell her.
The soup’s great, naturally. I tear off chunks of the bread I bought at the bakery in the city. It’s not Portagee bread, but it’s close enough. I dunk the chunks in the broth. Ma does the same.
“Are you going to get another cat right away?” she asks.
I forget Sam’s cat kind of became Ma’s cat. Marigold took to her lap right away. I wasn’t offended. The cat and I had an understanding. I was her loving servant. Just like the meat in the soup, it’s not too much to get another cat if it makes my mother happy.
“Sure. I’ll check the board at the store,” I say. “If there’s nothing, we can go to the shelter in the city soon to pick one out. A kitten would be nice. It could grow up with Sophie.”
Ma smiles. She likes that idea. We eat and don’t talk for a while. I’m thinking about Adela Collins and the folder upstairs. I’m not finished eating, but I set down my spoon.
“I want to ask you something,” I say. “You know a little bit about the town already. A woman who lived here all her life disappeared twenty-eight years ago in September. She used to work at the store when her parents owned it. One day she just didn’t show up. Two months later, a couple of local guys hunting deer found her car on an old logging road in the woods on the next town over, Wilmot. But she wasn’t in it. The doors weren’t locked. It was the first day of shotgun season.”
My mother’s head tips to one side. Besides being a nice kind of nosy, she’s read tons of detective novels and watches the same kinds of movies.
“Tell me more about her. What’s her name?”
“Adela Collins. She lived with her son, Dale, not far from the store. He’s still in town. She was the store’s cashier. People liked her. I never heard anyone say anything bad about her even before she disappeared. She was divorced twice, but both were a long time ago. I sometimes saw her at the Rooster. That’s the bar in town.”
“What about the son?”
“Dale was only ten when it happened. He doesn’t seem the child killer type to me. He went to live with his grandparents, but then he inherited his mother’s house. He’s kind of a sad sack.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him smile. He doesn’t stick with one job too long.”
“What about the cops?”
“They treated it like a missing person’s case. At least the seven years are long past, so the family could officially declare her dead and take care of the paperwork.”
“When was the last time anyone saw her?”
“Her son was sleeping over at his grandparents’ house that night, so it would’ve been after she left the store and walked home. It was a Monday evening. People said they saw the lights on at her house. They were still lit when her father came to check on her the next morning. Get this. Her dog was inside. Her purse was on the counter. Nothing was taken.”
My mother sits back in her chair.
“Why are you so interested?”
“You know why. Patsy.”
She presses her lips as she nods.
“I suspected that much. It’s hard to forget something like that.”
“Uh-huh. But I also was a reporter when Adela disappeared. It was really hard on the people who loved her. Besides, how could a woman in a town this tiny disappear into thin air? Now that I have some time, I’d like to find out.” I catch my breath. “So, what’s your opinion?”
She pauses.
“Well, there are a few possibilities. I’d probably rule out her going for a walk in the woods and getting lost.” She continues when I nod. “She could’ve taken off somewhere and gotten a new identity. But if she did, why would she leave a son that young behind? I think it’s easier to do that in the movies and books anyways. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s still a possibility if she had one of those midlife things.”
“A midlife crisis?” I say.
“I read about it in a magazine.” She smiles. “Or she could’ve killed herself somewhere people couldn’t find her after she dumped the car in the woods. Or someone could’ve killed her. It could’ve been an accident or on purpose. Maybe it was a stranger. Maybe it was somebody she knew. Maybe they still live here, or they could’ve moved away.”
I smile when I hear my mother use the word “dumped.” Like I said, she reads a lot of mysteries.
“That’s a lot of coulds and maybes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have a folder upstairs with every piece of paper I could get my hands on at the newsroom about this case. I’ll talk with the people who were close to her.”
“That was almost thirty years ago.”
“Uh-huh, twenty-eight. But people have good memories here cause not much goes on, and this was really huge for this town.”
“Be careful, Isabel.”
“Don’t worry, Ma.” I dip my spoon into the bowl. Through the living room windows, I see the strobe of yellow lights as a highway truck makes its first pass down our hill. “This is really good soup by the way.”
Lloyd
I call Lloyd, who was my assistant editor at the Daily Star. The number he gave my mother is his cell. He answers right away. Of course, I’m still in his contacts.
“You working tonight?” I ask him.
“Yeah, we’re a morning paper now you might have noticed,” he says.
“How’s that working out?”
“We had to make some, uh, adjustments. I’m the regional editor now. The new managing editor said he didn’t need an assistant. It’s okay.”
I liked working with Lloyd. He wanted to learn, so he didn’t mind doing grunt work. He’s married with two young kids. From what I hear, he’s one of the few survivors during the change in regime.
“What can I do for you, Lloyd?”
There’s a bit of silence from the other end of the line, except for newsroom static.
“We’re missing some folders in the morgue. They contain info about some of the cold cases in our area. We were wondering if you might know what happened to them.”
“Cold cases?”
“Yeah, like that woman who went missing in your town.”
Now I have an ethical dilemma. Do I lie or admit I took them? I know for certain, because it used to bug me, the files are a mess in the newsroom’s morgue, which admittedly is an odd name for a library. I had a hard time finding hard copies of clippings and photos, old black-and-whites when they were still processed by chemicals in the darkroom. It all depended on who was the newsroom librarian then, a position I doubt still exists. Also, reporters would take stuff to their desks and not bring them back. I used to get after them a
bout that.
What the hell, I’ve made my decision. I’ll dodge it.
“Gee, I wish I could help you,” I tell Lloyd. “You really can’t depend on that filing system. Your best bets are the hardbound copies in the morgue or the microfiche at the library. I’ve used both.”
“Yeah, it’d just be easier with the folders since that was before we had our website,” Lloyd says. “My understanding is they had copies of documents. And I can’t Google anything.”
“Need them for something special?”
“We have a new eager beaver cops reporter who’s thinking of doing a series on cold cases. That woman from your town is one of them.”
“When’s that coming out?”
“Don’t know. Maybe in the new year. He’s also covering the courts and social services beats. We have to make do with a lot less now.”
“I hear you, Lloyd. Well, good luck to you.”
Dinner at the Rooster
Friday night I take Ma to the Rooster. I don’t know if she’s ever been inside a bar, never mind eaten in one. My parents never drank because their fathers did. But I tell Ma at this time of night, which is 5 p.m., of course, the Rooster is more like a restaurant than a bar, so she agrees.
“Now you’ll really get to know the town,” I tell her.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she says.
The place is a quarter full when we get there, mostly guys off from work and not willing to go home yet, or they’re here for the night, and people like us who came to eat. I find us a table in the row alongside the windows.
The Rooster is more like a shack in the woods, but it’s our shack in the woods. Rustic pine boards line the walls and photos of sports teams – Boston sports teams, naturally – are hung everywhere. There are a few wide-screen TVs placed strategically high. Jack Smith, the owner, with his sister, Eleanor, has already gotten some of the guys to move tables outside to make room for the dance floor and the band that’ll play later tonight. Right now, people are feeding money into the jukebox.
Chasing The Case Page 2
