Dearly Departed Page 16

  “Her name is Michael!” he shouted. “Michael Bettich!”

  He was in the final stage now—assault is imminent. His face went from red to white; his lips tightened over his teeth; his eyebrows slanted forward into a frown. He closed his hands and started rocking back and forth. His eyes darted quickly to my groin, my jaw—target glances.

  “Listen,” I told him, talking loud and fast now, trying to reduce the threat verbally, “only two people knew I was going to Deer Lake and why. Neither of them knew about The Harbor, neither of them knew where Alison could be found. And I wasn’t followed; there was no chance of that. No one followed me to Alison, so it had to be—”

  “Her name is Michael!” the sheriff screamed and lunged at me, catching my jaw with his shoulder. His momentum pushed me against the stone wall, jamming my cuffed hands against my spine and knocking the breath out of me. One, two, three blows to my stomach and then one to my face. Then another. I turned my head with the next punch, and his hand caromed off my chin into the wall. The sheriff cried in pain as I pivoted out of his reach.

  He turned quickly and swung at my head, but I bobbed and danced away. His knuckles grazed the wall. The miss made him even more furious. He moved toward me with measured steps, his hands held high. When he was in range, I lifted my right leg into the chamber and snapped a kick to his solar plexus. But with my hands cuffed behind my back, I was off balance. When he fell, so did I, landing on my shoulder. I think I hurt myself more than I hurt him. I tried to roll to my feet, but it was too late. He was on me in a hurry, pounding my head, throat, and upper chest. I used my knee to push him away but the relief was only temporary; he resumed smothering me with punches before I could even get to my knees.

  I was fading fast.

  “Jesus Christ!” a voice shouted. “Jesus Christ, Sheriff! What are you doing?! Jesus Christ!”

  A pair of hands gripped the sheriff by his shoulders and pulled him off me. I didn’t see who they belonged to until I was able to shake the sweat and blood out of my eyes.

  “Deputy Loushine,” I muttered, tasting blood in my mouth. “How good of you to come.”

  “Jesus Christ!” he repeated.

  “Get ’im outta here!” the sheriff shouted.

  “But, Sheriff …” Loushine protested.

  “Get ’im outta here!”

  “He’s a material witness—”

  “Get this sonuvabitch outta my county!”

  I rode in the front seat of Deputy Loushine’s white 4X4. A second deputy followed close behind in my car. My hands were free, and I dabbed at my swollen, cut lip with a white handkerchief now stained pink.

  “What you’re doing doesn’t make sense,” I told the deputy.

  “You’re telling me,” he answered.

  “Do you know who Michael Bettich is?” I asked.

  “All I know about her is that she’s been living with the sheriff for over two months now,” Loushine replied. “And that’s all I need to know.”

  I had to chew on that one for a while. Finally I said, “It doesn’t make sense.”

  We drove without further conversation. Twenty minutes later Loushine stopped at an intersection of two county highways, crossed over, and stopped again.

  It was nearing 8:50 central daylight saving time, and the sun was fading fast. Loushine sat with his eyes on the road ahead while the second deputy parked behind us, came around, and yanked open the passenger door.

  “This is the county line,” Loushine announced.

  “I guessed,” I told him.

  I left the 4X4 and struggled to my own car. I hurt all over, and my head felt light and fluffy, but I managed to squeeze behind the steering wheel without fainting. The keys were in the ignition; the engine was running; the headlights were on. Suddenly Loushine was next to the door, squatting so that he could see my face through the window.

  “Sorry ’bout this,” he said.

  “To serve and to protect,” I told him. “Have a nice day.”

  I steered my car more or less south, driving on automatic pilot, not knowing where I was until I saw the sign: WELCOME TO MINONG. There was something familiar about it, even in the dark. That and the county blacktop where I turned left, the gravel road where I turned right, and the dirt driveway at the end of the gravel road that I followed to a large two-story lake house.

  The pain was a flashing red beacon blinking a simple message: Lie still, don’t move. I ignored the instructions and left the car, hugging my sides like a grocery bag that was threatening to burst open at the next hard jolt. I staggered to the door of the house in the light of my high beams. I immediately recognized the man who answered my knock. He recognized me, too.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, obviously confused.

  “Dean, who is it?” a woman’s voice called from behind him.

  I moved past the man into the hallway. The woman was wearing a flowing white robe that my wife and I had presented to her on her birthday over five years ago.

  “Excuse me, Phyll. I don’t mean to intrude.…” then I collapsed at her feet.

  Never let it be said that I don’t know how to make an entrance.

  eighteen

  A bright ceiling light was in my eyes, and a cool washcloth was on my forehead. Voices filtered through the bedroom door.

  “No police,” one of the voices insisted. “Not until we know what happened.”

  “Why did he come here?” asked the other voice.

  “I don’t know. We’ll ask him when he wakes up.”

  “Think he’s in trouble?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “He looks different.”

  “Honey, he’s beat up. You’d look different, too, if you were beat up.”

  I heard nothing for a moment, then: “What are you doing?” my mother-in-law asked. The metallic sound of the hinge of a double barrel shotgun opening and closing punctuated her question.

  “Think I’ll just take a look around.”

  “Dammit, Dean, you haven’t been in the service for good long time.”

  “Honey. Once a marine, always a marine.”

  I woke up tired and sore, remembering vaguely a dream in which I was running naked through the forest, chased by a bear wearing a sheriff’s badge. I couldn’t remember if he caught me or not, and then I moved. Oh, yeah! He’d caught me.

  The washcloth was still damp and resting on the pillow next to my head. I carried it from the bedroom to the kitchen. Phyllis Bernelle was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, a black briefcase opened in front of her. Her head jerked up at my entrance.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “How do I look?”

  “Like someone beat you up.”

  “That’s how I feel.”

  I sat across from her, and she poured me a steaming mug of coffee, French almond, one of my favorites. It had been Laura’s mother who first introduced me to the pleasures of coffee made from beans you grind yourself.

  “Are you hungry? Do you want some breakfast?”

  I shook my head. I doubted my stomach could handle the job.

  Phyllis was dressed in a simple sports jacket over a white shirt and blue jeans. That was another one of the things I liked about her. She dressed like me.

  “I’m sorry, Taylor, I have to leave. I’m showing some property in about twenty minutes. Guy from Chicago is thinking of buying five lots on the flowage. It’s something I can’t get out of. I’d like it if you stayed, though. Will you, please? Will you stay here at least until I get back? You could use the rest.”

  I could at that.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She smiled and cleared her coffee cup to the sink.

  “Where’s Dean?” I asked.

  “Up at the garden.”

  I nodded. Dean Bernelle had studied horticulture at the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, then inexplicably took a job in the accounting department of 3M. He retired the year I married his daughter with a
pension I wished I could look forward to, moved to his Wisconsin lake home, and now has the most ostentatious garden in the state—an entire acre’s worth. But while he is quite content digging in the dirt, his wife is not. So Phyllis, who had never worked outside the home while Dean was working, earned a realtor’s license and now makes more money than he ever did, selling lakeshore property. Which was perfectly fine with Dean. “The more she makes, the more I get to spend,” he liked to say.

  “How are things, Phyll?” I ventured.

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “I’ve been better.”

  Phyllis Bernelle had a way of asking questions without uttering a sound. She would stare at you with clear green eyes, and you would fall all over yourself confessing to various misdeeds. “The trick,” Laura once told me, “is not to look at her.” But I was looking at her, and I couldn’t resist.

  “I was worked over by the Kreel County sheriff yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “I think I upset him,” I told her. “Something to do with his girlfriend.”

  She stared at me some more.

  “I’ve been looking for a woman who was supposed to be dead but apparently isn’t. I found her, and then she was shot.”

  “By who?”

  “I don’t know, but I intend to find out,” I vowed. And please, don’t let me be an accomplice, I prayed.

  Now she was nodding.

  “You always had such interesting stories to tell,” she told me. “I’ve missed them. I’ve missed you. I wish we could have seen more of you since Laura was killed.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  My mother-in-law closed her briefcase and pulled it off the table. “I have to go.”

  “I appreciate your taking me in.”

  “Will you wait until I get back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me what happened in Kreel County?”

  “In grisly detail.”

  “Don’t let Dean put you to work.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Listen,” she said, “if you’re in trouble, I know a good lawyer.”

  “Thank you,” I answered. “But lawyers are a dime a dozen. It’s friends that are hard to come by.”

  “Where the fuck are you?” Hunter Truman wanted to know.

  “Minong.”

  “Where is fucking Minong?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  “Where in fucking Wisconsin? Goddammit, you were supposed to call me yesterday. I’ve been waiting by the fucking phone since—shit—since noon. What’s going on? Didn’t you find her?”

  “I found her.”

  “And?”

  “Hang on to yourself, Hunter,” I told him. “I found Alison, and two minutes later someone shot her. She’s badly hurt.” The pause was so long, I was compelled to ask, “Are you still there?”

  “How bad?” he asked. “Will she live?”

  I told him I didn’t know and why.

  “The sheriff assaulted you?!” Truman was clearly outraged. “The bastard assaulted you?!”

  “Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Fuck, yeah,” he said. A moment later, he added, “Shit, Taylor, what’s going on?”

  I told him my only theory. “It wasn’t Alison who was shot—”

  “Not Alison?”

  “What I mean is, I think whoever shot her was shooting at Michael Bettich, the person she’s pretending to be.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, but it might be connected to a small resort she’s building across the highway from a proposed Indian gambling casino.”

  “She’s building a resort?”

  Truman was asking too many questions; my head started to throb violently.

  “I’ll tell you more after I have a chance to get back up there and poke around,” I told him, hoping to end the conversation. “Assuming I can avoid the county cops.”

  “Fuck ’em!” Truman said so loudly it hurt my ear. “You get your ass back up there; I’m officially authorizing you to do that. You find out what you can about Alison, and if the cops get in the way, we’ll sue the shit outta the whole fucking lot of ’em.”

  “Whatever.”

  I was pleased that Truman was still paying, but even if he had pulled the plug, I would have gone back.

  “When are you leaving?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?! Why not today?”

  I told him I had to go and quickly hung up the phone. My head couldn’t take any more.

  “Hi, Desirée. Cynthia Grey, please,” I told her office manager-cum-Doberman about an hour later. I hadn’t been able to reach Cynthia at home, so I tried the office.

  “Whom may I say is calling?”

  “Holland Taylor.” As if she didn’t know.

  “Miss Grey is in meetings all day. However, I will inform her that you called.”

  “Please don’t do this, Desirée; I need her.” I wondered if my voice sounded as pathetic to her as it did to me. Probably, because she put me through.

  “Holland?” Cynthia asked. “Are you okay? Desirée says you sound funny.”

  “If you really want a laugh, you should see how I look,” I told her.

  “What’s going on?”

  I gave her the short version, lingering on my injuries only long enough to solicit her sympathy. When I had finished, she told me, “Come home. You did your job. You found her. Now come home.”

  “I can’t,” I told her. “I have to know—”

  “If you’re responsible?” she finished my sentence. “Don’t give me any of that male-pride bullshit,” Cynthia added earnestly. “And I don’t want to hear how a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You come home. Right now. You come home to me before you get hurt again.”

  “Will you take care of Ogilvy for me?” I asked. “Make sure he has plenty of alfalfa and water?”

  Cynthia hesitated before saying, “Of course.” Then she added, “I hope he eats your Nolan Ryan autographed baseball.”

  That hurt.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I promised.

  “Please do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s personal now,” I told her. “Maybe it always was.”

  “I know.”

  I hung up the phone and stared out the window. Every muscle and bone in my body hurt. Even thinking hurt. “Run it off,” my coach used to say. That had been his cure for everything. “Run it off, sweat it out.” During those few brief years when I had the audacity to consider myself an athlete, I would follow his advice like it had come down from Mount Sinai. I wondered what had become of him as I crawled back into bed and pulled the blankets to my chin.

  Dean Bernelle can’t cook. He was one of those older-generation gentlemen who bought into the theory that cooking, that anything to do with the kitchen, was women’s work. But he made a valiant effort nonetheless, whipping up fried eggs, toast, and canned chili for a late lunch. I thanked him profusely even though the toast was burned and the yolks of the eggs were rubbery.

  The death of his daughter, Laura, and his granddaughter, Jennifer, had hit him especially hard. Yet he never discussed it. At least not that I was aware of. But it was always there, just below the surface.

  “I’m putting in a wall of blueberry bushes near the shed,” he told me. “I remember Jenny used to love picking blueberries. She’d eat a berry for every one she dropped in the bucket, then come home with her mouth and fingers all purple. Laurie would get so angry at us.”

  “That was just for show,” I told him. “Mostly she didn’t mind at all.”

  “Guess you’re right,” he agreed, then rapidly changed the subject. “Are you in trouble?” he asked. “Do you need help?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You look it.”

  “I admit I could have used a hand yesterday.”

  “Cops
beat you up, is that right?”

  I nodded.

  “They used to do the same thing when I was young. They see a guy they thought was trouble, they’d smack him around a little just to keep him in line. I saw that a lot when I was young. I bet you did the same when you were a cop.”

  “No, not at all,” I assured him.

  Dean just smiled. I don’t think he believed me.

  “You’re going back, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Back where?”

  “Back where they beat you up.”

  “I suppose,” I admitted.

  “Yeah, I knew it. I remember telling Laurie when she first started bringing you around, ‘One thing about Taylor,’ I said. ‘He’s no quitter. He’s not going to quit on you. He’s like a marine. You can kill him, but he’s not going to quit.’”

  “Did you really say that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “No wonder it took her so long to accept my marriage proposal.”

  “Don’t give me that,” he said. “If you only had the guts to ask, she would have married you the weekend after you two met.”

  “Really? She said that?”

  Dean nodded.

  The things you learn.

  The warm sun played peekaboo behind white, fluffy, daydream clouds—perfect weather for lake watching. I descended the long, steep flight of stairs that led from the Bernelles’ home on top of the hill to the lake below, carrying three cans of beer that I’d found in the refrigerator. About halfway down I realized I was overburdened and stopped for a half hour to drink one of the beers. My load reduced, I continued to the L-shaped dock, making myself comfortable on the bench at the base of the L.

  Like most forms of human endeavor, lake watching can be elevated to an art form in the proper hands. Me? I’m the Monet of lake watching. I can do it for hours, thinking about nothing and everything, whereas less dedicated artists grow weary and bored after thirty minutes or so. The difference is that most people look for answers in the gently rippling waves while I search only for questions.

  “I wonder how much that cost?” was one of the questions. It was directed at the sailboat moored to the stem of the L. I remember the day Phyllis had launched it. Dean and Laura had both asked, “Where did you get it?” I asked, “How much did it cost?” I wondered what that said about me.