Dearly Departed (12 page)

“The most beautiful woman in Kreel County,” Deputy Rovick informed me.

“Most beautiful woman in
any
county,” I said, then caught myself. I hadn’t realized I was going to say that. After a few embarrassed moments I said, “At the risk of demonstrating my ignorance yet again, what is she doing in Deer Lake, Wisconsin?”

“Ingrid owns the place.”

“The whole town?”

“Just the part you’re sitting in.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You were expecting a bunch of inbred hicks dressed in overalls and sucking on jugs of mash, weren’t you?”

“You have to admit that pretty much describes the clientele over at The Last Chance.”

“Do I?”

“Perhaps it’s my imagination, but your speech did seem to contain certain countrified colloquialisms that magically disappeared once you crossed the street.”

“You’ve got me there,” the deputy said and then presented her hand. “I’m Gretchen Rovick,” she said as if we had just met.

“Holland Taylor,” I answered, accepting the charade. Now we could start over.

We discussed Alison for an hour or more, Gretchen contributing extended anecdotes—like the time Alison embarrassed an American history teacher who couldn’t see how the rivalry between Andrew Jackson and his southern-born vice president over Jackson’s mistress, Peggy O’Neal, had contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. Or the time she purposely answered all one hundred questions in a true-false test wrong to see how her teacher would react. (Alison argued it was impossible to get one hundred percent wrong unless you knew all the correct answers. The teacher gave her an F anyway.)

Often Gretchen would slip into the present tense. “I still can’t believe Alison’s gone,” she’d say when she caught herself.

Gretchen and Alison had been childhood friends, growing up across the street from each other. Occasionally Alison would accompany the Rovick family on weekend retreats to Deer Lake, where they kept a cabin. And when Alison’s other friends began to shun her after she was certified a genius, Gretchen remained steadfast and true.

“It wasn’t her fault she was smarter than everyone else,” Gretchen declared as if intelligence was a handicap.

The two friends didn’t drift apart until the age of nineteen. Alison was at the University of Minnesota, completing work on her master’s. Gretchen had enrolled in the Law Enforcement program at Minnesota State University in Mankato. After graduation, Gretchen moved to Deer Lake and took a job with the Kreel County Sheriff’s Department. Still, the two women spoke at least three times a week by telephone. Inexplicably, Alison’s last call, according to her phone records, was placed one whole month before she disappeared. About the same time Marie Audette had lost track of her.

“We spoke every other day,” Gretchen said. “Our phone bills were outrageous. Then one day she stopped calling me, and when I called her, all I got was her machine.”

I told her about the harassing phone calls and suggested that that was the reason Alison refused to answer the telephone.

“Doesn’t explain why she quit calling me,” Gretchen said. She turned away, and I was afraid she might start to cry. I hate it when women cry. There’s never anything I can think to do about it except watch. Only she didn’t cry. Instead she asked, “Is there anything else?” obviously anxious to end the conversation.

“Stephen Emerton claims Alison was having an affair with someone while she was working for the health-care company, possibly a doctor.”

“Stephen is a jerk,” Gretchen insisted.

“That’s already been firmly established,” I replied. “But is he also a liar?”

Gretchen breathed wearily. “The woman in me says Stephen is full of it. Alison would not have had an affair; she just wasn’t like that.”

“That’s what Marie Audette said,” I offered hopefully.

Gretchen nodded, then added, “The cop in me says it’s a possibility, although Alison certainly never mentioned a doctor to me.”

W
e had just finished our meal when the commotion started. A woman dressed in a wide flaring skirt and tight cotton sweater that was far too young for her was wobbling along the bar, a martini in her hand. She looked like the kind of woman who only drank with men. And there were plenty about, most of them competing to see who would be first to refill her glass or drag a chair over to her, all of them ogling her with a thirst that was both comical and frightening. One of the men pushed a second, who pushed a third, who pushed the first, and so on, while the woman laughed gleefully.

“Stay here,” Gretchen commanded firmly in case I was contemplating a reprise of my performance at The Last Chance.

The deputy moved to the center of the group. Two men left immediately, leaving three and the woman. I couldn’t hear what Gretchen said, but her words were effective. The woman responded with a high-pitched laugh, but the men all grabbed some bench except for the largest of the three. He grabbed Gretchen by the wrist. She did not pull away. She merely looked at his hand, then at him, and spoke a few, slow words. The man hung in there with as much tenacity as a professional ballplayer in the first year of a guaranteed multimillion dollar contract, which is to say he backed off quickly, sitting with the others, pulling the woman down into a chair next to him. After a few more words, Gretchen returned to our table. The four people watched her, huddled close together, and then left the restaurant.

“Are you married?” Gretchen asked me as she regained her chair.

“No,” I said, without going into details.

“She is.”

“Who is she?”

“Eleanor Koehn. She’s a slush.”

“A slush?”

“A lush who drinks and then becomes a slut.”

“I take it her husband was not among Eleanor’s admirers.”

“Her husband is King Koehn. He owns King Boats.”

“King Koehn?”

“That’s what he calls himself, what he insists his employees call him. About half the people in Deer Lake work for him one way or another.”

“And he doesn’t have time for a wife,” I guessed.

“Sure, he does. Just not his own.”

“Compliments of the management,” Ingrid announced, interrupting us with a bottle of Beringer white zinfandel and two wine glasses.

“This isn’t necessary,” Gretchen told her.

“Are you on duty?” Ingrid asked.

“No.”

“Compliments of the management,” she repeated, pouring a generous amount of the liquid into each glass. We both thanked her.

“You did that well,” I told Gretchen after our hostess left.

“Breaking up the brawl?”

“No. Scamming the freebie,” I said, and Gretchen laughed.

“Don’t tell Bobby Orman,” she said. “He’s the sheriff. He takes a real dim view of deputies accepting gratuities.”

“You did handle yourself well, though,” I told her again. “Both here and at The Last Chance. You’re a good cop.”

“I don’t know. I might be catching on. Finally. When I first started, I was in everyone’s face. Always mouthing off, always threatening people until physical force became a necessity. I was the best baton twirler in Kreel County, you know?”

I nodded.

“I guess I was trying to overcompensate for being a woman, trying to prove I was just as tough as the male deputies. There was a lot of hostility and suspicion when I first started; the guys stood back to see if I could handle myself. Some of them didn’t want to work with me. Others, when I called for backup, they’d take their own sweet time responding, stopping along the way to bag a speeder, stuff like that. So I was always asserting my authority, I was always playing it hard. And I never understood why no one complained. Oh, they’d scream a blue streak about some of the things I said but nothing when I beat them up.

“Then one day I started thinking, This is silly. It’s silly for a deputy—man or woman—to start duking it out with some guy in a bar. What does it prove? That you’re stupid, that’s what it proves. I guess I’ve mellowed. I don’t get in their faces anymore. I don’t try to belittle them. Or challenge their manhood. I talk softly but firmly and directly, and people respond. They call me ma’am. They kiss my hand and they say, ‘Can I tell you my side of the story first, ma’am?’ Most people who give cops BS do it for effect, they do it for the crowd. But look at me: five foot six, one hundred twenty-five pounds. People who give me BS look stupid, and no one wants to look stupid in front of their friends. They’d rather go to jail. Besides, I bust someone, he figures he’ll get treated right. He knows he won’t have an accident on the stairs; you know, trip and bump his head eight or nine times.”

“You’re a peace officer,” I volunteered.

“That’s it exactly. A peace officer. I like the sound of that.”

We finished the wine and listened to Lonnie Cavander’s first set, and when it seemed the right time, I squeezed Gretchen’s soft, warm hand and told her it had been a pleasure meeting her. She told me she had enjoyed herself, too, and I should call her the next time I was in Deer Lake. Neither of us spoke of Alison again.

eleven

T
he Donnerbauers lived in a house in an old-fashioned St. Paul neighborhood that harkened back to the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald and bootleg booze. But the house itself wasn’t old-fashioned, merely old, with a spotty lawn and crumbling sidewalk. Mrs. Donnerbauer greeted me at the door, waving frantically. “Come in, come in,” she urged, as if she were afraid the neighbors might see me.

I had called the Donnerbauers from a pay phone before leaving Deer Lake and asked if I could visit. They agreed. But it was well after ten when I arrived, and no visible lights burned in the house as I stood on the porch and stared at the front door, deciding whether I should knock or not. I figured they must have gone to bed until Mrs. Donnerbauer opened the door just as I was about to leave.

I stepped across the threshold into virtual darkness. An ancient floor lamp burned in the far corner of the living room, but the dim light it cast was supressed by a burnt-orange lampshade and didn’t reach the door. The only other light in the room came from a seventeen-inch television mounted on a metal TV tray, also in the far corner; its flickering shadows gave the plastic-covered furniture an eerie sense of movement. A man that I assumed was Alison’s father sat under the floor lamp in a chair facing the TV screen, his bifocals balanced on his nose. He was either watching the Entertainment channel or reading the
People
magazine that was opened across his knee. Mrs. Donnerbauer introduced me, saying, “The detective person is here.” Mr. Donnerbauer didn’t reply. Maybe, in fact, he was sleeping.

Alison’s mother led me to the kitchen in the back of the house, where a single bare lightbulb burned overhead. She offered me a chair after first removing a large cardboard box from the seat. The box was at least fifteen inches square and filled with the small rubber bands that the delivery kids wrap around your newspaper. She set the box on the counter next to an impressive stack of wrinkled aluminum foil. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked. When I said I did, she filled a tall juice glass and handed it to me.

“Would you like some fish sticks?”

“Fish sticks?” I replied.

“We have plenty,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said, confessing that she worked as a food demonstrator, enticing supermarket shoppers with free samples as they pushed their carts up and down the aisles. She always brought the leftovers home to feed her family, which now consisted only of herself and her silent husband.

I declined the fish sticks.

“That woman in the paper, are they going to make her pay for hurting my little girl?” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. There’s not much physical evidence,” I answered.

“It ain’t fair,” she insisted.

I agreed with her.

Mrs. Donnerbauer was a small woman on the downside of fifty, an age she hadn’t reached without hard struggle. Any resemblance to the young woman in my photographs had been eroded by time. Without prodding, Mrs. Donnerbauer began speaking of her Alison—only not with the hallowed devotion you would expect from a grieving mother. Rather, she spoke of Alison as if she were the wayward daughter of an unpopular neighbor.

“Very peculiar child,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said.

“How so?”

“Well, she wasn’t like the other children.”

“How so?” I repeated.

“For one thing, she was always reading,” Mrs. Donnerbauer said as if she had caught her daughter drinking three-two beer behind the garage. “Reading at the dinner table. Reading in the car. Reading in front of the TV. Reading at night under the covers with a flashlight.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I suggested. “I did much the same thing when I was a kid.”

“
War and Peace?
” Mrs. Donnerbauer asked. “
The Selected Plays of Eugene O’Neill? Canterbury Tales?
In old English! Once I caught her reading
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. She was eight years old. Imagine.”

Imagine, indeed.

“And she would never answer when I spoke to her,” the woman added from across the kitchen table. “I would chant her name: Alison, Alison, Alison. Nothing. At first I thought she was deaf or something. Then I thought it was because Alison hadn’t been named until after she was three months old because of a family disagreement.…
His mother,
” she mouthed silently, gesturing toward the living room. “I thought maybe she didn’t realize that Alison was her name. Of course, I now know that she was just ignoring me, like her father. Isn’t that right, dear?” she asked the man in the living room. When he didn’t reply, she shook her head. “See?”