“Huh,” I said. “That’s nice. I didn’t know you knew her. Or that she knew Gracie was… you know.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Felicia Haskell.”
Mom thought for a second. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t think I know her.”
“It’s all just part of the campaign,” Mrs. B said.
“Campaign?” For a second her suggestion eluded me. “Oh. You mean for the rink? Come on. They know me better than that.”
An idea popped into my head. I fingered the letter in my pocket.
“They came late yesterday,” Mom said. “I was just running out to ceramics and didn’t have time to move them.”
“If it was me, I’d feed them to the deer,” Mrs. B said.
“I might just do that.”
“We don’t need that rink, and we don’t need a new coach either. Poppy does just fine with those boys.”
I set the card back down. “I better get in the shower.”
“We’re going to Audrey’s, dear. Would you like to join us?”
That gave me another idea.
“No thanks. I’m already running late. See you at the office later, Mrs. B.”
The bathroom sat between the two bedrooms and had doors on either end. I went in one door, locked it, and turned on both the shower and the sink. I listened. Mom and Mrs. B were still talking. I opened the door at the other end and slipped into Mom’s room.
I found the manila envelope Audrey had told me about in the middle drawer of my mother’s desk. It was torn open at one end. As quietly as I could, keeping one ear on the conversation in the dining room, I slipped two sheaves of pages out of the envelope.
The first was bound within a cover of light blue cardboard. “Haverford Variable Life Insurance Company” read the logo on the front. I scanned the first page quickly. On January 7, Grace Maureen McBride had signed up for a term life policy for the sum of $250,000. I flipped through the pages, wondering who was the beneficiary. On page six I found a notation that the beneficiary “will be as shown in the application unless you change them.”
I switched to the other sheaf of pages, Gracie’s application for the policy. I found what I was looking for at the bottom of the fourth page. Fifty percent of the death benefit, it said, would go to Patricia Armbruster of Melvindale, Michigan, the woman I knew as Trixie.
The other 50 percent would go to Beatrice Carpenter of Starvation Lake, Michigan.
“Oh, holy shit,” I whispered.
“Gus?”
My mother’s voice came from behind the opposite door of the bathroom. I stuffed the papers back into the envelope. She knocked on the door.
“Gussy. Why is the sink running?”
I slid her drawer closed, tiptoed back into the bathroom, and eased the door on my side shut. I turned off the running water.
“Just shaving,” I said.
“Are you all right in there?”
“I’m getting in the shower.”
“Gussy. Are you going to be all right? At your meeting?”
Mrs. B must have known where I was going.
“Everything’s going to be fine, Mom.”
I stood there staring at the door, waiting for my mother to go back to the dining room. I could tell she was waiting herself, probably thinking, What does my son know? while I wondered the same about her.
My cell phone rang as my truck descended the big hill overlooking Skegemog Lake along M-72 west. If I didn’t hit traffic along the Traverse bays, I’d be on time for my appointment with Jim Kerasopoulos.
“Hello?” I said.
“Where are you?”
There was something unpleasant in the tone of Darlene’s voice.
“Got a meeting with the fat ass in Traverse. Did you talk to the cops in Sarnia?”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes you’re as slippery as an eel.”
“Huh?”
I heard a newspaper rustle in the background.
“You haven’t heard the news?”
“What news?”
“Looks like you got scooped again.”
I had watched a few minutes of Channel Eight’s 7:00 a.m. report at Mom’s house and seen nothing about Starvation Lake.
“Scooped how?”
“The Detroit Free Press. You know. Front page, too. Here, let me read you the headline: ‘Feds Investigating Car Makers’ Nemesis.’ ”
Car makers’ nemesis, I thought. Ralph Nader? Why would I care about the feds and Ralph Nader? Then it came to me.
“Haskell?” I said.
“Correct,” she said. “Would you like to hear the first paragraph?”
In my mind I saw Michele Higgins sitting across the table at Petros, cigarette jutting from her hand, her face lined with disdain.
“Go ahead.”
“‘A federal grand jury is considering evidence that renowned plaintiffs’ attorney Laird Haskell avoided paying taxes in excess of two million dollars, sources familiar with the matter say.’ ”
“Jesus,” I said.
“It gets better.” She continued reading. “‘Haskell, who left Metro Detroit last year and moved to the northern Michigan town of Starvation Lake, has had his assets frozen by the federal government and is said to be struggling to avoid personal bankruptcy, sources said.’ ”
She stopped. In a way, the story was a complement to what I’d written about Haskell’s inability to finish the new rink. But I doubted that was why Darlene was reading it to me.
“That’s quite a story,” I said, bracing myself.
“Here’s the best part.” She read:
A. J. Carpenter, executive editor of the local paper, the Pine County Pilot, said Haskell has stopped paying contractors he hired to build a new hockey rink in the town. “Work’s come to a stop,” Carpenter said in an interview Tuesday at a diner in Metro Detroit. “He’s trying to shake the town down for a hundred grand.”
Carpenter, a former Detroit Times reporter who resigned in the wake of an ethics scandal two years ago, described Haskell as “slippery as an eel.”
“I’ll bet you can guess the byline on the story.”
“It was strictly-”
“But not strict enough that you would mention it to me last night? Or the other day? I know you had all that other business to attend to and of course you had to get back in time for your precious hockey game but maybe you had a few minutes to squeeze in a quickie, huh?”
“Darlene, we had coffee.”
The line went silent. My tires whined on the plowed asphalt. Darlene spoke so softly then that I could barely hear what she said.
“You lied.”
“I-no. Darlene, I didn’t lie, I just didn’t-”
“You lied. And I don’t know who to believe anymore. I don’t know who to believe.”
