“Good,” Dingus said. “You been out there before? I have nothing against born-again Christians, but I’ll tell you, that place is just a tad creepy.”
SEVEN
After Dingus cleared out, I headed down the river to Estelle Street, where I turned toward Main and the Pine County Courthouse.
My chat with the sheriff had reminded me to pick up some documents. The week before, I’d requested several years’ worth of tax reports on properties owned or formerly owned by Stewart and Bernice Edwards, Tatch’s parents, or owned by Roy Edwards, Tatch himself. He and his little camp of born-again Christians were fighting the county over an increase in taxes on the property where their trailers huddled on a wooded hill above the lake. They were arguing that they were a religious organization that shouldn’t have to pay taxes at all, and certainly not more than before. Now that Dingus seemed the least bit suspicious of Tatch-even if I didn’t think Tatch clever enough to break into a house without getting caught or mean enough to hurt a flea-I figured I ought to have those documents handy, just in case.
The redbrick courthouse stood over a square guarded by oaks and crosshatched with sidewalks blotched with dirty snow. I remembered the call I’d ignored and pulled out my phone to check messages. Luke Whistler had left one.
“Hey, boss,” he said. I heard the sound of a truck rumbling past him, wherever he was. “Popped a story online about what happened last night. Hope that’s OK, Mr. Sleep-All-Day. I’m headed out to the territories. Talk later.”
I pocketed the phone, thinking, how the hell could a fifty-six-year-old reporter be so chipper day after day? His beloved “territories” were anyplace outside the newsroom-the courthouse, the pizza joint, the cop shop, Audrey’s, the high school, Enright’s, wherever there might be someone willing to whisper in Whistler’s waiting ear.
Although the Pilot published on Tuesdays and Saturdays, our bosses at Media North let us post stories on the Internet each morning. Whistler loved having a place to counter Channel Eight’s ability to go with a story the minute they got it. So what if Channel Eight was also owned by Media North. I thought Whistler also liked having the freedom once in a while to post stories without showing them to me. “Always first,” he liked to say, “and frequently right.” I’d tell him I hoped he was joking, and he’d grin and assure me he was.
Vicky Clark wrapped both of her fleshy hands around mine and tugged me toward her across the glass-topped counter in the Pine County Clerk’s Office. My forearms tensed a little as my fingertips neared the cleavage jiggling in her low-cut sweater.
“Gus, I am so sorry,” she said. “So sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“Such a caring lady. I hope I can be so caring one day.”
I tried to slip my hands free but Vicky tightened her grip and pulled me closer, her perfume so sweet I thought my eyes might water.
“You’ll let me know about arrangements?”
“Sure.”
The deputy clerk had three fat youngsters and an on-and-off boyfriend named Sully who spent weekdays working road construction downstate and weekends fishing, drinking, and shooting pool with his old high school pals in Starvation. On balance, I figured Sully had a better life than Vicky, which was probably why she imagined it couldn’t hurt to try to draw me into hers, via her boobs. I couldn’t blame her for assuming that I, too, was stuck in Starvation forever, since I had already made my own downstate foray and it had ended badly.
I liked Vicky. We had a sort of understanding in our mutual stuckness. But I had no serious interest in her beyond friendly chitchat and extracting whatever I needed from her office. Especially if it meant I could avoid dealing with the clerk herself, a brittle stick of a woman who happened to be Vicky’s mother, Verna Clark.
Vicky gave me a smile, her tomato cheeks squeezing her eyes nearly shut. She loosed my hands. “One of these nights,” she said, “I have to have you over for dinner. In all modesty, my chicken and dumplings is to die for.”
“I love chicken and dumplings,” I said, while thinking, But not that much. “Hey-do you think I could get those documents I asked for last week?”
“Did you fill out a form and give it to me?”
“It was me,” Verna Clark said. The county clerk emerged from the rows of file cabinets behind her daughter, wearing the same drab gray woolen dress she seemed to wear every day. Here we go, I thought.
“Good morning, Mrs. Clark,” I said.
She peered up at the clock on the oak paneling over my head. “Nearly noon, Mr. Carpenter, and our lunch break. I’m afraid you’ll have to come back later.”
It was vintage Verna. She couldn’t legally withhold the records, but she could make it difficult for you to actually put your eyes and hands on them. Complicating matters with formal paperwork gave both her and her daughter more things to do and the county commission reason to keep them on, when in fact one member of the Clark family could probably have handled the clerk’s office on her own, especially now that so little property was being bought and sold in Starvation anyway.
“I’m sorry, I can’t come back later,” I said. “I have to get back to my mom’s.”
“I’m very sorry to hear about the incident at your mother’s house,” Verna said. She stood pole straight at the counter, her reading glasses dangling from a frayed silver strand. “But we cannot allow the vagaries of daily life to disrupt our procedures.”
“Excuse me?”
Two lawyers stepped into the office and set briefcases on the floor.
“You’ll have to come back at one p.m.,” Verna Clark said.
“Why? I filled out the request forms a week ago. What’s the holdup?”
That was the wrong thing to say. Verna pursed her lips, then turned to Vicky. “You may take lunch now, but”-she looked at the clock again-“be sure to be back six minutes early.”
I glanced at the lawyers waiting by the double doors. They were smiling. I felt the seconds ticking off the clock.
“Bye, Gus,” Vicky said.
Verna waited for her to leave, then leveled her gaze on me. She’d been county clerk for as long as I could remember. She won re-election each time partly because she kept her office on budget, partly because her demeanor made her job seem so grim that nobody could work up the energy to mount a challenge. Verna herself seemed to operate on a limited budget of smiles and helpfulness that she rationed for county commissioners.
“For your information, Mr. Carpenter, there is no holdup,” she said. “You made a rather extensive request for records. We’ve processed them once and I need to check them over one last time to make sure that we’ve given you precisely what you asked for.”
“Forgive me, Mrs. Clerk, I mean Clark,” I said. “I’ll take whatever you have now.”
“As you know, the county is strict about closing times, given our current budget situation. I know you’re familiar with our budget, Mr. Carpenter, because you’ve written extensively about it, and opined extensively about it, too.”
The Pilot had published an editorial the previous November recommending that voters reject a tax increase that would have shored up the county budget. Someone at Media North headquarters in Traverse City had written the editorial, not me, but that distinction wouldn’t have mattered to Verna Clark.
“Yes ma’am. But if I could just-”
“The truth is, Mr. Carpenter, another individual was in to look at a number of the same records earlier today-after filing the proper request forms prior to you-and the files have yet to proceed through reprocessing.”
“I thought you said they were processed.”
“Yes, but not reprocessed.”
