corner of my eye I saw the glass door on the restroom building flash in the light. The father and his daughter were coming out. He was carrying her now, and she was eating a candy bar. The door of the minivan opened and a woman stepped into the light, smiling. The father set the girl down and she ran to her mother, who gathered the child into her arms.
The piece of paper was a rectangle. One of the two long edges looked as if it had been folded and then carefully torn along the fold. I decided I was holding one third of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch page. I turned it sideways so a short edge was on top. At the top of the rectangle were a faded stylized capital “S” and part of a small “a” along the torn edge. Below those were color pictures, cut in half by the ripped edge, of what looked like ice-cream confections, maybe a sundae and a soda.
Sanders, I thought. The classic Detroit ice-cream and candy palace. I had tried to take Mom there on one of her rare visits when I worked at the Times. But she had demurred, calling the place a tourist trap. It was funny to hear that from someone who lived in a town desperate to be a tourist trap. We got ice-cream cones at a Baskin- Robbins instead.
But now in my hands was what looked like a placemat from a Sanders restaurant, maybe the very one I had tried to take Mom to. The mat had to be old, maybe as old as me, because I could see parts of the prices of the items, and each carried a cents rather than a dollar sign.
I flipped the paper over.
On the back was some sort of drawing-or, again, part of a drawing, because I had in my hands only about a third of a page. I switched the dome light back on and leaned into it. As I looked more closely, the drawing appeared to be a map of some sort, drawn in ballpoint ink. It looked as though someone might have carefully traced over the lines and letters on the drawing, perhaps because the earlier version was fading.
In the upper left corner of the page was an arrow pointing up and marked alongside with a capital “N.” For north, I assumed. A smaller arrow beneath it pointed down and off the left side of the page, and beneath the arrow was the word “LAKE,” written in my mother’s hand.
A car pulled in two spaces to my right. I lowered the paper to my lap and waited while a stooped old man emerged from the Chrysler and made his way slowly toward the restrooms. He wore an orange hunting cap with a picture of a deer over the bill. He peered at me as he passed. For a second I thought he might stop, and I started to slip the paper back into the envelope, but he just smiled and nodded, and I gave him a polite smile and pointed at the restrooms as if I were waiting for my wife. He kept walking.
I looked back at the map. Beneath the arrows, a curving line traced the upper portion of an irregular oval from the bottom left of the page up and around to the bottom right. Within the oval my mother had scratched three X’s and some squiggly vertical lines. Perhaps, I thought, the squiggles signified a hill or a rise. The X’s were clustered around those lines, each marked with the name of a tree: “BIG OAK STUMP,” “BURNED OAK,” and “TWO-TRUNK BIRCH.”
The burned oak stood at the apex of a triangle with the other oak and the birch marking the ends of its legs. A scalene triangle, I thought, remembering my mother saying it to me over my ninth-grade geometry textbook at the dining room table. She was better at math than she was at spelling. The scalene was outlined by dotted lines. A fourth dotted line bisected it from the burned oak down and off the page’s ragged bottom edge. To where, or to what, I had no idea.
A treasure map? I thought. It made me recall what I had said to Tatch when I’d visited his camp and seen all the people toiling on the hill: Digging for gold? Now I asked myself: Could this crude map my mother had drawn years or even decades ago show Breck and his blindly faithful diggers how to find whatever it was they were tearing up the earth for? If so, it would have to have something to do with Nilus, wouldn’t it, or why else would Mom have put it in an envelope labeled as it was?
I slipped the page back into the envelope and pulled out the other paper. It was, as I’d thought, newsprint, a yellowed, one-column clip that had been scissored out of a newspaper, then folded over once. I’d seen it on the microfilm machine at the clerk’s office: “Accused Killer Murdered in Pine County Jail.” I quickly reread it, noting again the connection between the accused, Joseph Wayland, and his grandson, Breck.
I felt someone looking at me and lifted my eyes to see the orange hunting cap floating in the dark before my truck. The old man grinned and looked back at the restrooms with a shrug, as if to say, “What do women do in there anyway?” I smiled again, nervously I thought, and kept a sidelong gaze on him until his Chrysler pulled away.
Mom obviously didn’t want the police to know about what I held in my hands, or else she wouldn’t have rushed me out the back of Dad’s garage. I imagined her now, sitting in a jail cell, reading a book or a magazine. I pictured Darlene stopping by to see her. I felt relieved. I wondered if the police would release Mom before I returned to Starvation, and hoped they would not.
I put everything back in the envelope, dropped it into the lockbox, locked it, and stuffed it under the rubbish on the floor. The fluorescent glow of the restroom lobby grew dim in my rearview mirrors as I pulled back onto I- 75.
SEVENTEEN
I turned my cell phone on after crossing the bridge at Zilwaukee, a bit more than a hundred miles north of Detroit. There were two new messages.
Attorney Peter Shipman said he’d been retained by my mother. Darlene, he said, had called him, God bless her. “Bea’s fine,” he said. “The cops aren’t saying much, and I told her to stay mum for now. No charges yet, but they’re holding her for questioning. Between us, I think they think it’s for her own safety. She has her own cell and they’re treating her with kid gloves. She sends her love.”
The young woman on the other message said simply, “Call me when you hit twenty-three.”
I dialed Joanie McCarthy when I exited onto U.S. 23 south toward Detroit.
“Thirsty?” she answered.
“Where are you?”
“The newsroom. The desk called me in to chase some stupid Freep story we wrote a week ago. Then they decided there was no space for it.”
My old newsroom: the wooden desks like steamer trunks, the wires snaking up the ancient pillars, the rattle of keyboards ringing off the tile floors, the smells of bad coffee and old leather and newsprint.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just pop it on the Internet.”
“Might as well put it in a bottle and throw it off the banks of the Detroit River. You still shoot pool?”
“Not for a while, but it’s kind of late, isn’t it?”
“Not upstairs at Aggie’s. You know it?”
I looked at my watch. After midnight. I had thought I would get a motel and meet Joanie in the morning. But she had stayed up, so I guess I had to stay up.
“Greektown, right? Monroe?”
“Off Beaubien. An hour?”
“Sure. You got some stuff on Breck?”
I heard what I thought was her taking her feet off of a desk, plopping them on the floor. “Altar boy,” she said.
“How so?”
“See you at Aggie’s. Bring your A game.”
I had to hop between three puddles of vomit glistening in the streetlights on the sidewalk outside Aggeliki’s Greek.
A man wearing a grease-spattered apron and folded white paper hat came out of Aggie’s with a bucket and mop, shaking his head. He looked at me and I said, “Not me, man.” He said something in Greek that I didn’t understand. His look said fuck off.
I opened the glass door to the vestibule at Aggie’s. The restaurant lay beyond another glass door to my right, aglow in white fluorescence, clattering with plates and forks and the babble of the boozed and drowsy. The aroma of garlic filled my nose, and my belly told me pastitsio, please, and dolmades, with a cup of creamy lemon soup. But
