“She was one of your exes?”
“Both, actually. Married her twice. Divorced her twice.”
“You mean she divorced you.”
“Takes two,” Whistler said. “But I wouldn’t want to be married and divorced twice to any other woman in the world.”
“And I remind you of her why?”
“Well, you don’t have her caboose,” Whistler said.
I waited.
He said, “You’re not letting on how much you care. I mean, sorry for saying it, but what happened tonight could’ve happened-perish the thought-to your mother.”
I had let that notion curl into a ball in a dark corner of my mind. Better to imagine that the whole thing was some case of mistaken address or identity. I glanced at the ceiling, a suspended grid of warped beige panels that looked like they’d been dipped in piss.
“I don’t know why anyone would want to kill Mrs. B,” I said. “Or my mother.”
“Your mother have a safe?”
“A safe? Right. Only the bank has a safe.”
“Valuables?”
“Define valuables. Her cross-stitch collection? She cashed in her jewelry a few years ago for like four hundred bucks and gave it to the Salvation Army. She’s got a coin collection she hasn’t looked at since my dad died. And a bunch of pictures of me in hockey gear.”
“Guns?”
“No. I mean, a twenty-two, for shooting muskrats and chipmunks, but they give you a twenty-two here when you get out of fourth grade.”
Whistler clapped his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. “OK then. We’ll talk tomorrow.” He zipped up his vest. “I suppose the next step is to figure out what this has to do with the other burglaries.”
“It happened on bingo night.”
“Yeah, but people know we already made that connection, so it’s a convenient cover.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way.
“Anything to that Scratch guy not showing up?” he said.
“Who?”
“The hockey guy D’Alessio was talking about.”
“Oh, Tatch. A born-again Christian who plays goalie? Harmless.”
“If you say so.”
My cell phone rang. Mom, I thought. “Excuse me,” I said. Into the phone, I said, “It’s Gus.” It wasn’t Mom. I listened. I hung up.
“Who was that at this hour?” Whistler said.
“No one.”
“You’re the boss,” he said. “Just tell me what you want me to do. We’ll get out there and dig some dry holes. You know what I say.”
“Can’t find a gusher without digging a few dry holes.”
“Yes sir.”
He went out the back door. The clock on the wall over the copier-and-fax said three minutes after three. I wanted to go to bed, but Darlene was waiting.
FIVE
The tree house,” she had said on my cell phone. “Ten minutes.”
Beneath four months of snow, the one-car garage seemed barely more than a bump on a hill. If you didn’t know it was there, with a 1969 Pontiac Bonneville parked inside, you probably wouldn’t have thought it was anything more than a gigantic snowdrift.
I felt a tinge of regret seeing the shrouds of snow drooping from the eaves. My dad would have wanted me to climb on top of the garage and push the snow off so the weight didn’t cave the roof in. He had built the garage when I was two or three years old. On the back he had attached a platform of planks ringed by a wooden railing. He called it his “tree house.”
From up there you could peer across the tops of shoreline trees and see the southwestern corner of the lake, watch the falling sun play its last orange and purple sheen across the water’s mirror before going away. Dad spent many a summer evening up there, smoking cigars, drinking Stroh’s, listening to Ernie Harwell narrate the Tigers. Mom almost never went up, which I think was how Dad wanted it, though I never heard him say so. “Girls don’t really get it,” he would tell me with a wink on the nights he let me come up. He’d pop me an Orange Crush and we’d clink bottles in the dusk.
I had brought a shovel from my pickup. I used it to dig my way through knee-deep drifts to reach the side door. The door was unlocked. I shoved it open. The smell of gasoline washed over me. I stepped inside.
“Hey, old girl,” I said.
The Bonneville was gold with a cream vinyl roof. I pulled the driver’s door open and sat down. The keys were in the ignition. I had been starting the Bonnie every few months since moving back to Starvation. I had taken it out only once, two years before, for a long drive that almost killed her. After that, I let a mechanic have at her, and she’d come back almost as good as new. But now I hadn’t been out to the tree house in so long that I worried her battery had succumbed to the winter damp.
I turned the key. There were a few clicks. Then nothing.
“Shit,” I said. “My fault. Sorry.”
“What are you sorry for now?”
Darlene was silhouetted in the gray light framed by the side doorway, in uniform, a badge glinting on the furry front of her earflap cap. Her face was obscured in the shadow, but I could feel her gaze, pensive and wary and sad.
I got out of the Bonnie, pushed the door closed behind me.
“Hey, Darl,” I said. “I’m-”
“Don’t.”
“Why?”
“Please.”
Darlene took off her cap and her dark hair fell around her shoulders. Her hands trembled as she held the cap, every muscle in her face straining to keep it from cracking. She started toward me and, as she did, she dropped the cap, as if it was too heavy to hold. I bent to pick it up but she fell to one knee and snatched it up in both hands, lifting it to her face, where she buried her eyes in its fur, her shoulders heaving.
“Darlene,” I said. I started to lay a hand on her left shoulder but hesitated, unsure whether I should.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You can’t what?”
She stood. She wrapped her arms around me, pressed her face into my chest.
I remembered the night after her father’s funeral. We were in my dad’s garage. It was two or three in the morning. Darlene hadn’t spoken a word since we’d left the community hall where my mother and Soupy’s mom had stayed close to Mrs. B while the other ladies clucked around Darlene, telling her what a wonderful man her father had been. We left our clothes down in the garage and climbed the short stairway to Dad’s tree house. We fell asleep in the humid dark, waking just before dawn. Then she curled her body into me, shivering against the dew.
Now she lifted her head and stepped back, fitted her cap back on. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a hankie or something,” I said.
She wiped a coat sleeve across her face. “I don’t want it to freeze there,” she said.
“Why did you want to come here?”
