Once You Go This Far Page 4

  I sat down on the floor and pulled the suitcase out so I could see its contents. Jeans and sweaters, hiking socks, a blue plastic pill tray with only Sunday’s and Monday’s medications missing. I opened Tuesday and peered in—an oval cream-colored tablet, a pale pink round one no wider than the hole in a drinking straw, two halves of an oblong white one. I was making a mental note to ask Maggie what her mother was taking, but then I found a trio of pill bottles in a mesh suitcase compartment: sertraline, propranolol, and an unpronounceable statin, respectively.

  I wrote these down in my notebook and moved on to the dresser: a dog-eared copy of Big Magic and a fraying phone charger, a bottle of Merle Norman foundation and a packet of makeup-remover wipes for dry, mature skin. A small television sat on one end of the dresser, so I flipped it on—NBC. The early news was airing right now, and the screen showed a jumble of white and pink poster boards on the statehouse lawn. I looked for Shelby and Miriam, but it was impossible to make out any particular faces. The disembodied voice of a reporter was saying, “Due to security concerns at the outdoor event, Ms. Archer-Nash canceled a scheduled appearance here this afternoon with promises to return to central Ohio before Election Day.”

  I turned it off and stood hunched under the skylight, taking in the room from the opposite angle.

  I noticed the strap of a canvas tote bag poking out from under the bed and bent to pick it up. A knitting project—baby booties—a tin of mints, a linty ChapStick, a five-dollar bill and two ones folded around a cashout voucher from Caesars Hotel and Casino in Windsor, Canada.

  Maggie didn’t know anything about it. “She wasn’t a gambler. Not at all.”

  “Well, not much of one, anyway,” I said, tapping the total printed on the paper slip—seven dollars and fifty-one cents. “What about Keir, is he a gambler?”

  “I don’t know. His hobbies tend towards guns and whatnot.”

  “And proselytizing at traffic stops, I take it.” I explained about the Toledo Blade article.

  Maggie bit her lip. “Boundaries were definitely one of the problems Mom had with him.”

  “What were some of the other problems?”

  “He’s a very, I don’t know, he’s flirtatious. With everybody. I think it’s his personality, and I know it bothered her, and they’d fight about it.”

  That seemed a little thin to be the basis for a murder accusation. “Why’d it take so long for them to get divorced? Trying to patch it up?”

  “Maybe a little. But when I found out I was pregnant, she wanted to make sure that everything she had would be for Bea someday. Rather than anything Keir could lay claim to.”

  And that sounded like a reason that Metcalf would not have killed Rebecca, if the divorce was already a done deal. “Did she have a lot of assets? I can’t imagine being a school nurse is terribly lucrative.”

  “She loved working at the school. Loved it. But she also had some property, rental property.”

  “Any problems with tenants?”

  “Not that I ever heard about.”

  “Do you have the addresses for the places she owned?”

  Maggie sighed. “Somewhere. This is one of those things that I need to deal with but can’t quite seem to manage.”

  “You can outsource dealing with her estate to somebody else,” I said, “just not to me. I would like those addresses if you can find them.”

  She rubbed her forehead. “I must seem like a lunatic to you. My priorities are really out of whack.”

  I touched her arm across the kitchen counter. “Not at all. I know what it’s like to lose someone. Your thoughts might not always make sense, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”

  The corner of her mouth tipped up. “Thank you for saying that.”

  I peeked in Rebecca’s silver Equinox on my way out—I knew which vehicle was hers because it had nearly taken off my own car door that day. Coffee cups in every cupholder. I got in and started the vehicle to check the in-dash computer to mine for information in place of having Rebecca’s missing phone, but the screen simply told me that Rebecca’s iPhone was not connected.

  I closed the door and patted around the inside, imagining the natural place to leave clues. The glove box was always a decent contender, but it—boringly—only contained the owner’s manual and the registration and a multi-tool to use to cut one’s seat belt in an emergency. Other than Starbucks cups, the console held a Michael Bublé CD case, empty, and a pack of gum. A silver chain dangled from the rearview mirror, one of those car charms that said Guardian Angel, Protect my passengers and all who pass by. Keep us safe under your watchful eye. I liked that Rebecca was hopeful, but practical—the guardian angel was wishful thinking, and the multi-tool was just in case. I checked the pockets on the back of each seat and found nothing, but the small pop-up trash can in the backseat revealed a discarded piece of gum tucked into a folded valet ticket for a place called the St. Clair Club in downtown Detroit.

  I was feeling around in the bottoms of Rebecca’s reusable-grocery-bag collection in the back when James Holmer got home. He did a double take when he saw me. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

  “Oh, I just stopped by to see how Maggie is doing.”

  He nodded. He wore the same tan jacket that he had on at the hospital. “That’s sweet. It’s been tough on her, it really has. But our daughter is perfect. So that helps. But, um, what’s going on with the car?”

  I would have had no problem lying to him, but nothing immediately came to mind to explain being elbow-deep in his mother-in-law’s Trader Joe’s bag. I said, awkwardly, “I thought I saw something moving back here.”

  “Something moving?”

  “Yeah, but I guess not. Must have been a reflection, I guess.”

  “Must have been,” he said.

  * * *

  My brother Andrew didn’t work at the Westin anymore; he’d gotten fired for missing more than a week of work after he was arrested back in January. But maybe it was for the best—being a hotel bartender maybe didn’t go so well with the whole new-leaf situation. A situation that seemed to include less drinking.

  There was something depressing about being the last drinker in the family, though. Our oldest brother, Matt, had been sober for years—some unpleasantness in college—and my mother barely drank even when my father was alive; now that he was gone, long gone, the legendary booze cart in the living room long depleted, she hadn’t bothered restocking. Even the contents of Frank’s office upstairs had been slowly but surely drained. Andrew used to be counted on to bring a bottle over during our family dinner, but that seemed to be changing now.

  Tonight he brought over a murky-smelling mason jar of CBD tincture with the intention of making us each some sort of honey-tea digestif after dinner, but my mother wasn’t having it.

  “I told you, it’s not marijuana, Mom,” Andrew was saying. “It’s not. Roxane, help me out here.”

  “It’s not,” I said, “but I still don’t want any.”

  “It’s cannabis,” my mother said gravely. “That’s what they said on the news.”

  “Yes, it’s cannabis—”

  “You know how I feel about all that.”

  “Listen, hemp is also cannabis. All that macramé shit you used to have?”

  “Language.”

  I smirked and resumed scrubbing the dregs of turkey chili out of the slow cooker.

  “CBD is perfectly legal, Gen.” My mother’s boyfriend—man friend?—Rafael Vega was a cop like my father had been, but the similarities stopped there. I actually liked him a lot, and not only because he was drying the dishes for me.

  From the living room, where the television was tuned to a Cavs game, my other, least favorite brother said, “Personally, I would never. I take sobriety seriously.”

  Andrew met my eyes with a roll of his. Matt was in rare form tonight, showing up in the new, gargantuan F-250 he’d bought since starting his own construction business and subjecting us all to a detailed
litany of its features despite the fact that no one cared.

  “That’s all well and good,” Andrew said, “but this has nothing to do with sobriety, because it’s not a drug.”

  My mother gave the mason jar a sniff and shook her head. “Nope. I can’t do it. I’m sixty-four years old. Why try drugs now?”

  Andrew said, “It’s not marijuana,” at the same moment Rafael said, “You’ve never tried?”

  Scandalized, my mother said, “Of course not! Have you?”

  Rafe didn’t miss a beat. “I was young once, if you can believe it.”

  When the Scrabble board came out, it was time for me to go. Matt became even more annoying—if possible—when zero-stakes competition was in play.

  Andrew followed me out onto the porch and lit a cigarette, unwilling to resist that vice, at least. He said, “I feel like you’re still mad at me. About Highbanks.”

  “Why, because I didn’t want your gross tea?”

  “No, because I’ve barely talked to you in like a month, and you’re standing there with your arms crossed.” I was doing that. I put my hands in my pockets. “And because you wouldn’t try my gross tea.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m not mad at you. Now Matt, on the other hand,” I said, nodding at the truck. It was so large that it took up the entire space between my mother’s driveway and the neighbors’. “How many miles per gallon do you think it gets? One?”

  “Oh, at least.” Andrew exhaled toward the night sky. “But come on. Something is up.”

  I sighed. “Not really. It’s just—you’re going on a journey, with all this stuff. You both are. Your new ambitions. Matt’s new truck. And I’m not. I’m just here.”

  “A journey.” My brother exhaled toward the night sky. “I’m not going full-on hippie or anything. I’m just trying to do something else with myself. With my life. I mean, Christ, you could have died in January, because of my bullshit. Honestly, you should be fucking furious with me. Like I am.”

  We watched each other, the only sound the faint crackle of his lit cigarette.

  “It’s not like that,” I said finally. I hadn’t even told him about what had happened at Highbanks the day he stood me up, so maybe it was like that on some level. “And I know you’re trying to do something else. It’s just, well, I want to go home and enjoy a drink, and I would like to do it without the taste of pond water in my mouth. That’s all.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You can drink in front of me, come on. Is that what this is about?”

  “I’m not about to be the only person drinking here.”

  “Okay, that’s fair. But seriously, I’m not Matt, I’m hardly Mr. Sober Living or anything. As long as having a drink is something you enjoy…”

  He trailed off and I knew why. I wished I didn’t.

  He’d had a come-to-Jesus moment in jail, and strangely enough, I had too. I remembered the beige cell in the Belmont police station a few years ago, feeling like I might actually die because I hadn’t had a drink in twenty-four hours. That wasn’t about drinking, though. It was about being unhappy. And I was less unhappy now, or at least less direly so. Now at least I had Elise Hazlett’s face to keep me company in addition to my whiskey. “I do,” I said, “and I’m going to go do that, right now. Please never ask me to smell that jar again.”

  Andrew grabbed me by the shoulders and planted a kiss on the top of my head. “Mind if I stop by your office to print some labels this week?”

  “You still have a key, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Print your heart out then. Labels for the gross jar?”

  “I’ll be on Shark Tank someday with this jar.”

  I held up two sets of crossed fingers as I walked up the block.

  CHAPTER 6

  The drive to Toledo was two and a half hours on a good day. Thursday wasn’t an especially good day. I sat in standstill traffic on 23 for seemingly no reason until Bucyrus, and then sat in stop-and-go traffic from there on because it started to rain and no one could deal. But I made it by lunch and knocked on Arlene French’s door just in time for egg salad sandwiches.

  “Poor Margaret,” she said, slathering bright yellow eggs on white bread. “I just feel so awful for her. Obviously it’s never the right time, but this really isn’t the right time.”

  It took me a beat to realize that she was talking about my client. “You know Maggie well?”

  Arlene was a stately woman in her twilight years, with feathery grey-white hair and a shuffling walk inside a billowing fleece housecoat. But her eyes were bright and her voice was strong. “Oh yes,” she said, “she grew up next door. Rebecca and Margaret lived there for years. Of course when Rebecca got remarried, she had renters in.” Arlene plated my sandwich and pushed it across the counter to me. “I wasn’t sorry to see them go, those renters.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. Her regard for renters seemed low. I didn’t mention that I, too, was one. “So Rebecca moved back in after her divorce?”

  “That she did. Sweet woman, Rebecca. They both are. Were. It was such a shock to hear about what had happened. Oh, you’d see Rebecca walking hither and yon, always preparing for some big trek. She was mad about walking.” Arlene looked sad at the mere thought of walking and/or renting.

  I took a bite of my sandwich—pickles, but they were sweet—and chewed. “So tell me about the day you saw the police over there.”

  Arlene nodded. “Well, Rebecca had asked me to get her newspapers and just keep an eye on things while she was down your way. So I did. Her mail goes in through the slot but it just lays there where anyone could see it, so I’d gather that up too and turn some lights off and on and whatnot—she had the one light on a timer, but I don’t think that’s enough these days. But anyway, I saw the cars pull up out that window, right there.” Arlene pointed to the square of light above her kitchen sink.

  “Cars, plural?”

  She nodded.

  “And these were cop cars?”

  “Yes.”

  “Patrol cars, like black-and-white ones?”

  “That’s right. Two of them.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Two officers got out of one car, a man and a woman, and another man got out of the second. He went around to the back. The other two went to the front door and knocked. They were on the porch for a while, but no one came to the door, so they left. I called Rebecca right away because she’d had a few problems with the ex-husband. But of course by then she was already, well…”

  I nodded. “When you say problems, do you mean police problems?”

  “She would never call the police on him, so I had to. Twice, since she moved back here. He’d be standing in the yard, screaming for her to come out.”

  I wrote this down. On paper, Keir Metcalf didn’t have any recent entanglements with the law, so it seemed possible that Maggie was right and the cops were doing him a favor. “When was the last time?”

  “Sometime in the spring. It had been a while. But when I saw them out there, I just assumed that it was related to him again. She’s never had problems with anyone else.”

  “What about the renters?”

  Arlene smiled. “They were simply annoying, never taking their trash cans back inside. They never had the police or anything.”

  “So you called Rebecca right away.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when was this?”

  “It was September the eighth, about eleven in the morning. I was just sitting down to watch that nice-looking Drew Carey on The Price Is Right. I like him a lot.”

  “And she didn’t answer,” I prompted.

  “Correct. So then I called Maggie—Rebecca had given me her phone number on a piece of paper before she left. I just figured Rebecca needed to know, if things were starting up with that ex-husband of hers again. But Maggie didn’t answer either. Then I thought that maybe the baby had come already and I decided not to bother them with it anymore. It was only a few days later when Maggie called me ba
ck that I heard about what had happened.”

  “You’re positive about the date and time?”

  Arlene nodded again. “I certainly am.” She stiffly got to her feet. “I even wrote it down.” She shuffled over to her refrigerator and slid a magnet off a sheet of typing paper. “I wrote, ‘Toledo police, two cars, October third, eleven oh five a.m. Gone by eleven twelve.’”

  She handed the sheet of paper to me. Her handwriting was blue-inked and wobbly. It also detailed the lights she had turned on and off: front table, back porch, dining room.

  I said, “Did you show this to Deputy Montoya from Delaware County?”

  “Show him? No, but I told him about it when he called.”

  I felt myself frown. He had given me the impression that he actually came up here to do his—admittedly very cursory—investigation. Perhaps that was my own wishful thinking.

  * * *

  I snapped a picture of Arlene’s log and thanked her for the sandwich, then left her with a business card in case she remembered anything else.

  I had packed thoroughly for this trip—a handful of the misprinted pens, not caring so much if misinformation was spread around up here, my passport in case I wanted to make a trip to Windsor, the casino slip and parking pass from among Rebecca’s possessions, and a house key from Maggie.

  I made use of the latter and let myself in through Rebecca’s back door.

  The small house was neat and orderly, though a fug of expired melon was coming from the fridge. I walked through the kitchen and into a dining room that seemed to have too much furniture—a large china cabinet, a table with space for eight, a midcentury banquette, and a desk with a framed picture of a middle-school-aged Maggie with her arm around a dog, not the one that had growled at me at the hospital, but a similar variety. I took in a living room with a modestly sized flat-screen TV and several bins of yarn, as though Rebecca intended to make baby booties for the entire city. She had a Real Simple magazine and a bottle of clear nail polish on the end table. Bedroom: clothes in a practical, functional vein, books that ran the gamut from The Cat Who mysteries to Melody Beattie to Nicholas Sparks. Bathroom: pink and devoid of clues. Basement: a dank place with a terrifying open shower like my grandmother’s house used to have. Upstairs, a half bathroom and two small guest rooms. One had a double bed and a sewing machine. The other had a single bed and a treadmill and a low row of built-in bookshelves below a window that looked out onto Arlene’s roof. The top shelf was full of yearbooks from the school where Rebecca taught, Horizons Academy. They were arranged in descending numerical order by year; she had one for each year since 1996.