“I’m good, I’m good,” I told him.
“What time will you be home tonight?”
“I’m not sure yet. It depends on what happens today.”
Jep said, “I don’t think you should drive home too late. Or do you want me to come up there now to go with you to meet Sunday.”
“That’s not necessary,” I assured him. I chatted about the innkeeper’s famous waffles I was anticipating for breakfast and an alluring claw-foot tub with bath salts that I invented on the spot. Eventually I hung up, only to see a deck of text messages.
Stefan had texted: U OK?
Jep had texted: U Still ALIVE?
Julie sent one of her customary long missives: I hope you find whatever you’re looking for. I hope it doesn’t end up costing you too much. You thought I didn’t know that you took off for up there, but I did.
And then there was the one I’d been waiting for: No one hurt you? I saw the police. I was scared!
It seemed impossible that Esme had seen what happened to me last night, but clearly, she had. What kind of crappy game was this? Suddenly, I was furious with the caller.
I’m fine. I was scared too. Are you going to come see me today?
I waited, but she didn’t answer.
I put down the phone, got up, then I did slip into a long bath—no claw-foot, but it was a deep tub with soothing salts—then hopped back into bed for another nap before breakfast, which would be served just after nine.
When I got up the second time, I checked my phone again.
No reply from Esme.
I don’t believe you anymore. I think you’re making this all up.
The waffles with raspberry syrup the innkeeper prepared were actually heavenly. I thought of telling her so, in just that way, but decided against any sort of hijinks. She was clearly a decent person, and she might think that I was trying to tease her about religion. Which would have been unkind. Maybe it was my mood, however, but the eldritch nature of the whole place was enhanced by portraits of children, the same boy and girl, that hung all over the dining room walls, old-fashioned colorized photos.
“My kids,” she said affably.
“Grown up now?”
“Oh, no,” the woman replied. But there were no sounds of children, nor any bookbags or boots scattered near the door. The place was prim and clean as a vault.
By the time I’d eaten and changed clothes, it was time for me to see Pete Sunday. I told Sherri I’d be back later on and that I probably would stay the second night—a possibility I’d left open. I was still exhausted.
The detective and I had arranged to meet at a coffee shop on Pottawatomi Street, where I fortified myself with a double-shot latte. He walked in, wearing a slim-fitting blazer in a Prince of Wales check over charcoal trousers and a striped shirt. We shook hands. He looked unchanged. After he ordered his own coffee, he asked me to follow him to the public safety building, just a few blocks away. When we got there, he settled me comfortably in his office.
“Why do you work here?” I asked him.
“Why does anybody work anywhere?”
“You dress like you’d work in a big city.”
“Ah,” Sunday said, spinning his desk chair and sitting down to face me. “People tell me that all the time.” He went on to say that he’d recently applied for a transfer, to Dane County, and was starting to be afraid he’d actually get it. “I know that’s hardly a big city. I want the challenge but not the change. I’d miss it here. I’d miss the quiet and the lakes and the trees and my mom and dad and all my brothers. Speaking of that, I heard from one of them that you had a little scare last night. Big whistle.”
“That was your brother? You guys go all in for the fraternity of police stuff, huh?”
“No, that was my actual brother, Judson. Jud and Ross are both county sheriff’s deputies, Jud here, Ross in Marathon County. My other brother lives in town here, too. He’s a librarian at the university.”
“What do your kids think about moving away from these north woods?”
“No children yet,” he said. “No wife yet. Just small crimes and good suits.”
“Not all small crimes.”
“Mostly. Not all.” As if apropos, he pointed to the banker’s box on the floor beside him.
“I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about our local cordiality. All the reports from Belinda McCormack’s death are in that box. I copied them for you and I won’t even make you pay the copy costs.”
To my next question, he answered that he had never heard anyone mention the name Esme. He showed me a list that Jill McCormack had compiled of Belinda’s close friends at the time of her death: Caroline, Celeste, Laura, Kilty and Anastasia. While he agreed that this was a notorious case, it was Pete’s opinion that if Belinda had not been a beautiful blonde girl on campus, whose mother had the wit and determination to focus on dating abuse as an issue, there would be no echoes. Women in America died every day at the hands of the men they loved. They ran the gamut, from poor unemployed mothers, flight attendants to Broadway actors, advertising executives. They answered the phone at the water utility or taught second grade. When I told him that many of those very women had reached out to Jill’s organization, he shrugged and said he hoped awareness would make a difference because many of the women whose lovers hit them felt oddly guilty, as if they deserved it. Your own side of that story, he said, might not be so popular; but there were plenty of people on the wrong side of the equation in a case of violent death—yet deserving of a certain kind of empathy too. There was no such thing as too much understanding.