12

Monday, July 31

I backed out of my driveway at six on the dot. It was going to be a long day. And a long week. I was driving home to LaFargeville, New York. Not because I wanted to. Or had to. I was going to LaFargeville because it was right next door to another place I was going. To Wolfe Island. To pay a surprise visit to Prince Anton Alexandur Clopotar, vegetable grower extraordinaire, pretender to the Romanian throne. I knew if I drove all that way to see the prince without making a perfunctory pilgrimage to my own hometown, well, I’d be pounding myself on the head in regret for the rest of my life. The way those idiots in the commercials pound themselves for having a plate of Krispy Kremes for breakfast instead of a V8.

I drove out West Apple to Hemphill College then took the Indian Creek Parkway north to I-77. It was still dark but already the traffic was picking up. Sleepy, coffee-slurping suburbanites on their way to their jobs in Cleveland.

I’d asked Ike to close his coffee shop for a week and come with me. But as I expected, he said no. “You know I can’t be taking off willy-nilly like that,” he said, as we stood side by side in front of my bathroom mirror brushing our teeth. “My regulars rely on me.”

Being the proud old bird I was, I could hardly tell him that I was afraid of facing my childhood alone. All I could do was shrug, spit my Tartar-Control Sensodyne into the sink and say, “Okay, but you’re going to miss out on one of the worst experiences of your life.”

Ike did show some concern about my going alone. “I hope you’re not thinking of driving that cranky old Dodge of yours,” he said. “You won’t get to the Pennsylvania line before something under the hood goes kerflooey.”

And that’s why I was floating up I-77 in his big, sensible Chevrolet. Thermos of Darjeeling tea on the empty seat next to me. James in the back seat licking himself. Bush-Cheney ’04 sticker on the bumper.

I must confess that Ike was not my first choice as a travel companion. My first choice, believe it or not, would have been Eric Chen. He’d already taken a couple of road trips with me on past investigations. He was surprisingly easy to handle—as long as I kept him well supplied with junk food and Mountain Dews. Gabriella Nash might have made another good travel buddy. She was afraid of me. She was already up to her eyeballs in my secret effort to learn the truth about Violeta Bell. Unfortunately she’d only been at the paper for six weeks. She could hardly take a week’s vacation. Another possibility was Effie Fredmansky, my old college pal and owner of Last Gasp Books. The previous summer we’d driven to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia together. We had a damn good time even though I suspected her of murder. But Effie, like Ike, had a business to run. And so James got the nod.

Thanks to the heavy traffic, and my decision to pour myself a cup of tea at the worst possible time, I missed the bypass and had to drive straight into downtown Cleveland. I made it around that hellish bend the locals call Deadman’s Curve—not something everybody does successfully apparently—and headed east on I-90, along the southern shore of Lake Erie. The water was just as pretty as it could be.

For a long while I drove past abandoned factories and empty railroad yards. Then little by little I eased into Ohio’s grape country. It isn’t the Napa Valley, but it is still quite impressive. One vineyard after another, for I don’t know how many miles, taking advantage of the warm lake air. I reached Erie, Pennsylvania at nine. Buffalo, New York at 10:30. Buffalo is a big Hannawa. Which doesn’t say much about either city.

I got on the turnpike and headed into the bumpy bowels of upstate New York. At a service plaza outside Rochester I stopped for gas. I bought a rubbery chicken sandwich for my lunch. I found a nice plot of grass for James to irrigate.

I reached Syracuse at two o’clock. I took I-81 north. Ninety minutes later I was in Watertown, population 27,705. What London is to the English and Paris to the French, Watertown is to the people of Jefferson County, New York. The big city they outwardly loathe while secretly lusting to visit.

LaFargeville was just 15 miles up the road. But I’d been driving, and thinking, for ten hours. I was pooped. Physically and psychologically. I got off the interstate and drove downtown. I checked into the Best Western. It was right there on Washington Street. Right about where fifty years before I’d caught the Greyhound Bus to Hannawa and Hemphill College. It was a pet-friendly hotel, meaning that James could stay in my room for an extra ten dollars. I didn’t take him with me into the lobby. I figured they’d take one look at the big bear and charge me an extra hundred.

***

Tuesday, August 1

I walked James around the hotel grounds until he found just the right spot on the dew-soaked grass to pee. Then we headed up Route 12 toward LaFargeville. Outside Watertown we were immediately surrounded by cow pastures and cornfields. As far as I knew, those were the very same cows and the very same stalks of corn that drove me out of LaFargeville in the fifties.

This narrow plain between Lake Ontario to the west and the Adirondack Mountains to the east is low and scruffy. Which makes it hot and buggy in the summer and absolutely uninhabitable in the winter. The lake winds drive the temperatures low and pile the snow high. There’s not much for people to do up there but make babies and cheese. And they make a lot of both. And both leave as soon as they’re properly aged. I turned onto Route 180 and headed toward LaFargeville.

My first stop was Grove Cemetery. I followed the looping drive around to where we Madisons have been burying each other for 150 years.

Grove Cemetery is well named. The graves are forever in the shadows of the great oaks towering above them. The older stones are covered with moss. I let James run free and walked across the slippery grass to my parents’ headstone. I hadn’t been there in sixteen years. Since my mother’s funeral. And I’d never seen the date of her death chiseled on the stone. It threw me for a loop.

My mother had survived my father by twelve years. Those twelve years weren’t very happy ones for her. But neither were the forty-two years she’d been married to my father. She loved my father, I think. And she loved us kids, I’m sure. But she wasn’t so keen on herself. She never kept herself fixed up as well as she might. “What’s the use with all the work I’ve got to do?” she’d say. And she never allowed herself to have a good time. “How can I enjoy myself with all the work I’ve got waiting at home?” she’d say. Today your family would force you to see somebody. You’d be diagnosed with clinical depression and given some pills. But back then when my mother was struggling to stay afloat, depression was seen as a moral weakness. And a stigma on the entire family. All my father could do was warn my brother and me that, “Mama’s a little down in the dumps today.”

My father, on the other hand, was the happiest man on the planet. He loved being a dairy farmer. He loved his cows. He loved going out to the barn and sticking those milking machine nozzles on their teats. He loved taking his filled cans of milk to the dairy. He loved handing the money over to my mother when he got back. “Not much for all the work, is it?” she’d say.

My brother, George Jr., is buried next to my mother and father. He died when I was sixteen. In Korea. When he was nineteen. My parents bought a plot next to his for themselves. They bought one for me, too. One big enough for a future husband and for any future children that might, like George Jr., die before their time.

I can’t blame my parents for thinking that I’d stay in LaFargeville, or at least settle down nearby in Depauville or Clayton. Even when I went off to Hemphill College to study library science, I’m sure they figured I wouldn’t end up any farther away than Alexandria Bay, or, since I was proving to be a headstrong girl with gumption, Watertown. Little did they know that my sights were set on Syracuse. When I was ten, my Aunt Dorothy took me to the main library in downtown Syracuse. I was staying with her that summer, helping her with her housework while she was recovering from her “women’s problem” surgery. Anyway, I took one look at that big castle full of books and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in there, bathed in all that respectful silence, sniffing in all that slowly decaying ink and paper, far away from the smell and moo of my father’s cows.

Instead, I met and married Lawrence Sprowls, who after a few fairly happy years of marriage metamorphosed into a skirtchasing skunk. But that marriage did keep me far away from LaFargeville. And it did land me the best-possible job in the world: head librarian of The Hannawa Herald-Union. I remember what I wrote my aunt a few months after getting the job: It’s better than a castle, auntie. It’s a newsroom.

I sat on the ground in front of my parent’s stone. I clapped my hands for James. He came running. He plopped next to me. Begged me to scratch his floppy ears. “There’s nothing wrong with spending your life in LaFargeville,” I told him, “being a dairy farmer or a dairy farmer’s wife. But I sure knew it wasn’t for me. I knew from the get-go I’d have to go somewhere else and be somebody else. I would have exploded like an over-baked potato if I’d stayed here. And maybe that’s what Violeta Bell did, James. Maybe she was from some boring little place like this. She knew it was either escape or explode. She gave herself a new name and a new history. More than likely she’s no more Romanian than you are.” I took him by the ears and stared into his eyes. “You’re not, are you?”

James waited for me to struggle to my feet then followed me to the car. “Maybe she had an aunt who took her to an antique store once,” I said. “Maybe she fell in love with all the fancy old stuff and knew that was just the life for her. Not that we want to paint her too sympathetically, of course. She was very likely a crook. Very likely she changed her identity to stay out of jail. We’re not talking about Mother Teresa here, James. But criminality aside, you’ve got to admire someone who knows what it takes to be happy inside their own skin.”

We drove into LaFargeville. It was as humble as it was when I was a girl. A hundred modest houses. A bank. A school and three churches. No real downtown.

LaFargeville is—how should I put it—very white. Everybody is either German or English. Everybody is either a practicing Catholic or a well-practiced Protestant. Everybody is either a Republican who votes Republican all of the time or a Democrat who votes Republican most of the time. Everybody is either married or wishes they were.

I drove past the house on Maple Street where my niece, Joyce, grew up. After my mother died, Joyce was my only living relative in LaFargeville. Now she was gone, too. For thirty odd years she’d militantly extolled the virtues of remaining single. Then five years ago she met a widower at a stamp collector’s show in St. Louis and married him. She now lives in Wahoo, Nebraska. She keeps begging me to visit.

I drove by the house on Mill Street where my girlfriend Edna Schwed used to live. It used to be painted white, like most of the houses in LaFargeville. Now it was painted pink. Which made me suspect that Edna still might live there. Pink was always her favorite color. I thought about stopping. But good gravy, what if Edna did still live there? What on earth would we talk about? Other than what her neighbors thought about her pink house?

I drove down Ford Street to see if the house where Chuck Crouse lived still had that fancy slate roof. It did. All through high school I daydreamed about Chuck Crouse. What it was going to be like being married to him. What the s.e.x. would be like. What the four children we’d have would look like. Would the two girls favor me and the two boys favor him? Or, heaven forbid, would it be visa versa? Don’t get me wrong. Chuck and I never dated. Chuck was too shy to ask any girl out. And I was too below average-looking for him to overcome that shyness. As I drove by, I wondered what had happened to Chuck. I’d Googled his name before leaving Hannawa. There were several Chuck Crouses but none of them were my Chuck Crouse.

I pulled into at Waggoner’s Grocery, the only real business in town. There was a single Sunoco pump in front. There was a big blinking New York State Lottery sign in the window. It was getting hot already. I left the windows down a crack so James could get whatever breeze there was. I went inside. The store hadn’t changed much since I was a girl. Pop and candy. Milk and bread. Cigarettes and beer. Lunchmeat and cheese. Tubs of ice cream for making cones. “You a Waggoner?” I asked the girl behind the counter.

“I think them’s all dead,” she said. “I’m a Gertz.”

The name didn’t ring a bell. I asked her to make me a double chocolate cone. I bought a Slim Jim for James. We ate our treats in the car and then drove north past Colby’s Dairy. When I was a girl just about everybody who wasn’t a farmer worked at Colby’s. I suspect it’s still that way.

Before leaving Hannawa I envisioned spending a day or two in LaFargeville, visiting all of our family’s old friends. The Siewertsons. The Griffens. The Wildenheims. I envisioned visiting the old Central School and the Methodist Church where I spent so much of my first eighteen years. I envisioned driving out to my parent’s farm on East Line Road. Getting a tour from the alpaca breeder who owns it now. Getting a peek inside my old bedroom maybe. Seeing if that big crack in the ceiling was still there. If the closet door still stuck. But now that I was in LaFargeville, well, I felt silly and lonely and a total stranger.

So I kept on driving, all the way to Philadelphia. Not the one in Pennsylvania. The one ten miles down the road. The one that’s about the same size as LaFargeville. The one that’s the home of Martin’s Pretzel Bakery. Their hand-twisted German-style pretzels are sold in fancy-schmancy stores all over the country. I bought a three-pound bag for Ike. For $14.50. I made James promise that he wouldn’t tell the old penny-pinching fool how much I paid.

I drove back to Watertown and checked out of my room at the Best Western. Then I drove up to Cape Vincent and pulled into line for the noon ferry to Wolfe Island. I was a day early for the cabin I’d reserved over there, but I was prepared to take my chances. James and I could spend a night in the car if we had to.

The attendant motioned me forward onto the little ferry. I stayed with James in the car. James is an American water spaniel. I was afraid if I took him up to the deck, he’d cannon-ball into the river and paddle back to shore. I didn’t need a scene like that.

Wolfe Island is the biggest of the famous Thousand Islands that choke the St. Lawrence River. While its southern shoreline tickles the American border, every inch of the island sits in Canada. It is 24 miles long with lots of pretty bays and points. Our family made two, one-day trips to Wolfe Island every summer. In June we’d go to one of those pick-it-yourself farms for strawberries. In August we’d pick wild blackberries. A couple of times in high school I went there with girlfriends to bicycle and picnic. It’s a lot more touristy now.

The ferry pulled out. I rolled down my window and stretched my neck to see. The water was flat and blue. In just fifteen minutes we were in Port Alexandria, pulling up to the Canadian customs booth.

I was ready for the girl with the Dudley Dooright hat. I handed her my birth certificate and driver’s license. As she looked them over it occurred to me how many times during her life Violeta Bell must have held her breath while her phony-baloney papers were given a perfunctory once-over.

The girl handed my papers back to me. “You aren’t bringing in any perishable vegetables, meats, or dairy products, are you?”

“Nope. No live minnows, firewood, or automatic weapons either.”

“Any dog food?”

“Only what’s already in him.”

She smiled. “You’ve done your homework.”

I handed her James’ records from the veterinarian, proving he’d had a rabies shot. “You wouldn’t know Prince Anton, would you?”

She didn’t. But she did know where I could buy food for James. At the grocery in Marysville. What the Canadians have against American dog food, I do not know.

Using the directions Eric printed out for me from Mapquest, I found my way around Button Bay to Clemens Road. At the end of that bumpy gravel path I found McWiggens’ Cottages. Four tiny white bungalows lined up along the rocky beach like bars of ivory soap.

On the porch of one cottage I found Alana McWiggens. She was a tall, bony woman with a face full of wrinkles. She had a thick thatch of gray, permanently windblown hair. She had a big ball of sheets and pillowcases in her arms. “I’m afraid I’m a day early,” I said after introducing myself. “My plans down in LaFargeville fell through unfortunately.”

“No problem,” she said. “I just now finished putting on clean bedding for you.”

She helped me with my suitcases. She made a fuss over James. She confided in me that she made enough money over the summer renting her cottages to spend her winters in Sarasota. “I’m one of those Canadian snowbirds you hear aboot,” she said. “Six months here, six months in the U.S.” She asked me if I’d come for the mystery writers’ festival.

I told her I hadn’t. That I didn’t even know there was a mystery writers’ festival. That I wasn’t a writer.

“You do look the type,” she said, quickly explaining by that she meant I was clearly well educated, sharp as a tack, and maybe a little on the eccentric side, in the most admirable way of course.

I was not about to tell her why I was really there—to solve a real murder rather than write about a made-up one. “I’m afraid I’m just a harried old librarian looking for a little peace and quiet.”

“You should go anyway,” she said. “They’ve been holding it for several years now. A real big deal. Scene of the Crime they call it. It lasts all day Saturday and afterward there’s a jim-dandy supper at the United Church. Barbecued pork and all kinds of pie.”

I remembered the pies my mother used to make with Wolfe Island berries. “It does sound fun. And speaking of mysteries—what do you know about that man who claims to be the king of Romania?”

She sat on the bed and let James put his chin on her knee. She scratched his ears. “Alex, you mean?”

“Alexandur Clopotar, yes.”

“He stays on the island all year from what I hear. A very nice man. Why do you ask about him?”

I sat on the other side of James and scratched his back while Alana continued to work on his ears. “I just happened to see something about him on my computer. You think he’s really royalty?”

“Oh, sure. Like I say, a very nice man. His wife’s gone though. So that’s sad.”

“He’s lived here a long time, has he?”

“I guess he retired here aboot twenty years ago. He was in the government up in Ottawa. Not a bigwig or anything.”

I had a lot more questions. But I also had a lot more days to ask them. “I am going to need some groceries,” I said.

She gave me directions to Marysville, the only real town on the island. I bought enough food to last James and me the five days we’d be there.