Dead Sleeping Shaman by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Page B

from front windows to side door and back, uneasy. I’d had enough of Jackson and memories of what should have been. Enough of sad people and inhumane violence. Time to treat Sorrow, who had been neglected and showed it with rolling eyes and big sighs, to a walk.
    It was different out in the woods. Sorrow and I were free. No sound, except the rattle of dying trees when the wind blew, and Sorrow’s scrambling paws as he dashed off, racing toward whatever he imagined had to be waiting for him.
    I watched my dog with pride—his graceful lope, ears back, shining coat of many lengths. Last night I had come home to a pristine house, not a single poop or pee anywhere. Sorrow was growing up. There’d been almost sadness about having nothing to clean. He didn’t need me.
    One of the reasons for a long walk was Marjory’s story, or as much as Crystalline knew of her story. It wasn’t a particularly original tale, nor even truly bad, as women’s lives went. Still, there was processing to do. If I was going to work on this with Dolly, I had to have all we knew sorted in my mind.
    Marjory Otis came from an old family that settled around Leetsville sometime in the late 1800s. Marjory told Crystalline that the Otis family was proud of the great-grandparents who’d worked in the lumbering business, living in the woods all winter, back at a boarding house in Leetsville all summer. By the time her father, Charlie, was grown, the lumbering business was long gone. After high school, Charlie got a job at a manufacturing plant near Mancelona and met Marjory’s mom, Winnie Frank; they married and rented a house in Leetsville. Marjory was only a little girl, Crystalline said, when he died, killed in a motorcycle wreck up near Vanderbilt. Later, her mother, Winnie, had what they called “a crisis” and was taken off to the mental hospital in Traverse City for almost a year. When she came back, Marjory said her mother was never the same again. They lived in a run-down little house her Uncle Ralph rented to them, off toward Deward. When her mother disappeared for a day or two, that was where they usually found her—in Deward, camping alone by the side of the river, surprised when they came looking for her.
    “I kind of think that was why Marjory hated the place,” Crystalline had said. “Maybe because of the way her mother loved it. I don’t know. It wasn’t that she hated her mother. I don’t mean that. It’s the memories … I guess going over there to find her mother living in a makeshift tent and seeming happy not to be with her kids, well, the pictures she kept in her head of that place weren’t good ones.
    “One day Marjory’s mother ran off with a guy selling tractors,” Crystalline went on to tell us. “She left a note that gave her three kids, Marjory, Arnold, and the youngest boy, Paul, to their Uncle Ralph and Aunt Cecily, their father’s brother and sister-in-law, to care for, though they didn’t much want children around. All Marjory ever hoped to do after that was get away from Leetsville. She married a soldier who stopped at the Shell station in town and gave her a ride down toward Detroit, which was kind of like what her mother, Winnie, had done. Marjory and the soldier stayed together for four years, until he stopped at another gas station, met a sixteen-year-old girl, and took off again.
    “No need for Marjory to come back to Leetsville,” Crystalline said. “When I first knew her, just saying the name of the place could make her sad. Bad days for her, when her mother ran off. Marjory always said her mother would never have walked out on her kids, no matter how sick she got, but nobody ever looked for her. Her aunt wanted to think the worst and only said Winnie was getting what she had coming to her. She could still be alive, you know that? Marjory was fifty-two. Her mother could be in her seventies. I wish I could find that old lady. I’d grab her skinny neck and …”
    Dolly put up a hand.