Dead Wood - By Dani Amore Page 0,72

Stroganoff was more important.

He must have heard the tone in my voice.

“Hold on!” he shouted to the people in the background.

“All right,” he said. “Let me think.” We both waited. A freighter nosed its way out of the Detroit River, heading north. The clatter of silverware from the Puhy kitchen sounded in my ear.

“Okay, I think I remember,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“It wasn’t a letter or anything,” he said. “I think I overheard him talking about it.”

“Was he talking about it with Laurence Grasso?”

“Yeah. How’d you know that?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Yeah, I think I overheard Coltrane saying something about getting out and going there.”

“Where, Mr. Puhy?”

“Home,” he said.

“Home where?”

“I’m pretty sure it was, um, Tennessee.”

A shiver ran down my spine. The little thing that had been dancing around in my brain finally let itself be known.

“Where in Tennessee?” I asked, even though I already knew.

A giant block had slammed into place.

“Memphis,” he said.

Forty-one

Something about a house. Fuck. I was losing my mind – short term, medium term and long-term memory loss. All at the same time. I pounded the steering wheel with my hands. Think, think, think. I pulled onto Vernier from Lakeshore, heading toward I-94.

I needed to start making more connections. That feeling of being close wasn’t good enough.

Where had I been when I felt things starting to come together? At the party. The first time. Talking to Shannon’s entourage for the first time.

A car pulled in front of me and I reefed the wheel to the right, sped up and floored it past him.

Something about a farmhouse?

What the fuck was it? We were all sitting around, talking about escapes or something. And Memphis mentioned something about looking at a house. Was she buying?

Finally, it clicked.

A lighthouse. That’s right, a lighthouse. Because she said she was on Harsen’s. The island at the other end of Lake St. Clair.

I pounded the wheel again and roared onto I-94. Harsen’s Island. A lighthouse. And someone had said something about Memphis milking cows. A joke that I assumed meant she had a little farm or something. Farms on Harsen’s weren’t unheard of.

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard.

It’d been nearly three hours since Molly had been killed. If the same person was headed for Memphis’, he or she had a big jump on me.

I pushed the pedal all the way to the floor.

• • •

Harsen’s island is the biggest of a small group of islands at the north end of Lake St. Clair. The lake narrows and eventually turns into the St. Clair River for a brief thirty miles or so before opening back up, this time into Lake Huron.

I exited I-94, sped across Harper and pulled into the parking lot at the ferry harbor. Fifteen minutes later, the ferry dumped us on the island and I hit the road running. Even though Harsen’s has its own yacht club and for years was a miniature summer playground for Grosse Pointers, it still feels like you travel back twenty years or so. Mostly summer cottages and the occasional bait shop/convenience store.

The entire island is only a couple square miles with one main road that runs along the outside border. The road is aptly named Harsen’s boulevard and I steered onto it from the ferry dock. It had been over fifteen years since I’d been on the island, and then I was a high schooler driving out to my buddy’s cottage to get drunk.

I’d never seen a lighthouse on the island, or if I had I certainly didn’t remember, and didn’t know that one even existed out here.

I also figured there weren’t many cops out here, either. So I hammered the pedal down and turned Harsen’s into my own private Indianapolis 500.

After about five minutes, I sped around a steep curve and saw the lighthouse, although, technically, it was more like a lightpost you see in the suburbs. A tiny harbor had a few boats tied off and I looked at the surrounding land.

No sign of a farmhouse.

I did, however, see an older woman walking a Bassett Hound. I pulled the car up next to her.

“Do you know of a farmhouse around here with a view of the lighthouse? It belongs to a songwriter named Memphis Bornais?” I said.

She looked at me with bloodshot blue eyes. They looked just like the dogs’. I thought she was going to tell me that Harsen’s residents were a private people and that if this Memphis woman wanted me to find her she would’ve given me directions.

Instead, she jerked an unusually