Page 16

That unusual Wednesday appetite for the macabre and weird should have been my first clue that things wouldn’t go smoothly for me as I prepped for my after-hours excursion, but I was too excited and determined to think it through.

After I closed out the register and locked the money and receipts away in the safe, Newt and I got in my car, and I drove out to Marty’s place.

Marty’s truck and trailer still weren’t there, and the place felt empty and deserted.

The woods loomed dark and mysterious all around the lot, and I left my car running with the headlights aimed toward the woods and the cliff beyond, which overlooked the bay.

I reached into the glove box and took out a small pocket-sized flashlight I kept there, tested it to make sure the batteries hadn’t given up the ghost, and stuffed it in my pants pocket.

Then I donned the nitrile gloves I’d brought with me from the store, unhooked Newt, and got out of the car.

There was enough peripheral light from the headlights for me to easily see the door to Marty’s mobile home, and I walked up to it and knocked several times as hard as I could.

I kept staring at the woods as I waited between knocks and my eyes began playing tricks on me, making me see shifts in the shadows that looked like someone emerging from the dark density of the trees until I blinked them away.

After three knocking attempts, I tried the knob and was surprised to find it turned easily.

Upon closer inspection, I saw that the lock was damaged, dented with something like a pry bar just enough to keep the dead bolt from catching.

Was that new? I tried to recall what the door had looked like when Rita and I had come before, but couldn’t remember.

Had it been like that when the police were there?

Newt sat at the base of the stairs, his ears pricked to the sounds of the night—owls hooting, leaves rustling, wind soughing through tree limbs.

I told him to stay, and then I opened the door and went inside.

The smell hit me like a slap in the face, making me reel back.

I realized, to my relief, that it wasn’t the smell of rotting or decaying flesh but rather a rancid, sour smell like that of rotting food.

It was the same smell I’d experienced the first time I’d been there, though on that occasion it hadn’t been as in my face as it was now.

I cupped a gloved hand over my nose and mouth, took a few steps deeper into the mess, and hollered for Marty.

I was met with silence.

Well, mostly silence. There was the sound of scurrying vermin off to my left and the relentless drip of a leaking faucet to my right. I flipped on a light.

If I hadn’t seen the place a couple of days earlier, I might now have thought that it had been ransacked.

Drawers were open with papers spilling out of them.

Every surface was covered with bundled and rolled newspapers, envelopes, unopened junk mail, dirty dishes, boxes and cans of food, packages of toilet paper, dishrags, and paper towels.

I pushed some of the papers around, looking for anything that might seem significant, but there was nothing of interest, save one rapidly scurrying and heart-stoppingly large cockroach.

Given what the inside of Marty’s trailer looked like, I found it hard to believe how neat and clean the cuddy cabin in his boat had been.

Perhaps the boat was more of a home to him than this trailer.

After searching just enough to make sure Marty wasn’t in there injured or dead, I bolted for the outside and gulped in lungfuls of the cedar-scented night air.

I also smelled sawdust, and that lured me toward the shed, which served as Marty’s workshop.

The shop area wasn’t anything spectacular but it, like Marty’s boat, was relatively clean and organized.

The wood-plank floor near the door had been swept, though the floor at the back of the structure, where a table saw was located, was covered with sawdust.

So were most of the surfaces.

Despite this, saws, planes, sanders, and other tools were neatly hung on pegboards mounted on the sidewalls.

Two unfinished chairs were partially assembled in the area near the door, and there were the subtle scents of stain, paint, and turpentine underlying the wood smells.

A table, a chair, and a cot stood off to one side and the cot had a sheet, a pillow, and a blanket on it, suggesting that Marty slept in there sometimes. I walked over to the table and shuffled through the papers spread out there, but all I found were drawings of chairs and other pieces of furniture.

Newt had followed me into the building and had promptly switchbacked his way through the place with his nose to the ground.

He returned to my side now with wood chips stuck to his nose and caught in his whiskers, his wagging tail stirring up a small dust-nado.

“Where are you, Marty?”

I said to the air.

Newt cocked his head to one side and whimpered.

“I know, buddy,”

I said, clearing the wood chips from his face.

“I’m worried about him, too.”

I got back into the car and drove to the boat landing where I’d met Marty the other morning.

His truck was still parked in the space it had been the morning I went out with him.

What did you see on your screen, Marty? Had he gone back out to that area in the Rock Island Passage and found it again?

I pulled into an empty parking space a couple rows back and grabbed the slim jim I had in my glove box, a tool my father had kept on hand because he was always having to help customers who had inadvertently locked their keys in their cars.

For some reason, it seemed to happen to our customers more than it did anywhere else, if the claims of other Door County business owners could be believed, and I eventually came up with a theory as to why.

Odds and Ends can be quite distracting when one first pulls up.

Not only are there oddities inside the store, but often there are some outside, too.

In fact, on nice days I drag Henry and his chair outside and park him beside the entrance, something my father used to do.

My father’s other favorite piece of outdoor decor was a coffin that was rumored to be from Transylvania. It was a simple black wooden affair, but it had a red velvet liner that caught one’s eye and, when propped up outside, attracted a lot of attention. When Dad eventually sold the coffin—the fellow who bought it insisted on lying in it before he’d commit to the purchase—he started rotating other items to the entrance, though none proved quite as eye-catching as that coffin had been. It might have been these distracting items that led to people absentmindedly locking their keys in their cars so often.

The slim jim saw a fair amount of action during the busy tourist seasons back in my father’s day.

I still have to use it on occasion, though a lot of the newer vehicles are slim jim–proof and some cars won’t let you lock your keys inside.

Marty’s truck was an older model that I was confident I could work with the device.

After checking to make sure that the truck was locked and then checking my surroundings to make sure no one was watching me—the late hour and the cover of darkness helped—I slid the tool down inside the driver’s side door between the window glass and the outside frame.

Seconds later I had the lock undone and pulled the slim jim out.

After one more look around, I opened the door and slid inside, leaving the door ajar and telling Newt to sit and stay.

There was a lingering odor in the truck’s cab that I recognized as eau de Marty.

Several papers were spread out on the front seat and across the dash, and I wondered if Marty had left them like that or if the police had sorted through them and left them all askew.

Had they slim-jimmed their way into the truck the same way I had? I sifted through the papers and found electric bills, grocery coupons, store receipts, a pay stub for Marty’s federal pension, and a receipt for a bank deposit that showed a balance of more than two hundred grand.

It surprised me, given the way he lived, but then again, his lifestyle was relatively simple.

He didn’t have much to spend money on other than his boat, the materials he needed for making his chairs, and maybe a payment on the land where his trailer sat, though he might have owned it outright by now.

Marty was a mystery, a dichotomy of lifestyles and habits that intrigued me.

I wanted to get to know him better.

I’d always been drawn to quirky, odd people the same way I was driven to find quirky, odd creatures.

Or maybe it was the other way around and I was the one who was odd and quirky.

I shoved that idea aside.

Sometimes it’s not wise to dig too deep into one’s own psyche.

I dug into the glove box and the visors in the truck instead.

I found nothing of interest until I pulled down the driver’s side visor.

Tucked up there was a warped, torn-off piece of envelope bearing a postmark from four days ago.

Written beneath that postmark in the same heavy, angular scrawl that I recognized from the note that had come with my Adirondack chair was one word: Plymouth.