Dead Dogs and Englishmen Read Free Page A

big dent in the trunk and a wobbling back tire.

The house on Old Farm Road, half-hidden by a tall clump of a long-dead woman’s overgrown lilac bushes, was one of those abandoned farmhouses waiting for one last wind storm, one last snow, to finish it, weight it down to broken boards and twisted windows. Michigan State Police cars had nosed in along the road between unmarked cars and a white van—probably the techs from Grayling. Men and women—some in protective suits—stood around in the yard, behind police tape, talking, working, photographing.
    I pulled in next to Dolly, got out, and waited beside my Jeep.
    The blackened house stood to the front of a once-plowed field. The land was a mass of tall wild grasses stretching over a low rise to where the farmland ended and the forest began. I covered my eyes against the bright sun. In a far corner of the land three birds circled, soared, and circled again, wings barely beating as their heavy black bodies rose and fell. Even I could recognize these kings of the sky. Turkey buzzards. Ugly and clumsy on land but in the air they floated endlessly, circled gracefully, dipping, rising, turning sidewise and turning again. As I watched the birds I thought about Dolly—so graceless in most of her life but utterly at home as a cop, in charge, magnificent in her own Deputy Dolly way. But then I told myself Dolly probably wouldn’t appreciate being compared to a turkey buzzard, so kept my observations to myself.
    I didn’t like abandoned houses. Driving by one, I could smell the mold, and the disrepair. Places where families used to live brought up questions—the whys of everything. But then I sometimes don’t have a lot to do while I’m out driving and my imagi nation runs to the philosophical dark side.
    â€œYou comin’ or what?” Dolly yelled as she started across the road.
    â€œSee the turkey buzzards back there?” I pointed.
    She tipped her head. “Yeah? Turkey buzzards. So what?”
    â€œBecause of the body inside?”
    She kept her head turned away from me, then shrugged. “Who knows? Something out there, I’d say. Dead animal probably. They got theirs. We got ours.”
    We ducked under yellow police tape strung along the road frontage, down both sides of the house, and probably across the back too. Crime scene. The officers would be very careful, collecting evidence, recording finds, impressions, names of people at the scene—what each had done, when they arrived and left. Dolly had studied police procedure recently, through an online program, and was into dotting every I and crossing every T. “So those bastards’ lawyers can’t trip me up in court,” she’d groused and slapped her log b ook against her thigh.
    She motioned me to hurry as she made her way toward the house. The first thing to hit me inside was just what I’d always imagined about abandoned houses: the overwhelming stink of mold and dust caught in dead, wet heat. And then the unmistakable smell of a rotting body. Enough to make me retch; only I tried never to do things like that in front of cops. Later, when I got back home and washed the stink from my clothes and skin, maybe I’d give my stomach the go-ahead, but for right now I put one hand over my nose and mouth and tried not to breathe too often.
    The room we walked into wasn’t large, maybe nine feet by twelve feet. Smashed beer cans, old rags, and yellowed fast food bags testified to who had been using the place lately. Peeling, blue flowered wallpaper hung in streamers from the walls. The ceiling, having fallen some time ago, exposed narrow wooden slats overhead. Piles of old plaster lay strewn across the bare, wide-plank floor. In the middle of one of the piles of fallen plaster lay the curled body of a woman. She was dark-skinned—maybe Hispanic or Indian, and lay on left her side, facing away from us, knees drawn up. She wore white shorts,