Of course the letter made him angry. He dressed warmly in near tears and set off for a walk in the falling snow and was gone for four hours. By the time he reached Presque Isle in about forty-five minutes the anger had passed because he was able to admit to himself that she was right on every count. The idle idea of throwing himself off a cliff into Lake Superior amused rather than alarmed him. He had work to do.
Two days later they were off for Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. Diane and Mona had organized a precise itinerary including hotels and appointments. Diane had irritated Sunderson by renting them a nice Hertz car for the trip feeling that his twelve-year-old Blazer with a hundred and seventy thousand miles on the odometer was vulnerable. She had rented the car without telling him saying that it was a “treat.” As a civil servant from a relatively poor family he had chosen the path of ignoring their finances and when Diane had tried to involve his interest in her inherited money he had refused to cooperate. Any amount over a thousand dollars set off a red light in his noggin and that was what the rental car would cost for the four-day trip. Sunderson felt like one of the limo drivers he used to talk to at the Detroit airport early in his career when he was on surveillance for a mob hit man supposedly coming in from New York City. The drivers were there waiting for “bigwigs,” a name referring back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when a man’s importance could be determined by the amplitude of his wig.
They left an hour before dawn with Mona not excited about colleges but about a computer discovery: to wit, she had started over from ground zero in the investigative process. Instead of using the Peace Corps dead mother’s name, Atkins, she had tried the French father’s name, Peyraud, while surveying Carla’s clue of Dwight attending an Oregon college twenty-five years before. Bingo. Dwight had attended Reed College for two years in 1983 and 1984. Mona then managed to communicate with a retired anthropology professor who recalled Dwight with amusement and distaste. Dwight had been arrogant and overbearing though a brilliant student. He had had a Mohawk haircut, a thin strip of hair down the center of his skull, wore martial arts clothing, and had a cadre of male and female students following him around. Mona’s ingenuity depressed Sunderson. He and Roxie at the cop shop had clearly begun with the wrong name, the wrong presumptions. The sixteen-year-old neighbor girl was a better detective.
Mona typed on her laptop and listened to CDs of John Cage (which drove him batty), Pink Floyd, and Los Lobos, the latter with traces of rhythm that made him stupidly sentimental about his time on the border. His mistake in not searching Dwight’s father’s name kept reminding him of the term “unforced errors” in tennis. He had Mona reread the professor’s e-mail pondering the last sentence about Dwight’s disappearance during a summer visit to the Haida Indians on the Queen Charlotte Islands off British Columbia for a research paper. Sunderson recalled a few things about the Haida from talking to Marion. They believed that wolves and killer whales were the same creatures, taking up separate forms on land and water. Sunderson felt he should research native shape-changing since that seemed to be a continuing motif.
Five hours into the trip at a gas station near Cadillac he abruptly demanded that Mona change from her short skirt to slacks. An hour before she had curled up and dozed and he could see her blue undies and a bit of pubic furze and had come up on a semi too fast. What was this thing about blue panties? Diane had always worn white.
Mona returned from the service station laughing and waving the new Rolling Stone at him. She read a quote from the cover girl, an antic starlet named Megan Fox: “Men are scared of powerful, confident vaginas.” What in God’s name could this mean, Sunderson wondered. Had the starlet’s parents read this and been embarrassed for their daughter? He was unsure of parental emotions but then here was Mona, nearly a stepdaughter, who of course was capable of saying something this preposterous.
“Imagine having a vagina as powerful as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime,” Mona laughed. “You could chew up unsuspecting men.”
The city of Kalamazoo, their first stop, didn’t last long. He said the college looked homely but she said that he was looking at western Michigan. They drove to the top of a hill to Kalamazoo College but then Mona said, “Too small,” and demanded that they proceed to Ann Arbor.
“But you have an appointment in the morning.”
“I’ll e-mail them.” She suitably placed her laptop on her lap. “I won’t be able to meet with you tomorrow because my father has died. How’s that?”
“Wonderful dear.”
