Dead Floating Lovers by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

nose. “Find her family. Find out if anybody knows anything. Start with missing persons from back thirteen years. That’s it. Start there.”
    “Check with the Odawa. They want her back so bad, they must know who she is,” I said.
    “Can’t contact the Indians. They’re gonna be all over me—when they hear for sure it’s Indian bones. Their religion’s big on burying people fast.” She took another swipe at her nose then tucked the crumpled Kleenex into my glove compartment. “Why don’t you check your newspaper morgue. Just in case something shows up from another town that looks like it could be her. We don’t even know if she’s from around Leetsville. Maybe see about Peshawbestown, the reservation. I mean just go asking about missing girls. Nothing else. Hmm … Got any other ideas?”
    I shook my head and prayed for the trip to end. Whatever Dolly was going to get herself involved in, she meant we were in it together. I made a face toward the windshield and wondered what I’d ever done to make this feisty little policewoman light on me as her compatriot in crime fighting. I’d come up north for the solitude, for the quiet to write, for peace from trouble and anger and stress. What I needed most right then was to get back home, kiss Sorrow, get Deputy Dolly Wakowski out of my car, and get lost in my new book.
    Or better yet, get lost in the spring woods for a while. Maybe I’d take Crazy Harry up on his offer to help me find edibles growing out there. I could learn to tell a false morel from a real one. He’d teach me the names of all those flowers lighting open spaces under the just filling out trees. The thought of it made me feel cleaner. I didn’t want to be involved with old bones, cheating husbands, murderers, awful foster mothers who didn’t remember a child who had nobody else to love. There were better places to be and I wanted, desperately, to be there.
    “You don’t have to help me with anything,” Dolly said in a small voice after I’d been quiet all the way around Grayling. “If that’s what’s bothering you, I can do it alone.”
    I made a noise, something like agreement but also something like: got my own work to do. She took my noncommittal sound to have another meaning.
    “Thanks, Emily. I knew you’d want to be there for me.”
    I made another noise, aimed at me. Too late to disagree. I sat straight and still, visions of my writing, my quiet, my garden, the woods leaping out of my head like those rats that are supposed to be the first to leave a sinking ship.
    “I’ll go see the chief. Tell him everything. Then I’ll go through old missing persons’ records. You wanna see Eugenia? Ask if she ever heard about Chet and some Indian girl? If anybody knows anything, you know it will be Eugenia.”
    “Tomorrow, Dolly. I’m tired. I want to get back to my house and forget dead people for a few hours.”
    “Great reporter you are. When you gonna call your paper?”
    “Let me handle my own business, all right?”
    She shrugged. “Can’t drag your feet.” The eyes she turned on me were red-rimmed. She lowered her head fast, as if she had no right to pain.
    “I need time to … heal from all of this.” I made a gesture encompassing I didn’t know what.
    “Yeah, well, healing’s one thing. Getting on with life—that’s another. I’m getting on.”
    One blunt hand went up and Dolly began ticking off things to do on her fingers.
    Thumb: “I’ll go over to The Skunk and see if anybody remembers back that far.”
    First finger: “Then—let me see—I’ll try the gun shop and the barber shop. Wish he’d been a churchgoer. No chance there.”
    Middle finger: “I’ll go through all our missing persons from back awhile. Don’t expect her to be there though. I’ve been over the old cases before.
    “More than anything I wish I’d raised a fuss when I saw ’em together. Be forever sorry now. Just too shocked at the sight of his dog tags around her neck. Might have