Sweetgirl Read online

  Dedication

  for Cassy

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  About the Author

  Also by Travis Mulhauser

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  Leo and Edie Lou, who are my beating hearts and who taught me a lot about everything. Susan Ramer, for being spectacular. My editor, Megan Lynch, for her talent, vision, and guiding hand. And everybody at Ecco who has done so much for this book. Søren Palmer, for all the rides and the readings. Jon Baker, for all the answered questions. The Sustainable Arts Foundation, for their incredible generosity. For their readings and many areas of expertise: Fred Mulhauser, Whitney Mulhauser, Cassy Stubbs, Laura Waldrep and Matt Norcross. For their endless support, Joanna Kolodziej and Kyler Mulhauser. And for all sorts of stuff, this list of stellar human beings: Pamela Kolodziej, Emily Dings, the Gillmors, the Reddings, Niels Lunsgaard, Matt Gallagher, Gill Pulley, Robert Sorrenti, Rebo Sullivan, Susan Miller-Cochran, Michael Parker, Terry Kennedy, the Aarons, John and Terri Lee, and Louise Deaton.

  Chapter One

  Nine days after Mama disappeared I heard she was throwing down with Shelton Potter. Gentry said she was off on a bad one and wandering around the farmhouse like a goddamn ghost.

  Mama bought her booze at Night Moves, where Gentry worked the counter, and he stopped by to tell me he saw her at Shelton’s while he was out there delivering a keg.

  “When?” I said.

  “Last night,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to come by.”

  The only thing that surprised me was my own surprise. As many times as Carletta let me down I still felt all gut-punched and woozy, like it was the first time she forgot to pick me up from school.

  “She didn’t even recognize me,” he said. “It was like she looked right through me.”

  Gentry took a puff of his clove and pulled his knit hat down over his ears. He had seven years on me but we were friends. He sold me cigarettes at the store even though I only turned sixteen that summer and I was always supportive when he had some drama with a boyfriend.

  He looked at me with sad eyes. He said he could come in if I felt like talking, but I didn’t see the point. Gentry was a good listener and there was plenty I could say about Mama, but none of it was going to bring her home.

  I grabbed my hoodie off the hook, thanked Gentry for looking out, and made for the pickup. He called after me from the porch, but I kept going.

  It was late and cold and I was bone tired. I work at Pickering’s Furniture, and I’d stripped and sanded two small tables and a chest of drawers that night. I didn’t lock the shed until after eight, but what was I supposed to do? Stretch out on the couch like everything was copacetic?

  No, I started the truck instead. I cranked the heat and looked out at the falling snow. There was a norther on the way but the apocalypse itself wouldn’t stop Mama if she was already in orbit—so I gunned it down Clark Street and set out for the north hills like a solid-gold fool.

  Our block was all beat-down rentals and busted-up fence, but the digs were even worse when I hit Detroit Street, where the Mexicans stayed. Carletta called it the barrio and liked to cluck her tongue when we rolled by those crumbling-down row houses. She liked to say she didn’t understand how some people lived.

  I never bothered to point out that we were just a few blocks away, in a one-bedroom, and that I didn’t know whether to say I slept in the living room or the kitchen because the couch was technically in both. The irony would have been lost on Mama, who always said we had an “open floor plan”—like we lived in some magazine house where everything was spread out nice and all the fabric matched the throw pillows. Like we put out bowls of decorative fruit, just because.

  It’s not that I minded the couch. I slept like a baby. It was just that Carletta had a way of denying certain realities to make her life seem like more than it was, which was sort of like coping, but was mostly just another way to lie.

  Still, I missed her. I missed her and I was tired of my waiting-around, worried-sick life. I was tired of the wondering where she was, and of the constant alarm that gripped my heart like a strangler vine.

  So I took Detroit Street to Grove, which led me toward town, where the homes and lives improved considerably. There were the local well-to-do in their big brick houses, and beyond them the shoreline where the real cash was. The downstate and Chicago money put their roots down in sand—their seasonals all perfectly placed along the water for maximum panorama, and not a soul there to enjoy it because it wasn’t nice that time of year.

  I couldn’t blame them. It was the middle of January in Cutler County, Michigan. We’re at the northwest tip of the lower peninsula, the top of your left ring finger if you map it by the back of your hand, and unless you go in for the whole Jack London, ends-of-the-earth vibe, why wouldn’t you fly off to somewhere else if you could? It was only nine o’clock at night and downtown was already three blocks of black windows behind high banks of snow and there wasn’t a single other car in the streets.

  I sailed through a blinking red onto 31 North, then took the highway past the old cement plant and the Shoreline Estates trailer park. The wind was hard off the bay and I could see the shape of the north hills in the distance—a jagged, soot-colored line through the snow.

  I wished I could stop at Portis Dale’s. Portis was the closest thing I had to a father and he had a cabin not a half mile from Shelton’s. I’d have much preferred to take him to the farmhouse with me, and would have begged him gladly if I thought there was half a chance he would.

  The problem was, Portis quit chasing Carletta years ago and was liable to bind me to a chair for the duration of the winter if I so much as made a whisper about Shelton Potter’s. I could hear him clear as day.

  “That farmhouse ain’t no place for a girl,” he would say. “No place for you.”

  Portis might have been right, but I drove on anyway. I drove despite the broken promises and heartache and all the lying and stealing and flimsy, sorry-as-hell excuses. I ignored my own good sense and the coming storm and exited the highway onto Grain Road and took it along the Three Fingers River.

  The road and the river ran a crooked line and halved the hills from top to bottom. To the east was nothing but deep forest and some fishing ponds, while the west was a wide scatter of cabins and trailers connected by two-tracks and snowmobile trails.

  The north hills were only five minutes from town, but they might as well have been a hundred miles from those big houses along the bay. The second you turned into the hills it was like somebody flipped a switch. The high trees swallowed the stars and the city lights and there were times it felt like you were dropping. There were spots in the hills where you could see out, clearings that let in some light, but the drive up felt like shooting straight down a mine shaft.

  I took the switchbacks and was surprised the radio signal held—Kid Rock going on about fishing walleye while I peered out and looked for my turn.

 
; Grain Road was paved beneath the snow but I’d have to veer off to get to Shelton’s. It concerned me some, but the farmhouse wasn’t too far off the river and I’d avoid the tangle of two-tracks that run farther west.

  My high beams weren’t much use against the dark, but I saw the bend where the river hit the big rocks between ice floes and shot white water. The entrance road to Shelton’s was at the next break in the pines and I let the old Nissan ease through a fishtail when I took it.

  The road was narrow, but there was a stretch a quarter mile in where it swung out and showed the clearing where the farmhouse sat on the edge of Jackson Lake. On a nice day you could spot the color of the front door from that ridge, but in the dark I couldn’t see anything beneath me but a big, empty bowl of black.

  I came off the ridge and the road tightened as it wound deeper into the trees. I drove until I came to the edge of Shelton’s property where a million flagged stakes and tree-nailed signs were marked NO TRESPASS. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about Shelton Potter’s property rights, but I didn’t want to go much farther and get pinned in by the snow. I could already feel my tires starting to drop, so I idled the truck and sat inside while I plotted the best course in by foot.

  I figured I was a mile from the front door by land. The quickest route would be across the lake, but I hate to walk hardwater in the dark. I knew the ice was likely to hold, but say it didn’t? One misstep and I could be in a bad way quick—ice crackling as the splits spread like taproots and opened into breaks.

  I would have to hike the rest of the way through the woods, then cross open land to get to the farmhouse. It would be cold and dark and purely miserable, but I’d keep walking until I got there because I didn’t have a choice. Carletta had to be got.

  I leaned toward the vents and wrapped my arms tight around my chest to pull the heat in. Mama had seen fit to steal my winter coat and gloves the night she disappeared, which meant I would be making the trek in my hoodie and blue jeans. An injustice that might have angered me if I thought it would do any good.

  Snow was already piling on the hood of the truck. They cut into the radio with a weather advisory and after the warning sirens came the voice of Lester Hoffstead, northern Michigan’s most trusted name in weather. He was in a tizzy over his Doppler radar and its dire predictions and I reached out to punch the power off. No offense to Lester, but I understood it was a damn blizzard coming.

  I pushed the door open and felt the cold come over me in a wash. I tightened my hood strings and ran for the cover of the trees.

  I moved through the pines at the edge of the property without much problem, but when the woods cleared and I hit the open fields the snow got deep. The wind was hard against me and I had to drop my head low against the gusting. I fisted my hands at my side and walked.

  It was the burning kind of cold. A tear had opened in my lip and I put my tongue to it and tasted the salty, pooling blood. There was already a throb and tingle in my toes and the air torched my lungs just to breathe it. I looked back after a minute and could not see the pinewoods or tell the falling snow in the fields from what was wind-thrown.

  Shelton lived in the farmhouse, but it was his uncle Rick who owned the north hills. Rick had most everything west of the river, where he rented plots to his cronies and had built himself a spread on top that he faced toward the setting sun. Even Portis was on Rick’s land, a holdover from the days when he ran with those idiots.

  Rick was raised in the hills and earned his money in cocaine and marijuana, legitimate markets in comparison to Shelton’s preference for home-cooked methamphetamines. Rick had long-standing agreements with Cutler law and was a high school football hero to boot. People still bought him drinks on account of some la-de-da record he set against Cheboygan, and every Christmas he stood on Mitchell Street in a Santa suit and roasted chestnuts for the Kiwanis Club.

  Rick Potter was a pillar of the community, while Shelton had done a stint in the Ionia penitentiary and smoked his own cook—a source of considerable tension between the two. People said Shelton was the bad guy, but I didn’t like either one on principle. I didn’t care to make distinctions between the ways they conducted their criminal lives, but it was Shelton I feared as I walked through the dark.

  The drifts finally lowered near the house and there were rutted trails and some hard-packed snow to set my feet in. I could see the farmhouse now, a bluish smudge through my wind-teared eyes, and Carletta’s Bonneville parked out back and buried beneath a foot of powder.

  I didn’t come up the front steps. I flanked the house instead, then hoisted myself over the railing on the far side of the porch. There was a wide, double-hung window along the wall and I crouched beside it and cleared snow with my sleeve.

  The living room was low lit, but I could see Shelton’s sorry behind through the glass. He was shirtless and laid out on the couch in blue jeans. He had WHITEBOY tattooed on his back—lest he be mistaken for a black albino—and I could see the Old English scrawl along the bony jut of his shoulder. I could see a rash of acne on his back as he faced the center of the room and slept.

  The coffee table was cluttered with tinfoil, pipes, and ash, and there was a shotgun leaned against the wall beside it. There was a woman on the floor in blue jeans and a black sweater. Her blond hair was pulled back and I could see the hard line of her jaw and two scrawny arms stretched above her head like she’d been reaching for something. She looked familiar somehow, but I thought it was probably just that she resembled Carletta when she crashed. She was all contorted and trampled-looking and facedown on the floor like some corpse washed up on the beach.

  I hurried to the back of the house where steps led to the rear entrance. The wind was deadened some by the pole barn behind me and I could hear the stereo blaring inside. I could hear the thump of bass and a man’s voice above guitars. The backdoor opened into the kitchen and I stood there in the cold with my hand against the icy knob.

  I had my moment of doubt. Part of me wanted to drop the whole thing right there and hoof it back to the truck. I knew how stupid it was to walk in that back door, but Mama had to be found. There was no guarantee she would survive the storm, assuming she hadn’t curled herself into a corner of the farmhouse and died already.

  The knob turned in my palm and I stepped inside and was brushed back by the stink. I don’t know why I was surprised the place smelled like the circus, but I had to take a minute and stand there with my breath held.

  The floor was littered with trash and animal droppings and the stereo rattled empties on the countertop. There was a Maine coon cat curled atop Gentry’s keg and it startled me so bad I gasped when I saw it—a frenzy of orange-white fur, licking at its paws all lazy like. I nodded and the cat trailed me with its yellowy eyes.

  The man on the stereo sang something about fur pajamas and I took a short breath and crossed the room. I had a small Maglite on my key chain and I followed its tiny beam to a staircase between the kitchen and the living room. I was glad for the music, otherwise I know Shelton Potter could have heard my heart beat out loud.

  Check out Mr. Businessman, said the singer.

  The stink got worse when I reached the second story and I buried my nose in the crook of my arm and whispered for Carletta. I scanned the floor with my flashlight.

  The hall was narrow and unlit. The wallpaper was patterned with roosters and torn in wide strips and beneath the paper I could see the wood framing and feel the cold whistling through.

  There was a door on each side of the hall and when I opened the first the stench was like a wall I walked smack into. I jerked at the shoulders and braced myself in the doorframe but couldn’t keep from retching. It was the foulest odor I have ever encountered and I knew right off to call it death. I retched a second time and then shone my light.

  The dog was lying stiff on the carpet in the center of the room and I cried out when I saw its unmoving, marble eyes. I saw the snout receding toward the collapsed jaw, and the fur that lay puddled where the mus
cles had gone soft. I backed out of the room and had to keep myself from slamming the door in a rage.

  You want to bake your own brain with a bunch of damn Drano, then fine, but leave a helpless animal trapped and starving to death while you did it? I was shaking angry and had a thought like I should go downstairs and suffocate that sonofabitch, Shelton, in his sleep. Or shoot him if the shotty was loaded.

  It was the kind of thought you have because you know you won’t do anything with it, but it makes you feel better for a second to think that you might. I’m not a killer and even if I was, who was going to take care of Carletta while I rotted in prison for doing the world the good turn of putting out Shelton Potter’s lights?

  I returned to my search and whispered for Mama. I asked if she was there. There was no reply from the hall, and as I eased the other door open I held in my heart a desperate and wordless prayer about what I would find there.

  The room was lit with a single, exposed bulb that flickered and cast a dusty light from the ceiling. There was a flood of cold through an open window along the side wall, and there was snow piling on the sill and the carpet. A mattress lay cockeyed on the floor and between the mattress and a radiator I saw a bassinet. Inside the bassinet was a baby.

  The man on the stereo was back to the part about fur pajamas. I didn’t know if the song was on repeat, or the singer had felt the need to double back and touch on that particular detail again.

  Things fall apart, he went on. It’s scientific.

  I could see the baby was shrieking, but its cries were buried by the wind. The snow blew in sideways, edged across the floor, and dusted the baby’s cheeks with frost. The baby’s eyes darted in a side-to-side panic as it reached up with trembling hands and searched for something to grasp.

  I ran toward it.

  Chapter Two

  Crisis is a constant when you’re a daughter of Carletta James, which prevented me from outright panic at the sight of an abandoned infant in the farmhouse. This is not to say I was unsurprised by the discovery of the bassinet, or the sight of the baby wailing against the wind. Of course these things surprised me, and filled me with a momentary terror—it’s just that I could not allow my shock to extend beyond a clipped breath or two. While the particulars of a given calamity may be impossible to predict, while I could never say I expected to find a baby in the bedroom, chaos itself was always confirmation of the dread I carried blood-deep and certain in my bones.