Black Otter Bay (8 page)

“Your little brother is just fine. And if you listen closely to me, he'll stay that way.”

“He doesn't know anything. I'm the one you want.”

“That's what I thought, too, Abigail. When I returned your belongings, I intended to have this discussion with you. But Ben said you weren't home, so I had to improvise. I think this new arrangement will work well, though. Ben's a nice boy, Abigail.”

“Where is he? You better bring him home. When my dad finds out—”

“Abigail, please listen to me. Your brother is fine.”

“Where is he!” she demanded, so mad that she stamped her foot on the kitchen floor.

Silence on the line again, then the voice. “Take a look out your front window, Abigail. You'll see that your brother is just fine.”

Abby jogged back through the house, afraid of what she'd find outside. Pulling the front door open, she looked through the storm door window to see the big luxury car parked across the street. The man sat behind the wheel, cell phone at his ear. Darkened glass made it difficult to see, but she spotted Ben's head rising up in the backseat window. He looked so tiny and vulnerable, especially compared to the big man at the steering wheel. Another figure sat on the far side of Ben, but she couldn't make out anything of his appearance.

Ben's eyes, wide and round and scared, focused on Abby. From the phone she heard the man's voice. “Abigail.”

When Ben slowly dropped out of sight again, Abby's heart rose up in her throat. But when she saw the figure next to Ben struggling to push him down in the seat, she lost her composure completely.

“Abigail.”

The storm door flew open, the telephone crashed on the steps, and Abby exploded out of the front door. She ran at the car as hard as she could, heard muffled yelling from the driver, noticed frantic scrambling around inside, but before she even reached the edge of the yard, the car shot off down the street. She chased it a little way, until it turned the corner and headed south out of town on Highway 61.

Abby's adrenaline surge quickly dissipated. Walking back to the house, she used her lingering anger to scold herself.
Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
Now Ben was gone for good. She'd blown what little chance she'd had to bring him home.

The only other house on the street was the Soderstrom place. No lights were on there, no one to witness her chasing an out-of-town car down the street. Marcy's parents were still
in Arizona, and Marcy was probably down at the bar shooting a game of pool before going to bed. She'd have to be up early tomorrow to open the café.

Upon returning to the front door, Abby spied the discarded telephone lying in the grass. It began ringing, even with the back cover knocked off and the battery hanging out on its wire. “Hello?” she said, cupping the insides in her free hand.

“That was not the sort of behavior I expected out of you,” the man said.

“Bring my brother home. He didn't do anything to you.”

“That's just what we need to talk about, Abigail. If you can control yourself, I promise that no harm will come to him.”

Abby went in the house, shut the door, took a seat in her father's chair, and watched the street out front. “What do you want?” she asked.

“It's really very simple, Abigail. You keep your mouth shut. You don't say anything to anyone about what you saw today. Can you do that?”

Abby didn't reply. All her strength was gone. She slouched in the chair, exhausted and discouraged. The telephone battery dangled against her shoulder.

The man said, “If you keep your end of the deal, Ben will come home in a few weeks.”

Still no response from Abby.

“Do we have us a deal, Abigail?”

Abby finally found her voice. “When will he come home?”

“Probably six weeks or so. Fourth of July at the latest. Won't that be cause for a big celebration?”

“Why six weeks?”

“Do we have an agreement?”

“I don't know anything, anyway,” she said.

“So there's no reason to discuss what you don't know. Not one word to anyone. Even this phone call. If anyone asks, it was a wrong number. Deal?”

Abby found it hard to think. The day had been too long. All she wanted was to crawl into bed, wake up tomorrow, and discover that this was all a bad dream.

“Abigail?”

“Okay. It's a deal.” Silence on the line again. “Just don't hurt my little brother,” she added, before realizing the line had been disconnected.

• • • • •

W
hen her father came home half an hour later, Abby still sat in the chair. She looked at him, a solemn expression forcing the corners of his mouth to turn down. Matt switched on the entryway light and went to his daughter. “Why are you sitting here in the dark, Abby?”

She sat forward in the recliner. “Dad?”

“Listen, sweetheart,” he said. “I'm afraid I have some bad news.”

His words draped a mask of confusion over her face. How did he know?

“We just got word up at the Hall. It's your friend, Rosie. You know, from the bait shop? She drowned today working her minnow seines.”

Abby shook her head. “Dad?”

“You know how high the water is now that the ice went out. And Rosie was really old. She shouldn't have been out in the cold water like that.”

“Dad? Listen to me.”

“Most of the rocks are still ice covered. It was just an unfortunate—”

“Dad!”

Matthew paused, seemed to actually see his daughter for the first time. Saw the disemboweled phone in her lap. “What is it, honey?”

“Ben's gone, Dad. Ben's gone.”

Mrs. Virginia Bean

T
he United States Post Office in Black Otter Bay sat about forty yards back from the curbing on Main Street near the center of town. Main Street was simply a narrowed stretch of Highway 61 where it passed through the city limits. The shoulder of the old highway in front of the post office had been converted into half a dozen angled parking slots for customers, with a series of five flag poles lining the front of the property. Every morning at six o'clock Mrs. Virginia Bean, the postmistress, raised the United States flag on the tallest, center pole. On days when the weather wasn't too disagreeable, she ran a Minnesota state flag up one of the other poles and a black-and-white POW-MIA flag on another one. After twenty-five years as postmistress, however, she still had no idea what the other two poles were for.

Several years ago, some local hooligans used the two outer poles for their pranks. Arriving for work early in the morning, Mrs. Bean found any number of odd items flapping in the breeze atop one of the poles. Usually, it would be a pair of men's underwear—sometimes long johns, other times briefs. One time, she found a high school letter jacket from Two Rivers, an Iron Range town seventy-five miles inland. She always suspected Daniel Simon to be the instigator, but Mrs. Bean had kept that suspicion to herself. She felt sorry for the Simon family, having to live with that abusive old drunk. Besides, Daniel always charmed her with his devil-may-care smile, while his younger brother Matthew usually tried to fix things by coming down to retrieve the fluttering garments.

Now, Mrs. Bean was no prude, but the morning she spotted the black lace bra and panties dangling high above the post office, she decided it had gone far enough. She cut the ropes off the two outer poles and posted a sign on them warning against vandalizing federal property. That was the end to the high-flying underwear, but she never knew if it ended because of her warnings or because Daniel Simon enlisted in the army.

The post office building itself was easily the ugliest building in Black Otter Bay. For years, Mrs. Bean had pleaded with post office headquarters in Duluth to do something about the rotting siding, sagging eaves, and mouse and chipmunk holes in the trim work. Finally, two years ago, a pallet of five-gallon buckets of paint and supplies arrived on the morning dispatch mail truck. Mrs. Bean advertised for volunteers to help repair, prime, and paint the post office, but, after inspecting the provisions, none of the local professionals would help. If they were going to volunteer their services, they said, the project should at least be suitable for a reference. In their opinion, attaching their names to this job could even hurt their reputations.

The problem was that the paint had been requisitioned through the federal government from Fort Ripley, 150 miles southwest of town, and consisted of three discontinued camouflage colors from the Vietnam War era. When the military's current color schemes went toward the desert hues of the Middle East, the forty-year-old jungle colors became obsolete. Sheriff Marlon Fastwater and his nephew finally came forward to help, spending much of their free time that summer working on the building. It was Leonard Fastwater who came up with the idea of mixing two of the three colors, providing over twenty gallons of paint for the siding, enough for two coats. The end result for the post office was that it now boasted a two-tone color scheme: a blended pea soup green siding with an olive drab trim.

For that reason, Mrs. Bean thought it a blessing that the building sat so far back on the property. Most of the other
buildings in town were rough-sawn cedar-clad storefronts, or solid brick and stone edifices. When Red Tollefson heard about the paint fiasco, he joked that they had the only camouflaged post office in the state. “Folks driving through town won't even see it. It blends right into the woods behind it on the ridge.”

On the Saturday morning three days after eight-year-old Ben Simon went missing, Mrs. Virginia Bean fed slab wood into the post office's barrel stove. It already radiated enough heat to warm the whole town, but she liked it hot. Over the top of the freestanding woodstove, she glanced at Sheriff Fastwater sitting next to her desk. Aligned in profile to her, one of his arms dangled at his side to scratch the ears of his dog, Gitch. A mixed-breed husky with plenty of malamute blood accounting for his formidable size, Gitchie Gami derived his name from the Ojibwe words for Lake Superior. Gentle by nature, yet ferociously loyal and protective of the sheriff, Gitch was known around the countryside for a unique physical trait: one of his eyes was a startling, opaque blue.

“Like shards of ice on the big lake,” the sheriff had told her once.

Mrs. Bean always made Gitch welcome on his visits. She kept a stash of dog biscuits in a desk drawer, and a heavy ceramic bowl for water on the floor. For his part, Gitch exuberantly greeted her with a ninety-pound nuzzle, then made himself at home on the braided rug she provided next to her desk.

Over the last few years, the two of them had been stopping in almost every day. Mrs. Bean enjoyed the visits, and considered the sheriff to be one of the kindest men she'd ever met. For all his lack of words, she thought he communicated the sincerest forms of friendship. His late Monday afternoon visits, for example, delivered a much-needed boost to her morale, as well as dinner at the end of a long shift. Other than the day after a holiday, Mondays were the heaviest, busiest days in the post office. Years ago, the sheriff noticed how stressful the first day of the week was for her, and started bringing in dinner to
give her a break. At first, he'd share a pizza with her, or a takeout sandwich from the café. Soon, he began bringing his own homemade dinners: a grouse and wild rice soup, or venison stew. For her part, Mrs. Bean hid a small set of dishes and silverware in a supply cabinet. She even added long-stemmed wine glasses, with a variety of red and white wines locked in the bottom drawer of her desk.

This past winter, when daylight faded early, she introduced candles to the Monday evening dinners. She dimmed the lights by turning off one bank of fluorescents, then covered her desk with a linen tablecloth. Because Black Otter Bay was a rural branch office, she wasn't required to wear a uniform, so Mondays often found her in a floral print dress. Jewelry suddenly appeared at the end of the workday. Mrs. Bean's whole countenance lit up with the arrival of her two friends, and the dinner candles enhanced the delighted glow in her blue eyes.

On the other hand, Saturday represented a half-day of work for Mrs. Bean, and, like today, the sheriff often stopped in early to share a thermos of coffee from the café. She closed and latched the doors on the woodstove, straightened up, then brushed slivers of kindling off the front of her dress. Gitch was sprawled out full length on the rug, his body tucked up tight against the sheriff's boots. Mrs. Bean's blue eyes picked up the black in her sweater, giving them an almost violet shimmer. She planned to attend the memorial service for Rose Bengston after work, so she'd avoided her usual bright colors for a modest black shift and sweater. She wished she had the appropriate words to comfort the sheriff. He was under enormous pressure, and the sudden death of Rosie only added to his misery.

Fastwater rocked back on the rear legs of the chair, rolling up his sleeves. As Mrs. Bean returned to her desk, he asked, “Why do you always have to have a fire going? It's warm outside today.”

“Helps my joints loosen up, Marlon,” she said, smiling at the man she felt so much affection for. “You should try handling
all this mail when your knuckles are swollen and your fingers won't bend. I know it's a short day today, but there's still a lot of mail to sort. Besides,” she added while taking a seat across from the sheriff, “a good fire in the morning dries all the moisture out of the air. Keeps it cooler in here the rest of the day.”

The sheriff knew her words were in no way meant as a rebuke. He looked across the room at the gurneys stacked with trays and tubs of mail, and a larger hamper overflowing with packages. He found it amazing that she could sort all that mail in just a couple short hours. As far as her need for a fire every day, he'd learned early on not to argue with her logic. If a fire somehow kept her cooler, so be it. He figured her reasoning came from her upbringing in eastern Maine. Marlon had never been to that part of the country, but he pictured the North Atlantic coastline as a generally cold, damp place. He imagined the natives there had developed their own techniques for dealing with the climate.