Skinny Dipping (21 page)

“Hold on a minute, Mugsy,” she shouted back. She waited hopefully for Mimi to send back some reply.

She felt a little underhanded about sending that text message to her great-niece. No one had actually hired an assessor yet, and a firm date hadn’t been set to meet at the lawyers’, but it was only a matter of time and Mimi would have to get her ass in gear if she was going to lead the movement to save Chez Ducky. Debbie was rallying the younger cousins to pressure the older family members to sell. Some of Johanna’s grandkids were talking about getting dirt bikes, which meant that the die was almost cast.

Birgie had been doing what she could, staying in close touch with Naomi to keep track of Debbie’s movements and then funneling the information through Vida to Mimi. She’d have contacted Mimi herself, but then Mimi might get all comfortable with the idea that since Birgie was interested she was going to do something, and, well, she wasn’t. She couldn’t. Despite Mimi’s opinion otherwise, Birgie knew she didn’t have the sort of personality that could sway others. She also didn’t have force of will, and she was too old to start acquiring it now.

“You ready, there, Birgie?” Mugsy called.

“I’m coming,” Birgie said and flipped down the phone.

January

“Ms. Olson? This is Otell Weber.”

“Who?”

“Otell Weber, the private investigator?” the man on the other end of the phone said patiently.

“Oh, yeah. Hi.” He sounded, Mimi realized, just like he’d looked: gray, tired, and rumpled.

“Hi. I just got back into town and since I told you I’d get in touch, here I am.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.”

“Nothing to thank me for, Ms. Olson. I haven’t been real successful for you.”

“I didn’t really expect you would be,” Mimi answered, trying to keep the disappointment from her voice.

“It’s not all bad news, though. Before I left I sent out inquiries to any motels operating along Interstate 2 between here and Bainsville, Montana, asking them to search any records they might still have for summer 1979 for a John Olson.”

“Why?”

“Well, Bainsville, Montana, was the postmark on the postcard your father sent you, and that town is on Interstate 2, and since your dad didn’t have a car, the chances are he was hitching a ride or taking a bus along that highway. He might have stayed at one of them.”

“I see. Anyone answer?”

“Nope. But since I got back I’ve compiled a list of motels that were in operation during ’seventy-nine but have since closed.”

“And why is that not bad news?”

“Well,” said Otell, “there’s quite a few of them. And most of them were cheap joints, the sort a guy with limited means might stay in. Better yet, they tended to be family owned and operated, so a lot of the folks that ran ’em are still around, not like the chains who have a different kid manning the front desk every season. They also tend to hold on to things. So, there’s some slim hope we might find your dad’s name there.”

“That sounds promising,” Mimi said.

“That’s way overstating the case. It’s better than nothing. Marginally.” God love a stoic, honest-till-it-hurts Minnesotan.

“Anyway,” Otell went on in his laconic voice, “that’s what I got. It’s a long shot, Ms. Olson. I wanta be perfectly fair here. But if you want, I can keep at it. Your call.”

Another shot, thought Mimi, was better than no shot. What the hell?

“That’d be great, Mr. Weber.”

It was another few weeks before Mimi rented a sturdy four-wheel-drive vehicle and drove up to Chez Ducky with promises to Oz that she’d be back in two weeks at the most. As post-holiday business tended to be slow anyway, he didn’t kick up a fuss.

As soon as the headlights picked out the old wood-burned sign with its welcoming Daffy Duck–like character, she regretted having waited so long to come. Above, the starry river of the Milky Way coursed through the indigo sky, while below, a fresh blanket of snow unfurled like a luminous white banner along the drive. Moonlight turned the Big House’s pale facade silvery and glinted in the upper-story windows, all the light-reflecting snow creating a faux day, a dusky hybrid of silver and blue. She got out of the car, taking her backpack with her and slinging it over her shoulders as she trudged to the doorway.

Beneath her boots the snow squeaked, a quality it took on only when the temperature dipped below zero. It didn’t feel that cold, but then Mimi was dressed in worst-case-scenario clothing: an oversized Alaskan Bag Company down jacket, a layer of thermal underwear beneath her felt-lined pants, wool choppers, and Will Steger mukluks.

Inside, the electricity had been shut off, but the same moonlight that illuminated the outdoors had seeped in here, too. Her breath made phantasms in the chill air as she moved down the hall, the floorboards creaking underfoot as she made her way to the kitchen. There, she opened the battered gray fuse box, threw on the master lever, and then flipped on the kitchen’s single ceiling light.

They were tasks she’d performed a half dozen times over the last decade during Ardis’s infrequent and impromptu winter visits. Ardis would call from Sun City, exclaiming gleefully over some cheapo last-minute airfare she’d gotten. Mimi, who’d inherited the use of Ardis’s old Pontiac LeBaron during the winter months, would pick her great-aunt up at the airport, and they’d head north, arriving at dawn.

Mimi would leave Ardis snoozing in the warm car while she got the place ready, just as she was doing now. Except when she looked out the window this time, she wouldn’t see Ardis, roused by some arcane Olson sixth sense that told her that all the work had been done, crawling out of the car and blinking like a baby owl.

Mimi looked around the kitchen, noting the ice chest, the Formica-topped kitchen table, and the old corked floor. She could see Ardis in her ratty old chenille bathrobe, her bare feet calloused, hammer toes crooked, adding a single spoonful of new coffee grounds to yesterday’s in the old percolator. God, that coffee had been vile, but Ardis wouldn’t hear of getting a drip brewer, and any suggestion that they start with fresh grounds when making coffee earned a stern lecture on wasteful practices.

“Ardis?” She held her breath and listened, half hoping to hear a reply. But all she got was the pop and groan of the house protesting over being awoken, so she shoved open the back door, pushing against a drift of snow that had accumulated there. She squeezed through the opening and slogged over to the propane fuel tank squatting beneath the kitchen’s back windows. She turned its knob, then went back inside to the parlor and crouched down before the old gas furnace in the corner. Like many old cottages, the Big House had no basement, so all its mechanical guts were in the public rooms for easy access. She reached into the little door on the side of the furnace, turned on the pilot light, and waited. The light flickered on and, with a little whoosh, the furnace started. Mimi stood up, wondering what to do next.

Experience told her it would take a couple hours for the lower rooms to warm up enough for her to shed her jacket and a couple more after that before she could start the pump and return water to the pipes. The antique water heater would take an additional two or three hours to warm up enough water to fill a shallow bath.

She looked out the front window toward the lake. It reminded her of a particularly sugary Christmas card, the kind with the shimmering snow made out of glitter that gets all over when you open it. She had always wanted to walk through a Christmas card. She was certainly dressed for it, and it beat the dickens out of shoveling the snow away from the back door.

Pulling the earflaps on her hat down, she headed back outside and trudged through the snow to the beach, where she followed the icy heave along the shoreline to the edge of Chez Ducky’s border. She stopped and looked up at Prescott’s monolith. Not a light shone from it. Like the rest of the Fowl Lake summer people, Prescott had undoubtedly ditched the place for the winter. He and Bill were probably sitting in some spectacular replica of a Moorish castle he’d built on the Mexican riviera, staring down at some other beach. Good. She had the lake to herself.

She stood without moving for long minutes, memories awakening to fill her mind’s eye. She remembered the last winter her grandfather had been alive. Solange, housebound in her eighth month of pregnancy with Mary, had agreed to let Mimi’s grandfather bring her up here during Christmas break along with Naomi and Bill, who’d returned from college for Christmas vacation. Granddad had woken her up in the middle of the night and made her get bundled up for a walk. She’d been a sullen, moody teenager and definitely not the best company, but he’d insisted.

They’d ended up just about here, Mimi thought, looking around. Her grandfather had told her some wacky Scandinavian fairy tale she didn’t recall much about other than there had been ice trolls and wolves and a snow princess. She’d been thirteen, after all, so more or less obliged to scoff. He hadn’t minded. He’d only said, “So you’re too old for fairy tales?”

She’d rolled her eyes, not deigning to reply.

“And I suppose you’re too old to make snow angels, too, huh?”

Once more, she’d rolled her eyes.

Her grandfather had grinned at her. “Thank God I’m not,” he said. “Because it would be a crime to waste perfect snow like this.”

Then he’d turned around, dropped flat on his back in the snow, and made a snow angel.

When Bill and Naomi had woken the next morning and looked out at the lake, they’d seen the entire shore lined with snow angels, alternating tall and tiny. By noon, they’d vanished in the wind.

“You’re right, Granddad,” Mimi whispered. She crossed her arms over her chest, tipped her head face to the sky, and fell backward. She landed a lot harder at forty-one than she had at thirteen. A white puff of snow erupted around her and the wind was knocked out of her lungs.
“Ouch.”

For long minutes she lay there getting her breath back, staring up at the sky and listening to all the years, all the summers and falls, springs and winters, that had gone before.

The beach had seen a thousand campfires and the careful construction of thousands of s’mores, many made by Mimi and even more eaten by her. Most nights, she and her cousins were serenaded to sleep by her aunts’ and uncles’ singing, not because they had fancied themselves some sort of Minnesota Von Trapp family, but because there was nothing else to do—no television, no radio signal; even the lighting was too poor to read by for long. She still remembered every note of “Autumn Leaves” and “Misty” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

How many rainy days had she and her cousins spent in one of the tip-tilted porches playing dominos or Cooties or Candyland, while the leaf-choked gutters overflowed and the rain carved deeper ruts in the driveway? How many paper sailboats had she launched at the top of the drive?

Somewhere near where she now lay, her father had taught her how to swim, bobbing along beside her on an inner tube, holding her long braid in one hand to keep her head above the water and a beer bottle in the other. Mimi twisted her head, squinting as she tried to make out the shape of the swimming raft that had floated here almost thirty years ago. There. There…

Her father had brought her up to Chez Ducky for the summer. She’d been eleven. Her mom hadn’t been keen on the idea. There were so many better, more productive ways to spend a summer, but in the end she’d relented. It was going to be a wonderful summer, an endless summer, with all the Olsons and her dad and her and nothing to do but play. But her dad had only stayed the one night before taking off again, casually saying good-bye and warning her he didn’t know when he’d be back. In the meantime, she had to promise him to enjoy every day and let go of all her worries and cares for the summer. She hadn’t protested. Protesting never got her anywhere, not with her father, not with her mother.

After he’d left, she’d tried to go with the flow. She really had. Yeah, the days were relaxed and the faces pleasant and the sounds comfortable, but she kept wondering when he’d come back. The days turned into weeks turned into months. September arrived and her father didn’t return. Then, one afternoon, her grandfather told her that Solange was coming to pick her up and take her back to the cities because school was going to start soon. And all of a sudden, just like that, she’d realized her dad wasn’t coming back. Maybe not ev—

Just as she had when she’d been eleven, Mimi stopped the thought from fully forming, returning to her memory.

Late that night, like dozens before, she’d heard her aunts and great-aunts splashing and laughing out on the lake. Her summer was almost over and she and her dad hadn’t spent more than a single day of it together. But out there, on that lake, the summer was still going on.

She’d slipped from her cot and down to the beach to find the Olson women skinny-dipping in the moonlight. When they saw her they waved at her to join them. Eagerly, she’d stripped off her nightshirt and slipped into the water. She’d gasped, amazed at the sensation of every inch of her skin enveloped in cool, silky water, and thought she’d never truly been swimming before. She’d never wanted to leave the lake, or for that night to end.

And in some ways, it hadn’t. That night she’d finally learned the art of letting go.

Now Mimi closed her eyes, inhaling through her nostrils. She stretched out her arms and started sweeping them up and down by her sides. Her legs joined in the action, scissoring from side to side, her boot heels scraping the ice beneath. There. Now
that
would be a snow angel the wind would have a hard time erasing, she thought when she finally stopped.

The only problem now was how to get up without ruining her creation. She couldn’t roll over, even to get to her knees. How had she and Granddad done this, anyway? She tried bending at the waist, but a few years and a lot of goose down made the whole sitting-up-without-using-your-hands thing nearly impossible. But if she’d done it when she was thirteen, she could do it now. She gathered her resolve and heaved upward, grunting. Almost…She fell back.

She tried again with the same lack of success. Okay, how about if she bent her legs, grabbed her knees, and used the leverage to rock upright? She gave it a try. She almost made it, but like a Tommee Tippee Cup, at the last moment she listed sideways. She pitched herself in the other direction so as not to ruin the angel and ended up on her back again. This was ridiculous. All she had to do was stick her feet under her butt and—Her boots slipped out from under her.

Damn. If only she could—

“Mrs. Olson! Mrs. Olson!” a young man shouted frantically.

She lifted her head off the snow and peered between her feet. Someone, a man—
Prescott?
—was lurching down the snow-covered steps of the lodge deck, his coat flapping open, hatless, gloveless, waving his arms wildly. “Stay there! Don’t try to move!”

Huh?
She lifted her head higher.

“It’s all right! I’m coming!” he shouted. And now he had been joined by three dogs, who danced wildly around his legs as he stumbled off the last step.

Sonofabitch.
He better not tromp out here and ruin her angel. She heard a sound, faint but growing louder. It took her a minute to place it. It was an ambulance siren. What the hell?

“You’re going to be all right!” Prescott was screaming while the dogs barked furiously. “Don’t try to move! The paramedics will be here any minute!”