Skinny Dipping (5 page)

“I suspect I’m going to regret saying this, but aren’t you overreacting?” he asked.

She regarded him sadly a few seconds, then slapped her thigh and stood up. She reached down for his hand. He didn’t hesitate to take hers. “Come on, Doubting Joe,” she said. “Let me show you something.”

Mimi was limping purposefully past Cottage Two when her great-aunt Johanna literally popped out of the bushes.

“Geez!” Mimi gasped. “You scared the crap out of me, Johanna!”

“Sorry, Mimi,” she said, regarding Joe with interest. “I’m hiding from Naomi. She keeps trying to hang a bedsheet on me.”

“It’s a tunic,” Mimi said. “She wants us to celebrate Ardis’s passing in a traditional Viking manner.”

“And that means a toga? I thought togas were Roman.”

“It’s not a toga, it’s a tunic,” Mimi repeated patiently. “And just be glad she didn’t pound breastplates out of garbage-can lids.”

Johanna’s gaze shifted to Joe. “And who might this be?”

“This is Joe.”

“How do you do, Joe? You must have just gotten in. Staying the night? The week? The cabins are awfully cozy, aren’t they? I hope Mimi’s taking good care of you?”

Mimi waited. Johanna was the romantic in the family and fancied herself a matchmaker. The fact that she’d never actually had any success in this area did not deter her.

“I couldn’t hope to be in better hands,” Joe was saying, “Miss…?”

Johanna fluttered. “Olson.
Mrs
. Olson, actually. Johanna Olson.”

“Ah, lucky Mr. Olson.”

Smooth,
Mimi thought admiringly. He’d even managed to say it without sounding smarmy. Which was quite a feat since it was a highly smarmy comment.

“Oh, he died,” Johanna volunteered. “Thirty-five years ago come November.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Joe said, dialing down the charm.

Johanna nodded, lowered her eyes respectfully, then said, “So. How did you meet our Mimi, Joe? Did you call her eight hundred number? She meets a lot of men that way. Of course, most of them are losers, not to put a shine on it. I can’t imagine
you
calling.”

Mimi looked at Joe to see how he handled these decidedly provocative comments. Unsurprisingly, he looked nonplussed. How else would he look? Johanna had made it sound like she worked on a phone sex line.

Mimi took pity on him. “Gotta go, Johanna. Taking Joe on the grand tour. Back later.” She hooked an arm through his, steering him away from Johanna and onto the footpath leading through the woods.

“What did she mean?” Joe asked.

Now, Mimi wasn’t embarrassed by her occupation, but experience had taught her that most people considered phone sex purveyors marginally more principled than mediums. So generally when she met people, she tried to keep from revealing her unusual career until after she’d hopefully established herself as a sound, reasonable, and principled woman. But even if Joe was the handsomest man she’d met in ages, he was just somebody’s temporary houseguest, and she was just filling up a few hours before the toasts to Ardis began. There was no reason to equivocate.

“I’m a tele-medium,” she said, hobbling along. “People call the eight hundred number I work for and I contact the Other Side for them.”

He slowed down. She kept moving.

“Really?”

“Yup. We work out of an office and everything.”

“Huh. Then…you weren’t kidding when you said there’s no escape from your family even after death? I mean, you think you really know this for a fact?”

“I just calls ’em like I sees ’em,” Mimi said. She could almost hear Joe mentally floundering for the right tone, some rejoinder that would be neutral. She’d been here before.

“Interesting,” he finally said. “How does that work? Do you charge by the minute?”

As a neutral gambit, it wasn’t half bad. He didn’t even sound flustered. “Mostly, but we have All You Can Talk weekly and monthly payment plans available, too. Look,” she said, happy to leave the subject of her work behind. “We’re here.”

They’d come out of the woods and stopped cold. They’d had to. The other option was to walk into a wall of logs.

“Behold the Next Generation!” Mimi declared, pointing. Standing three-plus stories high, its massive “logs” gleaming gold with some sort of sealant, topped by a small forest worth of cedar shake roofing channeled with copper flashing, was what looked like a resort but was in fact what someone apparently considered a “weekend place.”

Down a ways from where they stood, Mimi’s cousin Gerry and a group of his pals stalked along the edge of a tiny strip of manicured lawn. They reminded her of something…. She had it. They looked like the primates confronting the obelisk in the beginning of
2001: A Space Odyssey.

They grumbled and gestured as they walked, in particular her big, blond, Thor-lookalike cousin Gerald, who kept flinging his arms out in an apelike show of aggression. For the sake of the family’s dignity, she hoped he didn’t start throwing tufts of grass at the place.

Only Half-Uncle Bill, aka Mr. Debbie, stood motionless, his naturally benign face corrugated in lines of concentration as he chewed on a piece of grass. Poor Half-Uncle Bill; the years of marriage to Debbie were taking their toll. For one, he was wearing a salmon-colored polo shirt, salmon-colored polo shirts being this summer’s uniform for upper-middle-class, fiftysomething men. For two, a neat little bouclé rug of dark hair covered his balding head.

Mimi followed his unblinking gaze. He was probably admiring the monstrosity. All indicators suggested he’d been brainwashed by Debbie into that perpetual state of misery known as “wanting more.”

“Isn’t it the most obscene thing you have ever seen?” Mimi asked Joe, feeling perversely proud.

Joe didn’t answer. He was watching her narrowly, like he half expected her to start chanting a spell. Oh, yeah. She’d told him about Uff-Dead. She ignored his speculative look and tried again to get his mind off her job. “I talked to the builder when it was going up this spring. Do you know what it is?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “It’s a replica of an Adirondack’s
camp
built in the 1880s. Of course, it has a few modern embellishments. Those would be the home theater, a three-thousand-dollar built-in cappuccino machine, and a four-car garage,” she said. “Want to hear the best part?”

“Do I?”

“You do. It’s not even real. I mean logs. They’re made out of recycled newspapers and cocoa-bean hulls. Very environmentally correct.” She glanced at him to see whether he appreciated the irony of this. “Yup, you’re looking at over ten thousand square feet of environmental correctness. I wonder what his heating bill is.”

“Ah, hell. I’ll bet the guy heats the whole damn place with wood. Look out, Superior National Forest! The environmentalists are coming!” While she’d been talking, Cousin Gerald and little grizzled Hank Sboda, who owned the cottage on the other side of the monolith, had detached themselves from their companions and wandered over.

“Gerry, Hank, this is a friend of mine, Joe,” she introduced the men. “Joe, my cousin Gerry, and this is Hank Sboda.”

“Friend, huh?” Gerry said, looking Joe over. Mimi had followed her older cousin around Chez Ducky throughout her childhood. Consequently, he still felt a certain responsibility toward her. “Mimi doesn’t have many—I mean, she doesn’t bring many friends up here. You must be special. How’d you meet?”

Joe clasped Gerry’s proffered hand. “I helped her out of a bit of a mess.”

Gerry shot a concerned glance at Mimi. “You in trouble?”

“No. He meant a literal mess. I was covered in mud and he offered me a ride.”

“Oh.” That she’d been covered in mud obviously didn’t surprise Gerry. His gaze fell on the stains on Joe’s shirt. He opened his mouth, caught Mimi’s eye, closed his mouth, and turned back to the mansion. “So, whaddya think of ’er, Joe?”

“What do you think?” Joe rejoined.

“I think,” Gerry replied, “that is the biggest pile of crap to hit the North Woods since Babe the Blue Ox took a dump. I mean, look at it, Joe. It’s a good ten feet taller than any building within fifty miles.”

“We call it Prescott’s Erection, after its owner,” Hank Sboda put in, coloring and glancing sheepishly at Mimi, who, despite not only having heard the tag before but having been the one who’d coined it, demurely lowered her eyes.

“Prescott’s—” Joe choked. Men were so sensitive.

“Aw, come on,” Mimi said. “You don’t think maybe there’s a little compensation going on here?”

“Can you imagine what it’ll be like at the Big House this winter after the trees drop their leaves and you look out and instead of a winter wonderland all you see is that thing looming up into the sky?” Gerry muttered.

“Unpleasant?” Joe asked.

“And look at
that.
” Mimi pointed up at the octagonal tower perched at the corner nearest them. “There are fire towers up here that aren’t as high.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Gerry said.

“Okay,” Mimi conceded. “But the point is I come up here in the fall sometimes and with that thing towering over me I’m going to feel like I’m in a prison camp waiting for the guards to open fire.”

“Chez Ducky doesn’t look much like a prison camp,” Joe said uncomfortably.

She peered at him. “Say, you don’t actually
like
this thing, do you?”

“No.” His response was immediate and sincere.

“
We
hate it,” she said, looking to Hank and Gerald for confirmation. Both men nodded.

“Hate it,” echoed Gerry’s wife, Vida, emerging from the wood’s path.

Mimi approved of Vida, a wiry redhead who had gone back to school a few years ago in a felicitous move to become a massage therapist—felicitous because she often practiced on Mimi.

“Hi,” Joe said. “I’m Joe.”

“I’m Vida. Wouldn’t you hate it if you were us, Joe?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “In fact, I’d probably consider selling because of it.”

Mimi waited for someone to point out the error in his reasoning. No one did.

“And go where?” she finally asked, exasperated with her relatives. “It would only be a temporary reprieve. Sooner or later every pothole in the state is going to be cheek to jowl with places like that.” She jerked her head toward the fauxlog monstrosity.

“Besides, we could never replace Chez Ducky. It’s paid for, and spreading the cost of upkeep makes it affordable for all of us. Plus, some of us couldn’t afford any vacation at all if we didn’t have here to come to,” she finished pitiably.

Gerry shot her a bemused glance. She ignored him. No need to tell Joe her “vacations” usually lasted from May through September. She was aiming for sympathy here, not full disclosure.

“We’re selling.”

Mimi’s, Gerry’s, and Vida’s heads snapped toward Hank Sboda.

“Huh?” Gerry asked, his lanternlike jaw dropping open.

“We decided to sell,” Hank said, his tone defensive. “Fowl Lake in’t what it used to be and never will be again. We can’t afford to stay and we can’t afford not to sell. Just like Mimi here said.”

“I never said that!” Mimi protested.

Gerry stared at Hank in horror. “You can’t be serious. The Sbodas have been on Fowl Lake almost as long as the Olsons.”

“Longer,” Hank said primly, “but that in’t the point. Point is, a…realtor tells us she can sell our land for enough that we can buy a condo in Fort Myers.”

Gerry snorted, his expression contemptuous.

“Don’t look at me like that, Olson. You’re a young man,” Hank said.

Actually Gerry was pushing fifty, but now wasn’t the time to point this out.

“And you got lots of folks to help with all the stuff needs doing,” Hank went on heatedly. “My kids got their own kids now and don’t get up here more than a couple times a year. That leaves all the maintenance to me and Mary. Damn near got a hernia getting the dock in this spring.”

“You’re selling ’cause it’s
too much work
?” Gerry asked. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, like most line-bred Minnesotans Gerry liked to think he represented the apex of a staunch work ethic. Hank Sboda enjoyed the same fantasy.

The woolly caterpillar of Hank’s brows dipped toward the bridge of his nose. “Course not,” he exclaimed. “That’s just part of it. Hell and damn, Gerry! It’s fine for you to talk. You got eight
thousand
feet of lakeshore and a whole forest standing between you and what’s happening out here. “I got two hundred feet with this, this—
hotel
on my east, and now Svenstrom’s sold on my other side and I hear the guy what’s bought it is going to start excavating next spring and it’s gonna be another one of them!” Hank stabbed a finger at the log wall. His face had gone an alarming shade of fuchsia. “Hell, I’ll be hemmed in with nothing to look at but fake log siding.”

Aha,
thought Mimi, the Svenstroms’ inexplicable absence from the party was thus explained. Turncoats. She gazed sadly at Hank, uncertain what to say and guiltily aware that deep within she was giddy with relief that such considerations didn’t affect Chez Ducky. Still, Fowl Lake wouldn’t be the same without the Sbodas puttering around it in their old twelve-foot Alumacraft.

“Might as well sell now before someone wakes up and realizes this is nothing but a glorified slough.” The air seemed to have gone out of Hank, because he said this last on a forlorn whisper.

“How much do you expect to make?”

Mimi wheeled around to discover Debbie beside her.

“Debbie,” Hank said, “you know—”

“Two thousand a lake-frontage foot,” she answered for him. She reached across Hank, shoving her hand toward Joe. “Debbie Olson. Nice to meet you.”

He held out his hand to shake hers and instead she slapped a small printed card into his palm.

“What’s that?” Mimi asked.

“My business card. As soon as I pass my realtor’s test, I’ll be licensed.”

Everything started to make sense. “
You’re
the realtor who Hank here has been talking to?” she asked, shocked at this open betrayal of family and friends and…Chez Ducky.

“I’m not a realtor yet. But yes, Hank and I have had a few talks.” She didn’t look in the least bit embarrassed. The woman had no shame.

Mimi rolled her eyes, disgusted.

“That
is
a lot of money,” Vida conceded. She caught Mimi’s dagger glance. “I mean, this isn’t Gull Lake or Vermillion. Why’d anyone be willing to pay that for land here?”

“The ‘where’ don’t matter to people like Prescott,” Hank said sourly. “He just wants to build a big, new, showy place to prove how successful he is to his friends. Though there don’t seem to be too many of
them
crawling around.”