South of Superior (9 page)

“All right. Where do I go?”

Gladys's expression was withering. “To the hardware, where else?” She was clearly furious. “Looking at a person's mail. I should have known better than to leave it lying around.”

“I'm sorry—”

“Sorry doesn't do any good. Just go get the fertilizer. I'll get you the money.” Gladys stalked to her desk in the hall and took her wallet from her purse. She turned her back, but Madeline knew how carefully she must be counting money that really did not exist. She came back with a worn five-dollar bill and Madeline took it from her, not wanting to but knowing Gladys would insist.

“Take your car. There's something I want you to pick Up for me while you're down there. And I'm telling you right now, not one word to my sister. You can keep your busybody ways to yourself.”

Some kindness or patience that Emmy had drilled into her—and her own guilt—made Madeline keep her mouth shut.

Gladys held out a key—a skeleton key no less—on a narrow leather strap. “There's something I want out of the hotel. This is for the back door. Pull in the alley and park there. You're going to go into the kitchen. Go straight through to the front hall. I want the kicksled, it's right next to the door, you can't miss it. It's awkward and it's heavy, but I think you can handle it. You've got a big trunk on that car of yours, it ought to fit. And be careful, it's an antique. Wrap some sheets around it, take them off the furniture.”

“Why—”

“Just please don't ask me any questions.”

Madeline counted to five and then said, “Am I allowed to ask what hotel it is I'm going to?”

“Our hotel, of course. On the main street. The Hotel Leppinen.”

 

 

Madeline didn't bother
to stay annoyed at Gladys, not with the key to the building she'd admired so often in her hand. As soon as she got the bone meal at the hardware, she hurried back across the street. She'd already parked in the alley, as Gladys instructed, so now she made her way around the side of the hotel, past a dense thicket of lilacs and through a tiny orchard of gnarled apple trees, Up three steps to the back entry. She fitted the key into the lock and pushed the door open.

She stepped inside and drew in a wondering breath. Ten-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, walls wainscoted in dark paneling, massive counters of the same dark wood. The hanging cupboards were fronted with leaded glass and showed orderly stacks of thick white china cups and plates. Lightbulbs hung overhead from their cloth-covered wires, and Madeline saw they were operated by push buttons instead of flip switches. She pushed a button and looked Up at the dangling bulbs, but nothing happened. Maybe the electricity wasn't on. The room was dusty and cool, but did not feel abandoned. Frozen, more like. Waiting.

She walked across the kitchen and through a double swinging door and was behind the registration desk, another massive construction of wood and glass. An enormous, ornate cash register sat on top, and Madeline could not resist reaching out to push the “No Sale” key. The drawer sprang open with a brisk
ching
that startled her. She eased it shut again and moved around the desk into the front room. Furniture sat covered with sheets, and a rug lay rolled against the far wall. A pendulum clock sat on a shelf, and Madeline could almost hear the Unflappable, eternal ticktock it would make if it was wound. There was no clutter or disorder, no sense of a place packed Up into permanent storage. It was more as if someone had closed down in the fall and would soon be bustling in to open for another season.

She yearned to pull the sheets off everything, Unroll the rug, pull open the drawers of every cabinet and counter, but instead she made herself go to the front hall to find the kicksled. Once she saw it—a sort of wooden chair on runners—and lugged it out the back door, stole a couple of sheets from a china cabinet and a settee and swaddled it into the trunk, she couldn't make herself drive straight to Bessel Street.

Instead she went back inside. She wandered through every room, climbed every flight of stairs, peered in every closet. She'd stepped back in time. The woodwork and hardware and floors and wallpaper—everything spoke of another era, not so much simpler as more definite, more solid. The place had been built beautifully, but was without ostentation. Each of the twelve guest rooms was furnished with just a bed and dresser and chair. The beds had black metal frames, each with a blue-striped ticking mattress stripped bare, the blankets and pillow stowed in a plastic bag at the foot. Every pine dresser had a china bowl and pitcher, every dangling bulb a frosted glass shade. The blinds were pulled at every window, waiting to be opened and let the light in.

Madeline creaked along the hallways and with every step her enchantment grew. The final set of stairs led to the attic, and she made her way Up, determined to look out the dormered windows she'd seen from the street. At the top of the stairs she pushed a small door open to reveal a large room with rectangles of sunlight falling across the floor—no blinds in these highest windows. There were a few pieces of furniture in a corner, but nothing else. Just a big, empty room. A perfect place for painting. Plenty of light and space, few distractions. She went to the closest north-facing window, and Lake Superior was laid out before her in all its vastness.

Madeline was, suddenly and unequivocally, filled with yearning. This place should be open, running, welcoming visitors, showing itself off, reinstated in its rightful place as queen of the street. Why had Gladys and Arbutus ever closed? The hotel was so beautiful and so ready to work. Maybe it was just too much for them, but if they found someone to help—what a place. If it was open, Madeline could hang out Up here, painting, while the business of the hotel clattered away below her.

For the first time since Emmy died—and before that, before the last battles of the illness had worn them down, before all the years of work and worry and tending to practicalities—Madeline felt a charge of possibility run all the way through her.

A car door slammed on the street below with a muted thump and jolted her back to the moment.

All this dreaminess was brought on by the building—so romantic and lovely, perched in this beautiful spot, so full of potential. She was a sucker for architecture, she always had been—and
light
, she loved the light on the big lake. And she'd always been insanely sensitive to the spirit of a place. For whatever reason, this hotel called to her at some deep level, called to a self she'd packed Up and put away a long time ago, a self who was going to be an artist, have adventures, live in a garret in Paris maybe, or a remote shack in Alaska.

All those ideas had been nothing but Unformed, youthful dreams.

Still, she
could
do something new and different now, if she wanted to. Wasn't that why she was here in the first place? She shouldn't forget that. She should find a way—a reasonable way of course—to keep those old dreams alive. She should keep drawing, for sure. After one last look out the window, Madeline headed back to the car.

 

 

A few mornings later
the burner on the gas stove didn't light when Gladys turned the knob. After peering into the oven to check the pilot, she sent Madeline out to check the tank.

Madeline came back in. “It says it's empty.”

“That can't be.”

“That's what it says.”

Gladys glanced over her shoulder, thinking of Arbutus, not wanting her to hear from where she sat in the parlor watching the television. “Let me see.”

She went outside and peered at the gauge and tapped it, hard, but the reading didn't change. She picked Up a branch and whacked at the belly of the tank and sure enough, it sounded hollow. She dropped the branch. “Damn it, I just filled the thing.” She bit her lip, chagrined at herself for cursing.

Madeline came Up behind her. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.” But even as she said it she knew she was wrong. When she let herself think about it, Gladys knew that the tank hadn't been filled in months. Time just went so fast, was all, and money went almost nowhere. She took a deep breath, exhaled in a gust. “We'll have to get more, that's all.”

Of course it wasn't that easy and Madeline would know it. She'd snooped at the bills and probably had seen the one from the gas company stamped “Delinquent.” The stamp went on to say,
“Please note that we can no longer refill any tanks for delinquent accounts.”
One good thing, if they'd had a rubber stamp made Up to say all that, she couldn't be the only one with money troubles. Which wasn't much consolation.

Gladys felt like flinging herself on the ground and having a good old-fashioned tantrum. It was a shame and a waste, but she was going to have to sell the kicksled, Grandma's
potkukelkka
she brought all the way from Finland, to raise the money to pay the bill. She'd find some way to explain it to Arbutus later. It was just a thing, after all. A thing that had been sitting in the front hall of the hotel for years, not doing anybody any good. And the antiques man from over in the Soo had offered her a big price for it a decade ago, before she'd closed the place Up for good. She'd scoffed at him, told him she was poor but not so poor she'd go selling off family heirlooms. Well. How the mighty had fallen.

She'd just about made Up her mind to sell it even before the gas tank turned Up empty. The jolt of fury she'd felt when she caught Madeline inspecting her bills finally gave her the courage—or foolhardiness?—to take the first step in doing this terrible, terrible thing. Only it wasn't so terrible. It was just necessary. Now that first step was taken, it wouldn't be so hard to take the next one. That was the way of life. She'd call the man if she could get a minute alone. She knew he was still in business at the same place. She allowed herself to wonder if it had been a mistake, after all, to close. It would have been a trickle of money coming in, at least. But the expense of it all—the heat, the electric, fixing the roof, a hundred other things the old behemoth needed.

“What are we going to do?” Madeline asked.

That startled Gladys back to the present. Of course Madeline wouldn't know anything about trouble like this. She'd grown Up coddled and modern in Chicago, a world away from the life Gladys led, or Joe Stone, or even Jackie, come to that, though it was not Gladys's habit to give Jackie the benefit of any doubt.

“
We're
not going to do anything. I'll take care of the gas company. You go bring in some wood for the cookstove, I can't think why you let it get so low by the door.”

Madeline gave her an exasperated look but headed for the woodpile beside the shed without saying anything. That stack was low too, Gladys noticed, narrowing her eyes. It hadn't concerned her much before—summer was coming—but now its meagerness seemed ominous. She stood chewing her bottom lip a moment before she bent and picked Up two small pieces near the door.

“Arbutus!” she called out once she had a fire snapping. “Come get your coffee.” She gave Madeline a severe look:
not one word
.

“Glad, it's too hot for a fire,” Arbutus complained when she came in.

“Nonsense. Nothing like a fire for baking, I'm making bread today.
Hiivaleipä
, like Mother Used to make, if we've got the barley. You'll like that.”

Arbutus sighed and pulled at the neckband of her blouse, fanning herself.

 

 

After breakfast,
Madeline went to Emil's to find out about getting more wood. “And stop by the fruit man on your way back, I want some apples,” Gladys said.

Emil's place sat atop the hill that plunged into town, along a dirt road that seemed to lead into the depths of nowhere. When Madeline got out of the car, she stopped a moment to take in his million-dollar view, which she hadn't bothered to do the other two times she'd been there. Tiny McAllaster sat nestled below; the forest and bogs stretched far in either direction; Lake Superior churned in all its stunning immensity to the north. Then Emil came around the corner and Madeline headed toward him.

Emil was built small and wiry—it was hard to guess his age but she thought seventy or even eighty—and he looked as tough as an old strap of leather. He wore a red and black plaid shirt buttoned Up to his chin, rubber boots tied Up tight to his knees, and despite the mildness of the day, a lumpy knitted cap. His expression was watchful, a little amused, and Madeline had the Uncomfortable sense that he was reading her mind. He carried a gun, the barrel easing toward the ground. A beagle trotted after him and came Up to her to have its ears rubbed. Emil lifted his chin in greeting.

“I'm Madeline Stone,” she began.

“You came with Paul Garceau to pick Up the kid. And you're Joe Stone's granddaughter, that right?”

“Ah—yes.”

Emil nodded. “Thought so. You look like your great-grandma.”

“So I've heard.” Madeline said this calmly—coolly, almost—but she felt a thrill of curiosity that she immediately stomped out, like a tiny grass fire that could be controlled if she was fast enough and vigilant.

“You drop that food off on my step awhile back?”

“Gladys sent it out for you, extra she made, she thought you might like it.”

“Meat loaf was a mite spicy, you ask me. I don't like them red things in it.”

“Pimientos?”

“I don't know, red things. They give it a funny flavor. I fed it to Sal, she ate it Up, she ain't fussy. The cookies was tasty, though. I don't suppose she sent any more?”

“No. Actually she needs a favor.”