The Lost Women of Lost Lake (10 page)

Jonah had been the one to suggest they grow their own dope. For a while, it was just pie in the sky. Then, one day, Kenny found a rundown shack in the middle of an empty field that nobody seemed to own. Next thing Jonah knew, Kenny had the seeds and was digging up part of the field. Jonah busied himself finding information online about how to care for the plants, how to make sure they grew straight and strong. For a time, he got really interested in horticulture, read everything he could find. Together, he and Kenny carted out what they'd need to make the hideout their home away from home. Coolers for pop and beer. A couple of big plastic containers for the munchies. The truth was, without Kenny, Jonah's idea might never have seen the light of day—or the Bic at the end of the pipe. Jonah saw himself as the idea man. Kenny was the enforcer.

Kenny Moon was six foot five and built like a pro football defensive back. He could eat five Big Macs in one sitting and still have room for a couple chocolate triple-thick shakes. Girls loved his Irish good looks—his mother's name was Flannigan—his mischievous smile, and the glint in his eyes that suggested he was up to something, which he usually was. He could be generous, and he liked to laugh and party-hardy. That was Kenny's good side. His dark side was equally big.

Kenny was so pigheaded that, as a kid, he'd refused to let his parents show him how to tie his shoelaces, which meant that he'd been condemned to wear dorky loser loafers until he figured it out himself, somewhere around fifth grade. He wasn't exactly dumb, although he didn't understand the finer points of … well, just about anything. He also didn't like to spend the time or effort it took to think things out logically, so he tended to overreact for all the wrong reasons. He was ridiculously sensitive to criticism, hotheaded in general, and tended to throw a punch rather than try a less physical route to solve a problem. He made for an exciting friend, but Jonah doubted he'd make a great husband, lover, employee … or army recruit. Then again, that was the army's problem.

“So,” said Jonah, holding in another lungful of smoke, starting to feel pleasantly drifty. “I'm gonna need a key for that new padlock you put on the shed door.”

“Check.”

“Did you take the army physical yet?”

“Last week.”

“Man, with all the dope you smoke, how'd you pass it?”

“Not to worry.”

“Have you seen the results yet?”

“Should have them this week.”

Jonah thought he was living in dreamland. “So what's next?”

“Boot camp. No pussies allowed.” He elbowed Jonah in the ribs. “You're too soft, man. You gotta harden up.”

This was one of their biggest differences—their values. They were polar opposites when it came to virtually everything that mattered. The last thing Jonah would ever do was join the military so that he could be sent off to fight some foreign war for the political bullshitters in Washington or the fat cats on Wall Street. His body wasn't going to be used as fodder to fuel anybody's pocketbook or political empire. It was all black and white to him. No shades of gray in an equation like that.

“You're one of those softie liberals, Jonie.”

“Don't call me Jonie,
Kenny
.”

Kenny slapped the back of Jonah's head.

“Hey,” he said. “That hurt.”

“Remember, it's Kenneth.”

“What
ever
.”

“What's it called when you're a psychic and you hear dead people's voices?”

“Huh?”

“You know? You see these people on TV sometimes. They talk to the dead. What's that called?”

“Channeling?”

“Yeah, that's it. It's like you're channeling some douche-bag hippie from the sixties. 'Course, you know what they say about the sixties.”

“What's that?”

“If you remember them, man, you weren't really there.” He began to giggle and couldn't stop—another stranger-than-fiction thing about him. He didn't have a hearty, deep male laugh. He giggled.

Because Jonah didn't want to get hit again, he decided not to point that out. “I'll take your assessment as a compliment.”

“Not meant that way.”

“Peace.”

Kenny rested his head against the shed wall and gazed disinterestedly up at the dark clouds scudding across the sky. “Wonder if it's going to storm again?”

Jonah's thoughts happened to be on the freak in the Toyota. His love of hitchhiking had been severely shaken. On the other hand, what was a guy to do who didn't have much money and had no other way to get around? “Listen,” said Jonah, feeling a raindrop hit his forehead.

“If it's about Emily—”

“What about Emily?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what about her? I drove past her house. The car was gone.”

“She's working at a resort.”

“You know the name of it?”

He pulled out a roach clip and attached it to the end of the joint. “Can't remember.”

“I need to see her.”

“Doesn't get off work until five.”

“But she's okay, right?”

He examined the tip of the roach to make sure it was still lit. “She's fine.”

“You see her much?”

“Now and then.”

“God, but I've missed her.”

“She'd be easy to miss.”

“You got another joint on you?”

Kenny produced one from his shirt pocket. Holding the clip in one hand, he stuck the joint in his mouth and lit it with the Bic in his other hand. “Here,” he said, handing it to Jonah. “This stuff is older. Still primo.”

While Kenny sucked in the last of the first doobie, Jonah started in on the second. Even if it rained, he doubted he'd get up.

“Okay,” said Jonah, blowing smoke slowly out of his nostrils. “You gotta focus for a minute, man, because this next bit is important. Are you focusing?”

The question might have elicited another punch if Kenny hadn't been so high. “Just spill it.”

“Something's going on with your grandmother and Aunt Tessa.”

“Going on? You mean sexually?”

“Huh?”

“They sleeping together?”

“Hell no. Where did you get that idea?”

Kenny shrugged.

Jonah decided to leave out the part about the gun exchange. For the moment. “Last night, a friend of my aunt's caught some weird dude in a White Sox cap looking in Tessa's study window. Jane Lawless. You remember her?”

“Sure. The dyke restaurant owner.”

“You used to call her that ‘foxy' restaurant owner.”

“That was before I found out she was a dyke.”

“Tolerance in action.”

“Never claimed to be tolerant. Get back to the subject.”

“Far as I can make out, your grandmother and my aunt set off a bomb someplace.”

Warming to the topic, Kenny said, “Like where?”

“Not sure. Your grandmother's first name isn't Lyndie. It's Judy.”

“Well, shit.” He digested that for a few seconds. “Judy. Yeah, I can see her as a Judy. What else?”

“They think the guy looking in the window last night is after them. I mean, really out to hurt them.”

“There was a dude in the emporium the other day. Gran acted really weird after he left. And then she took off, put me in charge. Ain't never done that before.”

“So you know what he looks like.”

“Kind of.” He closed his eyes. “Narrow face. Dark eyebrows. Dark scruff.”

“Your grandmother said she and my aunt were sitting ducks. They even talked about … well, about taking care of him.”

“You mean as in really … taking
care
of him?”

“I got the impression they thought it was either him or them.”

“Hell,” said Kenny, shoving the roach clip into the dirt. “Nobody's gonna threaten my gran. I don't care what she did.” Glancing at Jonah, he said, “Did you tell me what that was?”

“A bombing.”

“Well, hell. If shit happens, they had a reason.”

Jonah hated to admit it, but he felt the same way. That's why he'd hightailed it to the hideout. He pretty much anticipated what Kenny's reaction would be. “So what do we do?”

“Find the guy and send him back to where he came from.”

“And if he won't go?”

Kenny smiled. “He'll go. Or I'll break every bone in his freakin' body. You think I'm kidding?”

“No.”

“Damn straight.”

They touched fists and went back to smoking their dope.

11

Once upon a time, Tessa had fed off risk. It had been her drug of choice. She understood intimately the kind of pleasure—and pain—that came from knowing you were risking something important. And yet, during her time in the wilderness of northern Minnesota, she seemed to have lost her taste for it.

It had bothered her at first, this lack of courage. It took her years to understand such a fundamental change in her nature. What she saw now, a truth that she'd been blind to as a younger woman, was that risk, the kind she relished, was bound to certainty; they were halves of the same coin.

If you were, for example, engaged in fighting for a righteous cause, the cosmos, by its very nature, had to be on your side. Thus, while risk might exist, it was mitigated. In the end, if you failed, if you were caught, beat up, fired from a job, evicted from your apartment, jailed, if you lost your lover or even your family, you could still hold your head high because what you'd been working for was the cause of the Greater Good.

What Tessa had lost wasn't simply her love of risk, but her absolute belief that she had the keys to the kingdom of the Greater Good. Once lost, she doubted those keys could ever be recovered.

Strange as it would have seemed to to her twenty-five-year-old self, her sixty-five-year-old self thought that lack of certainty was not only good but a huge step forward morally.

A quiet life, a settled routine, a room of her own to work on her craft, the love of a good woman—those were what Tessa craved now. Perhaps it meant that she'd buried her head in the proverbial sand. What she also knew was that all human beings shoved their heads as far into the dark as they could just so they could continue to live and not go quietly insane. Everyone turned their backs on the horrors in the world, otherwise no one, with the exception of sociopaths and fanatics, would be able to sleep at night.

From the very first, Tessa understood that Judy was the biggest threat to her continuing freedom. If it wasn't for their shared goal of staying under the radar, they would have parted company long ago. They had nothing in common except for a single violent act, one they both regretted. Still, Tessa continued to keep her finger on Judy's emotional pulse because she needed to know they were still on the same page. The problem at the moment was, she was no longer sure they were.

Two years ago, when Judy met George Sunderland and found the Lord, a new element had been tossed into the mix. Tessa had never been religious herself, although she respected the spiritual instinct as universal. And yet, instead of adding an authentic sense of ethical and moral underpinnings to Judy's internal life, Tessa felt a new slipperiness take hold. Now more than ever, Judy's ideas and actions seemed inscrutable. After years of being philosophically to the left of the average anarchist, Judy's values, such as they were, had turned murky. Tessa had no way to predict where she'd come down on any given issue, which provided her with another good reason to keep Judy close.

Hearing footsteps on the deck, Tessa hoisted herself to a standing position, pulled her crutches under her arms, and went to unlock the front door. Right after Jane and Jonah had left, she'd called Fontaine, asked him to stop by. He was the one man in the world she could go to with the kind of favor she needed to ask.

“Afternoon,” he said, removing his snap-brim cap, bunching it together in his large, rough hands. These days, his once thick black hair was shot through with gray. “How's the ankle?” he asked.

“Awful.”

“You been taking your pain meds? Always important to keep up with that.”

“Come in,” she said, making her way back to the couch.

Fontaine closed the door and stood for a moment taking in the large, open room. “Smells good in here.”

“A friend came by to make me breakfast. A frittata. There's some in the fridge if you're hungry.”

“No thanks.”

She motioned him to a chair.

Still glancing around, he adjusted his small, round, wire-rimmed glasses, then lowered his muscular frame down on the leather La-Z-Boy. He was dressed in his usual gray work shirt, jeans, and heavy work boots.

Fontaine Littlewolf, a full-blooded Ojibwe, was a Gulf War vet, a man who'd served his country with honor. On the outskirts of Lost Lake there was a sign that said
WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
. In Fontaine's case, it was only minimally true.

While society was changing, many folks in town still looked down on Native Americans. Fontaine had come home from Kuwait with headaches, odd skin rashes, and chronic fevers, what doctors eventually began to call Gulf War Syndrome. Because he was Ojibwe and couldn't exactly hide his heritage, he had a harder time than most finding a job when he returned. His fatigue made it difficult for him to hold on to one once he'd found it.

Tessa had been elected president of the board of the Lost Lake Community Center the same fall she'd first met Fontaine. In a conversation over coffee, he mentioned that he'd been evicted from his apartment because his sporadic attempts to pay the rent had created problems with his landlord. For the time being, he was living in a tent in the woods. He said it was no big deal. It might have been alright then, but winter was coming on.

It took a few weeks for her to finally get the go-ahead to offer Fontaine the job of janitor at the center. With a BA in history from the University of Minnesota and seven years of high school history teaching under his belt, he was overqualified, although nobody seemed to notice. She figured that if he was in charge and had to take time off, he could find someone to cover for him. She arranged for him to report directly to her, which gave him the option to take as much leeway with his hours as he needed.