But in the next instant, he would assure himself everything was okay. The shop was the same as it had been the last time he was there—and no bad news had surfaced since then. After all, Mildred had an instinct for what people were likely to run out of when the Loon Lake Market and the local gas stations were closed. He knew for a fact that he was hardly the only Loon Lake resident willing to risk death under a toppling shelf on a national holiday. Given that she opened at five a.m. and stayed open til ten, the cigarette trade alone was sure to keep her in business.
The finances of Mildred’s Food Shop were a favorite topic of Osborne and his buddies as they nursed their early morning coffees at McDonald’s. “Yep,” Pete Ratliff, the retired accountant among them would say, “if you start with minimal overhead for upkeep and add to that the free labor she gets from those foster kids of hers, plus her location and the increase in Loon Lake property values over the decades. Hell, old Mildred must be worth at least a million.” Thoughtful heads would nod as someone echoed Pete’s words, “Yep, at least a million.”
Always as they talked, Osborne would think about the girls. They were sisters off the Ojibwa reservation whom Mildred had taken in as foster children four years earlier. Frances Dark Sky, the
oldest, was so shy that when she came for her annual dental exam, just to look at Osborne had seemed to cause her pain. Josie, younger than her sister by two years, was the polar opposite—ebullient, chatty, not in the least intimidated by an adult.
Osborne knew it was his own Métis heritage that piqued his interest in the girls. Though he was not as nut-brown as they, his complexion was darker than most Loon Lake residents, the majority of whom were descended from a mix of northern European settlers. But even though the girls were full-blooded and he was only a sixteenth Ojibwa, his eyes were as black-brown and his forehead as high and wide as theirs.
The girls, of course, had no idea that he kept an eye on them, that he checked with the young dentist who had taken over his practice to be sure Mildred didn’t skip their six-month cleanings and check-ups. And she didn’t. The old woman might be crabby but she appeared to take good care of the girls. It helped that Osborne arranged for the dental visits to be free. Mildred was led to believe that the state paid.
“Seems the only thing old Mildred spends money on are those damn raccoons,” Pete would add to his assessment of Mildred’s net worth. Again the heads would nod in agreement: yep, you couldn’t get in or out of Mildred’s Food Shop without confronting a raccoon.
Granted they were dolls—stuffed animals dressed in outfits ranging from firemen to Peter Pan to ballerinas—but they were a bit overwhelming. Dozens crowded an overhead row of shelving that circled the interior of the store. Twins dressed in waders, red checked shirts and fishing hats, each holding a cane pole with a tiny plastic fish swinging from it, sat in a birchbark boat that hung over the cash register. A baby raccoon in diapers, a bottle of milk in one hand and a rattle in the other, snuggled up against the computer that printed the licenses for fishing, hunting and the harvesting of wild rice.
Osborne found the raccoons unsettling and he once made the mistake of commenting to his daughter, Erin, that Mildred’s “thing for ‘coons” caused him to question her mental state. “Oh, right, Dad,” Erin had said. “And what about all the guys you know who hang dead deer—heads and shoulders—over their dining room tables, their living room fireplaces, over their beds for God’s sake. At least Mildred’s raccoons aren’t dead. You know, she’s had some of those dolls for years. They could be worth a lot of money.”
“Well…,” said Osborne, “I still think it’s weird.”
CHAPTER 3
He-l-l-o-o,” said Osborne, raising his voice as he ambled towards the front counter. The interior of the shop had a way of reminding him of the shadows cast by ancient hemlocks: all sun was blocked out. Mildred saved on electricity, too.
Though the store appeared empty, he was well aware that the old woman was, as always when there were no customers, hunkered down in a beat-up armchair in a sitting room off to the right—one eye on a small portable television set, the other watching the shop through a half-open door. Sure enough, he heard the rustle of fabric. Then the door squeaked back and Mildred shuffled into the room, pushing her bulk into the tight space behind the counter. She wore a shapeless black shift that fell almost to the floor, skimming the top of scuffed black oxfords and exposing thick ankles encased in beige orthopedic stockings.
“Yeah, whatcha need?” Her voice was low, gruff. In all the years that Osborne had been coming by for a license or some groceries, not once had he seen Mildred smile or heard her greet him by name. Nor did she appear to change, not even with age.
Mildred Taggert’s head was remarkably large, large even for the imposing monolith of her body. Her face was doughy and puckered where dimples might have been (though Osborne found that hard to imagine). She had a nose that crumpled up and back and was too small for the width of her face. As if words were an extravagance, her lips were thin lines that barely moved when she spoke. Small, round, black lenses hid her eyes, lenses so dark he wondered how she could see anything in the dimly lit shop.
But Mildred’s hair made up for the homeliness of her face and figure. Streaked in shades of black, white and grey, it had a wondrous sheen that reminded Osborne of the silk thread used on bamboo fly rods. The old woman herself seemed pleased with that hint of beauty: she let her hair flow back from her face in waves, then twisted it into a soft bun, which she anchored with an ebony spike.
Osborne waited for Mildred to position herself behind the counter. He knew what to expect as the script rarely changed. First that growl of “Whatcha need?” His answer to which was followed by the pointing of an arthritic finger in the direction of the requested item. Next a grunted “That’s all?” And she rang up your purchase. If the request was for a license, she was just as succinct: “Name. Address. Birth date. Social Security.” If someone balked at giving their Social Security number to an old woman they didn’t know, her answer was blunt: “No Social, no license.”
“Good morning, Mildred,” said Osborne, determined to shake an extra word or two out of her today. “Gorgeous morning for a Thanksgiving, don’t you think?”
“Whatcha need?”
“Well, I appear to have lost my hunting license and was hoping you could fix me up with a duplicate.”
Before she could grunt an answer, they heard a loud crash in the far corner of the shop. “Whaddya do this time, Frances?” said Mildred, scowling as she leaned across the counter to look down the aisle.
The brown, burnished face of the young Indian girl showed itself above a stack of boxes near the refrigerator at the back of the store. Her eyes were wide and worried as she mumbled, “I just … I didn’t mean to … this box fell.”
“I know that—question is whaddya break?” Osborne didn’t like Mildred’s tone.
“Um, I’m checking—maybe salad dressing? But I’ll get it cleaned up, Ms. Taggert.”
Osborne watched as Frances scurried to pick up several jars and bottles that had rolled along the floor. She glanced up suddenly and caught him staring at her. She looked away fast as if expecting him to bark at her, too.
“Frances,” said Osborne, his voice gentle, “what do you think of our new dentist—the one who took over my practice?”
“She sees ‘im just like the state says she has to,” said Mildred.
“Thank you, Mildred, but I was talking to Frances,” said Osborne, without taking his eyes off the girl. She had grown since he’d last seen her. Her face was fuller with an angular beauty of its own: remarkable cheekbones, a square jaw and a wide, generous mouth that drooped to the left when she smiled. If she smiled. Osborne could never help thinking poor Frances, poor Josie—those poor girls… The only time he ever saw the sisters was when they were working in the shop—never outdoors, never with friends their own age. And he knew Mildred could not be easy to live with.
Before Frances cou
ld answer Osborne’s question, Mildred was demanding: “Name? Address? Birth date? Social Security? Ten bucks.” With a sigh that implied he knew she knew his name, Osborne provided the information.
“Where’s Frances going to school next year?” he said as he opened his wallet to reach for a bill. “She’ll be in college, right?”
“Ask her,” said Mildred with a dismissive jab of her thumb. But when Osborne looked back down the aisle, the girl was gone. She had vanished behind the curtained French doors that led to the living areas of the old house.
Deciding to let Mike out of the car before he left, he put the dog on a leash and guided him along the alley and past the storage barn to a vacant lot. God forbid Mike poop in Mildred’s yard. Not that it mattered—Mildred’s passion for raccoons included a live one, which she kept in a wire cage at the front of the barn. Attached to the cage was a white sign painted with yellow flowers and the name “Daisy.” The cage was elevated so the animal’s droppings littered the ground beneath it.
In Osborne’s eyes, Mildred’s affection for her pet redeemed her crabbiness: somewhere under all that black fabric and behind the dark glasses, the woman must have a heart. He just hoped that that miniscule evidence of warmth extended to the Dark Sky sisters.
But this morning, as Osborne neared the cage, he was surprised to see that the cage door was slightly ajar and Daisy nowhere in sight. He stopped, holding the leash tight. Raccoons are canny—quite capable of jimmying the kind of latch used on the cage. Canny and confrontational. The last thing he needed was for Mike to tangle with an angry raccoon.
Looking up, he checked to be sure the animal hadn’t found its way onto a branch of the old oak that hung over the fence from the house next door. He peered up at the barn, wondering if the critter might be inside. No sign of the raccoon, but the barn was interesting. Contrary to expectations, Mildred appeared to have put some money into the place: new windows gleamed in the sunlight. Casement windows in new frames no less. Expensive.
Of course, the outer walls hadn’t been touched—the mustard yellow paint still peeling and dusty with age—and the door leading into the barn was battered as always, though it sported a shiny brass padlock. But the door was closed so Osborne hoped that Daisy was either inside or long gone.
Keeping an eye out for trouble, he held Mike on the leash until they had walked past the barn and were standing on the edge of the vacant lot, a field of tall grass toasted golden brown by early frosts. A quick scan showed no movement so he unleashed the dog. Mike trotted off sniffing eagerly. He gave a quick spin and set about his business.
“Here, Mike,” called Osborne when the dog was done. But a sudden breeze enchanted the air-scenting lab, pulling him towards something hidden in the grass. Nose down, he snuffled, lingering even after Osborne called again.
“You goofball,” said Osborne, walking over to check out Mike’s prize. He was expecting a dead rabbit and hoping like hell the dog wouldn’t roll in it. It was a carcass all right, but one too fresh for rolling. A raccoon wearing a collar ringed with yellow plastic daisies lay on her side, dead. And judging from the fresh blood pooling under her body, Daisy had not been dead long. Out of curiosity, Osborne nudged at the blood-soaked fur near her left ear. She had been shot and not with a BB gun—a bullet from a .22 caliber pistol maybe?
Osborne sat back on his heels. He was certain Mildred wouldn’t have done this to her pet. So who did? What mean-spirited person would harm a little critter like Daisy?
More disturbing was that someone had fired a gun within the city limits—a highly illegal act. Out of town you can shoot as many gophers and prairie dogs as you wish—but not in midtown Loon Lake. He’d definitely mention this to Lew when he got to her
house later. A dead animal wouldn’t be serious enough to ruin her Thanksgiving dinner but as the Loon Lake Chief of Police, she needed to know that someone was firing a weapon too close to homes and schools.
Getting to his feet, he wondered if he should tell Mildred. Or should he hope that she would assume that Daisy ran off—and never know the truth?
A scream shattered the sunny silence of the vacant lot. Osborne looked back towards the barn and the shop. If he had been in the woods, he would have thought it was the cry of a rabbit losing its head to an owl. But he wasn’t in the woods. That was a human scream. But of anger? Pain? Terror? Leashing Mike, he ran back towards the shop.
CHAPTER 4
The shop was empty. Silent. “Mildred?” Osborne called out. No answer. “Mildred!” He raised his voice. Still no answer. Threading his way past cereal boxes and jars of condiments, he managed to get to the end of one narrow aisle without a disaster. He rapped on the French doors leading to the living room of the old house. “H-e-l-l-o-o? Mildred?”
From somewhere beyond the doors, he could hear voices rising and falling. A fevered discussion was taking place in a distant room. “You old biddy—you can’t make me!” A girl’s voice, followed by the sound of a slap. No wonder they couldn’t hear him.
He was about to rap again when he heard Mildred say, “Josie! So long as you live here you do as I say and I told you I don’t want to see that bum around here again. I’ll call the cops on the son-of-a-bitch. You hear me?”
Osborne certainly heard her. Sounded to him like Mildred had enough on her hands. Forget the raccoon. He backed away from the French doors and hurried down the aisle doing his best to make as little noise as possible. At the entrance to the shop, he held the dangling doorknob until the door had closed without slamming.
Thirty minutes later he was trudging down a gravel road that led to the logging lane he had promised Mike. The land, which belonged to the paper mill, was open to hunters and had long been Osborne’s favorite spot for hunting birds: grouse, a few pheasant that escaped from a nearby preserve, a random woodcock.
Setting out on a hunt had a way of reminding him of a time in his late teens when he had considered becoming a sculptor—until his father gave him a short course on the reality of the artist’s life vs. the financial guarantees of dentistry. He hadn’t regretted following in his father’s footsteps. Not only did he enjoy the profession and discover that he was very good at it, but dentistry held an unexpected benefit: it sharpened his eye for volume, line, color and shape. As a result, a successful hunt could yield more than an entrée for the dinner table—though he didn’t see that at first.
He was in his forties before he realized it wasn’t the game he was after so much as the hunt itself. Hunting forced him to watch for the slightest movement in the forest cover, to listen for the faintest whisper. Hunting drew him close to the heartbeat of the forest and it was that that he loved.
That and the unexpected. Walking through woods where the only paths were those made by deer, he often stumbled onto totems of past lives—animal, vegetable, even mineral—that haunted the northwoods.
He saw skeletons of ancient trees whose immense, rotted caverns seemed hushed with secrets; bones of animals delicate and detailed in the patterns left as they fell; carcasses of cars burned and abandoned by owners Osborne guessed to be mobsters from Chicago anxious to hide evidence of bootlegging. He had yet to find a corpse in one of the burned out vehicles but he wouldn’t be surprised when he did.
And the more he enjoyed a hunt—or an evening of fishing—the more he was likely to recall the badgering of his late wife: “Paul,” Mary Lee had said too many times to count, “how much longer until we’ve got enough of a nest egg that we can move to Milwaukee? You know you’ll have so many more patients there and make a lot more money …”
Somehow that nest egg never happened—not even when Mary Lee added separate bedrooms to her pouts and punishing silences. Again, he had no regrets. He might not be worth as much as Fred Merrill, but for over thirty years he had been able to hunt within minutes of his home—and fish off his own dock. A lifestyle money can’t buy.
The dog bounded ahead, sniffing here and there, levitating in sheer bliss. Under normal circumstances, Osborn
e would be sharing Mike’s enthusiasm, but not today. He couldn’t get his mind off the dead raccoon, off the anger in Mildred’s voice, off that single, piercing scream.
What had the girl done that was so bad she deserved to be slapped—and slapped so hard he could hear it in the other room? Not like he hadn’t had to discipline Mallory and Erin when they were in their teens—though he had never laid a hand on them. Grounding had worked.
Osborne tried to keep his mind in the moment as he followed the lab down the rutted lane. He signaled the dog to find birds and Mike charged into a thicket of young aspen peppered with balsam. Osborne followed, running. But instead of listening for the flutter of a flushed bird, he thought again of poor dead Daisy. Maybe he should have said something? If he had, he might have been able to see for himself that the girls were okay.
A bird flushed, catching Osborne by surprise. Raising his shotgun, he pulled the trigger even as he knew he was too late. The bird was long gone. “All right now, get your act together,” he said aloud to himself. “This is one of the last fine days of autumn. Pay attention.”
The thicket gave way to a sea of black-brown cattails, their velvet cones split and ravaged by autumn winds. Mike ran along the edge of the swamp to where it bordered a hardwood forest of maple, oak and white birch. Just a few weeks earlier they had hunted here, but all was changed: the luminous reds and russets of the leaves had disappeared—vanquished by ever-hardening frosts. The trees were barren now, their black-brown branches thrust skyward as if to steel themselves against the harsh gusts of winter.
Again Mike flushed a bird and again Osborne shot too late. Mike didn’t know—he wagged his tail in anticipation of the command to retrieve.
“Sorry, fella, but I think we better give it up,” said Osborne. “I’ve got too much on my mind. I’m just not sure I did the right thing.” Mike looked longingly in the direction the bird had flown, then turned quizzical eyes on his master. He tipped his head and waited.
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