The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  “Get out,” Jill said.

  All three of us just looked at him, waiting for the command to register.

  “Wait… what?” he said finally, eyes open, cop instinct engaged.

  “I said,” Jill repeated, jabbing two hard fingers into his shoulder, “get out!”

  Jill was small, but when Dick didn’t move, she leaned closer, crowding him into the corner.

  “It’s raining,” he said, his voice strangely small. “I mean, just look out there.”

  “Get out!!” we ordered in unison.

  Dick tried to sit up, but he couldn’t because Jill was still in his way, and for the first time that night, he looked and sounded angry.

  “Hey now, wait a sec,” he snarled. “You bitches can’t do this to me. I’m a state trooper, goddammit!”

  Andrea laughed and gunned the engine. When she was a girl, her stepfather had been intimidating, but she wasn’t afraid of him anymore and he was a lot taller, a lot bigger, and a lot more frightening than Dick. Neither one of my parents were the police, though, they were educators, and my heart was beating so fast and so loud I was pretty sure it wasn’t inside my body anymore, but revving under the Bronco’s hood. My hands shook so hard I had to steady them on the doorframe.

  A cruel smile spread across Jill’s face. Sweet, petite Jill. I’d never, ever seen an expression like that on her, but she’d smiled like that before, I could tell, and would probably smile like that again.

  Jill actually likes this, I thought.

  Then from the backseat came an unmistakable sound.

  Andrea heard it, too, and turned on the domelight as if for proof. Had we really heard what we’d thought we heard?

  The bowie knife. It was out and laying, glinting and terrible, across Jill’s lap.

  Dick’s ruddy face blanched white in the shadows and he tried to sit up again, but Jill put her face so close to his they could have touched noses.

  “I’ll cut ya,” she promised.

  And with that, Dick was gone.

  He’d launched himself past Jill, out of the backseat, and right by me. He leaped over the weeds at the side of the road and sprinted into the woods. We heard branches snap, his voice yelping “Ow!” then nothing but the wind and the rain.

  I climbed back inside the Bronco and pulled the door shut. I was soaked. There was a pause; the three of us just looked at each other, then looked out the window and into the woods, and then looked back at each other again.

  “Wow,” Andrea said, deadpan, “that boy can really move.”

  Jill’s smile changed back to pretty again and my heartbeat slowed, just a little. We all took a breath, then another. I thought of the other girls and what their reaction was going to be when we told them what happened. I thought of Bev, and how afraid she would have been if she’d been with us, and I was glad she was back at Fairview, safe from harm, still believing the wildest thing you could do with a man on Drummond was dress him in a beanie hat and slow dance with him at Chuck’s.

  “I wish Linda could’ve seen that,” I said.

  At first, a shocked silence surrounded the three of us inside that car, but then we all started talking at once.

  Did you see his face? Jill, you were amazing! I bet he never hits on a woman in a bar again. Not at Chuck’s anyway. Just look out there—we’ve got to be ten miles from anything. What do you think the temperature is, forty? I hope there’s a bear out there. Yeah, that great big one.

  Our voices were young and strong, and I imagine them now swirling and spinning through the glass and metal of the Bronco and following that man beyond the road and the weeds and deep into those primeval woods. Inside Andrea’s car, we were warm, we were alive, and we were invincible.

  Andrea put the Bronco in drive, we began our dark ride back to Fairview, and I only relaxed when I heard Jill resheath the knife.

  “We might have to take that shit back home,” she’d said. “But not up here. Up here nobody fucks with the Drummond Girls.”

  The first thing you saw when you pulled into the dirt driveway of Fairview was the rough-hewn wood of the cabin’s side porch. When we returned, lights from the sliding glass door shone onto the log railing, so we knew at least some of the girls were still awake. I wondered if one of them was Linda. I was not looking forward to confronting her; she could be formidable. Drummond was supposed to be a time to support each other and have fun, not bail on each other over a guy.

  The whole way back, the three of us had been like a highlight reel, reliving the best moments of the previous hours, and we hadn’t discussed what we were going to say to Linda. When we finally pulled into the dirt driveway of Fairview, I was about to suggest we stay in the car and talk about it together, when Andrea got out, jogged up onto the porch, opened the door, and disappeared inside the cabin.

  A second later, Jill and I heard her loud and unmistakable voice: “What the hell, Linda?” It was the same tone she’d used on me when she thought I’d brought one of my kids to her bachelorette party. Irritated, yet also curious.

  Jill had been the brave one in the face of a physical altercation, and it looked like Andrea was willing to tackle an emotional one. What had I been doing during both of these? Thinking about things. What a rebel.

  But Jill and I went inside then, too, and just like the three of us had talked all at once in the Bronco, the girls who’d been with Linda talked all at once when we walked inside. Where had we been? Did we get lost? What was going on?

  Not one of those questions sounded angry; when I thought about it, not even Andrea’s question to Linda had. She’d sounded genuinely perplexed, as if the nighttime ride the three of us had just endured was a mystery to be solved and not an offense to be atoned for.

  Later, Andrea would become our group’s conscience, our conflict resolver, and her actions that night just the beginning, and showed exactly why she was so good at defusing a conflict. Andrea was fascinated by people, by their motivations, and especially by the why of human behavior, making her capable of doing something impossible for the rest of us: keeping her own feelings out and just assessing the situation.

  That moment inside Fairview was a harbinger of things to come, when Andrea our friend would develop a reputation as Andrea the Confronter. She was good at it. Fair, compassionate, and willing to get right to the point. She was down-to-earth, too, so that night all her communication skills had come out as simply “What the hell, Linda?”

  “What the hell, what?” Linda asked.

  “Why the hell did you tell that guy we’d give him a ride?”

  “What?” Linda said, sounding genuinely confused. “I never told him that.”

  “For real?” Andrea asked.

  “Yes, for real. Why the hell would I tell him that? I was trying to get the hell away from him. I thought you guys were, too.”

  Linda had left the parking lot before Dick had come outside. She didn’t know he’d approached our car, let alone been allowed inside, and neither she nor the other girls knew where the three of us had been for the past two hours. It was almost three o’clock in the morning, and they’d thought we were going to follow them straight back to Fairview from Chuck’s. That’s why they were all still awake. They’d been worried about us.

  “Now, who’s taking the guy’s side?” Linda said.

  She was right. Dick had lied to us. It was totally out of character for Linda to have dumped him on us like that, and yet we’d believed him, a guy we didn’t know, over everything we did know about her.

  “We suck,” Andrea said, hanging her head. It broke the tension and a few of the girls even laughed.

  It must have been all that thinking I’d been doing, but I couldn’t resist. I reminded Linda that she’d invited the guy to sit down. We’d all seen that with our own eyes. Yes, she said, that was true, but she just wanted to ask him about his mother, who’d been a good friend, and by the end of the night he’d started to get on her nerves.

  That rang true; I remembered seeing her
give him a shove and then later yank her arm away when he’d tried to grab it.

  Linda said she’d felt relieved when Mary Lynn commanded us all to the door. She’d wanted to get away from him. That was why she’d peeled out of the parking lot so fast, not because she was trying to dump him on us.

  “So, like, what?” Linda asked, looking from my face to Andrea’s, and then to Jill’s. “Did something happen?”

  “Yeah,” Jill said, poker-faced. “You could say that.”

  That winter, two months after our trip, Linda was working a day shift at Peegeo’s when a woman she hadn’t seen in years came in for lunch. She didn’t live in Traverse City; she was just visiting from downstate, had taken a chance that Linda still worked at Peegeo’s, and come in to say hello. The restaurant wasn’t busy, so the woman and Linda had time to talk. They caught each other up on the people they knew in common; then Linda inquired, gingerly I’m sure, about her son. How was he doing?

  Great!, the woman had said. He was a state trooper now, stationed in the Upper Peninsula, and she could not have been more proud of how he’d turned out.

  CHAPTER FIVE 1999

  Bev, dancing at the Northwoods the night she received her Drummond nickname.

  I didn’t see the point of making all that fuss over the calendar. I thought the Y2K conspiracy theorists were silly, and I didn’t join the millennial celebrators, beyond walking out onto my porch at midnight and banging an old pan with a wooden spoon (a family tradition) and then toasting the New Year. If staying clear of all that Year 2000 hoopla made me a know-it-all or a cynic, so be it.

  Then again, I’d never been much of a trend follower or joiner, not even when I was a little girl.

  I wasn’t even a Girl Scout. I wasn’t a Camp Fire Girl, a Foxfire Girl, a Girl Guide, or a member of the 4-H, either. I’d never pledged a sorority (unless you counted Alpha Krappy Grammar, the anti-Greek society I’d cofounded in graduate school), and although I actually liked the idea behind the Daughters of the American Revolution, because I was adopted I didn’t know whether my biological kin had fought in any war, ever.

  When I was about six, I was a Brownie. For about two whole weeks. It’s still difficult for me to believe, but it must be true because there is a black-and-white picture in the Link family photo album of me in the uniform. My mother is standing next to me, smiling proudly as she prepares to apply the sash around my neck. If badges could have been earned by having legs that looked like tent poles, I would have been first in line to receive one.

  I am smiling in the picture, but I remember feeling uneasy. The word contrived hadn’t entered my lexicon yet, but that was already my opinion of organized socializing. My family camped, hiked, and spent a lot of time outdoors. Why couldn’t I just learn about nature that way, I’d wondered, instead of being forced to go to a meeting with girls I didn’t know in someone’s basement?

  The uniform’s socks were unbearably itchy, I told my mother, and I could no longer abide them. In truth, I couldn’t abide the uniform, period. Pledges, songs, and candlelit rituals? Even at six, I knew mind control when I saw it. Outside of the Drummond Girls, I’ve never joined anything.

  I didn’t know how the other girls felt about such things. It had never come up. Until one night in the new century when Linda took us two-tracking and Andrea was regaling us with a story about a woman she worked with and didn’t like. While she talked, an unlit Winston bobbed up and down between her lips and she patted her pockets for her lighter. Finding none, she continued the story anyway, while Linda kept one hand on the wheel and reached around in her purse in the dark with the other. She found it and pulled it out, but before she flicked on the flame she stopped the car and her face became a mask so serious Andrea even paused her story. Linda held up her palm, as if to preface an historic moment.

  “Wohelo,” she’d said, in a deep voice from the beyond. “I light the light of life. Wohelo means life.”

  The remark was so random that Andrea barked out a laugh, propelling the cigarette out of her mouth like an arrow. For the rest of that weekend, Linda wasn’t Linda anymore, and she wasn’t even the Dragon Lady. She was Wohelo.

  The word was familiar to me—I had friends who’d been Camp Fire Girls—and I’d just assumed that Linda had been one, too. I could just picture her. A sassy, black-haired hellion bossing a bunch of other little girls in plaid uniforms around. The nickname stuck. Back in Traverse City, and at Peegeo’s, she was still the Dragon Lady, but on Drummond Island she was Wohelo.

  The thing about nicknames is you can’t choose one for yourself. Well, you could choose your own, I suppose, but it probably wouldn’t stick. Since Jill had extricated the trooper from Andrea’s Bronco, we’d started calling her the Secretary of Defense, and both that label and Wohelo had arisen naturally out of two memorable but unexpected moments we’d shared.

  “I need a Drummond nickname,” Bev declared. “What do you think mine should be?”

  Bevski, Wojo, the Polish Princess. Bev already had three nicknames, I thought. Why did she need another? Especially when the rest of us didn’t have a single one?

  “You’re not supposed to plan it out like that,” Andrea said. “Nicknames just kinda happen.”

  “I guess.” Bev sighed, but she sounded disappointed.

  We had liked Fairview so much that we’d rented the cabin again. The nickname conversation had come up when we were all sitting around the kitchen table, recounting Jill’s backseat heroics of the previous year.

  “I’ve got a good one for Pam,” Linda said. “She’s the Sheriff.”

  “Perfect!” Andrea said.

  “You can’t have a Sheriff and a Secretary of Defense,” Pam said.

  “Oh yes, you can,” Jill said. “We’ll each have our own jurisdictions. You handle duck hunters and I’ll take the cops.”

  “Deal,” Pam agreed.

  Amazing, the conversations the eight of us would sometimes have up there, when maturity was neither required nor expected. Spread out on the table were the colorful cards from Apples to Apples, the game Susan had brought along that year, and she was soon christened Gamer. Jill said Andrea was our very own Jukebox Hero, since she was the one who always brought along her boom box and knew the perfect mix to play at Chuck’s and Northwoods. That left Mary Lynn, Bev, and me. Mary Lynn would not have appreciated being reminded of her Gnomie moniker, and I sure didn’t want to be called Gloria all the time.

  “Y’all just need to do something crazy, then,” Andrea had told us, rotating her head around in a herky-jerky spiral.

  I don’t think any one of the three of us took that suggestion literally; Andrea was just being Andrea. Maturity requirements aside, I was almost forty, with Bev and Mary Lynn both more than a decade older. I thought our “doing something crazy” days were behind us, and that weekend I’d made a point of noticing the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the island instead.

  We saw more tourists but there were all sorts of endearing things about Drummond that would never be in any travel brochure. The lift of an index finger off the steering wheel that functioned as a roadway greeting for locals. The ubiquity of mounted deer heads inside various businesses, regardless of their decor. Plaid wallpaper and deer head? Check. Wood paneling and deer head? Check. Nautical scenes and deer head? Check.

  The women’s bathroom at the Northwoods was another of the island’s idiosyncrasies, and peeing there could be… challenging. There were three stalls, one sink, one mirror, a paper towel dispenser, and a trash can all packed into a room smaller than my closet. If you opened the door too fast, it’d hit the porcelain bowl of toilet number one. To conserve space, someone had decided mounting shower rods on the walls and hanging three pistachio-green curtains as stall doors was a really good idea. The curtains didn’t reach all the way to the floor, though, so if three women were using the facilities at the same time they looked like a six-legged squatting shamrock.

  The first year that Bev had joined us, we went to the Northwoods straig
ht from the ferry, ordered a round of drinks, then another, intentionally waiting on Bev’s bladder. It didn’t take long before she stood up, asked us where the bathroom was, and we pointed her in the proper direction.

  A few minutes later she’d emerged, a shocked look on her face.

  We whooped and gave her a round of applause.

  “That’s because I’m a Polish princess!” she’d announced to the room, taking a bow.

  I’d forgotten all about that moment, but after the nickname conversation, we’d left Fairview for a drive and found ourselves at the Northwoods again. Pam pointed to the bathroom and reminded us of Bev’s debut. Not a one of us was what you’d call a girly girl, though if any of us had princess tendencies, it was Bev. After the laughing died down, Pam asked her about the heritage portion of her royal title.

  “Are you really one hundred percent Polish?” Pam wanted to know. “Or is it mixed with something else?”

  Coming from Linda, Andrea, or even me, the question would have seemed like a joke—a good-natured nudge at Bev’s tendency to be a little spacey. Pam did have a good sense of humor, but she wasn’t a teaser. She was much too tenderhearted for that. Pam herself was from a big, northern Michigan farm family, knew her own genealogy well, and was honestly curious about Bev’s.

  “Not all Polish,” Bev had answered, unusually serious. “Only ninety-nine percent.”

  The rest of us frowned. We were all the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants, a mix of this heritage and that ancestry, our blood containing European genes randomly scattered in Michigan and the Midwest before the turn of the century. I didn’t know any specifics of my own background, just that I was English and Irish. Data I was thankful for, nonetheless, because I thought it might explain my propensity to overthink (English) and sometimes to overdrink (Irish).