Fifteen minutes later, she still searched. Nothing. Everything was as she remembered, except their belongings were gone. She even got on her knees at the exact spot where they’d first noticed the car. She found where the backpacks had been, where they’d started eating their lunches. Nothing. At the water’s edge, she stood where they’d fished, looked back at the spot on the grassy bank where Ben had kept the fish wet. But other than a few places where the brush had been disturbed, a person could easily have thought that no one had been here since last fall.
Then she remembered the trout they’d caught. Scrambling along the shore, she came to the spot where she’d stored the freezer bag of fish. The anchoring rock was there, but no bag. She considered the notion of a bear wandering in and stealing the backpacks. And the nose of a bruin would have easily detected the bag of fish. But as she studied the vacant space at her feet, Abby’s heart suddenly began pounding again. This time it had nothing to do with the run through the woods. In the mud next to her tennis shoe, she spotted the print of a large boot. Squatting for a closer look, even in her relative inexperience she could see that the impression had been made by a big man. Next to her own footprint, the indentation was huge and deep. It was smooth-soled, like a dress shoe, a style the big man in the fancy car would have been wearing.
Abby grunted in bewilderment, then hurried along the shoreline searching for any sign of their belongings. Her thoughts went to hip waders, how every pair she’d ever seen had thick-lugged soles. The man must have removed them, she decided, before searching the area. Scrambling back to the open boat landing, Abby stood still long enough to take a deep breath. She looked back up the road behind her, and out over the lake. The breeze had died down, making for a peaceful stillness at this early evening hour, but to Abby, the silence echoed with mystery. Things had happened here after her hurried departure earlier today, events with no witnesses. Big Island could have told her a few things if it could talk, or those loons calling back and forth to each other.
She wondered why the man had taken all their gear. There was nothing in the backpacks to interest a grown man. He’d even taken that stupid fishing pole, and the freezer bag of small rainbow trout. He’d taken everything, including their notebooks containing their names and address.
That was the factor that turned Abby aboutface and thrust her at a full run up the road. The man knew who they were. He knew where they lived. Ben was home alone, counting on her to fix this whole mess. She angled off the road into the woods, ducking branches, hurdling puddles and deadfalls, racing for home. Her mind whirled with fears and questions. What would the man do with the information? What could he do? They hadn’t done anything wrong. He was the bad guy. She barely noticed the animal tracks she crossed, didn’t really hear the ravens calling to roost above her, and ran right past a pair of white-tailed does watching her from under a copse of cedars.
Over the ridgetop she climbed, huffing, breathing deep gulps of fresh air. Lake Superior spread out to the horizon before her. A few rooftops in town became visible far down below. Barely able to check her flying descent, Abby dropped down the face of the ridge, grabbing tree branches along the way, using her knees as shock absorbers, all the way to the familiar landscape behind town and, finally, to the back door of their house.
“Ben?” she called. “Ben!”
Through the kitchen she ran, noticing the sink still full of dishes, and into the front room and the staircase to the bedrooms upstairs. “Ben?” she called, before leaping two and three steps at a time. By now it was apparent that her brother wasn’t home. The rooms had a silent, vacant feel to them. “Where are you, Ben?” she called in desperation, as if by a strength of will she could make him be home.
Back downstairs. They always left notes for each other near the cordless telephone on the kitchen table. Nothing. Then she ran through the front room again, abruptly stopping in the front entryway. Their backpacks sat side by side on the floor inside the front door. Abby slowly approached, then squatted to inspect them. All her things seemed to be present: notebooks, pencils, books, even the plastic container of worms from the compost pile. Stuck behind her backpack was the telescoping fishing rod.
From her crouching position she contemplated the sudden appearance of their belongings until the phone rang behind her, causing her to cry out and nearly fall over. Lunging back through the house again, she grabbed the phone on the second ring. “Ben? Ben, is that you?”
Silence on the line, then a man’s voice, deep and steady. “Hello, Abigail.”
No one called her Abigail. It wasn’t even her real name. She’d seen her birth certificate; her given name was Abby. Timidly, she asked, “Who’s this?”
“I think you know who it is,” the voice said.
“What do you want? Where is my brother?”
“Whoa, Abigail. Slow down. I thought perhaps you’d appreciate an opportunity to thank me for returning your school supplies.”
Abby was getting mad. “What have you done with Ben?”
“Your little brother is just fine. And if you listen closely to me, he’ll stay that way.”
“He doesn’t know anything. I’m the one you want.”
“That’s what I thought, too, Abigail. When I returned your belongings, I intended to have this discussion with you. But Ben said you weren’t home, so I had to improvise. I think this new arrangement will work well, though. Ben’s a nice boy, Abigail.”
“Where is he? You better bring him home. When my dad finds out—”
“Abigail, please listen to me. Your brother is fine.”
“Where is he!” she demanded, so mad that she stamped her foot on the kitchen floor.
Silence on the line again, then the voice. “Take a look out your front window, Abigail. You’ll see that your brother is just fine.”
Abby jogged back through the house, afraid of what she’d find outside. Pulling the front door open, she looked through the storm door window to see the big luxury car parked across the street. The man sat behind the wheel, cell phone at his ear. Darkened glass made it difficult to see, but she spotted Ben’s head rising up in the backseat window. He looked so tiny and vulnerable, especially compared to the big man at the steering wheel. Another figure sat on the far side of Ben, but she couldn’t make out anything of his appearance.
Ben’s eyes, wide and round and scared, focused on Abby. From the phone she heard the man’s voice. “Abigail.”
When Ben slowly dropped out of sight again, Abby’s heart rose up in her throat. But when she saw the figure next to Ben struggling to push him down in the seat, she lost her composure completely.
“Abigail.”
The storm door flew open, the telephone crashed on the steps, and Abby exploded out of the front door. She ran at the car as hard as she could, heard muffled yelling from the driver, noticed frantic scrambling around inside, but before she even reached the edge of the yard, the car shot off down the street. She chased it a little way, until it turned the corner and headed south out of town on Highway 61.
Abby’s adrenaline surge quickly dissipated. Walking back to the house, she used her lingering anger to scold herself. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Now Ben was gone for good. She’d blown what little chance she’d had to bring him home.
The only other house on the street was the Soderstrom place. No lights were on there, no one to witness her chasing an out-of-town car down the street. Marcy’s parents were still in Arizona, and Marcy was probably down at the bar shooting a game of pool before going to bed. She’d have to be up early tomorrow to open the café.
Upon returning to the front door, Abby spied the discarded telephone lying in the grass. It began ringing, even with the back cover knocked off and the battery hanging out on its wire. “Hello?” she said, cupping the insides in her free hand.
“That was not the sort of behavior I expected out of you,” the man said.
“Bring my brother home. He didn’t do anything to you.”
“That’s just w
hat we need to talk about, Abigail. If you can control yourself, I promise that no harm will come to him.”
Abby went in the house, shut the door, took a seat in her father’s chair, and watched the street out front. “What do you want?” she asked.
“It’s really very simple, Abigail. You keep your mouth shut. You don’t say anything to anyone about what you saw today. Can you do that?”
Abby didn’t reply. All her strength was gone. She slouched in the chair, exhausted and discouraged. The telephone battery dangled against her shoulder.
The man said, “If you keep your end of the deal, Ben will come home in a few weeks.”
Still no response from Abby.
“Do we have us a deal, Abigail?”
Abby finally found her voice. “When will he come home?”
“Probably six weeks or so. Fourth of July at the latest. Won’t that be cause for a big celebration?”
“Why six weeks?”
“Do we have an agreement?”
“I don’t know anything, anyway,” she said.
“So there’s no reason to discuss what you don’t know. Not one word to anyone. Even this phone call. If anyone asks, it was a wrong number. Deal?”
Abby found it hard to think. The day had been too long. All she wanted was to crawl into bed, wake up tomorrow, and discover that this was all a bad dream.
“Abigail?”
“Okay. It’s a deal.” Silence on the line again. “Just don’t hurt my little brother,” she added, before realizing the line had been disconnected.
• • • • •
When her father came home half an hour later, Abby still sat in the chair. She looked at him, a solemn expression forcing the corners of his mouth to turn down. Matt switched on the entryway light and went to his daughter. “Why are you sitting here in the dark, Abby?”
She sat forward in the recliner. “Dad?”
“Listen, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
His words draped a mask of confusion over her face. How did he know?
“We just got word up at the Hall. It’s your friend, Rosie. You know, from the bait shop? She drowned today working her minnow seines.”
Abby shook her head. “Dad?”
“You know how high the water is now that the ice went out. And Rosie was really old. She shouldn’t have been out in the cold water like that.”
“Dad? Listen to me.”
“Most of the rocks are still ice covered. It was just an unfortunate—”
“Dad!”
Matthew paused, seemed to actually see his daughter for the first time. Saw the disemboweled phone in her lap. “What is it, honey?”
“Ben’s gone, Dad. Ben’s gone.”
FIVE
Mrs. Virginia Bean
The United States Post Office in Black Otter Bay sat about forty yards back from the curbing on Main Street near the center of town. Main Street was simply a narrowed stretch of Highway 61 where it passed through the city limits. The shoulder of the old highway in front of the post office had been converted into half a dozen angled parking slots for customers, with a series of five flag poles lining the front of the property. Every morning at six o’clock Mrs. Virginia Bean, the postmistress, raised the United States flag on the tallest, center pole. On days when the weather wasn’t too disagreeable, she ran a Minnesota state flag up one of the other poles and a black-and-white POW-MIA flag on another one. After twenty-five years as postmistress, however, she still had no idea what the other two poles were for.
Several years ago, some local hooligans used the two outer poles for their pranks. Arriving for work early in the morning, Mrs. Bean found any number of odd items flapping in the breeze atop one of the poles. Usually, it would be a pair of men’s underwear—sometimes long johns, other times briefs. One time, she found a high school letter jacket from Two Rivers, an Iron Range town seventy-five miles inland. She always suspected Daniel Simon to be the instigator, but Mrs. Bean had kept that suspicion to herself. She felt sorry for the Simon family, having to live with that abusive old drunk. Besides, Daniel always charmed her with his devil-may-care smile, while his younger brother Matthew usually tried to fix things by coming down to retrieve the fluttering garments.
Now, Mrs. Bean was no prude, but the morning she spotted the black lace bra and panties dangling high above the post office, she decided it had gone far enough. She cut the ropes off the two outer poles and posted a sign on them warning against vandalizing federal property. That was the end to the high-flying underwear, but she never knew if it ended because of her warnings or because Daniel Simon enlisted in the army.
The post office building itself was easily the ugliest building in Black Otter Bay. For years, Mrs. Bean had pleaded with post office headquarters in Duluth to do something about the rotting siding, sagging eaves, and mouse and chipmunk holes in the trim work. Finally, two years ago, a pallet of five-gallon buckets of paint and supplies arrived on the morning dispatch mail truck. Mrs. Bean advertised for volunteers to help repair, prime, and paint the post office, but, after inspecting the provisions, none of the local professionals would help. If they were going to volunteer their services, they said, the project should at least be suitable for a reference. In their opinion, attaching their names to this job could even hurt their reputations.
The problem was that the paint had been requisitioned through the federal government from Fort Ripley, 150 miles southwest of town, and consisted of three discontinued camouflage colors from the Vietnam War era. When the military’s current color schemes went toward the desert hues of the Middle East, the forty-year-old jungle colors became obsolete. Sheriff Marlon Fastwater and his nephew finally came forward to help, spending much of their free time that summer working on the building. It was Leonard Fastwater who came up with the idea of mixing two of the three colors, providing over twenty gallons of paint for the siding, enough for two coats. The end result for the post office was that it now boasted a two-tone color scheme: a blended pea soup green siding with an olive drab trim.
For that reason, Mrs. Bean thought it a blessing that the building sat so far back on the property. Most of the other buildings in town were rough-sawn cedar-clad storefronts, or solid brick and stone edifices. When Red Tollefson heard about the paint fiasco, he joked that they had the only camouflaged post office in the state. “Folks driving through town won’t even see it. It blends right into the woods behind it on the ridge.”
On the Saturday morning three days after eight-year-old Ben Simon went missing, Mrs. Virginia Bean fed slab wood into the post office’s barrel stove. It already radiated enough heat to warm the whole town, but she liked it hot. Over the top of the freestanding woodstove, she glanced at Sheriff Fastwater sitting next to her desk. Aligned in profile to her, one of his arms dangled at his side to scratch the ears of his dog, Gitch. A mixed-breed husky with plenty of malamute blood accounting for his formidable size, Gitchie Gami derived his name from the Ojibwe words for Lake Superior. Gentle by nature, yet ferociously loyal and protective of the sheriff, Gitch was known around the countryside for a unique physical trait: one of his eyes was a startling, opaque blue.
“Like shards of ice on the big lake,” the sheriff had told her once.
Mrs. Bean always made Gitch welcome on his visits. She kept a stash of dog biscuits in a desk drawer, and a heavy ceramic bowl for water on the floor. For his part, Gitch exuberantly greeted her with a ninety-pound nuzzle, then made himself at home on the braided rug she provided next to her desk.
Over the last few years, the two of them had been stopping in almost every day. Mrs. Bean enjoyed the visits, and considered the sheriff to be one of the kindest men she’d ever met. For all his lack of words, she thought he communicated the sincerest forms of friendship. His late Monday afternoon visits, for example, delivered a much-needed boost to her morale, as well as dinner at the end of a long shift. Other than the day after a holiday, Mondays were the heaviest, busiest days in the po
st office. Years ago, the sheriff noticed how stressful the first day of the week was for her, and started bringing in dinner to give her a break. At first, he’d share a pizza with her, or a takeout sandwich from the café. Soon, he began bringing his own homemade dinners: a grouse and wild rice soup, or venison stew. For her part, Mrs. Bean hid a small set of dishes and silverware in a supply cabinet. She even added long-stemmed wine glasses, with a variety of red and white wines locked in the bottom drawer of her desk.
This past winter, when daylight faded early, she introduced candles to the Monday evening dinners. She dimmed the lights by turning off one bank of fluorescents, then covered her desk with a linen tablecloth. Because Black Otter Bay was a rural branch office, she wasn’t required to wear a uniform, so Mondays often found her in a floral print dress. Jewelry suddenly appeared at the end of the workday. Mrs. Bean’s whole countenance lit up with the arrival of her two friends, and the dinner candles enhanced the delighted glow in her blue eyes.
On the other hand, Saturday represented a half-day of work for Mrs. Bean, and, like today, the sheriff often stopped in early to share a thermos of coffee from the café. She closed and latched the doors on the woodstove, straightened up, then brushed slivers of kindling off the front of her dress. Gitch was sprawled out full length on the rug, his body tucked up tight against the sheriff’s boots. Mrs. Bean’s blue eyes picked up the black in her sweater, giving them an almost violet shimmer. She planned to attend the memorial service for Rose Bengston after work, so she’d avoided her usual bright colors for a modest black shift and sweater. She wished she had the appropriate words to comfort the sheriff. He was under enormous pressure, and the sudden death of Rosie only added to his misery.
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