“Behold the Next Generation!” Mimi declared, pointing. Standing three-plus stories high, its massive “logs” gleaming gold with some sort of sealant, topped by a small forest worth of cedar shake roofing channeled with copper flashing, was what looked like a resort but was in fact what someone apparently considered a “weekend place.”
Down a ways from where they stood, Mimi’s cousin Gerry and a group of his pals stalked along the edge of a tiny strip of manicured lawn. They reminded her of something…. She had it. They looked like the primates confronting the obelisk in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
They grumbled and gestured as they walked, in particular her big, blond, Thor-lookalike cousin Gerald, who kept flinging his arms out in an apelike show of aggression. For the sake of the family’s dignity, she hoped he didn’t start throwing tufts of grass at the place.
Only Half-Uncle Bill, aka Mr. Debbie, stood motionless, his naturally benign face corrugated in lines of concentration as he chewed on a piece of grass. Poor Half-Uncle Bill; the years of marriage to Debbie were taking their toll. For one, he was wearing a salmon-colored polo shirt, salmon-colored polo shirts being this summer’s uniform for upper-middle-class, fiftysomething men. For two, a neat little bouclé rug of dark hair covered his balding head.
Mimi followed his unblinking gaze. He was probably admiring the monstrosity. All indicators suggested he’d been brainwashed by Debbie into that perpetual state of misery known as “wanting more.”
“Isn’t it the most obscene thing you have ever seen?” Mimi asked Joe, feeling perversely proud.
Joe didn’t answer. He was watching her narrowly, like he half expected her to start chanting a spell. Oh, yeah. She’d told him about Uff-Dead. She ignored his speculative look and tried again to get his mind off her job. “I talked to the builder when it was going up this spring. Do you know what it is?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “It’s a replica of an Adirondack’s camp built in the 1880s. Of course, it has a few modern embellishments. Those would be the home theater, a three-thousand-dollar built-in cappuccino machine, and a four-car garage,” she said. “Want to hear the best part?”
“Do I?”
“You do. It’s not even real. I mean logs. They’re made out of recycled newspapers and cocoa-bean hulls. Very environmentally correct.” She glanced at him to see whether he appreciated the irony of this. “Yup, you’re looking at over ten thousand square feet of environmental correctness. I wonder what his heating bill is.”
“Ah, hell. I’ll bet the guy heats the whole damn place with wood. Look out, Superior National Forest! The environmentalists are coming!” While she’d been talking, Cousin Gerald and little grizzled Hank Sboda, who owned the cottage on the other side of the monolith, had detached themselves from their companions and wandered over.
“Gerry, Hank, this is a friend of mine, Joe,” she introduced the men. “Joe, my cousin Gerry, and this is Hank Sboda.”
“Friend, huh?” Gerry said, looking Joe over. Mimi had followed her older cousin around Chez Ducky throughout her childhood. Consequently, he still felt a certain responsibility toward her. “Mimi doesn’t have many—I mean, she doesn’t bring many friends up here. You must be special. How’d you meet?”
Joe clasped Gerry’s proffered hand. “I helped her out of a bit of a mess.”
Gerry shot a concerned glance at Mimi. “You in trouble?”
“No. He meant a literal mess. I was covered in mud and he offered me a ride.”
“Oh.” That she’d been covered in mud obviously didn’t surprise Gerry. His gaze fell on the stains on Joe’s shirt. He opened his mouth, caught Mimi’s eye, closed his mouth, and turned back to the mansion. “So, whaddya think of ’er, Joe?”
“What do you think?” Joe rejoined.
“I think,” Gerry replied, “that is the biggest pile of crap to hit the North Woods since Babe the Blue Ox took a dump. I mean, look at it, Joe. It’s a good ten feet taller than any building within fifty miles.”
“We call it Prescott’s Erection, after its owner,” Hank Sboda put in, coloring and glancing sheepishly at Mimi, who, despite not only having heard the tag before but having been the one who’d coined it, demurely lowered her eyes.
“Prescott’s—” Joe choked. Men were so sensitive.
“Aw, come on,” Mimi said. “You don’t think maybe there’s a little compensation going on here?”
“Can you imagine what it’ll be like at the Big House this winter after the trees drop their leaves and you look out and instead of a winter wonderland all you see is that thing looming up into the sky?” Gerry muttered.
“Unpleasant?” Joe asked.
“And look at that.” Mimi pointed up at the octagonal tower perched at the corner nearest them. “There are fire towers up here that aren’t as high.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Gerry said.
“Okay,” Mimi conceded. “But the point is I come up here in the fall sometimes and with that thing towering over me I’m going to feel like I’m in a prison camp waiting for the guards to open fire.”
“Chez Ducky doesn’t look much like a prison camp,” Joe said uncomfortably.
She peered at him. “Say, you don’t actually like this thing, do you?”
“No.” His response was immediate and sincere.
“We hate it,” she said, looking to Hank and Gerald for confirmation. Both men nodded.
“Hate it,” echoed Gerry’s wife, Vida, emerging from the wood’s path.
Mimi approved of Vida, a wiry redhead who had gone back to school a few years ago in a felicitous move to become a massage therapist—felicitous because she often practiced on Mimi.
“Hi,” Joe said. “I’m Joe.”
“I’m Vida. Wouldn’t you hate it if you were us, Joe?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “In fact, I’d probably consider selling because of it.”
Mimi waited for someone to point out the error in his reasoning. No one did.
“And go where?” she finally asked, exasperated with her relatives. “It would only be a temporary reprieve. Sooner or later every pothole in the state is going to be cheek to jowl with places like that.” She jerked her head toward the fauxlog monstrosity.
“Besides, we could never replace Chez Ducky. It’s paid for, and spreading the cost of upkeep makes it affordable for all of us. Plus, some of us couldn’t afford any vacation at all if we didn’t have here to come to,” she finished pitiably.
Gerry shot her a bemused glance. She ignored him. No need to tell Joe her “vacations” usually lasted from May through September. She was aiming for sympathy here, not full disclosure.
“We’re selling.”
Mimi’s, Gerry’s, and Vida’s heads snapped toward Hank Sboda.
“Huh?” Gerry asked, his lanternlike jaw dropping open.
“We decided to sell,” Hank said, his tone defensive. “Fowl Lake in’t what it used to be and never will be again. We can’t afford to stay and we can’t afford not to sell. Just like Mimi here said.”
“I never said that!” Mimi protested.
Gerry stared at Hank in horror. “You can’t be serious. The Sbodas have been on Fowl Lake almost as long as the Olsons.”
“Longer,” Hank said primly, “but that in’t the point. Point is, a…realtor tells us she can sell our land for enough that we can buy a condo in Fort Myers.”
Gerry snorted, his expression contemptuous.
“Don’t look at me like that, Olson. You’re a young man,” Hank said.
Actually Gerry was pushing fifty, but now wasn’t the time to point this out.
“And you got lots of folks to help with all the stuff needs doing,” Hank went on heatedly. “My kids got their own kids now and don’t get up here more than a couple times a year. That leaves all the maintenance to me and Mary. Damn near got a hernia getting the dock in this spring.”
“You’re selling ’cause it’s too much work?” Gerry asked. Despite plenty of evidence to the contr
ary, like most line-bred Minnesotans Gerry liked to think he represented the apex of a staunch work ethic. Hank Sboda enjoyed the same fantasy.
The woolly caterpillar of Hank’s brows dipped toward the bridge of his nose. “Course not,” he exclaimed. “That’s just part of it. Hell and damn, Gerry! It’s fine for you to talk. You got eight thousand feet of lakeshore and a whole forest standing between you and what’s happening out here. “I got two hundred feet with this, this—hotel on my east, and now Svenstrom’s sold on my other side and I hear the guy what’s bought it is going to start excavating next spring and it’s gonna be another one of them!” Hank stabbed a finger at the log wall. His face had gone an alarming shade of fuchsia. “Hell, I’ll be hemmed in with nothing to look at but fake log siding.”
Aha, thought Mimi, the Svenstroms’ inexplicable absence from the party was thus explained. Turncoats. She gazed sadly at Hank, uncertain what to say and guiltily aware that deep within she was giddy with relief that such considerations didn’t affect Chez Ducky. Still, Fowl Lake wouldn’t be the same without the Sbodas puttering around it in their old twelve-foot Alumacraft.
“Might as well sell now before someone wakes up and realizes this is nothing but a glorified slough.” The air seemed to have gone out of Hank, because he said this last on a forlorn whisper.
“How much do you expect to make?”
Mimi wheeled around to discover Debbie beside her.
“Debbie,” Hank said, “you know—”
“Two thousand a lake-frontage foot,” she answered for him. She reached across Hank, shoving her hand toward Joe. “Debbie Olson. Nice to meet you.”
He held out his hand to shake hers and instead she slapped a small printed card into his palm.
“What’s that?” Mimi asked.
“My business card. As soon as I pass my realtor’s test, I’ll be licensed.”
Everything started to make sense. “You’re the realtor who Hank here has been talking to?” she asked, shocked at this open betrayal of family and friends and…Chez Ducky.
“I’m not a realtor yet. But yes, Hank and I have had a few talks.” She didn’t look in the least bit embarrassed. The woman had no shame.
Mimi rolled her eyes, disgusted.
“That is a lot of money,” Vida conceded. She caught Mimi’s dagger glance. “I mean, this isn’t Gull Lake or Vermillion. Why’d anyone be willing to pay that for land here?”
“The ‘where’ don’t matter to people like Prescott,” Hank said sourly. “He just wants to build a big, new, showy place to prove how successful he is to his friends. Though there don’t seem to be too many of them crawling around.”
“You know Prescott?” Joe asked, breaking his silence.
“Nah-uh,” Hank said. “One of the local guys doing the landscaping—and, come on! This is the North Woods, for the love of God. Who landscapes the North Woods?—told us his name.”
Joe turned to Gerry. “Have you met him?”
“Nope. The guy’s a hermit,” Gerry said.
“I think he may be agoraphobic,” Mimi put in, turning her shoulder to Debbie. Birgie would deal with her later. “He’s a computer genius, a professor on sabbatical from Berkeley or MIT, I think. He invented some sort of Web application he gets millions in royalties for and decided to build that place as a retreat. There he is now.” She pointed up at the third-story turret window, where a pale, pudgy face looked down at them.
“He looks so young,” Joe murmured.
“Yeah,” Mimi said. “He can’t be much more than twenty-three or twenty-two. Probably one of those kids who graduated from college at twelve. He’s always up there looking down like some weird little male Rapunzel. I’d feel sorry for him if I didn’t have to look at this eyesore every day. Kind of kills the sympathy reflex, you know?”
“He’s pathetic,” Gerry agreed. “I mean, what kind of guy pays God-knows-what to build a house as big as most resorts, then never has anyone up to visit and never comes outside?”
Joe sighed, his gaze fixed on the face in the window high above. He lifted a hand in a weak salute. “My son.”
Chapter Seven
Prescott Tierney looked down as his father gave him a brief two-fingered salute. He flushed with embarrassment and attempted to melt back into the room and out of sight. Unfortunately, Prescott’s was not a physique given to melting.
What the hell was Joe doing down there amongst his neighbors? Joe was supposed to be visiting him. Not that Prescott gave a damn if or when Joe visited, but it was just common courtesy to show up when you said you were going to show up. Seeing Joe down there, ecstatically not with Prescott, brought back all his adolescent anger. God knew, it was an old pattern.
Even before his mother’s death, Joe hadn’t been around much. He was always somewhere else, becoming rich, worldly, and important. Oh, he showed up during holidays and birthdays, always toting some wildly inappropriate gift. The man apparently never talked to his wife or looked at his son, or he would have known that Prescott had no discernable athletic ability.
Why couldn’t Joe have just celebrated the fact that Prescott was a genius? He wasn’t bragging; it was fact. He’d been a boy genius who liked math and physics and The Lord of the Rings and would have preferred his own computer to some stupid hockey stick. Besides, who was supposed to show him how to use a hockey stick? Not Joe, not in the five minutes every few months he was around. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be his mom. She, like him, was an academic. She, like him, was a genius (IQ 165). She, like him, lived a cerebral life.
And she was proud of Prescott.
Proud of them, he amended. His mother’s single-minded dedication to his welfare had seen that he’d had the best possible educations. Since that obviously meant home-schooling—for, as she’d often said, who better to teach a genius than a genius?—it also meant constantly preparing herself for what she’d called “the sacred task of molding a brilliant mind.” Her faith in herself was not misplaced, either. At nine, he’d nailed the SATs.
Then she’d died, hit by a bus as she was crossing the street talking on her cell phone in a heated debate with the chancellor of Harvard University over whether or not Prescott would be admitted as a full-time student at age ten. Prescott had never forgiven Harvard. He’d done his undergraduate work at Princeton.
Joe had shown up in time for the funeral looking confused—the only time in Prescott’s memory he could recall Joe looking so. After a week of staring at each other, Joe had come up with the outrageous suggestion that Prescott tag after him when he returned to work and attend schools in other countries. Prescott had wasted no time in shooting down that halfhearted proposal. And it was halfhearted. Even at ten Prescott recognized relief when he saw it.
Prescott proposed instead that he go to the elite boarding school he and his mother had occasionally toyed with the idea of his attending while they waited for him to reach the chronological age supposedly erudite institutions required of their students. He didn’t so much propose as insist.
Thank God, Joe had let him go. The only mildly surprising part was that Joe had actually continued showing up on holidays and birthdays, and persisted in taking him out of school for a month each summer to live in whatever luxurious short-term rental he was then currently occupying. It must have become an ingrained habit, because Joe was still showing up periodically even when it should have been clear to him that Prescott did not need Joe to play daddy. He didn’t need Joe at all.
He supposed Joe’s ego could not stand the idea that his only child didn’t care for his company. Especially when everyone else did. After all, Joe was handsome, debonair, and charismatic.
Prescott’s lip began to twitch. He banged his forehead once against the wall next to the window—but not too hard, as he bruised easily. Plus it had taken him hours to get his Diane Arbus originals perfectly aligned. He looked down.
How had Joe come to be there?
Knowing Joe, by now the Olsons had discovered he was some sor
t of prodigal son or better yet, the uncrowned king of the Olsons and invited him to be guest of honor at their little shindig. That was typical of Joe. Somehow, he always managed to fit in. Despite looking like he just stepped out of GQ, he seemed perfectly comfortable amongst the Nordic types standing around admiring Bombadil House.
Okay, he knew it was a little sketchy, but Tolkien had been his hero since he’d been five. And so it was fitting that he should name this place, which he’d designed, with some help from Architectural Digest and Adirondack Home, to be his refuge from the outside world, after The Lord of the Rings’ famous happy hermit. He briefly wondered whether anyone at MIT realized he’d gone into self-imposed exile. He doubted it.
Except for some of his students at MIT, no one had even asked where he was going on the year sabbatical he’d taken following the college’s sale of his Internet security program. Fine with him. He didn’t feel any compulsion to share his personal life with the school’s second-gen Silicon Valley greedmeisters and relentlessly ambitious grad students. They could jockey all they wanted for the second rung on the genius ladder. He knew he stood at the top. Still, it was hard standing alone at the top of the heap. He needed a break; he needed to find himself a simple place where a man could contemplate whatever it was he wanted to contemplate and not be made to feel like an outcast by even so little as a walk across the campus grounds.
Here, at Fowl Lake, he felt he more or less belonged. No one expected anything of him. They didn’t ask him stupid questions like what his favorite football team was, or what he was working on that would make his next million. Here, he just was part of the scenery. Like the Olsons. Oh, he realized he wasn’t here as a part of the Olson milieu—he wasn’t delusional. They were more like sea lions and penguins in the South Pole, cohabiting on a rock atoll, separate but equal.
Prescott’s eye caught a motion below and he looked down at the scrawny red-haired woman who’d joined the group below. He wondered whether Joe had told the Olsons he was his son. He leaned sideways and peered closer. Nope. Prescott knew this because no one’s face betrayed the startled expression people always got upon hearing this news. He’d seen the look countless times before.
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