“Exactly.”
“Sounds a bit like a conspiracy.”
Mark shrugged.
Just then, the waitress arrived with four slices of pie. Mark and Emily both groaned, shocked at the size of the slices, each blaming the other for ordering so many, then blaming the waitress for not telling them. The waitress smirked, “I’ll bring your thimbleberry pie in a minute.” They both groaned again, shaking their heads, capitulating before the first bite.
They decided which pie each would start with. Mark had a knife in his hand and asked if she wanted her slice cut now. She waved him off, and then pointed her fork like a weapon. “Just don’t eat it all.”
He pointed the knife back. “You either.”
They dug in. “Wow this is good,” he said.
“This is perfect,” she agreed.
“I have to confess to something,” Emily said after another bite.
“What? You’re not going to share your pie?”
“Maybe not.” She took another bite, then looked up at him with a nervous smile. “I hope you don’t get mad at me.”
“For what?”
“I sort of snooped around yesterday when you were at the grocery store.”
“You snooped around the house?” It sounded too much like an accusation, and he immediately tried softening it with a broad smile.
“Nothing invasive. Just walked around the house, checked the basement. I was just a bit uneasy because I didn’t know who you were. A stranger. Your aunt wasn’t there.” She laughed anxiously.
“I guess you didn’t find anything too incriminating or you would have left,” he said flatly.
“Actually, I did find something.”
“What?”
“A book.”
“Which book? The one about the history of local Native Americans?”
“No, a different book, about doctors—”
“Because the book I read,” Mark interrupted, “had some interesting bits. I’m a bit of a history buff, did I tell you?”
She shook her head weakly as the waitress arrived with the last piece of pie. “Here’s the thimbleberry.”
They thanked her but she lingered. Mark looked up at her. She was biting her lip. “I have a confession,” the waitress finally said.
“What, did you snoop around my house too?” Mark said.
Emily jabbed her fork in his direction, frowning hard.
“No,” the waitress answered. “Why would I do that? I’m talking about this thimbleberry pie. The berries are from Minnesota, not from the UP. I just found out. When they’re in season, we do get the berries fresh from Keweenaw.”
Emily dramatically raised a hand to her chest. “Mud duck berries?”
“If you come back in a couple months, you can get the authentic UP version,” the waitress said before leaving.
“I suppose you’ll still be here,” Mark said, poking at Emily.
“Ha, ha.”
“What’s a mud duck, anyway?”
“A person from Minnesota, of course.”
He shook his head. “Never heard that.”
She scrunched her nose. “Really? Maybe it’s a Wisconsin thing. You know what we call people from Illinois, right?”
“That one I do know. And I can say it’s well deserved.”
Emily laughed. “So should we trade now?” she suggested.
He looked at her pie, which was at least half gone, and nodded. He nudged his plate toward her, but he kept his grip. “You push yours first.”
“What’s this, a prisoner exchange?” She laughed.
“I don’t trust you.”
They successfully swapped pies after counting to three. After she finished the last bite of apple pie, she started to reach for the peach, but stopped, sticking her tongue out as if exhausted. “I can’t eat any more. Too much, and then the milk.”
“It’s fine. We can have it later.”
Mark finished a quarter of the pecan, and they each took a bite of the thimbleberry. He ordered an entire apple pie to go. “It’s for George,” Mark said, responding to Emily’s dubious frown.
The restaurant was now half full. It was five forty-five and every few minutes another group came in.
Mark paid, and as they waited for the change Emily said, “Thanks for helping me out. Letting me stay at your aunt’s place. Paying for my pie.”
“Sure,” he replied.
They stared at each other at each other for a long second, neither disengaging. The moment endured, normally at first, then smiles swelled slowly on their faces, ready to burst into awkward laughter—
Screeeeech! came from one side of the restaurant. They turned to see someone moving a microphone stand in front of a tall chair.
“Live music?” Mark asked.
As they walked towards the parking lot, Mark told Emily that he, too, had a confession. “Bear Foot told me he got food poisoning here last week,” he said.
Her head snapped toward him. “What!”
“But not with the pie!”
“What did he eat?”
“Fish.”
Emily frowned and wagged her finger at him. “If I get sick . . ."
“You won’t. If you had wanted to order fish, I would have stopped you.”
“Gee, thanks.” She gave him a sarcastically stern look.
In the adjacent empty parking lot, some young men were hanging out in front of a closed bank. Five of them Mark counted. All of them with floppy brown hair. Talking loudly, each seemingly wanting to outdo the other. Twenty-somethings—barely.
“Watch this,” one of them yelled to the other. He took a beer bottle and attempted a handstand on the top, but he crashed on his side instead. He brushed himself off while the others mocked him for failing. He challenged the others. “Fine, I’ll do it,” one of them said.
He set the bottle back up.
“What idiots,” Emily said.
Mark grunted, “Who, those guys?” pretending not to have noticed.
“Yeah.”
Mark unlocked the car.
The guy put his thumb on the bottle, but this time the bottle fell and shattered.
There were screams of “Oh my God!” and profane scoldings.
Emily ran to the scene. Mark, frozen for a second, thinking whatever it was wasn’t that bad, that there was no need to overreact, set the plastic bag with the pies in the car. When he heard Emily yelling for someone to give up his shirt, he ran over. He flinched when he saw the blood spewing.
She wrapped the injured young man’s bloodied hand and had him raise his arm. “Mark, get your car. We have to get him to the hospital.”
For a split second, Mark hesitated. The thought of returning a blood-soaked rental car and being charged for “excessive wear and tear” crossed his mind, and he lamented opting out of the extra insurance.
In the back seat, the failed stunt performer banged his head several times against the seat and called himself an idiot. Emily held his hand up, telling him to calm down.
As they raced out of the parking lot, Mark spotted Bear Foot walking down the street carrying a guitar case. He was about to point him out to Emily but stopped himself when he saw her in the rearview mirror. She was in a zone, and pointing out Bear Foot with a guitar sounded lame.
A few minutes later, following directions grunted by the young man, named Conrad, they arrived at the hospital. Emily directed Conrad out and rushed him inside. Mark parked the car and waited in the lobby. About five minutes later, Emily came out. “It’s under control. He won’t be doing much with that hand for a while. He sliced it down to the abductor pollicis brevis.”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
She grinned and shook her head. “Shut up.”
“Seriously, though. Good thing you were there,” Mark said.
She blew out a long breath. “You don’t have to wait around. I know my way back,” she said with a smirk.
“You sure you don’t want me to wait with you?”
She shook he
r head. “No, there’s nothing for you to do here. Plus, aren’t the electric car people due back any time?”
Mark nodded. “Oh right.” The Hinton’s can’t stay! “I’ll see you at the house in a bit then.” He started walking away, then stopped. He yelled out, “Hey!” She turned around, her eyebrows lifted. “You did a great thing there. I’m really impressed.”
She smiled modestly and gave a delicate wave.
As Mark pulled into the driveway, his phone rang. Emily, he thought, wanting him to go back to the hospital. But it wasn’t. It was Frank Walters
“I’ve got some news for you,” the lawyer said flatly. He told Mark that Vivian did have a child, though the adoption was closed. Nothing in the will had changed because of this, Walters reiterated.
Instead of walking into the house, Mark started down the sidewalk toward the lake as he asked Walters questions. But nothing was known—all the information was sealed in court documents. Mark asked how they could find out more, and Walters blew out a breath testily. The fact that his private investigator friend had found out as much as he had was extraordinary enough. Mark asked him to thank his friend, and after a few seconds, Walters explained that getting more information would involve paperwork, the court system, and the state bureaucracy. But even then he thought it unlikely to be successful. He also suggested that they keep Vivian’s wishes in mind. She hadn’t mentioned her biological child when she wrote her will, he said, and perhaps she wanted to keep it all in the past.
By the time they had finished talking, Mark was at the highway. He crossed it and strolled along the beach. He took in the air, the waves of the lake, its vastness, and he pondered the aunt he barely knew and the child she gave up for adoption. His cousin.
Chapter Nineteen
The doctor treating Conrad came out to talk to Emily. It was Dr. Currant, who had treated Emily the day before.
“How is he?” she asked.
“He’ll be fine, thanks to you.”
“Right place, right time, I guess. It was nothing, really.”
“I’m Jim, by the way,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“Emily.” His shake was as gentle as a surgeon’s, and his hand was warm.
“I didn’t realize you were a doctor when I treated you yesterday.”
“You didn’t ask.”
He laughed. “You’re right. In fact, I’ve been told by our new patient advocate that I should interact more with the patients, get to know them better, as people.”
Emily smiled. “I see.”
“Where do you practice?” he asked.
“Actually, I’m starting residency next month.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
“Chicago. Lincoln Presbyterian.”
“Great hospital.”
She grinned, “I’m excited about it.”
He pointed to his eye. “How’s your eye? I see you’ve removed the patch.”
“Yes.” She smiled impishly. A tacit understanding passed between them. “I think it’s all right now.”
“Good,” he said. Dr. Currant was maybe thirty but looked younger with his smooth face and reddish-brown hair, parted in the middle, if intentionally parted at all. He had no hint of a Yooper accent, so she figured he was from somewhere else, somewhere out west. “Are you from this area originally?”
He shook his head. “No. Overland Park, Kansas. But my grandfather was from here. He had a summer home on Indian Lake. We’d come up here every year.”
“Neat.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to do your residency here? In fact, we have a new, state-of-the-art hospital off Highway 2 opening up in a couple months. It’s going to be a gem.”
Emily laughed. “I appreciate it, but—”
“Nah, I’m only kidding—well, I’m not really. We’re always looking for talented, young doctors, but Lincoln Presbyterian . . ."
She shut her eyes for a long second, and a life with Dr. Currant flashed in her mind. She smiled. “If I ever change my mind, I’ll come and see you,” she said.
It was more gesture than offer, but he smiled and his eyes lit up as if she meant it genuinely.
Emily strolled back to the house, taking the same path she had the day before. But now she didn’t feel uneasy. She felt high on herself. Part of it was from helping the young man, but then she thought of Mark.
She couldn’t believe the transformation he’d made in a single day, from oddball stranger to a friend—perhaps more than just a friend. He inexplicably filled a void, and she worried she’d have that emptiness all over again when she left. Then again, Chicago was a month away, and they’d be near each other, and hopefully they could reconnect. . . . She wondered what he thought of her.
As she approached the house, an amusing idea popped into her head. She’d knock on the door and ask if there was a room available. She jauntily climbed up the steps and knocked three times before turning around, trying to contain her smile and energy. When she heard the door creak, she waited a long second before facing the house.
But it wasn’t Mark who opened the door. As if she’d been punched in the stomach, she fell back a couple steps. For a few seconds, Emily couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t form any words, either. And when she could, she stuttered. “W-w-what are you doing here?” Darkness encroached on the edges of her vision. John towered over her.
“I came for you, of course,” he said matter-of-factly. He smiled gently, the kind of smile a parent offers to their dismayed child.
She swayed a bit. “But . . ." She hastily reached out to John’s arm and tugged him. He stepped outside onto the porch.
“Are you angry or something?” he asked.
She needed to move this conversation away, far away from the cavernous house where Mark might be listening, wondering, ready to ask questions. Was he confused? Upset? What did he know? Had he put it all together?
She reached around John and shut the door, scarcely looking inside. Without a word, she walked down the steps, her legs wobbly. She stepped onto the grass and stopped near the fir tree under which she had been chilling out a couple hours earlier. She turned around and folded her arms, thinking of what to say. “You shouldn’t have come,” she said breathlessly.
“Did you think I’d give up on you that easily?”
In fact, she had. Her eyes darted to the house—no sign of Mark—and then set back on John. “How did you find me, anyway?”
“I stopped at the hotel along the highway and asked the clerk if you were a guest. She told me you might be here. I wasn’t expecting you to be at a bed and breakfast.”
“It’s a long story. Where’s your car?”
He pointed across the street. “Over there—that rental. I drove by the house twice. It’s hard to find. There’s no sign. I mentioned it to the owner.”
“He doesn’t like guests. Besides, he’s not the owner, his aunt is.”
“His aunt? Really?”
“Yeah. I just can’t believe you came all the way out here.”
“Well I wanted an explanation.”
She met his eyes briefly. “Don’t you know why?” He was wearing a polo shirt with asymmetrical stripes of yellow, gray, blue, and white, untucked over dark, unscathed jeans. A strange casualness—ersatz as it was—that she’d never seen in him before. She knew him in button-down shirts and tan pants, a white overcoat.
“No,” he said simply. “I need to know what’s changed for you.”
“Can’t we just move on? It’s better this way.”
“I need to know. Can you just tell me?”
She went with the easiest. “Distance, for one.”
“What if I took a job in Chicago?”
“You’re going to move to Chicago?” she said doubtfully.
He nodded. “I have an offer. That’s what I was going to surprise you with on Mackinac.”
Emily turned around, tears welling in her eyes. It was then that she noticed a figure walking up the street. She rubbed her blurry eyes, and confir
ming who it was, she demanded that John leave.
“Emily, please—”
She pushed on his shoulder, but he didn’t budge. “Let’s go. I’ll go with you,” she said.
He moved. “Where?”
“Anywhere. Let’s go.”
With her hand on his arm, she guided him faster toward the car across the street. Mark shouted out, “Hey! Emily.”
Emily stopped and looked back at Mark. “I’ll meet you in the car,” she said to John, forcefully nudging him once more before walking back toward Mark. They met at the edge of the street.
“What’s going on?” Mark asked. He looked in John’s direction. “That’s not another guest, is it? Because if it is, I like how you got rid of him.”
Emily shook her head. “No, just a friend.”
“A friend? I didn’t know you had friends here.”
“I’ll explain later.”
He glanced over her shoulder and nodded. “Sure. I have something I want to tell you.” His mouth curved into a frown.
She sensed a looming confession, and what flashed in her mind was that it had something to do with how he felt about her. She started stepping away, pointing back toward John. “I’m going out for a quick drink with my friend. Tell me when I get back. I won’t be gone long.”
“Okay, sure. See you later,” he said, but his voice fell flat.
Emily couldn’t handle whatever Mark was about to tell her, or give it the attention that it deserved. Not in front of John. But she also felt bad for cutting him off so abruptly. She got into the car. “Let’s go,” she said. She briefly checked over her shoulder and saw Mark staring curiously at the car—or rather, the driver of the car.
“Where are we going?” John asked.
“To a bar.”
“A bar?” He started driving. “So who’s that guy?”
“Oh, that’s Mark, the owner’s nephew.”
“Huh? Then who’s the one who let me into the house?”
“That must have been George. He’s a guest.”
John laughed. “I thought it was strange when you told me his aunt was the owner. His aunt would’ve had to have been a hundred.”
Emily laughed. “Sorry. I thought you had spoken to Mark at the house.”
They laughed a little more.
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