“Kristina, baby,” he said. “It’s Joel. Can I come in?”
I didn’t hear her answer, but he went in and closed the door and within a minute the water was running in the bath. The sheriff stuck his head out and asked me to pack a few changes of clothes into an overnight bag while they finished up. When they came out, Kristina was in the sheriff’s arms, wearing a bathrobe. She held tight to the sheriff’s shoulder, wild eyes darting to the shadows.
Outside, once we succeeded in getting Kristina into the car, the sheriff took a key ring from his pocket, removed a key, and gave it to me.
“Looks like you’re the man of the house now.”
* * *
I was grateful I had a job to distract me from the madness. That first day after the sheriff took Kristina away I lost myself in cracking eggs for pancake batter, in slamming potatoes through the french fry maker, in dicing onions for the huge pots of soup we made. Cooking was something I could control, a science of a sort in which my experiments always turned out more or less the same. My plates were worthy of photographs. Egg platters that could be featured in menus. The cross-hatched grill marks on my pork chops were impeccable. Aside from the orders that trickled in one at a time, something was always dirty enough to be cleaned at the Aurora. The deep fryer and grill were on metal stands that I pulled out from the wall so I could scrub the floors, sweep away the odd chicken chunk or french fry that went flying during service. I took a rag into the cooler to soak up the puddles of condensation that collected in the corners. It was a fine balancing act, keeping my attention on these necessary yet trivial tasks while the sheriff sought out what had happened to Jenny.
One afternoon a few days after my return, a familiar figure in a tiny blue hatchback pulled into the Aurora and I ran off the line into the dining room to see him pass the wide window there and into our back lot. Leaving what I was cooking to burn, I cut back through the kitchen, the dish room, and the break room, and rounding the last corner I heard the screen door slam shut as Leon made his way outside. Peeking around the cooler, I saw Svenson climbing out of the little car as Leon approached. They shook hands and Svenson called Leon sir before he pulled an envelope from his back pocket and pressed it into Leon’s hand. The sight of the catering money sent my mind into a frenzy. Suddenly, I understood why Leon would prefer to have a sometimes truant stoner working for him rather than the previous cook, who had gone to him about my drug use. I snuck closer to the screen door to see if what they said would confirm my suspicions but I couldn’t quite hear. I wanted more than anything to run out and confront Svenson—he couldn’t kill me with Leon around, could he? When they shook hands again I turned and ran back to the kitchen to throw a couple more chicken breasts on the grill to replace the ones that were now charred black.
Leon walked up from the office a few minutes later with the envelope in his hand, made his way to the cash register to key in the catering totals, then left through the front door without a word to anyone. Not that this surprised me; I was working the closing shift and he often took off for hours at a time when I was in charge, but my new suspicions about him and Svenson led me to wonder if I knew him at all.
That was when I began pacing. I lost hours up and down Jenny’s hallway, back and forth in the living room, out on the back deck. I stared hard into the thin forest that lined the edge of the property. Tall and narrow firs obstructed my view of the neighbor’s house and beyond that, Old Main and the A&W on the other side, behind which the train tracks ran. The train whistle was the only thing that could draw me out of my thoughts. If I wasn’t already out there when I heard the signal—two long, one short, one long—I’d make my way to the deck, descend the stairs, and cross through the neighbor’s yard to the A&W where I could watch the HOPEs pass by.
I slept every night at Jenny’s, made it my home. Russell came by when he could and I launched myself at him, tearing off his clothes, losing myself in his arms, but I was most grateful for the nights when he would show up tired, lie next to me on the couch, and fall asleep while we watched The Odd Couple or The Jeffersons, his breath on my neck, a tossed-over leg keeping me weighted down, grounded.
Although I could’ve gone into Jenny’s room at any time, I didn’t. I had, of course, checked to make sure she wasn’t in there, but beyond that I left her room alone. I told myself each passing day that she had run away—that Svenson had nothing to do with it—that she would be back.
But then, on my seventh day back in Holm, I knew something was wrong. Standing at the crossing as the morning train made its way south, I noticed the HOPEs were disappearing; rather, they were already gone. Jenny had known this would happen when she made them, you can’t expect graffiti to last, but their absence caught my eye: new patches of brown paint covered most of each train car and fresh identification numbers had been stenciled in where Jenny’s pieces had hidden them. On the afternoon train I would find it was the same, not a single HOPE remained. The cars were free of all graffiti.
Fourteen
Cars and pickup trucks lined the county road for a quarter-mile, so Russell pulled right up to the gathering and let me out. He had been planning to join me, to park the car and return, but his pager buzzed as I opened the door.
“I can come back,” he said. “It shouldn’t take long.”
“No problem,” I said. “I can find my own way to town.”
We stood there looking at each other for a second before I leaned back into the car and pressed my lips to his. He smiled when I drew away, a departure from the last time I had tried to bring our shadowy relationship into the light of day, then honked his horn twice as he drove off.
I watched his car round the bend, then stepped into the huddle of volunteers, a mass of red-and-black plaid and denim rolled up over leather boots, to see the sheriff standing before the crowd, a small light strapped to his head and a bottle of water in each hand as he addressed the group of about fifty, some of whom I recognized from the Arlington and the Aurora and even a couple from the field party and the Confederate flag revival. The sheriff was haggard, the bags under his eyes suggesting he hadn’t caught more than a brief nap for a while, and his voice was weak, going hoarse. He turned one way and then the other as he explained proper procedure for searching, giving tips on how not to miss anything, then pointed out as an example the chain of men in chest waders and orange safety vests, arms linked, slowly crossing the river as one.
“A young couple found the car here,” he called to the crowd. “It had been here for days, long enough for the bell and the light that signaled that the door was open to kill the battery. No sign of Jenny, not even her fingerprints—the car has been wiped clean, the door handles, the rearview mirror, the keys. No sign of her mother, the car’s owner, either. Very suspicious. A smarter person would have worn gloves and let the old prints remain. All I can say is that I hope we don’t find her here, because then there is still a chance that she’s okay. Certainly, she has been the victim of foul play.”
This last statement hit me like a fist to the chest, taking my wind and filling my eyes with tears. The sheer number of people had raised my hopes for a moment but now I understood that these people were expecting to find her dead body. This was a search for a corpse in the woods, not for Jenny. I turned away from the crowd as the sheriff answered some questions from the volunteers and took in the afternoon while I blinked back my sadness. The sun hung over the western bank of the river and a few wispy clouds spanned the sky, long white brushstrokes on the blue canvas.
The search parties organized and dispersed, five groups of nine sent in different directions. I walked arm in arm through the woods with the others in my group, only dropping our linked elbows to maneuver around trees. We didn’t speak, our boots and shoes shuffling through the brush the only sound aside from the occasional shout of surprise as one of us tripped over a hidden branch or sunk in a sinkhole. A pair of squirrels followed us for a time, one brown and one black, leaping from branch to branch and watching us from
the canopy as we inched through the forest.
There was one moment of excitement when someone at the end of our chain stumbled over a pile of bones, but it turned out to be an old deer carcass, long ago picked clean by the scavengers of the woods. We stood around the animal for a moment, each of us taking in the sharp ribs that reached toward the sky like saplings, then we kept on in the same direction until the volunteer leader called time. We moved one length of our line away from the river to cover new ground on our return.
Back at the meeting site, the other search parties came back empty-handed as well. I went down to the riverbank to watch the crew still pacing the river to the south but aside from a few car tires and mattress frames they hadn’t had any luck either. I stood there a long while battling what I thought was the strongest feeling of déjà vu I’d ever had before I looked up and saw the rope swing. This was the place Mary had driven us to at Russell’s request on the Fourth of July.
The sky was darkening by the time we finished a second sweep of the woods, pulling up nothing. I found the sheriff standing out on the road, thanking people for their help as they made their way to their cars.
“You know Svenson did this,” I said. “What are we doing out here?”
“I went out to check on that,” the sheriff said. “And the funny thing is that both Sven and his sister say they last saw her with you.”
“Yeah?” I said, my heart suddenly pounding in my chest. “Of course they did. I told you that too, that we were out there on his birthday.”
“I don’t know what to think, Shane. I have no evidence one way or the other. It’s your word against his and his sister’s.”
“I can’t help but notice that neither of them was here today.”
“It is unsettling that he didn’t show up to help search for his girlfriend, if that’s what she was, but that doesn’t mean he did it,” the sheriff responded, eyes on the road, dragging a foot back and forth across the gravel. “Just because I have no proof doesn’t mean I don’t think he did it. I’ve already told you he’s dangerous. There’s nothing I can do, Shane. Not without a photo or an eyewitness account.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“Now, I’m not trying to send you after him. Don’t think that,” the sheriff said. “Do you need a lift, by the way? I need to pick up some stuff for Kristina.”
I told him I’d take a ride, then went back down to the edge of the water while I waited for him to see the rest of the volunteers off. The crew that had been working the river was still going, now fitted with headlamps like the one I had seen on the sheriff, shining their beams in semicircles around them as they stepped.
* * *
I had a long list of messages that I was keeping in a notebook by the phone, mostly creditors and collection agencies looking for Kristina, so I hit play on the machine and picked up my pencil while the sheriff gathered Kristina’s clothes and whatever else she had requested. The first was another call from Bonded Accounts, the most common caller on my list, but the second was from Walmart.
“Hello,” the voice of an older woman said, “this is a courtesy call from the photo lab. An order was placed using this phone number ten days ago. Please pick your photographs up at your earliest convenience. Thank you.”
Five minutes later we were on the road again, a basket of Kristina’s stuff riding like a prisoner in the backseat of the sheriff’s car while I further detailed the night Jenny and I had out at Svenson’s.
“I’m not sure why this is the first I’m hearing about these pictures,” the sheriff said as he made the right onto Center from Old Main. I looked again up at my window on the third floor of the Arlington, still dark.
“I told you we had taken pictures,” I said. “I assumed she had picked them up.”
The car hadn’t yet come to a stop when I got out and ran. Through the sliding doors, past the greeter, down the wide empty aisles to the photo lab. Out of breath, I told the attendant Jenny’s phone number.
“I see you got our message,” she said, pushing the paperbound stack across the counter. “That’ll be four ninety-nine.”
I took a bill from my pocket and she gave me the photos. I flipped past the first few because they were blurry, then past the next few that were too dark, then to the end and when I reached that last photo my heart sank and I went back to the first. Odd squares of light stood out against dark borders. The brightness of a lamp drowning the rest of the photo in midnight shadows. I could make out a cluttered desk or table, but couldn’t tell what made up the clutter. One single picture had a sharp image, even a hint of detail, and it was Jenny’s face with the camera before it, reflected back from a mirror lying flat, a long white line of powder across the glass.
“No flash,” said the sheriff from behind me.
I turned and handed him the stack of photos, crestfallen.
“Look, Shane,” he said. “This is bad enough. Promise me you won’t do this again, that you’ll leave it to the adults.”
* * *
That night I tossed and turned so violently that I woke up on the floor before sunrise, soaked in sweat. After I untangled the thin blanket from my legs, I stood and made my way to the front window and saw a pair of deer standing so still beneath the oak in the front yard that I thought for a moment they were perhaps decoys placed in the night. They must have sensed my movements and froze in place, muscles taut, ready to flee, lips inches above the acorns on which they had been feasting. The female raised her head to scan for danger, and after deciding I was no threat, she dropped her head again to the grass. Although both deer were spindly thin, the male had thick antlers with five points on one side and three on the other. I watched them until a car rounded the corner, sending them bounding off in sharp zigzags to the thin forest behind the house.
Then, with nothing outside to see but the wind shuffling the trees, I sat back down and put my head in my hands but couldn’t sit still. Pacing Jenny’s house in the dark, I relived the night we had gone out to Svenson’s in my mind—all the moments I could’ve stepped in. The first, of course, was the car. My body made noises as the story played through my mind, grunts and moans as if the pain was physical, sighs of regret. When I sat back down on the couch, the clock on the VCR read 4:19. I was due at the Aurora at six for my morning shift so I took a long shower and walked over as the sun rose, trying to keep the pair of deer in my mind, but it was no use—my entire life circled around Jenny. As long as I was in Holm, Jenny would be on my mind.
After all, I was surrounded. The first customer to come in that morning was Chelsea, her red hair tied into a knot, dancing atop her head as she made her way to a booth a few feet from the service window, her daughter sleepwalking beside her. The waitress brought her a coffee and a menu as she lay her daughter out on the bench seat, and Leon joined her after a minute. She was upset and I could hear some of what she said from the kitchen.
“I can’t leave her out there with him,” she said. “He’s been awake for a week, carting that rifle around the house like he’s Yosemite Sam.”
“Who?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been watching too many cartoons. He’s losing it is what I meant, and I don’t feel safe there anymore.”
“He’s your brother,” Leon said. “You need to help him.”
“He needs to be put in his place,” Chelsea said, an echo of what she had said the night I had spent with her.
Their order came in—egg breakfast and toast for Chelsea and a BLT, of course, for Leon—so I sprinkled some hash browns on the griddle and popped some bread into the toaster. When the food was finished a couple minutes later, I dropped my apron on the cutting board and walked off the line with a plate in each hand, both of them turning toward me as I approached.
“Where did you come from?” Chelsea asked as I set the eggs before her. “I had the law out to my place asking about you and Jenny.”
“I have some questions for your brother myself,” I said, setting down Leon
’s BLT.
“I would stay away from him if I were you,” she said. “He is not your friend.”
“I’m looking for his girlfriend, so I won’t need to talk to him if you tell me what he did to her.”
“Last we saw Jenny, she was with you,” Chelsea said. “Sven was looking for you two for days.”
“Why did he stop looking? I’ve been back a week now and he hasn’t said shit to me.”
“He’s got eyes on you, don’t worry about that.”
“And where’s his truck? Why’s he driving around in that little hatchback?”
“It’s in the shop,” Leon said sharply. “The passenger door is broken. Will you please go back to the kitchen and let us have our breakfast?”
“You shouldn’t stay around here,” Chelsea said, one last warning. “Don’t you have somewhere to be? Some other town? Some other life?”
Chelsea stayed for most of the breakfast rush and they carried on the rest of their conversation in whispers so no matter how hard I tried to listen I couldn’t hear a thing over the sizzling bacon and popping eggs. I assumed they were talking about Svenson—how could they not be? Leon looked my way more than once while I was staring, causing me to snap back from the window as if something was burning.
When Chelsea left, Leon walked through the kitchen to the office, then came back up on the line in a chef’s jacket and hat.
“You need to get out of here,” he said. “You don’t have time to wait for your check.”
“But,” I said, stopping my sentence at the finger he held up to me. He took three one-hundred-dollar bills from his jacket pocket and set them on the cutting board.
“Go to Minneapolis,” he said. “Today. While you still can.”
* * *
“I can’t stay here any longer.”
Northern Lights Page 20