Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  “Fancy Fowl? Please, can I see—”

  “It’s Bruno, Dad.” Having answered Steve’s question, she returned her attention to her father. “He was on the side of the highway about two miles back, so we brought him along.”

  Cash’s expression softened. “Poor old boy. Heidi retired him from the line this year and he’s not taking it too well. He keeps getting out and taking off after them.”

  “Ah!” Jenn said. “Poor guy.”

  “Why? Why’s he a ‘poor guy?’ What’s a line?” Steve demanded, fascinated.

  “He was one of Heidi’s lead sled dogs,” Jenn explained. “Sovereign of the Sled, if you will. But he’s getting old, so Heidi retired him. Only old Bruno here thinks of it as being dethroned.”

  Steve regarded the fur lump. He was snoring again. “What was he planning on doing once he found the sled?”

  “Beating the shit out of whoever took his place as lead dog,” Cash said.

  “Sounds reasonable,” Steve said, looking with new favor on the huge creature.

  “Dangerous,” Jenn said flatly. “He’s too old. He’d only get hurt.”

  “Old? How old is he?”

  “Six.”

  One of the models Steve used had occasionally brought to the studio her chihuahua, carefully wrapped in a pink blanket and tucked in a basket. She knew all about dogs and she liked to talk. One of the things Steve recalled her saying was that the human-to-dog-year ratio was something like seven to one, which meant that Bruno was … “Hell, that’s not old! He’s only like forty-two in human years. He’s just hitting his stride.”

  Jenn regarded him sympathetically. He wasn’t sure he didn’t find that a little demoralizing.

  “I agree with you, Mr. Jaax. But try telling Heidi Olmsted anything about dogs.” Cash regarded him approvingly. It seemed that he’d proven himself worthy of Cash Hallesby either by agreeing to pay an inflated room rate or by coming to the defense of middle-aged sled dogs.

  “Well, he was right, after all. You are here, Jenn.” A woman came through the archway, carrying a cordless phone nestled against her shoulder.

  Except for a white feather clinging coyly to her carefully coiffed temple, Jenn’s mom would have fit in any group of society matrons haunting the couture shops on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Her straight, rail-thin body displayed her perfectly tailored and perfectly timeless clothing like a mannequin.

  “Mom, this is Steve Jaax, the—”

  “Artist,” finished Mrs. Hallesby, sailing forward with her hand outstretched. He took it, bowing slightly. “Of course, I know who this is. I’m Nina Hallesby. It’s lovely to meet you, Mr. Jaax.” She had no accent whatsoever, but the evenly modulated voice of a news anchor. “Welcome to”—her elegant hand fluttered in a circle above her head like a conjurer’s—”the Lodge. We’ve been expecting you.”

  “We?” Cash muttered.

  “Your room is ready, of course. But before I show you, why don’t we all have a nice hot cup of chamomile tea, shall we?” She swept by him, heading for the couch, where she nabbed the sleeping dog by the scruff of the neck and dragged him off with an ease that belied her slight frame, for a second reminding Steve forcibly of Jenn. “There.”

  Nina snapped her fingers at Bruno, who was blinking, having been rudely awakened. “Come on, Bruno. We’ll get you something to eat, too. Shall we adjourn to the conservatory?”

  “Most people call it a kitchen,” Jenn whispered from behind Steve.

  Nina didn’t wait for an answer but sailed through the arch, Cash at her side. Steve fell into step behind her, Jenn following.

  “Of course, we’re really only summer people,” Nina said.

  “In spite of the fact that it’s winter,” Jenn said in a voice pitched for Steve’s ears alone.

  It was like having a voice-over only he could hear, or a devil on his shoulder, or a disembodied narrator. Jenn sounded amused and a little, well, sad. And why that was, Steve couldn’t begin to guess.

  “I’m afraid we enjoy our little haven in the north woods so much we haven’t been able to bring ourselves to leave it for some time now,” Nina was saying.

  “Like twenty-four years.”

  The kitchen wasn’t as fantastical as the great room. The table was a simple, round oak pedestal variety and the chairs were all traditional ladder-backs.

  “Please, have a seat wherever you like and I’ll just—”

  She stopped, suddenly remembering the phone buried against her shoulder. She thrust it toward Jenn. “I don’t know who this is, Jenn, but he knew you were here before I did. He’s been calling all morning, insisting he has to speak to you and that he cannot possibly leave a number where you could return his call. Then about ten minutes ago, he called insisting that you’d arrived.”

  Jenn took the phone and held it to her ear. “Yes?”

  Pause.

  “Yes, this is she.”

  Pause.

  “I’m listening.”

  A longer pause.

  “Forget it.” She took the phone from her ear, depressed the off button, and handed the phone back to her mother.

  “Who was it?” Cash asked.

  “I don’t know. Some guy,” Jenn said. “He claimed he has the butter sculpture and said he wanted a thousand dollars to return it.”

  Steve felt his heart stop in his chest. He opened his mouth but no words came out at first. “He wanted …” was all he managed after a few seconds.

  She turned to him, head nodding empathetically. “I know.” She sounded completely taken aback. “Can you believe it? A thousand dollars for—”

  Abruptly the phone rang in her hand. She pushed a button and raised it to her ear.

  “Hello? Oh. Well, that makes all the difference.” Another pause. Steve reached for the phone but she lifted a finger, waggling it in the manner of one saying, “I have it covered,” while she nodded at whatever was being said to her from the other end.

  “Forget it,” she said. “I know what I said but I was being sarcastic. Really. Yes, that means no.”

  By the time Steve realized what she meant to do, she’d already hung up.

  “You didn’t—”

  “Of course not,” she said. “He wanted five hundred dollars this time.”

  “Is that who that was?” Nina exclaimed. “He called here yesterday and asked for five hundred from your father and me.”

  “You said no?” Steve’s voice came out as a whisper.

  “Of course, we did.” Nina sniffed. “Hallesbys don’t submit to blackmail.”

  “But it … it’s worth—” He trailed off. He didn’t know what it was worth.

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” Cash said. “Nina had it appraised some time back and, well, the guy said its only value is as an oddity.”

  “But … Picasso’s cocktail napkins sell.”

  “Yeah,” Cash said gently. “But you can frame those. You’re not Picasso—sorry—and you’re not dead. The bottom line on the butter head, Steve, is you can’t frame it, you can’t exhibit it, and eventually it’s going to degrade to the point where it’s unrecognizable. It’s not all that pretty now.” He gave Jenn an apologetic glance. “Sorry, honey.”

  “I don’t care,” Jenn said. She really looked like she didn’t care, too. “I like the idea of it being a Picture of Dorian Gray sorta thing. ‘The Butter Head of Jenn Lind.’ And as my sins grow darker and my soul more corrupt, the butter head—”

  “That’s nice, Jenn,” Nina interrupted. “Don’t worry, Mr. Jaax.” She patted his hand consolingly. “Whoever it is will likely realize they’ve targeted the wrong people and just abandon it somewhere. I mean, who in Fawn Creek would pay five hundred dollars for a block of dehydrating butter?”

  Chapter Twenty

  11:55 a.m.

  The Soderberg garage

  “What she say?” Ned demanded.

  “Exactly what she said before,” Turv said, tossing the cell phone to Ned. “Forget it.”

 
“Well, shit.” Ned raked a hand over his scalp, displacing his thinning red hair. He paced back and forth between the broken-down Crestliner occupying one of the car stalls in the detached unheated garage and the butter head perched atop the backseat of the snowmobile in the other. He gave the butter head a sour look.

  He’d unwrapped it a while ago just to see if it had survived its ride the other night without any damage. As far as he could tell, it was the same, but if he didn’t know better, he would say the thing had somehow shifted on the seat it occupied. Of course, that couldn’t be because Ned hadn’t been out on the snowmobile since they’d stolen the butter head.

  “Throw a blanket or something over that thing. It’s giving me the willies,” he told Eric, who’d perched himself atop the freezer chest on the side of the garage.

  Eric had hot-footed it over to Ned’s house—technically, his grandma’s house—as soon as he’d seen Jenn Hallesby arrive at the Hallesbys’. Eric had almost made the call to Jenn himself, right from the Hallesbys’ barn, but at the last moment had decided it would be too risky since Mrs. Hallesby might answer the phone and recognize his voice.

  “Does this thing look different to you today than it did last night?” Eric said, hopping off the chest and approaching the butter head.

  “You mean like it’s … moved?” Ned asked.

  “Nan. The face … it’s … Look at it.”

  Ned and Turv studied the sculpture. Ned started to shake his head but then changed his mind. He scratched his chin, glanced at the light streaming in through the garage windows landing square on the butter head’s face, looked at the butter head, and swore. “Shit! The damn thing is melting. Her bangs are about to drop and her lips are sliding off! Shit!

  “Don’t just sit there. Help me move the snowmobile into the shade,” he yelled at Eric. Together they managed to push the snowmobile and its cargo out of the direct sunlight.

  “Think it makes any difference?” Turv asked from the broken-down sofa he hadn’t bothered to vacate during the crisis. He popped a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth.

  “No,” Ned said, not at all certain. “No one’s gonna be close enough to see it real good until after we get the money, anyway. But just in case … You took woodworking in junior high, Turv. Get your ass over here and fix her up.”

  Instead of kicking and fussing, like Ned had expected him to do, Turv popped up off the couch and headed toward the butter head, unfolding the deer knife he kept in his back pocket as he came. “Cool.”

  “Seems like this ransom idea isn’t turning out to be as good a deal as you thought it was going to be,” Eric said, watching as Turv squatted down in front of the butter head. “No one but you seems to think this thing is worth squat.”

  “We just haven’t found the right buyer, is all,” Ned answered. “Think we should try that Jaax guy? The guy who made it?”

  “Nan,” Eric said after a thought-filled pause. “You heard him on television. He said the only value it has is a sentimental one for the Hallesbys. I always thought Mrs. Hallesby was sort of tenderhearted, what with those chickens of hers and all. Guess not.” He parked his chin dolefully on his chest, looking distinctly disappointed in Mrs. Hallesby.

  “What the hell are you doing, Turv?” Ned, for a second distracted by the fact that Eric was talking and actually making sense, looked around to find Turv bent at a ninety-degree angle, eyeballing the butter head from near floor level.

  “I’m studying it.”

  “Well, get to work,” Ned snapped. “We gotta think, you guys. If the Hallesbys don’t want it and Jenn Lind don’t want it, there’s gotta be someone who does.”

  “Who’d want a crappy-looking hunk of rancid butter?” Eric, the master of the obvious if ever there was one, asked.

  The three of them considered this quizzer for a few minutes until Turv, who’d risen and begun poking at the butter head face with the flat of his knife, said, “Well, it was the mayor that got all goosey when he found out Mrs. Hallesby had the head, and it was the mayor who talked her into loaning it to the town for their parade.”

  “Yeah,” Ned said slowly. “So, then, maybe the mayor’d pay something to get it back. Even that Jaax guy mentioned how Paul was all excited about making it some sort of marshal. On TV, remember?”

  Turv, squinting at the butter head with one eye closed, had made a rather graceful slice across the forehead, his tongue parked in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t appear to hear Ned.

  “Someone should call the mayor and find out,” Eric said around a mouthful of seeds.

  A few minutes later Eric, having gotten the mayor’s cell phone number from the city clerk by telling her he was Ken Holmberg’s plant manager, punched in the appropriate numbers and waited. On the fourth ring, Paul LeDuc answered, “Eh?”

  Eric, nominated to do the call since he had the least face time with LeDuc, stuck a handkerchief over the receiver and piped in a falsetto, “Is this the mayor?”

  “Put it on speaker phone!” Ned hissed. Eric pressed a button.

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Mayy-oor?” Eric sang.

  “Oh fer chrissakes, Dot.” LeDuc’s voice dropped to a low, embarrassed whisper. “I told you not to make these kinda calls when I’m working. I’m the mayor—”

  Eric blushed and abruptly changed keys, dropping about three octaves. “This isn’t Dot.”

  “Eh?”

  “This is one of the guys who has the butter sculpture.”

  “Yeah?” LeDuc didn’t sound too desperate but then all those damn Chinooks were cool customers. “So where is it, then?”

  “We’ll tell you for a thousand dollars.”

  “You guys are nuts.” He hung up.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  12:00 p.m.

  Oxlip County Hospital

  At Dunk’s insistence, and with much reluctance, the mayor had called Sheriff Einer Hahn down from his tree stand to investigate the robbery of the Hallesbys’ butter sculpture. Einer, a muscular guy with a shaved head, still sporting camouflage-paint stripes on his cheeks, had been standing at the foot of Dunk’s hospital bed “interviewing” him when the mayor’s cell phone chimed.

  The mayor stepped away from the bed, muttered into the phone, and a half a minute later came back looking real pissed. He made another call, listened a few seconds, and then made a sound of annoyance.

  “Wouldn’t ya know it? Blocked ID.” He crammed the cell back in his coat pocket.

  “Who was it?” the sheriff—and who the hell named their kid Einer?—asked.

  “That,” the mayor said, “was one of our thieves. The little shit had the balls to tell me they wanted a thousand bucks to give the butter head back.”

  “But you said no!” Dunk said, appalled. These idiots were going to lose him that butter head yet.

  “Of course he said no,” the sheriff said, looking disappointed with Dunk. “I don’t know about you, sir, but I was in the military. Desert Storm. A man never gives in to terrorist demands.”

  Dunk regarded him blankly. “This isn’t a terrorist. It’s some guy who kidnapped a hundred pounds of butter.”

  “Same thing.”

  From the pugnacious set to the sheriff’s jaw, Dunk realized he meant it. “Is Mr. Jaax here?” he asked suddenly. God, he hoped not. “Has he arrived yet?”

  The sheriff and the mayor traded quick unreadable glances. “You bet, Mr. Dunkovich,” the mayor said. “And he seems like a real nice guy. I’m pretty sure he’d be happy to stop by and thank you for your efforts on behalf of … of his head.”

  Shit. They thought he was some sort of celebrity stalker. The last thing in the world he wanted was Steve Jaax laying eyes on him. Steve Jaax struck him as someone quick on the uptake. If Jaax recognized him, he’d realize in a minute what his old cellmate was doing in town, particularly as that old cellmate just happened to show up the same time as the butter head where Steve had hidden a key to a literal fortune, and about which h
e’d blabbed to said cellmate, resurfaced.

  “No!” he said and then, seeing their curious looks, added, “I don’t want Mr. Jaax to see me like this. I … I’d rather wait until I could stand up to shake his hand.” He was going to make himself vomit.

  “Sure thing,” the mayor said.

  Damn it. With Jaax in town and looking for his sculpture—which of course he would be—Dunk would have to think fast and work faster. The only thing Dunk had going for him was that Jaax didn’t realize that he had competition for finding it. He’d probably be doing just what the sheriff suggested to Dunk that he do, relaxing and waiting for it to show up all on its own. Which meant Dunk couldn’t relax and wait. He had to act and act quickly.

  “Damn!” he muttered under his breath.

  “Are you upsetting our patient, Einer?” Nurse Ekkelstahl, ever vigilant for any ripple in her patients’ smooth course of recovery, charged through the door, arms akimbo. She’d changed from the no-frills blue scrubs of yesterday to scrubs with little yellow baby ducks waddling all over the mint green expanse of her bosom. It was perversely sexy.

  “No. The jerks what stole the butter head are upsetting me,” the mayor announced. The sheriff had flipped open his spiral notebook and was scratching things down in it. Dunk suspected he was doodling.

  It was time to let a cooler head prevail. It was perhaps a little surprising it was going to have to be his. Scrapping together every bit of gravitas he could muster, Dunk said, “You know, if you were to tell these guys that you would pay their thousand dollars, you could get your team to set a trap for them.”

  “That’d be great if we had a team. We have Einer here”—the mayor nodded at the deer hunter—”and a deputy, who’s on vacation until tomorrow when we’ll start to see some of those seven thousand people showing up for the start of the sesquicentennial. So he’ll be busy with traffic duty. So there’s not going to be any trap setting.”

  Einer nodded his concurrence with the mayor. “No way, buddy.”

  “You have to do something.”

  “You yourself pointed out, Mr. Dunkovich, it isn’t like anyone’s in danger here,” the mayor said. “We’ll find it eventually. Probably some deer hunter’ll stumble over it on his way to his stand. Or whoever has it will decide it isn’t worth the trouble it already cost him and just dump it back at the Hallesbys’. Guy on the phone didn’t sound like a bad sort, just not too bright.”