Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  “But—”

  “Look.” The sheriff had obviously decided they were due for a man-to-man. “Mr. Dankwitch.”

  “Dunkovich.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. Dunkovich. I understand you got a stake in this butter sculpture being recovered. Shit, I’d feel the same way if I found out I’d gotten busted up chasing something, even if it was nothing but a whittled-up block of butter. But the fact is, we don’t have the time or the manpower to devote to the recovery of a butter head. Now, then”—he made a show of snapping the spiral notebook closed but not before Dunk caught a glimpse of the inside pages; he had been doodling—”there’s a ten-point buck out there somewhere with my name on it, and I got two days to find him before seven thousand tourists turn this town into a traffic nightmare. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to look for it. I’ll ask around. Leave word at the gas stations, over to Smelka’s, and such. This is a small town, Mr. Dunkovich. Someone’s gonna say something somewhere and I’ll hear it. In the meantime, you just get well, okay?”

  Paul nodded gravely in concurrence and reached down to give Dunk’s exposed big toe a friendly tweak.

  “Listen,” he said. “For all you knew, those thieves coulda been making off with a priceless artifact. Just because it was butter doesn’t make you any less heroic in anyone’s eyes.”

  “It’s an original Jaax sculpture,” Dunk said. “Doesn’t that mean something to you guys?”

  The mayor shook his head. “You said it best. It’s butter. If it had been worth something, the Hallesbys woulda sold it long ago. Those folks could sure use the cash.” His handsome face crumpled with compassion. “Now you take it easy, okay?”

  With that, the mayor headed out, followed closely by the sheriff.

  Dunk watched him go, thinking hard. “Karin,” he finally said, “does this town have a Kinkos or something like it?”

  “Well, the Fawn Creek Crier does some of that sort of stuff. Copies and xeroxes and rents out computer time. Why?”

  If those two clowns weren’t going to do anything to help him get that key, he’d have to do it himself.

  “Could you get me the local phone book? I have a couple calls I need to make.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  12:00 p.m.

  The Lodge

  “Can’t you redial?” Steve asked for the third time.

  “No,” Jenn replied patiently. “I cannot. The call was blocked. You cannot redial a blocked number.”

  “There’s got to be a way around it,” he insisted. “I really wanted to see her again.”

  What was it with him and that sculpture? Jenn wondered, eyeing him. His attachment to a thing he had spent four hours carving twenty years ago bordered on peculiar. She gave a mental shrug. Maybe he’d forgotten to bring along his meds.

  “Don’t worry, Steve.” Her father and Steve had quickly progressed to first-name basis. “It’ll turn up. Without anyone having to pay a penny.”

  For whatever reason, Cash seemed to have taken to Steve. As had Bruno. Of course, Bruno’s adulation was a little easier to explain, seeing how Steve kept tearing off chunks of the oatmeal-raisin cookies her mother had put on the table and was surreptitiously feeding them to the dog under the table. Jenn hadn’t seen Steve slip her dad any cookies; ergo the attraction was something of a mystery.

  “If they call back, tell them you’ll give them whatever they’re asking for,” Steve said. “I’ll pay.”

  “Now, then, no good has ever come of giving in to a blackmailer’s demands,” her father advised in the tones of one who has a vast expertise dealing with blackmailers.

  “It’s wrong,” her mom said, pushing the plate of cookies toward Steve.

  He picked one up and took a bite. He lowered his hand—with cookie—to his lap. “I’m not particularly interested in the moral aspects of the situation,” he admitted sadly. “I just want my butter head back.”

  Jenn couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “You know, you keep saying ‘my butter head’ like it was, well, yours.”

  He regarded her earnestly. “Yes?”

  “Well, it’s not yours.”

  “Jennifer Lynne Hallesby!” her mother breathed.

  “Really, Jenny,” her father protested. “Steve’s our guest—”

  From “dump him at the Valu-Inn” to “Steve’s our guest!” in less than two hours. The man must exude some sort of charisma pheromone.

  “No, please,” Steve said, raising his hand—sans cookie—and lowering his eyes modestly. Beneath the table, Bruno smacked his lips. “Jenny’s right, Nina, Cash.”

  Jenny?

  “I have been acting possessive about something that doesn’t belong to me. Except … well … an artist always feels he owns his creation to some degree.”

  “Bull,” Jenn said. “I read an article in the Wall Street Journal where you were quoted as saying that once the art was out of your studio, it was dead to you.”

  Steve didn’t look the least bit disconcerted. “Yes, I know. But that was just press. It sounded lofty. Artists always say things that sound lofty. Don’t you, occasionally, in the course of polishing your public persona, say things just for an effect?”

  Her mother turned an assessing eye on her. Busted.

  That wasn’t fair. Jenn expected her mother to be sympathetic at least. It wasn’t as if her parents didn’t pad their own lives with a few pleasant untruths like “we’re biding our time while we sort out our options” and “we’ll be moving out of here as soon as our plans come together.” They’d been “biding” and “planning” for twenty-four years and were no closer now to leaving Fawn Creek than they’d ever been.

  Jenn had tried a dozen times in as many ways to provide them a way out. She’d attempted to give them money and tried to convince them to let her make them a loan. She’d even offered to make investments for them via her broker, hoping that the return would be enough to set them free even if she had to provide it herself. They wouldn’t accept any help, in any manner.

  Every time Jenn walked into the Lodge, she felt like she was walking into the home of political exiles bravely putting up a front that had become nearly farcical. But the worst part was that over the years, with every offer she made and every refusal given, a wall had grown between them. Any real conversations about what they could do to leave and how she could help had ended long ago. Nowadays, they played stock parts: her pretending that any day they were going to call the movers, them pretending they had the company on speed dial in anticipation of their emancipation.

  There was no question they’d been plucky in the face of their exile, but part of Jenn could not help asking at what point plucky simply became pathetic.

  No one wanted to think of her parents as pathetic. Just allowing the word to slip into her thoughts made Jenn feel awful.

  “Of course, she has,” her father said, dragging Jenn back from unpleasant musings. “But that’s just part of being a celebrity, saying what you think people want to hear. No one’s happier than when they’ve had confirmed what they already think. Even if it’s not true.”

  “Exactly,” Steve agreed. “Which is why I am sure you understand when I tell you that, to some degree and at some level, I will always feel that the butter sculpture is mine. Please, don’t think anything of it when I call it ‘my butter head.’ I mean … in my heart.”

  He touched his hand to chest, dividing his most charming smile between her mother and father. They smiled back. It was a moment.

  “That’s really touching,” Jenn said. She had no intention of letting him get away with such outrageous pap. “But if you paid for the sculpture’s ransom, wouldn’t you feel like you were entitled to a little more than ownership in here?” She folded her hands over her heart and batted her eyelashes.

  “Well,” Steve said, “sure.”

  “Ha! Just as I thought!”

  “I wasn’t trying to put anything over on anyone.”

  “I’ll believe that when—”

&n
bsp; “Have another cookie, Steve,” her mother interjected. “They’re my own recipe. I’m quite a different brand of cook from my daughter, I’m afraid,” she said with an apologetic glance at Jenn that somehow managed to be more superior than apologetic. “I’m a health- and heart-conscious cook. Those cookies are made from sprouted grains, bran flours, and natural vegetable sugars.”

  Steve accepted the cookie a little slowly but without flinching. Served him right.

  “Now,” Nina continued in the voice that had ruled the boards of at least half a dozen Raleigh nonprofits back in the day, “should it prove necessary, we will discuss the ownership of the butter head upon its return. For the moment, the butter head, wherever it is, is ours.”

  “Yeah,” Jenn said slowly, taking the opportunity to address a subject that had been bothering her since she’d first heard the thing still … lived, for want of a better word. “And why is that?”

  “Why is what?” her mother asked.

  “As I recall, I told the guy from the Lutheran Brotherhood to melt that thing right along with the other butter princess heads. By the way”—she glanced at Steve—“the person they got to carve the other princesses was terrible.”

  Steve received this info with a gratified nod. She turned back to her mother. “So how’d it end up in your barn?”

  “I went over to see it before they took it off. I didn’t intend to do anything but look at it and”—she lifted a hand from the table; it was thinner than Jenn remembered—“well, once I saw it, saw you, Jenny, how could I let them melt it?”

  “You knew it was a Jaax. Even back then,” Steve said understandingly.

  “What? Oh. Certainly.” What was it about Steve Jaax that made people willing to protect his enormous ego? Because obviously her mom hadn’t had a clue who Steve Jaax was twenty some years ago.

  “Here.” Her mom unceremoniously handed him another cookie, her attention on Jenn. “I knew you didn’t like it. I mean, I knew it had bad associations for you—”

  “My butter head had bad associations for you?” Steve broke in, the cookie frozen halfway to Bruno’s open maw. He sounded hurt.

  “Anyway, dear,” her mother said, “I never told you. I suppose I should have.”

  “That’s okay,” Jenn said. “I was just curious.”

  At least the butter head hadn’t arisen from the depths of some murky cornfield drainage ditch in the middle of the night on the anniversary of its melting.

  “How did Paul LeDuc find out about it?” Jenn asked.

  “It was Eric Erickson.” Cash took over the story. “The handyman. Mows the grass, plows, that sort of thing.”

  “Yeah. I know him, Dad.”

  “He was cleaning out the barn this summer,” Cash said, “and found the freezer. I’m sure he was hoping there was some beer in it. Anyway he opened it. Says he screamed when he saw her staring up at him—we’d nested her on the back of her head—”

  “Can we not call it a her?” Jenn asked. “It’s creepy.”

  “I always think of my pieces in terms of gender,” Steve said.

  “That’s creepy,” Jenn told him, though not unkindly.

  “Anyway,” her father went on, his tone suggesting he didn’t like having a good story interrupted, “Eric found it and he told some of the people in town and they remembered you posed for it and someone told the mayor and he contacted us. After contacting the Guinness Book of Records people and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Do you realize that there is a good chance that this is the oldest surviving intact—”

  “Yes,” Jenn cut him off at the pass. “I know. It’s old. Very, very old.”

  The phone rang and Jenn, closest to it, reached back and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “We’ll let you have the butter head for two hundred dollars,” a sullen voice announced without preamble.

  “One hundred bucks and not a penny more,” she answered calmly.

  The conversation around the table stopped dead.

  “Aw, that’s not fair!” the male voice on the other end sputtered. “That barely covers the cost of the gas. And what about the danger we put ourselves in? That freak on the snowmobile tried to run Tu—” He cut himself off. “Tried to run us off the trail! Oughtn’t we get compensated something for that?”

  “Your choice, your problem,” she clipped out. “Look, you guys, if you have a brain between you, you’ll take the hundred I’m offering and count yourself lucky I don’t call the cops.”

  “Shit,” muttered the guy. “Hold on. I gotta talk to my posse.”

  He covered the mouthpiece and Jenn covered hers. “It’s the thieves. They’re talking it over.”

  “If he insists on two, give it to him!” Steve said.

  “Look, the banks aren’t open weekends,” she explained patiently. “All I have on me is a hundred and twenty. Do you have the rest?”

  “I have MasterCard.” Apparently not.

  “Cool,” Jenn said dryly. “Do you think he’ll charge us the in-state tax?”

  “Sarcasm duly noted,” Steve said with a lift of one brow.

  “Mom? Dad?”

  “Probably,” Cash answered but he didn’t sound too sure.

  “Okay. We’ll take a hundred,” the guy on the other end of the phone announced. “But you’re being a real bitch.” He waited, as though expecting her to apologize.

  “Well?” she finally said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Where do you want me to bring the money? Where are we going to make the exchange?” She looked at Steve and rolled her eyes.

  “Oh. Wait a minute.” He covered his end again.

  “Are you going to call Einer?” Cash whispered and then added for Steve’s sake, “Einer’s the sheriff.”

  “I dunno,” Jenn replied, one ear attuned for any voice coming from the cordless. “Think I should?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Steve said. “The sheriff would set a trap and that might scare off the thieves—”

  “I doubt it,” Nina put in her two cents. “I think he’s hunting this weekend and he’d be real unhappy if he missed a trophy buck for a butter sculpture.”

  “How do you know he’s hunting?” Jenn asked. She was always fascinated how her parents managed to know so much of what happened in Fawn Creek.

  “HEY! HAL-LO!” A voice boomed from her hand. She uncovered the receiver and held it to her ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “Sorry to interrupt you and everything.” The guy was clearly in a peeve. “But we got a ransom drop to organize here. Now you know where the old Storybook Land is?”

  “Sure.” Her family had visited Storybook Land on family vacation to the Lodge when she was a kid, when two weeks of “roughing it” had seemed romantic. The theme park, never much of a success, was long since defunct, just a bunch of tipped-over cement statues in an overgrown woods north of town.

  “Bring the money there. Tonight at seven. Leave it in Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.”

  “And where will my head be?”

  “You’ll see it on your way out.”

  “And why should I trust you?”

  Her question proved a poser. There was a long silence during which the guy on the other end didn’t even bother to confer with his “posse.” Evidently he didn’t have much confidence in their ability to come up with an answer.

  “You’ll just have to is all,” he finally snapped out, “if you wanta see the butter head again.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  12:10 p.m.

  Same place

  “It’s settled. I’m going to go out to Storybook Land, drop off a hundred bucks, and load up the butter head,” Jenn said, standing up from the table.

  Her hair had begun escaping from the perfect little knot at the nape of her neck and though he was more concerned with what she said than how she looked, Steve could not help but think she was one of those women who looked as good a little unkempt as well-polished. Maybe even better. “Can I borrow the pickup, Dad?�
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  “Sure,” Cash said. “But you’ll have to gas it up.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll take Steve’s MasterCard,” she said with a teasing smile.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t worry, Steve,” she said, correctly interpreting the lines between his brows. “I promise I won’t tell the sheriff—which is against all my best instincts because all we are doing is encouraging these idiots to steal—but I can see by your faces that I am in the minority here and so will let it go.”

  They all looked at her with approval.

  “As soon as I get it, I’ll call the mayor and he can contact the Guinness Book of World Records. The parade will have its mascot, Steve will see his Beloved again, Mom can thereafter continue doing with it whatever she was doing with it, and all will be right with the world.”

  “Thank you.” Steve supposed he ought to be feeling more excited about this, but the promise that the key to his long-lost statue was slowly working its way back within his reach made him feel odd and he wasn’t certain why. He definitely wanted that key. He definitely wanted to see the butter head again. So what the hell was going on?

  He probably needed to eat something.

  Something hearty and homegrown, packed with vitamins and earth-friendly goodness. Something the good people of Minnesota ate daily and for which he would spend forty dollars a plate in Manhattan. A Nina Hallesby specialty. She had to be a good cook, right? What with Jenny being some sort of food icon or something. The cookie had been an anomaly.

  “Am I having dinner here or should I go back into town?” he asked.

  Nina’s face bloomed. “Why I would be happy to make you dinner, Steve.”

  Jenn’s face froze, and then she was moving toward the doors. “I better unpack and change, and then I should call Heidi in case she’s worried about Bruno, so why don’t I see you all at dinner?”