Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  “Why’re you all fired up to plow Duddie’s cow a path? We got a walk right here that needs some work—”

  Someone banged on the front door, saving him from the interrogation. Muttering to the sound of his grandmother’s warning not to let anyone in to track snow all over her clean front hall, Ned headed to the front door and flung it open.

  Paul LeDuc stood in the doorway, his shoulders hunkered up around his ears, a close-fitting cap pulled down over their red tips. He looked cold and miserable. This considerably brightened Ned’s mood until it occurred to him that this was not a social visit.

  “Hey, Mayor, what’s up?”

  Paul didn’t waste any time. “I don’t know where you were going, Neddie, but you’re gonna have to cancel your plans.”

  “What?” he squealed. “Whaddaya mean?”

  “I mean when I hired you it was with the understanding that you would be available to plow during snow emergencies. Well, this sure as hell—sorry, Mrs. Soderberg! Didn’t see you there. That sure smells good! Sure as heck is a snow emergency and you’re plowing.”

  Shit. “And you just had to come over personally to deliver this message?” he asked, so pissed off he didn’t care if he was endangering what little income he had. “You coulda just called.”

  And he could have come up with some excuse why he couldn’t go. It was gonna be a little hard to sell the mayor on a sudden illness when he’d obviously been on his way out.

  “I was thinking maybe you’d appreciate a ride seeing how’s your car doesn’t have snow tires,” Paul said.

  Did everyone in this damn town know everything about everyone else?

  “Besides,” Paul went on, “I thought maybe I’d drive along with you a bit since the last time I told you to make sure you cleared Route 442 you forgot where it was.”

  He was coming with? Shit!

  “That’s not necessary, Paul—”

  “Just for a while,” Paul interrupted. “Now get your hat and let’s get moving. You can call Turv on my phone and tell him we’re on our way to pick him up.”

  Shit. Just … shit.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  6:55 p.m.

  Storybook Land

  Jenn turned the truck off the county highway and onto a gravel road, where the snow was collecting in the ruts. The trees crowded close here, no ditches to act as a moat separating the road from the wilderness. The dense canopy of interlocking limbs overhead had kept most of the snow from reaching the ground, but a determined wind had bullied enough through the piney defenses to cover the ground and mound over the windfalls.

  They had gone a hundred yards when Jenn cranked the wheel and turned the truck around. “I’ll walk the rest of the way. I don’t want to bottom out in here and be stuck all night. And do not give me that eager look. You don’t want to, either. Winter camping is not fun. Especially without a camp.”

  “Okay.” Steve opened his door.

  “You can stay here. Really. It’s like two minutes away.” She gave his leather jacket and jeans a critical once-over. “And let’s face it, honey. You are not dressed for the weather.”

  He blinked. He couldn’t remember the last time a straight person had called him “honey.” And she said it so naturally, so comfortably.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Your dad’s boots are great and I want to come. I’ve just never been anywhere like this. I’m loving it.”

  She shook her head. “Ho-kay.”

  She got out and led the way along the road. It was quiet. Nothing in any of Steve’s previous experiences had owned this same quality of silence. What sound the soft, damp snow didn’t absorb was muffled by the pine trees or snickered away on the huffing sighs above them.

  “It’s like we don’t exist,” he whispered. “It’s like being a ghost.”

  “With big feet,” she whispered back and pointed at the imprint left by the boots Cash had lent him. She reached out and hooked his arm in hers, compelling him to stop. Her face was alive in the light bouncing off the snow, glazing her skin with a bluish patina, blackening her irises. Flakes caught on her ski cap and made epaulets on her shoulders.

  He wanted to kiss her.

  He didn’t move.

  “Look if you dare,” she said, her voice bubbling with amusement, “and prepare to be freaked.” She lifted her mittened hand.

  He looked in the direction she’d indicated and broke out into laughter.

  A few dozen feet away, a big cement gnome, his paint peeled and faded, tipped drunkenly against the back end of a three-legged fawn. The gnome looked suspiciously like Grumpy and the fawn like Bambi, but each was altered just sufficiently to keep the copyright police away. Still, Steve got the idea. They’d been positioned in such a way that they looked caught in some disreputable act, especially since the wide-eyed Bambi looked more alarmed than innocent.

  “Since when were Bambi and Grumpy in the same fairy tale?” he asked.

  “Since some local wag with too much time on his hands crept in here about ten years ago and rearranged the statues left behind.”

  “Who was the local wag?”

  “No one knows,” she said, starting forward again.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. And believe me, plenty have tried to find out.”

  “You’d think that in ten years someone would let it slip out,” Steve said, fascinated. “I mean, who can keep a secret like that for that long?”

  “Ever hear of Olof Ohman and the Kensington stone?” she asked.

  He had. He’d seen a special about it on the History Channel. Some farmer late in the last century had purportedly found a stone with inscriptions made by a Swedish exploration party that predated Columbus’s journey by several hundred years. Scholars were still arguing over whether it was a hoax or not.

  “You think it’s fake and that the secret’s been kept all these years?” The very idea was awesome.

  “Swedes will have their little jokes,” she said playfully but without committing. “They still do.” She nodded toward Bambi.

  “Man, for some guy to change all this round and never breathe a word of it to anyone …” he said. “Now that is an artist.”

  “How’d you figure?”

  “He didn’t leave his signature. He wanted the work to stand on its own merits, uncolored by his personality or society’s expectation of him.”

  “Steve,” she said, “someone tipped a bunch of cement statues over so they looked like they’re fornicating. That’s not art.”

  “It is in a way …” He trailed off. “Is that a castle?”

  “Yup,” Jenn said. Leaving Grumpy and Bambi behind, she followed what at one time would have been a footpath but then broke from it to head straight through the woods toward the turret he’d glimpsed.

  “When I was a kid, I thought each of these tableaux were miles apart,” she said as they walked. “The deeper we went, the more it seemed like we could get lost like Hansel and Gretel—and don’t ask what they’re up to. It’s not nice. Even when I was eight, I knew it was hokey and the cement figures were bogus, but there was still something about following these twisty paths to see what came next.

  “The castle was at the farthest end of the place. By the time we got there, it seemed like we really might be walking through an enchanted forest.” She broke off and stepped aside. “There it is.”

  It was only about one and a half stories high, and a third of the top had eroded away, exposing the structural rebar in the crumbling cement, but someone had taken time with the original. Beneath the crenulated roof, rather than the expected paintings of little windows, real ones had been set in. The entrance on the ground level was to scale, but whatever door had originally hung there had long since left its hinges. In the decades since, roses had been planted beside the little door, and they’d taken over the structure. Now the dead vines rambled up the western side, draping over the ruined top like Donald Trump’s comb-over.

  “Magic, huh?” Jenn asked.r />
  She didn’t sound the least embarrassed at using the word nor did she sound particularly reverent. She said the word as if magic were a given. As if she was used to it, on a first-name basis with it. Maybe it was all the snow swirling softly down from above, or the way the night had leached the color from everything and left behind nothing but sheen. Maybe it was walking abandoned paths to revisit abandoned places, but it was magical.

  He lifted his face to the sky, letting the snow blind him, and stuck his tongue out, trying to catch a flake and catching more like forty.

  “Blah! This snow tastes lousy.”

  “Oh?” She sounded amused. He looked over at her and discovered that she’d tipped her head far back, too, and was letting the flakes dissolve against her tongue, her eyes narrowed against the snowfall and her arms spread wide to keep her balanced. “You’re a snow connoisseur?”

  “No. I can’t remember the last time I tried to catch snow on my tongue. I thought it would taste different. Like spring-water. You know, pure, innocent, God’s tears, that sort of thing? Like when I was a kid.”

  “You really are a romantic, aren’t you, Steve?” She had quit catching snowflakes and squatted down in front of the castle door. “The snow was never pure and innocent, hon. You were.”

  She wrapped a rubber band around the money she’d brought and leaned forward, her entire arm disappearing inside as she stuck the bills into the castle’s interior: half quixotic goddess, half practical businesswoman.

  She straightened, her nose wrinkling. “I think others have been using the castle for nefarious purposes. It reeks of dope.”

  “Now what?” Steve asked. Magic or not, he was starting to get really cold. He stomped his feet and wished he’d accepted Cash’s offer of a hat “Do we wait around for them to show up and hand over the butter head? Do we leave and come back? What did this guy say?”

  “He said we’d see the butter head on the way out.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Have you heard a car or a snowmobile since we got here?” she asked.

  “No, but I wasn’t listening for them, either. Have you?”

  “No.” She frowned. “Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe we’re supposed to just sit in the truck and wait for him to show up.”

  “Okay,” Steve said. “Let’s sit.”

  They returned to the truck, got in the cab, and sat.

  They sat for an hour and a half, watching the snow first veil, then blanket, and finally completely obliterate the truck’s windows. They took turns stomping around and brushing it off, just so they’d have enough light in the cab to see each other. Every fifteen minutes or so, Jenn would run the engine to keep the interior of the cab above freezing. Above freezing, Steve discovered, wasn’t all that comfortable.

  He wrapped his leather jacket as tightly around himself as he could and dug his hands up the sleeves of the opposite arm to keep his hands from going numb. Only his feet were comfortable in his borrowed boots. His ass was like an ice cube.

  “Want to share body heat?” he asked her about an hour in. He could imagine what he looked like: red, drippy nose, red ears, blue-black stubble on his cheeks and chin (he hadn’t shaved since five this morning). “It’s a survival technique. I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”

  She raised one of those expressive eyebrows. “Even more surprising than the fact that you watch the Discovery Channel is the information that you own a TV.”

  “I don’t. I was in a hotel room. I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms with the TV when I’m in some city doing a show. I do a lot of shows.” He did a lot of hotels. “Don’t look all superior. You can learn things from TV. Like conserving body heat to survive arctic temperatures. So do you wanna?”

  The look she gave him was answer enough. “We’re not in any imminent danger of freezing, Steve. If we want to leave, we can just leave. Do you want to give up and leave?”

  Yes. “Do you?”

  “I dunno,” she said. “Let’s give it another fifteen minutes.”

  By the time the fifteen minutes had elapsed, his mood had gone even further south. The jerks who’d taken his butter head had seen the ransom note in town and opted for the more lucrative offer, and in the meantime they sat here—not sharing body heat—freezing their asses off. He wasn’t keen on the idea of giving up the butter head. He wasn’t keen on freezing his ass off. He’d leave the decision to her.

  “I’m freezing my ass off,” he said.

  “Me, too.” She started the engine and flicked on the wipers, displacing the latest load of snow that had covered the windshield. “I’ve been thinking. I wouldn’t be surprised if these clowns were pulled off the road somewhere waiting for us to leave before coming in to get the cash and dump off the butter head. What with the snow and all, they might have gotten here late. They might be out there watching us right now, wishing we’d leave. So maybe we should.”

  For a very practical woman, this was an amazingly dumb suggestion. “And once we leave and they drive in and get the money, what’s to keep them from keeping the butter head?” he asked.

  “Not a thing” she admitted, “except unless they’ve seen that flier in town there’s no reason for them to keep it. I think they got the message that my offer was a ‘one time only.”’

  “And if they did see that flier in town?”

  “We’re screwed. They never were here and aren’t going to be here, and we’ve wasted all this time and your personal BTUs for nothing.” She didn’t have to sound so nonchalant about it. But then, of everyone involved, she was the least interested in retaking the butter head. And yet, here she was, shivering beside him.

  “Ah, don’t look so sad, Steve. If they do turn it in for the reward, you’ll still end up riding at the head of the parade alongside it. All’s well that ends well. Except”—she hesitated just a few seconds—“it would have been nice to save this crappy little town their money.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  7:00 p.m.

  Same place

  Without waiting for Steve to reply, Jenn shifted into gear and started driving, reaching the highway and climbing carefully over the snow onto the road proper. There was a lot more snow than when they’d arrived. A lot. And the driving conditions, which hadn’t been good to begin with, had further deteriorated. The highway was nothing but a pale river in the headlights, only the faintest tire tracks giving Jenn a clue as to where the road curved and where it went straight. Under her mittens, the knuckles gripping the steering wheel were white. She glanced at Steve. At least one of them was enjoying the drive.

  Steve, who’d admitted earlier that the last time he’d driven a car before this morning had been to a Bangles concert, sat looking around with the expectant pleasure of a six-year-old on a special outing. Every now and then he’d wipe the window with his sleeve and press his nose to the glass and make some exclamation of delight, pointing out first a hummock of snow (“Is that a bobcat?” “No.”), then a road reflector that had caught the headlights (“Are those the eyes of a bobcat?” “No.”), and finally a big barn cat scooting across the road (“Is—” “No.”).

  She wished something would come out of the night to grant him a little wish-fulfillment, but except for the big torn, who was presumably motivated by testosterone levels beyond his control, nothing that wasn’t similarly affected was going to be out in a storm like this.

  They shouldn’t be out in a storm like this.

  They were in the midst of nearly whiteout conditions, the snow coating the windshield like Christmas tree flocking and obliterating any indications of where the sides of the road ended and the ditches began. Every strong wind gust pushed the truck sideways toward the unseen ditches she fought to keep the vehicle from sliding into. She hunched over the steering wheel, trying to stay in the proximal middle of what she hoped was the road while Steve sat in idiot contentment.

  No one else was out on the road, either. Why would they be? Everyone else had too much sense. She thought briefly of c
alling the state patrol on her cell phone but as she hadn’t driven them into the ditch—yet—and she had no doubt that the state patrol were answering plenty of calls from people who had, they’d probably say, “Good luck, then, and drive slow, okay?”

  So slow they went. They’d been driving for thirty minutes when the town’s sole snow plow roared past them, heading north up the highway in the direction from which they’d just come, a poor call in Jenn’s estimation since there weren’t that many people living up there. When they finally made the town limits a few minutes later, she realized good judgment might not have been the plow driver’s strong suit because the streets he’d “plowed” in town were a mess.

  Heavy banks of snow blocked most of the side streets and a tall ridge divided the center of the main street, making turns across the center line all but impossible. The wind had already reconfigured the snow left behind by the plow, forming huge drifts that swept across the street at the town’s only stoplight, effectively barricading access to the southbound road.

  Not that there was any traffic moving south. Or north. Or any direction.

  Fawn Creek was a ghost town, the only sounds the driving wind and the rattling of the traffic signs at the intersection. Not a single car appeared in any direction, just sheets of snow blown horizontally down the main corridor.

  “Crap,” Jenn muttered, her head swiveling from side to side as she looked for a passable side street. “We can’t try to ram through that. Even if we didn’t get stuck, little ways out and the roads south will all be drifted over by now.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Steve asked, looking monumentally unconcerned. He pointed to the dark storefronts. “Can we knock on some doors and beg, ‘Help the poor traveler?”’

  “We could if anyone lived above the shops but most of the storeowners live on the residential streets.”

  “Let’s go there then.”

  She squirmed. “I don’t want to.”

  “Huh?”

  She was being ridiculous. It didn’t matter. “I don’t want to ask for help.”

  His hands flew up in an age-old expression of bafflement. “How come?”