Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  What was their deal? She pounded her fists against the steering wheel. She couldn’t believe this. She couldn’t believe she was crying about it! About them! But it had caught her so off-guard. One minute she’d been focused on the pleasant enigma of her relationship with Steve Jaax, feeling all sorts of agreeable anticipation and girlish expectancy and plain old enjoying the hell out of the unexpected … situation (she wouldn’t call it anything more than that; she was by nature too cautious and by experience made doubly so) that had apparently caught them both by surprise. The next she’d been plunged back into the unpleasant sensations of her entire high school experience.

  She was too old for this crap.

  She took a deep breath. Why didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter that they’d betrayed her again. Just like it didn’t matter why that whack job up there in the body cast wanted the butter sculpture. What was it about that stupid butter head anyway? Even Steve acknowledged it didn’t have much real value. Not that it mattered. She still needed to find some money fast.

  She banged her forehead forcefully against the top of the steering wheel, frustration finally outpacing despair. She had to think.

  She supposed she should have insisted she saw Dunkovich’s photo, but what difference did it make if he had it or not? All he’d need to do is drop a few comments into the right ear and soon some reporter would be interviewing some Fawn Creek native about it and no doubt whoever that native was would trip over himself spilling every detail about Jenn Lind: the fact that Fawn Creek wasn’t her hometown, that she wasn’t a native, that she had been disqualified from the Buttercup pageant for lying, and that she’d been gay in high school.

  Why, why, why did Dwight Davies have to be such a dick? Why couldn’t she work for a nice capitalist who didn’t really care who his employees were once they stepped away from the camera? A man without a mandate to lead the country onto the heterosexual straight and narrow? Who would be content with his own sins and leave other people’s alone?

  Because that was who’d offered her a freaking fortune, was why. And she damn well better get used to it.

  Success equaled security. The more success, the more security. She needed to keep her eye on the prize, not be distracted by Fawn Creek’s seemingly limitless capacity to screw with her life. She needed to pull it together and work for what she wanted.

  She scrubbed at her drippy nose and wet cheeks with her mittens. She was not going to let Fawn Creek mess this up for her. She had worked way too long and way too hard to just walk away without putting up one helluva fight.

  She rolled her shoulders back, like a boxer preparing for the next bout and took stock of the situation.

  She didn’t have twenty-five hundred dollars and no one she knew up here had that sort of cash laying about, either. She briefly considered swearing Steve to secrecy and asking him for help but why should she trust him? She’d allowed herself to become a little too secure in Fawn Creek, and look what had happened? Rabbit punched when she wasn’t looking. She should take heed of the lesson. Besides, Steve wanted the damn thing for himself. He wasn’t likely to fork over the money so someone else could have it. No, she needed to come up with the money herself and keep her mouth shut. But how?

  Unlike “real” cities, the banks up here were all closed on the weekends, and with all the snow last night’s storm had dumped and more predicted, the five-hour trip down to the cities and back would be impossible. Added to which, she’d heard that another storm was blowing in from the Dakotas later this afternoon. Her folks might scrape together a couple hundred, and if they even had an ATM, which she doubted, that would put her close to a thousand. Heidi and Mercedes wouldn’t have any money lying about. Not enough.

  There was only one place she knew of where you could get thousands of dollars in bills…. Nah. She dismissed the idea. That was nuts.

  She hadn’t held a deck of cards in twenty years or more. Unless you counted the occasional gin rummy hands she played with Nat’s eight-year-old niece. Sure, once she’d been right at home shuffling a deck of cards or bluffing her way to a pot of nickels and dimes. To say her parents and she were enthusiastic recreational poker players and had been since she could remember would have been an understatement. But all that had ended with her parents’ trip to Vegas in 1982. Since then she’d sworn off gambling and trusted hard work, commitment, and focus to keep her life safe and predictable. She wasn’t a gambler. Gambling was for suckers. Or desperate people.

  She was a desperate person….

  All the rules she’d made for herself to keep her life on the straight path to success had been falling by the wayside over the last few days. What was happening to her? She couldn’t really be considering this, could she? She’d probably only end up losing the few hundred bucks she did possess. On the other hand … if she didn’t have twenty-five hundred dollars, it wouldn’t make any difference if she had three.

  Gambling. A short bitter laugh escaped her. Almost twenty-five years ago, a trip to a casino had cost her family everything and set her on the course her life currently followed. There was a delicious celestial irony embedded in there. No doubt about it, those damn Nordic gods really knew how to stick it to a girl. She just couldn’t do it.

  What choice did she have?

  It was a long shot—a horrifically long shot, true—but right now horrifically long shots were her only shots at setting her life back on course. She couldn’t let the AMS gig go without a battle royale. If her career fell apart now, what would she have? Okay. A decent retirement fund but not enough to weather the potential storms of the next four or five decades.

  The twist of anxiety the thought provoked decided it for her: she’d hit the casino. She’d have to be careful, of course, and she’d need a disguise; no one must recognize her as Jenn Lind. Old Dwight wasn’t a whole lot more forgiving of one sin over another and, in his book, gambling certainly constituted a sin.

  She started the Subaru’s engine and backed out of the parking lot, heading out of town.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  11:10 a.m.

  The Lodge

  “—Krissie downloaded the photo to Kinkos Online and had them make a paper table cloth out of it. So the next time she was host for the Ladies’ Five Hundred Club, they finish up their hands and go to the dining room and there’s this beautiful spread and beneath that is the picture from the back of Vern’s sock drawer of Lindsey, too, if you know what I mean,” Cash said.

  “Wow,” Steve said, sincerely impressed. “Now that’s retribution. It’s like biblical.”

  “Yup,” Cash agreed, pausing outside the barn door. “So then Lindsey goes squealing home and confesses all to her husband, not realizing their teenage son is listening in. The next day Junior shows up at school and proceeds to tell all the kids that Vern Nagel seduced his mom.

  “Vern, who’s understandably in a pissy mood anyway after being kicked out of his house and has set up camp at the Valu-Inn, gets a load of this, and after church that Sunday finds Dahlberg and tells him if his kid doesn’t learn to shut his mouth, he’ll shut it for him and, of course, Dahlberg gets all indignant about Vern threatening his kid and the two of them end up in this fistfight in the church parking lot, both their noses broke and Vern missing a tooth.”

  “Geez. So who ended up moving?” Steve asked.

  “No one,” Cash said, rolling open the door to the barn. “Dahlberg divorced Lindsey and married one of his nurses and Lindsey ended up marrying Vern. Krissie married one of Vern’s business partners. The whole lot lives within three blocks of one another.”

  Steve was impressed. “Live and forgive?”

  “Hell, no. They still hate each other’s guts and have managed to drag half the town into taking sides. Not that it took much dragging. Needless to say, Lindsey quit the Five Hundred Club.” Cash’s brow wrinkled. “I think she plays bridge now.”

  This was unexpected. “But what about that small-town, one-big-happy-family thing?” Steve asked. “You know,
the Lake Woebegone shtick?”

  “Forget it,” Cash said. “You know the thing I’ve learned about small towns? Everything gets magnified, both virtues and vices. Everything tends to be a little more black and white. At least, that’s my perspective after a quarter of a century.”

  He waved Steve forward. “Here we go. Last stop on the tour.”

  He stepped aside, letting Steve enter first. Heidi had gone soon after Jenn, so left to their own devices, Steve had talked Cash into showing him around the place. The old guy had insisted on lending him appropriate outerwear, for which Steve was humbly grateful—down-filled baffles and felt liners really did make all the difference. The three of them, Cash, Steve, and Bruno, had tromped all over the Lodge’s land: through the woods, along the overhang—pausing for a moment of reflective silence at the splotch on the frozen lake surface below that marked the landing pattern of “that guy who chased after the butter thieves”—across the field and up toward the back of the Lodge to a wooden outhouse that was revealed to be, in fact, not an outhouse at all but a sauna, and from there to the chicken coop, where Nina kept her Fancy Fowl.

  Here Bruno, who had obviously held unpleasant memories of encounters with either Nina or her chickens or both, took off. That left Steve to express sympathy for Nina’s fascination for her gorgeously patterned birds and regale Cash with their probable history as remnant dinosaurs—once more thanks to the Discovery Channel.

  Now he preceded Cash into the dim interior of the barn. Beside him, Cash flipped on the lights.

  It was a barn all right, but with unpainted, sheetrocked interior walls and a row of exposed floor joists overhead. Except for a workbench at the back, a dilapidated-looking tractor (“Hey, can I drive that?” “It’s broke.”), and a big, old-fashioned freezer chest, presumably the late resting place of his butter head, the barn was empty.

  “It’s warm in here,” Steve said.

  “Yup. We were thinking at one point that if the B and B really got going, we’d convert the barn into more rooms, so we had the walls put up and blown with insulation.” He pointed at the joists overhead. “We were going to have a second level put in, too. But then we had a couple months there where we had people every single weekend and realized pretty quickly that innkeeping was not for us.” He shook his head. “They wanted things. All the time, ‘gimme, get me.”’

  Steve wasn’t paying much attention. He’d wandered over to the big, scarred worktable at the back and was running his hands over the rusty tools Cash had left scattered over its surface, a wave of nostalgia sweeping through him. Vises, hammers, saws and chisels and … a crowbar.

  “You’ve got a crowbar!” He picked up the crowbar, relishing its weight in his hand.

  “Yeah?” Cash said.

  “I used a crowbar to make Muse in the House,” he said wistfully. “A crowbar, a hammer, and an acetylene torch. And some aluminum tubing.”

  “Muse in the House?”

  Steve nodded. “My seminal piece. Someone stole it from my ex-wife’s house just before our divorce.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It’ll probably show up again someday. Great art cannot be hidden forever.”

  At this, Cash dug his hands into his back pockets and tilted his head, studying Steve. “That’s what you do? Great art?”

  “Yes. At least, I did once.” His gaze fell to the crowbar, Jenny’s words from the night before playing out in his thoughts. Her honesty and her obvious deep-seated and real concern for his art had been bracing. Biting, yes, but refreshing, too. And she’d been right; Verie should have been telling him that stuff. Not that he blamed Verie. He’d only been doing what Steve had been doing—enjoying the view without paying any attention to the fact that they were driving in circles.

  It didn’t matter to him that her comments hadn’t been particularly, well, positive. He had file cabinets full of positive comments. What he didn’t have was direction. He saw it now. He’d been on a celebrity treadmill. Just like she’d said. Or at least inferred. Really, when you thought of it, it was downright flattering that she’d cared enough to tell him the truth. He didn’t know a woman like her—a woman who wasn’t impressed with his celebrity, but just his art, a woman without pretenses who lived in the media world of pretense, a woman who didn’t want fame for fame’s sake but for safety’s sake. A woman truly screwed up in some ways yet breathtakingly sane in so many others. A woman who made him feel eager to create. To explore. To seek inspiration. A woman with lips as soft as semlors and a body as pliant as …

  “Steve?” Shit. Her father was studying him through narrowed eyes, as if he could read his mind.

  “Yeah?”

  “What do you mean, you did once?” Cash asked.

  Whew. Steve looked the older man in the eye. “I’m a sellout, Cash.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve been trading on my celebrity for years, satisfied to produce, forgetting how to create. I like celebrity. I like people knowing my name, recognizing me, knowing that they’ve seen things I’ve made. I’m a sellout for celebrity.”

  Cash cast a critical eye over him. “You seem sort of proud of it.”

  “I’m proud I’ve realized it. You can thank Jenny in part for that. You are witnessing an epiphany, Cash,” he said gravely. “I have decided to eschew my present course. Ultimately, I want to be known because of what I do, not who I am.”

  “Oh.”

  Steve narrowed his eyes thoughtfully as he considered his decision. Where to begin? How to go about the Second Rebirth of Steven Jaax—the first rebirth being the butter head? How to begin and where? Like all great art, he supposed he ought to hark back to the past to discover the future. What better place to begin than with Muse? He would find it, liberate it, and set it up as his lodestar.

  Plus, it would really piss Fabulousa off when she found out he had the thing in his possession.

  Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly the most magnanimous motivation in the world. So what? He’d never claimed to be the poster child for altruism. Revenge would be sweet. Then, balance thus restored, he could be done with her once and for all.

  His gaze fell on the acetylene torch again. Give him five seconds with the butter head and that torch and he’d have the key to his past, literally in the palm of his hand. And yet he intuitively knew he would need more to bring about the resurrection of his latent talents. Something fundamental. Something that would snap the commercial ties binding him to his celebrity. Something momentous and unambiguous.

  “Damn,” Cash said suddenly, drawing his attention. “It’s almost nine o’clock. I promised Nina I’d wake her at eight thirty. Not that I’m supposed to tell you that. She’d like to maintain the illusion that as a healthy, hardworking Northerner, she rises early to greet each dawn.”

  “But I’m already up.”

  “She’s made assumptions based on herself, and one of those assumptions is that anyone who lives in the city sleeps till noon given any opportunity. She’ll be mortified you’re up before her.”

  “Should I go back to my room and come down in a while?”

  “Nah,” Cash said and grinned. “It’ll teach her not to make assumptions.”

  He exited the barn, waiting until Steve had followed before closing the door behind him. Bruno showed up to lead the way back into the Lodge, where Cash left Steve in the kitchen, after pouring a cup of coffee from the thermos Jenn had filled earlier to take to Nina. The silence after he left was amazing. No cars. No planes. No street noise. No voices. Nothing but Bruno’s soft breathing.

  As Steve had trailed behind Cash back to the house, he realized how he would go about stimulating his decaying talent.

  He was going to buy the Lodge.

  As soon as the idea came to him, he knew it was perfect. He also knew, within a few seconds more, that his idea might not exactly please Jenn. Oh, her words said clearly enough that she despised Fawn Creek, the Lodge, and everything and everyone in between, but her attitude wasn’t quite
so clear and sometimes her expression whispered of something quite different. He thought.

  He didn’t want Jenn to want what he wanted.

  It was another one of those uncomfortable moral conundrums, and the fact that his feelings for her were quickly evolving beyond casual interest only made things more difficult.

  He needed the Lodge. He needed the sanctuary it would provide, the quiet and unrelenting boredom that would jump-start any imagination. The place was perfect for him. There was nothing to do here, no distractions, no public to impress, no media to court, no parties. Nothing but woods and quiet and a huge, empty barn just waiting to be filled.

  He had to have it.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  11:20 a.m.

  Blue Lake Casino

  Ed White, the general manager of Blue Lake Casino, stood behind his office’s one-way mirror overlooking the casino’s vast interior and estimated the head count. Beside him his assistant, Paul Rodriguez, did glumly likewise. Tomorrow night the casino would host its first annual All-Amateur Dusk-to-Dawn Tournament, and so far not a quarter of the players they’d anticipated had signed up. It was that damn snow. Piles of it keeping the professional amateurs, tourists, and would-be poker sharks in the cities. And if the weatherman was right, another five to six inches would be dumped on them this evening. Nope, the only hope they had of this thing not becoming a complete bust was if they could somehow draw on the local population and at the same time siphon off some of the fishermen up early for Fawn Creek’s Sesquicentennial Ice Spearing Tournament.

  But how? They needed a hook, someone who would draw them up here from down there.

  Rodriguez pointed at a woman in a cheap, plastic black wig and cheaper wraparound reflective sunglasses, sitting at the five-dollar blackjack table beneath the banner that read, “DAWN TO DUSK AMATEUR TOURNAMENT—ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS TO THE WINNER!” Ed had noticed her earlier, Ed’s job being to identify odd characters, and this little honey certainly fit that bill.