Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  Originally, Dunk had been thinking he could get maybe a hundred thousand dollars for an older piece like Muse in the House off the legit market. Now he was thinking four times that. He wanted that money. He needed it. And the key to it was literally here, in this pissant nowhere town, his for the taking. If he just knew where to look!

  The thieving sons of bitches who were supposed to have called him and told him the butter head’s whereabouts as soon as they got their money hadn’t called. If he hadn’t seen the panic in Jenn Lind’s eye, he might have suspected her of ignoring his threats. But he had seen the panic, and if Dunk Dunkovich knew one thing, it was when he had a fish well and truly hooked; Jenn Lind had been gill-netted.

  Which didn’t solve his little problem, did it?

  Beside him, the phone rang and Dunk snatched it up. It could only be one of two people: the assholes or Jenn Lind ‘fessing up that she’d missed the drop.

  “Who is this?” he spat into the phone.

  “The butter head bandits.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Where’s my sculpture?”

  “We got it.” The guy was trying to sound nonchalant. Amateurs.

  “Well, where is it?”

  “I said, we got it. There’s been a change of plans.”

  Dunk waited.

  “We found out that we were undervaluing our stock, so’s to speak. And now it appears there are other parties interested in acquiring the product.”

  The guy had been watching too many Quentin Tarantino movies. “Really? So you’re trying to screw me?”

  “Pretty much.” The bastard sounded gleeful.

  “How much do you want now?”

  “We’re not sure exactly.”

  “What?” What kind of deal was this? Ransomers calling just to chat? Or maybe they wanted his advice on how much to ask for? He didn’t frickin’ believe this!

  “We still got feelers out, trying to determine exactly what our product is worth.”

  “Would you stop saying product? It’s a butter head!” Dunk shouted into the phone.

  “Okay, butter head, then,” the guy came back sullenly. “We’re calling to let you think on how much you’re willing to bid for it, so think and”—his voice dropped dramatically—”hang close to the phone. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Like I have a choice,” Dunk sneered, but the line had gone dead.

  Steve sat at the kitchen table two hours later, drinking a glass of milk and munching on a rice cake he’d smeared with Nina’s homemade, unsalted peanut butter. At least it was recognizable, and besides, he was starving. He’d managed to get down most of Nina’s FiberFabulous Tofu Loaf, but it wasn’t exactly stick-to-your-ribs fare. No wonder Nina was so skinny.

  The phone rang and Steve jumped. It was, he’d learned earlier today, the only phone in the house. It rang again.

  He knew from experience that no one was going to race down here from wherever they were—and he wondered especially where Jenn was—to answer it. The Hallesbys did not center their lives around the ringing of phones or clocks or television programs, and neither did he, not since TiVo. Still, it was so high-minded, it made him grin. He wondered if he’d become as high-minded after living here a while. Probably. Jenny could be his mentor.

  That Jenny figured prominently in his vision of his future he no longer questioned. The only real question now was how to get her to accept the same vision. As he pondered this, the message machine picked up, silently communicating its missive to whoever was on the other line. Then a man’s voice came over the speaker.

  “Look,” the guy said in a grudging tone, “I know it’s late. Sorry. But we forgot to tell you when we were gonna call you, so we’re calling back to tell you now. Only we got more information for you to chew on, too. So that’s another reason we’re calling so late.”

  My God, Steve realized, it was the butter head thieves!

  “So here’s the thing,” the voice continued. “That guy over t’the hospital? The guy who chased us on the snowmobiles and crashed? And that wasn’t our faults, by the way. He went off the trail.”

  The thief sounded stoned out of his mind.

  “Anyhow,” the guy rambled on, “he’s willing to pay big bucks for that sculpture. So if you want it, you can have it for—” he broke off.

  “No!” Steve shouted, grabbing the phone. “Are you there?” he spoke frantically into the receiver. “Tell me you’re there. Come on, man, speak to me.”

  A tinny voice came from the earpiece. “Who’s this?”

  Steve closed his eyes, breathing a sigh of relief. “This is Steve Jaax.”

  “Oh fer … where’s Jenn?”

  “She’s not here. What do you want for the butter head?”

  “Well, now that’s just what me and my friends here were discussing when you went all postal.”

  “What do you want for it?”

  The guy took a deep breath. “What’ll you give?”

  “I dunno. Twenty-five?”

  “Come on, man,” the guy sounded disgusted. “You gotta do better than that.”

  “Right. Thirty.”

  “Geesh,” the guy sneered.

  Steve had no idea where he was going to get the money but he would get it even if Verie had to charter a plane and fly here from New York. He had already planned to sell some of his collection to pay the Hallesbys. He might as well kiss good-bye to the Miró, too.

  “Forty then” he said, adding as he heard the sniff on the other end, “Look, when do you want this? In what form? Forty thousand dollars is not going to be easy for me to come up with here.”

  “Forty thous—” It sounded like someone dropped the phone.

  There was another long silence. Then the sound of a hand covering the mouthpiece and the mumble of excited, muffled conversation.

  “Come on, man!” Steve said in exasperation. It was so close, he could almost see her, the sylph form, brilliant and graceful and irreverent and … Fabulousa’s furious face when she heard the news. He’d carried the dream of retribution so long it was reflex. But now superseding it was the image of Jenn looking at him approvingly as he returned the butter head, sans key, to her parents’ care. She might even tear up. Hell, he might.

  “Just tell me where you want the money and where I can pick up the butter head.”

  The voice, when it finally spoke again, sounded strangled. “We gotta talk to another guy first. We’ll be in touch.”

  “But I don’t have a cell.”

  “Borrow Jenn Hallesby’s,” the voice clipped out. “Bye.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  9:55 a.m.

  Sunday, December 10

  The Lake, Fawn Creek

  There was a picture in the family album taken the winter her father had forced them to spend an entire February week at the Lodge. He had rented an ice house, and every day he and her mother would get up, wrap themselves and Jenn in the layers of specialty store clothing he’d sent away for, and trudge across the lake to an outhouse-shaped, -scented, and -configured box. The ice beneath them would boom and groan as they went—which had scared the crap out of Jenn until one of the locals had assured her that such sounds were natural for frozen lakes.

  Once to the fish house, her father would plunk her down on a bench between himself and her mom. Then they would wait in a state of breathless anticipation (though Jenn’s state was nearer comatose) for some pathetic fish to drift beneath the open hole carved in the floor and through the ice so her father could throw a mini-trident at it.

  He was not a successful spearer. Later Jenna would learn that the art of spearing came in the smooth release and directed fall of the spear and that throwing it only had the effect of causing the spear to torque in the water and startle the fish. Later, much to fishdom’s sorrow, he would catch on. But back then their days of attempting to catch their own food were spent in uneventful torpor, lulled into a state of semisomnambulism by the overheated fish house, the dark and musty interior, the
crackling of the woodburning stove, their only light from the eerie fantastical glow of the aquarium-like hole at their feet.

  Occasionally, things livened up a bit, what with the excitement of a fish showing up and her dad jabbing, missing, and swearing.

  Anyway, the picture had been taken inside the fish house. She couldn’t imagine who the photographer had been, probably the guy they’d rented the fish house from. Her father’s face was red with heat from the stove, the flash from the camera’s light flaring in his eyes, making them manic with a red gleam. Her mother looked like she was posing for Ladies’ Home Journal, the consummate lady being equally at home in the conservatory or fishing shack, and Jenn was sitting stiff-legged on the bench behind him, having edged as far away as possible from the proceedings, her face transfixed with a familiar expression of horror and resignation.

  It was a good picture, perfectly summing up the whole fish house experience and one she was not eager to relive though that was precisely what she’d be doing in a few minutes when the Fawn Creek Sesquicentennial Fish Spearing Tournament would officially begin. Jenn, decked out in the latest lodge wear fashions, and cringing at the blast of arctic cold that ripped at her parka hood, took the purring gasoline-powered auger from Paul LeDuc’s hands and shoved it into a prebored hole.

  “Let’s go fishing!” she shouted into the microphone above the sound of the wind and the engine noise, her voice booming out of the giant speakers flanking either side of the platform erected out on the ice for the festival. Later that day, if the weather allowed—and a quick glance at the lowering, scuttling bruised clouds above suggested otherwise—she’d do a cooking spot from the same platform for the AMS cameras.

  At the sound of her voice, six hundred fisherpeople charged from the shore and ran for the dark houses set on the surface of the lake in strips and clusters. There would have been ten times that number but for the twenty mile an hour wind stampeding down from Canada that had driven away the meeker competition and closed all the roads to the west and most of those to the south.

  “You get into your house before you get blown away!” Paul shouted at her, his hands clapped over his red ears. He pointed a short distance off at a small eight-by-ten structure with a huge sign painted on its side that read, donated for the use of jenn lind by hank’s hardware, fawn creek, minnesota. She’d promised Paul she’d pretend to fish for at least an hour before escaping.

  Paul was right, she thought. She should head right in there. But that meant heading in there with Steve Jaax, who’d asked her earlier if he could come fishing with her. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Well … she acknowledged honestly, that wasn’t exactly right; she knew precisely how she felt about it, and that was the trouble. This was crazy. She was starting to anticipate time with Steve and want more of it, and where the hell was that supposed to go? Oh, yeah. She was supposed to show up in Fawn Creek when he flew in from London or Paris to sequester himself in the great north woods and work on his art.

  The trouble was, the way she felt right now, she suspected she would.

  She didn’t need that sort of complication…. Oh yes, she did. It was exactly what she needed. To feel alive and excited and a little nervous and completely involved in the moment.

  She glanced out of the corner of her eye at her co-grand marshal. He was sitting on the top of the three steps leading down the platform, looking around with that fascinated expression, much, she suspected, like Jane Goodall had looked upon first spying the chimps of Gambia. Her father had found Steve a Norwegian fisherman’s sweater to wear under the old army coat they’d found in the attic, a fur-lined bomber’s hat, Sorel boots, and leather choppers. The fur-lined ear flaps were down, snapping in the wind. He looked goofier than hell and she wished she didn’t find him so appealing. It was stupid. Maybe even dangerous.

  He caught her looking at him and smiled. “What do we do now?” he yelled over the wind.

  “Come on, Jack London,” she said, holding out her hand. He reached up and took it, drawing her down to his side. He didn’t let go of her hand as they lowered their heads against the wind and trotted to the ice house.

  He pushed open the door and stepped back to let her enter. She ducked inside and looked around. It was a true Fawn Creek dark house, none of Mille Lac’s notorious excesses of satellite television and water beds here, just a simple, wood-burning stove in the corner pouring out heat into the little room, a bench tacked to the wall, and on the opposite wall, cut into the floor and through fourteen inches of ice, a three-by-two rectangle of glowing aquamarine light.

  A small trident, the prongs buried in balsam wood, rested against the wall while a spooled jig dangled motionless from a hook above the hole. It could stay there. The last time she’d been in a dark house her father had had the temerity to actually spear a fish. She could still hear his whooping laughter over her shrieks as the fish had flopped free and onto her feet and from there flopped back into the hole to be swallowed by the blue light.

  Steve let out a low whistle, turning slowly in a circle. She watched him, wondering what he saw, if his eyes translated images in a manner different from hers, if he saw things clearer. Or maybe foggier. He certainly made her feel foggy. Just his presence clouded her thoughts, and for someone who had spent forty years congratulating herself on her clear thinking, this was distinctly uncomfortable.

  “This is wonderful,” he whispered as if he was afraid of talking too loud.

  “It’ll do.”

  “Do? Someone’s already got the stove going and look!” He reached beneath the bench and pulled up a bucket filled with Sam Adams beer. “Fawn Creek has got to have the nicest people in the country.”

  As if she had been slapped in the face, she heard Dunk’s voice. Your fans here in Fawn Creek … and You know how it is when you got dirt on someone you think has gotten way above herself but you can’t use it? You just gotta tell someone.

  The fog thinned. “Sure. They’re regular saints.”

  “Why do you dislike this town so much, Jenn?” Steve asked, moving aside and stripping off his jacket. He pulled his choppers off and tossed them along with the bomber’s cap to a shelf above the door. “Why do you dislike the people here so much? No one has been anything but nice since I’ve gotten here. I mean, even the name Fawn Creek couldn’t be sweeter.”

  “Forget it,” she said, shrugging out of her parka and hanging it on a hook. She looked over her shoulder at him. He was stripping off the Norwegian sweater. Under it he wore his usual white shirt, the tails hanging loose over his jeans.

  The glow from the fishing hole swept up his body, rimming him with silvery blue, backlighting his white shirt and exposing the silhouette beneath. He was lean and well-toned. Too sexy by half. And the darkness was too intimate, too seductively warm. It had to be ninety in here.

  “You want to know how Fawn Creek got its name?” she asked to distract herself. “I figured it out when I was doing a research project on the town for history class.”

  “Sure.”

  She sat down on the bench, leaning her head against the wall. The wind buffeting the house from outside gave the room a clandestine feel. “Tradition holds that the town was founded by some Swedish immigrants who were heading west to the Dakotas but came upon this little Eden by a bubbling creek and were so taken with it they couldn’t bear to leave. So they set stakes, named their new town Fawn Creek, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  “But you know different.”

  “I looked up the weather records. The winter this town was founded was one of the coldest on record.” She unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse and began rolling up her sleeves. “That’s the first clue. Here’s the second and third. This is the sesquicentennial, right? The birthday of this town. And it’s December.” She looked at him askance.

  “So?”

  “Think about it. There are no fawns in December, and that creek? It would have been frozen.”

  Steve lifted one of his brows.
>
  “However, there is a Swedish word pronounced ‘fawn.”’ She waited a beat. “It means shit,”

  He burst out laughing. “No!”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “You know how I think the town came to be? I think they got marooned here. I think they were trying to cross the creek, broke through the ice, and were soaked through. I think someone, probably the leader or even more likely the leader’s wife, said, ‘I’m not going any further than this shitty creek.’ And thus, the name. Call it a premonition by the founding forefathers.”

  His laughter faded. He stepped closer, looking down at her. It was called chiaroscuro, she recalled, light and dark, and it made magic of the reflected light and shadows composing his face.

  “What’s it about, you and the town?” he asked, his voice probing. “Come on. Tell me. I’m going to be living here, you know. At least part of the year. So tell about My People.”

  He sounded all interested and earnest. Poor sucker. She remembered her own naive assumption that she’d be accepted in Fawn Creek.

  “Please,” he said.

  Okay. “Why do you think people are so nice to you, Steve?”

  “I know you think they’re nice to me because of the celebrity thing, but really, I’m a celebrity everywhere and this is different. It feels different. It’s not because of who I am.”

  “You’re right,” she agreed. “It’s not because you’re a famous artist, Steve. The people here are nice to you because they think you are going away.”

  He tipped his head inquiringly.

  “Small-town people are always nice to those just passing through. Because you don’t know anything and you’ll only be here a short time. You won’t be here long enough to … make waves.”

  “Waves? Come on.” He laughed again, but this time not so easily.

  She felt very old and very jaded watching her words sink in, dissolving his earlier pleasure. She didn’t like herself very much in that moment.

  “It doesn’t take much to make a wave in a small pond, Steve. You live in a small town and you spend all your time looking for waves. You have to, because in a small pond, every ripple is going to eventually hit you. It’s in your best interest to know where it’s coming from and who generated it and when it’s going to hit you and from what side.