by Jess Lourey
I dashed back to the library and searched through the Otter Tail County reference books. No mention of a kissing tree. I went online to do a search of the same, and I came up with obscure references to musical bands and some strange religion, and even a funny website where a woman had created a virtual tree consisting of pictures of people who had kissed her—but no landmarks in this area.
On a whim, I called over to the Senior Sunset and asked for Mrs. Berns. If there was anyone in this town who would know where people went to kiss in the 1920s, it was Mrs. Berns.
“Yello.”
“Mrs. Berns?”
“Last time I checked.”
“This is Mira from over at the library. Say, do you know if there is a kissing tree in Battle Lake?”
“Oh honey, who told you you have to be under a tree to kiss? That’s malarkey. You kiss anywhere you feel like kissing!”
I could sense her getting steamed up on the other end. “Thank you, Mrs. Berns. I’ll take that to heart. But I’m writing an article on the history of love in Battle Lake, and I want to know if there was some place you all went to make out back in the day, say in the twenties or thirties?”
“Oooch, that was a long time ago, honey. Most of the twenties are just a drunken blur for me, anyhow. Hold on while I go ask around.”
Twelve minutes later, she was back on the phone, cackling.
“You still here?”
“Yup.” I had been paging through Us magazine, reading a strangely compelling article about Paris Hilton, the Zsa Zsa Gabor of the new millennium, while she was away. I knew Mrs. Berns would remember me eventually, and I needed to catch up on what the stars ate during their photo shoots anyhow.
“I plumb forgot we were talking on the phone.” I heard some more chittering in the background. “The good news is, I found out about your kissing tree. You know where Chief Wenonga sits?”
Boy, did I. And I knew where I wished he’d sit, too: right in my front yard so I could wake up to him every morning. “Yes ma’am.”
“Well, straight across the road from him, there’s a little dip as you go down toward the lake. There’s a grove of trees in that dip, and I guess all the kids used to sneak there to make out, long before the Chief was around.”
I knew the grove of trees, and it was about twenty-three strides from the Chief. That might account for that number, only the Chief was built fifty years after Regina would have hidden the jewels. The only thing for it was to check out the area after I closed the library.
The afternoon dragged on like yet another war documentary on the History Channel, but closing time finally came. Normally, I would let people finish what they were doing before I closed up, but that afternoon I physically herded people out of the library. Leylanda tried to drag herself and Peyton in for some last-minute reading, but I would have none of it.
“We just need one book. I know exactly where it is.”
“Leylanda, it’s five after. It’s closing time. Come back tomorrow.”
Peyton grabbed my hand. “If you don’t let me get some new books, I’ll have to learn how to make carob almond-butter cookies tonight.”
I sighed. “Okay, sweetie. You go grab what you want, and your mom and I will wait for you here. You don’t even have to check it out.” I wasn’t letting Leylanda in. I knew she would make herself at home just to annoy me.
Leylanda glared at me, crossed her arms, set her shoulders, and waited. The silence must have been too much for her, because she started to make small talk against her will. “I saw you talking with Jason Blunt yesterday near the turtle races.”
“Sure. Talking.”
“He is quite a man.”
“If by that you mean he’s an abusive asshole, then I agree completely.” I watched Peyton grab three of the most colorful new arrivals across the room. “How do you know Jason, anyhow? He doesn’t seem like your type.”
Leylanda sniffed. “We went to high school together. As to my type, you probably don’t understand the nature of testosterone. You see, I am an alpha female, and I need an alpha male to equal out my power and drive for dominance.” She set her shoulders and revealed this with the forced air of someone who has been through a lot of therapy.
I gave her my full attention. She was in the early stage of making a terrible but common error—mistaking one-way attention for a two-way attraction. I was no fan of hers, but she was another human being, and I cared about Peyton. “Leylanda, you’ve got a great daughter, and I’m sure you also have some good qualities of your own. Just relax a little, and don’t be sucked in by Jason’s nice-guy front. He’s an insecure, violent creep, and he wears fur and eats genetically modified foods. And he doesn’t recycle.”
She sucked in her breath and covered her mouth with her small, birdlike hand, her eyes wide. “Come on, Peyton! Mommy says it’s time to go! Come on now, Peyton.”
Peyton handed me the books she had chosen as her mom dragged her past, and I grabbed them and fed them to her behind the alarm sensors so she wouldn’t trigger the book-recovery system. She was almost through the door when she pulled free from her mom’s grasp long enough to run back and hand me a stack of paper she had been crumpling in her seven-year-old fist. I unfolded them enough to see that they were crayon drawings. She was at a stage in her art career where she favored pastels. The first picture was of a house with a round yellow sun overhead, and she had scrawled her name on the bottom in tilting green. The second picture was of an animal, but I don’t think anyone short of Dr. Moreau could have identified it. The third picture looked like a drawing of a family sitting around a dinner table, and at the bottom of that she had scratched out the words “math lab.” That must be what Leylanda called homework time.
I left the pictures on the counter and locked the library door behind me. I took off toward Chief Wenonga at a jog and ran right into Johnny Leeson as I turned the side of the library, knocking both of us on our bumpers.
I was up first, dancing around like a fighter before a match. “Sorry, Johnny! I didn’t see you!” I held out my hand. He grabbed it and pulled himself up. I suddenly was self-conscious of the June-bug-shaped lump on my noggin and tried to find a reason to hold my hand over my forehead while I talked. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He brushed dirt off his jeans, and I saw a raw spot on the palm of his hand.
“Shoot, I’m sorry. Look. You scraped your hand.”
He glanced at it and rubbed it on his pants to get the gravel out. “It’s not a big deal, Mira. It’s just a scrape. I’ll be fine.” He did an unconscious head toss that moved his gold-flecked, shaggy hair out of his eyes for a second.
“Nice night, huh?”
He looked around, weighing the accuracy of my comment. “It is a nice night. How’re your tomatoes holding up? Is the dill keeping the bugs away?”
“It is, but I think I’m overwatering. The color on the tomatoes isn’t so good.” My hand was over my lump, and I drummed the side of my head with my fingers in what I hoped was a nonchalant gesture.
He nodded his head, a reluctant smile teasing the corners of his mouth. “That can happen. We have some new automatic tomato waterers at the nursery so you don’t have that problem. Stop by and I’ll show ’em to you.”
“That would be great!” I was smiling right up until the finch flew into the side of my head, above my right ear, and dropped to the pavement, stunned. I shrieked and jumped back a step. It shook its feathery little head, pooped, and took off again.
Johnny reached his strong brown hands out to me. “Are you okay? That had to hurt.”
I was already hustling in the other direction, away from Johnny so he couldn’t see the involuntary water filling my eyes. The birds were finally organizing their attack against me, and I wasn’t going to let Johnny observe me going down. He had already seen me out with Ody, and I’m sure he had just seen the green and yellow bump pushing out of my head like a horn—how much embarrassment must I endure in front of him? I hollered at him over
my shoulder, ignoring his bemused expression. “Oh no, didn’t hurt at all. I do that all the time at home!”
It took me about ten minutes to reach Halverson Park and Chief Wenonga’s statue, and I didn’t see any bird gangs flashing their blades on the way, so I calmed down some, though I had the mother of all headaches. I decided the finch had been a lone gunman, trying to protect Johnny from me, the un–Snow White.
I found the grove of kissing trees straight across the road, just like Mrs. Berns had said. They were an unassuming cluster of poplars with the road directly behind them, the lake straight in front of and to one side of them, and Sandy Beach Resort to the other side. Peonies blooming everywhere scented the air like delicious white trash roses. With my back to the trees, I paced seven steps with the sun’s downward trajectory off to my left. Then I walked twenty-three steps to the right, toward Sandy Beach, which led me straight into the volleyball pit. Twelve steps in any direction still left me in the pit. Anything hidden here would have been unearthed when this resort was built, so unless Regina had hidden the loot in West Battle Lake, I was at the wrong spot.
My shoulders slumped, and I kicked at the sand of the court. There was nothing to do but head back to my car in the library parking lot. Finding the jewelry before Jason had been my trump card, and this search was a dead end. My only hope now was that Nikolai Romanov would tell me something incriminating about Jason tonight.
I heard the siren before I saw the lights, though it all shrieked past me in under three seconds. Police racing through Battle Lake were a rarity, and I had a thick, bad feeling about this. The blue and red screeched left on Oak Avenue, about seven blocks up from where I was, and I took off jogging. Gardening, swimming, and walking with Luna kept me in pretty good shape, but as a grown-up, I hadn’t found much call to run, and my body didn’t know what to do with itself. I puffed about four blocks before I was forced to slow to a brisk walk.
Oak Avenue abuts the woods, mostly maple and oak, so the majority of the houses were very nice and situated on wooded lots. The one exception was the freakish white box of a house where Leylanda and Peyton lived. It was as tucked into the woods as a house in town could be. Chief Wohnt’s car was parked in their driveway, his lights off but his door open. I slowed to a walk, and in fact considered turning around. I had just seen them only a half hour ago, and I could picture them tucked in the safety of their living room, reading the books Peyton had picked out, eating roasted soy nuts, and chugging organic ginger ale. I didn’t want to disturb that picture, because I knew in my aching heart how quickly bad things happened to good people.
I forced my feet to move through the ominous quicksand of my fears and lumbered into their yard. The front door was flung open, and inside I could see Leylanda on the couch, her neighbor propping her up as her body heaved in sobs.
Leylanda’s voice quivered. “She wanted to read in her room alone. She wasn’t out of my sight for more than ten minutes. I swear! She’s been kidnapped!” Her eyes stared blankly as she cried, and two rivers of snot ran out of her nose.
Peyton was missing. My stomach clenched, and I felt the unbearable, aching fog of loss that I hadn’t experienced as acutely since my dad died. I knew what it was like to be a girl alone in the world, and Peyton was too young to experience that depth of fear and loneliness.
The neighbors who had gathered looked up at me as I entered, but no one stopped me. I tried to ask Gary Wohnt for details, but I felt like I was floating above the room, watching the actors stage their play.
Chief Wohnt spoke into his shoulder radio, and I heard some feedback, but it crackled too much for me to make sense of it. He next spoke to the inconsolable Leylanda. “I need to know everyone you’ve talked to and everywhere you’ve been in the last twenty-four hours.”
Leylanda struggled to pull herself together, but it was beyond her. “Somebody took my daughter! She needs to sleep in her own bed or she’s up all night! Who will practice Spanish with her if I’m not there?”
“You need to calm yourself down,” Wohnt urged, not unkindly. “She likely just ran away and is in the vicinity.”
Leylanda’s crazy eyes focused for the first time, and they shot zingers at Wohnt. “And I suppose she took the whole window frame out by herself and set it on the ground outside her bedroom before she ran off?”
I backed out of the house, remembering the time I had run away from home. I was nine, and my dad and mom were fighting about him getting a job. My mom said he needed to get out of the house and be with people, and he said that me and mom were already too many people for him, and if he had it his way, he would have lived alone. I decided to make his wish come true. I packed a bag of oyster crackers, a blanket, and my favorite Judy Blume book and spent the night in the cornfield. I was cold, and alone, and scared that when I got home no one would be there. The sad truth is that to a child, any home is better than no home.
And right now, Peyton was without her home in the hands of who-knows-what. I started pacing in ever-widening circles around her house, calling her name as if she were a lost pet. In the back of my mind, I noticed that the neighborhood was organizing, and soon, most of the town of Battle Lake would be looking for tiny Peyton McCormick.
When I was growing up in safe, acceptably abnormal Paynesville, there were two things that really got me keyed up. One was when it was my turn to have Connie Christopherson solve my Rubik’s Cube. She was the only person in all of fifth grade who had figured it out, and she hadn’t even read the book. For a small donation of Pixy Stix, she would click-clack-click your cube until each side was a paean to monochromaticity.
It was beautiful—art and organization united—and it never lasted more than one class period. It took that long for me to convince myself that if she could do it, I could too. I only messed it a little bit at a time, starting by moving the middle square of color on all six sides. I felt confident that if I started slowly, I could find my way back. This delusion assured continuing business for Connie and kept her in Pixy Stix well into sixth grade, when the handheld Simon game and Garbage Pail Kids cards hit Paynesville via Penny Johnson’s visiting cousin from Texas and effectively erased Rubik’s Cube, Snake, and Triangle from our consciousness.
The other thing that excited me was when I was allowed computer lab time and could play Oregon Trail for a full hour. The middle school owned only four computers at the time, all Apple IIe’s, and to get access to them, you had to be part of the gifted program. The first skill we learned on the Apples was basic line programming, which involved creating a program that looked like a ball bouncing down colored stairs on the screen.
I rushed to accomplish this so I could begin playing Oregon Trail, a control-loving girl’s ticket to joy. In the game, you started out as your average pioneer about to embark on a new life in the faraway state of Oregon. The trick was, you needed to decide what to take with you to survive the journey—you only had a certain amount of space allotted in the covered wagon and a certain amount of money to buy food, bullets, and supplies with.
Your quest was played out on a map-like screen charting the wagon’s progress in relation to famous towns and landmarks such as Big Hill and the Shawnakee Trading Post. About ten real-life seconds after you hit the Trail, one of the following would happen: (1) You would run into a buffalo stampede that you could opt to hunt, and hunting stampeding buffalo is like shooting fish in a barrel. Literally. The bullets moved in aching slowness across the green screen. (2) You would spot a group of strangers and choose how to react. “Approaching” them leads to a fight, as does “circle wagons.” In either case, you needed to have your guns ready.
The game was designed to build real-life decision-making and problem-solving skills by making a kid the leader of a wagon party. Although I may never have directly applied these skills, I derived infinite pleasure out of controlling my own destiny, if even only for an hour. I particularly missed that experience as, just before midnight, I began my walk to the public access to meet a dwarf on the
run from the law and pondered the whereabouts of a scared seven-year-old who may never know the pleasures of pre-teen fads and dim-witted computer games. I had spent four hours scouring the woods by her house for any trace of her, and soon, the entire town was searching. Now that it was dark, hundreds of flashlights stabbed the air in and around Battle Lake like fireflies.
Walking carefully through the dark toward my meeting, I swear I heard an audible click when I mentally separated myself from Peyton’s situation. I could feel my heart turning a little colder and my mind a little harder. If I kept worrying about her and imagining what she was enduring right now, I would go crazy. I had learned how to separate myself from emotions and circular thoughts when my dad killed himself and two others in that horrible car accident, and I would use those skills now. Plenty of others were searching for her, and there was nothing more I could do for her tonight.
I knew from Sunday’s post-fake-body trek that it would take me under forty-five minutes to hike to the south-side Whiskey Lake access, and since Nikolai demanded utter stealth, I figured walking would make me quiet as a ghost. I might even be able to sneak up on him and give myself the upper hand, if only for a couple moments.
I decided to stick to the woods and prairie, which would keep me on Sunny’s property right up until the access. That way I wouldn’t need to answer questions if someone passed me on the road at midnight. The slice of moon in the brilliant June sky didn’t provide as much light as the twinkling stars, but between the two, I was able to find my way just fine.
The mosquitoes were tolerable, and swooping bats feasted off the ones I didn’t smush. For some reason, bats didn’t bother me like birds did. Maybe it was because they were up front about their personalities. They were leathery flying mice not trying to be anything else. Plus, anything that ate mosquitoes in Minnesota had a certain sense of holiness about it.
