Hot Dish (21 page)

“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.”

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?”

“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?”

As soon as she’d left, Steve stood up, showering Bruno’s head with a lapful of cookie crumbs. Happily, Bruno didn’t share Steve’s complaints about the cookies; he began eagerly polishing the floor with his big pink tongue.

“Can I have the tower room?” Steve figured his chances of getting that room rose tenfold as soon as Jenn, who he suspected often cast herself in the role of the Voice of Reason, left.

Nina shook her head. “It’s not safe.”

“Now that might be overstating things, Nina,” Cash said. “I don’t think it’s likely to fall through the ceiling or anything.” He didn’t look too certain. “But Jenn had a point. If something happened to you, our insurance premiums would be impossible to cover.”

“I’ll sign a waiver.” Steve really wanted to stay in the tower. “Can I at least look?”

“Ah, what the hell? Come on,” Cash capitulated. He pushed himself up from his chair and led the way toward a hall at the back of the kitchen. Nina stayed behind, but Bruno didn’t. He trotted behind Steve, his feet making a nice, little castanet sound against the floorboards.

In the hall, Cash rolled back a pocket door, exposing a set of stairs so steep they could more appropriately be called a ladder. He motioned Steve forward. “After you. Just go right past the doors on the first and second floor, and when you can’t go any further, push on the ceiling. It’s a trapdoor.”

“A trapdoor? That’s so Disney. I love it.” Steve headed up, Bruno climbing after him. “Can he come up?”

“I wouldn’t let him,” Cash said. “Oh, he’ll make it up okay, but if the stairs are too steep for him to come down, you’re going to have to take care of him up there for the rest of his life. Malamutes leave crap piles the size of small dogs.”

Steve looked down at Bruno’s head. It wasn’t far to look. It was next to his hip. Bruno smiled. “How much do you think he weighs?”

“At least a hundred and fifty.”

“I can do that.” Steve nodded. He probably could do that. He started climbing again. “And after we’re done here, can I see the Fancy Fowl? And the barn thing?”

“You’re not a regular kinda guy, are you?” Cash asked.

Steve, halfway up the first flight of stairs, looked over his shoulder. “Everyone experiments a little in college, Cash.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant you’re not … Forget it. That’s the trapdoor above you. Just give it a good push.”

It was heavier than Steve would have imagined. After a few unsuccessful “pushes,” he gave up and braced his shoulders against the floor, pistoning up from his legs, all too aware of two sets of eyes—one masculine and one masculine canine—regarding him with a faint air of disappointment.

Finally, the trapdoor broke free of whatever held it and popped open, flopping backward and bouncing against the floor. Steve looked down, wiggling his fingers invitingly as he gave the universal sign for “you can applaud now.” Bruno shot past him on the stairs and Cash, who had been peeling a fingernail as he waited on the landing below, started up.

Steve climbed into the tower room, with Cash close behind. Bruno was already standing at one of the windows, front paws on the sill, ears alert as he surveyed the land below. The dog had paws the size of salad plates.

The room was notable for the number of windows it contained, so many windows in fact that finding wall space to put the head of the brass bed against had proved impossible. Instead, it stood at an angle in the corner, flanked on either side by end tables. A single narrow chest of drawers crowded another bit of wall to the right of the door that led out to the small, prowlike balcony. Two serviceable-looking rocking chairs sat parallel to each other five feet apart, both facing out of their respective windows at the view below, their backs turned to the rest of the room, a low table set with a pair of binoculars between them.

And then Steve’s gaze strayed out the window and stopped.

Jenn was right. The view was breathtaking. He could see—well, not that far, because there were heavy banks of clouds hanging low in the sky, and the snow falling from them had obliterated the horizon, but he bet on a clear day you could see to Canada. Whichever direction that was. Beneath, the pine forest spread out in all directions, even surrounding the huge silvery disk of the lake. A couple snowmobiles chased each other across its surface like cars on a kid’s wind-up race track, following a graphite-colored track. Other than that, there was no evidence of another human being.

There was no one out there
.

The sudden appreciation of their isolation hit Steve like a brick to the head.

“There’s nothing to do here, is there?” he asked Cash.

“We have satellite. And there’s Netflix.”

“I mean out there.” Steve pointed at the nothing outside.

“Of course, there is,” Cash huffed. “There’s snowmobiling and fishing and cross-country skiing, and when I get hold of the right investors, there’ll be one helluva golf course.”

“That’s not what I meant. The people who live here. Not the vacationers. There’s nothing new for them to try. No new restaurants, no theaters, no bars, no dance clubs, no new galleries, no new shops, no new exhibits. There’s nothing new to draw them out of their houses or their yards.”

“You have that right,” Cash agreed. He didn’t sound too put-out about it and Steve wondered if Jenn had ever noticed how content her father was in his exile. The old guy was walking gingerly along the perimeter of the room in increasingly tight concentric circles, testing the floorboards as he went.

Cash had to be pushing eighty. When Steve was eighty, he’d be content not to be drooling, and yet old Cash had made it up those stairs with no more panting than Steve had done.

“People raised on the plains never seem to like it much up here,” Cash was saying. “The way the trees close in on the roads and fill in all the empty places makes them feel claustrophobic.”

Steve’s gaze drifted back out the window, a little uneasy, a little fascinated. It was like watching a horror film. You knew it was going to scare you but you watched anyway.

“I’d like to buy the butter head.” The words just popped out before Steve had a chance to consider them. A flight-or-fight instinct, he supposed. Secure the butter head and run.

Cash had found a suspect board near where Bruno stood and was rocking back and forth on it experimentally, one hand carefully clinging to the window jamb. He didn’t answer.

“Whatever you feel is a fair price. Hell, fair price or not, I’ll pay it.”

“Now, then, don’t go jumping the gun there.” Cash might have started life as a mover and shaker of industry, but it was pretty clear whatever he’d begun life as he was going to end it as a Son of the Nord Star. His accent might be a conglomeration of north and south, but the word choice and the rhythms said Minnesota. “If I was you, I’d wait and take a look at what you’re so eager to buy. Besides, I’m not sure Nina would sell.”

“No matter what I paid? Why not?”

“Hm.” Cash whipped a grease pencil out of his corduroy pocket, leaned down, and marked a big, thick X on the suspect floorboard. He straightened. “You know how moms keep the things their kids make—handmade cards, and macaroni art and programs from school plays and that kind of thing?”