Hot Dish (27 page)

“The Ghost of Martha Stewart Past? No? What?”

He was trying to make her laugh but her smile was wan. “
Nothing
. I look in my rearview mirror and the road behind is empty.”

She’d often been mistaken for being younger than she was, and now rather than seeing that as a compliment, she felt it as an indictment.

“At forty you should have a history,” she whispered, “things cluttering your past. There should be messy relationships, heartbreaks, bittersweet memories, embarrassments, and extravagances. There should be a first home somewhere back there, anniversaries, champagne dinners, a fast
car.” She looked up and caught his eye. “There should at least be a dog, don’t you think? I mean, a
dog
? I love dogs! Why haven’t I ever had a
dog
?”

Because her eyes had always been focused forward, nothing deterred her from the goal; nothing interrupted her forward momentum. No detours. No off-ramps. There were to be no bumps in her road, no siree. She’d routed her life carefully, one straight line to the land of security, to that “home” she’d been promising herself since she was sixteen, the one she not only lost but somewhere even lost the memory of because looking behind didn’t get you ahead.
That
was how you got an image like hers in the rearview mirror.

She gave him a wry smile. “But all that’s gonna change as soon as I conquer this last frontier, national syndication.”

“What’s going to happen then?”

“I’m gonna get a dog.”

“Why don’t you get one now?”

“Because I want to know that I can take care of him like he deserves, that I have the time and the right place for him.” Because you never knew when the storm might break, when your home might disappear and you might find yourself an exile.

When your friends might die.

Her eyes stung and she blinked rapidly, trying to clear them, and looked down.

Steve was holding her hand. How had that happened? Her own hand tightened in his. He reached across the counter with his free hand and brushed her knuckles lightly. His eyes were incredibly blue. If she leaned over a few feet, just twenty-four inches … there’d be something to see in her rearview. She wet her lips.

His gaze sharpened and he stood up, his hand dipping beneath her hair to cup the back of her head. He leaned forward and his mouth touched hers, at first as soft as chamois cloth, questioning and tentative, not the least bit overconfident.

She practically jumped to her feet, grabbing hold of his shirt front and pulling him in closer, kissing him back, a little amazed, a little desperate, and a little embarrassed. She didn’t have to be; he reacted well to encouragement.

With a moan, he hooked his arm around her and lifted her up, dragging her over the counter. No, onto the counter. Dishes flew, clattering to the ground and spinning on the floor as he brushed the last of them out of the way and pushed her down onto the Formica, his arm cushioning her back, his mouth sealed against hers.

She cupped his jaw between her palms and kissed him back, hungry—no, starving. He tasted of almond cream and aquavit, heady and sweet, and his tongue swept between her lips and found hers and she sighed with openmouthed pleasure back into his mouth. Her head was swimming, foggy and sparkling at the same time, drunk, drunken, on kisses, on alcohol, who the hell cared as long as she could stay focused on his lips and hands and the way they were traveling over her, molding her hips and her ribs and riding up to her breast? There he hesitated, a little uncertain, a great deal careful. It was incredibly arousing. She wanted it to go on and on, necking like a teenager, hot and flushed and driven.

He made a sound, low, urgent, and she felt herself being shifted and then his knee next to her hip. He was climbing right up onto the counter with her, straddling her. Not so uncertain after all.

Abruptly, he tore his mouth away and pushed himself up and braced his hands on either side of her head. He looked around a little wildly, as out of breath and befuddled as she felt. “Jenny. This is a lunch counter…. There’s got to be—”

A blue light suddenly painted his face and his white shirt, disappeared, and painted them again. She turned her head and stared dumbly straight into the flashing signal of the sheriff’s patrol car.

“Looks like our ride’s here,” she said.

“Fuck,” he answered.

12:05 a.m.

Saturday, December 9

Fawn Creek town hall

It was after midnight. From inside the town hall’s glass vestibule, Ned watched Turv park the front-end loader in the Quonset hut garage, where Ned had parked the plow an hour earlier, and haul the sliding doors shut. Turv trotted across the empty parking lot, flapping his arms and puffing clouds of vapor into the frosty night air. For being half frozen, old Turv looked pretty happy, and after Ned told him what he’d learned, old Turv was going to look happier still.

He opened the door to the vestibule and Turv scooted in.

“Some weather, eh?” he said.

“Got that right,” Ned agreed.

Turv peeled off his choppers and rubbed his hands together to get the blood back circulating. “Did she really leave the money in the castle like you told her?”

“Yup. I couldn’t get out there until about two hours later than we told her, ‘counta the asshole mayor kept driving by to see if I was clearing the highways to his liking. She had the hundred bucks all wrapped up tidy with a rubber binder and stuffed right in the castle.”

Ned, feeling that perhaps someone ought to call attention to his honesty in his dealings with his partners, decided that someone would be himself. “You know, a guy coulda just taken the top twenty dollars for himself and no one would have known better.”

“If a guy was an asshole,” Turv said.

Ned had wasted his breath. Turv couldn’t appreciate a subtle moral problem like that.

Turv’s prematurely corrugated brow pleated up into a few more ropy lines as he frowned. “Don’t suppose you had a chance to pick up the butter head and drop it off then?”

“Nope,” Ned said, hugging his surprise to himself just a little longer.

“Crap. I suppose we should just go do it now then.” Turv sighed gustily. “I mean, we got no reason to keep the damn thing anymore, do we?”

“Yes,” Ned said, “we sure do.”

“Why’s that, Ned?”

“Because Providence has finally smiled down on us, Turv. Look what Eric found on his way out of town.” He held up a pink Xeroxed sheet like the one Eric had phoned him about, a flier he’d found pinned to Pamida’s community bulletin board half an hour ago.

Turv stared at the reward flier. “Holy shit,” he whispered.

“Indeed, Turv, my friend,” Ned said. “Indeed. All we got to do is call this number, claim we found the butter head dumped out in the woods someplace, and collect us twenty-five hundred dollars. And,” he added magnanimously because he was in a really fine mood, “by the way, I think you got a real calling there with sculpting, Turvie. That butter head looks better now than when we took her. Kinda like Angelina Jolie.”

“Thanks.” Another set of wrinkles joined those already on Turv’s forehead. “But … but what about Jenny Hallesby?”

“What about Jenny Hallesby?” Ned asked, mildly exasperated. “She had her chance. If she hadn’t been so damn greedy and paid us the thousand dollars we asked for to begin with, she’d be staring at her butter face right now. Serves her right. Besides, it’s not like she couldn’t have afforded it. Greedy, greedy, miserly, and greedy.” He shook his head over the failings of modern women.

“So, if she’s not paying the reward, who is?” Turv asked.

“Don’t know,” Ned answered, feeling downright chipper. “And I don’t much care.”

7:30 a.m.

The Lodge

The sun, bouncing off all the white snow outside, filled her room like a movie set’s lights, waking Jenn up.

She rolled over in the single bed she’d had since they had moved to the Lodge, wondering—and not for the first time—why she wasn’t in a larger bed, and looked around for her clothes. They were heaped in the center of the threadbare rug. At least, they weren’t hanging on a hook in the Fawn Creek jail, which is exactly where Greta Smelka had wanted her and Steve to be after Einer had called her to tell her about the café’s broken window. Even Steve’s celebrity hadn’t been enough to save them from Greta’s wrath. His checkbook, on the other hand, had done the trick. He’d also added more than enough to cover the cost of replacing the dishes that had been broken during their … what? Make-out session?

Jenn smiled lazily and stretched. Despite her throbbing temples, she felt pretty damn good. She supposed she ought to feel some little tickle of embarrassment; she didn’t. Making out with Steve Jaax on the counter of Smelka’s Café sure wasn’t something she regretted. Steve was a really good kisser, and besides, she couldn’t imagine him being embarrassed about some excellent necking. It would be anti-Steve Jaax. She decided to take a page from the Steve Jaax Handbook of Celebrity Live in the Momentness and enjoy.

She rolled out of bed, relaxed and with a little girlish frisson of anticipation that she found as goofy as it was unusual. She decided to go with that, too. After a quick look to see if any
semlor
had been ground into them during her Encounter on the Counter (there wasn’t), she slipped into the jeans she’d worn last night, and a nubby, oversized gray-green sweater. Then she slid her feet into a pair of shearling slippers and headed down the hall to the bathroom.

She emerged ten minutes later with everything brushed and was about to return to her room when she heard voices downstairs. One was
unmistakably her father’s. The other was a female voice, thick with a north Minnesota accent. Heidi! Her pleasure in the day grew as she trotted down the steps leading into the back of the kitchen.

Against anyone’s expectations—including her own—she and Heidi Olmsted had maintained their friendship after high school. What had begun as two outsiders forging a relationship out of loneliness—and what could have been more unlikely than a beauty pageant princess and a dog sled–racing dyke?—had developed into appreciation, admiration, and real affection. Though painfully shy, once she relaxed, Heidi had proven to have a great wry sense of humor, cool-headed reasonableness, and a vastly charitable nature. Jenn wasn’t exactly certain what she brought to the relationship; she was just glad Heidi enjoyed her company.

How odd, Jenn thought as she pushed open the kitchen door, that all the people she liked and loved best were here in the place she liked least.

She found her father sitting at the table with the newspaper spread out before him, a cup of coffee steaming by his hand. Next to him sat a stocky, suntanned woman with perpetually chapped lips and curly dark hair shot with gray. Her hands—Heidi had always had strong, elegant hands—were clasped together on the table, her stocking feet hooked around the legs of her chair like she was afraid if she didn’t anchor herself in place she might bolt.

“Heidi!” Jenn greeted her. “How you doing, doll?”

“Okay, mostly,” Heidi replied, pushing back in her chair but keeping her feet locked. “I got your message. Sorry ‘bout takin’ so long getting over here. I was throwing up something awful last night.”

Heidi sick? That had to be a first. In all the years Jenn had known her, Heidi had only been ill a handful of times, and when she had been, she hadn’t broadcast it. People up here considered sickness a gross form of self-indulgence unless …

“Yup,” Heidi said, meeting Jenn’s widening gaze, “I’m preggers.”

“Huh?”

“I got artificially inseminated,” she explained in typical prosaic Heidi fashion.

The only times Jenn had ever seen Heidi excited about anything was when she’d come in second in the Iditarod and when she’d told Jenn she’d fallen in love with a “goddess from Alaska,” a gifted artist and potter named Mercedes. She didn’t look all that excited now. But she did look all glowy, now that Jenn examined her more closely, a hard feat to achieve on forty-year-old skin that had weathered months of arctic wind and sun.

“Heidi,” she said, at a loss for words, “that’s wonderful. When are you due?”

“Same time as all the other bitches whelp, April.” Heidi grinned. She would never be a gorgeous woman. She looked butch and today, beautiful.

Jenn swallowed. Heidi was going to have a baby. Pregnant. At forty years of age.

Jenn had given up the thought of having children. No, that wasn’t true. She’d never been at a place in her life that she felt she
could
have children, and lately, the sight of infants and little kids had only brought with it the melancholy of lost opportunities, of potential expired. But maybe the opportunity was still viable, maybe not as promising as an opportunity, but maybe still a chance.

After all, Heidi, who’d never been interested in any infant creature that didn’t walk on all four legs, was going to have a baby. Where had Jenn been while all these changes were going on with Heidi? And had any sort of similar transformation ever happened to her? Did new set designs count?

Kind of
, she told herself, a little unnerved by the timbre of her thoughts. Of course they did.

Her dad got up. “This is getting a little too odd for me. I always like to think of Heidi as the son I never had. Now she’s pregnant.”

“Don’t worry, Cash,” Heidi said, with deadpan seriousness. “I’m not going to start wearing pearls and calling Mercedes ‘Ward.’ I’m just incubating because Mercedes couldn’t.”

“The world is a strange and beautiful place.” Jenn’s father got up and smiled. “You girls chat. I’ll go get Bruno.”

Jenn took the seat her dad vacated, reaching across the table and securing Heidi’s hand. Heidi blushed fiercely, looking embarrassed and touched. “So when did you decide all this?”

“Well, I’m not getting any younger, and Mercedes and I figured if we’ve been together this long, the odds are pretty good we’ll last through toilet training.”

“Heidi, you incurable romantic, you.”

“You should hear my poetry,” she said.