Invisible (5 page)

“The police left a few hours ago. We got permission to finish clearing the site. But now we are looking at paying the crew overtime.”

A worry. “Have the police learned anything?”

“It was a woman.”

That made everything seem much more personal, and doubly strange. How had a woman found herself in the lonely, predawn hours inside an abandoned building about to be demolished? “Who?”

“We don’t know.”

Across the street, porches were bathed in warm yellow light. Windows glowed, and shadows moved within, people gathering for supper. “Ahmed, please have Halim call me as soon as possible.”

“Of course.” His reply was smooth, and not the least bit reassuring.

Julie’s house crouched dark and silent behind me. I eyed the split-level next door, the ragged line of houses across the street. I didn’t want to ask a stranger where my sister might be. Far worse
would be to talk to someone I did know. Maybe Peyton played a sport, and Julie and Frank and Peyton were all at a game. What sport? I wondered. Was Peyton tall and lean like Julie, a sharp point guard? It wasn’t basketball season. Maybe she was a swimmer. Or ran track. Afterward, the three of them might have gone out to eat; with so many new restaurants in town, they’d have lots of choices.

After all, no one knew I was coming. No one would have hurried home to greet me. But I couldn’t tamp down the uneasiness. Where was everyone?

Music wailed from the jukebox, someone else’s heartbreak flayed through tinny speakers. People sat at booths along the wall, and a couple rotated on the small dance floor, the woman taller than the man and tenderly draped around his shoulders. True love.

I sometimes wondered about true love, what it looked like, whether it pounded toward you or sneaked up alongside and just astonished you one day. Did it wait behind a door I had yet to open? Or had it already walked past, in the guise of a stranger who’d glanced at me and moved on? My mother had given up on true love, and Julie thought she had found it in Frank: she’d desperately wanted it to be so with him. But wanting didn’t make something come true. My brother-in-law was taciturn and stubborn, not someone I could ever envision embodying true love for anyone, let alone someone like Julie.

Though what did I know? Men had ventured in and out of my life, some of them staying long enough to make me wonder whether they were the one. But in the end, we’d drifted apart and there hadn’t been a single true love among any of them. Well, maybe there had been one, but that had been long ago.

And there I was again, for the second time that day, peering down the path I hadn’t taken. It was being back in Black Bear that
was dredging up all this old history, memories that needed to remain buried. If I could, I would obliterate my past completely. It didn’t do any good to look back over one’s shoulder. The only thing to do was to keep moving forward.

“Leinie’s, please,” I told the bartender, taking a seat at the long curved bar. “On tap.”

Someone had done a pretty good job of sprucing up the old Lakeside Bar and Grill. The battered linoleum had been pried up and replaced with light oak flooring; the bare plaster walls had been painted a deep red and hung with boating gear and old-fashioned road signs. A definite improvement, but the bar itself was still sticky with wax and the air rich with the same yeasty smell of beer laced with grease.

Years ago, Sheri and I had thought this was the big time. We spent hours giggling before our bedroom mirrors and gluing on false eyelashes, tugging on tight jeans and strutting around that pool table as if we had a clue. Did Peyton try the same thing? Did she doll herself up and borrow Julie’s heels to sail in here on her boyfriend’s arm? I tried to imagine it, but couldn’t.

She’d had that high-pitched voice of youth, that breathless way of making everything into a question.
You don’t know me? It’s about my mom? She’s sick?
There had been nothing there I could pin an impression on, no matter how hard I tried, nothing to indicate if she was scholarly, athletic, spirited, or contemplative. There had just been that soft voice lengthened by Midwestern vowels.

Why hadn’t Julie let me know she was sick? Pride, or was Peyton overreacting? I’d finish my drink and head back to Julie’s place. If no one was home, I’d just have to start knocking on neighbors’ doors.

A jar with a photograph taped to its side sat on the bar, half-filled with coins and rumpled bills. Rotating it, I was surprised to see the fierce scowl of Miss Lainie glaring back at me.
What the hell you want?
the old woman seemed to snarl.

The bartender placed a mug in front of me, a perfect half inch of foam.

“Thanks.” I reached for my wallet.

“It’s on the house, Dana. Welcome home.”

I took a closer look. Right, that overbite. He had to be one of the Petersons. “Fred,” I guessed.

“I own the place now.” He sounded pleased I’d recognized him. “Me and my brother. Going on two years.” He nodded at the collection jar. “I saw you looking. We’re collecting for her burial. You remember Lainie?”

Of course. How could I forget Miss Lainie? She was the most taciturn person I’d ever known, and given some of the work crews I’d dealt with, that was saying something. Miss Lainie chased people out of her store with a broom if they tracked in a flake of snow; she hovered behind them as they decided between Reese’s Cups and Three Musketeers. She snatched coins from shoppers’ palms, leaving behind painful red marks. One day Miss Lainie shortchanged me, and Julie marched right into the store and demanded the quarter back. Julie hated confrontation but she hated unfairness worse. “She owned the Stop ’n Shop,” I told Fred Peterson. How old had Lainie been? Ancient, I decided. She certainly seemed ancient to Julie and me.

“Until she sold it and went to work at Gerkey’s. In the gift shop, if you can believe it.” He chuckled.

“Since when does Gerkey’s have a gift shop?”

“Since Brian took it over five years back.”

“Brian
Gerkey
?” How had that happened? Brian used to be so high on weed he couldn’t turn himself around, let alone a family business.

My surprise made Fred chuckle again. “He’s one of our most upstanding citizens now. He’s married, got two little girls.”

That lost, sad look in Mrs. Gerkey’s eyes as I’d plucked my paycheck from her grasp. Everything had worked out in the end. “His mom must be thrilled.”

“Old Alice? You betcha.”

The waitress waved from the end of the bar, and Fred said, “Excuse me.”

I studied Miss Lainie’s picture. Hard to imagine her working behind the counter of a gift shop. She probably snapped at the customers to hurry up and decide, made a big production out of having to give them a bag to carry their purchases in. But it didn’t mean she didn’t deserve a decent burial. I tugged a bill from my wallet, folded it into a neat rectangle, and tapped it through the slot cut in the jar lid. What happened to people like Lainie, alone and poor at the end? I fingered the few remaining bills in my wallet, then pushed a second one through the slot. In another day or so, Halim would deposit the money from the Burnside job into our account and I could use my ATM card.

I picked up the mug. Good old Leinenkugel, Minnesota’s unofficial state beer. The honeyed malt taste blew me right back to the blanket spread beneath the football bleachers, the backseat of Joe’s car. I’d forgotten how cloying the brew was. So much for nostalgia. Next round I’d return to good old Sam Adams. No memories there.

I scratched the mosquito bite on my shoulder. In town less than an hour, and already the insects were feasting on me. It was like they sent up signal flares.
Over here, juicy one right here
. They never bothered Julie, though. Martin used to say it was because she was too sweet. Which meant, of course, that I was too sour. Martin always winked at me when I grumbled at the unspoken comparison. He never tired of teasing me.

Was I reading too much into one phone call, made by a girl I didn’t even know? After all, people could live a long time with kidney disease. I could have gone to a doctor back in Baltimore to see if I was a match. Instead, I’d dropped everything and raced up here. Maybe I’d been waiting for an excuse to return. It was just curiosity, I told myself. Nothing more.

A man slid onto the barstool beside mine. “Hey.”

Round-faced, droopy brown eyes, blond hair, potbelly straining at the front of his polo shirt. No one I knew. “Hi.”

“Am I glad I found this place. Nothing worse than checking in to a hotel and finding out it doesn’t have a bar.”

“At least Black Bear
has
a hotel. Try the next town over and you’d have to pitch a tent.” I should know. I’d spent an entire summer there once.

He laughed. “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be camping in a place called Black Bear.”

“Don’t worry. There aren’t any bears around here. Head north toward the reservation, though, and you’ll find plenty.”

“I’ll stay south, then. Martini,” he told Fred. “And one for my friend here.”

Fred looked over; I shook my head.

“I just flew into Fargo to meet with a client. I’m in specialty chemicals.” He paid for his drink. “You ever see that movie,
Fargo
?”

A talker. Full of pent-up energy from being trapped in a plane and then driving across the endless flat countryside between here and Fargo. “Sure.”

“Until I heard the girl at the car rental place, I didn’t know people really talked that way.”

Oh, yah. Sure they do, now. You betcha
.

“No offense,” he said, hastily. “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

“I’m not.” Not anymore.

The door opened to admit two newcomers, men who didn’t glance over, but instead went straight to the pool table, lifting cue sticks from the wall rack. Mike Cavanaugh? Yes, though his face looked weathered, like the winters since I’d last seen him had been harsh on him. The other guy looked familiar, too. Wasn’t he the band director’s son? His hair had thinned to a fluffy circle around his head, and now he really looked like his dad. I’d better prepare myself, practice my happy face. No doubt I’d see a hundred
more people I knew before I finally left town. An unwelcome thought. Just how long could I keep the mask in place before it slipped? I told myself I’d better finish up my beer and head back to Julie’s house. The sooner I found out what I needed to do to be tested for a match, the sooner I could leave.

“So what’s there to do in a place called Black Bear, if it’s not camping?” Mr. Specialty Chemicals wanted to know.

“Fishing’s big. And hunting.”

Someone new had joined the pool players. A man, six feet tall, dark-haired. He had his back to me, but I recognized him instantly. The way he stood there with his head cocked to one side was unmistakable. My body registered it first, a familiar tug deep inside, then my brain caught up. Joe Connolly. My heart had conjured him up out of thin air. But of course he’d be here. This was his town, his hangout. Did I want him to turn and see me? Yes. No. Maybe.

“That lets me out, then. I’m more into golf, watching football, that sort of thing. Hey, what’s that you’re drinking? Is it any good? You sure I can’t buy you a drink?”

“I’m sure.”

Joe took the pool cue Mike held out and moved around the pool table. He was saying something that had Mike frowning and the band director’s son standing motionless. Now they were all shaking their heads.

Joe was wearing his hair shorter now; I suddenly imagined the tickle of those hairs along my fingertips. His blue shirt was open at the neck, the cuffs folded to reveal tanned forearms, his jeans well worn, the hypnotic pull of wide shoulders leading down to trim hips.

“Specialty chemicals are the future, I tell you. They’re gonna rule the world.”

Joe leaned over the pool table. The hanging light cast his face in shadow, revealed the planes of his cheeks, his lips. I realized he was staring at me.

Slowly, he straightened.

I flushed and lowered my beer. Should I smile, or be cool? How ridiculous. I was acting like a kid.

“You don’t really care, do you? You’re not even listening. Lemme ask you something. You ever heard of nanotechnology?” Mr. Specialty Chemicals loosened his tie. “Seriously. Do you even know what that means? I don’t know what the average person on the street knows.”

Joe said something to Mike, and now he glanced over, too. “I’m not average and I’m not on the street.”

“Right, right.” He patted the air. “It’s just an expression. So, do you?”

The band director’s son was looking over at me, too. Not one bit of welcome or surprise on any of their faces.

“It’s gonna change the world, believe you me. Insider tip, I don’t mind sharing. You got any spare cash, that’s where you should be putting it. Nanotech’s gonna cure cancer, solve the energy crisis, stop world hunger.” He burped softly. “You name it.”

Joe was coming over, threading his way around the tables, his gaze intent on mine. Did we have anything to say to each other after all these years? Damn, he looked good, his dark hair still in compelling contrast to the bright blue of his eyes.

“Hey.” I smiled, but Joe didn’t smile back. So he didn’t have the same fond memories I did. Fair enough.

“Dana.”

When had I last heard him say my name?

“What are you doing here?”

Caution in his voice, and something else. Concern? “I was just passing by,” I joked.

He shook his head, still not smiling. His fingers touched my arm, the warmth of his grasp singing through the thin cotton to my skin. “Excuse us,” he said to the salesman.

“Sure, sure.”

I slid off my barstool and followed Joe to an empty table. He
pulled out my chair and sat down, looking at me with such compassion that I felt the faint prickle of alarm. “What is it, Joe? You’re scaring me.”

“Dana, I’m sorry.” He shook his head.

The jukebox silenced, and in the small cupful of quiet, I said, “Sorry about what?”

He took my hand in both of his, dragged his chair closer. “You don’t know?” he asked. “No one called you?”

“Peyton called me this morning. She said Julie was sick.”