Maiden Rock (4 page)

would give her a clue as to where her daughter was right now. She doubted it. Plus, she didn’t believe in reading something that was that private. Things would have to get worse before she’d stoop to that.

She looked at the pile of books next to Meg’s diary:
To Kill a Mockingbird, Sweetblood, The Thorn Birds,
and
Pride and Prejudice.
Her daughter had definitely moved on from Harry Potter. Meg used books like drugs, a way to get distance from a world that wasn’t always what she wanted.

With every breath Claire took she waited to hear the phone ring. She thought she couldn’t wait any longer, but she was forced to. She had known that at some point, Meg would do something like this—skip school, steal a candy bar, skinny-dip—but she hadn’t thought it would be so soon. She thought it would happen when Meg was a senior and was ready to bust out of this small-town life.

Claire leaned over and grabbed her daugher’s pillow, just wanting to hold the smell of her. Underneath, she found a folded note. Under normal circumstances, she would never have read it. If everything turned out fine, she would never tell Meg she had even seen it. But she needed to know what was going on in Meg’s life right now that might make her stay out all night.

The note was on narrow-lined paper and folded as small as it could fold. Carefully Claire undid it. She held it arm’s length from her eyes; she didn’t have her new reading glasses handy.

The phone rang. Rich answered it before it had a chance to sound again. Claire stood at the top of the stairs and listened.

“No, nothing. You haven’t heard anything either?”

He must be talking to Emily. Claire perched on the top stairs. She could feel tears pushing to get out. She fought them back; she needed to see clearly now.

She couldn’t stay in this house. She had to be out actively looking for the kids. Driving around helped her feel like she was accomplishing something, even if it was only using up gas. She would go to Meg’s favorite haunts: the lake, the gravel pit, the winding road up toward Gaylord’s.

Rich looked up at her as she came down the stairs. “That was Emily.”

“I figured.”

“She’s sounding worried.”

“Me, too.” Claire looked at Rich. Even after three years, she couldn’t always read him. “How about you?”

“I’m starting to get there. This is so unlike Meg.”

“She’s a teenager.”

“She knows we would worry.”

“She probably thinks we wouldn’t even know yet,” Claire pointed out, trying to sound more positive than she felt. “Maybe they thought the Jorgensons wouldn’t check on them.”

“That’s true.”

“Rich, do you know if Meg has a boyfriend?” Rich turned away and poured himself another cup of coffee.

He knew something. This time Claire could tell. He was trying to think how to say it. She just needed the truth.

“I don’t care if you know something I don’t know. I just found a note upstairs and it read like a love note.”

He sat back down at the table and gave her a grimace of a smile. “Meg thought she might have a boyfriend. She wasn’t sure. I should have told you, but … she said she’d know after tonight. She wanted to tell you herself.”

“I think that’s good. I mean, who was he? Was he a nice kid?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me. She said he was a really nice kid.”

“God, what if he wasn’t a nice kid? What if he did something to her?”

U
nlike some old fogeys his age, Edwin still drank coffee—three cups every morning. He had started when he was ten years old, when coffee was brought out to the fields for mid-morning breaks. He would drink it, he hoped, until the day he died. Every night, he set the coffee-maker for 5:45. He swore that he could smell the rich aroma in bed. It pulled him down the stairs.

This morning, he left Ella sleeping, arm wrapped around her pillow. She was such a quiet sleeper, he hardly knew she was in bed with him. Betty had snored and thrashed through the night. He pulled the covers up over Ella’s shoulder and patted her. Sometimes, being in bed with her, he felt unfaithful to his first wife. Hard to get over having slept with one woman for fifty years, then sleeping with another. But he liked the slightly illicit feeling of having Ella next to him.

The stairs were his first trial of the day. He had to go down using his bad leg first. The steps were steep and narrow, tucked into a small space in the house. If he was smart he would have them enlarged, but he was accustomed to them, knew how to manage them. He always kept a tight grip on the railing.

Once in the kitchen he went to the dishwasher, opened it and got out a mug. Ella had insisted they install a dishwasher when she moved in. She had scolded him about not having put one in for his first wife. He tried to tell her that Betty had liked doing the dishes, but Ella wouldn’t believe him.

She had changed a few other things, even the bedroom they slept in, and he had let her. He felt it was a kind of exorcism, even though Ella and Betty had always been good friends. Ella had to make these changes in order to claim the old farmhouse and he was glad to pay for them.

He poured himself the first cup of coffee and walked to the window. The car was still there.

Darn kids! He hated to make a fuss, but it was necessary. If he called the sheriff and the deputies came out, it would spread through the community that he had reported these kids. This news would act as a deterrent to all the other teenagers who wanted to come park on his land.

He picked up the phone and dialed the sheriff’s number.

He didn’t mind if people climbed up to Maiden Rock from the road, but he didn’t want them driving in through his land. When they made the hike up from the road, he felt like they deserved to sit on the rock and enjoy the view. They never stayed long either, because they had to climb down the bluff and no one wanted to do that in the dark. It was too dangerous.

***

Bridget looked in on her three-year-old daughter before she went downstairs to start the day. Rachel was stretched out on her back, her face open and calm. Just looking at her daughter made

Bridget happy. She seemed so content. Rachel, like her mother, didn’t like to get up early. On weekends, she could easily sleep in until eight or nine. Bridget let her, she understood.

Her ex-husband Chuck was coming to get Rachel today. He took her once a month for an overnight, then usually one other evening a month. It wasn’t as often as many divorced fathers had their children, but it was enough so that Chuck and Rachel had a real connection. Bridget didn’t know if she would have liked him to have visitation more often. She did look forward to her nights off and often planned something fun to do: a movie she wouldn’t have watched if Rachel was around, a trip into the Cities, a night out with her sister Claire.

But for tonight she had planned nothing. Maybe she’d call and see if Claire wanted to go into the Cities with her. Shoe shopping was always an activity they both enjoyed. Her notion of what constituted a good shoe had changed considerably since she had moved to the country, clod-hoppers were often on her feet now—good solid-soled shoes that tied tight and, if possible, were waterproof. Such shoes tended to make your feet look about two sizes larger.

Bridget slipped down the stairs quietly and walked to the back door. Since moving to this small town, her morning ritual had become stepping into the back porch and reading the thermometer. When she opened the door, she guessed it was about fifty degrees out. Fall tang was in the air. The thermometer surprised her—thirty-five degrees. They’d had a light frost already, but were due for a heavy one.

She heard an odd noise and a whoosh and looked over the backyard to the field at the bottom of the bluff.

A dark bird came sailing down out of the denseness of trees and landed in the tall grass that rimmed the bluff. Another one.

A whole bevy of turkey must have roosted up in the trees. She shivered and watched three more wild turkeys awkwardly fling themselves into the day. They were such prehistoric creatures: large, black, and lumpy. Looking at turkeys, it was easy to see the connection between dinosaurs and birds. Often, when she got ready for work, they speckled the fields, bent over eating leftover grains. They would wander across the highway and take their time as cars screeched to a halt for them.

She shivered again and hugged her bathrobe around her.

The phone rang. She stood still for a moment, wondering who it could be. She prayed it wasn’t work. If it was somebody calling in sick she would say she couldn’t fill in. She needed this day off. She wouldn’t get another whole day to herself for over a month.

Reluctantly, she walked into the house and picked up the phone.

She was happy when it was only Rich on the other end. “Good morning, this is a little on the early side even for you.” “I have a favor to ask,” he said.

She didn’t like the tone of his voice; it sounded clenched. “A favor? What’s going on?”

“Could you come over here and man the phone?” “What’s going on, Rich?”

***

Jared woke with a jerk. He needed it.

Bugs, he could feel them in his mouth. His gums were crawling with bugs. He rubbed at them, but they didn’t go away. Tunneling into his teeth.

Something wet on his fingers. He looked down and saw streaks of blood. He wiped them on his shirt front.

He needed to tweak bad.

Where was he?

He knew he was in his car, but he couldn’t see out his car windows. When he opened the door, he saw mist swirling over the fields.

He had gone to get Hitch the ammonia.

Then he saw his Aunt Letty’s trailer.

Aunt Letty was his mother’s sister. She’d been a nurse at the People’s clinic in Wabasha until about a few years ago, when she had been caught stealing some Oxycontin. She was put on probation, but seemed to go downhill after that. Since then, his mother didn’t like him hanging around with Letty.

His mother had good reason. Letty turned him onto meth last summer. He’d been using regularly ever since. When Hitch had come to live with her, getting meth got a whole lot easier. They just cooked it up every couple days. Hitch called him his “sous-chef.” Once Jared asked him what that meant. Hitch said, “Undercooked.”

Jared grabbed the metal canister full of ammonia from the floor of the car and walked toward the trailer. No sense knocking. He just walked in. No one hardly ever slept here, except Davy, Letty’s three-year-old son. He could sleep through anything. The little boy had learned to go into his room and sleep when he needed to.

The trailer was wall-to-wall garbage and smelled like a rank boy’s locker room. Letty didn’t bother to clean anymore,

Hitch just messed things up again when he made the next batch of meth.

Hitch came walking out of his aunt’s bedroom. “What took you so long? You got the stuff?”

“Yeah, I got it. Man, for a second I fell asleep in the driveway.”

“Let’s get going. We got deliveries to make.” His aunt came up behind Hitch, tying a bathrobe around her waist. She grunted at him.

Once, Letty had been beautiful.

Jared remembered how glamorous he thought his aunt was when he was little: long dark brown hair, big blue eyes, and a smile a mile wide. She had looked like a country singer.

“Hey,” he said to her.

“You got it?” she asked.

He nodded.

Now Letty looked older than his mom. Her skin was dark under her eyes, her hair was thin and greasy, and she had lost some teeth. A bad case of “meth mouth.” Her clothes hung on her wire-thin body.

If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was older than his grandmother, her mother. Grandma wouldn’t even talk to her anymore. She had given up on Letty, said Letty was killing herself and she didn’t want no part of it.

Now, Grandma wouldn’t talk to him either.

Jared wondered if he was killing himself. He had tried once or twice to quit tweaking. He stayed clean at his mom’s house for four days, curled up in bed and feeling all the skin on his body being pulled off of him at once. Every square inch of flesh hurt. Every hair follicle shrieked. His eyeballs wept. His nose ran. He couldn’t stand it. The morning

of the fifth day he managed to get out of bed and came straight to the trailer. That was three months ago.

Davy came wandering out of his room, his hand in his mouth, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. No one had even bothered to get him ready for bed.

Jared liked Davy. He was a good kid, not much trouble. Very quiet. Big eyes that watched everything.

Davy had come to stay with Jared’s family when his mom was in prison. Now the boy was back living with Letty, but Letty was too fucked up to take good care of him. Jared tried to keep an eye on the kid, but he wasn’t much use either.

“Hey, Davy, it’s not time to get up,” Jared grabbed him by the shoulders. The kid was so tiny. He didn’t even come up to Jared’s belt buckle.

Davy turned his big blue eyes up to Jared, rubbed his face, then pointed at his belly. “I’m hungry.”

“Come on, buddy. I’ll make you a peanut butter sandwich.”