Skinny Dipping

Prologue

SUMMER

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

FALL

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

WINTER

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

SPRING

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

SUMMER

Chapter Forty-Nine

March

“This came in the mail last week.” Mignonette Charbonneau Olson, aka Mimi, slid the greasy, mangled postcard across the gray metal office desk to the detective.

Otell Weber didn’t look like a private detective to Mimi; he looked like a retired Nate’s Men’s Clothing Store salesman, a little stodgy, a little tired, a little worn down at the heels. But Mimi’s employer, the great and all-knowing Oz, had vouched for him, and Mimi trusted Oz, who had many reasons to know Minneapolis’s most inexpensive yet reliable private detectives.

Otell peered through his reading glasses at the note scribbled on the postcard:

The sight of her father’s once familiar scrawl no longer had the effect of sucking the air from Mimi’s lungs. Like a lot of things over the three decades since his disappearance, she’d grown used to it.

“Wish my daddy had held a similar view,” Otell muttered, turning the postcard over. The picture side featured a giant rabbit sporting antlers and sitting in front of a distant blue mountain. The caption below it read, “The Rare Montana Jackalope.”

“Quite the yuckster, your old man.”

“He was being ironic, Mr. Weber,” Mimi said. She leaned forward and flipped the postcard back over, pointing at the cancelation mark covering the stamp. “That’s what I wanted you to see.”

It was postmarked June 22, 1979.

Otell’s interest finally woke up. “You just got it?”

Mimi nodded.

“You know, you hear of things like this. A wallet left by some long-dead carpenter in a wall and found during remodeling, a letter wedged in a PO mailbox delivered decades after it was sent.”

“Yeah, and this would fall into the latter category.”

“So, what exactly do you want me to do with it?”

“I want you to find out what happened to my father.” Just saying the words out loud made Mimi uncomfortable. After years of learning to ignore the question of what had happened to her father as being unanswerable, the unexpected reminder that he was still out there somewhere (or at least parts of him were) rattled Mimi far more than she would have expected.

Since receiving that postcard, Mimi had lain awake at night. Mimi disliked anything interfering with her sleep. She had long ago embraced a serene, uncomplicated lifestyle founded on a refusal to reflect on the past or predict the future. But this postcard had nibbled at her tranquility until, with a sense of dismay, Mimi had concluded that
something
would have to be done. Which is why she was here.

“Ah-huh,” Otell said, nodding tiredly. “He skipped out on you?”

“No,” Mimi said, offended. “He disappeared. Thirty years ago. He dropped me off up north with my relatives for the summer and said he’d be back before Labor Day. He never showed up.”

“Any child-support issues? Court orders, lawsuits, that sort of thing? Any…habits?”

“No.” Mimi shook her head. “Look, Mr. Weber. There’s no reason my dad would want to disappear. My mother had all the money. Dad didn’t pay alimony or child support. He didn’t have a worry in the world.”

“Ms. Olson”—Otell Weber leaned across his desk—“if he had a kid, take my word for it, he had worries. I got five. I got a
world
of worries.”

“You don’t know my dad,” Mimi said confidently.

Otell regarded her disbelievingly. “Huh.”

Mimi didn’t care whether he believed her or not. It was true. John Olson didn’t owe anyone anything. He had no debts of any kind. He never made waves. He didn’t tell people what to do or how to live. He didn’t expect things from anyone. He wasn’t materialistic or envious. And if Mimi’s mother, Solange, had passed down the rather severe indictment that John Olson was defined more by what he wasn’t than by what he was, it worked for him. He’d been the happiest guy Mimi had ever known.

Otell finally began using the pad of yellow legal paper he’d placed on his desk. “Has anyone else ever made any attempt to find him? Was a missing person’s report ever filed?”

“Yes and yes. My grandfather hired someone. The police in North Dakota were notified.” At Otell’s questioning look she elaborated. “He was in North Dakota the last time we heard from him. He called us from a public phone.”

“Do you happen to remember the date of that call?”

Mimi didn’t have to think. “June seventh.”

“Well, that’s something,” Otell said, leaning back in his chair. “How about Canada? Mexico? Anyone look there?”

“I think so,” Mimi said. “My grandfather contacted just about everyone he could think of, and he must have done a pretty good job, because the courts didn’t have any trouble declaring my dad legally dead in ’eighty-six.”

“Hm. But you don’t think so.”

“His death was only declared because of his absence, not because they found him or anything that suggested he was dead. Maybe he’s in a jail in Irkutsk or something. I don’t know. That’s why I’m hiring you.”

Otell tapped the end of his pen against the yellow pad. “Well, let me give you my spiel first, Ms. Olson. Then, if you decide to hire me, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do and what it’s likely to cost you.”

He sat back in his chair. “After thirty years, there’s not much of a chance I’ll find anything. Most people wouldn’t remember what their next-door neighbor looked like after thirty years let alone some guy they passed at a gas station. But we do have the information that he was in Montana, and the police didn’t have that back then. I’m just warning you that you’re likely not to get much satisfaction for what it’s going to end up costing you.”

She nodded. “I don’t have a lot of money.”

He sighed in disappointment. “Well, the good news is that a lot of searching can be done online now. So that’ll keep the bill down. The bad news is that other pieces of information could come dribbling in for months. Is there any hurry?”

“After thirty years? No. None at all.”

“Okay, then what I propose is this: I’ll do what I can from the computer in my spare time and, barring that, through the good old U.S. postal system. Anyway, that way I can charge you a cut rate. Then, if I find anything interesting, we’ll decide if it’s worth pursuing. It could take months,” he warned her. “Probably will.”

“I understand.” She hadn’t expected anything else. She just wanted to fall asleep. And the money didn’t matter to her. She didn’t have anything else to spend it on. Not herself and not anyone else.

She truly was John Olson’s daughter.

When Mimi got home she decided she might as well get the other chore on her list out of the way, so she called her doctor’s office about what she assumed was a missent lab report. The records clerk put her on hold a few minutes, and when the phone picked up again, Mimi was surprised to hear her doctor’s voice.

“I am
so
sorry, Mignonette. We
never
mail out positive lab results without first talking to the patient.”

“No skin off my nose,” Mimi said. “But you do have my test results there, don’t you?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Anything interesting?” Mimi asked. “Anything I should know about?”

There was a longish pause.

“Doc?”

“You mean aside from your pregnancy?” her doctor asked.

Mimi authored the next long silence. “I’m pregnant?”

“Well, yes,” the doctor said, clearly confused; then, “Oh. Oh, god. I’m sorry. I assumed you knew. I thought the report was pretty straightforward—”

After that, Mimi didn’t remember anything too clearly. She had a vague recollection of mumbling affirmatives for a while, then being shunted back to the front desk. It was all kind of a blur.

At least she’d spared herself the ignominy of shouting, “I can’t be!” Fact was, she could. True, the candidates for her baby’s father were limited to one, a hot-air balloonist, and the possible times of conception limited to the three hours after he’d told her he was moving and after asking her to come with him and after she’d told him she’d no intention of moving to Arizona. And after laughing.

She hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings. He’d surprised her, and she frankly had thought he was joking. They just didn’t have that sort of relationship. She didn’t have those sorts of relationships. When she saw that her amusement had hurt him, she’d deviated from a long-established rule of no unprotected intercourse as a way to make up for her gaffe. She hated bad feelings to ruin the memories of a perfectly fun and pleasant relationship. And so there she was, forty-one and knocked up.

She’d never wondered whether she’d be a good mother. She didn’t do so now. Wondering about things, trying to anticipate what was coming, what was going…she’d never had particular success in these areas. To be truly content you simply had to let life happen without interfering. Her dad had taught her that. “Just let it slide, honey, until it slides right on by.”

That afternoon, she returned to her apartment and ordered in pad thai. She did not get around to addressing the practical matters of her pregnancy. She didn’t get around to it the next day either. Or the next week. Or the next.

She would, she decided, just wait and see what happened. Except…she found herself speculating about who the baby would be like, what bits of DNA would show up that marked her or him as an Olson, or even a member of her mother’s Charbonneau family, or the hot-air balloonist’s. Images filled her brain like champagne bubbles, phosphorous and fragile, of herself holding a baby, or handing an infant to a faceless young woman, or lying on a table with her legs in stirrups.

For six weeks her restlessness grew, until in surprise she realized that this time waiting was not going to work. She made an appointment with an obstetrician.

The night before her appointment, she miscarried. It was a small event as events go. If she hadn’t read the initial lab report in the first place, she would have assumed she’d simply been late, like lots of women her age, and never known she’d been pregnant.

But she did know.

It subtly changed things, skewed her in some fundamental way. She’d assumed that with the end of the pregnancy, she would return to her carefree ways. It didn’t work that way. She’d still felt that uncomfortable sense of anticipation, like she was being prodded by some internal mechanism to
do
something. She just didn’t know what.

She sure wasn’t waking up shouting, “My God, I
need
to be a mother!” She was actually pretty certain she didn’t. But Possibility, in all its vague and chimerical forms, had reared its ugly head.