“I’m running late for a conference call. Apologies.”
seventeen
The Pine County Clerk’s Office was exactly as I remembered it. Behind the frosted-glass windows set on the lacquered oak counter now stood twelve rows of filing cabinets instead of eight, a testament to the growth and prosperity the county had enjoyed when Jack Blackburn and Francis Dufresne, and later Teddy Boynton, were stumping for progress. All that was missing, for the moment, was County Clerk Verna Clark. Instead I was greeted by Deputy Clerk Vicky Clark, Verna’s daughter.
As a teenager, Vicky Clark had played the piano well enough to win a scholarship to a prestigious out-of-state music academy. But she’d gotten pregnant with triplets, no less, and enjoyed a brief moment of triplet celebrity before sinking back into anonymity in Starvation Lake. She never went to the academy. Now she was a heavyset woman who dyed her blond hair black, streaked it purple and scarlet, and drew it back into a spiky leather catch. She wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, black lipstick, black stud earrings, and black mascara on her eyes, which were pinched nearly shut by her fat cheeks. A plaster cast painted black encased her right arm from the wrist to just above the elbow. Spackle, I thought. I couldn’t help it. When we were kids, Soupy had dubbed her Spackle for all the makeup she plastered on her face.
“What happened to your arm?” I said.
She held it out, bracing it with her left arm. “Fell off a ladder at my boyfriend’s house. Taking down Christmas lights.”
“Your boyfriend puts up Christmas lights?”
“His kids like them. Mine could give a crap. But here I’m trying to help him out, and he’s in the house watching hockey. I’m laying out there in the snow for like an hour before Sully comes out and says, ‘What happened to you?’ I broke my damn arm is what. He ain’t my boyfriend anymore. I’m going to sue him. Know any good lawyers?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I might get one if it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg-I mean my other arm and a leg. Dad said I could probably get some money out of Sully’s homeowner’s. Fine with me. Help me get the hell out of here.”
I wasn’t sure whether she meant the clerk’s office or Starvation Lake, but I would’ve bet she’d never leave either. Despite what she said, she was probably back with Sully, or would be soon. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear he’d put her up to suing so they could split the insurance money.
“I hope your arm gets better,” I said. I told her I needed to see the minutes for all the town council meetings from March through August of 1988. Just as her mother had fifteen years before, Vicky handed me a public- information request form.
“Boy, Vicky, do I really have to do this?” I said. “I’m in kind of a hurry.”
“Sorry. It’s policy. My moth-my boss would kill me.”
She folded her hands on the counter while I filled it out. She looked bored. I’d almost finished when she leaned across and said, “Can I ask you something?”
I looked up from the form. “Sure.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“Come back?”
“Here. Why’d you come back here? I heard you had it made downstate, then you got fired.”
What the hell happened to you, Spackle? I thought. Didn’t you have it made? Then I immediately felt bad for thinking it.
“Fired?” I said. “Not really. I just wasn’t seeing eye to eye with my bosses, and I thought it’d be good to come back here and regroup before I get out in the real world again.”
She knew I was lying. She gave me a little smile, seeming comforted to know that she had a kindred spirit, someone else who appreciated the dull pain of being stuck forever in Starvation Lake. “Give me that,” she said, taking the form. She looked around the room. “Hang on.”
Fifteen minutes passed as she went through drawer after drawer of filing cabinets in the back of the room. She came back to the counter empty-handed. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “They aren’t hard to find, everything’s filed by year, but there’s a whole big folder missing from 1988. Maybe somebody from Town Hall came over and-uh-oh.” She was looking past my shoulder. I turned around to see Verna Clark, lips pursed, hands on her hips. She didn’t look pleased, but then I wouldn’t have known what she looked like when she was pleased.
“What’s going on here?” she said.
Vicky said, “Gus was asking for some-”
“If a customer wants some archival files,” her mother said, “we have them prepare a public-information request, don’t we?”
Vicky waved the sheet of paper. “He did.”
Verna stepped forward and grabbed the form without the slightest glance at me. She skimmed it and, for the slimmest sliver of a second, I thought I saw Verna Clark smile. “Unfortunately,” she said, “these particular files are unavailable at this moment.” She gave me a look that felt like a slap. “I haven’t forgotten you, Mr. Carpenter.”
She was still as thin as a hockey stick, still wearing a gray dress and glasses that dangled at her neck. “Nice to see you again,” I said.
She turned to Vicky. “As a matter of procedure, we don’t go digging around in files until we’ve completed the proper processing of the form.” She turned back to me. “That normally takes three to five days.”
“Gus works for the newspaper, though, Mother, and he-”
“I thought we’d spoken about how you should address your superiors in the workplace. And I’m well aware of where Mr. Carpenter works. In fact he worked there once before, many years ago, and now that he has decided to come back, he’ll find that our procedures have remained consistent.”
“Yes, they have,” I said.
“In any event, the files you’re requesting were needed elsewhere this morning. I would’ve had them make copies, but our copier has been malfunctioning and we haven’t been able to get it serviced yet, what with the budget cuts.”
I thought it strange that someone from Town Hall would want to see ten-year-old minutes at the very moment that I wanted them. It had to be Dingus, working through channels.
“Can I ask who took them?” I said.
“You can ask, but I’m unable to furnish a reply,” Verna Clark said. I looked at Vicky. She obviously didn’t know. Her mother said, “If Town Hall follows procedures, we should have the documents back and ready for you to view in approximately seventy-two hours, no earlier.”
Back at the Pilot, Tillie’s little television showed frosty wisps of breath rippling around the perfectly round face of TV reporter Tawny Jane Reese. Her shiny mahogany hair framed a look of near constant surprise, accentuated by her slightly upturned nose. “Dumber than a bag of hockey pucks,” Soupy liked to say about Tawny Jane. “But who cares?”
She was talking into a Channel Eight microphone in front of the sheriff’s department. “Within minutes,” she said, “Sheriff Dingus Aho is expected to talk about the discovery of a snowmobile at nearby Walled Lake. As exclusively reported by Channel Eight, police have determined the snowmobile belonged to legendary youth hockey coach Jack Blackburn, who drowned in an accident…”
Though she screwed up facts like Walleye Lake and took credit for “exclusive” stories she’d actually read in the Pilot, I had a soft spot for Tawny Jane Reese. Sometimes I just turned the sound down and watched her practice those TV moves: The punctuated nodding of the head. The furrowed brow of concern. The everything’s- going-to-be-OK flash of smile. Tawny Jane had them down. Sometimes I tried to picture her having dinner with me. Would she chat with the same furrowing and nodding? I supposed she wouldn’t. Other times I wondered if she was still young and perky enough to land a job in a big city. I supposed she wasn’t.
Now she knitted her penciled-in eyebrows as the camera dollied in. “Local news reports have pointed to the discovery of a bullet hole in Blackburn’s snowmobile as evidence that the coach has been murdered. However, sheriff’s department sources are telling Channel Eight this may be premature. In fact…”
