Missing Mark (29 page)

A couple of hours later, I decided feuding with her wasn’t worth the effort.

T
HE AIR WAS
brisk so I was glad for the life jacket over my sweatshirt out on the boat that afternoon. Malik seemed comfortable in the outdoors gear he often wore when doing live shots in inclement weather.

“The deepest point of the lake is over there.” Russ Nesbett pointed somewhere in the direction of open water. “Eighty-four feet straight down.”

The developments in the missing-groom case, as well as the drug bust next door, had distracted me from the upcoming largemouth bass contest. Russ had insisted on taking me out for a spin in his new bass boat, sleek, shallow, and speedy. He hoped to net some publicity for the town.

“But not all publicity is good publicity,” he explained, confiding that he wished I hadn’t done the meth-neighbor story because now viewers might think White Bear Lake has a drug problem and that could affect property values.

“I’ll keep that in mind next time.”

As the boat banked, a spray of water hit my face. I wiped it off, smiling politely, while telling Russ that I was feeling cold. Instead of heading back to shore, he handed me a wool blanket. Malik looked amused at my discomfort.

“So how long could you live if you fell in this water?” I asked. I wasn’t trying to be negative. I just like knowing my odds.

“That depends,” Russ said. “The water temperature’s probably around sixty-five degrees. If you lived long enough to die of hypothermia, that might take a few hours. But you could die in a matter of minutes if you drowned or suffered cardiac arrest or your larynx went spastic.”

All unpleasant-sounding ways to go.

“Holding on to something that floats, like a capsized boat,” he continued, “would help prevent the loss of body heat. You lose more heat when you swim or tread water.”

I was glad I wore a life jacket. And I made it a point to sit low in the boat, especially on the turns.

“Let me show you some of the basics of bass fishing.” Russ steered the boat near the shallows and pulled out a rod and reel. “Bass like hiding under sunken logs.”

“I thought the season hadn’t opened yet.”

I was looking for a plausible excuse for why we shouldn’t do this. Calling the sport boring wouldn’t faze him. He probably heard that from dames all the time.

“We’re just going to practice your cast.” Russ showed me that his blue-speckled fly had no hook. “We’ll use this, though bass really like to bite on live crawfish.”

He demonstrated how to hop the bait across the shallows into the shade, then handed the fishing rod to me.

I recalled my husband had been especially fond of, even superstitious about, a particular red-speckled fly. He’d once landed a lunker with it. Not just a fish story, either, I’d seen photographic evidence. I smiled at how he’d employed that angler trick of holding the fish out toward the camera to make his catch look bigger. I now regretted giving away his tackle box and wished I’d kept that special lure.

“Just a minute,” Malik called out.

He got repositioned low on the bottom of the boat to take no chance that I’d knock his camera overboard while I was casting. To save money, Channel 3 recently dropped insurance on most of its equipment. Malik knew if he lost the camera, he wouldn’t be fired until the station worked the replacement cost out of him.

He hoisted the camera to his shoulder. “I’m ready.”

Then Russ reached his arms around my shoulders to demonstrate how to pull back and flick my wrist. “Gentle. Gentle.”

I didn’t answer, but concentrated on achieving a perfect cast so I could thank him and we could head back to shore.

“We’d make a great team,” he said. “With your media connections and my business know-how, I know we could land the Governor’s Fishing Opener next year and really put this town on the tourist map.”

To distract him from thinking of me as his public-relations maven, I asked if we could look at some of the historic lake houses from the water
on our way back
. I knew many of the estates started as summer homes for St. Paul’s elite in the late nineteenth century. But Russ filled me in on vivid lake lore like how famous gangsters such as Ma Barker, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Al Capone hid out in the fashionable resort town during Prohibition. And how the lake got its name from an Indian legend that a Sioux warrior saved his beloved by killing a white bear and the animal’s spirit still lives in the area.

I must have looked skeptical about a polar bear being this far off course, but it occurred to me that the lake’s namesake was most likely an albino black bear. By then Russ was insisting that Mark Twain even referenced the tale in
Life on the Mississippi
.

“And that’s an American classic,” he added.

That would also be easy to check, I thought, confident the volume sat on my bookshelves at home.

We were approaching the Post family’s landmark Peninsula House. I hadn’t seen the view from the water before. Situated on a cliff, the mansion looked formidable. Russ steered the boat around the point, emphasizing the coveted shoreline location. I encouraged Malik to shoot exteriors, just in case we ever needed them.

Next Russ pointed out the White Bear Yacht Club, and I paid close attention because Madeline and Mark’s wedding reception was supposed to have been held there. I tuned out Mr. Civic Booster’s running commentary of all the celebrities who had played golf on that course, to admire the vast wall windows in the clubhouse. As part of the lake history Russ mentioned that F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, rented rooms at the yacht club one summer in the twenties before being kicked out for disruptive parties.

Russ’s historic gossip was starting to make me feel special, sharing the geographic shadow of noted authors. Especially when he told me that Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams” (generally considered the precursor to
The Great Gatsby)
was set in White Bear Lake.

“Except he called it Black Bear Lake in his story,” Russ explained.

I tried discussing what he thought Fitzgerald was saying about women and greed in
Gatsby
, but it became clear that Russ wasn’t much of a reader, just a collector of local trivia.

That became further apparent when he echoed a hooker’s cheer, “Go, Bears!,” from the 1996 movie
Fargo
, and proudly explained, “That came from White Bear Lake High School.”

I’d forgotten that scene and made a mental note to try to stump Garnett with it.

Yet I walked on literary air when I returned home. With so many bedroom communities popping up overnight around suburban shopping centers and convenient freeway access, it felt nice to be living in a community rooted in real history. After all, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald were among America’s most influential novelists. And if White Bear Lake was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. I was even considering talking to a real estate agent once sweeps month ended.

I flopped onto my couch and flipped through my copy of
Life on the Mississippi
and sure enough, Mark Twain did visit the area. I read his discourse with great interest until I got to the part where he wrote “connected with White Bear Lake is a most idiotic Indian legend.”

Idiotic? My newly adopted hometown? I slammed the pages of his American classic, thinking, How judgmental of the old coot.

adeline ran her hand across a shelf of books and complimented my fiction collection. She pulled out a copy of Gaston Leroux’s
Phantom of the Opera
and flipped through the pages. Her choice, a novel featuring an emotionally tortured adversary with a disfigured face, fascinated me, given her diagnosis of prosopagnosia.

“Yeah, if this TV thing goes south,” I said, “I’m hoping to be a librarian.”

She lifted her eyebrows in surprise at my answer. “Come on, Riley not a writer?”

“Too solitary.” I shook my head. “At least librarians get to mingle at the check-out desk and explore the stacks.”

“I’d like to write a novel, but right now I’m working on short stories.” Madeline explained that she held degrees in both English and business. “English for me. Biz for my mother. She says we all have a duty to understand the workings of money so we can put it to good use. But I’m more drawn to words than numbers. Statistics lack soul.”

“Madeline, that last line of yours is quite profound. I think you might have a natural flair for writing.” Better to encourage that career path than a job dealing with customers and having to remember faces.

“Oh, what do you know about my writing?” She said it dismissively, but blushed in a pleased way.

“You wrote a six-word novel. Remember your want ad that brought us together? ‘For Sale: Wedding Dress. Never Worn.’ Your work rivaled Hemingway’s. Even if yours was self-published.”

She looked puzzled at the compliment and I explained that literary legend had it, Ernest Hemingway, arguably the finest American novelist of the twentieth century, wrote six words—“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”—to win a bar bet among other writers for the shortest story.

Silently, Madeline considered my words and the very direct comparison to the wedding-dress want ad that started our odyssey.

“Some say he considered it his best work, Madeline.”

Then I dropped the subject because I’d made a mental vow not to discuss her deceased fiancé tonight and we were veering close to that forbidden topic. Mark might be buried, but Madeline’s emotions were still very close to the surface.

She and I were riding together to a charity benefit in downtown St. Paul honoring the 125th anniversary of the Schubert Club, formed to salute classical music. Tonight’s event included a chamber concert featuring a world-class cellist, followed by a four-course dinner.

I wore a little black dress with pearls because that seemed safest in uncertain social situations. Madeline wore a little black dress with an emerald brooch.

Madeline had invited me to join her family at the Post table. I’d initially declined because I didn’t want to accept anything of value from them. That policy generally keeps things cleaner in reporter-source relationships. But she’d convinced me that my presence was an added bonus to the event. That guests enjoy mingling with news celebrities. And couldn’t I spare just one night out of my busy schedule in the name of charity?

So I reconsidered, but insisted on driving and paying for parking so as not to be a total mooch. Madeline agreeably left her cobalt-blue Mercedes parked outside my house and climbed into my middle-class Toyota Camry.

After the concert we walked next door to a ballroom and checked our coats. I regretted wearing my stiletto heels. While balance was my biggest obstacle, the evening would be even more challenging for Madeline and her mother on the face front. Nearly all the women in attendance wore little black dresses and nearly all the men wore black suits and ties.

The guest list represented a who’s who of St. Paul’s most influential and wealthy. Name tags were out of the question because it was
such
a swanky affair. Suddenly I suspected the real reason Madeline invited me.

“You need me to help you work the room,” I whispered, “and make sure you don’t confuse the mayor with the waiter?”

She had the grace to look embarrassed. “All right, Riley, it did occur to me you’d probably recognize many of the people here. So if you can just greet them or elicit an introduction, I can follow your lead.”

“You make me feel like a guide dog.”

She smiled, explaining that Roderick usually escorted their mother while she’d be left to fend as best she could because it looked odd for the three of them to cluster together too much.

As if on cue, I spotted her family on the other side of the room. We headed in their direction, mixing along the way with the chief of police, the CEO of a large insurance company, and the general manager of the Saint Paul Hotel.

Madeline made seamless small talk. But when the head of a nonprofit group, who we’d just conversed with minutes earlier, approached her again, she was clueless until I put him in context with a couple of precise remarks. Men looked at Madeline with interest; she looked at them like they were invisible. Unlike Mark, she couldn’t see any of them. Well, maybe she could see them, but she couldn’t tell them apart.