Skinny Dipping (36 page)

“Did you see your little niece?” Johanna asked as Mimi slid into the booth they’d commandeered at Buonfiglio’s.

“I peeked,” said Mimi. “But she and Sarah and Mom were asleep and the nurse said Tom and Mary had gone to get a couple rooms at the motel.”

Mimi kept expecting someone to jump to their feet and yell, “What the hell are we thinking?” and dash back to the lawyers’ office. No one did. Everyone seemed quite happy with their decision. No one had uttered a word about Ardis’s Directives from Beyond the Grave. Even Debbie hadn’t kicked up much of a fuss, capitulating with more grace than Mimi would have thought possible by saying, “It’s not like the land’s going anywhere.”

They ate amongst contented chatter and after a pitcher or two of beer began trading stories about people who weren’t even familiar to Mimi.

“Who’s Olaf Junior?” she asked.

“You know,” Gerry said. “The first Olson with six toes.”

“Come on.”

“It’s true. I know I saw a picture of him
and
his toes on the dining hall table. All you have to do is look close to see ’em.”

“You have pictures of Olaf Junior?” Charlie asked, interested.

“And his wife.” Gerry nodded.

“I gotta see ’em,” Charlie declared. “You gotta see ’em, too, Jo. Half your kids got six toes.”

He stood up and started to sway. Mimi caught his arm and steadied him.

“Hold on,” she said. “No one’s driving anywhere except me.”

“I want to see those pictures,” Charlie said.

“Me, too,” piped in Vida.

“Okay, look,” Mimi said. “I’ll go get the pictures, and you all head over to Smelka’s—Don’t look at me like that; I mean it. You guys stay here and you’re just going to drink more. You need to get some good bland food into your stomachs. I’ll get the pictures and by the time you’re done with dinner, I’ll be back. We’ll look through them, and afterward you should be able to drive. Okay?”

“When did she become queen of the universe?” Gerry grumbled.

“Just be damn glad she is,” Vida replied.

They split up on the sidewalk, where Mimi got into Sarah’s Lexus and the others started walking to Smelka’s. She could hardly wait to tell Joe and Prescott about the coup at the lawyers’ office, but she had no idea where they’d gone. Maybe back to Fowl Lake. She started for Chez Ducky, smiling. The western sky lit up in an electrical light-show extravaganza. Dry lightning always put on the best spectacle, but this was a doozie. Despite earlier tornado warnings, it didn’t overly concern her. All spring the weather and the weathermen had made a lot of noise that came to nothing. The ground was parched.

True to her suspicions, by the time she drove up to Chez Ducky, not a single drop had fallen. The lightning, on the other hand, had grown close. Booms of thunder shook the Chez’s windowpanes and rattled the doors. Of course, a good sneeze produced much the same results.

She let her eyes play over the blistered gray surface of its clapboard siding, the multicolored roof, illuminated by the lightning, the soft, moss-covered foundations. She closed her eyes and heard the echoes of generations of children and adults hidden in the sound of the wind rushing through the pine tops, could almost see their shapes moving across the windows. Inside, she looked over the boxes of pictures, trying to decide which one to take. She finally decided she might as well take them all; Charlie had been more than a little tanked. She loaded them into the Lexus’s trunk and returned for the last box. On her way out, she noticed the FedEx package lying on the table. She angled her head to read the return address label: Otell Weber. Her private investigator. Frowning, she ripped open the top and upended the contents onto the table. A small stack of paper slid out, held together by a paper clip. On the top was a typed letter from Otell:

Mimi let the file slide back onto the tabletop. Her father was dead. Gone. She lifted her head, staring around unseeingly at the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, the floors. She felt light-headed. Like the top of her skull was going to float away and the rest of her would soon follow. She concentrated, trying to conjure up her dad’s voice, his smile, the way he’d ruffled her hair, the way he’d picked her up and set her on his shoulders and galloped along the beach while she shrieked with laughter, the way he’d winked at her every night before he turned out the lights. Or left the house for “an adventure.”

He wasn’t there…good.

Her eyes flew wide open at the thought. Good.

The thought was clearer now, firmer, more confident:
Good.

She didn’t want to be a modern-day Lady of Shalott, experiencing life only through a reflection of what others had been and done. But that’s what she’d been doing, weaving ghost stories because the living were just too hard to pin down. But now she wanted out of the tower, she wanted to take a ride in the boat down that cataract called Life, and she did not want to go to Camelot. She wanted to go to Minneapolis. Chicago. Maybe Rome.

And she wanted to go with Joe, not Lancelot. Their relationship was bound to be messy and convoluted and everything but straightforward. There would be no guarantees. But it wasn’t just Joe’s life she wanted hers meshed with. She wanted it tangled with Prescott’s and her mother’s and Tom’s and Sarah’s and Mary’s and Ozzie’s and all the cousins and ex-wives and future wives and stepkids, and all the messy, tangled relationships that came with them.

That was the deal. Chez Ducky wasn’t anything without all the people who came here, who’d found their own route to this odd, mismatched little community. Not a place, a tribe. An ever-shifting shoreline of faces and names, who kept coming back because here they belonged.

She’d always thought of Chez Ducky as being timeless, of never changing, of being a constant, but she’d been wrong. Chez Ducky was a revolving door of histories, changing from day to day so that you never knew who was going to be there or what their story would be or how they would be connected. Only that they were.

It didn’t matter that she couldn’t find her father’s spirit. She knew it was here, and that was enough.

She was walking back to the car, still smiling softly, when the lightning hit, striking so close that the earth beneath her shook and she tripped and almost fell. She smelled burning ozone and then smoke.

She ran around to the front of the Chez to see what had happened. The Big House was fine, no fire anywhere—No. There was definitely fire somewhere. She loped back to the beach where the sightlines were more open. On the other side of Prescott’s house, the Sbodas’ cabin was on fire. Black smoke billowed and churned above the rooftop before being caught by the wind and pushed flat in a black pennant pointing straight at Prescott’s house and, from there, Chez Ducky. And Fawn Creek and the fire engines were half an hour away.

For a second she could only stare. After all that. After all her angst and worry, and finally to go against decades of habit and make a stand and win…? They were being screwed over by a storm. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The woods was a tinderbox. There was no way the fire wasn’t going to wipe out Chez Ducky before anyone got here. Not to mention Prescott’s Palace and…

“Jesus!”

Lightning flashed again and she fled from the beach toward Prescott’s house. Like most lake owners during the off season, Prescott didn’t lock his door when he was going to be gone only a short while.

Inside, Blondie and Wiley hurled themselves anxiously at her, bouncing and pawing at her legs. She shushed them, fumbling in her jacket pocket for her cell phone. She flipped it open. None of the little black bars indicating signal strength appeared. Not one.

She stabbed 911 anyway and held the phone to her ear. Nothing. She headed into the great room, her eyes toward the north-facing windows. Through them, a hundred yards away, the Sbodas’ cabin was a bonfire. Black snakes of smoke crawled out from the eaves and shot out toward Prescott’s house, the fire leaping behind it, fed by the wind. A peal of lightning cracked open the sky overhead. Blondie howled.

She had to get the dogs out of here. She raced for the door, calling them by name. Blondie and Wiley were there ahead of her, leaping around like maniacs, their eyes ringed by white. Bill was nowhere to be seen.

“Bill!” she screamed. “Bill!”

Nothing. She looked down at Wiley and Blondie, realizing she couldn’t get all three out at once. She couldn’t just open the door, either. In their fright they might take off into the woods and be lost. Or worse. She wrenched open the front closet and got out their leashes, snapping them to their collars, her fingers stiff with terror. Then she opened the door and yanked.

The dogs didn’t need any encouragement. As soon as the door was open, they bolted for the woods, dragging her with them. She barely kept up, stumbling after them along the footpath, heading pell-mell toward Chez Ducky.

They broke from the woods and dove for the Lexus. She yanked opened the car door and the dogs flung themselves in. She slammed it shut and spun, heading back for Prescott’s on a dead run. Her legs ached and her lungs burned and she imagined she could hear the sound of the fire eating through the woods. All she could think was that Bill was somewhere inside the house, cowering or, knowing Bill, snapping angrily at the flames.

She saw the fire’s light before she emerged from the woods. She stopped dead in her tracks, awed by the sight. Prescott’s entire house was backlit in brilliance. But it was not on fire. Not yet.

The air was filled with the sound of things breaking, bursting, cracking, and behind it all the rushing roar of a runaway locomotive. The smell of burning pine and the noxious odor of smoldering rubber hit her nostrils at the same time. She dashed into the house, sweat streaming down her face, the salt stinging her eyes. “Bill! Bill!”

She sprinted down the stairs, racing madly from room to room, screaming like an idiot before heading back upstairs, looking to the north as she surfaced. Too late. The fire was at the windows. More than a glow now, she could see the flames clawing at the glass—Then it shattered inward, exploding in hundreds of glass pebbles across the floor.

“Bill!” She backed up into the front hall. “Bill!”

She turned and fled, tears streaming down her face, blinding her as she stumbled down the drive. Strong hands grabbed her.

“Mimi!” Joe shouted. “Get in the car!” He shoved her into the passenger seat of the Lexus and climbed over her, ramming it into gear and sending it squealing across the gravel drive. She craned her neck around and saw Wiley’s head rise from the dark bottom beneath the backseat.

“How? Why are you here?” she asked Joe.

“I dropped Prescott off at the hospital,” Joe said. “Gerry told me you’d come out here. I didn’t want to wait so I came looking for you. You weren’t at Chez Ducky but I saw the Lexus. I looked inside and saw the dogs and that you’d left the key in the ignition so I got in to make sure they didn’t hit a button and lock you out. Then I saw the fire.” His gaze grew haunted.

“I didn’t know where you were. I thought you might have gone up to warn Prescott. So I—” He broke off. “Thank God you’re all right, Mimi.” She was never to hear Joe Tierney sound like that again.

They were at the end of the drive now, a half mile between them and the fire. He slammed on the brakes and she flung her arms around his neck. He crushed her to him, sliding her onto his lap. “Everything will be all right. We’ll be safe. The wind’s pushing it straight south. As soon as we get a quarter mile away, we’ll be out of its path.”

“No,” she gulped, shaking her head violently, her eyes riveted on the column of smoke rising from the shore.
Bill.

“It’s okay, Mimi.”

She tucked her knees beneath her chin and held her legs tight against her chest, rocking herself on his lap. “No, it isn’t all right,” she sobbed. “I went back for Bill but I couldn’t find him. Oh, Joe! I tried!”

She looked up, pleading for him to understand, to say she couldn’t have done anything. He was looking at her oddly. “What is it?
What
?” she asked.

“When we came back from the hospital this afternoon, Prescott and I decided to go to Portia’s and get a beer.”

She watched him uncomprehendingly. Bill was dead and he was babbling about beer.

“Bill likes car rides, so…” He pointed behind him.

Mimi swung around and hauled herself over the back of the seat, peering into the darkness. There, flanked by Blondie and Wiley, lay Bill, staring up at her.

With a whoop of delight, she reached down, grabbed Bill, and hauled him bodily to her, squishing him against her chest. “Oh, Bill!” she crooned. “Bill, you’re alive! You’re alive!”

She didn’t know what she wanted to do more, kiss him or kill him.

Bill, being Bill, was not so conflicted.

He bit her.