A Rendezvous to Die For (3 page)

Monday

There was nowhere to turn, no
place to run from my tormentors. I was penned in by flying tomahawks
that swirled around me in a shower of spraying blood. Rhythmic
undulations and incessant drumming pounded on my eardrums. I sank to
the ground and wrapped my arms tightly around my body, trying to make
myself as small a target as possible. One ‘hawk landed directly in
front of me, another to my right, another to my left. There was no
escaping them. I was doomed. An earsplitting, piercing scream forced
me to lift my head.

I awakened sweating and shaken,
the scream persisting, despite the realization that I had survived an
all too realistic nightmare. Why wouldn’t the shrieking stop? I sat
up and shook my head. The sound changed to something more
recognizable. It was my bedside telephone!

“
Cassandra, are you okay?”

“
Anna? You heard—”

“
Yes and I’ve been worried
sick! My friend Willis was at the Rendezvous.” Her voice was
unnaturally high. “He just left the store. He told me what he knew
about that horrible, horrible incident yesterday. I’m so sorry,
Cass. I should never have urged you to go to that event.” She
paused. “How are you, honey? Never mind. I’m coming over. You can
tell me then. I’m going to bring you something. Coffee? Something
stronger? How can I help?”

I rubbed my eyes and swung my
legs off the bed. “I’m all right, now that I’m awake. Don’t
come here, Anna. I’ll come to your shop and see you in about an
hour.”
I hung up and sat motionless for several minutes. I
couldn’t shake the image of Eric wrapped around the fire pit with
that ghastly hatchet in the back of his head. Maybe coffee would
help. I showered, dressed, ran a comb through my curly hair, and
headed toward town.

A lot of elements make a town
livable, and Colton Mills had enough of them to make me rein in my
Jeep, when I first passed through a year ago. Returning from a photo
shoot in Duluth, I had decided to take the slow route back to the
Twin Cities where I had lived for a couple of years. I still remember
how the approach to Colton Mills had taken my breath away. A two-lane
paved road passed through a forest of pines and descended a mile or
more into a valley cut through by the Oxbow River. Then, suddenly,
the town simply “appeared,” like something out of a
nineteenth-century picture post card.

I couldn’t resist stopping to
photograph the downtown area’s brick and stone facades that marked
Colton Mills as a once prosperous grain and lumber-milling center.
Then, places, such as the wooden grain elevator on the edge of town,
which sat by long-abandoned railroad tracks, charmed the photographer
in me. I was hooked. It was such a contrast to the traffic-blocked
city I wanted to leave behind that, before leaving town three days
later, I had rented a second-floor studio. Heading south, I had
purposely overlooked the unsightly subdivisions sprouting in the
soybean fields and the year-round brick McMansions displacing the
tiny summer clapboard cabins around Oxbow Lake. After all, a working
photographer had to get her potential clientele from somewhere.

Now, and in retrospect, I knew
I’d have had to reconsider my decision if it weren’t for The
Grizzly Bar. All the town’s qualities wouldn’t be worth the paper
the Colton Miller newspaper was printed on, without a decent place to
get a real cup of coffee. Although a resistor of trends, I was fully
in favor of the Starbucks craze.

This morning, as usual, Roxy, a
fellow refugee from the rat race, was working behind the counter.
“Morning, Roxy,” I said. Roxy and her husband Mel, transplants
from Minneapolis, had transformed a building that once housed a
machine shop into a coffee shop with a northern Minnesota feel. A
six-foot cardboard cutout of a grizzly bear holding a steaming cup of
coffee loomed over me as I entered. The coffee bar’s tag line was
emboldened on the bear’s cup:
roarin’
good coffee
. The shop looked as if a chainsaw demon had been
turned loose in a pine forest. Whole trees—stripped of their bark,
cut into ten-foot lengths and shellacked—flanked the counter from
floor to ceiling. A half dozen booths, faced with pine slabs, lined
one wall. Throughout the shop, several square tables and chairs, also
made of pine, had been conveniently placed for relaxation. Near in a
cozy seating area, Northern Minnesota
objets d’art
graced
shelves interspersed with used books and magazines.

Roxy greeted me the way she did
every time I came into Grizzly’s, as the locals called it.

“
Hi,
Cassandra.” She leaned her forearms on the tall counter. “What’ll
it be? The regular?”

The relationship I had
established with Roxy, while exchanging pleasantries over my morning
coffee order, made her one of my closest acquaintances. Thankfully,
she hadn’t yet heard about Eric’s demise and my involvement.
“I’ll take two to go,” I said. “The flavor of the day and one
extra-large hazelnut, with a shot of espresso.” Minutes later, I
stashed the steaming paper cups in the Jeep’s cup holders and
headed across town to the Vintage Clothier.

Anna’s store was located on the
edge of the business district, one block off Main, where the old
buildings were being turned into shops that drew tourists to Colton
Mills every weekend. It was situated in the former Ames Ladies Wear
store, between Ye Olde Fudge Shoppe and Embroidery Heaven. With the
weekend tourists gone, I had no problem snagging a parking place.

Before entering the store, I
paused to check out the show windows. Anna had dressed the window
mannequins in long white summer frocks, featuring balloon sleeves,
high neck-hugging collars, and tiny, cloth-covered buttons that would
have taken an hour to fasten. They were appropriate for a game of
tennis at the old Minneobi resort, circa 1880, but simply looking at
them made the perspiration bead up on my forehead. Of course, my
usual jeans-and-red-shirt uniform, was contributing to my discomfort
as well. It was a combo I might have to abandon in the already too
intense June heat.

The antique wooden door that
opened into the store featured an oval of stenciled glass. It
immediately set the tone for what was to come. I pushed the door
handle with the side of one hand, while juggling the two coffee cups.
As I entered, a bell chimed to announce my presence.

Anna
was behind the counter talking on the phone. She tipped her elegant
head and peered over the rims of the half glasses perching near the
tip of her nose to acknowledge me, rolling her eyes upward in
gratitude, as I set a coffee container on the counter and pushed it
toward her.

Like Roxy and me, Anna was one of
the “new people” in Colton Mills. About to celebrate the two-year
anniversary of the Vintage Clothier, she’d been a resident a year
longer than I. Anna reminded me of my foster mother, Mrs.
Andrews—Crazy Mrs. A, as most people called her. Instead of trying
to disguise her considerable bulk, Mrs. A flaunted it, with swaths of
bright purple and red fabric. I can still see the discs of silver,
bigger than half dollars that always hung from her ears and the
silver-crafted squash-blossom necklace that splayed across her ample
bosom. She swept her gray hair high on her head and secured it with
combs. Wisps of it would escape and frame her round, unlined face, as
she expressed whatever outlandish opinion she had on any subject that
particular day. As I came up in the foster care system, Mrs. A was
the closest thing to a real mother I ever had.

I’d taken to Anna, because she
exhibited Mrs. A’s zest for life. She would be about the same age,
but where Mrs. A was big and loud, Anna was slim and sophisticated,
gliding through her vintage shop as if it were a Paris salon. She
wore her hair slickly pulled back from her lovely face and fastened
with a pearl barrette. Today, she was dressed in a black silk sweater
over a long, slim mauve skirt. “Yes, yes,” she said. Her refined
voice ran counterpoint to the clicking keys on her computer perched
anachronistically on the antique wood counter, looking as out of
place as a motor on a stagecoach.

I strolled around, waiting for
the conversation to end. Anna’s shop was crammed with racks of
period clothing. Prim hats with fragile netting, pointy-toed shoes,
turn-of-the-century under things, and other items I couldn’t
identify were neatly displayed on shelves. Scarves and gloves were
draped out of dresser drawers or over period furniture. It was all a
part of Anna’s artfully designed jumble. Whenever I saw what women
a hundred years were subjected to wearing, I worshipped anew at the
altar of Levi Strauss.

My own closet consisted of a row
of shirts in various patterns and shades of red. I used my creative
brain cells behind the camera, not in composing outfits to wear every
day. I never deliberated about the day’s outfit . . . only whether
I’d tuck the shirt in, wear it unbuttoned over a tee shirt with the
tails out, or whether I’d roll up the sleeves. Pair any shirt with
my jeans and boots and I was ready to go. When the occasion called
for it, I’d trade in the jeans for a pair of slacks, but the red
shirt with jeans and boots ensemble had become a uniform.

Many of the pieces in Anna’s
shop were copies of the real thing. Anna had learned early on that
few modern women fit into the small sizes that ladies of the past
wore. She had turned her business into a reproduction-clothing
establishment, when she opened the Vintage Clothier. Now, she also
had a thriving business on the Internet.

“
Cassandra, dear,” she said,
finally off the phone and gliding over to my side. She gave me a big
hug and pulled me onto a red velvet settee beside her. “Tell me
exactly what happened.” She listened without comment as I filled
her in on the details.

Anna
had introduced me to the Rendezvous concept when I visited with her
about a month ago. I had come to discuss a client’s project.
Heather Wilson, who was planning a 1920s theme wedding, was renting
clothing for the event from Anna, who had carved out an area in the
back of her shop where people could pose in their vintage clothes. I
had photographed several groups there and also called on Anna for
props suitable for other occasions. Because I had acquired a
reputation as a wedding photographer of the different-drummer
variety, I attracted my share of nontraditional projects. As
nontraditional went, Heather’s was pretty tame. Nothing like the
ceremony I photographed the previous spring, while scrunched shoulder
to shoulder in the dinky basket of a hot air balloon with a couple,
their minister, a witness, and the pilot. Recording the momentous
I-dos in a vehicle that was gliding a thousand feet over the Oxbow
tested more than my photographic skills.

Anna had suggested props for
Heather’s photo shoot. “This velvet settee (the very one we were
now sitting on) will be perfect, don’t you think, dear? You could
pose the wedding party just so around the bride and groom.”

“
Maybe so.” I had stepped
around her to find something more appropriate to the occasion, and
that’s when my destiny jumped up and bit me, as something furry
brushed against my face. “What the hell is
this
?”
I had thrust the thing away from me.

“
A fox pelt!” Anna had seemed
surprised that I wouldn’t recognize such a varmint. “There’s a
huge market now for frontier clothes, and fox pelts are one of the
accessories most often requested. So, I stocked a few.” Sure
enough, she had added racks of buckskin dresses and pants, calico
dresses, plain dresses, boots, kerchiefs, beaver hats . . . and the
fox pelts.

“
Where on earth would someone
wear a getup like that?” I had asked, pointing to a brown-fringed
number hanging on display.

Anna was way ahead of me, as
usual. “Cassandra, you really must get out more. There’s a whole
culture of people they call reenactors. You’ve seen them at
restored forts and old houses. They dress and act the part of people
from some other era. It’s quite fascinating.” She had held up a
skimpy bustier that must have been worn by a lady of the night “Old
clothing styles can be very ‘in-style’ when worn by someone like
you. This would look very sexy with your Levi’s.”

I had grimaced and walked away.
“A thirty-something Britney Spears look. Just what I need. What
kind of animal trapper would wear that little number?” I had
pointed to what looked like an animal hide with holes for arms.

Anna had patted her hair and
grinned. “Even trappers needed diversions now and then. And he
would probably wear that to a Rendezvous.”

“
At a meeting with his
girlfriend?”

“
No, no, no.” She had laughed
at my naïveté. “A Rendezvous is a place where trappers meet once
a year to trade their furs for supplies. If you’re interested, you
can read about the era. I’ve got several books on the subject.”
She pointed at her book wall, where a shelf carried books with titles
such as
1800s
Rendezvous Clothing
and
Fur Trade Fashion
.

When Anna got interested in
something, Anna became the expert. She was the one person who could
grasp the trauma eating me up inside. “Anna, I’ve never
experienced anything even close to this,” I said, holding my head
in my hands. “I thought I’d photographed all kinds of scenes.
I’ve been to many accidents. I’ve even covered other crime
scenes, but it’s never been, oh . . .
personal
. . . not
like this. What am I going to do?”