Hot Dish (15 page)

And it was Steve Jaax. There was no one else it could be. People from AMS, like the camera crew or production-value folk, would be traveling en masse. And there was no reason for anyone else to be here until the sesquicentennial started. Plus, there was just something about his posture, the way he moved, that awoke a sense of familiarity.

He turned as he spoke, so she finally got a good look at his face. It was unmistakably Steve Jaax’s face.

She was impressed. The years hadn’t been too hard on him. Oh, he still looked like an Irishman who got into bar fights, but he still looked capable of winning some of them, too. Wide shoulders, flat stomach, sinewy. His face hadn’t fared quite as resiliently as his body. Mostly it looked like he’d weathered a lot. Pouches hung beneath the sad-dog eyes, and his skin looked brown. The dark, rumpled curls that had been a big part of his youthful black Irish good looks had been cropped and stuck out at noncoiffed angles. And it wasn’t so dark anymore. Even from a distance.

The guy he was talking to jerked his head in Jenn’s direction and Jaax looked around at her. A huge smile broke over his face, and her pulse skipped forward, reminding her of the hours she’d spent in a freezer with him.
Charisma
. Even from twenty yards and through twenty years, she could tell that hadn’t changed.

He waved and scrambled over the snowbank, heading across the street toward her.

She wasn’t sure she wanted him coming over to her. Here she was, resting easy, happily pondering her future retirement, and now he was going to come over and she was going to have to slip on the old Jenn Lind mask, which, while not precisely
un
comfortable, was definitely not as comfortable as what she was wearing now, which was nothing—Oh, to hell with it.

This was Fawn Creek. No cameras were rolling. Jaax would just have to take her as he found her. At least until the film crews arrived this weekend.

“Hi!” he called out, slipping his way toward her and climbing over the mound of snow on her side of the street. “Jenn, right? Hi.”

“Hi.”

He leaned over, hands on his knees, face only a few feet from hers—definitely way inside her Personal Comfort Zone—and studied her. She let
him lean. He had remarkably bright blue eyes. She hadn’t forgotten them, either. They sparkled like gemstones. Blue cubic zirconium. Probably contacts.

“Wow,” he said. “You look exactly like I thought you’d look. The way your skin molds over your cheeks, the lips, the jawline … everything. Just like I thought you would age.” He straightened.

“Age.”

He shrugged. “Yeah. You know. Ripen. Mature. Grow older—”

“Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

He frowned. “Except for the hair. I would have thought you’d let it go natural by now.”

“It is natural.”

His smile became a grin. “Sure.”

An occasional partial foil did not constitute a dye job. She decided maybe he wasn’t so charismatic after all. “Why are you here so early?”

“You know who I am?” His eyes widened in wonderment. “You remember me?”

This did make her smile. “Don’t be coy.”

The disingenuous expression disappeared, replaced by unrepentant pleasure at having been caught. “Okay,” he said.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He shrugged again. “I needed a break. A vacation. You know.”

She didn’t. Not since her honeymoon in 1997. It had been Jamaica. Or maybe that had been Cozumel? She’d had to work double time to get all her
Good Neighbors
segments taped for airing while she was away, and as a result, she’d slept the entire plane ride to wherever it was they’d gone and then, except for all the newlywed sex, most of the two days that composed the rest of her honeymoon. She remembered a beach outside the window, though … didn’t she? Yeah, there’d definitely been a beach.

“And you thought Fawn Creek would be a good place to take it?” she asked doubtfully.

“Sure.” He looked genuinely surprised by the question. “I loved my days in Minnesota. You don’t know what a good thing you got here. No cell phones—”

“I hate to ruin the rural bliss thing, but cells are supposed to work here. Please note my use of the word ‘supposed.”’

“Really? Damn.”

“You can always hope yours fails.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Then why—”

“Hi!” Steve chirruped brightly, looking past her.

Jenn turned her head. The pair of guys who’d been lunching in Smelka’s had emerged from the diner.

They took one look at Steve grinning with maniacal goodwill in their direction, assumed he could not possibly be grinning at them, and spun about to look for whoever it was who warranted that sort of suspicious friendliness. When they discovered no one behind them, they turned back around in confusion.

Almost in unison, they realized that Steve was smiling at them. They blinked, took a halting step toward him, stuttered to a stop, looked at each other, looked at Steve, and by God, a few facial muscles on each seamed and leathery face twitched into something half resembling a smile. But before they could catch each other at it, they ducked their heads and hurried by.

“Shy.” Steve spoke matter-of-factly. “I get that sometimes. They probably never thought they’d meet someone like me.”

“Someone like you?”

“Yeah. You know. An internationally celebrated artist.” He didn’t look the least self-conscious. Not a whit of modesty clouded his absurdly blue eyes. “I’m practically an American icon.”

Okay. She hated to pop the dirigible that was the Steve Jaax ego—“Mr. Jaax, let me do you a favor.”

He tilted his head and for a second looked so much like her former neighbor’s bloodhound when asked if he wanted a treat that she forgot what she’d been about to say. She’d always liked that dog.

“Call me Steve,” he said encouragingly, that confident, winning smile still in place. So confident and guileless, that she was beginning to feel like a heel for the scrap of schaudenfreude she’d been experiencing just by thinking about telling him the facts of Fawn Creek celebrity. Oh, well.

“This isn’t New York. Or London. Or Paris. This is Minnesota.
Northern
Minnesota. I don’t know what you’re expecting but I can pretty well guarantee you’re not going to get it. Not here.” She waited to see if any of this was sinking in. He was listening intently, again like the neighbor’s dog when she used to give it really specific commands. Commands it didn’t understand. “People up here don’t do celebrity.”

“Geez, Jenn.” He glanced away, his expression distinctly embarrassed. “Look, I certainly am not up here looking for a little local hookup. I would never use my name—”

Heat exploded up her throat and into her cheeks. “That is not what I meant!”

“Oh?”

“I said people here don’t do
celebrity
, not don’t do
celebrities
!” Her tone was withering.

“Oh?” He puzzled over the distinction. The discomfort faded from his face. Connection made. “I see.”

Not that he seemed embarrassed by his comment. Nahuh. Instead, he simply drew his brows together in an expression Jenn immediately identified as “This is fascinating! Please. Tell me more,” because it was exactly the same as an expression she used when speaking to Dwight Davies.

“Look,” she said, and her voice was testy, “I’m only trying to keep you from making a fool out of yourself by expecting the people here to fawn all over you. I’ve been in and out of this town for twenty-three years now and no one has ever even asked me for my—”

“Can I have your autograph?” a breathless young voice gushed, as a herd of teenage girls, identifiable as such by the spray-paint fit of their jeans under the pink puffy baffles of their ski jackets, rushed past Jenn and surrounded Jaax. “You are Steve Jaax, right?”

“Yes,” Steve said, smiling politely. “I am.”

No. Not possible. Why would these little cupcakes give a rat’s patootie about Steve Jaax? They wouldn’t. They’d been watching the media hype from the cities and got caught up in it—that was all. But, a small hurt voice inside her whimpered, she’d been hyped, too….

“Now you girls just let Mr. Jaax get settled before you start pestering him for autographs. And why aren’t you girls in school, anyway?”

Jenn looked around. Ken Holmberg chugged down the street toward them, his portly body snugged into a black cashmere coat, ruddy face all smiles, the tip of his well-oiled comb-over flickering in the wind. At the sound of his voice, the girls broke and scattered like a covey of quail, dispersing down the side streets and along the sidewalks to regroup later.

“Mr. Jaax? It’s a pleasure to meet you again.” Ken stuck out his hand and shook Steve’s. “Ken Holmberg. I was councilman of Fawn Creek back in eighty-four. Still am. As well as owner of the Minnesota Hockey Stix Company,” he added importantly.

“Catchy name.” Steve nodded.

“I was the guy in the freezer with you just after you finished the sculpture of Jenny—oh, hey, Jenn! Didn’t see you there—when they, well, when they—”

“Arrested me,” Jaax finished for him. “Oh, yeah. I remember. I was acquitted, you know. She couldn’t prove anything. And I had an alibi.”

Ken looked a little nonplussed by the turn of the conversation. “I didn’t. But that’s great.”

“Yeah.” Jaax nodded some more. “So … ah … where is it? My butter head.”

The world had gone along quite nicely for twenty years without the butter head’s presence, Jenn thought. It was too bad it couldn’t just continue that way, but if it couldn’t, Ken and even Steve sure as hell weren’t going to appropriate it. “That would be my
parents
‘butter head,” she said.

Both men ignored her.

“Well, that’s a good question, now, Steve,” Ken was saying in his best “big dog” voice. “And I wish t’hell I could answer it for you. But the truth is, I can’t. Someone busted into the Hallesbys’ barn night before last and stole it. They were on snowmobiles.”

“What?” Jenn asked.

“What?” Steve echoed even louder.

Ken’s head dipped up and down, like a glum bobble-head doll. “Yup. We even got a witness. Some tourist was out on one of the trails that night and saw the thieves while they were at it. He took out after ‘em cross-country, stupid bastard, but ended up going airborne over the Lake. Got himself busted up pretty good in the bargain. He’s over t’the hospital in a body cast.”

“But you’re looking for it, right?” Jaax asked. “You have the cops looking for these thieves, right?”

“They don’t have cops here,” Jenn supplied helpfully. “They have a sheriff.” Einer Hahn, on whom Jenn had once had a tiny crush in high school.

“Sheriff then!” Jaax looked a little wild-eyed. “The sheriff is searching for these guys, right? You’ve talked to this tourist, right? And you’re investigating—”

Ken went from troubled bearer of bad news to compassionate comforter in a heartbeat. And they said Minnesotans lacked dramatic range. “We only have a sheriff and a deputy sheriff here, Mr. Jaax, and they’re busy fellas already, what with the celebration and all. But you rest assured they’re looking into it, all right.”

“They’re all off on the muzzle-loader opener, aren’t they?” Jenn asked with sudden inspiration. They were deer hunting and Ken was covering. God! Fawn Creek could run amuck with aliens, and if it happened during December, no one would even report it lest it interfere with the muzzle-loader opener.

Ken gave her a sullen glance. “Maybe.”

“What? What’s a muzzle?” Steve asked.

“Nothing to do with nothing, Mr. Jaax,” Ken said. “More’n likely this is just some prank. Teenagers. You know how they can be, Jenn.” He speared her with a look. Point taken.

“Yeah,” she agreed. She wasn’t too worried he’d rat her out. Over the years, they’d developed a symbiotic relationship. Ken supported the myth that she was a hometown girl, and every now and then she said he made nice hockey sticks. At least his sticks were nice, which is more than she could say for him. Her parents called him “Babbitt of the Bog.” He was a not so secret misogynist who masqueraded as a paternal figure of goodwill. None of his employees, Jenn knew, were women.

But he probably
was
right. Why would anyone steal a butter head except as a joke? “Kids.”

“You’re not going to assume that, are you?” Jaax sounded incredulous. “I mean, someone was robbed. This woman’s”—he gestured at Jenn—”this poor woman’s elderly parents have been violated! That’s a felony offense.”

“No one had a weapon, Mr. Jaax.”

“That anyone
saw
. What about this tourist guy? Maybe he knows something that could lead you to the criminals.”

“He’s a stranger in town, Mr. Jaax. Came up for that poker tournament at the casino. Besides, it was dark and there were flurries and everyone was wearing helmets. I know this is a disappointment to you.” Ken’s gaze bounced off Steve to Jenn. “Both of you. But it’s bound to show up sooner or later.”

Steve’s shoulders lifted and fell in a deep sigh.

“Look, Mr. Jaax,” Ken said, “I hope this doesn’t affect your plans, but if you want to forget the whole thing and go back to New York, I guess I’d understand.”

“What about me?” Jenn asked. “Can I skedaddle, too, Ken? Because without a butter head …”

“Ha-ha,” Ken said, his eyes never leaving Steve. “Well, Mr. Jaax, can I convince you it’s still worth your while to stay?”

Jaax stared at him. “Are you kidding? I’m not leaving. I … I promised I’d be your grand marshal”—a quick glance at Jenn—”co-marshal, and that’s what I plan to do. If you still want me …?”

“Of course, we do! Dang right!” Ken pumped Jaax’s hand.

Steve smiled, withdrew his hand, hunched his shoulders, and shivered. “Geez, it’s cold. What is it, thirty below?”

“Twenty above,” Jenn said.

“Let me go get my hat,” he said, taking off for the Mercedes tipped up on the opposite curb.

“’Bout time you used your celebrity to bring a little attention to your hometown,” Ken finally muttered, smiling, his eyes on Steve, who was struggling up the snow mound.

Jenn stared at him, sure she must have misheard him because Ken had neither a sense of humor nor irony, and in order for him to call Fawn Creek her hometown, you’d have to have one or the other. Or sarcasm. That must have been it; he was being sarcastic.