Hot Dish (30 page)

“Shit. And what’s to keep you from coming back again and again with it?”

“Tell you what. You hand me twenty-five hundred and I’ll hand you that picture.” Not that he had it. No one did, at least that Karin knew about. Who’d keep a twenty-one-year-old school newspaper? Lucky for him, Jenn didn’t know that. She looked perfectly willing to believe that people kept their high school newspapers just on the off chance that some day something in it could be used to hurt her. Wow. She really didn’t think much of these people. For a second Dunk wondered why, but then what did he care? She had a weakness; he used it.

The bottom line was that when she handed him the twenty-five hundred and he told her he didn’t have any picture, it would be too late. What was she going to do? Say the money he was holding was hers—and he had no doubt he could get her to hand him the cash—and that he’d blackmailed her for it? Just looking at the thread of panic hiding behind her enraged expression, he could tell that wasn’t going to happen. No, sir, she wasn’t going to risk it all for twenty-five hundred bucks. Which reminded him …

“I’ll need that money in cash,” he said, “by five o’clock this afternoon.”

“I don’t have that kind of money with me. I don’t even have my checkbook with me. My ATM card is maxed out. Just how do you expect me to get this … this cash?”

“I don’t know. I don’t much care. Borrow it?” This brought another topic to mind. A very important one. If what the sheriff had said was right, Steve Jaax was staying at Jenn Lind’s parents’ place. “And, Ms. Lind? I want to make this next part crystal clear. You are not going to tell anyone that I’ve been in touch with the thieves. Especially Steve Jaax. Got that?”

She glared at him.

“Got that?” he insisted.

“I got it,” she snapped.

A nurse—not Karin Ekkelstahl, Dunk realized with a stab of disappointment—appeared in the doorway. She took one look at Jenn’s face and froze. She tried on a tentative smile.

“So, then, Jenny,” she said, “what is it I can do fer you?”

Jenn Lind’s eyes had filled up with tears. Angry tears. Her face twisted and she bit hard on her lips before pivoting on her heels and stalking toward the door.

“Get out of my way,” she snarled as she pushed past the startled nurse.

The nurse’s penciled brows almost banged into her hairline. “Now I wonder what bee’s got in her bonnet.”

9:20 a.m.

Oxlip County Hospital parking lot

Jenn held it together all the way down the long corridor and into the elevator and to the first floor and through the lobby until she made it to the safety of her Subaru. There, behind the darkened window glass, she laid her forehead between her mittened hands on the steering wheel and cried.

This could not be happening again. They could not be doing this to her again.

Here she was again, on the very cusp of achieving a goal she’d worked her ass off for, and it
was
happening again. It was like that nightmare that had haunted her sleep for months after the state fair debacle, only in her dream the emcee had actually announced her name and she was actually standing on the podium, the crown inches from being placed on her head, and then, for God knew what reason, the people of Fawn Creek rose up en masse to slap it away. Only this was her waking life and they really had done it!

What was their deal
? She pounded her fists against the steering wheel. She couldn’t believe this. She couldn’t believe she was crying about it! About
them
! But it had caught her so off-guard. One minute she’d been focused on the pleasant enigma of her relationship with Steve Jaax, feeling all sorts of agreeable anticipation and girlish expectancy and plain old enjoying the hell out of the unexpected … situation (she wouldn’t call it anything more than that; she was by nature too cautious and by experience made doubly so) that had apparently caught them both by surprise. The next she’d been plunged back into the unpleasant sensations of her entire high school experience.

She was too old for this crap.

She took a deep breath. Why didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter that they’d betrayed her again. Just like it didn’t matter why that whack job up there in the body cast wanted the butter sculpture. What was it about that
stupid butter head anyway? Even Steve acknowledged it didn’t have much real value. Not that it mattered. She still needed to find some money fast.

She banged her forehead forcefully against the top of the steering wheel, frustration finally outpacing despair. She had to think.

She supposed she should have insisted she saw Dunkovich’s photo, but what difference did it make if he had it or not? All he’d need to do is drop a few comments into the right ear and soon some reporter would be interviewing some Fawn Creek native about it and no doubt whoever that native was would trip over himself spilling every detail about Jenn Lind: the fact that Fawn Creek wasn’t her hometown, that she wasn’t a native, that she had been disqualified from the Buttercup pageant for lying, and that she’d been gay in high school.

Why, why, why did Dwight Davies have to be such a dick? Why couldn’t she work for a nice capitalist who didn’t really care who his employees were once they stepped away from the camera? A man without a mandate to lead the country onto the heterosexual straight and narrow? Who would be content with his own sins and leave other people’s alone?

Because that was who’d offered her a freaking fortune, was why. And she damn well better get used to it.

Success equaled security. The more success, the more security. She needed to keep her eye on the prize, not be distracted by Fawn Creek’s seemingly limitless capacity to screw with her life. She needed to pull it together and work for what she wanted.

She scrubbed at her drippy nose and wet cheeks with her mittens. She was not going to let Fawn Creek mess this up for her. She had worked way too long and way too hard to just walk away without putting up one helluva fight.

She rolled her shoulders back, like a boxer preparing for the next bout and took stock of the situation.

She didn’t have twenty-five hundred dollars and no one she knew up here had that sort of cash laying about, either. She briefly considered swearing Steve to secrecy and asking him for help but why should she trust him? She’d allowed herself to become a little too secure in Fawn Creek, and look what had happened? Rabbit punched when she wasn’t looking. She should take heed of the lesson. Besides, Steve wanted the damn thing for himself. He wasn’t likely to fork over the money so someone else could have it. No, she needed to come up with the money herself
and
keep her mouth shut. But how?

Unlike “real” cities, the banks up here were all closed on the weekends, and with all the snow last night’s storm had dumped and more predicted, the five-hour trip down to the cities and back would be
impossible. Added to which, she’d heard that another storm was blowing in from the Dakotas later this afternoon. Her folks might scrape together a couple hundred, and if they even had an ATM, which she doubted, that would put her close to a thousand. Heidi and Mercedes wouldn’t have any money lying about. Not enough.

There was only one place she knew of where you could get thousands of dollars in bills…. Nah. She dismissed the idea. That was nuts.

She hadn’t held a deck of cards in twenty years or more. Unless you counted the occasional gin rummy hands she played with Nat’s eight-year-old niece. Sure, once she’d been right at home shuffling a deck of cards or bluffing her way to a pot of nickels and dimes. To say her parents and she were enthusiastic recreational poker players and had been since she could remember would have been an understatement. But all that had ended with her parents’ trip to Vegas in 1982. Since then she’d sworn off gambling and trusted hard work, commitment, and focus to keep her life safe and predictable. She wasn’t a gambler. Gambling was for suckers. Or desperate people.

She
was
a desperate person….

All the rules she’d made for herself to keep her life on the straight path to success had been falling by the wayside over the last few days. What was happening to her? She couldn’t really be considering this, could she? She’d probably only end up losing the few hundred bucks she did possess. On the other hand … if she didn’t have twenty-five hundred dollars, it wouldn’t make any difference if she had three.

Gambling
. A short bitter laugh escaped her. Almost twenty-five years ago, a trip to a casino had cost her family everything and set her on the course her life currently followed. There was a delicious celestial irony embedded in there. No doubt about it, those damn Nordic gods really knew how to stick it to a girl. She just couldn’t do it.

What choice did she have?

It was a long shot—a horrifically long shot, true—but right now horrifically long shots were her only shots at setting her life back on course. She couldn’t let the AMS gig go without a battle royale. If her career fell apart now, what would she have? Okay. A decent retirement fund but not enough to weather the potential storms of the next four or five decades.

The twist of anxiety the thought provoked decided it for her: she’d hit the casino. She’d have to be careful, of course, and she’d need a disguise; no one must recognize her as Jenn Lind. Old Dwight wasn’t a whole lot more forgiving of one sin over another and, in his book, gambling certainly constituted a sin.

She started the Subaru’s engine and backed out of the parking lot, heading out of town.

11:10 a.m.

The Lodge

“—Krissie downloaded the photo to Kinkos Online and had them make a paper table cloth out of it. So the next time she was host for the Ladies’ Five Hundred Club, they finish up their hands and go to the dining room and there’s this beautiful spread and beneath that is the picture from the back of Vern’s sock drawer of Lindsey, too, if you know what I mean,” Cash said.

“Wow,” Steve said, sincerely impressed. “Now that’s retribution. It’s like biblical.”

“Yup,” Cash agreed, pausing outside the barn door. “So then Lindsey goes squealing home and confesses all to her husband, not realizing their teenage son is listening in. The next day Junior shows up at school and proceeds to tell all the kids that Vern Nagel seduced his mom.

“Vern, who’s understandably in a pissy mood anyway after being kicked out of his house and has set up camp at the Valu-Inn, gets a load of this, and after church that Sunday finds Dahlberg and tells him if his kid doesn’t learn to shut his mouth, he’ll shut it for him and, of course, Dahlberg gets all indignant about Vern threatening his kid and the two of them end up in this fistfight in the church parking lot, both their noses broke and Vern missing a tooth.”

“Geez. So who ended up moving?” Steve asked.

“No one,” Cash said, rolling open the door to the barn. “Dahlberg divorced Lindsey and married one of his nurses and Lindsey ended up marrying Vern. Krissie married one of Vern’s business partners. The whole lot lives within three blocks of one another.”

Steve was impressed. “Live and forgive?”

“Hell, no. They still hate each other’s guts and have managed to drag half the town into taking sides. Not that it took much dragging. Needless to say, Lindsey quit the Five Hundred Club.” Cash’s brow wrinkled. “I think she plays bridge now.”

This was unexpected. “But what about that small-town, one-big-happy-family thing?” Steve asked. “You know, the
Lake Woebegone
shtick?”

“Forget it,” Cash said. “You know the thing I’ve learned about small towns? Everything gets magnified, both virtues and vices. Everything tends to be a little more black and white. At least, that’s my perspective after a quarter of a century.”

He waved Steve forward. “Here we go. Last stop on the tour.”

He stepped aside, letting Steve enter first. Heidi had gone soon after Jenn, so left to their own devices, Steve had talked Cash into showing him around the place. The old guy had insisted on lending him appropriate outerwear, for which Steve was humbly grateful—down-filled baffles and felt liners really did make all the difference. The three of them, Cash, Steve, and Bruno, had tromped all over the Lodge’s land: through the woods, along the overhang—pausing for a moment of reflective silence at the splotch on the frozen lake surface below that marked the landing pattern of “that guy who chased after the butter thieves”—across the field and up toward the back of the Lodge to a wooden outhouse that was revealed to be, in fact, not an outhouse at all but a sauna, and from there to the chicken coop, where Nina kept her Fancy Fowl.

Here Bruno, who had obviously held unpleasant memories of encounters with either Nina or her chickens or both, took off. That left Steve to express sympathy for Nina’s fascination for her gorgeously patterned birds and regale Cash with their probable history as remnant dinosaurs—once more thanks to the Discovery Channel.

Now he preceded Cash into the dim interior of the barn. Beside him, Cash flipped on the lights.

It was a barn all right, but with unpainted, sheetrocked interior walls and a row of exposed floor joists overhead. Except for a workbench at the back, a dilapidated-looking tractor (“Hey, can I drive that?” “It’s broke.”), and a big, old-fashioned freezer chest, presumably the late resting place of his butter head, the barn was empty.

“It’s warm in here,” Steve said.

“Yup. We were thinking at one point that if the B and B really got going, we’d convert the barn into more rooms, so we had the walls put up and blown with insulation.” He pointed at the joists overhead. “We were going to have a second level put in, too. But then we had a couple months there where we had people every single weekend and realized pretty quickly that innkeeping was not for us.” He shook his head. “They wanted things. All the time, ‘gimme, get me.”’

Steve wasn’t paying much attention. He’d wandered over to the big, scarred worktable at the back and was running his hands over the rusty tools Cash had left scattered over its surface, a wave of nostalgia sweeping through him. Vises, hammers, saws and chisels and … a crowbar.