No Coming Back (11 page)

Chapter Thirteen

I
n a nation built on godly virtues, people find it hard to forgive.

I backpedal out of Varney’s Bait & Tackle and shake myself down before crossing the street. I need to follow Ruby’s story to its conclusion if I want to get to the bottom of what really happened with Jenna the evening she disappeared. Six Pack could hold the answers. But when it comes to interrogating the three remaining members, I don’t have great expectations, not after my encounter with Ben. Mistakenly, I was hopeful that Ben might have softened with age, like his belly, and that he might have been prepared to let bygones be bygones. After all, he is one of my uncle’s closest pals. I would have expected Owen to talk him around to the idea of my innocence after all these years. But now I see that Ben’s sealed-lips response is likely to be repeated throughout town, and I have to remember that most of Harper think I killed one of their own. It’s going to involve a
continent
-sized shift in perspective to alter that world view.

I push open the glass door of the diner and wince under a blast of hot air coming from an overhead heater.

With happy hour swiftly approaching, Merrill’s is busier than it was at seven this morning: a scattering of regulars imbibing the freshly ground coffee and salivating over Merrill’s special pastries; a few tourists in the corner, here for the snowmobiling, laughing about their James Bond antics; a cook whistling tunelessly in back.

No sign of Krauss.

I strip off my coat and hat, then slide into a booth by the
window
. It’s the same booth I sat in earlier, with Lars. The same booth Jenna and I claimed every Saturday morning as ours.

The TV on the wall is still broadcasting its worldly woes. I keep my gaze diverted.

The young girl from the breakfast shift has been replaced by an older veteran of the hospitality service. I recognize her from an earlier age, but she doesn’t recognize me—not because I’ve changed so radically, but because she doesn’t once make eye contact.

She wipes a hand over the tabletop, brushing away a freckling of sugar granules left behind by a clumsy customer. “My name’s Maggie,” she tells me in a bored monotone, “and I’ll be your server today. Can I get you started with something to drink and maybe a slice of one of our special homemade pies?”

“One root beer and one pop,” I say, getting out my phone. “I’m expecting company.”

“Sure thing, honey. Which pop?” She runs off a list of every kind of soda imaginable.

“Mello Yello.”

“Sure thing. Mello Yello coming right up. There’s a menu card by the window if you change your mind about the pies. The special today is the blueberry swirl, and it’s a real knockout.”

She drifts away, humming tunelessly to herself as she goes.

The time on my phone reads five minutes after four. Krauss is late. Not like her. But then what do I know about the new Krauss?

Outside, the snow has stopped falling and an early winter dusk is muddying the overcast sky. Street lights popping on again.
Storefronts
brightening, like illuminated billboards propped up along the sidewalk.

I avoid my ghostly reflection in the window as it takes shape, thinking instead about Ruby’s revelation. Her words have left me with a sickly feeling deep down, like I’ve eaten something bad and it’s indigestible. Not for the first time I go through all the arguments against her being right about Jenna, trying to reason it away or at the very least make it feel more palatable. In prison, my psychiatrist told me I overcompensate for Jenna’s loss by only ever thinking of her in perfect terms and excluding all memories that are less than immaculate. Even so, Ruby’s claim is the last thing I expected to hear. None of my research into that turbulent time has unearthed a link between Jenna and Six Pack and yet, in one cannabis-smelling breath, Ruby has blown away the silt from my eyes and shown me Jenna in a different light.

“Hello there, stranger.”

I look round to see Krauss walking toward the booth. She’s
wearing
a thick roll-neck fisherman’s sweater over faded jeans and hiking boots. A big padded jacket is bundled under her arm—one of those silver bubble coats that makes the wearer look like an
astronaut
.

“Hi, Kim. You’re late and out of uniform.”

She slides into the booth. “One, it’s the weekend and the other is a girl’s prerogative.”

“And yet you’re still wearing your gun.”

“Comes with me everywhere I go. We’re on the threshold of the great untamed outdoors and I never leave home without it. I’m a crack shot, you know?”

“Really?”

“One of the best in town.”

“I seem to remember you had an aversion to firearms.”

“Well, I had to toughen up if I wanted to wear the badge. Would you like to see my permit to carry?”

“No, just the food options.” I hand her a menu.

She smiles and opens it up.

The waitress returns with our drinks. Krauss’s eyes light up when she spies her pop. She winks at me, then proceeds to share polite pleasantries with the waitress: how the weather’s warmed up a little; how the January business is slacker than usual; how Krauss’s dad must be feeling the chill up there at the lake. I tune it out,
scanning
the menu card instead.

Finally, Krauss orders the BLT on rye. “It’s as good as it’s always been,” she assures me and I go along with her recommendation.

“You kids enjoy,” the waitress says and leaves us to it.

Krauss bats her eyelids at me. “Jake, you remembered.”

“Is Mello Yello still your favorite?”

“You bet!” She takes a hearty slurp on her drinking straw. “Hard to beat that caffeine rush. Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

She leans back in the booth and gazes around us. “Well, I know this is different for me, but it must be weird for you being back here.”

“A little.”

“Is that why you look like you’ve seen a ghost?”

“I do?”

“Yes, you surely do. Or is it because Chief Meeks paid you a visit?”

“Ah. You know about that?”

“It’s a small town; news travels at the speed of a sled. I thought he’d at least let you settle in before trying to turf you out.”

“Meeks is just doing his job.”

“And there’s no harm in doing it with a tad more subtlety either.”

“He’s not the world’s most diplomatic person.”

She smiles. “You figure?” She takes another slurp at her pop. “So how’d it go, the interrogation with the big chief?”

I shrug a lip. “Not quite a train wreck. Basically, he wanted to remind me of my place in the food chain. My dos and my don’ts. I guess if this was back during Harper’s founding days he would have tanned my hide with a whip and run me out of town.”

“He’s such an asshole.”

“Some things never change.” Now it’s my turn to smile. It draws one from Krauss’s lips. Her whole face brightens with it. She has blossomed in womanhood, I realize. Never the proverbial ugly duckling and not quite the swan now, but she is unquestionably attractive. Surprisingly, it feels easy sitting here with her after all this time; two old friends reacquainting and reattaching, not quite sure if that includes testing the waters.

“Rest assured I’ll speak with him about it,” she says,
twiddling
her drinking straw. “Politely remind him which lines he shouldn
’t cross.”

“Kim, there really is no need; I can handle Meeks.”

“He used to bully you all the time!”

“I’m wiser now, older.”

“Don’t forget bigger.” Her smile inflates into a grin. “In a nice way, of course. Anyway, I promise I won’t make things any worse for you than they already are. I can be very persuasive, you know?”

“No doubt.”

When we were in the third grade, Krauss had me believing hers was a royal bloodline stretching back to a principality in Europe. She had me treating her like a princess for a week until her mom laughed it aside and Krauss dropped the pretense.

She taps me on the back of the hand, “Hey, do you remember we used to be in here all the time? This was our booth.
Saturday
mornings
. We’d sit right here in these very seats, drinking
milkshakes
and putting imaginary speech bubbles on passersby.”

I dive deep for the memory, sifting through years of suspended silt, but resurface empty-handed. The only images I have of this place are with Jenna. Then again, virtually all of my more
prominent
Harper memories feature her and her alone.

The expression on Krauss’s face tells me she’s a little crestfallen with my inability to pluck out the pearl. “Oh, Jake. You don’t remember, do you?”

“Vaguely.” I think harder, but the memory simply doesn’t exist. The truth is, prison life is acidic. It corrodes those memories least able to withstand the weathering.

“Do you at least remember it was here you first decided to be a reporter?”

I do. But again the memory is with Jenna, not Krauss.

Everything’s mixed up.

This time she doesn’t wait for me to catch up. “Let me jog your memory. We were fifteen. It was spring break. On a whim, you dragged me to the printing press and practically begged Lars to give you a weekend job at the paper. I remember he was furious with us for barging in like that, right in the middle of a print run. I’m sure he had steam coming out of his ears.”

“Not helped by the fact I virtually chained myself to his
beloved press.”

“That’s right!” Krauss shakes her head. “He had to drag you out by your ear and throw you on the sidewalk.”

“It stung for about a week. When my father found out he locked me in the old bomb shelter in the backyard the whole of the weekend. I had to sit it out with the dank and my grandfather’s rusting junk.”

Krauss’s nose wrinkles at the thought. “You know, I’d completely forgotten about that place in your backyard until you
mentioned
it this morning. Mostly, I remember it smelled like a sewer.”

“That’s because my grandfather built it next to the septic tank. I think his reasoning was that if the Russians dropped the bomb at least my family could still go to the toilet.”

Krauss’s grin grows into a giggle. “We did some crazy spur-of-the-moment stuff back then, didn’t we?”

“We were kids.”

“Yeah, and by all accounts, totally shameless.”

For a moment we reminisce, enjoying each other’s company. Retuning to our favorite frequency and feeling the rhythm.

Krauss and I have a lot to talk about. Years of our lives following different routes, exploring separate social landscapes. Before my arrest, I knew everything there was to know about the
teenage
Kimberly
Krauss. I knew she liked horror movies and books by
Stephen
King. I knew she favored pasta over pizza. I knew she wanted to be a hotshot lawyer and that all her favorite songs were sung by Meatloaf. Our divergence means I know practically nothing about this adult version. She’s as good as a stranger to me, as I am to her. But I can feel there’s something still here between us, connective. Something invisible, bonding us together. Something more than memories.

Krauss slurps more pop. “So how’s it shaping up—the story? Knowing Lars, he’ll be expecting a first draft on his desk come
Monday
morning, followed by an earth-shattering exposé by
midweek
.”

I lean back in the booth and shrug. “Lars can expect all he likes. He’ll get his pound of flesh when I’m ready, if at all.”

All at once Krauss scrutinizes me the way somebody studies a piece of modern art they can’t quite wrap their mind around. It’s a look I’ve seen regularly since my release from prison. She’s wondering how things have been for me, all these years cooped up with other men, shielded from the world, my horizons pulled in and my worldview shrunken. She’s wondering what happened to me in jail, how much of it was bad or even detrimental to my psyche. She’s curious to know to what extent my experiences have altered who I was and shaped me into what I am: the unknown quantity she’s struggling to pigeonhole.

“You’ve changed,” she concludes. “You’ve toughened up and become a bit of a bad boy. I think I like it.”

But she’s undecided if it’s truly for the better. Ideally, she wants to believe the boy she grew up with is still in here, the drip of a boy she connected with on so many levels. He is, just like the studious teenage Krauss is deep within her, under her complex layers of
experience
. We have both grown thicker skins while we’ve been apart, become bigger than what we were.

She reaches out to touch my hand. “Seriously, though, Jake, I missed our conversations. You and I used to talk until the cows came home. There was never a dull moment. Always something juicy to get our teeth into. When they took you away, I missed our friendship, our hanging out together. Most of all I missed you.” She holds my gaze, emphasizing her last three words.

In any other moment, with any other woman, this might feel awkward. It doesn’t. Holding hands with Krauss is as natural as breathing, and it’s nothing new.

“The thing is, Jake, I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve been around the block a few times. I don’t expect miracles. We’ve been apart for so long. I don’t know what you expect from me and the feeling’s mutual. I know it’s going to take time to get back to where we left off, to be proper friends again. That’s if you want to.”

“Kim, you never stopped being my friend.”

“And that makes me feel incredibly guilty.”

“Why, because you didn’t visit me in Stillwater?” I squeeze her hand. “Kim, we were kids. You had school and then college to think about. After that, a life to make. You had plenty of distractions, and I knew that. I never once held it against you. Sure, I missed you. But the last thing I wanted was for you to keep making the long trek to the Cities instead of moving on. It wouldn’t have been fair. Besides, you visited me plenty before the trial and I’m really grateful for that.”