The Lighthouse Road (27 page)

   "Nope."

" Where is he?"

"Couldn't say."

   Hosea looked over Danny's shoulder again. "His boat's not in there." He turned his head over his shoulder and looked at the cove. "Where's his boat?"

   "He launched her this weekend."

   "Launched her?"

   Danny nodded.

   Hosea stood in confused silence for a moment before he said, "Can I come in for a minute, Danny?"

   Danny stepped aside and followed Hosea into the fish house, closing the door behind them.

   "Can we light a lantern?" Hosea said.

   Without a word, Danny went to the bench and put match to mantle and adjusted the kerosene.

   Hosea walked slowly around the empty space where the boat had been for the last six months. It still smelled of the homemade varnish, and the fumes were making Hosea's lightheadedness worse.

   "You look like hell, Mister Grimm."

   Hosea sat on the three-legged stool. He put his elbows on his knees and started wringing his hands. In a raspy voice, he said, "Why would he put his boat in the water now?"

   Danny hopped up onto the counter and lit a cigarette.

   Hosea looked across the room at him. "What are you doing here, Danny?"

   "Odd asked me to watch the place for him."

   " Watch the place?"

   " While he's gone." Danny would not look away. They stared at each other for a long moment.

   Hosea shook his head. "You're a straight-faced son of a gun, Danny."

   Danny answered by taking a long drag off his cigarette. He held the smoke deep in his lungs until Hosea began to speak again, then blew it all out in a steady stream.

   "I see," Hosea said. He turned his hands palms up. The lie that was his life and that had been lived for so long had come back to get him. The truth was no longer a thing to even imagine.

   Hosea stood, looked again at Danny. "Rebekah is gone, too," he said, his voice little more than a whisper now.

   Danny didn't respond.

   Again Hosea shook his head. He looked around the fish house as though he'd never seen it before. "It's been nearly twenty-five years now that I've taken care of her. I raised Odd. Even you can't deny it. It's because of me he's got this fish house and the farm up on the Burnt Wood." He stood up straight. "He was an orphan. Or
phan
. I gave him a home." He looked again around the fish house. Tears welled in his eyes, a thing he'd not felt since he couldn't remember when. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "Christ almighty," he whispered. "How did I miss it?" This he asked himself, but the wonder of it turned him to Danny, and he repeated the question. "H
ow did I miss it
?"

   "I don't know what you're talking about, Mister Grimm."

   "Did they leave together?"

   "All I know is Odd wanted to get his boat in the water. He wanted to put a few miles on the engine. He told me he was going down to Port Arthur. To see about a job for the winter. He asked me to watch the fish house for him. I haven't seen Rebekah for weeks, maybe months, but I watched Odd motor out of the cove alone on his boat just this morning."

   Hosea listened intently, but he knew a lie when he heard one and what he'd just heard was a steaming pile of moose guts.

   "I guess you and Odd are thick as thieves, aren't you? I could probably get a straighter answer out of a winding river than out of you."

   "I thought you knew every damn thing, Mister Grimm."

   "Is that what you thought?"

   Hosea looked a last time around the fish house and headed for the door. At the threshold he stopped. The consequences of all he'd discovered since he'd woken would take days to parse, but the one thing he knew as he walked out to his truck and started it up was that more than anything else he felt abandoned. However peculiar their coming together had been, however twisted and convoluted, he thought of Rebekah and Odd honestly and lovingly as his children. And now they were gone, without the courtesy of a single word, and he was left to wonder at the world without them. All he saw were the unborn days ahead, their emptiness, and his place among the countless hours. In the instant of that realization, it was as though he aged all the hours yet allotted to him. He put the truck into gear and drove slowly away from the fish house.

D
espite his sadness and the sting of abandonment, Hosea was geared for deception. Before he was back at the apothecary he had already shaped another ruse: an imaginary sister, deathly ill in Chicago, in need of Rebekah's ministrations. By the time he parked the truck he'd already started believing she existed.

   When the first customer came in at ten Hosea was scrubbed and dressed properly and sitting behind his counter, reading a day-old newspaper while his pipe smoldered in an ashtray at his elbow.

   Winter arrived with its vengeance and with it Hosea took ill. He spent the week before Christmas nursing himself in his apartment, the apothecary closed for the first time in its twenty-five-year history. When he reopened the day after Christmas, the flood of customers could hardly believe the change in Hosea. He had aged, to be sure, but he also had about him the aspect of a man pulled from the ashes of a great fire. And it was this— ruin more than age — that caused the townsfolk their greatest concern.

I
n the hills above the waterline the snow in the shadows and meadows' edges had held deep into the spring. There had been no midwinter thaw to ease the April snowmelt now, so the Burnt Wood came down the hills and spilled over its banks and when it reached the lake it surged against the rollers and boulders as though all the vengeance of the long winter past had been reincarnated in the river's mad rush.

   The jacks had driven the last load of white pine down the ice road three weeks earlier, and a week after that the camp had been boarded up. Only the barn boss and bull cook remained, and would until the fall. They'd tend the horses and repair the buildings and spend as much time drunk during the warm months as they'd spent sober during the cold.

   Thea came down to Gunflint on the back of Trond Erlandson's wagon with a promise of more work the next fall. Since her day in Mayfair's chambers, she'd spent much time pondering the nonsensical life that had been intended for her when she'd left Norway, and when they arrived in Gunflint having not passed the farm, she was as disappointed as she was perplexed. When Trond Erlandson stopped his wagon at the livery, and when he pulled Thea's bag from the wagon bed and offered her his hand for help getting down, her confusion became greater still.

   Trond removed his gloves and put them in the back pocket of his dungarees and turned his head to spit a wad of snoose. "Here's where the ride ends, Miss Eide."

   She looked at him helplessly. W
hat do I do now?
she wanted to ask.
Where should I go? Whom can I trust? Where is that man, the watch
salesman?

   "Where'll you go?" he asked, as though reading her thoughts. He pulled his pocket watch from his vest and checked the time and replaced the watch. "You've got your earnings. Take a room at the hotel." He pointed up the Lighthouse Road. He looked at her suitcase. He seemed to take stock of his own annoyance. " Maybe Grimm will help. He helped you before."

   Now he lifted her bag and carried it the two blocks to Grimm's. When they reached the storefront, he set her suitcase on the stone walkway. "Like I said, you're welcome back upriver come fall. You make a mean biscuit. Keep Grimm apprised, he'll let me know."

   Thea looked up at his worn-out face, his complexion scarred by the cold. She smiled helplessly. " Thank you," she said. She reached down and picked up her bag and climbed the staircase to Grimm's porch. She turned once to look at Trond already walking back toward the livery, set her suitcase beside the door to the apothecary, and smoothed her dress.

   Hosea's kindness had been her salvation when she arrived in Gunflint, and though she had no right to expect any more of it, she walked into his store. The bell above the door rang. She stood at the threshold, waiting.

   There was no one about, so it surprised her when she heard Hosea Grimm's voice from across the room.

"I'll be right with you," he said.

   She took a tentative step toward the counter, smoothing her dress again.

   "Now," Grimm said, rising from behind the counter, "what can I do for you?" He appeared almost to flinch when he recognized her. It took him a moment to gather his voice. "Miss Eide! I hardly recognized you. How are you?" He looked behind her, as though expecting to see a companion. "Are you alone?"

   Grimm walked from behind the counter and stood in front of her. "Now, there's a beggarly dress, Miss Eide." Her dress was indeed filthy and threadbare, its hem undone by the scullery mice in the camp's mess hall. "Of course," he continued. "The camp's shut down for the season. You've nowhere to go."

   Thea had yet to say a word.

   "You're back where you started. You need a place to lay your head." He put the tip of his index finger to his pursed lips and then raised that same finger to the air. "Excuse me a moment." Now he stepped around her and walked to the base of the staircase. "Rebekah, please come down. Thea Eide is here."

   A moment later Rebekah was standing in front of Thea.

   "Miss Eide has finished her work up at the Burnt Wood Camp and is looking for a place to stay until she can get her bearings," Hosea said. "What do you think, Rebekah, could we take her in?"

   Rebekah tapped her foot as though to a song. She wore quite lovely shoes, Thea noticed: ankle-high brown leather boots with mother-of-pearl buttons. A well-pressed gingham dress with lace cuffs and a matching lace bow in her hair. Thea's own shoes were worn-out brogues. Where Rebekah smelled of lavender, Thea hadn't had a proper bath in eight months and her muskiness was downright rank. But despite Rebekah's pearly skin and the scent of her fine perfume and the lustrous hair braided down her back, she appeared more trapped in her finery than at ease. Thea could not help but feel pity for her. She felt, in fact, that she held some advantage over the druggist's daughter.

   "Well?" Hosea persisted, taking Rebekah unkindly by the wrist.

   Rebekah shook his hand free. "Of course. We should find a place for her to stay."

U
p on the third floor of Grimm's apothecary, in the finest quarters Thea had ever seen— the finest by far— Rebekah gathered raiment and hairbrushes and glass bottles of hair oil and bath salts. When all was ready Rebekah led Thea, who had been sitting on the settee with tea, to the bath.

   "I thought he'd never shush. He talks just to hear himself. Honestly! Have you ever seen anything like it?" Rebekah was sprinkling the bath salts into the steaming tub. The windows above the tub, looking out over the hills behind their muslin drapes, were clouded with the vapor rising up from the bath. "Be careful of him. Do you understand? Be careful? Especially if he comes around with his camera. He's swine. Sooey, sooey!"