“That's one cold way to have fun,” Jo said. “But he's my grandson. I expect he has a mind of his own, and right that he should.”
“I helped him bring his equipment onto the lake this morning when I dropped him off. You wouldn't catch me sitting on a bucket all day long hoping to catch a couple of perch or bluegill.” Maude raised perfectly arched eyebrows and shook her head.
I didn't really want to get involved in a question of what a suitable day's entertainment for someone Danna's age was, but I was a little surprised Ron didn't have a weekend job to go to. “Jo, you were asking about the upstairs,” I said. “I've been working on it this winter. So far I'm still in the demolition phase.”
Jo seemed to shrink into herself a little, but she mustered a smile. “That's nice. I know you want to make the place into an inn, like.”
“I'm sorry.” I cringed at my thoughtlessness. “That's not very nice of me to mention the demolition. You used to live up there. It's just that I wanted a different configuration of walls than you had.” And insulation. And modern wiring. And a myriad of other improvements.
“Don't worry about it,” Maude said. “We knew you were going to renovate the second floor, didn't we, Mom?”
“Of course.” Jo's smile brightened. “I'm glad you're going to improve it. The place got pretty run down, I admit.”
“If you need a consult on the new design, my office is just above the bank.” Maude's mouth smiled, but not the rest of her face. “I'd be happy to take a look one of these days.” She kept smiling as she talked.
I don't know why it was, but people who smiled while they were talking had always struck me as insincere. “I'm finding some interesting things in the walls,” I said.
Maude, who had a bite of omelet halfway to her mouth, halted her fork and tilted her head and eyes toward the ceiling.
“I'll bring them by for you to look at one of these days, shall I?” I asked Jo.
“Please, dear. Please do.” She glanced at her plate. “Oh, don't these flapjacks look yummy, Maude?”
Maude blinked a few times, and stared at her own plate. “Absolutely, Mom. They sure do.”
* * *
Lou and I clipped our snowshoes onto our boots at the back of her little SUV in the Crooked Lake lot off Route 135. Only one pickup truck also sat in the lot, likely a late-day ice fisherman. I'd driven by in the morning on one of my days off last week and the lake had been full of guys sitting on low stools watching the flags they set up to indicate a nibble. Others were twisting giant augers to drill new holes or hauling up a wriggling fish. I ought to see if I could buy a supply of catfish or whatever they were catching for next week's dinner, or even for a lunch special.
Now we still had three hours of light before sunset at 6:30, and I needed to get out and stretch my legs in some fresh air. When I'd called Lou to propose an outing after the store closed, she was as eager as I was, and had picked me up. Winter can be a long season for cyclists when ice and snow make biking outdoors a real pain.
“You can almost taste spring,” she said with a grin. “Look how much light is in the sky.” She wore a cone-shaped purple and pink knitted hat with ear flaps along with a breathable pink jacket and stretchy black pants
“It's only a month until the equinox.” I tugged my own striped knit cap down around my ears. My jacket was blue but my double-layer pants looked just like hers. “Funny how in late August this much light just seems sad, like summer is over. But now? It means the snow's going to be gone one of these days.”
The path down to the lake had been trampled flat by dog walkers and fishermen. We grabbed our poles and set out on the trail around the lake. Other hikers and snowshoers had broken trail, so we weren't floundering through two feet of white stuff. We both wore modern metal and plastic snowshoes instead of the traditional ones made of wood with the long point at the back. I didn't see any point in not having good gear.
“You lead the way.” I pointed with a pole. “Your legs are a lot longer than mine and I don't want to hold you up.” I followed her as we trudged into the woods. It was a little tricky not to step on your own shoe, especially if you had short legs. I had to adopt a wider stance than I normally walked with.
“I already had one run through here early this morning,” Lou said over her shoulder. “It's a great place to exercise.”
“You went running in the woods?” I asked.
“Sure. Didn't see a soul except when I did a loop on the lake.”
“It's so pretty in here,” I said. “We don't have snowy woods in California. At least not in my part of the state.” The sun filtered through the trees and scattered sparkling light on a set of tracks that paralleled our trail for a few yards.
“Yeah, but you have the Pacific Ocean. And great wines.”
“I'll say.” Which I wouldn't mind a glass of when we were done here.
“Want to sprint?” Lou flipped a grin over her shoulder, then set off running, the snowshoes
fwapping
behind her.
“Are you kidding?” This was only my second time out on the contraptions. But hey, I didn't have strong cyclist's quad muscles for nothing. I gave it a try, lifting my knees and pushing off. I been at it for only a couple of minutes before I tripped. I yelled on the way down and nearly face-planted. “Yo, Perlman,” I called.
Lou stopped, turned around, and
fwapped
back to me. She extended her pole. “Here, pull yourself up.” She clearly tried not to laugh, but a snort slipped out.
“It's not really that funny.” My own giggle made a liar out of me as I managed to get vertical again. I brushed the snow off my jacket and legs. Leaning on my poles, I shook the white stuff out of first one snowshoe then the other. “Okay if we just walk? My legs aren't as long as yours.”
“Wuss.” She stood there grinning.
“Show-off.”
“Scaredy-cat.”
“Jock.” I tramped around her. “I'm going to lead now.”
“Whatever you say, Shorty.”
As we tramped along, I spied a pileated woodpecker through the trees and pointed out its tall black-and-white body with the distinctive red crest to Lou. She talked to me about her plans to attend an academic conference in Sweden in April. We continued in silence for a little longer, the only sounds the noise of our footwear and the crunch of the snow underneath.
“What was up with you and Charles Stilton last night?” I asked.
“He's unscrupulous and unfair. When I came to IU, I thought I could work with him. He's very charming on the surface. We collaborated on some research. That is, I researched my idea and wrote it up, but I met with him once a week to talk about it. He steered me in a particular direction, and that was fine. It was a good tip. But then I saw in the department newsletter that he's about to publish my work under his own name.” Her voice was filled with disgust. “He outright stole it.”
“That's terrible. Can you do anything about it?”
“Not really. I talked to Zen, but the paper has already been accepted by a major journal, and I can't really prove that he robbed me. What I can do about my studies is change them. I'm switching topics. I'm never working with that jerk again, and my coursework is finished, so I won't have to study with him, either.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“It'll take me longer to get my degree now, but one good thing is that Zen is going to be my advisor.”
“I liked her.”
“She's very cool,” Lou said.
“Did you know I bought my store from Charles's mother-in-law?”
“Really?”
“Jo Schultz. She's a very sweet, very sharp older lady, but she hadn't been keeping it up at all. The place was kind of a wreck, even upstairs where she lived.”
“It isn't a wreck now. You've done a fabulous job with it.”
I thanked her. “I'm working on the upstairs now, too.” We kept going until we came to an opening in the trail, with a clear path leading off to the right. “Want to check that out?” I asked, pointing my pole. “It might lead down to the lake. We can watch the ice fishing.”
“Sure. Lead on, O guide.”
I took a right. The snow was deeper here, since it didn't look like anyone else had taken the same turn. I lifted my knees and pushed down, breaking trail for Lou until my thighs burned. After a minute the snow parted over a small stream, but a couple of wide logs had been laid over the water as a bridge. We crossed and trudged along as the path sloped downward, soon opening up to a clearing at the edge of the lake. The bank was only a foot high, so I figured out how to maneuver myself down. When Lou caught up, she just jumped onto the lake.
“Wow, what a beautiful sight.” I leaned on my poles and surveyed the expanse as a cloud blew over the sun. The lake was covered with snow, of course, but the wind had carved drifts in places and swept it clean down to the ice in others. The whole scene had a bluish tint, even the trees at the far edge. A figure sat on a red stool across the way near a clearing at lake's edge. I could spy the truck we'd seen in the parking lot behind him.
“Come on. We can work up more of a sweat on the flat,” Lou said.
“You're not already sweating?” I unzipped my jacket halfway down and ran a finger around the neck of my wicking turtleneck.
“It's good for you.”
“You think it's thick enough to walk on?” It had taken me, the Californian, a couple of years to trust that it was okay to walk on water. Frozen water, but still it made me very, very nervous the first time I walked on a solid lake. It just didn't seem right.
“Uh, yeah. You think ice fisherpeople would sit on it all day long if it wasn't? The paper said it's been ten inches thick all winter. Okay, wimpie?” Lou didn't wait for me to answer and set out at a fast walk. “And we can get back to my car in a straight line,” she called back.
At least she wasn't running again. When a gust of wind chilled my chest, I zipped up again and followed. I wasn't a wimp. I was just a Southwesterner.
She started singing out loud, which made me smile. I caught up and walked next to her, but I couldn't quite keep up with her energetic pace. We were about halfway across when I spied a dark hole in the snow ahead. As we drew nearer, I saw that footsteps led away from the hole in the direction of the guy on the stool.
“Seems kind of far out to be drilling a fishing hole,” I said.
“Avoiding the competition, I'd guess.” She detoured around it and kept going.
I paused at the hole. It was a couple of feet across, and the water on top had already iced over again. I leaned over and peered in. It seemed odd that with all this cold, fish were still swimming around down there, carrying on their lives as if it was June or October. Maybe I could spot one. I saw something move and squatted to get a better look.
I stared. And grew cold, not from the wind but from dread. No fish was that brightly colored green. No fish on earth sported a tidy black goatee.