Hot Dish (16 page)

“It’s not my hometown, and you and I both know it,” she said through her teeth, smiling pleasantly at Steve, who was digging around in a duffel bag without much success.

Ken glanced at her, looking startled. “Okay. Maybe not. But your media pals don’t know that, and I think we’d just as soon keep it that way, eh?”

We’d
? He meant her. She was the one with a career built on a shaky foundation. Great, she’d been here an hour, and she was already getting veiled threats from the town Babbitt.

She didn’t dignify his comment with an answer, waiting while Steve recrossed the street. He was bare-headed. He looked sheepish. “I didn’t think of a hat. I know, stupid.”

Ken clapped him on the shoulder, his snub nose bright red with the cold. “That’s okay, Mr. Jaax. We got plenty of hats here,” he said. “In the meantime, why don’t you let me drive you over to the Valu-Inn?”

Steve, whose gaze kept shooting around the streets like he expected to spy the thief trying to sneak the stolen sculpture past them under his coat, did a double-take.

“The motel? I’m not staying there. It was booked up. I’m staying at some place called—” He dug into his jacket pocket until he found a scrap of paper. He held it at arm’s length and squinted. “The Lodge.”

10:30 a.m.

Oxlip County Hospital

Room 323

A soft, cool hand brushed his forehead and Dunk swam up out of a happy pool of morphine, eyes rolling back in his head. “Mommy?”

The light touch disappeared and Dunk opened his eyes to a moon-faced female floating a foot above him, a no-nonsense expression on her face as she tugged at the pillow behind his head.

Definitely not Mommy.

He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness more frequently today—they must have been cutting back on his drugs—and every time he’d been “in,” she’d been in the room nursing about.

“So you’re awake, then.” It sounded as much like an accusation as a statement. Adroitly, she slipped the pillow further beneath his shoulders and added another behind his head. Then she smoothed the bedsheet over the body cast that wrapped him from his hips to his shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

“Awful,” he mumbled.

“Well. You look better.” She stood back. “Some.”

“I’m not.” He wanted to dive back into that nice pool of semiconsciousness, buoyed on a cushion of morphine.

“You broke a couple ribs and cracked your pelvis. You’re just lucky that Polaris didn’t land on your head.”

“Polaris …” A memory floated sluggishly out of his clouded mind: snowflakes, trees, and the machine beneath him suddenly taking flight over a silvery lake far, far below as far, far ahead of him the butter head—
the butter head
! Those bastards had stolen his butter head!

He jolted upright. “
DAMN, THAT HURTS
!”

The nurse pushed him flat. “Yeah, I betcha it does. Poppin’ up like that. Lie still.” She began sponging off the sweat popping out over his forehead.

“The butter sculpture,” he gasped. “Where is it?”

Her mouth pursed up. “Fool thing’s gone. Least I haven’t heard anything about anyone finding it.”

He whimpered. He couldn’t help himself. He had to get his hands on that butter head before Jaax did. As soon as Jaax dug the key out of it, all Dunk’s newly hatched hopes for financial security vanished.

“Now, then, I gotta say how it was real decent of you to try and stop those good-for-nothings from stealing that sculpture.” A tiny ember of … something warmed her brown eyes. “Not sure it was worth getting all busted up for, but it’s the principle of a thing that counts, I always say, and you got principles.”

First he’d ever heard of it.

“But you can’t let some fool butter head sculpture upset you. You need to rest.”

She thought he was some sort of
hero
, Dunk realized in amazement. Well, this was new. Maybe useful. At least he was thinking clearly now, pain having a tendency to focus his thoughts.

“You can imagine,” he said, gazing up at her with somber eyes, “that I’d hate to think I ended up here all busted up for nothing. I’d really like to see that the—butter head, you say it is?—butter head gets returned to its rightful owners.”

She regarded him approvingly.

“Principles being principles,” he added. “You’ll let me know if you hear something, won’t you? It would make me feel better.”

“You bet, Mr. Dunkovich.” She gave a curt nod. “Now I expect you’d like to call your family? We didn’t find any emergency number in your wallet, so we couldn’t notify anyone. But if you don’t feel up to making the call, I can do it for you.”

He liked her accent. It was all soft and round and comfortable. Like her ass in those baby blue drawstring pants … Geezus, he must be higher than he realized because not only had the pain disappeared—well, not disappeared, exactly; it was there, just cruising beneath the radar—but because as a rule he liked his women younger, thinner, and a whole lot more exciting than this solid-looking woman with her inexpressive face and Clairol brown hair showing a bit of gray at the roots. She had really nice skin, though. Peaches and cream.

“I don’t have any family,” he said.

“Oh.” The corners of her mouth twitched once before going dormant again. “Can I get you anyt’ing else, then?”

“Nah.” He had some hard thinking to do.

“How ‘bout a sponge bath?”

“Maybe later.”

“Should I turn on the television maybe?”

“Sure.”

She found the universal remote on the tray next to his bed and clicked on the TV set suspended on the wall opposite him. “What do you like?”

“Whatever.” His thoughts had started moving again. How the hell was he going to get that damn sculpture before Jaax showed up in town? He had to be coming any day. How was he going to get that damn sculpture at all, come to think of it?

Even if he could figure out who’d taken it, what could he do about it? He wasn’t even mobile. He needed an accomplice.

He glanced at the nurse still fussing around the room. No way. Not Miss “Principles are Principles.”

As Dunk watched, she suddenly looked up at the television set. Dunk followed her gaze to where Jenn Lind’s Midwest Madonna face glowed with warmth and decency from the picture tube.

“—Minnesota’s quintessential hostess, Jenn Lind, is taking some well-deserved time off before moving to New York to begin her duties as hostess of
Comforts of Home
. She’ll be helping her hometown of Fawn Creek celebrate their sesquicentennial by acting as their grand marshal. Now
that’s
‘Minnesota Nice.”’

His ministering angel snorted. It wasn’t a little snort, either, and her face wore a “tell me another” expression.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Nuthin’.”

“No, really. Why’d you sound like that?”

“I just laugh every time someone holds Jenn Hallesby up as this ideal woman.”

“You know her?” Hm. A little small-town rivalry?

She nodded, still looking a little smug, a great deal superior, and far too close-lipped. “We were in the same senior class in high school.”

Dunk would have pegged Jenn Lind as being at least five years younger than his nurse. “She’s not the ideal woman?” he asked, only mildly engaged. What did little Jenny do, a few members of the football team? Big deal.

“Depends on your definition of ideal,” she said, then added tellingly, “or woman.”

Now
this
sounded interesting.

“Huh. Well, well, well,” he said, recalling what the guy in the Ramsey Workhouse had said about Jenn’s soon-to-be employer, Dwight Davies, and his absolute brand of morality. There might be something useful here.

“Not that I’d say anything bad about her. She was just a kid. We were all just kids.” She blushed.

His nurse had clearly convinced herself that whatever bit of dirt she had on Jenn Lind couldn’t be used for malicious purposes. And from that blush, it looked like maybe because Jenn had something on her, too. But then, who didn’t like to gossip a little—especially about celebrities? Especially about celebrities you actually knew. Gave a girl a little cachet.

He gave her his best confiding smile. “Interesting, isn’t it? There’s what the general public thinks it knows, what the media are sure they know, and then there’s what people who really know know.” He shook his head. “And when it all comes down to it, most of the things we are so worried about other people finding out don’t make any difference to anyone anyway.”

“Well,” she said gruffly, “‘course, it don’t matter to me. But not everyone’s so open-minded.”

More intriguing by the minute. “You know, maybe I’ll have that sponge bath after all, Miss—” He gave her his best insurance salesman smile. “Heck. I don’t even know your name.”

“Ekkelstahl,” she said. “Karin Ekkelstahl.”

10:40 a.m.

Back on Main Street

Fawn Creek, Minnesota

“Thanks for the ride,” Steve said, tossing his battered duffel bag into the back seat of her Subaru. The Food Faire owner had arrived a short while ago and pushed open a passage through the snow blocking the parking lot entrance, releasing her car from captivity.

“No problem. Climb in,” she said. His face was ruddy with cold, and though he hadn’t complained, his feet in those cloth shoes must have been aching with cold. Jenn, slipping in behind the steering wheel, turned the engine over and flipped on the floor heaters full blast.

Since Steve’s rental car’s axle had been whacked out of alignment when he’d driven it over the curb and consequently he was without a ride, it only made sense that she should offer him one, especially since they had the same destination. Besides, she wanted to see his face when he got an eyeful of “Minnesota’s most unique and historic north woods bed-and-breakfast experience.” Even odds she’d end up driving him the twenty miles to the reservation hotel and she didn’t want to make that drive at night.

She was feeling a lot more kindhearted toward the world in general since finding out the butter head was gone. At least now she wouldn’t have to listen to people comparing Old Current Jenn with Young Butter Head Jenn. Besides, she was honest enough with herself to admit that she’d been crushing on Steve Jaax for twenty-some years and she wanted to see if time had diminished his charms. So far, nope.

Steve got in and at once slipped his feet out of his deck shoes and wiggled his stocking-covered toes in the blast of warm air. He beamed at her. “Look at that snow. There’s got to be a couple feet out there, right? And that guy … Ken? He said we’re expecting some ‘weather’, like that meant something dire, and when I asked him about it, he admitted more snow was being predicted and that we might even end up being cut off
from civilization. Which is completely cool. This is so wilderness. You must love it here.”

Her head snapped around to see if he was kidding. He wasn’t. He was staring out at the streets like a kid looking at the Christmas display windows on Madison Avenue.

She’d replayed the hours in the State Fair Dairy Federation freezer so many times in her head, it had never occurred to her that something so important to her could be insignificant to someone else. Which was what ego was all about, she supposed. But those hours had been a turning point not only in her life but in Steve Jaax’s life, too. Or so he’d claimed. It was part of the Jaax-verse—the Descent into Post-Fabulousa Hell and the Return with the Butter Prize.

“Love it?” she asked. “Were you listening to
anything
I said in that freezer?”

He looked over at her, still all smiles. “You’re kidding, right? Of course not.”

She felt her jaw loosen at the comers. The crush lost some of its patina.

“Hey, don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I was in a really bad place, having just come from a worse place. I was possibly a little tanked, and let’s be honest here, you were a high school girl complaining about high school. Hey.
That’s
gotta be a first.”

Her brows lowered in a frown as she pulled out of the Food Faire parking lot and headed down the main street.

“Come on,” he continued reasonably. “If you’d been stuck in that freezer with some high school jock whining about how the football coach didn’t put him on the A squad, would you have remembered the particulars of the conversation twenty years later?”

It was the reasonable part she disliked the most. That and the fact that even though what he said was insulting, or maybe mortifying, he still managed to be inexplicably charming saying it. He was so artless. He wasn’t condemning her whining. He was simply stating a fact.

At the same time, she didn’t doubt for a second that if she’d trumped the false modesty of his earlier remark, “You remember me!” by pretending she hadn’t, he would have been shocked. Not that she hadn’t remembered him, but that she would have lied about it. Because he simply wouldn’t have believed
she
could have forgotten him. After all, who could forget having met Steve Jaax? It didn’t matter that he would have been right. It was still irritating.

“Well,” she said, trying to sound as casual as him, “I told you that I didn’t like this town and this town didn’t like me. So, no, I don’t love it here.”

“Oh, yeah. The Great Buttercup Betrayal. See?” he said, clearly pleased with himself. “I do remember some things.”

“Wow. I’m flattered.” He made it sound silly. It hadn’t been silly. It had hurt and they had betrayed her and it had taken a long time to get over it. Like, maybe, never.

“Look, Jenn—I can call you Jenn, right?—look, Jenn, I had my thing going on. I thought I was about to fall off the end of the world and never be heard from again. Creative-wise, I felt done. But then you started talking and I finally started really looking at you. Seeing you. You took my breath away.”

Okay, this was more like it.

“But not in any creepy pedophile sort of way,” he explained. “You were just a kid.”

She thought Jaax might have protested too much. She hadn’t been that much of a kid. And she definitely had been good-looking, and from the few and far between society bits about Jaax’s love life that landed in Flyover Land, he appeared to like young women. Stunning young women.