Buttons and Bones Read online

“There are a hundred miles of lakeshore,” said Betsy.

  “Oh, it’s even bigger than I thought.”

  “Yes, it’s so convoluted that it’s hard to take the whole thing in, except from the air.”

  Peg went on, in a tone that hinted of amused condescension. “Everything around here is named with the syllable Mini, as if it’s small, even things like this grand, huge lake.”

  “Minne is an Indian word for ‘water,’” said Betsy. “Minnetonka, Minnewashta, Minneapolis, even Minnesota, which means ‘many waters.’ There are a lot of lakes in the state.”

  “I see. Da, do you like living here? I mean, this is kind of a backwater place ...” She laughed. “I mean, it’s hardly New York or Los Angeles. I came here because of Professor Henry Lamb at the university, and I’ll be gone in two years. Will you be glad to leave, too?”

  Backwater? Humph! But Betsy found herself holding her breath while waiting for his reply.

  “You know the reason I came here was to live near you. But I’m finding another reason, and she’s not leaving in two years.” Connor’s baritone was as warm as it was certain, and Betsy, sitting in the backseat, felt a thrill at this near declaration of intent.

  “I see,” said Peg thoughtfully, and she gave a swift, not altogether friendly glance into the backseat.

  THE restaurant in Wayzata was very nice.

  “Is that how you say it, Why-ZET-ta?” asked Peg, while they waited to be seated. “Another Indian name, I suppose, written down by semiliterate settlers.”

  Betsy said, “It is Indian. Waziya is the name of the Sioux god of the north, he who blows the cold north wind from his mouth. The suffix ta means ‘shore,’ and the whole just means ‘North Shore.’ Lake Minnetonka was very sacred ground to this Mdewakanton branch of the Dakota or Sioux. I don’t think the spelling is illiterate, I think the difference between the spelling and pronunciation is a product of scholars, the same sort who keep changing the spelling and pronunciation of Chinese place names.”

  Peg laughed. “Touché,” she said.

  Betsy said, “I hope you are getting all you want from your studies at our university.”

  “Oh, yes—well, at least as much as I expected from a redbrick college.”

  Betsy took a breath to reply, then bit her tongue. Connor’s ears were turning red, his sign of annoyance. No need to aggravate him further. But she wondered what had Peg’s undies all in a twist.

  “Now, Peg,” said Connor, “many of these ‘redbrick’ universities are doing extremely good work. You came here yourself specifically to work with Dr. Lamb, who obviously is himself satisfied with the University of Minnesota.”

  “Yes, of course you’re right, Da,” said Peg meekly.

  Betsy had never heard a parent called “Da” except in British movies, but thereby knew it was a common Irish term of endearment for a father. She was touched by this evidence of a close tie of affection and respect between Connor and Peg. Betsy hoped Peg didn’t see her as a threat to the tie between the two of them. She would have to step very carefully.

  Connor said to Betsy, “Has Jill Larson asked you up to their cabin yet?”

  “Yes, but I can’t get away right now. Besides, I think they were just being polite. They’ve got a lot of work to do before it’s presentable for company.”

  “Maybe they’re hoping to organize a working party.”

  Betsy laughed. “That could be.”

  “Who’s Jill Larson?” asked Peg. “And why do you use a plural noun when speaking of her?”

  Connor said, “She’s married to Lars Larson ...” Peg snorted. “Ah, Peg, my dear, do you wish me to start pointing out some of the more outrageous Irish naming customs?” His Irish accent was suddenly very apparent; whether deliberate or not, Betsy couldn’t tell.

  Peg said, in a pure Midwestern accent, “Oh, Da, don’t be such a dork!”

  They all laughed.

  Peg asked Betsy, “These Larson people, do they have children?”

  “Yes, a girl, Emma Beth, who is three and a half and my goddaughter, and a little boy, Erik, who is nearly two.”

  The food came then and a silence fell while the trio dug in. After a few minutes, Peg said, “I hope you realize what you are doing to my attempts to convince my palate that pizza, hamburgers, and cafeteria food are all they serve in this part of the world.”

  “If I remember correctly,” said Betsy, “it’s all they serve on any campus.”

  “Then it’s been going on since as far back as that?” asked Peg.

  Betsy felt as if she’d been struck in the face.

  Peg looked startled. “Did that come out of my wicked mouth, then?” she asked. “I’m so sorry!”

  “It’s all right,” said Betsy. “I suppose it has been a long time.”

  “You’re a nasty, evil girl and no child of mine,” said Connor lightly, but with a hint of anger.

  “I really am sorry, Da,” said Peg. “I’ll guard my tongue, I promise.”

  Looking back on the evening while lying in bed, Betsy reflected that Peg hadn’t tried all that hard to keep her promise. There weren’t any further digs, at least none as serious as that first one, but still, Betsy sensed that Peg had a problem with her. It seemed it was true that she saw Betsy as a threat. Betsy thought that strange in a woman of Peg’s years. Normally only the very young were threatened by a new woman—oh. That was it. It wasn’t that Betsy threatened the relationship between Peg and Connor, but the one between Connor and his first wife.

  Not that there was one—there hadn’t been for many years, even back before the divorce.

  At least according to Connor.

  But it was normal, even for adult children of divorce, to see a new relationship between Dad and a woman—or Mom and a man—as disloyal to the first spouse.

  Many maintained a fiction that one or both of them pined for the lost spouse, perhaps even vowed to live a life of celibacy in honor of it, and the presence of a new love was a serious threat to that romantic nonsense.

  And Peg’s undergraduate degree was in art.

  Oh, dear.

  “REMEMBER The Parent Trap?” Betsy asked. “The version I remember starred Hayley Mills, but there was a more recent one. About twin girls separated as infants when their parents divorced, and how they found each other and concocted a plan to get their parents back together. A successful plan. The dream of every child of divorce, to get their parents back together.”

  “But Peg’s not a child, for heaven’s sake!” Connor said. “She’s twenty-three years old! She knows the reasons for the divorce, and she’s fine with it!”

  “I will bet you ten dollars she has this vision of you brooding down your declining years, carrying a torch the size of Lady Liberty’s for the one true love of your life.”

  “Rot!” he said.

  “Then explain why she was rude to me.”

  “She wasn’t rude.”

  “Of course she was. Tell me what she said to you on your way home from dinner last night.”

  “She said it was a delicious dinner in a beautiful restaurant overlooking a gorgeous view of Lake Minnetonka, which she thought was a silly name.”

  “About me, what did she say about me.”

  He hesitated. “She thought you were nice.”

  “I don’t believe she said that. She said something rude, or at the most she said something defensible. You know, double meaning. Like I was pretty much as you described me—how did you describe me to her?”

  His cheeks grew red, and she said, “I thought so.”

  “Now truly, machree, I think you’re reading too much into this. She was a little nervous about meeting you, it’s true, so I played down your sterling qualities so as not to scare her off entirely. But now she’s met you, I’m sure she sees what a dear pet you are and will come to like you just as I do.”

  “I sure hope so. I don’t want to cause trouble between the two of you.”

  “Of course you won’t!”

 
“I’m not so sure. But I think she feels threatened, and it worries me.”

  “Ach, don’t fash yourself,” he said in an accent suddenly very Scottish—he could put on any British accent at the drop of a hat.

  Normally it made her laugh, but not this time. Angrily, she turned away.

  After supper she turned in early and wept into her pillow for half an hour.

  “OH, dear,” said Godwin in the shop the next morning. “All our little insecurities were on display, weren’t they?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, you were so very sure he described you to his daughter in less than glowing terms.”

  “And I was right! Oh, I can just hear him: ‘Not very tall, a little overweight, two ex-husbands,’ the rat!”

  Godwin came to take her hands in his. “My dear, dear, dearest boss, listen to yourself. He is wild about you, you know that. He wants his daughter to at least like you. Why would he say such unflattering things about you?”

  Betsy turned away, blinking against tears.

  Behind her, Godwin said in his gentlest voice, “Because you think he thinks that about you, right?”

  Betsy sighed, “Oh, Goddy!” and a tear spilled over.

  “And there you stand, a successful businesswoman with a sweet attitude—most of the time—and a generous heart. You think he doesn’t know that? You think he wouldn’t say something like that about you to his daughter? Look at you! You have big blue eyes and a curvy figure. You have a clever mind and a talent for solving criminal cases. You have loyal friends and employees. You’re very pretty, almost beautiful, especially when you pay attention to your clothing. Your second ex-husband, when last seen, was eating his heart out because he let you get away. Am I making any impression at all on you?”

  She turned back, eyes still shiny with tears, but of a wholly different kind. “Oh, Goddy!” He came and they shared a long hug.

  “You make me feel like such a fool!”

  “Good, I’m glad. Because you’re behaving very foolishly.”

  “I’ll invite him over for a home-cooked meal and we’ll make up,” Betsy said.

  But Connor had a previous engagement with his daughter already set up for that evening and also said he was going to be busy for the next several days. He’d have to get back to Betsy about that supper sometime in the next week or two.

  Betsy spent the next twenty-four hours switching from heartbreak to fury and back again, and nothing Godwin could say changed either mood.

  She was in heartbreak mode when Jill Cross Larson came into the shop with something obviously on her mind.

  “I’m here to pick up that pattern I asked you to pull for me,” she announced.

  Betsy reached into a desk drawer to lift out Paula Minkebige’s Loon Lake, Number Seventeen in the Crossed Wing Collection.

  Jill went on, “Plus I need some DMC floss.” She headed for the cabinet of little drawers in which the floss lay sorted. “And I want to issue an invitation to you to come up and see what you have wrought for us. There’s plenty to do, and the area is just beautiful. The cabin is going to be wonderful.” She pulled a drawer open. “Besides,” she added archly, “a little bird told me there is a person who needs to discover he misses you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I can get away right now . . .” Betsy sighed. She was trying to save money by working extra hours in the shop, thereby cutting back on her part-timers’ hours. Employee pay was her biggest expense.

  Jill, who had pulled a skein of 645, dark gray, and another of 924, dark blue-green, came over to the checkout desk to lean forward, her light blue eyes shining. “Think about it,” she murmured. “Pine trees so tall their tops seem to tangle in the clouds, air cool and clean and a little sharp in the nose. Sky blue water in the lake, a deer half-seen in the woods, an eagle circling a clearing on still wings. A fire in the stove on a cool evening, a cup of cocoa, and pair of loons making that yearning, lonesome yodel down on the lake.”

  Against her will, Betsy’s interest stirred. “You have loons?”

  “Right down on our shore.” She put the floss on the pattern, which was of a pair of adult loons, black-and-white-striped water birds. A fuzzy gray infant rode on one adult’s back. “Like this, except it’s August and the babies are grown now.”

  Betsy had never seen a loon in person, and had heard their eerie cries only in recordings. They had pointed beaks and heavy bones, she knew. They were very strange birds, the state bird of Minnesota.

  She looked up into Jill’s kind, concerned face and said, “When?”

  “How about this weekend? Come for four days. Lars is taking Monday and Tuesday off because he’s working all of Labor Day weekend. It’ll be the first time we’ve brought the children up.”

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  Godwin appeared from out of nowhere. “No, don’t think. Just go. Consider this—what do you military folk call it? Emergency leave. Take emergency leave.”

  She looked at his face, also kind and concerned.

  “All right,” she said. She looked at Jill. “Yes, I’ll come. Thank you.”

  Three

  THERE are two kinds of travel, goes an old saying: first class, and with children. The Larson children were well behaved, for nearly four and almost two—but they were lively little ones, and for them the three-hour drive to Thunder Lake was interminable. Lars stopped twice on the way up to turn them out of the SUV and let them run around. That worked for little Erik after the second time, when he fell asleep in his car seat. But Emma Beth, buckled into her car seat, couldn’t find a DVD she liked, so she sang, loudly and off-key, the same three verses of “Old MacDonald,” and asked after every other verse if they were there yet.

  Jill and Lars discussed what they had done to the old cabin. It had been six weeks since they had taken possession. They had gone up on weekends to do some emergency repairs to make the place suitable for human habitation—which meant they had driven out the spiders, squirrels, mice, and mama raccoon that had taken up residence. They had unplugged the chimneys and propped up the miniature front porch. Lars had found and plugged a leak on the roof. There was no electricity pending an inspection of the wiring by a professional, and the only source of water was a hand pump outside the cabin.

  Betsy, no fan of roughing it, was prepared to put up with a certain amount of primitive living for the sake of getting really far away—cell phones didn’t work on that side of the lake, and the Larsons didn’t plan to install a landline, at least not right away.

  But thoughts of a fugitive spider or two nesting in her hair overnight and no hot shower in the morning were discouraging.

  At last they turned off the highway onto a secondary road lined with immense pine trees set here and there with aspen. They turned off that onto a gravel road even more closely set with huge pines, and off that onto a dirt road, and off that onto a lane that was two barely visible tire tracks. It led up a steep little rise and into a small clearing—and on the far edge of the clearing stood a little log cabin.

  “Are we here yet?” asked Emma Beth.

  “Yes, darling, we’re here.”

  “Yaaaaaaay,” said Emma Beth. “Look, Godmama, we’re here! Wake up, Airey, we’re here! Airey, Airey, wake up!” She reached over and pushed Betsy into the side of Erik’s car seat.

  Erik, startled, began that thin wailing of a baby awakened against his will.

  “Are we going to have that kind of weekend?” asked Lars in a very heavy voice.

  “No, Daddy,” said Emma Beth humbly.

  “Good.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Very good.” Lars shut off the engine and climbed out. His open door admitted a heavy fragrance of pine.

  He opened the door on Emma Beth’s side and unbuckled her seat belt. He lifted her out and then suddenly up and around, high in the air. She shrieked with laughter.

  Betsy slid out on the same side and stood for a few moments, enjoying the sunshine and clean,
sharp-scented air.

  Meanwhile Jill opened the door and unbuckled Erik from his car seat. “Ma-ma!” he wailed, and she lifted him into her arms.

  “There, there, baby,” she soothed, and he quickly fell silent while he looked around with wet, wondering eyes.

  Emma Beth, put down, turned slowly to look up at an enormous pine going up, in her eyes, forever. “Oh my goo’ness!” she murmured. “Oh my goo’ness, is this tree ours?”

  “Yes, darling,” said Jill with laughter in her voice.

  Lars said complacently, “All these trees are ours.”

  But what Betsy was looking at was the pretty little cabin across the clearing. A for-real log cabin, with a low-pitched roof and a tiny porch. An old-fashioned long-handled pump was near the left corner, standing on a circle of gray planks. The cabin was right on the edge of a drop-off, down which marched more trees. She walked toward them, past the cabin, for a look downward, and saw a very crooked path—a series of uneven switchbacks really—that led down among brush and pine trees to the shore of a lake. She couldn’t see more than a twinkle of water because of the foliage. Some kind of bird was calling in a monotonous high-pitched skree, and a squirrel scolded nearby.

  “Betsy?” called Jill.

  “Coming!” She turned and went back around to the front of the cabin, where Jill and Lars stood. The children watched curiously from the patchy lawn behind them as their mother made strange ducking and waving motions. As Betsy got closer, she could see why: spider webs, some with spiders on them.

  “Honestly, you’d never think I cleared the spiders off just last weekend!” exclaimed Jill, waving her arms. Betsy admired her nerve; if she had encountered a set of spider webs, she’d have retreated to the car until someone else cleared the porch of them.

  The porch was a small concrete slab about the size of a city sidewalk square, set with two slender pillars holding up a tiny peaked roof. Two long boards leaned against the outsides of the pillars, helping them support the roof. The concrete slab sloped forward just a little from the front door, making Betsy wonder about the stability of the soil under the cabin. But surely, over a century, the porch would be tilted farther down than that if the soil were really unstable.