As Georgia drove through Duluth on her way to Sand Lake, the steely overcast highlighted a band of sapphire-blue ice that hugged the shores of Lake Superior. She’d never seen ice this blue. Chicago’s was dull white.
She was puzzled by Vanna’s relationship with their mother. JoBeth and Vanna hadn’t seen each other since Vanna ran away last year, and she’d run away largely because of JoBeth, who, according to Vanna, had been drunk most of the time and a mean drunk at that. Vanna had clearly matured over the past year, but some problems couldn’t be solved by the passage of time.
Was JoBeth drinking again? How was that affecting the way she treated Vanna and, even more important, Charlie? In retrospect, it occurred to Georgia that it might have been a blessing that Georgia hadn’t grown up with JoBeth in her life. She’d had to develop resiliency early on. Vanna hadn’t.
After ten minutes heading south on I-35, the snow started. It wasn’t an easy snow. The wind blew up, and bands of white assaulted her windshield. A few minutes later, it accelerated into a blinding snow. Daylight acquired a uniquely dystopian cast and the windshield wipers were no help. The swirl of white overwhelmed her. She gritted her teeth and slowed to thirty.
Her GPS went out, but she’d expected that and had printed out directions back in Chicago. She tried to make out the highway signs, but many were already covered by snow or hard to read in limited visibility. She kept the defroster on but she had to wipe her sleeve on the glass in order to see at all.
The most unsettling part was the silence. The storm was intense, unrelenting, and dangerous, but it didn’t make a sound. The only noise was the thud of her wipers swinging back and forth. The silence added to the sense that she had crossed the border into an unfamiliar no-man’s-land. The heater was on full blast, but Georgia shivered.
The sign announcing she was only a few miles from Sand Lake also pointed to an exit that led to the Fond Du Lac Band Chippewa casino. Georgia noted the irony. White people like the Jarvis family were trying to find isolation off the grid on a Minnesota lake, while Native Americans were trying to encourage people to lose their money by flocking to splashy casinos.
The snowstorm was still blustering when she reached Lakeland road twenty minutes later, but she caught glimpses of an expanse of white through the trees hugging the road. Sand Lake was still frozen. She thought she saw a couple of pickups and icehouses on the lake. Although she’d grown up in Chicago, she’d never known people camped out on the ice in winter until Matt Singer, her former lover, took her up to Wisconsin one weekend. She’d been shocked, and fascinated.
Now she pulled up to a mailbox with the number 9415. A long driveway bisected a lawn that led to a small cabin. It took effort to turn around, and her wheels kept spinning, but eventually she parked facing the direction she’d come. She holstered the Sig under her North Face jacket, tied the hood snugly, and climbed out of the car.
The wind whipped her face, threatening to freeze her nostrils as well. Except for the swish of her boots in the snow, the silence seemed more pronounced. As she drew closer, she studied the cabin. One story, wood logs. The chimney was brick, but no smoke drifted from the top. Shades covered two windows and were tightly drawn. It looked abandoned. Maybe that was the point.
When she got to the door, she hesitated, recalling the last time she’d knocked on a cabin door in the middle of nowhere. Then she took a deep breath and knocked.