A plane roared over the Traverse City airport. Not Lisa’s plane. Not yet.
Jenny had come to the airport early. She needed a few hours away from everyone. Away from the insanity that had struck her hometown.
Alone for the first time in almost a week, she was relieved to sit and relax in the small refreshment room at the Cherry Capital Airport.
The big gate closed off the runway, so no planes were coming or going at the moment. All there was to do was wait.
She stretched her legs and closed her eyes, feeling as if a big gate had closed around her life, too. No place to go. No choice but to stay at home with her mom. No way she would leave her in the middle of the awful stuff going on: murder, the library destroyed, Zoe—her almost friend—under suspicion, and people talking all over the north country.
For just this minute, until Lisa arrived, she wanted no problems. She wanted to be nothing but a stranger sitting alone in an empty terminal, a woman in a wild T-shirt with a pouncing leopard on it and khaki shorts, waiting for her older sister to arrive and straighten out everybody’s life. She wanted to be an ordinary woman with long, black hair hanging around her kind of pretty, oblong face. Maybe a woman going to California to meet her husband, the big business tycoon. A woman—so neat and nice—with places to go and people to see.
After a while, an airport agent appeared and rolled back the gate. There was still time before the plane landed, but not thinking wasn’t getting Jenny anywhere, so she stood, feeling the excitement of seeing her sister. Let the rest of it wait—all the trouble. They’d go someplace and talk before returning to Bear Falls. First, she wanted to see her sister’s face, hug her, and then feel the way a kid sister feels: happy, dependent, eager to get back to sharing their lives.
She walked over to the arrival gate where others were waiting. Travelers came out one by one: tired mothers with tired children, businessmen, tourists. Greeters queued up behind her, hurrying forward, one after the other, to meet their friends or family. Lisa wasn’t in any of those groups.
Jenny was getting impatient. Lisa would have called if she missed the plane. She wouldn’t leave her standing there.
And then a lone woman, wheeling a red carry-on behind her, made her way slowly up the carpet. She was a woman swathed in blue scarves and a long, off-white dress. A large, puffy bag was slung over her left shoulder; her blonde streaked hair was swept up into a pile on top of her head. Large sunglasses were pushed up into her hair. At first Jenny wasn’t sure—too tanned, too thin, too . . . otherworldly.
Lisa waved and hurried forward, big smile on her face, carry-on forgotten as she rushed to Jenny with her arms out.
Lisa was home.
They hugged hard and stood back to look deeply into each other’s eyes. Lisa, shorter than Jenny, hugged again and said, “Missed you, kid.”
“Me too.” Tears sprang into Jenny’s eyes.
“Think we can go someplace and catch up?” Lisa asked, her arm around Jenny, who’d taken over the suitcase.
“Absolutely. How about Junior’s? I haven’t been there since I came home. Nobody to go with. How I’ve missed you.”
“What the heck have you been doing? You come home and the place goes to hell.”
It wasn’t a real jab, just a sister’s way of showing sympathy.
They kept their arms around each other as they made their way out of the terminal and into the dark lot where Jenny’s car was parked.
***
Junior’s Bar, on Cass, was an old place with a lot of history and thousands of glasses of Irish beer behind it. It was both a family restaurant and a place for the good ol’ boys to shoot pool and drink beer. And it had real good food. Not a place for tourists, exactly, although they found their way to Junior’s, too, eventually. Both women had childhood memories of the place: with their mom and dad on a Sunday afternoon, eating hamburgers and drinking sodas, their parents talking about a vacation they were planning with friends who were visiting.
Neither found a familiar face along the bar when they walked in. Too many years since they’d been there.
They took a booth near the pool table in the second room. With cold Irish beers in front of them and warm smiles and a little shyness, they talked. First Lisa told Jenny how filming was going, about the people she was meeting, about a distributor who’d already contacted her. It didn’t take long, though, before Lisa was asking, “Really, Jen. What the heck’s going on in Bear Falls?”
Lisa shook her head while Jenny laid out all that had happened since she got home, beginning with the Little Library and moving to two dead men and Zoe Zola. “You know her, don’t you? Mom’s fairy-tale neighbor?”
“Met her last time I was home. I love her. A little odd, but I figured hanging out in fairy-tale land can do that to a person. Actually, we’ve kept in touch. I call her from time to time. She calls me. She’s friendly with Mom. Kind of keeps an eye on her.”
Jenny shook her head, conveying her feelings about Zoe Zola.
Lisa leaned back, rubbing her neck. “Mom loves her, too, Jenny. They share gardening and the Little Library . . . she is building it up again, isn’t she?”
They talked on, into a second beer. A group of men entered the room talking and laughing, maybe a little drunk. One racked up the balls on the pool table. Another shoved coins into the jukebox, and a country singer whined through the speakers about his dog loving him more than his girl did.
Jenny looked around for a table they could move to, but the place had filled while they talked. The laughter was loud. The crack from a break shot on the pool table was enough to spawn a headache.
“We should’ve remembered not to sit here,” Lisa said. “You want to move to the bar?” She laughed, but when she looked over the back of the booth, her smile fell away.
Jenny leaned forward. “What’s wrong? Somebody you know?”
Lisa screwed her pretty face into one of those warning looks. “Sure is,” she said and started to get up.
“Who?”
“Nobody you want to see. Let’s get out of here.”
Jenny finished off her beer and got up, trusting Lisa to know what she was doing.
“Then why the hell don’t you go on home?” a man’s voice snarled from someplace behind them.
The voice came from an alcove next to the jukebox. Noise in the room died down. Even most of the half-drunk men at the pool table stopped, looking past Jenny at the commotion.
Jenny froze. “Is that Johnny?”
Lisa nodded slowly. “He’s with Angel. And drunk. You are so lucky you didn’t marry him.”
“Get the hell outta here. Go on home,” Johnny barked. A mumbling followed, and then Angel stepped from the alcove where they’d been hidden. Her large belly preceded her. Her face was a deep, mottled red. Angel paused and stared straight at Jenny.
Johnny muttered something at her that made Angel scurry for the door, working her way through a gauntlet of staring faces—every patron watching as she stumbled out the door.
“We better go before he sees you.” Lisa rose and reached across the table for Jenny’s arm.
“Too late. I’ll bet I’m what Angel’s mad about.”
Lisa made a face. “Oh, oh,” she said.
Jenny turned to see Johnny walk slowly toward her.
She couldn’t catch her breath as he approached—there was no getting away this time. The young face Jenny remembered had been carved by the last eighteen years into an older, unhappy man’s face. But it was still Johnny: black, straight hair hanging over his forehead; hooded, hurt eyes fixed on her; a thin, angular body—that of a man wracked by alcohol, cigarettes, and other things.
Her breath caught in her throat. This was her first lover: gentle, sweet, and brimming with plans for their future back then. She almost fooled herself into smiling until his lips curled into a cruel, drunken smile.
“Let’s go,” Lisa said and pulled her arm.
Jenny couldn’t move.
Johnny maneuvered around Lisa and then half-fell into the vacant side of the booth. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and shook his head ever so slowly. When he opened his bloodshot eyes, he smiled a slipping smile at Jenny.
“Saw you the other day at the market. Guess you didn’t see me. I was gonna come over and say hi.” He put a hand on the table, fingers inching toward hers.
Jenny pulled her hand down to her lap.
“Aw, come on.” He leaned closer. He smelled of beer and smoke. “Don’t be like that. We used to be . . .” He stopped to smile a bleary smile. “Well, you know what we used to be.”
Lisa, looking mighty, grabbed Jenny’s arm. “We’re getting out of here, Jenny. This guy’s got nothing to do with you.”
Jenny’s mouth opened. Whatever the words were supposed to be, they didn’t come out.
Johnny grabbed for her arm, too, ignoring Lisa. His voice was low and lush. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk. We’ve got a lot to make up for.”
“Now, Jenny.” Lisa puffed with anger. Blue scarves wafted around her as her chin dropped into her neck and her body got tight. Sweet Lisa was spoiling for a fight.
“You always were a pain in the ass.” Johnny blinked up at Lisa then back to Jenny.
Jenny found the strength to pull away from his hand and stand. There were things she wanted to say, things bottled inside her for years. But now was not the time. She took the hand Lisa held out and followed her through the poolroom, past the row of staring bar patrons, and out the back door to her car.