William Krueger - Copper River

She looked Ren over a moment longer, then as quickly as she’d produced the gun she flashed a smile. The Glock slid into a holster under her sweatshirt, and the same hand that had threatened Ren was held toward him, open and empty.

“How do you do? I’m Dina Willner.”

He shook her hand warily. It felt strong as a man’s, but different, too.

“Ren DuBois,” Cork said, because Ren, who was still trying to put everything together, hadn’t replied. “Dina’s the friend I called last night.”

“Oh.” Ren nodded slowly.

“Are you always this talkative?” Dina asked.

“Huh?” Then he got it. A joke. He smiled.

“Sorry about the gun.” She patted the place where it was holstered. “You surprised me.”

Ren wondered if he’d surprised her any more, would he be dead?

“Mom asked me to bring Cork’s breakfast.” It sounded apologetic, a little pathetic, and he didn’t like that. He stood straight and as tall as he could. Even so, his eyes were not quite level with the woman’s. “I didn’t see your car. I didn’t even hear you drive up.”

She took the chair she’d been sitting in, flipped it around, and sat down again with her arms folded over the back. She continued to study him with her green, catlike eyes.

“I came through the woods,” she said.

“You should be careful. There’s a cougar out there.”

“What I carry would stop a bear.”

“You wouldn’t shoot him,” Ren objected.

“I’ve never harmed a thing that wasn’t trying to harm me. If I run into this cougar, what do you suggest I do?”

Ren glanced at Cork, who was enjoying the conversation immensely.

“First, you never turn your back on a wild animal,” Ren said seriously. “You should stand as tall as you can, get up on a tree stump or something to make yourself look even bigger. It sometimes helps to wave your arms and shout. Usually, unless you’re threatening its young, it will leave you alone.”

“You’ve had that experience?”

“It’s what I’ve read.”

He stood awkwardly, aware that he’d interrupted something and should probably go, but he wasn’t sure. Adults weren’t easy to figure.

Dina’s stomach let out a long growl. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I haven’t eaten this morning.”

“I could fix you something,” Ren offered.

She laughed. “The last time I had a man fix me breakfast, it turned out to be beer and corn dogs. What I’d really like is a latte.”

“Do you like kolaches?”

“Do you make kolaches?”

“No, but the Taylors do. In town. Really good ones. And they have espresso and stuff.”

“Long walk for coffee,” Dina said.

“I’ll take the ATV. I was thinking of going anyway. I have a friend and I was going to take her some breakfast.”

“Charlie?” Cork said.

“Yeah. Sometimes there’s not a lot of food in her house. I could drop a kolache off at her place and be back here in half an hour.”

“Or I could just share whatever’s on that tray you brought,” Dina said.

“I don’t mind going.”

“Ren,” Cork said, sounding as gravely serious as he possibly could, “if you go into town, you have to promise not to say anything about me or Dina.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

“And make sure, absolutely sure, that Charlie doesn’t, either.”

“I can do that.”

“All right. Why don’t you head into Bodine, then,” Cork said, thinking it would give him a chance to talk to Dina alone. “I’m starved and I’ll be damned if I’m giving up my breakfast.”

“Here.” Dina pulled a wallet from her back pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “A vanilla latte and a kolache for me. And get whatever you want for yourself and for your friend. How about you, Cork?”

“I’m fine.”

“Thank you, Ren,” Dina said. “This is quite nice.”

“’S okay.” He gave a nonchalant shrug, but the glow on his face was obvious. He went to the door and just before leaving glanced back at Dina. His eyes lingered a hair too long for mere curiosity. Dina smiled at him. The boy blushed and hurried out.

“Nice kid,” she said to Cork. “But can we trust him to keep his mouth shut?”

“Unless you want to shoot him, we don’t have much choice.”

Ren loved Bodine. And he hated it. The town circumscribed his life, defined him in many ways. It gave him a place to belong, offered him a stable center from which to view the world in order to make some sense of it. On the other hand, it was small, suffocating, and sometimes cruel. There were days when he felt like a prisoner. He knew every street, every shop, every shop owner, and they knew him. They called hello when he passed. They made him feel part of a large family. Like any family, however, they always had their noses in his business, and in his mother’s. When his father died a little over a year ago, there’d been an outpouring of sympathy, but there’d also been a vein of censure that ran through the sentiments, the feeling-occasionally voiced-that Ren’s father had somehow got what he deserved, that his business should have been minding the resort cabins and taking care of his family, not stirring up trouble in other places. This bothered Ren. What bothered him more was that he knew there was a dark voice inside his mother that sometimes spoke to her in the same way.

Harbor Avenue, Bodine’s main street, ran due north off the county road straight to the lake. Shops lined the street in the block before the harbor. The commercial buildings were mostly brick, built simple and sturdy to withstand the gale winds that often blew off Lake Superior.

In the sixth grade, Ren had done a long project about the history of the town. He learned that over the years, Bodine had seen good times and bad, though for a long time they’d been mostly bad. It had begun as a lumber town, taking the fine hardwoods of the southern Hurons and turning them into planks prized for their solid grain and durability. Henry Ford had been so struck by the quality of the wood that he’d purchased vast tracts of forestland and used the timber for paneling in his early automobiles. But the lumber didn’t last.

In 1881, the Cyril Mine opened fifteen miles southwest of Bodine, tapping into a solitary vein of native copper, a long splash of ore as rich as any on the Keweenaw. That had brought prosperity in many forms until the copper finally petered out in the late 1950’s. When the mine closed, jobs vanished and people with them.

Both the lumber and copper industries had resulted in the development of Bodine’s harbor, which was small but deep enough to accommodate the heavy freighters of the day. Early on, Bodine had become a modest terminal for lake traffic. In 1890, an entrepreneur named Edward Farber, who’d made decent money in shipping and who’d fallen in love with the beautiful Huron Mountains, built a fine hotel overlooking the picturesque little harbor. In its day, the Farber House was reputed to serve the best food between New York City and the Mississippi River, and for a while it attracted a rich clientele who considered the Upper Peninsula an exotic destination.

For most of the wealthy, however, the U.P. turned out to be a passing fancy, and eventually they found other places to play. By the early 1920’s, the writing was on the wall, and Farber, an old man by then, let things slide. The advent of the Great Depression seemed to nail the coffin shut on his beautiful hotel.

In the years since, the Farber House had gone through a number of incarnations. It had served as temporary housing for the Civilian Conservation Corps, which carried out numerous public works projects in the area, like the picnic shelter on the Copper River. During World War Two, it housed a group of Canadians and Americans who worked on breaking codes. For three decades after that, it had been a nursing home. Finally, it had simply been abandoned.