Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

I started by displaying the same picture showcased on all the news outlets and taped up on my fridge, the Blackthorns sitting on a dock together before they’d disappeared. After repeating the story everyone in the room knew, I told them the part they didn’t know – that the Blackthorns had lived happily off the grid for ten years until a few months ago, when Josiah got sick.

‘It’s been twenty-five days since Lucas last saw his father and time is running out. Our mission is to rescue him before the ice sets in.’

I went over the details of the trip. Due to Lucas’s ‘inability’ to pinpoint Josiah’s location on a map, we’d backtrack his journey starting from the outfitter’s store. Lucas would lead us to his father, our doctor could administer any emergency medical treatment, and Micah the forest ranger would be able to radio in for an airlift to transport Josiah to the hospital.

‘What if he’s already dead?’ one of the orderlies asked.

That question sparked a debate about whether a helicopter would be called, under increasingly extreme conditions, merely to transport a body and who was going to pay for all these extraordinary measures. The doctor suggested towing an empty canoe for the remains, but – after accidentally catching Lucas’s murderous look – quickly amended that it could be used to haul out any extra stuff from their campsite, too.

‘After all,’ he appealed to everyone else, careful to avoid Lucas’s corner of the table, ‘that’s the motto in the Boundary Waters, right?’

Lucas grunted, drawing the table’s attention. ‘We don’t need lessons on how to disappear.’

I directed the conversation quickly back to the list of supplies, cautions about entering the Boundary Waters in November (cue smug grins from the ranger), and general preparations for monitoring Lucas, who needed to be supervised at all times by Congdon staff. He would sleep in a tent with the orderlies, paddle with me, and wear an ankle bracelet in the event he got separated from the group. As long as Dr Mehta gave the approval, our target departure date was November 1, three days away.

Sometimes when things moved forward, they moved backward, too. It was a strange sensation, a déjà vu carnival ride. I’d spent years trying to forget Ely, Minnesota, and now it had clawed its way back into every corner of my life. Past and future, a man killed, a man who might be saved; everything converged in Ely. There was no hiding from it anymore, so on my last day off before the search party was scheduled to leave, I left Dad a note and drove north.

If Duluth was considered small by most urban standards, Ely was hardly more than a dot on the map. It had been an iron town until the mines gave out, drawing all the miners to the taconite under the towns to the south. Now it was a collection of small businesses, a hub for the forest service, and of course, a gateway to the Boundary Waters. Soon after my discharge from Congdon I’d read that Ely was named The Coolest Small Town in America, referring to possibly more than the temperature.

Driving through the small grid of streets I saw a mix of old and new – Babe’s Bait and Tackle, Steger Mukluks, and the Northland Market sitting adjacent to places with vague names like Insula and very specific ones like Gator’s Grilled Cheese Emporium. I drove past Pillow Rock, the one place we always stopped when Mom and I came to town, our tradition, like some people went to the Old-Fashioned Candy store. Bigger than a car, the ancient greenstone could be found nowhere else in the world, but what I remembered most was that she never let me climb on it, never let me lay my head on those inviting, almost fluffy looking puffs of minerals.

In the center of town, I found a large camping store in a clapboard building whose foundation was lined with flowers. Wilting plants, crosses, and wreaths with ribbons that whipped in the wind crowded next to black-and-white pictures of a lined, laughing woman’s face. A hand-painted sign in the center of the memorial had Monica Anderson’s name with her dates of birth and death. Across the street, a tax office’s window was crowded with signs. One of them said, Friends of the Boundary Waters. Another, in large red letters, read, Remember Monica. Keep Blackthorn in jail. I parked outside the camping store and took a deep breath.

Inside there was enough gear to outfit the entire Forest Service. I browsed the all-terrain boots, the tent covers, and varieties of powdered eggs, picking up items here and there and starting a pile on the abandoned counter. I was on my fourth trip back up to the register when a man appeared on the stairs at the back. Moving stiffly, he unfolded a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and scanned my selections with flat eyes.

‘Planning a winter trip?’

‘Yeah.’ I set a box of fire starters on top. ‘Going to find Josiah Blackthorn.’

His head snapped up. I gave him a bland smile.

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘I didn’t say you did, Robert. I’m just here to buy some gear.’

His throat worked and he seemed to be weighing the benefit of a thousand-dollar sale against the urge to throw me out of his store. Eventually he stepped closer and picked up a pair of top-of-the-line boots. ‘These are men’s. This size won’t fit you.’

‘They’re not for me.’

He braced both hands on the counter then, and stared at the stack of clothing, gear, and provisions. He might have been anywhere from fifty to seventy, with stone gray hair standing up in odd places, and a series of faint red lines zigzagging through one side of his forehead and temple, like the edges of puzzle pieces if the puzzle had been bleeding. A huge silhouette of a moose against the sunset hung behind the counter, framed in driftwood. There were other touches through the store – painted paddles mounted near the ceiling, product explanation cards written in an elegant flourish – the undeniable traces of a woman who’d left her mark, even if she hadn’t planned on leaving.

‘Take your business elsewhere.’ He didn’t look at me.

I moved to the door but stopped before opening it, glancing through the window from one end of the street to the other. ‘Why didn’t he?’

‘Excuse me?’ It was the closest most Minnesotans would come to telling you to fuck off.

Ignoring his implication, I looked through the store, filling in the shadows of struggling bodies, the spill of fluids. ‘Why didn’t Lucas go somewhere else? Why did he come here, to an outfitter in the middle of town, when there were three other stores closer to the edge of the woods?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He strangled me. See?’ I moved back to the counter, approaching carefully, lifting my chin to reveal the faint bruise line. ‘He could have killed me, but he didn’t.’ Robert looked at my neck and his jaw started working.

‘There are two kinds of violence, Robert. Violence as an end and violence as a means. Lucas’s violence is a means, and we both know what the end is, don’t we?’

I let the silence drag out. No one came in to interrupt us, the store virtually dead in the off-season. Picking up a premium winter tent, I added it to the pile.

Robert heaved out a long sigh and shook his head, then pointed me to a model that cost half as much. ‘That’ll give you the same protection with less draft and an easier setup.’

I smiled and made the switch.

After ringing up the sale, Robert flipped the closed sign and invited me upstairs for coffee. He showed me pictures of him and Monica at the store’s grand opening. It had been their second career, their dream. He wasn’t sure what to do with it without her and could hardly bear to look at the flowers laid outside the building. Then, swirling the grounds at the bottom of his cup, he began talking about Josiah Blackthorn.