“I will be done in a minute, okay?” The man stood stamping his feet almost in time with the dinging bell on the pump. The pump had one hose. An old Texaco with the flying horse symbol faded pink on the steel hood.
“I need to go inside anyway. I’m Mitch,” Levon said putting out a gloved hand.
“Sascha,” the man said smiling. Levon couldn’t see through the fogged over glasses to see if the smile reached his eyes. He wore corduroy pants and sandals over thick woolen socks.
“Short for Alexander?” Levon said, giving the man’s limp hand a single pump.
The man hesitated before nodding.
Levon left him stamping and pumping to cross the gravel lot, avoiding the puddles of slush that gathered in the depressions. The door of the store banged open and a woman stamped toward him, head down. She nearly walked into him on her way to the pump.
“Excuse me,” he said.
She looked up, eyes goggling through thick glasses misting with condensation. The bitter expression twisting her face turned into a beaming smile. An explosion of red hair was barely contained by a red and white striped knit tosh.
“I am sorry. That woman, she…” she said, turning her head toward the store with a wince.
“Cecile? Some days I’d rather run into a bear behind the counter. I’m Mitch.” Levon nodded and offered his hand.
“Lily. You live on Mohawk Road? With your family?” she said, giving his hand a firm grasp in a wool mitten decorated with reindeer.
“Just my daughter and me. Do you have kids?”
“No. Only Sascha and I. We are artists.”
“Painting?”
She squinted at him.
“What kind of art do you do?”
“Oh. Concept art, Graphics. It looks like we are ready to go.” She nodded to where Sascha was replacing the nozzle on the hook.
“Well, see you around the lake then. Merry Christmas,” he said and watched her pick her way around the slush puddles. She also wore sandals over socks. They were in the Rover and gone across the county road and hooking a left to Mohawk Road without a wave or word of farewell.
“Wanted to know if I had the New York Times, if you can believe that,” Cecile said by way of greeting when Levon entered the store, muggy and warm after the bitter cold outside.
“Well, they’re artists.” Levon shrugged.
“The goddamn New York Times,” she huffed behind the counter. Cecile was a woman of indeterminate age who gave the impression that the store she stocked and managed simply grew up around her one day. It fit her like a turtle’s shell.
A grocery store with two rows of mostly empty shelves in the off season. A pair of coolers stood against the back wall loaded with sodas, beer, lunchmeats, dairy, cheeses and bacon. The longest wall held racks of chips and candy bars. A spinner rack of dog-eared paperbacks was the town’s unofficial public library. Behind the counter was a wall of cigarettes and cigars. A broad arch at the rear of the grocery opened into a reasonably well-stocked hardware store filled with necessities for emergency repairs and simple DIY jobs. During the summer the place was hopping with tourists coming north and south on the county road. Cecile had the only gas, smokes and snacks for thirty miles in either direction, with signs alerting drivers to that spotted all along the shoulder in either direction. In the winter her customer base was limited to the locals and anyone who was wintering around the lake.
“I told her that after Thanksgiving even the mail doesn’t come every day. I’ll be damned if I’ll stock a newspaper that I’ll never sell anyway. I told her, ‘you want to know what’s going on in New York you should Google it,’ ” Cecile continued.
“Artists,” was all Levon could bring to the exchange.
“I suppose.”
“Did that PVC pipe order come in, Cecile?”
“It did. You can find it in back. The joins are in a box with your name marked on it.”
“Great. I’m going to work on the Hoffert kitchen over the holidays,” Levon said.
“And where’s that darling little girl of yours?” Cecile leaned on the counter, her entire demeanor changed. The wrinkles on her face deepened to allow a toothy smile to open.
“Home with her studies.”
“This close to Christmas?”
“She has to finish her language and math sections then she gets to take two weeks,” Levon said as he picked up a fistful of Merry’s favorite candy bars. Mallow Cups and Snickers.
“Those for her?”
“Stocking stuffers.”
“Nothing for Dad?” she said with a conspiratorial wink.
“This,” Levon said, holding up a Payday.
“I think Dad deserves something better than that,” Cecile said and bent to root around under the counter. She came up with a black cardboard tube embossed with gold and silver letters.
“Glenfiddich eighteen-year-old Scotch. Picked up a case at an estate sale. One fifty,” she said.
“One hundred. Cash. When did you get a liquor license?”
“Call the cops. They’ll be here in a week maybe. And you always pay cash anyway, Mitch. One twenty.”
“Sold. I need something for Nate Fenton anyway. Forty for the pump and whatever I owe for the PVC pipes and candy,” Levon said and counted out twenties on the counter.
“Candy’s on me. You give my love to your little one,” Cecile said and bagged the Scotch for him.
Third Entry
12/25
* * *
Christmas was good.
M was surprised by the skis.
Will spend the winter reading the two-volume history of the Civil War she gave me.
More snow on the way.
8
* * *
A sound awakened Sefa in the night. A sound that made him think the owners of the house were home.
He turned to the girl lying next to him on the king-sized bed in the master suite. He touched her naked shoulder. Sefa wanted to ask if she heard the sound, too. She was dead to the world, sleeping off the primo hashish they both smoked the night before out on the tennis courts behind the house. Try as he might he couldn’t recall her name. She was Dutch maybe?
Sefa slipped from the bed and pulled a pair of baggy shorts over his skinny ass. If the owners were home he’d have to get himself and the girl out of here. Even through his hash-addled brain Sefa could recall the many contingencies he’d worked out for just this scenario. If only he could wake up the Swede in his bed. Or was she German?
He’d been living here for over a year, rent free. Sefa was a Fijian, a local born on the north island of Vanua Levu. The first time he came to this big house at the end of Otu Point was as a worker in a gardening crew contracted to do regular maintenance on the ground for the absentee owners. On his second visit to the house he simply hid when the crew climbed onto the truck for the trip back to Nadi.
No one missed him.
He never left.
That’s how Sefa Buwawa, bastard son of a shrimp fisherman, began life as a millionaire. The owners were far away and, from what he could tell by playing detective, had not been here since their second child was born. It served them right to have an unwanted house guest. Rich Anglo pigs having so much money that they could have a house thousands of times the size of the apartment he and his eight siblings grew up in and never even come visit. All he had to do was stay in the house when the gardeners came once every two weeks and all was cool.
There was little food. The wall of freezers and refrigerators in the gourmet kitchen were long empty and shut down. The pantry had some canned goods and he’d lived on those for a few weeks. He put on some clothes from one of the walk-in closets and hitched a ride down to Denarau where the cruise ships came in. He didn’t realize that he’d chosen the wife’s closet to raid. But the silk pants suit fit him reasonably well and he cut a dashing figure; creamy silk against his dark skin set off by a royal blue blouse. He never noticed it buttoned from the wrong side.
It was rid
iculously easy to pick up foreign girls in the hotel bars that lined the streets and embarcaderos. Sefa was a good looking kid with an easy manner built upon the plain fact that he never had anything to lose and would just throw himself into social situations until he was thrown back out. To everyone who knew him he was an asshole. But to these European, Japanese and American bitches he seemed funny, exotic and harmless with his stupid jokes told in halting English. The drugs, and all the girls had drugs, made him seem even more of a charmer.
Australian girls were the only ones who never fell for his bullshit. Stuck up Aussie twats.
He would draw them back to the big house with stories of his wealthy family who were back home in India. The girls usually had a rental car or would spring for a taxi. Sefa was always losing his wallet, wouldn’t you know? They were invariably gobsmacked by the size of the house. The girl last night said “unglaublich” when she saw the pool. Was that German or Dutch? Every girl he brought back easily bought his explanation that the electric was out because of a recent storm and these damned Fijians they hired to get it back on line were just too fucking lazy to fix it right.
Now his life of playing Fijian millionaire, getting laid by tourist girls and getting high, was coming to an end as indicated by the sounds from the other side of the house.
He crept barefoot over the tile and crouched behind a knee wall that ran across a big gallery room separating a media area from a music room complete with a Steinway grand piano. Sefa raised his head over the sill of the wall just enough to peer over it and through the opening that led to the home gym.
These weren’t the homeowners returning for the Christmas holidays.
Men in mechanic’s coveralls were going around the gym, breaking the glass off the mirrored walls. He could see four men from his vantage point. They all wore vinyl gloves on their hands and cloth booties over their boots. A fifth man joined them carrying a pair of heavy toolboxes in from outside. Big boxes made of red-painted metal. One of the mirrored panels fell to shards, revealing the shining steel door of a safe set in the wall. Two of the men swept the broken glass away and moved the exercise equipment aside while another pair opened the tool boxes to remove power tools and attachments. The fifth man stood waiting, casually smoking one of those electronic cigarettes.
The smoking man had a bush of dark hair atop his head. The sides were shaved close. He spoke to the others in a mumbled tongue that sounded to Sefa’s ear like French but not French. He turned as if to look right at Sefa. One of his eyes was milky white with a heavy lid that fell over it as if half of his face was dozing. One whole side of his face looked frozen as if paralyzed. The effect spoiled what might have been handsome features.
Startled, Sefa dropped back into his crouch and crab-walked back the way he’d come.
A vinyl gloved hand clamped over his mouth. An arm snaked around his neck, cutting off his wind in an instant. His bare feet left the floor with a jerk.
The Fijian millionaire prayed to every god he knew (and he knew a lot of them) to not let him die tonight.
An hour later he was praying to those many deities to let him die.
Three hours after that they granted his wish.
9
* * *
The Mercedes SUV was good and jammed in the snow all the way up to the wheel wells.
When Levon came on it, the Merc was grinding away, wheels spinning enough to make it shimmy side to side along the verge of the ring road that circled the lake. All the driver was accomplishing was digging the wheels in deeper.
He pulled his Ram up in front of it and climbed out. The driver was a woman of thirty or more. Pretty with short-cropped pale, almost white, blonde hair. She wore what looked like a very expensive parka over a black turtleneck.
“Stuck?” he said.
“I should say.” She smiled and her face colored a bit. There was a trace of an accent. The Merc’s plates were Massachusetts but that wasn’t it. Clipped and precise with no dropped consonants.
“I can turn around and winch you out.”
“I think I’d only get stuck again. And you’re the first person to come by in over an hour,” she said.
He stepped back as she opened the door and stepped out after raising the window. She wore leather boots with jeans tucked in. Both looked as pricey as the parka.
“Then I can give you a lift. You’re on the lake?”
“Yes. The Moulson’s house. They’re letting me stay there while I do some work. Though I wish they’d been more strident in their warnings about Maine winters.”
“What did they tell you?”
“That I’d freeze my ass off!” she said and a laugh exploded from her.
He allowed a smile.
“I thought that was just an expression!” She laughed again.
“Well, my truck is warm and I know where the Moulson place is,” he said and held an arm out for her to take.
She blinked at the offered elbow before putting her arm in his and allowing him to walk her to his truck through the calf-deep drift she’d created around her car.
“I take it from your accent and manners that you are some kind of Southern gentleman,” she said as he guided her. The boots she wore were fancy but the slick soles were not made for travel in snow.
“Just an Arkansas redneck, ma’am,” he lied.
“Ma’am? Call me Lee, please.”
“I’m Mitch Roeder,” Levon lied once more.
He helped her into the cab of the truck and crossed in front of the cab to climb behind the wheel and take off.
The Ram followed Mohawk, the road that ran around the circumference of Lake Bellevue. The locals still called it Gourd Lake for its shape: fat and oval at its southern base, narrowing to a neck that led to another, smaller span of water to the north. The developer who’d subdivided the parcels all around renamed it for the nearest town, a flyspeck along the county road ten miles east. Cecile’s place was the only landmark. A gas station and a combination convenience and hardware store that also served as the local post office backed by a few homes owned by lifetime Mainers. Bellevue was a misleading name Anglicized from what was probably a joke name given it by the original French settlers. The only view the town offered was pine forest for hundreds of miles in every direction.
The twenty-two homes distributed around the lake shore ranged from mini-mansions to full-blown palaces. They belonged to financiers, a retired senator, a television producer, three trial lawyers, a construction contractor from Boston, a software developer from San Francisco and a handbag designer from Italy. They were empty in the winter except for a few guests here and there. That meant they were empty most of the year since Maine winters tended to start early and then stubbornly hang on when the rest of the country was starting to wear t-shirts. They were boarded up and shut down, running only enough electric to keep the pipes from freezing. The boats were out of the water and locked up in boathouses until spring. Pools were drained and all the toys put away.
“You don’t seem to be having any trouble navigating through this,” Lee remarked as the Ram rolled along easily, following the buried roadway through the trees.
“Your Merc is good in light snow. But it just doesn’t have the clearance for this kind of depth.”
“If I’d known that I could have saved some money and bought a truck like this. Appearances over practicality has always been my downfall.” She sighed.
He had nothing to say to that.
“I went down to Bellevue to buy some things I needed. Do you believe that they don’t get any newspapers until the beginning of April? The woman behind the counter suggested that I Google whatever I needed to know. It’s the only store still open so I suppose I have to put up with that colorful character until the snow melts.”
Levon had no remark for that. Cecile down at the Bellevue Market and Hardware was colorful.
“And what brings you to stay in this godforsaken place in the dead of winter? I’m doing some writing and so crave isolation. Th
ough not so much isolation as this,” she said.
She wanted a conversation.
“I have a place on the other side of Mohawk Road. Not right on the lake. It was a carriage house once.”
“That tells me where but not why, Mitch.”
“I’m doing some renovation work on one of the lake houses. Putting in a new kitchen. The family wants it done for when they come back up from Boston in the summer.”
“So you have work to wile away the dreary winter months as well. It must be lonely. God knows, I’m lonely. Is there anyone else living around here?” she said with a gesture of exaggerated desperation.
“There’s the Fentons. They work on contract for the home association. Danni does light maintenance like watering plants and making sure the pipes don’t freeze. Nate looks after the heavier stuff like repairing furnaces and keeping generators running during outages.”
“A gay couple?” She arched an eyebrow.
“Danielle. They have two kids. Carl and Giselle.”
“Where do they live?”
“There’s a guest cabin on the Morgan property. The rent’s paid by the association. It’s on the west side of the lake up near the neck.”
“Anyone else?”
“The Espositos. Retired couple from Boston. They’re in the east side of the neck a couple of properties north of you. And a pair of artists in the bungalow behind the Christophers. That’s next door to you. That’s about all.”
“And you?”
“Our house is at the foot of the lake across the road from the Hofferts. The house I’m renovating.”
“ ‘Our’? Is there a Mrs. Redneck and a trailer full of little Rednecks?” She chuckled to let him know she was being playful.
“My daughter Moira. Her mom passed a few years back.” The best lies always had some truth in them.
“Pity. Your poor little girl.”
“It’s been tough. But she’s brave for my sake. Here’s the Moulsons,” he said and pulled off the road following the tracks the Benz had left upon leaving to the bank of doors that fronted the six-bay garage that stood separate from the vast chalet-style mansion.