Page 10 of Secrets Along the Shore

The air was thick with the scent of burnt coffee and Lisa’s perfume. Lisa was my co-worker. We sold fireplaces and woodstoves and air conditioners, and we pretended we knew what a BTU was and how many of them a forced-air furnace needed to give out per square foot. In reality, Lisa was a fifty-something woman putting tick marks on paper until the day she could retire—she really did—I’d seen them. I was a twenty-seven-year-old introvert who had fully justifiable reasons to be one, an aversion to people, but a desperate need to make a living. Archer’s Heating and Cooling it was.

I did data entry when I wasn’t pretending to know what I was talking about to customers. At the end of my sales pitch, I’d schedule my boss—Phil Archer—to go to their homes and do an actual quote for the unit and the installation. They’d change their minds on what they wanted and needed, and my sales pitch didn’t really matter in the end. So I couldn’t care less about BTUs.

The door slammed behind me after I’d already maneuvered myway across the small sales floor maze of demo gas stoves, through the office of my four over-zealous co-workers who believed they were the blood of Archer’s Heating and Cooling, and into the back warehouse. A blast of humid air hit my face along with the acrid scent of installers already sweating in the early morning, August heat. Southerners could brag all they wanted, but Wisconsin could match their seventy-percent humidity any summer day.

“You see the news this morning?”

I hung back from the time-clock machine, watching as Toby slid his timecard into the slot and waited for the contraption to punch him in to work.

Whatever happened to technology? Scanning a QR code or something to log an employee’s time?

“Yep.” Toby was staring at me. I nodded. He was twice my size. At least 6’2”, well over 250 pounds, and mainly muscle. He had cropped strawberry-blond hair, his shirt sleeves were chopped off at the shoulder revealing freckled biceps, and his jeans were permanently stained from grease or oil or something.

His blue eyes scanned my face. “No. Yeah. I suppose you did.”

No. Yeah. It was a Wisconsinite’s way of saying “I guess so”. “Yes” sounded more sure of yourself if you added a “No” to its beginning.

I eyed Toby. “I didn’t read it in detail, though.” I was curious about what all had been released to the public since I’d only skimmed it in an attempt to compartmentalize and not dwell on it. I’d gone home with Livia the evening before, and then I’d been up half the night and contemplating going for a run. I had energy. I was wide awake. I wasn’t even a runner, for heaven’s sake, so I had been more consumed trying to understand this new breath of life I felt and why I felt it at the cost of Sophia’s own.

“They found the missing girl, Sophia Bergstrom—out by Stillwater Lake.” Toby jammed his time card back into its holder. He flicked the end of his nose with his thumb and sniffed. “It was murder.”

I couldn’t help it. I gave Toby a blank look in response. I learned years ago and through necessity to temper my reactions. It was more than a poker face. It was a face of survival. Well, and numbness. Incidents that evoked emotional reactions did the opposite for me.

“Yeah.” Toby glanced over his shoulder. I followed his gaze to see some of the other guys loading boxes of triple-wall stove pipe into their vans. “I gotta get goin’.” He hopped off the cement platform onto the warehouse floor, but then paused and looked up at me. Something flickered in his eyes. He was single, but he was also forty. Too old for me. But I think he saw me as a kid sister. Whatever it was, his hesitation breathed something into me.

Camaraderie.

Toby was—a friend, I think. Not close like Livia, but someone I could trust. As long as I held him at arm’s length.

“Hey.” Toby lifted an index finger and waved it at me. “Don’t let the other chickens peck you to death today. K?”

I laughed then—and nodded.

The other chickens.

That’s what we called the office ladies who clucked and preened and poked around all day in their coop by their computers.

They were the hens.

I was the chick.

Only as usual, not too many people noticed me. I preferred it that way.

I punched my card and slid it back into its place in the time card holder. I was lucky to have a job this morning, since skipping out yesterday. Reuben had let Mr. Archer know I’d been helping with the search and Mr. Archer had been understanding.

But today? I needed to work. To face the chickens.

I turned back toward the door to the office and entered the chicken coop.

They had doughnuts and coffee.It was 9:00 a.m., but the ladies had already deemed it break time. So the four of them, all over fifty-five and all with gray in their hair, huddled around the office manager’s desk. Normally, at this point in the morning, Marge would pace the office with her chin tipped up, her permed brown-gray hair in a white woman’s version of an Afro, and a look of queenly power onher face. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if she yelled, “Off with her head!” and guillotined someone.

But this morning, she was conspiring with the others about who had killed Sophia Bergstrom and why. It was sickening, the way people removed from a crime turned it into a game of Clue and disregarded that it involved real people. Real families. A real deviant.

“They think it may be her boyfriend.” Powdered sugar from Lisa’s doughnut stuck to her red lipstick. She chewed and swallowed a bite, her blue eyes wide, her straw-like ash-blonde hair hanging to her shoulders. “Sophia was dating Dereck Hyde.”

“Mmm,” Elisetsked tskedher seventy-five-year-old tongue. She was as intent on staying relevant in the workforce as Lisa was in wanting to retire. “I had that boy in Sunday School years ago, and I knew he was trouble then. He kept telling me his favorite Bible character was King Nebuchadnezzar. That says a lot.”

“He’s eight years older than Sophia.” Carol was a masculine version of a woman, but she was also in a common law marriage going on thirty-six years. “He rides with Blake now and then.” Blake was Carol’s biker son. Not the motorcycle gang type, just a good, old-fashioned biker who did Sturgis every year, could hold his liquor, and would fight to protect the innocent.