Purgatory Ridge

“I already told you. I’m in a big poker tournament down at Grand Casino Mille Lacs tomorrow. We can do it another day.” Bridger glanced at him. “Ah Jesus, Chief. I can read you like you’re thinking in neon.” He stepped across the deck toward LePere, who’d never seen on Bridger’s face a look so serious or afraid. “Promise me, God damn it. Promise me on your brother’s watery grave here that you won’t dive alone. Promise me, Chief.”

The lake was dead calm. Over it hung a high pall scented with the vague smell of smoke. The sun was white, and it lit a pale fire on the lake all around the Anne Marie. John Sailor LePere looked at these things, then at Wesley Bridger. He smiled calmly and said, “I promise.”

11

THAT EVENING, as she backed her Toyota from the driveway of the house on Gooseberry Lane, Jo took note once again of Jenny’s attire. Black silk blouse, short black skirt, black stockings, black beret. Somehow, she’d acquired glasses with stern black rims.

“You look like you’re going to a funeral in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse.” Jo turned up Center Street, heading toward the library.

“I don’t want her to think I’m a kid.”

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being sixteen and liking her book.”

“I love her book, Mom.” Jenny clutched the novel to her breast. “She writes with such a deep understanding of tragedy.”

“I suspect that’s because she’s lived with tragedy, Jenny.”

“To lose the man you love, and so mysteriously.” Jenny stared down at the dust jacket of Superior Blue. The cover art showed the dark blue of Lake Superior curving away beneath a menacing blue-black sky. Caught at the edge of earth and air, as if trapped in the mouth of a huge blue monster, was a small sailboat with an empty deck.

“Believe me, Jen, tragedy’s more appealing in the abstract than in the reality. It makes a good read, but it’s awful to live through.”

“Do you think there’ll be a lot of people?”

“If I know Maggie Nelson, she’ll make sure people turn out in droves.”

Two dozen chairs had been set up in the meeting room of the Aurora Public Library. By the time Jo and Jenny arrived, all the chairs had been taken. Along with half a dozen other late arrivals, Jo stood at the back of the room, Jenny beside her. Most of the audience were women, but a few men had come.

“Mom, there he is,” Jenny whispered. “The guy who talked to me in French yesterday. The one who went to the Sorbonne.”

She pointed toward a young man standing against the wall on the other side of the room. Jo pegged him to be in his early twenties. A thin blond mustache dusted his upper lip. He wore scruffy jeans and a white T-shirt that wasn’t exactly clean. Jo recognized him, too. She’d seen him only that morning being interviewed by a newsman at the tent city on the Iron Lake Reservation. He’d spoken ill-advisedly then. She hoped he didn’t have any other ill-advised notions at the moment and was there only because he admired Grace Fitzgerald’s book.

Maggie Nelson stood at the front of the room beside a table on which sat a display of copies of Superior Blue. Grace Fitzgerald was seated at the table, and next to her a boy of nine or ten, with the same honey-colored hair as she. The author wore a light green blouse, probably silk. A small gold cross hung on a thin gold chain about her neck. She was a striking woman, even more so because of her nose, a prominence that resembled a raptor’s beak and that dominated an otherwise soft-featured and lovely face.

Maggie Nelson introduced the author. After polite applause, Grace Fitzgerald said, “First of all, I’d like to thank Maggie for hosting this event. I’d also like to thank so many of you for turning out this evening, although I suspect some of you are here mostly because of the wonderful food waiting for you afterward, courtesy of Fairfield’s. Thanks, Jackie.” She gave a brief wave to a slender, dark-haired woman standing at a table filled with trays of cookies and exotic-looking bars. “And finally I’d like to thank the Friends of the Aurora Library for sponsoring this event and so many others like it.”

She sent a smile in the direction of Jo, for Jo headed that organization and had been the one who’d first approached Grace Fitzgerald with the invitation. Jo had liked the woman immediately and immensely. She found her intelligent-which she’d expected-and also gracious and full of wonderful humor. More important, she felt a kind of kinship with Grace Fitzgerald. In a town like Aurora where not even a dozen years of residence and work on civic organizations were a guarantee of acceptance, she felt as if she’d found someone who could be a friend, someone who, like her, might always be an outsider.