The Girl in Duluth

The

Girl

In

Duluth

Sigrid Brown

Copyright © 2022 by Sigrid Brown

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-578-33876-7

ebook ISBN: 978-0-578-33877-4

Library of Congress LCCN: 2021924471

Book design by Jess LaGreca, Mayfly Design

For Cynthia

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

One

Visitors sometimes feel uneasy in the county I grew up in. They call it a strange and lonely spot. The kind of place where something terrible might happen to you but no one would ever know exactly what, because they would never be able to find you.

Those of us who grew up in the county see it differently, of course. When someone goes missing, we know where to look.

Four years ago, when I was eighteen, something awful did happen there. A whole sequence of events had led up to it. It began months before, or you could even say years.

I hate to be melodramatic, but in order to tell it right, here we go: it was a clear, bright day in January, but a storm was rolling in.

Two

The rapids first, don’t you think? I said.

I climbed up into Frank’s truck and slammed the door. Obediently, he began driving east. In the bright lavender sky was a growing softness from the snow beginning to come down.

But in Frank’s eyes was a sharpening alarm. He was hunched over peering upwards through the foggy glass. I straightened up and clutched my own hands primly in my lap. It was certainly not in my long-term plans to look as old and wrecked as Frank did when I reached forty-three.

We took the two-lane Highway 400 out of Aulneau to Hartnell Rapids. Tonya liked to bring picnics out there in the summer and fall. She said the noise of the rushing water replaced all the thoughts in her head and made her feel as if she were something wild.

Snow was filling in the crevices of the big gray-black rocks. They looked as if they had been dabbed with paint. The lines of white made the rocks look even bigger and blacker. Dark pine trees arrowed up to the sky while the other trees, bare of leaves, were crowned with soft clouds of whitish-gray. The overall effect was like a black-and-white photograph.

Tonya would have liked it—but she wasn’t there to see it.

It was now after four. The sun would be down within the hour. Frank turned around in the small dirt lot, switched his lights on, and drove the eight miles back to town.

We passed the population sign, 1,047—a lower number than it had been when they changed the sign two or three years before. Then we were coming up to the apartment above the feed store where I lived with Tonya. I looked at the small front window, where I had left a lamp turned on. I pressed my forehead into the cold glass and sighed.

We didn’t stop, but drove on through.

I didn’t particularly love that apartment. Just an hour before, I had been looking around it while doing calculus problems and sighing for a different reason.

The bathroom door with its broken hinge leaning against the wall. It had been haphazardly replaced with a yellow polyester curtain nailed over the doorway. The old industrial carpet: rough, clay-colored fuzz that looked filthy no matter how often I vacuumed it. Mine and Tonya’s single beds across from one another in the one small room.

I was about to call my best friend Zee to see if she’d come over and add some brightness and beauty to the place. We might bake some cookies and scent the stale air with cloves and cinnamon.

Then I heard a slow tread on the stairs that came up from the street. Soon the faint sound of Frank’s knuckles trailing over the door.

He was a tall man with a stoop. That and an imploring expression made him seem as if he were always slightly ashamed of himself.

Many times Frank had come to our place knocking weakly like that. Usually he would train his desperate look on Tonya. Once he’d come begging her to shoot a dog for him. His own poor dog, which he’d accidentally run over when he was drunk.

Today, Frank had a favor to ask of me.

His eyes were gray. The dark brown hair on his big, triangular head was going that way, too. He sighed, leaned against the refrigerator, and coughed his wet and dirty smoker’s cough, his chest caved in, but the top of his eyes still glittering on me.

She’s your mother, June, he said.

I shook my head and affected a laugh. Tonya my mother? Only in the strictest biological sense . . .

I turned to the stove to heat water up for tea. It was January, after all. It was northern Minnesota, so it was cold out. Not morbidly cold, but cold enough. Twelve or fifteen degrees.

And it was almost three. The sun was getting low. On every episode of Father Brown or Miss Marple that I’d ever watched, characters in mystifying situations almost always suggested that tea might be in order, to bring about some calm and clear some heads. And often at these times, the light in their cottage, or village rectory, or stylish London flat, looked like this—slanting through the windows and tinted with blue or gold.

I looked out the front window of the shabby apartment. A rusted pickup drove slowly by on Highway 400. Dirty snow was banked up on either side. A light was turned on in one of the small frame houses across the street.

Yes, there was gold in the sky, though clouds were moving in.

I could imagine better tea companions than Frank, my mother’s unfathomable choice for a longtime best friend.

Tea, Frank? I asked him politely, nonetheless.

Juney, he said.

I poured hot water into my beautiful white teapot. A curly handle, an embossed diamond pattern around the rim. On the front a cluster of blue flowers, on the bottom a unicorn and the words Blue Rose. This summer I had bought it at the annual church basement sale at Sacred Heart.

What have you got there now? Tonya had said, and laughed gently, when she saw my new pot. You are such an old lady, June. I didn’t know if I liked that better or worse than her usual, You’re such a weirdo, June.

She called you? Where is she? I asked Frank today.

He shook his head. After a second, I shook mine back at him. Until Tonya called to ask for help, she didn’t want to be found.

I shrugged and Frank said, I’m worried, June.

Why?

With how crazy she drives?

She’s driving? I put down my cup.

Must be. Her car’s not here.

It’s not at your place?

Frank shook his head. My mother had had her license taken away multiple times, one of those being a week or two ago. As far as I knew, she hadn’t gotten it back yet. She liked to speed and spin out on the ice and whip around corners as if she were in Nascar.

Well, call Jack. See if he’s got her, I said.

The perpetual sadness in Frank’s downturned, hound-dog eyes dimmed into something harder. Jack was one of the cops in our town.

No, he said.

When did you last hear from her?

Three days ago. And we check in every day.

I frowned.

And you haven’t heard from her, Frank added.

That doesn’t mean anything. I took a sip of the honeyed orange tea to see if it would sweeten away my bitterness and calm me down. It didn’t, but I pretended the magic was real by swatting my hand as airily as a Southern belle who had grown up surrounded by protection and love.

Three days . . . That’s nothing . . . Don’t you remember when she disappeared to Winnipeg for a month? I said.

You got a postcard. I remember you did.

And Christmas. She wasn’t even here for Christmas. Tonya had been gone for at least two weeks this past month, right over the holiday. She never even gave me a present.

And when New Year’s arrived, she didn’t have money for the rent, either. Today was the 11th and we hadn’t paid it yet. Luckily, our landlord felt sorry for me. She was letting my mother’s negligence slide for a while, as she’d had to do a hundred times before.

Frank, what’s up? He began to look uneasy then. I tried to inspect his gloomy eyes and he flicked them away. He looked down and began to knead the fingers on one of his hands as if they were frozen and he had to rub them back to life.

He said, Sometimes people—do things.

What? What things?

Well. Frank was still squeezing his fingers one by one and looking at the ground.

What people? You don’t mean like, I said slowly, you don’t mean like those women on the news?

What women?

Frank looked up at me squinting. The women who had gone missing, I told him, sitting up straighter at the table. He must have heard about it. It had been on TV a few nights ago. The station was doing an investigative report about it. Five women had gone missing from northern Minnesota this year. Three had been found murdered, one of them just a few days ago. The other two were still gone.

Britta had been talking about it, too. She was my boss—the editor at our county’s newspaper.

The women in Duluth, I said. You think something like that happened to Mom?

Frank shook his head. He blinked a few times. Duluth? What? No.

They were her age. Three of the women had been in their late thirties and early forties—Tonya was thirty-nine.

My hand began to shake. I put both hands on my knees. I stopped drinking my tea.

Frank?

No. Nothing like that. What I meant was . . . Frank shook his head again and trailed off.

Listen—maybe we really should call Jack.

Juney . . . Frank came from his post at the refrigerator and stood in front of me. He sat down at the table and looked at me helplessly.

What? I said.

Juney . . . please . . . Now, don’t get all excited about what you saw on the news. There’s all kinds of things on the news. None of it has anything to do with this. Who said anything about Duluth? He lowered his eyes.

I stared at him. It makes sense.

I don’t know about that. What I’m saying is— Frank sighed. Listen, Juney. That’s not what I meant.

Then what?

She hasn’t been herself lately.

I stared at him for a moment. Then I nodded slowly.

Frank was right. My hippy-dippy mother, laidback and charming, happy-go-lucky, had been anxious recently. Excited sometimes; at other times nervous.

For a while now. Since the late fall, at least—around the end of November. When she came back home after a few weeks of being away.

Then at Christmas, she had left again. When she came back after this second trip, she had at first seemed more relaxed. I conjectured that perhaps she’d had a wondrous spiritual experience out in a snowbank or talking to a random weirdo in a backwoods bar somewhere.

But her peaceful feeling seemed to fade. In a few days, she was upset again.

She’d snapped at me when I asked her, Hey, Mom, what’s with you? I used Mom when I felt like annoying her. As long as I could remember, she’d always liked it better when I called her Tonya.

Leave it alone, June. She was sitting on the edge of my rocking chair, her head in her hands, at the time. Her voice low but harsh.

Which wasn’t like her. Tonya had never been attentive or solicitous. She’d never seemed particularly interested in being my mother at all. But while she might tease me sometimes, she was rarely bad-tempered or cruel.

Later, she’d apologized: I’m sorry, Juney. It’s just that I’m in a little bit of a jam—moneywise. But I’ll figure something out. I always do.

It was true. My mother always got us by on the odd jobs she did sporadically around the county: gardening, shoveling snow, yard work. Occasionally she rebuilt old furniture she found at the dump and drove it down to an antique store in Lisbeth. She cobbled together enough for the bills at some point.

Better late than never—which must also have been the mantra of our landlord and the gas company.

No—not herself at all. A day or two after she’d barked at me, Tonya had even taken a job at Otten’s, the big flooring factory in Gabekana, forty-five miles away. She hadn’t held a steady job there, or anywhere, for years.

What had prompted her to do that, after all this time?

Unsurprisingly, she was only able to keep the job a few days.

So, what? You think she killed herself? I said crudely.

Frank winced. I thought of how Tonya had once said to me—when was it, just a month or two ago?—that when she died, she wanted to be cremated, not buried.

And she didn’t want her ashes locked up anywhere. Not in the ground. Not in an urn or a box.

Or a teapot, she’d added with a little smile.

I reminded myself now that people did that: planned ahead. Even young and middle-aged people. They knew death was always waiting and could come at any time.

But Tonya? Tonya, who rarely committed to anything more than an hour in advance? Tonya, who groaned, Oh, just a little longer, Juney, when I pulled her out of bed at eight-forty on a day she was due to be out by nine?

Frank tugged at a tuft of his gray-brown moustache and began to turn his head restlessly around the room. He looked at the rickety wooden rocking chair by the door and the tall brass lamp wobbling beside it—both of them my own treasures, snagged on one of Tonya’s dump trips.

Then Frank moved his gaze to the eastern window with the torn screen. He looked for a long moment at Tonya’s bed. It was covered with a worn blanket, a pale spring green. Finally, his eyes settled on a stuffed animal on my own bed. The old and ratty brown dog had enormous black plastic eyes and a despondent expression. My Uncle Aaron had given it to me when I was little. I loved that dog because I loved my Uncle Aaron; the only thing I didn’t like about it was that it sometimes reminded me of Frank.

But why would she—hurt herself? I said.

Why? echoed Frank. His eyes faltered and he looked away from the dog and gazed past me out the window. I glanced over my shoulder, as if I would catch a glimpse of the reason my mother might have killed herself out there on the empty street.

I looked back at Frank. Yes—why?

Juney, if she’s done something—Frank’s hands were now on top of his head—if I found her like that . . . Juney. I can’t do this. Not alone. If I saw her like that— I’d go out of my mind. You gotta come with me, Juney.

What aren’t you telling me?

Frank stood up. For a moment I just sat there with my hands on the table, looking up at him.

Then I moved my eyes back down at the table. I spoke to its Formica top in the most poised and cynical tone I could manage. That technique sometimes worked to chastise Frank into calming down.

I told him that he must not get himself all worked up. Tonya was likely just at the lake or somewhere in the woods. She had wanted to see the falls or walk out on the ice or talk to the birds. Alone. She took some back roads so Jack wouldn’t see her. She was fine and would come back to us at some time or another, the way she always did.

But thoughts about her funny moods were filling my head. There were also images of dead women’s frozen fingers sticking out of the snow. Women who had been killed for a reason no one seemed to know yet, then dumped like trash in the woods north of Duluth.

And then the more mundane possibilities: Tonya had gone into the ditch or hit a deer. Or the car was out of gas and her phone had