“That would be great,” said Shadow. They went into an empty office, next to Chad’s. The light was slightly better in there. The number Shadow gave Chad to dial for him was that of a funeral home in Cairo, Illinois. Chad dialed it, handed Shadow the receiver. “I’ll leave you in here,” he said, and went out.
The telephone rang several times, then it was picked up.
“Jacquel and Ibis. Can I help you?”
“Hi. Mister Ibis, this is Mike Ainsel. I helped out there for a few days over Christmas.”
A moment’s hesitation, then, “Of course. Mike. How are you?”
“Not great, Mister Ibis. In a patch of trouble. About to be arrested. Hoping you’d seen my uncle about, or maybe you could get a message to him.”
“I can certainly ask around. Hold on, uh, Mike. There’s someone here who wishes a word with you.”
The phone was passed to somebody, and then a smoky female voice said, “Hi, honey. I miss you.”
He was certain he’d never heard that voice before. But he knew her. He was sure that he knew her…
Let it go, the smoky voice whispered in his mind, in a dream. Let it all go.
“Who’s that girl you were kissing, hon? You trying to make me jealous?”
“We’re just friends,” said Shadow. “I think she was trying to prove a point. How did you know she kissed me?”
“I got eyes wherever my folk walk,” she said. “You take care now, hon…” There was a moment of silence, then Mr. Ibis came back on the line and said, “Mike?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a problem getting hold of your uncle. He seems to be kind of tied up. But I’ll try and get a message to your aunt Nancy. Best of luck.” The line went dead.
Shadow sat down, expecting Chad to return. He sat in the empty office, wishing he had something to distract him. Reluctantly, he picked up the Minutes once more, opened it to somewhere in the middle of the book, and began to read.
An ordinance prohibiting expectoration on sidewalks and on the floors of public buildings, or throwing thereon tobacco in any form, was introduced and passed, eight to four, in December of 1876.
Lemmi Hautala was twelve years old and had, “it was feared, wandered away in a fit of delirium” on December the thirteenth, 1876. “A search being immediately effected, but impeded by the snows, which are blinding.” The council had voted unanimously to send the Hautala family their condolences.
The fire at Olsen’s livery stables the following week was extinguished without any injury or loss of life, human or equine.
Shadow scanned the closely printed columns. He found no further mention of Lemmi Hautala.
And then, on something slightly more than a whim, he flipped the pages forward to the winter of 1877. He found what he was looking for mentioned as an aside in the January minutes: Jessie Lovat, age not given, “a Negro child,” had vanished on the night of the twenty-eighth of December. It was believed that she might have been “abducted by traveling so-called pedlars, who were run out of town the previous week, having been discovered to be engaged in certain larcenous acts. They were said to be making for St. Paul.” Telegrams had been sent to St. Paul, but no results were reported. Condolences were not sent to the Lovat family.
Shadow was scanning the minutes of winter 1878 when Chad Mulligan knocked and entered, looking shamefaced, like a child bringing home a bad report card.
“Mister Ainsel,” he said. “Mike. I’m truly sorry about this. I appreciate how easy you’ve been about all this. Personally, I like you. But that don’t change anything, you know?”
Shadow said he knew.
“I got no choice in the matter,” said Chad, “but to place you under arrest for violating your parole.” Then Police Chief Chad Mulligan read Shadow his rights. He filled out some paperwork. He took Shadow’s prints. He walked him down the hall to the county jail, on the other side of the building.
There was a long counter and several doorways on one side of the room, two holding cells and a doorway on the other. One of the cells was occupied—a man slept on a cement bed under a thin blanket. The other was empty.
There was a sleepy-looking woman in a brown uniform behind the counter, watching Jay Leno on a small white portable television. She took the papers from Chad, and signed for Shadow. Chad hung around, filled in more papers. The woman came around the counter, patted Shadow down, took all his possessions—wallet, coins, front door key, book, watch—and put them on the counter, then gave him a plastic bag with orange clothes in it and told him to go into the open cell and change into them. He could keep his own underwear and socks. He went in and changed into the orange clothes and the shower footwear. It stank evilly in there. The orange top he pulled over his head had LUMBER COUNTY JAIL written on the back, in large black letters.
The metal toilet in the cell had backed up, and was filled to the brim with a brown stew of liquid feces and sour, beerish urine.
Shadow came back out, gave the woman his clothes, which she put into the plastic bag with the rest of his possessions. She had him sign for them. Shadow signed for them as Mike Ainsel, although he found that he was already thinking of Mike Ainsel as someone he had liked well enough in the past but would no longer be seeing in the future. He had thumbed through the wallet before he handed it over. “You take care of this,” he had said to the woman. “My whole life is in here.” The woman took the wallet from him, and assured him that it would be safe with them. She asked Chad if that wasn’t true, and Chad, looking up from the last of his paperwork, said Liz was telling the truth, they’d never lost a prisoner’s possessions yet.
Shadow had slipped the four hundred-dollar bills that he had palmed from the wallet into his socks, when he had changed, along with the silver Liberty dollar he had palmed as he had emptied his pockets.
“Say,” Shadow asked, when he came out. “Would it be okay if I finished reading the book?”
“Sorry, Mike. Rules are rules,” said Chad.
Liz put Shadow’s possessions in a bag in the back room. Chad said he’d leave Shadow in Officer Bute’s capable hands. Liz looked tired and unimpressed. Chad left. The telephone rang, and Liz—Officer Bute—answered it. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. No problem. Okay. No problem. Okay.” She put down the phone and made a face.
“Problem?” asked Shadow.
“Yes. Not really. Kinda. They’re sending someone up from Milwaukee to collect you. Okay, do you have any history of medical problems, diabetes, anything like that?”
“No,” said Shadow. “Nothing like that. Why is that a problem?”
“Because I got to keep you in here with me for three hours,” she said. “And the cell over there”—she pointed to the cell by the door, with the sleeping man in it—“that’s occupied. He’s on suicide watch. I shouldn’t put you in with him. But it’s not worth the trouble to sign you in to the county and then sign you out again.” She shook her head. “And you don’t want to go in there”—she pointed to the empty cell in which he’d changed his clothes—“because the can is shot. It stinks in there, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. It was gross.”