Chapter 16

Wolf River, July 1987

LINDY

Twenty years ago the Wolf River Inn had been unquestionably the best place in town. The best hotel, the best restaurant, the best - and only - bar with live entertainment. The Grange and the VFW and the Legion all held their banquets here. Anyone who wanted a "night out" went to the inn.

The exterior was finished in a pseudo Swiss ski resort architectural style. It bothered no one in Wolf River that there wasn't a skiable mountain within several hundred miles. The interior carried out the Alpine theme with white plaster walls and dark beamed ceilings. There was a walk-in-size fireplace in the lobby and another in the Chalet Room.

Any party that exceeded the size of the host's home, and was deemed too classy for the Elks Lodge, was held at the inn. Such sexual fooling around as there was in Wolf River took place mostly at the inn. More than one clandestine tryst was rumored to have been consummated in the cozy rooms on the third and fourth floors, the first two being used primarily for tourists and commercial travelers.

Lindy Grant had things on her mind other than the inn's appearance, but she couldn't help feeling a little sad about the obvious decay. The outside, which used to get a fresh coat of paint every spring, now showed the scars of hard Wisconsin winters. Inside, the lobby carpet was stained in several places. The furniture had a secondhand look, and the smell of long-dead cigars hung in the corners like cobwebs.

The desk clerk was watching a game show on a small television set behind the reservations counter. He was in his early twenties, with a complexion problem and greased-back hair. When Lindy walked in he turned down the volume of the game show and looked her over with the eye of small-town makeout artist.

"I'd like a room," she said.

"We've got 'em." He said. "Fourth floor's the best."

"That's fine."

He slid a registration card over in front of her and leaned across the counter to read upside down as she wrote. "Is that for... one?"

Lindy caught the significant pause. She looked up at him with a cold stare until his eyes shifted away. "That's right," she said. "One."

She finished filling out the card and slid it back across the counter. "You do take Visa?"

"Sure. We're totally up to date in Wolf River."

I'll bet you are, Lindy thought dryly. She looked around the lobby. It was empty except for an old man who sat in a sagging plush armchair by the cold fireplace reading a copy of Playboy.

"Are there any activities planned here at the inn for the class reunion?"

The clerk gave her a blank look. "What class reunion?"

"Wolf River High School. Class of '67."

The desk clerk shrugged. "Not that I heard of. Was there supposed to be?"

"I thought so. I guess somebody will contact me."

The clerk shrugged again, anxious to get back to the game show. He selected a room key with a big tab of hard plastic attached.

"Four-fourteen," he said. "Has a nice view of Main Street."

"Can you have someone take my bag up?" she said. "I'd like to walk around town a little."

"Hey, Jed," the clerk called.

The old man looked up from Playboy.

"How about taking the lady's suitcase up to four-fourteen."

"You betcha." Jed got to his feet and limped over to the desk. He gave Lindy a smile of tobacco-stained teeth.

She put a dollar bill in his hand along with the key, and he reached for the bag.

"Just leave it in the room," she said.

"You can pick up the key here when you come back," the clerk told her. He eyed her curiously. "Anything special you wanted to look for in the town?"

"Not really."

"You won't find a lot doing in Wolf River."

"I've been here before," she told him, and walked out of the lobby before he could extend the conversation. She could feel eyes on her back.

* * *

Her last year of high school was a dim memory for Lindy, deliberately clouded by the internal censor that screens out unpleasant memories. She forced herself now to think about it as she walked the once-familiar streets.

The most painful part of it was the change in her relationship with her father. Wendell Grant had always seemed the ideal parent, the envy of her friends who only wished their fathers could have been so friendly and understanding. Not to mention handsome. Lindy was aware that half the girls she brought home developed a crush on the tall, athletic judge.

After the Halloween thing at the lake, however, it was never the same at home. The conversations with her father, which had flowed so naturally before, became stilted and difficult. Whenever the subject became personal, he eased out of range. The judge began spending more time in the county seat, and when he was home often retired to his study, there to remain until after Lindy had gone to bed.

After she left home with a scholarship to Northwestern, her contact with her father or anyone else in Wolf River dwindled rapidly. After her fathers marriage to the young Shawano woman his letters became even less frequent.

All in all, the situation did not disturb Lindy. She had little wish to remember the town, nor did the town seem eager to remember Lindy Grant.

Over the years the judge's letters had described in general terms the steady decline of Wolf River. The people there never fully recovered from the double economic blow in the early 1970s when Moderne Gloves closed up shop due to changing fashions and the Allis Chalmers plant relocated to Sheboygan. Lindy had expected to see some deterioration in the town, yet she was hardly prepared for the pervading atmosphere of rot and depression.

Few of the shops she remembered were still located on Main Street. That might be expected with the passage of twenty years, but there seemed an inordinate number of empty storefronts with FOR RENT signs taped to the windows.

The old Woolworth was now a discount furniture and appliance store. SUMMER CLEARANCE! ALL PRICES SLASHED!

Bonnie's Gift Shop was now an unappealing cafe.

Where the Dairy Queen had been was an office of Milwaukee Savings and Loan.

The Rialto Theater stood empty and dead - a cobwebby cave under a broken marquee with a few meaningless black letters still clinging drunkenly to the slots. She could squint her eyes and see Dr. Zhivago, The Sound of Music, Alfie, Bonnie and Clyde. All gone now. Dead. Shadows of the past.

Lindy shivered. Abruptly she remembered promising to call Brendan Jordan when she got in. He'd never asked her to do anything like that before, and she was amused and touched by his concern.

She wasn't ready to go to her room at the inn yet, so she stepped into a phone booth - they still had the old-fashioned enclosed kind with a folding door - outside a Shell station. She punched in her credit card code and Brendan's Los Angeles number. After much crackling on the line she got a busy signal.

Lindy was oddly relieved. She would have felt silly saying something like Hi, I got here safe and sound. She was not, after all, a twelve-year-old. Still, it was nice to have someone care about you. She would try Brendan again later when she got to the room.

Lindy continued her walk through town. The streets seemed narrower and dirtier. The former might have been an illusion: childhood memories always shrink when revisited as an adult. But there was no overlooking the scraps of wastepaper and other trash that littered the sidewalks and gutters.

Lindy shook herself out of her gloomy mood and walked on. Traffic along Main Street was spotty, consisting mostly of muddy pickup trucks driven by sunburned farmers. There were few pedestrians - washed-out looking women, dispirited men. Almost no young people. If Wolf River was not yet a dead town, it was sure as hell dying.

Without realizing where she was going, Lindy looked up to find herself at the intersection of Main and Elm streets. A montage of old Saturday afternoons flashed through her mind - shiny cars, loud rock music on the 8-tracks, girls dressed as sexily as their parents would allow. The girls' hair sprayed into flips, boys with D.A.s, curls carefully arranged on their foreheads. Lots of flirting and fooling around. Fun. Plain, simple fun. God, she hadn't really had fun for a long, long time.

There was no conscious decision, but Lindy seemed to be carried along up Elm Street by her memories. Up the Hill. How much less impressive it seemed now than when she had lived there two decades ago. Did all houses grow smaller with the passage of time? Did all hills flatten into insignificant grades?

The houses at the bottom, near Main Street, had not been the most imposing even when she had lived there. They had aged badly. Several were empty now, with taped cracks in the windows and shingles missing from the roofs. In one front yard a rusting automobile sat on blocks, never to run again. A couple of hungry-looking dogs prowled through the weeds of unkempt lawns. Sad. The scene made Lindy want to cry.

And there, of course, was the house where Frazier Nunley had lived. She didn't want to look at it, but it drew her attention, like an accident across the road. It was one of the empty ones, somehow looking even more abandoned and forlorn than the others. The paint was badly weathered. Rusted junk littered the front yard. A faded realtor's sign stood crookedly in the weeds.

A chill made Lindy shiver in the hot July sun. She turned from the old Nunley house and walked quickly on up the Hill.

More quickly than she expected, she reached what she really wanted to see - the Grant house, where she was born, and where she had lived so happily with her father for the first seventeen years of her life.

It was in fairly good repair, thank God, and had a fresh coat of paint. But there had been changes. A second entrance had been added off the front porch, the house split into a duplex. A neatly lettered sign noted that one side was currently for rent.

The house had been repainted a sad shade of blue-gray with white trim and shutters. The combination lacked the warmth and happiness that seemed to radiate from the old brown-and-cream paint her father had freshened every year. Or maybe the color scheme was just fine; it was her depressed mood that made it seem so melancholy.

She closed her eyes for a moment and saw the house as it had been. She imagined the changes over the years as in a speeded-up film. The summer after Lindy's graduation, Ida Krantz suffered a stroke that put her into a convalescent home, the kind where the patients never get better, just become paralyzed and mute. Her father had continued to live alone in the big house, but he seemed to lose interest in keeping it up.

Then, during Lindy's sophomore year at Northwestern, Judge Grant married the woman from Shawano, only a few years older than Lindy, and brought her home to Wolf River. Lindy came home for the wedding, but felt like a stranger. The judge was totally fascinated by his bride, and the young woman did little to hide her hostility to her predecessor in the house. A year later Wendell Grant and his wife moved to Madison, where the judge set up a private practice. That was when Lindy's communication with her father had all but ceased.

Thinking now of her father and the way it used to be drove Lindy even deeper into her funk. She turned away from the house of her happy childhood and walked rapidly back down Elm Street and into the present.

* * *

Like the rest of the town, the Chalet Room at the Wolf River Inn was not what it once had been. The high-backed, vaguely Swiss-looking booths of carved oak and rich brown leather had been replaced by red vinyl. The little raised bandstand-stage was still there, but the Baldwin piano was gone and a jumble of amplification equipment was in its place.

The bar was smaller, or maybe like everything else in Wolf River it just seemed smaller. The only other customer when Lindy entered was a stout gray-haired woman with a deeply seamed face. She sat unmoving except when she raised the stubby on-the-rocks glass to her lips.

Lindy took a stool well away from the silent woman. The tired-looking bartender wandered over and wiped down the bar space in front of Lindy's stool.

"Vodka and tonic, please," she said.

"You got it." He dropped ice cubes into a glass and brought up a vodka bottle from the well. "Staying at the inn?"

Lindy was about to give him a don't-bug-me answer, but stopped herself. Sometimes people just made conversation without being on the make.

"That's right," she said.

He nodded pleasantly, eyeballed a generous shot of vodka into the glass, and added tonic.

"Isn't there supposed to be a high school reunion celebration here?" Lindy asked.

"If there is, nobody told me about it."

She began to wonder if this whole thing was some bizarre practical joke. Get her all the way back to Wolf River for a meaningless hoax. But who would do a thing like that? How could it profit anybody? And how would that explain the eerie messages and what had happened to Nicole's face?

The bartender added a squeeze of lime and set the drink before her. Lindy sipped at it and gave the bartender a brief smile of approval. She was relieved when he went away.

"Miz Grant?"

Lindy started at the sound of her name. She turned on the stool and saw the elderly bellhop named Jed standing there, grinning through his brown teeth, holding an envelope.

"A message come for you. I seen you come in here so I told Jerry at the desk I'd bring it."

She took the envelope from him and scooped up a couple of quarters from her bar change for a tip. "Thank you."

The envelope was cheap drugstore stationery. Her name was written with a black felt-tip pen in an angular hand that was chillingly familiar. With trembling fingers, Lindy tore it open.

The message inside, in the same pointy script, made her throat close up when she read it:

Hello, Cat.
Welcome home.
Remember the clown?