The Tenth Good Year

You wake up with your phone on your chest and a crease from the case in your cheek.

The last thing on the screen, timestamped 4:52 a.m., is his: sun's coming up. it's gone back down. sleep, deputy. alive.

You lie there a while, reading back through the night. Short lines. Times. Little dry jokes when you pushed him for them. You remember sitting at the kitchen table at two o'clock with the lights off, watching the fog and typing to a man you'd pointed a gun at the day before, and feeling, for the first time since you left Detroit, like someone was on your side.

One line you read three times.

it only talks like the dead. that's how i knew about your mom. i'm sorry.

The invitation was in your mailbox at noon. Heavy cream card, gold edging.

The Families of Ninebark request the pleasure of your company at a welcome supper for our new deputy. Vanderslice Lodge, seven o'clock.

"You have to go," Arlene says, when you show her. "Everybody goes when the Families ask."

"Who are the Families?"

"The Vanderslices. The Sundquists. The Hagedorns." She counts them off on her fingers. "Founded the town back in logging days. Own the lodge, the bank, the dam, half the lake frontage and the sheriff's office." She doesn't smile. "Wear something nice, hon."

The Vanderslice Lodge sits on a point of land on the north shore, all timber and fieldstone and walls of glass. The parking lot is full of cars worth more than the town's annual budget should allow. A fire roars in a fireplace you could stand up in.

A man meets you at the door before you can knock.

"You must be the deputy." He takes your coat. "I'm Amias. My father's the one who'll make a speech. I apologize in advance."

He's beautiful. There's no other word for it. Dark-honey hair pushed back off a sun-browned forehead, blue eyes that crinkle like he's in on a joke with you specifically, a cream sweater that probably cost what your car did. Three women at the bar are watching him and pretending not to.

"I'm Ava."

"I know." He smiles. "Small town. You're the most interesting thing to happen here since the marina opened. Come on. I'm seating you next to me. It's the only way I'll survive dinner."

The dining room is long and candlelit. Eighteen people at a table built from a single slab of pine. Hagedorn is there in a sport coat, waving at you with a dinner roll. Beside him a woman in her late fifties with an ash-blond bob, pearl earrings and a navy dress that looks like it was cut for her this morning.

"Alma Sundquist," she says, offering you a cool hand across the table. "Sundquist Savings. If you need anything at all, a mortgage, a car loan, a friend, you come to me."

"Thank you."

"We take care of our own here." Her eyes move over your face like she's checking a balance sheet.

At the head of the table sits a silver-haired man in a charcoal cashmere sweater and reading glasses, handsome in a way that looks expensive and cold.

"Evert Vanderslice," Amias murmurs. "Father. Owner of everything you can see from the window, and some things you can't."

Dinner is whitefish and wild rice and a wine you can't pronounce. Amias keeps you laughing. He tells stories about tourists who try to feed the loons, about the time Hagedorn arrested a moose, about growing up on the lake.

"Do you swim?" he asks.

"Not in forty-degree water."

"Smart." Something flickers across his face. "Don't. Not in October."

"Everybody keeps telling me that."

"Because everybody means it." He pours you more wine. His hand isn't quite steady.

At dessert Evert Vanderslice stands and taps his glass.

The room goes quiet faster than any room you've ever seen.

"Friends," he says. His voice is warm and practiced. "Ten years ago, this town was dying. The mill was closed, the young people were leaving, the bank was underwater." A ripple of polite laughter. Alma Sundquist smiles thinly. "Look at us now. A new marina. A full lodge. Property values up four hundred percent. Not a single winter death in nine years."

Applause.

"We owe it to hard work," Evert says. "And faith. And to the fact that in Ninebark, we take care of what's ours." He raises his glass toward you. "So. To our new deputy. To a quiet October."

"To a quiet October," the table murmurs.

"And to our tenth good year."

Glasses lift. Everyone drinks.

And everyone, every single person at that long candlelit table, looks at you. Not at Evert. At you. Just for a second. A second too long. Hagedorn. Alma. The man from the hardware store. A woman you saw at the bakery. Their faces are pleasant and soft and completely still, the way people look at a deer in a field before someone raises a rifle.

Then they look away and start talking about the weather.

Beside you, Amias has put his glass down without drinking.

"Excuse me," he says, very quietly, and leaves the table.

You leave at ten. Nobody stops you.

Hagedorn walks you as far as the lobby, one heavy hand between your shoulder blades, steering. "You did good in there, Ava. Folks like you. That matters, up here." He holds the door. "Drive safe, kiddo. Fog's coming."

"Sheriff. What did your friend mean? The tenth good year."

"Evert likes a round number." He smiles. "Get home before it gets thick."

It is. It's already pooled in the parking lot, knee-deep and luminous under the lamps.

You check your phone on the walk to your car.

how's the lion's den.

You start to type an answer. Then you see the piece of paper.

It's folded under your windshield wiper, damp from the fog. Lined paper torn from a notebook. You look around the lot. Nobody. Just fog and parked cars and the lit windows of the lodge where eighteen people are laughing.

You unfold it.

The handwriting is shaky and slanted, like whoever wrote it was in a hurry or afraid.

They hired you for the fog. Go home while you still can.