The Northwoods Chronicles (25 page)

He felt inordinately tired, so he undressed,
brushed his teeth, set the alarm, got into his pajamas and crawled
into bed.

A few minutes later, he sat up, his breath
coming hard, a cold sweat popping out from his forehead. Exhaustion
settled into his left arm to the point where it felt like a dead
appendage, and a fiery pain crawled up his jawbone. The pressure on
his chest was immense.

He only had one phone, and it hung on the wall
in the kitchen. He’d never make it, he knew. A better use of the
minutes he had left was to get himself right with God. Then maybe
the pain would subside and he’d make it to the phone. If not, he
was prepared to meet his maker.

Wasn’t he?

It only took the flash of an instant for Fred to
review his life. He’d been a good man. He had done everything by
the book. He was nice, he paid his bills, paid his taxes, was
courteous, looked for the good in people. He never acted on his
negative impulses, and he didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t chase
skirts. He’d lived a frugal life, ate low cal, low fat food, and
had an enormous savings account that his brother could use to put
some of his kids through college. Fred could meet God with a clean
slate and an open heart.

What a waste. If he had it to do all over again,
he’d live. He’d
live!
He’d smoke and drink and get married
seven times. He’d have a dozen children and waste money. He’d tell
guys like Mooseface Tyler exactly what he thought of him, and he’d
spend those long sultry evenings up north looking through the
window at lovely young Katarina Svensen.

Fred Kramer’s chest tightened with grief and
remorse and the agony of his heart in spasm, and the tears spilled
out of the corners of his eyes and trickled down into his ears. He
wished he could turn back the clock. He wished he could take it all
back. He wished, he wished, he wished. . . .

Muffy sat down in Mr.
Edgar’s old creaky wooden desk chair and set her backpack on his
desk.

“Study,” she said to herself, opened her pack
and took out her biology text. His desk was mildly cluttered with
invoices, papers and dusty paperweights. She opened her book, set
her pack on the floor and tried to concentrate.

“Study,” she told herself, but she knew she
wouldn’t, not until she had explored a little of the place. The
delivery she was waiting for could come any minute, and perhaps
she’d never have another chance to see behind the scenes, as it
were, of the old wax museum.

Muffy, home from school on a whirlwind weekend
trip to see to her ailing mother, had been visiting Victoria, an
old high school friend who waited tables at the tiny pie shop
across the street from the museum. Just as Victoria was turning the
sign from “Open” to “Closed” that night, old Mr. Edgar came rushing
in, hat in one hand, car keys in the other. He said he had an
emergency and had to leave, and would she please go over to the
museum office and receive the delivery he’d been waiting for all
day? It should come soon. He pressed a worn twenty-dollar bill into
her hand.

She looked at Victoria, who looked at the clock
and shrugged. “I could use the money,” Muffy said.

“It’s late and I’m tired,” Victoria answered.
“Tomorrow’s my day off. We’ll hang out then.”

Muffy turned back to Mr. Edgar and smiled.

He hustled her across the deserted street and
through the side door of his office. “Leave the package there on
the floor,” he said, “and lock the door when you leave. Thank you.
Thank you.”

“Sure,” Muffy said, the twenty equaling a week’s
allowance on her parents’ thin budget. She needed to study anyway.
Next week were finals. What quieter place than a wax museum?

Too quiet.

Maybe there’s a radio.

Feeling naughty, like she did when she snooped
in other peoples’ medicine cabinets, she opened Mr. Edgar’s desk
drawer. The wood was sticky, and she tugged hard. It lurched out of
the desk and all Muffy saw were a hundred creatures looking up at
her. Looking at each other. Looking mystified. Looking crazy. She
stifled a squeal, then, heart pounding, realized that it was a
drawerful of glass eyes. Of course. Wax people needed glass
eyes.

She closed the drawer and moved a little bit
away from it.

No more exploring. Now study.

But it was too quiet. Way too quiet. No dorm
noise, with people giggling and eating, no campus sporting event,
no loud music next door, no hair dryers, no humming machinery, or
smell of freshly delivered pizza. Just a drawerful of eyeballs.

Wonder what else?

Vargas County used to be home to the northwoods’
only amusement park, Enchanted Pines. Muffy remembered going on the
Ferris wheel when she was a little girl—it all seemed like brightly
lit magic to her. Then she heard the words bankrupt, and default,
and there was resentment among the locals, and soon the Ferris
wheel disappeared, leaving only the two giant triangles and an axle
between them to rust. The midway booths blew down and were
vandalized, the driving range was reclaimed by the swamp until only
the 150-yard marker could be seen at the edge of the woods. The
skeleton of the old roller coaster shone whitely in the moonlight
and attracted kids of all ages to mischief of all types. In fact it
was a hand-in-hand walk on the overgrown narrow-gauge train tracks
that led to the loss of Muffy’s virginity one night, over by the
petting zoo. The animals were all long gone, except for Jimmy
Miller, who finessed her out of her panties so fast she barely knew
what was happening until it was over. Jimmy Miller. Ha. Wonder
whatever happened to him?

The truth was, it had been five years since
she’d been back to White Pines Junction. She’d moved out of state
the summer before her senior year to live with her aunt, and from
there she went to the local community college, and now she was in
her last year at the state university on student loans, grants and
scholarships. When she got the word that she needed to come home to
see her mother, she hopped the plane, looking forward to seeing
Victoria and hoping to run into Jimmy Miller. It had been over five
years since that night in the Enchanted Pines, over five years that
she had been away, dating guys that somehow never measured up to
him in her memory. Maybe only because he had been her first. That’s
what her girlfriends told her. She’d like to run into him again
just to see. Just to make sure. Just because.

Anyway, Horace Edgar bought the wax museum from
the bankruptcy court and kept it going. Muffy thought he probably
owned the pie shop, too.

She wondered what was being delivered so late.
It couldn’t be coming UPS, could it? Maybe. White Pines Junction
probably wasn’t on the regular UPS route.

Study,
she told herself, and looked again
at the text.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

Something metallic was making a little noise on
the other side of the other door—the door that led to the exhibits.
Goose bumps ran up her arms. Ought she investigate?

No, she decided. I’m not the bloody caretaker,
I’m just waiting for a delivery.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

Louder.

She jumped out of her chair, sending it skating
across the floor behind her, wheels screeching, and her heart
pounded so loudly and so hard she couldn’t catch her breath.
Someone was in here. Maybe someone wanting to get out. What if
someone was locked inside?

She edged toward the door and listened. Nothing.
“Hello?” She hoped her voice would sound full of female authority,
but she sounded like a cartoon mouse instead. She took a step back
toward the desk, toward the safe circle of desk light, and the
tinging started up again.

“Okay,” she said, bravely strode to the door,
pulled back the deadbolt, slowly turned the knob and opened the
door.

The cold breath of the exhibition hall flooded
the small office with its overly perfumed smell of wax along with
something scorched.

The small desk light shed precious little of
itself into the cavernous hall. Muffy felt the walls for a light
switch, but found none.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

Way back in the darkest, furtherest. . . .

No way. “Stop it,” she yelled. “I’m trying to
study.” She backed out and closed the door, wheeled the old chair
back to the desk and sat down. “Now, do it!” she commanded
herself.

Fat chance.

She wouldn’t mind going in there if she could
turn the lights on. She hadn’t seen the wax exhibit in years. Maybe
the light switch was inside the office.

There was a circuit breaker. Just as she opened
the gray metal door, a real knock came to the outside door. The
delivery. Thank god.

She whipped open the outside door and opened her
mouth to say, “It’s about time,” when a greasy, smelly glove
grabbed her around the mouth and a toothless, horrifying specter
grinned down on her.

“Pretty,” it said.

Chainlink Charlie, the village idiot. Everybody
thought he was harmless, mumbling to himself, directing traffic
that wasn’t there, dancing in the parks to music in his head. He
had a tarp with coat hangers fastened to it with duct tape and
anywhere he could find himself a chain-link fence, Charlie could
make himself a home. His portable hovel moved on a daily basis—and
he survived on the goodwill handouts of others.

Just tonight, in fact, Victoria had given him an
expired pie.

And now he had Muffy, both hands around her
head, and she was scared to bloody death. She tried to move away,
tried to yell, tried to bite him, but was immobilized.

“Very pretty,” he said and smiled, and she would
have gagged at his foul breath if she had any air in her lungs to
gag with.

He smashed her head into his bony, smelly chest
and she could feel him singing as he fumbled in his pants. Muffy
had regained her composure enough to know that she didn’t want to
have anything to do with what Chainlink Charlie had in his pants,
so she brought her knee up forcefully and connected just right.

With a grunt, his grip eased. She slipped from
his hands and ran to the other door, threw the bolt, pulled it open
and walked quickly but carefully through the pitch black hall, arms
out in front of her. She tried to be quiet, but kept hearing little
sounds coming from deep inside her own throat.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

She altered her course toward the sound. Please,
god, was someone in here?

“Gurl? Pretty gurl?” Charlie was closer behind
than she thought, and she couldn’t stop with the moaning thing,
although she knew that her own noises pinpointed her location.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

“Gurl?”

He was right behind her. She ran toward the
tinging, and bumped into somebody. She screamed as they tumbled
together to the floor, and screamed again as Charlie tripped and
landed on top of them.

He lay on her with such a weight and a stench
that she desperately tried to wiggle out from underneath him. “No,
no, no,” she heard herself say in breathless little shrieks.

“Hey!” someone else said, and then the
exhibition hall was filled with light. “Hey, what’s going on in
here?” She heard footsteps and then the FedEx guy pulled Charlie
off her and said, “Jesus god!”

Muffy saw that she was covered in blood.
Charlie’s blood.

“You okay?” the delivery man asked, but Muffy
couldn’t stop staring at Charlie, who had fallen on a butcher knife
held in the hand of the wax figure she had knocked over.

Butcher knife?

She blinked and looked around. Where once were
wax figures of presidents and queens, poets and composers, sports
heroes, astronauts and movie stars, now stood famous murderers—John
Wayne Gacy, Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer,
Lawrence Pursley, Ted Bundy, The Boston Strangler, Charles Manson,
Susan Smith . . . Old Mr. Edgar had turned the museum into a shrine
for the criminally insane.

She heard the FedEx guy’s comforting monologue,
though she couldn’t understand it. She let him get her a chair, and
when he went to call the police, she wiped the tears from her face
with bloody hands and looked again down at Charlie. In his hand was
a butcher knife exactly like the one that was stuck in his chest.
The wax hand that had held that knife belonged to someone…someone
strangely familiar.

Not able to help herself, Muffy slowly got up
from her chair and walked around the gruesome display to read the
card:

Vargas County’s only convicted mass
murderer, Jimmy Miller, is thought to have gutted twelve young
women in two years before being apprehended. While all the evidence
against him was circumstantial and he always maintained his
innocence, he relished his notoriety and enjoyed his fame. He was
killed in prison while awaiting trial.

Mr. Edgar had captured that adorable smirk, she
noticed. Before she had run into Jimmy’s likeness in wax, he had
been standing by the old weathered metal sign from Enchanted Pines.
The sign read “The Enchanted Pines Choo-Choo. You must be this tall
to ride.” With unsteady legs, she bent down, picked up the knife
from Charlie’s hand and touched the sign.

Ting.

Mitch Kardashian was the
only person in town who knew that he had a secret in his past, and
he intended to keep it that way.

When Emmiline had left him no choice but to give
her a little extra dose of what she had come to depend upon him and
his prescription-writing privileges for, she went to sleep calmly,
peacefully, innocently, and never awakened. Accidental overdose, of
course, the medical examiner told the grieving widower.

Mitch sold the house, donated the furniture,
said good-bye to his pitying friends, and took his dental practice,
specializing in the bright white smile, up north where he would
likely minister to loggers and fishermen, hunters and outdoorsmen.
No more women. Women were trouble for Mitch; always had been,
always would be. None of the other men he knew seemed to have the
problems he had with them, but Mitch never seemed to get the recipe
right. Women were either too good-looking, and therefore more
expensive than he wanted to maintain, or else they were too
demanding of his attentions, when he required so much time alone,
or else they were too bitchy, and he needed a certain amount of
adoration if he was going to put up with a woman at all. The
perfect woman was probably out there, but he wasn’t looking for
her, didn’t want to find her, and hoped that she wouldn’t be in
White Pines Junction.