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Chapter 6
"It shouldn't have been that easy," Mike thought. "Something's wrong. What is it?"
With Carrie gone to the Woman's Club deal, and with Webb at Rotary, they were going to be shorthanded in the back room, so Mike left Sally back at the shop once they'd finished with the Spearfish Lake and Albany River drops, offering to make the country run solo.
At least no inserts this week, he thought. Even though they brought in part-timers to help with the inserting when needed, inserting on top of everything else was a pain in the butt. The long solo run out to Warsaw and back would give Mike another favorable opportunity to
think, and it was clear that he needed the opportunity.
How many times had he gently pressured Kirsten to do something about the house, only to have her brush him off? Now, one snake, and she couldn't wait to sell it. He hated to see Kirsten upset, as she'd gone through a lot of agony in her life, and seeing her hurting
made him hurt. Probably the worst of it would blow over in a few days, and at least they'd have a move made to get rid of the house. It wouldn't be the first time he'd ridden out one of her episodes, and he knew he'd just have to hang on and ride until the storm blew over.
North of the lake, Mike slowed to turn up County Road 919. Shaundessy's Bait and Tackle at East Turtle Lake sold about five papers a week in the winter, but made up for it with fifty a week in the summer, so it was worth the stop, only a mile or so off the main road.
It took a minute to go in and deal with the papers, but a good five minutes to get out of there, shooting the bull with Emil over where the perch were biting and where the ice was still safe -- nowhere on the river or the smaller ponds, but there was still some good ice out on
the east side of the big lake.
Back in the van, Mike headed back out on the pavement. He pointed the van west, and set his mind on automatic. He absent-mindedly made the bundle drops in Hoselton, then drove on to Warsaw. There'd been a lot of rebuilding in Warsaw since the great fire of '81;
the new paper plant had thrown money into the community that hadn't been there before, and these days, you could hardly see any trace of the fire. There was one thing that Mike still missed from pre-fire days, though.
The big reward for making the Warsaw run before the fire had been the lunch stop at Millie's Pizza. Simply put, Millie's had made absolutely the must luscious, heavenly pizza ever to pass between a set of teeth. Mike had been saddened to watch the shop go up in
smoke, and would have been more saddened as he watched had he known that it would be replaced with a third-rate coffee shop that could screw up a simple hamburger. He usually didn't even stop there, but held out till he could get back to Spearfish Lake. Today, however, he
was a little thirsty, and decided to risk a cup of coffee.
He was a little surprised to see Fred Linder sitting in the coffee shop. At the time of the fire, Linder had been a machine operator in the plant, but as the village fire chief, he'd played a pivotal role in the fire, and, as it turned out, an even more pivotal role in the
rebuilding. When the new plant had needed a production manager, Fred was the obvious choice.
Fred was one of the good guys, and it had been a while since Mike had seen him. "So what's happening with Jerusalem Paper these days?" Mike asked.
"Quite a bit," Linder told him. "We're tacking on another ten thousand foot addition, and going to set up two new lines. Something new: an unscented, undyed, more biodegradable premium toilet paper. More environmentally sound."
"Yeah, but how bad is it going to stink up the town?" Mike asked. The new plant wasn't too bad, but the old one, the one that had gone up in the fire, had reeked to high heaven.
"Oh, Christ," Linder snorted. "Not a bit. We got so many environmental controls, OSHA controls, health department controls, you name it controls, we're going to have to kill half a forest filling out forms before we wipe a single butt."
"Any new hiring?"
"Maybe half a dozen," Linder said. "Nothing spectacular. This new line is going to be pretty automated. Maybe not even any more local pulp cutting; the biggest part of what we do now is with pre-chipped stuff the railroad hauls in."
"When do you think you're going to be able to go on line?"
"Fall, maybe, if all the paperwork gets done. You'd better talk to Chip Halsey about it, though. I wouldn't want him to think that I'm going behind his back."
That made the coffee stop worthwhile, all by itself. This was a big story, Mike thought, one that the stringer out here had totally missed, being too involved in the end of the basketball season. He'd talk to Halsey, and then rub the stringer's nose in it. "Sure will," Mike agreed.
"You coming out for the snowmobile race this weekend?" Linder asked.
"You haven't got enough snow left for a snowmobile race," Mike protested. "Besides, when it gets to April, I'm past thinking about snowmobiles. Maybe I'll send Pat out. The kid needs something to do on the weekends to keep his mind occupied."
