The display case came apart in fluted glass panels, and Dot priced the wreckage at forty dollars at most. Orv had kept everything. The third case held the Kermiss treasures: a stack of booyah ribbons from the 1970s, a three-legged burlap sack, a photograph album with a black paper cover and the binding gone soft.
Dot sat on the floor of the empty banquet room and opened it. Dust made her sneeze. She turned pages carefully—Kermiss after Kermiss, booyah kettles steaming, men in aprons stirring with canoe paddles, children tumbling out of jute sacks. The 1989 spread was three pages. She almost missed it.
At the edge of the frame, half-cropped, a woman's shoulder and hand. The hand held a paper cup. The shoulder wore a brown corduroy jacket with a missing button at the cuff. Dot knew that jacket. She had worn it herself, in seventh grade, until the sleeves rode past her wrists.
Ellen Mercier, two weeks before she vanished.
Dot closed the album. Sat for a minute in the quiet of the empty club, a northeast wind nudging the bay against the seawall. Then she stood, tucked the album under her arm, and left through the kitchen, past the $4,200 walk-in cooler that still wheezed like it owed money.
She stopped at Deneys' Market for a can of cream of mushroom soup, ninety-nine cents, a bag of egg noodles at $2.29, and a can of Chicken of the Sea at $2.19. At the farmhouse she boiled the noodles, stirred in the soup, the tuna, a handful of frozen peas. $5.47 total, plus forty-five minutes of her life. She wrapped the dish in a towel and drove to the rectory.
Father Bert answered the door in an old cardigan and housedress slippers. “Dorothy Mercier, you’ve brought a bribe.”
“Tuna casserole. The peas were a gamble.”
“Sit down. I’ll make coffee.” He led her to the small kitchen with the cracked linoleum and the radio tuned low to an old polka hour. She set the dish on the counter and took a chair. He poured two mugs from a percolator that looked older than she was. “You came about the appraisal, I imagine. Parish archive’s open to you anytime, but you already helped yourself to the Kermiss records.”
“How did you—”
“Peg told me at the fish fry. Said you’d been up there with the photo albums. I’m a priest, Dorothy. I hear everything at least twice.”
Dot ate a forkful of casserole. “The farm crisis years. I was going through the ’89 Kermiss, and it put me in mind of it. You were here.”
Father Bert’s spoon stilled above his mug. “I buried most of the farmers who lost their places. Some twice—first the farm, then the man.” He set the spoon down. “The bank man, Kolbeck, over at the old Namur Farmers State branch. None of us said his name with anything Christian in our hearts. Your father didn’t lose the place, but I recall he came near it.” He paused. “Your mother—she brought a Belgian pie to every Kermiss. Lemon meringue, I think it was.”
Dot waited. The priest’s eyes dropped to his coffee.
“She’d set it on the dessert table by the south tent, the one with the rips in the canvas.” He was talking about the pie, not the woman. “Lemon meringue, yes. I’d have a slice before the auction started.”
“Father Bert.” Dot’s voice stayed level. “Her shoulder’s in the photograph. The one from ’89. Her hand. The jacket with the missing button.”
He said nothing for a long moment. The radio played a waltz. “I have a meeting with the altar society at two. Let me wrap this for you before you go.”
It was the clumsiest exit Dot had ever seen him make.
She drove to Lu & Peg’s under a flat gray sky, the wind from the northeast scouring leaves across the highway. Peg was wiping down the counter, the lunch crowd gone, a single slice of Belgian pie under the glass dome. Rice, Dot’s favorite, $3.50 for the slab. “Sit,” Peg said, sliding it across the counter. “You look like you just cross-examined a bishop.”
“Father Bert and a tuna casserole. The casserole did the work.” Dot took a bite. The pie was warm, the rice pudding sweet and slightly chewy. “I found a Kermiss photo from ’89. Mama’s in it. At the edge.”
Peg set down her rag. “Oh, honey.”
Lu came in from the back room, a shipping box in her arms, and stopped when she saw the two of them at the counter. “What happened.”
“I showed Father Bert the picture. He spent a lot of time on the pie crust.”
Lu set the box down hard. The napkin holder jumped. “You cornered Father Bert about Mama. With a casserole. At the rectory.”
“I asked a question.”
“You opened a file.” Lu’s voice had an edge Dot hadn’t heard in years. “That’s what you do—you file things. You price them and you file them and you decide what’s a discrepancy. She sent postcards, Dot. From Florida. I have the one she wrote to me on my confirmation day, with a flamingo sticker. You don’t get to make her a mystery. She gets to be a coward.”
The word hung in the room. Peg set a hand on Lu’s wrist.
Dot looked at her sister across the counter. “What do you remember of that day?”
Lu laughed, short and bitter. “Kermiss ’89. The jute-sack race. I fell. Cut my knee open on a rock. Peg—Peg wasn’t even ours yet, she was just the new girl from Manitowoc working the bait shack—she came with a first-aid kit and said I didn’t need stitches, just a Band-Aid and ten minutes not to be a hero. First time anyone was kind to me that didn’t have to be.” She shook her head. “That’s my memory of that day. Not Mama’s shoulder in a picture. And you’re going to dig her up anyway, because you can’t let anything be.”
Dot didn’t answer. Lu turned and walked back into the storeroom. Peg watched her go, then faced Dot and said, “Well. That’s the first time she’s ever called her a coward out loud.”
Dot finished her pie. She was not hungry, but Peg had given it to her, and she had learned as a girl that you finish what Peg gives you.
At the farmhouse that evening, the furnace rattled to life as the wind shifted north. Dot sat at the kitchen table under the overhead light and opened the album again. She lifted the 1989 photograph free of its black corners and held it close.
In the lower right, stamped in gold by the developer: NOV 89. The print had come back the month Ellen disappeared. And the photograph’s edge—the left side, where her mother’s shoulder cut out of frame—was not the scalloped developer’s cut. It was straight. Trimmed by hand. Someone had taken scissors to history and taken something out.
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