Free Black Otter Bay by Vincent Wyckoff Page B

he said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
    His words draped a mask of confusion over her face. How did he know?
    â€œWe just got word up at the Hall. It’s your friend, Rosie. You know, from the bait shop? She drowned today working her minnow seines.”
    Abby shook her head. “Dad?”
    â€œYou know how high the water is now that the ice went out. And Rosie was really old. She shouldn’t have been out in the cold water like that.”
    â€œDad? Listen to me.”
    â€œMost of the rocks are still ice covered. It was just an unfortunate—”
    â€œDad!”
    Matthew paused, seemed to actually see his daughter for the first time. Saw the disemboweled phone in her lap. “What is it, honey?”
    â€œBen’s gone, Dad. Ben’s gone.”

FIVE
    Mrs. Virginia Bean
    T he United States Post Office in Black Otter Bay sat about forty yards back from the curbing on Main Street near the center of town. Main Street was simply a narrowed stretch of Highway 61 where it passed through the city limits. The shoulder of the old highway in front of the post office had been converted into half a dozen angled parking slots for customers, with a series of five flag poles lining the front of the property. Every morning at six o’clock Mrs. Virginia Bean, the postmistress, raised the United States flag on the tallest, center pole. On days when the weather wasn’t too disagreeable, she ran a Minnesota state flag up one of the other poles and a black-and-white POW-MIA flag on another one. After twenty-five years as postmistress, however, she still had no idea what the other two poles were for.
    Several years ago, some local hooligans used the two outer poles for their pranks. Arriving for work early in the morning, Mrs. Bean found any number of odd items flapping in the breeze atop one of the poles. Usually, it would be a pair of men’s underwear—sometimes long johns, other times briefs. One time, she found a high school letter jacket from Two Rivers, an Iron Range town seventy-five miles inland. She always suspected Daniel Simon to be the instigator, but Mrs. Bean had kept that suspicion to herself. She felt sorry for the Simon family, having to live with that abusive old drunk. Besides, Daniel always charmed her with his devil-may-care smile, while his younger brother Matthew usually tried to fix things by coming down to retrieve the fluttering garments.
    Now, Mrs. Bean was no prude, but the morning she spotted the black lace bra and panties dangling high above the post office, she decided it had gone far enough. She cut the ropes off the two outer poles and posted a sign on them warning against vandalizing federal property. That was the end to the high-flying underwear, but she never knew if it ended because of her warnings or because Daniel Simon enlisted in the army.
    The post office building itself was easily the ugliest building in Black Otter Bay. For years, Mrs. Bean had pleaded with post office headquarters in Duluth to do something about the rotting siding, sagging eaves, and mouse and chipmunk holes in the trim work. Finally, two years ago, a pallet of five-gallon buckets of paint and supplies arrived on the morning dispatch mail truck. Mrs. Bean advertised for volunteers to help repair, prime, and paint the post office, but, after inspecting the provisions, none of the local professionals would help. If they were going to volunteer their services, they said, the project should at least be suitable for a reference. In their opinion, attaching their names to this job could even hurt their reputations.
    The problem was that the paint had been requisitioned through the federal government from Fort Ripley, 150 miles southwest of town, and consisted of three discontinued camouflage colors from the Vietnam War era. When the military’s current color schemes went toward the desert hues of the Middle East, the forty-year-old jungle colors became obsolete. Sheriff