South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [4]
Suddenly, it was real. She came around a bend and over a small rise, and the lake and town appeared below her. It was as if the road had been unfurling for all these miles for just this purpose: to bring her to this spot.
The town sat at the base of a steep hill at the edge of the water, a lonely collection of buildings she could take in all in one glance from this distance. Huddled Under the sleet that had been falling for hours, it looked stark and desolate. And beautiful. There was still snow on the ground—had been, for the last twenty miles—and small icebergs bobbed near shore, waves lashing over them. Madeline had read that Lake Superior was as big as the State of South Carolina. It looked like an ocean. Without it, McAllaster might have been any of the small, drab hamlets she’d driven through today. With it—and from this vantage point high above—the effect was somehow thrilling.
Madeline slowed to a stop and sat motionless at the wheel, her hands still carefully placed at the ten and two o’clock positions, staring. Even in the driving rain the lake glittered and shone with movement, with the mystery of its whole huge self. It dawned on her that everyone’s cautions had been correct, even if for the wrong reasons. This was a foreign, otherworldly place, complete with magic and perils and tests.
Madeline spent a long moment gazing at the town. She Understood in a way she hadn’t before that if she drove down that hill, her life would change forever. Was it really too late to forget this idea? She shifted the car back into gear: of course it was. She had plenty of faults but being a coward wasn’t one of them. She would not make herself ridiculous by turning back now, no matter what her misgivings. She cruised down the hill and pulled Up in front of a grand old empty relic of a building—faded lettering above the second-floor windows proclaimed it “The Hotel Leppinen” but Madeline doubted anyone had stayed there in fifty years—and looked at Gladys Hansen’s directions.
Pass the Hotel on Main, the note said. Go left on Edsel two blocks, left again on Lake, and right on Bessel. Go just past the big hemlock that’s cracking the sidewalk. We are the third house from the corner, number 26. Madeline had read this a dozen times before she left. It hadn’t seemed quite real. But now she was at the hotel and could see the sign for Edsel and there was no going back.
She started the Buick again. From high on the hill, the town had appeared mythical, a symbol of man’s insignificance in the great scope of nature. Up close it was far more prosaic. She saw a hardware store, a grocery, a gas station, a bank, a bar, a few parked cars and pickups, and not one person. A dog trotted down the center of the street, as purposeful as a pedestrian out on errands. She turned left on Edsel and felt foolish for flicking on her blinker.
Number 26 Bessel was a small, elderly house covered in pebbly brown shingles. Lace curtains hung in the two windows that were centered on either side of the front door. Daffodils bloomed at the base of the steps and marched in a narrow row around the house’s perimeter, and patches of grimy snow lay in shady places, but otherwise the yard was bare. It was a little forbidding—so spare and plain. Madeline sat very still, listening to the roar of the lake, the rain streaming on the car’s roof, the sharp, solitary scream of a gull. This was a wide, wild quiet, so spacious it seemed endless, and she wondered how it might change a person.
“Are you going to sit there all day noodling, or are you getting out?” Gladys Hansen said, loud enough to