Cheboygan, Michigan

It had been a warm February for northern Michigan. The snow fell in big clumsy flakes and melted on its way down. Clearing the fog from the windshield with the sleeve of his hunting jacket, Jack Saiget turned the pickup right on Pine Street heading for the Cheboygan library. His heater labored with a stoic wheezy stubbornness. He should get it fixed, but the furnace needed replacing, the garbage disposal had tried to eat a metal spatula and died, Jenny needed new basketball sneakers, and his left rear tire was going bald. He rode on a see-saw of indecision about which expense was most necessary.

He was late getting off work and if he didn’t make good time he’d miss Jenny’s game. He hoped she really wanted to play. He hoped she’d get off the bench soon. He had a lot of hopes about Jenny and basketball.

Jack hurried to the main desk in the library and looked around helplessly. He always felt stupid in libraries. He wasn’t a book-learner. The most important things he’d learned by getting his hand’s dirty. 

A rather queenly looking elderly lady looked up from a computer and smiled at him. He’d never seen her before. He didn’t spend much time in the library, but his daughter did so he was often waiting in the parking lot to take her home where he saw most everybody who came and went. Jenny claimed the internet at home was too slow for getting her homework done.

“Can I help you with something?” Continue reading →

Cheboygan, Michigan

Tammy was forty-one and not getting any younger. She was nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother, and if things didn’t start moving in the right direction she’d be nobody’s girl. She kept a suitcase packed under the bed, and every time Johnny left the room, she slipped a few bills from his wallet. The week before, she snuck his Rolex from the night stand and took it downtown for appraisal. Oh how Johnny loved to show off that Rolex, making a big show of winding it in public, calling out the time like a town crier. According to the local jeweler, the Rolex he usually wore on his thin hairy wrist was worth about $12 and wouldn’t even buy Tammy a bus ticket out of town.

The payoff better be worth it, she told herself for the thousandth time. She hitched up the straps of her sundress and put on the zirconium studs Johnny had given her for her fortieth birthday. He’d claimed they were real diamonds, but Tammy was nobody’s fool when it came to jewelry. Continue reading →

Cheboygan, Michigan

Nick sat at his desk waiting for his editor, Tom Parker, to leave the Tribune Building for the night with the paper put to bed. It was midnight, hot and sticky for Cheboygan. The air conditioning was laboring, and sweat inched along Nick’s hairline making his head itch.

“Hey, Nick,” said Parker on his way out, “What are you working on?”

“The history piece.”

“Excellent. You’re ahead of schedule.”

Parker was new, young and organized, the polar opposite of the last Editor.

When he locked the door after Parker, Nick turned off the overhead lights and sat back down at his desk. Paper dust swirled under his desk lamp. His new Apple computer screen threw a blue hue around his cubicle. Continue reading →

Cheboygan, Michigan

Nick and Quinn Johnston stood at the edge of the boardwalk as the evening star appeared in a wedgewood blue sky above Mullett Lake south of the city. The charter boats that were usually docked along the bank had been moved out of the way.

Lifted into the soft light by a giant crane, a crushed Packard rose slowly, water gushing from the windows and out the doors.

Nick wrote in his notepad with his head down, immersed in thought. He was working on his lead-in for the front page story of the next day’s Tribune.

“Got something for you,” Quinn said.

“What’s that?” Nick didn’t look up from his scribbling. Continue reading →

Cheboygan, Michigan

Jenny’s mother loved peonies. Jenny didn’t care about peonies, except they smelled good. She sat on the grass in front of a dead patch of the faded and rusty pink flowers and tried to remember what her mother did about the dead stalks. But it was all too much to think about; how to keep the garden nice, how to keep her dad from looking like a hobo when he went to work in the mornings, how to keep up with the housework and her schoolwork. She wanted to throw a good old-fashioned tantrum. She lay back in the grass and listened to the cicadas.

Summer was over. There would be Indian Summer and some nice warm days ahead, but it was already getting dark early in the evening. Her dad was at the library looking through books about Packard cars and the history of Cheboygan, trying to find out all he could about Mr. William Endicott. Her dad was obsessed with his ghost. Continue reading →