heart, would he care for some leftover turkey dinner? Last year they did goose but this year it was a big old turkey, well, coffee then, won’t take a moment to brew a fresh pot—and Shadow took a large red toy car off a window seat and sat down, while Missy Gunther asked if he had met his neighbors yet, and Shadow confessed that he hadn’t.
There were, he was informed, while the coffee dripped and brewed, four other inhabitants of his apartment building—back when it was the Pilsen place the Pilsens lived in the downstairs flat and rented out the upper two flats, now their apartment, that was the downstairs one and that was taken by a couple of young men, Mr. Holz and Mr. Neiman, they actually are a couple and when she said couple, Mr. Ainsel, heavens, we have all kinds here, more than one kind of tree in the forest, although mostly those kind of people wind up in Madison or the Twin Cities, but truth to tell, nobody here gives it a second thought. They’re in Key West for the winter, they’ll be back in April, he’ll meet them then. The thing about Lakeside is that it’s a good town. Now next door to Mr. Ainsel, that’s Marguerite Olsen and her little boy, a sweet lady, sweet, sweet lady, but she’s had a hard life, still sweet as pie, and she works for the Lakeside News. Not the most exciting newspaper in the world, but truth to tell Missy Gunther thought that was probably the way most folk around here liked it.
Oh, she said, and poured him coffee, she just wished that Mr. Ainsel could see the town in the summer or late in the spring, when the lilacs and the apple and the cherry blossoms were out, she thought there was nothing like it for beauty, nothing like it anywhere in the world.
Shadow gave her a five-hundred-dollar deposit, and he climbed up into the car and started to back it up, out of her front yard and onto the driveway proper. Missy Gunther tapped on his front window. “This is for you,” she said. “I nearly forgot.” She handed him a buff envelope. “It’s kind of a gag. We had them printed up a few years back. You don’t have to look at it now.”
He thanked her, and drove, cautiously, back into the town. He took the road that ran around the lake. He wished he could see it in the spring, or the summer, or the fall: it would be very beautiful, he had no doubt of that.
In ten minutes he was home.
He parked the car out on the street and walked up the outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy Gunther had given him.
It contained a passport. Blue, laminated cover and, inside, a proclamation that Michael Ainsel (his name handwritten in Missy Gunther’s precise handwriting) was a citizen of Lakeside. There was a map of the town on the next page. The rest of it was filled with discount coupons for various local stores.
“I think I may like it here,” said Shadow, aloud. He looked out of the icy window at the frozen lake. “If it ever warms up.”
There was a bang at the front door at around 2:00 P.M. Shadow had been practicing the Sucker Vanish with a quarter, tossing it from one hand to the other undetectably. His hands were cold enough and clumsy enough that he kept dropping the coin onto the table, and the knock at the door made him drop it again.
He went to the door and opened it.
A moment of pure fear: the man at the door wore a black mask which covered the lower half of his face. It was the kind of mask that a bank robber might wear on TV, or a serial killer from a cheap movie might wear to scare his victims. The top of the man’s head was covered by a black knit cap.
Still, the man was smaller and slighter than Shadow, and he did not appear to be armed. And he wore a bright plaid coat, of the kind that serial killers normally avoid.
“Ih hihelhan,” said the visitor.
“Huh?”
The man pulled the mask downward, revealing Hinzelmann’s cheerful face. “I said, it’s Hinzelmann. You know, I don’t know what we did before they came up with these masks. Well, I do remember what