Towering - By Alex Flinn Page 0,16

up. After that, there was nothing but bare trees, ice-covered roads, snow, and more snow. The tires on the old car had looked close to bald when I left, so I drove slow. It was the kind of place where people just left things by the side of the road, abandoned. I passed a boarded-up bakery with a Closed sign and a hotel with a weather-beaten For Sale sign. I saw an old doghouse on its side, then an empty stand that had once held firewood for sale. Then, there was nothing but trees again for a long while. I checked my phone. Still no signal. I didn’t even want to talk to anyone, but still. Everything was white and gray and empty. It looked like the end of the world and the haze of nuclear winter. My soul felt like the landscape here. It was hard to believe that, back home, there were people wearing bright colors and going to the movies, too many people shopping at malls, buying things they didn’t even need, returning gifts they’d just gotten to get other stuff. Here, it felt like they didn’t even exist anymore. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe I belonged here, here with this mournful woman and the ghost of her dead daughter.

Finally, I saw a building, its sign barely visible through the snowy haze. Hemingway’s Hardware and Sporting Goods, it said with no irony at all.

I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot. I contemplated leaving the car running in case it didn’t want to start again after it stopped. Finally, I decided to chance it.

The hardware store wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before either. In front was a bulletin board with items for sale, cats and snowmobiles. In its center was a Missing Person sign with a photo of a guy about my age. I examined it. The date he’d gone missing was a little over a year earlier. I counted him, Danielle, and the girl Danielle had mentioned in her diary, all missing. This place was starting to look like a rerun of Cold Case.

The sporting goods section was a wall devoted to fishing lures and guns. Another wall held secondhand items, waffle irons and battered board games, irons and baby dolls, model Hess trucks and vacuum cleaners. A fancy hairbrush that looked like silver lay on a shelf by a monkey made of coconut shells that someone had bought on vacation. Three golden retrievers lounged in various locations, and there were two white pigeons in a cage with a sign that said Wedding doves for rent. Ask Josh. The only other customer was a man in his seventies, examining a television set that had an antenna attached to the top.

“Hey, she’s got you running errands already.” Josh came up behind me.

“Yeah, I might need a jump-start—or a mechanic—if this car of hers doesn’t start again.”

He looked out the window. “Oh, that car’s not that old. People around here believe in keeping things. We don’t need any newfangled stuff when our stuff works just fine.”

I thought he was joking when he said “newfangled,” but I couldn’t be sure.

“I mean . . .” He held up the fancy silver hairbrush with engraved flowers all over it. “Why have a plastic brush when you can have this one that weighs ten pounds, and why have one of those big, ugly flat screens when you can have this cute one?”

I nodded toward the old man, who was trying the television’s knobs. “Can you even get cable on that thing?”

“If you can, he’ll do it. Jerry knows a thing or two about repairs.”

“Well, I’m learning. I’m looking for cabinet hinges. And I had a few questions.”

“Cabinet hinges. What kind?”

I held out the old one I’d taken off. “Like this.”

He gestured me toward another section, sort of hidden, considering this was a hardware store, behind the duck decoys and the tents and looked around. “We don’t seem to have those in stock. I could order it, though, and you could pick it up in a few days.”

The internet would probably be faster, but I wasn’t really in a hurry. My grandfather always said it was important to patronize local businesses. Besides, I wanted info from Josh. So I said, “That would be great. Thanks.”

I followed him to the counter, making conversation about another topic. “So, what’s with the pigeons?”

“We rent them out for weddings and stuff. They look like doves, but pigeons always come back home. We’ve got a falcon too, but