In spite of Webb’s warning that things would be busier than somewhat, for Mike, his first months at the Record-Herald were hot and dull. They hadn’t installed air conditioning in the office then, and it got a bit uncomfortable – well, more than a bit, when the hot summer sun got around to light the windows in the front of the building. Old man Sanderson was a little on the old fashioned side, and insisted that the front office staff wear ties or skirts, as gender applied, and that didn’t help a lot.
Mike learned a lot that summer otherwise, from Webb, from Virginia Meyers, the older woman who had greeted him when he walked in the door – she’d been the social editor since sometime in the thirties, and knew literally everything that was happening. If she happened to miss something, either Webb or Carrie Evachevski, the good-looking thirtyish woman who ran the big blue Compugraphic typesetting machine, would know about it. Time and again, they’d know more about a story that had taken place than Mike did, even when he’d been present and they hadn’t.
“It takes a while to learn your way around,” Webb told him. “This is all new to you, so don’t let it bother you too much. I’ll admit, Virginia could take you on a walk through the junkyard out beyond the railroad tracks and tell you who got pregnant in what back seat, how much the baby weighed, what part it had in the kindergarten extravaganza, and who the kid is jumping into the back seat with now. But she pulled that stuff on me when I was new here, too.”
What made it worse was Kirsten Langenderfer, who proved to be the assistant advertising sales person. She wore skirts that were most of the way up to the crack of her cute little ass, and thin blouses that let her bra show through, underlining the fact that there was an awful lot to fill out the blouse – and that she didn’t mind showing it off. That could be distracting, to say the least, especially since she rarely gave him any hint that she thought he existed, but seemed to lust after any other unattached guy around. It seemed like she had a bad case of the hots for some new guy about once a week, and Mike got the impression that she did a fair amount of sleeping around. In the office or in his hot little apartment overlooking the city beach up the street, Mike wasted a lot of hours thinking about her, dreaming about what she’d look like without her relatively minimal clothing or in a bikini. But he had trouble getting the time of day from her.
In the first couple months, the only time he managed to get even moderately social with Kirsten was one evening when he’d been having an air-conditioned burger and beer in a local bar, and she dropped in, expecting to meet her date, who never showed. It turned out he’d had a mild accident with his pickup, but she thought she’d been stood up. She and Mike managed to sit and talk about nothing in particular for the evening, but it was clear that if her date showed up Mike was going to be history. Ultimately, Mike wrote her off as a flake he’d be best off avoiding, although if she got interested in him she’d do for a fun evening or two.
However, Mike learned a bit more about Kirsten as an indirect result of yet another story that everybody but he seemed to know about. It wasn’t a big deal of a story, a routine bond sale for a bridge project out in Amboy Township, to the east of Spearfish Lake. At that point Mike couldn’t have found Amboy Township without a map, but at a Tuesday morning story conference, it proved that not only did Webb know about the bond sale the night before, but so did Virginia, and Carrie, and even Kirsten. It made him wonder just what he was doing there. Webb suggested that Mike call the township supervisor, Heikki Toivo, to find out what had happened, and Mike didn’t get the name quite right. “How do I get hold of this Henry Toivo?” he asked no one in particular out in the front office a few minutes later.
Kirsten turned white as a sheet, mumbled, “I better go,” grabbed a briefcase, while leaving the papers for the project she was working on scattered on the desk, and headed for the door.
“What’d I do?” Mike said to Carrie, who was working over at the typesetting machine. “Say the secret word so we can divide up a hundred bucks?”
Carrie got up from the Compugraphic, came over and sat down on Mike’s desk. “I’m afraid you did,” she said. “It’s kind of a long story, but I think you’d better know it.”
It turned out that Henry had been Kirsten’s high school sweetheart, steady date, and more, all through high school, and it was common knowledge that there was going to be a wedding right after Kirsten graduated from high school. Henry was a year ahead of Kirsten, and it was at the height of Vietnam, so he figured he’d better join up, get the service out of the way, and give Kirsten time to graduate and maybe get a year of college before he came home to get married. It was sort of a unilateral decision, and she wasn’t happy about him leaving, but he gave her an engagement ring to make up for it a little. They had an intense period together when he was home at Christmas in 1969, his last leave before Vietnam.
He never came home.
One day, in June of 1970, Henry’s infantry platoon was patrolling in a patch of jungle north of Phuoc Lot. Henry went into a particularly thick patch of jungle, got separated from his unit, and was never seen again.
The Army soon reported him missing in action. A few days after the report reached Spearfish Lake, Henry’s father Heikki, nearly as distraught as Kirsten at the lack of information they were getting from the Army, took his problem to Garth Matson. Matson was a semi-retired bank president who had commanded the local National Guard artillery battalion during World War II, and was also Carrie’s father. Matson had some political connections, and the elder Toivo figured he might be able to pull some strings, and maybe find out a little more.
Matson was genuinely concerned. He hadn’t been particularly happy with some of the stories he’d been hearing about Army screwups, and thought it was a damn shame that a Spearfish Lake kid had to be caught up in them. So, he reached for a special string, his son-in-law, Sergeant Major Gil Evachevski, who was stationed in Germany. Gil had been a Green Beret since the beginning, had spent his fair share of time in-country. He knew people and had favors he could call in.