By the time Cody was into his third week of his temporary summer job at the Spearfish Lake Police Station, he’d come to the conclusion that Charlie had been right about the two things he had promised about the job. He did learn quite a bit about police procedures, at least the way things were done in Spearfish Lake. Beyond that, it was dull, but it paid in money, not a lot, but some, and it beat doing nothing.

One of the good parts about the job was that he learned a good deal about the practical side of police work, at least as it applied to being a policeman. Mostly it wasn’t very exciting; three or four incidents a shift was a busy day for a Spearfish Lake cop, and most of those incidents were pretty minor, running to speeding tickets, a lost dog, or the like. Sometimes writing up the paperwork after the incident took more time than dealing with the incident itself.

There was a considerable amount of paperwork, though, and much of what Cody did was help Charlie keep up with it, doing some typing and filing, and that sort of thing. On a busy morning he might answer a half dozen calls a day on the department’s business line; emergency calls didn’t go to that line, but were handled by the call center across the street at the sheriff’s office. Once in a while, someone came into the office to see about one thing or another; sometimes Cody could help them, but at other times he had to call Charlie in on it. All in all, that left him with a lot of free time, and he spent that time reading training manuals and the like, so he did get something productive out of the down time.

If anything, the whole experience made him wonder just how bad he wanted to go into law enforcement as a career, at least in a small town like Spearfish Lake. Maybe it wouldn’t be quite as bad in a bigger city, he reasoned, but he knew that in bigger cities he’d be running into situations that perhaps he didn’t want to deal with.

Although Cody hadn’t been able to talk with Mr. Schindenwulfe as much as he would have liked about a career as an attorney, in some ways it seemed to have some potential. Not all attorneys were up to their necks in criminal cases, but from Cody’s viewpoint a lot of what Mr. Schindenwulfe did was help people out when they had trouble dealing with a system that frequently was complicated and incomprehensible, things like wills and property transfers, as an example. From his viewpoint, it seemed that an attorney was as much in the business of protecting the weak from the strong as a policeman was.

It all needed some thought, and Cody was glad that Charlie had pointed out to him months before that it wasn’t something that needed to be decided right away. If he went on to college, and that seemed just about dead certain either way, he had several years to make up his mind; perhaps he might decide to do something else entirely.

Cody wasn’t particularly thinking about the question on the last Monday morning in June as he lackadaisically worked on typing up a report that Charlie wanted him to do. He was taking his time, since if he was lucky he might be able to stretch the job out all morning. He’d be getting off at noon unless something came up, and in the back of his head he was considering what he might do with Janice in the afternoon. He wasn’t having much in the way of good ideas. In other years he might have gone somewhere to hang out with Shay, but with his brother working at Cedar Point, that wasn’t even a consideration. The family hadn’t heard much about what Shay was doing down there other than the fact that they’d moved him around to several different jobs. He seemed to be having fun, but that was about all they’d heard.

Anyway, the odds seemed likely that he and Janice would wind up doing what they did most of the time they were together on these summer afternoons – spend some time reading, mess around on the computer a little, or hop in the pickup and go somewhere mostly for the sake of going somewhere. Once in a while they borrowed kayaks from the rental fleet at the store and paddled around the lake a little, but it was still June and already that was getting dull. Maybe they could drive down to Camden and catch a movie . . .

The door opened, and Cody glanced up to see who was walking in. Hopefully it would be something interesting, something to make the morning go more quickly.

He recognized the visitor at first glance: Susan McMahon, the daughter of the editor of the Record-Herald. Susan was a shirt-tail relative of sorts, his Aunt Tiffany’s youngest sister. Susan was several years older than Cody, and he didn’t know the blonde girl very well, but on the rare occasions that they’d spent any time talking she’d proved to be an interesting person. “Hi, Susan,” he spoke up – he knew she didn’t like to be called “Sue” – “What brings you here today?”

“Oh, Dad’s without a junior reporter again,” she sighed. “Colby got a job down in Geneva, and left Friday. That left Dad without a junior reporter and I sort of got stuck with making the Monday morning rounds.”

“Gets you out and gives you some exercise,” Cody grinned.

“Oh, I don’t mind doing it once in a while but I hate it when I just get stuck with it,” she shook her head, “and I’ve done it enough since middle school that I know how to do it. At least Dad can’t stick me with it for long. I just got back from teaching English as a Second Language in Japan, and now I’m leaving for Germany the end of the week.”

“That ought to do a pretty good job of getting you out of it,” Cody laughed. “Bike tour again?” He knew, of course, that his cousin or whatever she was had been an exchange student in Germany during her junior year of high school, and she’d gone back to Germany every year since to hang out with friends, mostly doing a month or six weeks of bicycle touring. She and her friends had traveled to places like Italy, France, England, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

“Yeah, we’re going to do Denmark, Norway, and Sweden this time,” Susan confirmed. “That ought to be interesting. We speak nine languages between the five of us but Danish, Norwegian and Swedish aren’t among them for any of us, so we ought to really be tourists this time.”

“Sounds like fun,” Cody admitted. “I don’t know that it’s something I’d want to do, but it sounds like you’ll have a good time.”

“I hope so,” she replied. “It may be the last time. We’re all going to be graduating next year and it seems likely that we’re all going to have to grow up and get real lives. Well, Lothar and Freya have another year in uni, so if I’m free next summer we might still do something, I don’t know. A lot depends on if I find a job and what it is.”

“So what are you looking for?”

“What I can get, just so long as it’s working overseas somewhere. I mean, I’d like to get a job in video production overseas about anywhere, but I’m not really all that interested if it proves to be in Iraq or Afghanistan or someplace like that. But something overseas, whatever. I’ve about driven the career counselors down at Southern nuts.”

“I can imagine,” Cody grinned. Susan’s career goals were well known in the family, and simple: travel the world and get someone else to pay for it. Ideally, she wanted to be a travel writer or be involved with the production of travel videos, but she didn’t really care and wasn’t picky about it. “Someplace where you know the language, right?”

“Doesn’t have to be, I usually pick up languages pretty quickly.” Again, Cody knew about that: Susan was one of those irritating people with a seemingly magic talent to learn languages. He’d had enough trouble with his one required year of high school French; in addition to English, Susan spoke German like a native – with a North German accent, certainly not American. She was fluent in French and Spanish and had enough spoken Japanese to get by, though she didn’t know the written ideographs, and she had a smattering of other mostly European languages.

“Is that what you’ve been studying at school?”

“No,” she smiled. “I figured if I’d actually studied any language, at least enough to major in it, I’d get tempted to become a language teacher. The last thing I want to do in my life is to spend my time trying to pound the rudiments of a language into American high school kids who couldn’t care less.”

“Hey, that’s me you’re talking about,” Cody laughed. “I guess I thought you were studying some language or other down where you’re going to school.”

“No, international business major with a video production minor,” she replied. “Like I said, I didn’t want to approach anything that would get me even close to getting sucked into teaching forever.”

“Sounds like you did pretty well at it. Let’s see, as I recall, you’re going to Southern Michigan University, down at Hawthorne, aren’t you? How do you like it down there?”

“Pretty good,” she said. “It’s an interesting college, a little out of the ordinary. They tend to be pretty career oriented, and not real big on fuzzy subjects. They don’t even have an education department, which is part of why I decided to go there.”

“You really don’t want to be a teacher, do you?” he laughed.

“No way!” she laughed with him. “My worst nightmare!” They giggled for a minute, and then she went on. “Southern is really a neat school, and it’s pretty different. It’s far and away the smallest of the state schools and not all that far from Western, so when the state got the school shoved down their throat, the decision was made to do things a little differently to make the place stand out.”

“Like what?”

“Like they don’t have an athletic program, not at all. Nothing. Not even a physical education department.”

“You know,” he replied thoughtfully, “having put up with the jocks all through high school, not having any athletics at all sounds pretty good to me.”

“I think that was what the administration was thinking about when they set it up that way. See, it used to be a little religious school, even smaller than it is now. It went belly up, and the local representative managed to get it taken into the state system as a bare plant, no staff, no administration, no kids, so there was no reason to not try to do things a different way. There wasn’t even a science building, I suppose because the old religious administration didn’t want the kids to learn that not only did Darwin exist, but he was right. So when they were looking for a place to put the new science building, they planted it right on the fifty yard line of the football field.”

“I have to admit, I’m liking the sound of this place better and better,” he smiled. “Do they offer criminal justice, pre-law and nursing?”

“As far as I know, but you probably ought to check the web site to be sure. How does the nursing figure in?”

“It’s not settled yet, but Janice is thinking she wants to go into the field,” Cody replied. “I don’t think it’s her life goal yet, but it’s the only subject she’s shown any real interest in so far.”

“You’re saying both of you want to go to the same school?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Cody replied, thinking that if Janice was going to go to college at all, it would have to be in a place where they could have close contact much of the time, so he could encourage her. While he liked Janice, she was still fragile in a number of ways, and was always saying that she needed his protection. It would have been nice to wean her away from that a little, but it didn’t seem like it was going to happen soon. “Let’s face it, it’s something that we’re both going to have to settle on in the next several months.”

Susan gave him a knowing smile. “Then you really ought to look at Southern,” she grinned. “One of the neat things about the place is that they don’t make you live in the dorm, not even your freshman year. I’ve never spent a night in one, and from what I hear some of them are real zoos.”

That was an angle Cody hadn’t considered. He knew that Shay had to live in a dorm at Lake State as a freshman, and pretty well planned on staying there. But to have to live in a dorm apart from Janice would be very hard on her – and might make college a make-or-break situation for her, and therefore for him as well.

“That’s good to know,” he said as neutrally as possible. While many people seemed to think it was common knowledge that he and Janice were not only having sex, but having a lot of it, the truth would be even harder to believe. He was sure that Susan had heard those stories, but he just didn’t want to make any indication to her about them. “So what do you do?”

“Well, they don’t have enough dorms to begin with,” Susan replied. “And I sure didn’t want to live in one, so before I moved down there Dad and I went down looking for apartments. We found one in a four-unit building where the rent was pretty high, but the place was for sale. So we sat down and did the math and wound up buying the place. The rent from the other three units not only covers the cost of mortgage payments, there’s been enough left over for me to go to Europe every summer.”

“Now that,” Cody shook his head, “is a deal and a half.”

“We think so,” she said. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do about it when next spring rolls around. We’ll probably have to sell it. If you and Janice decide to go there, you might have to get with Dad and talk about buying the place from us.”

“That sounds like it offers a lot of possibilities,” Cody said, realizing that he now had something interesting and useful for him and Janice to do this afternoon. “I obviously can’t make a decision right now, maybe not for a few months, probably not until Janice and I can get down there and check the place out for ourselves. And I’d have to talk over buying your apartment building with Dad, of course. But Susan, thanks! Janice and I will give it a real hard look.”

“I realize you can’t make a decision right now,” Susan replied. “But I think that if we can solve this apartment sale problem easily and not have to go through a realtor it would simplify things a bit. Besides, a deal like that would be nice to keep in the family.”

They talked for a few more minutes about the college and Susan’s apartment. Finally she said that she really had to be going, because she didn’t want her father to think that she was screwing off as much as she really was – if she was as efficient as she could be, he would be leaning on her to work even more. She left Cody with a lot of things to think about.

Although he’d only listened to her talk about it, and hadn’t even visited the web site, he was very interested in Southern Michigan University. It seemed to have a lot of good points. On thinking about it, he was aware that he really hadn’t thought a great deal about where he wanted to go to college, other than that he didn’t want to go to Lake State and follow in Shay’s footsteps. Oh, he’d thought about this college and that one, even looked at some web sites, but somehow it seemed far off in the future, something that he could consider at a later date. Now, the later date was fast approaching, and some decisions were going to have to be made.

Also, the reality hadn’t yet struck him that wherever he went to college, it would almost certainly have to be where Janice went, too. Realistically, the chance of the two of them going to different places was just about zero – she seemed so dependent on him that it appeared to be out of the question. In a year and a couple months they would be heading out to do it, and while he hoped that she’d be independent of him enough by then that it wouldn’t be necessary to be around her all the time, he couldn’t bet on it happening. After all, not a lot of progress had been made in that direction in the past six months. As far as that went, he’d become comfortable with having her so close to him.

While the sex issue was still out there, since that evening a month before when it had come out in the open, it was clear to him that sooner or later they were going to be doing something more than sleeping in the same bed. When that happened, what was awkward now was going to get even more awkward – but he was beginning to realize that he’d become used to it enough that it was going to be hard to give up when they went to college. If Susan was right, Southern Michigan University and her apartment might offer a way around that touchy question out of sight of the gossips in Spearfish Lake, no small consideration.

Finally noon crawled around, and Charlie told Cody that he’d see him tomorrow. With his mind rolling with the possibilities, Cody headed for the door and started to walk home.

Since it was only a short walk, only a few blocks, Cody had walked to work rather than driving the pickup. On his way home, he happened to run into Wyatt Curtis, coming out of a store. Wyatt was sort of a friend, not real close, but Shay and Wyatt’s older brother Zeke had been big buddies, jocks of a major sort, and the four of them had hung out together a little since shortly after the Archers moved to Spearfish Lake. “Hey, Cody!” Wyatt said, “strange to see you without Janice.”

“I had to work,” Cody replied. “She got to sleep in this morning, lucky her.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re working over at the cop shop, right? How’s that going?”

“Really kind of dull. Mostly it’s just paperwork and answering the phone, but it should pretty well last me through the summer.”

“So are you and Janice doing much besides hanging out and enjoying yourselves?”

Cody was sure that was a sneaky way of saying that Wyatt thought the two of them must be screwing each other silly, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Cody thought that must be the common impression around town; at least that was what he had picked up from Susan. “Really pretty dull,” he replied. “We read a little, hang out on the beach a little, occasionally watch a movie on TV or something. Honestly, I’m almost half ready for school to get started again.”

“Yeah, me too,” Wyatt agreed. “Spring Trevetheck and I have been getting together and having a little fun on the computer. World of Warcraft. It’s pretty neat, got a lot of interesting things to it. You ever try that one?”

“Afraid not,” Cody said, not really surprised at the statement. Wyatt just about lived on his computer; Cody didn’t mind using his, and spent time surfing the net here and there, but he usually could find better things to do. “Neither Jan or I are much on computer games. Windows Solitaire is about the limit of my computer gaming.”

“Yeah, you shoot real guns, not computer ones,” Wyatt laughed. “There’s got to be a big difference. Hey, for a change sometime, maybe the four of us can get together and you and Janice can see what a real computer game is like.”

“It’s not impossible,” Cody nodded. “I’ll have to ask Janice, see what she thinks.” Looking to change the subject, he said, “Hey, you been doing any thinking about college?”

“Yeah, some. Zeke has me about convinced to go to Northern Michigan. That’s where he goes. He says it’s pretty cool. How about you?”

“Shay is trying to talk me to into going to Lake State,” Cody replied honestly, “but I’m not sure that’s where I want to go. It’s pretty clear that Janice and I want to go to the same place, so it makes things a little more complicated.”

“Boy, she has you tied up in knots, doesn’t she?”

“We’re close, but I don’t think you could say that. It’s just that we have other things to think about too. It’s not like we’ve made our minds up yet, but we’re going to have to be picking one pretty soon now.”

“Yeah, I need to be making up my mind,” Wyatt agreed. “Hey, I’ve got to get moving. Spring is going to be wondering what happened to me. Like I said, let’s get together sometime.”

“Yeah, might make the summer go a little quicker.”

“Catch you around, Cody. Don’t go letting the nights get too long on you.”

“See you around, Wyatt. I’ve got to be getting on home, too, or Janice is going to start wondering where I am.”

Cody headed on up the block. So Wyatt and Spring were going out? That was interesting! Wyatt was something of a geek, at least compared to his older brother Zeke, wrapped up in computers and especially computer games. Spring was, well, different, very intense, almost otherworldly; the fact that she was into computer games at all was a sign that perhaps she actually had a normal side to her. On thinking about it, he figured that it couldn’t be too serious between the two of them; he couldn’t imagine the two of them having sex, like half the town seemed to think about him and Janice. That was one good thing about going to college; he and Janice would be away from all the small-town gossip, people assuming things that had no basis in reality.

On thinking it over a little more, Cody realized that was another good point about going to Southern Michigan – it was far away. Susan had told him that as far as she knew she was the only Spearfish Lake kid going there, and she would be gone by the time Cody and Janice arrived, assuming that was where they wound up going. Granted, it would be a long drive to get there, much worse than Lake State, but that wasn’t all bad. After all, the idea of going away to college was at least the idea of going away, breaking the chains to home. While he and Janice had talked about that angle of it very little, it was pretty clear to him that she would like to go far away if she had the chance, someplace where her history and the reputation of her father and brothers wouldn’t haunt her.

Cody continued thinking about the idea as he turned onto Lakeshore. He took a glance at the broad expanse of beach that fronted the lake side of the street for several blocks. There weren’t very many people out there, and only a couple bikinis worth giving more than a glance. Nobody seemed to be in swimming, not that it was surprising; the lake was still cold, and it never warmed up very much, even in late summer. In spite of spending a few hours out there in the sun over the last month, he and Janice hadn’t made it into the water yet, although presumably they would have to give it a try one of these days. But lying out on the beach with Janice was fun, especially since she’d taken to wearing some really tiny bikinis, probably to try his resolve a little.

A couple of blocks up, he turned onto Grove and walked on up to the house, going in the back door as is often the usual thing in small towns. “Hey, Jan, I’m home,” he called.

“Good,” she replied from the living room. “I was beginning to wonder.” Within seconds, she appeared in the doorway, came to him, and gave him a big hug and a small kiss – something else she had been doing regularly, at least when no one else was around. That had started over the course of the last month or so. “Well, did anything interesting happen today?”

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