True to what she had told her parents, Susan didn’t spend long in Spearfish Lake the next day, but she made good use of her time.

On her way up to Spearfish Lake, Susan had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to go crazy about taking stuff from home. She had clothes there, some of them dating back to high school days, but a lot of things didn’t fit very well after her return from China, so there was no point in taking them to Hawthorne. She filled a couple large suitcases and some cardboard boxes, but was a little dismayed at how much was left over. She resolved that sometime – not soon – she was going to take the time to really clean her old room out and throw things away, or maybe give to her mother for inclusion in the next city-wide garage sale.

There were things she decided to take with her, from make-up and personal items on through a collection of books. The latter filled several more boxes, even after she’d taken a little time to pick through them. Once again, she would have to seriously sort through the remainder sometime – not now. There would be better opportunities in the future.

She also took some boxes of housekeeping items, pots, pans, dishes, silverware, and the like that had been packed up and left stacked in the corner of her room since she and Mizuki had left Hawthorne two years previously. She didn’t even bother to sort through those boxes – it would take too much time, even though she wasn’t sure what she had. There was no point in buying items like that locally – they would be available in Hawthorne, after all, and in a big box store there was a good chance that anything missing would be cheaper than in Spearfish Lake anyway. At least that way she could get what she needed, and when she needed it.

Finally, she decided not to take any furniture to Hawthorne at all. She didn’t have the space for it in the Cavalier anyway. She had not been impressed with the furniture that came with the apartment – she’d once owned it anyway – but it would do for a while; she had more important things to do than mess around with furniture this trip. She could replace the more objectionable items piece by piece, shopping on the cheap when the need arose. After all, if she was headed overseas when the time came to leave Hawthorne, she could just abandon it to Cody and Jan, or whoever the new owners might be, and it wouldn’t be any great loss. If by what she considered to be an odd happenstance she decided to stay at Southern Michigan University for longer than she’d first thought, she could revise her thinking when needed.

After all, she took pride in being able to move lightly, so there was no point in overdoing it now. Thoreau had said something about the burden of too many things, but she couldn’t remember the quote right now. She understood what he’d been talking about though.

Toward the middle of the day she decided she needed a break from the chores in her room. She had a couple of things to do downtown, and a couple people she needed to say hello to during her brief stay.

Her first stop was at Marlin Computer, around the corner and up the street from the Record-Herald office. The laptop computer she’d taken to China with her had given out early in her stay, so after some searching with Theo she’d bought a local brand, a Ben-Q, which had keys marked both in Chinese symbols and English, and was loaded with a presumably illegal Windows XP operating system. It was a Chinese computer, after all, and she knew the Chinese were not very good about respecting foreign patents and copyrights. Theo was rather more computer literate than she was, but it still took some time for him to tickle it around so it worked mostly in English, but not entirely.

The Ben-Q also had proved to run hot, had a battery life of about zip, and had taken some fiddling to get to run off a charger, especially with American current. Replacing it had been high on her list when she got home, but she just hadn’t gotten to it until now.

Susan knew that the university would be issuing her a laptop for her official work, but she still needed one for home. She’d been meaning to drop by Marlin Computer to see what they had, mostly because the people there knew a lot about computers, which ones were good, and which were not so good. She could have bought one in a big-box store, but the clerks there might not even know how to turn it on, much less the advantages and disadvantages of one she was looking at.

After some discussion, and some amusement for the Marlin Computer people over the keyboard of the Ben-Q, she settled on a small notebook computer, which would be more portable than the laptop in case she had to travel with it. What was more, the price here was comparable to the big-box store prices she’d happened to notice in the past few weeks, and the guy at Marlin Computer said he could transfer her files from the Ben-Q in only a few minutes. Susan was happy to pull out her credit card and let him have at it.

That left her with an hour to kill. She knew she could go home and work some more, but decided to drop in on Cody’s parents, John and Candice Archer, to see if she could learn a little more about deRidder and what had happened with him in Spearfish Lake.

John Archer was the owner of an accounting agency located in a block of stores next to Spearfish Lake’s big downtown beach. His wife, Candice, managed the next store in the block, Spearfish Lake Outfitters, which was actually owned by Susan’s older sister Tiffany and her husband Josh. It specialized in non-hunting and fishing outdoor gear, and especially in dogsledding supplies; Candice, Josh, and Tiffany were active dogsled racers and had run the famous thousand-mile Iditarod in Alaska several times, Candice as recently as the previous spring, although it had been a few years for Josh and Tiffany. Susan had grown up around dogsledding and even done a little of it when she was a lot younger, but she still couldn’t quite get her mind around that big of a commitment.

However, dogsledding wasn’t what Susan had on her mind, and from what she’d learned the night before, John was the president of the Spearfish Lake School Board and had been in the middle of what had happened with deRidder.

She found the two of them in the accounting agency, having subs from the store across the street for lunch. Of course, they had to talk about China, about Cody and Jan, and about Susan’s new job for a few minutes before they could get down to what Susan really wanted to talk about. She explained what she had in mind, and about her father’s thumbnail summary from the night before.

“I’m afraid I can’t quite agree with your father,” John told her. “Yes, deRidder liked to be aware of which direction the wind was blowing, but he could ignore it if it suited his purpose. He really wasn’t a bad administrator, but he wasn’t very good, either. I have no idea why he decided he needed to back up Bryson Payne in the business over Cody, because what Payne did clearly was directly opposite to both the law and the school board policy. If deRidder had pulled Payne up by the short hairs like he should have done when it first happened, he would probably still be the superintendent today. But Payne had to go, there was no question about it, and since deRidder wouldn’t listen to reason, he had to go so the board could get at Payne. Of course, that turned into a fight.”

“My understanding is that you had to take over the school board to do it,” Susan said. She knew that John was a reasonable and easy-going man, so he must have really been upset to take up such a vendetta. But, with the injustice Payne had done to Cody, she didn’t blame John in the slightest.

“It couldn’t have been done if I hadn’t had the backing of Ryan and Randy Clark, and the Clark Foundation through them,” John said flatly. “DeRidder and Payne yanked their chains pretty badly, and not over Cody, either. Actually, it must have mostly been Payne, since he was an arrogant little twit at the best of times, but again, deRidder backed him up when he should have kept him under control. I still don’t know why he did that, other than out of an obvious loyalty to a subordinate. I will say that when deRidder gets his mind made up, don’t try to confuse him with the facts. It’s a waste of breath.”

That was a rather more dismal picture than what Susan had gotten from her father the night before. It could be – in fact, was likely – that John was still grinding an axe over deRidder so his advice had to be taken with a grain of salt. But there was no question that she’d have to watch her step and choose her fights carefully, hopefully with the backing of Dr. Thompson.

The three of them talked a little more about what had happened here in Spearfish Lake; it was interesting to hear the real story, but how much relevance it would have for Susan was open to question. Finally it got to be one o’clock, and both John and Candice had to get back to work, and her new computer ought to be ready anyway.

That afternoon Susan finished her packing and loading the car. In spite of being pretty picky about what she was taking with her, it was going to be a full load, but she was ready to leave first thing in the morning and was looking forward to it. Whether deRidder was going to be a problem or not was still up in the air, but there was nothing she could do but get started and see how it was going to work out.

*   *   *

While Susan was getting ready for her move to Hawthorne, across town Nancy was working on the same thing. Hers was still days away, but at least the end of this long ordeal of Mary Lou stalking her was in sight.

Not surprisingly, Jack and his friends had come through for her; there had been a couple of phone calls to work out the details after she’d called him at Vixen’s and been told that they would help her out and the discovery of them all living in the same house made the move easy. Part of their decision had to have come from the fact that Vixen hated the very ground Mary Lou walked on, and her friends were probably pretty much in agreement with her.

It was good to know that she had some friends in this town. At least they didn’t hold being a lesbian against her, however much of a lesbian she might really have been; she wasn’t sure anymore. At one time she thought she might have been, although she had no experience to back up her feelings, but while she’d enjoyed the experience with Mary Lou for a while, it had turned sour in the end – very sour.

She really hoped that Mary Lou would come to her senses when she realized that her lover wasn’t at Meriwether College with her, and would be at Southern Michigan like she’d planned for a long time. It wasn’t a sure thing; this was Mary Lou she was talking about, after all. But the prospect of being out of Spearfish Lake was refreshing.

Nancy wasn’t a gossip like many girls in her class at Spearfish Lake High School. She was gossiped about a lot, she knew that. She didn’t like it, but had come to accept it for the way life was, but that didn’t mean that she wanted to put up with it any longer than she had to. For years she’d been looking forward to the day when she would be able to leave Spearfish Lake, mostly so she wouldn’t be subjected to the continual rumors and innuendoes. She wanted to make a new life for herself and figure out a few things without having to look over her shoulder all the time.

At a minimum, it was going to involve finding a guy and exploring the other side of the street a little. There was no way, she thought, that it could be as bad as Mary Lou had said time and again. But then, she’d learned the hard way that Mary Lou was as full of shit as her reputation said she was.

But that was for the future; now her main goal was to put this mess behind her, and Mary Lou wasn’t making it very easy. Incredibly, Nancy’s parents didn’t know the whole depth of what had happened and what was behind it, on both her and Mary Lou’s parts. They knew that the lesbian girl with the slutty reputation had been stalking her – Mary Lou had become very out about it in the recent months. But neither of her parents knew much about what she and Mary Lou had shared either. Nancy wanted to keep it that way, at least until she was out of her parents’ house.

What she really worried about was that Mary Lou would get to her parents and run her mouth about what they’d been doing off and on all winter. That would be bad, however it happened, but it might be less bad if she were out of town. And then how much her parents might believe Mary Lou after the last few months was open to question. If only she could have kept her desire to know what she was under control until she was in far away Southern Michigan, this wouldn’t have been an issue at all, but the time for that was long past. It had been a mistake, and now she had to recover from it.

At least her parents had realized that Nancy did have a problem with Mary Lou and had supported her in dealing with it. They had helped her to attend a summer technology camp in southern Wisconsin, just to get out of town. It had been refreshing to be out of the increasingly bad drama Mary Lou provided in Spearfish Lake, to go to a place where no one knew her, and she could be herself. She’d roomed with a rather religious girl from Iowa, who would have been shocked to tears to know that Nancy thought of herself as bi, and whose only sexual experience had been as a lesbian. But it didn’t matter; she’d had a good time and had dreaded having to go back to Spearfish Lake.

But the camp came to an end and Spearfish Lake couldn’t be avoided. Nancy soon learned that Mary Lou had been getting increasingly persistent and was still looking for her, demanding that she go to Meriwether College with her, even though the application period had passed. About all Nancy could do was to stick to her plan and hope that reality would soon set in – and that perhaps Mary Lou could find a suitable lover at Meriwether.

Her parents agreed that the best thing Nancy could do was to get out of town, and after some discussion, they’d agreed that sneaking out ahead of time might distract Mary Lou’s attention, especially if didn’t seem her parents were taking her there.

So about all Nancy could do was to pack her things and store them where she could get at them easily. It didn’t feel right to have to sneak out of town, but at least she would be out of town. Hopefully, things would be better at school.

There was no guarantee that Mary Lou wouldn’t cause trouble for her at Southern, but Nancy had one ace in the hole: she was going to be in the apartment building Cody and Jan Archer owned. She was sure that Mary Lou knew as well as anyone that Cody wasn’t somebody to mess around with. He’d proved it to the whole school years before, and Mary Lou would remember that if she remembered anything at all about him.

*   *   *

In another part of town, Jack and Vixen were sitting on the back porch of the Erikson house. They each had a glass of iced tea, a large bowl of popcorn was sitting between them, and both had binoculars close at hand while they kept a sharp eye on the row of bird feeders out in the yard. Any chance of actually spotting a roving rarity here at the bird feeders was minimal, but it had happened, and Vixen was still trying to get her life list of birds seen up somewhere close to Jack’s.

Besides, lounging on the back porch watching the bird feeders was one of their favorite things to do, and it was something they were sure they were going to miss when they moved into the apartment in Hawthorne.

They were anxious to get started. Completing their list of things to do before they left was way ahead of schedule, and if it hadn’t been for Howie’s first football game of the season, still a couple weeks off, they would have been happy to be on the road right now. They were sure they could use the extra time to set up housekeeping, explore the town, and maybe get a running start on their classes.

They already knew what they were going to be taking – they’d signed up for their classes months before, and in every case they were going to be in the same room. They had become used to working together, studying together, and supporting each other, so they figured it would help them out. It was an advantage that Alan and Summer couldn’t arrange – they only shared one class, the research and composition class required of everyone, just to be sure they knew how to present papers and citations in the format that was standard at the college.

After a while they heard Howie’s Jeep pulling into the driveway, and after a couple minutes he and his girlfriend Autumn, Summer’s younger sister, came around the corner. “Seeing anything interesting?” Howie asked.

“Not really,” Jack said. “Just the usual stuff, but you never know what’s happening next. So what are you two up to today?”

“Oh, we spent the afternoon out at the practice field, helping Jared work on his kicking. I don’t think Jared is going to be anything like the kicker that Lyle was, but he’s still better than average. We want to cool off a bit, have something to drink and a bite to eat, then I’m going to drop Autumn off at cheerleading practice while I go to football practice.”

“You guys practice enough; I hope you play well,” Vixen smiled.

“That’s the general idea,” Howie said. “Part of the reason the guys on the old football team never could seem to get it together was that they didn’t practice often enough. They seemed to think that the official practices were all they needed, and it sure wasn’t.”

Vixen shook her head. “You know, there’s a part of me that almost wishes I was a senior again so I could see what happens this year up close and personal. Last year was so much different than before it wasn’t funny, what with Payne gone and the old football team guys being treated like the way they used to treat everyone else.”

“God, yes,” Jack agreed. “I mean, a year ago, who would have ever figured that Mary Lou Kempa, of all people, would turn into a lesbian?”

“I didn’t know her the way you guys did,” Autumn grinned. “But that was one no one saw coming.”

“Lesbian or not, it didn’t keep her from being the pain in the ass she always was,” Vixen snorted. “Being the punchboard for the whole old football team seemed to make her think she was above everyone else. It sure was nice to see her get hers.”

“Not that you didn’t provide some of what she deserved,” Howie grinned. “But I can’t say the whole old football team. If the stories I heard going around back then have anything to do with the truth, she must have missed a few guys.”

“Give me about two more weeks and she’s history as far as I’m concerned,” Vixen shook her head, making a mental note to not say anything to Howie about Nancy’s plans. That was still supposed to be a big secret, and Vixen didn’t want to be the one to spill it “In fact, it’ll be nice to be away from the whole football crowd, present company excepted, of course. You guys are pretty much all right.”

“Oh, we still have a few jerks, but nothing like it used to be,” Howie replied. “Coach does a pretty good job of keeping them under control.”

“Yeah, but we put up with enough shit from the jerks on the old football team to balance things out,” Jack snorted. “When the four of us heard about Southern, it seemed like a miracle to come up with a good college that didn’t have any jocks running around. I think that was what sold us right there.”

“I can’t believe a state college like that wouldn’t have a football team,” Howie shook his head. “It, well, it doesn’t seem natural or something.”

“The point of the whole thing about going to college is to learn something, not just play football,” Jack told him. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this discussion, perhaps not the hundred and first. “Vixen and I are going to be paying a lot of money to go there, so we want to get the most out of it that we can.”

*   *   *

Kyle Reed was dismayed. What had happened to the football field? Where it used to be, where he’d had so many great days playing for the Hawthorne College Saints – it was gone! There wasn’t a trace of it! Instead, there was a big, ugly, modern building that had absolutely none of the charm of the old campus he remembered so well.

Kyle had been traveling. He hadn’t been appreciated in Kingston, and there wasn’t much that had worked out for him very well there anyway. Things had been tight ever since he’d been laid off work. He’d felt the Lord leading him elsewhere – he wasn’t sure where, but somewhere west, maybe California. There ought to be somebody there who would appreciate hearing The Word as it was supposed to be spoken. Maybe someone would listen to him and not take him as some kind of nut.

No football field! He couldn’t imagine it. What was a college without a football field? Worse than that, there had been many changes around the place, so many that he could barely recognize it. Sunday Hall, where he’d lived and studied the Bible and prayed so joyously – it was gone, and only a rough patch of grass remained. Several other charming buildings he remembered so well were gone too. At least the Lord had seen fit to spare the old chapel, but now that he looked at the building he realized it had changed, too – the soaring cross on the front of the building, even the steeple, was gone! A sign referred to it as the “SMU Auditorium,” which meant that it was no longer a house of the Lord! How could He allow such a perversion?

Even the name was gone. It wasn’t Hawthorne College anymore, a name that had once stood for righteousness, for the goodness of God, for the salvation of mankind – gone! It had been replaced by “Southern Michigan University,” a name that meant nothing to him, a name for a mundane place where the Lord was no longer first and foremost on campus – indeed, it seemed as if the Lord had been forgotten entirely around this place. How could the Lord have allowed a place like this had once been, sacred and dedicated to His works, be turned into a place that spurned Him?

Even thinking about it was too much to bear. A work of God, turned over to atheists and heathens. True, it had been a long time since he’d been there – too long – but he could barely stand to look at what had become of a place beloved of God. Letting it fall like this had to be the work of Satan; there was no other explanation.

Everywhere he turned he saw the rejection of the Word of God that this place now seemed to represent. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, got back in his car, and hoping it would hold together, got moving toward wherever it was the Lord was leading him. But he would remember the insult to the glory of God this place had become …

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