Mike McMahon slept in on Saturday morning; he knew he might as well sleep in, as there wasn’t much that he had to do, anyway. It promised to be a boring weekend.

His “date” with Kirsten the evening before had gone fairly well. At least, it wasn’t a total washout, and there was still hope for another, so it hadn’t been a total loss. The way he had seen Kirsten go through men, even in the short time he had been in Spearfish Lake, he knew that he’d done about as well as he had hoped for, at the expense of about $35 being totally torpedoed at the steakhouse in Albany River. The date hadn’t gone late; she had told him she had to get home early, as she wanted to get out to the West Turtle Lake Club early in the morning, so he took her back to her car well before sunset.

At least it had been more than he’d expected for the weekend.

He got up, poured himself a bowl of cereal, and flipped on the TV. Nothing but cartoons, and ones even more brainless than he remembered as a kid. He flipped the TV off and pawed around the apartment for the book he had been reading earlier in the week, but that couldn’t hold his interest more than a few minutes.

After a while, he realized that there was only one thing that he had the slightest interest in doing, that he could do, anyway. He had glanced at the Record-Herald’s clip files on Garth Matson and Donna Clark the day before, and they hadn’t told him anything. Perhaps, just perhaps, in the light of what Kirsten had told him, he might find out something more.

Being Saturday he didn’t have to dress up, so he pulled on a T-shirt and shorts and went down to the Record-Herald office.

It was hot and still in the building; no one was there, and the place had shut down for the weekend. He flipped on the scanner, in hopes that there would be some excuse to go take a picture, and began to leaf through the clip files.

Both Garth Matson and Donna Clark’s files were thick, and he read them carefully but found out nothing he didn’t already know, which wasn’t surprising; both were important people in the town, and he suspected that the paper had had a long-term policy of pussyfooting around the feud. However, once he knew that the feud was going on, he could read a lot into what had not been said, and what had only been hinted at.

On the whole, he had the feeling that the clips on the two would tell him more when he knew more; he’d have to go over them again.

Putting the clip files back, he walked past Kirsten’s desk and fell to thinking about her. Curious, he went back and pulled the file on her.

There wasn’t much there. The most recent story was about her being hired in at the Record-Herald as an advertising representative. Most of the rest of the stories dated from high school, being named student council secretary, and that sort of thing. There was one, six years old, now, that told of her engagement to some guy he had never heard of. He wondered at what had happened, and decided they must have broken up; if what he had seen was any indication, it must have been a miracle for anyone to have held on to her long enough to get engaged to her.

Sweat was soon rolling down his face in the heat of the office. He wondered if Kirsten was any cooler, out at the West Turtle Lake Club, wherever that was. Helpless to avoid it, an image of Kirsten in a bikini again rose in his mind. It had to be a pretty good sight, for whoever had the chance to see it. Maybe he ought to go swimming at the city beach that afternoon; there wouldn’t be many more chances for doing it.

He thought about the West Turtle Lake Club. It had come up often, but he realized he didn’t know much more about it than the name and the fact that it was some kind of exclusive country club or resort or something. He pulled the file, and found it surprisingly slim. A brief story about plans to build the club dated 1946. Half a dozen stories about holes in one shot at the club and a couple of other golf-related stories. There were a few others, including Carrie Evachevski’s wedding, and it was a damn short story for the wedding of a bank president’s daughter, he thought, and strange that no photo had been submitted. Then, he realized that he had heard somehow or another that it had been some kind of a whirlwind courtship, and perhaps it hadn’t been too popular with her parents, which would account for the brevity.

Mike put the West Turtle Lake Club clipping file back in the file drawer, realizing that he had not learned much, other than to confirm his suspicion that it was some kind of an exclusive, high-class, private country club and resort that drew a lot of people from both Spearfish Lake and out of town. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to hold the key to the story of the Garth Matson-Donna Clark squabble.

What to try next? Well, the squabble had obviously had a lot to do about child custody, back in the fifties. He pulled the files on the elder Matson children, Barbara and Frank.

Both files were thick. He started on Barbara’s file first, and soon realized that many of the stories were wedding stories, all to different men, most in California. Apparently, she hadn’t lived in Spearfish Lake for years, but Mike found himself wondering if the custody battle between her parents could have screwed her up, somehow. If he got the chance, he’d have to ask somebody. There might be a key to the story there.

He was about to turn to the Frank Matson file when the scanner emitted a high-pitched screeching. “Spearfish Lake,” the county sheriff dispatcher’s voice came over the loudspeaker on the fire frequency, “Report to the station for an automatic alarm at the Spearfish Lake Super Market.”

Mike turned back to the file. Probably it was just a sensor cooking off in the heat.

Harry Masterfield’s voice came over the scanner. “Base from C-2, roll Albany River, Blair, Hoselton and Warsaw,” he said. “Get Lynchburg and Meeker on standby.”

Mike’s jaw dropped open. Five departments called, and two on standby, in response to an automatic alarm? Masterfield must know something he didn’t.

He jammed the files back into the drawer, grabbed a camera, a telephoto lens and a couple of rolls of film, and headed for the door. He ran to his car, and rolled up to the Spearfish Lake Super Market, just as a pumper rolled up from the other direction.

It was strange. There was no smoke coming from the building, but people were standing around outside, and most of them didn’t look too happy. The pumper stopped at a hydrant only long enough to hook up a hose, and laid out a hose line right up to the front of the building. Firemen laid out two hose lines from the pumper, and raced into the front door with the hoses then everything seemed to come to a halt; the firemen stood around, waiting for something to happen, while Mike wondered what was happening.

A minute or two later, Masterfield came out of the building, soaking wet. Going to the pumper’s radio, he called, “Base, this is C-2. Cancel the call for the backup units. No fire, repeat no fire.”

“Clear on that,” came the voice over the loudspeaker. “No fire, canceling backup units.”

“What happened, Harry?” someone asked.

“Fire sensor must have malfunctioned and set off the sprinkler system,” the assistant chief of the department said.

“Sprinkler system, hell,” a drenched man at the edge of the crowd said. “That’s more like a flooding system. I thought I was going to drown before I got outside.”

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

SPEARFISH LAKE SUPER MARKET DAMAGED BY FIRE SYSTEM

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

The Spearfish Lake Super Market was closed for the weekend after a Saturday malfunction in the store’s fire suppression system set off the store’s new sprinkler units.

Super Market owner Bud Ellsberg said that the system had recently been installed and thoroughly tested to prevent such occurrences.

The building received light water damage in the incident, but some items of stock were heavily damaged or destroyed, Ellsberg said.

The store owner said that the loss was totally covered by insurance, but that it would take days to completely restock the shelves. He said that some items of damaged but salvageable merchandise would be on “flood sale” this week. “We carry good insurance,” Ellsberg said. “We have to.”

The Spearfish Lake Volunteer Fire Department was called to the scene about noon, Saturday, to shut down the sprinkler system. Surrounding departments were called to the scene but were told to turn around when no fire could be found.

Kirsten Langenderfer and Henry Toivo were close friends, steady dates, all through their high school career. It had been common knowledge that they were a couple who would be married soon after they had graduated.

Henry was a year older than Kirsten and he graduated at a time when the Vietnam war was still at its height; he figured he’d better get his service time over with on his own terms, rather than getting drafted at an inconvenient time. He reasoned that holding off on getting married would give Kirsten time to graduate and spend a year or two at college, and, he had to face it, there was a chance that he would be sent to Vietnam and not come back.

The love-smitten Kirsten protested Henry’s rather unilateral decision; she would have much rather been married to him, and pregnant by him, especially if he didn’t come back. She tried hard to accomplish the latter, but didn’t succeed; and tried again and failed again, when he came home from his final pre-Vietnam leave around Christmas of 1969.

She never saw Henry again.

One day, in June of 1970, Henry’s infantry platoon was patrolling in a patch of thick jungle in the hills above Dak To. Henry went into a particularly dense patch of jungle, got separated from his unit, and was never seen again.

They made a search sweep through the jungle, looking for him, but not a trace of the young man was found. Ultimately, the Army had to notify his parents.

Heikki Toivo was a World War II veteran, a marine who had fought in dense jungles on Guadalcanal, so he had an inkling of what the place must have been like. Still, he couldn’t see how Henry, a country boy experienced in dense cover, could just walk into a patch of jungle and disappear. He suspected that the army had to be covering up some sort of a screwup, somewhere, but he didn’t know how to find out.

A few days after he was notified by the army, and thoroughly frustrated by the lack of information he was getting, he drove over to the West Turtle Lake Club and laid his problem on the lap of Colonel Matson. Matson, he knew, had political connections, and perhaps could find out something.

In addition to the fact that Matson knew that he owed Toivo a couple of favors, he was genuinely concerned, anyway. He had not liked the stories he had been hearing about the crappy way the army was handling things in Vietnam, and it was a damn shame that a Spearfish Lake boy had to get caught up in it.

However, rather than calling a senator and getting the runaround, Matson took a more indirect, but potentially more fruitful approach: he made a trans-Atlantic phone call to his son-in-law, Green Beret Master Sergeant Gil Evachevski, then in Germany. He told Gil the story, and asked him to find out what he could about it.

Gil knew some people in a Special Forces camp near where the young Toivo disappeared, and he had some favors he could call in. The investigation, while totally unofficial, was considerably more complete than PFC Henry Toivo’s unit had released.

In a few days, Gil was able to report to his father-in-law that there had been a genuine mishandling of the search for the young man. The Berets had made several unofficial patrols of their own through the patch of jungle, and never turned up a trace of him; their local informants, some with good information on the local NVA, though sharply questioned, never had a positive word, either.

“I hate to say it,” Gil reported on the trans-Atlantic phone call directly to Heikki Toivo, “But they didn’t find a thing, and I know those guys. If there was anything to find, they would have. The only hope I can offer – and it’s not much – is that he got captured by some unit that was passing through the area and not much in contact with the local gooks. That’s a real long shot, though, and I wouldn’t pin anything on it.”

To hear it from the army was one thing; to hear it from Gil Evachevski was something else. Kirsten and the Toivo family refused to give up all hope until after the prisoners were released from North Vietnam in 1973, and then they finally held a memorial service for the young man. Many in the county attended the service, and Heikki publicly thanked Matson and Evachevski for their efforts, futile though they were.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, March 17, 1973

AMBOY TOWNSHIP MAN NOT AMONG RETURNED POWS

The Pentagon confirmed last week that all Prisoners of War known to be alive and held by the Communists in North and South Vietnam have been returned.

In response to a request from Senator Jim Donnely’s office, a Pentagon spokesman said that debriefings of returned POWs had revealed no trace of PFC Henry Toivo of Amboy Township, a 1969 graduate of Spearfish Lake High School, who disappeared in South Vietnam in June of 1970.

Heikki Toivo, father of PFC Toivo, said the news was not surprising. “We’d already pretty well given up hope, and learned to live with it,” the Amboy Township man said. “I just feel very bad for the girl he was engaged to be married to.”

A memorial service for PFC Toivo has been scheduled for this weekend.

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