None of us could say we were surprised, exactly, when Holly Schneiderhan came back to town. To be surprised would require a subversion of our expectations, and the truth is that the few of us who ever had any idea who Holly Schneiderhan was when she’d lived here hadn’t given her a second thought since the day she left. Even so, it’s a small enough and dull enough community that people will get to talking whenever anybody new opts to join it, and so Holly’s return was fair game for conversation around the Table of Knowledge.
The Table of Knowledge is what we call the big table in the front corner at Katie’s Coffee Shop where all the older guys with nothing better to do on a weekday morning gather to talk about the news of the day. The name’s meant as a joke, but you sure couldn’t tell that to a few of the fellas who sit there.
It was Paul, the young guy who worked the counter at Katie’s, who filled us all in on the Holl Schneiderhan situation. He and Holly had been in the same graduating class seven years previous. He said she was a quiet kid, good at school, did a lot of reading. He checked his yearbook after she came back and the only activities she was involved with were the Gardening Club and the Mythology Club, neither of which he even remembered existing.
We knew the family, of course. The Schneiderhans were one of a handful of hippie couples who bought cheap land outside of town in the late ’70s, after old Walter Woyczek died and his kids sold off a bunch of parcels of his farmland all over the county. Dan and Britta Schneiderhan grabbed a good piece, a 120- acre plot in a valley that had been farmed for years but was always too steep to be ideal cropland. Britta was a nurse at the clinic and Dan had a woodshop out behind the house where he built furniture out of wood from the groves of birch and walnut on the land. His stuff was too pricey for most folks around here, but people from Madison and Minneapolis and even Chicago would drive in to buy it. The Schneiderhans seemed okay, though neither of them was ever the chatty sort and they never did have a lot of close friends around town. We all just figured they were the type of folks who wanted to be left alone to grow their marijuana or whatever they did out there in the woods. Lord knows they would’ve had plenty of company in that category.
Truth is, none of us even knew the Schneiderhans had left the place until Paul mentioned that Holly and her husband were moving into it. He said the old hippies had cashed it in and moved down to Tucson to be closer to an older daughter that some of us vaguely remembered them having. The consensus around the Table of Knowledge was that wanting to get the hell away from a Wisconsin winter was understandable, but trading that for the desert was like jumping from the freezer into the frying pan—neither one was a place where any sane person would choose to lay their head.
A few weeks after that this new fella started showing up at Katie’s every morning, a young guy. He was a hard guy to miss, tall and ghostly pale and rail- thin, with a swoop of dark orange hair full of some kind of styling gel, always acting like he was in a big rush. He wore a light blue button-up shirt and a solid-colored tie every day, which made him stand out all the more amongst the stained flannel shirts and Packers tees that made up the general Katie’s dress code. On the fourth day that he popped in for his usual black coffee and maple bar, we figured it was time to get him sorted out. We all badgered and nudged each other until Kenny Herkimer finally got up and introduced himself. Turned out the kid was named Gavin and he was married to Holly Schneiderhan, now Holly Andrews.
It also turned out that the kid was more than happy to make our acquaintance. We learned more about him on that first day than any of us cared to know. He grew up on the other side of the state in a suburb twenty minutes outside of Appleton. He’d met Holly in college, where he’d gotten his degree in business administration and she’d gotten hers in classical literature. (“I’m sure there’s a less practical way to go six figures in debt, but I can’t think of one right now!” Kenny said.)
He started his first business at sixteen when he borrowed money from an uncle to buy a snowblower and hired himself out all over the town. He’d paid his uncle back halfway through the winter and used the profits to open a kiosk selling cell phone accessories at the local mall, a job that he said paid off a big chunk of his college costs. He’d just started a sales job at one of the local farm implements dealers, but he wanted us to know that he was on the lookout for opportunities to launch his own business ASAP and if we knew of any promising leads he would appreciate it greatly. The kid was a born salesman, we had to give him that, even if none of us were in the market for what he was pushing.
After that, Gavin stopped by the Table of Knowledge most mornings to talk at us for a few minutes and pump us for information about start-up opportunities in the area. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was severely overestimating the entrepreneurial climate of the greater Reinhart, Wisconsin, area. He wouldn’t have listened anyway. There was no mistaking the fact that he regarded us as a bunch of rubes who might be of use to him somewhere down the line, just as we regarded him as an overeager city kid with more ambition than common sense. (“If that boy asks me one more damn time whether I ever considered renting my barn out for weddings, he’s gonna be eating his damn necktie!” Kenny said.)
Every now and then Holly would accompany him into Katie’s in the morning. She’d started working at the local greenhouse. She was just as shy and unnoticeable as ever, but the word from Janice at Reinhart Floral was that she had a rare talent for working with plants, flowers especially. Anyone who’d driven by the old Schneiderhan estate could attest to that. Even though the house was set back in the woods a quarter-mile off the road, you could see splashes of color dotting the hills and a long row of paintbrush-perfect blooms lining the gravel driveway that cut between the neighbors’ cornfields. Holly wasn’t any more interested in joining the Table than Gavin was in looping her in. When she came by, she mostly just sat at the counter and chatted quietly with Paul until Gavin got tired of yapping and they headed off to work.
A year or so after Holly came back to town, Gavin invited us all out to a summer party at their place. None of us could say we weren’t intrigued at the idea, but in the end only Paul ended up attending. He said it was about as awkward as we’d assumed, a couple dozen people sweating and drinking High Life in the ninety-degree sun while Gavin buzzed around like a hummingbird jabbering business ideas to anyone he could corner. “I mostly kept Holly company,” Paul said. “You know, she’s actually pretty interesting. She can tell you the names and history of every one of those flowers she’s got planted out there. She has a whole garden that’s just flowers whose names come from Greek and Roman mythology. I guess half those stories end with some god or goddess turning a mortal into a flower for punishment, or out of pity, or something like that. She can walk you through the garden and tell you the myth behind her peonies, her hyacinths, her crocuses. The lady knows a whole hell of a lot about all that stuff!” We all agreed that it was impressive that Holly had actually found a way to put her time in both the Gardening and Mythology Clubs to good use.
Around about that time we started to notice a change in Gavin. He still came into the shop busting with energy every morning, but his business ideas started taking on a new tone, a sort of desperation. By now he’d more or less given up on finding partners around town. Instead he’d started obsessing about finding ways to make money off of the land he and Holly owned. “If a crazy hippie like Holly’s dad could turn a profit off of this place, it should be easy for someone with my experience,” he told us every few mornings. He’d looked into walnut farming, renting out parcels of land as grazing pastures, bottling the spring water that bubbled out of the hills in the back valley. Apparently, every idea had too high a start-up cost to justify the short-term return on investment. We took his word for that. (“Someone oughta tell that boy that the last thing any of these farmers out here want is to pay somebody else to do farmer stuff for them,” Kenny said.)
Holly seemed different whenever we’d see her too. She had always been vanishingly quiet, but now her quietness seemed more sullen and unsettled. Paul had kept up his friendship with her and even started stopping by their place for dinner every now and then. He didn’t think she much liked the idea of turning her family’s place into a money-making scheme. He said the only time he’d ever heard her raise her voice was when Gavin floated the idea over drinks that she could start selling her flowers at the area farmer’s markets. “Not everything has to be a business, Gavin!” she’d shouted. “We’re doing fine, why can’t you just be happy with what you have for once in your goddamn life?” We all agreed that we couldn’t picture timid little Holly shouting, let alone cursing. “There’s more to her than she lets on,” Paul told us. “You know she’s published like a dozen papers about mythology in academic journals?” We weren’t sure how impressed we were supposed to be by that fact, but we could tell Paul was.
Even if Gavin couldn’t talk her into selling her wares, it did seem like his pitch got Holly thinking more about sharing her talents. She started bringing along bouquets of cut flowers every time she stopped into Katie’s. She’d actually come by the Table of Knowledge to tell us what each flower was while Paul tossed out the old ones and slid the new ones into vases. Even if none of us was especially interested in the details, we all agreed they were a nice touch around the coffee shop. We also agreed that Holly was real nice girl when she came out of her shell and chatted a bit. Paul agreed emphatically on that point. (“I don’t wanna suggest there’s anything funny going on there, but I think that’s exactly what I just suggested,” Kenny said.)
One day as it was turning toward summer, Gavin came busting through the coffee shop door with a big grin on his pasty face. “I cracked it!” he hollered at us. “I finally cracked it!” He pulled up a chair and opened a laptop, never minding that this was a direct violation of the unwritten rules of the Table of Knowledge. For the next hour he babbled at us about permits and investors and easements and all sorts of business speak we couldn’t have cared less about. The gist of it was that he’d just started talks with some company out of Iowa that ran a chain of campgrounds and resorts all over the upper Midwest. They’d been looking to expand to our area and Gavin pitched them on converting a good piece of the Schneiderhan land into cabins, complete with RV hookups, a snack shop, a small swimming pool for the kids. Nothing was set in stone yet, he admitted, but it was just a matter of hammering out some specifics and getting some permits lined up.
Everybody at the Table was mostly quiet through the whole spiel, all of us glancing back and forth amongst ourselves. Folks in this part of the world don’t generally take too kindly to anything that might disturb the peace of our sleepy rural existence. But we also knew all too well how much farming revenues had been declining lately, and how gung-ho the local politicians were about anything non-agricultural that might give the area economy a shot in the arm. When Gavin finished his pitch and closed his laptop we all sat there quiet for once, even Kenny. Paul was the one who finally broke the silence from behind the counter. “And Holly is okay with this plan?” he asked.
Gavin didn’t look back at him, just sort of smirked as he packed up his computer. “No, to tell the truth, she’s been a pretty hard sell. I get it, it would be a big change and that place means a lot to her. But she’ll come around when she sees the final quote this company gives me. I mean, do you know how much that place costs in property taxes every year? We’d be crazy not to have it start making money for us instead of costing us! And she’ll be able to keep most of her garden space. Or a lot of it, at least.” He bounced out the door, practically vibrating with excitement. We just sat there quietly for a long while.
Some time the next week, we realized we hadn’t seen Gavin at the coffee shop since he laid out his plan for us. We figured he’d probably been busy meeting with contractors and county board members and such. A couple of days after that we were startled to see Gavin’s face on the bulletin board by the restroom. It was a printout from the sheriff’s office declaring him a missing person, a description of the kid in block letters underneath a portrait of Gavin’s awkward smile beneath that gooey upsweep of rusty hair.
Paul told us that Holly had reported Gavin missing when he didn’t come home for two days after he gave us his business presentation. He answered the question none of us dared to ask when he said that the cops had questioned Holly for hours and didn’t consider her a person of interest at this point. They had dogs and detectives combing the woods of the Schneiderhan estate as we spoke. So far nothing had turned up except a few bones that turned out to belong to a deer and a heifer that wandered away from a neighbor’s farm a few years back. We all agreed that it was a damn shame. (“Can’t pretend he was my favorite person in the world but I’d still hate to think anything happened to the kid,” Kenny said.)
By early fall there was still no word on Gavin. The mostly unspoken consensus around town was that he probably struck up some kind of secret business deal and headed out for greener pastures, though some people surmised that he’d tried to cut some corners while dealing with that Iowa bunch and crossed the wrong person. There were lots of places to make a person disappear between here and Iowa City.
For her part, Holly seemed to be taking it pretty well. She took a few weeks off work but soon fell back into her usual routine at the greenhouse. Paul had been stopping by to check up on her fairly regularly, until one day someone reported that they’d started seeing his car parked there overnight on the regular. (“They say everybody grieves in their own way,” Kenny said.)
One day in early September Holly came by the coffee shop to visit Paul in the morning. She had a new bouquet in her hands, the first one she’d brought by since Gavin disappeared. She stopped by the Table and exchanged small talk with us while Paul went and got the vases out of the closet. The plants she clutched were curious looking things, with long, slender stems that melted into a gathering of pale white blooms, capped off with a feathery swoop of deep orange at the very top. “I don’t think I ever saw that kind of flower growing around here before,” Kenny said. “What’re they called?”
“You know what?” Holly said, examining the blooms with a bemused expression. “I have no idea!” She smiled the broadest smile any of us had ever seen on her as Paul returned with the vases. She was still smiling as she walked out the door and headed off to work.
Ira Brooker is a freelance writer and editor living in the scenic Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. You can find his fiction at Pseudopod, No Sleep Podcast, and Wild Musette, among others. He makes his living writing business copy, arts journalism, and bar trivia. Ira has a family and a cat and is largely hair.