The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay by Kelly Harms

log carving requires. His mouth is open in a silent roar.
    I start to wonder if Ben Hutchinson has lured me here to kill me. I imagine my mangled corpse dangling from the bear’s mouth, and a sign below painted in blood: “This is what happens when you don’t do your annulment paperwork!”
    With this likelihood in mind, I pull over—or I think I do: there aren’t even yellow lines painted on this new road, and the newfallen snow makes the shoulders indistinguishable from the ditch—and text Renee the address Ben gave me. She writes back, “???” and I reply, “Where to send the police if I mysteriously vanish after tonight.” And quickly she texts back, “Good to know!” And then about sixty seconds later, “Srsly, txt when safe, k?”
    â€œOK,” I punch back and then put the car into drive. In three minutes I’m on a winding road that services a lake and the homes set deep in between the woods and the lake.
    These are not fishing cabins. Each estate is grander than the one before. No wonder he’s broke now, I think, taking in one million-dollar estate after another. I hope he has a good mortgage rate. Or maybe he paid cash. Either way, it’s the sort of neighborhood that doesn’t come cheaply.
    The houses I’m passing are largely dark. It’s a seasonal community, I suppose. Wealthy Chicagoans who come up for summer weekends, and snowbirds currently scooting about Arizona until the thaw. Though desolate, what I can see is appealing. None of the vaulted front alcoves and gabled four-car garages that speak of a housing development popping up overnight like in the area where I grew up. This lake, its homes, they’re mixed in age and they’re all different, starkly different. Each, I imagine, was built for a family, a particular set of people, who fell in love with this particular body of water. And because the trees are leafless right now, and the thick forest is nothing more than a black bar code stamped over my view, I can see the large, open, bean-shaped hole in the growth past the houses that must be the lake. I see the skinny moonlight bouncing off the white white white of the snow that stretches in every direction, that lays itself down silently on the thick ice day after day.
    I take a gentle curve slowly, circling the lake counterclockwise. The snow is growing more treacherous, or I am growing more intimidated. I am only going twenty-five miles an hour, though the last speed limit I saw posted was forty-five, but it is so hard to see anything here even that feels too fast. Soon, I fear, I will have made it all the way around the lake and be back at the bear. But, to my great relief, around the bend I can just make out three houses in a row, and they are all lit up. One, a rambling brick ranch, has twinkling, icicle-style Christmas lights still blinking a week into January. I can’t imagine going to all the trouble of hanging lights for the two or three cars that might pass by on any given night. Immediately, I like the people who live there. There is a dimly lit wooden sign, nailed to a tree right by the mouth of the driveway, that reads “Grandpa’s Hide-A-Way.” And a snow-covered Santa hat festoons the curve of the G. I make a mental note to run to Grandpa’s if Ben comes after me with a knife.
    The next house is a rustic-looking A-frame, a true lodge rather than a house, with big logs stacked upon each other forming the siding. It’s rich-looking and speaks to me of woodstoves and heavy woolen blankets and the scent of leather. I imagine a graying anesthesiologist, his slick, slender wife, and four blond children, each in various stages of affluent ennui, sitting around a big-screen TV with iPhones at the ready. This is the sort of place I can picture for Ben Hutchinson, but their wooden sign reads only “Van Holden” in dignified script.
    The last in this row of winter neighbors must be the