Page 15
Jake does some more chores around the cabin, mostly getting wood from the woodshed and stacking it in the kitchen and living room. He makes his dinner, and afterward, he begins to wonder about the Prohibition booze stashed in the secret room down in the basement. However, having cold craft beer in the refrigerator, he decides that instead of looking around in the basement, he will have a few IPAs as he begins putting notes together for his first assignment. He prints up anything he feels he needs from his notes and makes a physical copy of his files. He thinks he needs these files because tomorrow, he will be traveling to the town of Winn, Michigan, to research the first story of his assignments and see who might still be around to remember it. Jake goes around and stokes the fire in the fireplace and kitchen while loading them up for the evening. He puts his now-organized notes aside and listens to music while he has a couple more beers before going to bed.
It is Friday morning now, and earlier than Jake is used to rising, but the cold fireplaces have him teasing the waning embers into warming flames. He prepares the coffee pot as he continues to tend the fireplace and wood stove. Sam makes an appearance in his area in the living room near the fireplace, where his bed, cat stand, food, and water are now, along with all of his things from home. He meows and begs for attention before digging into his food and refreshing himself at his water bowl. Jake indulges Sam by petting him and talking to him while he eats.
Jake decides to have breakfast today and cooks a sausage and egg breakfast with toast. This particular dish is one he calls a number two because it has two eggs, two sausages, two pieces of toast, a small glass of orange juice, and a cup of black coffee. After breakfast, with no other concerns, he looks up the local weather reports and begins to plan his day in Winn. He is in no real hurry; he will go in the afternoon and make the rounds. He will bring his usual equipment, a slim briefcase for his files, a camera, a digital audio recorder, and, although entirely unnecessary, a small notepad and a pen to write notes if needed. He will wear his interview outfit, which is a dark ensemble consisting of a charcoal colored suit, long coat, scarf, and hat. In warmer weather, his interview outfit has him somewhat overdressed, but not this time of year, and it is, in fact, less than warm to wear in the winter. However, he liked his interview outfit and wore it when he cruised downtown Chicago to hit the small club scene. It wasn't too uptight for the dark metal and goth types that were found there, and if anything, he looked more like management or the club owner, and he was even sometimes mistaken for the mob.
Around mid-afternoon, Jake gets into his vehicle and heads to Winn to see what this town is about and dig up some new or otherwise unreported information. He hopes to find this original witness who made the report, even though he knows it is unlikely he will. When he arrives, he can see there isn't much there, and the only businesses are a gas station and a bar and grill. This is a small unincorporated village that doesn't have a library, a church, or a city hall for record searches. A small post office and an elementary school south of town are the only government buildings there. Most of the few storefronts on Main Street are empty or closed for business. It is still early, but there is a community center at the west end of town, so he stops there, only to find it closed on weekdays. He decides to ask questions at the post office, then have lunch at the bar and grill.
Once inside the small post office, he looks around and determines the population of Winn must be very small based on the number of post office boxes. He rings the bell at the window and gains the attention of the only postal worker present. She is an older, middle-aged woman, heavy-set, and carrying a package that is apparently meant for delivery as she approaches the front window. She greets Jake as she places the package down on the floor. This woman is far more pleasant than the postal worker at the post office near the cabin and gives Jake a big smile with her greeting. Jake decides to put on the charm as he asks her questions about the sighting and the person who made it. Her responses are ones where she wants to give Jake all the answers he seeks, as Jake charms her by playing the part of the dark, mysterious stranger who came to town. However, she can't give any information on the witness of the sighting, not due to the privacy of her postal customers, but because this person never lived in town that she knew of. Jake flirts with her more, and finally, she divulges some information that Jake might just be able to use.
She reveals to Jake that there is one character who lives just outside of town. A man named Jim-Bo was said to have seen this creature, but wasn't taken seriously. He is a southern transplant who's considered by the locals to be a hillbilly and the town drunk believed to have a still somewhere in the area. Jake is told he can be found near a certain corner on weekends at a bonfire near a large cornfield. She tells him he plays loud music from his truck out there, so Jake should have no trouble finding him for an interview. Jake continues to chat up the woman at the post office and even gives her a business card that she is very impressed by before he leaves. He knows he will likely never be back, but he leaves her believing he will come around again. Perhaps he will, as he now resolves to find this person and do a proper interview before his assignment is due.
"Now for lunch and a beer or two", is Jake's thought as he goes to Main Street and the tavern he saw among the empty storefronts. He was highly disappointed when he found that the local bar and grill was shut down and no longer in business. This made Jake rather depressed as he considered how the main drag of Winn was now basically a ghost town of empty storefronts, with second-story apartments vacant and long abandoned. Jake would notice this more and more as he traveled through rural Michigan. This makes him feel alienated, like a ghost lost in a land of ghost towns, and now he has become very lonely. When he arrives back home to the family cabin, he longs for Mick's and the neighborhood that would never be the same without his favorite local bar. He thinks for a short time about Jennifer during his depressed condition, and for a second or two, he considers a relationship with her, or any woman for that matter. He shakes off that feeling due to his experience with his past relationships, which had hardened his heart against falling in love once again.
Once Jake returns to the cabin and puts his things away, he again entertains the idea of searching Al Capone's stash of illegal booze down in the secret room in the basement. He goes back to the hidden room, but rather than opening crates and uncorking bottles, he follows the old electrical wiring that came from the adjacent hallway. He follows the wiring down the hidden hallway to another area where it disappears behind the wall. Because he had rediscovered the secret room that his brother John had found by following the old wires, Jake thought that by following the wiring, he might find another hidden room full of Capone-era contraband. He searched and discovered another secret door into another room near the end of the hallway. After finding a handhold and opening the secret door, Jake entered another hidden room down below.
It was another dirty and unlit room that needed Jake's flashlight to illuminate. It wasn't a storage room like John found, but a brewery/distillery room with a number of filing cabinets near the hidden door. It was a small production area that must have been meant to fill orders when there was no bootleg alcohol coming from Canada. Since there was no prohibition era booze, Jake went on to investigate the file cabinets for anything related to Al Capone. To Jake's utter surprise, the files weren't prohibition era records, but his late uncle Carl's unpublished files. Jake gathers up the files and brings them up into the main house.
Once he brought all of Uncle Carl's files upstairs into the living room, where he had been doing all his work, he began to look at each file and organize them. It didn't take too long to find a file on the Winn encounter in a report his uncle made shortly after the incident occurred. As Jake reads his uncle's report, he thinks about how using his report as his own would be plagiarism, yet he still feels compelled to tell his uncle's stories as he wrote them. He sees information he can follow up on, including the original witness's name, and this has him conjure up some thoughts. Not wanting to dig into copyright laws and considering his uncle was deceased and never published these reports, Jake felt he could add enough to them to make copyrights a non-issue. He decided to look into the witness and this local hillbilly he heard about, and add this to his uncle's original report. It is late now, and his beer consumption has made him tired and ready for bed. As much as Jake accomplished today, he believes he has his first assignment in the bag and can rest easy now that his prospects look so good. He went to bed and had his first good night of sleep in the cabin. Sam was nowhere to be found, not that Jake was even thinking about the cat or its owner, who was soon to appear to retrieve him.
