“All right,” I said. “I got it.”
“I wish you were here right now. I really do.”
“Me, too.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
I didn’t want to end the call like that. But I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t want to put any more pressure on her, didn’t want to add any more weight to her burden. I said good night and that was it.
A week later, and I still hadn’t spoken to her. She’d leave a message every couple of days. Always during the day, never at night. I’m okay, she’d say, things are moving fast, talk to you soon. I couldn’t call her back, of course. At any moment she might have been in character, with Rhapsody or God knows who else right there in the room with her.
Seven days, and the only time I wasn’t thinking about her were those few minutes on the night of July 4, when I was pulling those guys off the sinking boat. Otherwise, no matter what I was doing, working on the cabin with Vinnie, sitting at the Glasgow, lying in my bed and staring at the ceiling, she’d be right there in my head and I’d be wondering if she was safe.
Seven days with me going quietly insane while Natalie put her head in the lion’s mouth.
Chapter Three
The morning after the boat wreck, I woke up so goddamned sore, it was like I had been in the wreck myself. My arms hurt, my back hurt, and it felt like I had somehow pulled both hamstrings. Getting out of bed was comical. I got in a hot shower and let the water pound on me until I loosened up a little bit. When I was dressing I looked outside and saw the trees bending. That plus a light rain I knew would feel like cold buckshot in the wind. It’s July 5, I told myself. This is not a hallucination. It’s really the middle of the damned summer.
A cup of coffee and I was out the door. I could have gone down to the Glasgow for breakfast, but I wanted to get two hours of work done before I did that. I got in the truck and headed down the access road, past the second cabin my father had built, then the third, the fourth, and the fifth. They were all empty now. The people who had booked them had looked in the newspaper, had seen a high of maybe fifty-two degrees, a low of thirty-nine. They had decided they could just stay home and be miserable instead of coming all the way up here. I couldn’t blame them.
I came to the last cabin, a half mile down the road. I had been rebuilding it for the past few months. Vinnie had been helping me when he could. Things had once gotten a little sideways between the two of us, and this is how we made up. He showed up to help one morning, and without saying a word we were good again.
When I got out of the truck, I spent a few minutes looking around the outside. The little grooves I had cut on the bottom logs were doing their job, collecting the rain and letting it drip off away from the foundation. Thank God the roof was on now, was all I could say this morning. There’s no way we could get up there today and work on it without killing ourselves.
I went inside the place. It was still just a rough shell at this point. I had been trying to restore it to its full glory, to make it the best cabin in the Upper Peninsula again. This was my father’s masterpiece, after all. When it was burned down…Well, it had become an obsession with me to rebuild it.
I went inside and took my coat off. About five minutes later, I knew I either had to put the coat back on or build a fire. I wasn’t sure which was more ridiculous, but I figured the fire would make things a little cozier at least. I put some paper and wood in the new stove and lit it. That’s when Vinnie showed up. Vinnie LeBlanc, in his old denim coat with the strip of fur around the collar. His hair was tied in a ponytail today.
“Why aren’t you using the fireplace?” he said. He was the kind of guy who never said good morning. Or goodbye.
“I wasn’t sure how long I’d be here.”
“Is that draft still coming down? You’ve got to fix the flue on this thing.” He bent down and looked up the airway. This fireplace had always been his favorite part of the cabin. The way my old man had saved up all the rocks he had dug up over the years, until he had finally taken on this monumental task of building a two-story fireplace by hand. I couldn’t even imagine how he had done it alone. Hell, for that matter, how he had done any of this alone. Clearing the property, building these cabins, each one better than the last. It must have been therapy for him, after my mother had died. Something to do instead of sitting at the window, staring out at the street.
“What are you going to start on today?” Vinnie said. “The stairs?”
“I thought we should get the flooring in first. Then we can do the stairs.”
He looked up at the beams crossing the room above our heads. “You want to put the second floor in before you even build the stairs to get to them?”
“That’s what ladders are for. It’ll be easier to do the stairs after we have something to build up to.”
“You just want to get the floor in so it’ll look almost done. I’m telling you, it’s a bad decision.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re too impulsive. You know that. You don’t do things in the right order.”
I stood there looking at him. “You’re being a little abrupt this morning,” I said. “Even for you.”
“Abrupt? Who says ‘abrupt’?”
“What’s the matter, Vinnie?”
“Nothing,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye. “Let’s get some work done. We can do it your way if you really want to.”
As he bent down to pick up his tool belt, I heard the little grunt he let out. I saw him stand back up a little stiffly.
“Vinnie, what happened to you?”
“Nothing. Come on, let’s do it.”
“Stop,” I said. I went over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders. Up close I could see the bruise on his face, just outside his left eye.
“Who did this?”
He looked away. “It’s nothing.”
“You got clocked pretty good here. Who was it?”
“Some guys at the casino. We had a little altercation last night.”
“Some guys? How many?”
“There were three of them. They were all at one table, getting totally lit up, making a racket. I asked them to turn it down a notch, but they didn’t seem very cooperative.”
“Three men, you say?”
“Yeah. One of them looked underage. The other two were real hard cases. I eventually had to ask them to leave, and I tried to escort them outside personally. That’s when things got a little out of hand.”
“Just out of curiosity, was one of them rather large?”
He started rubbing the side of his face, where the bruise was. “Yeah, one of them.”
“Did they happen to leave on a boat?”
He stopped dead. “Yes, they did. How did you know that?”
“You’re gonna hate me for this,” I said. “But I think I helped save their lives.”
We started on the stairs. I told Vinnie I was just humoring him, but deep down I knew he was right. He usually is. We got in a couple of hours, but I was working on an empty stomach. So we left everything where it was for a while. I asked him if he wanted to join me at the Glasgow. He probably spent more time there than anybody, not counting Jackie and myself, but today he begged off. He wanted to go down to the rez and check up on his mother. Ever since his brother died, it was something he made a point of doing at least once every day or two. I couldn’t even imagine how many times he got asked why he wasn’t living on the rez himself now. Sometimes I wondered what his answer was, when it was just Vinnie and his family and they really wanted to know why he was living up here in Paradise.
He told me he’d be back after lunch, that he’d meet me there. So I went down to the Glasgow on my own. Past my empty cabins, with the wood split and stacked next to each front door, waiting for somebody to decide it was worth making the trip again. There’s a spot right where you turn onto the main road-you can see the lake through a break in the trees. The wind was kicking up three-foot breakers now. The sky was such a dark shade of gray, it was like you couldn’t even imagine the sun ever coming out again.